Little wolf, little wolf, do you truly think you're safe? Dragon's fire might rage within your throat, nightingale's song in your shadow, but neither define you more than my gift; my blood searing through your veins, feeding your wild heart ever onwards. It gave you a life and vigor greater than any you've ever known, and you squander it day and night skulking in the dark as though you are mere prey. Keep to them as you please; they won't spare you from an eternity hunting at my beck and call.
In her dreams, her hands are big and gnarled and black as the night, claws as long as scalpels and twice as sharp. Her jaws are disfigured and each tooth is as big as the length of a child’s hand, built for nothing else in this world but to rip and tear and destroy. Here, she is a creature of war, an abomination of the Daedra, the perfect killing machine; a child of the Moon and more than that, a child of the Prince of the Hunt, something she embodies well.
She always knows she’s dreaming because she remembers it. The wolf isn’t somebody else, not a separate creature in her heart. In her dreams, in the hunting grounds, both those souls are one. She’s more aware than she’s ever been of her body, and this wretched ugliness it carries. A blessing to some and a curse to her.
Little wolf, little wolf, do you truly think you’re safe? Dragon’s fire might rage within your throat, nightingale’s song in your shadow, but neither define you more than my gift; my blood searing through your veins, feeding your wild heart ever onwards.
She would like to say the first thought in instant denial, a confidence in herself.
Someone like her should have the predictable response, what most would expect from the Slayer of the Eater of Worlds; something headstrong and brave and unfaltering. The words of someone that doesn’t feel fear, someone courageous enough to look daedra and dragons alike in the eyes without flinching like common men. That is the ideal Dragonborn, the ultimate epitome of what makes a hero in the storybooks.
But they’re just that, really. Stories. They’re not real, and the reality is much harsher and much more disappointing. The reality is her hesitance, wide-eyed and fearful, that split second of belief.
The words are a myriad of whispers and screams in her mind all at once, its source every direction and yet nowhere all at once. There is no figure to match this voice but it’s familiar regardless, like a close bedfellow she doesn’t want to know. His presence here is far more irrefutable than anywhere else, spelling her futility without explicitly wording it.
She cringes in on herself.
The expanse around her is nothing but darkness, plains as far as the eye can see with endless horizons and trees dotting the landscape. Behind a thin mist of fog, there’s a blood-red moon, the same color that reflects in her eyes.
No! You’re wrong! That’s not me!
She tries to scream, but her mouth is warped and distorted and all that comes out is a gurgling, guttural whine.
It gave you a life and vigor greater than any you’ve ever known, and you squander it day and night skulking in the dark as though you are mere prey.
The anger will come later, she knows. After the fear and despair, after the self-hatred for this monster she is, how pitifully she bends to her most hated.
Keep to them as you please; they won’t spare you from an eternity hunting at my beck and call.
This time, a howl rips in her throat, a sound of pure expression she cannot name; a noise of utter despair.
And then she’s falling. She’s falling, and the world underneath her gives way and as she plummets and the moon shrinks smaller and smaller into the sky. She reaches upward to grasp at something – anything – and all she sees is the two gnarled hands in front of her, clawing at nothingness, and then–
Valvossa wakes, suddenly and violently. She doesn’t jerk upward as much as she wrenches herself forward, fingers digging into the furs at her sides. Her eyes are wide and wild, teeth bared like an animal and cold sweat beading over her skin and sticking strands of hair to her forehead. She realizes it was a dream – a nightmare – the second she wakes, but it does little to comfort her.
She is no fool to dismiss them as little else but figments of her imagination. That isn’t how the Princes work. No matter how safe she may ever feel in Nocturnal’s arms, his are always just out of reach. Waiting for her to falter, to grapple her and rip her away for eternity.
The heels of her palms dig into her eyes, aggressively wiping at them. Whether it’s to wake herself better or perhaps dry them, she doesn’t admit either to herself. She doesn’t admit to that or anything else, and she certainly doesn’t pay any mind to her body’s uncontrollable shuddering, or this incessant want she has for company, something and somebody to help ground her. To tell her it’ll be fine.
But it won’t be.
This is a curse. A horrid curse, and nobody can know about it.
Nobody can know how much it terrifies her.
