Blood, thick and sticky and so, so perfect in her throat.
She licks her lips. Can't help herself. Licks again. She wants to drop to the cobblestones. She wants to suck at puddles that gleam crimson, to lick and lick and lick and feel it.
Ah, the taste would be...
A shudder tore down her spine and she could see herself doing it. The picture was so clear and crisp in her mind. Dark building hunched toward her. They closed in and stretched out and tore at the sky. The drip, drip of blood (beautiful, horrifying, wondrous, delicious, disgusting blood) was present and lovely and almost she could ignore the distant screaming. Almost she felt peace.
She could do it, though. Could scrape her tongue raw against the stone. Hunger twined in her guts, hissed in her mind and flooded her mouth with desire. She could forget, truly forget. Just take and kill and revel in a red ocean of delights unimaginable. It would be so, so easy and feel so, so good.
A sound overwrote the drip, drip that hypnotized and tempted. A moaning, low and guttural and wretched. Her hand tightened reflexively on the slick handle of her hammer, standing head first in front of her, before she realized that the sound was her.
The Good Hunter bit down on her tongue (not hard, the last thing she needed was to bleed) cutting off the godawful sound. The night lost some of it's deeper shadows as the haze cleared from her mind. At least, the shadows she didn't like to think about (those that pulsed and glowed and-) were gone and with them her sick desires.
The smell drilled itself into her nose, only now registering on a conscious level. The Good Hunter swallowed heavily, not wishing to add vomit to the desecrated alley she was currently crouched in. She blinked and every flicker of darkness imprinted the piles of gore into her memory. She wasn't sure what they had been.. before. There was so little left whole.
How had.. why had?
Flashes of memory bullied it's way to the forefront of her mind. Swinging her Kirkhammer and swinging it and swinging it and nothing was moving but she'd kept going. She'd just.. kept going.
A sense of obligation, of love, forced her to really look at her poor hammer, the head of which was almost completely coated in.. paste. No decision was made, not really but The Good Hunter found herself scraping gloved hands through the mess. The splat and splash as she flung bits of the coating away made her stomach clench both nauseated and (sick and wrong and it would be so good) hungry.
It was only when there was nothing more to claw off her hammer did The Good Hunter think of the Dream, of safety, of quiet. Yes, that was what she needed. And she did need it now, suddenly and intensely. She ached for the swirling, twining mist and the great golden moon above and the silence.. the silence most of all. The hunger, the ache, the desire would fade there. She was safe there. She would stay for a time before returning to the hunt. Because...
Because she was a hunter and hunting was what she did.