Nymeria & Lilómiel

baby, I'm a sociopath / sweet serial killer / on the warpath / 'cause I love you / just a little too much.

She is virginal to the process of bonding, a lover waiting in only the thinnest of slips for what is to come; her dowry is only her soul, a precious and yet to be nurtured thing. Back and forth she rocks, flight-like, on the very tips of her charcoal toes, a slight and darling movement betraying the anticipation, the nerves, coiled in her sinewy breast. For all her lessons on bonding and the connection of twin souls, responsibilities to be uplifted upon shoulders and slung over her spine ('til she is loaded in the likeness of a metaphorical pack mule), she did not know what to expect. And this unknowing, this blindness to the first touch of her pledged and unwarranted draconian friend, shook her to the very fibers of her indelicate being.

Will it hurt? What will it feel like, to rub spirits with this floppy little being sprawled across marbled floors, with those eyes which match hers? Would she be able to understand it, like she does Volterra? Would it be knowingness? Maybe it wouldn't take hold to her; maybe it would reject her. Fear taps away at her heart, and adrenaline flushes beneath gray, circumnavigating veins all too familiar with the embrace of terror.
Jitters play across silvered skin.

"Lilómiel," the arachnid equine coos to him, ivory lashes flexing down across carmine retinas. Weight pitches forth, shabby and short mane spilling out across a slim neck. The wolf lets bend her long neck, bringing her muzzle close to the dragon. Over she roams his damp body, muzzle quick and deft and cautious, letting his scent permeate deep in her nasal passages and (as she so imagines it) settle into the cautious places of her heart. His skin is warm; it smells like iron and rust, feels like damp leather, and his claws, tiny and wicked like barbed thorns, puncture through the tender flesh of her right nostril, leaving behind four nicks in the curving flesh. It stings, but her smile only grows. Hers. All of this tangly slate and sloe, hers and none other, and it is in this moment that she feels it.

Haunting. Peculiar. Alien.
The brushing of minds, a whisper of the intimacy to soon be shared. To explain it would be impossible; to put words to this weaving and fabricating out of nothingness even more so. It's a sensation abhorrent and appealing in equal nature, and she is greedy for it even as she is scared for her individuality. Mother said it would not affect her so much as it would the dragon; but she, at the height of youth, was still impressionable, still vulnerable to the clever guileless of an older mind.

And her thoughts are thus shaken by the familiar, the homey and cozy, the slovenly slump of massive black shoulders. Up her head snaps, with the slender waif of a girl arcing her neck to peer back at him, coy grin nestled upon egocentric features.

It fades and melts into sincerity, a softening of her tender brows at his insecurity. "Brother," she laughs, a piteous chuckle—even knowing he cannot abide by her sympathy. "Nothing could replace you. Nobody could come close to being as ugly as you." Nym can't really explain the emotions nestled away for him; love and adoration and admiration, faith and confidence and tender conviction in his strength. There weren't enough words. It was like trying to drink the ocean, or dig to the center of the earth—simply impossible. Nobody could replace him. He was Volterra, and she Nymeria. They were twins, hatchmates, flowers sprung from the same seed; he was everything, her everything. If he wanted to, she would strike this companion out from being, tear her own soul in two—just to make him happy. Just to make him believe in her (even if it meant risking the wrath of Confutatis.)
Volterra and Nymeria.
Rulers together.