my heart is not a home for cowards

The waste of battle called to her, the blood a luring siren; Callanwolde's stained fur the ocean she wished to drown in. 

Arya found him after the crackle of pompous excitement ebbed. With a new bound toy to kick and prod, her family would be too distracted with perfecting their sneers to notice she'd gone to the beast.

"How does it taste?" She was shameless in how she looked at him, wondering if that dot of blood there was too coagulated to drip from his fur. "Winning. Claiming. The power of it." The impermanence of power to a slave.

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She stepped into the shadows, the murk seeping through her pale fur like cold fingers of the bloody tide. Arya didn’t fear the dark.

Those eyes of hers that stung in the light adjusted well enough in the cave, leaving the outline of Callanwolde more bull than shadow. “That sort of easy strength,” her voice echoed like a loon in mourning, “like popping a mouse’s skull. It must be intoxicating.”

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The deeper they went, the greater her appetite grew until it felt as bottomless as the caverns. Her heart fluttered with anticipation; only secrets for monsters lived in the pits. 

The beast beckoned her. She went. 

"Tell me." She was near enough that the smell of carnage encompassed her too, and for a brief moment, she saw herself with a cape of red. "Tell me what real power feels like."

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Arya had only a brief moment for the thought to exist; power was in her hands only because they believed it was. In the next moment, the air was alive. The dark cavernous belly swarmed with parasitic, chittering wings, sweeping the cave around the wolves like a gnawing sigh.

Her ears were still ringing with the echo of the beast's roar when she snapped her teeth, first in retaliation when she felt the bats brush against her fur and then with purpose.

She was clumsy and uncoordinated as those pristine teeth, sharp from underuse that came with her royal status, flashed in the dark with frustrated, fruitless bites—

Until she caught one.

Arya spat the bat out with a startled cry as hot blood pooled across her tongue. It writhed on the floor at her feet, a dark shadow squirming and squealing and bleeding. Never before had she tasted something alive or felt something squirming between her teeth. As the frenzied creatures above fled through the dark network, the Highblood stared at the dying mass beneath her with confused scrutiny as if she didn't think it had been possible. The first - the only piece of ruin orchestrated by her own jaws. 

It was wrong. It was violating; the gentle, quiet Arya lowering herself to the base level of beasts, but when the bat fell still, she realized that's what she had always been beneath her crown.

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She was panting when she turned her teeth back to the dark swarming above, invigorated by the breaking of her perfect mold.

Punishment was never befit for a Highblood, but she the skip of her frantic heart spoke of a darker desire; what did pain feel like?

Retribution came when the wing snared between her jaws hinged beneath crushed bone and the bat sank its needle teeth into her chin. Arya shook her head trying to uproot the creature, but the flecks of blood that dotted her chest were her own.

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She winced; the bat’s teeth left her chin throbbing and raw when Callanwolde yanked it free. The scent of bile and blood from the mangled carcass took up the space between the wolves until even that was overwhelmed by the beast.

His tongue, warm and sudden against the tender bite that bled beneath her lip, left a searing impression on her skin, hot enough that she thought she might burn like a dying comet in the dark. Arya leaned close. “Why didn’t you kill him?”

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Her skin prickled with goosebumps when he pressed the taste of death into her ear. “The man in the valley.”

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She stepped into him, eating the dark space he had created. “You don’t believe that.” It couldn’t be so simple; the way he rippled and swelled atop the dark stranger had to be for something deeper. Something selfish.

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A smile was slow to stretch across her stained lips—

a king of grit and bone was still a king.

Arya laughed then, a soft, breathless sound. “You want more than that.” Her voice tasted like blood, her eyes dazed with the stirring of something primal and dominating within her. Was this power? “Why don’t you take it?”

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The beast’s snarl and her startled yelp echoed like laughter in the cave, taunting her ruse of power that was so easily snatched away.

Arya’s instincts reacted like crossed, frayed wires within her— unable to decipher whether the curl of her tail felt right or the flash of her teeth.

Her heart hammered against him when she met his eye.

“I can have anything I want,” There was a shake to her voice that made her gnash her molars, “that’s why I’m here.”

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