[Broadcast Mind]
[The first time you feel it, it's like a splinter in your mind-- a whisper, his voice, stinking of desperation and those sharp, hot feelings you can't put a finger on. It's the same feeling that you get when you catch eyes on you, looking at you the same way other eyes did in school, watching you in your gym uniform, all long legs and speed on the track-- but that was years ago, when you were young and vital and your blood wasn't pooled in wheeltracks tracking into the forests around the shortcut you thought you could take on your way home (but you couldn't, could you? All those times your aunt told you it wasn't safe, all those times you flaunted that speed, but it never had a chance when the horse screamed and you felt it: a blow like a suckerpunch, the sudden feeling of blazing pain along the right side of your head and the sickening feel of bones that give when they shouldn't give at all). You wake up cold and pale and covered in torn, half-rotting clothes, stiff with rusty stains of blood, and you don't realize then that that's the last time you'll associate that color with bleeding. You don't realize that, like Rip Van Winkle, you've slept through the loss of everything you thought you loved.
Now you're older and still vital, still energetic because that's what they expect, that's what they want even if you don't have the gravitas they expected, even if you're not the prince they wanted, and there's that feeling. And suddenly you understand, you watch the white rose princess as she pulls the spirit from the thing, and you understand the process. The reach-and-grab and the bright, hot heat of a soul, a life, in your palm, becoming more-- becoming a weapon, a skill. You understand it all.
And you try it, and as that heat spreads through your palm, it sets something off like an allergic reaction, an explosion in your chest, white-hot light through your veins. That power isn't something you can control, isn't something any human could, and you realize that entirely too late as a sweet savagery takes over. Blows that initially aimed to kill now inflict maximum pain, leave the creatures before you whimpering and something in their animal eyes is begging, is pleading for death instead of this cold, appraising stare and the slow grin that leaves your skin feeling tight and wrong. And when your friends have to take that step, have to stop you from doing what He would do, you feel the cold rush of blood taking over that burning center, and you swear you won't do it again.
But you'll always do it again. How not, when you're all weary and the creature is vicious? How can you not become That when death (once again, a friend you'll never see again without the sharp stabbing pain of a blade or the blaze of magic-- a friend who will never visit you unbidden) waits behind those claws, those teeth?
How can you not become what you have been made to be?]