[mature] this life, it feels like a prison || tantalize

[Offspring]

You're looking at an absolute zero;
I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.

  ”The red eyes,” he murmurs softly, as his heavy lashes blink slowly over his own. She had mentioned her father before, and his scarlet-tinted gaze – Gryffen had a pair of his own (how could he forget a striking gaze so similar to his?), and the connection is made at last. The wraith-like creature had ventured onto the shoreline, feigning a concern that had been far too disingenuous for him to take seriously – with his own pale lashes fluttering over the crimson flicker of his gaze and a soft, demure tone adapted to a voice too rough and too ragged to ever be as saccharine as he pretended.

  Offspring had known then that he should rebuke him; he should turn him away and keep him away from the heart of the volcanic isle, where what he so vehemently sought hid away within a distant seacave. He can sense by the coiling tension beneath her russet skin that Gryffen is all and more of what his instinct had warned him he could be – and it is enough to unnerve him; to leave his own nerve-endings frayed. She is guarded, steeling herself away as ire is melded with the white-hot blood pooling within her veins – he can see the frustration boiling beneath the surface, and when her own gaze bores into his at last, he can see the hardened resolve within.

  She is wary, worried of what he might think – but behind the furrowed brow and terse jaw, there is a flicker of concern – not for himself, for Tephra, but for her. There is so much more than meets the eye, and she is as restless and as changing as the churning, open sea (and he is drawn in by it, by the fierce tempest brewing within her). He does not say anything for a long moment, instead closing the space that lay between them as an empty void, the warmth of his breath brushing across her cheek, as a gentle nudge is placed where her jawline is connected to her slender, dappled neck – a simper tugging at the corner of his mouth, his gaze coy, for a fleeting moment.

  ”I never would have known, had you not told me - there is not much of a resemblance.” He muses softly, his own gaze cast out toward the sea. ”He came to Tephra, once – seeking someone that found refuge in our land beneath Magnus’ reign before mine,” he pauses, his voice rough as the tone lowers, quieted between them as the humor fades away with the fallen sun. ”I did not trust him then, and turned him away. Apparently there is good reason.”

  His eyes bore into her own again, tracing the flecks of gold that line her pupil, as the moonlight illuminates the darkened shadow of her wary face. It will not be his last, her words echo in his mind, and his mouth is contorted into a deepening frown while the scarlet of his gaze searches hers for an answer. ”His last? Do you think he is the cause for Taiga's collapse?”

OFFSPRING

another zealot with the weight of the fucking world