Never Promised

The tit-for-tat landed deep enough for him to notice her sudden stillness. Ah damn... Gany would probably smack him for that one, he wasn't doing himself any favors as he let his eyes rove over the princess's delightful fur again. Her eyes were distant and caught in the space between waking memories and nightmares.

He could almost hear the hammering against her chest as her memories bombarded her mind's eye. His gruesome work with the beaver began to still as he caught the blinking of her eyes. He leaned back and watched with a detached mask as she growled but answered him. He nodded, it seemed to fit more or less of what he had previously gathered from his soldiers that night. She had knocked them both out and slipped away, they hardly knew what had happened.

He wanted to know if she had gone down a secret route or something. But alas, it was simply idiots who let a child barely out of puppyhood get the better of them. He went back into his task and flayed the beaver under its chin. Loosening the skin and began peeling it away from the skull.

He smirked as she lobbed a hard question back at him but he continued to wrench the skin away from the skull until it was free, seemingly undisturbed by the digging query.

When the skin was free he scooped out an eyeball and held it aloft before him. Peering inquisitively into the gruesome fading depths of the foggy
pupil.

"Touche." He remarked with a glance her way, placing the eyeball with the other meats.

"No. I received this from my father on the eve he -" His voice suddenly cracked and stopped as the memory suddenly came flooding HIS senses. He had ignored it. He had discarded it. He had pretended for this long that it hadn't happened. But it did. He could no longer deny it, and the news would devastate the princess before him and the rest of her family. Not even Lailah knew, not even Gany knew how he had come across this scar exactly, not yet.

The untouchable god prince suddenly dropped the amused, self-important, and self-righteous facade. Ultyr grew somber, a glassy look even cast over his gaze as he was finally faced with the truth. His shoulders dropped and his paws became heavy.

His lover was not here, his lover was not with them. Because his father had not resold the last Judilan Prince into slavery. The Demon King Aryn had killed him before Ultyr's very eyes.

She had a right to know. As one heir to another, equal in every way of the old lands, she had a right to know.

"We were to be betrothed you know. You and I." He said instead with a glistening half-assed predatory smile. Fuck. That wasn't what he wanted to tell her just then. And just like that the masks were clumsily back in place. The mist in his eyes remained still as he grabbed the beaver and freed the last of its skin from its carcass.