@redsabered sent a meme for rey.
Send “appease the monster” for a starter where your muse has been left out as a human sacrifice for my muse. // Send “sacrifice” for my muse to be the sacrifice to your muse.
Anger, more than anything, boiled in her veins as she struggled against the ropes that bound her to the post, blood staining her wrists, palms and fingers where her skin had blistered and torn with the force of her efforts. Futile efforts, thus far. She still could not believe that it had come to this. Almost all of her life, she had known them, the villagers, the fathers and mothers, the husbands and wives, the young and the old, the sick and the hale, the cruel and the kind -- all in all she’d found them fairly tolerable. At least in small doses.
Yes: ever since she’d been old enough to survive on her own she’d scurried to the outer edges of the village, and then beyond, but that should’ve been as much a blessing to them as anything else - relieving them of the burden of social conscience to care for the orphan, the stray, the one left behind, to no one in particular and all of them, somehow, the first years of her life that she could remember, drifting from one household to the next, whomever could spare the bed and the food, until she’d been pushed further and further away. They hadn’t bothered to object when she slowly stopped coming around, save to bring pelts and food and fish for trading --
So she didn’t attend their Sabbath services. She didn’t attend their festivals and their harvests, except to bring her own things in to barter, or to steal away what food was left uneaten. So she preferred the company of herself, of the woods, the water, the mountains -- so she turned to the earth and its bounty to tend to her wounds and treat her ailments -- it wasn’t as if she had the coin to barter for medical treatment from their savage physicians anyhow ....
So she hadn’t ever quite fit in. She hadn’t expected it would ever come to this. Bound, to a pole erected in the clearing with the sole intent that she might be eaten instead of one of their own precious children.
Sure. She couldn’t quite blame them, if she looked at it logically. The attacks had been brutal, and had only been growing in frequency over the last months. Livestock, travelers, alone or in small groups, savaged, torn apart. At night, only, and most often around the full moon. Wolves, some said. Something else, others whispered when they thought no one else could hear. A sacrifice, they’d suggested, in desperation, fear and grief and alcohol ladening their thoughts. A trap, someone had countered. Why not both. So here she was, bound, dangled bait, with hunters with crossbows and villagers with pitchforks laying in wait.
She grimaced, twisting against the ropes once more, her shoulders and chest burning with the effort thrown into trying to wrench herself free, but she froze, her breath caught in her throat at the sound of weight, heavy, laden, a crack of leaves the snapping of branches, and her gaze turned up, slowly, to stare down the gleaming red eyes of the wolf. Massive, broader than two men across the chest, as tall as she, fur pitch black, the cool air rippling in visible waves as the heat of its body collided with the frosty air. Her heart hammered, her stomach clenching, throat dry. “Don’t -- “ To say her words lacked conviction was an understatement. “Stay back!” That sounded at least a little more determined.