Stavanger Bay here, i killed this for you ♥

This post took a weird turn. Sorry! ♥

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Like his siblings before him, Szymon was a Cairn; and with that birthright came a relentless greediness — a hunger that never quit. In Szymon it mainly manifested itself through his attitude toward Doe. He had proclaimed his ownership of her in a way that no other male could boast; they had raised a daughter together and been blessed by the Sea Herself; and perhaps that should have been enough to satisfy him. For the most part, it was — Szymon was happy for the first time in his young life, and he guarded that happiness with ardor that bordered on obsession. Still, he recognized a growing restlessness within himself, new and uncharted, to which he could attach no name or reason. While his brother recovered from wounds won protecting Deirdre, Szymon prowled the shoreline and the territory borders, determined that the Cairn legacy be protected and upheld. He would always be softhearted; it was a trait he had no power to fight. He had proven, however, that he was no pushover — except when it came to his girls.

Perhaps therein lay the rub.

Szymon was a willing supplicant to Doe’s every whim. He was capable of providing for her and comforting her, grooming and feeding her — but he was incapable of controlling her in a way that her submissive nature demanded she be controlled. He was not the Leviathan, who ruled with fangs of roughhewn sea glass; nor was he Furiosa, who compelled and seduced. He watched greedily as she quieted in his embrace, his golden eyes alight with a feeling he now knew to be love — a feeling that she had awoken in him. They gleamed as she turned hungrily to her meal; like any good Italian grandmother, Szymon was immediately satisfied by the fact that she was eating. He watched, bemused, as she removed the beast’s heart and nudged it toward him with her own measure of Italian grandmotherliness — mangia mangia! Growling his thanks, he gripped the heavy muscle between his paws and ate — and oddly enough, her gesture was not completely lost on him. “What need do I have of this?” he asked, not unkindly, his bloodied lips and paws betraying how much he’d enjoyed the meal. “I already have yours.”

Even Cairns could be cheesy sometimes.

His grin was roguish as he licked the blood from his muzzle and helpfully leaned forward to bathe Doe’s face in turn, thinking nothing of the fact that he maybe still had strings of sinew caught between his molars. He wondered anew at the strange scent that he’d detected in the birthing den and, to a lesser extent, in the territory itself and in Doe’s fur. Wary of inciting her ire as he had the day of Qilaq’s Drop, now that she was acting more like herself, he again stilled his errant tongue and captured her with tenderness. With long sweeps of his tongue and fussy nips and nibbles along her spine, he continued to groom her, reassuring her in the only way he could that all was well and that Skellige would recover. An idea occurred to him. “Will you take a walk with me later?” he asked, formally courting her. He would continue to do so every day of his life.

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