I HAVE ALWAYS found something rather addictive about fear, whether it be the rush, the flight or the ever-eventual fall. This fear was different, however, a whole new kind of delirium that the presence of him induced within me. A spell, a thrumming, burning terror, as if I teeter at the edge of a crag, and cold sea spray is all that lies waiting below. Will I be Icarus? — Damned a stain of sickness across sharp rocks by a blur of God-born wind and greed. Or will I land smarted but safe?

It strikes me then, sudden as any killing blow, that I have never seen him standing before; always draped across some throne, a chill barbing the lash of his tongue.

He is a God, certain as this Northern mount is sturdy. No mortal man could be so tall, so broad, so divinely handsome. So close. And his art, cursed across the carving of his chest, though partially obscured by a pale tunic, stuns black despite the heavy shadow of night air, almost as if they absorb all the darkness around them.
His lips are red with wine stains, eyes alight with honey gold as he leans so casually against the wall, as if he is no less a deity than I am the damned that cowers beneath.

"I... I was just visiting my sisters." I say uneasily, for this small confession is enough to put me under.

"I know."

My skin prickles with heat. He's goading, toying to see just how much information he can pry from me. He knows the weight of his silence and all those unspoken implications lingering like a noose alongside it.
"Well, in that case — I shall be going, the hour grows late." I do not make it even three steps before his voice stops me dead, a command-less order.

  "Tell me," He says as firelight flickers across his face from the fading sconces, casting him into stark relief, "Are you always so terribly disobedient?"

"Only if the order is so terrible." The quip comes too fast, too sharp. And I am too scantily clad. Too ruled by angst.

The Spartan King smirks, all sharp teeth and sharper knives, "And what about your confinement to my finest fighter is so terrible that you must escape, little lamb?" Each word he speaks seems to find a way to burr its way beneath my skin, like a seed that settles, nurtured impossibly on foreign hostility, "Or is it that you wish for another?"

"I wish for no one."

His piercing eyes narrow, bright as fire strikes in the night. But his voice is careful; measured, pushing but never pleading. Like he knows my secrets before I even know them myself, "Is that so?"

My heart thrums so fast and loud I fear he may hear it, "It is."

"If you are to survive here you shall need to learn to lie better, little lamb. And I suggest you work on your stealth too, if you are to run to your sisters' rooms each night, at least try to hide it." He says it calmly but calculated enough for me to know this is not the first time he has either witnessed or been told this.

"You have been watching me?"

His lips curve upwards into a devastating taunt, "You think yourself important enough to be watched?"

I hold his gaze and despite the thickness of the night it is like staring directly into the sun, "Do you?"

He regards this for a moment, a long, agonising second in which my breath refuses to release and my fingernails bite into my palm. He likes this all too much; the game, the way the anticipation becomes a living, fighting thing inside me, coiling and churning. Desperate to make its presence known.

"I have yet to decide." He says slowly at last, right when my lungs begin to burn and constrict, begging for mercy from my self-inflicted torture. There is to be no relief from this man, no easy salvation, no kindly-given solace. Only cruelty. Only torment of the most wicked design. Only the thought of him, but never the touch. And yet I find myself wanting it, craving it, needing it. — Telling myself that just one taste will be enough to sate this desire. Just one touch and that will be it, he will have no further hold over me.

"How shall you decide?" I say, not realising I have taken a step closer until I feel the heat of him emanating through my entire being. I look up into his eyes with pleading piety, tell me. Tell me what I should be and I shall be it. I shall break myself apart into one thousand pieces if only so I can be reborn, remoulded into an image of his pleasing.

"Do you wish to be watched, little lamb?" His voice is low, a call to all that is unholy, the most irreligious parts of me answering with beckoning.

"By you?" Like the sun he becomes blinding, so sharp he is almost painful to look at. A kind of immoral beauty that feels like it is killing you the longer you look. "Perhaps, like you, I have also yet to decide."

At this, he smiles. A piercing glint of sharp teeth and feral intent, nothing calm or kind about it. Instead, this is the snarl before the strike. "And if your life were to depend on it on the answer, what then?"

A cool wind circles between us, his heat dissipating, turning to ice, "You do not scare me, Northerner."

Nothing about his face changes, and perhaps that is most terrifying of all, "Then you are a fool."

"I never claimed to be anything but." A foolish little girl, that is all I have ever been. Driven by heart, never head like Ascella nor faith like Andromeda, for I fail to find any in anyone or anything safe for myself. Even my own flesh and blood betrays me; my mother when she died, my father when he bartered with the devil for pride, even the traitorous hum of my pulse as I stand beneath this great mountain of a man.

"What sane mortal does not fear death?" I have caught his interest there, though he tries to negate it, burying his curiosity quickly and replacing it with something more sinister.

"I have been dying from the moment I was born, Northerner," A strange smile finds my lips, he is not the only one who can weave words to weapons, "Death is no new friend of mine, all my torments both begin and end with him. Only those who think they cannot die fear death."

The strike finds it mark, for change comes about him, then. The icy sheen that dulls his eyes, the terse set of his shoulders.
And I am just a girl. Small and insignificant and stood before this Spartan God, and yet, to him, I am a threat. A commination of the mind, yet to someone as divine as he, that is worst of all.

"You do not fear death?" His tawny eyes damn me without words, "Or is it only that you do not value your own life?" What of the lives of your sisters, then?"

I hide my worry well, drowning it with a placid facade as if nothing he says is of any consequence. If he knows just how his threats scare then he will hold fast to them like the reins of a bridle. "That is coward's play, Northerner, and you know it."

"And what of it?" He holds the thorned bit, offering it out to me if only I am naive enough to bite, "You think better of me?"

"I think only the very worst of you," My brows knit as I stare up into his nefarious face. The whisper comes as a slight, as much a poorly thrown quip as a stone to a bear but unlike him, I do not aim to maim, "Though maybe that makes me as much as fools you claim me to be."

He says; softer then, "I do not think you are a fool at all, little lamb, and that is what puts you in so much danger."

"So save me." I say, eyes wide and pleading, playing on all that is known to be the subtle softness of women, of pertness of my breasts and the swollen curve of my lips. If there is harm in this court then he is the only one that can truly satiate the strife.
He, like all men, must be used as a means to an end. And so I toy with all that is the innate curse of men; the need to protect, gather, collect, possess. "You are King — a God no less, you have the power to do as you please."

But I should have known that this Northern beast is not alike the meekness of mortal men, nor any other for that matter. He is himself alone. A unique sin. An untamed atrocity — for he does not smile as he says, "I cannot be the salvation if I am also the sickness."

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QOTD- any thoughts/theories as to what he's alluding to?