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Maybe in the Dampwoods again?
500+
The pied brute had left Dahlia with another injured soul. And such spilt blood would not be lost upon his daughter. The black mind laughed with a black mockery. She was the pack’s warrior, their protector. And yet already two had been left to his mercy. And their lives could have been taken. But they were gifts. Their lives were his gift to Cwmfen just as that coyote boy’s had been. For that, for their lives, she should be thankful. Even that vigilante—Onus—had been spared. Lovers. Those empty orbs glittered with insidious amusement. That lowly coyote had not even been able to defeat him, had been at his mercy, and his daughter gave herself to him? And that girl, Mati she had been called. That had been his warning. That girl, so similar and yet lesser than his woad marked daughter, had been the vigilante’s warning. He sneered, that cold smirk sliding upon his malicious maw like a slithering snake. They were weak. They were undeserving of his presence, and yet he had given it to them. He had tasted their blood. He was generous.
His feet dipped into the shadows as his form slipped into the darkness of the woods. The black orbs scanned the world about him—this silent place was the only place that was not infested by the weakness of these creatures. Like a virus, he had said, they spread and multiplied across the land. But he had planted his seeds, he had shown what the darkness could do. And when he had taken from Cwmfen nic Graine mac Corvus what was his, he would leave this disgusting place that even the gods of light turned from. And his darkness would purge the land of weakness, of ignorance and idiocy. He would remain. He would be eternal. His darkness, like the darkness of these woods, would be perpetual, eternal. Undying.
Once before he had met another here. It was a familiar place—but it was no longer raining. The female. Sabeen Thames. She had been a creature ready to embrace the dark. And he had rejected her—she had not been ready. The Korean sneered. He wondered, and his thoughts were spared for this one lone female. And he wondered if she had learned, if she were ready. He paused in that clearing. The dead trees of early spring had filled with the green of leaves, darkened now by the night. And the clearing was darkened by the shade of the trees and they shuddered and sighed in his presence. The Korean was still, watching the depths of the dark as if expecting something. And from the tainted heavens, the pied Raven descended to him, landing into the hands of the crow wolf as the beak whispered things to him. And then he sent the bird away, dismissing the creature. And the clearing was silent once more, and he stood in that lithic stillness, ever as that effigy of a long forgotten god of darkness.