style="padding: 2px; position: relative; left: 120px; top: 9px; width: 244px; height: 433px; z-index: 2; overflow: auto;">
His mind moved with the sinister precision of sharp, black obsidian. The hollow eyes were impassive as he watched the small thing. It was a snake’s cold gaze that watched the female, a snake’s coiled body that rose up to strike. But it was the pied brute that held his poise, that was patient and merciful, the pied brute that laughed silently with a terrible, mirthless laughter that slithered through the gelid corridors of his mind. The smaller thing was afraid. It was weak. It was undeserving and yet he had given his attention, his protection, without a price. No, he would take his price. It but needed to come. He had but to decide what this thing could give to him. The gift he would take would be insignificant, would be worthless to him. But he would take it nonetheless. He would take what she had to give. And he would take it because she was too weak to refuse him and he could overcome her. And because he was kind, because he was merciless.
“The opened you,” the dangerously suave tenor continued to repeat, as if in the repetition he would awaken the memories she visibly tried to contain. The cool façade was unmoving in the following silence that fell heavily like black tar. “The luperci stabbed me with a knife,” that poisonous tenor continued with slow, menacing words. He turned his sinewed form to expose the place in his right rib. Perhaps she would see the deep, heavy scar that rattled like a snake beneath the white fur. Perhaps, in the darkness, she would not be able to see it. A cold sneer played across his lips indiscernibly, like the cold moonlight upon deep, black waters. The Dahlian thing responded to similarity, and she would see their stories to be similar. But the pied brute did not think that they were similar. He did not think that they were alike. He had not cowered in fear. He had not died. Like the Darkness he had persisted even after the flash of day. And like the Darkness, he would continue to persist even when this wretched thing died.
Gradually, he had slowed their pace. Rock rose up at the Dahlian thing’s flank, a place in which now he slowly and easily cornered her. Those unnatural, eerie movements ceased suddenly, although when he had stopped was unnervingly unclear. The larger body of the crow wolf blocked any passage forward or backward. She had only one place to go, and that was to him. “You hate them,” he repeated again, but the cold tenor had grown hard like the obsidian glass spewed from the depths of the earth. “Did you kill them?” The emotionless sound was quiet now, those black orbs holding her with their intensity. “Did you destroy them for having destroyed you?” The sadistic soul echoed with its hollowed body. He knew what he wanted. He wanted her to change, to shift and become what she did not want to become. To become what she already was. And to suffer knowing that.