Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was only just past dawn, and already you had a problem. A fiercely inescapable, moon-tethered problem. 

You just hadn't realized it yet.

Still, its inklings were beginning to ripple over you even without your knowledge, giving you momentary pause - stealing your attention away from Kalé as the merchant stared up at you, quizzically, from his usual slouch.

“A howling, you say?” 

His question brought you back to the present, and he raised a scraggled brow at your sudden, flustered expression.

“H-huh?” 

Swallowing past that feeling of uncomfortable wings fluttering about your belly, it took a moment for you to remember your asking about a sound you’d heard that morning - indeed, a howling. A sound that seemed to summon you. A mysterious, haunting, disembodied aria, wavering its song above the trees.

“Oh - yes,” you regained yourself, rubbing that strange sensation from your skin and clearing your throat again. “In the Mistwood, which I believe you’ve traveled through, if your stories are to be believed. Have you heard it?” Your arms folded tight a moment, attempting to keep your mind in order. “Had to sleuth my way past far more runebears than I’d ever like the pleasure of meeting just to find out where it came from.” You sighed, stumped by the mystery. “Only to find nothing there at all, beyond some moss-choked ruins! But I must be missing something...” A wry smile gripped you. “Well, unless I’m going mad.”

Mad or no, the fact remained there’d been nothing howling out to that blanket of sun-jeweled treeline above the Mistwood. Nothing you could see, anyway. 

But undoubtedly you had heard something…

Perhaps it was a ghost.

Kalé’s pale eyes crinkled up at you, and you knew he wore a smile beneath his cowl. “Ah,” he said, with a newfound shrewdness. “I suppose he must still be skulking about, then.”

Your eyes grew overlarge despite yourself. “Who?” you edged toward concern. “A ghost?!”

To think you’d sought such a creature of your own volition! Perhaps you were mad!

“Hardly,” Kalé returned unhurriedly, his rasp speckled with a laugh. “Not unless he’s gotten into far more trouble than he ought to since last I saw him.”

Your concern tilted once more toward curiosity.

“Him..?” you repeated, a question to it. Though as you waited for an actual answer from your ashen-faced friend, you failed to receive one before that creeping, insistent something started wiggling through your stomach again.

Fluttering. 

Fidgeting.

Not to be ignored.

Threading through you a dreadful, all-too-familiar, impatient ribbon of heat that sank straight from your spine down into your toes. That had your thighs shifting of their own accord as you blinked in slow alarm, as if your subconscious were attempting to swat whatever it was away.

And then it struck you, all at once - the mystery of your unavoidable, moon-tethered problem, solved like a bucket of ice poured atop your head.

…No.

No…!

No, no no-! Not yet! It can’t have been long enough already-!

No!

Biting your lips in trepidation, you didn’t hear if Kale ever answered your question - your gaze tearing away from him and instead toward the sky. Searching harriedly despite the sun’s light masking the whole of it, making the cosmos nearly impossible to see.

Kalé’s brow rose high enough to disappear beneath the brim of his hat as he watched you biting at your lips like you wanted to chew them off your face, adjusting one jutting knee from his cross-legged plop upon the ground. “Something the matter?”

“What-?” you stammered, ripping your gaze back from the sky.

You were startled back down to reality, again, with Kalé all the more puzzled for it. Doing your utmost to appear inconspicuous, despite the dread wracking through you. To appear normal, despite the fact you were anything but. For an omega near her heat, its tether creeping toward her, was anything but normal.

It wasn’t as if you could stop it from coming, but you were usually so careful, so cautiously attuned to exactly when it would come seeking to claim you, to turn you into some creature you hardly recognized. Desperate, enslaved, needy. A lust-starved beast with no control over its own desires.

The very thought disgusted you. And worse still, an imprint of agony, one you were all too familiar with after suffering alone time and time again through your cycles, wrenched your stomach already into painful knots. 

You’ll survive, you tried to dislodge your apprehension. You always do.

You shoved your nervousness on the matter aside, feigning a smile for your friend that felt far from convincing. “N-no! Nothing’s the matter - everything’s fine.” Waving the question in his gaze aside, you folded your arms in shaky insistence. “Fine, good, right as rain - never been better.” 

Hah, came your dry, inward scoffing.

Your heat would come. Would seek to destroy you, burning you from the inside out - or so it always seemed. There was nothing you could do about that, no matter how much you wished there was - but you had a few more days, at least - and you wouldn’t let it control you here, now, before that particular moon was full. You’d belong to it soon enough, but for now you belonged to you.

You stubbornly insisted as much, anyway.

Still, your stomach crawled with apprehension.

You were in dire need of a distraction from the inevitable.

“So…” you said, rehoning your attention on your friend. “About that howling…?”

Perhaps you should have left well enough alone.

Kalé studied you a moment, unspent musings locked behind the dull fabric of his mask. Though thankfully he didn’t press the matter further, nor ask why it was you looked to’ve just seen a ghost; instead suggesting you meet yet another.

His eyes crinkled in that way that meant he smiled. “Why not meet the howling for yourself?”

He lifted a long-fingered hand, then, and snapped. Just the once. A simple gesture.

“Make this signal right under the source,” he slowly smiled. “And the ghost is sure to come and greet you.”

Now, you were indeed a curious sort. But even you had your limitations, and your curiosity in that moment might have hid behind a rising bout of concern at the thought of coming face to face with some sort of howling, bodiless monstrosity lingering like a ghost in the trees. 

The runebears of the Mistwood were bad enough, let alone its phantoms.

Still… you could certainly use a distraction from the tangle of your apprehension, ghostly or otherwise…

You nipped your bottom lip whilst considering. “Can’t you just tell me whose ghost it is..? And what they’re on about? I don’t necessarily need to be greeted by whomever, or whatever, might-”

“Bad at lying, and a coward,” Kalé cut you off, and though you bristled in offense you bit back in retorting. 

He wasn’t wrong about the lying part, at least.

He chuffed like he knew this, seemingly amused by the frustration written across your features. “Don’t fret, Tarnished,” he said; his eyes a cornsilk, clever sheen that made you feel oddly transparent before him. “There’s nothing to fear… I just have an inkling the two of you might hit it off.”

You eyed him a moment more. Stubbornly wondering if there was something he wasn’t telling you. Knowing he likely wouldn’t tell you whatever it was, anyway, even if there were something. 

Eventually, your curiosity won over your fear of ghosts.

“Fine, then,” you relented, already turning to leave. “I’m no coward. I’ll meet your ghost. I’ll snap at him, even.”

“Better hurry, then,” Kalé teased, “before it gets dark. Ghosts are more savagely bloodthirsty in the moonlight.”

You huffed indignantly at him, walking out of earshot entirely. And summoning Torrent to your side, you were soon back on your way to the Mistwood, if for no other reason than to shove Kalé’s smirk in unwavering proof that you weren’t afraid of whatever might find you there.

You rode Torrent as far within the surrounding treeline as you dared, before patting the spectral steed’s sinewed neck, dismounting in a fluid motion as Torrent’s very form slipped away from view; vanished to a void of wispy, smoking blues.

The gold of a hazy, early afternoon was upon you then, its light seeping through the foam of forest leaves, catching on the shimmer of insects that floated to and fro, buzzing from one erdleaf petal to the next. The breeze, soft and soothing, had the wildgrass beneath the trees waving like an ocean, each strand tugged in turn as if by lazy strings.

You were almost fooled into enjoying yourself as you made your way along the beauty of it all.

Almost.

But the distant rumble of something large, something heavy, plodding as if from tree to earth, shook you from any such foolish reveries, the vibration of it traveling up from the soles of your boots.

For as beautiful as those woods were, they were also just as dangerous.

As such, you dared not risk the clomping approach of Torrent’s bringing. No, you much preferred whatever safety sneaking through the trees might bring you. It had worked before, after all, to bring you to those mossy ruins, un-clawed and un-eaten by ghosts or runebears. And indeed it worked again. You slipped your way from tree to tree, shadow to shadow, until at last you saw the spires of those long-forgotten ruins peeking through the gentle sway of leaves. 

And the second you saw them, you heard it. 

The howling.

That formless, wraithlike howling.

The song of it mournful, almost; as if searching for something it may never find. So much like that of a wolf’s. And yet it sounded almost… human. A man imitating beast.

“Make this signal right under the source,” Kalé had said. 

Well…

Not one to loiter until the runebears caught scent of you, you scurried into the shadows beneath those ruins. Glancing side to side in your ever cautious approach, feeling as if you might suddenly be set upon by whatever serenaded the trees with such a bestial song, even before you called out to it (quite foolishly, you scolded yourself for the umpteenth time - but curiosity had a way with you). Until at last that wolf-like cry seemed right above you. Though even as you strained your gaze upward, you saw not its source. No ghost, no wolf, no man. Nothing.

Taking a deep breath, fraught with more worry than you’d like to admit, you lifted one hand. Just as Kalé told you. Lifted one hand, and snapped.

Silence. 

Silence surrounded you, filled by nothing but the song of leaves.

But slowly, another sound came to find you. One far from a rising, lingered howl. A low sound. A coarse sound. An inquisitive growl that grated along your bones as if the very sky was snarling at you.

You felt a shift of wind before you saw him. Saw his shadow eclipse the golden light above before you saw him - plummeting to the earth like a falling star of steel and fur and fang. 

He landed so heavily that his giant, lengthy knees bent in something of a crouch to receive his weight; another coarse huff of air released from bestial lungs. And then he rose, without effort, to his full and imposing height. Fully armored to the utmost intricacy, every inch of him you could see painted in silver fur. His stance like a man’s, and yet his face - his eyes, his ears, his snout, were all that of a wolf. Towering so far above that you were forced to crane your neck upward, to gawk as if at a wolven moon. 

It happened so fast. You didn’t realize you’d screamed in absolute horror until seconds after you heard the terror tear from your lips. And suddenly you were tripping backward, falling flat on your rump; that shriek of alarm cut short as all the air shot out of you.

He did nothing but stare down at you, that wolven giant. His eyes like frost; a piercing color, glowing blue from the fur-brimmed shadow of his gaze.

“Well…” he slowly mused, his voice low enough to send goosebumps skittering across your nape. The single word alone affecting you. 

He waited, as if for you to speak, to announce yourself, to say anything, and perhaps you should have. But your tongue remained frozen, your eyes remained wide, your fingers treading earth from the ass-backward sprawl his presence had sent you in. 

A row of sheening white teeth glimpsed along his elongated jaw, and after a moment more of gawking up at him in horror you realized he was smirking at you. You’d never seen a wolf smirk, but there was no mistaking it.

“You startle easily, don’t you,” he rumbled in your petrified silence, eyeing you with a reserved sort of interest. “Why are you sneaking about these woods, little one? They seem a place unfit for someone as timid as you.”

Timid…?!

“I’m not sneaking,” you argued back at him, despite the fact that you clearly were. Irritation and embarrassment rekindling your ability to speak. 

The man simply went about wolfishly smirking.

“Oh?”

“And I’m not timid,” you protested further still, struggling to untangle yourself in order to stand, “and I’m not little, you’re just-”

Your words caught as a giant, gauntleted hand lowered into your field of view, with you blinking in startlement at its offering.

The half-wolf’s arctic eyes were narrowed in amusement as your gaze tore up to him, surprise stilling your tongue.

“Could have fooled me,” was his good-natured muse, his hand remaining offered. 

For a moment, you considered rejecting the gesture, as if to do so might somehow salve your wounded pride. But eventually you swallowed thickly instead; taking his giant hand that soon after swallowed yours, his size twice that of yours, his armored fingers wrapping easily around you.

He pulled you to your feet so swiftly you gasped and stumbled off balance, only stopped from tripping directly into his steel-plated waist by the way his other hand came to steady you, his palm enveloping your shoulder as if you were but a doll.

“Steady there, lass,” he said, dusk-blue cloak catching with the breeze, ruffling at his booted heels. And to see a wolf wear boots, let alone the full regalia of some battle-scarred knight, well… you’d never seen a thing like it. Though, the man was clearly not a wolf. Not really. No matter how his lupine eyes reflected like one.

Your lips parted to thank him, or perhaps to muster up something a bit more snarky - you weren’t certain, and in the end it didn’t matter. For whatever it was, or whatever it might’ve been, it was stripped from your mind completely. 

Suddenly, you couldn’t speak. 

And though you weren’t exactly keen on holding hands with strangers, you found that you couldn’t slip your hand from his, either.

Something caught you. Not a hand, nor any tangible thing, but something quite unseen.

The invisible string of scent. 

It coiled around you before you even knew it was there, without any chance of stopping it, of slipping through its grasp. And suddenly you were tangled; tangled in him, this wolfish stranger, though he did naught but hold your hand and shoulder steady, regarding you with a downward, quizzical stare. All the same, you were captive to his warm musk, in a way only someone like you so disastrously near the apex of her heat might’ve been. And before you knew it you were staring up at him, not in surprise or incredulity, but in a spellbound trance. Bound by a breath of timber, of a sweetness like rain-slicked stone. Of a warmth like sun on berries as they thawed on a wintry morn, still frozen to the vine.

Though the second this stranger’s dark nose twitched, as if unweaving a scent from the wind, the downy fur along his snout furrowing just a touch, the spell that held you shattered; your sudden jolt of panic cracking straight through it.

What’s happening to me-?

Is this man an alpha…?!

No - no, he couldn’t be. You’d never come across an alpha in the Lands Between, not a one - you’d even begun to wonder if they existed in the first place. 

He wasn’t an alpha. 

He likely wasn’t an alpha. 

…

And even if he was an alpha… 

No, he wasn’t!

And you weren’t about to lose yourself in the scent of a complete and utter stranger. Refused to be imprisoned by an inexplicably intoxicating musk alone.

And even though he likely wasn’t an alpha, you weren’t about to take any chances. You were in control, no one and nothing else. Not your omega nature, not your needy hormones, not some alpha who would carnally enslave you or whatever the bloody hell it was that alphas sought to do.

You slapped his hand away rather coarsely, rather rudely, though you were too flustered to really address it beyond the barest, apologetic half-glance.

“Thank you,” you gritted out, stepping back until you were what you hoped was a safe distance away. Until that thrum of ambrosial, forest darkness rolling off of him could no longer sink its fangs between your thighs. 

There… you sought to reason with yourself. Better.

“And before you go on insulting me,” you went on, attempting to regain your composure, “you might as well give me your name first.”

His brow remained heavy, as if perplexed by you; a crease visible on his fur. Though after a moment it smoothed itself over again. 

“Have I insulted you?”

Your lips pursed defiantly up at him. “You have.”

The man hummed in thought, sounding bear-like as he did. As if he truly didn’t remember. As if his calling you ‘timid’ and ‘sneaking’ had already slipped his memory. 

“I suppose I may have. Clearly I misspoke,” he mused at last. “A trick of the light, perhaps - for you hardly seem a timid thing now that I’ve gotten a good look at you. In fact, you look closer to slapping me than sneaking on by.”

“Thank you,” you said again, a touch more braggish this time; folding your arms across your puffing chest. 

In reality, you wouldn’t have dared slap a man of his size. 

A minor fact he needn’t know about.

He smiled at your cockiness. “Still rather on the small side, though.”

Your eyes narrowed. “Shall I slap you now, or once you’ve finished speaking?”

He chuckled at that, warm and throated, and you imagined a mountain’s mirth. “Slap me anytime you wish, little love,” he said. “But first tell me why Kalé sent you. For he’s the only bloody busybody to so far summon me as you have in these woods, and I suspect he’s the reason you’re here now. Snapping at me, for whatever reason, as it were.” He eyed you, head to toe. Speculation in his gaze. “You don’t look a tradesman.”

“I’m not.”

“Then pray tell your purpose,” he returned, “if not to peddle wares.”

You raised a brow at him, stalling for time. Not exactly wanting to answer, seeing as how your mere curiosity seemed hardly grounds enough to summon him. “I just so happened to be here,” you lied. “Does one require purpose to wander these woods?”

His strong arms folded in his regard of you, not appearing particularly swayed by your excuses.

You very much wished you were better at lying.

“Fine,” you admitted beneath the weight of his suspicion. “But I’d have your name first.”

“Very well,” was his easy return. “The name’s Blaidd. And who might you be?”

After hesitating a moment more, reluctant to become too familiar with someone with such an effect on you, you saw no way around it. He’d given his, after all - what was the harm in giving yours? 

Carding one hand back through your hair, you gave him your name; shyly, for whatever reason. Admitting to it almost like it was a sin. And saw his wolfish ears prick taller to receive it. 

“______,” he repeated; and again you didn't know yourself. Because for some idiotic, nonsensical reason, to hear your name like gravel from his lips caused a ripple of delicious heat to tumble down your spine, stoking fire through your middle. So much so you bit hard on the inside of your cheek when next he said it, as if to taunt you, though he did so innocuously enough. “Good to meet you, ______.”

A spot of silence - filled only by the murmurs of the Mistwood. Not of an uncomfortable sort, but of a mutual appraisal. Of a sifting through separate, hidden thoughts. Curiosity was a mirror in you both, it seemed. Though eventually his assessing eyes of ice made you feel too warm, their intensity turning you to glass and threatening to shatter through, so all the pieces of you lay bare to him.

You caught the back of your neck with one hand, rubbing at your nape with a sheepish sort of smile that was likely more of a grimace. “As for… for why I’m here, to be perfectly honest…” You dug one toe into the dirt, reticent beneath the weight of his study, such was his strange effect on you. “I was… curious. I admit. Drawn by your howling.”

You glanced up to catch his expression, and saw his lupine lips curved with something of amusement. 

“My howling..?”

“Yes,” you returned, your curiosity returning to overtake you, "...and, well, if I may ask… Why were you howling…?"

It had seemed an innocent question enough. But no sooner had you asked it did you witness his unopposing, open demeanor shiver closed in response.

Tension drew his broad shoulders into a line, the cords of his thickly muscled neck flexed beneath his fur. So much so that you flinched back another step from the mountain of him, wishing you could reclaim the question, yet at the same time more curious than ever for its answer.

For a time, he remained quiet.

“To fill the silence, I suppose,” he said at last. Voice hushed lower than you’d yet heard it. Something vulnerable to him, this giant-half wolf - something so at odds with the fierceness of his image. “Perhaps,” he further ventured, with a hesitant slowness, “to distract my solitude. If a shadow can feel such a thing. For it seems a shadow to me, as I am to others.”

It was all he said, before your glimpse inside him was closed, and he would say no more.

The admission seemed despite himself, and he eyed you then almost with reluctance. Like he hadn’t meant to say as much to you, the stranger who bid him. And for a moment more, neither of you said anything. Not for lack of trying, for you wanted to break whatever had overtaken him, but found that your tongue was frozen to your teeth.

His words had somehow pierced their way into your heart, in a way you couldn’t comprehend and certainly hadn’t expected. His hesitant, heavy silence, before and after, even more so. As if the quiet sealed one's fate to solitude more than any words or howling ever could.

Eventually he offered you a wry smile, seeming to drag some of the tension from the bridge of his shoulders. Locking it away into whatever hidden place it came from. 

“Have I satisfied the mystery, then?”

The question was nearly lost on you, caught as you were. A witness to something he didn’t mean to show you. 

It was silly - surely it was. It didn’t make sense. But even with as intimidating as Blaidd undoubtedly was, you still found yourself wanting to throw your arms around him and hold him. 

Hold him? your thoughts at once chastised. Have you lost your mind..?  

Yet apparently at least some part of you had, because your sudden longing to shatter the solitude that his howling sang through fought to extinguish all other thought. 

You’d shatter the solitude of a stranger..?

You wanted, inexplicably, foolishly, to throw your arms at once around him and hold him close. Which was of course ridiculous. 

Ridiculosity at its utmost. Lords, you really have gone mad.

In this, at least, the chaos of your thoughts could agree. You barely knew the man - throwing your arms around him would be perversely unwelcome.

And besides… how would you even hold a man so huge? 

And how would you even begin to comfort a stranger to whom you had nothing to offer?

It was a stupid thought. A foolish inclination. One you immediately ignored, frowning at yourself - wondering where such an inclination had even stemmed from. Was this the crawling of your heat trying to sway you? Was that it? 

It must have been. Surely. For it was nearly overpowering. So much so that you pulled your hands into fists at your sides with the effort of remaining where you were.

“I… yes,” you eventually got out, ignoring those ridiculous thoughts. Ignoring that itch to press through the distance that separated you; a distance you yourself had created. “I suppose you have.”

He watched you a moment. Glancing at your fists. Seeming to map your overwrought expression.

If he thought anything of the fidgeting state of you, he made no note of it.

“In that case,” he mused, not seeming keen to discuss the matter further. “Now you’ve a lack of mysteries to pursue, perhaps you might aid me in another task? Seeing as how Kalé sent you here…” He briefly, slightly smiled. “Friend of a friend, and all - if you could spare a hand, I’d use it.”

You blinked, taken from your muddied thoughts by such a forthright request. Then again, ‘friend of a friend’ and all that.

Perhaps you weren’t to remain strangers for long.

“Oh..?”

His threadbare smile returned, near-hidden in the silver of him. Amused once more, if only just, by whatever curiosity you showed him. “Yes. I’m looking for someone.” His eyes darkened slightly before he continued, like cold pale stones. “A traitor, who’s managed to slip through one too many fingers one too many times, whom I must put an end to.” The scars on his grizzled maw contorted as he seemed to envision such an end; its undoubted shades of violence. “But first I must find him. He’s a dangerous sort. And if you happen across his way, I’d have you tell me of it.”

This traitor, whoever he was, had the giant half-wolf’s hackles raised. Had his voice a steady, dangerous calm; the storm behind it bridled within him. 

It should have been alarming, this subtle, baleful shift in him - and yet you were gripped instead by something like excitement. Taken by a thrill at the thought of somehow being of use to him, of helping him in a way that didn’t end with his struggling out of some ill-advised embrace.

“Who is he?” you asked nearly at once; straightening up with a zealous resolve to find this traitor already. “I’m quite adept at finding people.”

Blaidd’s coyly lifted brow didn’t seem quite convinced of it, though he refrained from saying anything, and you rolled your eyes up at him.

“I found you, after all,” you argued in his silence. “Took some searching, but here I am. And whoever this traitor is, I’ll find him too.” Your chin ticked up as you attempted to impress him. “You have my word.”

His tall ears flickered, and after a moment’s silence, he actually laughed. Not unkindly, though he was still laughing at you, with something disbelieving caught beneath it. 

Your eyes narrowed slowly at his mirth, embarrassment creeping over you. “Do you doubt me that much…?” If it were anyone else, you might have rescinded the offer. But for whatever reason you persisted, “At least give me a chance to prove myself!”

“No, no, that’s not–” he assured in good nature, stifling back his throated chuckle. Wearing that smile again you were finding yourself quite fond of. “Guess I just thought you’d object. Or throw a harder bargain, at least. But you’re rather eager to assist, aren’t you?”

“Well,” you admitted, unthinking. A bit of warmth on your cheeks. “Yes...”

You should have stopped talking then. 

But on you rambled, “I’d like to assist, despite you being a troublesome sort - which, though I hardly know you, I can tell that much already–”

“Troublesome..?” he wondered over you, bemused. 

“Absolutely,” you insisted, staring doggedly right up at him. 

Gradually, he smiled. Eyes glistening. “You’re the one traipsing through my woods, summoning me without purpose.”

“Your woods?!”

“My neck of them, at least,” he countered, mirth dripping off his teeth. Chuckling lightly at your flustering obstinance.

And though you glowered up at him, you didn’t dare much else - though slapping his laughter into silence was a tempting thought. But the man could fit your entire head within the cradle of his teeth if he wanted to - no, you’d sooner slap one of the runebears in the woods. At least they didn’t have some magnetic, unwanted effect on you that made your insides squirm just by looking at them.

Eventually you sighed, wringing back your hair. “My point, sir, is that despite your being troublesome, I’d…” You nipped your lower lip, tossing your gaze shyly away from him, “Well… yes, I’d like to help you. Perhaps I even find myself rather fon-d - th-that is, I…” 

Gods, what were you saying? Marika’s tits, you’d shared but a few minutes with the man and you were already admitting you were fond of him?!

You weren’t fond of him!

Face nearly scalding, you barely caught any further embarrassment from slipping through your teeth. 

“I’d like to help you,” you ended. Stunted. Awkward. Businesslike. Folding your arms up at him stubbornly once again, though your ears burned. “If I can, that is. At my convenience. Since I’m here already. And you’re a friend of Kalé’s.” You shrugged. “I suppose that leaves me no choice. So who is this traitor?”

For a few long seconds, Blaidd didn’t say a word. And it was obvious he was studying you. Trying to read you. Like you were a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out, which in itself was just as puzzling to you - you hadn’t said something that strange, had you..? No, you'd caught yourself from being too forward. Or too strange. 

Hadn't you? 

Gods, you really wished he’d say something. For the longer his eyes were on you, the more aware you were of a gentle, deceiving warmth creeping on your skin, making every inch of you disastrously sensitive, making even your clothing seem too tight, like it was too much to bear. And perhaps even worse, though you didn’t know how or why, you felt he could somehow see your inward squirming, trying to free itself from beneath his heavy gaze.

“Very well then,” he said at last, with some apparent difficulty. Clearing some unspent musing from his sonorous voice. “Since you’re eager to help, I’ll make use of you. This traitor’s name is Darriwil; a Bloodhound Knight with a curved blade, and he’s fled somewhere nearby. Or so I’ve heard.” He motioned with his long, wolfish snout toward the dilapidated perch he’d swooped down from, before eying you again. “I mean to retain post here. In case he comes lurking through, as I believe he has before. But if you find him before I do…” A pause, in which he contemplated the way you intently clung to his words. “...Come and fetch me. I wouldn’t have you harmed on my account, regardless of how your pride might refute it. Use the signal Kalé taught you, and we’ll dispatch of him together.”

Your insides were buzzing with elation, but you tamped the tempest of it out - forcing a curt nod, instead. A soldier on a mission. “I’ll find him, don’t worry.”

He grinned a little at that, incisors shimmering into view for a fleeting moment. “I’m not worried, little one. Even if you are indeed small, regardless of what anyone else might’ve told you…” If anything, the way you bristled just made his smile broaden. “But still - you’re brimming with fire. So much so, in fact, that I’m more worried on Darriwil’s behalf should you find him before I do.” 

You weren’t certain if he was only poking fun at you, but the praise warmed butterflies in your stomach all the same, though you fought not to show it. And with an upward jut of his silver jaw, he gestured to set you on your way. “Off you go then. Good luck, little flame.”

Without protest, you couldn’t help a little smile from slipping across your face before you were bounding off obediently. Something stirring nigh unnoticed in your chest, like threads of sunlight through your ribs, sewn by the opportunity to impress the giant half-wolf.

Chapter Text

True to your word, and such was your tenacity in aiding Blaidd’s search, that you found the traitorous Darriwil not long after that. Found, or rather, fortuitously stumbled upon his imprisonment in the Evergaol. A purely happenstance thing, though upon circling back to tell Blaidd the news, you played the part of astutely cunning hunter. For the giant half-wolf was quite impressed with your ability to track Darriwil down so quickly, and you weren’t about to spoil the exquisite elation of it by admitting dumb luck led your way.

Together, you made quick work of the Bloodhound. More on account of his expert swordsmanship than on any account of yours. The man fought like a beast, his stance transposed between human and wolf. Sometimes arching the heavy swing of his blade from the towering height of two legs, iron carving air with a master’s ease. And at others, hurling his steel from a hunkered, wolfish pose; broad shoulders hunched, massive back arching, one gloved hand grazed along the earth in his crouch before pouncing. Always with a perfect elegance, a fluidity that defied you. All while wielding a frost-licked blade that dwarfed your weight and height at least twice over.

You were intimidated by him already, but after fighting at his side, you were also in awe of him.

By the time your fight was finished, the Bloodhound sundered through, he hefted that ice-touched blade up and over the dense bridge of one of his shoulders, casual in his strength. Meanwhile you were out of breath and doing your best to feign otherwise so as not to embarrass yourself in front of him for the upteenth time since meeting him already.

“Had to work for it,” he said between steady breaths as he eyed you, and you stifled the haggard inhale your lungs were aching for. Forcing a grin (a grimace) instead. And, making a show of appearing just as unaffected by combat as he apparently was, you attempted to offhandedly agree; a foolish endeavor, as you merely coughed instead, and he smiled with a glimmering, wolfish amusement. 

Twas a mercy he didn’t tease you for it. That, or pity. You preferred the former, if you required rescue from his teasing at all.

“You’re strong of arm,” he lowly noted, and you fought not to roll your eyes at how much of a stretch that was. 

“Hardly,” you groused, a bit petulant, “compared to you.”

“Then don’t compare,” he said, those watchful blues shining. “You were of aid, and I thank you for it.”

His half-smile warmed that little coal trapped where your heart was, and you shifted your huffiness away because of it. Giving in more to your rising wonderment of him. “If I’m strong of arm, then you’re…” the first word that came to mind slipped your tongue before you could stop it, “...incredible.”

His ears twitched up, and invisible hands seemed to grip him for a moment; polar-light eyes stirring, like watercolors, lilac to frigid blue. 

You couldn't help but stare at him. A slow fabrication forming in your mind, penned by his momentary hush.

Was he so stirred by a single compliment?

Was he, perhaps… blushing? 

Do wolves blush...?

You could barely suppress a smile at the idea of it, ridiculous as it was. 

“Incredible, eh?” asked Blaidd, seeming to regain himself. Silken voice barbed with archness. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever called me that before.” The admission, though genuine, was not without its mark of mischief; one that seemed signed and sharpened just for you. “Quite the praise, little love... I wonder what else I might inspire from those lips.”

A spike of heat pierced right through your middle, so at odds with his gaze of ice.

My, the adrenaline of battle made him brazen, didn’t it? And apparently you were the only one blushing in that moment, despite how you fought against it. The warmth traveling up the ridges of your cheeks only seeming to spur his broadening smirk onward.

“That’s all the praise you’re getting,” you shot back, stubborn against his ribbing and that rebellious longing, rising in your gut. “Don’t let it go to your head.” You eyed him - slowly, for effect - arms folding across your chest. “Though I suspect it already has.”

“At a praise from you,” he said, unabashed, “can you blame a man?”

Lords, the gravel of his voice…

The wind, nonexistent until that moment, chose to breeze across the both of you then as you watched one another. Shifting as if with an oncoming storm, first forward, then away. Tearing at the air as if conspiring against you. It whispered through your hair, rippling your slightly sweat-damped blouse. Feathering through the soft streams of ashen fur along Blaidd’s neck. Ashen fur you found yourself wanting to reach up and spill your hands through, tighten your fingers in, pull him closer with, assuming you could even stretch up high enough to reach it.

You wanted to grip his fur and pull him down to you, until his maw found your mouth and you could lose yourself in him, could–

Dammit! 

You were becoming a lust-drunk idiot at a mere change in the breeze, and you’d yet to even hit the peak of your oncoming heat. 

The realization of how easily undone you were already made unease twist in your chest. Anxious to whatever suffering surely awaited you when the full moon took the sky and all your senses with it.

You shuffled a few steps away from the towering half-wolf, so that the treacherous wind blew both your scents away from one another, though it continued in its insistence to try and tempt you regardless. To breathe that man’s exquisite, intoxicating musk into your every pore, till it thrummed like delicious poison in your veins.

Your fingers itched, tensing and clawing at your sides. Skin feeling much too tight, too sensitive. Your attention hinged to him, as if he in all his heavily armored, leviathan glory were all that existed. And in that moment, he was. He was all your mind consumed. You couldn't help it. 

Slowly lost from the demands your mind shouted that you get away from him, your eyes dragged up his muscle-bound form, catching on his density, his detail, before finally meeting his gaze, still so high above your own even at this stumbled distance. And what you saw there shocked you. Jolted you from your stupored state, so much so that you stumbled still further away. For those eyes that watched you from above were dark. Not azure, nor amethyst. Black. Pitch with a predatory promise.

But you must have imagined it. You must have. Because just as that promise appeared, it was gone. Sunken in his depths once more.

His eyes, jewels on the watchtower of him, regained their usual, icy iridescence. And he eyed you without expression for a time, weighed by a contemplation that clutched you. One that, slowly, drifted off him - allowing you to finally slip free. 

“Sorry,” he murmured, his tense grip shifting along his giant sword’s hilt. Adjusting the weapon’s heavy weight upon his shoulder. “Didn’t mean to put you ill at ease. A jest perhaps taken too far.”

A jest. 

So… he didn’t mean it, then. 

You’d overreacted, of course - thinking him flirtatious, when he was naught but teasing. 

Good. That was good.

Though, for a moment… perhaps you’d wished it was more.

The realization sunk an anchor of disappointment through you, and a small frown threatened your lips. But you forced it away with an empty attempt at a reassuring smile. “N-no! It’s fine… there’s nothing to apologize for,” you insisted, an aching in you strained. “Truly. I’m not ill at ease, I’m just… fatigued. From battle.” You forced a flippant gesture, ignoring the curl of heat ever-brewing behind your navel, inspired by his gaze alone. “Jest all you like.”

His slow smile seemed to match your own. Hollow beneath his eyes, though gentle in its curve - attempting to break through whatever thick thing stifled the air between you. 

“Glad to hear it,” he said, words rigid.

He cleared his throat. Perhaps let out a long breath, though it was difficult to tell with the wind shivering through his burly, fur-hemmed cloak.

The fact that a man covered in fur needed still more fur to adorn him… well, the oddity of it made your smile quirk a little brighter. Which, in turn, made his own smile hint more true.

That thick thing stuck between you slipped away, and once more in that clearing above the Evergaol, it was just he and you.

“I owe you one, I reckon,” he mused, his resonance calming. “For the help you’ve given. So allow me to return the favor, eh? If you haven’t other pressing matters to attend, why not venture north, to Raya Lucaria?”

The name rang a bell, though you couldn’t exactly recall it.

“Raya Lucaria...?” you wondered aloud, and he affirmed with a single, sturdy nod.

“You’ll come across a venerable blacksmith there,” he said. “Can’t miss’im, as he’s a little on the large side…” 

You were actually caught with a laugh at the thought of anyone being large compared to Blaidd. If that truly was the case, this blacksmith fellow must be huge. 

Blaidd’s proposal faltered at the tittering song of your laughter. Perhaps he was confused by whatever you found so funny - you weren’t sure. But he seemed displaced by the sound of it all the same. The days fading light caught on those sapphire facets of his eyes in the length of his pause, and like two blue embers they glowed, phosphorescent in the nighttime dim that had only just begun to stretch its hands above you. The blue of them branding. 

“Tell him I sent you,” he suggested, his baritone softer than it had been before. “And he’ll be sure to treat you right. The favor might not seem like much, but with a blacksmith such as he… I think you’ll find your favor repaid, and then some.”

That voice. His voice. Already a balm in its own right, and further still in that deepened cadence… A tide that pulled you. That lulled you. 

You could listen to him speak like that forever. Perhaps that’s why you didn’t find it in yourself to respond, instead staring up at him like some lovesick puppy or twitterpated dolt. Perhaps the wind had picked up again, struck you dumb, drowning you in his scent - you weren’t certain. You’d like to think that’s what reduced you to such a state, but thought itself evaded you; so you simply stared. Stared at him. He, the beguiling wolf - and you, the captive fool.

His gaze warmed, and in its swelter you suffocated. 

“Who knows,” he went on in your absence of words. A hint of curiosity about him, though he made no note of it. “Perhaps we’ll run into one another again. For my path draws me northward often.”

A blacksmith’s boon was tempting enough. But it was the thought of seeing Blaidd again that sealed your destination toward Raya Lucaria. A destination you’d likely set forth for immediately. Not that you’d tell him that. Not that you even could.

Still, you couldn’t speak. 

You tried to nod. 

You think you nodded.

In any case, he turned to take his leave, broad cloak flowing like a waterfall of dusk at his back. A subtle, sharp-toothed grin cast over the shoulder free of his giant sword. 

“At least,” he mused, “I hope we will.”

His eyes glinted sharply in the days fading light, and with that he departed. His armor shifting about him like dragon-scales of metal, tassets clinking, twisting on leather. Their song submerged in the heavy brush of his cloak. 

He didn’t look back. And perhaps it was good he didn’t, for he would have found you staring after him, awash in your own writhing thoughts, prisoner to the need clawing like a beast inside you.

You tamped the snarling of it out, scolding yourself for allowing it breath in the first place. 

You were in control. You. Not your hormones, not your heat, not your insufferable omega nature that would soon see you punished for refusing to give in to it.

Though, the closer the full moon drew, the more blurred the lines between yourself and your unfortunate nature were. In fact, you found yourself questioning if there was really a difference between the two at all. If whether an omega was really what you were, all you were - the core of you. And to fight against it was futile. If that’s what made you the fool.

You shook such nonsense from yourself - no, to be an omega was to live a cursed life, and that was the end of it.

Relentless in this fact, you at last turned away from where Blaidd had strayed out into darkness, willing yourself to summon Torrent and be on your way. Yourself split in two. One half whispering suggestions that, should you truly wish to avoid the inexplicable pull of the rugged half-wolf, you shouldn’t venture north. While the other half flooded over such suggestions, like a river of snakes, purring its insistence that you do.

Crowded by these separate halves, you deigned not to think on it. Rather, you’d sleep on the matter, and decide what to do come morn. Though that river of snakes seemed to hiss with laughter at the prospect that you - not your nature - would actually be allowed to choose.

You shared a campfire with Kalé that night, as you had so many nights before. You enjoyed his story-filled company, just as he enjoyed the avid attentiveness of yours. 

Though you’d come to regret sharing this particular night with him entirely.

“What’s the matter with you,” he asked over the crackling fire, just a few hours past your departure from Blaidd. The question pulling your distracted gaze away from the dancing flames you sat beside. 

Kalé was eying you from his haunches on the side opposite the fire; eying you as if you’d gone mad. 

“You’re quiet,” he slowly observed. “More so than usual. Haven’t given so much as a slightly bated breath, even at my expertly-dramatized run-in with a dragon.” 

The longer he scanned you over, the more fidgety you became.

“You’ve been quiet all night,” he said again. “And staring at those flames with an idiotic smile on your face.” 

An idiotic smile? you balked unspoken, hoping it wasn’t true.

He scratched at one wiry brow with a long finger, before you saw his pale eyes crinkle with a sly smile. “You look a little lovesick, truth be told... Don’t tell me you’ve a fetish for fire...?”

Your nerves were already flushed, strangled tight. Perhaps that was why you tensed at the question. Or maybe it was because you felt suddenly as if your thoughts were on full, horrifying display to your inquisitive friend. That perhaps he could see those sensuous reveries wiggling in your brain, teasing to get out. Fantasies of this campfire tamped to darkness, and of you curled up on your bedroll. Of Blaidd, slinking suddenly from the shadow, as if beckoned there by your desire for him alone. Sneaking into your bed, crawling in over you, swallowing you with his size. Weaving your hair with his fingers. So soft, and then so roughly - pulling a cry you’d try to stifle so as not to awaken anyone. The sound of it, choked off in your chest, flaring need to life within those lupine-glowing eyes hovering possessively over you.

You were hopeless -  the thought of it alone had your thighs twisting together. Had your breathing picking up.

But Kalé couldn’t possibly see such depravities. You were being silly.

Still, your face grew warmer in spite of the flames, and you nearly barked at the poor man, “No, I most certainly don’t.”

Kalé’s smile only broadened. 

“Oh,” he shrewdly rasped, “then it must be the fellow I sent you after today who’s whet your appetite.” His suggestive tone was shameless. Like he wanted a reaction from you, as recompense for ignoring his dragon-filled tales. Gods, you wanted to slap him for it, but you grit your jaw instead. “I had little idea I’d be playing matchmaker. When’s the wedding?”

You sunk your teeth into your lower lip to stop from immediately snapping at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about-!”

“Quite some taste you have,” Kalé steamrolled right over you, subtle in twisting the blade. And though you knew you were playing right into his hands, mirthful as he was, you still couldn’t keep yourself from bristling. “He’s boorish, that one. Blunt. Hairy. Couldn’t find his nose with both hands, I reckon–”

“I don’t - like him, I - not like that, I only just met him, you sordid… so stop at once with your–!”

“–But he’s a good egg,” Kalé went on anyway, grinning all the while. “You both are. Quite the omelet, really. It’s cute.” His impishness wore down a bit, and his narrow shoulders shook with a few huffs of laughter. He sounded quite pleased, actually. Like his verbal torture wasn’t just to entertain himself. “I think the two of you are sure to find the best in one another.”

‘Happy for the happy couple’ or not, you still found his barbing insufferable. You were on edge, perpetually slick between the thighs, and not in any sound state to be trifled with.

“If you don’t shut up about this,” you lowly warned, though its bite lacked any actual teeth, “I’ll… I’ll definitely, absolutely …!”

Suffice it to say, your threats were empty. Each one ruffled and fizzling out the moment it even started.

Kalé’s eyes crinkled further still as he watched you flounder, his smirk cutting wide behind his mask.

“Very well, Tarnished,” he relented at last, ceding with a sandpaper chuckle. “I’ll leave it be. Though you are so very flustered at the mere mention of him…” His eyes twinkled in the dancing light. “It’s a very entertaining thing.”

“I’ll entertain your face with my fist if you don’t shut up!” you snapped, and he chuckled again.

“Fine, fine,” he said, still smiling. “Such a poor sport.”

You spent the rest of the night trying desperately not to think about Blaidd. Not wanting Kalé to be right about you fawning over him. Failing miserably, despite your efforts. Not at all missing the way Kalé kept stealing clever little glances at you, like the damned bastard was a bloody mind-reader or something.

By the time dawn crept over the horizon, you’d already packed your things and were riding north before he had another chance to tease you anymore about it.

Chapter Text

Unfamiliar with the land of lakes, it had taken you several days to ride north. Several days you really couldn’t spare as far as preparations for your oncoming heat were concerned - with you ignoring that dire need to sequester yourself away somewhere before its bud fully bloomed, so close was it now to flowering. 

Days, you wasted, traveling there - and yet you spared them all the same. 

Foolhardy. Reckless.

In truth, you were in no sorts for travel. No sorts to even be seen gallivanting about in public view. Every bump in the road rattled your bones with unwanted pleasure, in a most offensive way you repeatedly grit your teeth against. A perpetual trail of sweat trickling down your spine, boiling your blouse to your back. Poor Torrent must have thought you were dying, his horned head tossed back to catch the occasional look at you - hearing your sporadic, stifled whines, as if wounded, when in reality you just wanted, needed, to tear your own skin off, to somehow set the kindle of your fevered flesh ablaze. 

Every inch of you rippled with need, and though you fought against it, your resistance was slowly bowing.

You shouldn’t have come north. You should have hid yourself, instead. Somewhere. Anywhere.

And yet there you were. Riding north along the lakeside, through oncoming shades of night. 

By the time you finally arrived the temptation of your makeshift bed, tucked closely to a campfire, was a compelling one. So you weren’t entirely sure what drew you toward that striking outline of the Caria Manor in the distance, instead; especially not after receiving warning of it from Iji, the very blacksmith Blaidd had suggested you find. And find him you did. Quite handily, in fact. He was, after all, as Blaidd had said - a little on the large side.

“Blaidd actually sent you, did he?” the giant asked, the many smooth facets of his mirrorhelm glinting with refracted moonlight, so that he himself appeared a moon-headed man. He hummed in his affable way; thoughtful. “Quite a rare occurrence, for such a guarded soul as he. Perhaps he sensed something unusual about you…”

Fidgeting around what might have been a compliment, you attempted to stuff back the shudder that ran through your hormone-strangled mind at the mere mention of the half wolf, as it brought with it a mirage of his pale, wolven eyes. Eyes that, in your mind, stared down at you. Watching. Hungering for you.

For an uncountable time, you scolded yourself for not locking yourself away in an abandoned cave somewhere.

You crossed your arms, gripping each elbow, trying to steady yourself. Trying to ignore those unseen, urgent claws ribboning your insides, demanding in their fervency to get out. While at the same time quite unable to ignore the fact that you still hadn’t found a decent place to hide until your heat finished tormenting you. 

You were beginning to panic that no such place would find you while you still had half a mind to aid your search.

Though, perhaps, within the Caria Manor… 

Perhaps some long abandoned chamber would do. 

Only– 

“At any rate,” Iji continued, his voice a gentle wave over the tangled fray of you, “if you’re friendly with Blaidd, I’ve a word of warning, if you please.” Drenched in moonlight, he adjusted his stance upon his perch, moving with a giant’s slowness. “This territory doesn’t welcome those who would trespass." His gaze, hidden in his helm, seemed to join yours in glancing toward the spired, Caria outline. "Don’t go near the manor. Not unless you wish to lie with the corpses of the heedless Knights of the Cuckoo.”

His warning was wizened. Kind, yet implicit. Yet still, not long after receiving it, you found yourself drawn toward the manor and its supposed groves of fallen corpses all the same.

Foolhardy. Reckless.

Iji wasn’t wrong. The defenses left behind by the Carians were all of the utmost peril, ready to ensnare those who might be foolish enough to cross them. Those, it would seem, like you. But still, you pressed forward. Telling yourself you’d find the perfect place to hide, to wait out your heat, if only you went a little further - that time was not your ally in searching elsewhere. Using stealth to your advantage as often as you must, as through the manor you stept. Past its night-bathed plazas, its many halls and chambers, its mirrored grounds of moongazing. Onward, to a clearing beyond the whole of it. To a final place, from which you could step no further, atop an edge of jagged cliffs. 

It was here you’d have to find refuge. Here, where wisps of moon-glossed fog flittered around your every footstep, pooling in the imprints left behind. Your gaze was drawn to the outline of three stone spires, sprouted from gardens of glintstone. Two of which, to your rising apprehension, you found to be locked up tight. 

But the third…

Late was the hour when you stepped through its doorway, and by all accounts it was empty, despite its ghost-lit candles. Seemingly, at last, a haven for your suffering. 

You relaxed somewhat at the thought, despicable as it was; though there was still something that stood the hairs of your arms and neck like needles. Perhaps it was nothing - merely the unknown itself haunting you. If you searched through the tower thoroughly, it’d surely put your mind more at ease, and perhaps then you could sleep.

The foyer of that strange, abandoned place was cold. Touched by the creeping tendrils of time. The breadth of its chamber, and all those above it as you slowly climbed, filled with all manner of academics: old bookshelves, dusty tomes, tattered scrolls, the cobwebbed machines of astrological examination. And though even the very air lie still, your muscles remained taut, ready to bolt at a moment's notice should some unseen Carian trap assail you.

Up you went. And up further still. Shirt sticking uncomfortably to your back and between your breasts. Until at last you reached an outer set of stairs, trailing up them cautiously. And at their top, an opened doorway. A final doorway. And it was here you peeked about its edge, peering inside the tower’s topmost room.

Books lined the walls, scattered and stacked upon the floors, with unlit candelabra tucked inside their dusty congress. And amongst the throngs of tomes sat a woman, one you blinked with shock upon recognizing. A woman, pale and doll-like, whom - though you were indeed surprised to see her there - at once put your nerves more at ease.

Renna - or, as she’d correct your startled outburst of her name - Ranni.

The barest of smiles hinted her seaglass lips as she spied you lingering there, peeking past the doorframe like a skittish rabbitgaroo. 

“Tarnished. Again our paths meet,” said she, her own surprise to see you there a tame and tranquil thing. She beckoned you inside with one of many similar forefingers. Watching with an ethereal, graceful curiosity as you sidled through the door at her behest, hugging to yourself as your jawline flexed, the whole of you close to snapping. “It pleaseth me to see you. But… what business hast thou here?” she gently wondered. “I have no memory of inking thee an invitation.”

Gripping tightly to your forearms, your lips strained in an attempt to smile. 

“I didn’t mean to impose, I… I thought this place abandoned,” you apologized, trying to ignore a new wave of sweat rolling down your back, chilling with the night. “And in truth, I have no business.” 

Not wanting to elaborate on some foolish, reckless hope of crossing paths with Blaidd again, nor on any other reason you couldn’t quite place your finger on, you ended somewhat sheepishly, “I was just… around, I suppose…” You rubbed your neck, fingernails clawing too harshly. “For no particular reason.”

“No reason in particular, though claimest…” the witch mused, not seeming quite to believe it, though her reservation was difficult to read. 

She watched you. For a time. Watched that sheen of sweat budding on your brow amidst your struggles to appear unaffected by everything that you were. 

“Then mayhaps fate hath steered thee to this encounter.” The glow of her eyes flickered beneath her wide-brimmed hat. “And as fate, it seems, hath sent thee… I would ask if thou would enter into my service. Would question if to search for the dark path arouses thy interest.” Her gaze steadied like a cool breeze over you, the hush of it making you shiver. “But before this… I would ask why thou trembles, as if held by sickly clutches…” 

Mortification struck you like an open palm to be so easily deciphered. To be very much not what it was you so longed to be. Normal. For to be anything else, especially the needy omega you were, had shame wriggling up your stubborn features, your ears stinging with it. 

So seized, were you, against admitting what ailed you, that for long seconds you didn’t let loose a single word. As if to do so would make your suffering more real.

Not that it mattered. Not really. For she seemed to surmise it all the same.

“...I see,” she breathed at last, with an ounce of cunning. And like a pale match, her eyes gleamed strangely for a moment. “Thou needn’t suffer so, Tarnished,” she said. “Thou needn’t suffer at all. I see plainly, now, what ails thee. And if thou desirest to break the shackles an omega’s fate hath placed upon thee… search no further.” She barely, imperceptibly smiled. “Thou hast arrived at the perfect place.”

Her words wrapped themselves around you, yet even so you couldn’t immediately respond, as if stricken dumb. And for a long, hushed moment, you simply stared at the way she watched you. Your jaw clenching. Your thighs shifting. Every inch of you riddled in uncertainty that you’d heard her right. 

Break free from an omega’s shackles…?

Is such a thing possible…?

“I…” you hesitated, daring to hope. A tremor trickling into your voice. “I have…?”

The pale witch smiled. 

“Indeed. I myself hath broken from a dreaded, fated path, and neither shall thee acquiesce to one of not your choosing, shouldst thou truly desire not to. The choice is thine,” she said, and repeated, “Thine alone. Yet in finding such choice… I might aid thee.”

For moments more, you simply stared. Head spinning with possibility, with disbelief at just what it was she so easily, impossibly promised. 

Hope chipped away at what little strength you had left. Desperation plucking at your bones. Until at last you crumbled to your knees before her, no longer tending to the charade that hid your growing weakness; that barely concealed the strings of a helpless, pathetic puppet, slave to near-hypnotic need.

“Tell me how,” you begged her, pupils wide in the moonlight. “Please… I can’t stand this, I don’t want to suffer through another moon, I-I can’t - I hate myself - please, Ranni… I’ll do anything–”

Her doll-like hands threaded together as she studied you, movements as unreadable and serene as her expression. 

“Whilst I cannot cure thy heat, omega, I can help thee stave it,” she said at last. “To delay its hold upon thee; forever, if thou likest, so thou needn’t suffer to thy nature a single day again. So long as thou’rt always poised with what’s needed.” For a moment, she glanced at the near-pregnant moon outside her tower windows. So close to being full. “There is a flower which sprouts along an underground shore. A vein of glovewort unique to the cavern waters of Siofra. Set there, Tarnished, and gather what’s needed. Pluck of this plant, and crush of its roots. Boil the remnants and, once cooled, drink until thou feelest in thy bones it hath quenched thee. Hath suppressed thee. Innately, thou wilt know the very moment. But thou must take haste, Tarnished - for all this must thy do before the moon is ripe. Thou hast, I fear, but this single night left before thee. For at its utmost, not even this brew will stave thy heat from overpowering all that thou art and all of thy senses; won’t spare thee from enslavement to nature, nor shake its sway from thy shoulders.”

The very notion seemed too good to be true. Though in those many, long nights past of lonesome, cycled suffering, you’d certainly dreamed of such a thing. To be not what you were; to be normal.

Normal. 

Resolve rose like a vicious tide within you, for a moment more consuming than your feverishness of flesh. 

“I’ll head there now, then,” you managed, as resolutely as you could, though your voice wavered. Struggling to stand again and making to leave at once. “I’ll find that bloody plant - I’ll comb the whole forsaken shoreline if I have to, and I’ll–!”

“Rest, first, Tarnished,” Ranni halted your exigency, bringing your departure to a hesitant pause. “Thy journey shall be swift come morn. But sleep will soothe thy fever, and thou look'st to need it; I hope thou wilt forgive the plainness of my saying so.”

Perhaps she was right. It was likely she was. Though still you wavered near the doorway of her book-strewn chamber, desperate to be off, to fix yourself, to be freed from the rising need that fettered you. 

Under Ranni’s pressing, blue-glowing gaze, at last you crumbled - sighing through stiff lungs. 

“I suppose some sleep wouldn't hurt…” 

She smiled gently in return. “A choice well made. And thou needn’t travel further this night - take refuge in this tower, or in any place thou wish. ”

Hesitant though it was, once yielded to the idea of sleep, it seemed your body was dragged down by it. And weakly, you nodded. “I’ll sleep here, then,” you said, meeting her sapphire gaze as you turned to leave. “And… thank you, Ranni… this means… I…” You were too overcome, too overwrought, too over-tired to manage much more than that. So with a weary, hollow crook to one corner of your lips, you simply murmured, “Thank you…” once more before making your way back down the stairs which brought you. Bootsteps echoing a lonely trail along the silent stone.

Wearily, you made your way down to one of the lowermost floors. As good a place as any, you thought, to roll out your makeshift bed and struggle your way into sleep. And so downward you sauntered, feet dragging, lead in the soles of your shoes. And indeed, you’d thought yourself exhausted enough to slumber whilst standing - but the sleep flew right out of you the very instant you rounded the corner to that lower room, your heart squeezed into a terrified fist that nearly pummeled right out of your chest. For striding through that chamber - headed right for you, in fact - came a towering spectral image, formed of glowing fog. The tips of its tall, pointed ears flickered forth to catch the startled gasp that escaped you at the sight of him.

His passage stopped, those fog-eyes blinking. Not an ounce of color to them other than your memory of their cold. 

And there, like a fog, like a dream, stood the spectral image of Blaidd the half-wolf. Struck by just as much surprise, it seemed, to see you there as you were to see him.

“Blaidd…?!”

At his name, at your complete stupefaction, his expression slowly relaxed. Unspooled into a smooth, canined smile. 

“______,” he said, voice low enough not to wake the night. And the more you gawked, the more his smile grew. His eyes a glimmering chill. “You headed north, after all…”

So many thoughts wrapped their suffocating hands around you, strangling you to silence. So many unthinkable desires you could barely comprehend or fight away. 

The desire to fling your arms around him in greeting, regardless of how odd he might find it, regardless that he was, for some reason, a ghost. 

The outrageous and nigh unthinkable urge to tear his armor off of him without even a proper greeting first, piece by desperate piece, so when embraced you’d feel his heartbeat on your skin. 

The sudden, deafening alarm that you flee; flee from the mere sight of him, lest his wolfish senses decode the utter mess of you - that depravity and untouched madness. Though, spectral as he was, he likely couldn’t smell you anyway - a fortuitous thing for you both. Couldn’t decipher the desperate creature swiftly unraveling you, for surely if he could he’d have fled from you himself already. The scent of you must be overpowering, repulsive to a half-wolf with senses as sharp as he.

“Why are… what are you doing here..?” you wavered around your startlement, past your strangled thoughts. Gaping at the massive, spectral shape of him. “And why are you…”

His gaze followed yours; glancing down at the spectre of himself. That smile of his sneaking ever-toward a smirk. 

“...Phantasmic?” he finished for you, his amusement barely subdued as he eyed your rising bafflement.

His canines, even in this form, glinted sharply in the candlelight. Immediately dragging your thoughts toward their fiendish edges. Toward those many, many ways those teeth of his might tow against your skin, dragging yet not quite biting. A taunting touch. A teasing one. Just enough to electrify, to tempt, to taste you. 

With dreadful difficulty, you tore your stare away from his damnable, smirking teeth. Visibly shaking away the images of them grazing your throat whilst tucking back a strand of hair that was already shoved haphazardly behind your ear. Every motion of you hasty, quivering; ready to bolt, to break, to melt. 

“I… y-yes,” you stammered, not daring to look at him. 

“Easier to answer mistress Ranni’s call like this,” he explained, and you cursed how the velvet of his voice still managed to send shivers through you. Was your gaze averted not enough? Would you be forced into plugging your ears against his inescapable effect on you, too? “Being in two places at once has its conveniences. And seeing as how I’ve found you here…” he paused, words trailed in speculation, “...would it be safe to assume you’ve entered Ranni’s service, as well?”

You risked a glance at him. A fool’s mistake, for your attention was at once drawn to the thick ridges of his shoulders. To the downy scruff of his neck and strong jawline. Your thighs shifting together without your thinking. 

“Not, uhm… not officially,” you said. Horribly, utterly distracted. Barely even hearing the words stumbling from your own mouth, their sounds muted beneath your pulse. Nor could you, it seemed, any longer hear him - though you think he must have said something. Must have been saying things. For when you did indeed hear him speak your name, he did so with the weight of someone repeating themselves.

“H-huh?” 

Frazzled, you shook yourself; rubbing your forearms raw and forcing yourself to blink up at him.

He didn’t immediately respond. Questions buried in his spectral gaze.

“I said it’s good to see you again,” he slowly said, seeming to choose his words carefully.

He eyed you head to toe, then; taking his time. Taking in the full sight of you. His already waning smile shrinking more and more as he did. 

“Are you alright?” he slowly wondered. “You seem… unwell.” Worry creased his brow. “Feverish.”

Lords, was it that obvious? 

But of course it was. Even in as little time as you’d stood battling with yourself before him. 

Your skin crawled with a million tiny legs of anticipation, with an urgency to be touched that became more and more overpowering the longer he was near you - despite how, in actuality, he was likely very far away. Still, you were fighting not to drown in the sight of him, in your need for him to do anything even as simple as touching the back of your hand. Felt moments away from falling to your knees and begging him for it. Begging him to please, please, just…

Hold me, Blaidd - if only for a moment. 

Touch me anywhere. 

Touch me everywhere.

Take anything. 

Take everything.

Oh, the horror of begging such a thing.

Only the barest amount of resilience kept you from displays so deplorable. Only one last remaining thread, strained with the weight of your resistance, barely keeping you with any pretense of behaving as one should.

You weren’t entirely certain how you found it within yourself to choke around those unspoken pleas. A hardly convincing, “I’m fine.”

If anything, the severity of him only deepened. And though you tore your gaze again from his, you were startled into meeting it once more as he stepped abruptly toward you, carving through the distance that kept you from him. 

For once, you didn’t flee his being near you. After all, you couldn’t smell him, nor he you. ‘What was there to flee’, you told yourself, even as you tensed to escape him - though his very presence seemed to petrify you to the ground.

He came, and stood, much closer than he ever had before without you stumbling back from him. Reaching with one giant hand to take your chin, to guide your eyes more to his. To force your gaze into his possession. Though his spectral touch sank through you, instead; leaving a tingled chill behind it, one that tickled your chin and cheek in a fizzled chill. 

He didn’t need to force you into anything. His presence was magnetic, and you couldn’t unravel from his towering intensity all the same. Couldn’t not hold his gaze. And you saw his lupine brow furrowed high above you, heavy above those serious eyes that mapped your each expression closely.

For a moment, he seemed about to say something. His breath bated to. His illusory hand still hovered beneath your jaw, thumb tingling at your cheek.

You were silent as you watched him. Hostage to things unspoken. And so, it seemed, was he.

You couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand being so near and so very far away from him, all at once. Every inch of you ached to draw closer. And in your delirium you imagined you saw his eyes burning above you, more and more. Molten with dark promise. A promise to tease to life that ache you so despised inside yourself, to drag you through the coals of it until you burned alive. Scorched. Consumed. Only pulled from the char and ashes once you were his.

His words said nothing. But his eyes swore everything. To break you. To put you back together again. To feed that starved, neglected beast inside which had never before been fed. 

No - no, what were you thinking?! He’d promised nothing of the sort, hadn’t said a single thing, and why would he? With you gawking up at him like that?

You were losing your bloody mind, your thoughts their own treachery.

You had to get away from him. He was dangerous, even just standing there. Threatening to shatter through any semblance of your self control. 

Go.

Now!

Run, you damned idiot!

"D-don't let me keep you," you stammered, desperate to create any sort of distance from his intoxicating pull, yet just as yearning to somehow make him stay. Even as he was in that moment - spectral, unable to touch you, unable to hold you. 

Foolish fantasies. Ones you ought shake from your disillusioned head. You couldn’t trust yourself; surely you couldn’t, not like this. And anything you yearned for this close to your heat, surely you should resolve for the opposite.

He watched you in unreadable silence. Strong jaw flexing; once, then again. Wolfish features painted by the ghostly flicker of candlelight, gripped by tense confliction.

“Right,” he gruffly agreed at last. Only then did his intensity relinquish you. His large hand falling from how it hovered below the cusp of your jaw. “Mistress Ranni must be waiting…” 

Still, he didn’t leave. His eyes like anchors, sunken into yours. 

You weren’t sure how much time had passed when eventually he tore his gaze away from you, with you finally able to breathe. Briefly surveying the dusty room around you both, the massive breadth of his shoulders still somewhat rigid. “Are you staying here the night, then..?” he wanted to know.

"Ranni insisted," you all but grumbled, taking advantage of that moment’s respite from his intensity to fix your gaze safely to the floor, rubbing one arm again. Feeling heat skitter up your ears at the sound of his warm chuckling.

"Good,” he rumbled over you. “I'm glad she did." 

You heard his breath go still. Something in him hesitating, though you dared not glance to decipher why. Before at last he turned toward the stairs, his footfalls eerily silent, apparition that he was. "I'll let you rest, then,” he said thickly.

You looked up once his back was turned, watching him go. Fingernails biting into the skin of your palms. Heart lurching like it wanted to follow after.

Stupid, foolish heart - you weren’t dumb enough to give into whatever it thought it wanted.

And yet you couldn’t seem to help yourself. You wanted. Wanted so many things. Wanted him to turn and come back to you. Wanted him to take you roughly in his arms, to steer you suddenly to the nearest wall and pin you there, caught beneath the height of him. For his giant hands to make quick work of tearing through your clothing, jerking down your leggings so sharply they stung, such was his urgency to have you.

"Goodnight, Blaidd," you stammered over your racing thoughts, the images trapped within your skull, choking you, sinking like firebrands straight into your gut until you writhed just to look at his retreating outline.

He stopped, turning to glance at you over one shoulder. Already halfway up the stairs. A wolfish mirage of fog, stark against the darkness.

For a long while, he simply watched you. And together you stared as if inside each other.

"Goodnight, ______," he rumbled, his voice a midnight tide, rough on rocky shoreline. And then he was gone, ascending to Ranni's chamber up above.

Torn apart inside, every piece of you pulled incessantly, twisting in different directions as you struggled to focus on anything besides Blaidd. Struggling to dig out your bedroll from your belongings, spreading it out on the hard ground before curling up inside it. Caught in a feeble attempt to sleep. To not think about his forest-dark scent filling your every breath. Of him tonguing and nipping marks into your skin.

You’ll be fine soon, you shakily assured yourself, wiring your eyes shut tighter in struggled sleep. Fixed. Normal. As one should be.

Amidst your struggles, perhaps you fell asleep. You thought you had, anyway, when you were suddenly awoken by a tingled chill. A coolness like a broad thumb, smoothed across your cheek. Though as your eyes fluttered open in the dim, you saw no one there. Nothing, save perhaps the flutter of a foggy cloak, turned and already fading into darkness.

Chapter Text

Siofra. 

You’d been there before, that cavern with a sky trapped within it. A capsule of the cosmos, separated from the world. Painted with the glowing, molten hues of space itself. Bloody roses, violet wines and overripe mulberries - their shades a melted tapestry, a solvent thing, everchanging. So thick you could barely see the mammoth stalactites that hung high beyond it; the only indication you were indeed underground and not lost within the stars someplace.

That sky, which was hardly a sky at all, burned like a bruise; its majesty pinpricked with diamond-brilliance. And though the beauty of it stole your breath away, gave your path beneath its canopy pause, you soon shook yourself and pushed onward. For tonight you hadn’t time for such marvels to sway you. For anything to sway you. The world above this one was nearing dark already, moon towed heavy in the sky, and the time you had to stop its unwanted effect on you was slipping through your fingers, stolen like silt in a rushing stream. 

You’d departed Ranni’s Rise at first light, and still it had taken all day to travel there, with you more and more distraught you might not make it in time. How had it come to this, you wondered - you were always so careful - had never not been hidden away somewhere before such snarling, ungoverned cravings sunk so deeply into your bones. Ravenous in your ears. Hammering in your head. 

The prospect of being so vulnerable, so out in the open in such a state, pressed you against an edge of panic.

Have to hurry - have to find that damnable plant before it’s too late - !!

You stumbled off of Torrent at Siofra’s water’s edge, one foot catching on his stirrup in your hurry to dismount, tangled and tugging you back a step before his form fully faded. And as you staggered blindly through the shallows, gaze torn this way and that in desperate search of glovewort, you found that your hands were shaking, strangling at nothing, wringing endlessly at your sides. 

You could barely even think, let alone focus on exactly where to find those much needed roots. Each thought spouting out of you with your effort to maintain it, like you were actually going mad.

“Where is that dratted, damnable, lake-loving plant?” you heard yourself fretting. Cursing beneath your breath and completely heedless to the water soaked calf-high up your legs. “Do its petals not glow like gods-forsaken beacons in the night? Practically calling out for plucking? Should it not be easy to find?! Why can’t I find it?!”

It was as if your desperation alone summoned the existence of what you looked for to life.

There, at the edge of the panic-rippled waters, not so far up ahead. Sprouted with leaves drained of most their color, with celestial bulbs hung heavy from its trusses. A sprig of glovewort. Many sprigs, in fact; more than enough to brew a tea with.

You were struck dumb by the sight of them, boots sloshing to a standstill. Brow slick with the effort to keep on task, when every inch of you yearned to instead curl up like some lust-filled horror.

“Glovewort-!” you practically gasped.

Water kicked even further up the backs of your legs as you scampered toward the iridescent grove of them, heels sinking in mud that nearly sucked your boots off with every step.

You crouched so swiftly you almost fell, scooping up fistfuls of the stuff, strangling their stems as you tore them into your belonging, free from muddy earth.

“Oh, thank the fucking gods,” you exhaled, throttling your waterlogged bouquet in hand. A breath of laughter, of relieved elation, trickling out of you. “Just need to boil them - quickly - and then I’ll be okay, I’ll be alright, I’ll be normal, I’ll be – !?”

Your voice stopped. Your breathing; stopped. As suddenly you heard your name, as if caught in the distance someplace behind you, an ounce of disbelief to it. 

Footsteps, then - footsteps soon followed. 

Heavy ones.

Sinking through the reedy bank, before stopping at your back. 

You might have heard them sooner had you not been jabbering away at the edge of your sanity like a lunatic. Might have heard your name in time to make a swift escape.

But at its utterance, you were frozen. Ribs closing in on your heart. 

Now it was too late.

“Are you muttering to yourself, little flame..?” those footsteps mused; with a masculine, graveled familiarity that at once sent shivers clawing through your gut. 

Blaidd-?!

How had he found you here?! Why did you keep running into one another like this?! Was the world conspiring against you?

His voice, that velvet thunder - such a voice should have soothed you. But instead it only heightened your alarm.

He’s going to smell whatever awful thing I smell like-

He’s going to smell me-!

I - I have to get away from here! 

Away from him-!

And yet, even with your panic, you couldn’t move. And with your stiff back turned to him, Blaidd’s musings continued, seemingly unaware of your plight.

“Or have you taken to making friends with the lilies?” he asked in your silence. A warm chuckle followed, the gentle sound washing over you. “Though perhaps it’s your lovely reflection to which you whisper secrets…?”

Every muscle in you tensed as you heard him stoop behind you, his voice drawing right behind your ear, to which he rumbled teasingly, “I’ve an ear for secrets, you know. If you find your reflection lacks advice, why not–”

His words stopped. And in their absence, his breath on the shell of your ear was like electricity zapping your stillness back to life.

You twisted round and slipped across the mud as you made to face your beguiling visitor. Face, or perhaps flee from. And not for the first time, you fell flat on your ass at the arrival of Blaidd, so far above you even while he was crouched. Looking down with amusement in his eyes, looking as if to laugh at how incredulous you looked, tripping over yourself again and quite the muddy, sodden mess for it. 

But that glimmer of amusement was short-lived. Extinguished as, for a moment, he appeared taken aback, blinking as if seeing you for the first time, sitting in the water before him.

You couldn’t so much as utter a hello, caught in his memorization as you were, though some wiser instinct in you screamed that you scurry away from him as you normally did. 

But your body wouldn’t listen. And like a statue, you watched as his long snout twitched, as his gaze felt to dismantle and decipher you, piece by piece. Saw his dark, dewy nostrils flare as he slowly drank in that heady, horrid scent of you, with you unable to steal it back again. 

He filled his lungs so deeply it was as if he’d been drowned, and when he breathed you back out again he did so with a resonance you’d never heard from him before. A lowered, salacious hum, half-trapped within his throat. 

The sound of an animal, starved.

His eyes never left you, as slowly they stripped of all their color, his pupils blooming wide. Unfurled until his gaze was naught but pools of unfed darkness. Two obsidian mirrors, in which you saw a reflection of yourself - cornered, on your haunches in the mud, stricken as if to stone before him. Trepidation crackling over you.

You’d never thought of Blaidd as a predator before. 

Not until that moment. 

And as a low, drawn out growl lingered in his throat, you could no longer deny just what the half-wolf really was. What he’d been the entirety of knowing him. 

An alpha. 

An alpha who, drunk on the scent of you, might very well be lost from the Blaidd you’d come to know.

His boots twisted in the mud as he drew slowly toward you in his crouch, seemingly unaware of the water soaking through him. One giant knee, one large hand submerged, dragged along the depths in the stance of a lowered beast. Only stopping when he was nearly atop you. And all you seemed capable of was remaining frozen in place, unblinking, wide-eyed beneath him. For though your fingers squelched through the mud at your back, you didn’t seem able to otherwise move, to shift away from him. 

A delicious fear stirred within you as you felt the warmth rising off him, the waves brought with his movements lapping at your hips. 

He doesn’t know what he’s doing, some part of you shakily insisted. He’s as uncontrolled as you are - stop him! G-get away from him! Before it's too late!

Yet still, you sat there, unbreathing - anticipation chipping at your bones.

His face smoothed down beside your own with a fatal slowness. One tall ear tickling against your cheek as, again, he breathed in the scent of you deeply. The metal of each his gauntlets twisting into fists in some bid of self-restraint. His next growl, so low you barely heard it, coursing through him like a rockslide trapped within his chest.

To be the cause of such a sound…

Desire and alarm shot through you so fiercely you couldn’t untangle them, couldn’t tell either of them apart.

“Blaidd…” you attempted, his name but a dormouse squeak. Attempting to stall whatever he might do, whatever he might regret in the midst of madness.

He didn’t say a word, though at the tremble in your voice his body tensed.

As if fighting a magnetic pull, he pulled back from you enough for his eyes to take yours. For his intensity to pin you even more fiercely in place beneath him. Muscles flexing beneath his silver pelt as if in readiness to pounce, to devour cornered quarry; though he remained rigidly in place, half above you. Broad shoulders seized into knots. Something unknown rippling over him as he studied you with shrouded eyes.

Guilt and desire rose like bile in you, clawing at your insides for what you’d done to him. Intertwined with a yearning so fierce it was painful, a longing to see him even more undone. The battle of each nearly making you sick.

Frustrated tears bit at your lashes and you blinked them savagely away before he might notice.

“Blaidd, j-just, hold on, and,” you wavered again, attempting to catch your thoughts, to contain your desire from running rampant. Clutching to your underwater bouquet as if to strangle the life from it. “Th-these flowers,” you stammered, unable to so much as glance at them, snared as you were in his gaze. “I found them, and - and Ranni t-told me they’d… you don’t… we don’t… I can stop it, m-my… th-this effect on you, on us, if I hurry - I can fix this, fix me, I…” Even as you sputtered, you felt your heart sink in your stomach. And again you blinked those insufferable, insistent tears away. “I d-didn’t mean to do this to you, Blaidd…” you whispered hoarsely, biting at your cheek so the sting might somehow steady you. “I can fix this… You don’t have to do this…”

The shadow that held him wavered; hovered at the edges of him. 

Slowly, his fists untethered, and you couldn’t stifle a needy, pathetic whimper as he took your cheek in one large hand, the leather of his glove so smooth across your flushed skin. Palm so large it nearly swallowed you. His touch - at last, his touch - soothing away any further attempts to go on speaking. 

His voice was gentle when at last he found it.

“My poor omega…”

Longing gripped at your heart despite how you resisted. Despite some fleeting relief that he wasn’t yet lost to your effect on him. 

So he knew, then. You’d been a fool to think you could hide what you were from him. And yet still you asked, “D-did you always know…? What I am..?” Your expression pinched with self-loathing. “Of this… obscenity I can’t help from being..?”

His lupine brow grew heavy as he watched you, weighted by a slow hesitation. “You ask such a thing,” he breathed, disbelieving. His thumb skimming across your cheek. 

He watched you so cautiously, so carefully, despite the hunger burning behind his every cracking surface, tempting to claw its way out. A war waged in his eyes the longer he studied you. 

His fingers dug just slightly into the curve of your jaw, before slipping away entirely. Impatiently. Only for as long as it took for him to snag the leather of his glove between hasty, wolfish teeth and tear it clean off him. His gauntlet abandoned, metal clashing with the waves as it sunk into the silt. And then he took your cheek again, this time in the cradle of his warm palm and wolven fingers. His thumb stroking along your cheekbone’s ridge, then slipping down to hook beneath your jaw, so that he might tilt your face more toward him. To guide your gaze, a ship to shore, crashing into his.

Your breath faltered, possessed as you were to be moved to his whims, even if only just like this. By the sensation of his skin so warm against yours, his touch already threatening annihilation.

“I wasn’t certain at first,” he admitted, his resonance so at odds with the struggle you sensed inside you both. 

His jawline flexed tight before he could continue, as your eyes closed and your face leaned further into his palm without your thinking. Your brows drawn, lower lip tucked harsh between your teeth in an effort to keep from making any more hushed sounds that might embarrass you. 

You felt the vibration of him swallowing roughly. 

“I suspect you made sure of that,” he went on, struggling to regain himself. “Careful to keep your distance, even in benign conversation. And though I was curious as to why, curious about you … the distance placed between us was obvious. And who am I to question it,” he said with a growing heaviness, the note of which caused your eyes to open once more, to catch his bleak expression. “Especially when I’m…” his muzzle twisted slightly, “... what I am. I’m no fool. Half-breeds aren’t always welcome company. And if that was at all the reason you kept so much distance between us…”

Thorns wrapped round your heart, and before he could continue you reached out to stop him, to smooth one hand along his muzzle, carding your fingers back through the fur of his cheek. 

He fell into your touch for a moment, his eyes briefly closing. 

“I didn’t want to frighten you,” he lowly admitted. And as again he studied you, he seemed to be searching for any such fear - searching, whilst you refused to look away, knowing he’d find nothing that resembled it. 

Relief spilled visibly through him, eyes smoldering as he stroked your cheek again. “No, I wasn’t certain at first…” he continued. “But seeing you now… scenting you… feeling you…” 

The warm pad of his thumb trailed to the corner of your lips, his gaze distracted by the shape of them. Your mouth like a lighthouse that all of him drew toward, no matter how those lips might ruin him. 

“I am painfully aware of what you are, little love,” he murmured roughly. His thumb towing across your mouth, tugging at its plushness in a way that made your spine shudder, unable to help yourself. 

Eventually, he forced his gaze to return to yours. “What I don’t know is why you seem disgusted by it. Why you’re fighting it…”

He glanced to those flowers still buried beneath clear waters, drowned and strangled in your grip. “Are those bloody weeds supposed to save you, then? Is that it?” he wondered, searching your eyes for the truth when you found your throat too tight to reply. “Save you from yourself?”

He couldn’t help being drawn toward your lips again, his eyes tracing the way you bit at them as you battled within yourself, his pupils flared with hunger. 

“Why would you want something so absurd?”

“Why wouldn’t I?!” you wavered, your trembling hand withdrawn from his cheek; his brows cinching the moment your touch fell from him. “I don’t wish to be some uncontrollable thing - and I… I…” 

The defiance you’d managed thus far as your shield faltered the longer he watched you, leaving you vulnerable without it. 

“L-look at you, Blaidd… I don’t want to force you into… into wanting me…” Hearing it aloud, an evidence of his longing, had heat flaring up your middle and up around your ears. But still you forced yourself onward as steadily as you could. “But what I am leaves you no choice. And I hate myself for it. I hate it.” Your vision stung, though you fought to ignore it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get here quick enough, and I didn’t…”

He was silent. Blue eyes dancing across yours. “Do you really think that…?”

Your throat closed too tight to respond, and his thumb stroked your cheek in your silence. All the many facets of his fractured expression drawing slowly together again, so that he watched you with a newfound firmness. As steeled as the armor that arrayed him.

“It seems I’ve let you wander lost from the truth of me,” he slowly mused. “That you’ve misconstrued the things I haven’t said. So I will say them.” His gaze flickered over yours. “And you will listen. If only for a moment, you’ll surrender to me in this, omega - for I won’t have you led any longer by absurdities and half-truths.”

He waited, as if for your objection; ready, in his fervency, to strike it down. But even if you’d tried, you couldn’t muster a word. His boldness pressing into you with such a weight that you dared not disobey him, not that you even wanted to.

And like this he murmured, unabashed, “I care for you... It doesn’t matter what you are.” Through his obstinance, his dominion, he dared a tiny smirk. “I’ve wanted you near me since the moment you first wagged your sharpened little tongue at me, and what you hid from me has nothing to do with it. I saw all the rest, and I cared.” 

His intensity was a firm, enigmatic thing. And the way he looked at you sent an unfamiliar, unknowable flush of heat between your thighs.

When at last you felt his gaze might fracture through and break you, he released you from the spell of it. Focusing instead, for a moment, on the way he brushed back a single wet strand of your hair, with you unable to do more than stare wordlessy up at him, heart pounding fiercely in your chest. 

“You’ve lingered in my thoughts,” he murmured, “even trailing to my dreams. You don’t need to tell me you’ve experienced the same.” His eyes returned to yours, and in them he searched for whatever truth you might try to hide from him, with an ease as if you were crafted of glass. “I know it already. And I realize, now, what a fool I’ve been. With you in such a state; and, in my ignorance, my denying what I might give you. What you suffered for. What you needed.” His thumb trailed sparks along your cheek. “I won’t leave you to suffer so needlessly any longer.”

“Blaidd…” you barely breathed, his intensity catching the words on your tongue. Stopping what it was you weren’t even sure you were saying.

“You think what you are, what we are, is why I want you,” he said so low it neared a growl. His hand smoothing back along your jaw, tangling in the hair of your nape as he studied you. His grip tight enough for firelight to spark in your belly, yet still somehow too restrained. “And yet I’m fighting what I am every second I’m near you. Fighting what I want just to tell you this.”

That fire within you fueled as his other hand slid from the sand, roaming up your waist, drawing you closer to him. His knee twisting against the lakebed as his hand in your hair relaxed to cradle you. Leaning down so close you felt his breath fan beside your cheek. His giant form huddled so low just to meet you, so small as you were beneath him.

His lips brushed heat along your ear, in which he murmured lowly, “I don’t want to fight it any longer.”

You didn’t quite stifle the needy whimper his nearness brought you, though you tried. Tried, and failed again as you felt him nip your earlobe in reply, tugging it taut for just a moment; as you felt the wet warmth of his tongue ghost along your skin, restraint in the way he longed to taste you. 

His giant hand slid off your waist, only to slide up and along your calf, fierce behind your knee, rough around the back of your thigh. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, just the way you are,” he murmured, his words curling round you. “I wouldn’t see you change a thing.” 

His fingers coiled in your hair. “Let me in, my little love…” he breathed, “I’ll take care of you.”

You were lost. Lost in him. Held as if inside his very heart. That massive warmth, that dark shroud of timber engulfing you. Intoxicating. Blinding you with need. 

Without your thinking, you tilted toward the way he held your nape; mouthing at the inside of his wrist before you could so much as attempt to stop yourself. Your reticent tongue flicked along fur and flesh, and the second you tasted him a small moan escaped against your wishes, half-muted against his skin.

Your eyes were wired shut, though you heard his graveled inhale. Felt his whole body shudder. Felt his fingers twist sharp against your scalp.

Your need, or - what you’d thought was your need - to feel in control, to have dominance of your person… it was swiftly overwhelmed by a far more dire need for him. To be his. Surrendered. Cared for. Subjugated. Worshiped. 

His.

The stems of glovewort, bent nearly in half through the course of your rebellion, slipped suddenly from your fingers. Floating, disembodied, just above the starlight lakebed. 

You didn’t need them. 

You needed him. 

And reaching from the crystal waters, beads like glass dripped from your fingers as your hand instead roamed up the broad expanse of his armored chest. Trembling, clutching, spilling through the hammered designs that adorned him, the sculpted grooves that embellished his giant form. Grasping ever higher toward his neck, to that cowl of fur you wanted to bury yourself in, wanted to scratch against his skin.

“I need you, Blaidd…” 

The admission attempted to reach him. So hushed you weren’t certain it had. Though his hand tensed around the back of your thigh all the same, digging in as if he could pull you inside himself. A dire, bruising grip that restrained what else he might have done to you; though such restraint wasn’t needed. For even should he wish to devour you whole, to desecrate and ruin every inch of you, you’d beg to burn alive and shatter between his teeth.

“I want you…” you whispered, unable to keep your voice from shaking. “This whole time - I’ve always wanted you.”

Fingers weaving through his fur, back along the strong ridge of his jaw, you gripped his roots and endeavored to pull his height closer into yours. Curling your lips up into his scruff, feeling his low and coursing thrum vibrate against you.

“Please,” you murmured into his fur, nosing beneath his wolfish chin. Lost. Consumed. “I need you… I’ll do anything, just… please,” your words became whimpers, your grip in his fur constricting. “I can’t fight this any longer, I can’t - so please, Blaidd, please, I’ll do anything, just- ahh!”

His hold on your thigh slid beneath your buttocks before you could muster another word, and so suddenly did he lift you off the ground that you squeaked, your legs struggling to wrap around his torso in the panicked instinct not to plummet back down. Both of you sodden, dripping, untangled from the starry stream.

His eyes burned like azure flame above you, delving into yours as he held you firm against him, your thighs spread wide against his middle; and already it awakened further need inside you. That throbbing heat pulsing through your core, even with you fully clothed, with him fully armored, still enough to skim your nerves with pleasure, to make you stifle a trembled keen.

“As much as I love to hear you begging with me, my sweet omega,” he murmured deeply. “I’d have you say as much in other ways.” His gaze devoured as he turned, taking you with him. “Perhaps in whatever helpless, wordless fealties my teeth and tongue might drag from you.”

His bootsteps sloshed uncaring through the shallows, strong arms holding you so high off the ground. And as he went, he seemed unable not to slide his giant hands across the gentle curves of you; up the backs of your clinging thighs, over the plush of the ass he cradled. Possessive fingers inching toward that lure of heat so tempting between your legs, just outside his reach with how he held you. 

You had little idea of where it was you even were anymore, little idea of where it was he took you, but found it impossible to care. All you could focus on was the giant, mountainous heat of him; that way his touch roamed inward beneath your thighs. Your small arms wrapped tight around his sturdy neck as a small, breathy whimper escaped you, urging his exploration forward. 

He was not to keep you wanting. And again you tried not to moan as his fingertips dipped up between your legs, tracing the seam of you.

“You sound like a bitch in heat,” he mused of your stifled whining, desire molten in his chest. And though your face flushed immediately to be so taunted, you couldn’t stop from moaning aloud as he drew idle pressure along your clothed folds, upward and down.

“Do you - enjoy teasing me?” you managed with breathy indignance; the weight of all defiance lost in the way he chuckled, the sound a rockslide through him. 

“You’re mine to tease,” he said, voice thick. And suddenly you were shoved up against something cold and unforgiving. The chill of a giant, stone column biting at your back, the cold of it seeping through your lake-soaked tunic. 

With a sharpened gasp, you were startled back into awareness of your surroundings; into anything other than him. And his eyes glimmered down at you with amusement while your own shied away.

“S’cold,” you mumbled sheepishly.

He hummed noncommittally. Settling you to sit upon the column’s decorative base, which held you at the same height his hands had; himself still two heads above you.

“Is that why you’re trembling..?” he wondered, his hands now free to roam. To slide down your thighs, to wrap behind your knees. His gaze like heated glass as he parted your legs further for him. As he made you tremble more. And taking hold of your calves, he tugged you to the edge of where he sat you, pulling you tighter against him, so roughly you gasped as if bitten once more by the chill.

One large hand remained a shackle round your calf, while the other smoothed up along your hip, over the plane of your stomach. With you unable not to arch into his palm as his fingers slid up and over the curve of one breast. Broken, pleasured whines fighting from your lips as he kneaded you possessively, rolling your nipple’s peak around his thumb.

Everywhere he touched, jolts of pleasure shot through your skin; writhing deep and hot into the base of your spine, with you fisting both hands within the heavy, shrouded cloak that draped his shoulders. Struggling to steady yourself. To pull him closer. Your hips moving of their own accord, rolling just slightly against his cuirass, restrained yet desperate to stoke the flames he was slowly igniting.

When his grip on your calf slid instead up between your thighs, the pad of his thumb drawing slow, harsh circles around your sensitive clit, you were forced to cry out his name, to buck your hips against him as he thrummed with deep satisfaction. 

Never had a sight so captivated him. And hearing you gasp his name - the pleading in it - the ruin he was driving you toward already… 

Your gaze was so unfocused even then, hazy with lust, and he had yet to begin fully unraveling you. 

A beast was slowly unmasking in him, and he wondered just how far he could bend you before you were nothing but rubble at his feet.

Growling low in his throat, he drank you in through darkly hooded eyes. And with one final drag of his thumb across you clit, he seized the collar of your blouse with both hands and tore straight through it, shredded neck to navel with brutish ferocity. 

A gasp caught in your throat - unfurled instead as a moan as his grip bruised your waist and his long, rough tongue snaked out from behind his teeth, laving up and over the curves of your naked breasts. His mouth eager to feel the way your nipples tightened for him as he pressed you harsher against the pillar at your back. His lowered growl hot on your skin as he dragged long, wet stripes across you. Tasting every inch of your curves, holding your pleasured writhing prisoner beneath him. Gripping still more fiercely to keep your hips from bucking into him, with you helplessly gasping every time his tongue’s agile tip flicked across your stiff, aching peaks.

His touch was torture - a single spark where you begged for wildfire to consume. Raking you over coals of euphoric torment as he held your hips hostage until you thought your bones might melt with how you longed to buck against him. Every languid stroke of his long, heated tongue dragging you closer to a violent edge of pleasure. So close, yet not nearly enough to send you spiraling off the edge. 

A wolfish purr locked within his throat as his canines grazed along your spit-slicked skin, a groan escaped around one pert nipple as he suckled and lapped and nipped at you.

“F-fuck, Blaidd-!” you gasped, arching further into his mouth. As much as you could; as much as he’d allow. Trembling breaths pouring out of you as your hands trailed desperately into his fur, twisting in his scruff fierce enough to make him groan hoarsely at the sting of it, with his tongue's greedy lashing all the more punishing in return. 

Lost to his own impatience, he jerked the remnants of your tattered blouse from off your shoulders; rough tongue dragging toward the sensitive gland along the side of your delicate neck. And the second his nose ghosted past it, the second his mouth laved with slick pressure, your whole body jolted as if electrified. A desperate gasp strangled in your chest, caught there before breaking free as his wolfish mouth worshiped your throat; stroking firm, wet pressure along your mating gland until you thought your mind was melting, until heat pooled slick between your thighs, soaking through even your leggings. His starving mouth reducing you to helpless gasps that further roused his hunger, and he growled so deep he neared a dragon's purr, his need for you rippling through his teeth. 

“These sounds you make for me,” he uttered hoarsely, hot against your throat. Gritting out a tight breath as your fingernails curled harshly in his scruff, with you holding onto him as tightly as you could to keep from shaking. 

He ran his tongue over the points of his teeth for just a moment, savoring the way you gaspingly tried to catch your breath. 

“I could lose myself in them,” he growled, before massaging your sensitive neck with his tongue again until your vision blurred. “In the sound of you alone,” he breathed betweenst his lapping, his words strained. “The sound of your need. It’s enough to end me. Enough to drive me mad.” 

He tongued at your mating gland more and more vigorously until you cried out just as shrill and sharply as he wanted you to. Until that aching emptiness between your legs clenched around nothing, desperate to be filled, to be owned by him. 

More. Oh, you needed more than he would give you. More of him. More of his friction. And as your need made you its prisoner, you wrapped your ankles as best you could around his armored waist, rocking against him in rhythm with his tongue, desperate to come apart even as his grip still restrained you. 

He released your bucking hips only long enough to unlatch the single gauntlet still adorning him, stripping it hastily and shucking it to the grass. One hand returning to cinch your waist fiercely while the other toyed along the waistband of your pants. Your breath hitching as his fingers, now bared, snaked beneath your leggings, pushing past the fabric which could barely stretch around the giant size of his hand.

“Blaidd-!” you weakly pleaded, while his fingers trailed lower, bringing fire with them. Your fists gripped tighter in his fur as you felt the warm pads of his fingers trace over your underwear’s hem, soaked through with your longing for him. His hips forcing your thighs wider apart as he drew a single line of pressure along your slickly clothed slit.

You felt his forearms tense as you tried to buck against his fingers despite how his brutal hold kept you still, keening high in your throat as he continued to toy with you. His hungry thrum sinking dangerously low as, gradually, his grip on your waist lessened just enough for you to rut helplessly against the heel of his hand, while his fingers sank lower, pushing the fabric keeping you from him aside. 

Slowly, he coaxed his thick, wolvish fingers along your folds, sinking inside you. Teasing your entrance enough to make you burn with how he might fuck you on his fingers - only to keep you wanting, to keep your pleasure ransom. Running slow, torturous circles that barely dipped inside as you rocked against his palm.

Perhaps he didn’t realize how fargone you really were. Perhaps he thought he could tease you forever. But your whole body was flushed with heat, weakened by the singular need for him to drag you to orgasm. And as he came to stroke your clit with his thumb, warm skin on skin, a coil in you snapped and all of you shattered, unable to fight the waves of pleasure consuming you. 

Your forehead fell weak against his broad, armored chest as your thighs bucked uncontrollably, with you clinging to his ashen pelt as you sobbed helplessly through your release.

You could barely hear him coaxing you through the unforgiving climax he’d teased you toward, humming praises as you came so well on his fingers. Only bits and pieces of his resonant voice reaching through your jagged spasms of bliss.

“So loud,” he breathed, maintaining a torturous speed that both trapped and elongated your euphoric torment. Your clit pulsing in waves against his fingers whilst he dragged the length of pleasure to its brink. 

He growled as he watched you, possessed by your undoing. “So shattered. So wet for me…” 

You felt his rumble of low ravening, buried deep in his chest as at last your body slumped feebly against him; brow damp with sweat, thighs weakly quivering. With him leaning down to give the side of your sensitive throat a rough, single lick, if only just to see your toes curl again and hear your sharp, single moan. 

“And every lovely, trembling inch of you,” he murmured, with eyes that glowed like frozen embers, trapped within his skull, “mine. ”

He appeared so much a predator. A wolf scenting fresh-spilled blood. And there was no time to compose yourself as he gripped your waistline and jerked both pants and underwear off you, so harshly the fabric dug into your curves, trailing rosy lashes down your hips and thighs. Taking next your blouse - or what remained of it. Tattered clean away, leaving you bare. His naked, vulnerable, precious omega, watching him with wide eyes and an innocence that begged to be devoured. 

It took everything in him not to completely ravage every morsel of you then and there, with you so tremulous, so needy. But he could wait, he thought - would wait - wanting still more pleasure from your lips. Still more of his name chanted breathlessly, desperately, before he too lost himself, buried inside you.

And so he guided your back once more into the column of stone. Keeping your legs spread as he slunk down between your thighs with a predatory slowness. Phosphorescent eyes shining up at you; piercing in a way that made you feel hunted, that sent your pulse throbbing between your legs. 

His elongated maw, the ridges of its battleworn scars, smoothed up your inner thigh as he watched you like a beast from below. Fixated on the smallest changes to your expression. Taking his time to savor the way your thighs twisted the closer he came, the way your breath hitched as his fingers flexed up the shape of you. His eyes, aglow with appetite, closing for a moment to relish just how beautifully you smelled; a scent that lured, that had him salivating.

Your breaths came shallow, with you unable to keep from touching him. From smoothing a few, tremulous fingers along his snout, sinking in the silver scruff above one wolven ear. 

Fangs of fierce longing pierced through your middle as his eyes slid open once more, their sharpness like crude-cut gems. Watching as you watched him. The hunter and the hunted.

“You look so eager for me, love.”

Lords, he was troublesome even now. And though his musings weren’t untrue, you still mustered up an unconvincing scowl at him.

“Must you keep on teasing me..?!”

The whimper you failed to stifle as he nipped your inner thigh chipped away at what little patience remained in you both.

“You’ve possessed me these past few days,” he murmured, grip tightening, indenting your flesh. “Taken too many of my thoughts for me to end things too swiftly.”

You gasped as he abruptly took both your calves, tossing them up and over the breadth of his heavy-set shoulders; pillowed by the dusky, pelted cloak he wore, so that your thighs surrounded him as his muzzle slid upward, his dew-kissed nostrils slightly chilled. Hands roaming up the outsides of your thighs again, more tense with his every graveled inhale. With you biting back every obscene sound that fought to pour out of you as he lapped once at your folds; a long, wet stripe that sunk eagerly inside you, and already Siofra’s starry skyline sparked behind your vision. Your breath catching, fingers dug sharp against his scalp as his slick muscle withdrew to savor the sweetness of you, the wolf between your legs starving in the way he thrummed. And greedily he lapped up your cunt again, tongue pushing inward in a savage need for more.

Desire for you stripped bare, you cried out as his long, rough tongue thrust in and out of you; savoring, flicking deeper, with your walls fluttering against his mouth’s every intrusion. Hungry canines skimming flesh with just how deeply he tasted, heavy breaths warm against your skin. Every stroke of his tongue spiking need throughout him until he was throbbing and painfully hard. And as his tongue delved deep enough to massage that swollen, growing ache inside you, heat flared up your middle, robbing you of thought as your legs tied around his neck, as if you could somehow drag his mouth further into you, helpless moans breaking from your chest. More and more the more ravenous he became, with your thighs squeezing him as he fucked you mercilessly on his tongue, nosing at your clit, teeth dragging slickly. 

He’d tasted nothing sweeter. Nothing so sweet as the way your slickness poured along his tongue, and his cock jolted with need every time you moaned for him, throbbing within its confinement with the urgency to stretch you open, to fill you just as his tongue did. But that could wait, he urged himself again. You weren’t going anywhere, not now that you were his. And he’d feel you squeezing down on his knot soon enough, but first he’d savor every last ambrosial drop of slickness that welcomed him between your legs. And all the while, his thoughts kept chanting:

Mine. 

Perfect. 

Mine.

Beautiful.

Perfect.

Mine.

Mine.

Fucking mine.

His name fell apart as you gasped it, and suddenly it was all too much. Your walls quivering around him as he growled, guttural and throated. His hands digging in like claws as he fucked you on his tongue until all sound and color blurred and your climax wrecked through you like an earthquake, hips bucking mindlessly against his mouth to somehow take him deeper.

“Ah-Blaidd-!!”

Every nerve melted with pleasure as your walls grasped at his tongue, yet even as convulsions ceased to strangle you his tongue’s eager lashing never slowed. Never ceased its rising, ravened thrusting.

“More,” he roughly groaned, his greedy tongue and violent grip demanding it.

Bliss danced on the edges of pain, so sensitive, so overwhelming; every stroke of his wolfish tongue lapping wet flame within you, with you crying out in unthinking spasms as you were forced to endure his avarice. Until at last all edges in you snapped, and you were hurled into another blinding orgasm that tore your breath away. All thoughts shorting out; strangled by pulsating, mind-bending pleasure, with you unable to do anything but take his greedy tongue, writhing and moaning helplessly as he indulged himself your sweetness, lapping up every drop that poured molten on his tongue.

You were a quivering mess when he finished with you, raking in shallow gasps. Unable to unclench your muscles, to unfasten your legs from around his dense, shaggy neck as you whimpered with the aftershocks of pleasure. Eventually hearing his low voice beneath the throttle of your pulse. Feeling his grip release your thighs; massaging them with slow, soothing pressure.

“Easy, love,” you heard him breathe, and hazily you blinked down at him. 

Your vision swam with the shapes and steel of his visage, but slowly his blue eyes cleared through the darkness, taking hold of yours; their glow an anchor with which you sought to steady yourself.

“Relax for me, little love,” he murmured gently. “Unhook your legs for me… there’s a good lass,” he praised your fragile efforts, easing your quivering thighs from off his shoulders. Holding them firm in his giant palms at he lifted himself once more to stand between your legs, his fingers working to unstrand your aching muscles - kneading until your thighs no longer trembled.

His head bowed to nuzzle the crook of your neck as he soothed you. Breathing you in, buried in your scent. Exhaling a low, graveled purr as you reached up to card your needy hands through his fur, silver swimming through your fingers.

Even exhausted like this, you hadn’t had enough of him, nor he of you. And as he pressed himself firmly between your legs as you held him, as you clutched him closer - even through his scale-like faulds you could feel the heavy girth of his arousal for you, such was his size, aching to fill you. 

The realization sent nervous sparks skittering across your nape - that his cock must be just as large as the rest of him. And yet, even through your apprehension, you’d never felt so empty, so yearning. The thought of him pushing his way inside you tying your stomach into tight little knots.

“Shall I give you a moment, love?” he questioned softly. Sensing your need, your apprehension; patient, yet burning to sate it. The vibration of his words felt on your lips as you curved them up beneath his jaw, soft skin on velvet fur.

Fumbling blindly, you took to the fastens of his pauldrons, needing to feel more of him against you. 

“No,” you trembled whilst endeavoring to undress him. “Please - I need you, I can’t -” 

Your string of rambled urgency cut short; startling at his touch as his large hands took yours to still them. 

His eyes caught yours, their pale a savage brimstone; two glowing gems that shone as a beast’s, hunting from the brush. And like a wolf stalks its prey, those eyes never left you as he set your hands gently aside, working to unfasten the tethers of his armor for you himself, one weighted piece at a time. 

You couldn’t look away. Burning him to memory as he slowly bared himself to you, stripped of the metal that adorned him. A hulking, wolven beast of a man, corded in dark muscle like steel, pelted in ashen fur. Fur that ebbed and flowed, thickest on the cowl of him, more sparse along the rest. His chest near bare, besides that thick strip of fur bisecting it, so that you could see the heavy contours and dense ridges of his strength. Could even lick his skin if you wanted to, and oh, how you wanted to.

When he’d kicked his leather boots off, his eyes still pierced yours as he began untethering the drawstrings of his pants, and you couldn’t stop your breath from catching as your gaze fell captive to the motion of his fingers. Honed to the way he loosed his waistband, to that flash of skin beneath. To the ridge of his hips as he worked his trousers downward; his height folded for a moment as he shed them free completely.

And then he stood; naked. His thighs thick with muscle, dappled in dark fur, and you blushed as you glimpsed the length of his arousal stiff between them. The base of him dark and thick, veins taut; a webwork that spanned toward his tapered, rosy tip, already beading with precum with what the taste of you did to him.

Flushing with warmth, your eyes met his again; feeling like your face might melt. An unfamiliar, exquisite coil of heat twisting low behind your navel as his gaze branded you. And though his shoulders had grown tense while you drank in the sight of him, whatever your expression betrayed then had his muscles relaxing. Brought the barest of smiles again to his lips. 

He stepped between your legs again, both of you fully bared, and took you by the waist - slipping one strong arm around your hips to scoop you up while you gasped and wrapped your legs obediently around him. He only needed one arm to carry you. Such was his strength, he might’ve needed only one finger. And as you melted into the firm warmth of him, drunk on the feeling of his fur and skin, he toted you with him to a plush of nearby grass. Lowering to lay you there on your back, before crawling in atop you - his weight steadied on one knee and forearm so as not to crush you under the mountain of him.

He nipped at the sensitive skin of your neck, soothing the sting with a heated lap of his tongue. So tempted to mark you, to signature his claim, though he resisted. One hand roaming up the length of you, mapping your every curve to memory as he breathed against your ear. 

“Beautiful…” 

You shivered as sharp teeth nipped your earlobe, his tongue wetly teasing. 

He yearned to be so gentle. Just as he yearned to tear you apart. And truly, he thought to slow things, to delay what he might do to you. Despite how consumed, how maddened he was by the feel of you so warm and vulnerable beneath him. By that slight uptick in your breath as his thumb rolled along the stiffened peak of one breast, coaxing it harder for him. 

But then you wrapped one hand around his throbbing, eager cock as it bobbed heavily against your middle, and even before you stroked its length he was lost, more monster than man; sucking in a sharp breath through sharper teeth that wanted nothing more than to sink inside you, to make you scream.

Tonguing and nipping marks across the soft skin beneath your jaw, his fangs trailed down to your clavicle as his giant hand swallowed yours; guiding you to continue stroking him as he roughly aligned himself with your entrance. And not even that adorable, nervous way you bit your lower lip up at him was enough to give him pause. Nothing could, not any longer.

He wanted you. He needed you. You were his.

“You’re going to take every inch of me, omega,” he breathed against your ear, and you bit your lip harsher, failing to suppress how the heat of his growl made you shiver. 

His rosy tip nudged your folds, your slick warmth inviting his continued conquest, with you biting back whimpers of both pain and pleasure as he slowly pushed inside. Both of you tense, gripping to each other - captive to a storm that overcame you both. Moaning in unison as he flexed his hips forward, sliding inside you to half-length. A growl congealed in his throat with how snug your slick walls gripped to him, clinging as if to drag him deeper inside, even with you stretched to the point of sweet, sharp pain already.

You weakly gasped, weakly pleaded as, achingly slow, his cock slid back out again, your slickness coating the thick length of him, before with a groan he flexed fiercely back inside. More urgent, less restrained. The way you choked on a cry stealing away the fraying threads of his self control.

Your spine arched off the grass with the strain to stretch around him, vision stinging. Overcome yet burning for more, for all of him. One hand clawing at his muscled chest, carving raised lines wherever his pelt revealed skin, while the other twisted in the grass beside you, tearing up the roots each time he buried himself inside your growing slickness. A rhythm that slowly built to the speed he’d reach to ravish you. His every thrust pushed deeper, your walls forced more and more to receive him.

It was too much. 

It wasn’t enough.

His breaths drew more ragged with every firm stroke of his hips. And you sobbed his name as he finally bottomed out, sheathing himself to the swollen base of his knot with one urgent, final thrust; an animalistic groan trapped within him. 

You were so tight, so slick and sinfully warm. It was like your body possessed him, so much that he couldn’t wait for you to adjust to his size for long. Couldn’t stop from rutting into you in slow, lengthy strokes.

“Taking me so well,” he murmured thickly, barely sounding like himself. Watching pleasure and pain warp your expression as his groin dragged against yours, the curves of your breasts bouncing in time with his movements. “So, so well.”

“Blaidd…!”

He licked your jaw, your throat, everywhere his greedy mouth could reach. Trying - failing - to restrain his more urgent pace. Mouthing toward your ear, to which he growled, “Sing louder for me, little love. I want to hear every sound you make for me.” One giant hand trailed into your hair, tilting your ear more to his graveled, “I’d hear every broken syllable, every gasp of my name.”

“Blai-dd-!” you mewled obediently, delirious with need, helpless to whatever he wanted. Your toes curling in the grass as your back arched even further to receive his punishing thrusts, molten coils constricting you with every push and drag of his girth along your walls. Gasping brokenly, “Please - keep going, you feel so g-good- ah, please, Blaidd - please don’t stop-!”

His eyes burned above yours, hooded and hungry to witness you in such a broken state. Savoring those breathy, high-pitched moans you made each time he sank himself to the hilt of his swollen knot, fucking you like you were his. Heavy cock throbbing as he buried himself inside you more and more ruthlessly.

“You’re mine,” he grit between thrusts, rutting still more forcefully. “And I’d have that fact undeniable.” He hotly kissed your throat, tonguing one bouncing breast before your arms brought you closer against him, wrapped tight around his neck. 

“I want more than just my mark on your throat,” he growled against your cheek. “Want every claim on you visible.” Nipping toward your ear, his voice coursed roughly, “I want you filled with me, full of my pups - marked for everyone to see. Want you round, and full,” his tongue slid along your jaw as he continued thrusting roughly inside you, “and mine.”

His fervency alone - to claim you, all of you - had your walls clenching needily around him as he continued driving into you, as if your body wanted only to obey, attempting to milk him dry. Your moans louder and more desperate with his every assault. 

“Yes - please - Blaidd,” your pleading caught in your throat, so close to unraveling. 

His fingers dug into the meat of your hips, gripping your waist more fiercely as he angled himself to piston in and out of you, hammering over and over against a spot which made your vision blur. His lowered groan slipping past your ear as the orgasm he dragged you toward shattered through you, hot pulses gulping him further inside. His cock surging harder as he forced his girth past your spasms, your cunt gripping him so tight he could barely keep slamming inside you throughout your waves of pleasure.

“Squeezing me so tight,” he groaned, rutting relentlessly as you fell apart. Every muscle in him taut, his grip near bruising, so close to losing himself as his knot swelled against your pulsing entrance. Mouthing along your jaw, wet tongue tracing its curve and the shape of your parted, gasping lips as your small body jostled beneath him.

He licked into your mouth as you moaned for him, twin tongues consuming. A desperate, feral, savage kiss. One which ended with you licking up the ivory length of one of his canines betweenst your tattered, needy breaths.

The trembled whine you made spurred a low, feral purr from the harbor of his throat. Its growl more hoarse as you stroked that single, ivory tooth with your tongue again, panting weakly against his lips. Until at last he tore his mouth from yours, scooping up the backs of your thighs with sudden gruffness. Hoisting your lower half off the ground completely, hooking your knees around each of his muscled forearms that were braced on either side of you; hooked so that your ass remained lifted.

You choked back a gasp as he guided you so roughly to his whims; trapped and helpless with your hips off the ground, toes pointed straight up in the air. Flushing with heat at how vulnerable it made you feel, with how the sight of you like this smoldered darkly in his eyes.

His thrusts began a punishing rhythm, your calves bouncing on his forearms every time his hips slammed into the curves of your upraised ass. Toes writhing in the air as you sharply cried out, your walls forced to take him deeper, to stretch around the way his massive weight was added to every thrust. Hearing his low groan at how completely, how slickly you sheathed him as he pumped you achingly full.

“Come again for me, love,” he groaned against your ear, and fierce longing twisted obediently through your gut, abused walls fluttering around his every weighted assault. “Come on my knot.” His rhythm stuttered slightly as he felt you clinging to him. “Let me make a mess of you.”

The jagged gravel of his voice coaxed you to ruin; and with a high, choked sob, pleasure seized you. Toes curling, flexing tight, bounced with his momentum as he fucked you into climax so fiercely that wetness slicked down your legs, heightening the wet slap of skin on skin.

He growled like an uncaged beast as you clamped around him over and over, so impossibly tight.

“That’s it,” he gruffly praised, pumping faster, more erratic. “Keep coming, love - coming so well for me-” You felt his girth swell, the desperate throb of his cock forcing you open as he came so close to knotting you. Hammering without restraint, the wet slap of flesh nearly deafening. 

His pupils flared dark, eyelids fluttering as your walls clenched and begged for him deeper. 

“Fuck-!” 

With a harsh moan he lost himself, the swell of his knot forcing you so full you could barely breathe. Your fingers numbing as you gripped to his ashen scruff, writhing with each sweet, agonizing spasm wracking over you. Both of you unraveled by pleasure as his giant cock throbbed, pumping wave after wave of thick heat deep inside you, slave to his need to claim every inch of you with every molten drop of himself.

Gradually, his rhythm slowed, his breathing thick, his focus annihilated. The cords of his muscled thighs quivering with just how perfectly tight you sheathed him, clenched around his knot so not a drop of seed was wasted. 

He brushed back your hair as you chased after your breath beneath him, his heavy-lidded gaze admiring the delicate side of your neck - knowing he’d claim that, too, the next time he knotted you. And with one firm, final thrust to ensure his knot filled you snuggly, he gently took your thighs, easing your trembling legs from off of his forearms. Smoothing his hands up your waist as he lowered you gently to the grass, your size swallowed beneath him. 

You’d be stuck like this for some time, with him inside you. Which he didn’t mind - he far from minded - but he wanted to ensure your comfort, even stretched as you must be with him filling you. So he wrapped one strong arm around the small of your back, lowering himself to lay on one side in the lush bed of grass; bringing you easily along with him. Curling your tiny, sweat-slicked form against his chest as the two of you sought to reclaim your breathing; twin lungs seized with the aftershocks of climax.

Your body molded to his instantly, as if you’d always belonged there. His musk so warm as you buried your face into his chest. So inviting. 

He felt like home. 

You nuzzled further into him as his arm drew you close. Both of you sinking into the warm comfort of one another’s closeness; a cocoon of naked, tangled limbs.

Mine, his inward hum, so tender.

His, you softly smiled against his skin.

Tenderly, he trailed one finger along the shell of your ear. Eyes glistening at the sound of your small, exhausted sigh his doing so brought you. At the way you cozied even closer beneath his chin, lounging in the cradle of him.

Your eyelids fluttered as he drew soft, comforting designs along one small shoulder.

“How are you feeling, little love..?” he asked you softly. Your spell of quiet breaths still hushed around you. “I fear I might’ve gotten carried away with you…”

Your lips pressed against his warm chest. “M’full,” you mumbled, sounding fuck-drunkenly slurred, before with a sigh you nuzzled further into him. “You’re so warm…”

His low, sonorous chuckle traveled through his chest and into yours, and he hugged you just a touch closer. 

“Get some rest,” he murmured into your hair. “I’ll clean up the mess I’ve made of you when you awaken.”

“I’m not tired,” your small voice protested with a yawn.

He chuckled again. Drawing those soft designs that melted all your bones to butter. 

“Sleep,” he bid again, a bit more sternly.

Part of you wanted to protest, however petulantly - simply because teasing the man was a good bit of fun, and he surely deserved it after how he’d teased you. But his gentle touch was a beguiling thing. And thinking to rest your eyes for just a moment, you fell asleep almost instantly.

When next your eyes fluttered open, you were still wrapped up in his arms. And though it was difficult to judge the time in Siofra you thought it must be morning. 

Blaidd’s chest rose and fell gently, as if held in the clutches of sleep. Though as you wiggled to peek up at him, you saw his eyes opened just a sliver. Peering down at you with a little lazy, wolfish half-smile, like he knew you’d only just awakened.

A morning bath was tempting for you both, though he wouldn’t let you walk, despite your protests. He insisted on carrying you to one of the deeper portions of Siofra’s mirror-like waters, only then allowing you loose so that the two of you could rinse off together. 

Even at its deepest, the water’s glimmering surface barely licked above your knees. In fact, you had to lower yourself to kneeling in the sand in order to dip your head back and splash water across your face. And as you did you pretended not to notice the very obvious fact that the two of you remained, quite obviously, completely naked.

You felt like a timid little church-mouse, flustered by his nakedness, even after everything. And after struggling to contain yourself, you decided to sneak a glance at his muscle-bound nudity whilst wringing out your hair, as casually as one could so as not to be discovered. 

Only to be caught in sheepish, blushing surprise to see him already watching you. Watching, as if he’d been watching you the whole time. His gaze, unabashed, devouring the full sight of you. Your wet hair, your warm cheeks. Your dripping, naked curves.

You were no good at subterfuge. Unable to look away even when caught peering right at him. Snared, as you were, by the half-wolf’s hungry gaze. And when he came slowly toward you and scooped you up into his arms, you remained ensnared by him. Wrapping your arms around his neck obediently as he kissed down your throat, lowering you into straddling his lap amidst the shallow waters. Large hands kneading your waist as he guided you onto his eager cock, with you soon bucking your hips desperately as you rode him.

He was oh-so-tempted to knot you again. To have his fangs signature your skin. But he denied himself either. Holding your hips as he pulled you down into his forceful thrusts, fucking up into you relentlessly, reveling in the way you fell apart with him inside you. Finishing with your hand wrapped so deliciously around his cock; thrusting against your palm as cum coated your fingers. 

He knew he’d knot you again soon enough. Would keep you thoroughly fucked for many days to come, throughout the remainder of your heat. But, even possessed by you as he was, he wanted you to enjoy feeling freshly bathed for a while before he completely ruined you again. 

Bathed - and fed. 

He pulled on his trousers after making his way back to shore, letting them hang a bit loose about his hips, not bothering to tie them. Making a fire near the shoreline as you finished cleaning yourself off, tending to its gentle flames in leisure. A batch of juicy prawns he’d managed to net soon skewered above the flame, the smell of them teasing the until-then latent appetite he’d worked up through last night’s and that morning’s physical activities.

After a time, he looked up from the fire, scanning the starlit waters for you; a protective note threading through his veins. 

Surely a quick bath shouldn’t take you so long…

The muscles lining his neck relaxed as he heard you stumble in the shallows, near-hidden in the shade of a small tree. You seemed to be sifting around for something, and though his lips quirked at your obvious clumsiness in the mud, he couldn’t deny the sight of watching you do anything whilst naked had a very strong effect on him…

“Little love,” he called to you, though in your intense concentration you didn’t so much as glance over at him. “What are you doing?”

“I’m - aha!” you spouted triumphantly, grabbing something from beneath the water - something that, as you hoisted it dripping from the lake, he came to realize was his discarded gauntlet from the night before.

He chuckled lowly as you brought it to him. His attention flicking from your smile to the gentle bounce of your breasts, the slight sway of your hips. 

Yes, he’d definitely need to cover you up a bit if he was expected to resist you long enough to allow your eating breakfast.

He stood from where he sat tending the fire, fetching his heavy cloak to drape about your shoulders. Smiling slightly at the way you curled it around you, sunken so small in its depths, beaming up at him.

He noted as your little nose suddenly twitched. Saw appetite widen your eyes as you glanced to the fat prawns sizzling on the fire, then again up at him, eyes sparkling. 

“You made breakfast!”

Gods, you were adorable. 

He grabbed one skewer of prawns, setting the other aside so as not to burn, before sitting down beside the fire again. Wordlessly suggesting you join him with one curled finger. Which, hugging his cloak about you, you more or less rushed in doing. 

You were about to sit beside him when he caught one of your wrists, tugging you into his lap, instead. Slotting your back against his chest, wrapping his arms around you. His height so high above your own that he could easily tuck his chin atop your head as you leaned into him.

Pulling one prawn from off the skewer, he insisted on feeding you himself. Something he thought you’d object to, headstrong and defiant as you were. But you simply parted your lips and sank your teeth right into his offering, your tongue briefly grazing his thumb as you took the food into your mouth; which made his spine shudder and gave his cock quite a lot to think about.

He could definitely get used to feeding you.

You hummed with hungry satisfaction as you chewed, already reaching to slide another prawn from off the skewer. Holding it over your head, to Blaidd’s amusement.

“Try it!”

A warm flower unfurled inside his chest, and he huffed a small laugh before nibbling the food from your fingers, decidedly licking the tips of them clean. 

He absolutely felt the way your thighs twisted together at his doing so, but decided not to tease you about it. Not yet, anyway.

“It’s good. Thank you, love,” he mused instead, glad you couldn’t see his knowing smirk above you.