"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
It had begun by leaving her shriveled and calloused heart still and numb to whatever the ache was that lingered beneath her breast - and it had blossomed into a blistering rage, quieted only by the sheer power of her will. Stoicism remained at the surface - with only the wicked gleam in her silver-laden eye to give away what emotion lay beneath the placidity of her expression, but in the dark recesses of her mind, it thrives, ravenous and insatiable. She had devoted her time, her drive - her strength and wit and effort to him, and for what? Silence has permeated the woodland as winter waned, as her body convulsed and birthed a child born from his loin -
She cannot waste her energy being bitter over what never was, over what never could be.
She moves seamlessly with little else but her feminine, shapely silhouette to give her presence away. Her cheek brushes once, and then twice over a lone birch, pale and stark in contrast to the dry and brittle bark of the pine and hickory surrounding her, and the disarray of her ivory forelock is brushed away from the gleaming gray of her roving eye, searching the darkness, illicitly drawn to what might lurk within. She is not alone, and she is startlingly aware of it, as a shiver traverses the length of her spine - the heaviness of another breathing the same air as she is sucking the oxygen from her lungs, as she becomes still.
Never cautious, always curious.
”Show yourself,” she demands, searching the abysmal darkness for differentiation between black and blacker - for an outline, for a pair of watchful eyes, just like her own. Her teeth unsheathe with a faint sneer - no longer blunt, but sharp and glistening like the wolf that hid beneath sheepskin. ”come now. I don’t bite. Not unless you’d like me to, that is.”
12-03-2017, 11:29 PM (This post was last modified: 12-03-2017, 11:29 PM by Deimos.)
The last he had seen of her, she had been on the ground below him, bending her knee to that waste. The one he had once aligned himself to… the ghost king who wanted to know his greatness in the eyes of those he held subservient. The forests had run dry with the memory and the screams of the dead, and it was only just now that the trees were coming back. His wall remained, though it was wearing away as the bramble crumbled and the vines wound their way through it, taking back the forest and making it wild again.
Wild, like the woman whose scent now bled into the ground. He was stalking her as one stalks prey. The ground was soft, the lichen a stench to his nose. He has found himself enjoying this form of late, the fangs that hang down and clip his pink tongue, allowing him to taste his own blood, savoring the copper on his palate. His black eyes were bright, his ears erect. Since that day, he has not been seen in his normal form, though now the time has come…
He steps out, pawing at the ground again, snorting his derision. His black tangled fur hangs in stringy clumps on his back, his tail erect…knowing. He smiles darkly when she speaks then… his distraction, his darling witch.
She was beautiful. And nobody’s fool.
His voice rolled over her, not bothering to disguise himself. “But what fun is it in the wanting, Thana? You’re so much more fun when you impose your will on others. Isn’t that what you are best at? Where is your precious lapdog? Let him off his leash with his crown tipped over his ears?” He angrily snorts, bearing his teeth and almost barking that last sentence. A king. A ghost.
From the deepest and darkest recesses of her memory, the image of him transfixing himself into the boundary that had very nearly been her own demise - the image of the felled pine and the rumbling of the ground beneath her, it all causes her heart to stir, to race. The adrenaline is surging recklessly and seamlessly through the length of her body, while the abysmal black of one eye and the shining silver of the other stare at the vision of death and decay standing before her. She had thought him dead. She had thought him lost to the roiling river of magma, lost to the rising brine of the ravenous sea that crawled along the distant shoreline of Taiga, swallowing all it could beneath the boiling heat of its fervor.
”Deimos,” she says finally, the astonishment fading slowly as each corner of her wry mouth is turned up in a delighted, albeit wicked smile. ”where have you been?” she muses (as if she hadn’t thought him dead at all - as if he had only been gone a fortnight, and not an eternity). Her legs carry her closer to him - her breath caressing the ridge of his shoulder, where raw energy and muscle lay just beneath the blackness of his flesh.
”I do like to take what I want,” she murmurs with a glint of impish mischief in her eye, while her gaze roves over the darkness of his skin to the broad line of his jawbone and the emptiness of his eye - staring back at her. She can hear his ire laced between each word, pressed through gritted teeth, and she can feel the anger in each punctuated word - and it only rouses enthrallment in the hearth of her tightening chest, where her heartbeat is thrumming loud enough for him to hear. Her cheek caresses his neck, then, reaching beneath the entanglement of matted dreadlocks to grip the root of his mane, tugging it tightly between her teeth before releasing him. ”but there is illicit beauty in being wanted.”
Then, she encircles him - the predator drawn to the forefront yet again, as the metallic scent of blood envelopes her, reminding her that it had been too long - too long! - since she had spilled the blood of another. The feminine curve of her hip catches along the hardened muscle of his, as she comes around his hind end, her sharp teeth nipping at the curve of his barrel while her shoulder becomes aligned with his again. There, she is staring into his other eye, as dark and as insidious as the other.
”He is nowhere to be found,” she says with an edge - disdain etched into the silver flecks of her eye, staring out into the dark woodland before her. Disinterested in discussing the absence of the one that had let her down; of the one that had promised so much only to fall short (is it not said that a daughter often pursues the image of her father?). She pauses then, searching the rigid shadow of his face, amusement tainting her tone.
”You’ve been following me,” she says - a statement, not a question - as her teeth graze the column of his neck. ”did you miss me?”
He smiles darkly when he realizes that she knows exactly what manner of beast has been following her, flattered, and impressed that she knows him by his wolf. His pheromones gave off the sense of a hunter, but when she calls him by name, he peeled back his lips to reveal a dark smile framed by a set of very impressive fangs. And then, he shifts, turning himself back into the black equid that she knew, loved, and despised.
It was true, they despised each other.
And yet, the tension between the two had always been tenable.
Those thick leathery wings could not wait to reach out and grab at her chest, clasping at her flesh and digging in as they pulled their bodies together. She speaks, her words made of acid and ice as they drip down his body and land between them. He pulls her closer as she pulls into his neck, and he wraps her up in his own, crooking his head around hers, his voice thick as it whispers into the recesses of her mind.
Do not toy with me, girl. You know I have always wanted you.
Her hip catches on his, and the heat of his body pierces the icey fleck of her cold perfection. They are pressed together, drawing closer. Her body is bleeding for him, and he is drawing her in. He smiles darkly when Thana tells him of Gryffen’s absence.. “How dare he leave you alone in such a state. Does he not know that you cannot be satisfied by absence? How will we stoke that pretty little fire in your belly? Whose life will we have to wreck to see you smile again?”
The trees grew together in their haste to prevent their darkness from spreading—and Deimos leaned in and breathed in the heady scent that Thana presented. “You wanted me to find you, Thana. I do not have to read your mind to know that I know you missed being touched this way… Claimed this way…
He presses closer to her, skin to skin, and the heat of his breath trailing the length of her neck is enough to elicit a shiver from her. ”I do not rely on him, just as he does not rely on me.” (She is not devoted to only one, nor had she ever been. She would not be made vulnerable by exclusivity and jealousy, though it had already begun to fester anyway.)
When his voice reaches into her mind, a shiver reaches into the very pit of her belly, causing her to quiver with delight. There is delicious anguish in the way each claw presses into her pliable flesh, but she pries herself away, if only to reach more of him with her lips, brushing ever so lightly along the coiled ridge of muscle along his shoulder and neck. She does not need for him to say it, not with word, nor with thought. She can feel his arousal in the way he clutches her closer, as if he had thought of it time and time again, of how he might pull her in and take her for his own.
She had thought of it, herself – he is raw magnetism, power, and prowess. She is intoxicated by the allure of his magic, by the sheer capacity of his ability, and when he changes beneath her lips to become the towering, blackened beast she had come to know so long ago with such effortless ease, a low and drawn-out moan rises from the tightness of her throat. A coy smile rises again to her lips, while her ivory forelock lay haphazard over her eyes, dark and glistening.
Her teeth lengthen once more, as her sharp incisors graze along his shoulder and press into the muscle beneath her ravenous lips. She can taste the heat, blood, and darkness under her tongue, and she can feel his pulse thrum – so close that she can almost taste him.
A low and rumbling chuckle emerges then, as her dreary gray eye roves over the ridge of his hipbone and beneath his barrel, where he is wanting and thick with desire. She is not disappointed by the sight of him. Her gaze is cast over her shoulder, wry and delighted. ”And you wanted to find me, Deimos – what took so long?” she muses softly, teeth sinking into the thick leather of his wing, tasting the inkling of blood that surfaces onto her tongue, and it only serves as fuel for her own desire.
”You have missed me,” she murmurs to him, dark and dangerous, daring him to come closer as her delicate folds part and her lustrous tail is drawn to the side, giving herself to him as she had only given herself to few. She feared nothing, and least of not him – he is menacing, commanding, formidable and treacherous, but she is drawn to him like a moth to a flame, yearning to be burned by the inferno of his longing. ”You wanted me then, and you want me now.”
The musk she gives off is intoxicating. He closes his eyes, flaring his nostrils. The feel good drag of her seeps into his mind and electrifies him—there, in that moment, he feels the wetness and pliability of her body as she sinks into him, like stepping into quicksand and quickly being dragged down to the highest depths of ecstasy.
She purrs at him then… a statement, not a question. Her voice is laced with iron and arsenic, and he cannot help but be dragged into the web of her making. Her tail sweeps to the side, and a kaleidoscope of color blinds him to anything else but her. It is well known that Deimos has exactly one weakness above all others….in that there is only ever one.
There is only ever one.
There have been a few, and there have been many one nights…
But those select few who could dig deep and hook themselves into Deimos—it is a rare thing indeed. His eyes bulge and he feels a dark, dangerous rumble escape from his throat as he feels her fangs seep into his skin… What is left of his life, his undeath, he feels escape into her mouth as she drinks him in, and he finds that he does the same, growing his own dark incisors into her jugular vein, hungry to taste her—to make her his.
And only his.
After a moment, he closes his eyes and groans again, feeling the rigidity of his body pulling out from its case, throbbing with an ache he has not known in more than a lifetime. Once again, her words taint his mind, sending electricity to the nether most reaches of his mind and body, causing him to shudder in a way unbecoming of the black-hearted magician.
You wanted me then, and you want me now.
He growls then, releasing her neck as he shifts them both to their wolf forms. Black claws grab at her shoulders as he pulls her down with him, biting her ears and pulling back her head, entwining it with his own. He hungrily takes her then, rampant and rough, whispering obscenities into her ear that he knew would turn her on, and make her quiver for him.
She was wasted for him, her body crumbling under him as he took her over and over, until they were a wet tangled mess of fur and sex, alone in their part of the forest. The scent was obvious. And yet he found he was still unsated.
He wanted more of her.
He wanted to drown inside her and never come up for air.
Beneath the demeanor of darkness, the wickedness, and the wildness, he is raw and unfiltered testosterone, undone by the tantalizing heat of her touch and the press of her sharpened teeth into the supple give of his flesh. She cannot stop herself from taking delight in how he has unraveled beneath her touch, hardened with need and plucking hungrily at her flesh. There is illicit beauty in being wanted, and she is writhing under his voracious mouth, sinking teeth into flesh and seeping blood across the cobalt of her skin, trickling down over muscle and bone.
There is undeniable pleasure in the way he clutches her close, possessive and ferocious, but she does not shy away from the force, nor from the anguish that accompanies his weight onto her own - she is captivated, lost to the sheer wonder of his desire. So much so that it is more than a dozen heartbeats later that she realizes she is once more the predatory wolf, cloaked in thick, lustrous black fur as her talons grip the soil beneath her, while her haunches rise and push against the burden of his weight, seeking more. The girth of him leaves her gasping and panting beneath him, sore but aching for him, drawing him in deeper with each thrust.
Instinctively, she is submissive to him - he is the dominant alpha, claiming her with gnashing teeth and filling her with his insidious seed, but beyond the instinct, she is unraveling beneath him and entranced by the way he elicits pleasure from within her, simply by taking for his own. Roused by power and intoxicated by strength, she is undone, wholly content in letting him sink into her, in feeling a creature so fearful and so forceful become undone unto her.
The powerful made powerless by sex, by desire - and though it is her writhing beneath him, she is the one feeling powerful, fed by the way he desires her and covets her.
Taking delight in the way he takes her again, and again, insatiable and wrought with a need that went beyond lust - beyond physical, carnal pleasure. Her own climax does come, more than once, leaving her trembling under him and crooning his name on her lips, delirious as blood and seed stain her inner thighs, as her muzzle is tilted toward the darkness overhead - her blackened eye seeking his; a wry smile tugging at the corner of her mouth as the ache to be filled becomes the ache of fulfillment.
”I knew I was right,” she coos softly, with a trill of laughter at the edge of her words.
He groans, and they both fall on the ground, tangled together. Deimos nips at Thana’s ear and wraps his paws around her belly, keeping himself firmly connected to her… inserted inside her deepest part, taking part of her soul into his belly. He hears her laugh darkly, and he works his jaw, his face set grim as he closes his eyes, his body spent in a way it has not been worked in years.
If ever.
I knew I was right.
His ears go back, and his tail covers them both where they lay—the heavy weight of him pinning her warm body to his, keeping her with him in that way just a bit longer. Just to feel the inside of her, to remind her that this was where he belonged, and he thrusted into her one last time, grunting as he did do, reminding her… This is mine. I have ruined you for all other men. No one will ever fill you as I have.
But he said nothing aloud. Indeed, there was no need for the time being. Of course there was the matter of politics. Of Gryffen’s absence… of what would happen with Sylva without the Wraith. There was much to do. But for the time being, there was much more to do….
