[private] slipping through the cracks of your cold embrace, Atrox

[atrox]

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

He knows what it’s like to not find a place—to not truly belong anywhere.

Even though he now has this plot of earth, this land, it doesn’t feel like his own. It’s not the place where he wants it to be. Not the place where it could be—and, yet, he doesn’t hate it completely. It doesn’t itch or wear thin around the corners and when he wakes in the morning to take in the fog that will sometimes roll across the glass of the lake, he will even feel something like home settle in his belly.

Still, this isn’t home. It’s not his own.

He would not bleed for it or bury his heart in her soil.

And there’s nothing he can do to rectify that.

So in this, he can understand Ryatah and finds himself grateful, if only a little, for her presence here. He grunts under his breath at the confession because he’s not particularly surprised. She didn’t strike him as someone who yearned for the crown. He didn’t think that she was power-hungry or particularly obsessed with the idea of fighting for the crown once more and he likes her more for it.

His teeth flash into his predatory smile and a laugh as he feels that tension mount. He’s no stranger to it—one doesn’t father dozens of children without some awareness of it—but he prefers to withhold more. Prefers the strange control that comes with it. “Does everything boil down to that with you?” he laughs, low and smoky, as though he had not been the one to turn the conversation in that direction. As though he had not been the one to take the first step in their every interaction. “Am I being used, Ryatah?”

Humor flashes in his yellow eyes but he doesn’t soften it with any further laughter.

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING