They deserve it all.

Chapter 23

"Father." I say as I get closer and the guards begin to move away towards different parts of the forest to keep us protected.

"Willow!" He exclaims a little too excited for my taste. "I hadn't thought you still liked hunting?"

I used to like hunting because of all the blood. I'd experience a rush-like flooding feeling throughout my body, I'd feel myself experiencing something that came just so close to oblivion and euphoria to me. I'd love to hear their last scream, to watch them get dragged away and the blood trail behind them, to watch as they'd get tied up and to see others eating it later on. I didn't know why when I was younger, I was disgusted with myself, I promised I would no longer hunt because which normal person would ever get a certain satisfaction from dying creatures and their sad howls, their flesh being ripped apart, their skin being used for clothes, their teeth being used as accessories and their bones being used for stock. But I realized after a long time of no longer hunting that it wasn't the crying and the blood of the animal that made me forget of all my worries, that wasn't it, no, partly only, but it was because I am not a normal person. It was them being so close to death that made this flower inside of me bloom. And whenever I participated in those tournaments and I listened to my opponents cry and scream at me on the top of their lungs to stop their pain, I felt good and bad but mostly good because they were in pain, not me, on the edge of dying, and it fed Willow and made my rage and the burden I carried so often on my shoulders just that much lighter. And I also realized that though it was Willow I fed, it was me who they saw being delighted in their pain. Willow was but a shadow, someone only I saw and heard, she was a part of me no one would ever see, and I wanted to keep it that way, for no one to see her, but if I wouldn't feed her, they would see her, and nothing ever good came from that.

As I walk over the fields with my father, my hands in front of me, his hands behind him, the powerful cover draped over him and me walking beside him I see he's taller than me now, but in reality, I am taller than him. And maybe it's because of things I endured that I cannot help but want to be taller than him, to tower above him and intimidate him, to look down on him. Instead he looks at me and smiles, then points at what looks like frog but in reality is some tiny flesh eating monster than resides deep in the blacks of the water and comes over as small and tiny beast when you see then from this point.

"Remember how you begged me to go hunt those?" He smiles thinking at the memory. "For days you'd be asking, 'daddy, daddy could we please go today', and when we went it took only one shot for you to kill it."

"Yet you took the win for it, not to forget that you refused to go with me for days until someone on the council agreed with the 'nice idea' of mine."

His smiles falters, but he doesn't let it completely ruin the moment. I don't exactly know why I said that, I could have shut my mouth, smiled at him, faked it, but I haven't spoken to him in years and suddenly he wants to act like nothing happened, as if he was the best father I could ever wish for. Just because he needs something from me doesn't mean I have forgotten what he did and how he did it, I haven't forgotten any of that, the way he blasted me, he did it carefully, made sure I was safe, but before I was stomped and pushed through that tiny hole in the border he had left to the comforting walls of his golden palace. He wasn't there to see the consequences of his actions, he just left me, with open wounds he made and a promise he broke.

"If you want, we could try and catch it."

I shake my head. "They have evolved to their surroundings in the last few years, back then it was clueless to arrows and poison and sleeping potions and rocks thrown to their heads. But they learned and hunting them now would be like a death wish." I point to the other side of the forest. "How about we hunt somewhere safer."