Avarice

By Any Unborn Child

There is stillness amidst the chaos.

A slight pause.

The pregnant calm before everything shatters.

It was often that Aihi found herself in this state. Once his name appeared in her mind, there was no stopping the confusion, the spontaneous yet calculated affect that it had on her.

They were different creatures, she and Kaguro. There was a self-confident disdain to everything he did, a disdain held even to his own supposed comrades. He was in his own world. This was a madness that she was not aware of until meeting Kaguro, upon the first time she saw him.

Yes…the madness was evident. It was evident in his crimson eyes, in his deranged smile, in his bristly voice, and in the skins that he kept. There was something propelling him that she could not figure out – as if he was hiding insecurity within the destruction that he craved.

If there is anything or anyone deemed superior, no doubt he will destroy it, cut it to shreds, and relish every moment of the act.

That much was true.

What disturbed Aihi the most, amidst the avarice that Kaguro exemplified and the destruction that he craved, was that she was intrigued by his behavior.

It was primal.

It was despicable.

It was deplorable.

It was…so natural.

Everything Kaguro did, it was without a second thought.

Aihi could only wish for that kind of freedom.

Her physical prison was within the walls of the castle of the Kokuboro – that was easy to understand. She was tied to it – there was nothing she could do to leave it.

It seemed, however, as if her feelings of longing for something more were just as binding, just as constricting, just as impossible to escape.

Her feelings of insecurity and longing, her own wish for a humanity that she could never have, had been kept under a mask of indifference and logic.

Worst of all, her own hidden jealousy and spite towards a demon, towards Kaguro, was just as confining, just as bitter, just as twisted…and just as never-ending.

This bitterness would never stop, no matter what she did.

He would always come to her.

She would always come to him.

He would always toy with her mind.

She would always try to figure him out, with little success.

So it was true…

…the avarice never ends.