He grows more restless with each passing day. The war drum of his heartbeat tells him there is a great future just on the horizon now. He can almost taste the blood mist spraying across his face and it drives him wild with hunger. It is the perfect day, then, for his first enemy to arrive on his doorstep. He recognizes her scent and takes flight from his perch immediately. The awful king glides easily to where she stands and he lands with a heavy thud.

Scarred lips peel back from discolored, crooked fangs when she lifts her head to meet his gaze. Her outline is much as he remembers it - bristling at the sight of him, the scent of venom ripe in the air. But her fangs can only meet with hardened scales now. She allowed him to live for too long. Adna should have smothered him in the winter cradle where she found him, he thinks. But no one can defy fate. It was always meant to come apart this way.

“Enemy, myenemy,” he declares proudly. Ghaul moves forward and his talons leave deep wounds in the dry clay with each step. He keeps his wings spread wide so she can appreciate how much larger he is than the runt she knew him as. “You smell like Taiga. Will you ever make it back there?” he asks, his nose burying itself in her mane as he breathes her in.

She had seemed so monumental when he first saw her - the unyielding serpent he could not fell. He grins as he takes her mane in his teeth and roughly tosses his head to test her strength. Ghaul follows it with a quick bite to her shoulder where his fangs find her own scales. “Remember when you swore you’d devour me whole?” he muses as he circles her. The crooked monster tilts his horned head and laughs but the sound is disjointed. “Remember when I took everything from you? Let’s do that again.”

With a beat of his wings, he kicks up the dust that covers the ground around them. It takes only seconds for his talons to pull her by the hips until she’s beneath him. His teeth find the soft skin of her neck after some feverish fumbling. Ghaul savors the agonizing seconds as they tick by, moving carefully until his hips meet hers. Every scale lining her skin is repulsive but it delights him to ruin her this way, he supposes.

He sinks his claws into her thighs as he picks up a faster rhythm. Her blood is sour across his tongue but he keeps his teeth buried in the back of her neck just the same as grunts and groans escape his throat. Ghaul never stops to wonder if Gospel will grow to despise him for this. Instead, his mind remains clouded by the hate flooding his veins and it shows it the way his body collides into hers. Then, at long last, his breath hitches and he buries himself inside her one last time.

Finally, he slides off her and stumbles back. His mind swims with post-coital haze that renders him briefly docile. “Get out. Get out of my sight.”