[private] hangman hooded, softly swinging

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

Life had descended into a warm haze. The summer nights were long and the afternoons were thick with the kind of pure pleasure that could not be manufactured or forced, but merely uncovered. He grew nearly lazy in his contentment, pleased to put aside his fury and rage in pursuit of life’s finer offerings. Although his body remembered the wars and the riots, the armies and battles, he did his best to forget, to relax into this steady pulse of life alongside Ryatah, focused on protecting her and growing fat off the land.

It is on one of those days that he walks amongst the Hyaline mountains as a panther, heavy tail swinging behind him, each step purposeful as his claws knead the rich loam beneath him. Several paces behind are two souls he has summoned, each radiating that familiar blue, their eyes watchful and their mouths mercifully shut. Atrox has never expressed much interest in the musings of those souls and when they had first opened their mouths once they arrived, he had shot them one sharp look to quiet them.

It was, thankfully, all he needed to do.

Now, the trio of them walk through the winding trees. Every so often, Atrox bounds ahead, stretching his muscles beneath his sleek velvet coat, before falling back into his comfortable walk. He sniffs the scent of a passing deer, considering going after it, before he catches the scent of something far more alluring. His crooked smile grows wicked as he takes a different path, veering off into the bramble and thicket.

Leaping, he manages to make his way to a tree where he comfortably drape over it just in time for Ryatah to come around the corner. He angles his head where it rests on his leg, casually swiping his free paw through the air toward her. “Where are you off to today, my love?”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING

@Ryatah

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU

IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU

She is not used to peace—not like this.

She has had periods in her life that she considers to be lulls, stretches of time where the marks left behind on her heart had faded and no one was around to create new ones. She has been a ghost before, literally and figuratively, when she haunted the shadows instead of someone’s side, years where her voice went unused until words tasted like dust on her tongue. And maybe to some that would have sounded like relief; a welcome respite from the turbulent romances that she always seemed to find. A heart untouched is a heart unbroken, they might think, but she has never much cared for being either of those things.

The quiet had not been peaceful. The times of quiet always left her too alone with her thoughts, too much time to twist them inside out so that she might inspect every curve and angle of each mistake she has made. It’s why she had learned to seek a certain kind of chaos, to at least be able to blame the unease in her heart on someone else’s storm. Not even Skellig had been entirely peaceful, even if, at the time, it had been the realest love she had ever known. He had loved her, she knows that had been true, but she had not trusted it. She lived everyday waiting for the fallout, and when it never came, she did it herself.

But Atrox is different, has always been different. For someone that has lived her life searching for love in places it was always meant to die, she had always assumed she would be discontent when she actually found something that could thrive.

Perhaps it had not been his plan to prove her wrong, yet he had managed to do so time and time again. Even if the storm in her chest would never settle it was different knowing that he was weathering it with her, not searching for ways to strengthen it. There would always be parts of her that could not change—that pit of darkness that had always been present but now clung to every bone after her time in that black void, and her tendency to self-destruct—but the one thing that had changed is that she would never trade her peace with him for anything.

He is there just as she rounds a copse of trees, sprawled across a branch in that way she has seen him so many times throughout the years—in lands that no longer existed on the occasion their paths had crossed, in the depth of Tephra’s jungle, but most often here, in this place that they had managed to turn into their own. She ducks her head to the side to avoid the swipe of his paw, but it does nothing to deter her from stepping closer, lingering just beneath him. “I was just looking to see if I could find someone to entertain me,” she says, followed by a feigned sigh of disappointment. “But I’ll just have to keep looking.” Her head tilts, the playful glint evident in her dark eyes before she follows it with a small laugh. “What are you doing?”

AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE

@atrox