[o] you make breaking hearts look so easy

Maea

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved

Straightening up only to shake herself as the man eased away from her shoulders only to sink back on his knees, she allowed him a moment to collect himself. Lowering her nose to drink deeply of the cold water, her stumpy tail twitched absently to stave off a fly. The stench of death juxtaposed against the freshness of the morning. In her heightened awareness of all that moved around her, Maea found the carcass appalling with its obscene starkness, yet even in the shape of an animal so similar to the elk, she couldn't find a trace of revulsion or even fear. It only went to show, she was a wolf in sheep's clothing even now, and all suggestion of innocence or fragility was naught but illusion.

It was there in the all-too intelligent look the doe cast upon the kneeling man. His silence annoyed her, because it was one she knew all too well. If he wasn't spiraling into some dark and gloomy corner of his mind, then she was a baboon and he could yell at her all he wanted for what she was about to do next.
Without making much of a fuss about herself, she traipsed away from the water, as though to walk around his back to reach a patch of dew-laden grass on Liam's other side. But as she came behind him, there was a tense twitch of her tail, a toss of the antlered head - and without warning she reared a smidge, put the forelegs against his back and shoved him forward, into the cold, refreshing, hopefully re-invigorating water.

In secret, between the shadow and the soul