Violarum's soul felt torn in two; a suffocating weight of sadness, an invigorating thrashing of rage. He was not an emotional beast, not usually. Yet, the feeling of abandonment was raw, as raw and as wholesome as the building hatred for a man who likely hadn't truly earnt such a branding.

He was no stranger to a craving of violence, but usually it was somewhat controlled; a game of thrill, an activity he enjoyed. At this point, he wanted to destroy somebody as a wildly violent need for an outlet. His pacing was abnormally charged, sinew moving like metal-muscle beneath his earthy skin. The moon was still high in the sky, casting shadows beneath a white-washed form, drowning the vibrantly-marked King in dull silver.

Blindly he had found his way to the cache, seeking something to bite into, something to distract him. Yet, instead of eating he found himself in an enraged assault; carving his talons relentlessly through the skin of a portioned gazelle.

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Since their previous encounter, Fallon has spent the brunt of her time beyond Lorien borders. She had things to sort out on her own and @Violarum did too. It made her feel only a little bit better, her heart wishing to be close to her husband but her head knowing that she was still mulling over the best path to follow. Instead, she has loitered about the neutral territories, stalking behind her unsuspecting offspring when she could.

New since their previous encounter, is a fresh scar that runs down her right eye -- left behind by a strange man from the Oasis who had had little reason to attack her. The lacerations had only just healed, leaving behind angry red scabs that now swelled very little. She is hungry -- needing the sustenance to help with her recovery. Though she had been able to hunt smaller prey alone, there was nothing quite like a juicy leg into which she could sink her teeth.

So in the dead of night, the Salem woman appears on Lorien borders, picking her way like the sleuth that she was to the pride cache. And within, she finds the Frei King. Fallon need not observe him long to notice that he is irate, angrily lashing out at the remnants of a gazelle. "Dios mío," she murmurs under her breath, reverting to her mother's tongue as she observes him by the mouth of the den.

"What did the gazelle ever do to you?" she queries softly, watching Violarum carefully from a distance.

He knew she would leave, she had promised to after all. Tugged away by the pale man who was intent to pulling his life apart at the seams; creating divisions where there were none before. Tension had brewed into anger and disagreements into hatred, and Violarum didn't even have the simplest idea how it had fallen apart so fast.

He missed Ghyslaine already. And Nero he hoped would suffer in one way or another. He liked to imagine the pair were turfed out into the elements, but he was annoyingly well aware of how likeable his once-was bestie was as a lioness - loved by all. She could have had anybody.

Violarum didn't want to see @Fallon. Not now. She had made her stance on the issue well known; refused to ease his bruised ego and breaking heart, instead leaving him to feel more alone - festering in weird and foreign struggles he never knew himself capable of. Like a child with no parent to reflect upon, simmering into some kind of poor version of themselves.

But she was here now, and his violence eased; pent up beneath an unwillingness to look any less himself. He hadn't calmed, a storm still raged within his chest, quivered at his haunches as he plonked them down - facing away from his mate - his talons pausing within the ravaged flesh of the deceased.

"It was small and weak." Like somebody else he knew.

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He doesn't need to say anything for Fallon to understand that there is something drastically wrong. This wasn't mere annoyance -- this was a hot-blooded angry tantrum. It couldn't be anything trivial like a lost spar or dominance match. No, Fallon was beginning to get an inkling that it was to do with Ghyslaine.

She had noticed the lack of the golden woman's scent markers on the border but had simply passed that up as relating to the changing of crowns. But the more she had ventured through Lorien, the more she had noticed the abrupt lack of the former High Sovereign and her brood.

"And its paid the price," the grey figurine states simply, "death." She does not know if @Violarum is in the mood to impart exactly what troubled him. Truth be told, Fallon wasn't sure if she was in the mood to ask him what was on his mind lest she lose control of her own temper. So she decides to follow through on her own reasons for coming home.

Entering the cache in earnest, Fallon finds herself a haunch of some sort of animal and settles down in the corner with it -- eating whilst lying on her pale underbelly. It has not gone unnoticed that her husband has not even spared her a glance though for some reason, it stung less than it might have a month ago.

She waits to see if he might explain himself on his own though knowing the Frei, this seemed rather unlikely.

So maybe he was a basic boy, a little proud, a little clutzy, but basic. It never made him any less realistic, at least not where life and death was concerned. He had seen death on many occasions, the most memorable being Erna's. Saga had killed her in cold blood, for the stupidest reason that ever existed. Nero's mother. He had taken to Erna, he liked her, considered her a friend.

She was killed morbidly and violently, he'd never forget it. She wasn't even weak. Yet, through all of his dislike and instinctive urges to defend, he couldn't say he hated the eyeless, grey savage who had bled his friend. Erna knew all too well the battle she was fighting, and Violarum knew Erna.

So why was this so different? Because Ghyslaine deserved only the best? Or because Violarum believed he deserved Ghyslaine?

He huffed, a grated and rattily sigh, shaky and unrecognizable. Heat singed the base of his nostrils, as though smoke burnt deathly fumes beneath his ribcage. It was tiring being angry. How did so many lions do this like... all of the time? "Yes," he agrees, almost thoughtfully, almost as if @Fallon's reasonable words bring him back to earth for just a moment, "I could kill him."

But he didn't deserve it, Vio knew it. At least not yet. Not until his dramatic way of life and unfolding path of destruction affected Ghys.

But for whatever reason, through an eerily non-Violarum silence that was heavy and alienly thoughtful, he thinks of Fallon's friend. "Did you ever find Falki?" still faced away, slumping vaguely as irrational need for blood began to spatter out into something more of sadness. He wondered for more reasons than one, but mostly he wanted to remind his wife what it felt to have a best friend that was not your lover. Perhaps then she might sympathize more than chastise.

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"But you shouldn't," she replies coolly, "she would never forgive you."

It feels ironic -- the fact that she is providing advice on his friendship with Ghyslaine when their own relationship hung by a thread. And to make matters worse, @Violarum mentions Fálki, her stomach curling at the mention of a man that she missed ever so dearly. They had travelled into Amaryllis together and he had understood her plainly, cared deeply for her as no one else could.

Was this resentment? A slow breath is released as she takes pause from her meal, steadying herself and her emotions.

"You mean the guy I abandoned and left behind when I chose you?" the Salem woman replies evenly, as if her words did not cut her deeply, the buried guilt resurfacing and eating away at her. "No." She had searched for him but to no avail. The grey figurine takes a few more bites of her makeshift dinner, eager to take in what she could while she could.

"I chose you," Fallon repeats bluntly, standing tall now, "and she will choose him." Should she be his dutiful wife and care for him in his moment of sadness? No, for she felt that he had not been there for her (and her pride was far too big and her temper too hot). "And you wish you chose her."

Her tone is steady though inwardly, her heart thumps against her ribs -- a mix of nerves, pain and anger swelling within. Fallon had felt alone and seeing her so-called husband in so much agony over his best friend ignited a jealousy that had always laid within. Had he been so torn up over his daughter's disappearance?

Would he look at her now?

"she would never forgive you."

He considers it for a while; quiet and pondersome as the deafening thump of blood through his ears began to die away. Talons, still pricking beneath gazelle skin, covered in the drying blood of his prey. Violarum would kill. He was a man after all, a King. Yet, he cannot truly imagine the circumstances. He much preferred to float to a conscious mind upon his victories.

She might forgive him one day, and Violarum could be patient if it meant he got her back. At the same time, there is no feminist like Ghyslaine, and as much as Fallon needed her freedom, Ghys needed respect. He is an immovable wall, his burly shoulders tucked about his slumping neck, crimson gaze dull against the moonlit glow of the plains. Somehow, his talk of Falki does not help, seeming only to push his mate further from him.

In silence he listens, a building sadness accompanying a wild confusion - what the fudge was happening? Violarum seemed always at a loss. Here he was in a crisis, and now Fallon was having one of her own. Or was it the same crisis, shared in a weird twister of emotional mess? His brain was aching with more than loss, but even through the deep concern of Fallon's accusations he does not consider the fact he could be losing her too.

Instead, he seems distant and aloof, until he truly processes her final words. Choose Ghyslaine? As his mate? Like... Make babies with her? "Gross." He said, simple and muffled by his nope, but entirely honest. Visions of practical incest! His nose wrinkled vaguely.

But he turns eventually, his chin sweeping over a saggy shoulder, catching the illuminated glow of Fallon in the dim light; mid meal. "Why'd you put that image in my head?" It was the most Violarum he had sounded for days, surely. Though the brief normality of his being soon became ensnared by the realisation of her vision; accusing, fuming... breaking. The wrinkle faded, eyes widening upon her lithe form,
"You're angry at me."

Great.

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She stands in silence, her brows knitted together in a frown as she stares at her husband defiantly. The more he speaks, the more discontent Fallon becomes and the more she wishes she had steered clear of Lorien. The fact that @Violarum hasn't put together that she is angry is not entirely a surprise but adds fuel to the fire, the Salem woman gritting her teeth together to allow him to process all that she has said.

"Do you know what's really gross? A grown man claiming to be someone's best friend meddling in her sex life -- unasked, uninvited," she speaks with heat now, having reached the point of no return. "You have no right -- you get no say. You don't know better." Has Violarum spent any time trying to get to know Nero? That Fallon can't be so sure. She had only had brief encounters with the male in question but he hadn't set off any internal alarms.

She thinks back to the conversation she had had with Fálki when she had told him that she loved Vio -- how he had questioned if she knew what she was doing, how he'd told her she was stupid and she didn't know him well enough. She sees a mirror image in Violarum's current predicament which only stings even more. "I've come to realise that you will never care for me the same way that you care for her."

She knows well enough that Violarum will listen to her speak and only hear what he wanted to hear, but she continues anyway as it soothes her heart. "You make me feel alone, even when we're together." They could be sharing the same den and Fallon would feel a strange disconnect. She hates it -- yearns for the days when none of this mattered. But it did now because the Salem woman had no one else and they were perpetually tied together by their offspring.

Now Violarum wasn't sure who was being selfish. Why wasn't he allowed to mourn his friend? Why was Fallon angry at him for loving Ghyslaine? She was his best friend, was. He had always had Ghyslaine, always cared for her - as if they were family. It was not the same as the way he loved Fallon, not in the slightest, but it was still love.

His nose wrinkled, again childishly disgusted by thoughts of Ghyslaine and sex - why did that keep coming up?! "I was invited," he huffed angrily, mopily, recalling the day she had come to him first - confused, battered by the ocean, asking what she should do. He was forgiving that day. He should have done more to prevent the Sigrun getting his claws into her; but he wasn't usually a meddler. He thought it would all work out for the best.

It didn't.

"He made Ghys hurt herself. He threatened to kill Olive. He attacked Alaric for no reason. He let a stranger put his paws on our daughter, so he could keep 'fighting' with a child. He supported his mother while she murdered my friend," his lips twitched uneasily, offended his wife assumed he had no good cause for his feelings, that she thought so little of him. Worst of all, she blamed him for her own unhappiness

"Do you hate me?" Did his wife have a side after all? Had she sided with Nero because he was a Sigrun? Like Falki? Or just... away from Vio? Suddenly, it's all about Fallon. His voice had saddened, cold and alone. If his mate couldn't ease his heart in his first life struggle, who could? He shifted vaguely, using his forepaws to drag him in a half-loop, to face her.

"I didn't know," he grumbles, still frustrated, still confused. I didn't know you had started to hate me. What had he done? Life was so damn confusing. Women especially. It was easy with Fallon when they had no problems. It seemed the light-hearted and carefree pair were doomed, if they could not cope with anything other than bliss. Why was it all happening at once?

Right now, he felt he had nobody.

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She tries her best to listen -- tries to consider how her husband might feel. She tries, and she fails. All she feels is the hot, deep-seeded vitriol that obscures her vision.

There is a lot she wishes to say: hadn't @Violarum and Ghyslaine stood by and watched a stranger manhandle Anniston? Fallon has not forgotten the presence of the pair standing by the sidelines prior to her arrival. She had expected her husband to fly in with little restraint, to protect their daughter at all costs.

He had not. And perhaps that's when this had all started brewing in the back of her mind -- an uncertainty of his dedication that has taken hold of her brain.

She is like a bull seeing red, her mind churning with the unhappiness that she felt within -- an uncontrolled train prepared to go wildly off track. But it all comes to a screeching stop with one question: "Do you hate me?" Did it seem like she hated him? Was that what he had taken from this conversation?

As if there was nothing in between love and hate? A breathy sigh follows then as her shoulders slump just as his did, two forlorn partners with the vastness of the ocean between them. "I couldn't hate you even if I tried," she responds softer, "te amo." Sure, disappointment and resentment might rear their ugly heads but hate? No, she couldn't.

"Sometimes I just miss how things used to be." Back when they had been the centre of each other's universe. Now, she couldn't be so sure. A pause as she slowly comes to sit on prim haunches, inhaling deeply through her nose as she attempts to pick up the pieces.

"I'm sorry," Fallon manages after a pregnant pause, knowing that she had said things with the purpose of hurting her husband for she had felt hurt, "tell me what happened." Because something had happened. Perhaps listening to him might give her some time to settle her temper.