Blackfeather Woods nothing but the burnt edge of an unfinished history

Potema offers Atli silence as he speaks, standing in a league that is so above his own and he takes her silence as a neutral sign. He’s not sure if it’s necessarily good or bad but her teeth have yet to make contact with his throat. He still lives and draws breath, he’s still able to worship her with gaze. Her voice is like chipped ice as she speaks, the rasp of her tone is an attractive sound to him. He holds as still as he physically can at her command, Caribbean blue eye watching as she snaps a femur bone from the border’s decorations and approaches him. She explains over the bone held betwixt her jaws that she will mark him with a shadowmark — mark him as worthless. He has already suspected that she sees him as such: and really he doesn’t blame her. He is. There isn’t a promise that he hasn’t broken: he loves and leaves because it’s what Atli’s good at. His ears slick back to his skull as Potema warns him that if he makes any noise he’s gone. As she carves her shadowmark into his flesh with sharp and jagged bone: her movements uneven and with frequent pauses to change the angle of the bone.

He bites down on his tongue as the pain spreads white hot through him. His leg trembles with adrenaline and the pain…the agony as she carves up his flesh with her brand. He thinks he can feel the unbridled rage in the movements of her rudimentary carving; a part of Atli that finds the action almost intimate. The metallic taste of blood lingers upon his tongue as he presses his teeth too hard against the soft flesh and it offers him brief respite from the unnerving heat and pain that radiate from his right thigh. She finishes carving he assumes when he hears the bone clatter to the earth and the tremble and pulse of his thigh is soothed by the feel of her tongue drawing across her handiwork. His right ear twitches as she whispers between laps but her words are foreign to him and they might as well have fallen on deaf ears.

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