Recent content by Shrike

“If you want to use the knife, use the knife.” The reply came with a cold, detachment as if neither way mattered to him. He cared little. She would not be the first dead speaker to fail him. Alarak would watch as he always watched, from the battlements. His distance bred fear and awe...

Such naïveté. She spoke when words were not required, not when two minds brushed so intimately. “Of course you are.” The words rang in her mind, heedless of objection. “You know how to touch the souls of the dead. Now you will touch the souls of the living.” The power to absorb the life...

Impassive, Alarak watched her movements as if he were simply a statue in the room until at last she stood clothed in a sable camisole of silk trimmed in silver, paired with loose pants in the Kaliti fashion. He clenched his jaw, muscles writhing beneath skin the color of volcanic ash. “Your...

A crease slit the distance between eyebrows on the Shrike’s forehead, the slightest of frowns. She stood before him, defiant in the stark beauty of her nakedness. The Shrike exhaled, meeting her eyes, then allowing his stare to drift across every ridge and valley of her form, dripping with sap...

The Shrike’s stare lingered on the thread of dripping sap gleaming against her skin. “I sleep alone,” he said simply, deciding she had earned that much of an explanation at least. Though she deserved only that - the merest of rationales. Not the knowledge of what he awoke with in the night...

“You are welcome,” he said softly, his eyes still on the wave-broke surface of the ocean beyond, whose surface he’d not traversed in so many years now. Could he recall the feel of the sea breeze at full sail, the tilt of the ship, the beating of the waves. Every year they drifted from memory to...

… Later that evening, the Shrike had Keres brought by the same pretty thrall who led her around earlier to one of the lower bath chambers. It was well past the chimes of midnight and the storm clouds had left the island, leaving only the moons. They filtered in, soft and gentle lights that...

“No,” he rasped, with a detached cruelty, “I don’t think you have.” Heedless of the way she grasped at him, pleading, eyes wide and terrified, he pried free of her grasp and shoved her forward. The panic in her cracking voice stirred a darkness in him - a hunger that needed to be sated. Why...

Crack. His now ringless hand struck her across the cheek hard enough to turn white skin red. “You overestimate-“ Crack. Another slap, striking the way one might hit an annoying dog. “-your worth.” So much for her appetite. She would rather play games than eat. Enough. He had tolerated her...

A third infraction, perhaps, in her tone. He misliked the shape of those words. There would not be a fourth permitted. Grand crimes? Spoken like a mainland cur. On the sea, the captain’s word was law. On this island, so too was his. “They die because I want them dead,” he hissed. “The scale of...

“Your eyes reek of your thirst for it.” Could there be more to this dead speaker than just haunting beauty and a tongue like a lash? Perhaps. The fingers on her cheek became claws that gripped her jaw with iron, thumb wrapping around chin just below her lips. “You want power.” So she could...

White brows knit in a frown amid his ash complexion. "You think that was the answer?" His chin tilted up and he regarded her, this insect whose defiance bled away to plaintiveness before the terror of the builders, as he knew she would. Slowly, he shook his head, just twice. "No. That was...

"What a foolish question." Once more he ticked off her insolence in a mental note. She would pay the balance in due time. Alarak held up the piece of paper with the ink smear, then crumpled it into his hand. It seemed the werewolf would be useful, despite Ravenna's wishes: a pressure point...

The quill's tip snapped against the parchment, ink spilling from the shattered length and out across the place meant for his signature, black seeping into the off-white of the paper like blood. "Did I not warn you to mind your tongue?" he hissed, venom in every syllable. His lips twisted in...

The rumble of her stomach filled the room, followed by her terse greeting. He did not look up, his only response for a moment in the form of the final scratch of quilltip on parchment paper, signing his name to a death warrant. He stared at the name for a moment. Alarak. Captain. His gaze...