Nestled in your hollow shoulder - Sinew

[Pollock]

He watches as she sends them off; like faithful pets, they oblige her instantly. He grunts, deep from his throat, in approval – entertains her warning teeth only because he knows they will be the same grim, flat weapons when she mothers.
He watches them, with feral eyes and hungry thoughts, until they are well away from her hips – casting impossibly large and strange shadows in the dust.

He would allow them to stay, indeed, if she could not be peaceably parted from them.
He is not a cruel man. There are a few to whom he offers some moderation.

But,
He would not tolerate their crowding. They could join the ruck of this damnable place, for all he cared;
—they will feast at different carcasses than his own; they will eat last.

These are feral, savage instincts for which he does not apologize. The same barbaric grunts and mouths he offers her now, borne of the same impetus to possess. Catalyzing similar ire when she speaks that name and then her truths.

First: Tarnished. A name he does not know. A face he would not recognize, not even when it still wore skin and moisture and expression. A death grip, from which he took a land for only a second, lorded over a hovel of trees and a disparate band of squaws.
Tarnished – from whom he took a daughter and left only blood.
Tarnished – who could do things he could not.

Then: I liked it.
She is right. He likes it even less. Tarnished be damned, he isn’t here now, is he? Wherever the whoreson is, he had lost, as far as Pollock could tell, this prize at least. There is victory there. It satiates him. He is simple.
But this? It bites. It rankles him and he snorts his disapproval. “Did you, now?” he grunts, through his teeth, his mind never leaving that mark, even as he watches her face. That mark on his thing, which to him looks beyond out of place – but hostile. Worse still is the want that accompanies that blasted name – Tarnished and that war song – I liked it. Want and revulsion – he knows this combination and the way it burns like acid in the mouth. He knows the kind of creature that foments that reaction.

He knows the kind of hold.

His lip curls and he steps forwards in somber silence, passing to stand neck-by-neck, examining that smooth, pink symbol of how vast the world really is. How many of them stand, behemoths of marble and sweat, and how many of them fall.
He touches the place around it but does not lay a lip where fur will not grow.
And then he lets her go.

He lets her go as long as she needs, but not as far. He keeps an eye on her as much as he can.
Of course he does.

Until one day, she sneaks past him and is gone. She is as animal as he – she nests.
He festers in it, becomes surly and unapproachable to all that dwell in their forsaken hellhole, as he waits. Because she will come back and if she does not – well, he’d have to go after her. She knew that. He offers her more time than, perhaps, he would offer most others. He offers this because she came when he was naked. She would come when he is King. And, because he hopes what she nestles with is something worth bringing back to him.

He stands on a cracked and desolate cliff, watching the waves break against the ocean-side of Pangea. It is where he comes, often, to think. Today, he is drawn away, as usual, by the desire to prowl his kingdom – prowl it for lost things, because he has not changed much; prowl it for official things, every once and a while, that crops up. Today, his duties let him pass through quickly, and as it is, he descends into the arid and cool valley just as they return. 
‘Pollock’ that name from those lips. He turns and moves towards then, giving them a hard, dour stare.

“Two,” he grunts, with some measure of felicitation in his voice, for the performance. He watches them, stern-eyed, and it might be for the best that they fall quiet as he does. “Boys,” he says simply. A preference, to be sure. 
He circles them, examining, first, the blotchy colt. He is their amalgam in colour, he notes, as he stops in front of him and looks down. He is, by far, the larger of the two, at least in the shapely way he has filled in. “Healthy,” he remarks, moving around and behind them to her other side.
The second, he finds, is gold. Smooth and solid as he is. But unlike his brother, he has not filled in. The giver’s lip curls, ever so slightly, as he gazes down at the boy. He is bonier than the first and something about him is sickly. 
“Could have left this one, he does not look like he will make it,” he turns away, his full attention on their mother now, “unless, he hides something from me. There is a foul wind on you lot – the mountain?”