Snowforest Taiga you were laid in verse, living on a promised word

for @Kanuux but after he posts aw

the sky was clear tonight. cold and bright, each star pricked against the dark like an torchlights. gjalla lay on her side, chin propped against her foreleg with her gaze fixed upwards to the scatter of stars.

they wheeled cold and bright across the void, and for a long while, she did nothing but count them. she had counted the constellations twice already, then the tallies of the dead. individual spirits of sivra's tapestry.

her breath misted white, curling upward to dissolve into nothing, wind singing into her ears. she didn’t move for a long time, not until the cold caught up and forced a long exhale from her lungs. she puffs a breath, hums out to no one. “well?” she muttered to the stars as if it might answer her. “what do you see?”

kanuux had chosen the march after all.

step by step. ridgeline to ridgeline.

the sea had been left behind him. salt and seal and the deep groan of ice. now only the press of soil beneath his paws, the clutch of trees, the chatter of birds he did not care for. he told himself this was the way of men who sought wives, who left the lodges and the smoke of the hearth.

taktu had followed. he should not have. sharadoii women had been spoken of, sharp with feathers and rites, yet his lodgebrother had turned his paws south. kanuux had thought him weaker for it, but the sight of him still pressed a quiet warmth into his chest.

his scars burned in the night air, twin rakes across his temple, the torn ring about his eye. the leopard seal had not killed him, though it might have. the ice had not claimed him, though many it did. and so he stood now in this valley, a man too large for the trees, too silent for the streams.

he thought of women he did not yet know. wives to fill the winter lodge, children to carry the names. he thought of the old way, the right way. his father’s words: a man without kin was a ghost.

icy eyes turned across the dark, catching the faint stir of movement; elk shifting in the grass, caribou hooves striking stone. food, hides, wealth. they would be driven, corralled, herded as he had done with the seal at the floes.

the wind curled sour brine against his nostrils. he did not speak. he rarely did. but in his silence there was weight enough.

kanuux of the big shoulders. kanuux of the long scars. he would find what he came for.

a shift in the night drew her ears back, a fresh scent curling on the wind—not one she recognized.

gjalla rolled from her side to her feet in one fluid motion, the fur of her cheeks rolling head lifting, mane spilling across her shoulders, and the stars she’d been addressing were forgotten in favor of the figure cresting the slope.

golden. big brute, broad across the shoulders and built like a bear, crawling along the horizon line. He did not skulk or hide, walking bold as if the ground itself belonged to him.

she says nothing when he comes within earshot. her stare stayed on his like a gargoyle, body posturing for defense. no friend of hers.

a woman draped in midnight, carved strong, terrible, beautiful. kanuux’s gut twisted as if hunger had taken him, though it was no hunger for meat.

he slowed, but he did not hide. scars caught the starlight— temple raked, eye-ring torn, shoulder scored deep— each mark a story carved into flesh, each one speaking louder than tongue could. his bulk carried forward, frost and sunlight wrapped in hide, too large for the slope, too heavy for the trees, yet moving as though the earth opened itself for him.

her stare held him fast. sharp as spearpoint, unflinching. a gargoyle, a guardian. his chest rumbled low, a sound neither greeting nor threat but the raw truth of him, deep in the marrow.

he dipped his head once, not submission. not to her, not to any. but a recognition of what she was.

he said nothing. he spoke with the set of his shoulders, the weight of his gaze, the power bound in silence.

and in the marrow of him, twisted hard against bone, burned the want: this midnight woman was an aptitude of beauty. he desired her as he desired breath.

gjalla stood rooted in her place, unshaken by the bulk of the wolf who came down the slope like some fallen sun— an icarus, golden and scarred. heavy with a history she did not yet know.

her breath steamed in the cold, drawn slow and measured. he dipped his head, and though it was not hers to claim, she received it all the same. her stare carved into him like shards of ice—unrelenting and pitiless.

a beat passes. one to two, two to three. at last, words—"speak."

his ears cant backward, a flicker of confusion breaking through the cold, sculpted calm of his face. he tastes the air between them, heavy with her scent; dark pine and wild hide, smoke and snow. it coils in his chest like fire smothered beneath ice.

the woman stands as the sea cliffs do—unyielding. she commands by breath alone. he feels it, the weight of her eyes, the way her silence threatens to carve something out of him.

for a heartbeat, the only sound is the wind between them—whispering through his fur, catching the edges of his scars. and then, quieter, lower, something raw slips from him—

beautiful, he says, as if the admission costs him.

and still, his eyes hold her. glacial, storm-bright, unblinking.

a seal hunter stripped bare before the night.

moonlight shoulders into her profile, silver catching on the high ridge of cheekbone, the disciplined line of jaw. she regards him with the poise of a crowned beast—eyeing him tentatively like a creature carved from the deep, a sea so deep that the waters change color.

beautiful. he says it with a voice strained, as if it accosts him to admit it. the thought brings a soft smile to her lips, and a slow breath spills from her nostrils in a puff of white. if she is flustered by the statement, she does not show it.

when she finally moves, it’s only the tilt of her chin. a shift precise as a sword angled to catch the light, an invitation closer. come. let me see you.

the invitation is a hook buried deep, and he answers without word. frost crackles beneath his weight as he closes the distance, the low breath in his throat thick with want and warning both. his size devours the space between them; shoulders broad as stone, fur catching the moon’s blue pall.

she smells of danger, of dark water and promise. his scars burn beneath her gaze.

kanuux circles her once, slow, a predator tracing the edge of something divine. the air bends around them—ice, smoke, heat. he lowers his head to her shoulder, breath ghosting over her fur, the sound that leaves him low and rough, half-growl, half-prayer.

woman of dark, he rumbles, the words shaped like ritual, thick with his broken tongue. you… not fear sea. not fear me.

his muzzle trails the line of her jaw, claiming both scent and sight. then i take you.

and in that vow there is no softness, no plea—only the terrible certainty of a man who has crossed too many white horizons and found, at last, something worth the hunt.

stars blink overhead as his shadow folds over hers, hulking and vast, and she is unmoved from it. power answers to power, and it is that power the bridges the gap of language. a few words are familiar already—some similar to lanzadoii, and yet she knows he is not among them.

when he leans in close, a golden nose beneath her jaw, the world narrows to only them. his words are rough but reverent, a hymn broken on mortal tongue.

it is not courtship as she knows it; it lacks the gentleness—though not the intimacy. a creature forged by hunger and horizon, perhaps what he finds in her is not salvation but a mirror, something just as vast, just as willing to consume as he is.

he would not have her refusal. in rough lanzadoii, in words she hopes he understands, she agrees—"so take."

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the night split open around them.

her breath, his heat, the pale shiver of moonlight caught between their bodies. kanuux did not speak—there was no need. the dark woman’s words had already given permission, and in his world, that was enough.

his teeth brushed the line of her throat, a promise and a warning both. the low growl that rose from his chest was not anger, but want—deep, bone-heavy, old as the tide. he took as he was born to take: not cruel, but certain. the sea had shaped him for this—claim, crash, retreat.

their shadows tangled until the stars dimmed, until the wind drowned every sound but breath and salt. and when dawn came, soft and gray, the place beside her was empty.

only the scent of brine and fur remained, leading down toward the shore where kanuux moved again—his massive shape cutting through the fog, heading for the ice.

the seal-hunter was gone to his hunt.

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the night split open around them. a breath, a shadow, the faint tremor of moonlight caught where their bodies met. the sound that left him was low and ancient, invading her senses until it echoed in her mind. no words passed between them—they were not needed.

teeth grazed skin in something that was neither cruelty nor gentleness. he moved like the tide—claiming space and receding with it still tucked in his grasp until his touch became a vow, silent and searing itself into her skin.

she is spent by the end of it, body limp beneath him with his mouth pressed to her cheek.