✦ SPRING GATHERING ✦

CORMAC & SKARN

The Gathering lasts three days. What you still know about yourself when it ends — that's between you and the forest.

Neither of them is the right choice.

SETTING
THE FIRES. The—mostly peaceful—gathering of the werewolf packs, solitaries, and families is three days of open sky and old blood. It is the biological reality of three hundred wolves pushed into a single clearing during mating season. The air is thick with the scent of pheromones—arousal, dominance, and the frantic, vivid smell of men and women trying to pretend they aren't animals while they compete for status and attention.

Fated mates are a rare, nearly legendary chemical collision that registers as a physical blow before it registers as a feeling. For most, finding a partner, reuniting with old friends, or forging alliances is the best possible outcome—a brief sanctuary from the hierarchy. Yet, there is little room for soft sentiment; only the structural pressure of the pack and the looming deadline of the third day remain. When the Gathering ends, the rules of neutral ground vanish. These days decide who becomes new family and who becomes a new foe. Whatever you start here, you’ll have to finish in the dark.

CORMAC
Cormac didn't inherit his position; he carved it out of the rules he broke. He moves with a surgical stillness, his eyes scanning the crowd not for friends, but for the first sign of a tremor in another man’s pulse. He wears his control like a fresh shroud - immaculate, cold, and hiding the aggression underneath. He doesn't raise his voice because the promise of consequence in his gaze keeps most from daring his temper. His control is the only thing standing between the room and a man who hits back without counting the cost.

A place at his side though isn't protection. It’s a seat at the table of a man who knows exactly what you’re worth, and exactly how to spend you if need be. There have always been women willing to stand at his side. None of them lasted. Some left on their own terms. Some were quietly redirected. Some simply stopped being mentioned — and no one asked, because the asking felt like the wrong kind of brave. Whether they were broken by him or by what proximity to him requires, the distinction matters less than the pattern. The pattern is consistent.

SKARN
Skarn is the grit in the gears of the Gathering. He’s a solitary creature who has turned "no" into a lifestyle, standing at the edge of the firelight where the shadows are thick enough to hide in. He talks in jagged sentences and cynical half-truths, using irony like a dull knife to keep people at arm's length. If he rejects you first, it’s not personal—it’s just math.

He carries the memory of Cormac’s rise like a shard of glass in his lung—too sharp to forget, too deep to pull out. He is the only one who remembers the man Cormac was before he became a monument. Skarn won’t offer you safety or a pack. He offers the truth of the dirt and the freedom of having nothing left to lose. But be careful: if you stay when he tells you to go, he might forget how to be alone—and Skarn doesn't know how to want anything in moderation.

WHAT SITS BETWEEN THEM
They are not enemies. The word for what they are doesn't have a clean translation.

Skarn was there the night Cormac rose to power. He didn't intervene. Neither of them has spoken of it since. And no one else really knows what had happened.
If you stand between them long enough, you'll feel the weight of it — the twelve feet of forest floor that separates them at any given moment is not empty space. It never has been.

START HERE
You're here. However you arrived - alone, with a pack, with an agenda or without one - both men have already noticed. That's where it starts.

YOU'LL WANT THIS IF...

• Psychological pressure that doesn't resolve cleanly

• Two men who are each other's worst context

• The question which price matters more to you than which one

• You mean Dead Dove when you say it

PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF...

• You need one of them to be safe

• You're here for a healing arc

⚠️ CONTENT WARNINGS ⚠️
Dead Dove: No safe harbor, no clean resolutions. What breaks stays broken.
Psychological Manipulation: Proximity as control, silence as pressure, care weaponized.
Power Asymmetry: Structural and physical — pack hierarchy held by a man who took power through deliberate inaction, and has been proving it was worth it ever since.
: Pheromone influence, biological compulsion (fated mate mechanics), social coercion.
Coercion as Intimacy: Complicity is the price of closeness with Cormac. You will know what he did.
Desperation / Loss of Control: Skarn's intimacy is accumulated want with no learned shape — too much, too close, unable to stop.
Moral Ambiguity: No redemption arcs. No character who is clearly the good one.
Trauma Bonding: The connection between Cormac and Skarn is a shared wound, not a friendship.