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“And what has the future told you?” The brute watched as she came closer, accepting that false invitation, obeying that command. Always, whether there was acceptance or not, the end of another’s path in his embrace was the same. With the impressionable young, it could be different. With the impregnable females, different yet. This male, unlike much of the wretched males of these lands, was not necessarily a sexual predator. What he sought from the life of others was something far deeper: a taste of their life, a taste of their soul, to devour life and destroy it. And he had that power—like a god he could take life or give it, and with his loins he could create it. He took control of that power, he believed, and so had placed himself within circle of gods, crowned by the tenebrous divinity that he followed now, that had showed to him the blood that now ran in his daughter’s veins. And through that causality of his life, the male wandered through this unfulfilled life as if he controlled it, as if he were a god. Transcended.
Upon this light female there were many seasons, more so than most he had encountered within these lands. But she was not aged. But it was not that which allowed him to consider her worthy of his attention. He sensed, as he had sensed in Sabeen and the male that shared his daughter’s pack, that potential. This female was not as wretched as the things with which she surrounded herself, but she was not pitiful like those who followed the darkness falsely, disgustingly. The pied brute had refined his darkness, like polished obsidian that held a hidden barb shrouded in tenebrous clouds. His hands reached out to grasp her approaching form, bringing her to a dangerous proximity. That movement had been strange, surreal. It had been unnaturally fluid and swift, and they brought her body near to his, on hand at her waist and the other at her neck. He did not ask permission to touch her—he did not need it. It was she who required permission. His nose ran along the curvature of her neck, breathing in not her scent but the scent of her blood—as if he could smell it through her fur and skin. “I can show you the darkness—the true nature of the night.” That was all. His maw ceased to move as those fathomless orbs shifted, his narrow eyes taking a sidelong glance up to her face. He did not desire her body. Now he desired only her blood.