Dream, Memory, and Blood (Olkhon Island | Baikal Lake, Siberia)

[Thalia]

She didn’t offer reassurance; he was right that he didn’t belong in this place. Whether her exclusion was intentional on his part she was not sure, but it was poignant all the same. “I feel strange in here,” she agreed, “like a fast-moving current is tugging all my thoughts in a direction I'm not sure it's safe to go.” The latter she murmured mostly to herself, glad to finally rid herself of the confession as she ruffled papers in an ineffectual, distracted manner. Indecipherable diagrams and a language she could not read elucidated, well, nothing. One scrawled symbol she did recognise, but its gentle squeeze upon her heart felt like a warning. She could slip away easily here, disappear into an oblivion she was not certain she could return from.

The blood pounded in her veins, thrumming in her temples. The allure of it was tempting; just one more small step on an already strange journey. Tempting, and terrifying.

Her hand jerked back from the table when she realised power was roiling out of her in disturbing waves. Nothing happened but a world that dimmed when she abruptly dropped her hold on it, but for a moment her heart skittered about in the cage of her ribs. Tristan spoke into that surprised and silent horror, dispelling it like mist, and she blinked, realising he had retreated all the way to the hearth like he claimed stake to a lonely island of one. She hadn’t considered dreaming as a prospect, actually; her fears had been more cutting, and perhaps more mundane. The rumble of his cleared throat and consequent grin loosened a laugh from her, and she slipped back into a moment that was only here and now. How he made it all sound so ordinary; it soothed something in her she hadn’t known needed soothing.

Thalia pressed away from the desk and its secrets. The blanket slid about her shoulders, its pattern catching like starlight, and she drew it closer. Beneath its folds her thumb skimmed the cool, damp skin of her chest, but it just felt like skin, as it always had. “The beautiful thing about questions is that we don't have answers,” she mused. Patricus had been evasive in the face of her care for him when he’d spoken those same words, but she agreed with the sentiment nonetheless. Days felt like a lifetime, but the changes wrought since she had run from him down the church steps had been monumental. She wondered where he was now.

Padding steps finally drew her to the warmth of the strange flames, and the man who surveyed its fiery kingdom. Curiosity pulled Thalia’s gaze up at the giant structure of the surrounding hearth as she sank to sit beside him. “I'm not looking for answers. I rather like the mystery,” she admitted. “But the life I had before… it was a good life, Tristan, but it was not enough.” The blanket pooled in loops and waves about her lap as she settled, crooked legs stretched out to the fire. Her ankle was an angry red where the tentacle had wrapped, but it was a negligible nuisance, because, “Ohh,” she breathed, distracted in an emphatic moment of bliss. The heat tingled a flush of warmth back into numb skin, reminding her she did indeed have toes. Contentment flooded from that small comfort, liquefying muscles that had given past protesting weariness. She had not stopped since her feet touched Olkhon soil, not knowing if she was chasing or running. She still wasn’t sure.

His words sank like stones into the depths, weighty with burden. She let them settle around her quietly, solemn as she listened. It sounded utterly fanciful, but she never questioned its truth.

The wolves left their legacy in his eyes and senses. It seemed probable the trolls also left a mark of their own, and she wondered what deep shadows it must cast for him to be so resigned to his warring fate. In the cabin she had thought his use of ‘monster’ was a reclamation, an easy comfort in his own strange skin that had fascinated her, but now she was not so sure it was born of confidence. He told her it was better to accept, yet she wondered at how he seemed to hold the moniker like the sword of damocles above his own head. She knew nothing of trolls, even less than she knew of wolves, which was little enough, and so she took his solemnity straight to heart. Yet she might easily dismiss any of those aspects before she’d label them as monstrous – as easily as she saw a mother before she saw a monster when she looked at her drawings of the creature.

As she drifted into that contemplation she leaned to rest against him. If it was like leaning into the unyielding rock of a mountain, she did not seem to mind; she let that trust speak what words would only offer as hollow comfort. Her body relaxed and her breathing deepened to the soothe of rest, though she didn’t close her eyes; she was still watching the curling flames. He was warm underneath her cheek; blood and flesh, not ink and paper.

It would be a simple thing to tell him all the ways he was not monstrous, but he could not be blind to those kindnesses in himself, and they seemed as obvious to her as the point of a fixed horizon. She’d never wanted to be soothed like that: fears dismissed because they held no power over the comforter, the matter closed. It was never you’re not crazy she yearned for Aylin to say in her own darkest times; Thalia was too aware of her own oddities, too enamoured of them even when they made her afraid. What she longed for her sister to say was: it’s okay if you are.

It was better to seek peace than battle yourself forever, she thought. Though that wasn’t a gentle journey either. And it wasn’t her decision to make for him. But she wondered if it was not comfort he really needed, but reassurance that it was okay to explore something he thought he should not want.

“What do they say to you?”

[Sierra]

Sierra woke up and leaned against the tree but time still slunk by like molasses. She was getting worried. Had they drowned? Did they get eaten by this creature that had harmed Thalia?

Sierra started pacing with Never at her heels.

[[ just reminding myself Sierra is in this thread too ]]

[Thalia]

[[The place they’re stuck in is a vacuole and time runs differently in it (why everything inside appears super ancient but isn’t dusty). Not much time should pass for Sierra outside. That’s just fyi. I think I already told you but it was probably ages ago and may have been chat rather than pm, and it’s a useful note to have in-thread anyway. I hadn’t forgotten the wolfdream she was in with Howl and Sure Foot btw but wasn’t sure what else to add to it]]

[Tristan]

When Thalia sank into him, Tristan sank into something of relaxation. An entrapment, but Tristan did not fight it. He hoped his warmth soothed her. For all the calm of the moment, the tension of their talk kept Tristan from lulling too far.

He wasn’t sure what to do with Thalia now that she rested against his chest. In the dream, he was much more suave, but such was the way of dreams. He let the moments flow, but while awake, he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.

A rumble rolled in his throat upon her question. Not because he prickled at the probing, but because he disliked talking about the trolls. “They want me to break their prisons and let their souls wander free.” If the trolls were released from their cages, they would wreck havoc on the wolf dream and devour those who wandered it.

“They taunt me too,” he half-smiled at that. The names they called him weren’t wrong. Creative, though.

He looked around the place, “Did you find what you wanted?” He asked, still not sure what it was they sought.

[[OOC: a shitty post. Sorry about that. Wasn't sure what to do and kept putting it off. Then kept waiting for a brilliant idea to come to mind. Then nothing and the brilliance slowly diminished to absolute nothing. This is what is left over. Hah.]]

[Thalia]

“They must have done something very bad to deserve such a prison,” she murmured. “Else it’s a very cruel punishment, never being free,” Her voice was musing, lulled with the promise of sleep. If Tristan did not deign it right to release them, Thalia didn’t argue with the logic or morality; rather, she trusted his judgement, and considered only that to be forced into the role of a jailor was a heavy burden to bear. Especially a jailor of kin. Her eyelids drooped a little as she watched the flames, thinking of the beating heart he had wrenched from a stone pillar. He spoke so calmly now, but in the drawings his expression had been tormented. In the drawings he had swallowed that heart like it was an inescapable part of him. “Do you believe your blood marks you for the same fate? Is that what troubles you?”

Tristan had answered so far, and each time it felt like brushing silt from the discovery of sunken treasure, but he did not relish the conversation. Huddled so close, Thalia was aware of the tension built in his muscles, even if he had relaxed some in the fire’s warmth, and yet the words spilled free before she considered if they were wise. Her curiosity was as insistent as the kiss of waves upon shore. But it was gentle too, taking away only what was offered. She found his silences as fascinating as the things he chose to share, and in the closeness of the moment, she minded neither response. But she did not want him to move away.

“I ask too many questions,” she admitted, sleepily rubbing the side of her face in an effort to rouse herself. She had been told as much, usually in chagrin, a thousand times over. And even so she wanted to ask what they taunted him with, and why he sounded so resigned to its truth. To ask why he had called her a monster too, back at the cabin. But she quieted herself, for when she looked up, the study’s shifting light made him almost appear like basalt stone himself, motionless as he was – and as unyielding. Her injured hand lifted to rest against his chest, half expecting reality to blur and phase and crack no matter his assurance that all this was real.

But his skin was warm; far warmer than the cool press of her fingers. Deja vu hummed with the touch; she had drawn almost exactly this, and more than once, but a drawing could not convey how solid it felt, or how alive. The rise and fall of his breath was steady. The rhythm of his heart pressed against her palm.

“If it didn’t beat with troll-blood too, you would never have had a reason to come here,” she said after a moment. The revelation captured her in the very same moment she said it aloud for them both to hear. Because no-one else would have come here. Even Patricus only paused long enough to instill his warning, despite the mountains he moved to find her in the first place. “We never would have met. Not in this world, and maybe not even in the dreaming one. I would still be bleeding out on those rocks. Or tumbling lost through the maze of this place alone. Nothing of this moment would exist.” Thalia was soft and earnest in her evaluation. Her knees pulled up close as a shiver travelled through her, not cold or fear, but the enormity of the world around them distilled down to this one place and time. She wanted him to know that it meant something to her.

A symphony of feeling filled her up and overflowed in the openness of her expression, and she was content in the wonder and fear of it. When Tristan’s gaze scoured the room, Thalia’s attention obediently followed, washed afresh in the surreality of it all. She understood the question to mean her halfhearted flutter through the contents of the table, but his phrasing pulled at something else entirely. She felt it flush through her, and she didn’t fight it. If need pulled her onwards, beholden to mysteries she could not hope to understand but could neither ignore, she had never paused to consider what it was she actually wanted.

“I don’t know. I could ask you the same thing,” she answered, faint amusement twinkling for how she suspected he knew just as little about his own motivations and desires as she did hers. As she spoke she leaned closer, artist’s fingers tracing marks on his face that did not exist outside of her drawings and a life she didn’t remember. The glitter of amusement warmed to something else. From the cliff of his cheekbone, her thumb skirted the swell of his lip, and then she kissed him.

[Tristan]

The trolls are evil, Tristan wanted to reply, but something held his tongue. 
“They are greedy, devouring creatures. Banished long ago from civilization. It was said that they charmed their prey to isolation with beguiling lures. Then they would kill and eat those that fell to their traps. They are also tricksters. They would throw avalanches just for the joy of crushing the innocent. They stir up the gods to anger who would fling their wrath unjustly at the people instead of the trolls. They are enormous and strong as stone when they want to be. They flee the sunlight and turn to stone when they die. Three trolls were known to drag a ship into the bay at Reynisfjara. Everyone on board the ship drowned as they jumped overboard to escape. The trolls are cruel,” he said, reflecting upon the person who raised him. He’d not always thought of his grandfather as cruel, but that was only when he’d assumed Tristan was like him. The moment the wolf within began to wake, it was like Tristan never existed.

“We tell stories of the Yule lads, trolls who reward well-behaved children with treats at christmas. Tales to charm the innocent into thinking them harmless and fun. There are so many other things that we take for granted. The Land Wights, whale-wizards, griffins and dragons, elves and Huldufolk. They all have their place.”

These things were a part of the fabric of his home as the rocks, crevices, waterfalls and volcanoes. Yet no where in the stories were there wolves. The animal didn’t even exist on the island. Nor did snakes or spiders. They never made it to their devilish shores. What was a wolf to them but a fairy tale? What was when the blood of mortal enemies found themselves sharing the soul of the same being?

“My fate will be worse than the trolls,” he answered. Because even if he ended his life bound to the rocks, the war within would never cease. He closed his eyes like blocking their surroundings would hide his thoughts. It was why he wanted to atone for what he was while he still walked the earth. He had a chance to help those otherwise without help. Maybe the gods would show mercy when the hour of judgment came. Thalia was right in that regard.
“I do not regret my being. I will prove to the gods that I am worthy. Perhaps they will pity me,” he said. A hint of a smile grew beneath the wisps of his beard and he pat her head in mixed token of appreciation and affection.

Her tender kiss was unexpected. He’d tasted those lips in the dream, and it felt like another life. In the waking world, she was flesh and blood. She was warm and vulnerable. It was like they were completely different people. 

He returned the affection with guarded gentility. He didn’t want to bruise her tender arms with a strong grip holding on for life. Nor did he want to scare her with intensity of desire that he’d known in the dream. Then there was Sierra, who waited outside in bond and trust. There was no excuse of a soul wandering unchecked in the dream as kissing another woman had in the waking world. He’d made no promises to monogamy, but after their recent reconciliation, a sense of guilt crept in. But neither did he stop the kissing. Thalia was sweet and strong, a mother-goddess of nurturing vitality. And for all that he was, Tristan was also a man.

[Thalia]

Listening to him talk was like being guided by the steady hands of a riverbank. Thalia did not even understand all the words he used, but it tumbled images about in her head like the flipped pages of a storybook. Victors tell the stories, she wanted to say, but did not desire to interrupt the flow of his drumbeat voice or the deep and ancient resolution of his heritage. Tristan spoke with such certainty that she never questioned it as truth, however it might have sounded in other circumstances. But it wasn't the curiosity and awe she had felt when Nox had told her how her drawing of the ijiraq was real, tearing like a veil from her eyes to reveal a strange and frightening new world. It was the stir of something older, something forgotten, and the understanding of it came upon her far more gently.

For Thalia had always known that this Other world was real.

When she looked back it was to a good childhood, but it was one riddled through with holes. Her entire life she’d plugged such absences with mundane explanations, until truth and fiction were indistinguishable. In that way her life was erased and rebuilt a thousand times, the cycle repeated, until she blurred all those odd edges of herself into something that passed for normal. Apart from her drawings at least, and those she had simply hidden from everyone but her sister. Sometimes she still couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what was not; was not sure of the things she had really seen. Like Yana.

Gods how much of her life had she already forgotten?

Would she forget this too?

Talk of fate paused to shiver something cold in her, and she didn’t want to know why. The Sisters guarded their work jealously, and if a sliver of thread could be spied of the tapestry ahead, it was usually only enough to loop a noose. Nothing good ever came from that glimpse into the future. A lesson Thalia was beginning to learn for herself.

Soon after she wasn’t thinking any of that at all, though. She certainly did not regret Tristan’s being, either.

She’d imagined he might crack like stone, or disperse as a constellation scattered cruelly to the night sky. But if this was all the throes of her dying mind, she desired to pass happy rather than afraid of what was to come. The warmth of his mouth convinced her quickly enough that this was real, though. His skin was weatherworn beneath her fingertips, the kind of detail a sketch omitted. It sped her heart. She wondered if he might recoil; probably not unkindly, but like she’d done something entirely inappropriate. He had not given any indication of interest in her that way. But it wasn’t why she kissed him.

She kissed him because he was so unfathomably strange and unapologetic for it, and it was a world she wanted to find a place inside. She kissed him because she believed soulfully in cross-roads and small, insignificant destinies, and this one filled her with a vital appreciation for the here-and-now. She kissed him because she wanted a memory that would not fade when they returned to the brightly structured world above.

He responded with affection as softly as summer rain, unexpected and pleasant both. Thalia let it soak her through. Letting go was easy for her. The gift of acceptance blossomed in her a vitality for living, and she was unguarded in tenderness, in the giving or in the seeking.

“The gods are wrong, and we do not need their pity,” she told him before the words were lost. A fierce current lay underneath, but it was shared through sweeter breaths and the secrets of brushed lips. None deserved pity as their due. Everyone deserved their time anew and washed clean; not even blood had a right to stain so deep. But cruelty did not weigh on balanced scales. If a dire fate awaited, as she did not doubt, then the sustenance to withstand could only come from living fully and well while the chance remained. “You are worthy, Vanagandyr,” she reminded softly.

Temperance guided the sweetness of his kiss, but he did not stop either. Thalia didn’t remember the dream, but she had not woken up from it unaffected. Those feelings warmed in her with rootless abandon, even as Tristan was as careful of her a butterfly alighted on the tip of his finger. If his touch trailed it was as though he thought the callouses themselves might leave bruises on her cheeks, but her skin beneath the blanket’s cocoon was warm and still-damp and electric, and she had never been the sort to consider fear before curiosity. The bruises already existing testified to that.

Languorous with distraction she shifted, until like waves eroding rocks to smooth pebbles she found herself in the seat of his lap. Thalia wasn’t shy in the seeking, but if she was a force of nature it was a malleable one. His beard tickled a smile to her lips. Fingers trailed the back of his neck but did not seek to cage. She could feel the heat of the flames against her back, even through the blanket cascading across her shoulders, but it was warmer in the space between them. The light made beacons of his eyes and fathomless depths of hers.

“Live with me,” was all she said, somewhere between urge and question. She would led him by the hand, like the fragrant rush of a river, but she would not take what he was not prepared to give.

[Tristan]

As a child, Tristan chased wights and fairy folk along the shores of the fjord. His family’s cabin was isolated in the westfjords, a part of Iceland cut off from an already isolated island. Only the hardiest of folk resided in the westfjords. It was the perfect place for those of trollblood.

As Tristan grew, his uncle sent him to school in the city for part of the year. It was an all boy’s school. It was a poor place to closet up a bunch of teenage boys with little to do except play football and run amuck. Tristan rarely dated. He attended the dances but often remained on the edges of merriment.

His ignorance was not completely physical. When Tristan came of age and confronted his uncle’s treachery, Tristan fled to Norway. He took a job in an isolated sea vessel and spent much of his time as a fisherman at sea. Other than his pup, his companions were brief, heated affairs that ended almost the moment they began.

Tristan did not know what it was like to mix feelings with commitment. Only in the wolfdream did he feel free to express what he truly felt he was without repercussion.

As such, when he found companionship in Sierra, Tristan wasn’t sure how to navigate those feelings. Their physicality in the dream had not yet translated to the waking world despite the intimacy of sharing beds and traveling together. Tristan wasn’t sure why he was hesitant, other than he feared hurting her.

And now Thalia. In the Dream, he found her intoxicating. Here, in the waking world, it was like this moment was the dream and the other was his true self.

Heat flushed his entire body. Arousal was easy to spurn. He was surprised that he found himself so malleable to Thalia’s designs on the moment. He laid himself back and accepted her weight as he might accept the brush of a cool breeze on his cheek. She was light as a feather,

Her use of his other name took Tristan by surprise. He’d not understood why Nimeda called him by the name of another being. He hadn’t recognized it at the time, but a simple search found a more familiar name: Hróðvitnir, which he understood to be a figure of old mythologies. A lord of wolves and father of monsters. Tristan was accepting of the name like one was bestowed a title, and thought little of it until this very moment.
“I thought you didn’t remember the dreams? You called me that before,” he responded as he snaked a hand behind her neck. Her hair was still damp and fell over her shoulder to tickle his chest. At some point, he had tugged off his shirt. He was well built, with the muscles of chest and arms defined. The tattoos were clearly visible even in the low light. Including the newest inking that he awoke with one day.

When he tugged the shirt from her shoulders, he marveled at the softness of her beauty: the tenderness of slim breasts and the inward curving line of her waist. It was so similar and yet so different than before. 

"Alright," he told her.

[Thalia]

She half shook her head, lips parted for an answer, but it was too large a burden to encapsulate in a bridge of words. There was a sharp and surprising sting in realising the depth of that chasm; for Tristan did remember, and she did not know what he made of it, or of her. Patricus had been disappointed in whatever he saw. He had not said so, but she had felt it in the way he tried to coax from depths something she had barely been able to understand at the time. The first thing she’d done was run from him. Afterwards he’d insisted she must accept that they were one and the same, but it was he who could not reconcile the ways in which she both was and wasn’t the girl he found in his dream. The delicately fractured veins of Thalia’s soul were not like the others he claimed to guard. She was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with it. With her.

She felt like running again. Every new step of this wayward journey revealed her to be a ghost in her own life; nothing but a shadow cast from a figure she could not see. Everyone came because of Nimeda, and none stayed for the pale reflection of whatever they perceived to find in her stead. Even the creature tried to drown her when she reached out only for kinship. Around her the room blurred a little, running through her like a cooling current, and its whispers did not help. (It was easy to leave you.)

But Tristan’s hand snaked behind her head, soft as a shoreline anchor, and it tugged her back into her body. Stars swam her vision, but maybe it was just the gold of his eyes; for a moment she just couldn’t tell. Her touch skirted her own fragile temple along the tender edges of the blossoming bruise. It did not make her wince, but she felt it throb the echo of her thrumming heart. Thalia. My name is Thalia. “I don’t. Not up here,” she told him. He already knew but she spoke it like a secret, perhaps because in the moment she felt diminished by the confession.The hand she used for drawing threaded through the other of his, hers fine-boned and delicately small by comparison. Yet blood rimmed her nails where the swim had not washed it away, and there were cracks where the dreams ripped free when ink ran dry. The wound on her palm still ached. She did not bring focus to the small injuries though, just the fingers which spilled the mysteries controlling so much of her life. “Only here.”

After a breath, she squeezed and lifted Tristan’s hand closer; kissing the blunt tips of his fingers, then pressing them lightly to her chest. “And sometimes here.”

She knew the name only because he’d spoken it back at the cabin. When she’d said it before he’d looked at her strangely, and she’d presumed he simply didn’t appreciate the humour of his being so completely dripping wet at the time. Why she used it now she could not say, beyond that it spread feeling through her like soft ripples and she did not know the cause. Instinct ruled all the currents of her life since she left Moscow, both to joyous ends and terrible ones. Some things beat in her with an alarming ferocity, or a yearning that stirred the soul. She felt it when she looked out over the lake for the first time in person. She felt it when she beheld her sketch of what the creature protected. She felt it too when she watched the sprout of green from a cracked wall in Estonia.

Such feelings frequently doused her like sudden rain, with no thoughts or memories to anchor or explain them. Sharing that part of herself felt more vulnerable than the blanket she slipped bare from her shoulders, and she did not know if he would even understand, or if she wanted him to. Vanagandyr felt like an intimacy; one she was not sure she had a right to use. She hadn't even realised she had used it, until he said. But Tristan did not set her gently aside like she had made a mistake, as he had not when he first relaxed beneath her weight. Sweet and slow affections stripped her instead to damp skin. Thalia was flushed by desire, and unabashed by her nakedness. Her hair sat wild about her shoulders and down her back, shivering trails of lakewater down the curves revealed. She knew she was not beautiful, but whatever Tristan beheld her to be in that gaze, it set flames dancing in her blood. For a moment she was held still by it, utterly enchanted.

When he actually answered her though, her lips fluttered in sudden and honest amusement – for it was so endearingly artless a seduction. Fortunately, Thalia was not made for solemnity. Her hair coiled into ribbons against his chest when she leaned closer, pooling a collection of droplets into the thickets of hair there before each slipped a shuddering path down the wide valley of his ribs. Her own touch trailed warmer, charting a landscape she had only ever seen mapped on paper. She cupped his cheek.

“Alright,” she echoed. Her laugh was a pleasant hum, and she brushed her nose affectionately against his. By now she was very aware of his willing response beneath her, yet the heat from his palms was still almost careful in its capture. Tristan seemed far too old for what suddenly seemed very much like simple inexperience. The consideration dawned upon Thalia slowly, and a new thought occurred then; that maybe he’d not meant to question her ignorance of the dreaming so much as he offered up evidence of his own. Whatever kind of painted warrior he appeared to be in her sketches, Tristan was no more that man here than she was a girl she could not even remember being. The revelation was enough to pause her eyes upon his own, like she needed to see him anew.

Had he only been wondering what it meant?

"Because you were soaked through and dripping," she offered, expecting some flare of recognition. If it was his name in the dream he must know why it had amused her enough to point out – she had presumed as much this whole time. “Monster of the River. That’s what it means,” she added softly. As an explanation it meant little to her. She didn’t know why it shivered her through with feeling or made her heart beat so fiercely in her chest to share it. Maybe it would mean little to him too, but she didn’t choose to pause long enough to read his response.

This time the slow coax of her kiss fell into a current that beckoned deeper. It was an invitation and a need all at once, because if she couldn’t explain the swell of passions he provoked, she had no inclination to deny them when they swept over her. Thalia was not hesitant to guide them both. She shared with him the paths and trails of her body; showed him where to touch to quicken the thread of her pulse or pull unbidden sounds from her lips. In her own affectionate explorations she urged him for the same directions, seeking the connection of intimacy, and not just an exchanging of blind pleasure. It was a gentle intoxication, but she was left both breathless and enamoured by it.

A soft gasp left her when she finally steered herself on top. She discovered an intense and hypnotic kind of power, and one that mesmerised her for a time before she urged him closer instead, desiring the intimate enclosure of his arms and the heated rush of his lips. Her touch had been pressed unshyly between them, but she guided him there and let her hands find other distractions at the curve of his neck. Release when it came overspilled in shivering tides, buffeting her closer like waves reaching shore. She was breathing hard. Her teeth grazed his lower lip once the shuddering subsided into sensitivity, and if he minded she only offered the curve of a smile. When she kissed him next, it was in yield.

[Tristan]

There was a mark on Thalia’s chest that his fingers settled upon. She didn’t seem to notice the attention to it beyond reacting to the graze of his touch. It made him smile, and he himself found his hands trailing down to her hips instead, helping her movement as they could. Their synchronization was intoxicating. He thought little more of it. Knowing that he himself bore strange marks of his own likewise unexplained.

Monster of the river. The translation tugged at his lips in pride. His own stories told him the name’s heritage, but Tristan was Icelandic, not Nordic. He only knew what was commonly known, and she was clearly the expert. “I told you I was a monster,” he joked. Soon, intensity deepened her expression, and the jokes slid from his as well. Her kiss pulled him near, and he found himself sitting close enough to hug against her. She was slicked with sweat that he trailed down the ridges of her spine. Every curve and shallow hollow was soft. If not his lips, his hands explored.

Her coming breathlessness gave him a knowing smile that closed around her lips with pleasant pride. It empowered him to move.

He’d scooped her back, lifted and rolled so they exchanged places. Tristan’s hair had come undone by then, and hung from his shoulder so close that it tickled her skin. Her legs were twigs in his arms, and he felt enormous on top of her. In the dream, they had embraced within the arms of the waters. It felt real now. A flicker of thought considered Sierra, but he had to decide that she was unharmed. The monster of the river was a monster. Tristan was that man, and he was a monster. The world could come to accept him or they could reject him. Sierra included. He was what he was. 

When that release came, he sank into the softness of her embrace, careful not to smother her tiny frame. He lay there for some time, stroking her hair and trialing the pools of sweat. As the motionlessness settled, she would grow chill, and he pulled the furs to cover them both. As they lay there, his fingers trailed the mark on her chest again. He’d seen it before. "It seems we're both marked by the gods."

He let his lids close in the relaxation. His head was empty as his body, and the temptation to stay like this was strong. Eventually, he spoke, probably the first sign that he wasn't asleep.

“I like the name,” he eventually said, breathing steady and calm. “The wolves call me Sun Snatcher. And I like that name too. But I don’t like this place,” he added. “I feel like a trespasser in a realm not my own. How can I help you find what we're looking for? How do we help her?”