Eat. Sleep. Bleed. Repeat. [SOUTH]

With a touch of your words
I saw the devil sneak between my fingers
It's much too familiar
With a touch of your words I learned to reverse
It's gotten me nowhere

Sleep is a world where Eris can reign over all she surveys, the true queen of an existence crafted by her own hand. Her dreams are rife with chaos, nothing makes sense and she wouldn't have it any other way. But something about the Moreno household pulls the prospect of sleep away from her on an elusive string, dangling it just out of her reach for days on end until her body finally succumbs to fatigue. It's not that she's afraid of this life - she signed up for it, in fact, anticipated the glorious discord of living in a mansion-arena with a sort of feral joy that most people would never understand - but after shedding blood within the first five minutes of living in her new home her guard has raised subconsciously, a constant sense of paranoia prickling at the back of her mind that speaks of vengeance and swirls of bright vermillion that took hours to scrub off of her hands.

Eris was born to be a Moreno. Her original family had no idea what to do with all the chaos that swirled inherent beneath her skin and they had let it flow unchecked as a result, a decision that brought about their demise in an untimely twist of fate and flame that's seared into her memory on a haze of not-quite-guilt. Eris takes no responsibility for those Death claims for his own. She's simply a messenger, a witness, a harbinger of impending doom that manipulates the existence of others with guiding hands and a wild grin. But here, in this place, the guiding influence of her trainers adoptive parents has given her a way to channel all of that repressed cataclysmic energy into something exquisitely destructive, a cacophonic symphony of muffled screams and rattling final breaths that feels more like home than the drab walls and pointless occupations of the orphanage or even the soaring ceilings of her childhood residence, now nothing but ash and half-lost memories. Sleep and safety are sacrifices she's willing to make in exchange for feeling so completely alive, no more plagued by the boredom that has been the downfall of any who dare to shift within the reach of her chaotic grasp. Eris always knew that people were far more fun to play with than toys, but it took her a while to learn that they broke far more easily, and when she finally did she found that she didn't care.

A tense tide of something cuts through the eccentric ebb and flow of her dreams, a visceral, instinctual harkening of danger on the horizon that pulls her to consciousness, bottomless dark eyes sliding open to reveal a petite but threatening silhouette hovering above her the half-dark of the room accenting only the feline glimmer of emerald orbs and the (only slightly) more dangerous wink of a dagger's blade hovering speculatively over her throat. Eris smiles approvingly, appreciative of a move well played. "Hello, Elspeth."

The true Moreno daughter (although it's hard to remember who is truly a product of their parents and who is just another adopted tribute sibling what with all the people crowding the house and more arriving every day, it seems) is tiny in comparison to Eris' five-foot-ten stature and sturdy bone structure, but the seeming fragility of her frame is belied by something sadistic and ruthless glinting behind her gaze and the fact that Eris has seen her hit a boy squarely in the back with a throwing knife from thirty yards. They buried him in the yard with little ceremony and no tears; she never even learned his name. She blinks steadily up at the form hovering above, eyes still holding vestiges of sleep and hair a mussed cloud of blonde around her face, oddly serene given the situation. Eris has never been scared of dying, only of losing the elaborate game in which she's embroiled herself. Taking Moreno as a last name is a certain assurance that she's going down at some point, and she'd gladly take in flames over burning out.

Her gaze flits around the room fleetingly, taking in everything from the slightly ajar door to the wicked grin stretched over Elspeth's face to the crimson smudges marring the surface of her mirror, your time draws near scrawled across the reflective surface in bright carmine that matches a barely-noticeable smear decorating the pale skin of the other girl's arm. A laugh bubbles up from somewhere in her chest, spilling in a stormy alto over her lips as she takes in the organic artwork from across the room, a spark of insanity flying under the radar at the fact that she's lying there giggling while the epitome of a ruthless career princess holds a knife threateningly above her. But the last thing anyone would accuse Eris of being is sane, she knows that there's something not-quite-right in her head in the same way she knows that the sky is blue or that the sun rises in the east and that everything is so dreadfully boring, repeating itself time and time again and pleading to be disrupted.

"Nice finger-painting," she snickers, nodding at the rust-stained expanse of the mirror and stretching out her sleepy limbs like a cat in the sun, uncaring of the razored edge that hovers ever closer to her skin. But the laughter dies out gradually like a rainbow after a storm, giving way to a close-lipped grin and a curious quirk of the eyebrows. "Are you going to kill me, Elspeth? Sporting of you to wait until I woke up."

Eris may be more scared of losing than dying, but a high-staked game with Elspeth Moreno promises to be exciting enough to justify any outcome.

A deep shade of horizon-gold
The constellations remind me I am home
We were lit from the west, our silhouettes
Yet a sight of industrial-ness
As the silence wins over every word

Stop stalling, make a name for yourself
You better put the pen to paper, charm your way out
If you talk, you better walk, you better back your shit up
With more than good hooks while
We're all under the gun

Eris holds her gaze with something on the tipping point between mild interest and entertainment, deep brown meeting scintillating viridian across the expanse of half-dark between them. Elspeth is something rare even in this house of blood and grit and no true brotherhood, a force to be reckoned with even among the greatest of the Moreno clan simply because of the decadent, sadistic chaos that shimmers behind her eyes and in the blade at her fingertips. Eris wonders briefly as the cool surface of the knife rasps over the sun-kissed expanse of her skin if the inside of Elspeth's mind looks the same as her own, all swirling cataclysms of discord and pandemonium with no regard for anything else. The harkening of a kindred spirit is something Eris has never felt before, always hopelessly trapped among mundane wastes of space who never shared her outlook, but the dark-hued glint of the sanguine paint on the surface of her mirror speaks volumes, a faint whisper among the teeming rush of her consciousness that perhaps she is not alone.

"Shall we presume for a moment I'm not going to kill you? What then, Eris?" Elspeth all but purrs, pressing the pointed end of her blade into the hollow beneath Eris' chin and raising her head a few inches, the motion sending a waterfall of sleep-tousled blonde tendrils shifting over her pillow. Eris simply grins in response, a cheshire-cat smile that gleams sticky-bright in the low lighting, revealing nothing and everything all at once. In a split second the faint press of the blade disappears from its place against her neck, the sudden lowered thrum of adrenaline in her veins feeling more like loss than salvation. It now dances in an intricate series of flashes and clicks between Elspeth's fingers, agile and seemingly independent of her thought process as she continues to survey Eris as either a threat or interesting specimen. She can't quite tell which, although the probable answer is that she is both something intriguing and unsettling to this girl with murder in ever fiber of her soul just as much as she is to everyone else. It occurs to her that Elspeth is used to being feared; it's inherent in the way she carries herself with a confidence that is just past the edge of arrogance, and while Eris can plainly see why others might hold her in such esteem, she finds it impossible to do so herself even as the knife continues to glint in its intricate dance and the low, dangerous questions still wash over her in a tremulous tone. "Tell me, Eris, why were my parents so very thrilled to welcome you into our family? My father, or rather, our father, rarely smiles, and yet for him, he was positively beaming when he walked through the door with you in tow."

Respect and fear are two very different things, and while Eris will admit wholeheartedly that she has a healthy amount of respect for the girl before her, she fears nothing. When it all comes down to it, maybe that's what's wrong with her. People are supposed to have a sense of fear as a mechanism of self-preservation, a well-stocked set of inhibitions to keep them safe from potential harm, but Eris has never been held a victim of terror, constantly embroiled in a game of chance with Life and Death themselves, pushing limits simply because she can and anxiously awaiting the day when all of the chaos she puts into the world finally comes home to roost and she can stop being so bored. Maybe that means death, and maybe it doesn't, either way she can't bring herself to fear the Reaper after he's been following her like an old friend for almost as long as she can remember, taking her parents and her home and her peers but never her. Maybe, Eris reasons, she has nothing to fear simply because she has nothing to lose. Maybe that's what the Morenos saw in her that day at the community home, a reckless sense of abandon bred over the years to wreak havoc because it had no other purpose. They wouldn't be the first to think that Eris exists for the sole purpose of tearing the world apart piece by piece. She brings the universe down around her in any way she can, blood and grit and fear she can never understand, and it's becoming more evident by the second that Elspeth does the same thing. Maybe not out of boredom, like Eris' own motivations, but they're both daughters of Destruction that can't quite deny their sisterly bond.

She smiles again, all wide and feral and maybe a bit more welcoming than before. "Because I destroy people when I get bored, and I'm never, ever scared. Not even of you."

Yawning slightly, Eris props herself up on her elbows, blinking the last of the sleep from her eyes and staring contemplatively at her reflection in the mirror, face framed by the smeared vermillion letters of impending doom and a bright line slashed over her throat. It's supposed to be scary, she knows this, but the quirk of irony that she just had a knife pressed to her jugular less than a minute ago only serves to make her laugh again, finding humor in the darkest of places where others might scream and run.

"Why are people so scared, Elspeth?" she asks quietly, still staring that the gilded picture of her would-be corpse that looks back at her with the same intensity. "Everyone dies. Some people just die sooner. Living forever would be terribly boring. I don't think you're scared, though. You wouldn't be able to frighten people like you do if you were frightened yourself. Neither of us is scared. Does that mean there's something wrong with us?"

Eris works in a warped sort of philosophy, rationalizing things that don't make sense simply because she couldn't bear it if her life did make sense. Having an existential conversation with the girl who had just been prepared to kill her makes no sense at all, and Eris supposes that's exactly why she's doing it, eyes shifting back over to the diminutive form that hovers in the shadows. "It's like everyone here's on teams. There are alliances, truces. I've seen it. We'd make a good team, Elspeth. You, me, maybe Ella if we could get her down off her high horse. The ones who are never scared."

Eris has never had friends, but allies are something she can deal with.

And just for the record, the weather today
Is slightly sarcastic, with a good chance of
A) Indifference, or
B) Disinterest in
What the critics say