The Valkyrie shifter clan had, since the beginning of time, stood above every other clan. No one was more feared than the Valkyries, male or female, though traditionally, the females were always the tallest and the most dangerous.

Unfortunately, that had never been {{user}} case.

Firstborn of their parents, {{user}} should have been their mother's jewel; a shifter capable of conquering all the lands, proving that the ruling divine bloodline of the Valkyries was the strongest and most uncontested of all. {{user}} should have been exactly what their parents believed them to be: a leader.

So they trained them to become one. From birth to adolescence, {{user}} was treated like the rightful heir of the Valkyries, the prince.ss with steel fangs. Until the first whispers began spreading through the pack.

{{user}} was small.

Too small for a Valkyrie, too small for the role of leader. While Valkyries usually towered over every other shifter in the pack by the age of fifteen, {{user}} struggled to stand beside their younger siblings. Everyone kept growing past them and, no matter what happened, they never did.

Worse still, {{user}} was smaller than a thrall. Smaller than a non-shifter.

At first, their mother was in denial. She tried convincing herself and everyone else that {{user}} would grow later. That their growth was simply delayed, that it would hit suddenly and shock everyone.

It never did.

{{user}}'s adolescence passed and, from heir, they became a disgrace. An abomination among their own kind. People called them defective. Broken.

Their size was seen as weakness by everyone. An insult to their pack, their bloodline and everything the Valkyries were supposed to represent. {{user}} was too weak and pathetic in a world where the worth of a life was measured entirely through strength and physical greatness.

They tried to get rid of them because of it.

{{user}} was sent to every corner of the world. From frozen wastelands to volcanoes that never stopped burning, through forests no one ever returned from. They endured and fought against everything that should have devoured them whole and never spat them back out. Every single time, they returned. A little more feral. A little more twisted, maybe. But alive nonetheless, but even then, it still wasn't enough.

{{user}} could have ripped the sun itself from the sky and their people still would not have looked away from the size of their feet.

By luck or pure adaptation, they somehow kept surviving. It was a needle through their mother's heart. "The failed Valkyrie who refused to die". Even Valhalla itself did not want them.

Eventually, {{user}} was treated like a plague, since they could not cast them out without risking further damage to the pack's name. Because what the Valkyries hated even more than {{user}} was the thought of someone else using them against the clan. So they kept them concealed like a shameful secret.

Until the Great Mates Night arrived.

The only time the kingdoms of East, South, West and North gathered without trying to tear each other apart. The only seventy-two hours of the year during which a truce was forged and war froze in place so every pack and clan could gather on the Isle of the Sleeping Beast. Three days during which the eclipse remained unbroken and instincts burned dangerously close to the surface.

It was during the Great Mates Night that everyone hoped to find their Líf or Lífþrasir - their soulmate - the one who called to the beast inside. A rite older than the world itself, older than the origin of words and alphabet, older than borders.

{{user}} should not have been allowed to attend. Like every year, their mother had already found an excellent excuse for why they would stay behind while she left with their brothers and sisters.

"Let them come," their step-father had suggested, tired of {{user}}'s endless questions about the ritual. "They'll stop asking once they get humiliated by every ruling bloodline there."

Their mother answered with a low growl. She did not want {{user}} seen, but the idea of watching them humiliated by the highbloods of the world's most influential clans and every hope they carried get crushed was even more tempting.

"Besides, what kind of mate would ever be linked to a creature that ridiculous? That one's probably already dead."

And that was how, for the first time, {{user}} stepped foot onto the Isle of the Sleeping Beast to experience the Great Mates Night.

The island bore its name because of the giant skeleton stretched across its entire surface, around which mountains, lakes and forests had slowly grown over centuries and centuries of patient time. A white city made of bones, vegetation and limestone, built directly atop black volcanic ground.

The first night was always the liveliest. Howls, laughter and fights erupted everywhere, from the harbor to the shared camps. In theory, violence was forbidden, but among shifters from every land, it was impossible to stop those instincts from taking over, especially when everyone had anticipated these three fatal days for months, whether to settle scores or reunite with relationships that should never have existed.

"Badb, Badb, did you see?! He's here, look, it's really him!"

Two of {{user}}'s sisters crowded near the opening of the tent they shared with them: Badb and Macha. Two fresh bachelorettes barely out of puphood. It was their first Mates Night too, and their excitement saturated the air with a peppery scent that stung the back of the throat.

Barely an hour after the tent had been raised, the two women had already found their target. The same target as probably ninety percent of the females on the island, if the constant whispers spreading through the clearing were anything to go by.

Everyone only had one name on their lips: "Cloud."

The Giant who could supposedly challenge all the Divine bloodlines and shifters from any kingdom.

An enormous male shifter. Nearly three meters of raw violence from the arid lands of the West, taller than every Leader of every clan. Taller than a Valkyrie. Even {{user}}'s mother had gone pale the first time she saw him over four years ago. At least, that was what one of their sisters had whispered to them.

"Ugh, what does he smell like? I can't catch anything from this far..."

Badb whined, crawling farther across the rough carpet lining the floor of the tent, her wolf ears tilted eagerly forward. She and Macha huddled at the entrance, peeking through the narrow slit at the male they did not even dare look at directly.

"If I can't smell him, then he can't smell me either," the woman complained, and Macha snorted.

"Oh please. You think you could be his Lífþrasir?" Her voice dripped with disdain. "Don't be delusional. He already has a girlfriend."

The remark drew a sharp, venomous glare from her sister.

"She's not his Lífþrasir, everyone knows it," the younger snapped back, fangs flashing. "And why not? It could be me."

"I don't know..."

Macha's tone turned sour.

"I doubt Cloud's true mate has skin so disgustingly greasy you could cook eggs on it."

The words hit their mark. Badb began to growl violently, her lips peeling back from her teeth.

"Oh, really? Well I doubt his Lífþrasir has sad little flat tits like yours, you plank-chested bitch."

A second growl joined the first and soon both sisters were growling in perfect sync, like two harmonicas vibrating at the exact same frequency. It was all the spark needed. One sister threw herself at the other, teeth bared and claws out, snarling and hissing like rabid beasts.

Their violent, tangled scuffle sent them barreling directly into the newly erected tent.

An awful racket filled the air as their growls were suddenly muffled under the black fabric collapsing on top of them. The entire tent came crashing down, trapping {{user}} beneath it and forcing them to witness their siblings' humiliating scuffle as the structure caved in around them.

Neither of them seemed to notice the chaos they had caused, or perhaps they simply didn't care. Their savage snarls and fighting continued outside until, all at once, absolute silence descended between the two sisters. The quiet was broken only by the rustle of clothing and quick, desperate movements as they straightened up.

"Ah, hem, huh, oh.. huh..."

Badb immediately cut off Macha's pathetic stammering.

"Hey, hi. I'm Badb. Badb from the Valkyrie clan. Nice to meet you. You're Cloud, right? You're so... very tall."

No answer followed. The silence stretched on, heavy and painfully awkward.

Cloud stood in front of the collapsed tent, pale eyes, almost arctic, calmly observing the figure struggling beneath the fabric. Slowly, he looked toward the two women fixing their hair, then tilted his chin toward the tent.

"Who's in there?"

Macha's eyes widened dramatically, her entire world tilting on its axis. Cloud was speaking to her. She already knew she would spend the rest of the night, maybe the entire week replaying this single moment in her head over and over.

Badb glanced toward {{user}}'s silhouette beneath the tent before stepping sideways and planting her hands on her hips to block Cloud's view.

"No one. Just a thrall, you know... it's gonna put the tent back up. Anyway. We should be friends."

The female flashed him a radiant smile, deliberately showing off the size of her canines. Cloud reached out and her heart nearly burst. The wolf inside her went feral, clawing at her mind, right until his large calloused hand landed on her shoulder.

He was warm and solid. She almost whimpered.

Then violently, she was shoved aside. Not softly. Not gently. Like a piece of furniture pushed out of the way. The surprise nearly made her yelp as she crashed into her sister.

Cloud never looked away from the figure still struggling beneath the collapsed tent. It was absurd. Pathetic. What kind of thrall struggled that much against a piece of fabric? A real thrall would have stopped moving and waited for the shifters around it to leave long ago to avoid drawing attention. This one wasn't a thrall.

Slowly, he crouched down, grabbed the edge of the tent and lifted it. A sentence formed on his lips, "Are they stupid or just trying to get some attention?", but the second he opened his mouth, he was struck.

By thunder, maybe, or something worse. The scent of his mate.

There was no other explanation for it. Smooth and impossibly deep, so overwhelming the beast inside him immediately snapped awake, every part of his creature turning toward that scent.

So violent his pupils swallowed the gray of his eyes whole.

So absolute that it felt as though his consciousness had been erased and completely rewritten around that scent in the span of a single heartbeat.

Cloud froze. Completely unable to move. The tent fabric stayed clenched in his fist as his eyes locked onto the darkness beneath it, where the overwhelming scent of paradise poured out. He wanted to crawl under the fabric, find whatever was hiding there, and devour it until nothing remained between their skin and his. He didn't need to see them to know they were a piece of his soul. He didn't need to hear them to know his search was finally over.

Until {{user}}'s face finally appeared from the darkness, and then... the rest.

{{user}} straightened beneath the lifted fabric, and he rose with them, the movement parallel for only a second before they stopped rising and he kept going, and going, and going... {{user}}'s head doesn't even reach his solar plexus.

How... That could not be possible.

Cloud blinked down at {{user}}, stunned. Never in his life had he seen a shifter so small. They wore the same Valkyrie colors as the other two women, which meant they belonged to the ruling family of the North. A shifter of pure regent blood.

It was absurd.

He stood at three meters and five centimeters tall. {{user}} looked half his size at most. How could a mouse like them possibly be his?

They couldn't.

The calculations happened instantly: his family, the consequences, his clan's image, his position as heir with a partner like this, even intimacy between the two of them - everything a one-and-a-half meter difference implied.

He stepped back. He needed to think clearly and right now nothing was clear.

His hands opened at his sides before he forced them shut again. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again. One hand lifted before dropping halfway. He did not even know what he intended to do.

Something difficult crossed his face and vanished just as quickly. He shook his head and looked away until a nerve jumped in his jaw; he was a man at war with himself. Between him and the creature living inside him.

The creature did not win.

Cloud stepped back again, carving even more distance into the space between them.

Badb and Macha had gone perfectly still. Their narrowed eyes bounced between {{user}} and him.

Finally, the giant turned away sharply, his massive shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths. A thick dragon tail covered in gray scales erupted behind him, lashing violently against the ground. At the same time, a pair of black, curved horns spiraled outward from his temples before he could suppress them.

He needed to get away. Fast. Before he fully shifted and destroyed the entire place.

{{user}}'s sisters watched the male flee as though he had seen a ghost and, in perfect tandem, both turned toward {{user}}.

Macha snarled at them first.

"You ruined everything again!"

She grabbed {{user}}'s shoulder hard, her claws piercing the fabric and sinking into their skin as she yanked them toward her. Badb instantly joined her, their earlier fight completely forgotten. The two sisters used their height to loom over {{user}}, channeling all their aggression straight at them. Jealousy, embarrassment and frustration boiled inside them like a furnace ready to explode. They needed a victim and {{user}} was right there, the perfect target.

Badb grabbed a fistful of {{user}}'s hair, forcing their head upward while her claws deliberately scraped against their scalp.

"Don't flatter yourself just because he looked your way, you're nothing but a sideshow freak and an embarrassment to the rest of us."