“Riuk?”

The word was barely above a whisper, mingling almost inseparably with the ambient sounds of the swamp. It would have been swept away in the cadence of the omnipresent water, but the russet brute was on edge. He had been for days, ever since he had met the monstrosity at Crith Thalmhainn. Sindicate. He couldn’t clear the image of the beast’s leathery maw from his mind, could not shake the feeling of raw power and savagery that had emanated from the creature in a cloud so thick as almost to be visible. More than that, he could not shake the feeling that he had liked this other being, that he had seen something of himself reflected in those wild blue eyes.

His own amber gaze now shone fiercely with that same wildness. Every strand of his dusty coat stood on end as though pulled erect by an unseen force. It was as though an electricity flowed through him, charging every fiber of his every being. Since meeting Sindicate, he had been transformed. He had spent his days and his nights roaming the forest, a hulking shadow made of muscle and fang alone. In his wake, a trail of corpses, small things that had crossed his blind path. Mice, birds, the small dwellers of the forest he had once upon a time so adored, all cut down for the simple transgression of being noticed by the fallen king. He bothered not even to consume them, killing not out of need, but only for the sheer pleasure of killing.

Huge hackles raised, lips parted in a snarl, he whirled to face the shape dragging itself out of the gloom toward him. The shape that knew his name. He dropped his massive frame low to the ground, muscles tensed to spring, letting a savage sound rip itself from his throat. So composed there, in the light of the small clearing, he was the very picture of a demon, of a wolf consumed.

He knew the girl at once, or at least knew who she used to be. The creature slinking toward him was the ghost of Stormy Horizons, a girl he had known, perhaps even loved, in a past life. She had always been slight, but looking upon her now he could see that the years had weathered her so that she appeared even smaller than the reaches of his mind could recall. Moreover, he could sense, nearly smell, something amiss within her. Gone was her pride, her self-assuredness. This was not the Stormy he had promised so much to all those years ago. Something had broken within her, that much was plain to see.

The cruel snarl of his face curled itself upward into something resembling a smile, though his feral features became no less unsettling to behold. He pulled himself out of his crouch up to his full height, still wearing this serpent’s smile and gazed upon the dainty she-wolf in silence for a long while. Broken was good. Broken was sister to obedient.

Finally he addressed her in a deep, resonant voice that was tinged with just a note of something uncouth:

“Stormy, my girl. Come here. It has been far too long.”

The buzzing animal noise of the swamp ceased with his words. In the silence, he bade her approach with a gesture of his heavy, scarred head. He wanted her to see the scars, to remember how he had come to bear them when really they should have been hers. But more than that, he wanted her close enough to smell what lie beneath his characteristic musk; the subtle hints of sweat and blood, both dried and fresh, which would expose to her just how far from grace her once noble king had fallen.

His heart thundered within his broad chest as his eyes bore intensely into her slender frame, the twist smile still plastered across his face. Yes, he desired Stormy, but not as he once had. In that past life perhaps he really had loved her, and perhaps then he would have been excited by the prospect of even being near her again, of feeling her embrace, of making her his. But now it was her frailty and uncertainty that excited him. He wanted this damaged waif at his side. He wanted her to fear him, to obey him, to be his in an entirely different sense of the word. He relished the memory of her devotion, took it in as confidence that with the right words whispered into her ivory ears, the right brush of his tongue against her neck, he could turn this broken girl into anything he wanted.

For broken was sister to obedient.

. | . | . | .