#there is so much to unpack for rafal's pre-canon especially in the 'i killed all my siblings' department

[rafent]

✦ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐘 𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐄𝐏 𝐈𝐒 𝐀 𝐖𝐎𝐋𝐅 ✧

There is a cottage in the woods.

Nil watches it through tiny breaches in the briars, like the peepholes of a starving white wolf. A nuclear family nests inside consisting of father, mother, and child; picture-perfect, as quaint as the humblest aspirations can hope to be. The hardworking father descends the mountain to peddle cut lumber. The diligent mother rises early and fills the forest with smells of plain but revitalizing cooking. The lone child plays all by her lonesome, quietly and causing no trouble, asking after no toys her parents cannot afford.

Each is hard at work in their painted-on roles, but the mother especially. She dabs away her sweat with the bone of her wrist, tidies her spilling bun and adjusts the straps of her apron when they fall loose amid midday labors. Her chemises and linens air on the clothing line, brought in before the preparations for supper.

These pristine appearances are what throw him off, of course, the singular child that induces pause. Is it not all too mundane? Should there not be a second wretch to frolic in the garden beside the first? Over the course of several days, Nil gleans what he can for the simple act of confirmation. On the fourth, he approaches. He learns there are many allowances the littlest ones will make for a kind and studied smile.

“Do you know my mama, mister?”

“I do. I am friends with her, from long, long ago, but it is very cold outside. Can I wait for her in there with you?”

“Okay.”

It is the most innocent that let the devil into their home. It is the most innocent that is the devil, after all. Kindly Nil sits and waits, his fingers drum thoughtfully against the naperon, studying the stains of spilled, ill-dried broth. The smell of washed millet and dank wood. It is a pleasant home, a proper home; that is the reality; the truth, in the same way that Nil does not really know who this child’s mother is, her face, her age, or even her name. He knows only that they have the same eyes.

She arrives eventually. She sees his eyes, too. How? her chalk-white expression asks. At this distance there is no mistake for either of them. After a moment he rises from the chair with a severe set of his mouth, there is nothing of Nil in it anymore.

“Outside.” On his demand they go together. As one might estimate the age of an oak tree by its quantity of rings, the length of existence for a Fell Child can be judged by different visual parameters; the cocked alertness of her spine, the clenched fingers down at her side, the primordial readiness of fight and flight. But it is futile, Rafal has made sure of his advantages from the moment they stepped out, the defective Child leading and Rafal at her back. It does not stop her from trying.

“I’ve left Gradlon behind. My ambitions, my dragonstone—everything. I have a family. You don't have to do this.”

His lips twist, amused, bitter, disbelieving, everything at once. He laughs with all his chest and says to the pleading red eyes that have damned her, neither gleeful nor triumphal, merely factual: “But I will. Did you think laying with a human and birthing his pups would absolve you of this struggle? Never.”

Those born of Gradlon cannot run even from the enemies they have never made. The dice their blood has cast for them from the moment each drew breath, hissing in the viper pit hundreds and thousands strong, wanting with all their wicked hearts to be the last and only one. Revanche, a conferred axe from Divine Dragons, points at her like a wielded guillotine, like Rafal is judge, jury, and executioner. The reality is only that he is rightful heir over it all.

And ultimately, like it has been for countless others, it is easy. She is nothing like Nel. Her atrophied strength does not compare, not the pitiful tooth she straps to her thigh - a single knife batted away - or the futile scrabble of her nails down his arm in her final throes. Her face is not remotely alike, too plain without the dragonkin's trappings of gold, that it evokes nothing when he stares into it, rips into it. So it is easy. 

“Mama! Mommy! Momm—”

Hair topples fully from the struggling bun, the apron like Rafal is white now freckled and stained. Rafal looks down at a homely brown-haired niece; a nameless, wretched, sorry inheritor of Fell Dragon legacy and sees nothing of her mother in her; there is everything of her human father about her. That does not leave him satisfied. He is the one that will not take chances.

...

Too soon, the truant father returns home from cutting wood, catching a young man in his home with an axe in his hand, his two greatest treasures shattered on the floor. His mouth opens to yell, to scream, to say anything at all. This noise stirs the wolf, startles him, provokes him, and for that there is movement—

. . .and then there is silence.

There is a cottage in the woods and no family inside.