Steven was amazed at the craftsmanship the Beast had shown in making his cloths. He didn’t default straight to amazed of course. There was a whole journey of emotions before he hit that positive one, but amazed was where he ended up. The first emotion he felt was hard to describe. He wanted to call it horror or terror, but the most accurate description was a little more nuanced than that. In short, it was ‘the feeling one must endure when they have witnessed an action that breaks the emotional foundation of who they are’.

Steven had wallowed in that emotion for a good period of time he wasn’t able to measure. That’s the trick about that breaking hat you are at a fundamental level. When existence stops having any type of profound meaning, it’s hard to care if it’s been 20 or 30 minutes.

Steven didn’t stop sobbing after he figured out he was a intrinsically broken individual who would never recover and could at best find ways to cope with the rest of his existence. He rocked back and forth and cried for a while, just because the alternative was finding something else to do. If he wasn’t crying, he would have to be looking at what was next, and if he was looking at what was next, that was admitting that he could in fact get over what he was feeling. That was terrifying, what being could feel what he had felt, and keep existing? Steven felt like he should implode, explode, or at least catch on fire out of the sheer magnitude of emotions he’d felt. But he didn’t. Steven was just sitting there, rocking back in forth, in front of a little green humanoid who had slaughtered an anima and was fiddling with the corpse.

Fiddling wasn’t the right word though. The Beast clearly had some sort of purpose in what it was doing. Sure, it was separating the hide from the animal, but there was more than that. The Beast had cleanly separated the hide from the animal. The only real flaw was a stab mark or two that it had expertly sewn up and had been turned into a strength more than a flaw.

There was magic at work now, Steven was sure. He’d wiped some of the snot off of his face and tried to wipe that off into the grass around him. The Beast had somehow covered the inside of the cloths with that same metal color of the knives, and Steven could finally admit they were knives now, and that just wasn’t something that happened in the natural world.

More than that though, the Beast kept working on the hide, threading metal over, under, through it. It began to take shape. The hide- no, cloths. They were beautiful, but worse than that, Steven was grateful to have them, grateful the deer had been murdered for him, grateful that the little ball of murder he called the Beast had made them for him.

That made me more worried than anything