i’ve been both a saint & a viper
The abysmal black of his eyes are shining and without pupils; dark and twisted and never-ending as the parchedness of his blackened tongue moistens with her blood. He swallows hard, fractiles of moonlight spilling across the spikes of his worn body, alighting the peaks of his bones in swathes of silver amid the utter black. Balto’s ears flatten against the hellish curve of his slender neck, void of muscle as each vertebrate clicks with the lowering of his head. She baits him further despite his innate attempts at clinging to whatever morality still stutters within him, shattered and barely breathing.
She doesn’t hesitate to close the space that he had created, sweeping her mouth against the deep dark of his protruding jawbone. The stallion’s blood-stained lips curl, causing those terrible teeth to flash darkly in the dim and horrendous light of the haunted forest. He returns the gesture with a scrape of fang along her neck and to the sloping of her slender shoulder, pinpricks of blood rising from the gentle punctures. Those terrible antlers find her skin almost tenderly, pressing at her urgently.
Something sinister wells up inside him, completely overtaking him. Something primal and otherworldly as a hiss of satisfaction escapes his paper-thin lips followed by the sound of a growl that was not in any sense equid.
No, he is not finished.
With a strength that seems out of place on such a skeletal, fragile-looking creature, Balto’s antlers suddenly dig deep into the hollow of her shoulder. An unearthly yell comes from his throat as he brings his head upwards, slicing the pearlescent blue of her skin into beautiful, rubied ribbons. When his antlers run out of skin to rip through (leaving her shoulder, neck, and underside of her jaw cut in haphazard red rivers), he dives for her again with his head low.
A chorus has taken up somewhere in the darkness of the shadows, his demons chanting and wailing until it nearly makes him deaf as blood stains his eyes and skin.
He does not know how long it lasts, only that when he has eaten his full that his mind truly feels clear for the first time in decades. No, not clear (for they still dance in the periphery of his dark eyes, their once cajoling voices now silent with satisfaction) but merely undisturbed. His hunger has ebbed and the weakness he felt in his bones no longer ache.
His entire head is dipped generously in her blood; he had not hesitated to dig through her ribcage and feast on the soft organs that lay beneath the bones. His forelegs are encased in blood and tissue as if he had feasted on her like a starving animal. The beast gazes down at what was left of her body with indifference, at first glance. Then, the antlered creature tilts his head, his sunken eyes softening. His brow furrows, confusion revealing itself in the void of his eyes as something like regret swims through his chest.
“Sabra?” he calls to her uselessly, his demons’ laughter now permeating the silence.
Balto
@[Sabra]