Stavanger Bay pain is a ritual we are required to conduct in

i couldn't decide if i wanted to make his read only or not. i'll leave it up as a potential thread for two weeks & if no one replies by november 19th i'll just archive is as a read only. xD

Beneath the tangle of ash trees Kerberos slumbers: tucked beneath a thick tangle that forms a bleached, bone-like cage around him. It is a tight squeeze but he feels indefinitely safer contained, beneath the reach of others and with others kept at bay from his reach.

Kerberos’ dreams are not pleasant.

He dreams of Sos: the screams of a thousand burning souls loud and panic-inducing. He shudders in his sleep, the branches scraping together in an eerie manner, as terror threatens to consume him. Yet, he is calmed by the knowledge that he, in his own right, is a terror. A monster can’t be terrified, not when he contributes, when he bends to the Dark Father’s will without much resistance. Darkness is consuming and Kerberos knows as it threatens the light that it can swallow it whole if he would let it. Still, some stubborn, moral part of the Aok refuses to let Atka slip from him. The Mother of Light’s grip is not nearly so strong now, but she persists and he tries to fight. It’s a struggle and he knows soon he will break and he will slip and he will sate that hunger within him. That terrible and aching hunger.

He dreams of the night he allowed the Dark Father in: when he opened the door to the civil war within his mind. Desperation had been a such a good motivation. As famine had struck his home and pack the dead had begun to outnumber the living and there were not enough of them, and certainly not enough strong enough to continue the impossible task burying them. His youngest children: still suckling at the breast of their weak and dying mother had not been the first the famine had claimed but they had been the first he’d eaten. His three older children and him had done what had been a necessary evil: disposing of the dead in foul cannibalism. He hates himself for it just as much as he has accepted it as apart of him. He is the monster now. He is everything he had never aspired to be as a sullen and self-driven outcast. He had built himself to greatness once …and now nothing remains of that man.

There is only the all consuming darkness and that hunger that can only be sated by blood and flesh of his own species: that gnawing and terrible hunger.

Kerberos shutters awake and lets out a soft. He tries to find comfort in the fact that’s been attempting to abstain but the more he denies it the more urgent the desire becomes. He tries to resist: for Atka, for the small boy he’d once been who would have rather death than the become what he is now. Still, Kerberos reluctantly accepts what he has done, what he has become to some extent. It’s impossible not to: he cannot ever go back, cannot ever stop feeding the beast that he turned to in his darkest of hours. In the siphoning hours of dawn he tries not to think about it and attempts to assuage his hunger with paltry seagulls. They pale and are flavorless in comparison: their salty meat tastes little better than ash in his mouth. Still, he gnaws on them and pretends it is enough as the salty brine whips through his fur the taste of the sea, familiar and welcoming, lingers upon his tongue.