OC Kiss Challenge 2026 | Day 5 - Heated

today's kiss comes from Rivener and is a rewrite of a scene from draft 1! i'm very fond of it.

​length: 325 words

 ↳ in which Wren is a woman with a ruinous ability, Kai is an enslaved wolf shifter, and circumstances conspire to have them relying on each other for survival.

She was burning.

​Kai felt his stomach twist as he carefully pulled Wren free of her sodden clothes, manoeuvring her limbs out of the clinging cloth. Scrapes decorated her shins and back and large, blue-black bruises spanned her sides but, after pushing against them carefully and listening closely to her breathing, he didn’t think her ribs were broken—only bruised.

Moving her slowly and carefully—he’d learned that humans could die of shock if treated ungently—he gathered her against himself, wrapping his arms around her back and legs to pull her into a loose ball against his chest, hoping his heat would transfer to her, warm her chilled body even as she burned with fever. Her head lolled against his shoulder.

She was so thin. He’d known it, seen it, but to feel it was a different thing completely. Every knob of her spine and span of her ribs and jut of her shoulder bones was sharp against him. It was a marvel that she was so strong when she seemed to have been starving.

He looked down at her unconscious face. She had short dark lashes to match her short dark hair, and faded scars sprinkled across her nose and cheeks that he could only see from this close. He wondered what they were from.

Her breathing was laboured and shallow, and she wasn’t shivering, and he didn’t think it was right that she wasn’t. Most people would be, after being swept along icy mountain rapids like she’d been.

Kai squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his mouth to her heated brow, lips brushing in a facsimile of a kiss against her skin.

“Mother Solace, guide her, Father Fang, guard her, Sister Sorrow, keep her heart, Brother Bone, lend her strength,” he murmured, over and again, a prayer to the Ancient Ones who watched over him and his kind and, he hoped, Wren too.

He needed her. He needed her. She couldn’t die. She couldn’t.