[ She leaves early in the morning, while the hyenas are still asleep. It is easier that way, to avoid their complaints and demands and insinuations. They have grown brazen under Haran's watch, thinking they belong in the House, thinking that Qetzi is somehow indebted for her continued survival. She is not their servant, and what cleaning she does within the House is for her own satisfaction, not theirs.
She leaves early in the morning after another night of ghosts and whispers. She is used to it by now, and perhaps in a way looks forward to the familiar voices of her sisters, even if they come in wails and screams now. She knows what they want from her, but there are other calls which much be answered. The call to preserve their blood, the call to escape. The two conflict, and never so stridently as when she is in the House itself. And so she leaves, early in the morning.
She takes no path on her way into the woods, looks for no markers amongst the mist. The trees will open the way for her as they see fit. Past the river where her mother had once walked in the night, past the abandoned coal mines where once strangers had thought to find fortunes and instead found death, past the little unconsecrated cemetery where the first settlers of the Hill lay. And then the flowers are before her, wild and brambling, sprawling in every direction, clawing their way up trees and strangling the life from them. A secret place that she had found as a child, and now returns to as a woman for the solace it provides. No demon will find her here.
She spends the afternoon tending to her wildflowers. Coaxing the stems of smothered flowers up into the light, up around branches to receive more sun. She scatters cinnamon and coffee at the roots to keep slugs and infections away. She pricks her finger on the stem of a blackberry and shares her blood with the fruit. Once there had been such a patch by the House, tended to and beloved by her grandmother, long since torn up now. When the sun becomes to hot for such a night-born creature, she takes to the shade of one grand Elder Tree untouched by the invasion of wildflower. Its mossy boss is comfortable and she sleeps there for a time, she dreams of dancing and soft kisses and she awakes with purple wisteria braided into her hair. As the sun begins to set, she clips a few flowers to take back to the House, collects a small satchel's worth of berries. ]
[ The girl who returns to the House at sundown has an armful of vibrant flowers. She is dressed functionally, but feminine. Her dark dress made of strong canvas, her boots sturdy and tall and caked with mud. She is not surprised that the visitor is there, she knows who comes and goes from the Hill as well as Haran does.
However... she is perhaps surprised to find him in her kitchen.
She hesitates in the doorway for a moment before she carries on with her business, laying down her bundle of weeds on the square wooden table where once daughters and granddaughters had helped to prepare dinners and potions. ]
[They've had the chance to meet, sometime when Haran wasn't - didn't care to - be around, probably tending to another capture in the city. None of the people leftover in this house care much for the guests he chooses to bring in, and he's sure Brandon is just another one.
Still, the boy knows his way around... He knows how to talk to the Morrisons and wants to learn how to appeal to them, most of all Haran, which the spoiler brat likes. The hyenas are restless with the new presence, desperate to snap their teeth at fresh meat, and Haran may just decide to send it to them if he's proved wrong.
Do the others feel anything new about him, though? They must have had the chance to talk and form an opinion by now. Even Tavor, stuck in the basement with the other monstrosities, watches from the shadows.]
Qetzi...
[A sing-song mutter, playing with one of the flowers she's left in the kitchen.]
[ Dinah is rarely alone. She had been born into this world in a squirming, messy litter full of teeth and laughter. She had devoured her sisters before she could even open her eyes, could even walk, and that was the world to which she belonged. A simple place between animal and mankind, between life and death. Magic and mayhem.
Their mother had been a half-breed, the daughter of a demon dead woman and the Cerberus demi-god whose duty it was to keep her behind the gates of Hell, to guard her in the upper world when those gates should be unlocked. Neither of them human, at least not any longer, and neither of them what one could call truly, fully, alive. Spectral and immortal, and so was their daughter who wandered in twilight feasting on the corpses they would leave behind as they wreaked death upon all things they touched.
Their father had been witch through and through. He is gone now, and this... does not trouble Dinah. He had only ever gotten in the way of things when he had lived. He had prevented her from disciplining the pack as she saw fit, instead injecting his ugly witch family's strange laws where they did not truly belong. All it had done was fuel their frustration, like dogs chained together in a pen, snapping at each other for lack of space.
Things are better now in Haran's hands, the demon spawn is more alike to them. More mercurial and disinterested, like their mother had been. She had left them when they were young because they did not need her, and she did not need them. And now the hyenas stay for comfort not for obligation. She can even tolerate Hekate's return now that things have gone on for so long, the mad little bitch had proven herself with her survival. With the witches gone... what was there left to fight over. The House was theirs, the Hill was there.
They would pick it clean. The thought graces Dinah's daydreams and it feels right to her as the daughter of Anubis.
She is not usually alone, in the usual there are her males always beside her, larger and stronger than the rest, but she has left them sleeping in the den to come out into the quiet of the woods and admire its barrenness now that the dark-eyed women of the House no longer extend their tendrils out into the mists. ]
[ The girl lazing on the steps of the House does not quite look like the other Morrisons. She is taller than them both, her shoulders are wider and her legs look very strong. It is easy to see in the loose clothes she wears, wet hair trailing over her shoulder after a dip in the stream. Her eyes are more deeply socketed than the witches he has met, and the eyes set so deeply are intense and wild.
She tilts her head at Brandon as he comes back up the path, her tongue pressed to the back of a canine tooth in a thoughtful, hungry smile. ]
[The sun sets. The hyenas have fed and are content for the night; Qetzi arranges dinner as per Haran's request, and Brandon is invited to be at the dinner table by eight. Haran dresses well; he steals one of his grandfather's best jackets to wear it primly, confident that Qetzi will hate him all the more for it. The worst part, perhaps, is that it fits him perfectly.
Once the clock ticks to the first second of the hour, he places down one of the poppy moth larvae he's carefully placed on display in the master bedroom, considering whom to use them on first. Perhaps one of the hyenas, just to start. There are plenty of them and the majority are perfectly disposable; plus, their magic and strong connection with the most vicious side of nature makes them prime sources of energy.
Later.
He steps into the room, hand sliding lightly on the back of the main chair. He looks at his cousin first, then at the wizard, sitting down until he's well settled. Then he gestures at them with a deceitfully kind smile, allowing the two the honor of sitting with him.]
We've arranged tonight's meal especially for you, wizard.
[ Tavor has always resided in the cavernous depths beneath the House. There was never another world for him; no other option. There was no way for him to feign humanity, and neither was he witch. He is a monster, in far more depth than even the other creatures housed in the labyrinthine cellars could suggest. Half-breed abomination, one of a kind, a mistake in nature, and too barren to ever replicate himself. He will live and he will die, son of the black dirt more than he ever was of the Morrisons.
With pure-blood Sapphira gone, if anyone is emissary of the true spirit of House, it is Tavor crawling in the squalid under-layers. He maintains the last of the menagerie, the pieces that could be contained after the communal will of the family was vanquished by Haran.
'Maintains' may be a strong word. He can be moved to feed them on occasion, speaks with them when it suits him to, but he is quite an absentee guardian. His mother would be disappointed in him, but then he had always been disappointed in his mother. So they would, at last, be even. This disappointment is his feeling for all of the witches, an ever present disdain that he does not hide and does not need to. He is inconsequential to them, a stain on their lineage they would rather forget but cannot quite sever.
He appears when he is summoned, he disappears again when released, finding his way ever deeper into the heart of the Hill. ]
[ In her own way, Qetzi'ah does not expect the magus to return. She hopes that after seeing the basement and Haran's pathetic sense of 'amusements' that he has thought better of this entire game, reported to his masters that there is nothing worth their time nor flattery. It wouldn't be entirely true, there are generations worths of arcana and magick collected, some of them utterly invaluable. But... she would slit his throat long before she parted with a single piece of it, and were that feckless slug Haran to attempt to undermine her-- Well. Everyone is curious to know how far he will have to push her before the rage bubbling just beneath the surface will finally spill forth. Does she have it in her finish him?
No, not yet.
But as she throws cards and bones the image the knife comes again and again, precarious and too close to the past, present and future. It is all roads.
In her own way, Qetzi'ah also hopes desperately that the magus does return. He is the wind of change in the air, disrupting the stagnant routine that she and Haran have fallen in to. A catalyst and distraction, something that might pull Haran's attention away, might weaken him enough for her to drive the dagger home. But then what would she do with the magus... Morrisons are hoarding folk, it seems a waste to simply kill him but he's far too sickly and weak for breeding. But what other choice would she have? He was what was left. No villagers remained in the hovels of the surrounding hills, where once this would easily have been solved.
The crystals and entrails show her nothing in that regard, she even grows desperate enough to go out into the meadow in the dark and ask those pretty things that dance beneath the moon.
[ Qetzi'ah's room is lined with dried flowers. Across the ceiling and up the walls, the bundles of flowers are each neatly tied with twine and strung to thin trellises that make a barrier against the true walls of her room. It gives the illusion that the little area has been thatched in with herbs, as if it is its own little world. But then, every bedroom in the House has such a feel when you step across the threshold, although that surety has been waning surely night after night now that all of the inhabitants are gone. Qetzi can do nothing to prevent this, and every time she enters one of the old rooms to dust, she feels that sense of their death. Their nearness fading. They are no more, and their energy bleeds from all that had once resonanted with them, whispering out into nothingness.
Aside from the flowers, placed carefully on dresser tops and shelves are Qetzi's other little knicknacks. Her sentimental hairworks from each of her fallen family members, the moths and butterflies pinned carefully beneath glass... Every part of Qetzi'ah's room is something beautiful but dead. Delicate but decaying. She lives in a twilight place, an in between where she does not quite flourish but neither can she truly allow herself to wither...
She places Kae's jar on her desk, an uncluttered space where he has a clear view of all that goes on in the room, although at the moment that is nothing much. Just Qetzi'ah unlacing her shoes, taking off the outer layer of her dress to sit in her shift, then reaching with little enthusiasm to brush her hair out. Her expression is both sorrowful and irritable, and she is tired in a way that is more emotional than physical.
[ Hekate and her brother-consort keep unusual patterns upon the Hill. Almost as if strangers to it. They do not fit, they do not blend into the shadows with their pale hair and blue eyes. They are ethereal, ghostly, but always tipped in blood, crusted into their nails, stained at the hems of their clothing. They keep apart from the others. Hekate clearly does not even particularly mourn the other males left of her litter. She has deemed them weak and unfaithful and left them in Dinah's care. It does not matter, she has realized she only has care enough for Ivor. When she takes the House she wants him at her side, the father of her litters, the soft-hearted adviser at her right hand. It fills her body with certainty and lust, every time she looks at him. And it is not so very different for him, they belong to one another in a way that defies all else.
There is something untapped in them. Something that rings between them, something that comes into focus when they stand at the correct angles to one another. Like two beams of light through separate prisms overlapping to expose something forbidden. Something cryptic, ghostly, which they acquired from their mother's side of the bloodline, just as they did their blonde hair and blue eyes. Their mother was a magical thing, the jackal-hearted girl that should never have been born. Her own mother was a corpse in kind, her father the ghost of a monster, each of them tainted with the infernal. What kind of beastliness could they make, if they could unlock the secret. What kind of demon, what kind of magic...
At night, they dream in tandem of a grey world covered in fog, where all the eyes lurking in the mists are their own. A distant land where it is just they two and the magic of the world. How strange, how unlike the goals that Hekate espouses in waking: her desire to the Hill, her devotion to the black. Has she merely never known any other height to ascend? She never remembers the dreams when she awakens, and if he does Ivor says nothing.
At least not to her.
When she is not looking he takes the golem away, to be alone with it, to try and find the grey country where they run free in the night... ]
[ As the litters of hyena had been born, Anubis's mother had come to assist in the births. Catherine Mary St. Croix had made her way to her daughter's side through both Hell, and high water. It was Mary who gave each of the little wriggling creatures, with their closed eyes and many teeth, their wide variance of names. She had traveled all across the world called Earth in her hundreds of years, been to many places, killed many men, tempted many women into covenant such as she held. She had liked the idea, of naming her jackal daughter's pups in many ways, rather than confining them only to the biblical canons the Morrisons found so amusing to befoul.
Aziza, the beloved.
It had suited her well, when she had been a pet of the House, when she had been the warmth in Sapphira's bed. When she had taken magicks, the family secrets, as gifts straight from the pure blood daughter's mouth. Those days are gone now. There is no one to love her here, and the demon usurper is everything that her mistress had hated; everything she had hated and been unable to change. Sapphira had burned with a feverish madness, daughter of twin brother and sister, she was more closely tied to the House than anyone before or after her would ever be. It should have made her powerful, capable of taking a whelp like Haran down at the knees, but she had been conflicted. Did she want the Hill's throne... or did she want to burn it to the ground and cleanse its bones so that no more Morrisons would live and die there ever again.
Aziza too looks up at the House, and wonders on its demise. She does so now as Haran summons them all into the clearing before the House. All the hyenas, and his cousin and then his... pet, Aziza supposes is what Brandon must be. He looks docile enough, has caused little enough trouble, but... Sapphira had always told her that looks can be deceiving. She crosses her arms, in the back of the crowd of her siblings while they jostle and snap at each other impatiently.
On the steps to the House, Qetzi'ah has a mistrustful expression set upon her lips. Aziza takes note. ]
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[ She leaves early in the morning, while the hyenas are still asleep. It is easier that way, to avoid their complaints and demands and insinuations. They have grown brazen under Haran's watch, thinking they belong in the House, thinking that Qetzi is somehow indebted for her continued survival. She is not their servant, and what cleaning she does within the House is for her own satisfaction, not theirs.
She leaves early in the morning after another night of ghosts and whispers. She is used to it by now, and perhaps in a way looks forward to the familiar voices of her sisters, even if they come in wails and screams now. She knows what they want from her, but there are other calls which much be answered. The call to preserve their blood, the call to escape. The two conflict, and never so stridently as when she is in the House itself. And so she leaves, early in the morning.
She takes no path on her way into the woods, looks for no markers amongst the mist. The trees will open the way for her as they see fit. Past the river where her mother had once walked in the night, past the abandoned coal mines where once strangers had thought to find fortunes and instead found death, past the little unconsecrated cemetery where the first settlers of the Hill lay. And then the flowers are before her, wild and brambling, sprawling in every direction, clawing their way up trees and strangling the life from them. A secret place that she had found as a child, and now returns to as a woman for the solace it provides. No demon will find her here.
She spends the afternoon tending to her wildflowers. Coaxing the stems of smothered flowers up into the light, up around branches to receive more sun. She scatters cinnamon and coffee at the roots to keep slugs and infections away. She pricks her finger on the stem of a blackberry and shares her blood with the fruit. Once there had been such a patch by the House, tended to and beloved by her grandmother, long since torn up now. When the sun becomes to hot for such a night-born creature, she takes to the shade of one grand Elder Tree untouched by the invasion of wildflower. Its mossy boss is comfortable and she sleeps there for a time, she dreams of dancing and soft kisses and she awakes with purple wisteria braided into her hair. As the sun begins to set, she clips a few flowers to take back to the House, collects a small satchel's worth of berries. ]
" YOU WILL LIKE MY COUSIN. "
However... she is perhaps surprised to find him in her kitchen.
She hesitates in the doorway for a moment before she carries on with her business, laying down her bundle of weeds on the square wooden table where once daughters and granddaughters had helped to prepare dinners and potions. ]
Good evening.
[ Polite, but softly chill. ]
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Still, the boy knows his way around... He knows how to talk to the Morrisons and wants to learn how to appeal to them, most of all Haran, which the spoiler brat likes. The hyenas are restless with the new presence, desperate to snap their teeth at fresh meat, and Haran may just decide to send it to them if he's proved wrong.
Do the others feel anything new about him, though? They must have had the chance to talk and form an opinion by now. Even Tavor, stuck in the basement with the other monstrosities, watches from the shadows.]
Qetzi...
[A sing-song mutter, playing with one of the flowers she's left in the kitchen.]
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[ Dinah is rarely alone. She had been born into this world in a squirming, messy litter full of teeth and laughter. She had devoured her sisters before she could even open her eyes, could even walk, and that was the world to which she belonged. A simple place between animal and mankind, between life and death. Magic and mayhem.
Their mother had been a half-breed, the daughter of a demon dead woman and the Cerberus demi-god whose duty it was to keep her behind the gates of Hell, to guard her in the upper world when those gates should be unlocked. Neither of them human, at least not any longer, and neither of them what one could call truly, fully, alive. Spectral and immortal, and so was their daughter who wandered in twilight feasting on the corpses they would leave behind as they wreaked death upon all things they touched.
Their father had been witch through and through. He is gone now, and this... does not trouble Dinah. He had only ever gotten in the way of things when he had lived. He had prevented her from disciplining the pack as she saw fit, instead injecting his ugly witch family's strange laws where they did not truly belong. All it had done was fuel their frustration, like dogs chained together in a pen, snapping at each other for lack of space.
Things are better now in Haran's hands, the demon spawn is more alike to them. More mercurial and disinterested, like their mother had been. She had left them when they were young because they did not need her, and she did not need them. And now the hyenas stay for comfort not for obligation. She can even tolerate Hekate's return now that things have gone on for so long, the mad little bitch had proven herself with her survival. With the witches gone... what was there left to fight over. The House was theirs, the Hill was there.
They would pick it clean. The thought graces Dinah's daydreams and it feels right to her as the daughter of Anubis.
She is not usually alone, in the usual there are her males always beside her, larger and stronger than the rest, but she has left them sleeping in the den to come out into the quiet of the woods and admire its barrenness now that the dark-eyed women of the House no longer extend their tendrils out into the mists. ]
" THEY HAVE THEIR OWN RULES. "
She tilts her head at Brandon as he comes back up the path, her tongue pressed to the back of a canine tooth in a thoughtful, hungry smile. ]
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happy dinner times
Once the clock ticks to the first second of the hour, he places down one of the poppy moth larvae he's carefully placed on display in the master bedroom, considering whom to use them on first. Perhaps one of the hyenas, just to start. There are plenty of them and the majority are perfectly disposable; plus, their magic and strong connection with the most vicious side of nature makes them prime sources of energy.
Later.
He steps into the room, hand sliding lightly on the back of the main chair. He looks at his cousin first, then at the wizard, sitting down until he's well settled. Then he gestures at them with a deceitfully kind smile, allowing the two the honor of sitting with him.]
We've arranged tonight's meal especially for you, wizard.
hateful dinner catastrophe
after dinner hate mints
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I WISH THE GOBLINS WOULD COME AND TAKE YOU AWAY RIGHT NOW
wow is that a thing. a delivery service. can brandon have their number
plot twist: haran dethrones and becomes the new goblin king
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" COME TO THE BASEMENT WITH ME. "
[ Tavor has always resided in the cavernous depths beneath the House. There was never another world for him; no other option. There was no way for him to feign humanity, and neither was he witch. He is a monster, in far more depth than even the other creatures housed in the labyrinthine cellars could suggest. Half-breed abomination, one of a kind, a mistake in nature, and too barren to ever replicate himself. He will live and he will die, son of the black dirt more than he ever was of the Morrisons.
With pure-blood Sapphira gone, if anyone is emissary of the true spirit of House, it is Tavor crawling in the squalid under-layers. He maintains the last of the menagerie, the pieces that could be contained after the communal will of the family was vanquished by Haran.
'Maintains' may be a strong word. He can be moved to feed them on occasion, speaks with them when it suits him to, but he is quite an absentee guardian. His mother would be disappointed in him, but then he had always been disappointed in his mother. So they would, at last, be even. This disappointment is his feeling for all of the witches, an ever present disdain that he does not hide and does not need to. He is inconsequential to them, a stain on their lineage they would rather forget but cannot quite sever.
He appears when he is summoned, he disappears again when released, finding his way ever deeper into the heart of the Hill. ]
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WAITING
[ In her own way, Qetzi'ah does not expect the magus to return. She hopes that after seeing the basement and Haran's pathetic sense of 'amusements' that he has thought better of this entire game, reported to his masters that there is nothing worth their time nor flattery. It wouldn't be entirely true, there are generations worths of arcana and magick collected, some of them utterly invaluable. But... she would slit his throat long before she parted with a single piece of it, and were that feckless slug Haran to attempt to undermine her-- Well. Everyone is curious to know how far he will have to push her before the rage bubbling just beneath the surface will finally spill forth. Does she have it in her finish him?
No, not yet.
But as she throws cards and bones the image the knife comes again and again, precarious and too close to the past, present and future. It is all roads.
In her own way, Qetzi'ah also hopes desperately that the magus does return. He is the wind of change in the air, disrupting the stagnant routine that she and Haran have fallen in to. A catalyst and distraction, something that might pull Haran's attention away, might weaken him enough for her to drive the dagger home. But then what would she do with the magus... Morrisons are hoarding folk, it seems a waste to simply kill him but he's far too sickly and weak for breeding. But what other choice would she have? He was what was left. No villagers remained in the hovels of the surrounding hills, where once this would easily have been solved.
The crystals and entrails show her nothing in that regard, she even grows desperate enough to go out into the meadow in the dark and ask those pretty things that dance beneath the moon.
They giggle and they tell her nothing. ]
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[ Qetzi'ah's room is lined with dried flowers. Across the ceiling and up the walls, the bundles of flowers are each neatly tied with twine and strung to thin trellises that make a barrier against the true walls of her room. It gives the illusion that the little area has been thatched in with herbs, as if it is its own little world. But then, every bedroom in the House has such a feel when you step across the threshold, although that surety has been waning surely night after night now that all of the inhabitants are gone. Qetzi can do nothing to prevent this, and every time she enters one of the old rooms to dust, she feels that sense of their death. Their nearness fading. They are no more, and their energy bleeds from all that had once resonanted with them, whispering out into nothingness.
Aside from the flowers, placed carefully on dresser tops and shelves are Qetzi's other little knicknacks. Her sentimental hairworks from each of her fallen family members, the moths and butterflies pinned carefully beneath glass... Every part of Qetzi'ah's room is something beautiful but dead. Delicate but decaying. She lives in a twilight place, an in between where she does not quite flourish but neither can she truly allow herself to wither...
She places Kae's jar on her desk, an uncluttered space where he has a clear view of all that goes on in the room, although at the moment that is nothing much. Just Qetzi'ah unlacing her shoes, taking off the outer layer of her dress to sit in her shift, then reaching with little enthusiasm to brush her hair out. Her expression is both sorrowful and irritable, and she is tired in a way that is more emotional than physical.
Brandon should not have tried to bribe her... ]
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[ Hekate and her brother-consort keep unusual patterns upon the Hill. Almost as if strangers to it. They do not fit, they do not blend into the shadows with their pale hair and blue eyes. They are ethereal, ghostly, but always tipped in blood, crusted into their nails, stained at the hems of their clothing. They keep apart from the others. Hekate clearly does not even particularly mourn the other males left of her litter. She has deemed them weak and unfaithful and left them in Dinah's care. It does not matter, she has realized she only has care enough for Ivor. When she takes the House she wants him at her side, the father of her litters, the soft-hearted adviser at her right hand. It fills her body with certainty and lust, every time she looks at him. And it is not so very different for him, they belong to one another in a way that defies all else.
There is something untapped in them. Something that rings between them, something that comes into focus when they stand at the correct angles to one another. Like two beams of light through separate prisms overlapping to expose something forbidden. Something cryptic, ghostly, which they acquired from their mother's side of the bloodline, just as they did their blonde hair and blue eyes. Their mother was a magical thing, the jackal-hearted girl that should never have been born. Her own mother was a corpse in kind, her father the ghost of a monster, each of them tainted with the infernal. What kind of beastliness could they make, if they could unlock the secret. What kind of demon, what kind of magic...
At night, they dream in tandem of a grey world covered in fog, where all the eyes lurking in the mists are their own. A distant land where it is just they two and the magic of the world. How strange, how unlike the goals that Hekate espouses in waking: her desire to the Hill, her devotion to the black. Has she merely never known any other height to ascend? She never remembers the dreams when she awakens, and if he does Ivor says nothing.
At least not to her.
When she is not looking he takes the golem away, to be alone with it, to try and find the grey country where they run free in the night... ]
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i wanted real icons
he's a delicate buttercup
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[ As the litters of hyena had been born, Anubis's mother had come to assist in the births. Catherine Mary St. Croix had made her way to her daughter's side through both Hell, and high water. It was Mary who gave each of the little wriggling creatures, with their closed eyes and many teeth, their wide variance of names. She had traveled all across the world called Earth in her hundreds of years, been to many places, killed many men, tempted many women into covenant such as she held. She had liked the idea, of naming her jackal daughter's pups in many ways, rather than confining them only to the biblical canons the Morrisons found so amusing to befoul.
Aziza, the beloved.
It had suited her well, when she had been a pet of the House, when she had been the warmth in Sapphira's bed. When she had taken magicks, the family secrets, as gifts straight from the pure blood daughter's mouth. Those days are gone now. There is no one to love her here, and the demon usurper is everything that her mistress had hated; everything she had hated and been unable to change. Sapphira had burned with a feverish madness, daughter of twin brother and sister, she was more closely tied to the House than anyone before or after her would ever be. It should have made her powerful, capable of taking a whelp like Haran down at the knees, but she had been conflicted. Did she want the Hill's throne... or did she want to burn it to the ground and cleanse its bones so that no more Morrisons would live and die there ever again.
Aziza too looks up at the House, and wonders on its demise. She does so now as Haran summons them all into the clearing before the House. All the hyenas, and his cousin and then his... pet, Aziza supposes is what Brandon must be. He looks docile enough, has caused little enough trouble, but... Sapphira had always told her that looks can be deceiving. She crosses her arms, in the back of the crowd of her siblings while they jostle and snap at each other impatiently.
On the steps to the House, Qetzi'ah has a mistrustful expression set upon her lips. Aziza takes note. ]