irenehearth!!! @irenehearth - Tumblr Blog

♥ 𝓕𝓐𝓔 𝓐𝓛𝓦𝓐𝓨𝓢 𝓕𝓘𝓛𝓛 𝓣𝓗𝓔𝓘𝓡 𝓓𝓔𝓑𝓣𝓢

𝓢𝓨𝓝𝓞𝓟𝓢𝓘𝓢:

You are walking home through a snowstorm when you find a dying flame trapped in an iron lantern, and against every warning your grandmother ever gave you about the Fae, you breathe it back to life. It vanishes. So, it seems, does the ordinary shape of your life. Now the wind goes soft when you're cold. The wood never runs low. Someone is watching from the treeline, and it keeps showing up right when you need saving most. You're starting to think all he's ever wanted is you. And what you offer him in return is the one thing you have always had plenty of: yourself.

Featuring. Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins Word Count. 20k (please, I promise it's worth it) Trigger Warning(s). SMUT (18+) ♦ fucking in the woods ♦ slightly horror-adjacent? but extremely tame, dw Notes. I have tried to incorporate accurate Russian culture into this work, but keep in mind that I'm not Russian, so beware of any inaccuracies, esp in terminology! Feminine terms/pronouns used for reader throughout the work.

By the time you were ten, you had buried your mother in the ground so hard the priest cracked two shovels trying to dig her a grave deep enough for God to find her.

You remember thinking, even then, that this was the trouble with Nod-Krai. The dead were always closer to the surface than they ought to be. Frost kept them honest. It pushed coffins up through the soil come the spring thaw, the way a sin pushes its way up through a confession, and the men would go out with their hooks and their crosses and put the bodies back where they belonged, muttering prayers with the particular tiredness of men who did not quite believe them anymore.

You think of this now, several winters later, because you are walking through a storm that wants very badly to make you one of the dead it puts back.

The wind does not blow so much as it arrives, all at once, from every direction, as if the forest itself has exhaled. It finds the seam where your shawl meets your collar and works its fingers in. Snow has filled the road past your knees, and the birches on either side have become something else entirely in this light, white bones standing sentry, their black eyes watching you pass with the patient indifference your Babulya always warned you trees like that could feel. They remember who walks past them in the dark, she used to say, crossing herself, then crossing you, two fingers pressed hard to your collarbone like she could pin the blessing into your skin so it would not slip off. And they tell.

You are walking to her now. Babulya Marfa, who has not left her izba on the far side of the wood in nine years, who sends word twice a season to whoever is fool enough to make the crossing. Who is, as of three days ago, very possibly dying. Your uncle wrote it in a hand so unsteady you had to read the letter twice to be certain the words were asking for you and not something crueler. You left before the ink on your reply had dried. You did not think, until you were already an hour into the trees, to ask why a storm like this had chosen tonight, of all nights, to come down off the mountains and bury the only road that led to her door.

Your father would call this foolishness. He would say a woman with sense waits out the weather in town, drinks her tea, says her prayers to the Tsaritsa by the stove, where the only thing she has to fear is whether the samovar needs more coals. But your father is three days behind you, and you are not, despite what people say about you, entirely without sense. You are simply the kind of fool who has always believed that love is owed in person, paid in full, while there is still time to pay it.

So you walk. Your valenki are soaked through to felt that no longer remembers what dry feels like. The lantern you carried from town gave up its flame an hour ago, smothered by wind that seemed almost deliberate in the way it found the glass, and you have not had the courage to stop and relight it, certain that if you stood still even a moment, the cold would decide you had made its decision easier and simply keep you.

It is in this dark, this particular shade of black that swallows the difference between shut eyes and open ones, that you see it.

A flame.

Blue, and so small you mistake it at first for the storm playing tricks on your sight.. It hangs low among the birches, perhaps thirty paces off the road, no taller than a candle's flame and twice as faint, guttering as though some unseen hand keeps pinching it nearly to death and then, at the last possible moment, relenting.

Your whole body goes still with the particular stillness of a hare that has just understood the shape in the grass is not grass.

Bolotnik fires, Babulya's voice says, clear as if she stood beside you, clearer than she has sounded in any letter these nine years. You were seven the first time she told you, the two of you wrapped under the same wool blanket while the stove ticked and settled, her hands smelling of tallow and dried dill as she traced the story into your palm like she was teaching you to read by touch alone.

The wisps. The Fae's own lanterns, lit from a coal they stole out of the first fire that ever burned, before God made the sun to make fires honest. They do not burn for warmth, devushka. They burn for hunger. You see one in the marsh, in the wood, anywhere the dark pools like water, and you do not go to it. You let it call you sweetheart in your mother's voice if it likes. You let it weep. You keep walking, and you do not look back, because the moment you go to comfort it, it has already won.

You know this. You have known it since before you knew the shape of your own name in your own handwriting.

And still, fool you are, your feet have already turned off the road.

You tell yourself it is only that the flame is so weak, so clearly wretched in the way it strains and dims and strains again like something genuinely about to gutter out, that some animal part of you, the same part that once spent a whole spring nursing a crow with a broken wing back into the sky, simply cannot leave it to die. You tell yourself a great many things, in fact, in the time it takes you to cross those thirty paces, snow past your knees, breath turned to frost-lace at your lips, and every one of those things is a lie you are telling so that the truer, stupider reason, it looked so alone out there, the way you feel most nights, and you have never once in your life been able to leave a lonely thing alone, does not have to be looked at directly.

You should know better. Babulya spent half your childhood making certain that you did.

But you have never been able to walk past a thing that is suffering, not a crow, not a dog, not the old beggar woman outside the church whom the other girls crossed the street to avoid, and some buried, stubborn part of you has already decided, before your mind has caught up to agree, that whatever this flame is, it is hurting, and that this, more than any warning whispered over a childhood blanket, is the only fact that matters.

The snow grows strange beneath your feet as you near it, packed too smooth, untouched by wind in a perfect ring no wider than a grave, and the flame does not flicker the way fire flickers when it is fed by wind. It flickers the way breath does when it is being held back on purpose.

You stop within arm's reach and understand, all at once, two things.

The first is that there is no marsh-light hovering free in the air the way Babulya's stories always told it. It is caught, contained, burning low and blue and dying inside the soot-fogged glass of a small iron lantern, the kind a traveler might once have carried. Its handle hangs from nothing, from no hand, from no branch, suspended at the exact height a person would hold it if a person were standing there. It turns, very slightly, on its nothing-chain, as if it has only just noticed you, too.

The second is that you have already reached out your hand.

You have seen weirder things than a dying lantern with no one to hold it. You were twelve the night the Wild Hunt cornered you to a cliff, and whatever you carry from that night you have never spoken of to anyone, not even Babulya, who you suspect already knows because she never once asked. Set against that, a flame guttering in its little iron cage seems almost a kindness of a haunting, the sort a girl could reasonably survive.

Still, fear comes, and it settles less on the lantern itself than on the air pressing close around it, the way the cold here seems to bend slightly inward, the way the silence holds itself with a kind of attention. A shiver moves through you that has nothing to do with the wind. You know its name. You have felt it before, kneeling too close to the iconostasis with its rows of painted eyes, in the breath before a held secret decides whether it wants to stay held. It is the body's oldest language for something here is watching you back.

You ought to turn around now. Babulya told you this part too, the part that comes after the warning has already failed, where you are meant to drop your hand, walk back to the road, and let the wind keep whatever pity you were about to spend on a thing built to spend you in return.

But the flame dips low again, nearly to nothing, a wick about to surrender its last claim on burning, and something in your chest answers it before your senses can intervene. You think of the crow. You think, absurdly, that nothing this weak could possibly still be dangerous, the same lie every soft-hearted fool has told herself walking up to every wounded thing that ever bit her for the trouble.

You pull it from the air. It is lighter than it has any right to be, the iron cold enough to ache through your mitten, and you tuck it inside your coat against your ribs the way you'd carry a half-frozen kitten, your other hand coming up to shield the little glass door from the worst of the wind.

The clasp is iron too, plain and old, sized for fingers larger than your own, and it takes three tries with numb hands before it finally gives. The moment the door swings open, the flame leaps, rising thin and furious, bending away from your fingers like something startled out of sleep that wants nothing to do with being seen this close, this raw. You nearly snap the door shut again on instinct, certain you have woken something better left to die in peace.

But it does not strike you. It cannot, you understand a breath later. It has not the strength left to do anything but flinch, and the flinch costs it; it dips lower than before, and something in your own chest twists with a tenderness that makes no earthly sense, pointed as it is at a marsh-light, a Fae's stolen coal, a thing your own grandmother spent half your childhood teaching you to fear.

You cup your hands around it anyway. You bring your face close, the way you would to coax a coal back to life in a dying stove, and you breathe.

Not hard. Not the way you'd feed a fire that wanted feeding. Soft, the way you'd breathe warm air over fingers gone white, willing the blood back into them before it could be lost for good. The wind itself seems, for one strange suspended moment, to hold off from you, as though even it is waiting to see what you'll do.

The flame catches your breath the way a starving thing catches the smell of bread.

It does not simply grow. It answers. The blue of it deepens to something nearer violet at the root, then climbs to gold at the crown, and the little glass casing fills with light so sudden and so warm against your numbed face that you gasp and nearly drop the whole lantern into the snow. Heat rolls off it, real heat, more than a flame that size has any business giving off, and for one heartbeat you feel something unmistakably like relief, though whether it belongs to you or to the flame you could not say.

Then the air around the lantern draws tight, the way air draws tight before lightning finds its mark, and a crackle of something that is neither quite fire nor quite frost races up the iron in a bright thread, snapping hard against your fingertips. You cry out and let go.

The lantern does not fall.

It is simply gone. No smoke trails where it hung, no sound marks where it might have struck the snow, only the smell of scorched air left behind and the ghost-shape of the flame still printed on the inside of your eyes, the way a candle leaves its light behind even after you've shut them.

You stand there with your scorched hand cradled to your chest, the wind rushing back into the silence all at once as though it, too, had been holding its breath, and for a long moment your mind refuses to agree with what your eyes have just told it.

It is only when you finally look down, half expecting to find iron and broken glass scattered somewhere in the drifts, that you see them.

Two prints, pressed deep into the snow before you, where a moment ago there had been no prints, no one standing at all. Not a hare's tracks. Not a wolf's. Boot prints, large, larger than any foot you have ever stood across from, sunk into the snow with the full weight of someone who had been standing there, close enough to have reached out and touched you himself, for who knows how long before you ever noticed him at all.

The wind is already filling them in, patient, the way it fills in everything in Nod-Krai eventually. By the time you find the nerve to step back toward the road, there is almost nothing left to prove they were ever there.

Almost.

. . .

The izba is a smear of gold across a field gone the colour of spilled milk, and the sight of its one lit window does something to your knees that the whole night of walking had not managed. Smoke threads up from the chimney in a thin grey rope, bent sideways by the wind, and the gate hangs in its drift with a crust of ice fused so thick along the latch that you have to work your fingers under it to lift the bar at all, your scorched hand screaming where the cold metal finds the rawest part of it.

You do not let yourself think about why that part is raw. Not yet. There will be time for that later, in the dark, when no one is asking you to be brave in front of them.

Babulya does not wait for the knock. The door opens before your knuckles ever reach it, spilling stove-light and the smell of tallow candles and dried dill out into the storm, and there she is, smaller than you remembered, wrapped in three shawls against a cold that lives in her bones now more than it ever lived in the air, one hand braced on the frame as though the doorway itself might decide to abandon her if she let go.

"Devochka moya." Her voice cracks on the second word, half scold and half prayer. "What kind of fool walks Nod-Krai in a storm like this one?"

"The kind whose grandmother is dying," you say, and step into her arms, and you hear her sardonic chuckle at your humor, the particularly dark kind you have only been comfortable enough to use with your grandmother.

She is thinner than the letter let on. You feel it through the shawls, through your own numbed hands, the way her shoulder blades sit too close beneath the wool, like a bird's, like something built for leaving. She smells the same as ever, woodsmoke and beeswax and the particular bitterness of the herbs she keeps strung along the rafters, and for one long moment neither of you says anything at all, because some reunions are better held in silence than spoiled with words.

It is she who pulls back first. It is she who takes your face in both her hands the way she always has, thumbs pressed to your cheekbones, eyes narrowed in the candlelight like she is reading something written beneath your skin.

Then her gaze drops to your hand, and whatever she finds there stops her cold.

"Show me."

"It's nothing, Babulya."

"Show me, or I will know you for a liar before you've even taken off your coat."

You hold it out. In the stove-light the burn looks worse than it felt, an angry welt curled across two fingers and into your palm, the skin gone tight and shining where the crackle caught you. Babulya's mouth presses into a line you know from a hundred childhood scrapes, the line that means she is deciding how much of her fear to let you see.

"A frozen latch," you say, before she can ask. "On the gate, two farms back. I grabbed it without my mitten, stupid of me, and it stuck like a tongue to iron in January. I had to pull it free."

It is not, strictly, a lie. There was iron. There was cold enough to take skin. You have simply rearranged the order of things, set the lantern's clasp where a gate latch ought to be, and you tell yourself this is mercy and not cowardice, that a woman with a chest like a creaking floorboard does not need to hear about lights that should not exist hovering in Nod-Krai at midnight.

Babulya studies you the way she studies bread to know if it has risen properly, with the whole of her attention and none of her trust.

"Mm," she says, which from her has always meant I do not believe you and I am choosing, for now, to let it be.

She makes you sit by the stove anyway. She fetches the little clay pot of goose fat and honey from the shelf where it has lived since before you were born, the same salve she has smeared on every burn and chilblain and skinned knee of your whole life, and her hands, though they shake now in a way they did not used to, are still steady enough for this. She works in silence, mostly, her lips moving now and then in something too quiet to be speech and too rhythmic to be anything else, a prayer worn smooth from decades of use, the kind that does not need the saint's name spoken aloud anymore to still reach him.

"You were always like this," she says at last, winding clean cloth around your fingers with a practiced, gentle pressure. "Even as a small thing. Found a wounded sparrow once, hid it under your bed in a shoebox, fed it bread soaked in milk for a week before your mother found the smell." She ties off the bandage and holds your hand a moment longer than the task requires. "Soft hearts make for hard living, in a place like this one, devochka. The wood does not reward you for your kindness."

"Then it is fortunate," you say, "that I did not do this out of kindness. I did it out of carelessness."

She looks at you the way she has looked at you your entire life, the look that has always meant I see straight through to the lie and I love you regardless, and says nothing further on the matter. She only crosses herself once, quickly, before she rises to bank the stove for the night, the gesture so old and so automatic it might be aimed at God or at you, and you are not certain, even now, that there is much difference between the two as far as Babulya is concerned.

That night you lie awake on the bench by the stove long after her breathing in the next room has gone slow and even, listening to the wind worry at the shutters, your bandaged hand cradled against your chest. The pain has dulled to something distant, banked the way Babulya banked the coals, and you are nearly asleep, the line between waking and not gone thin and porous, when the warmth finds you.

It comes first as a hum beneath the bandage, faint, almost ticklish, the way a struck glass keeps singing long after the spoon has stopped touching it. Then heat blooms beneath the cloth, gentle and total, spreading up through your wrist and into your arm like sunlight remembered rather than felt, and for one disoriented moment you think you must be dreaming of summer, of the river before it freezes, of your mother's kitchen with bread in the oven.

You do not open your eyes. Some animal instinct keeps them shut, the same instinct that once told you not to look directly at the flame in the wood, and you lie there in the dark and let whatever this is finish what it has come to do, half terror and half something perilously close to gratitude, until sleep takes you before you can decide which one ought to win.

In the morning your hand does not hurt.

You notice it before you are even fully awake, the absence of pain so total it takes you a moment to understand what is missing, the way a sudden silence can wake a person faster than any sound. You unwind the bandage by the grey light coming through the shutters and find skin beneath it unmarked, no welt, no shine of new scar tissue, nothing at all to say that iron and lightning had ever touched you there.

Babulya finds you staring at your own palm like it belongs to someone else.

She takes your hand without asking, the way she always has, turning it toward the window, running her thumb once across the place where the burn should be. Her face does something complicated, disbelief and suspicion and something older than either, something that might once have had a saint's name attached to it before the church got hold of the old fears and dressed them up as sin.

"This was not nothing two days ago," she says.

"It must not have been as bad as it looked, Babulya. The cold makes everything look worse than it is."

"Mm," she says again, and this time the sound carries more weight than before, a whole unspoken sermon folded into one syllable, but she lets your hand go and does not press further, the way a woman learns not to press a wound that has decided to close on its own.

You spend the rest of the day telling yourself the same thing in a dozen different ways, peeling potatoes at her table, feeding the stove, listening to her cough in the next room with a sound like wind through a cracked window. You tell yourself the cold does strange things to the body, that burns from frozen metal heal faster than burns from fire, that you imagined the hum beneath the bandage the way exhausted travelers imagine all manner of things in the dark.

But some quieter, more honest part of you keeps circling back to the lantern.

You think of the way it had answered your breath like a starving thing answers bread, the violet at its root, the gold at its crown. You think, before you can stop yourself, that perhaps this is its doing somehow, some strange debt repaid across whatever distance separates you now, a kindness returned for a kindness given.

Silly, you tell yourself, almost fiercely, the way you might scold a child caught believing too easily in things that want to be believed. Why would a Fae's stolen flame trouble itself over the burned hand of a girl who'd only meant to save it? You are not even certain it was Fae at all, not truly, only that it matched every word of every warning Babulya ever gave you. And warnings, you have learned, are not always honest about what they are warning against.

It is only later, scrubbing the supper pot in water gone cold, that the other thought finds you, the one you had managed, until now, not to look at directly.

The footprints.

Someone had been standing in that ring of undisturbed snow. Someone large enough to leave a mark like that, close enough to have watched you take the lantern from the air, to have watched you breathe life back into a thing that should not have had breath left to take. A lantern does not simply float along a forest road for no reason at all. A lantern belongs to a hand, even one that does not show itself.

You wonder, scrubbing harder than the pot requires, whose hand that might once have been.

The dead, perhaps, lost and wandering as the dead in this country are said to do when the ground freezes too hard to properly hold them.

Or something else. Something that does not die in any way the priests would recognise, that only loses its light for a while and waits, patient as the wind filling in footprints, for someone soft-hearted enough to give it back.

. . .

The days that follow settle into a rhythm so ordinary it almost convinces you to forget the forest entirely. You boil oats and feed them to Babulya by the spoonful when her hands shake too badly to manage the bowl herself. You mend the hole in the second shutter where the wind has been getting through and complaining about it all winter. You sit by her bed in the evenings while she tells you, again, the story of how she met your grandfather at a spring fair, embellishing some new and entirely impossible detail each time she tells it. And you let her, because a story told a hundred times is still a gift the hundred-and-first time it is given. The cough in her chest does not improve, but it does not worsen either, and you decide to count that as something close enough to mercy.

It is on the fourth morning that you notice the woodpile under the eaves has shrunk to almost nothing, and you rise before the sky has so much as considered turning grey to do something about it.

The hour before dawn in Nod-Krai has always had a particular quality of dark to it, a dark that seems to have weight, that presses against the lantern glass and the backs of your eyes both, and you have walked it before with your heart in your throat and your axe held tighter than was strictly useful against a forest that does not, as a rule, care how tightly you hold anything. You bundle yourself into your tulup, wrap the strap of the hand-sled twice around your palm, and step out into a cold so total it feels less like weather and more like a held breath, the stars still hard and bright overhead, Orion's belt hanging just where Babulya taught you to find it as a child, a line of three lights she always called, with no apparent irony, God's own measuring rope.

The walk to the deadfall stand should take the better part of an hour in this dark, picking your way around drifts and roots buried under the snow with nothing but memory and starlight to guide you. Tonight it does not.

You notice it first as an absence rather than a presence, the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue before you understand what is gone. The drifts that usually swallow you to the knee along this stretch of path have firmed beneath your feet into something almost like a road, packed and even, as though some patient hand swept it clear before you arrived. You tell yourself it is only the wind, that drifts shift and settle on their own logic, and you keep walking, and the feeling does not leave you even as the explanation does its best to.

Then there is the light. Not moonlight, which has none to spare behind tonight's thin cloud, and not starlight either, which has never in your life been bright enough to throw a shadow. This is something low and blue, hanging at the edges of your sight the way a held thought hangs just behind the eyes, never quite where you look but always present in the place you've just stopped looking. Each time you turn your head to find its source it slides away into the black between the birches, patient, unbothered, content to let you doubt it rather than be caught.

The sled grows lighter as you fill it. This, more than anything else, is the detail you cannot make peace with later, turning it over in your mind the way you'd turn over a coin to check it wasn't counterfeit. By the time you have stacked it with as much deadfall as you can reasonably drag, the weight across your shoulder where the rope bites should be considerable, should ache the way it has ached every winter of your life doing this same chore. Instead the sled seems to glide, its runners finding the smoothest line through the snow as though the ground itself has tilted very slightly in your favour, as though some unseen hand has taken up the back end of it and is bearing the worst of the weight without once asking to be thanked.

A raven watches you from a low branch the entire time you work, untroubled by your nearness in a way no wild bird ought to be, its head tilting with what you could swear, if you allowed yourself to swear to such things, looked very much like curiosity. When you straighten and meet its eye directly it does not startle into the dark the way it should. It simply watches you a moment longer, as if deciding something, and then lifts off without a sound, not so much as a single wingbeat disturbing the snow it leaves behind.

There are other small wrongnesses too, the kind you would not think twice about alone but that begin, stacked one atop the other, to take on the shape of something deliberate. Frost ferns bloom across a fallen log in a pattern too symmetrical to be weather's careless hand, fanned out like fingers pressed flat against the bark.

The cold that should be biting at your scorched fingers, the ones that healed too fast and too clean to ever properly explain, seems instead to skirt around them, leaving every other part of you numb while that one hand stays strangely, impossibly warm.

Once, you are certain you hear footsteps falling in time with your own, just beyond the treeline, matching your pace exactly, and when you stop dead to listen, they stop too, a half-beat too late to be only an echo of your own boots.

You do not run. You tell yourself this later as though it were a point of pride rather than the simple fact that your legs, full of wood and cold and four days of grief held carefully at bay, would not have carried you far even if you'd asked them to.

It is on the walk back, the sled heavier with cargo and somehow no harder to pull, that the ice on the little creek crossing gives way beneath you.

You have crossed it a hundred times in your life, this narrow vein of water that cuts the path near the old stone marker, frozen solid every winter you can remember, safe enough that Babulya never once warned you off it the way she warned you off the deeper water further south. You do not know, would not know, until much later from a neighbour's offhand mention of overflow ice swelling beneath the surface this year, that the crossing has turned treacherous, the visible ice no more than a skin stretched thin over a slow black current still moving underneath, waiting for exactly this kind of trust to be placed in it.

The crack beneath your boot sounds almost gentle, a small dry note like a knuckle popping, and then the world tilts and the cold reaches up through the broken ice to close around your shin before your mind has finished understanding what your body already knows.

You do not fall further than that. An arm comes around you from behind, solid and sudden, an entire wall of warmth pressed flush against your back where a moment before there had been only forest and falling, and you are hauled bodily off the cracking ice and onto solid ground with a strength that does not strain, that lifts you the way you might lift something you were never in any danger of dropping.

For a long moment you do not move at all, and could not if you tried. The cold has not finished delivering its verdict on your soaked boot, the creek still hissing behind you where the ice gave way, and your whole body seems to be arguing with itself over which sensation deserves your attention first, the water working its slow way through wool toward bare skin, or the warmth at your back, vast and improbable, radiating clean through your coat the way the stone bench beside Babulya's stove holds its heat on the rare nights the fire has been fed too generously. Your heart has not slowed since the ice cracked. If anything it climbs higher now, hammering against your ribs with a fear that has only just caught up to the danger that provoked it, several breaths too late to be of any use to you.

He has not let go. One arm remains banded firm across your middle, his hand spread wide against your stomach through the layers of your coat, and you understand, distantly, almost academically, that you ought to fear that more than you fear the water. You are not a fool. Babulya did not raise you to mistake a stranger's hand for safety only because it happens to be warm. And yet some unguarded, traitorous part of you leans back into that warmth before you can stop it, the way a half-frozen thing will press itself gratefully into the very palm that may, in the end, decide to do it harm.

You try, on instinct, to turn and see him properly, and find you cannot. Not because his hold has tightened, though it has, slightly, but because some older instinct, the one Babulya spent your whole childhood sharpening in you, insists that turning would be the worse mistake of the two. Still you catch fragments at the edge of your sight: a sleeve of something dark and heavier than wool, rimed white at the cuff the way iron rimes over in a hard freeze; a hand broader than your own and entirely bare despite air that numbed your own fingers through two layers of mitten; breath fogging out over your shoulder in a plume gone faintly, impossibly blue at its edges, like woodsmoke caught the instant before it remembers how to be flame.

Fear and something far less sensible move through you in the very same current, indistinguishable by the time either reaches your throat.

"Who's there?" It comes out smaller than you intend it to, edged with a tremor you cannot quite master, though you make yourself say it regardless, because Babulya also did not raise a girl who goes quiet simply for being afraid.

"Forgive me." His voice meets you low and unhurried, courteous in a way you were entirely unprepared for, the voice of a man who might once have bowed over a lady's hand at some fair now long since swallowed by frost, strange and out of place against the cold breathing out of the dark beyond the treeline. "I startled you. That was never my intention, only to keep you from going under." A pause, faintly rueful. "Though I confess you make it remarkably difficult to be merely a passing rescuer and nothing more."

Some inkling of bravery seeps into you, "Let me see you, then, if your intentions are so honest."

"Not yet." Said so gently it costs the refusal nothing of its firmness. "Forgive me the discourtesy of denying you twice in one night. You have done enough looking at things you oughtn't for one winter, brave as you are foolish."

The hand at your stomach shifts, just slightly, fingers spreading wider as though to better hold you upright, and you feel it then, through the wool, the unmistakable ridge of scarred skin across his palm, a burn healed over rough and old in a shape the too-observant part of your mind recognises at once, because it is the very shape your own hand wore for one single night before it healed too clean to be natural.

You do not have the chance to ask him about it. "Mind the ice on your way home," he says, close enough now that you feel the words against your hair before you hear them, something almost like a smile threaded through the courtesy of it. "I find I would rather not make a habit of fishing you out of it."

Then the warmth at your back withdraws all at once, the cold rushing in to fill the space he leaves so completely that you sway on your feet from the shock of it alone, and when you finally turn, breath fogging hard in front of you, there is nothing left but a scatter of frost already creeping back across the broken ice and a low blue light receding fast between the birches, swallowed by the dark before you can take a single step after it.

You stand there a long while with your soaked boot going numb and your heart going the opposite of numb entirely. It is only the thought of Babulya waiting on you, of smoke needed for the stove and oats needed for the pot, that finally turns you back toward the road at all.

The rest of the day passes you by the way a current passes a stone too heavy to be carried along with it.

You are aware of moving through it, of sweeping the floor and feeding the chickens and changing your soaked boot for a dry one before Babulya can ask why your stocking is wet halfway up your shin. But none of it quite reaches the part of you that is still standing at the edge of a cracked creek with a stranger's hand spread warm against your stomach.

By evening you have not managed to put it down. You feel it still as you set the pot to simmer, the cabbage and the last of the autumn carrots going soft in water, gone the colour of weak tea, a phantom warmth pressed flat against your middle that no amount of cold air or honest work seems able to chase off. Twice you catch yourself with the ladle hovering forgotten over the pot, your mind thirty paces into Nod-Krai instead of in the kitchen where it belongs, and twice you have to scold yourself back into your own body before the soup scorches.

"You'll put a hole clean through that pot, staring at it so hard," Babulya says from her chair by the stove, not unkindly, her knitting needles clicking along at their own steady rhythm. "Or did the soup insult you somehow, that you mean to murder it twice?"

"I’m only tired, Babulya. I was up before the birds."

"Mm. The birds in this house keep later hours than they used to, then, because you've been somewhere else since you walked in that door, and it was not in the henhouse." She does not look up from her needles. "I am old, devochka, not blind."

You busy yourself with the bread instead of answering, and she lets you, for now, the same way she let the lie about the gate latch stand for now, and you understand, even as you're grateful for it, that her patience has never once in your life been the same thing as her forgetting.

The samovar takes longer than usual to come to a boil, or perhaps it only feels that way with your thoughts circling where they keep circling, back to the shape of a scar pressed into your stomach through two layers of wool, the precise, impossible warmth of a hand that should have been as cold as the air around it and was not. You wonder, not for the first time today, whether a thing like that leaves a mark a person cannot see. Whether you are walking around now carrying some invisible brand the way livestock carry the burn of their owner's iron, claimed by something that never once gave you its name, only the warmth of its hand and the courtesy of refusing to let you see its face.

You do not know if you should be afraid of that thought. You find, uncomfortably, that you are not nearly as afraid of it as you ought to be.

Outside the window, far off toward the mountains, light flickers once through the clouds, a soundless, violet-white flash that has no business existing in a sky this cold. Lightning in a Snezhnayan winter is rare enough that the old wives count it an omen, one way or another depending on which old wife you ask, and you stand very still at the window with the kettle forgotten in your hand and watch the dark for a second flash that does not come, and think, with a certainty that has no reasonable foundation at all, that it was watching you back.

Dinner is quiet in the comfortable way, the bread torn instead of cut, the soup eaten straight from the same pot it was cooked in because Babulya has never once seen the sense in dirtying a second dish for two people who already know each other's faces too well to bother with manners. She tells you, between spoonfuls, that the priest's wife caught her husband talking to the goat again, and that she is fairly certain it is the goat doing most of the talking these days, and you laugh harder than the joke perhaps deserves, grateful for anything loud enough to crowd out the violet flash still printed behind your eyes.

After, you kneel at her feet with the little jar of warmed juniper oil and unwrap the wool from her legs, and she hisses through her teeth at the first touch the way she always does, more out of habit now than real pain.

"Careful, devochka, I am not yet so far gone that you may simply knead me like dough."

"You complain every winter, and every winter you ask me to do it again the very next evening."

"A woman is allowed her contradictions. It is one of the few luxuries left to me." She watches you work for a while in silence, her swollen ankles giving slightly under your thumbs, and then, in the same mild tone she might use to remark on the weather, she says, "You have the look of a girl who has met something in the wood."

Your hands do not still, though it costs you something to keep them moving.

"I met a cracked creek and a wet boot, Babulya. Nothing more interesting than that."

"Mm." The sound carries the whole weight of a sermon again, the way it always does. "I have lived a long time in this house, devochka, longer than is strictly polite for a woman to admit to. I know the smell that clings to a person after the strange has had its hands on them. Ozone and woodsmoke and something underneath both that has no right name in any tongue I was ever taught." Her eyes, when you finally look up, are not angry. They are only tired, and old, and afraid in a way she is trying very hard not to let show. "You have carried that smell into my house twice now."

You say nothing, which is, between the two of you, its own kind of confession.

She sighs, long and rattling, and reaches down to touch your face the way she has since before you could properly remember being touched at all. "Even as a babe you reached for the spider before the flower," she says, almost fond despite herself. "Strange things have always known a soft heart when they find one, dear. They collect hearts like that the way magpies collect anything that shines, not always out of cruelty. Sometimes only because shine is rare, and they are hungry for it in a way you and I will never properly understand."

"Is that a warning?"

"It is an observation. The warning is older and you have heard it from me a hundred times already and ignored it on the hundred-and-first." She lets her hand drop back into her lap. "So I will give you something more useful instead. If it comes to you again, and I think we both know it will, do not give it your name. Not your true one, not even in jest, not even to be polite. A name is a door, devochka, and you do not hand a stranger the key to your own house no matter how warm his hand felt on the threshold."

You think of the creek, of a voice low and unhurried against your hair, of how easily a name might have slipped free of you in that moment if he had only thought to ask for it.

"And if I lose my way," you say, half a question, "out there. In the dark."

"Turn your coat inside out and put it back on," Babulya says, as plainly as if she were telling you how much salt the soup wanted. "It will not save you from everything. But it confuses the kind of thing that leads by tricking the eye, and confusion, in my experience, has saved more fools than courage ever has."

You finish the oil in silence after that, and she lets you, watching the fire instead of you for once, and when you finally rise to bank the stove for the night her hand catches your wrist, briefly, only long enough to say, without words, that whatever else she is, she is not finished being afraid for you yet.

Sleep does not come easily. You lie on the bench with the blanket pulled to your chin and your thoughts will not stop circling the same low orbit, danger and warmth tangled so closely together you cannot any longer find the seam between them, the way you never could as a child either, always the first to climb toward the high branch instead of away from it, always the one who followed the strange sound into the trees instead of running from it. You have always been like this. Babulya is right to fear it in you. You are not entirely certain you would change it even if she asked.

You rise once, near midnight, drawn by nothing you could properly name, and go to the window.

The yard is empty. The snow lies smooth and undisturbed all the way to the treeline, lit faintly violet by clouds that have not yet decided whether to give up their lightning again, and you stand there with your palm pressed flat to the cold glass and your heart doing something unsteady in your chest, half hope and half dread, both feelings so similar in your body that you cannot say with any honesty which one you are hoping will win.

For one heartbeat, just at the treeline, a shape resolves out of the dark. Tall, still, edged faintly in the same violet-white as the lightning, the suggestion of a man standing exactly where the birches grow thickest, watching the house, watching, you understand with a certainty that settles into your bones like cold water, you.

You blink, and the shape is gone, swallowed back into the trees as completely as if it had never stood there at all.

You stay at the window a long while after, your breath fogging the glass in slow, even clouds, waiting for it to come back.

It does not. But you find, lying back down in the dark with your pulse still unsettled and your skin still remembering the precise shape of a hand it will not soon forget, that some part of you is already certain this is not the last you will see of him. . . .

You are not, at first, certain anything has changed at all. The morning after the lightning, you wake expecting the world to have settled back into its ordinary shape, the way a held breath settles once the danger that provoked it has passed, and for the length of breakfast it seems to have done exactly that. It is only later, hauling water from the well, that you notice the rope has come up without its usual stiff fight against the ice, sliding through your palms smooth as something freshly oiled though you know for a fact no one has touched it since autumn. You stand there a moment with the bucket dripping at your feet and tell yourself it is only a milder morning than most.

The bread proves you wrong by midday, rising fuller and faster than the same dough has any right to in a kitchen this cold, the crust coming out of the oven a deep, even gold instead of the patchy brown you have made your peace with every winter of your life. The hens, who by this point in the season usually offer you one egg between the four of them if you are fortunate, give you four whole eggs that morning and four again the next, and you carry them inside cradled against your chest like something stolen, glancing back over your shoulder at the coop as though it might explain itself if you looked at it hard enough.

You do not mention any of it to Babulya at first. You tell yourself this is only because none of it seems worth mentioning on its own, a softer rope, a better loaf, a generous hen, the small unremarkable mercies that any winter might occasionally offer a person without there needing to be a reason behind them at all. You know, even as you tell yourself this, that you do not entirely believe it.

By the third night you have stopped pretending not to notice.

The wind that has been needling its way through every gap in the shutters since the first snow falls strangely quiet around you on your way back from the woodpile, the bite gone out of it so completely that for a few startled paces you could swear something has wrapped itself bodily around you, warm and close as a held breath, before retreating back into ordinary cold the moment you cross the threshold.

Your lantern, when you light it that same evening to check on the chickens one last time before bed, catches on the first strike of flint instead of the usual three or four, and burns brighter than the wick should allow, its flame threaded through at the very root with the faintest, most fleeting hint of blue, gone again before you can be entirely certain you saw it at all.

You stand in the yard with that lantern held up before your face for far longer than the chickens require, watching the flame for some sign of itself, your breath fogging white and even in the cold, and you do not know, even now, whether what you feel watching it is fear or something far less easy to name honestly.

Babulya notices before you find the courage to bring any of it to her.

"The wood from that last cord is lasting longer than it ought," she says one evening, not looking up from the sock she is darning, her needles moving with the same steady rhythm they have kept your whole life. "I split that cord myself, in better years, and I know its measure. We should have burned through half of it by now."

"Perhaps you split it more generously than you remember."

"Perhaps." She does not sound convinced, and does not pretend to be. "Or perhaps God has finally taken an interest in this house after forty years of looking elsewhere, which I confess would surprise me less than the alternative, which is that you have struck some manner of bargain with someone considerably less patient than He is, and considerably less inclined to wait for a proper prayer before deciding to help." She glances up at you then, sharp despite the candlelight softening every other line of her face. "Tell me, at least, that it was a charming devil, devochka, if you've gone and doomed the both of us. I should like to know I died for good company."

"I haven't doomed anyone, Babulya."

"Mm." The sound again, that whole unspoken sermon folded into one syllable, and she goes back to her darning without pressing further, though you can feel her attention on you for a long while after, the way you can feel the cold radiating off a window even with your back turned to it.

It is Babulya herself, in the end, who gives you the clearest proof that something has indeed turned in your favour, however little you understand the shape of it.

Her cough, which has rattled through this house every night since the letter that first called you home, begins, gradually and then all at once, to ease. The colour comes back into her face in a way you had stopped letting yourself hope for, a faint warmth returning to cheeks that have been the colour of tallow for weeks, and one morning you wake to find her already up and dressed and humming something tuneless over the porridge pot, her hands steadier on the spoon than they have been since before the snow came. You stand in the doorway and watch her for a long moment, your chest aching with a gratitude too large and too frightened to hold comfortably, because you cannot account for it, cannot point to any medicine or prayer or change in the weather that would explain a recovery this swift, and the not knowing sits in you alongside the relief like two animals forced to share the same small cage.

"Don't look so pleased with yourself," Babulya says, catching you staring, a wicked little glint surfacing in her eyes for the first time in longer than you can remember. "A woman my age improving this fast smells less of mercy than of mischief. Though I'll say this much, devochka. I'd rather die of mischief, in the end, than of that cough. At least mischief has the decency to be interesting."

You laugh, because the alternative is to weep, and she lets you, watching you with an expression that holds both her old wit and a far more careful underneath it, the look of a woman who has lived long enough to know that gifts given without a clear giver are rarely given for free.

The hearth proves the strangest mercy of all. Some nights now you wake near dawn to find the stove still glowing warm and low though you banked it hours before with barely enough wood to last until midnight, the coals at its heart burning that same faint, impossible blue you have started to recognise the way you'd recognise a voice in a crowded room, low and constant and entirely too familiar for something you have only properly heard once in your life. You lie there in the dark on those mornings with your blanket warm around you and your heart going much too fast for sleep, and think, with a certainty that frightens you more than any cold ever has, that the very fire keeping you alive through this winter has decided, for reasons of its own, to keep you.

You should be more afraid of this than you are. You know this the way you know the catechism, by rote, without it changing anything about how your chest tightens each evening as the light fails and you find yourself listening for footsteps that do not come, watching the treeline from the window with an attention that has nothing to do with wolves.

It is the nights, more than anything, that betray you.

You tell yourself, the first few times, that it is only natural to think of him. He saved your life. He has, perhaps, gone on saving it in a hundred small ways you cannot prove and cannot quite bring yourself to refuse. It would be strange, you reason, not to think of a man like that, however briefly you knew him, however little of him you actually saw.

But the thinking does not stay brief, and it does not stay innocent for long.

You lie awake long after Babulya's breathing has gone slow and even in the next room, and you feel again, with a clarity that should by rights have faded by now, the exact warmth of his hand spread wide across your stomach through two layers of wool, the way it had not felt like a stranger's hand at all but like something that had always meant to rest there, patient, certain of its welcome. You feel it settle low in your belly each time you let yourself remember it, a warmth that does not stay politely where it started, that creeps, slow and unhurried as melt water finding the path of least resistance, further down than any decent thought has business travelling, and you lie very still in the dark and let it, because some traitorous part of you has stopped pretending it wants to stop.

You imagine his voice some nights, low and unhurried, frost caught somewhere in its register the way it had been at the creek, murmuring things you cannot quite construct into full sentences even in the privacy of your own skull, only the shape of his breath against your ear, warm where everything else in this house is cold, his chest a solid wall at your back the way it had been for that one suspended moment before he let you go. You wonder, in the dark, what those hands might feel like elsewhere, hands broad enough to span your whole stomach, scarred in a shape that matches your own, gentle in a way that does not feel remotely safe.

You try, more than once, to quiet the wanting with your own hands, alone beneath the blanket with your jaw set against the sound of your own breath. You chase the memory of him down through your own skin in the dark, palm pressed flat where his had been before letting it wander lower, into the ache that has pooled there for days now, slick and insistent and entirely unmoved by reason. For a moment, sometimes, it is almost enough. Your back arches off the bench, your breath catches high and helpless in your throat, your thighs tense around the hand that is trying so hard to be his and so plainly failing to be anyone but your own.

It is never enough. You come back to yourself each time a little emptier than before, your fingers slack and your chest still tight with a frustration that has very little to do with your body and everything to do with the fact that the only hand you actually want is one that does not belong to you, has perhaps never belonged to anyone, and chose, for reasons you cannot fathom, to belong for one single moment to you instead. You lie there afterward in the dark, spent and unsatisfied in the same breath, and feel, underneath the shame of it, something far more dangerous: the dawning, helpless certainty that no hand but his will do.

There is a darkness coiled inside the wanting that you do not examine too closely, not at first. You know what he is, or near enough. You know what Babulya's stories say about things that wear kindness the way a wolf wears sheep's wool, patient, generous, building a debt in small mercies until the debt comes due all at once. You know you ought to fear a creature that mends your grandmother's lungs and warms your hearth and never once asks what it wants in return, because nothing in this world, mortal or otherwise, gives so freely without eventually wanting something back.

And still you find, lying awake with your blood still unsettled and your own hand gone still and useless atop the blanket, that you do not only fear it.

Some small, dark, unguarded part of you wants to be wanted that badly. Wants to be worth the trouble of a wood that lasts longer, a cough that eases, a fire that burns blue through the coldest hours of the night. There is something in being chosen, even by something monstrous, even by something that may yet prove to want you only the way a magpie wants anything that shines, that you cannot make yourself entirely wish away.

You go to confession in your own head most nights, the old habit too deep to fully shed even now, and find you cannot make yourself properly sorry for any of it.

It builds like this for the better part of two weeks, favour and longing rising together in the same slow tide, until one night you simply cannot lie still in it any longer.

You do not plan it, not really, not in any way you could explain afterward to Babulya or to yourself. You wait until her breathing has gone deep and even, until the stove has burned down to its low blue coals and the house has settled into the particular silence that only comes once every living thing in it has finally stopped fighting sleep, and then you rise, and dress, and take down your cloak and your lantern from beside the door, and nothing else.

You do not know, stepping out into a cold gone strangely gentle around you, what exactly you mean to do if you find him. Demand to know why he has been so generous with a stranger's house. Ask him what the lantern was to him, what it cost him, what it meant that you were the one foolish enough to breathe life back into it. Or something else entirely, something you do not let yourself name even now, something carnal and reckless that lives lower in your body than any decent question ever has.

You walk without any clear destination, only the pull of something you cannot properly describe, the same instinct that once sent you reaching for a wounded sparrow before anyone could tell you it was foolish to. Your thoughts wander as your feet do, back to the creek, to the crack of ice and the arm that caught you before you'd finished falling, and a new and uncomfortable thought surfaces in you, unbidden, sharp enough to stop you mid-step in the snow.

What if the ice had never been an accident at all.

What if a creature patient enough to warm a hearth for weeks without once showing his face was also patient enough to know, long before you ever set foot on it, exactly which crossing had gone treacherous this year, and exactly when you would cross it.

A strange new heat moves through you at the thought, equal parts fury and something far darker and more thrilling than fury has any right to be tangled alongside it, a feeling you do not have a clean name for and would not say aloud even if you did. You do not know whether you want to scream at him for it or thank him, and the not knowing frightens you more than either answer would on its own.

It is full dark by the time you notice you are no longer alone.

The wind parts strangely around a stand of birch ahead of you, the falling snow bending visibly to either side of some shape you cannot quite see, the way mist parts for a body moving through it even when the body itself stays hidden. A pale light flickers at the very edge of your vision, the same low impossible blue as your lantern's flame, gone the instant you turn to look at it directly. Somewhere behind you, soft and unhurried, footsteps fall in a rhythm too deliberate to be the wind, matching your own pace exactly, the way they had once before, only this time you do not stop to test them. This time you keep walking, your heart loud in your own throat, something fierce and unwise blooming behind your ribs.

Fool I may be, you think, but who is being imprudent now, following a fool like me out into his own woods at midnight.

You catch yourself smiling at the thought, alone in the dark, and the smile frightens you more than the cold does.

It is only then, with the trees pressing close on either side and that light still flickering at the very edge of what you can see, that Babulya's voice surfaces in you, clear and sharp as it had been by the fire. Do not give it your name. Not your true one, not even in jest. You hold that one close, easy enough to keep, a door you have no intention of handing anyone the key to, however warm his hand had felt on its threshold.

Turn your cloak inside out, if you lose your way. It will not save you from everything. But confusion has saved more fools than courage ever has.

Your hands rise to the clasp at your throat almost on their own, the old obedience deep enough in you to move.

And then you stop.

You stand very still in the snow with your fingers resting against the cold metal of the clasp, your breath fogging slow in front of you, the light still flickering somewhere just out of reach, patient, waiting, and you think of warm hearths and healed lungs and a hand spread wide and certain against your stomach, and some small, dark, long-buried part of you, the same part that has always reached for the spider before the flower, decides, quite calmly, that it does not want to be found its way out of this at all.

You let your hands fall back to your sides, the cloak left exactly as it is.

If you are going to be led astray tonight, then astray is precisely where you mean to go.

You walk a while longer with that decision settled warm in your chest, the light still flickering somewhere ahead of you through the birches, patient as a held breath, and you let yourself believe, for a few more minutes, that the prickling at the back of your neck is only anticipation. It would be like him, you tell yourself, to make you work for it. To let you walk a little further into his woods before he finally let himself be found.

It takes you longer than it should to notice that the feeling crawling up your spine has stopped resembling anticipation at all.

The wind is the first thing to turn honest with you. It has been strangely gentle since you stepped outside, the bite gone soft around you the way it has been most nights this fortnight, and you do not register the moment it changes back, only the moment you realise it already has, cold enough now to needle straight through your cloak the way winter always has, the way it always should have, and something in your stomach goes very still and very cold in a manner that has nothing to do with the temperature.

It is, you tell yourself, only the ordinary cold reasserting itself. Even kindness must have its limits. Even a fire banked all winter eventually burns down to ash.

You do not entirely believe yourself, and the forest, in its own way, seems determined to prove you right not to.

The quiet comes next, and it is the wrong kind of quiet. The Chernyles at night is never truly silent, not even in the deepest cold, always some small business of owls or settling snow or wind worrying at branches to fill the dark with ordinary sound. Tonight that ordinary sound simply stops, all at once, the way a held breath stops, and you become aware of your own heartbeat with an intimacy that feels almost obscene in a silence this complete.

Then the smell reaches you. Not woodsmoke, not the clean mineral bite of frost you have grown almost fond of these past two weeks, but something underneath both of those, faint at first and then suddenly, sickeningly present, the smell of meat left too long past its honest use, of earth turned over somewhere it was never meant to be disturbed.

You stop walking.

The light ahead of you flickers once, low and frantic, and for the first time since you left your own door you understand, with a certainty that drops through you like a stone through black water, that it is trying to warn you rather than lead you.

The dark that comes pulses before it arrives, the way thunder sometimes announces itself in your chest before the sound of it ever reaches your ears, a pressure against your sternum that has no business being felt rather than heard. When it finally breaks across the treeline it does not come as light at all, but as its absence, a bruised, hungry black that swallows the snow's pale glow wherever it touches, and within that black, shapes.

You know the shapes from a hundred half-remembered stories before your mind even finishes assembling them into something whole, riders sat too straight in saddles built for bodies with proper weight to them, horses whose legs bend in places no living horse's legs were ever meant to bend, the whole procession dragging that swallowing dark along behind it like a hem too heavy to lift clear of the ground. The riders themselves are worse for being almost familiar, the shape of men and women both, faces collapsed in on themselves around hollows where eyes should be, mouths hung open on hinges too loose to be holding anything resembling breath. You understand, distantly, sickly, that these were people once. That something has worn them the way a hand wears a glove long after the glove has stopped fitting properly, and gone on wearing them regardless.

You were twelve the last time you stood this close to something wearing the dead. You have spent nine years building a wall around that night thick enough that you rarely have to look at it directly, and the wall comes down now in pieces too fast for you to stop it, the cold of a hollow tree trunk pressed against your back, the smell of rot passing close enough to taste, the particular, specific silence of a child too frightened even to weep. You remember thinking, at twelve, that you would surely die there. You remember surviving anyway, and never once feeling, since, that survival and luck were properly different things.

You do not have a hollow tree to press yourself into tonight. You have only open snow, and a lantern with no flame, and a cloak you deliberately, foolishly, left exactly as it was.

The Hunt sees you the way a storm sees a single standing tree, not with malice exactly, only with the simple, terrible inevitability of a thing that has never once had to ask permission to take what stands in its path. The lead rider turns its ruined face toward you, and whatever sound comes out of that hinge-loose mouth is not a word, has perhaps not been a word in longer than you have been alive, but you understand its meaning regardless, the way you understand a wolf's bared teeth, the way your whole body understands, all at once, that it is about to run out of road.

You do not get the chance to run. The lead rider's hand closes around your wrist before your single backward step has even finished, more claw now than hand, cold enough that it burns, and the wound it leaves does not wait politely for the rest of the world to catch up. Something rakes hard across your cheekbone in the same instant, parting skin, the pain arriving a full breath behind the shock of it, hot where everything else has gone numb, and you are being dragged forward into the reek of old earth before you've even managed to scream.

The world breaks open before the scream finishes leaving you.

There is no warning to it, none of the patient, gathering dread that announced itself before. One heartbeat the claw is closing tighter around your wrist, dragging you into the dark whole, and the next the night simply splits down its middle with a crack of violet light so total it scours every shadow from the clearing at once, the sound of it less heard than felt, a blow against your chest that drives the breath from your lungs before the cold ever could. The claw is gone from your wrist in the same instant, torn away by something too fast for your eyes to properly follow, and you go down hard into churned, blackened snow with your ears ringing and your cheek still bleeding and no clear memory of the half second between captivity and freedom.

He is already among them by the time your knees find the ground, as though he had never once been anywhere else, as though the Hunt itself had simply made the grave error of existing in the same dark he already occupied. There is no warming up to the violence in him, no measured beginning. Chains uncoil from somewhere beneath his coat and find their marks before you can track the movement that threw them, and where they strike, riders that should not still be moving simply stop, the bruised black light bleeding out of them into the snow like ink swallowed by water. The lantern at his hip flares violet with each turn he makes, throwing his shadow huge and shifting across the trampled ground, and within a handful of heartbeats far too few to properly count, the clearing belongs to no one but the two of you and the wreckage left behind.

He crosses to you before the last of it has finished settling, kneeling in the bloodied snow with a quickness that has nothing courtly left in it at all, and his hand finds your jaw before you can flinch away from it, tilting your face toward what little light remains.

"Hold still," he says, low, and you do, though whether from obedience or simple shock you could not honestly say.

His thumb finds the cut along your cheekbone and the pain there does not so much fade as forget itself entirely, warmth blooming beneath his touch and spreading outward in slow, deliberate waves, the same impossible heat you have spent two weeks chasing through your own hands in the dark and never once managing to properly recall. You feel the skin knit itself closed beneath his thumb, feel it with a clarity that makes your breath catch high in your throat, and he does not hurry the work, his palm cupping the whole curve of your jaw afterward as though reluctant to relinquish a thing he has only just finished claiming back from harm. His other hand finds your wrist next, the bruise already purpling there fading to nothing under the same slow, deliberate warmth, his thumb tracing once, lightly, over skin that remembers, beneath the new healing, exactly how his hand had felt the first time it held you.

"There," he says finally, and does not move away as quickly as the word suggests he might. His face is close enough now that you can feel the cold coming off him in waves even through the lingering warmth of his touch, close enough that you understand, with a lurch low in your stomach that has nothing to do with fear, that he is in no particular hurry to put any distance back between you. "The debt's settled, then. Though I doubt that will stop you coming to find me again regardless."

"You sound very certain of that."

"I am." Something almost fond moves behind the exhaustion in his eyes. "You have a particular look about you, little fool. The one that has never once in its life known how to leave a wounded thing well alone, even when the wounded thing in question is considerably more dangerous than it looks."

You hold his gaze, breath unsteady, and find some reckless scrap of courage still left in you despite everything the night has already spent. "Then tell me your name, and I'll know exactly how dangerous to be afraid of."

He laughs at that, properly, the sound of it melodic and surprised and entirely too warm for something that came out of a face built like winter, and the laugh does something complicated and unwise low in your chest.

"Bold," he says, "for someone who was warned, I expect, never to give away her own. Did your grandmother not also tell you what a name is worth, before you go demanding mine so plainly?" His thumb moves once more along your jaw, absent, proprietary. "Names are not handed over for the asking. Not by anything like me."

"Then how am I meant to find you again?"

"There is a stone marker by the creek that already owes you a debt of its own," he says, the amusement settling into something quieter, more deliberate. "Leave something there that was truly yours, given freely and not by accident, on a night the moon hides her face completely. Choose carefully what you part with. I am not always so generous with what I take in return as I have been tonight."

His gaze sharpens then, holding yours with an attention that feels almost like being read rather than looked at. "But you already know that, don't you? You knew it walking out here tonight with your cloak left exactly as it was." A pause, soft and certain. "You know precisely what you're doing."

He leans closer before you can answer him, close enough that his breath, when it comes, is warm against your skin in a way nothing about him should by rights be, his fingers ghosting once down the line of your throat with a touch too light to be anything but deliberate.

"Perhaps," he murmurs, "you will come to find out in time."

One final step closes the last of the distance between you, his breath heating the air at your temple, and then he is smoke before he is anything else, the whole solid weight of him unraveling into a low coil of violet-blue flame that gathers, impossibly, back into the small lantern at what had been his hip, and the lantern disappears with a single soft crackle, leaving nothing behind but scorched air and your own ragged breathing in the dark.

You kneel there a long while in the ruined snow, your skin still humming everywhere he touched it, heat pooling low in your belly with a persistence that has nothing left to do with fear at all. Some small, dark, unguarded part of you, the part you will not yet admit to even lying alone in the dark tonight, has already begun turning over what you might leave at that stone marker, what among your few poor possessions could possibly be valuable enough to be called truly yours.

You are, you understand with a thrill you cannot entirely call unwelcome, already looking forward to the choosing.

. . .

Whatever guides your feet back through Nod-Krai that night does so with a generosity that borders on tenderness, the drifts parting ahead of you the way a crowd might part for someone it had decided, for reasons of its own, to let pass unharmed. You reach the izba in half the time the walk out had cost you, your wound healed clean beneath cold-stiffened skin, and you let yourself entertain, somewhere between the gate and the door, a thought too dangerous to examine closely in daylight. Perhaps he is not the only one waiting on this. Perhaps, wherever he goes when he is not chains and violet flame and a voice low enough to live somewhere beneath your ribs, some part of him is also turning over what you might bring him, the way you cannot stop turning over what there is in your whole poor life worth giving.

It takes you the better part of two days to understand exactly how poor that life is.

You go through what little you own with the methodical, increasingly desperate attention of a woman searching for something she is no longer certain exists. Your mother's handkerchief, edged in thread gone soft and grey with age, feels too easily lost to trust to a roadside stone. The single coin you've kept since the spring fair, pressed flat and smooth from years in your pocket, has value only to a moneylender, and you doubt very much that a creature who heals wounds with a thought and unmakes the dead with a glance has any particular use for coins. A wooden comb, a chipped clay bead from a necklace long since scattered, a ribbon worn thin from braiding and rebraiding the same hair through a dozen winters, each in its turn seems too small, too cheap, too easily mistaken for an accident rather than an offering, and each in its turn you set back down with the same hollow, mounting frustration.

You are not, you are forced to admit somewhere in the long second afternoon of searching, a woman who has ever owned very much. You have only ever had people, and people, you suspect, are not the sort of thing a stone marker is built to hold.

Babulya notices long before you find the nerve to tell her anything at all.

"You smell of him again," she says on the second evening, not looking up from the stocking she is mending, her voice gone careful in a way that frightens you more than any sharpness might have. "Worse than before. Like something has gotten its hands properly on you this time, rather than only its kindness."

You set down the basket you've been pretending to sort and find you cannot, this time, manage another easy lie. "He saved my life, Babulya. The Hunt found me in the wood."

The needle stills entirely in her hands. When she finally looks up, the fear in her face is not the gentle, half-affectionate worry she has worn through every other strange thing this winter has brought you. It is older than that, and far less willing to be teased into something softer.

"The Hunt," she repeats, and crosses herself, quick and instinctive, the gesture of a woman who has spent a lifetime not quite believing and never once daring to stop hedging her bets regardless. "Bozhe moy. And you went looking for him anyway, after that. I can see it on you, devochka, you needn't lie to spare me the trouble of guessing."

You kneel at her feet then, the way you have a hundred times before for the oil and the wool, only this time it is your own hands that are unsteady. "I have to tell you something, and I think you already suspect most of it." You tell her about the lantern, finally, the whole of it, the blue flame guttering in the snow that first night, the warmth of it answering your breath, the crackle that took it from your hands and left only frost and footprints behind. You tell her about the burn that healed itself in a single night, about the wood that lasts and the hens that lay and the hearth that burns blue and unaided through the coldest hours, every small mercy you have spent weeks quietly refusing to question aloud.

She listens to all of it in a silence that does not soften, her hands folded too tightly in her lap, and when you finally finish she does not scold you, which somehow frightens you more than scolding would have.

"You did not save a lantern," she says at last, quiet. "Whatever you saved that night, devochka, it was never only a lantern. You understand that now. I think you understood it before you ever told me."

"I think I have, for some time."

"And still you went looking for him in the dark, with your cloak left exactly as it was." It is not quite a question. She studies you for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her tired eyes, equal parts grief and a reluctant, painful tenderness. "Do you remember what I told you, the spider and the flower, when you were small enough to still believe me about everything?"

"I remember." You hold her gaze, surprising yourself with how steady your own voice comes out. "You said strange things have always known a soft heart when they find one. That they collect hearts the way magpies collect anything that shines." You pause, something turning over in your chest that has been waiting, you realise now, a very long time to be said aloud.

"But you never finished the thought, Babulya. A flower only ever gives sweetness back to the hand that reaches for it, and nothing more, no matter how long you hold it. A spider, if you let it close enough, might actually look at you while it decides what to do with you. I think some part of me has always wanted that more than I wanted to be safe. To be looked at. Properly. Even by something that might, in the end, choose to ruin me for it."

Babulya says nothing for a long moment, her hand coming to rest, light and trembling, against the side of your face. "Then God help you, devochka," she says finally, "because I do not think I can anymore. I can only hope whatever you've gone and let yourself love has at least the decency to be careful with you."

She does not forbid you from going back. You understand, watching her turn back to her mending with hands that have not quite stopped shaking, that this is its own kind of permission, the only kind she has left to give a girl who was never, by either of your own admissions, built to be talked out of a thing once her heart had already decided it.

You go on searching after that with no greater success, the third day bleeding into a fourth without anything in your possession rising to meet whatever standard he meant by truly yours, until you find yourself, on a still, solemn afternoon with the light already failing early the way it does this deep into winter, sitting before the small cracked mirror in your room with no particular purpose beyond simply being tired of looking everywhere except at yourself.

You have not looked properly in some time. The face that meets you in the silvered glass is not unfamiliar, only tired in a way you had not let yourself notice until this exact moment, the eyes a little hollowed by weeks of broken sleep, though something else lives in them too now, something restless and faintly bright that was not there before the night a lantern first answered your breath, a spark that survives, stubbornly, beneath all that weariness. Your chest rises and falls in the glass with each unsteady breath, the simple, ordinary motion of any living body keeping itself alive, and it is that motion, that small private rhythm of your own breathing, that finally drags the memory up whole and entire, the way it has been waiting, patient as frost, to be properly let in.

You tucked him there. Against your ribs, beneath your coat, pressed close to the very same body breathing in the mirror now, on the first night you ever saw him, when he was nothing more to you than a dying blue flame too pitiful to leave to the cold. You carried him against your own skin like something small and helpless, warmed him with nothing but the heat your own body had left to spare, and you understand now, sitting here with your own reflection watching you understand it, that he had been that close to you from the very beginning. Closer, perhaps, than he has been at any single moment since, closer than the creek, closer than tonight's ruined snow, his whole guttering self held against the place where your heart keeps its most honest rhythm, and you had not even known enough to be afraid of how intimate a thing that was.

Heat floods through you at the thought, slow and total, and you let it, alone in your room with the light failing and no one left to see your face but the mirror.

You wonder, for the first time, whether an ancient thing's patience is built the same way a mortal one's is, with a thread that frays a little more each time it is asked to hold, until eventually, inevitably, it simply does not. He has watched you for weeks now, mended your hearth and your grandmother's lungs and the small soft wounds the world keeps handing you, has come to your aid twice now with a violence that cost him nothing visible and a tenderness afterward that cost him, you suspect, considerably more. You think of his hand at the creek, of his thumb against your jaw healing skin that had only just finished tearing, of the particular unhurried way he had let his palm linger at your wrist long after the bruise beneath it had already gone. You do not think a creature moves that slowly, that deliberately, over a debt it considers fully settled.

You let yourself imagine it properly for the first time, sitting alone in the dying light, what it might mean if the patience fraying in him is not so different from the ache that has been fraying in you. What it might look like, the moment that thread finally gives. Whether he has lain awake, in whatever cold and ancient place things like him go to rest, turning over the memory of your breath against his dying flame the same restless way you turn over the memory of his hand against your stomach. Whether wanting, for something built of frost and old violet fire, feels anything at all like the slow, low-bellied ache that has kept you from sleeping properly more nights than you have admitted even to yourself, or whether it is something colder, hungrier, a wanting with teeth in it, patient only because patience has always been the surest way for a predator to make certain of its meal.

You think you would let him have you either way. The thought arrives calm and entire and frightens you with how little fight you have left in you to argue against it.

You imagine, because you cannot any longer stop yourself from imagining, what it might be to be wanted by something that old, that careful, that has spent weeks proving itself willing to set a wood untouched and a grandmother's lungs whole simply to keep a single mortal girl comfortable through her own ordinary winter. You imagine his hands again, broad and scarred and entirely too gentle for what you know they are capable of doing to anything that crosses him, moving the way they moved at your jaw, only slower, only further, learning every cold and ordinary inch of you the unhurried way a man learns a prayer he intends to keep saying for a very long time. You imagine his mouth finding the same places his thumb has already mapped, his breath the only warm thing left in a world gone entirely to frost around the two of you, and the ache low in your belly answers the thought so immediately, so thoroughly, that you have to press your own hand flat against your stomach simply to feel something solid beneath all that wanting.

Your hand does not stay at your stomach. It rises, slow and unthinking, to the soft underside of your breast, to the exact place a small iron lantern once rested against your own racing heart on a night you still cannot properly account for, and you hold it there a long moment, feeling your own pulse beat hard and unhidden beneath your palm, and understand, with a clarity that settles through you like the first true thaw of spring, exactly what it is you have been searching your whole poor life for these past two days without ever once finding.

It was never going to be a thing. Not a coin, not a ribbon, not anything you could set down on cold stone and walk away from with both hands still empty.

You have already decided, you realise, sitting there with your hand still pressed warm against your own chest and the last of the daylight finally giving out around you. You decided it, perhaps, the very moment you chose not to turn your cloak.

You know exactly what you mean to give him.

You dress, on the appointed night, the way a much younger version of yourself might have dressed for a spring fair she had no business attending, and you catch yourself at it halfway through lacing the bodice of the one good dress folded at the bottom of your chest, sky-blue thread worked into the collar by your mother's own hand, kept for Easter liturgy and your own nameday and almost nothing else in between.

What are you thinking, you ask yourself, hands stilling over the laces, he will not even see it under the cloak.

You finish lacing it anyway.

The goodbye you give Babulya is shorter than either of you pretends not to notice. She does not ask where you are going, though you suspect she has guessed well enough by now, and only takes your face in both her hands the way she has since before you could properly remember being touched at all, her thumb tracing once over your cheekbone as though memorising the shape of it against the possibility that this might be the last time she is given the chance to.

"Come home," she says, which is not quite the blessing it sounds like, and not quite a prayer either, though it carries the weight of both.

"I mean to."

"Mm." She crosses you, quick and certain, two fingers pressed to your collarbone the way she has done since you were small enough to need carrying. She does not say be careful. You think, perhaps, she has finally understood that careful was never going to be a road open to you.

The night holds no moon at all, the sky scoured down to bare, hard stars, and heat crawls over you the entire walk to the creek despite the cold, a current that will not lie still no matter how the frost outside tries to claim it, settling low in you the way water settles beneath ice and goes on moving long after the surface above it has stopped looking like anything alive.

You wait at the stone marker a long while once you arrive, your pulse keeping time the way the rosary beads by Babulya's icon keep time, fast and overworked, counted out one bead at a time against a silence that gives nothing back. You do not know what to call him, have never once been given anything to call him by, and so when you finally find your voice it comes out smaller and stranger than you intend.

"I've come," you say, to the dark, to the birches, to whoever or whatever might be listening. "As you asked."

For a moment nothing answers you at all, the night holding its breath the way it had before the Hunt found you, and your heart climbs into your throat with a fear that has, this time, almost nothing to do with danger.

Then he is simply there, the way a held breath becomes, all at once, the air you finally let go.

You have seen pieces of him before, his back in violence, his hand at your jaw, his eyes catching low firelight, but nothing has prepared you for the whole of him standing before you now beneath bare winter stars, and the sight of him knocks the breath clean out of your lungs the way the ice once had, sharper, colder, and far more dangerous to your continued survival. He is beautiful in the particular, merciless way a blizzard is beautiful, all sharp pale elegance and midnight-blue hair bleeding to ice at its tips, his mouth made for something caught exactly between a smile and a threat, his gold eyes holding yours with an attention so total you feel it land somewhere beneath your sternum.

He smiles, slow, and it does something unforgivable to your knees.

"What have you brought?"

The question is not unkind. It is, somehow, worse for being asked so gently, and you feel the heat climb your throat and settle high in your cheeks under the particular focus of his gaze, the same gaze that watched you mend yourself back together from a dying flame, now turned wholly and unbearably toward whatever answer you are about to give him.

He steps closer when you do not immediately speak, tilting his head, one dark brow lifting with the patient, knowing amusement of someone who has already guessed and is only waiting, with some private cruelty, to hear you say it aloud yourself.

"Myself," you say first, and then, quieter, your voice nearly lost beneath your own racing pulse, "my body."

He goes very still.

Whatever courteous mask he has worn for you until now slips, for one bare, unguarded instant, and beneath it you catch something far sharper, hunger and amusement tangled together so closely you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, his mouth curving into something that is not quite a smile anymore, something closer to a sneer, cruel and delighted both at once.

"How generous." His voice has dropped, gone low and edged in a way that raises the hair along your arms. "Mortal flesh, freely offered, as though I have not had my fill of soft, foolish bodies a hundred times over before your grandmother's grandmother was so much as a thought in her own mother's womb." He circles you slowly, unhurried, the way a wolf circles something it has already decided is not, in fact, any real danger to itself. "You think yourself a gift, little dove. I wonder if you understand yet that you are closer to a sacrifice."

You should feel smaller for it. Some part of you does, heat rising shameful and furious in your chest at the easy, contemptuous certainty in his voice, and yet beneath the shame something else coils tighter still, something that does not want him to stop looking at you like that, like a thing worth picking apart slowly simply to see what it is made of.

He stops in front of you, too close now, close enough that the cold coming off him raises gooseflesh along every inch of skin the cloak fails to cover, and leans down until his face is level with your throat, breathing you in slow and deliberate, the way a man might breathe in bread fresh from the oven, helpless to it despite himself.

"Are you sure, little dove?" His mouth brushes the shell of your ear, and you feel the words more than hear them, frost and heat both at once. His hand finds your waist and draws you the last small distance forward, until there is no cold left between you at all. "I will unmake you."

You do not have the chance to answer him with words. His mouth finds yours instead, slow at first, almost reverent, as though he means to memorise the shape of your hesitation before he takes it from you entirely, and then it is not slow at all, not reverent, only deep and certain and utterly unhurried in its thoroughness, his hand sliding from your waist to cradle the back of your skull as though he means to keep you exactly where he has decided you belong.

You lose the night somewhere in the middle of it. You lose the cold, the stars, the stone marker digging into your hip where he has walked you back against it, lose every coherent thought beyond the slow, devastating drag of his mouth against yours, his other hand finding your jaw, your throat, the fevered pulse beating there, tracing it like something he intends to learn by heart. Your own hands fist in the heavy fabric of his coat, in the cold chains looped beneath it, anchoring yourself to him the only way you have left, and the kiss only deepens for it, lengthens, builds the way a held note builds before it finally breaks, until your knees have gone entirely unreliable beneath you and the only thing keeping you upright at all is the solid, immovable wall of him.

When he finally draws back, just far enough to let you breathe, you are dizzy in a way that has nothing to do with the cold air rushing back between you, your lips swollen, your pulse a wild, unsteady thing beneath his still-resting palm, and the satisfaction low in your belly has not eased so much as sharpened, gone taut and aching and entirely unwilling to be soothed by anything less than more of him.

He watches you come back to yourself with an expression that has finally, fully abandoned anything resembling courtesy, hunger sitting plain and unhidden in those hollow gold eyes now, and his thumb drags once, slow, along your bottom lip, as though tasting the effect of himself on you for his own private satisfaction.

"Well," he says, low, rough at the edges in a way his voice has never once been before tonight. "It seems I have only just begun unmaking you at all."

He has you pressed against the stone marker, but the rigidness of the rock is nothing compared to the absolute pleasure he delivers through you. In seconds, as though it took no thought at all, he hikes the skirt of your frock, and pulls down your underwear. He grins in absolute, dark glee at the shining slick of your core. You gasp as the cold winter air hits your skin.

“How long have you been dreaming of this, dove?” He asks, slow and deep. He pulls your thighs apart, holding you by the waist as he pins you to the stone. “Those nights spent trying to satisfy yourself, imagining it was I?”

His tone is mocking and you whine. He is so slow, so unhurried, he has not even touched you yet, and yet the breath of his mouth against your clit, his fingers pressing hard against the plush of your inner thigh has you squirming. You can’t help but move closer to him, like a desperate dying moth fluttering towards the blue lamp, knowing for certain a lick of its tongue would lead to your unfettered death right there. You want that death. You want his fingers in you. His mouth over you. Him.

And then he inserts his finger into you. You cry out, sharp and furious, the same cry you had let out when the lantern had burned you, left your skin charred. It’s unfair, really, how long his fingers are. They curl just so perfectly against your gummy, wet walls. Your eyes fill with tears, damp little drops decorating your lashes. You swear you see stars dancing over you, little flames. He smiles, and it’s a mocking smile, one that is so egotistical, to be the only one that could undo you like this.

He leans over you and presses hot, open mouthed kisses against your skin. His lips press against your cheek, your throat, your collarbone. It travels down and down, and soon enough he has your carefully tied bodice undone. The dress gathers at your waist. It leaves you bare underneath, your breasts perfect round mounds of soft flesh. Sweat gathers in the valley between them. And the Fae reaches up and gathers one of your breasts in his hot mouth. You moan out loud, the sound echoing across the forests, the sounds are so lewd you think, for one dizzying second, that it could ward off even the fiercest of creatures. His finger works magic inside of you, curling and pinching, it has you writhing beneath him. The carefully tied knot low in your belly unspooling with each curl of his finger. It’s all so much. His mouth on your chest, his finger bullying its way inside, hitting that sore, aching spot you’ve never been able to reach on your own.

“P-Please! Ah… mhm, I—” You cry out. You feel, at your entrance, the skin of another long finger, it dancing over your entrance. You shiver in its ghostly hold. And then, for one shocking second, for one nauseous clarifying moment, you think to ask a question that out of all moments, this moment precisely, you ought to ask. You heave in his hold, before you stutter out desperately, “Y-You, haahn…. Your—name?”

The Fae laughs, the vibrations travelling over your stomach, and then plunges a second of his fingers inside you. He relishes in the lewd moan you let out, the way your legs come up around him, bucking at his digits. And then, all too cruelly, before you can finally come undone, finally have the knot inside you untangled, he pulls out his fingers; they come away glistening and sticky, a thin strand of your arousal liquid connecting his digits to yourself. The sudden cold, the sudden absence of his flesh has you gasping. Tears spill from your face, and you look down dumbly, at his face twisted into a courteous yet mocking expression.

“You never stop asking, do you, golubka?” He sneers at you. He watches as your hole clenches around nothing. And then almost taking pity on you at the sudden punishment, he breathes against your clit. His voice comes low, “Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins.” And then his tongue darts out, pressing itself flat and hot against your flesh. Your back arches.

The name, Kyryll, Kyrll, Kyrll, floats around your mind. “Satisfied, are you?” He asks. You don’t get to respond to that as his tongue darks out like a spike into your entrance. Almost subconsciously, you give him your name, too. And it seems to be at that moment that he seems to truly gain a different glean in his eye. He hauls you by your waist, his large hands keeping you elevated against the giant stone, your legs thrown over his shoulder, as he fucks into you relentlessly. You swear you see stars as you feel your folds open and licked clean with his tongue, long and flexible.

Kyryll presses his mouth between your thighs, and feels the way your body convulses before you even realise it. “Yes, ah…” He murmurs low, keeping the pace. “Come undone for me, dove.” Your body relinquishes in an instant, your body nearly lifts from the stone as your weeks-awaited release washes over you in waves. “Hnah…. Kyryll, ah!” You writhe.

For one second, as your orgasm comes over you, it’s all euphoria. You pant, your breath laboured and heavy, and you dare to glance at the man, no, Fae, that kneels at your feet. His mouth is covered in your slick and you feel the heat rise to your cheeks when you see his tongue come out to lick at his lips, as though the minutes he spent between your thighs, feasting on your bud and its liquids have not yet quenched his thirst. His eyes, you take note, have turned into slits, snake-like as he pierces into you. He takes a hold of the fabric of your frock and discards it to the side.

“You’re beautiful like this,” He murmurs. “Bare, your eyes wide, your body squirming, given to me like an offering.”

“Kyryll…” You whisper. His eyes get blown wide. Your mouth is heavy with his name, your tongue tasting the consonant of its writing. You realise, belatedly, that you hold some power over him. He had given you his name, his most sacred possession, and you could dangle it in front of him like you would dangle a wad of feathers in front of a cat. You try again, “Kyryll.” And this time, he pants. His grip on your thigh tightens, so tight in fact that you don’t doubt that red marks have been plastered all over your skin, like you have been branded to be his for eternity.

Kyryll moves before you can properly register it. It is as though the utterance of his name has him completely, absolutely, totally ensnared by you. He has your back pressed against the stone in an instant. His hands come up below your thighs and circles your plush legs around his waist.

You don’t know if it is simply your imagination or not, but the woods around you blur at the edges of your vision, and it seems for one dizzying moment that you are not in the wild at all, and rather that you are in a synagogue of sorts with your back pressed against a large marble pillar. Certainly, this is the most sacrilegious thing you have done so far. But your surroundings do not matter. It does not matter where you are or what local sacrilege you are committing. All that matters is that Kyryll is looking at you with a stare so penetrating it could cut through you. His clothes have come undone, discarded who knows where, and you dare to glance downward.

His cock is hard and erect. A long pink thing with precum leaking from its head. It has your mouth salivating. You realise that you need it, that all the magic his hands and mouth could do would pale in comparison to how full he could make you feel. He could press it in you to its hilt, have you see the world in a way you never could before. You can hear the snarl in Kyryll’s voice when he says, “Say it again, baby.” You realise, belatedly, thoughts clouded with lust, that his speech is far less controlled now, far less pompous, it rather takes on a base and vulgar tone. “Say my name.”

And you do. Or, rather, you moan it loud and harsh.

Kyryll whines, bites you hard enough on the throat you whine, hips bucking against him. You shiver when he lets his tip catch your clit a few times until you manage to tilt your pelvis enough for him to slide in. Just a bit, but enough for his breath to catch and a hurried curse in a language you do not recognise, to fall from his lips as your walls eagerly flutter around the intrusion.

“Oh, ah, I—,” you whine softly as he finally presses closer to you. Your hands scrabble for purchase on his back as his body surrounds you. chest brushing against yours and sending pleasure from the pressure against your breasts. You are reminded of his lantern heat, and you nuzzle into him. One hand grips your thigh and holds your legs open as he sinks to the base. He places kisses and marks along your collar. His teeth, sharper than most, graze against your skin. It leaves stinging marks on your supple flesh, marks that you are sure will leave deep purple bruises come daylight. “...Feels good!”

“Ha–Hah… I, dear… God,” Kyryll mutters, but at the utterance of the word ‘God’ his entire body convulses. His length stutters inside your walls breaking the pace he had set. You moan louder. It was almost as though any utterance of ‘God’ sent shocks of pain and repulsion through him. Kyryll snarls and sinks his teeth into your collarbone. You cry out, clawing into his back with marks that are sure to leave half-moon scars on his pale, smooth skin. You like that thought. You like having carved yourself into him, the same as he is doing to you now.

And then he moans out your name, over and over and over again, a substitute for God. Each brutal thrust is punctuated with a cry of your name. Your vision turns white at the edges. You feel as his cock hits your cervix. Pleasure and pain entangle themselves together, your legs press tighter and tighter. You can feel and see and hear only him. His thrust speeding up, his breath against your ear, you take it all as the creature inside you comes undone.

All it takes is one final moan, “Kyryll!” And he comes undone.

Your orgasm floods you yet again, stronger and more potent this time, overtaking all your senses. And you swear that Kyryll loses it. He fucks you through it, hard and fast, and you feel it in the way he chases his own release, rutting into your soaked entrance like he had not had an offering this good before. You could bet, if you were braver, that he truly had not had someone like you at his whim before. Thick white ribbons of cum release and it coats your insides, dripping down your thighs onto the ground below. He stays there for a minute longer, ensuring all of his seed would nest deep inside you.

You pant, sweat gathering at your temples, but he does not seem to mind. Kyryll cups your jaw in hand and smiles, slow.

When you finally surface back into your own body properly, you find the snow beneath you has melted in a wide, perfect circle, bare earth steaming faintly where frost has no business yielding at all. He has kept you warm the entire time, you understand, distantly, the same patient heat that has lived banked in your hearth all winter now spent freely on nothing but you, and the realisation settles through you with a tenderness that aches almost as much as anything else tonight has.

He does not move away from you after. This, more than anything else, is what undoes you completely, the way he stays close, unhurried, his mouth finding your shoulder and pressing there, soft, before moving on to the curve of your collarbone, to the inside of your wrist where your pulse still has not properly settled, to each of your knuckles in turn as though every part of you deserves its own separate, private reverence. You lie still beneath the slow, deliberate attention of it and feel something in your chest crack open even further than your body already has, because this, the gentleness of it, the patience, frightens you in a way his hunger never quite managed to.

You ache everywhere, a soreness that has settled deep and low and entirely pleasurable, the particular satisfied heaviness of muscles finally, properly spent, and you think, with a breathless half-laugh you cannot quite suppress, of every restless night you spent these past weeks chasing this same release with nothing but your own poor, insufficient hands. Nothing in all those long, frustrated hours came anywhere close. You are sated now in a way that reaches all the way to the bone, and some small, smug, satisfied part of you decides, lying there in the steaming snow, that the weeks of wanting were worth it simply for the contrast.

He helps you dress afterward with the same unhurried care, and it is this, more than the kissing, that you will remember longest. He laces your bodice the way you imagine a much gentler world might have taught him to, slow and careful, his fingers brushing your skin with each pull of the cord, pressing a kiss to the join of your shoulder once it is closed, to your collarbone above the sky-blue embroidery your mother once worked there. He kneels to tie your boots himself, an act so absurdly domestic for something built of chains and old violet fire that you have to look away from him for a moment simply to keep your composure, and even that small task he performs as though it were a rite rather than a chore, his thumb tracing once over your ankle before he lets the laces fall closed.

He settles your cloak back over your shoulders last of all, drawing the clasp closed at your throat himself, his knuckles grazing your jaw as he does, and presses one final kiss, soft and lingering, to your temple, as though sealing something shut that he has no intention of letting come undone again so easily.

"Kyryll," you say, quiet, savoring the shape of it now that the urgency that first dragged it out of him has burned down to embers. It sounds different in this voice than it had in the other, softer, almost shy of itself, and you watch something in him answer that softness in kind, his composure slipping for just a moment at hearing his own name spoken so gently after spending however many centuries hearing it, you suspect, mostly in fear or in screaming.

"Do not waste it," he says, though there is no real warning left in the words now, only a kind of fond, weary resignation, his thumb tracing slow over your knuckles. "I am told I am rather difficult to get rid of, once properly summoned."

You laugh, and the sound surprises you both, bright and unguarded in the cold dark.

He walks you to the edge of the treeline and no further, some old instinct in him apparently still unwilling to be seen too near Babulya's gate, and there he stops, drawing you in by the waist one last time, his forehead resting against yours, his breath warm against your mouth.

"This was never going to be a single night's bargain, golubka." His smile, when it comes, is dark and slow and entirely too pleased with itself, and yet underneath the danger of it lives something that looks, unmistakably, almost embarrassingly, like tenderness. "I have spent weeks now learning the shape of you, one small mercy at a time. I find I have no intention whatsoever of stopping simply because the debt's been paid twice over."

He brushes one last kiss against your mouth, lighter than all the others, almost careless, almost a promise.

"You will see me again," he says, already drawing back into the dark between the birches, his eyes holding yours until the very last possible moment. "Sooner, I expect, than either of us has the sense to properly prepare for."

And then he is gone, the way he always is, all at once and without sound, and you stand alone at the edge with your lips still warm and your whole body humming with a satisfaction that finally, finally, feels complete, and find that you are already, helplessly, counting the days until he keeps his word.

𝓟𝓛𝓔𝓐𝓢𝓔 𝓡𝓔𝓑𝓛𝓞𝓖 𝓘𝓕 𝓨𝓞𝓤 𝓔𝓝𝓙𝓞𝓨𝓔𝓓 𝓣𝓗𝓘𝓢, 𝓘𝓣 𝓗𝓔𝓛𝓟𝓢 𝓐 𝓛𝓞𝓣 ❤ gold animated divider by: @cafekitsune

#genshin impact #genshin x reader #flins #flins x reader #kyryll x reader #smut #rebloged #fic rec