[open] don't close the coffin yet; any

[atrox]

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

He doesn’t expect her to relax in his presence, but he is surprised when she grows more somber. He tilts his head slightly, an ear swiveling toward her before shrugging and making a non-committal noise in the back of his throat. His children had never truly needed him, and he has never needed them. There were only a few that he was even an absent presence for—the ones with Twinge, mostly, although he had ended up taking in Anastasia and training her for several years. He has no doubt that they miss him little.

“I think most children do well without parents there to mess it up,” he muses out loud, his yellow eyes moving away from the white of her to the shadows that exist beyond, thinking briefly about his own. His father, a general who had set his path from a young age, and his mother—weak and useless and Atrox’s first taste of murder at such a young age. It is a strangely introspective thought for the stallion and one that he shakes easily, his crooked, apathetic grin sliding back into place as he shakes the dust away.

His eyes sharpen again as he studies her once more, wondering just what she would have found of interest in this new world. Would she have found a replacement for the Gates? Another cause for her to pick up with the same eagerness that Magnus had tried to fill the Heaven shaped whole in his chest? The comparison leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, a strange ache that he was unused to, and he turns toward her with a new sharpness, a casual cruelness that pulls his scarred mouth into a flat line.

“So how does it feel to live as a ghost in a world that has long forgotten your name?”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING