Queer genre writer, printmaker, and pianist | 👍🐺 | white settler Muslim disabled
Villain who started studying healing magics for nefarious purposes.
The sharp inhale when all the functions of a body starting up again coalesce into a living again is his least favourite part. It’s dramatic. It’s unpredictable and therefore a shock every time. He doesn’t jump at it, but it’s still a bother. He snaps his book shut—an unpredictable shock to the freshly reinstated mind that had just started breathing again—with its series of incantations, and trades it again for the knife.
Decimator is sitting against a nurse log, his leather roll of tools unrolled down the leg stretched out on the soft earth of decades of decomposition. He only really uses one knife 90% of the time, but the roll was a gift from his minions and they had embossed his name into it with their infernal talons. The bit of branch fork in his other hand had fallen some time ago from the massive old growth in front of him.
Decimator is taking advantage of the fork shape to carve a bird.
Some hundreds of yards away—that Decimator can still hear, because super hearing—the hard-to-find actual quiet for miles—because super hearing—is broken by what even someone without super hearing would call a stage whisper. "What is he doing?" The voice is elevated, which means it's one of the flying/floating superheroes or one of the ones that can't resist climbing tall bodies. If it's the climbing kind, Decimator has opinions that they will share at a later date about disturbing the forest.
"Just sitting there?" This is a more ground-level voice, letting Decimator know the earlier sound of pressure on soft earth out of nowhere was truly out of the nowhere of being flown in by another hero. If there isn't a third voice, this would mostly rule out any tree climbing and Decimator won't be sharing those particular opinions in the future. "What did you think he was going to do?"
"I don't know. He bought this whole region. Maybe build a lair?"
"He's already got a lair."
"You can have more than one lair."
This is starting to annoy Decimator, who exhales long and deep while securing his knife in the personalized roll. He puts the unfinished carving in the breast pocket of his flannel, attaches the closed roll to the strap of another leather minion item this time labelled Butch Bag—a joke a high minion had to convince the other minions was indeed funny and would not mean death by long, drawn out incineration (it takes just short of forever for infernal minions to properly incinerate)—by way of carabiner, and makes his way away from bothersome heroes with nothing better to do.
"What's he doing now?"
"Uh, leaving? Wait, he stopped. He's writing something in a notepad, he's holding it up—"
Decimator can hear the palm make contact with face.
"What is it?"
"He says we're trespassing on ancestral land and that your lawyer alter ego should do better due diligence when reading into land trusts."
Alongside a very nice stream where if he's followed at least there's something to drown out the "whispers" of nosy superheroes, Decimator finishes carving the bird. Back at the lair, he gifts it to the minions who carefully—so as to not singe or set ablaze—place it amongst the growing altar of carvings in the central chamber of their dovecote cave abode.
