Recent content by Shrike

Once more her words fell as waves slapping upon the coastal cliff of his utter apathy. He watched her, hands behind his back, features carved from marble and just as unfeeling in their expression of mild disdain. “No?” He echoed her word, a curious note in his voice, as if turning it over and...

For a long moment, there came no answer. Indeed, as she looked up she would not find the eyes of the Shrike. He had turned his back to her and faced the sea, his gaze distant and far away. Callous to the sounds of her labored breathing and pain. The crowd gathered before the scaffold dispersed...

You let them writhe within you. You still see them as people, as individuals. That is why you cannot control their power. He watched the limp bodies hanging from the two stocks. Look how their corpses sag now, untethered sails with no wind. Their souls are the same. They are refuse. Whatever...

"Good," a cold croon in her mind. The elf's life force roiled within her. Alarak could feel the thrum of it. The corners of his mouth twitched upward, the ghost of a smile flitting through his features. She possessed far more talent than she understood. No wonder the Radiant Church had hunters...

“Yes.” Satisfaction rippled through the Shrike as he watched her from the battlements. He could feel how she wielded her sorcery, how she drew upon the very essence of the condemned prisoner. A pulsing, ephemeral tendril of aphotic power ran from her to the prisoner, invisible to all but those...

“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...