Offspring;

[Offspring]

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

  He is aware of her presence long before she is aware of his own –

  He is quiet, observant, studying the distant shoreline with sharpened sight, even from many miles away. Looming near to the rumbling volcano in the very heart of the island, he had seen a flicker of movement to the southern shore – the dark and raucous sea is ravenous, lapping hungrily with each sweeping motion of the tide, and with it she is brought to the stifling humidity and tropical domicile that had become his own. Long before her voice has emerged into the thickened air, seeking him, his hefty and heavily muscled legs carry him through the shallow mire and across the golden vegetation, ensnaring around his legs before incinerating to the moist and fertile soil below from the lightest brush across his coal tinted skin.

   The fire is burning brightly, flickering along the surface of his body – he does not suppress it here; he is within his domain and he felt no need to draw the flame inside of his body. He had learned to control it, to wield it, and do so, he would. The ember is low, barely rising off the scarred flesh, though it is wrapped around the girth of his behemoth form, inevitably towering over her own as he is finally upon her, with his scarlet, altogether disdainful gaze settled upon her own of steel.

   She had been scathing and filled with white-hot anger upon their last meeting, and there is a touch of hesitance lingering within his steady gaze. Time had passed, as unyielding and as ruthless as it had ever been, bringing with it a change of season, among other things (the thought of Taiga and its untimely fall does come to mind; there are worse things than a burnt landscape and a wound or two).

  Alas, he had eventually come to understand her position – frustration, ire, and fiercely defensive. He, too, would be furious, should Tephra be harmed – should a resident be injured by the fault of another and their recklessness. His son had been out of line; he was careless and acted with poor judgment but a monster? Hardly. He would offer no apology - despite conceding that her anger was justified, her treatment of him and her sharp jab toward his parenting was not.

  He could only imagine what had brought her, and when the thinly veiled words emerge from her soft, parted lips, he can hardly stifle the amusement from gleaming within his crimson stare.

  ”Let me get this straight. You’ve come all of this way, to ask my intention with Tantalize?” he muses aloud, his voice rough from disuse but rich and honeyed, with laughter breaking through each word. ”You have wasted your time; my love life is hardly any of your business. I respected your border, and did not cross it - and that boy is my son. Unless you have come seeking a diplomatic meeting, or to apologize, you can take your leave.”

OFFSPRING

another zealot with the weight of the fucking world.

@[Nayl]