His hooves connected with her head and she crumpled to the ground, another slender heap in the sand. His rib-laden sides heaved from the effort, his front legs sticky with dried blood from his growing collection of wounds. Every muscle in his body screamed at him as loudly as the thoughts inside his head, racing, ripping and tearing at the fragile fabric that held together his unstable mind.

The colt darted away quickly and silently, and Zahhāk's eyes trailed him as he left the scene of the massacre, his mouth held agape as he breathed. Smart little shit, he thought; and with very little desire to know his half brother, he returned his focus to the dapple grey Arabian that still stood before him—her face a classic mix of shock, horror and anger. Zahhāk glared back, shaking with fury, ready to charge at her too if she was fool enough to chide him again.

It would never be enough.

“Do you want a turn?” He barked at her, his eyes alive with fury and dead with exhaustion all the same.

He would strike her down too, if she begged him the way the palomino had. Zahhāk knew no bounds any longer—his self control had evaporated instantly, the heat of the flames that emerged from the ash was too much now, uncontrollable. It ripped through him relentlessly, and whatever kindness might have been growing like a small sapling shriveled and burned to a crisp.

He was done here, regardless of what the grey mare said or did next. He could not stand over the corpses of Maslakhat and his lover and expect to feel anything else besides hatred and emptiness that stretched deeper than a bottomless chasm.

Zahhāk only wished he could have thrown himself in too, but he was already falling. On and on, surrounded by a black void with no end to smash into and wake him from this endless nightmare.

---

Zahhāk

There was madness in any direction, at any hour.