04-01-2016, 01:52 PM
She can feel him feeding on her; he takes sips and bites of her lack of fear and swallows them up.
It is only a small tingling of awareness that dances on quick catpaws up and down her spine, little shivers of his strange magic working on her and it makes her bask in the way he slowly, carelessly, quietly devours her.
He is a cannibal; eating her up from the inside out and Sinew just breathes through it, meditatively and oddly at peace with him chewing on her foolish bravery.
It leaves a taste in her mouth, like the promise of spring rain, clear and cool, and she knows that if there is one to teach her fear - it will be him, and only him, because she is too old and unafraid of this world to fear anything it.
(Except for the way he eats her up, because he is a wolf in horse’s clothing and might swallow all of her up and if that is what she has to fear - the swallowing up, the not existing, the loss of self and soul, then that is what she just might fear.)
It is no wonder that Sinew cleaves so cleanly towards him, her flesh shapely enough and not yet showing the seed of her first - perhaps only - breeding (so animal, so vile, so base and yet never more arousing than the dance that a stallion and a mare share, though she remembers he was not always as a stallion during the heated rush of those moments and their shared madness - he had been other things too, boar and dragon, and a ghost of her death or another’s, she can’t quite remember), but it is there - she can feel it beginning to stir and take shape, taking from her strength and shape, just as he does in those first few feedings that feel like bits of air being sucked from her skin. So subtle, she would not miss them and does not, for fearlessness is her mettle - her backbone - her blood, and her very life.
Still, she curves into him but never close enough to touch - not yet, there is always time for that later, to skim her lips along the ram-curl of a horn, to suck on the ruin of that one wing, to feast on him as he feasts on her.
She seizes upon the way he grimaces - lips tight against teeth - as she sizes up that poor, dejected excuse of a wing. It is his biting back of admonishment and temper that pulls a laugh from her throat, smokey and low, as she inclines her head to him in pure supplication - she will placate him, and pretend that wing does not exist and that he is pristine and terrible in his ram-horns and pale clouds of hair. He would look better in his adornments of blood and gore, she thinks it as much as he does, and would prefer him to wear the ruin of his conquests like trinkets - he would be more godly and commanding that way. Instead, he came to her cleansed and naked and she appreciates him all the more for it, in the way that only she can. Maybe it was the dark of him calling to the dark in her.
“That,” she begins and ends, “Depends.”
He has named her boldness a thing to give to the Valley, but asks more of her as if it is a challenge that she will rise up to meet. Part of her muses that he is not wholeheartedly scheming on the Valley’s behalf with his questions, but dreaming up his own machinations for her and she flashes him a dark smile that seems so odd on her pale painted face. Already she knows that she can offer the life inside her, that precious unspoiled thing that came from Tarnished’s seed that is like a coin well spent for a chance at greatness (or failure, since Sinew never aspired to much other than to be herself). That, and the thing she has kept hidden from him when she told her darling pet to go play in the meadow. She thinks the revelation of such to him will be most appealing and her lips still hold that same darkly sinister smile; “I do not come alone.” She confides to him, her eyes as sly as her tongue as they slip away from him.