why do you write like you’re running out of time? how do you write like you need it to survive? (hamilton, non-stop)
── .✦ yeng .ᐟ.ᐟ 24. infj. sylus, caleb & valko's. chronically thinking about l&ds. sleep-deprived. writes stories with teeth and love that isn't pretty.
── .✦ links .ᐟ.ᐟ solarium. athenaeum. grand hall. drawing room.
let these writings linger the way glances do: once fleeting, twice persistent.
thank you for staying, gentlereader.
And that's the part that's making me lose my fucking mind.
We lost an entire section of the MAIN STORY.
The livestream literally told us Valko's release was going to reveal more about the Aethercore—one of the biggest mysteries in Love and Deepspace and something that's been central to the plot from the very beginning.
So now what?
You think they can just delete him and nothing changes?
Do people genuinely think you can rip out an entire story arc without consequences?
Everything that was supposed to be revealed through Valko now has to be rewritten, redistributed, or outright cut. The main story is going to have to be retconned. Future updates are going to have to be reworked. Characters may have to be rewritten just to fill the gap he leaves.
If you're celebrating this because you "won," I sincerely hope you understand what you've actually cheered for.
honestly, if a boycott, refund requests, and people uninstalling are what got us here in the first place, then i think those of us who were genuinely excited for valko should be just as loud.
because why are we expected to sit quietly and be grateful for crumbs when we were teased an entire character, got invested, got excited, and then were told to simply move on?
no, actually.
if people can make noise when they dislike something, then people are allowed to make noise when something they did want gets taken away too.
i wanted the wolfboy. i was ready for the wolfboy. i had already made room in my little morally questionable heart for the wolfboy.
so yes. refund, uninstall, boycott, howl at the moon, whatever feels right. but don’t let them think no one wanted him.
This is actually so ass like fully ?? Cancelling ???? I want to CRY he was so fun I genuinely liked him so much I didn’t ever think they’d ever get rid of him completely 😭
no because same. it feels so awful.
he was fun. he was different. he actually felt like a new direction, and that was exciting. i don’t think any of us expected them to fully pull him back like this, especially after teasing him so recently.
and that’s what makes it sting even more. people had already started getting attached.
also, if i’m being completely honest, the game has been feeling a little stale lately. that’s why valko actually felt exciting to me. he seemed different. something that could bring back that spark and make the game feel unpredictable again.
Creation as a competitive sport is a death sentence for your art. the second you start writing to "outdo" someone else, or posting to clear an invisible hurdle of algorithmic metrics, you’ve fundamentally misunderstood why we make things. art isn't a race track; it's a mirror. if the only driving force behind your work is an obsession with beating the person next to you, then whatever you pull out of yourself won't be a piece of soul—it’ll be a hollow shell. and trust me, the reader can always feel the draft blowing through a hollow thing.
I’m thinking he and Caleb have definitely met or have some sort of cold standoff going on. Like not exactly actively trying to kill each other but don’t like each other either??? Hmmmmmmm
oohhh my thoughts exactly!!! he looks more like a mixture of crowapple. oh gord. puppy caleb will not be happy about this. can you just imagine military dog!caleb and wolf!valko butting heads???? the tension can snap me in two, thanks.
synopsis: your fear should make valko hungry. instead, it slips beneath his skin, and under the moon's pale witness, the wolf remembers your hand, your blood, your command.
cw/tw: valko x reader. wolf/lamb symbolism, blood, implied violence, possessive behaviour, mild body horror.
a/n: here's my little contribution. this took me the entire day to write, and i am currently in a committed love-hate relationship with is, so please be kind. since we know so little about him, i wanted to explore the unknown a little. the wolf, the lamb, the hunger, the devotion. all the deliciously terrible things.
Fear always had a scent.
Most people wore it poorly. It soured them, made them loud, foolish, eager to bare their little human teeth at creatures who had been killing long before they learned how to pray. Yours was different. Soft as milk, warm as wool. A trembling little thing that did not run, though everything in your body had already begun its flight.
Little lamb, something in him thought. The name should have amused him. Instead, it entered his chest like a blade.
Across the hall, men spoke of acquisitions, mergers, bloodless victories. Women laughed with their wine-dark mouths. Above them all, the moon hung in the windows with its pale, accusing face, and Valko felt the beast within him lift its head.
For a moment, nothing in him belonged to the room.
The suit became a borrowed skin, the cufflinks, a joke, the expensive watch around his wrist ticked with the patience of a trap. Beneath it all lived the older body, the one made of hunger and moonlight. The one that rememered forests, open throats, the sacred panic of running prey.
Then you looked at him.
Not for long.
Only enough.
Your eyes found his across all that wealth and light, and some wretched part of him, some starving creature, went still.
How strange, to be made monstrous and discover reverence in the same breath.
He had imagined many things for his life. Power came easily, violence even easier. Obedience could be bought, fear cultivated, loyalty bred in dark rooms by darker hands. Love had always seemed like a story humans told each other so the knife would look prettier going in.
Yet there you stood.
Soft throat, steady eyes, hands folded before you as if you could hold yourself together by force.
The wolf in him wanted to circle.
The man in him wanted to kneel.
That was the horror of it.
No conquest rose in his blood, no though of easy ruin, no vulgar little triumph. Only a desire so severe it felt almost religious. To lower himself before you, to place his dangerous head in your lap and let you decide whether he deserved the mercy of your touch. To bare his teeth to the world and his throat to you.
When you moved, his pulse follower.
When you breathed, the beast listened.
Somewhere deep within him, hunger changed its name.
You were not safe with him. He knew that. Wolves didn't become gentle because they adored the lamb. Teeth didn't vanish for love. Claws didn't turn into hands simply because they wanted to be worthy.
Still, when a man approached you too closely, Valko smiled.
The poor fool stepped back before understanding why.
Good, Valko thought, and hated himself for the pleasure of it.
The lamb had not asked for a guardian, certainly not one with blood in his history and moonlight in his bones. Yet devotion came over him like a curse from an older god. If you commanded, he would tear the city open, if you whispered, he would obey, if you placed one hand upon his head and called him monster, he would thank you for the honesty.
Across the room, your gaze turned to him again.
This time, you didn't look away.
Memory came to him through the throat.
A strange place for the past to return, perhaps, though Valko had long ago learned that the body kept better records than the mind. Bone remembered winter, skin remembered injury, blood remembered blood. The mind, proud little tyrnat that it was, lied with exquisite conviction.
The body never did.
When you looked at him for the second time across the hall, something tightened beneath his jaw.
No.
Lower.
Beneath the pulse.
There.
A collar.
Invisible, ancient, burning with a pain too old to belong to this life.
For one terrible moment, the chandeliers vanished. The room went black around the edges. Music thinned into a high thread of sound, then snapped. Glass towers became ruined pillars, silk gowns became smoke. The moon in the window swelled until it filled the sky, enormous and white and merciless, and Valko saw another world opening beneath this one.
A courtyard of ash.
A city on its knees.
His hands, larger then, darker with blood. Claws sunk into stone. Breath coming out of him in brutal animal bursts, as if something inside his ribs had been trying to chew its way free for days.
And you.
Always you.
You had worn another face then, though beauty had never been the thing by which he knew you. Beauty was too fragile a witness, too easily altered by time, grief, hunger, death. He knew you by the stillness you made in him. By the impossible quiet that entered the beast when you came near, by the way his violence, which had never obeyed king or god or blade, lowered its head as soon as you lifted your hand.
In that other life, you had crossed the courtyard barefoot.
Ash clung to your hem, blood darkened one sleeve. Around you, men shouted for you to stop, priests wept into their prayers, soldiers raised their weapons with hands that shook badly enough to make the steel sing.
You didn't look at them.
Only at him.
“Valko,” you had said.
Valko. A name. A command. A mercy.
The beast inside him had snarled so violently the pillars cracked.
Still, his knees had struck the ground.
The memory tore through him.
Back in the hall, someone laughed too loudly near the champagne table, a waiter passed with flutes. You were still standing beneath the moonlit window, unaware that you hade just reached into him and opened a grave with your bare hands.
Valko swallowed.
The collar tightened.
Again, the past returned.
Your hand on his face.
So small against the ruin of him, so warm. He remembered wanting to turn away before you saw what he had become. He remembered failing. Shame had entered him then, sharp as iron. Why shame? Shame required love. Shame required someone before whom a monster still wished to appear worthy.
“Bind me,” he had told you.
Your mouth had trembled.
“No.”
“Bind me, before I kill them all.”
The beast had raged against teh words, it wanted the city, the soldiers, the priests, the nobles trembling behind their locked doors. It had wanted the whole world spilt open beneath its teeth.
Yet he had wanted your hand.
Only that.
Only the mercy of being stopped by someone he would not surviving hating.
“I will hurt you,” you whispered.
“You already have.”
Pain crossed your face.
Even then, even with blood in his mouth and half a kingdom dead behind him, he had regretted those words. Cruelty came so easily when grief held the tongue. He had reached for you, then lowered his hand before his clkaws could touch your sleeve.
“Please,” he said.
That had ruined you.
He remembered it now with such vicious clarity that the present blurred. Your eyes, wet and furious. Your fingers, shaking as you drew the blade across your palm. The red opening of your skin, the scent of your blood flowing the night until the beast inside him went mad with wanting and silent with devotion.
You had pressed your bleeding hand to his throat.
The world had screamed.
No chain appeared, no iron closed around him, no visible mark announced his capitivity. Only you. Only your voice, low against his mouth as you bent close enoiugh for his breath to warm your lips.
“In every life,” you said, “find me before the wolf does.”
The vow entered him like a nail driven through bone. His body bowed beneath it. The beast howled.
Then your forehead touched his.
“So long as I live,” you whispered, “you will know my hand.”
“And when you die?”
Your silence had been the answer.
When you died, the world would have him back.
When you died, he would become hunger without a name.
Valko came back to himself with his hand at his throat.
The hhall had not changed, Linkon glittered beyond the windows, music poured its polished grief over the rich adn beautiful. Nobody had noticed the chair twisting slightly beneath his grip, its metal frame bent inward as if softened by heat.
Nobody except you.
Across the room, your eyes had lowered to his hand.
Then to his throat.
Something moved across your face. Confusion first, then unease. Then a flicker of pain so brief a kinder man might have pretended not to see it.
Valko was not kind.
He saw everything.
The old vow stirred beneath his skin, his wolf lifted its head, not with hunger now, but recognition.
