my heart is not a home for cowards

The waste of battle called to her, the blood a luring siren; Callanwolde's stained fur the ocean she wished to drown in. 

Arya found him after the crackle of pompous excitement ebbed. With a new bound toy to kick and prod, her family would be too distracted with perfecting their sneers to notice she'd gone to the beast.

"How does it taste?" She was shameless in how she looked at him, wondering if that dot of blood there was too coagulated to drip from his fur. "Winning. Claiming. The power of it." The impermanence of power to a slave.

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directly after this thread

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 When it was over the bull retreated, happy enough to seem in stasis to the rest of them, materializing only when needed. 

 On the far side of the Hollow close to the border's edge, Callanwolde laid claim to a network of caves, the entrance an organic web of rock, extending and connected like tendons of stone. 

 She'd followed him all the way home. 

 “Come find out.” The bull replied without looking back, disappearing into the dark.

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She stepped into the shadows, the murk seeping through her pale fur like cold fingers of the bloody tide. Arya didn’t fear the dark.

Those eyes of hers that stung in the light adjusted well enough in the cave, leaving the outline of Callanwolde more bull than shadow. “That sort of easy strength,” her voice echoed like a loon in mourning, “like popping a mouse’s skull. It must be intoxicating.”

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 Arya imbibed on his brutality, sipping slow as she followed him into the shadows.

 The bull descended, the modest cave entrance belying a cavernous network of tunnels and shrouded corners. Bones littered the otherwise starkly decorated cavern, the spine of some sorry soul accenting the entrance to a larger alcove. 

 His little dove ventured into the pit with him, her lilting voice chambered and echoing off the damp rock. 

 Finally, in the center of the room, he stopped. Without the garish light of day, darkness ruled. He ruled. In this living grave, he would command her. “Come here.”

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The deeper they went, the greater her appetite grew until it felt as bottomless as the caverns. Her heart fluttered with anticipation; only secrets for monsters lived in the pits. 

The beast beckoned her. She went. 

"Tell me." She was near enough that the smell of carnage encompassed her too, and for a brief moment, she saw herself with a cape of red. "Tell me what real power feels like."

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 She was a child of narcissism and inertia, quietly clawing against what was deemed to be right.

 Callanwolde had recognized it the moment he'd seen her - Arya had a hungry soul. Gaunt and ravenous, it was the kind of appetite that consumed recklessly. The kind that needed to be fed.

 In the silence that stretched between them the air began to fill with roiled chittering. The bull smiled, mirthful and cruel. Above them, the ceiling teemed with the wriggling bodies of bats, thousands of them. 

 “You have power. Use it.” 

 Raising his voice, he bellowed, the sound so cacophonous it reverberated off the walls, spinning the flying rats into a manic frenzy. “Kill them. Then you'll feel it, too.”

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Arya had only a brief moment for the thought to exist; power was in her hands only because they believed it was. In the next moment, the air was alive. The dark cavernous belly swarmed with parasitic, chittering wings, sweeping the cave around the wolves like a gnawing sigh.

Her ears were still ringing with the echo of the beast's roar when she snapped her teeth, first in retaliation when she felt the bats brush against her fur and then with purpose.

She was clumsy and uncoordinated as those pristine teeth, sharp from underuse that came with her royal status, flashed in the dark with frustrated, fruitless bites—

Until she caught one.

Arya spat the bat out with a startled cry as hot blood pooled across her tongue. It writhed on the floor at her feet, a dark shadow squirming and squealing and bleeding. Never before had she tasted something alive or felt something squirming between her teeth. As the frenzied creatures above fled through the dark network, the Highblood stared at the dying mass beneath her with confused scrutiny as if she didn't think it had been possible. The first - the only piece of ruin orchestrated by her own jaws. 

It was wrong. It was violating; the gentle, quiet Arya lowering herself to the base level of beasts, but when the bat fell still, she realized that's what she had always been beneath her crown.

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 He came forward and stood beside her, walking through the thinning torrent of beaten membranes and bristles. 

 Her catch twitched on the floor at their feet, a slow and wheezing end. 

 This was not hunger or self-defense, this was violence born without necessity, wild and rushing and bold. 

 A lady pure of pelt, a lady with a speckled heart. The organ fitted inside her, thudding so hard he could feel it. Ventricles and squeezing muscle dotted with flecks of rot, leeching, spreading.

 “Again. Don't stop.”

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She was panting when she turned her teeth back to the dark swarming above, invigorated by the breaking of her perfect mold.

Punishment was never befit for a Highblood, but she the skip of her frantic heart spoke of a darker desire; what did pain feel like?

Retribution came when the wing snared between her jaws hinged beneath crushed bone and the bat sank its needle teeth into her chin. Arya shook her head trying to uproot the creature, but the flecks of blood that dotted her chest were her own.

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 He moved quick, piercing the bat that so boldly latched to the chin of its ruin. The lower half bucked inside his jaws and he ripped it away, spitting the severed, leaking thing onto the floor. 

 Blood dribbled from the little dove's face, stark even in the shadowed dim. 

 With a single deliberate swipe, he ran his tongue over the weeping wound on her muzzle, growling at the taste of her and how he wanted so much more.

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She winced; the bat’s teeth left her chin throbbing and raw when Callanwolde yanked it free. The scent of bile and blood from the mangled carcass took up the space between the wolves until even that was overwhelmed by the beast.

His tongue, warm and sudden against the tender bite that bled beneath her lip, left a searing impression on her skin, hot enough that she thought she might burn like a dying comet in the dark. Arya leaned close. “Why didn’t you kill him?”

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 That delicious copper sang on his tongue. His teeth grazed her ear. “Be more specific, little dove.”

 Though there were plenty who would stare and call him monster - Callanwolde had spared as many lives as he had taken.

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Her skin prickled with goosebumps when he pressed the taste of death into her ear. “The man in the valley.”

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 He took a step back so he could look at her. 

 Of their audience, only Arya would have clapped. The rest had stared at the valley tussle with shallow masks of disgust. 

 “The High King needs slaves.”

 Their ivory blood could only be celebrated if they stood on the backs of others.

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She stepped into him, eating the dark space he had created. “You don’t believe that.” It couldn’t be so simple; the way he rippled and swelled atop the dark stranger had to be for something deeper. Something selfish.

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 She pressed, an unknowing princess setting her finger on the needle of a spinning wheel. He watched her push that digit down and studied how the skin indented until it split.

 So fucking curious.

 “Even slums have their levels. I'll be king of the cunts.”

 A title unrelished, a life of accepting gristle instead of real meat.

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A smile was slow to stretch across her stained lips—

a king of grit and bone was still a king.

Arya laughed then, a soft, breathless sound. “You want more than that.” Her voice tasted like blood, her eyes dazed with the stirring of something primal and dominating within her. Was this power? “Why don’t you take it?”

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 He growled a warning when she pressed further still, impaling herself on the idea of what he could give her. 

 Callanwolde could not provide Arya with anything. So, he'd follow her advice. He'd take.

 The bull was brutal, smashing himself against her delicate frame, Callanwolde overwhelmed her, pinning her to the ground flat beneath him. He could rip her in more ways than one.

 Saliva collected in the corners of his mouth, expectant. “Why don't you?”

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The beast’s snarl and her startled yelp echoed like laughter in the cave, taunting her ruse of power that was so easily snatched away.

Arya’s instincts reacted like crossed, frayed wires within her— unable to decipher whether the curl of her tail felt right or the flash of her teeth.

Her heart hammered against him when she met his eye.

“I can have anything I want,” There was a shake to her voice that made her gnash her molars, “that’s why I’m here.”

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