Consider helping the story to grow on wattpad,
Masterlist
Aiming for Thursday Updates
Status- Complete!
!!! I very highly suggest reading this before Unseelie as Unseelie may contain spoilers !!!
Consider helping the story to grow on wattpad,
Masterlist
Aiming for Friday/Saturday Updates
Status- ongoing
!!! I suggest reading Macabre first as this story ties into the conclusion of that story !!!
Consider helping the story to grow on wattpad,
Masterlist
Undecided update schedule [ Unseelie will take priority while uni is so busy because I want to finish it ]
Status- ongoing
________________________________________________________________
The Sideline; pre-production
________________________________________________________________
If I get any new fanfic ideas before these are done you have full permission to bonk me over the head with a stick. or do it anyway i probably need it ngl.
DESCRIPTION; Roman Godfrey and Peter Rumancek, in their travels while searching for the Vargulf, happen upon a strange girl in a cage. Roman Godfrey can't shake the feeling that his very destiny clings to her survival.
CW; Story contains mature themes such as dark folklore, foul language, graphic violence, cannibalism, anthropophagy, kidnapping, captivity, implied torture, cult violence, body horror etc.
masterlist ask to be tagged! @kikibit , @thedevotchka , @lunaskye999 , @coryoslut , @guaaafiiburg ,
ROMAN GODFREY WAS DROWNING, CHOKING ON BITTER BLACK WAVES THAT surged around him, crashing against his broken boy of a body, pulling him far, far beneath the tide.
Before peace came fire. Fire in his lungs as they clawed for air, heat rippling through muscles that burned through the last of the energy it took to keep his head above the surface. It was an ugly, violent agony. The water invaded him, forcing its way down his throat and shattering it like broken glass.
His heart hammered a frantic, erratic beat against his ribs—a trapped bird tearing itself to pieces in the dark. The sheer, blinding panic of the life within him being snuffed out was white hot, a singular, agonising realisation that he was entirely small, entirely helpless, and entirely alone against the weight of a world that did not care if he knew how to swim.
Then, the fire died.
The frantic, desperate thrashing of his limbs grew heavy, then slow, until the current finally stopped fighting him and simply took him away. The suffocating pressure in his chest didn't hurt anymore; it expanded, dissolving the wild edges of his panic into something thick, dark, and impossibly quiet.
The black ocean had become a womb, keeping him safe and sound, cradling him the way his mother never had.
A profound weightlessness washed over him as he sank deeper into the stars beneath the waves. The lick of the flames and the bite of the cold vanished, replaced by a creeping, deceptive warmth that bled into his veins like liquid silk. It was an unadulterated euphoria—the kind of terrifying bliss that only belonged to the dying. The kind of peace that came after it all ended, and there were no worries in sight.
There were no expectations down here. There was no family legacy, no monstrosity within him, no yearning for a greater destiny tearing at his heart. There was only the soft, creamy density of the dark, holding him so perfectly that he never wanted to break the surface again.
For once in his life he was entirely, beautifully loved by whatever god had granted him such mercy.
And then it burned again. A hand—vast, gnarled, and ancient enough to have held the beginning of earth in its palm—broke through the ceiling of the world. Giant, twisted fingers plunged into the black surf, reaching for him, not to save him, but to scoop him up like a rag doll.
Roman bolted upright, a breathless gasp tearing from his throat.
The silk sheets on his bed were tangled in a heap around his waist, damp with sweat and tears. The familiar, faded grandeur of his bedroom in the estate rushed back to meet him, but the phantom scent of stagnant water still lingered in his nose.
He found himself grieving that peace at once.
"Bad dreams, my darling?"
The voice—her voice—was a cruel, precise blade slicing through silk.
Olivia Godfrey sat in the armchair beside his bed, a cigarette perched between two manicured nails, with her other hand carding through the floppy brown locks draped across his forehead.
She hadn't turned on the lights, no, she sat there in the dim, grey morning light watching him. Always fucking watching him with that same stillness as always, the kind that itched at his bones and tore at his skin as if she had found a way beneath it. As if she wanted to crawl inside it, as if she couldn't possibly get any closer to him.
"You've been so busy lately, Roman," she murmured, her nails clicking softly against his collarbone as her hand drifted away from his head, before she finally withdrew her hand and settled it in her lap. "You're pale and, quite frankly, moody. You should spend the day at home with your mother and let me take care of you."
"Mmm. I would rather kill myself," he drawled, forcing himself up and out of the bed, in which he would have loved to remain for another several hours had she not tainted the space with her presence. He didn't feel completely safe going back to sleep, not with her hawk ass watching his every twitch.
Olivia let out a soft, melodic hum, entirely unbothered by his hostility. She tapped the ash from her cigarette into a small crystal dish on his nightstand, her gaze tracking the sharp, tense lines of his shoulders as he reached for his clothes.
"If you say so, darling," she murmured. "The staff tells me you’ve been spending your evenings down by the old greenhouse lodge. What's going on there, hmm?"
Roman froze, his fingers stalling on the buttons of his shirt. Gossamer was probably curled up in the sun by the docks out there right now, or swaddled in the blankets he had brought her. His neck still twinged where she'd fed from him before healing it as if nothing had ever happened.
"Needed a change of scenery. Fucking chicks in the car was getting kind of old".
Roman forced his features to smooth out, turning over just enough to look her in the eye with the most bored, pathetic expression he could muster.
Olivia stared at him for a long, slow beat, searching his face for a different. Finally, her lips curled into a faint expression of supreme disgust. "You wound me with your ludicrousness. Have you no respect for yourself? For this family?"
"I'm shocked that you ever thought I did," Roman muttered. For that, she slapped him.
<<>>
Gossamer knew she had company long before she stepped out of the shower. There was a distinct, sharp interruption in the static of her surroundings—a shift in the room's frequency that she had learned to pick up on.
She didn't rush. To show haste was to show a certain amount of fear, and Gossamer was not the kind of animal to be startled in her own nest, to be driven from her own comfort.
With deliberate elegance, she went about her routine as if she were entirely alone. She let the freezing water drip from the lengths of her dark hair, tracking the slow path of a droplet as it rolled down the curve of her spine.
She reached for one of the faded, threadbare towels Roman had smuggled down to her, her movements fluid and unbothered as she pressed the cloth to her skin, drying herself with the precision of someone who had all the time in the world.
When she finally dressed and braved the porch of the lodge, she found Roman's mother sitting at the edge of the small pier. Olivia Godfrey was a grand oil painting of high-society leisure, a vision of aristocracy and might lit within a swampy clearing. She was draped in a flowy white dress that pooled around her like milk, damp as her legs dangled over the edge of the wood and swayed about in the water.
A wide-brimmed hat shaded her face, catching the pale morning glare and filtering it into a soft, glowing halo. It was her eyes that were devilish—two sharp, calculating slits tracking the fog as it drifted over the water, before settling on Gossamer.
Beside her on the weathered wood sat a gorgeous marble charcuterie platter and two wine glasses, each filled with a deep, ruby-red liquid. One glass rested comfortably between her fingers; the other sat a precise distance away, waiting just for her.
"You certainly took your time," Olivia murmured, not bothering to turn around as the ice-thin edge of her voice carried over the lapping water. She lifted her glass, swirling the dark liquid in a slow, hypnotic circle. "But then, I suppose wild things like you never have the need to respect schedules."
Gossamer stopped at the edge of the porch. The contrast was stark—the upir woman lounging in her ethereal whites, drinking wine at the edge of a swamp, while the fae stood in her towel, all jagged edges and otherworldly eeriness.
"Wild things like me do not spare time for uninvited guests," Gossamer replied, her voice dripping with undisguised venom.
"Don't be so rude, darling. You're squatting on my property, are you not? Here, have a glass. I brought enough to share." Olivia gestured lazily to the second glass. "Let’s have a little.....chat about my son," the woman smiled, her crimson lips pulling back over teeth that were far too perfect.
At the mention of the boy, Gossamer felt her fangs throb, a sudden, white-hot ache blooming at the roots of her teeth. She didn't move toward the glass, but drew closer, shadow stretching taller.
"Yes", Gossamer whispered. "Let's."
.
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booooooooooooooooooo this chapter and life burned me out so bad I hope it's okay! Just needed to write SOMETHING to move this shit forward.
anyways here's a WIP of Gossamer I'm working on mwah <3
Gaaaah thank you @yes-no-maybe-soo, this is such a beautiful sentiment 🥺 and right back at you!
To all my lovely mooties, whether we've talked for a long time and gotten to know each other, or whether we're just here silently sharing and shitposting, I'm glad you exist and are out there, you make the world better 🌹
some of you i've known since before 2020 (maybe even before 2017), some of us did art together, or maybe we're just silently cuckoo bananas on dash together even though we've never spoken :))
@vadersangel @kikibit @grimoireskin @kittyflanders @voidofsunlight @222col @kingkat12 @a-differentbrandof-beans @skysgard @thedevotchka @lunaskye999 @bryandanielson-yes and probably many more I’m forgetting because my brain is soup 😭
Thank you all for being the sweetest mutuals a gal could ask for<333
Thank you for the tag @melancuntly you have no idea how much it means 💓 even if we never talk and just support eachothers work everyone who's here means the world
@bayrtucker @lokisprettygirl @kikibit @coryoslut @macynacym @thedevotchka *im forgetting so many* but thank you for being so supportive 🥹🥹💓
You guuuuuuuuys I am all warm and fuzzy inside today, thank youuuuu. Never has there ever been such a talented, supportive, cool, fun and obviously very sexy fandom!!! Tagging a few, but missing many: @ch404 @bryandanielson-yes @melancuntly @kikibit @skysgard @starzgard @a-differentbrandof-beans @coryoslut @katherinesdumbstuff @brightnessluvsworld @27reddieforjanuaryembers27 @goosegreenwood @lunaskye999
Y'all are so sweet omgggahhhhhh passing on the love! Some of you I don't know that well or have spoken to in passing but at the end of the day are all hogging my feed and i love to see it!
beep boop whats this? an original fiction inspired by Gossamer and Roman in Unseelie? NAY
Grayling Rost is a scavenger, a flesh-eating parasite living on the Isle of Zyr. To her, the wars of the Human Kingdoms are nothing but a br
If it takes me a little to get chapters out on here its because I desperately needed a big project to put my energy into. One of my assignents from uni is being published in an actual writing journal so I took it as my sign that maybe I CAN do this!
DESCRIPTION; Roman Godfrey and Peter Rumancek, in their travels while searching for the Vargulf, happen upon a strange girl in a cage. Roman Godfrey can't shake the feeling that his very destiny clings to her survival.
CW; Story contains mature themes such as dark folklore, foul language, graphic violence, cannibalism, anthropophagy, kidnapping, captivity, implied torture, cult violence, body horror etc.
masterlist
ask to be tagged! @kikibit , @thedevotchka , @lunaskye999 , @coryoslut , @guaaafiiburg ,
ROMAN GODFREY TRIED TO SCREAM, BUT THE SOUND OF IT SNAGGED IN HIS THROAT.
The noise escaped in a short, pained yelp, shoved right back down where it came from by the grey hand clamped firmly over his mouth.
Using all of her weight against him as he bucked under the sharp, searing zap that flashed through his neck, Gossamer held him down against the mattress. His eyes flew shut, the world vanishing behind a veil of hot white heat that rippled through his veins like liquid fire.
For a genuine, delirium-induced moment, he assumed that this must be his end.
I let her in, he realised, his fingers twitching against the headboard. I opened the door and I handed her the knife, and now she's using my own life to paint herself back into existence.
Her fangs had ravaged the flesh right at the base of his neck, where the slope of his shoulder met the collarbone, and he could feel his very life force being siphoned out of his body, guzzling straight down her throat. It was a strange tugging sensation created by the suction of her lips, the push and pull of his skin as she downed more and more of it by the second.
His head felt light and his stomach churned, his face hot and beads of sweat dripping down. He felt as though he were about to vomit.
But he was drunk on it. The smell of her magic as it flowed back through her—sweet, syrupy— in all its glory, oh it was intoxicating. It was a heavenly, divine thing to witness. He was giving her that life back, and so he let her take his.
As the ichor left his body, a jagged, frantic arousal spiked in its place. It was a raw, localised thrumming in his gut that made his toes curl against the silk sheets. He was floating adrift in a sea of static, yet every inch of his skin where she pressed against him felt hypersensitized, reactive, alive.
The more she took, the more he wanted to give. He would give it all to her if she asked, because he wanted to. He wanted her to take his life and consume it in every possible way, so that he would always be with her, would always be a part of her. It was a sick, desperate greed; he found himself arching into her, his hips stuttering against hers.
When she finally pulled away, Roman lay sprawled across the silken sheets, his limbs feeling as though they had been hollowed out and the marrow replaced with lead. The room was spinning in slow, nauseating circles, the moonlight through the high windows of the lodge cut silver gashes across the weathered floorboards.
Then, he felt the weight shift.
Gossamer adjusted her seat, straddling his hips with a fluid, silent grace. The silk of her scarlet robe hiked up, the heat she had stolen from his veins radiating through her own skin back into his. The violent tremors that had racked her body in the greenhouse were gone, the desperate begging of the witch was gone, replaced instead by a terrifying, sleek stillness—the steady certainty of a predator sizing up a deadly bite.
She started at the base of his throat.
Her tongue was a sudden, sandpaper wetness against his cooling skin. She dragged it from side to side in a slow and deliberate graze, tracing the path where the blood had leaked from the puncture wounds and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone. Roman's breath hitched—a sharp, jagged sound that echoed in the otherwise empty room.
"You're making a mess," he managed to rasp. His fingers cut into the silky skin of her hips, pulling her down, anchoring himself to the only thing in the room that felt solid, felt warm, felt real.
"Hush. I am cleaning it up, Roman," she murmured against his skin, her breath smelling of salt and iron. "Just relax."
The lapping of her tongue against his jaw was a rhythmic, delicate friction that made his skin crawl in the best possible way. It was a calculated torment, a reminder of how easily she had broken through his defences to get what she wanted.
Roman's head fell back into the pillow, his eyes rolling shut. Her fangs grazed the tarnished flesh once again, and he could feel her breath stuttering, as though she were doing her best to refrain from sinking them in and drinking all over again.
Satisfied, or perhaps simply overwhelmed by the sudden influx of power that his blood had restored to her, Gossamer began to shift. She placed her palms against his chest, her muscles coiling as she prepared to unstraddle him and retreat back into the shadows of the room.
"No," Roman rasped, the word tearing out of his throat.
Before she could slide away, his hands—shaking, blood-stained, and desperate—clamped down harder on her thighs, keeping her firmly rooted to the spot.
Gossamer froze, her spine stiffening like a startled cat. She looked down at him, her red eyes blown wide with a mix of surprise and a simmering, newfound heat.
"Roman," she warned, her voice a low, dangerous vibration. "You cannot take any more of this. You can barely even breathe."
"You're not done," he growled. The lethargy still pulled at his mind, making the world tilt and blur, but that skin-to-skin contact, that desire, was the only thing keeping him conscious.
He wanted the weight. He wanted the crushing, suffocating pressure of her. He wanted her to feel the frantic, aching pulse she had left him with—the hard, heavy proof that even as she drained him, she had filled him with a hunger that was far more dangerous than her bloodlust.
"You're not... done," he whispered once more, his eyes finally fluttering open to meet hers. They were dark, clouded with a dizzy, erotic delirium.
Gossamer stared at him, her breath coming in short, jagged bursts that mirrored his own. She could hear the frequency of his heart, a loud, thumping rhythm that was practically begging for more. She didn't pull away this time. Instead, she leaned closer, her lips brushing against his ear as she felt the strength return to her limbs, fueled entirely by the man currently refusing to let her go.
"I am done," she murmured, her hand sliding up to grip his chin, forcing him to look at the predator he was trying to cage, "I decide when I am done. Do you understand me?"
"Noooo," he whined, the sound small and pathetic, vibrating against her palm.
The witchling's lip curled. The sound disgusted her as much as it fed her ego. With a sharp, fluid motion, she released his jaw and stood up on the mattress, her movement so sudden it made the room tilt in Roman's vision.
"You are an ant, Roman," she whispered, her wings twitching—a dry, rustling frequency that made the hair on his arms stand up. "A delicious little ant that I may stomp on when I please. Do not ever think you can tell me what to do. It will not end well."
She let her robe slip from her body as she turned, abandoning the red silk draped over his legs as she stepped down from the bed and onto the floor. He watched the ragged form of her wings flex gently as the evening air caressed them, catching glimpses of the room on the other side through snags and tears ripped open in the leathery material.
He had not yet seen her fly. He wondered if she even could.
<<>>
"Aren't you going to join me?" Gossamer asked, pausing the sponge's gentle glide across her skin.
She had sensed him standing in the bathroom doorway for a fair few minutes now, felt those intense eyes watching her every move as she cleansed herself of him in the tub. He was a mess. A beautiful, ruined mess of a boy who didn't understand that he was currently the most expensive, exquisite meal she had ever eaten.
"You want me to?"
She did not answer with words, and instead shifted to make room in the tub behind her.
Roman took a step forward without further invitation. Then another, and then another. He moved as though he were wading through a dream he hadn't quite distinguished as real. When he finally reached the edge of the clawfoot tub, he didn't hesitate. He shed his clothes and sank into the scalding water, the intense heat a violent shock that made him gasp. He settled behind her, his knees bracketing her hips, arms instinctively coming to envelop her.
Gossamer leaned her head back against his shoulder, her wet hair a dark, heavy curtain draped between them. She felt his hands begin to move—slow, reverent, and agonisingly gentle. His palms slid over the slick skin of her stomach, then up, tracing the jagged lines of her ribs. She held her breath as his fingers snagged on the edges of her scars—the thin, torn ridge of silvered skin near her collarbone, a souvenir from a hunt she barely remembered from centuries ago. The various marks over her stomach, her back. He didn't ask. He just traced them, his touch so light it almost made her shiver.
Then his hands wandered further back, braving the space where her skin met the heavy, leathery base of her torn-up wings. Beneath the water, she felt him touch the scars there—the puckered, angry reminders of where the iron had bitten deepest during her time in the cage, where she had been forced to break them in some places just to fit inside the small enclosure.
Roman’s breath skipped, a warm puff of air against her damp skin. He didn't recoil. If anything, he pulled her closer, his forehead dropping against the nape of her neck.
"How did you get in the cage?" The question vibrated against her skin, lips dragging across it. "What...what happened to you? Who hurt you?"
Gossamer did not give him an answer at first. Instead, she seemed to go unnaturally still, her spine aligning with his chest as it straightened up.
She thought about it some, staring at her own twisted reflection in the sheen of the tile.
"I do not wish to speak of this with you."
Roman’s lips stayed pressed against her skin for a heartbeat longer. He didn't recoil, but his grip on her waist tightened.
"But I want to know—"
"Do not push me—" she snarled ",—When I am not ready."
Gossamer whipped her head around to face him, the motion so sudden and violent that a spray of water hit the slate wall with a sharp slap. Her wet hair lashed across his chest like a whip, stinging slightly as it hit his skin.
Before he could even blink, she had his face in her hand. Her palm cupped his jaw, her thumb pressing into the soft skin of his cheek with a strength that felt less like a caress and more like a vice. Her red eyes were blown wide, the pupils narrowed to pinpricks of dark, ancient fury. She leaned in until their noses were inches apart.
"You have pushed your luck with me too far today as it is. You are lucky I did not rip out your throat when I had the chance. You are behaving like an insolent, entitled brat."
She expected him to fumble about with a half-assed apology— which, admittedly, she wasn't sure why she expected. Instead, a slow, infuriating grin crept across his perfect fucking face.
"You enjoy it," he said, pushing his face closer to hers until the tips of their noses brushed one another. "You like it when I'm a brat. I guess that means I'm your brat, hmm?"
Gossamer’s fingers tightened on his jaw, her claws biting into the skin as she tilted him this way and that. A warning hiss gurgled in the back of her throat, a sound that should have made him recoil, but Roman was too far into this to care.
He tilted his head just a fraction, his eyes dark and dilated as they tracked the movement of her lips. Then, with a sudden, sharp daring that made the water in the tub slosh violently, he lunged forward to nip playfully at the split flesh of the scar on her lip.
She should have snapped his neck right then and there. She should have held him under the water until the bubbles stopped rising, just to remind him of his place within her world.
Instead, the distance between them vanished before she could talk herself out of it. She crashed her lips back against his, the kiss a collision of two deadly, starving things. It was desperate and messy, tasting of salt and the lingering copper of his blood.
Her grip on him softened, her fingers instead tangling with the wet hair at the nape of his neck to pull him closer, deeper. In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to steal that boy away for herself, take him far away into another realm where they could relax and feast for days on end. There would be no worry of sick dogs or lowly humans; there would be faerie wines and all the gardens she could hope to cultivate and all the blissful, passionate sex they could ever hope to have, and maybe the witchling could get a happy ending for once.
But she could not. There were greater, more important things in this life to do than indulge the self, and Gossamer would do well to remember what she came here for.
She would do well to remind herself that, try as she may to convince herself otherwise, he was not hers for the taking.
It was a bitter truth to swallow that Roman Godfrey's soul belonged to someone else. She wondered, perhaps with spite and a little rebellion, what would become of her, and all the promises she had made, were she not to swallow it at all.
.
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sorry for no update last week! i'm on break at the moment for a few weeks so you'll get some more frequent ones since I tried to time it!
my mental health has been kicking my ass lately with all sorts of things happening irl, i'm okay but i've decided to take a break from uni for at least a few months and live back home with my parents, maybe even find my own place somewhere and rethink what i wanna do with my life.
also maybe gonna revamp the cover for this book cuz me thinks i don't like it anymore its too dark and clashy
DESCRIPTION; Roman Godfrey and Peter Rumancek, in their travels while searching for the Vargulf, happen upon a strange girl in a cage. Roman Godfrey can't shake the feeling that his very destiny clings to her survival.
CW; Story contains mature themes such as dark folklore, foul language, graphic violence, cannibalism, anthropophagy, kidnapping, captivity, implied torture, cult violence, body horror etc.
masterlist
ask to be tagged!
@kikibit , @thedevotchka , @lunaskye999 , @coryoslut , @guaaafiiburg ,
.
A BALL OF CRUMPLED PAPER LANDED ON HIS DESK, and Roman did his complete and utter best to ignore it.
Another came soon after, followed by a swift reprimand from the teacher patrolling the room during the quiz. His mind had drifted far, far away from any answers he could scribble down on some insignificant test. He was so rich it did not matter if he even showed up at school; he just did it for appearances and because, well, he was bored.
Not bored enough to deal with this shit.
Not bored enough to go chasing after some demon dog. Not bored enough to involve himself with this mess, with Peter, with Gossamer.
"Roman!" Peter called out, as the boy made his way down the steps after school got out. "Wait. We need to talk."
"We really don't, actually," Roman answered, never slowing his gait.
He didn't have to run; his legs were long enough that his casual walk was a challenge for most people to keep up with. He cut through the crowd of students like a blade through silk, his shoulders squared, eyes fixed on the cherry red glint of his car at the far end of the lot. He could hear Peter’s boots scuffing the pavement behind him—a frantic, uneven rhythm that sounded desperate. Pathetic.
Roman reached the driver’s side door of the Jaguar in record time, the heat of the sun-baked asphalt underfoot radiating through the soles of his shoes. He could feel the eyes of the other students on him, but he didn't give them the satisfaction of a glance.
"Roman! Dammit, stop!" Peter huffed, finally catching up and nearly colliding with his arm as he reached for the handle.
Roman spun on his heel, using his height to look down at the other boy.
"What?" he snarked, looking him up and down. "What could you possibly have to say that I could care any less about?"
"We need to talk about Gossamer," he said. "Right now—"
"I'm not dealing with this," he interrupted, unlocking the door and sliding into the driver's seat.
"You're serious? What happened to the whole macho martyr act? You just what— don't care about her now?"
"Nope," Roman popped the 'p', starting the engine and looking at Peter with a bored, glazed expression that had cost him years to perfect. He wanted Peter to see the apathy, see that he was done.
"What happened? With you and her, what happened?"
"I don't need to explain anything to you. Just leave me alone."
He went to wind the window up, but stopped when the gypsy stuck his hand in the way, delivering him a salty glare.
"You don't think kicking her out is worth mentioning?" Peter protested. "She nearly killed me last night, actually, so you do need to explain it to me!"
It was then that he stalled, which was the greatest mistake he could have made that afternoon, because it would serve as the catalyst that would undo all of the wise decisions he had made all week.
"What do you mean?"
His eyes tracked the bruising on the boy's throat beneath the thick growth of facial hair.
"She knows I talked. Or talked you out of trusting her. She thinks it's my fault you kicked her out, and she went totally apeshit, dude."
"Oh. And I suppose she didn't explain the part where she knows perfectly well what she did to make me do that?" he scoffed. "Did she explain to you that she keeps hitting on me to drink my blood? That she's a fucking witch who couldn't give any less of a fuck about me if she tried?"
He shoved a hand through his hair, gnawing on it with a frustrated ring-clad grip.
"Oh, don't act like you don't like her hitting on you," Peter rolled his eyes. "I thought that kinda shit would be right up your alley."
"Fuck you man," he seethed. "Fuck you."
Because it would have been up his alley had it actually meant anything, had she not just enjoyed the thrill of toying with him and nothing more. He supposed it was a bitter, bitter taste of his own medicine, but it still did not mean he had to swallow it nonetheless. She was a beautiful, ancient creature, and he was no more than an ant to her.
"Okay. Okay, I get it. Sorry," Peter held up his hands in defence. "She's toying with you. It's what fae do. I told you that."
"So?"
Roman didn't wait for the answer. He shifted the Jaguar into gear and let the brake go, the car creeping forward with a low, expensive vintage purr. He didn't look at Peter; he kept his eyes fixed on the exit of the parking lot, his foot barely touching the gas.
"So you toy with her back!" Peter hissed, forced into a brisk, awkward stride to keep up with the slow-rolling car. "Keep her on the hook enough for us to find the vargulf. She could probably solo that thing for us, but only when she's back to health, and she won't get back to health if we don't help her."
A black SUV behind them let out a sharp, impatient honk. Roman didn't even flinch. He just watched the rearview mirror with a detached sort of interest, watching the line of frustrated students grow behind his bumper.
"Roman, I'm serious!" Peter ducked his head, trying to avoid the glares of the drivers they were holding up. "She's a predator. If you don't keep her fed with whatever the hell it is she wants from you—attention, blood, whatever—she’s going to start looking elsewhere. You saw my neck. Next time, it's a student. Or a teacher. Or Letha. Or Shelley. She knows where you live."
That hit home, but Roman’s face remained a mask of unmovable stone. He nudged the gas just enough to make Peter have to break into a light jog to stay level with the window.
"I'm not a fucking lure, Peter," Roman said, his voice barely audible over the hum of the engine. "And I'm not gonna be her fucking snack."
"Then be her partner! Lover! Whatever keeps her entertained," Peter pleaded, nearly tripping over a speed bump as he kept pace. "Just until we find the vargulf. Once it’s dead, we deal with her after by whatever means necessary."
Another car honked, longer and louder this time.
"And why can't you do it?" he snapped. "Why can't she stay at your place?"
"Police have been sniffing all around the trailer since we got here, well before the murders started. I can't have her mixed up with that, and I don't want Mom knowing what we're dealing with. She'll tell Destiny, and Destiny will have my balls."
He broke off for a moment.
"And she trusts you. She and I don't......click the way you two do. Werewolves and witchlings don't go together at the best of times."
The rich boy considered it. For a moment, he considered it, because somewhere inside, he knew his friend was right. He also knew better than to take Gossamer Bluethroat's threats as empty promises, knew better than to underestimate her when she said she would only be a plague on the town
He finally nudged the gas, the car's engine giving a frustrated growl as it finally felt the open road of the exit. The line of cars behind him erupted in a chorus of aggressive honking, but Roman didn't give them a glance. He peeled away, white knuckles gripping the wheel.
"Ditching her is as good as killing us!" the boy called out, a desperate attempt to get him to stay. "You'll fucking kill us!"
<<>>
"I thought I told you to leave."
Gossamer heard him before she saw him. Heard the rhythmic, expensive click of his shoes against the concrete, saw the warped, flickering reflection of the upir in the glass panes as he wound his way through the greenery.
That tether between them—that invisible, agonising cord—stretched taut. It hummed in the very marrow of her bones, vibrating with every step he took. She could feel his heartbeat as if it were a drum in her own chest.
She sat huddled behind a row of terracotta pots, the ceramic cool against her rigid spine. These were the plants she had spent the week coaxing back from rot—ferns that now happily unfurled their fronds, and heavy-headed lilies that bowed for her in return. She had breathed life back into them, bled what little of her fading magic she had left into the soil, and they had rewarded her with a thick, verdant wall of protection.
He had not yet even reached her place of hiding among the ferns in one of the back corners, had not even seen her face to know she was here.
"I am... collecting my things," she lied in response, because what things did she have to collect? Her voice was a dry, sandpaper rasp as it echoed throughout the glass room.
"No, you're not," he scoffed. "You're hiding."
The sound of his shoes stopped. He was close now—just on the other side of a sprawling monstera she had nursed back to a deep, waxy emerald over the last three days. Gossamer could see the shadow of his hand reach out, pushing aside a heavy leaf to reveal her sitting beneath it.
"Come on. If you're going to stall, you may as well just stay."
"I'm..... sorry?"
"Don't be," he sighed. "You're staying. I'm not kicking you out. You were—" he broke off, like it pained him to say it. "You were right. I changed my mind."
"Oh no, I'm not apologising," she cleared her throat. "What makes you think I would stay here again? After the vile way you treated me?"
Even from her position on the floor, she managed to look down her nose at him. She wanted him to feel the weight of the air she had to breathe to speak to him. She wanted him to see that while he might own the glass and the glamour of this place, she owned the life blooming within it— and could sever it all with just a flick of the wrist, his too if she wanted.
"You're shaking," he said. It wasn't a question, nor an answer to her own. It was an observation, delivered with that infuriating detachment, as if he were studying a particularly interesting specimen under a microscope.
He was not wrong. She was shaking, the violent tremors rattling her as the bloodlust worked its way through her nervous system like a slow-acting poison. It was a deep, bone-deep vibration that no amount of pride could steady. Every nerve ending was screaming, raw and exposed, sensitised to the point where the mere sound of his breathing felt like a physical touch.
"I am cold," she lied again, her chin lifting. "The climate in here is... inhospitable."
"It's sweltering in here, Goss," he countered. "You're hungry."
He didn't move to help her up. He stood there, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat.
"Come on," he sighed deeply. "Please. I'm sorry, okay?"
"Mmm. What are you sorry for?" she drawled, her voice gaining a bit of its melodic, dangerous edge as she watched him squirm.
"For....everything," his eyes lowered. "For being disrespectful. For kicking you out when you had nowhere else to go. For being a........for being a dick."
"Mmm. And how sorry are you?" she asked, fingers curling beneath her chin. She leaned back against the pots, letting the ragged fabric of her cloak slip off her shoulder. The shaking hadn't stopped, but she channelled it now, letting the vibration add a predatory hum to her presence.
"Very."
"Mmmm. You know—" her red eyes sparked, a sudden, sharp crimson. "Your apology might be much more convincing, were you to deliver it while on your fucking knees."
The silence that followed was thick, pressurised by the humidity and the sound of Roman’s hitching breath. He stared at her, his jaw working hard as he fought the last remnants of his Godfrey pride.
Then, the floorboards creaked.
Slowly, with a deliberate, agonising lack of grace, Roman sank. His long legs folded, his expensive trousers hitting the dirty floor. He didn't look away. He stayed right there, at eye level with her, his pulse thrumming visibly in the hollow of his throat—a frantic, tempting rhythm that made her fangs ache with a dull, throbbing heat. She could hear his pulse thumping, could feel it in her own chest.
"Is this better?" he rasped, his hands coming out of his pockets to rest uselessly on his thighs.
Gossamer smiled, and for the first time that day, it wasn't a lie. It was the expression of a creature who had just found exactly where the armour was thinnest.
A wicked grin crossed her face, and her tongue swept over her fangs.
"It is certainly a start," she said. "But you can do oh so much better than that."
.
________________________________________________________________
that's it from me this week folks ✨gonna finish up any assignments due the coming week before sitting down to write so if updates are late that shall be why
I've wanted to draw Scourge for forever but I always had a really hard time getting him to look right! He's had so many iconic looks over the years thanks to the fandom so he was a little daunting, but fun.
DESCRIPTION; Roman Godfrey and Peter Rumancek, in their travels while searching for the Vargulf, happen upon a strange girl in a cage. Roman Godfrey can't shake the feeling that his very destiny clings to her survival.
CW; Story contains mature themes such as dark folklore, foul language, graphic violence, cannibalism, anthropophagy, kidnapping, captivity, implied torture, cult violence, body horror etc.
masterlist
ask to be tagged!
@kikibit , @thedevotchka , @lunaskye999 , @coryoslut ,
.
ROMAN GODFREY DID NOT KNOW WHAT BUSINESS THIS WICKED DEVIL HAD TOYING WITH HIM LIKE THAT, all he knew was that he wanted her out.
She was an infection, a beautiful, necrotic sickness that had camped out in his head for long enough. Every time she looked at him, he felt the phantom sting of her teeth on his lip, a reminder that he was nothing more than a source of blood and meat to her.
Every time he looked at her, he saw someone, something, that was meant to be but he knew better than to let it be. Every time he looked at her it hurt in a way that was not fun anymore. She was a deadly disease, and it needed to be removed, removed from his life if he ever wanted to recover.
He needed to do it now while he was ahead.
"You do not mean that," she countered, right after he delivered the order of her eviction from her little newfound palace. "You joke, but unless this is some twisted mortal humour, it isn't very funny."
"I do, and I'm not joking" he said, approaching where she lay sprawled out across the bed and beginning to pile up her things. "Go. Get out. Leave and find your own place to stay. I don't want you here anymore. Or anywhere near me."
"You are serious?" she snarled, rising from the sheets, shadow growing in size. "Kicking me out because I won't fuck you? Huh? Is that what this is? Because I won't suck your precious cock is that it? Because if you cannot fuck me, then you will not help me? Then I am of no use to you?"
He whirled on her, and was not sure if he shook from frustration or from fear of confronting a literal predator. All he knew was that the conviction, the cruelty that he could exercise, could rival any creature like her.
"You were never of any use to me anyway. You're only here because I thought we were supposed to have something, and because I was worried about you. But even if we do, did have something, I know you're no good for me. For anyone."
If she ever flinched at his words, she never showed it.
"And why is that, do you think?" she drawled.
"Because you freak me out," he hissed, pacing back and forth, restless. "You tear me apart inside all the fucking time! I don't know what you did— I don't know what you did to me the day Peter and I found you to make me so fucking helpless, and I don't— I don't want to know. I don't."
"Yes you do," she rolled her eyes, watching him with a level of disinterest. "I wouldn't still be here if you didn't. You will calm down when you aren't thinking of your dick for once. This is just a senseless tantrum."
"Well I don't want to anymore," he told her, coldly. "I have bigger things to worry about. Bigger things than you. You're not my problem, and you never should have been in the first place. You're a fucking temptress, you laze and graze about here like I'm your fucking servant, and you spit in my face when I help you. And you know what you're doing. Peter was right about you taking advantage."
"Peter?"
She froze, and he watched her. Watched her turn over something quiet in her mind, and for moments more she did not speak— just bared her teeth, cursing in a language that Roman didn't understand beneath her breath.
"What did he say to you?"
"I'm not telling you shit," he growled. "Go and ask him yourself if you care that much about what he has to say. You're both fucking cryptic as shit, you'd be good for each other!"
"I'm quite confused," she blinked slowly. "You are jealous of......what...exactly?"
Jealous that he had all the answers and would never give them up. Jealous that Peter probably knew all there was to know about Gossamer and just would not tell him. Jealous of everything and nothing all at once because Roman Godfrey did not know what to feel.
"I'm not jealous. I'm done," he said. "It's not about the sex. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not a complete asshole. You're just an ungrateful bitch, and I'm tired of you winding me up on purpose."
She went silent for a moment, and for that moment, he let her. Let her scan him quietly, let her gather up a worthy response just to hear whatever bullshit spilled from those fucked up lips.
"It could be about the sex," she said. "Would it change your mind if it were? If that were something I'd offer, would you allow me to stay? If I fuck you in exchange for your blood?"
He expected her to turn, to spin around and slam the door and to hell with his telling her what to do. But she did not. She did not, and it fucking hurt not to act on it.
Instead of the arrogant show, the witchling simply broke.
She stopped, her shoulders trembling under the weight of his rejection. When she came to sit by the edge of the bed, Roman saw it: the uncertainty, the jagged fear, the dawning realisation that she had finally pushed the only hand that fed her away, and she would do anything to get it to feed her once more.
Roman did not care. His hammering heart said otherwise.
He watched, eyes darkening as Gossamer Bluethroat folded to the floor on her knees. The silk of her translucent robe pooled around her like spilled silver on the hardwood floor.
"Please," she whispered. The sound was raw, a scratchy rumble that bypassed his ears and went straight to his gut. "I want to stay. I need to stay. I don't have anywhere else to go. I'll die without you."
Without his attention, more like.
She crawled toward him across the floor, a slow, serpentine motion that brought her close enough for him to smell the lingering scent of the greenhouse—damp earth and crushed jasmine infused into her skin. She reached out, not with taunting claws this time, but with trembling fingers that grazed the hem of his trousers. Her gaze tracked upward, locking onto his with a devastating, glossy intensity.
She didn't just look at him; she devoured him with her eyes, her tongue darting out to lick the very spot on her lip where she had tasted his blood the night before. It was an invitation and a confession all at once. She leaned her forehead against his knee, the heat of her breath seeping through the fabric, right where his skin was already humming with a low, agonising thrum.
"If I leave, I cannot— I will not help you find your vargulf," she murmured against the grey material. "If I leave, I will be forced to kill more than just bugs and animals. You will have a bigger monster on your hands than a sick dog ever could be. Do you really think you want that?"
Roman breathed. In. Out. In. Out. Stopping himself from reaching down and winding his fingers into the dark river of her hair to drag her mouth back to his. He couldn't do it. If he touched her now, he'd never be rid of her.
"I don't care," he declared, gripping her chin and jolting it upwards. "I don't care if you'll help. Don't care who you kill, what you do from this moment on. But you are not welcome here anymore. You need to leave, now."
She wasn't some untrained, spoiled-rotten puppy. She knew when to concede, and did not need to be told twice. She withdrew from his reach, withdrew from his perimeter, and as much as he wanted to reel her back in and tell her to stay, he could not.
For the first time, perhaps ever, Roman Godfrey was done with a woman. Done with her games and done with the way this brutal attraction made him feel sick with greed and desire and all of the things he could not explain.
"You will change your mind," she said, brushing herself off as though she had never begged him in the first place. "You think you won't, but you will. You are right in that the two of us have a primordial bond. But I'll warn you- if you break that bond, you will never find another in all of your existence, in any possible version of your lifetime that will ever exist. Think on it and weep for what you have just now lost."
She didn't pack a bag. She didn't have anything that was truly hers to take. She simply turned and walked toward the glass doors. She didn't look back, not even when the door clicked shut with a finality that made Roman's knees go weak.
<<>>
"You said that you would not interfere," she hissed, claws wrapped around the thick, stubbly column of his throat, pinning him to the side of the trailer.
Peter flailed, lifting a hand to try to knock her back, but he could not. He could do not a thing to dislodge the crushing weight around his neck that slowly siphoned the air from his lungs. The world began to narrow into a dark, pulsing tunnel. Every time he tried to draw a breath, he met the sickening click of his own collapsing windpipe. The pressure in his skull was agonising, a frantic, rhythmic thudding that synced with the frantic beat of his heart as it tried to pump blood into a head that was rapidly being cut off from his body.
"We had a deal! And yet you have crossed me!" She snarled, tearing him away from the surface before tossing him to the dirt. She watched him struggle to regain his breath, watched his chest heave raggedly as he propped himself up against a burn barrel.
"I hope you know you have sacrificed the safety of your little town over this, in telling Roman Godfrey to evict me. I hope you have fun chasing after your vargulf on your own! See where it gets you."
Gossamer stood over him, her tattered wings flared slightly in the moonlight, making her look like a giant, broken moth. The silver silk of her robe was stained with the soot of the clearing, clinging to her damp skin in a way that should have been beautiful but was only terrifying. She looked down at him with a cold, aristocratic contempt, as if he were nothing more than a stray dog she had finally decided to kick.
"He kicked you out?" he echoed, holding a hand to his aching throat. "But he's been all about you all week? He'd rather die than give up on a woman he wants."
"Don't you play princess with me. You plant ideas into his head that I am what— taking advantage of him? That I am no good? And he believes them because he has no idea what is going on. Because you lie to him."
"You never said I couldn't warn him about the truth," Peter countered, his voice coming out in a thin, shredded rasp. "He came to his choices on his own, without my input."
Gossamer let out a sound that wasn't quite a laugh—it was too sharp, too full of glass.
"The truth? You wouldn't know the truth if it bit out your throat. You told him I was a leech, didn't you? You told him I was a weight around his neck, when I am the only thing keeping his head above the silt."
She leaned in, her face inches from his, the red glow of her eyes reflecting in the sweat on his forehead. "You did it because you're afraid of what he'll become if he starts liking the taste of the dark. You're afraid he'll realise that I'm the only one who actually understands what he is."
Peter flinched, not from the threat of her claws this time, but from the accuracy of the strike. He looked at her—really looked at the tattered silver silk and the mud-stained skin—and saw the desperation beneath the malice.
"I hate to bear the news, Peter. But if no one is there to guide him through his turn, there will be no one to blame but you for trying to shield him from it. He is upir. You're doing your best to deny that of him, which will only turn out worse. I am the only one he can relate to right now."
"I'll talk to him, okay?" he sighed, the fight finally draining out of him as he rubbed the angry, purple welts on his neck. He looked exhausted, the weight of the vargulf and Roman's fragile sanity finally catching up to him.
"I'll handle it. I'll tell him I... I overstepped. Tell him he overreacted," he said, pausing for a moment. "Just.......tell me what you plan to do with him? I just....I just have to know. I have to know if I've sentenced him to death over this."
She thought for a moment, judging whether or not he was even worthy of her answers, scowl dripping from his face.
"His safety, his.....integrity, is my utmost concern," she said. "The rest of it? None of yours."
.
________________________________________________________________
there's more where this came from! got a head start on the next couple of chapters during my days off. i'm going to try and hold myself back from publishing them as soon as they are done though, because this way i will have them written in advance when classes start to get BUSYYYYY
you lot are LUCKYYYYY i don't have classes monday 😎 yall are getting FED with Unseelie content
updates are whenever the heck i wanna write em! which is good because it will mean probably several times a week when i have the time! otherwise, you can always expect a chapter to be uploaded on or by fridays <3
Unseelie will take priority over Lord of the Hive for a little bit, but don't worry that will still get updates when I have the time or in between slow weeks for Unseelie.
DESCRIPTION; Roman Godfrey and Peter Rumancek, in their travels while searching for the Vargulf, happen upon a strange girl in a cage. Roman Godfrey can't shake the feeling that his very destiny clings to her survival.
CW; Story contains mature themes such as dark folklore, foul language, graphic violence, cannibalism, anthropophagy, kidnapping, captivity, implied torture, cult violence, body horror etc.
masterlist
ask to be tagged! @kikibit , @thedevotchka , @lunaskye999 , @coryoslut ,
.
IT HAD BEEN TOO LONG INDEED SINCE GOSSAMER HAD LIVED IN SUCH SPLENDOUR.
The Greenhouse Lodge had become something of her sanctuary.
She spent her days draped across the heavy, silk-sheeted bed of the master suite. When she wasn't enjoying the lovely bed, she sat out on the pier, her slate skin soaking up heat from the sunlight rising over the clearing at the base of the hill.
Most days, she would sink into the clawfoot tub in the en-suite, letting the water cradle her as it soaked away the grit, grime, and squalor of her life inside the iron cage. She didn't appreciate the way it had weakened her, perhaps even permanently so. She didn't like the way she had to hold onto the edge of the porcelain to climb out, the heaviness to her limbs despite them being of skin and bone.
She did not like the way she had no magic left to encourage her new vegetable garden to grow. The way that it had stripped her of her primordial power and reduced her to nothing but this. It was a strange, agonising grief that she did not know how to acknowledge, and so she did not.
She needed something sharp, needed something cold to pull her from her pity slump, which, if she wasn't careful, she could rot away in for hours on end.
When the sun dipped below the tree line, the lodge truly felt like home. As a creature who favoured the dark, the night was when she could feel some of that unearthly power seep back in. The cool air revived the fire in her blood, eased her spirit some.
She slipped from the guest house and into the dark, glassy water of the lake, letting the chill numb the constant, gnawing hunger that had followed her from her captivity.
It pulled at her, all the time. The meat that Roman brought her daily could never suffice to replace what her fangs yearned greatly for. Dead meat could never replace the rush of the kill that made the witchling's blood sing.
It was during one of these silent, midnight swims that the silence broke, and her blood could sing, for a moment, once more.
A bright green cicada found its way out from the light, emitting a loud hum as it fluttered towards her.
Her hand shot out, catching the insect. It buzzed in her hand, thrumming and incessant with anger. She took one look at the green, fat-winged thing, and licked her lips.
It wiggled frantically as she shoved it in her mouth, meaty innards gushing over her tongue, and with a satisfying crunch, she devoured it in seconds.
"Tell me I didn't just see you do that," came the Godfrey boy's disgusted, borderline disturbed commentary from somewhere behind.
Gossamer wiped a hand over her scarred lips, slurping at her claws as she swivelled around to face him. Treading water with ease, her red gaze found his with a grin.
"You didn't just see me do that."
He stared at her, there in his trousers and his wife-beater, like he had never seen something, someone, so outrageously gross and downright beautiful. This, in her opinion, was the highest honour.
"But I did," he stated. "I watched you eat a bug. A bug."
He said it like he was about to faint, doing his best not to even look at her, toothy grin coated in the remnants of her meal. "You ate— you ate an insect. That is a thing you did."
If she weren't all for keeping up this deliciously fun, mysterious woman act, she would bark out a laugh so jagged he and all the birds would flee.
"You are awfully squeamish," she teased. "What? The raw meat didn't get you, but a little bug bothers you? It does sound like I am not the one with the problem."
"People eat raw meat sometimes," he countered. "But people don't snatch bugs from the air and eat them alive."
She shrugged, moonlight rippling over her collarbones. "I'm not people. And I was hungry. You bring me no food, and expect me to what— starve? I'll do no such thing!"
"I brought you food just two hours ago!" he gasped, hands flying to his head, gripping his hair like he wanted to rip it out. "You are not starving, that's ridiculous."
"You forget I've been captive," she rolled her eyes, lowering her face closer to the water's surface. "I've not had a true meal in such a long, long time. Thanks to the deviants who destroyed my home, my garden, I now have to resort to such measures while I wait for the new one to grow in."
She offered him a look of contempt when he shook his head.
"You shall reserve your judgment if you do not want me to eat you next, Godfrey."
She was all too aware of the uncertainty he held in the truth of her promise. She was aware of her own, too.
Gossamer rose, completely nude, from her place in the shallows, leaving a wet trail behind her as she glided over to where he stood by the edge of the patio. The water clung to the sharp angles of her hips, dripping from her fingertips like liquid moonlight as she moved, ignoring the cut of the chill.
She bothered not to cover herself. She was a siren of the weeds and the silt, emerging from the muck to claim the shore— and the man, the boy— standing on it.
"You have wings," he said. Stunned, but not at that revelation, no.
She watched his throat bobble as he swallowed sharply, not missing the way his eyes scanned over her, over the tattered, crooked arches of the appendages. Stopping, and not briefly— of course— over the rise and fall of her tits as she breathed, slick with droplets racing down her abdomen.
She was not the ripped, toned goddess of her prime in this scrawny, malnourished state, which she found to be greatly annoying. But the upir seemed to be enjoying the show nonetheless, which only boosted her pride further.
A smirk twisted on her face.
"It appears I do," she bit her lip. "Do you like them?"
The light from the porch bled through the leathery, membranous sails as she extended them, turning the bat-like wings a deep reddish-black. She folded them around herself, parts of her skin revealed through the various slits deliberately torn through them.
They shielded her— unfortunately— from Roman's hungry view.
"Would you look at that," she purred, reaching out a hand to cup his face, clicking her tongue as she observed the delicate, sharp yet soft, planes of his features. "Someone just can't help himself, can he?"
She felt the tremor in his jaw through her claws, a vibration that had nothing to do with the night's chill. Her eyes dipped again, heavy-lidded as they lingered on the budding, not-so-subtle erection that formed a very clear outline in his pants.
He would not live this one down.
"For all your talk of my being disgusting, your little......friend seems to think I'm quite the delicacy."
The mockery in her voice was a physical thing, a sharp edge that seemed to cut through the heavy, humid air between them. Roman didn't flinch. Instead, his breath hitched, heaved, triggered by her insult.
He leaned into the heatless curve of her touch like a purring cat in want of petting, desperate for the slightest morsel of her attention. It was true that the disgust he'd worn just moments ago was melting, melting, melting away, replaced by a dark, magnetic pull that looked to her a lot like surrender.
He reached out, the pad of his thumb brushing over the torn flesh of her lower lip, tilting her chin up. He was warm when he pulled her closer—infuriatingly, pathetically warm—and as he stepped into the space between her folded wings, like he was walking right into the embrace of a fallen angel, she was surprised to find herself craving that warmth. The smell of him hit her like an atomic blast: expensive soap, spiced cologne, and the rich, decadent thrum of the blood beneath his skin.
Oh, she wanted it.
Wanted it more than she had suddenly wanted anything in her centuries of existence. Her mouth watered at the sweet, rich scent of it, sharp ears zeroing in on the rattle of his nervous heartbeat.
Gossamer allowed him to get close, allowed him to close the distance. She allowed him to make this foolish, clumsy mistake as his kiss folded into hers.
She would kiss him back, she would play with this sweet, pathetic boy for a little while, for her own enjoyment and nothing more. She would push him onto the sun-bleached padding of the nearest lounge chair, and clamber to sit right there on his lap, soaking his clothes as she dove for his mouth.
Then she would sink her fangs right into the soft, delicate meat of his lower lip with a sharp, punishing snap that brought the metallic tang of real blood flooding onto her tongue.
This— oh this— was a thousand times better than the stupid fucking bug. It was divine, and in that very moment, she cared not for the pleasant idea of riding his cock into the night but this, this was everything she needed, everything she wanted.
All she wanted.
It tasted of pure and unbridled royalty, and in only a moment, she had found a meal worth risking every fucking thing for.
Roman Godfrey let out a choked, half-strangled yelp— somewhere between a gasp and a moan, as the witchling suckled on the wound. It had already begun to swell up nice and big, blooming with a lovely purple-grety hue that very much pleased her to look at.
Satisfied, she pressed a cute little peck to the rich boy's booboo, as if that could somehow make it all feel better, and sat back on her haunches. Her weight shifted on his lap as she stirred, watching the light and the victory subside from his expression, replaced instead with a deep frown. The adrenaline of the encounter was rapidly curdling into the stinging reality of the bite.
He stayed there, pinned beneath her dripping, scrawny frame, one hand hovering near his bleeding mouth while the other still clutched the damp skin of her waist.
He looked at her—really looked at her—not as a mysterious woman or a guest in his lodge, but as a trap he had just walked into with his eyes wide open.
The delicacy he'd been so hungry for had just taken a piece of him instead, and the realisation that he would be going to bed bloody, frustrated, and entirely unfulfilled seemed to break something behind his eyes.
It was like he had realised, finally, that he would not, under any promising circumstances— tonight, tomorrow, or any other night— get to fuck her.
Gossamer didn't know what to do about the strange, foreign trickle of sympathy that she felt for him, when he shuffled her off of him like nothing more than a pest, and stalked away, up over the hill, out of sight.
She didn't owe him anything; both he and she would do well to remember it.
DESCRIPTION; A werewolf whose only skill is running from his fears and a half-upir with no idea of the true darkness lying inside of him, supernaturally bound to each other after the mysterious death of a girl they both knew, and the grim visions that haunt them.
Some secrets in Hemlock Grove should have just stayed buried. In a town that isn't so sleepy after all, monsters of all kinds are wide awake under the surface, crawling their way up.
WARNINGS; This story will contain mature and heavy themes that may involve potentially explicit content, gore and murder, talk of kidnapping and stalking victims, animal death, supernatural/paranormal/religious themes and trauma, etc
masterlist.
ask to be tagged! @thedevotchka @coryoslut
IT WAS DIFFICULT, ON MOST MORNINGS, FOR JUDE TO GET OUT OF BED.
She wished it were because of the large— impossibly large— cloud-like mattress. She wished it were because of the silk sheets, because of the beautiful draping sage green curtains of the canopy bed, which she had taken to keeping shut for privacy. She wished it were because it was comfortable, because it was peaceful, because it was safe.
But it wasn't any of those things, try as her husband might to convince himself of that truth. He left her on her own most days, which was more than she expected of him. The least he could do, she reminded herself. It was the least that he could do.
She spent mornings, spent nights, spent all of her time replaying the final morning with Roman, over and over like a prayer that would somehow bring that moment back. She couldn't not.
She remembered him waking from a nightmare, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and wild with a terror he couldn't name. He had warned her of what the Wolf God of Death had told him, remembered lying to him that she didn't already know what the fae prince had been planning. Back then she had just wanted to stay in that moment, to hold him and convince him it was going to be okay.
She remembered the heat of his skin as she held him, the way he clung to her as if she were the only solid thing in a dissolving universe. She had promised him then that the shadows wouldn't reach him. She had promised to be the one to wake him up from these terrors— always. She wondered who had been waking him up now? Who had taken her place? Would anyone ever? Would he be happy without her? Would someone else wake him from those dreams?
Now, she wished more than anything that he was here to wake her up from hers. She closed her eyes and tried to summon the ghost of his touch—the feather-light touch of fingers that hadn't worked a day, the way he whispered her name like it was a secret he wasn't supposed to keep. She wanted to hear his arrogant fucking laugh just one more time.
But Roman Godfrey was a world away. Forever away.
It ached like no pain she had ever felt before, so badly she had stopped eating. So badly she had wasted, until the mages were forced to nurse her back to health. Until they were forced to make her immortal, so that she would never die again.
Every morning, the ritual was the same. Her attendants—three maidens with skin like translucent porcelain and eyes that rarely blinked—would part the curtains with a synchronised rustle, forcing her into the golden rays of jarring sunlight. They did not speak; they hummed, a low, melodic vibration that made Jude's new, sharply pointed ears ring.
They would lead her to the bath, a basin of carved obsidian filled with water that glowed with a faint, bioluminescent violet. As they scrubbed her skin, Jude couldn't help but stare at the reflection in the water.
She had been nothing before, at least nothing in comparison to this. She was beautiful now, devastatingly so, and it didn't feel real, it didn't feel right. Her skin was too clear, features too sharp, her limbs too long, and her hair—once a dull and human auburn even when she had lived—now shimmered a blazing red like blood and fire itself.
This non-consensual magical facial surgery terrified her, because she couldn't even remember what her face had looked like before. She knew that her freckles were gone, the sun damage, the smile lines, the scars, they were gone. Her eyes were black— save for the small, red dots of her pupils.
The maidens dressed her in robes of heavy, midnight-blue silk that trailed behind her like a mourning shroud. They cinched her waist with a corset that bit into her ribs, a constant, stinging reminder that she was no longer allowed to breathe like a mortal. They painted her eyelids with hand-refined powders and placed rings on her fingers that felt as heavy as shackles.
By the time they led her down the long, echoing hall toward the dining chamber, Jude felt less like a woman and more like a statue being moved to a new pedestal.
Her feet didn't click against the marble floors; instead, they glided, her new stride graceful in a way that felt predatory, felt alien. Every time her silk train hissed against the stone, the sound seemed to bounce off the high, vaulted ceilings and return to her as a mere whisper in her ears. The palace was alive with it—the constant, low-frequency chatter of the Unseelie Court, hidden behind tapestries and stone pillars, watching the Prince's new prize pass by.
As they reached the great arched doors of the dining hall, the two guards—towering things with faces hidden behind iron visors—thumped the butts of their spears against the floor in unison.
The doors groaned open, revealing a room bathed in the glow of morning. At the far end of a table long enough to host a feast sat Prince Jassath.
Jude did not bow her head, but she did not meet his gaze either. She simply turned her head, occupying her gaze with the stained glass windows lining the hall.
She never wanted to see his face. Six months to the day since he took her, that would never change; it would never grow easier. She may have had no memory of all the twisted, crooked things he had done to her as a human— as a girl— but she did not need to, to know that he was rotten.
He folded his hands together, ruby gaze stretching down the length of the table to meet hers, even in its absence. The light from the windows caught the sharp, crystalline angles of his cheekbones.
"I was thinking. I know you have been terribly, terribly saddened as of late. It's rather dreary to see you so......bored with yourself. Have no activities on these grounds occupied your days?"
The girl— the fae— shook her head. "I'm afraid not, no. Give it some time. I'm sure something will catch my eye."
From the corner of her eye, she saw his claws—long, translucent, and tipped with a predatory sharpness—tighten around his golden chalice.
"You have been given enough time," he said, his voice dropping into a register that made even the shadows in the corners of the room twitch. "So, I present to you, as a gift, your new hobby from now forth."
Jude did not care for the look on his face—that look—the one he got when he was so fucking pleased with himself. It was a look of total, undisputed ownership. The one Roman had.
Her gut seized at the thought, a phantom pain from a life she was supposedly finished with. She pushed it down, pushed it so far down she had no idea where it went, just that it held no place here. Not anymore.
She watched a butler bring over a trolley. It was a spindly, skeletal thing made of wood, its wheels silent as it glided over the mossy carpet. On the top shelf, a heavy cloth of black velvet was draped over a high, domed object.
"What's this?" she asked, trying to show any morsel of interest.
She watched as the cloth was pulled away swiftly, revealing a small golden bird-like cage, the too-small kind one might keep a canary inside of. The bars were extremely close together—so close that a human finger couldn't pass through—and she realised why when she took further note of what lay inside.
It was no bird that lived inside it—but rather a small winged girl, as tall as her elongated index finger. The pixie's skin was the colour of a bruised plum, and her wings, though tattered and dusty, still shimmered with a sickly, iridescent light.
She was huddled on the floor of the cage, her tiny, claw-like hands gripping the bars as she stared at Jude with eyes that were nothing but wide, terrified circles of silver.
Rage. Rage began to simmer inside of her, and for a moment, she didn't know if she would be able to stop it from falling out. Rage that he could bring her a captive sentient being and call it a gift, rage because it almost felt like a joke, like a reminder of exactly where it was she existed in his peripheral.
Because she had once been the girl in the cage. She was still the girl in the cage; the cage was just the size of a castle now.
"From this moment on, you will be in charge of tending to the pixie garden," Jassath declared, his voice smooth-edged as a blade. "I trust you'll tell me all about your new eventful life at dinner this evening."
And then he stood, gaze lingering on her with a warning disguised as a look of affection—before he swept out of the hall, his black and gold robes trailing like smoke behind him.
Jude was left alone with the silent guards and the gold cage.
The pixie didn't stop. Now that the Prince was gone, she was throwing her entire body against the bars, a frantic, bone-chilling thudding that sounded like a heart trying to beat its way out of a chest.
"Stop," Jude whispered, leaning in. "Please. You'll break your wings."
The pixie snarled, a tiny, jagged sound. She lunged at the bars again, her silver eyes burning with a hatred so pure it made her new, cold blood run hot.
"I'm not going to keep you," Jude said, her voice growing steady.
Swiftly, she placed the cage upon the trolley and guided it down the hall, outside and across the courtyard. She set it down on the edge of the opulent water fountain.
Jude didn't think about the consequences. Her claws reached for the latch. It was small, intricate, and designed to be opened only by someone of her status. With a sharp click, the golden door swung open.
The pixie froze. For a heartbeat, she stared at Jude, her head tilted in that bird-like way. Then she bolted.
She shot away across the courtyard, never daring to look back.
Jude watched her go, a ghost of a smile touching her painted lips. "Run," she breathed. Run, because she could not do it herself, but now someone else could.
The pixie made it to the perimeter of the clearing, nearly at the archway bordering the woods beyond.
There was no sound—no warning.
A long, charcoal-grey arm shot out from behind the arch. It moved with the blurring speed of a strike from a viper, the fingers tipped with obsidian talons snatching the winged girl out of the air mid-flight.
Then it drew into view, as if it had been hidden there, invisible, waiting for the chance that a little bug of a thing might fly its way.
She was tall—impossibly so—with dark grey limbs that appeared to be stretched of shadow itself. Her hair was a wild, raven-black thicket that fell over a charcoal grey cloak. As she stood, she didn't look like a girl; but something akin to a demon or a witch.
Jude's breath hitched, her hands gripping the edge of the fountain.
The creature turned. Her eyes were a piercing, bloody red that matched the Prince's own, but it was her mouth that stopped Jude's heart. Her jaw didn't just open; it split, unlatching like that of a snake. Rows upon rows of fangs, jagged and overlapping, glistening with hunger.
With a sickening, wet crunch snap crunch, the witch devoured the pixie, right in front of her.
A single lace wing fluttered to the marble. The stranger wiped a drop of golden blood from her lip with a clawed thumb, reaching to pick it up.
She just smiled and bowed her head. Drifting over to her, she held out the wing like a souvenir or a token of approval.
"I thank you for the meal, your Highness," she curtseyed with a low, raspy purr. "I have a feeling you will provide me with many more to come. That blood of yours smells positively divine. It's the least you can offer me, after all, if you want to see your upir again."
Anything, she knew, she decided, then and there without hesitation.
I can't believe I'm finally done with this! Can ya'll believe I ACTUALLY finished a story for once? And my first ever finished story? Super proud of myself for not dropping it when I could have, it's been i think since 2024 that i started writing it. it's not very long by any means, but it's bizzare to me that it's actually DONE and I can move on to create more, better stories!
Speaking of better stories, you should definitely go and read Unseelie! To make up for the shitty person I am for giving you this fucking ending!
Much love to the freaks who waited years for this! sowwyyyyy. gonna go cry over this now byeeeeee
DESCRIPTION; A werewolf whose only skill is running from his fears and a half-upir with no idea of the true darkness lying inside of him, supernaturally bound to each other after the mysterious death of a girl they both knew, and the grim visions that haunt them.
Some secrets in Hemlock Grove should have just stayed buried. In a town that isn't so sleepy after all, monsters of all kinds are wide awake under the surface, crawling their way up.
WARNINGS; This story will contain mature and heavy themes that may involve potentially explicit content, gore and murder, talk of kidnapping and stalking victims, animal death, supernatural/paranormal/religious themes and trauma, etc
masterlist.
ask to be tagged! @thedevotchka @coryoslut
ROMAN GODFREY WAS NOT A HUMAN, this he had suspected for the majority of his life. It did not take an Einstein to know this, from the way he could compel people to his whim just by looking into their eyes, to the deep, intense fascination he held for the macabre.
He had always known that there was something cold and ancient coiled in his chest like a serpent, something that didn't belong to this little world of school dances and small-town scandals and fucking cheerleaders in his car. He was a creature of shadow and steel— of this he was certain.
For the very first time, as he plunged into this dream of darkness, the knowledge of his otherworldly being didn't feel so much like an ugly, parasitic secret as it did a useful weapon.
As he walked the reserve trail, the world felt thinner, like the veil of reality was nothing but a wet paper towel ready to tear and dissolve. This was the same path where they had found her—where Jude's battered body had been pulled from the dirt like a discarded toy after a child had finished ruining it. He tried not to delve too far into the sensation of being watched as he crept right past that ditch, to where the dirt path hugged the hillside.
He would much rather have taken his car, to save himself the vigorous amount of physical activity. But it seemed his conscience cared more about punishing him in pursuit of his destiny than it did about making it easy. Nothing about this would be easy, which really just pissed him off even more.
Roman stopped for a brief moment, only when his path became obscured.
He had seen these creatures before. Framed beneath the skeletal branches of the birch trees, five deer and a singular, spindly fawn on wobbling newborn legs stood lining the path ahead. As they had previously, they remained still— not bolting, not screaming— just still, placid and curious. They stood in a jagged line, watching him with eyes like polished ivory; completely glazed over with white film.
He did not like the cold feeling that washed over him, as their gazes tracked him— heads turning around to follow as he continued up the path. Looking back at them, he could still see them watching through the haze and the mist, necks twisted around, stationary as they disappeared into the night gloom.
The Godfrey Steel Mill loomed out of the fog on the hillside. Castle Godfrey the townsfolk called it, and maybe in a way it was to become his crooked palace. The gates groaned as he turned the lock with the family's key, and he parted the metal to slip inside.
He found it on the floor— the hatch leading to the basement. He slipped the key that Jude had given him out of his pocket, the iron sharp and cold as he cradled the delicate thing in his palm.
He turned it over, taking a moment to really observe it. Carefully engraved sigils ran along it, like some sort of magical artefact from some bullshit fantasy novel. Slipping it into the lock, he twisted it open.
He descended the ladder into the bunker. At the bottom, his hands—usually so steady—fumbled. The flashlight slipped, clattering against the concrete and rolling away into complete and total darkness. The light spun wildly before coming to a stop against the base of a wall.
Roman let out a jagged breath and reached down to retrieve it. As his fingers closed around the handle and he tilted the beam upward, the light caught a glint of iron— and the hulking figure of the wolf behind it.
"What the fuck!" he shouted, tripping as he jumped back and hitting his head on one of the rungs in the ladder. He lifted a hand to his scalp, relieved there wasn't any blood, but reeling from the throbbing ache regardless.
The beast didn't jump or snarl. It didn't even flinch at Roman's outburst. It remained hauntingly still, a mountain of matted, ink-black fur that seemed to absorb the very light from Roman's flashlight. It was massive—too large for the crawlspace of the cage, its spine curved painfully against the low ceiling of the iron bars—but it was also emaciated.
Roman scrambled to his feet, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He levelled the light to the creature's face.
The eyes were what stopped his breath. They weren't animal eyes. They were vast, swirling pools of molten gold, ancient and starving, glowing with a sentient brilliance that made Roman feel like a microscopic insect under a lens. There was no dog in this creature; there was only the raw, primordial essence of a hunter older than life itself.
"You," Roman breathed, the initial terror beginning to curdle into a dark, delicious fascination.
The wolf tilted its head, a slow, agonisingly deliberate movement. A low vibration started in the floor—not a growl, but a deep, almost inaudible hum that resonated in his teeth. It was a frequency of recognition. The wolf wasn't looking at Roman's expensive clothes, or his arrogance or his beauty— it had made contact with the thing inside him that was not a human.
"You," he said back. "You are the upir. You have a craving for blood, for death and for darkness. Come to kill the beast, have you?"
"Not kill," Roman said. He considered the animal's words as if he knew what any of it meant. Upir, blood cravings. It didn't mean anything to him in the face of death itself, which he knew, with every fibre of his being, every fibre of his soul, was standing right in front of him.
"I think I am going to free you."
"You think? Or you know?"
"I haven't decided," he admitted.
Because he hadn't. Because if death remained trapped here in this cage, it would not come for those he loved. It would not come for Jude.
"You think you can protect her from her fate?" The wolf blinked slowly, knowingly. "You think you can protect her from death. But even while I am here, you cannot. You do more harm than you do good by keeping me locked up here."
"She won't die," his fingernails bit into the palm of his free hand. "If you are here. She will stay."
"She will not," the wolf huffed. "She will fade. She is already fading. And when that happens, you will cease to remember she ever existed."
He thought for a moment, teeth pulling on his lip. "I would rather forget her. I would rather forget her than deal with losing her."
"You do not," the creature sighed. "You do not wish that. And I do not wish that for you. It is a beautiful thing to love someone so much that being without them is a pain unspeakable. But it is also a dangerous one," he said. "You need that pain. You need this loss."
"I don't," he spat. "How can I need it? That's just bullshit!"
Roman's voice cracked, sounding embarrassingly small in the hollow silence of the bunker. He wanted to silence the creature for even suggesting that losing Jude was a necessity.
Death didn't snap back. It simply leaned closer to the bars, its golden eyes expanding until the rest of the room seemed to dissolve into a sea of molten light.
"You need it because you need to let it happen," the wolf said. "You need to make peace with her choice, and you need to make peace with your hurt. It will rip the human out of you, if you do not."
Roman stared, his chest heaving.
"Step into the cage."
Roman did not. He did not want to get eaten.
"Step into the cage!" the wolf bellowed, fangs bared. "Don't think I will not snap you in half where you stand! If I had planned to, you would not have even seen me coming. I will not ask you again."
Wondering just what the fuck his problem was, the boy— the upir— conceded, and stepped inside the enclosure, crouching down to fit.
Another lock secured a small metal door flush with the wall, right at the back of the cell. Key in hand, he crawled on all fours through the muck and blood that the wolf god of death had lost, nearly slipping. He could feel the hot breath of the canine fanning over him as he worked to open the lock.
The door pushed inward, and through it he began to move.
The boy and the wolf emerged on the other side in a dense, thick area of the forest, right in the middle of a dried-up riverbed. He brushed off his blazer, which had been soiled with cobwebs and gunk, and picked his way down the rocky slope.
Death followed, fur black as shadow even in the violet light.
Before he could speak, before he could turn to ask what there was to do next, his eye caught movement across the way.
There across the way, above where the gnarled roots of the willows clawed over the edge of the riverbank, stood a figure.
It wore the familiar, clunky silhouette of the man in the gas mask from the cabin, the dark canvas coat hanging heavy. But there was no heavy breathing this time.
He didn't reach for the straps of the mask. Instead, the air around it began to shimmer and swirl, like heat rising in the distance.
Roman watched, his breath hitching, as the industrial nightmare simply dissolved.
Canvas bled into midnight silk— the rubber of the mask pulled back and smoothed into skin the colour of pure silver moonlight. The clunky boots vanished into a stature that was taller, more graceful, and infinitely more terrifying.
Standing there now was a man—if he could be called that—with hair like a spill of ink against the purple sky. He was beautiful in a way that made Roman's stomach turn, a handsome, predatory fae whose very existence felt like a mocking mirror to his own inhuman, inferior nature.
The stranger didn't move to attack. Instead, he simply stood at the edge of the riverbed, his midnight silk robes catching in the wind. He looked at Roman not as a rival, but as an interesting specimen—red pupils swimming in a gaze darker than anything he had ever seen, fangs revealed by the crescent shape of that devious, that deadly, smug smile. Ears as pointed and as sharp as blades.
Then, he simply disappeared over the ridge.
"What....who—" Roman struggled for his words
"He is demonic fae," the wolf snarled, like it disgusted him to speak. "A power-hungry Witchling. Capturing the God of Death has done more than just buy him time to find his perfect queen. It bought him the throne to begin with."
"Throne?" he echoed.
"In the Plane of Myth, from which he originates, beings can be categorised by their benevolent or malevolent nature," Death explained. "The seelie and unseelie. Witchlings are of the latter. This one has claimed rulership over it."
"And you— why can't you stop this?" the upir hissed, a jolt of anger running through him.
"I cannot stop him any more than I can stop the sun from setting," his ears drew back. "It is not within my power."
"You are death. If you can choose when Jude gets to die, you can choose when this bastard does too."
"I do not get to choose who lives and who dies. I did not choose her death, and would happily have avoided it," the wolf snarled. "He did. He chose for her, and now she will choose for herself. So will you."
He told himself to settle, that it was unbecoming of him to chew out the Wolf God of Death himself. But he just could not help it, and who could really blame him?
"So this..fae," he drawled, failing to feel his pockets for a much-needed cigarette. "What does he want? Why is he killing these girls?"
"I already told you," Death grumbled. "He wants a bride. A queen."
"Jude," Roman breathed, like it just dawned on his stupid ass. "He wants Jude."
"And if he can't have her, he'll rip everything else apart."
.
