(Taken from play with the awesome Jormundghast.)

Everything seemed wrong.

From the way the boards groaned with each step she took right down to how she wore her own damned skin. Even the flurried spits of snow were out of whack. All of it was out of place. Amidst the stink of not quite frozen fish guts and the sputtering dim yellow death rattles of a few streetlights, Sarah fought hard for a few hours of peace. With her legs dangling over the side of the pier, she sat almost hypnotized by the tortured crashing of the waves, even as snowflakes gathered on random patches of her clothes and decorated her eyelashes like small, wet spider's webs. She had a moldy loaf of bed in her lap and one lone seagull, either too stupid or too sick to fly to warmer climes, floated in the air above the water until a piece of bakery fodder was torn free and held out to it. Careful, cautious, it swooped down time and time again and plucked the treat from freezing fingers.

She and the bird weren't alone.

Malcolm hadn't managed much since the flubbed ritual had brought him to this accursed plane, yet had his run of this stretch of the docks, of which he'd made an admirable start. The mystic seals above the trawling companies doors; his. The facilitation for people-trafficking for magically-inclined clientele; his frightfully easily-wrested venture. A chantry and a comely ghoul with a penchant for elbow gloves, chokers and wearing little else; acquired with the most admirable of screw-overs and upsets of power.

His great, dark woolen pea coat hung over the rumpled collar of his button-down beneath, each crease seemingly calculated with enough mathematical precision that most onlookers just wouldn't 'get it' and would end up perceiving him as a self-absorbed, careless knob. He often did little to dissuade them of that notion. Flaxen hair danced in the breeze with the wildness one would attribute to those lost in thought, set above eyes dark, stormy and intense. That all fell to rot once he glanced at the pier.

Blood magic tended to offer one insights unto the sources of its own power, and be damned if he didn't sense, naught but thirty yards away, Something Far Too Familiar And Yet Nigh Impossible in this far-flung, podunk little word. All of his swagger, all of his bluster fell to pieces as he froze, with a phantom spasm somewhere down between his hips, long since without the fodder for the classic sign of abject fear to run down his leg.

He had, for a moment, recovered at least something of his faculties, some moment when rationale clawed back into his head and yanked hard on the reins, steering his blood, his will through the well-worn channels of knowledge in that time between her words and the flying walls of what would have been his cage. His fists rose up, arms parallel, palms facing his chin... then he stepped forth, twisting them out to knock back the walls, calling on the ill-begotten sorcery and the hope that, perhaps, he had enough force to keep his now-inevitable end from crashing in sooner than necessary.

"I f*cking tried, you b*tch! I f*cking tried, and I had it good! I finally had a chance to find a way back from this sh*thole and now..." His mind's hands burned as the reins slipped once again from their grasp, drawn by blood, by sheer inevitable forces beyond comprehension or control, by that insipid process that underscored their kind. "... now you've come to treat me like some hen in the farmyard!"

The ensuing hiss rippled with more fire of blood, further dips into the wellspring of his Will. The malediction barked out, hardly with any chance of sticking to its target, yet it was all he had left as the red tide pulled him in. "May all lights spit upon you! May all rays sear your skin and bake your mind, you rotten b*tch! F*ck you!"

Her skin tingled as if she had placed her tongue against a car battery but it was gone before it gave her too much cause for worry. Still, two fingers formed a 'u' and the bulbs held by nearby lamp-posts dripped from their sockets and fell to harden amongst the ice already gathering on the ground. The moon made for poor lightening, as blocked as it was by storm-clouds, but the beams that managed to hit her caused the skin she bared to take on an unearthly glow.

"I'm giving you purpose," she crooned, her tone still too sweet. Disarming. The walls rebuilt themselves but instead of the crunch of rotten, splintered wood, they melded into one another with a metallic tink. No cage. She wanted him closer. "Stop shouting. It's an honorable death that I'm giving you."

Malcolm dropped to his knees in the cattle chute. He might have had more tricks, more curses. Hell, he may have even had some fiery explosions, but the act of staying in his place and not running straight to her mouth with his neck exposed took every ounce of his resolve. The wild flax fell over his face as his hands fell to the snow-covered slats, feeling the snow come no closer to melting beneath his heatless palms.

"You're a cannibal. That's all you are. A Cannibal. You eat your children like some stupid mother frog, like some idiot squid. You can call yourself a monster and stomp around with your fangs bared and make Bela Lugosi proud. You can call yourself a god and pretend that this is some noble sacrifice to your cause. You can judge me by impossible ideals built on the backs of mortal minds. Beneath all of that, you're a thing that eats the children of your kind..." He sneered, to his very last.

"I know exactly what I am and I've grown tired of people reminding me. You balk and you bleat and it doesn't matter. You squander your potential on power and things that don't mean what you think they do." A wash of pity overtook her sharp, youthful features but the Beast was quick to swipe such a silly thing away, to leave her staring with her mouth a tight line across her face.

A sharp, ice prickled wind blew the hood from the top of her head. "There is nothing noble about what I do, not on my end. I'm just hungry."

Her lips did not move, but the words reached out regardless and she slowly began her fluid march towards him. "And you're here, and oh how the universe must hate you. In the end, I am what you all have made me to be."