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Story: A Soul to Protect

“I don’t know whether or not I should thank you for bringing Linh back,” she whispered with her head lowered. “It was wise, and I’m assuming it was due to you knowing you couldn’t save her.”

Indeed,he thought, as he extended his fangs.

He slid the point of one into the jar and pushed his fingers into the roof of his mouth just behind it. A squirt echoed within, and the stream didn’t end until he fully emptied his venom sac. He shuddered in repulsion, before doing the same to the other, expressing his fang himself.

That was wildly unpleasant.There had been no warmth to give it a euphoric feeling, and it somehow felt dry.

“A Duskwalker asking for aid on behalf of a human, andhumansaskitto stay,” she muttered, before looking off to the side. “What has the world come to?”

He licked the inside of his maw to settle the feeling of his empty sacs, only to flick his tongue forward at the female in annoyance.No one has asked me to stay.If he recalled, the male from earlier told him to get lost. They would soon learn he had absolutely no intention of leaving until his nightingale was placed back into his arms.

He offered the female the ceramic jar, its venomous contents swishing within. She took it and bowed her head.

“Demons and Duskwalkers are no different. Whatever you crave from that woman, forget it.” She backed up a step with the top of her hood showing. “But remain nonetheless.”

Remain? She is asking me to stay?He wished she’d be more direct, as she was just being needlessly confusing.

She turned, giving him her back as she walked between the guards. Once more, the males tried to get him to leave.

Nathair merely coiled his tail around himself, showing he would be stubbornly immobile to their demands. He also used it to block out the sounds and scents of the humans within thevillage walls. His orbs shifted to blue at the loss of her, his heart burning with guilt, but his longing and worries were too deep to change his sight.

Minutes bled into hours, day shifting into cold night. Even when Demons crawled over him, but left him be as he was not disturbing them, he refused to unfurl himself.

Despite the fragments he fought to keep at bay, a constant thought remained.

My heart feels colder without her.

As the last of the light drizzle faded, the sun eventually peeked through a few gaps in the clouds. The warmth was minimal, but Nathair’s wet form soaked it in nonetheless.

It’s been two days, he grumbled, mulling over the time span.

Two days of no answers.

No one had come to visit him, nor to inform him of what had happened to Linh. He took solace in the silence, hoping it was a good thing, rather than being told something dreadful. That his little female had died, and instead of pining over her, he should be mourning.

My chest hurts.It radiated with an intense ache constantly.

His orbs shifted between two colours that sat like acid in his gut. Blue as he drowned in the well of his sadness, and dark orange as he lay in the ice of his guilt.

I wish I could be by her side.

Rather than being stuck outside of this fortified village, he would have... entered it if they permitted him. The echoing loneliness that had never bothered him before gnawed at his mind in the wake of her absence. He would subjugate himself tothe humans’ chattering, and how it would batter in his skull, if it meant he could curl her on top of his tail while she slept, got better, passed away...

He wanted to hold that female more than he wanted his next breath. He needed to feel her warmth, while he took in greedy draws of her scent. He craved brushing the back of his fingers over her cheek, her soft brow, her jaw, or have his claws comb through the silky strands of her glossy hair. He longed to feel her slim curves moulding into the hardness of his body.

If she survives... I will rip my fangs out.They would return in a day, but until she gifted him her soul, he would remove them daily so as to not do this again.If she dies because of me...

He twisted, spinning in his coils. A snarl broke free, directed at himself.

How did I ever think I would be able to let the little female go?He promised her that she could leave him should she choose it, but that was no longer possible. He knew it, could feel it.

Like he had flooded her with venom, she had snuck her own within him. A sweet, enthralling, and tantalising venom that rippled his scales. Something that bled into his very veins and became necrotic now that she wasn’t here to give him the sweet nectar of her entire essence as a form of antidote.

This wait is excruciating.

It persisted. Annoying him, making him itch with irritation. He’d already flaked off scales from the need to barrel his way through the gates and find her.

The gates clanked and clunked as they opened.Fuck! Finally!

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