Full Moon

"You have spilled so much blood, you could drown yourself in it."
A flick of the wrist, and the blood of the land came alive with the fury of every person each drop fell from, coalescing and merging into one gigantic globe, weightlessly and effortlessly sticking to the scales and fur of the dragon.
Every scale, every strand of fur, it was a trap for another drop to join to. An anchor, ensuring that every one would never be free from its body without his will.
Bubbles erupted from its smooth glass surface, from every direction as the dragon thrashed in panic. Fury.
Fear.
As it drowned in the blood it had shed, choked on the lifeblood of those it had killed. Its death throws were silent, sound muffled by the blood it had chosen to rend into the open air.
The blood the dragons had spilled was nothing compared to that which had been spilled an eon ago, soil stained red and rusted beneath sheets of ice, snow, and permafrost. The blood of a people who no longer walked the earth, but a people who were exterminated like vermin, unfairly, uncaringly, so easily erased. The blood that barely had time to freeze to the frozen ground was but a drop in the ocean compared to the blood of humans that bathed the tundra, a world once theirs.
Their blood too, cried out for revenge, for justice, for just as many drops of theirs that sprayed the earth to be joined with that of a dragon's taken out in their name. Their song-like cries for it called to him, like a lullaby, easing his mind that this was justified.
The dragon, now a sopping wet corpse limp across the red tinted snow, had an ally, coming too late to save it from its fate. In anger, fire tinged its lips as it charged.
Another flick of the wrist, and those flames died along with it. A single wound was his entry, magic running up veins and arteries like the tendrils of mycelium through a forest floor. Nothing within its body was beyond his grasp, nothing free of being frozen to its core. Arteries shredded as ice crystalised the fluids, the freezing water in the beast's brain expanded and shattered the skull, the heart eviscerated from every angle, lungs at every level resembling swiss cheese more than flesh.
It too, was limp on the snow, body broken into wrong angles and stiff horror of a cruel death.
Beyond the crest of the shoreline battlefield, Mą'II's coyotes tore through bodies like damp paper, vulnerable points exploited for their weakness, as access to the best to cut through with tooth and claw. Mą'II, more brutal than he, cackling with delight watching a coyote fit perfectly into a dragon's eye socket, having reduced the organ to a plump mash, to chew straight into the bone as its companions aimed at the soft inner thighs to tear out arteries like spraying garden hoses, with equal glee at the fountain like spray. The dragon could do little more than moan, still alive through the endeavor, too weak to resist more than pathetic protests and damning every god to the deepest pits of suffering.
Chunks came off under Novi's jaws. A dragon flying too low met with the surprise at how high she could jump, could slam through frozen seawater like a pane of glass, and sever its wing from its shoulder with one tear. Warm blood over her black hide was welcome compared to the frozen waters, surely.
The dragon tumbled, desperately trying to flap a wing that wasn't there, each motion sending an arc of blood high into the sky, freezing before it hit the choppy waves. It was only seconds before it slammed into a berg with a crunch so loud it was felt through the water. Below, the sharks feasted upon the dropped wing, a swirling mass of flesh and teeth that ended anything Novi and her orcas left still alive.
Nagi's leap was even more impressive, sending his serpentine body so high he sucked the water out of the very sea with him as he swallowed a dragon whole. The waves when he came back down flew up again, knocking more into the sea where icebergs and pack ice crushed any who tried to surface for air, skulls pulverized between the uncaring sea ice like tin cans.
As soon as the water had settled beyond a deadly torrent, wingbeats filled the air to drown the screams and wails of few dragons left alive by the tidal fury, and soon replaced it with that of gnashing teeth and tearing flesh.
Ludovic knew he knew more of the omnia than average god- most regarded them as little more than byproduct of dragon fury and cruelty. People of bygone eras, those who walked the ash. Scrolls and tomes far more ancient than even the wolf or whale told tale otherwise, how he and they were kin as any other- but yet he still stopped his stalking across the icy ridge to watch with surprise as they tore into the bodies.
They looked like starving dogs, snapping at just yet each other as they did enemy for scraps of meat laid out across the icebergs, licking crimson blood from the ice with no regard for how the skin of their own tongues froze to it and ripped off with their lapping. The mortals had also grown gaunt in the weeks the war raged- Slimmer, more brittle, shaking like beaten dogs.
But they were not as the omnia were. Reformation upon reformation of their bodies, and driven by endless hunger that called out to him as God of Feasts to be sated, for their bodies to not be skeletons running on fumes, anger, adrenaline, survival.
The fur of his robes rustled, nearly jumping his own bones out of his hide, but he calmed at the familiar form at his side and dark hand on his shoulder.
“There is not enough rations, M’lord Domhnuich.” Rorschach’s voice was level, stern, devoid of emotion as he spoke. That fire that burned in his chest even in the most harsh of winters seemed near but a smolder of smoke as he watched the display alongside him, justifying the act.
“Your people hunger?”
“We need more than mortals. You know this.”
Indeed- He had seen his priest outpace an entire feast hall on many occasion. Some part of him yet had thought it merely the affect of his boons, as god of feast, hunger, plenty.
It made a hum draw out of his chest.
“And your people have little quarrel over eating foe.”
“...If we must to survive, we have no quarrel over worse, aye. Most yet here are of the Great Winter or older.”
One such tore chunks from a still yet living dragon, devouring bone and sinew alike greedily, as others sucked marrow from broken but living bone. Only in weeks had the omnia become skinny over the course of the war, in many of hushed meetings drawing up the worries they were too frail to fight. Since the battles had started… so many were little more than skin and bones, burning through auras in seconds, burning through their own fat and muscle at nearly such a suicidal pace.
“Rorschach.” He addressed his priest calmly, a cold and brittle level in his voice.
“Lord Domhnuich?”
“Tell the other priests to prepare a feast. Ensure that your people are fed enough to fight.”
Rorschach’s silvery locks fell in his eyes when he bowed his head, smearing blood soaked into them across his freckled skin.
“Change your robes as well, you are not hidden in the drifts as crimson as wounds.”
To that, his priest snorted. One would be hard pressed not to find a single inch of the battlefield not coated in blood, in viscera, painted in a million hues of crimson under crisp moonlight. Even he was coated to his knees in it, rust-red streaks so thick over his own pale skin that it might not wash off for a century at least. He was nothing if not a hypocrite.
“And of you, Maol-Domhnuich?”
So many gods had called him that alias from the wolf’s clumsy mouth that hearing his name, his true name that he propped himself up as more ancient than he was, felt strange. Even the omnia had been calling him it, disregarding the tradition, that ancient name and the power that came from it- But never Rorschach.
“I’m going to the Crane’s ships. Their people too are exhausted and hunger- they will not be able to keep up the artillery.”
Even so, a thunderous crack erupted over the coast, followed by the meaty ‘thunk’ and sound of a dragon’s body reduced to giblets once struck by one of their metal ballistae.
That sound had wormed into the polecat’s mind. It had lingered and festered into a rot that refused to be put aside for sleep, for liquor, or tonic.
As many a dragon he had seen tear mortals limb from limb, tear through their flesh like wet paper, reduced to mere puddles upon the ground or from living, waking, fleeing and to ash the next second, it was that sound.
A meaty thunk, followed by splatter.
Most didn’t survive that initial hit- shock and bloodloss left them dead quickly, if not the severing of neck from torso, complete evisceration of spinal cords, organs shredded. Those that survived wailed though- in pain, agony, fear, just as they had wrought on mortal forces trying their damndest and paying for it in heaps. Soliairs liked to aim for the wings- impeccable a shot they were, to time a shot with the wingbeats just right to go through and hook them together, falling out of the sky like a lead weight wasn’t always deadly.
Not immediately.
More and more he was favoring his own tactics of skewering dragons through the neck. His own reputation was preceding him on the battlefield- “Ludovic of the Sure Eye”. “Ravages of the God of Bloodshed.” How he used runes so that he would not miss, could not miss, and anything he struck with bloody icicles would be hit sure and die quickly. It certainly helped, it certainly made the magics come easier to his fingers, his aura flow more like water and less like slush.
But that sound.
Another thunk, another meaty splash and splatter across ice.
For all the savagery of the gods,
For all their actions,
For all to stop a war before it had begun,
How much was justified?
Another dragon fell- wings forced closed, a bolt through the membranes,
Crushing its body under its own weight when it slammed into the ice below.
Another dragon fell- confused by illusion spun up by the one Yung called his devout, twisting its shrieking body to dodge something that wasn’t there, recoiling in horror at whatever that one had spun up in its mind, not seeing the icewall until it was too late.
Perhaps never seeing it, for it broke its neck in the collision, bones crunching and folding like an accordion, leaving only yet another crimson splatter on what was once virgin ice.
This place would be painted crimson.
Maybe not the seas, as he clamored into the frozen waters- they diluted any mark of crimes and war easily under their inky black. But the ice-
Digging the burrows under his temple, the shelters for his priests, his followers, his young, deep enough down the very soil was red and ironrich. Soaked entirely through with blood of millenia passed and forgotten, people no longer there in any way but memory of the stars- the sigil of the hunter who held his bow.
His temple sang from land so far away, under order of the priest. The brilliant song of ovens roaring, pan oil popping, the deepest coffers of the root cellars being brought out and prepared. That song echoed in his bones, as Ludovic hauled himself without care for the frost rimming his robe, onto the deck of the ship, looping his frozen fur-clad arm over the Crane in greeting.
They pointed to a shimmer on the horizon, through the fog, how it beat and swelled and had the rhythm of a war drum- Wings, of the lunars circling back, just hardly out of view.
With the moon coming out from behind the clouds, it illuminated them more than any target, and his temple sung and surged.
The blood was at his fingertips. Magic swelling, the god of feasts fulfilling his duty as the runes drawn in snow on shore crackled, and his priests hauled their quarry through.
To be the god of bloodshed-
Ludovic aimed, and the blood sung just as merciless a song.