The quiet is soothing to her.

  Suffocating, stifling - the air is thick, but she has long since become accustomed to the density of the still, unmoving oxygen festering in the depths of the dark, concentrated darkness. The fire had long since slipped away, but the ash remains, tainting the woodland with charred remnants of what the flame had consumed. She is a part of it (a part of the darkness, that is) and her breath is shallow while the broad hearth of her chest is barely rising with her baited breath; a predator through and through.

  She has never felt more at ease than she had amid the thicket, with dry and brittle bark clutching hungrily at the swell of her feminine hip - the jagged bone resting against the curve of aged oak as her breath is caught within the confinement of her throat.

  She is drawn to him from the shadow, and the shimmer of her eye and the warmth of her breath across his hip is enough to speak of her curiosity, and her desire to know him - a glint of curiosity tucked away behind the impish gleam of her eye. She had heard much about him, and though he may have yet to taste his name on her lips, he is formidable, and his reputation precedes him. Her silver eye roves the slope of his spine, the curve of his hip, where scarring lay - a story etched into every line, and she is a voracious bibliophile, anxious to devour each word carved into flesh.

  ”You must be Lokii,” she murmurs, close enough for her shoulder to brush his own. ”I am Thana,” the Queen, she doesn’t say. It does not need to be said. She is a only a companion to carnage and a lover of destruction. No crown of thorns or coveted title could speak of what she had done and what she could do, and that can all be seen in the mischievous gleam of her eye, and in the sultry tone of her voice, carried to him through the dense thicket and echoing off the birch and hickory that surround them. ”I’ve been looking for you.”

  ”Call me bitch again and I will give you proper reason to think that I am,” she snarls, the deeply rooted predator emerging with the sharpened fangs protruding from her parted mouth. ”I belong to no one, and least of not him,” she breathes, recoiling from him as if he were made of acid, bitter and vile, or diseased – contagious and abhorrent. There is a gleam of disappointment within the darkness of her blackened eye, refusing to linger further across the marred, uneven flesh, no longer drawn to him. Any flickering flame of curiosity doused by his inability to see her for what she is, for who she is – she thought he had potential; she yearned to find another as chaotic and as vehement as she, but he is nothing. Nothing at all.

  Not if he cannot see beyond those she has taken as a lover; not if he cannot see her as anything but subservient to a King that would be nowhere without the Queen that had made it all possible.

  ”If you need to use the genitals that sit between my legs to define me, to define the relationship that I share with Gryffen, you are not half of what I thought you were.” She utters softly, though there is poison beneath her tongue, seeping into every arsenic-laced word pouring from the darkness of her lips. She is not frightened of him – he cannot do anything to her that she would not find delight in, that she would not revel in – (even death!) – but chauvinism held no place and no merit; he discounted her before every truly knowing her, and there is no roiling fury in her belly urging her to prove him wrong. Not even Gryffen had wronged her so.

  She owes Lokii nothing.

  Sylva would not be what it was without her; without her spilling the blood she had.

  Without her kidnapping, enslaving, murdering at a whim –
  Without her carving the bloodshed into the brittle and dying bark of the birch and hickory of the forest; without her moving seamlessly beside Gryffen while darkness descended, and Death followed their every move. She is left yearning for her companion in destruction, in decimation and devastation, angry that he is nowhere to be found, as betrayal and abandonment both fester inside of the dirtied blood of her sordid veins. But she would go on.

  ”I sought you, to see if you could carry your own reputation – to see if you might want to take a place in the history of our own making, but so far you are a terrible disappointment,” she does not look at him – not even once! Her ire is too much; her fury heavy and aching. Salivating, the wolf inside of her aching to burst forth, to clutch his jugular between her clenching jaws and to taste his blood under her tongue. ”Tell me why I should let you leave Sylva unscathed?”