Beneath the moon, beside an ancient lake - Etro

[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 waits in anticipation, quavering.

He licks his lips, craning in ever so slightly.
—he watches her pupils dilate, searching for light…
—he tastes desperation in the way her breath quickens on her lips…
He drinks hearty draughts and feasts on it. It could have been enough to sate him, but just as he goes in to tear another mouthful, it sours in his mouth like ash and worm-eaten fruit. His brows knit together and his mouth tightens as she lurches. He pulls his head back, chin tucking towards his chest. He wants to retch and send her away. He wants to put her down, not gentle but forcefully. Finally. Kill dead the things she stirs up from the silt in the pit of his gut. Place her carefully at the roots of a tree and let her feed some other tongue.

It is pining, not fear, he realizes all too late, that he fingers in her mind. Pining concentrated, boiled down, into something mimicking dread but he knows it too well to be fooled. He hates it too much.
He tries to withdraw from her, but like his body would not surrender to his will, so do his claws seem hooked impossibly into her psyche. “Stop,” he warns, too quietly, as she mouths the word, ‘no’, ringing it off like a desperate prayer to a cruel god, ‘Please… don’t leave.’ “Don’t...” 

He wrestles with control, but he feels resistance in everything he does. She diminishes him, he knows that now and the knowledge makes him blind. That beast, Anger. That thing of recklessness; not like fear, he wields like a weapon – but that black, roiling passenger. (He remembers hanging heavy on her, spent – she had sunk three of her dark horns into his jaw and had called on that beast.) He freezes, caught in the violent suck of where her pleading pulls him, 
(the boy presses his face against the ribbone-bars of his cage, rattling and raging, his only company the strange, dark and pulsating ornament that hangs from his scapula in his breast; the colt wails and calls out, his words lost to the expulsion of things the monster needs no more. But these two are harder to kill. They cling, incessant.) 

She touches his face, her breath against the scar tissue there, hot. He cannot seem to pull away, glued to the contact. (As he had found something strange and other in the brush of that star-hardened flank; the sturdy architecture of hips. They ease over the phantom touches of brutality, like a balm and an ablution.) She traces downward in hopeless throbs until he feels her weight and he unravels his faulty powers from her mind. He breaths heavy, flinching from her body and the unsettling ferocity of her grief. “Leave me. Get out of my Forest,” he pants, snarls. It is not his way to let them go.

And then just as suddenly, “What have you done?” he bellows. He pushes her away from him, swiping towards her with his great, curved headgear, stopping just before they collide with her shoulder, heaving. A warning shot. He turns his brown-black eyes to her, bright with demand.
But, there is fear there, too. This he brandishes like a weapon to her throat.

POLLOCK
the gift giver