He remembers this place, faintly. He had come here many times nestled in the safety of a younger, larger, able-bodied shadow. He comes here now, able in his own right, powerful as he ploughs through the snowdrifts and the curtains of falling flakes that lace broad grey shoulders and a shadowy, tangled mess of a mane that curls and ropes down his neck. He is old enough to decide upon the cold; he finds it distasteful, and his innards echo with an errant hiss.

But he is here, regardless, and Ka’Mate is mindless to his master’s displeasure with the elements; he soars through the snow, contemplating it briefly, his stomach hot and full of an owlet he had caught unawares in the shadows of a tree. Ka’Ora purches upon her master’s hips, wings shrouded against the fury of the wind; she is patient against the cold, her mind snapping to attention as she feels her master’s interest piqued.

Beat it, he commands. In a flurry of heavy grey wings, Ka’Ora disappears from her master’s company. She is now nothing; lost to the wind and the gentle, happy blizzard. She is swallowed by the winter. Reginald does not watch her go.

Eyes of grey rest instead on a rather interesting sight, for his interest for the female creature becomes a vice he easily slides into no matter the occasion. His eyes scan the way a tight, toned body fights the pull of the snowdrifts with a high, spirited gait. She would blend easily into the dull grey of the landscape, where it not for the sable legs that sprang in turn from the piles of silvery white with every step. He needs very little prodding for pursuit; a body caught by the grips of a cold always begs for warmth, and he is pleased by her form, besides. The blue eyes are framed well on her visage; she is built well; her color is not idiotic, erratic, inbred. She will be a nice one.

He shakes some of the snow from his mane as he trudges through the snow; she must fight it, yet it is no match for his awesome weight, the perfection of a grand obelisk as he. His grey eyes flash from the shadows of his brow; his smile is easy (he has been practicing). He approaches with an arch to his neck he knows showcases something a mare might like to see, and the look he cuts her is quick.“You can ease up, now,” comes the oiled, polished, dashing rumble; a serpent’s purr, “I’ve already noticed you.”

”Watch for Circe.”

Ooh, lucky me.

Yes, lucky you.

His eyes are captured; even when the subtle growl of a snow cat reaches his ear, he cocks it, idly, and pays no more attention to the aggravated feline. Ka’Ora soars above, vigilant; Ka’Mate beats his wings with ever, ever simmering anger, ready to dive and sink his vicious beak and furious claws into whatever might endanger his liege. Reginald does not feel himself in harm’s way—although, it should be noted, his attentions have become intoxicated and preoccupied with a mare who’s proving to make this much easier than he had intended.

He would wonder about it if his brain were not so inflamed—this ease of the womanly kingdom, her gaiety, her ferocious, adamant demand for pleasure. This grey thing with the acceptable eyes and adequate form is not the first to tempt the serpent with a sway to her hips that nearly begs with its willing shiver. They see him; they like what they see, and they are conquered by grey eyes and body and sperm. It is such a different picture than what he remembers from his boyhood, the image of the sniveling, jeering, tearful, prancing plague of a filly. He would wonder why his childhood had to be such a storm of torment and frustration—he would wonder, but then, his brain is inflamed, now, with a good thing.

He would think that it was worth it in the end, for moments like these.

“Come now, don’t treat me like that. I don’t notice ‘all the girls’ like I’ve noticed you,” he says with a false mope, a genuine purr, the words polished smooth by a tongue that caresses with ever-growing care and cunning. She stops in her tracks; he steps past her, a façade of jaunty disinterest, an opportunity for her to see all angles of him—every powerful edge, every subtle sinew that bulges with his movement—even as his own gaze rakes across her body as well.

The game is played loosely; they both know why they’re here. He only makes it warmer, sliding into it, leaving her with a memory worth saving.

Who might you be?

He snorts slowly, and his breath billows around him in the soft flurry. “A poor little boy, lost in the snow and far from home,” comes the smooth sigh of words. His eyes cut to her, and the greys are not so coy in their granite depths. The withholding of his name is a key: that is not what we’re here for. We don’t need names for this kind of thing. “Tell me: who is it that I’ve noticed?”

”Watch for Circe.”

*"If you keep telling lies like that, your nose will grow. Maybe it already has...oh, wait! My mistake... that's not your nose."*

He laughs. It bursts from him, booming and boyishly delighted with her wit, charmed by a mare with a quick, sizzling tongue. Ka’Ora, far above and away, pine’s for her master’s side; oh, but how she’s always loved the genuine laughter of her liege! How she revels and rejoices in his happiness, in a lightheartedness that rarely ventures forward to touch the grey hide. She wishes she could return, to meet this woman who has him laughing so—but master had said beat it, and her wings do beat, and she must float far away, solitary in the cold, hanging in the air as she waits for master to finish his—business.

He closes his maw, and the laughter ceases, yet in its wake a spark has been ignited in the eyes of grey. He looks at the mare (the dreadfully lonely woman) with a renewed flame, a blaze that seals the wax on a binding contract. “Yes, ma’am,” he answers her, and the words are dark fire spitting from the maw of an awakened dragon. The doubt is gone, the game becomes wearisome, and the woman’s teeth flashes against his shoulder blade. The ears only pin momentarily, and his rage, quick and hot and ever ready against the insubordination of a female, wastes away against the towering passion that replaces it. He knows better than to be angry. The stipulation was to put her in her place, a place she seems so eager to occupy. Well, then.

She dances away, and he throws his bulk at her, his shadow and weight tossed towards her left side—to unbalance her, to show her exactly how a man is built, how a man is made. His teeth reach for her poll, to imitate her sinister, sultry kiss with his own lovebite behind her ear—but his jaws are iron clamps, and he’s not in such a hurry to release his prey should he connect. He wants to taste her, to bring her to heal quickly, efficiently and with little mess. He is done with wasting time and charming wit, for while it is true they set the stage nicely for the dance to come, it is now time to dance.

”Watch for Circe.”

He is unaware and untouched by the silent fury of his quarry’s bonded. He does not anticipate their actions a possible dilemma, a consequence in waiting behind the guise of a passionate moment. He has never sired a child before (to his knowledge); he has never entertained the possibility. The grey-eye’d man is one of focus and treacherous schemes, of hot, boiling piss and a walking urge to be sated. He is not a creature to even consider the chance, however slight, of bearing offspring. He does not know what it would mean to be a father. He does not care for that, yet.

Here and now, as he dances with a blue-eye’d, hot-blooded whore in the snowfall, it is nothing more than the mixing of their beading sweat and hot breath. They are left to their own devices in the far, lonely north (for master had said to beat it). It is a moment, and pure, isolated moment in the middle of nowhere, a memory in the making (that she may look back on with sweetness); when they part, they will be parted, and he will have naught to do with her (except, perhaps, a round two, three, four, if they happen upon each other’s path).

He decides that likes this mare; he likes the way she pulls against his teeth (a futile effort, yet delicious all the same), how her hoof comes as if from nowhere to pound against his side. She has fight in her, and drive. She is no stranger to the fight, and just as well, for she had told him to put her in her place and it seems as though she intends to make him work for such a victory. He welcomes this challenge, this break from monotony of a mundane, infuriating herd life—and wishes, only, that she had found her way down to the blessed heat of the desert, and that they would fuck there instead of the frozen, impersonal north.

He groans deeply as her hoof connects with skin. His teeth release her, but he continues to throw himself against her, shoulder to shoulder, side to side, for he knows now that she cannot match against this raw bulk. He side-steps into her; he draws back his neck, and his lips grope for her wither, even as the sharp edges of his fangs teeth lay hidden behind the black folds. He aims for her wither—he dips down, and aims for her elbow and the thin, sensitive stretch of skin there; he dips further down and grasps for the back of her knee, for he has decided that she will kneel to him, after all, and that she will bow to her in more ways than one before the night is over.

”Watch for Circe.”

Ka'Mate is indecent with excitement; he feels what master's body prepares. He can see with master's eyes how the female kneels, and how the red-hot rush of satisfaction courses through his master's veins. It tastes so good, much too good, and Ka'Mate finds himself an addict to that sort of covetous pleasure. His attention (lost and ignored in the turmoil of fire in the mind of the Basilisk) is rapt, so like and unlike his sister, who turns her inner eye away from the proceedings, for she is weak and weary to it. She had hoped this mare would be different, from the way she had made her master laugh. It is not meant to be; she is another vessel, and her master remains a creature that does not love.

The musings of his bonded barely touch him. His senses are flooded with mare. Dimly, Reginald is aware of the small signs of the grand fighter he is about to bed; were it not for the ravenous stirrings between the both of them, he would've found their battle a worthy one, satisfying the bloodlust that lies ever dormant and willing just behind the curve of his fang. But fuck that. She presents herself to him, practically on a platter as silver as her hide, and his bulk rises, a shadowy obelisk in the gentle snowfall, and no time is wasted.

He is not gentle; he never is. He suspects she does not want him to be.

”Watch for Circe.”

[Bow-chicka.]