Stormcloaks. The bastards were everywhere nowadays, their camps sprouting up all over the mountains like fleas infesting an animal’s fur. Maybe they had hoped that being such remote locations, so far removed from the main roads as they were, would keep them and all their secrets well hidden—- from everyone but her. She always seemed to find them– even when she tried her best to stay far away. Always managed to stumble onto their mess of tents and table, then disappear again before any of them could ever have known the strange Nord had been nearby.
The last thing she needed was one of them trying to recruit her to their side of this ridiculous war with the city soldiers.
Even the wildest of animals can get desperate when their needs are great enough, however, and its not often that you find a man all alone with his own home in the woods. Far enough removed from the nearest cities to not be considered a part of it.
It was the first thing Valin noticed when she perched herself high up in a nearby tree. Light blue eyes flickering this way and that as she followed the stormcloak’s movements. Simply observing him as he went about his day, and quiet enough not to alert him to her presence there. The hollow ache in her empty stomach an ever present reminder that she would eventually have to come back down to scavenge something to eat. It wasn’t the first time she’d known this feeling however and was patient enough to push it from her mind and put that off just a little bit longer.
the day's last rays trickle through the thick underbrush, silent and missing any warmth. little droplets of light pouring through the canopy of leaves and thinning with every vine they run down, until when they reach the ground, they're but a faint promise, a dried river. here, where the earth is in perpetual frost, skeitan like all the other sly creatures that hibernate beneath the ice or in the bark of the trees hides from the sun.
it's a comfortable solitude, the forest something he revels in not having to share; everything he gives away here is for himself, witnessed only by the foxes and the deep, the ancient gods.
the nudity of his soles melts the recently fallen snow, and in return it burns his skin with a painful numbness, one that spreads from senseless toes to the arc of his bent, naked back. he is his favorite self: martyred and exposed, vile in his devoted masochism. spirituality has always been to suffer.
under the largest of the pines a small hearth lies, fire licking at the infested corpus of a hare, burning muscles off bones and melting sinews, fat and eyes into a wicked bile to boil in an iron kettle. to him, the stench is sweeter than doubt, perfume of a putrid liturgy rising to soak the treetops in its bloated humidity.
tonight he seeks council with the one he venerates. his body and health are hers when his fingers stir the brew and wet his earth-painted lips, trail down his throat to reach his tattooed chest. whereas the fumes fill him with instinctive revulsion, make him gag and choke, his worship of namira does not cease, never so.
yousharknotpass
izzy806
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
