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The patterns on the druid’s legs are cohesive, but not the same. Squatted at his side, Griel can make out a brilliant green python coiled sinuously around the left thigh just above the knee, vines with broad leaves wrapped around the right. He follows the snake higher up the body, just two fingers pressing along its spine, in the proper way. Higher. As he does this, Griel imagines he can feel the delicate pop and shift of the snake’s vertebrae beneath the touch. Pop. Pop. It slithers up Fenwytch’s pretty thigh through ferns and flowers. Almost sinuous enough to seem alive.Pop.Everyone else is asleep. They left him alone in favour of it hours ago. They don't stir. Griel makes sure that they don’t—he doesn’t sleep; not here. Rarely anywhere, but certainly not here. These ruins give him a bad feeling, with their flooded halls and the musty, hard-to-breathe air, and if their clumsy exploration hasn’t already given them away to the things that live here, then his screaming nightmares surely would. So he’ll sit awake, as he so often does, and stroke the snake that lives beneath Fenwytch’s skin.Pop.Vaguely, he wipes at his mouth with the back of a hand. Smears the saliva that had begun to drip down his chin. Higher, almost to mid-thigh now, Griel’s fingertips rasping inwards until he can reach no further and then back to the outside to follow the newest loop. His hunger gnaws at him, perpetual and dull. He wonders whether druid-snake would fill him up. Nothing else ever has.Pop…And Griel’s drowned-dark eyes are hungry, too—hungry for any other creatures that might be etched into this flesh. They dart between the knotted leather keeping the druid’s night-robe closed and his own hand as it slowly, finally eases the already-high hem even higher. The python continues well beyond what he can (or dares) see, and that’s… frustrating. He wants to touch, but he doesn’t want Fenwytch to hurt him for it. To hate him for it. To leave them for it. High in his chest, he aches and pangs, and together with the hunger, Griel feels something deeply strange starting to grow in the pit of his stomach. He thinks he hates it.He splays his fingers out near the top of Fenwytch’s leg, as though maybe he could simply dig them in and pull the snake from the body. That’s all he wants, he tells himself. The snake, the snake, the snake. He’s leaning heavily over him now, sucking the slaver back behind jagged teeth before it can ooze down onto naked skin. Without thinking about it, without consciously deciding to, without even looking, Griel reaches his other hand for the leather catch.Fenwytch’s hand shifts, then. Smooth but quick, not the dream-heavy shift of a sleeping creature. His golden palm settles squarely over the knot before Griel can even touch it. Griel’s gaze skitters up, and shrewd, slitted eyes are already staring back, distinctly reptilian and fixed on his face, without surprise, without disgust, and without the kneejerk recoil of someone who had only just woken to see this above them. The druid’s lips are parted, and the pointed teeth beneath are neither wholly elf nor wholly animal.“Hey, pal,” Fenwytch says; conversational and convivial, unmoving, unblinking. “Did you need something?”Griel swallows thickly, and nods.