burnt offerings; any

[sinew]

The dark beckons; reminds her of him and she half expects his eyes to appear out of the dark, his flesh to materialize from shadow and smoke. Sometimes she dreams of him, but the dreams never stay long enough for her to remember much about them except that he is in them and that is enough for her - these phantasmal touches in dreams, and the way his eyes gleam like gold or poison in a cup made from a skull, ancient and gruesome. She cannot help the way she sighs when she thinks of him, the corners of her lips sag dreamily until she snaps awake and flings the fragments of sleep from her face with a toss of her head that contains shreds of barely contained violence. It brims in her, bubbles and seethes at times until she doesn’t know what to do with the way she feels. These are the times when she throws caution to the wind and launches herself headstrong into the face of danger, fearless and thrumming with a sense that she flirts with the end and she has never felt so alive than in those moments of a dance with death. The merest brush with it is enough to make her heart spin and sing in her and she loves it, oh how she loves it! Sinew is foolishly brave and bravely foolish - a paradox unto herself as she sniffs and snorts at the earth, bits of dirt and grass stick to her muzzle until she rubs it against a knee and the detritus sloughs off like an old dead skin that never really belonged to her. She figures she might as well do something to dispel the boredom that creeps in the dark’s stead, threatening her with an idleness that might just be her undoing and so, what else is there to do then court their favor and fling herself into the grand folly of something she has not given much thought to - herd or kingdom? Both seem completely nonsensical to her for she has ever been beset by bum-like tendencies that keep her tethered in their own way but create just the right amount of illusionary freedom to satisfy her odd little heart. To the field she goes, on feet light and quick, medicine-capped like her mother and there the similarities end for Sinew is more bright chestnut and white in her pretty overo pattern than Scalped ever was. Sinew knows they will not know her for anything other than a fresh face not wholly scrubbed free of its youth but there is no innocence in her look, only haunted things, and dark knowing eyes that have seen too much even before she was conceived - Sinew was her very namesake, old and timeless, and she feels the immortality like a sluggish worm threading its way through her insides, it feeds on the few remaining kernels of her mortality, strangling them useless and dead until she knows that in a year or so, she will remain forever this way - bold, impetuous, and somehow, pretty. For now, she is picking her way carefully amongst them, sparing a few them a bold black look but most quail beneath the directness of her gaze and she swings her head away from them, to behold the field in all its glorified squalor.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

(She dreams of touches in dark places.
He does too.)

(They could share that cup; that elixir.) He bends to darkness, as well. Because once, in a dreamlike place, he had grasped it in his fingers so hard that the skin had bruised and raised around it. He had been so hungry for it that he had grown careless. Greed is a funny thing – does funny things. The boy had reached for it as the north began to disintegrate, and it had broken his fall.
It had lodged itself between his ribs, hanging by his heart from a shoulder blade like an ornament.

It had become a part of him.
It had given him everything, and more.

(Except, when he dreams of touches, he does not wake up yearning for them. He wakes up mired in their welts and their indelibility. The soft and the hard. The barbs – their punctures and their kisses. Bones breaking and rebreaking. The sensation of falling…) They probably come together because she is wanting of him, more than anything. Though she may not know it. And if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone like him.
She likes to take liberties with her life. He likes the same thing. Luckily, today he finds himself sedate.

Tranquilized, you might say.

Obviously, he isn’t a monster.

He does answer to things higher than just his appetite from time to time! – self-service… he could play with this new toy called duty. Demian had done him a favour, after all. (That doesn’t mean they could never play, only that he must play nice, if she comes. And he can do that. He had found Tarnished’s things fun in the past.) 
He appraises her. Her youth and temerity. It all hides the things about her that he would hate. Does hate. (A hate for her sex that has been tempered, a bit, by the sheer weight of his aggrandizement – unsurprisingly, when he found he could bring them to their knees, he felt less threatened.)

He offers nothing for her withering glances, though he finds them amusing. Interesting. She is absent weakness, frailty. That, at least, soothes him. Those things do so rankle his nerves. “Hello.”

His dark eyes meet hers. They can promise so much to her, but instead they are flat and wicked. Maybe for her, the latter is promise enough. “You seem very… spirited. I’m here on behalf of the Valley. It could use that,” he smiles (a grim smile that he sometimes imagines stretching unnaturally down the side of his face, like a smile he had seen before, in that dreamlike place – like a crocodile). “I'm Pollock.”

POLLOCK
the gift giver and guardian

[sinew]

Sinew lets the dark eclipse her light, for there is the penchant for both in her but there is something decidedly more interesting about the dark and the things that lurk within it that lure her over to their side. She is like lightning come from the storm, sizzling and bright amidst their darkness. But even for all of her brightness, she is terrible and rent by her fearlessness and the brightness dims, besieged by a tide of darkness it cannot beat back. Sinew likes the taste of danger on her tongue, a rich blend of copper (like blood) and metal (almost like fear, if she knew what fear was). Her immortality is a shield that she wields carelessly and easily before her very life, a thing that means little to her - she cannot die, so what reason is there to fear? Besides, in the time before, she has died many times that death is nothing to her now but a promise of sweet oblivion as fleeting as it is before she is born again. She knows she hasn’t dreamed the past; that most of it is inherent but not, and that things just come to her that she should not know but she does, there is little explanation for it. Like there is no explanation for what comes before her, horned and godlike and for a moment, the breath catches in her throat and she sees another that stands before her, horned and impressive, and she shuts her eyes awaiting the piercing whistle of domination that she expects to come but there is only the quiet and the dark and them. Her eyes open; the time before fades just enough to hover like mist at the corners of her eyes as she regards him thoughtfully. He sparks her interest and if she is honest with herself, it is only because of the ram horns that curl out from his head and the great cloven feet that stomp the earth into dusty submission. They remind her of before - in a time and place that cannot possibly exist in this one and that she should have no knowledge of but Sinew is immortal and the seeds of that immortality began in the very stuff that makes up what could be considered a soul. Her eyes are then drawn to the one wing that drags limply against his side and the ground, it has no softness that begs her to touch it and she is merely curious as to how he came by one wing alone. She thinks him an odder creature than he really is, more odd than terrifying though his flat wicked gaze is rather compelling and she cannot - does not want to - look away. “Is that all it needs?” she asks, the prompt soft and curious, as he introduces himself and she does the same, “Sinew.” His grin is toothy, and her lips turn up in an answering grin that is more bright than grim but somehow wrong for all that her face shines with a terrible promise of… something, pain, darkness, blood, and Sinew feels a delicious tremor ricochet down her spine. Briefly, she wonders if he will be the one to teach her fear but it is such a fleeting thought that it is gone before she has time to truly savor it, and if his grin is crocodilian in nature, than her own is soft and secretive like a shadow that has taken up residence on her pale face.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

He finds he can feed on her fearlessness as easily as on cowed flesh. 

To him, it is something like having game gravitate to the path of a buckshot – the antithesis of a moth’s inclination to flame... Except it glances off of her as if her skin is steely and not meaty. And even more than the thrill of easy prey, he is aroused by the idea of testing her mettle and picking at the calcification of invulnerability that he thinks must hide something even more appetizing beneath.
(He has learned that some things bend and bow stubbornly until they finally snap – he wonders if she neither bends nor snaps, but holds her shape, even as her flesh is harrowed.)

Yes. He could pry that open.
Pollock could teach her fear and maybe more.

While immortality can be such a pesky thing when he is in the mood for a happy ending, horses like her are canvasses that have no end. (Or have many ends and blurred beginnings and hold the splatter of a hundred lived lives.) And for artists like him, that is a wellspring of inspiration. 
He cannot tell from her face alone that she is endless – but there is a curiousness to her that he yearns to finger and figure out, to pull at like a woven thing until unravelled. Maybe he recognizes something confused and riven in her – both of their hands fumble with time. Hers is eternal and his is a queer snare of pasts and presents.

(He had given in to darkness, heart and soul, the moment he had taken healing hands and made them viscera art on the walls, ceiling and floor. He could have taken the other half of that whole, it was right there – he didn’t.) 
When she eyes his wing his lips wrinkle and curl and his head feels suddenly too light. Too unencumbered and tidy. (He had washed his horns and forehead clean in water mixed with Beqanna's cremains. Into that mire he had given his oblation – blood and sand. It had left him feeling empty and plain. He prefers himself decorated.) His lips draw tight against his teeth and he bites back admonishment and temper.
That is a strike. He lets it slide but it aches like a bruise that refuses to heal.

“–that. And more,” he says finally, catching her eyes and so unlike his other, younger things, she holds his. “Your boldness. There is always a need for more. The question is what else do you have to give, Sinew.” Much and more he imagines, but if pressed, he might admit that he has begun to think selfishly. 
The Valley would need more from her than he ever would, to be sure, and would offer more, too. He is not overly demanding, whether the Valley’s newly installed Queen is remains to be seen. He had never promised Demian he would relinquish his vices (Demian had taken him not inspite of his bloodthirst, but because of it), but he can keep his own nest clean and he can share.

He can be good, so he smiles.

POLLOCK
the gift giver and guardian

[sinew]

She can feel him feeding on her; he takes sips and bites of her lack of fear and swallows them up.

It is only a small tingling of awareness that dances on quick catpaws up and down her spine, little shivers of his strange magic working on her and it makes her bask in the way he slowly, carelessly, quietly devours her.

He is a cannibal; eating her up from the inside out and Sinew just breathes through it, meditatively and oddly at peace with him chewing on her foolish bravery.

It leaves a taste in her mouth, like the promise of spring rain, clear and cool, and she knows that if there is one to teach her fear - it will be him, and only him, because she is too old and unafraid of this world to fear anything it.

(Except for the way he eats her up, because he is a wolf in horse’s clothing and might swallow all of her up and if that is what she has to fear - the swallowing up, the not existing, the loss of self and soul, then that is what she just might fear.)

It is no wonder that Sinew cleaves so cleanly towards him, her flesh shapely enough and not yet showing the seed of her first - perhaps only - breeding (so animal, so vile, so base and yet never more arousing than the dance that a stallion and a mare share, though she remembers he was not always as a stallion during the heated rush of those moments and their shared madness - he had been other things too, boar and dragon, and a ghost of her death or another’s, she can’t quite remember), but it is there - she can feel it beginning to stir and take shape, taking from her strength and shape, just as he does in those first few feedings that feel like bits of air being sucked from her skin. So subtle, she would not miss them and does not, for fearlessness is her mettle - her backbone - her blood, and her very life.

Still, she curves into him but never close enough to touch - not yet, there is always time for that later, to skim her lips along the ram-curl of a horn, to suck on the ruin of that one wing, to feast on him as he feasts on her.

She seizes upon the way he grimaces - lips tight against teeth - as she sizes up that poor, dejected excuse of a wing. It is his biting back of admonishment and temper that pulls a laugh from her throat, smokey and low, as she inclines her head to him in pure supplication - she will placate him, and pretend that wing does not exist and that he is pristine and terrible in his ram-horns and pale clouds of hair. He would look better in his adornments of blood and gore, she thinks it as much as he does, and would prefer him to wear the ruin of his conquests like trinkets - he would be more godly and commanding that way. Instead, he came to her cleansed and naked and she appreciates him all the more for it, in the way that only she can. Maybe it was the dark of him calling to the dark in her.

“That,” she begins and ends, “Depends.”

He has named her boldness a thing to give to the Valley, but asks more of her as if it is a challenge that she will rise up to meet. Part of her muses that he is not wholeheartedly scheming on the Valley’s behalf with his questions, but dreaming up his own machinations for her and she flashes him a dark smile that seems so odd on her pale painted face. Already she knows that she can offer the life inside her, that precious unspoiled thing that came from Tarnished’s seed that is like a coin well spent for a chance at greatness (or failure, since Sinew never aspired to much other than to be herself). That, and the thing she has kept hidden from him when she told her darling pet to go play in the meadow. She thinks the revelation of such to him will be most appealing and her lips still hold that same darkly sinister smile; “I do not come alone.” She confides to him, her eyes as sly as her tongue as they slip away from him.