Northstar Vale i miss you in the dawn & most of all, your fingerprints, everywhere (mtr.)

he had reverted to the cold golem he once was; mahler could not more articulate his desires than he could hate the woman before him, as much as she might believe him capable of such things. they were alone here upon their separate islands, even as hers feinted toward him. 
marigold had been a tame and biddable creature, with no fire in her. only the hearthglow of home and motherhood, and it had comforted mahler in myriad ways. they had been too young to know the whims of the world; marigold had given the gargoyle her heart and brought forth his children.
a breath snuffed out by the impassive breath of some force beyond himself she had been in the end, and if he had known others with his body since his wife, mahler had forgotten them, their faces, how they had felt, what sensations they had fed into his flesh. and the urge was slow to rise these past years, for man though he was, he found a thousand reasons why he must not let himself be consumed.
a hawk performed a dive above them, the shadow of its wings flickering against the small shade cast by the canopy, and mahler was moved from his reverie. diaspora held those who loved him, would perhaps even concede to him in their own desires, slake his own. but that sort of joining held a promise the shadowpriest could not make, could not fulfill. he would not let another suffer in the same way that his kill-brother had done, inasmuch as he had loved stigmata.
with aurëwen — mahler lowered his broad scarred muzzle to touch the back of her neck, sweeping lips to the place between the sharp jut of her shoulders, the milieu which truly beckoned to the lusts that he could no longer swallow. the dove held no expectation of him that she could see, no longstanding quest behind her marred gaze, only the sacrilege of their bodies claiming one another in this watery heat.
and so with only a vague reluctance mahler breathed the scent of her tendriled paleness, pillaring her prone form beneath him with all four legs astraddle her cardinal points, and sought to feel with his kiss at last the place where the blood pulsed in her slight neck. weak despite all his slander, despite his pride, despite the reasoning he had given a vaunted role within his logical mind.
grief churned in him; diaspora must not go without his strength, and in aurëwen he might find a place for the pain he could not bid depart his soul.