" Deirdre’s consciousness flooded with unbidden images. Her foot on a man’s throat; her gun against a man’s head; her hand wrapped around power; her seat atop a throne of yellowed bone, a kingdom spread out below her in bloodstained wasteland. In return: offerings, worship.

Worship: apes eating their own young, faces smeared in meatjelly.
Worship: jackbooted soldiers marching over corpse-strewn battlefields.
Worship: a father staring at the severed hands and feet of his own child.

Inside her gut, an instinctive gospel heaved itself into her diaphragm. The scripture said there were two kinds of people in the world: predators and prey. All other truths were secondary. Deirdre could be a predator in exchange for worship. If not… "

― S.R. Hughes , The War Beneath