It was told that at the moment of her birth, the heavens shuddered and swallowed themselves, and flat rain lay ceaselessly across the land. Though the idea was appealing, she placed no belief in such tales, which were undoubtedly a poetic concoction of her father, the Demon Prince of Belial. She knew the heavens did not dread her coming, for that would be to grant her existence meaning, her father having indulged in such petty vices.
No, she had not once believed in her own destiny. Even as her father Mordecai spun his grand lies into ornate garments meant to constrain, she silently refused his desires. The Demon Prince was weak, deluded by his role in the universe’s empty, ageless conflicts. He lived a paradox, seeking to raise a successor committed both to an inherent meaning in the universe, and a ceaseless drive to annihilate all of it. From the moment she was born, she, his first child, Violet, was a sacrifice to the pursuit of purest evil. Here was a child who would know no warmth, no emotion, none of the hope which she would later witness in the eyes of those she destroyed; She was denied the simple, stupid, empty love that fooled entire races into believing that life was worth living. And into this empty child, this void of feeling, Mordecai would pour the vile ambitions of his ancient lineage. But he was a fool, and so easily deceived. The girl Violet saw reflected in the hollowness of life the absurdity of death. Evil itself was but a poorly veiled desire to be something real, something true. Even in its defiance of life, the pursuit of evil was equally meaningless.

Quitting life was of no interest to her; Death was but a transition from one empty state to another. Violet’s only true interest lay in that which was denied to her by her father. She was not treated poorly, of course. To be abused would be to inspire rebellion, just as to receive love would be to foster connection. She received neither, and in the blandness of her existence she was discontent. Even as her father sough to tailor her into a weapon of utter darkness, he did not dare supply the tools to allow her to care. At her core, Violet grew up numb. Her only desire became to experience that which had been denied to her: feeling, emotion, the little sparks of senseless warmth that were life’s only gifts. She lusted silently after pleasure in any form at all; Pain was nothing to her unless pleasurable. The ability to feel lay outside her grasp.

The birth of her sister Nayea provided one of the few opportunities for Violet to feel anything at all, and she cherished the feeble embers of stirring emotion which she felt while growing up with her younger sibling. Unwittingly, her father was the catalyst for these emotions: jealousy, bitter anger, and some semblance of loathing. For it was a silent fact that Nayea was the favourite, the Moonchild, she who would become the very image of beauty and death that would ensure the ascendency of Mordecai’s line into the realm of cosmic legend. Even at a young age, her beauty was evident, her very being infused with a spiritual gravity that touched all she met. Violet attributed this supposed profound beauty of her sister to her birthmark: her gorgonic belly, a cursed orb of vile, gritty, guttural texture amidst a paradise of delicate flesh. To gaze upon this blight in an otherwise divine form was to meet Death, for none who looked upon her belly could hope to live, so powerful was its horror. The only semblance of love Violet could recall feeling was for that hideous, wonderful belly and its stark violation of Nayea’s wretched piousness. Yes, Nayea believed in good, for surely good had given her the beauty for which she was known. Of course the bitch would never admit to such vanity; the virtuous lived by a code of false innocence, in which they would sooner die than admit the depth of their self-masturbatory conceit.

Mordecai found his weakness in Nayea, for he too believed in her duality, her pure soul tainted by her demonic blood. His fascination with her was delightfully sickening, and in observing her father’s love of her sister, Violet could treasure the offense she felt perpetrated against herself. The hypocritical Demon Prince could so easily raise a first hollow child before bowing to the sublime beauty of another. He who believed with zealous conviction in the destruction of life chose to let that which he sought to quash blossom within his daughter’s breast. He believed that Nayea would succumb to her destiny, that her virtues would succumb before the inescapable weight of her ancestry. Violet knew better. Nayea had been allowed a taste of that nectar which was life’s sole power over the void. She could not believe in death, having been suckled with the promise of love. Twice now, the Demon Prince had failed to raise a successor, and yet he was blind in his arrogance, ever more assured of his success.

In contrast to the two elder siblings, the birth of Kira was without ceremony, without celebration, without meaning. It was for this reason that Violet was drawn to the girl. Kira lived without pretense. Here was a living being who existed in true nothingness, for even Violet had the lingering prophecies of her father to silently mock. Physically, Kira was large, brutish, and bestial: a born servant to the wise. Mentally, she was just as crude as she appeared, and had Violet not taken the simple girl under her wing, she doubted Kira would have lived past her fifth year. Thanks to her sister, Kira enjoyed affection, leadership, and a sense of purpose. Where Violet went, Kira would follow. This emotional education did not come from a place of compassion. No, Violet could not give what she herself could not understand. Rather, she learned to pretend. She watched as Kira grew up knowing very little save that she loved her sister, and that all else was fit to be destroyed, or rather, devoured.

To Violet’s amusement, somewhere, somehow, Kira had acquired an intriguing habit of consuming whatever she could get her claws on. Food, small animals, large animals, even other sentient beings became nothing more than tools to sate her apparently endless hunger. This habit of devouring the living pleased her father, who merely saw it as Kira embracing her primitive nature. Violet saw past this conveniently shallow reasoning and saw a deeper poetry at work, for Kira had unknowingly grasped the same emptiness which Violet herself so acutely felt. Struggling to fill the void, the girl ate and ate, and in eating she seemed to find pleasure. She grew content, and, accordingly, Violet grew a distaste for her. Again, the guttered flames of jealousy struggled to burn within the eldest of the three women, and again she nurtured them with all her strength. Kira could be broken; she would keep Kira close.

As the three sisters grew to adulthood in the shadow of their father, they noticed a growing frequency in his absences. The Demon Prince was by necessity a busy man, and he had hardly been a close companion to them in their youth, but his negligence had ascended to the level of abandonment by the time his children had reached adolescence. Soon, there came a time when they saw no more of their father and became heirs to his manor, with only its undead servants and extensive vanity portraits to signal that he had ever been there in the first place. In the meantime, Kira had become the pet of both Violet and Nayea, the latter of whom saw in the energetic girl a love of life which clearly appealed to her. Nayea of course misunderstood, and Violet had strived to make this fact clear, but the girl was stubborn. Amusingly, she herself had unconsciously adopted Kira’s boundless gluttony into her own way of life, taking quiet, guilty advantage of the ample natural resources that surrounded her. Violet had long since done the same. To devour the living was in some way satisfying, though no amount of flesh consumed could bring to her the same pleasure she witnessed in Kira, and this knowledge only vexed her further. Still, to see proud Nayea succumb to her own carnal bloodlust offered Violet the faintest of pleasures, though these were subdued by the fact that the feeble-minded girl undoubtedly invented some proud justification of these acts that would otherwise marr her understanding of herself. Such was the nature of a mind obsessed with meaning.

The three did not live together for long after Mordecai’s disappearance. Kira had begun to decimate the tribes which lay scattered across Belial, a quest which Violet encouraged. Nayea grew self-righteous and incensed by her sisters’ moral laxity. Wary that she could not wrest Kira from Violet’s influence, the pompous middle-sibling fled. Within a short time, the people of Belial were no more, and Kira enjoyed her empty title of god-empress, which the remaining tribesmen had bestowed upon her in a desperate plea for their lives. Violet, meanwhile, turned her attention outward, aware that there was more to the universe than this paltry moon on which they existed. Its destruction would not be her goal; no, to take a life meant nothing to her, just as life itself was of little consequence. Even her own name mocked her with its emptiness. In the future she would twist it to express her own hollow soul. All that mattered now was to secure that which she did not possess, the terrifying, rapturous bodily euphoria of true feeling, the only truth which was allowed to mortals. She would secure it somehow, perhaps through the decimation of a million moons, or maybe through the utter annihilation of one individual’s hopes and dreams. The path was unclear, but without the illusion of greater purpose to burden her, she would suffer nothing to stand between her and the elusive warmth that only life could give.

Viol is (c) me

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