The blood runs quick and quiet over the back of the sharp silver silence. Quick and quiet and deadly keen, it retreats, briefly, throwing off a crimson bridal veil, then about-faces and plunges within like a man into the body of his lover, the cold steel slipping painlessly swift into the flesh.
 
'Cet retreats a moment, ponders, then leaves that small knife where it is and lifts another one, a large one, and begins, after a moment of consideration, to shave the skin from the man's forehead in the rough depiction of a three-tiered spiral.
 
He carves more bloody spirals into the man's flesh, drawing delicate ritual markings all over the twitching, trembling, shaved-hairless sacrifice. Sacrifice to the hunger, the dark demands of the inhuman deeper soul. The knife dances and the ripper hears its laughter, its complicity, and he surrenders to the moment. The chiminage has been offered, his helpers fed, the rites completed. He has apologized to the world for his act. Now it's his time.
 
Blood forms a dozen iridescent rainbows in the moonlight to his perceptive bronze eyes, shifting and changing like the rest of existence, not limited to just one color, just one way. The hunter tears into the throat, ripping away uninteresting gristle, then turns his attention to the skull, holding his big knife in both hands to drive it into the face like a miner's pike, smashing away the man's identity, destroying his reality, humbling him once and for all.
 
The destruction quivers into the ripper and coils into him, empowering his being, allowing the hungry one to sigh in satisfaction - if ever-brief and fleeting.
 
He licks the blood and shattered brains from his blade, then shifts downward, moving to spend a great deal of attention on disassembling the shoulders, the arms, the chest region. He rips away the sternum, breaks each and every rib into exactly three parts. These are placed on the ground in a pile to the right of the broken skull, that once-proud home of the brain which guided much ruin, now nothing but a pile of soon-to-rot ruin itself.
 
The hunter cleans himself with his tongue, but when he stands to leave, he looks down at the corpse, only half-violated, the wrongs only half-avenged, and feels he has not completed his job yet.
 
So he raises his foot and flexes his claws, ripping open the belly. He cannot resist, looking down upon silken maroon treasures lying like a demoness's jewelry scattered carelessly over the grass, and then he is down on all fours, tearing into the body with his clawed hands, destroying the gloves he wears, not caring in the slightest. He shovels handfuls of thigh muscle and shredded blood vessels into his jaws, ripping the pelvis asunder with his bare hands. The long bones of the limbs he crushes utterly in his jaws, scraping free the marrow with his tongue. The flesh lacks the sweetness of a willing victim's meat, yet 'Cet also appreciates the savory relish he finds in the flesh of those who, in the eyes of the spirits, deserved their fate.
 
It is good, but there is only so much corpse, after all, and soon enough, the body has gone, devoured entirely save for a few ritually broken and saved bones. The burning inside is temporarily sated. Acetyl carries the saved bones to the food of the great oak tree nearby and arranges them among its roots as the night sun approaches the horizon, smiling down upon her storm-sired child. The work is done. For now.