[private] Straia;

[Castile]

and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left
a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was

As though inside his mind, Straia extracts the one question that makes him stutter. Castile’s mouth opens, almost certain to know the answer, but he immediately realizes that it is the response he wants, not what is to be true. Protect them, his instincts scream, but the underlying behemoth recalls past conversations with Sochi and the truthfulness that coated her voice. With a breath that expels blackened smoke – it twirls and dances in front of his face before disappearing into the breeze – his original thought retracts to let the appropriate one reign. ”They will always be at my side,” he remarks as his eyes flash with feverish realization, ”They don’t need my protection.” Sochi has always fought at his side, even during a war that broke their young boy. Coated in blood but triumphant, Sochi returned to him; it was that moment Castile knew he chose a mate and not a damsel in distress.

To seek protection for them is to imply they are weak, all of them, but that cannot be farther from the truth. The reason he chose Sochi – the reason he loves her – is for the ferocity she exploits, and the tenderness she expresses behind closed doors. She belongs at his side, but he knows how devastating it would be to lose her, or to see her blood fall onto the battleground.

(It hasn’t happened yet)
(Do not fret)

The voice hisses as it impedes on his thoughts, dissolving his worries in a flurry of a moment. Meeting Straia’s eyes, he nods, the gesture curt and with militaristic resolve. ”Good. My knees weren’t made to bend to anyone,” perhaps once, half a lifetime ago, he would’ve submitted to many others, but not anymore. The time for that has ended. With the forbidden fruit just out of reach, and with Straia’s alluring voice, Castile can nearly taste all that he wants. It will be his, all of it.

With his sole concerns subdued and gently set aside, Castile has no other reason to hesitate. In his chest, his heart hammers euphorically; his eyes flash readily. ”Just tell me when,” the words growl from his throat as the creature within him eagerly tries to surface, wanting every piece of the chaos that thrums enticingly at its fingertips. How to begin, it wants to ask, but Castile simply waits, allowing the sweetness of suspense to course through his veins and electrify his coiled muscles. Those four words of compliance sign and offer away his body and soul for something greater. 

castile

@[Straia]

[Straia]

sometimes we want what we want --
    -- even if we know it’s going to kill us.

A Cheshire grin curves her lips at his response, the realization clear in the hesitation of his words, in the way he opens and closes his mouth before beginning again. Evil. What a funny designation. Does evil long to protect? Does it love? Does it care? She does not see evil before her, but simply a stallion with ambition, with a hunger that some will simply never understand. It is a hunger she knows all too well, the sort of hunger that itches deep against your bones, the kind of itch you can never scratch. Instead you keep going, keep scratching, keeping digging away as if you may find the source.

Here’s the secret, there is no source. Hunger like that cannot be satisfied. It is innate, it is consuming, and it is the beginning of true power. Not magic, but that hunger, that need.

She was powerful long before she was magical. Magic was reward.

“I can’t imagine you with a family that needed protection. If they needed it, you would have failed them already. To teach them to fend for themselves and to allow them to do so is success.” She has no idea where her children have gone. They have all flown the coup, as children do, leaving Beqanna in the wake of the Reckoning to seek other lives. She misses them, of course, as all mothers miss their children, but she does not worry for them. That is the difference. She loves them enough to let them fly.

Her grins turns to something else as he signs his life away in blood. It is ferocious, wild, and gleeful. She is something fearsome and beautiful in that moment, something alive and ready. The raven on her back, an impossibly silent statue through so much of this (ah, the wonders of magic), flaps it’s wings and disappears into the sky as if to seek something. He is a set of eyes for her, a scout to give her the lay of a land she know longer knows. “Come, show me where you call home and fill me in on the current politics. I am a bit behind.”

-- straia

the raven queen

@[Castile]