I. PROLOGUE

𝐒𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐍, 𝐃.𝐓

pairing: daemon targaryen x martell!reader

summary: y/n dreamed about the man she was promised since she was born. (I AM REALLY BAD AT SUMMARIES SORRY 😭)

words: 4.0k

author's note: part two is right here.

reblogs, feedbacks and likes are appreciated. i hope you like it!

warnings: enemies to lovers, descriptions of blood, descriptions of combat, mentions of sex

18+ warning

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The beauty of Y/N Martell was known throughout all Westeros. Daughter of Lord Martell with a Velaryon lady, the girl had beautiful silver hair and lilac eyes, that highlighted her warm skintone. The Sand Dragon is how they called her, even though lady Y/N wasn't a dragon herself. She had valyrian blood, but wasn't a Targaryen.

House Martell wanted power, and for that, they needed the biggest and greatest weapon the kingdom has ever known. King Viserys couldn't put a dragon egg in dornish hands, not without a marriage to finally bound the houses that once had been in war.

Lord Martell offered Y/N's hand to the king right after she was born and he saw potential in her valyrian features, but Viserys kindly refused, saying that he already had a wife, whose also just gave birth to a girl, princess Rhaenyra. The monarch mentioned his younger — and single — brother, who could do well with a wife. Lord Martell accepted the king's matchmaking, and promised the hand of his newborn child to Prince Daemon.

As a gift, the king gave the little baby a dragon egg, saying it was only for the future princess. It was a precious treasure, something that the dornish people had never seen before. The egg was in color white, with golden details in it's scales. It hatched a couple months later, and a female dragon was born. Lady Velaryon called it Faora.

Obviously King Viserys knew they had to wait until baby Y/N became of age and ready settled to marriage. As a child, she was told that her destiny had been traced, and her future husband was a cruel, and yet brave, Targaryen warrior. Y/N never met him, but she fell for the idea of him. A brave and handsome prince, who killed everyone that tried to harm the crown. She wanted to be like him, the man of her dreams.

At the age of 8, Lady Y/N started training. She was an excellent dragonrider, even though she was young. The Targaryen children start riding their dragons at even younger age, and Y/N insisted she wanted to be like them, so she could impress her Prince with her riding skills. Y/N also started battle training, and her father gifted her with a sword. Of course it wasn't something precious like valyrian steel, but it meant something to her. Her thin sword soon would become an object of fear to her enemies.

Her parents fed the girl's desire of becoming a warrior like her promised fiancé, but deep down she knew that it was all for nothing. Learning to ride her dragon was a necessity, since it was given to her, but she was never going to war, even if she wanted to. Years and years becoming the best swordswoman in Dorne, all for nothing.

Years later, Y/N finally became of age. She was 19 when her parents finally received an invitation to the royal annual tournament in King's Landing, where she would be introduced to the Prince, and they would wed before the competition.

"A tournament." She thought. Y/N never went to war, but she defeated every dornish soldier in combat. What was the difference between the king's soldiers and dornish soldiers? None. She could defeat them all.

They arrived in King's Landing in time for the tournament. Lord Martell explained to the king that his daughter was an excellent swordswoman, and would be representing House Martell at the competition. Viserys agreed and gave his permission for the girl to fight, even though he found it a crazy idea letting a young lady compete in a tournament against warriors and soldiers from all Westeros.

Whispers echoed loudly in the castle's walls. The staff talked a lot around her, and the maidens tried to be quiet every time she entered a room. Eventually, Y/N heard gossip about the Prince she never met, her prince. He found a new lover, a whore. Of course Y/N never expected him to be in chastity until marriage, he is a man after all. But, she felt strange. Angry, perhaps? No, she wasn't angry. It was too predictable to be angry about it. Sad? Ha, Y/N never felt sad in her entire life, she had everything she could ever ask for. This was different, it was a new feeling. It was like someone took her conquer from her, something that was supposed to be hers. She felt... jealous. So maybe she was sad and angry, but it was all the bad feelings mixed up in one.

A maiden was send to call the sand dragon to the gardens, Princess Rhaenyra's orders. Our highness wanted to meet the beauty herself, and see if the dornish girl was everything they say. The princess discovered that Y/N was everything she heard and so much more. Every hint of doubt faded, and she thought that the girl could make her uncle happy. They had a bunch of things in common, and it would be funny to watch Daemon dealing with someone tough like him, even more a woman.

"Tell me, your grace," The soldier started, "how does your uncle look like? Everyone tells me he's handsome. The most handsome Targaryen man since King Maegor. They say he's quite a brute like Maegor too." Y/N chuckled.

"Oh no, he's nothing like Maegor was. Maybe he's a brute in battle, but I promise you he's a nice man if you break his protection shell. He's a bit grumpy, but nothing you can't handle with your sword." Rhaenyra joked.

"Don't you find weird that I'll be the first woman competing in a royal tournament?" Y/N questioned. The princess smiled and placed a comforting hand on the warrior's shoulder.

"I find it inspiring. There's a lot of female dragonriders in my family, but the bravery was lost since Visenya and Rhaenys conquered our lands alongside Aegon. They were true soldiers, not just dragonriders. I don't even know how to use a sword." Rhaenyra laughed and Y/N smiled. Being used as an inspiration was the best compliment someone gave to her. It wasn't about her exotic beauty, but her skills.

A couple of days went by without Y/N meeting her prince. She heard the staff saying he was in Dragonstone with his whore, and he would stay there until the tournament day. Clearly he was avoiding meeting her. How weird was being engaged with someone for 19 years? To her it made no difference, but Daemon was 17 years old when his brother told him the boy was engaged to a baby.

Daemon was curious about the dornish dragon. He heard stories about her, and how she never lost a single combat against the dornish warriors. Daemon thought they were all weak, the dornish. That people who always wanted to be independent, but the first chance they had to marry into royalty, they took it. She was no different. He wasn't gonna let himself be fooled by a pretty face. Marrying for duty wasn't gonna stop him from being with Mysaria.

King Viserys himself went to Dragonstone to bring his brother back to King's Landing, a week before the tournament day. Daemon came back home, leaving his lover behind. The king told him about the young lady, trying to make Daemon a little bit more interested in the girl. Viserys said he saw the girl training for thr tournament, and that she could have chances of winning. That made Daemon laugh, reminding his brother that he would be the one representing House Targaryen, and that was no way a dornish girl would beat him. The king reminded his younger sibling that the "dornish girl" was soon to be his wife.

The prince insisted for his brother that he didn't had to meet the girl before the marriage ceremony, since he already knew she was beautiful and didn't had anything to worry about. He said he wanted to cut the boring parts, since he waited 19 years for this day to come. Viserys agreed without questioning, but truth be told, Daemon just wanted to do whatever had to be done, and then go back to Dragonstone and his lover.

The following day, Y/N met her prince, the one she has been dreaming of her whole life. The one it was promised to her. That tall, handsome man infront of her was such a sight to see. Daemon Targaryen was in formal clothes, the top of his long hair was braided, and the serious demeanor in his face made him look even more gorgeous.

Daemon felt weird in her presence. His eyes had never laid in such beauty, part of the lady's silver hair was braided on the top of her head, while the back part fell on her shoulders like a water cascade. Y/N was wearing a beautiful, and quite revealing with bare shoulders, yellow dress, reminding everyone where she's from.

The Rogue Prince chose to wed in the valyrian way, by "fire and blood", like most Targaryen couples do. King Viserys was the officiant, so the ceremony happened in the throne room. There was only a few members of the family, and The Hand, witnessing the valyrian wedding.

He never kissed her after that. The prince took her to his chambers because it was what they expected him to do, not be cause he wanted a complete stranger invading his space.

"So," Lady Y/N broke the awkward silence. It's been 10 minutes since they entered the room and Daemon faced his window. "should I undress?"

"It depends." Daemon muttered, "I don't want you to get sexually frustrated, if it happens once and never again."

"I see. You think there's not enough of my husband for me and his whore?" Y/N spat and Daemon turned to look at her, "Don't you worry, Your Grace, I would never get sexually frustrated because of you. I wouldn't be alone either."

"I could have you punished for that, you know? I don't know how things work in Dorne, but here a woman should respect her husband!"

"In Dorne, men are castrated if caught in adultery. That's why we are in favor of open marriage. That's when both parts are fine with being in company of other people." Y/N said with a smile.

"Dornish people are crazy!" Daemon replied, annoyance was cleared in his voice.

"I'd say dornish people are evolving faster than the rest of the realm. You people should learn something with us. Now, since we're not having our wedding night, I'll rest." The princess took her dress and corset, falling onto the mattress right after.

Prince Daemon, watched her undress, her perfect body being covered only by her golden nightgown. Men say that dornish women are the most beautiful creatures in the seven kingdoms, but Y/N was different. She had the flush of Dorne, and the features of Old Valyria. Her curves were hypnotic and her lilac eyes were magnetic. Sure, she was a true temptation, but Daemon was a warrior before a man. A real soldier could resist any kind of human desire, he was trained to resist to any kind of need.

Y/N on the other hand, was mad. She fell for someone she had never met, the idea of a prince that only existed in her mind. Daemon was everything she pictured him to be, but she expected the same love towards her. Her broken expectation turned into anger. She felt motivated. Y/N wanted to make the Rogue Prince fall onto his knees and beg for her forgiveness. She wanted him to banish his whore from Dragonstone, and promise she was the only woman in his life from now on.

There was only one day left until the tournament. The Rogue Prince and The Sand Dragon had been sleeping in separated rooms. The dornish woman had been the most commented topic in gossip around the castle since she came to King's Landing, and it seemed like it was going to take long until it ceased.

Y/N trained in the gardens, also teaching Rhaenyra the basics in sword fighting. The princesses became friends really quickly, and Y/N felt like she wasn't alone anymore.

Her parents weren't talking to her, since people had been saying that she offended the prince and he regretted marrying her. Of course the staff noticed Daemon leaving their shared chambers in the middle of the night, that's all they've been talking about for days.

Rhaenyra was happy to find in Y/N a true friend and a good company, never leaving her lonely again. Syrax also found a true friend in Faora.

On the dragonpit, Rhaenyra took Y/N to meet the royal dragons and the place where the dornish's dragon had been staying at. The sand princess met Meleys, Dreamfyre, and Seasmoke. She had already met Syrax, since the Targaryen girl took her new friend flying the other day.

And then she saw him, the Blood Wyrm, with his red scales and long neck. He roared whistling loudly, but she wasn't intimidated by him. Caraxes moved in her direction, and lowered his head, where his nose was right in front of her. He huffed, making her silver hair fly. Chuckling, Y/N stretched her hand to pet him, which the dragon accepted gladly.

"He likes you." Rhaenyra smiled, "That's rare, he usually doesn't like anyone. Quite like my uncle, actually."

Y/N laughed as her fingers danced through the dragon's scales, "Well noticed."

"Do you want to go riding? I'll ask someone to saddle Syrax and Faora." Rhaenyra said and Y/N nodded, watching the princess leave the dragonpit.

The girl hummed as the dragon softly huffed to her touch. His warm scales getting even hotter under her hand, his eyes closing in comfort. He didn't seemed like a menace much more than one of the cats in the castle.

"You're not so scary, aren't you?" Y/N smiled, and touched her forehead against the dragon, "No, you're not. I bet you're just like your daddy. Your tough act can't fool me, neither can his."

Caraxes opened his eyes and stared at the girl with his beautiful orange gaze. The dragon loved the attention he was getting.

"You're such a handsome boy. That's another thing you have in common with Daemon,"

The lady turned around to the masculine chuckle behind her, "Oh, really?"

The prince cocked his eyebrow. The sassy in voice was noticeable.

"Please, don't mind me. I was quite enjoying your little chit-chat with my dragon." Daemon smirked and the princess rolled her eyes.

"Don't get too cocky, my prince. At least Caraxes knows how to behave in a lady's presence." Y/N shrugged and turned back to the dragon.

Daemon looked around, watching the magnificent white dragon on the corner of the pit. Her golden eyes shining in the darkness of the place. The prince gave a few steps, and the dragon came closer to him. Caraxes watched the scene with caution, feeling a little tense to see his master so close to a unknown dragon.

Faora lowered her head to be in Daemon's height. She looked at her owner, expecting an order. The princess just smiled, and the dragon slightly pushed the prince's body with her nose making him laugh. Caraxes huffed again, this time in annoyance.

"You know," Daemon started, making the princess look at him, "I always thought my brother was a fool for giving you the egg. Dorne could be in possession of a dragon and decide to start a war. That's what I would have done."

Daemon placed his hand on the dragon's nose, that purred to his touch like a kitten.

"Using animals as weapons are a Targaryen thing, my prince. We are soldiers, we are trained to fight and win. Dragon fire is an advantage. To be brave is the real conquer, even if dying with it." The princess blurted out.

"And yet is dragon fire that reigns." The prince walked towards his wife.

"Life isn't always fair." Y/N said, her voice sounding lower than she expected. He was too close to her, his tall figure was covering her body.

Their violet eyes met. Daemon felt the urge to touch her, to feel her warm skin against his fingertips, but he controlled himself. Y/N took a deep breath, trying not to look intimidated.

Rhaenyra appeared on the entrance of the dragonpit, taking Y/N's attention. The dornish girl quickly vanished from the prince's sight, taking her friend's hand without saying a word.

The tournament day finally came. Y/N felt like it was the day to shut everyone down. The maidens didn't even tried to hide anymore, gossiping in codes right in front of her, like she was some sort of stupid lady that couldn't understand what they're saying.

No one could look at Y/N and say she wasn't a lady. The most shining armor in her body, and the sharpest sword in her hand, wouldn't take away the femininity in her. She always fought with beauty and grace, making violence look pretty when done by her hands.

So she fought. One, two, three, more and more soldiers of the king were defeated by dornish hands. House Martell standards were held up high with pride. Prince Daemon was also winning combat alongside his beloved Dark Sister, but Y/N didn't let herself be bothered with the chance of fighting against her husband.

Y/N almost lost the fight against Ser Criston Cole. She fell from her horse, landing on ground brutally. Her shoulder felt injured under the golden armor, probably badly bruised. The crowd looked shocked once she was back on her feet and someone came running to give her her sword.

Ser Criston made a great job knocking her out of the horse, but winning that fight wasn't going to be that easy. She made that very clear once her foot was on his chest, and the tip of her sword touched his face. He immediately surrendered.

Everyone cheered for her. The talents of dornish warriors were known throughout the country, but no one expected the girl to fight a real soldier.

Banners with the Targaryen symbol were raised. People cheered loudly for their prince, watching his glorious entrance. Daemon came on top of a black sorrel, wearing a black armor. His helmet drived attention, especially because of the wings and scales innit, reminding a dragon. He wanted to prove a point and show everyone what the house of the dragon was made of.

Y/N hopped on her horse again, taking a deep breath. They were both on place, staring at each other across the field. She held her spear in his direction, aiming for his chest. It took three rounds until one of them met the ground, and that was Daemon. Screaming for his sword, he watched the girl gracefully getting out of the saddle. Y/N took her own sword out of her helper's hand, and stayed defensive as the prince got closer to her.

"You should surrender, wife. I really don't want to hurt your pretty face" Daemon said in wit, as he swung his sword towards her.

Y/N smirked through the loud noises of the steel hitting against each other.

"You should be the one to surrender, my lord! I am not going anywhere," Her sword went straight to his face, where Daemon deviated from having his cheek cut.

Dark Sister's blade opened a wound in the lady's arm, splashing blood in it's length. Y/N whimpered in pain, but found enough strength to kick Daemon away from her. He took a few steps back, trying not to loose his balance as she came fearless in his direction. She screamed as her attack went for his neck, but the valyrian blade blocked her sword's way. Daemon grabbed her braids, and the girl could feel the cold steel against her neck.

"Surrender," Daemon mumbled against her ear.

"I'd rather die," She muttered between gritted teeth.

"If you don't surrender, I'll make it tie. It will be disgraceful, since it's the same as losing in a shaming way." The prince threatened in a low voice.

There was no way getting out of this. She was bleeding, and with a blade on her neck at his mercy.

They looked at each other. They had never been this close again since the day in the dragonpit. She could feel his warm breath against her ear. Moving her head slowly and getting even more close to him, their lips met. Daemon tasted salty, and one of them had definitely a bleeding in the mouth.

Daemon's grip around the sword loosened, and for seconds he forgot where they were. The place went completely silent, it was like no one was watching. His hand let go of her hair and went for her cheek, feeling the softness of her skin.

Completely free, Y/N opened her eyes and took off a dagger out of a compartment in her trousers, slowly taking it to the prince's throat. She broke the kiss and went behind him, getting out of his sight, deepening the blade against his skin.

"Surrender," She whispered.

Daemon groaned once he realized her move, and touched her arm patting it for surrender.

"Lady Y/N of House Martell is the great winner of the tournament!" King Viserys announced.

Y/N tossed her dagger against the floor, finally relaxing her body after so much effort. She looked at her arm, bleeding out where part of her armor was destroyed. She didn't realized how much blood she was losing it until then. Some drops were falling in the ground.

"Daemon" Y/N called, feeling her vision getting blurry and her legs getting weak.

The prince turned around in perfect timing to catch her before she fall. Her skin wasn't so warm anymore. Her eyes were shut closed, and worry took over Daemon.

When Y/N woke up, she was all alone in her chambers. She noticed someone had stitched her wounds, and her mouth tasted like milk of the poppy. She head a bad headache, and her shoulder was badly bruised from her fall. None of her maidens were in sight, so she had no where to go.

Y/N closed her eyes again and tried to sleep a little more. That's when she heard the door opening noise. She sat on the bed, and watched prince Daemon entering the room.

"Oh, you're awake. Do you want me to get your maidens? You must feel hungry," Daemon sat in front of her and took her hand, checking out her body temperature.

Y/N frowned. She couldn't recall what happened. "What time is it?"

"It's late, actually. I came to see you before heading to my room." Daemon muttered, analyzing the walls and the whole new decoration that the princess had done to his old chamber.

"This is your room, I'm invading your space. I should be the one to sleep in another place." She mumbled, playing with her fingers and avoiding his gaze.

"This is our room," He said "it just took me a while to see it."

Y/N raised her head and their eyes met. She lost her words, and had no idea how to reply to that. Did he confessed something? Did he liked her?

"What happened? I remember... kissing you." She frowned once she noticed that her memories were kinda blurry.

"You did that. And, you used the kiss to distract me. You won." Daemon smiled.

"Well, I must say I'm not surprised. I'm really that good." She said playfully and the prince laughed.

"Yes, you are." Daemon smiled without showing his teeth, "How's your arm? I'm really sorry about that."

"It hurts but I'll be fine. And, we both know that you didn't meant for this to happen, Daemon. You have nothing to be sorry for." Y/N placed a comforting hand in his thigh.

Daemon looked at her hand, and placed his own on top of hers, giving it a little squeeze.

"Stay with me tonight." She asked softly.

"I will."

AMBROSIA

dragon-hybrid knight x mage!reader| 18+| 15k

One day, you are approached by two informants of the Witch Queen of Noss. They come bearing gifts of wealth and opulent fruit. The fruit, you are promised, from her orchard is enchanted with her magic and she welcomes you to Noss to take it.

Guided by the loathsome Knight of Noss; a half-human, half-dragon abomination and the Witch Queen's butcher, you set out on the long journey. Along the way, you are kidnapped by the Sisterhood of Gosha, a group bent on dethroning the Witch Queen, and are given a guarantee to what you desire in exchange for helping them.

Their condition? You must seduce the Knight of Noss.

story warnings; dead dove do not eat, explicit sexual content, dubcon-ish, armor is on during sex, blowjob, premature ejaculation, cumshot on thighs, size kink/can't fit, descriptions of genitalia (dragon), dark fantasy, mc is morally ambiguous, manipulation, possession, heavy implications of torture, mentions of abuse (not to mc), mentions of animal death and cruelty (infrequent, mostly metaphorical), extreme body horror + grotesque details, extremely prose + detail heavy, vague magic system, this is an exploration of morality + choice + consent.

dividers by; @/strangegraphics & @/omi-reaources

proofread by my beloved @hantaslittlearsonist

shout-out to @noctis-kingfisher for lending me a tiny hand as well.

this story is purely a work of fiction. I do not condone the attitudes and actions of the characters therein.

this concept piece has taken me two months of writing and pulling out my hair. if you've enjoyed reading, PLEASE leave me feedback and reblog!! I desperately want to hear what y'all think of this labor of love!! 🧡💛

The Witch Queen of Noss had sent two informants to your doorstep with gilded chests braced in their arms, and an enormous black carriage waited at the edge of your hermitage pulled by six lustrous, silvery-gold stallions.

“She has searched for one of your magical prowess with seemingly no end for many centuries now. She says that your magic has a different smell to it, chews differently on her teeth. There's grit to it, feels unrefined in her hands and cuts through her bloodstream. She says you've got that raw magic ability. She likes it and wants you as part of her council.”

Of the two informants—one man and one woman—the man was the only one who spoke throughout the encounter. Or, more appropriately, he was the only one capable of doing so. Since the woman’s face, previously pale, now glowed scarlet and her eyes watered. Her arms trembled as perspiration turned her hairline oily.

This was as opposed to the man, who stood with a straight, rigid back. Dry in the eyes and on the skin despite having the appearance of a malnourished beggar. One of the wretched trying to wedge his fat tongue down the slender necks of empty beer bottles for any residual taste.

He did not look like the sort to find employment in the Witch Queen’s house.

Then, you took a real good look at his eyes which were brown, bulbous, staring-back things with a faint black film spread across the exposed parts of the organ.

To those who could not see, he would have been mistaken as marked by wyrmwort spray for chasing ladies in the night, or yet another unfortunate diseased by plague. But, the appearance of it was far too thin and had spread too uniform across both eyes for it to be of natural causes.

“It's bad taste to possess your own subjects in hopes of influencing an outcome, don't you think?” You spoke in pitying tones, both for the man unlikely to have consented to the possession, and the Witch Queen who had already revealed her desperation to you. “A normal man swept off the streets wouldn't be able to describe magic as he had just now. You are old, but not wise.”

“Wisdom falters in the face of might. Those who are wise eventually wither and rot, and the world soon forgets them. But, might? Power? It creates mountains and canyons, the very stars in the sky. It leaves scars like fissures in the land, in the weak, and you are always remembered.”

The Witch Queen bobbed the man on translucent black threads of magic, which wound him in dissipating mist. She commanded his left arm to rise. It did so with the unnatural, jerky stiffness of a ball-jointed doll. He was gesturing to the woman struggling adjacent to him.

“I have searched far and wide for magic of your caliber. It is simply unfathomable to me that you have chosen to hide and squander it.”

You were no longer looking at the man, but at the woman trying to strategically balance the chest on one arm, while opening its great maw for you to see inside.

Gold and silver medallions spilled out of it, plinking on the flagstone walkway underfoot. Faceted gemstones in regal rings and dripping necklaces gleamed with pristine, polished finish. There were even chess pieces among the contents, crafted from ivory, eyes embellished with orange-pink sapphires.

This chest alone contained wealth far exceeding that which belonged to rural kings. It was enough to feed the entire ruined city of Rûregar in the northeast region for seasons. And yet, the Witch Queen wielded this bribe without shame, in the failing arms of this woman burning and sweating under the yellow beat of the midday sun.

“Why do you hide?” asked the Witch Queen in the man’s slow, imprecise rumble. “Such raw, delicious power. I will admit that had it not been for my knight, you may have stayed concealed. But, dragons are most intimate with magic. They know it so viscerally, sensually, even, that I used to find myself envious every time I looked at him.”

In your recent past before self-imposed isolation, you’d heard rumors of an abomination. The grotesque spawn from a human father and dragon mother, so the story was told. An imposing butcher arrayed in black iridescence. Armor made of dragonscale and adamantine, brandishing a massive blade made of the same stuff.

Some stories insisted upon his existence being one of restlessness and carnality. Seasons turned to decades of waiting and engaging in the most perverse acts; savage romps with both humans and beasts alike. For his bloodlust best stayed dormant that way, and he went unchecked by his Master until he stood center in the great orchestra of war, severing spines, bodies in half with a single sweep.

Other tales were whispered to you conspiratorially after some coaxing with free booze and attractive enchantments. The word was that the knight didn’t exist at all, that there was no body inside to pilot the heavy suit of armor. It was all illusory; a cunning, convincing lie perpetrated by the Witch Queen to hold her throne and residence in Noss.

But, you'd already seen through one of her tricks. You doubted that she could maintain an intricate ploy such as that for over a millennia.

“I hide because,” you paused, eyes cutting across the man’s shoulder towards the black carriage when you caught movement around it belonging neither to the stamping stallions nor to the frazzled coachman trying to wrestle them into submission by cracking the reins. “I hide because there is nothing interesting and I am bored. I spend my days enchanting the soil and watching flowers grow. I change the color of waterfalls, and I gossip with the birds in exchange for seeds. My rice is plentiful and I always have wine to pour. My bed is the most comfortable place to exist in any realm.”

The Witch Queen reciprocated such ordinary sentimentality by using the man’s arms to open the second chest, revealing to you fresh, honeyed overabundance in the shape of a toppling mound of fig fruit.

Your curiosity pushed you to take one in each hand, mentally measuring their weight and studying their magenta roundness. You relished their succulent sweet, woody aroma when you pressed them under your nose. And, when she told you to eat them, you did so by sinking your teeth into both, alternating your bites between them.

They tasted of nostalgic summertimes carried on a balmy breeze. Each bite into the figs was decadent and pulpy with pale pink nectar overflowing the impressions your teeth left behind in its soft purple flesh. It was the most delicious thing you'd ever tasted.

“You should feel honored. Fruit from my orchard is forbidden. It receives all of my love that cannot be given unto others. I have grown my fig fruit from seedlings in enchanted soils, and quenched them in elixirs of life. My magic dwells within the orchard, in the air and all of the trees. It is a soft susurrus through the leaves and grass. It ripens my figs and allows me to keep my throne and my vitality. Noss shall never see another queen.”

“Where is your magic?” You did not taste it in the fig fruit in your hands, nor in others that you grabbed out of the chest and ripped with your teeth. Suddenly, you were captivated by the thought of the Witch Queen’s power being within you.

Would it chew like pork fat between your teeth, or lay across your tongue like thick oil, or snap and fizzle against your cheeks until they reddened raw and bled?

You ground another mouthful into watery mince. Let it slide down the back of your throat. “Where is it? Your magic. Where is it?”

“It waits for you.” She answered through the man, whose voice was starting to crack and unravel. The cords in his throat pulled taut, strained as though played across with the bow of a stringed instrument. His leaning house of bones had started sagging more left, and the skin under his eyes drooped like red sandbags. His eyes were slowly receding into the back of his head. “Come to Noss. Come to Noss. Come to me. Come to me. Come to me and taste my orchard. Lysander will guide you.”

You were fast to sidestep from the spilled chest of figs and the sinking body of bones and shriveling innards. Closer to the fatigued woman who'd fallen to her knees on the scorching flagstone walkway.

The chest she still clutched was so heavy that it pinned her folded legs to the stone, melting the flesh off her shins, and the polished brilliance of the gems and coins inside had burned her face and neck to stiff brown leather, and baked her eyes a blackened prune color.

“In their wickedness, they chose their own fates,” spoke a dour but potent voice from nearby. You'd been so fixated on the man rotting, deflating within his own skin-suit, and the woman dying on her knees, that you hadn't seen the Witch Queen's Knight approach. “The man was a violent thief. He had burglarized a merchant’s wagon and killed the merchant. Done far worse to the merchant’s young daughters. In the mind of the Witch Queen, there exists no death that she’d find satisfying. He did not always look so humble. She made it so.”

“And the woman?” you asked, queasily.

“Aye, that one was part of the Sisterhood of Gosha. They wish to usurp the Witch Queen by placing an imposter on the throne in her place. Skilled assassins, spies, politicians. Their sbires hide in ordinary faces. We must be wary of all: mothers with infants, beggars, and embroiderers. Even the young girls with flowers in their hair. Now that they know you have the Witch Queen’s favor, they will be coming for you.”

You moved back as he came forward, leaning down with his enormous mass to offer the armored bulk of his arm. “Come along, I will be ensuring your safe travel at the behest of the Witch Queen. I am Lysander, the Knight of Noss.”

The knight anchored himself like that for a long time as you refused to touch him.

He was an abnormal creature: immense in size, his precise silhouette concealed by his invulnerable black armor, but you could see his shape was not entirely human. The length of one of his arms was more than half of your whole body, and at his full height, you expected you'd only ever see the point of his broad chest that began to concave, narrow into a long waist wrapped in cloth and dragonscale.

You became flustered the moment you realized you would not be rewarded with a glimpse of the monster underneath, as there were no revealing gaps in his armor, which was all jarring angles and ungentleness. No war-worn chips or missing fragments, tears in the breathable fabric against the bend of his elbow, or under his helmet.

And, it was his helmet that you found most fascinating of all.

A heavy, sharp design with flattened protrusions pushed towards the back of his head like wings on a bird. The adamantine and dragonscale had been pounded smooth and pinched in the front. There was only a narrow slit across the eyes for him to see out of, and six or seven long, symmetrical vents set along a hinged jaw piece for him to breathe through unless he lifted it.

You wondered what you would see underneath the helmet and emboldened yourself to reach for it. He winced away only when the hinges made a screeching sound of unuse, not as your sticky fingers padded along the piece and raised it far enough to see a dark, textured chin.

“Do you know no fear?” Lysander hesitated to show you his arm again to help you across the thick sea of boiling red-brown flesh and entrails. “You've heard the stories, haven't you? You mustn’t be so brave in my presence.”

If you stayed focused on him, then you would think less of the possibility of human rot sticking to the soles of your boots. A very wrong, gummy sensation that you expected would feel like being suctioned down into a mud pit after a long rain.

“So, it's true you're an abomination? Hideous and monstrous? An unfathomable union between man and she-dragon?”

“Aye. I am,” he said. “That and much worse. C’mere now. Come closer to me and raise your arms.”

Any closer and your toes would touch the bubbling mass crawling over the edges of your walkway, suffocating the fertile soil and grasses you'd painstakingly grown. That would be enough to make you scream, yet you held it in your chest, locked away behind your ribs.

Intrigued still, you asked him, “And it's true that you engage in every one of your carnal whims without second thought? With all kinds? Humans and beasts?”

“Aye. All of it.” He gave you no pleasure or disgust in his response, speaking in a way that sounded manufactured. Unthinking. Detached. “I am insatiable. My carnal lust and my bloodlust. Now, do not tempt me with either. Come my way.”

“And,” you instigated further, enjoying harassing him, “It’s true that it was you who led the Witch Queen here to disturb my peace? You are the Witch Queen’s whore?”

This gave Lysander pause, his adamantine face gazing down at yours. The slits scored into his helmet perpetuated all of the malice he claimed was factual. But, within the shadows inside his helmet, you thought you heard something click and grind—not metal or scales, but his jaw.

“Aye. Truly, I am deserving of your abhorrence. It was I who infringed upon your sacred place as asked of me by the Witch Queen. My dragon half never knows rest and the pull of magic, no matter how small, is ruthless to me and my mind. Your skill is tremendous, but your magic is more so. There were cracks in your enchantment. Magic overflow that slipped free and found me, grasped me, and led me to you.”

More curious than aggravated after his confession, you were docile when he finally took you away from the human puddles and figs wrinkling in the sunlight. He had reached across it all and plucked you up with one arm around your waist before then situating you in both, cradling you in a way that was not unkind, but certainly foreign to him.

“I’m not diseased. Don't drop me.” Afraid that he would, you stayed still and shrank yourself in his arms so as to not brush his scorching armor.

He moved with surprising swiftness for his size, smooth enough that the sound of his armor did not crash through the conversation and distract you. “Have you seen the Witch Queen’s orchard? Is it as ripe with magic as she says it is?”

“It is a powerful place. Invigorating. Raw. Her magic is leached into the soil and is a part of everything. It goes unchecked,” he said, adding nothing else on the matter.

You were settled back on your feet by the edge of your flagstone walkway, right in front of the black carriage’s open door. Its interior was as wholly dark as its exterior and lightless, except for what wan sunshine could slither in through gaps beneath the heavy curtains hanging across the windows.

Lysander’s mass thwarted your view of your doorstep and the informant's amalgam of liquefied parts drying, stiffening, and cracking on the hot stone. You thought about what red-brown clay looked like when it was spread out and left to bake in the sun. It was easier to imagine that was the reality that you would be leaving behind, and what you'd sweep clean with a broom once you returned.

“Inside. We've got a long way to Noss.” He made a gesture over your head with the tip of his chin to the carriage's wide mouth leading into nothing but shining satin seats and floorboards of exquisite deep color that you feared would cut your legs off at the shins.

The air inside was cold against your back, serpentine; invisible coils that caressed your neck and huddled close to your spine through your robes as though trying to steal your warmth for itself.

“And, if I decided I don't want to go? Would you stop me?” you asked.

Lysander’s armor made an awful ruckus as he hinged forward, leveling his helmeted face with yours. You stared through the narrow slot for his eyes with intention and felt your neck hairs rise as two gleaming purple things looked out at you.

“Aye. There is no turning back now. Get inside.”

────────────────────────

Two fortnights into your travels, the Sisterhood of Gosha remained such a perpetrator of evil in Lysander's mind that it was seldom you experienced true rest. His paranoid particularities were most prevalent when it came to indoor accommodations as opposed to lying on cold, dewy grass beneath a backdrop of black-blue sky. Starless. Unending.

He was comfortable with his body open to the great expanse of the world because, in those amazing spaces, he knew he would always prevail. None other than his own kin and formidable magicians could fell him. And yet, now more frequently than ever, he was misplaced—landing in slanted wood buildings filled with small things and far too many windows.

Those things haunted him so terribly that he started encroaching on your privacy by barging into your lodging at all hours, claiming that walls and windows and doors created cramped spaces that made it easier for all the wrong sorts to hide. Imagined wretches, shapeless and malleable in shadows, molded into every little crevice that he could not maneuver.

Often, for this very reason, he would remove furniture from whichever room you chose to occupy. He abandoned them in the corridors for the staff to shove against walls so other guests could get around.

It left you with slim arrangements for sitting and eating. Fortunately, he came with enough sense about him to leave the beds alone, but windows must be locked at all times, and you were not allowed a room with doors leading to adjoining rooms.

One night, while staring out an open window at a blackbird roosting on a rooftop nearby, waiting for the maid assigned to boiling water to fill your bathtub, you thought about defying Lysander and just how strongly palatable an urge it was.

Paltry retaliation that held your stomach in unseeable hands, twisting it around into some awful mass. When the feeling started to subside, your stomach was placed center in those faced-up palms mockingly—a reminder that you could feel things beyond deep relaxation and deep boredom. You were only human.

The maid emerged from the corner after she'd emptied her bucketfuls into the tub, filling your room with pale steam. Wispy stuff that smothered your nostrils in wet heat, gave your skin a greasy shine. It moved swiftly towards the window and fogged the cool glass opaque gray as it passed straight through into the night air.

“Ah, this is no good. You could catch a cold. I will close it for you once you're in the bath,” said the maid, who then spun away with mechanical stiffness upon noticing you unfastening buttons and removing clothing. “I—pardon me. If you'd like to get comfortable—”

“The window is fine as is.”

Such a frank refusal was met by the maid lightly pacing in place, long skirts fluttering and winding her ankles. “My apologies, but the knight would disagree with you. It was difficult for the owner to convince him to let me even see the inside of this room to fill your tub. I fear what he may do if I do not…”

The longer you listened to this madness, the more desperate you were to disobey Lysander. In your hermitage, you’d gorged on absolute freedom as if it too had been in endless supply like your wine and rice, forgetting that the world beyond your barrier could not be as ungovernable as you were.

“Lie to him then, if it's something that bothers you so much,” you told her. It seemed so inconsequential to you, but the maid’s entire body jerked with emotion, the intention to turn around to look you in the face.

She did not, likely thinking of how close you were to full nudity at that point. “I—did you not hear that I'm afraid of him? We all are. We do not want to wear away his patience.”

“Then, tell him I've kicked you out before you could close the window. Surely it's easier to ask for forgiveness for something you weren't given the opportunity to do.”

This pacified her, albeit poorly, as she continued to fidget as though she'd forgotten how to do anything else. Her acquired silence were moments spent conjuring up ways to challenge you more on the matter, whereas you used it to search the endless depths of pocket space on your robes until you found what you were looking for.

A very generous nugget of gold was placed at her eyeline and at first, when she gasped, you thought it’d been more of a throaty scoff of affront. But, then, she snatched it from your hand, examined it closely, tried to magnify imperfections and falsities in it with just the twitching wet globes in her head.

She would find none because you'd been careful. It had taken you hours to transmutate it from an oddly shaped stone you'd found while urinating behind thorned brush just off the main road where the Witch Queen’s carriage traveled, into the smooth, glowing prize that it was now.

“Is—is this real?” asked the maid.

“Of course it is. I made it myself,” you said.

The maid tucked the gold into her apron, curtsied in the wrong direction, and hurried from your room. You tracked the swift patter of her feet across the floorboards until they faded, intermingling with all the rest of the sounds permeating the inn.

That calming, faraway ambiance was as fast to fracture as your respite was, however. From down the hall, metal scraped and rattled and approached your door quickly. You were fully unclothed, having gradually added each piece into a neat stack set aside, and gathered bathing soaps and balms and fragrances to take with you into the water. You dropped those on the floor and darted across the room.

You envisioned the Knight's neck slanted, pressed to his shoulder within the confines of his armor as he strided to your door, as most establishments never anticipate having to accommodate dragons or creatures larger than orcs.

You yanked the linens off your bed and wrapped yourself in them just as he opened the door.

He took in the unusually revealing sight, not moving for a long time. Some of your lasting uncertainties about him went away that night, while new ones surfaced.

How humorous was it that the Knight of Noss could be disoriented by a meager state of undress?

How concerning was it now that he truly knew you existed?

He could no longer starkly ascribe you as ‘the disgruntled magician’. No longer were you just the robes you wore. You were all asymmetry, gooseflesh, shedding hair, and tough calluses from years of wandering hard terrains in the same boots.

Your utter humanness in that moment of stillness had softened you to him, even with your dour expression and acerbic tongue.

“Some knight you are.” If you couldn't crack his armor, you wished to do so to his pride. You weren't malicious by nature, but embarrassment and unknowable things made your skin itch and bittered your mood. “Out of here, fool!”

“Allow me to intrude for a moment. I'll check now before you bathe.” He said this somewhat laboriously, as if suddenly struck through the back, winded by surprise and pain. “Step aside.”

You dragged layers of linen with you to the door and stood in his way. “No. You intrude too much. I went into isolation because people intrude too much and want too much. Begone, Knight.”

“Will you check the windows yourself tonight, then? You've got more to worry about than just thieves and cats getting inside. Open windows while you sleep thins the veil between our realm and others.”

When you pushed him out with half the weight of your body against the door, he went willingly into the hall with its low ceiling and compact walls. The sight of his armored mass in the incommodious space, tight and bent like items crammed inside a box, made you claustrophobic.

“That’s just old superstition,” you said.

“Aye. That it may be, but all superstition stems from a single truth. And visitors in the night coming through open windows is no superstition.” There was no denying he was right in saying that, but even so, you would not give him pleasure by letting him back inside. “It's a meager thing I'm askin’ of you.”

“Fine. I'll be sure to check them.”

Had Lysander been a true dragon without the innate patience and good-naturedness of his human blood, your flippant response would've been perceived much differently. An egregious act of disrespect to a superior being, of which dragons largely believed that they were. But, for all of the harsh edges of adamantine and dragonscale he wore, and his precise, guttural intonations which always made your chest quiver, he was remarkably even-tempered.

At first, when he did not immediately go away, staying hunched over in that strange wadded shape of black iridescent protrusions and looking straight at you through the slit in his helmet, you thought you'd finally agitated him inside that suit. Yet, as the moments passed without change, you grew increasingly aware of the scratchy linen against your bare skin and warmth reaching up your neck.

He could've been admiring your frame drowned in heaps of fabric, or observing the soft, swaying glow on your shoulders from nearby candlelight. If the grotesque stories about his unappeasable lust were to be believed, surely the opportune silence was his sizing you up, comparing you to his past conquests.

The most despicable part of leaving your isolation was all the wondering you did now. When before you'd been kept far too busy by vicious snapdragons in the garden and birds gossiping on a branch overhead about the baker’s wife and his cousin.

But, once you thought of the Witch Queen’s succulent figs, and the magic you’d been promised a taste of, suddenly your focus returned. Everything else was mediocre.

Lysander could think of you however he pleased.

“Goodnight,” you told him.

“Ah,” he livened at your voice, “aye. Goodnight.”

Afterwards, you discovered the bathwater to be lukewarm and beyond the possibility of enjoyment, but scrubbed yourself clean with soap and coarse sugar anyway. You let your hair halfway dry by leaning back in a chair, head tipped out the window to catch the nighttime breeze. It moved lethargically, cradling your scalp with cool fingers and flicked pearls of water dangling off strands back onto your face.

When you had tired of that, you left the window alone, enticed into doing so by lasting threads of defiance. You snuffed out candlelight and laid wide awake under the prickly linens for a short while.

Light feet shuffled down the hall. The smooth undersides of their leathery soles were an effortless glide across the floor boards. Explosive laughter pushed through cracks in the walls and the gap under your door, reaching you from across the inn where the guests inclined to nighttime wakefulness congregated in the common room. Its carefree nature, buoyant in the way of a life loved and well-worn despite hardship was contagious.

You smiled.

Outside, a beggar serenaded the moon peacefully, uncaring of just how badly he truly sounded. A bird startled from a high place close by and took flight. Meanwhile, in some distant alleyway, tomcats yowled and fought, and would likely die fighting. You closed your eyes.

The next time you opened them, you were not in your bed at the inn.

────────────────────────

Hunsiya was the name your captor gave you though you hadn’t asked for it, mere moments after rousing into some state of wakefulness. Your face and tongue were swollen from having been slouched across your thighs for an indeterminate period of time, nose heavy with pressure, hands anchored behind your back by glowing gold twine that pulsed with enchanted heat.

You could feel the magic coming off of it and rolling around the dim room where you were held hostage in. It permeated the space with smothering density, swathing you in prickly warmth and cold like a coat made of sanded down briars. The downy hairs on the back of your neck stood up; tiny spines, for magic of this magnitude could only mean there were many magicians present within the Sisterhood of Gosha, and you hungered for what they had.

“Mortal magic eaters are an impossibility, and yet, here you sit before me! Terrifying!” Hunsiya pierced a chunk of rare meat with her fork, raising it up, a toast you didn't reciprocate. “It was worth us waiting to catch you, because you did all the hard work for us, didn't you? Letting us right in and commanding a dragon. Not an easy task, my friend.”

She had removed your bonds and led you to a different room. Bursts of orange lantern light made it bright, forcing you to blink rapidly as your eyes reddened and watered in an effort to acclimate. You were situated in another chair. Lush cushioning pulled you deep into luxurious softness that molded your thighs and gripped them unrelentingly. Strongly scented wood polish lifted off the armrests as your fingertips moved across their silky luster.

Your stomach pressed lightly into the edge of a long table with a sumptuous feast stretched across it. Hunsiya only had to make a stately gesture with her arm across the table for you to fill the empty plate in front of you with as many delicacies as you could.

Tender meat dishes oozing blood and oil. Savory, herbal stews. Glazed, softened vegetables. Thick sauces in vessels with pinched spouts. Fruit desserts arranged like tiny islands in bowls surrounded by oceans of hot, caramel-colored syrups. Everything that could go into your mouth without coming back out, did.

Hunsiya watched appraisingly as you gorged. The twirling fork between her fingers told you there were things she wanted to say, thoughts important to investigate, but would doubtlessly mean less than nothing to you if she spoke of difficult things too soon.

So, she bided her time by asking trifling questions to which you only gave half-answers or simply swished your head in response. Once your consumption slowed to pretty cuts, thoughtful shapes in the fruit dessert, lapping at thin layers of syrup on the back of your sterling spoon, her verbal onslaught began.

“The Sisterhood of Gosha wants to dethrone the Witch Queen. But, we want to do this discreetly, without it being known to the city or her council. We will remove her and have one of our own replace her. All this you already know,” she proclaimed, “but, we will have you help us do this.”

Her words were forceful, stacked with ruthless confidence; fearlessness that could've only belonged to someone whom others believed was untouchable.

You knew her type: affable leaders with pitch black hearts and slippery intentions that never truly included the people they'd claimed to love. They embraced and kissed tear-stained cheeks soothingly before sending them away to their deaths. Later, these autocrats sat upon their thrones, which were erected upon a foundation of discarded loyalty and bones.

“I have no interest in that. Why not threaten to kill me instead?” you asked, now drawing lines through the cooling sauces with a blunt knife, watching the viscous stuff slowly ooze back into place.

Hunsiya smiled. “Because even I'm not foolish enough to believe that'd get me anywhere. You magic eaters are walking, living, breathing bombs.” She leaned back in her seat to observe your etching, saying after a time, “What if I told you I could guarantee you a way into the Witch Queen’s orchard?”

Your skillful motions in the sauce ceased. “She's already promised me the fig fruit from her orchard.”

“A promise is so hollow, my friend,” Hunsiya insisted with crinkling, deep-set eyes the color of aged honey. Many wrinkles appeared, creating uneven terrain above her cheekbones. The lines in her face were beautiful, disarming and alluring, but not in the least bit kind.

“A promise doesn't mean anything to a person who sees no value in it. A guarantee, though? That has tax. It has weight. A guarantee means that there is work to be done and there's a reward at the end of it. People are much more inclined towards rewards than maybes and promises.”

After such a large meal, you were growing drowsy and distracted. The only thing keeping you awake was no longer having a bed to lay in (you even craved the scratchy linens), and the thought of the Witch Queen’s magic on your tongue being oddly stimulating.

“Perhaps,” you relented begrudgingly, dragging each part of the word in a listless slur. “What does your ‘guarantee’ entail?”

“Nothing too difficult. You're almost there already. You need to claim absolute loyalty from the Witch Queen’s Knight.” Hunsiya said. “Who else better to inadvertently orchestrate the fall of a sovereign than her own servant? Who else better to help you into the orchard than someone who already knows it intimately?”

What foul and underwhelming logic.

It was a further notch in your motivation to end this expedition quickly and return home to your hermitage. You missed the roaring waterfalls with their colorful froth, the news from nearby towns carried by chirruping birds with roundabout ways of saying things, the carnivorous plants in your flower beds bristling at the sight of you nearing with shears to snip their thorns so they'd be more docile and only feed on rodents.

You'd only been away for a short time, but your mind reconstructed the snug shelter where you had lived for countless days.

Inside, you imagined a sheer layer of grime settling across all your things like ugly pale gray-brown organza: tabletops, chairs, bedsheets, and the bath towels with long, wooly naps that left behind handprints when you touched them. You'd have to vigorously scrub every surface, lovingly polish dust off of shelves of baubles and tomes, summon the wind within your walls to push the motes of dirt and time out.

But then, you always recalled the taste of the Witch Queen’s figs; their ambrosial sensations. The smooth, tender flesh splitting against your teeth as succulent nectar seeped into your mouth, spreading numbness across your tongue when the fruit’s overbearing sweetness made your cheeks tingle and pucker.

More than the fruit itself, you wished to sink your teeth into her magic and meld it into oneness with you. Absorb it. Consume.

Consume.

Consume…

“After tonight, he sees you differently. He no longer can witness you as his queen’s newest procurement. Now, you are substance. You are his longing. His painful yearning. He would lay with you if you allowed it.” Hunsiya was impatient, her voice a thunderous demand for obedience. “What I am saying is that he is more than willing to give into your every whim.”

“Dragons are unfalteringly loyal to those that they choose,” you argued. “Even if what you say is true, what he may now think of me doesn't compare to the millenia he's devoted to the Witch Queen.”

Hunsiya’s smile was vulpine; long and cunning in a way of a woman with secrets that you did not know. It sent heat to your head, behind your eyes, into the fingertips busy pounding out a rhythm on the tabletop.

“Fine, then.” You'd entertain her for a while longer. To sedate your annoyance, you reached far onto the table to pluck a handful of glistening, pinkish grapes from the bushel in a woven basket. You ate three. “You're telling me to seduce the loathsome Knight of Noss. How do you propose I go about doing such a thing?”

“Imagine a creature that's never known freedom a day in its life. It knows no existence outside of its cage of expectations and bonds it cannot see nor overcome on its own. What do you think would happen to the creature should it suddenly gain freedom?” asked Hunsiya, now leaning forward on her elbows, over a spot on the table cleaned of dishware and crumbs. “Think about it.”

“I don't need to,” you sipped water from a silver goblet which looked tarnished in the orange lantern light. “Your theory: an imprisoned creature that has never known freedom would go insane should it spontaneously gain freedom. Or, if it's a cute little dog, it’d just die in the wild. But, I suspect you're not talking about a dog.”

“Indeed.” Hunsiya stayed in her huddled shape of elbows and hands, head sideways to contemplate you. “The Knight of Noss is bound to his queen only because she makes it so. You're a magic eater. You've smelled it. You've seen it. The Witch Queen's magic that binds him. Yes, yes, I know you've seen it. And you can break it.”

Of course you'd seen it.

The magic that the Witch Queen used to bind Lysander was unlike what she had used to possess the melted man and the burned spy from the sisterhood.

Magic had a taste and what she had forced upon them was rancid and dead. A nauseating odor which spread through your nose and climbed down the back of your throat, clinging and throbbing like something alive, something infectious and vile. It was necromancy defiled by the lich and wayward magicians who'd sold their goodness in pursuit of something more.

Lysander's curse was that he was a bastard and his humanness could not eclipse the might of the Witch Queen's greed to keep him. She had wisely imprisoned the magical birthright his dragon blood gave him, thus, all he knew was colossal strength and the turmoil of a human heart.

In that way, you pitied him and his existence. You'd thought it the day he had approached you, carrying his burdensome armor and sword and the thick chains of hot white magic that had flickered in and out of existence before your eyes, descending from an empty sky. You wondered if he knew you could see them.

“It is unlikely that he is aware you're a magic eater, nor that his queen’s intentions are not so benign as simply keeping you as a trophy, and yet”—she gave you a derisive sneer— “you’re willingly walking to your doom. You know this, you just cannot resist temptation, can you?”

She found triumph in your silence and went on, “Dragons may be masters of natural magic, but he is no true dragon. He is impressionable, unsure of who he is if he is not a weapon. An enslaved butcher.”

“Free him.” Suddenly earnest, she thudded interlaced hands down onto the table, sending a ripple shuddering through silverware and plates and bowls across the table, up into your arms. “Free the Knight of Noss of the Witch Queen's hold. Do it slowly. Do it wisely. A dragon is most loyal to those who are most loyal to them.”

And, before you could speak your part, the spacious eating room swelled with ragged fluttering that you'd initially thought to be numerous coarse coats being shaken out behind you.

When you looked around, there were dozens upon dozens of blackbirds perched throughout the room, materialized from nowhere and reeking of magic. Their talons grabbed onto and into any surfaces they could find, wings twitching violently as if preparing to take flight, beady eyes aglow in orange light and focused intention.

The moment you sprung upright, knocking over your chair with the back of your legs, hands raised for invocation, the blackbirds surged at you in a hellish cacophony of shrill squawks and flapping wings. Your hands shrank against your head instead, protecting your face from their wind, their claws, as they encircled you, never making contact.

Through gaps in their wingspan, you watched Hunsiya slowly rise from her seat, smiling as though she were seeing off a cherished friend. Her fingers fluttered farewell through the small, moving apertures. Just then, the darkness of the birds and their shrieks closed in, encasing you in their strange smell of stale barnyard hay and uprooted greenery and soil.

Then, there was nothing.

Just as quickly as they had arrived to take you away from the feast and your comfortable chair, they hissed out existence just like a distant, dissipating mirage rising off of hot stone. What had remained of their magical essence was then carried off on the tails of an inky night breeze.

Although this region was in its ripest and hottest season of the year, the air billowing beneath your thin bed clothes made you shiver. You were exposed to the depths of the yawning streets of this nondescript town, lifting your bare toes off of the cobblestone road so they wouldn't freeze. Distantly, and then suddenly close by, you listened to heavy clatters charge through the nighttime veil with swift, monstrous strides.

It was like the earth shook and bent to the ruckus. These wild, fraught vibrations that made your bones ache. Only once he was standing still did that feeling subside.

“You! Where have you been?!” His wrath carried as far and as loud as his armor.

The birds had delivered you to the knight.

“I smell them on you! I smell the sisterhood’s wickedness on you! They stole you away just as I thought that they would. What have they done to you?” Lysander lowered his helmeted face to level to your own, voice dire and taut. “Speak! Your window was wide open and there was nary a thing in your bed except a single blackbird feather. I knew it, then. They came for you.”

You licked your lips. They had dried during your fast flight through the wind and cold, as brief as it was. A delicate sweetness lingered in the corner seams from the fruit desserts; the sticky syrups. “I—yes, I think they did. Maybe they did. I can't be certain.”

“Where did they take you?” he asked.

You tried to act in a way that made it seem as though your thoughts had been left askew, troubling you deeply, “Somewhere dark. Somewhere dank and foul and frightful. I was tied to a chair. I don't remember anything else. Now I'm here, with you.”

“Vile wenches!” he sympathized, perhaps so riled by the brazenness of the sisterhood that he wouldn't think of you anymore, despite remaining at eyeline with you. “There is no end to their evil, their depravity, their obsession to claim Noss for themselves. Those worshippers of a whore goddess!”

You instigated, “Gosha is disgraced.”

“Aye, a fallen goddess,” he agreed. “Mother of harlots.”

Then, he stilled like a forward-facing statue overlooking a wide garden, staring deeply into you, seeing you just as he had mere hours ago: vulnerable and nearly bear.

It was dreadful when he spoke again because his malice had detached from him like a scab. Beneath his vanished fury was an otherworldly patience, gentleness of a kind that couldn't survive in a world like this, much less what you deserved.

“Did you leave the window open?”

Your heart thudded in your chest, a sensation simultaneously unfelt, yet weakening as guilt deluged and rushed you bodywide. It hurt. It did things of its own volition: mimic the pulse in your neck, force a stone down your throat, and push all the blood in your body into your head to make it sweat and throb.

“Are you mad?” This voice was unfamiliar, but it was your own. You loathed its apologetic quietness. You hated him for luring more humanity out of you.

“Aye,” he said with his newfound softness still remaining. He added, “Verily.”

You replied, “I'm sorry,” and only meant it halfway, for what you were about to do was arguably heinous. You knew no remorse when it came to the need of magical satiety, which was something only the Witch Queen’s orchard could give you now.

Lysander was cold in your arms as you reached around the entire bulk of his head, the tips of your fingers unable to fully interlock. The protrusions on his helmet made for a precarious embrace, one which you kept as a featherlight touch in the event he grew to ire and tried to lash out by gouging you on the adamantine and dragonscale wings.

“Does nothing frighten you? What life have you lived to be so unafraid of all that I am?” He sounded stricken, winded by something unseen. Irritation led into confusion settling on the fringes of his words. “Your bravery is in a dangerous place. Have you forgotten the abomination and devil that I am? Have you so easily forgotten my bloodlust? My carnal desires? That neither human nor beast are spared of me when I choose it?”

You kissed his cool forehead, making a sound against the armor before returning to his level and pressing your lips to the hinged jaw piece. He was sure to feel the fog of your warm breath through the scored vents, swirling slow and seductive around his face, perhaps still tinged with the aftermath of your exorbitant meal.

“Is this the same mind that left the window wide open in spite of my warning? If so, I fear for what will become of you. You don't know what you're doing.” He declared, saying this only so he wouldn't be confronted with the revealing silence.

“If you're so fearsome, then push me away. I'll never touch you again,” you said. “We’ll travel the rest of the way to Noss without a word. You'll send me off to your queen, and you’ll be rid of me. Sounds convenient, right? So, push me away.”

He didn't.

Instead, Lysander enfolded you in his arms, pulling you high onto your toes, and against the less perilous points on his armor. He was aware of this threat because he held you self-consciously; close enough to feel the heat of a fire while fearful of it burning him.

For you, the proximity was exhilarating in the way of explorers who sometimes lose their minds to euphoria when they find something no one else has.

For you, this indicated that there were no obstacles barring you from the Witch Queen’s sinful fruits, as the one thing that could've stopped you was holding you flush to his chest of ice and cradling the back of your head with a leathery hand. The claws of his gauntlet were a light scratch on your scalp, but their weight was an anchor straining every muscle in your neck.

He pulled your face into him, into the deeper dark of his mass as the hinges on his helmet let out their shrill outcry of nonuse, and kissed you. It was a fervent moment where his lips roamed yours top to bottom, pressing the corners and the nooks where syrupy residue stuck before letting out quivering breaths against your mouth to diffuse his excitement.

Lysander was up against the halves of himself, both radical tormentors that craved to split him into separate parts so that they may become a whole of themselves. His humanity was devastating, as it was what felt the most and desired so hopelessly to draw you in and never let go. His dragon blood was passionate, but it was wise and used to waiting for these fleeting morsels of good fortune which willed him to live on.

You let him kiss you through his turmoil while using this to your own advantage. Your fingertips moved inside his helmet and touched the skin of his jaw. The feel of it was unusual in that it did not mold or divot with human fleshiness, rather it was perfectly solid like a rough stone, tapering down into a fine chin lightly knocking your own.

The skin was craggy and heavily scarred with rounded, uniform indentations larger than the pads of your fingers could fit. Something had existed in place of these scars at one point, leaving behind disfiguring injuries and memories equally as torturous. His lips were of lesser toughness than his face, thick and slippery smooth with moisture from your breaths and saliva.

It was you who withdrew then, satisfied with the taste you’d given him and his yearning. He had little fear of being seen by you in this lightless hour, so he didn't immediately withdraw into his enormous adamantine husk by covering himself with the slotted vents.

“Forgive me, I should have resisted. I reacted poorly to your words, but I was not dishonest in what I did,” said Lysander with somber candor. Although he no longer held you in his arms, several of his long, leather-clad fingers wrapped your wrist in warmth. “It was wise of you to stop. When you touched me, it was… unlike anything I've ever known. You would've met my carnal lust, then, and I would not have thought anything of hurting you to fulfill myself.”

“You're pitiful, Lysander.”

They were harsh words spoken kindly. Arising from a place of knowing fear and desperation and profound loneliness so hollow that it leached away the joy of fuschia sunsets, of fresh spring afternoons laying arched with the hillside and smelling honeysuckle, of comforting oneness during gatherings at end week markets where young children wove flower stems in your hair and stuck them in the pockets of your robes.

You had once been part of that world before isolation, whereas it was a world he had never known—not with his servitude to the Witch Queen of Noss.

“Aye, I suppose that I am.”

Then, your eyes cut above his head as the Witch Queen’s bonds blinked into existence: bright yellow-white, interlinked holy halos descending from nothingness. The sheer number of them was what made the sight terrible, far more troubling from the first time you witnessed them.

The chains swayed, clinking into one another against a breeze somewhere faraway before abruptly yanking taut, looking like countless lashes of white light moving in unison. They gave Lysander a start, but he made no sound. His agony was discreet, indicated only by subtle metallic scuffing between armored fingertips as they writhed and soothed with his hand not holding your wrist.

For the Witch Queen to feel compelled to expend this much of her power to demand subservience meant that the magic Lysander had been endowed with was frightful at least.

“I don't blame you for your urges. You're half of a whole dragon, after all.” As you outstretched a hand into the sky, around one of the chains which glowed and pulsated and burned deliciously in your closed palm, you tried to remember the conversation from before. “My magic must not be easy for you to withstand.”

“Nay, what I confessed had nothing to do with your magic.” Lysander surrounded you in his fortress of jagged peaks and impenetrable dragonscale, just as he had before. “Your touch was burning—scorching me, even. I've never felt anything like it. That softness. Such gentleness. You did not touch my skin like someone cursed, like the abomination that I know that I am. I fear I will never feel it again.”

You hardly heard him over the sound of brittle magic shattering into airless black. Clusters of white burst apart over yours and Lysander's heads, flickering out of existence without landing; a false image; fatigued eyes tricked in this is unordinary hour. And then, the Witch Queen’s banshee screams echoed from somewhere far, far away.

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Skewered and halved blackbird remains followed the Witch Queen’s glossy black carriage like a funeral cortège. Some fell out of trees, wings flapping, bodies crumpling out of existence much the same way as burning paper wasting into crisp embers before ending as specks of ash. Magic exhausted. Untraceable. Gone.

Lysander made an example out of the rest; the majority he had slain. Where they landed was where they stayed, turned into cold and unmoving parts of the landscape, making for an audacious trail leading right up to your bumper. This was a challenge he wanted, a chance to prove his malice, retaliate the embarrassment of being outwitted.

The result had been a terribly effective deterrent because in the weeks of traveling in broad daylight by way of the most worn paths, you hadn't seen another soul—human or otherwise. The chittering and scampering of animals dampened against a crescendo of silence, making a pleasant summertime breeze into a violent windstorm through the fluttering tree leaves of the forest, flanking either side of the carriage.

At some point, you had become familiar with the noisiness of the chassis underneath your feet. In particular, how the frame would quiver if one of the skinny wheels struck a craggy rock raised too far above the dirt and detritus, or one of those same wheels slipped out of the well-worn impressions left behind on the pathway by other carriages and wagons hauling special things.

You were often bored as Lysander preferred to stride alongside the carriage, door-side, superbly blocking your exit. It left you with little to do other than speak with him when he could tolerate it. Transmutate strange things you grabbed off the ground and hid within your bottomless pockets while urinating in the thicket and behind trees. The hard wear in the road made success nearly unachievable.

You'd even memorized what movements the silvery-gold stallions made to evoke wrath and whip from the coachman staring down at their backs from his high wooden perch.

Once or twice, you'd been irritated enough by the cruelty and echoing crack of the whip in the sky that you raised roots on the path ahead to catch every wheel so, when they were caught in the thick, wriggling greenery, the carriage would lurch violently and propel the coachman into the throng of horses below.

They were no ordinary horses either, as their ethereal glow and intelligent eyes indicated they'd once carried gods and goddesses on their backs and ate golden apples from orchards across the cosmos. But, they'd been defiled by the Witch Queen’s magic centuries ago and now they were here: bright as the sun and proud, helpless to defy the magic which confined them to this fate.

In return for your kindness, the horses were as watchful over you as Lysander was. They allowed you to stroke their long, lustrous faces and untangle their silvery manes with your fingers until you could let the hairs fall away like threads of tinsel. Sometimes they fell asleep like that, heads hung low, ears flattened outward.

“You've made a great ally in them,” said Lysander one evening. A fire was already going nearby with the bruised and battered coachman huddled next to it, silent and seething as always. You were sitting far away from the flames, outside of reach of the ring of orange, pulsing light when the knight approached.

He held something small and black and dripping in one of his hands before tossing it aside into the brush. Your eyes followed, spotting its landing and rustling among the briars and thick shrubbery, resembling nothing but a shuddering mass in the dark.

“The stallions, you mean?” you waited for the bush to stop shaking before looking away. Lysander had come to join you where you sat on a large boulder, armor grinding as it turned into a typical wadded shape when he crouched low and hunched between his thighs. You never thought he looked comfortable that way. “They were once steeds of the heavens and now they're enslaved by the Witch Queen's magic in much the same way as you are, you know? How could I not be moved to do something for them? Revenge is warranted by things held against their will.”

“Do you pity them as you do me?” he asked.

You leaned across your legs to be nearer to his helmeted face, hoping against futility that, perhaps, you'd discern a pair of gleaming amethysts through all of the shadows. When you did not, you settled into that arched posture, lightly touching across the hinged jaw piece with your fingertips. He no longer stirred when you did this, desensitized to the disbelief that no creature in possession of their own mind would dare to.

“Right now, I'm thinking more about how you're on the verge of wiping out local blackbird populations,” you quipped, but you were worried that it was true. “Leave them, Lysander. The birds are innocent, and even the birds made of magic are at the mercy of their conjurer.”

“Aye, that may be, but do not forget that the Sisterhood of Gosha stole you from your bed in the dead of night. It had taken a single moment of poor judgment for them to do so.” He pressed his face forward against your fingers, as though relishing the thought that your warmth could reach him that way. “Birds are inconspicuous. They are as much vermin as rats and rabbits. The sisterhood knows how to conceal their magic and when they contain it in creature's as small as birds—I cannot always distinguish a roosting blackbird from one exuding magic and malice. It troubles me.”

“That is largely in part due to the Witch Queen’s power over you. You know this.”

Whenever he would sigh, it made a muffled whistling sort of sound that no doubt ricocheted off the adamantine and dragonscale around his head. You imagined it would be a tiring thing to be hidden away inside a helmet, breathing fresh air through narrow slots, forgetting the softness of pillows and a bed partner’s bosom.

But, time passed and you realized that his helmet was as much of a boon for him as it was an obstacle to things he desired.

Inside of that blank space swelled in darkness, you had no way of knowing what expression he looked at you with right now—if he were even capable of maneuvering his tough skin into a grimace or a smile. You had no way of knowing how he’d looked at you after kissing you back then.

“The blackbirds,” he went on tersely, tearing into the quiet moment as easily as he did the poor creatures, “I can’t allow what happened then to happen again. I'll continue to ask for your forgiveness for such minor atrocities if it means you are safe.”

This was like him: roughly shifting conversation away from your prying to get him to divulge a true opinion about his enslaver. He seldom implicated the Witch Queen of evils she committed; how enmeshed she was in the entire fiber of his being. You supposed that if she was all he had ever known, even he himself could not comprehend the wickedness which still imprisoned him.

You fitted fingertips into the vents of his helmet, but your eyes were elsewhere now, up at the empty sky and the razored peaks of tall trees which seemed to grow inward, encircling you. It was as claustrophobic as when you witnessed Lysander bent sideways in manmade spaces. The Witch Queen’s halo of chains remained stubbornly, in numbers so many that it tired you to simply look at them.

Already, you'd destroyed countless but there were countless to go. Time had regained urgency only to belittle you, telling you that you would fail. Those long days from before felt squandered, lost to sultry summertime hazes with no relief and perfumed bathwater filling your head with sweltering fuzz.

You mourned what you should've done but didn't do. Considered solemnly that Lysander might have continued to live on unhappily, yet uncomplicatedly, if you had cast him away from your hermitage and never met him.

At Noss, it was expected that you would be destroyed once you were in the audience of the Witch Queen, for the humiliation you had caused her was unpardonable, no matter how prodigious her lust of you truly was.

You remembered before, when she had been so desperate as to be willing to entice you with a living organism—her forbidden orchard. It was her: breathing her magic, her essence tilled into the soil, her soul within the core of every luscious fruit on low-hanging branches. Her magic was at its apex in Noss, amplified by the orchard.

Your might would not overcome hers alone.

Was it worth it, then? To even hope for a morsel of her fragrant fruit, the magic weaving throughout toothsome meat, ripe flesh bright as jewels.

Was it worth it, still? To be weakened by insatiety because you were a magic eater; one of the most selfish entities to exist in any realm. If it meant a lick, a bite, a taste, a swallow, you were convinced that it would fulfill the savage hunger coiling inside of you like writhing parasites finding ecstasy after being without for so long. It made you fearless. It made things like suicide meaningless; inconsequential for the seconds of bliss before the endless shadow.

Yes, yes, you were exasperated and dismissive even within your own head. This will be my end, that I am certain. I will never see outside of Noss. I will never see my home again. Everything will keep gathering dust. Moths will eat my nice robes; they'll eat my tomes. My garden will rot and die. What a curse, what a shame. What a shame…

You flinched as Lysander’s cold claw, darker than the night itself, stroked the underside of your jaw. He drew your eyes back into his chasm, the hinges raised. They had been soundless this time, or you’d simply become unobservant of most things now that the world was unexciting.

“Are you unwell?” he asked, carefully pacing the words as though unsure of the sort of outcome they'd inspire. He wanted something and didn't know how to ask for it. “Speak. What's troublin’ you? Don't think I've ever seen you quite this way before.”

“It will all end soon,” you said, nebulously, without a trace of fear because your fate was ineluctable. A fish beating its fins upstream against the current only to become exhausted and be seized by the jaws of a bear. The starving rodent, obeying its very nature to seek out food and shelter, finds a house with crevices and pungent tidbits on a spring-loaded trap.

You were the fish, and you were the mouse. You threw yourself into the strong current, snuck into the drafty house with moldy daubs of food tucked away in a corner. It was innate. According to your own will.

But, you thrived in asking questions. That was all you could do. “What will happen once we arrive, Lysander? What will happen to me? To you?”

“I cannot say,” he admitted, “I do not know. My task will be complete once you are delivered to the Witch Queen's doorstep.”

He sighed in the oblivion of night, soul weary, but went on nonetheless, “You and I will be separated, and it will be the same as always for me. I will be sent away to wait until I am beckoned again. I will be dispatched to subjugate insurrections. I will waste hundreds, thousands more with my blade on the battlefield. I will see carnage and only myself still standing. I will see endless patrols in the darkness. I will see the four stone walls of my cell where I am kept. Nothing else. There will be nothing else for me.”

“And, that is what you want? To be separated? For there to be nothing else?”

To this, Lysander receded into his suit, into silence, as though confronted in a way he had never been before. You were pushing him to answer something difficult. Something foreign, selfish, disastrous.

“Nay,” was all he could bring himself to say.

You looked away again, up at the clattering chains, wondering if more of their numbers were obscured within themselves. The Witch Queen was aware of your intentions, gleaning from them that the Sisterhood of Gosha had reached you first, and she would not let you have the weapon she’d adroitly honed over a millennia so easily.

This was what magicians with power to flaunt did best: fought from hidden places with wit, tug-of-war over lesser things. There could never be a clear winner because these grudges spanned eternities; to the heavens and the underworld, along the misty galaxies dotting the cosmos.

But this was Lysander, he was not less nor was he other. The Witch Queen’s cleaver on the battlefield; the appalling Knight of Noss, and he was kissing you again.

You gave yourself to his passion; fragile, fraying restraint like time-worn threads on a garment. He pressed your lips separately, then together, a rough sort of kneading that pinched, numbed, could've swallowed you if that's what he had in his mind to do.

Unlike times before, you didn't busy your hands on his face to map out his odd anatomy. It occupied too much space in your head to visualize, stole away your enjoyment in blind snatches. Whenever you did, you still searched for softness in his cheeks, as his unyielding flesh made him more dragon than human when you felt it. The patterned scars etched into his flesh were repulsive, abnormal, and doubtlessly still made him ache on the worst of days.

Lysander would never be willing to let you see his face because of them, this you understood now.

You reached for buttons to unfasten your robes. Neatness fell apart, layers glided down the slope of your shoulders with silky lightness despite their number, what great weight they should've been. Such boldness invited a whip of black breeze to lash your skin, your bare chest and abdomen. The shiver made you feel attractive, whittled you down into a small thing enclosed by his mass.

The dark felt protective; blending you seamlessly with its opaqueness, camouflaging you from everything but his eyes. Ones which saw you exposed to him. Invited him into you.

He was motionless. A tamed beast presented with raw slabs of crude meat still red and smelling of coins. It provoked innate temptation, both exhilarating and frightening because something needed to be done since it was there, but what would be the cost?

“I'll hurt you,” said Lysander in his gentlest rumble, out of true goodness and sincerity. “If I could, I'd always keep you this pristine and lovely. Unsullied by me, or anyone else.”

His cold leather hands touched your body and stayed nowhere for very long. It gave you a start, a shock down your spine whenever he moved for a different handful of your flesh, curve, and fat. The claws overhanging his gauntlet threatened subtly, but he was aware of them with everything that he did.

“Then, walk away, Lysander. You have that choice here. Possibly one of the few you've ever had, or ever will have.”

It was an awful thing to say.

It was meant to be.

“If you want things to stay the same as they've always been, I'll say nothing else. This will be forgotten. I'll even show you one of my magic tricks; wipe this moment from both our minds. I'll wipe the others as well. All that will be left is formality. Wouldn't that be wise for us in the short time we have left? Just say the word, I'll say my own, snap my fingers, and it'll be done. Simple. Harmless.”

Lysander stroked at you lightly like you were flames spitting at his fingertips, or pin-thin briars he was pulling without gloves. His helmeted face closed in on yours once again, his breaths long and hot; a dragon exhaling from the darkness of its sauna-like cavern.

“And what of the other choice?” His interest was half-hearted, genuine in moments of clarity. “There are always two options. Opposites of each other. What is the other?”

You shifted on the boulder where you sat, rested back on outstretched arms and open palms. The real stone under your hands was unlike Lysander's terrain, lifeless and bloodless. You much preferred the feeling of him.

Your nudity was displayed, posed for him, to lure him into a decision you both wanted. With your unclothed chest and fleshy stomach and hips peeking through heaps of fabric, you suggested defiance to him; something he wasn't supposed to do, but would because he chose it for himself.

“The other option is that you choose this, you choose me. And you would be doomed, Lysander.” Indubitably, it would be an unspeakable betrayal. This reclaim of ownership of a body to do with what he pleased. “Things will be changed. We will never be able to go back to how it was before. You will never be the same. You will never be forgiven.”

“Aye, I will be reproached. I will be disgraced, and doomed as I've ever been.” Then, his armored silhouette eclipsed the forest canopy above you. “So be it.”

Gone were the treetops sprawling explosively into starless skies. Treetops as skeletal spires seeming to reach oneness with the night. His enormous husk of ungentle edges and cold was far blacker, more imposing than the ancients, yet his touch spread warmth through you.

He kissed you fast and fleeting from within his sanctuary, and then under your jaw with an open mouth. Shuddering heat and wetness slowly made a descent along your neck, his teeth a glistening concept though not felt. As he explored you, molded the softness of you with his fingers and pinching claws, he found your utter humanness to be divine. The surreality of it stifled his exhilaration.

His lips smoothed across your chest where heat now rose to the surface of your skin. There he rested, seeking to leach it from you, meld it with himself completely, unbelieving that mere centimeters of bone and viscera separated him from your thudding heart. It knocked rhythmically against your house, could've been a clockmaker’s best work with how strongly it reverberated in his head, throbbed in your ears, propelled blood through all of your incomprehensibly tiny places.

A long tongue with some thickness emerged from his helmet, came out serpentine with winding eagerness. It was split severely, nearly halved, and those halves glided across your breasts in damp, lightweight strokes. They caressed the hard peaks of your nipples, made them so sensitive to his lips, the precise flicking of his tongue, that you moaned. Pushed at his adamantine forehead feebly and clenched your thighs for friction.

Your head bloomed with heat that moved, flowing like lava from behind your ears to nestle between your eyes. Barely a touch and you were already full of perversions, haughty courage, flickering urges pulling wool over your soundness, and you wanted things you'd forgotten were possible to be wanted.

Then, you spoke like you were outside of yourself; a spectator looking in on depravity, “I want to touch you. Show yourself to me, Lysander,” and you used a leg to rustle the heavy fabric and chainmail hanging down the front of him.

By then, he had plunged his face down to your stomach, sampled your bathing fragrances and brine produced from your sweat with his tongue. The halves of his tongue were wormlike, slippery, trying to delve below the robes which kept him from smelling you, tasting your arousal.

You wouldn't let him go further. He was at the mercy of your whims, your leg pestering him to hardness. Strain building behind layers.

“Right now, I know no other tormentor as beautiful and devilish as you. I feel weakened by you and your magic. Intoxicated. You're a trickster god come down to seduce me,” said Lysander, through raspy breaths and stones tumbling in his throat. While he thrust his hips against your thighs, he reached past his coverings, loosened them, and let his cock fall.

You were startled by the weight of it as he continued to hump you, insides awash with cold guilt, wrenching in anticipation for what was to come. This was not what you deserved to receive for your crookedness, but you would take it from him, regardless.

For now, your hunger was quiet. For now, you were distracted by his adoration. How he revered your body, your temple of mortality like it was something truly enviable and memorable.

Lysander’s heavy cock wept invisibly on your skin, unseen to you in the dark. The first strokes you laid on it were featherlight, experimenting, yet all the same coquettish and making his entire body flinch with feeling. A groan started within his chest, deep and resounding pleasure rising high in his throat. It diffused into warm, bestial hums so separated from anything human that it astonished you. Aroused you more.

You couldn't fully grasp his girth, not even partway. Only the head fit in your fingers; a silky, spearhead shape which pulsated, oozed sticky heat into your palm as you kneaded it, smeared the stuff around the large slit with your thumb.

The rest of him was unordinary and textured, harsh against your hand as you stroked his length. Flared segments grew severe at his thick base, unsharp ridges grabbed your skin with each pass, creating delicious resistance that earned you his praise with more thrumming; throaty purrs.

A being this substantial was never meant to be experienced by a human, even though he was half-bastard, and despite his unbelonging to either of his bloodlines. You speculated that he'd never been given the option to know any creature so intimately, not with how he shuddered within his jaggedy husk as your mouth sucked the head of his cock, swirling saliva and substance with your tongue.

He would not go far past your teeth, so you did what you could by wetting, prodding his salty slit while both hands wrung his shaft, groped his hefty sac, felt through the coverings and chainmail he had undone for his abdomen. It was strong, clenched, yet jutted out in response to unfamiliarity roaming him. The span of flesh you could traverse without his writhing was the same as the rest of him: scarred and uniform. Something had been taken from him.

“Gods—that’s enough. Enough, now. Quickly. Off of me, you filthy thing!” He was stricken as he spoke, voice urgent and taut, guttural in the way that you liked. You were pushed off of his cock, back down onto the boulder while he rutted hard through your thighs, using all of your flesh and fat and pliability to surround him.

Your body moved like a straw doll; weightless to him, jolting to you. It was over suddenly with a potent groan, his helmeted face thrown up to the sky, and an explosion of hot cum spraying across your thighs. He twitched with more dripping out onto you, but he never went soft.

It had happened so fast that you were left disoriented once everything stopped.

“Lysander—”

“Aye,” he rasped out, winded. “I really am no better than a beast, am I? Forgive me, I didn't know that would happen. You—I hadn't expected you would do that. I never knew it was possible to feel as I just did. What pleasure. What agony. What relief.”

You opened your legs as his spend cooled on your skin, bothered by the way it tightened, dried honey-stiff and tacky.

“The stories about you are all false, then?” you asked, docile as he shucked off your robes and laid them on the ground. A summer quilt spread out over dewy grass. “The stories about your carnality. Your lust for humans and beasts and eagerness to lay with them. Was there any ounce of truth in them?”

“Far be it for me to speak on stories that have grown and aged alongside the trees in this forest. They do me no harm personally, as they remind me that I am still alive. Alive enough to still hear them,” said Lysander, recovered and breathing evenly within his panoply. “You can believe what you'd like.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

“Aye, looking at you, I suppose there could be some truth to it.”

You wished your vision could spear through the lightless world, into the dark entanglement of his helmet to see his expression as he looked at you now. Was he smiling? Frowning? Wincing as the threads of his identity unraveled?

“C’mere, you.” He hoisted you off of the boulder to lay you across the soiled robes he'd put down. Satisfied, he stared at you, long and thorough, at your complete nakedness arranged for him to see. “You're such a sight. I've seen much in this life of mine, enough that I would've believed it if I was told I'd seen it all. You? If part of my punishment was for my eyes being removed, I'd regret nothing. If my punishment were to be death, and my final memories were of this time with you, I'd regret nothing still.”

Shame sobered you. Wrapped your head close like a red burning wreath, singed your ears, and made your scalp itch with prickly heat. Your eyes felt sore and reddened, precariously tilting towards tears, which would've been devastating.

“You can still stop,” you blurted, wincing through a kiss, sharp teeth grazing down the column of your throat. He didn't bite you, only teased the idea with them. Soon, his mouth was on your abdomen, forked tongue probing lower still. “Lysander, you can still stop. Choose differently. Spare yourself.”

“Nay,” he replied, throatiness returned. “I've chosen you. You've bewitched me and I want for nothing else. Allow me to return your kindness.”

There then came clattering beside you, of heaviness falling from a height and vibrating the earth as it struck. It shook up through your spine, danced along the back of your neck with thousands of spindly legs. You squinted at the night and saw something darker, a helmet.

Before you could've glimpsed his face, freezing leather pressed to your eyes, fluttering your lashes. He told you not to look at him in his clearest voice. He almost pleaded for it.

“Eyes closed.” His breaths scorched down your thighs, words damp in the seams. “See nothing. Feel everything. Hear me ravish you, and let me hear you be ravished.”

It was his tongue that went first, laving decadently, thoroughly, bunching the serpent halves together; a well waiting for collection, to be filled. He swilled what arousal he could take from you with his saliva and kneaded you with a short, flat nose. You thrashed your hips against him, away from him, anchored in place by his heavy hands, adamantine gauntlet embedding ten stingers below your skin.

Lysander was unclean with you, indecorous in how he sucked and swallowed, kissed into you, ate as far as he could go with seemingly no satisfaction. It was repugnant and ferine, his most subdued self now at the surface and freed. He went on with that intensity until you trembled, body writhing across fabric and grass as you came up onto bent elbows, feeling through a suffocating void of dark and pleasure cinching around you for the top of his head.

You moaned achingly while trying to perceive what you were not allowed to see. Nothing stimulated curiosity more than what was forbidden, and you fathomed why as your fingertips worked to decipher his features, transmitted the rough etchings into bleary images with no beginning or end.

“Do you fear what you feel?” asked Lysander, without ire, but miserable in his yearning. He gave you permission to translate his darkness, make sense of the pits in his flesh, all of the stony, broken protrusions which had been filed down to stumps and never grown back. They were fused to him, bone and cartilage excruciatingly removed, emerging from the sides of his head and his temples. “Does my hideousness frighten you? Am I the abomination that you dreamed of?”

“I know no fear,” you said, and Lysander’s coarse cheeks raised, folded, and strained against your thighs as he smiled. “To me, you are merely Lysander. Not the abomination. Not that damned armor that you wear. Let that be enough.”

Pleased, he returned to you with fervor, to savor more of your push and pull. The jounce of your hips. Wanting him close as much as you wanted to shove him away.

He was mostly an amalgam of nonsense in your head; physical pieces unable to interlock into anything whole. Complicated.

It frustrated you that he would not let you set your eyes upon his true visage. It frustrated you that he was delaying your gratification because he liked licking, sucking you raw so you'd cry out sharply from your chest and not your head.

But, he had become anxious from anticipation, tormented by inevitability, so he turned you over. Maneuvered you onto your knees, splayed them over the sodden robes and damp grass. His armor grated as he came closer, crunching into that unforgiving form of sharpness and cold, startling you with the heat of his cock filling the gap between your legs.

“I'll hurt you,” was spoken differently from before when he had wanted you, looked at you questionably, tried to use his enormity to frighten you. He was unhindered now. “I do not want to hurt you, but I will. I cannot deny what either of my halves crave. I have tasted excess, the essence from your body and your magic. I am yours.”

“I knew what would come from this, Lysander. I know what can happen.” He could tear you apart, perforate your organs, be inundated by desire and biology so immense that he consumes your body. It was far too late to trade this for another course. “If you're mine, prove it to me. Show me how loyal you are. Don't stop until you've left your mark.”

“Aye, as you wish.” His cock dragged firmly along your abdomen, hot and pulsing, twitching against you like a thing searching for a way in. “You say cruel things with such sweetness. I fear that my madness, my brokenness have manifested you, and when this is over, you'll only have been a figment of fantasy.”

You swayed with him, clamped him with your thighs weakened by his tongue. Lysander’s groan resonated, harsher without the helmet, sharp like his teeth.

“If this is a fantasy, however short it is, we should both enjoy it. Fuck me. I'm yours.”

“Aye. You are mine.”

Those hard-worn leather hands and frigid claws were on you again, spread wide everywhere. He could not grab you, enclose you with his iridescent fortress without gouging you on his spikes. Skin-to-skin, burying himself within you completely, that connectedness would always elude him.

So, he devoured you how he could. Had indulged with his entire mouth, his wild hands, and now his cock. His head was gluey and smeared a sluggish trail to your core where he stroked you with it eagerly. Fluids intermingled: his, yours, sweat, salvia, and earthy condensation. More of his seeped out, warm and heady, a thick layer to cover his cock before he took you.

He nudged himself inside, listened for your brittle gasps of shock to the stretch, the great and unnatural intrusion. They came right away. You surprised him by letting him continue, strained the muscles in your legs to accommodate depth, and whimpered only a little when he started to thrust slowly.

You couldn't route your mind to other things as he did this, moved fractionally to minimize your agony, pushed deeper to gape your significantly smaller anatomy. His jaw chattered from overhead, beckoning either in patience, or stifling what sounds of bliss he really wanted to exhale.

Even when he had rearranged you again, down onto one hip with your other leg settled on his arm, he could only sheath himself halfway. He had finally decided to stop after pushing too hard and hearing you gag, fractured the silent air with a startled cry, one which was accompanied by real tears. The only ones you could ever remember spilling, and swiped away as quickly as they had come.

Lysander turned his head to your leg on him, molded a kiss to your shin, and took his time thrusting into you. Eventually, he let you rest on your back with both legs strewn over his arms. His hands cradled the globes of your ass, lifted your lower body up for his cock to reach.

His immense girth with the rough segments and grappling ridges started to feel good. Nothing went missed, nowhere went without being stroked or prodded. Your breaths were as shattered as you felt by him, eyes gazing up vacantly at the starless sky, hands creasing fabric and tearing up black fingers of grass.

At your every moan, his thrusts grew a little more honed and his armor grinded hollowly with a beat, putting some irrational fear in you that he was unscrewing and would fall apart in pieces. His vocalizations were a combination of wild thrumming and bestial panting and bellowing.

The silvery-gold stallions were probably pacing timidly, snorting defensive fog into the air, alerting the disgruntled coachmen to the sounds. He would've heard your frailer noises intertwined with Lysander's and would ask no questions tomorrow, nor be able to bring himself to look at you again.

Lysander’s strokes inside your body reached deep, left you queasy in the head as he effortlessly jostled you on his cock. The segments along his shaft pushed and pulled the fine tissue around your entrance. It throbbed sorely. You detected blood and thought of the faint tang of copper slick on your skin; imagined a pink, creamy ring around his cock.

The ridges were what finished you, built up that orgasmic well in your stomach and loins. It overflowed when you touched yourself and choked from sensitivity, but kept going. The back of your head dug into your soggy robes, joining the grass and the earth and natural indulgences you had abandoned in isolation.

You withdrew behind clenched eyelids, a world made of wrinkled skin and twitching eyelashes. It forced you to focus on Lysander; his ripe, inhuman pleasure as close to climax as you were. It forced you to truly experience his cock, the sheer size of it impaling you again and again, foul and sloppy and never fitting right. The ridges tried to find purchase along your inner walls, adhere unrelentingly like briars to your clothes.

They were evolutionary for dragons, meant to massage to numbness, house a cock cozily until it was flaccid. What you possessed was smaller and far less robust, so with every pass Lysander made, the ridges teased your velvety insides with hard tugs until you were over the edge.

Tiny threads of fire ignited under your skin, carrying you through the white static in your head, torrents of electric writhing through each limb, finger, and toe. It crashed over you so powerfully that you were soundless as if submerged underwater, or trapped in some airless place. Just as fast as it had all come on, the pleasure lifted off of you like a spirit ascending to the gods, leaving you pleasantly spent in cool, static relief.

Lysander had seen your warped grimace, your subsequent facial softening and sighing. He had felt your walls clench him, trying to wring whatever they could from his cock but he hadn't been ready until he saw you calm, intoxicated by emptiness, sprawled open and unmoving below him.

He rutted into you savagely at the end, stirring you back into discomfort, but he was done and cum surged inside of you so strongly that it caused another reaction. You gasped nasally, shivered as he fucked you through his orgasm with feral moans, hips lashing your naked ass with the chainmail he hadn't removed.

His release overflowed; globs of it pushed out, around his cock as he withdrew. It leaked from you sluggish and plentiful, and you pretended for it to be pooling hot white beneath you, under your ass and legs once Lysander let them down gently.

Even in your sedated afterglow, your body stinging, sore and chafed from overuse, you could still think of nothing but catastrophe, soul fruit, and whether Lysander was capable of producing life, or if everything about him was truly damned.

You heard his armor scrape, his helmet returned to complete him: the atrocity known as the Knight of Noss. He had once again become loathsome and impenetrable, but he stayed with you there on the ground, watching your limbs shift around as though the relaxation you felt was everywhere, all around you. An aura radiating, vibrating like a pleased animal.

“Such a sight. I will never tire of it.” He said from within his castle of magnificent thorns. “My days from before feel far away, long gone. They're memories of someone else, someone destined to walk in darkness, through rivers of blood and decay. You see me as more. I am more.”

Your night sky descended, swallowing everything around it into its peaks and mass. He was careful not to come down so far as to crush you beneath his armor, but he covered you, concealed you perfectly from the spiral of ancient trees overhead, from always prying, hidden eyes.

He kissed you. You accepted his lips and his veneration, his chest of ice.

After a moment, “This is our end set in stone, Lysander. From here on out, we will be marching to our doom.”

“Aye,” he soothed grim reality with fearlessness, devotion pressed against your mouth. “We are doomed. But, we face it together.”

Maybe, it wasn't so foolish to hope.

Maybe.

Maybe…

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author's note: so, first and foremost, thank you so much for reading. the concept for the knight of noss has existed in my head for almost fifteen years. until the past three or four years, however, I have never had the skill to be able to execute any of the ideas. to see an idea like this come to fruition after so long is, honestly... overwhelming. to know that there people who wanted to see my explore this idea means even more to me.

if you're interested in the actual story, you're more than free to shoot me questions about it. I did have a massive amount of lore written out, but decided against including it here so as to not drag things on and on.

I hope you enjoyed reading this story, and I hope to hear your thoughts on it! I'll see y'all in the next piece ❤️🙂‍↕️.

vampire x reader | 18+ | 16.1k

You're a crime scene cleaner who happens across an advertisement for a mansion housekeeper in exchange for room and board. it's close to work, close to your university, and an easy job. The ultimate package. Right away, you notice the owner's beauty as well as his eccentricities, but decide to commit to it. The spiral into depravity and debauchery begins when you're tasked with cleaning the site of a savage murder, solidifying you as a irreplaceable treasure

story warnings; dead dove do not eat, explicit noncon, major dubcon, explicit sexual details, hypnosis, bloodplay, sadomasochism, cigarette burns, choking, injuries to mc, gun violence, graphic depictions of violence, extreme body horror + gore, murder, graphic descriptions of crime scenes, descriptions of crime scene cleanup may be inaccurate, obsessive + possessive behaviors (yandere), manipulation, gaslighting, religious imagery + symbolism, exploration of morality, dubious morality (mc), allegorical for abusive relationships, very prose + detail heavy.

reposted from my deleted blog theoxenfree.

proofread by @noctis-kingfisher / @ceruleansol-archive

please leave feedback + reblog this piece if you found it interesting!

Another internet search bore fruit.

The image bouncing back at you from your phone had been hastily taken with a tremble in your hand, all the while launching a few too many cautious looks across your shoulder to either end of the dim, long hallway making up part of the second floor. There wasn't any particular rationale for your apprehension and busy eyes but the belief the mansion owner wouldn't be too pleased to see you taking pictures of his valuables rather than cleaning them.

That fear hadn't stopped you from reverse image searching a good couple of curiosities over the widening gap of time you had been living there. Tonight was a chalmette table vase displayed on a pedestal in the hall; brassy gold gilding cradled a somewhat drab white bloom that reached high and sprouted open to a hollow inside. Similar surviving articles went for thousands. You totaled the prices of everything so far as enough to outright buy a house on the more modest side of town.

There was a daring thought that loomed in the back of your mind, an ugly little thing that told you one or two missing antiques wasn't any big deal. He wouldn't miss them, let alone even notice they were gone, because he was the strangest man you had ever met.

Four months ago, he had only ever introduced himself by the name Montague, letting an anticipatory stillness hang in the air while you waited for him to finish. He never did, handsome features lifting as his dark eyes thinned and smile inched higher. He had you in a tight handshake.

"I enjoyed reading the resume you sent in with your response to my advertisement." He had traces of an accent intact but had cleverly adapted to one more common to the area. "You're the first person I've come across wanting the room who's done that. It really stood out to me. A crime scene cleaner? Must be a difficult job."

"I know it was probably overkill, but I think this will be perfect for me." You were led to a suede armchair, his hand anchoring onto your shoulder to lower you into the seat. He sat across from you in something similar, one leg crossing. "I recently had to move out of my other place, and the university will be about an hour closer. My work won't be as far of a drive, either. I—I, uh, clean some gross stuff, so taking care of your house won't be anything."

Even after that spiel, Montague never let his smile slip. Rather, it seemed to widen as though delighted by your oversharing. He looked like a man basking in glee over a rare find, an offer he couldn't possibly turn away.

"All amenities in the house are yours." This was after he showed you to one of the rooms on the second floor: a capacious, well-dressed space behind a red door at the end of the hall. "As long as you listen to a few rules and keep things clean, we should have a very amicable... cohabitation."

You thought it was an odd choice of wording. "Okay. Well, what do I need to know?"

"No guests." It was immediate, his tone suddenly a touch edgy, razored, unyielding. "Not unless I give you explicit permission beforehand. I keep many important valuables; they're very dear to me. Also, do not invite anyone in unless I am there."

Again, odd, but it was his house.

"Sure," you said agreeably, having half the thought to write down these peculiarities of his. "What next?"

He was set on your shoulder, reaching out to pull a thin, frayed thread off of your jumper. "The downstairs—as in, the basement—is my personal space. If I need you down there, I will ask you for you to go down. You can go anywhere else in the house, on the property. None of it concerns me."

"Why the basement, though?" It felt damaging to press a question like that so early on, but you figured it was innocent enough. "This house is so big that we could be on the same floor and hardly see each other."

The muscles around his mouth twitched slightly, only once. You still noticed it. Noted: he didn't like to be questioned. "Sorry, I'm not trying to-"

"It's cold downstairs." he injected, shifting to look around the room as though taking in the newness of it as well. "I make sure it stays comfortable all year, all throughout the house, but the cold suits me best."

With how downright frosty his skin felt in that handshake earlier—on a mild day in mid-spring—you thought that explanation checked out. He must have only just come up to greet you at the front entrance.

You tried to forget the feeling. "Alright. Next?"

"Oh," he restrained an unseemly laugh, using one hand to crowd into a pocket on his dark blazer, "there is nothing else, at least nothing pertinent. It's my understanding that we're both quite busy, so this would be the current arrangement unless something changes."

What changes? You wanted to ask, thwarted to silence when he revealed some sort of silver thing pinched between his fingers with a thick handkerchief. It was a dainty-seeming contraption with chains linking several old skeleton keys at the end. The fabric he used to hold the clip concealed all of the elegant tracery that made up its shape.

"Traditionally, this is called a chatelaine. It’s something I’ve modified for you to get around the house. It’ll be easier to clean." Montague said, fast to force the mess of cold silver and chains into your palm, rubbing down his fingers with the handkerchief afterward. "The smallest key is to your room. The largest one opens the doors to go outside, so don't lose that. One of them is meant for doors in the basement—can't recall which."

He could see the wariness behind your eyes, a worrying crease forming in your brow. "This house has been around for a long time. I've just never gotten around to modernizing the locks."

Other questions came to you, but he hardly acted interested in entertaining them. You let him swivel on black soles, stopping him just as he reached the doorway.

"Why haven't other housekeepers worked out?"

Montague let his fingers rest on glazed woodwork framing the threshold, drumming out a soothing rhythm while considering an answer for all of two seconds. "In short? They couldn't follow the rules. Now, let me show you to the yard."

Afterward, the so-called cohabitation had become a seamless blend for you both. You had learned right away that Montague wasn't one for idle chatter and niceties without purpose. He had deviated from it once, on move-in day, to reassure you that the mysterious nature of your life schedule and odd hours you were called to a clean scene wouldn’t be a source of concern.

Shortly after settling your things around the house, the reason for his amenable attitude was a little more apparent. Several times a month, you would be pulled from your forensics projects to the landing at the end of the hall, piqued by fresh voices always indistinguishable at first, and folded your waist over the railing to see down.

The top of his head, hair short, impeccably styled, and ash-brown, was the first thing you noticed, followed by someone on his arm.

Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man—always conventionally attractive, always utterly enraptured by him. It struck a nerve with you once or twice, finding your thoughts swimming bitterly: Of course a man who looked like him would go for types like that!

Why did he act so much differently with them than you? He wasn't nearly as friendly and affable as he was making himself out to be.

You stopped peeking down on him after an instance where his eyes shot straight up, pinning you where you stood. He simpered at you before leading his companion away to the basement, and that was it. You never saw them leave and never bothered to ask.

Tonight was different, however, both in the way you nearly toppled the two-figure Chalmette vase off its pedestal with flighty fingers and a duster, and the echo of a scream piercing the hollow halls to you. It stayed in one spot on the first floor, luring you down the center staircase with your duster clutched to you like a sword. At that point, your heart bursting in your ears was louder than the agonized cries resonating around the corner.

You looked around, spine wrapped in dread as another scream, weak, garbled, and wet, came from the basement, and then nothing at all. It was soundless in the house. Distantly, one of the clocks mounted in the kitchen archway toned onward. You followed its beat with the shuffle of your feet.

Hello, hello? Those words clung tightly in your throat, yet you were too afraid to announce yourself like that. Still, nothing came as you slowly pulled at the basement doorknob, brass and freezing and unlocked. The stairway plunging down inside was filled with inky black, so dark you couldn't get your eyes to adjust to it.

Is everything okay down there? Hello? Hello? You ran the imaginary chatter through your mind, lips sealed but trembling during your slow descent, the path now illuminated by white glow from your phone. At the bottom, the stone stairs turned into seamless gray marble and red wetness crawling toward the soles of your slippers.

"What—" You gasped, taking a step back while flicking the flashlight higher, deeper into the basement. The vivid red puddle glistened in your light, widening around a motionless figure with pale skin—a blonde woman you didn't know. Her face pointed up at the ceiling, twisted in terror, black tracks of mascara curving along her cheeks.

She was naked on the floor, surrounded by her own blood, something you didn't have to look at twice. Your breaths grew harsh, taking in the sight of her neck, or lack thereof; there wasn't much left of it. Only a few stringy bits of sinew and muscle kept it from a full decapitation, and blood still pulsed out in spurts from mangled arteries and veins.

A motion nearby made your nape prickle. It was like feet padding across wet pavement after a fresh rain, except this smell carried the malodor of rust and something sour under your nose. You settled a pillar of light on the source, capturing the view of Montague standing amid the bloodbath, sickly skin bare and saturated in rich crimson.

Something was wrong with him, came an instantaneous, instinctual reaction the moment his head spun toward you, catching pale eyeshine in the white light. The bones in his jaw cracked as the length of it began to recede into the semblance of something more man to you, rows of jagged teeth retracting into the depths of his throat until only a pair of long incisors remained.

Montague skimmed the tip of his tongue along his lower lip, smiling at you affectedly, saying as though it were some trife thing, "She started screaming."

You were gone and out of the basement after that, clearing the woman's body and kicking away the slippers on your feet when they squelched with blood. Montague said something after you when shrieks ripped out of your lungs and reverberated through the house. You winced as the basement door let out a hollow rattle when he collided with it, heart matching the rhythm of the skin on your feet slapping against old marble, thoughts disarrayed, frantic the closer you got to the front door.

Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! You were panting in unison with the vicious chants.

The doorknob was in your hand. The door was open—and it was thrown shut with the force of your body thrust against it, fingers wrenched off of the handle and enveloped in Montague's cold fingers as he pushed himself flush into you.

You felt his palm clamp around your mouth, whittling your screams into panicked whimpers, nostrils flaring with your ragged breaths.

"Ah, no, no." He had to stoop his neck to talk into your ears. "Shh, shh, shhh. Far too loud. I don't like screaming. Shh, shh, shhhh."

Tears seared red behind your eyes, making you think you could follow the warmth down your face as they filled the crevices in his hand. "It's really, truly a pity. She was a pretty one but far too smart. I'm usually decent at picking out the ones who wouldn't suspect anything or, at least, catching them before they try to scream.

"You'll have to forgive me. I swear to you I'm not ordinarily that messy. I prefer to keep everything tidy, especially so you don't have to go down there. After all, you're already so busy. You're already doing so much. I can't recall when I last saw you relax."

The weight of his palm softened, a wordless agreement that you honored with continued silence as he used that arm to lean against the door. His voice shifted around your head to your other ear. "That's it. Just wonderful. There's no need for screaming, is there? It's only the two of us."

"Are—are..." You couldn't get it out, lips and throat suddenly sucked dry. "Don't kill me, please. Please. Please."

His chest quaked while a subdued, eerily delighted laugh hissed through his lips. "Kill you? Oh, no, no, no. Never. How could I ever kill you when you're so remarkable? My home has never looked so beautiful and lived in. I'm enjoying how it looks with you in it."

You wilted away from his lips sinking to a spot below your ear, now taking far too much notice of his erection curving up along your lower back. It felt disgustingly wrong to wonder whether the violence and blood turned him on, or it was you and your fear. The man wasn't even human; that much was clear.

"What are you?" There was no shortage of daring questions in your arsenal. Montague was beginning to find the charm in them.

"That's quite difficult for me to answer." He let his chin lay on your shoulder. "I've been called many things over the centuries. I suppose the closest anyone has ever gotten is vampire, but even that's not quite right. You're free to guess as much as you'd like, though."

He was satisfied when you didn't, freeing the weight off of his arm to slide his hand under the hem of your shirt, fingertips still slick with that woman's blood as he explored your navel. You were too aware of the roundness of his fingernails stepping across your flesh, sometimes pressing deep, and other times a light touch you needed to scratch. His throat vibrated against your shoulder.

"What are you thinking? I'd love to hear it." He wanted to devour your fear in more ways than just feeling you wince. "Well? Tell me."

"I want to go." Go? Where could you possibly go that he couldn’t find you? If he ripped out the side of a woman's neck, he could track you down.

He leaned his cheek into your ear again, relishing the warmth that spread into him. "Where would you go? Who would you tell? Humor me, where is the first place you'd go?"

"The police," you said.

Montague let out a pleased hum. "Of course. It only makes sense to report a terrible scene such as that to them. Forensics and the police play together often, don't they?"

Your nod was weak.

"I know how hard you've been studying, how much stress you're under to commit to your degree, your work—to me." His hand crept along to your stomach, fingers splaying wide across the protective layer of skin and fat. "Let's say they were to find something I left behind. Who becomes a suspect in their eyes when they learn that I have someone who tidies up after me? Who knows the dirty insides of cleaning up anything and everything?"

You were starting to panic, fitfully struggling against his body. It's like he was made of stone. "They wouldn't accuse me of murdering anyone."

"Haven't you seen the news lately? Are you so sure?" he said derisively. "No, perhaps you're right. Maybe you'd be fortunate, and they wouldn't have your head for murder, but they would certainly try to peg you with something else. As an accomplice, maybe? And that's assuming that I don't disappear and let them rip you apart.

"Can you imagine it? Can you feel your heart break at the very thought of losing it all? Your degree? Your job? Safety? The world is cruel, darling. You'd never have another moment of peace or anonymity. Anywhere you'd go, you'd be found, every alias sullied with your sins. All because you decided to speak up about it."

You knew he meant to send you downstairs to do something about the mess, spend hours scrubbing and mopping until what had once been there was a secret that thickened your tongue and made it hard to swallow. No one would ever find out, but you would carry it in every waking thought until, one morning, the cute barista on Market Street had an eerie semblance to that dead woman, and the light roast in your hand suddenly looked so red.

"Thump. Thump. Thump." Montague mocked the heavy thrum of your heart behind your ribs, his cold fingers skimming your nipples before resting over your sternum. "You can go if you'd like, but I'll find you. I'll hear your little heart until it bursts and drag you right back here. You're mine."

The push of his body gradually faded away, giving your chest the room to expand, leaving you to gulp quivering, greedy breaths that didn't stop even as the pads of his feet grew distant.

He called back to you, "Give me ten minutes or so, and then come down."

You were already partway through the front door with your car keys to pop the trunk when, floating like a spectre's moans in still night air, his voice reached out once more, "You may want to clean up yourself first. You have blood all over your face."

༺ ♰ ༻

A damp towel came before your descent back into the basement. In tow on your shoulders were three bags of absorbent, the fancy stuff hospitals liked to use to throw on puke and piss and anything else they just lazily wanted to sweep around. It worked for blood in smaller quantities, blood that was still wet, anyway. The woman hadn't been dead long enough for her body fluids to dry, so you didn't anticipate needing anything except the basics stowed in your car trunk.

You weren't sure what you expected to see down there, noticing the lights were turned on high, fully illuminating the gray marble, the furthest reaches of the blood puddle with your slippers saturated dark red and ruined. What came as a shock was the woman's dead eyes and shredded neck being nowhere in sight. Montague had moved her body but to where?

For some reason, you were drawn to ridiculous spots like the walls, ceiling, and tiny cramped corners that he could have feasibly stuffed her in. There was no sickly trail of blood leading any which way, droplets only reaching as far as the stairs and first landing where you had been pursued—nothing else.

Where did he take her? Part of you was ready to turn a blind eye to all of this because you knew you would have to in order to keep everything. If you kept your head low and groveled a little bit, maybe he'd get bored and leave you alone, biding you the time you needed to finish your degree. But, that'd be two years of this.

You weren't sure you could stomach it.

As you moved granules of absorbent through blood with coarse bristles from the kitchen broomstick—shifting the puddle more than the actual absorbent—you wondered if he could hear your heart now from wherever he was.

You thought about a lot of things while letting your eyes roam the space. It was enormous, taking up the entire underside of the house, outfitted impressively with mahogany accents, sprawling bookshelves, armchairs, and loveseats pulled tight in leather and velvet. Across the room was a disheveled bed, creamy sateen sheets in a luscious heap but otherwise undisturbed.

To the adjacent end of this expanse were two doors you didn't notice at first, one a little taller than yourself in height, about as wide as any normal arm span, and looked old, so old that everything else was too new. Even from where you stood, you knew it'd take a skeleton key. The other door was more coherent with the rest of the basement, cleaner but certainly still part of the house's original construction.

By the time Montague had returned, you already had much of the ordeal pitched into a biohazard bag with some trace remnants putting you on your knees to scrub away. You hadn't realized he was even there until the tips of his shoes—brown leather loafers with a scalloped tassel near the toes—appeared in your peripheral, sending you launching back onto your hocks.

"This work is spectacular. I knew I had a good feeling giving that room to you." he said with a beguiling smile. All of the blood was gone; he was clean in a dark dressing robe with black trousers, a look you hated that you saw as alluring. "Don't forget to clean the floors upstairs. We made quite a mess there as well."

"What happened to that woman?" You were asking your pesky questions again. Montague wasn't so sure he found them as charming now, but you were still a prize.

You leaned away as he crouched in front of you, nearly risking the soles of his shoes in the blood and hydrogen peroxide. For the first time since meeting, you kept eye contact and saw that his reached a depth you didn't think could be possible for a human. He wasn't touching you, yet it felt like he had you caged, trapped in a vise that held you tight.

He did touch you then, grazing the side of your face with a thumb. Suddenly, he brought it to his lips and licked it as he rose to full height.

"You still had some blood just there on your cheek." There was an armchair a few feet away that he dropped into, withdrawing a gold compact from a chest pocket on his way down. "Don't worry. I wouldn't ask you to carry away the bodies. I'm not that Roman."

"That's not what I asked." you rejoined.

Montague tucked a cigarette between his lips, igniting it with a match he kept inside the compact. His first few puffs looked like they calmed him as he crossed a leg and settled deeper into the leather. "You shouldn’t expect answers to things you don’t need to know—or want to.”

But he humored you with a slight lean of his head towards the old door far away. "The original owner of this house was ingenious and built tunnels that were used to shuffle people in and out. Mistresses. Servants. More unsavory things—you must remember the era. At any rate, it stretches beyond the house and some ways off. I do not recommend ever going inside."

You understood now why you never saw any of the dates he brought home leave. And you believed every bit of his warning.

It inspired you to move away from the grim reality dwelling beyond that old door. You hovered over the same spot, drenching the floor with more of the disinfectant, grasping for a distraction. "I didn't know vampires could smoke. Isn't blood enough for you?”

Montague flicked his cigarette over an ashtray beside his chair. "Well, we all have our vices. Mine just happens to be five or six of these a day. Keeps enough of the edge off so you get to sleep at night."

Something about that comment made the entire stretch of the basement feel so confining—claustrophobic, even. Your back was wide open to it, to his ravening gaze and leather toe turning fluid circles as though to pace himself before lunging.

"I have class in six hours." You finished the job, tied the bag, and sprung straight up. "I'd like to get the upstairs done and take a shower."

"Of course. Try to get some sleep, you've had quite a night." He didn't move to see you out. "Oh, and leave the bag. I'll dispose of it."

༺ ♰ ༻

Meredith Nimu died approximately twenty-three days ago after a stroke left her immobilized in her favorite armchair. Her body wasn't peeled away from the murky-green polyester until day twenty-four, following enough neighbor complaints about a bunch of rats dying in the vents.

Getting rid of the chair was half the battle in this case, something that Meredith's overzealous, recently divorced daughter spouted off as sacrilegious. She insisted that the carpet cleaner she used for her obese dogs with raw patches on their legs could do it all. Your supervisor had been inflectionless when telling her it didn't work like that.

One of your teammates, a middle-aged black man affectionately nicknamed “Hoss” had unceremoniously slammed the apartment door shut and flipped the lock so the daughter's rancorous eruptions were somewhat contained outside. The other half of the duo responsible for pitching the chair, T.J., a white man who could never tan, wheezed out a laugh as he labored a hard bristle brush through the gunk left behind from Meredith's decay.

"Boss ain't gonna be happy about that." T.J. couldn't commit to the act of a brownnoser even if he wanted to. A couple more chortles rattled through his respirator. They were infectious, ridiculous sounds that coaxed similar from Hoss when he rejoined the effort to get the job done and over with.

You could still hear the daughter on the other side of the door, never once allowing your supervisor a word in edgewise. A part of you wanted to pity her, perhaps conjure up a shred of empathy for someone so completely enmeshed in the throes of grief and anger. She was clearly spiraling, her entire life yanked out from under her—and she was free-falling with nothing to catch her, no thin wire she could snag in the bend of her fingers and watch as the velocity of that cruelly, cleanly severed white tendon and bone.

Where would she fall after that? You didn't know. You didn't care. She could regain control over her life even without fingers, but what about you? No one understood how disconcerting it was to know that your survival depended on a vampire's good mood. An old woman was meant to expire, but you were young and had aspirations—yet that could be stolen from you just as quickly as a clot could kill the brain.

It wasn't fucking fair.

Hoss had called out to you repeatedly until the hard brushes stopped scratching the floor, and he and T.J. were settled back on their heels, staring at you. You were used to leveraging your commitments in life as a means to get them off your case, but even they could tell this was different.

"You've been real spacey lately." It was enough to gently reel you back to the moment, eyes unstuck from remnants of putrid matter hidden under a deluge of chemicals and soap. Now you were thinking that the landlord would probably have to replace this entire spot in the flooring. It would be an expensive fix.

"Everything okay at home?" Hoss tried again, emulating fatherly concern in his tone and sidelong stare. It was something he couldn't help since you were so similar in age to his adult kids. "I don't think I've seen you eat today. We oughta finish up here up and grab somethin' quick on the way back.”

"Sorry, yeah, it's just the usual things." They didn't know what that meant to you, but readily accepted with dour expressions masked by their respirators. "I think I saw a gyro truck down the street."

As many times as you had regurgitated the same thing when they pried into your well-being, you were surprised they still asked at all. That made it hard to wave after them as you pulled the lever to the trunk, waiting to be left alone once the job was done to stack half your weight in absorbent until the back bowed to it.

It was just past two in the morning when you were locking the front door of Montague's sprawling estate behind you. Every time you did, a part of you hesitated to seal it the whole way, as though if you did, your final traces of freedom would be stripped away entirely.

"Welcome home." Montague came out from prowling somewhere in the shadows, seeming to materialize from the darkest parts your eyes couldn't adapt to. He was in a dressing robe again, this one forest green with gold embroidery and a burgundy handkerchief tucked away nicely in his breast pocket.

He already had a cigarette lit between his knuckles, fussing with the little stick as he went to an open window, sucked in, and expelled pungent gray smoke. "I apologize. There's a bit of a mess for you tonight. It's unlike me to be so untidy, but it shouldn't take you too long—oh, darling, don't make that face."

"Why can't you get blood from other sources, like a blood bank?" It's been on your mind for a while, but Montague had a habit of turning petulant if you asked him too much.

He was in good shape tonight, though, despite still puffing away antsily. "Where's the satisfaction in simply being given what I want? Blood banks are a finite supply, but out there"—he gestured through the open window—"there is an infinite supply from any walk of life that I so choose. Did you know that not all blood is equal?"

You sensed him at your back, awash with that same vulnerability as the night on your knees in the basement. He strolled along with you while you collected your things, examined his leftovers, which fortunately wasn't as sensational as before. It looked like a Rorschach inkblot almost, purple-red and pristine, obviously untouched for some time.

Just like that dead blonde woman, there was nothing left behind of the victim except what Montague was too careless to handle himself.

"The worst blood is what you find in hospitals or on the streets. It doesn't matter their type; it all tastes like shit." he continued, even while you worked. Just like before, he sat himself nearby and observed your process with gross fascination. "In a pinch, though, I do what I must. It doesn't matter if a man is homeless or a woman is looking for a night out. When I hear their hearts dance, that thump, thump, thump—oh, I have to have it. I can taste them through their skin, even before I sink my teeth in.

"The fear in their eyes. The ragged breaths I see in their chests, watching their bellies pulse. I like to think in those moments they know exactly what's going to happen, like little flies in a spider's web."

Montague let more smoke slither out from his lips in skinny, swirling wisps that dissipated once it touched the air. The haze of it remained, just traceable to your eye. "I always find it interesting that they all struggle, even as they're writhing in their own blood. Sometimes I'll count how long it takes for them to die."

These weren't confessions of a madman because that would imply he was human. He was treating you akin to the way an old man recounted the fondness of his flawed, flickering memories. There were sensations of joy and affection in the work he did, a true love and visceral desire for carnage and suffering that made it hard for you to stomach. A few times throughout his soliloquy, you needed to bear your weight on the kitchen broom to keep yourself from toppling from nausea.

You shouldn't have been curious. "Has anyone ever survived?"

The surrounding space grew darker, not from loss of light but from the way his lower face sunk behind the hand wielding the cigarette. You saw his smile widen through sickly appendages and faint smoke.

His response pierced straight through you. "I'm looking right at it."

Suddenly, the urge to run rushed forefront in your mind, an instinctual reaction that you had trouble wrestling over with logic. The broomstick was easily pulled from your fingers and discarded onto the floor with a reverberating clatter that made your spine race with cold needles. Montague stepped into your proximity.

You shivered against the hands slowly climbing your neck to the underside of your jaw, cradling your face as he lifted it to meet his eyes. Something was so wrong with how black they were; you didn't see a pupil, nor did your reflection stare back at you in them. It's almost as though there was nothing there at all, the dark of them growing into an abysmal chasm that made your vision cross and blur, eyelids weighing like lead when you felt him kiss you.

His lips were the same kind of cold as the rest of him but full and unrelenting, never granting you the chance to mold the kiss in any other way. Surprisingly, the taste of stale smoke on his breath was just slight, a mediocre vexation you overlooked the moment his hands started groping you under your clothes.

And you didn't think much of it when your back settled into the clean linens on your bed, skin flushed with the crisp evening air and lips mapping their way south across your stomach and navel, delving lower to your core. It was too dark in your room to see down your body at the top of Montague's head, but you felt him with your fingers, coiling pieces of his ash-brown hair to your knuckles while he pushed your thighs wide open for him.

An anxious patter swelled in your chest, a vague understanding that something was horrible about this, but you were too wrapped up in a dreamy fog to think about it. More than the resounding boom of your heart, you heard your own breaths dissolve into lewd moans and slurred pleas for him to do more, more, more.

It didn't sound like you. It didn't feel like you despite knowing that build-up in your abdomen better than most things in your body. The hands in his hair, the back bending off of the mattress like an archway, the shaking limbs, and the cries begging for more were someone else entirely up until the very moment rapture fluttered behind your eyes in searing white, body deluged in hot release that left your scalp tingling and toes curling and spend on your sheets.

"Give me more." You tasted him again, his tongue pushing hard into your mouth where those salty notes of yourself lingered on your cheeks. His silhouette melded with the rest of the room, tangible only in the way he roamed every surface of you.

Montague had shucked the clothes from both your bodies earlier, preferring to lean into the flush of heat you radiated. Everything was only skin-deep away from him; he could feel your pulse throb on his lips when he teased himself against your carotid, your radial, trailing all the way to the powerful beat of your femoral nestled there in your groin.

His teeth came close many times to piercing you, allowing him a sliver of a taste like a parched king waiting for a drop of golden wine. But half the thrill of having you around was denying himself of you, knowing well that if he were to start, then he'd never be able to stop, and he'd fully hamper your dreams of escaping.

The air smelled like you now, heavy and like damp skin and your fluids soaking into the linens. He watched your face bunch and fall apart when he split you open with his cock, hips colliding, your skin sure to bruise as his thrusts turned savage. There wasn't much left in his heart anymore. Most of it had atrophied over the centuries, and yet the sound of yours spurred him on.

He could follow the path of your blood through your body, an extensive subject he had studied and dissected at length in his lifetime. The most vulnerable spots were gorged and worked the hardest, almost glowing red through your skin for him. When he thrust a little bit harder, a little bit faster, and felt your fingertips pushing against his chest, he heard your heart be the loudest it ever had been.

"That's it. That's it. That's it." His own breaths were ragged now. The sheer exhilaration of pushing his lips deeper, hot sweat leaving a slick layer on them, and that one big artery in your neck pounding out was doing everything for him.

Your frantic pants were a close second. He could feel you unraveling, tightening around his cock until you were soundlessly writhing on the mattress, clutching anything you could bunch together. The final few thrusts he made were purposeful; they were forceful and jolted your body, a show to make sure you wouldn't forget the feeling of him inside of you.

The clean linens were sodden with cum, some still dripping out of you while you lay there, legs splayed enough so you wouldn't feel it stick to your thighs. Whatever haze had been hanging over your eyes before lifted away, leaving you ruined and exhausted on the sheets but not alone.

"You've got class in a few hours, don't you?" Montague said from above, shoulders nestled in your headboard while one leg hung off the side of the bed. He was smoking again, acting the calmest you had witnessed him. "I don't really think you're in any shape for that. Why don't you stay home today?"

You were too spent to respond to him, somehow using the occasional breaths he blew out into the vast room to lull you into a dreamless sleep.

༺ ♰ ༻

Shin Nakamura had been a selfish man in life. Mid-fifties, thinning hair, and twice divorced from women who knew better—his tenants did not. He had built a reputation on the north side of town for hidden costs and faulty appliances that were never fixed. Once or twice in the past four years you had cleaned up scenes, they came out of Nakamura's buildings in the summertime, stuck to the floor and infested with maggots and flies in different orifices.

Everyone had asked at one point, yourself included, how he was able to get away with that level of blatant cruelty and disregard—and the answer was as simultaneously simple, complex, and terrible as poverty. The north end was an area notorious for local crime and violence, but more than that, it was forgotten in favor of gentrifying other areas of the city—pretty little boutiques that'd make a splash on social media and a couple of upscale dining spots, all of those meant to change the online scales deeming an area's walkability, and therefore, profitability.

The blind eye most city commissioners turned to the north end made it an easy life for Shin to do as he pleased without many consequences despite living in the area himself. Most of everyone found it an odd sort of justice when he was discovered in his office, unrecognizable from how badly the dozens of stab wounds had disfigured his face and body. One look was enough to know that it was personal, a tenant who had received their condemnation via a neon-pink eviction letter hastily taped to an off-white door.

Only, this time, Shin chose a person backed into a corner at their breaking point. There wasn't much left to lose, yet Shin had ultimately lost it all. Rumor had it that no one sold out the tenant who committed the crime, something even the more moralistic part of yourself could fathom. These were the cases that painted a grim picture of your future in forensics and often speared to the front of your mind at the worst of times—could you really be part of the reason why a person shattered by the powers of society goes to jail?

Shin Nakamura was a terrible man, but were his crimes punishable by that sort of torture? What about the tenants who probably heard Shin screaming for help, crying in agony—were they any better than murderers themselves?

What did that mean for you? An accomplice who quietly scrubbed clean murders at a monster's behest, you allowed those people to be swallowed up by Montague under a guise of fear, or was it selfishness?

That discomfort lasted you your entire shift, like an incredibly nauseating pill with a bad smell that sat in your nose for hours. You couldn't wipe away the thoughts like you could dried blood on smoke-stained walls or lumps of serrated flesh and fat wedged between slabs of wood on the floor.

"Man, he coulda been cleaner about this." T.J. had his feet planted solidly on the middle step of a ladder, well at work with a long-handled brush pushed flat to the ceiling. The splatter had gone that far, earning a few awestruck coos from him and Hoss earlier. "It would've made our lives easier."

It was a normal joke. You'd laughed at the exact same one many times before, even finessed your own commentary in there on occasion because the dead can't sue, and a murderer had no rights—but now, you thought it'd taste bad on your tongue.

The two hulking men noticed, far sharper than you gave them credit for. Or maybe you were just worse at hiding things than you thought. They didn't allude to anything until everyone was packed up in the van, dried from the sweaty protective suits and summer heat by the AC.

"Listen, it ain't my business, and I swear I've been trying my best not to ask." There was a furtive look linked between Hoss and T.J.; it was something they had talked about when you weren't around. "That guy you're living with. He isn't doing anything to you, right? You used to talk about him all the time in the beginning. Haven’t heard a peep about him in ages. God, you're not living in your car, are you?"

From the outside in, you weren't doing much to try to embellish fancy stories and reasons onto your drastic change over the months. You simply let it be and navigated every day with the hope you'd remember where you were going with your head down. It probably didn't look too good to a paternal man like Hoss, and to T.J., who had several younger siblings.

"No, it's not him—" But, of course, it really was and everything surrounding his cruelty, everything he made you do, and what you never refuted. "I'm just perpetually exhausted. I'm sure you've heard that from Sylvie and Deshaun while they've been in uni."

"All the damn time." Hoss beamed, chest perked a little higher with the mention of his children. It wasn't enough to diffuse the tension lingering in the van, however. "Just know, I'd do for you what I'd do for my babies—put the fear of God in that man. If he puts a finger on you, you let me know."

T.J. gave an agreeable hum, fingers sticking to the steering wheel as he moved them around, making a turn down some street. "We'll catch him by surprise and everything. I'll call in a couple favors, grab a few shovels and bags of cement from my dad's place. It's all good."

For some reason, their entire spiel only spiked your uneasiness, and suddenly you were far too aware of your bladder. It was enough initiative for T.J. to floor the gas and get back to headquarters, giving you the chance to break away and race the remnants of daylight all the way home.

༺ ♰ ༻

It had never happened before, but you managed to catch Montague by surprise when he walked through the front door to find you standing there in the foyer. The kitchen broom wrapped in your hands was a nasty ploy, along with the look you cast between him and a young man not any older than yourself. Again, just like all the others, you didn't recognize him. Montague's victims were fast, fleeting fixations for him, none worthy of names or an identity in his eyes. You suspected this guy was much the same.

Montague's bewilderment was swept away by a smile and laxing posture. He had settled back into his element. "You're home early today. I didn't expect to see you until much later. Not much to the scene, I assume?"

"It was pretty bad." A certain stiffness trailed on the end of your words, letting them echo through the hall and hang in the cool evening air. The young man was fast to perceive that tension: the tightness in your shoulders, fingers subtly wringing against the cracked wooden broom. Montague's anticipative smile climbed higher the longer he looked at you.

Would it be such a bad thing to turn around and pretend you had never seen him come home with that other man? You considered doing it, hiding upstairs and using your headphones until everything seeping through turned into an amalgamation of ambient noise that meant nothing to you, and you willed away the guilt like you'd always done.

In that moment, you thought about Meredith Nimu's apoplectic daughter, a woman so embittered by her own suffering that she was foul and relentless to anyone she crossed paths with. You thought about Shin Nakamura, a greedy, pitiless man who'd rather let coroners scrape up his tenant's remains rather than grant them mercy while they were alive and had been left in pieces because of it.

You thought of them and all their wickedness and edged your gaze towards the young man still standing in the doorway with his hand holding it ajar, clean fingernails picking at chipping paint, just steps from outside. "I think you should leave."

Run! Run! You'd better run away as fast as you can! Nothing would stop Montague from keeping his prey there, if that's what he chose to do. He did the opposite of that, and that was, simply, nothing at all. No pretty blandishments, nor a mouthful of teeth. Rather, now, he was particularly piqued by what you were trying to do.

To the young man, he had meddled into something rather egregious, probably convinced it was extramarital. You battled a surge of pride blooming inside you, shifting your chest a little higher, anchoring your spine back into your body.

"Don't come back here." You didn't need to say anything else. He was gone after pinching out a look of disgust towards Montague, tutting at him with his upper teeth showing through a curled lip.

Nothing happened for a while, not until the front door was secured after his departure. You were left to that responsibility, triple-checking the lock, while Montague ambled deeper into the house, but not too far away as you could follow the leisurely path by his heel strike. There was a rhythm in how he moved. It was deliberate, as though mimicking something.

It took you five paces to figure out he was miming your heartbeat, and he only stopped once it quickened in your chest. He appeared from around the corner, still taking his time reaching you, toying with some trinkets displayed on shelves built into alcoves throughout the lower floor.

You couldn't explain what you were feeling at that moment. Of the thousands—maybe millions—of victims Montague had taken in the previous times, you had just deprived him of one. That man would continue living, and he would tell his friends tomorrow about the weird night he had, and he would never have to be grateful that you saved him from a hellish death.

Yes, oh yes. Even as Montague approached you, carried by his deft gait with both halves of his gold compact open in his palm, you couldn't help but be in complete awe of yourself. A life continued outside of this mausoleum, and it was all because of you. You were entirely different from Meredith Nimu's daughter and Shin Nakamura, and, for once, your hands weren't sullied by bleach, blood, and body matter.

All that heaviness you had been carrying was suddenly so much lighter, and you felt like your chest could open up as wide as the room where you stood. The breaths you took were dry and cold in your throat, yet fresh as though you were walking outside in wintertime.

Montague must've seen something he didn't like on your face because he sucked down on his cigarette for a while, winding his wrist with it at his side once he was adequately calm.

"Did it feel good? I've only seen you this happy while I was fucking your brains out." It was jarring to hear him talk like that. He took another quick drag and let it out slowly as he rounded you. "Truthfully, darling, I didn't think you were the type to break the rules—on purpose, anyway. But I suppose we all get a little wound up every now and then, right? I've already forgiven you."

And then, you watched him drop the cigarette to the marble and snuff it underfoot until the weak ember was turned to soot. A black smear was left behind when he took his foot away. His stare into you was unwavering. "Clean it up."

You figured this was how a frightened animal felt when it wanted something within reach of an observant predator because you were trying to think of all the ways to get close without getting too close. It was a pitiful, humorous sight to him, seeing your steps forward so light and on the verge of bolting. But he showed no intention of doing anything more.

Still with the broom in hand, your knuckles turned stark around the handle while sweeping the remains towards you. It would take more elbow grease to get up that smudge, and he knew that just as well.

He reached for the broom and snapped it to a halt, making you jump, jaw clenching. A noiseless gasp lurched in your throat, his fingers wound tight into the hair at your crown as he yanked your head back to show all the fleshiness of your neck.

"What will you do about it, darling?" His lips were already cold and flush to the artery dancing in the curvature built of skin, muscle, and tendon. Your teeth chattered as the wetness of his tongue followed that intricate, breathtaking network inside of you as far as the neckline of your shirt would let him. "A man has to eat. Have you ever seen it? A man near starvation and the sorts of things he'll do to survive? Why, I've heard stories of desperate, little men eating their own lovers—their children—themselves just to claw around for a little longer. It's inspiring, I think."

He dragged you away then, up the stairs and through the hallway on the second floor to your bedroom, fingers still nested your hair until the moment you were shoved down onto fresh linens. There wasn't anywhere for you to go once he joined you on the mattress, feeling it bend towards his weight.

"Don't be afraid." he said this with all the fond familiarity of a lover, blunt fingernails digging crescents into your thigh through your clothes. In the waning moonlight that filtered through the dusty window over your bed, his pale eyeshine snared you like roots bursting from somewhere within your busy sheets to keep you there—keep you tame. "That's right. Come to me. Come to me."

There was a new drowsiness behind your eyes, one you couldn't stave by blinking. Montague's face was closer now, and you were struck with just how beautiful he actually was. The longer your gaze lasted, tips of your fingers exploring every shape and edge of his exquisite features, the less you were convinced he was a threat to you—that he couldn't have possibly been all that you'd feared up until now.

"I want you." His lips inched up like he expected you to say it. He felt your hands rest on the sides of his face, guiding him down into a soft kiss that he returned, that he kept clean and let you command until he was bored with it. You chased after him, lower lip pulled between both of yours and eventually out of reach. "Don't you want me too?"

"I wish you could understand just how much I do." He rummaged his pocket for the gold compact, losing it somewhere in the sheets, and then busied himself with stripping himself and you of clothes. Each piece discarded showed a greater expanse of your skin, a delight in his eyes because he could see that gorgeous webbing of arteries and veins throughout you, even in the darkness, through every defense your body created to protect you from every bacteria, virus, infection—from him.

He didn't need the breath, but he took one and held it anyway. You withered against his touch, those freezing, lithe fingertips traveling down all the areas where he wished his teeth could be, clear down to your groin. His smile stretched, feeling you search eagerly for a fistful of his hair with his lips smoothing across your inner thigh and then going higher.

There was warmth between your legs, a colorless glisten that leaked out onto the thin sheets, darkening a spot on them that tempted his tongue out for a taste. He came close to entertaining the notion of giving you that glimpse of heaven, allured by your hips leaping off the mattress and against his face.

"You really do think this is all about you." Montague kept you still by pressing down into your abdomen as he rose onto his knees, erection fitting tight between your bodies in the moments before he guided himself lower and hitched up into you. The sharp motion knocked a startled gasp out of your throat, where it quickly dissolved into a slew of filth and breathy panting. Your nails clawed into your palms, a sight he thought to make worse by digging himself deeper into you.

Montague had no issues biding his time this way, looming over the sprawl of your body beneath him, manipulating parts of you until he saw your face flinch and the first moans of discomfort shake all the way from your chest, up, and through your teeth. They matched the pace of his hard thrusts, smothered by sharp slaps of skin that carried in the inky air.

Indeed, I can wait. That thought of his unsatiated hunger melted in the back of his mind with the precedence of arranging the course of blood in your body. The drum of your heartbeat was deafening to him, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't loud enough. He wanted to be able to envision the arteries and veins bursting in his teeth, saturating the sheets and walls and both your bodies in hot red. He wanted it to paint his skin while he fucked you to absolution.

"It really, truly, is all about you in the end, isn't it?" He could still speak clearly, despite you being unable to utter noise beyond the air being forced out of your lungs. "You really are magnificent. How could I ever think to let you go? Not after everything you've done for me, how beautiful you look next to all of my things."

His hand shifted away from your abdomen at last, tracking across the soft span of your stomach and the muscles spasming there under his fingertips. All he would have to do is dig through you a little bit, and he could bury himself in those twitching fibers and insides. But he continued on his path to your pert nipples that he rolled against his palm a few times, higher still to fold his fingers together against your sternum where he felt your heart thundering there against your ribs.

"Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump," came his mocking chant that cracked into raspy moans as he lingered there. It had been a long time since something had made him feel this good. He had forgotten what bliss was truly like.

He reached your neck before long, trapping the underside of your jaw against his knuckles, forcing you to see him as his weight bore down on your throat. You both heard the cartilage and muscle in your neck shift, a subtle crack that sent your limbs flailing. You were thrown out of the rhythm of his thrusts in an attempt to grab at him.

"You really are despicable, aren't you?" He let out a gleeful laugh, letting your fingers turn ashen while you wrung his wrist. You weren't able to do much with your legs except use them to plant your heels into the mattress, vaulting your hips in the air to try to wrench yourself free. His cock slipped out of you, but he was hardly bothered by that. "Does it feel good that you chased off my guest? I could get him back, you know. You're aware of this. I know you are. But righteousness just feels so… rewarding, doesn't it? You couldn't resist. Desperation must've been eating you alive."

Strings of saliva glistened in your mouth, breaking apart the further your jaws spread. You were convinced, in that moment, that you would die like that in a silent scream. None of the words that Montague spoke truly reached you, not as your chest quivered and lungs burned as though swallowed in an inferno.

"Every misdeed in life vastly outweighs the good, you know? The scales have never been leaned in our favor—not I, and especially not for you. If that's the sort of thing you believe in. Isn't that what you're taught? Goodness for the sake of salvation at the end of a short life of inhibitions? How miserable." Montague took his hand off of you and let you breathe. You sucked in crisp air, gasping from your side through wet coughs and the sourness of vomit spat out on the floor.

Your respite was brief, weight on the mattress shifting as the hair on your scalp was used to lever you to your knees, body suspended upright only by his fingers tangled at your roots.

"This is all I can see." Montague loosened his hand from your head, moving south along your spine to your ass. He kneaded the bruised parts of your hips for a while after, lips ghosting their way along your neck up to the ear. "All I can see is what's right in front of me. And how it tastes. All that matters is that I have my fill—and that I feel good."

He smeared slick into the heel of his palm, rolling the head of his cock in that mess as he instructed you with every bit of lewdness how he wanted you to bend against the headboard, how far apart for you to spread your legs for him.

Every bit of it was humiliating for you, while he wished he could memorialize that moment of sinking back inside of you as your breaths broke into stifled sobs, face warped by anguish.

"Does it hurt? Tell me, I have to know, what does it feel like?" He enjoyed the suspense of not receiving an answer, listening as your fingernails dug tracks into the wood headboard and the dark room filled with obscene wetness that grew louder as his thrusts turned wild.

"Mmm—" He hinged forward, bracing his weight on top of your hands with his own. You shied from the surge of coolness that came with his cheek pressing yours. "You and I aren't so different. It makes me wonder if you actually like this. Isn't there something so freeing about it?"

"Mer—mercy, please." It was a coarse whisper from your dry throat, so much of your time having been spent with your mouth agape. The idea of having you that way was as tantalizing as all the others he thought up. "Montague, please—mercy."

Oh, now you were begging.

This was more than what he deserved. He managed a few more thrusts, spilling over into you by the third with a moan that he felt no shame to leave ringing in your ear. "Every part of you, every single part—I'll burn myself into your skin and your bones. You'll feel me in your veins, your blood. I'll make for certain that I'm all you remember—forever."

The vastness of your bedroom had grown warmer, permeated with the thickness of sweat and salt that left your palms slick against the headboard. You let your body slump against it, skin sticking to the wood. It didn't offer you the relief you wanted at that moment: a glass of ice water, all the tenderness of a soft bed to lull you into a blank dream—you just wanted to rest.

Montague knew this just as well, fishing his compact out from a muddled heap of linens and clothes. He checked inside to grab one of the two cigarettes left, making a mental note he'd need to replenish again tomorrow before lighting it and savoring it. At this rate, he anticipated he'd be empty before the end of the night.

For a while, he sat there cushioned on his haunches, admiring the way the smoke coiled towards the ceiling in dainty wisps and mingled with the stench of sex.

"It's not enough." he said, barely eliciting more than a glance from you. His current cigarette was already burnt to the filter, forcing him to pull the last and light that one too. "This is my last one. Such a shame."

You smelled the smoke strongly now, just seconds passing before you were yanked across the bed onto your back, the soreness in your scalp near excruciating as you yelped. Montague made a place for himself between your thighs again, leering down the length of his nose at you.

If he wanted to, he could trace the dread etched in your features with a finger, feeling all along your hot skin, into all the cavernous lines he wished he could preserve—right there, just like that. There had never been a more gorgeous visage than the one you wore right now. Only your gleaming, glowing, pink insides were more beautiful.

He watched your lips twitch while he teased a fistful of his hard cock against your sorest spot. You were swollen and bruised, and he could only imagine what it felt like when he bottomed out in you again.

The curve of your spine arched off the mattress, fingers frantically raking the air at him, reaching for any part you could sink into to get him out. Even your body seemed determined for the same, wonderfully stimulating walls squeezing around him.

It made a shiver roll all along his spine to his tailbone, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling, with his first thrusts feeling positively divine. Especially when you jolted, an almost exaggerated response amplified by jagged cries and wet gasps you couldn't seem to swallow back down into your chest.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry—" You sputtered around the mucus piled in your throat. "Montague, I'm sorry. Please, stop."

He had burned away half of his last cigarette when he leaned over you, his body eclipsing what poor light had managed to illuminate the room for you. You could only follow the dainty mesmerizing glow that worked away from his mouth—his exhale barely masking a moan that he blew away with the smoke—and towards you.

"Keep doing it." His other hand was crawling up your neck, forcing you to suck in a hard breath. "Beg me again. Keep doing it."

All sound but the steady pulse of the headboard striking the wall had deadened, lasting well until the moment the cigarette touched your skin—and you screamed. Your throat vibrated, suddenly stopping when his palm closed around you again, silencing all your noise, his thrusts sloppy and rough while you thrashed under him.

This time, he kept you pinned by his chest, letting your feet dig for traction and slip and slide on the sheets. The bright smolder turned dark as he twisted it into your neck, taking all the remnants of restraint he had not to drill into you as far as it could go. He curled his tongue behind his jaws, keeping them tight.

Montague let go of your throat to allow you the grace of a stifled wail before that same hand sealed your lips. "Ah, ah. You know better than to scream. Shh, shhh, shhh. It's such an ugly sound."

He rubbed the cigarette into your skin until it crumpled, leaving him to lament for a moment once flicking it away to the floor. For him, it left behind a beautiful burn: raw, mad, red, and enticing. As his hand fell off of your mouth, daring you to do more than whimper and cry, his tongue was already flat against your wound.

"Oh, God," you wheezed, voice hoarse and jarring with the force of his hips knocking into you. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry! Stop, stop, stop! I swear I'll never do it again! I swear. I swear!"

Montague caught the wrist you swung at his head, giving the taste of your seared flesh time to settle on his palate before turning towards the pulse in your thumb. He tried to match how he was fucking you out to how it throbbed on his lips.

"Oh, I'm well aware that you won't do it again. That much is a given." His strokes into you were suddenly languid and intentional, so achingly deep that your eyes rolled back. "I've already said that you're forgiven, haven't I?"

You could barely speak over the depth he reached. It didn't feel right. "Th-then, why?"

A smile flourished across his face, but your eyes couldn't pierce that dark veil to see it. You could feel the damp path he left on your wrist, how the muscle writhed all around the sprawl of your veins, going as far as to wind your fingertips before it receded back behind his lips.

"Because I'm enjoying myself." There was a weight of finality to those words before his mouth engulfed the side of your wrist, away from your fragile network of bluish-purplish channels. And when he bit into you, it was the incisors that sank through.

You didn't know what it was. A clamp seized you by the neck like his fist, steeling itself there and robbing you of a scream. The pain was unlike anything else—paralyzing and deep, like a pair of sharpened, narrow skewers made of molten fire piercing you with such an agonizing ache that you could do nothing but lay there.

But you still felt everything he was doing. His thrusts had grown truly vicious, chasing a high that came as the warmth of your blood seeped from a pair of punctures he had created. The steady flow he fed from was something he lapped on at his leisure. Enough of it streaked the length of your arm and dripped onto your bedding, onto your naked, warm skin when he guided the fall over your neck and chest, south to your stomach and abdomen. He let it fill and pool the seams of his fingers while smearing it with the fluids between your bodies.

At last, breaking the trance to speak, feebly, in between intermittent pockets of pain and numbness rolling through you, you asked with some hopefulness, "Are you going to kill me?"

"You? Kill you?" Montague dropped your wrist. It felt like a limp, dead thing that didn't belong to you. He dove at your neck for those drops he teased himself with, nudging your chin high with his nose to reach it all. "Death would mean letting you go. You're all mine, darling. Whatever other existence waits beyond death will never have you."

His tongue wet a trail to your chin, collecting a watery essence of blood and spit that he pushed into your mouth. Your lips were sealed by his ravenous kiss, relenting to the thickness of his tongue swirling the taste into your cheeks and down your throat, a nauseating intermix of iron and stale smoke that lingered and made you pucker.

And then, you heard him back in your ear, craning his neck only as far as to aggravate the cigarette burn with his breath. It gave several angry throbs. The weight of his body was almost flush on you, spreading the blood around as though your skin together was a single canvas.

To his eyes, it bloomed breathtakingly, seeping into every crevice, pore, and scratch that made up your design, an impermanent stain that he could saturate you in again and again and again. The things he whispered in your ear were vile and wicked, all on unlabored breaths while his strokes turned sluggish and stayed seated deep inside you until the final hitch of his hips left you full of him.

"I don't think you should go to work today."

You were only scarcely coherent of him—or anything for that matter—eyes unmoving from the black void above and unfeeling of how he chose to manipulate your body, still, hours later. All you could think about was the flutter of your lashes weighing down heavily over your eyes and how this world only survived on suffering such as yours.

༺ ♰ ༻

A small pile of things was arranged fussily in a duffle bag Hoss had given the day you returned to work after an impromptu leave of absence. It had only lasted three days, just enough time to acclimate to the pain that seemed to synchronize to every part of your body, throbbing everywhere, all at once, and at times with sharpness so great it toppled you to the ground. You could only lay there—wherever you dropped, on whatever cold slab of marble or concrete until it dissipated, unfurling from your limbs and organs to a rapturous wave of relief that melted the tension out of you.

It had only happened once while at work on a scene amidst a balmy summer night and came out of nowhere like an electric shock surging to your fingertips and toes, a hammer landing on your bones and leveling you on the sidewalk leading back to the company van. And that was all it took to incur a ruinous sort of anger in the two hulking men.

"You're going to take this bag, pack some shit, and you're leaving. Tonight." Hoss had to shake out the dust on the old duffle bag he pulled from somewhere in his car. "You ain't gonna tell me the reason, but I know he did something to you. T.J.'s calling in a favor."

"No. Don't—don't do anything. Don't try to come to the house—" There was a bandage around your wrist that you couldn't stop fiddling with. "I don't know what'll happen if you do. Just fucking don't."

"Nah, not us." T.J. slapped his phone back into the clip on his belt loop, eyeing the motions of your fingers on your wrist uneasily. "One of my old buddies—name's Roscoe—said he wants to handle it. Apparently, he and your guy have a history of some kind. He says to be ready to go by three."

The meaning behind what he said was left nebulous and concerning to you, even after you returned home with the duffle bag and started pulling things from your closet. Some ways across your room, high up on the wall and out of your reach was a clock. Its monotonous ticking brought your eyes over to it.

It was just after one-thirty, still enough time to change your mind if you wanted to. There was something so effortlessly easy about following along to the whims of other people. It felt safe, reassuring—their confidence was infallible. Not once in four years had T.J. or Hoss given you a reason to doubt their intentions, but right now, it boiled over in your mind.

But where will I go? What am I going to do? He'll find me. He'll find me. Montague would find you, but he wouldn't stop you from leaving. You could see it with clarity—him perched on the armrest of a chair, watching you walk through the door. He'd give you a headstart, a few days, maybe a few weeks.

You weren't sure you knew what to do without him. There was nowhere else in the world you could go, no one you could confide in that wouldn't be destroyed. He would keep your heart beating all the while breaking you apart until he had his fill, reminding you that this was how it was meant to be. This was how he showed you how you belonged.

And you—silly little you with your consciousness floating on the fringes of inscrutable ecstasy and some personal purgatory built on agony in your bones and blood—would believe him.

"Going on a trip?" His voice drifted to you from the doorway, far sweeter than it usually was. "I wish you would've told me. I can't imagine what it'll be like without you here in this house. You breathe life into it."

He was lured over by your silence, fitting his fingers between your shoulder blades to push along your spine, easing away the discomfort that had settled there. It was hard not to lean into that relief, a misstep that shattered any lasting hold of willpower when he stooped his neck to sweep you into a kiss.

"Why don't you stay instead?" He knew you wouldn't be coming back, not without dragging you back himself. "Stay with me instead. Right here. In this bed."

"Montague, stop—" He pressed down harder on your lips so those words withered into guttural frustration in your throat.

The duffle bag was flung far away, opening space on your bed for him to lay you out and begin to unravel the bandages around your wrist. Once he had access, his mouth was already full against the two puncture sites.

"Stay." He wasn't playing coy now. "I'll take care of you. It wasn't enough before. I can see that now. What can I do? It'd be too easy to break your legs. What if I chained you to this bed? What if I locked you up in this room? I wouldn't mind keeping you downstairs with me, but it would be too cold for you, I think."

"I want to leave." you said, mustering your composure through tight lips while he teased the infected purple holes with his flatter teeth. "Let me go."

He smiled derisively. "I don't think you know what you want."

"I—" You balked at him, reiterating with a stumble, "I—I just want to leave. Get off."

"How will you ever survive without me?" You didn't know if you'd be able to. "You'll be all alone, all alone in a world that's just ready to tear you open and spit you back out. I've told you before: Society doesn't reward virtue over vice—only those who play along. You won't last, not after you've known and tasted me."

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything, whereas he swelled like a man who had salvaged a victory, lying himself down to kiss you again—

And then, the doorbell rang with an immense melancholic echo that you could feel vibrate up your arms and legs. Nearly a year later, you were hearing it for the first time and grasping onto the lapels of his suit vest, keeping him still when you remembered T.J.'s promise.

"Ignore it." you said.

"We have a guest—" Something in his tone made your stomach clench. "It's not polite to leave them waiting, especially at this hour."

Montague had untangled himself from you and was gone before you could stop him. Another wave of pain put you on the floor when you moved. Drool piled from your mouth. An ache so unreal pounded in the wrist he had played with. The crawl to your duffle bag was far, arduous in that every inch felt like carrying stones on your back.

I'm going to die. I might as well already be dead. You didn't have any more time to wait, so you slung the strap over your shoulder and used the wall to guide you along the quiet hallway, bumping into every pedestal and display where Montague's most treasured things had stayed undisturbed.

You were one of them, something he could keep on the second floor with the rest of his stuff, but unlike brittle porcelain and fraying embroidery—he could break you as much as he wanted, again and again and again, and fit you back whole. He could do it forever while you wasted, longing for an end he would never give you.

But as you crept along the bleak wallpaper and all of his curios, you were so gentle with them, steadying any wobbling base or piece as you went. The central staircase was close, voices at the bottom of it faint and unintelligible, drifting alongside you as though part of the house—

The air exploded. Just once. A single gunshot brought back all the alertness to your body, neck and shoulders at full length, pain dulled to where you could shuffle faster and look off the bannister at the landing below.

Montague was staring back up at you from the floor, entirely still and soundless. His jaw was unhinged, askew, frozen in a position that should've been impossible. A black hole gaped between his eyes, but didn't bleed.

"If you're not ready, that's going to be bad news." Another man stood nearby sheathing a gun, unfamiliar and yet with sameness in the way his gaze felt hollow and reached through you. "I'm repaying my debts. I'd like to make good on this one."

You were slow descending the stairs, even slower while you rounded Montague's body and denied yourself the chance to stop. Something invisible wanted to pull you to him, plow your knees into hard marble and weep over his chest. However, your insides bending in disgust and twinges in your bones kept you onward.

This man, Roscoe, was just as sickly-seeming and gray as the other, every slot of space on his arms and neck filled with images of religious iconography and portraits of saints—Mary being the only one you recognized with just a glance. It was tempting to touch him, something he noticed and stepped out of your reach.

"Is there another way out of here?" He made a weak motion towards the front door just ajar, but his eyes were stuck on the wrist wounded and unusable to you now. "We need to go. Now."

You were racking your brain for an answer, turning half-circles in place before pointing to the archway with a clock. "There's a backdoor, but the yard is fenced in and there's nothing but forest for three miles. There's also—"

Roscoe waited expectantly, ushering you to continue when he went for the gun in its holster. "Start moving, we'll figure it out." He unloaded another round into Montague's head, a near indecipherable twitch in the fingers made the hair on your neck shoot straight out. "Silver only keeps him down. It won't kill him. Go!"

"Th—there's, there's the basement." You smacked your lips, trying to swallow around a bulge in your throat. "There's an old door. He said there are tunnels, but I don't know where they go. I don't know if he was telling the truth. I don't—"

He threw a hand into your back, thrusting you forward at least three feet. You almost didn't catch your footing. "Then that's where we're going."

"Not a friend of yours then, I assume, darling?" Montague's voice from the floor was as much of a relief as it was terrible. The silent gaps of air all around were disturbed by sharp snaps and cracking bones as his jaw moved back into place and he sat upright over his thighs. You were transfixed by the silver bullets being sucked into his skull, holes shrinking until they closed completely. "I'm not surprised you're still fraternizing with the wrong crowds, Roscoe. You and that entire Society have always been a fucking eyesore."

Roscoe readied his aim. "Parasite."

Montague laughed all the way to his feet, tugging at the edge of his vest to make it neat again. He opened his mouth just enough to let his tongue roll out, shards of silver bullets tinkling as they hit marble underfoot. "You can't take what's mine."

He looked to you, stepping closer every time Roscoe moved you back with his arm. "Come here. Come back to me, darling. This is where you belong. This is your home. You belong here with me, here with everything that you know."

"He doesn't mean that." Another gunshot snapped you to attention, blinking out of a stupor you hadn't realized you were in. The bullet landed in Montague's forehead, teetering his balance in such a way that his back curved towards the floor, arms hanging like useless instruments, yet he still somehow kept his soles planted. "Time to go. Get to the basement."

Roscoe didn't fail to reach you this time, running tight on your heels through the house to the basement floor. He stopped partway to the old door to help you scour the duffle bag for a key—one attached to the chatelaine Montague had given you the day you accepted to move in.

Your breaths were ragged, heart ablaze and beating against your ribs. In that moment, as you flipped through the assortment of keys with an unsteady, slippery grip, you wondered if Montague heard your blood racing in your veins, if he could follow the suffocating drumbeat your heart made in your ears.

Just above, fast approaching the locked basement door, came a thunderous roar so inhuman and reverberating that it scared the clip of keys out of your hands into a clattering heap on the floor. Time was up.

"Move!" Roscoe shoved you aside, illuminated by the hectic flare of your phone as he fit his fingers through a gap in the door and ripped the entire thing off its hinges. He pulled you by the scruff of your shirt and heaved you inside the tunnel. "Go! Go! Go!"

The first thing to hit you was a putrid smell intimately known but always through protective equipment and a respirator. And as you went deeper into the tunnel, led by a single route and the light off your phone, the dirt packed under your feet turned soft, sinking to the tops of your shoes.

And then, you saw bodies.

Numerous—countless corpses in varying stages of decay with twisted faces reflected your terror and pain right back at you. Most were intact with missing limbs or dark red chasms in their abdomens that had been scraped hollow and dry under the white light. A few had been fully decapitated, briefly reminding you of the dead blonde woman from that night, but most of what lay stacked against the tunnel walls were emaciated figures with skin pulled so taut to their bones you could still make out their faces.

You were doubled over your knees, sucking in fetid mouthfuls of air and retching them back out on the ground. It burned in your throat, in your nostrils, and behind your eyes, but stifled your sobs as Roscoe dragged you alongside him.

"What did he do? What did he do?" You were crying, wheezing out those words on every shallow breath you took all the way to an end just ahead. The more you thought about it, the more you smelled the rot, tasted the bitterness of your own vomit, the more came out. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"

Roscoe had to let you rest in the grass once you both surfaced. One of the exits turned out to be near the house, less than half a mile. But the tunnels kept going and so did the bodies. You suspected that there wouldn't be any reach of that underground labyrinth that didn't have some form of decay along it.

The thought brought the tears back, but now you could relish the sticky summer night humidity and touch dewy tendrils of grass under your hands.

"Can you drive?" Roscoe had a pair of keys hanging from his index finger, giving you a long moment to take them. He saw confusion in your watery stare. "I'll tell you where to go, just drive."

That's how it had been for hours at this point. You kept your hands locked around the steering wheel, one stronger than the other, gnawing the inside of your cheek while ruminating everything—tonight, the night Montague had bitten you, every other night before that, and your decision to have ever trusted him.

"How long ago did he bite you?" Roscoe had the seat reclined, arms over his eyes to shield them from oncoming headlights. "It doesn't look good."

You tested your grip on the steering wheel, but you couldn't do much without a sharp sting in your wrist. "I don't know—a couple weeks ago? I've tried everything short of going to the emergency room."

"That won't help," he said. "Modern medicine can fix a dog bite, antibiotics can kill an infection, a vaccine can protect you from a virus. Those aren't going to do any good."

Solemnly, you asked, "Am I going to die?"

Roscoe didn't sit up but had your wrist in his hands, turning it in little ways that didn't aggravate you. Besides the occasional glare from passing vehicles, there was no light in the car, and the holes in your skin were hardly distinguishable, though they had gotten darker. You weren't able to move it with any ease now.

"What you need to know right now is that he's never going to stop following you." He put your hand back on the steering wheel, careful as he enclosed your fingers around it. "It doesn't matter how long it takes, what you do, where you go—a parasite finds a host, and it latches on. And it doesn't let go."

You glanced between him and the road several times, tongue wetting the dry parts of your lips. "He's a vampire—you're a vampire. There's got to be something—"

Roscoe finally sat up in his seat, now cramped sideways with his shoulders flat to the window. The car veered a bit into the other lane. "You need to understand something. What you're saying would imply he ever had any humanity. Vampires are created." He paused for a beat, waiting for the realization to strike you. "Montague was never created."

"What—what the hell is he, then?" A horn abruptly blared by, prompting you to yank the car back onto the correct side. "He drinks blood. He has teeth. He—he hunts. He doesn't like silver. His eyes are the same as yours."

Roscoe lowered his gaze, but remained in that uncomfortable position. "There's a story I heard about him once. I don't remember the details except for one: ‘If the devil exists, they're one in the same.’"

You kept your eyes on the road, counting every car that flitted on past. They were probably going to work at this hour—green numbers on the dashboard showed it just after four—and they'd be able to have a place to return to at the end of the day. Now, you didn't belong anywhere, and twenty-four hours from now you still wouldn't.

The town where you had lived with Montague for a year was long behind you, backtracking would take hours, and you wouldn't know how to get back from the direction that Roscoe had told you to go. Dim streetlamps and cozy houses with spruced yards had morphed into an endless network of concrete, signs, and off-ramps to places you'd never heard of.

It was scary how everything could change in one night, and how it did. The only semblance of normalcy to you right now were the aches throughout your body, which had returned the moment you fully comprehended that you had escaped that house.

"Why…" Roscoe looked up at you, seeing your lips shake and eyes turn red. "Why do I want to go back to him?"

He fixed himself right in the seat, tousling a hand through his hair while looking out through the windshield. "You shouldn't do that. But you'll never be able to stop running."

You never saw Roscoe again once the car ride ended several thousands of miles later, mentioning something about how he repaid his debt to T.J. and had disappeared from a restaurant you both walked into. When that happened, you sat paralyzed at your little table for most of the day with a soul-crushing realization that you were truly alone with nobody in the world—just like Montague said you would be. And, for the sake of others, you'd never be able to have anyone else in your world.

It stayed that way for close to two years. The hardest part hadn't been the homelessness or constant vigilance, not the door revolving each person to come into your life since, but the fact that you still yearned for what you once had. Everything so awful about what you experienced sometimes looked like heaven when you thought about it, like soft, cloudy nostalgia from a time where the throes of agony were all you had ever known.

You were capable of thinking soberly as well, and with that came the understanding that a part of you would always want that time back—want him back.

He had left you with a permanent scar and neurological damage that could never be corrected. It was anticipated you'd lose that wrist at some point in the future, but for now, you could still hold a cup and brush your teeth with enough conscious effort.

The pain never went away either, but you refused to let it impede your work in the field. And your two roommates were a couple of engineering geniuses who'd managed to make the flat more accommodating to your needs. They'd been patient with you during every step of your transition into a new life, calling you an enigma because you had nothing to your name except a dusty duffle bag and a "strange-looking dog bite" on your wrist when you first met them.

Sometimes, especially on the weekends after clinking together enough shot glasses, they tried to probe your brain for some clue as to who you were, who you had been historically. You had decided it was better that they—that no one—knew about it or what actually existed out there in the world.

And when you returned home from the lab late that Saturday night, you were surprised to find the lights off and the flat immersed in the kind of soundlessness that made your ears feel clogged with cotton.

You were slow in lowering your backpack to the floor, keeping the front door slightly ajar so a slither of light from the residential corridor slipped inside. "Jordan? Felix?"

No answer. You didn't hear anything from their bedrooms upstairs either.

"Jordan?" The nearest light switch didn't work, neither did the one after that, or any others you hunted down with the diffused beam from your phone screen. "Jordan? Felix? Are you guys home?"

It was possible they had gone out somewhere for the night and just hadn't mentioned anything to you, as unsound as that logic actually was, considering it simply wasn't their personality. But as you wandered through different rooms checking the switches, you knew you were rationalizing to keep yourself in check.

The light from the hallway still piled inside like a narrow pillar, raising all the hairs on your neck and arms, knowing that it wasn't a building-wide outage. They had never left you in a situation like this before. Something was wrong.

"Jordan! Felix! Whe—" Your foot nearly shot out from under you when you slid through something slick on the laminate. After a moment to fix yourself, bracing the edge of the countertop with a clammy palm, you steadied the white glow of your phone at the floor.

There, glistening back at you, was the vast richness of blood in a tall puddle that spread like long winding tendrils through grout in the flooring. It looked almost black under your light at a certain angle, estimating it had been there for several hours—untouched.

You held in a breath and grit your jaws together as the more you moved, the more you saw. And when the top of a head came into view, silky hair shining like fine thread before clumping together at the base where the blood had pooled the most, it was everything you could to keep yourself from hitting the floor.

Both of them were there, perfectly out of sight of the front door and completely unrecognizable. Their bodies had been left in one piece, though where their faces had once been were cavernous holes with pale, pink ribbons of flesh and fat left behind. The roundness of their skulls let blood fill inside it like a vessel. What little pieces of brain matter remained had floated to the surface.

You staggered back from them, phone loosening from your weak hand and returning them to the maw of darkness, while groping the wall behind you as far as your arm could reach. This wasn't a result of crude knife work or even bludgeoning; no, it was a slow kill, one meant to steep someone in torment so immense that you prayed to whatever was out there that they succumbed immediately.

"Help…" Your voice was trapped in your throat, barely registering as a whisper even to yourself as you sidled along the wall. "Someone—anyone, please help."

The patter of your heartbeat was torturous. Your every step back to the entrance was leaden with fear. You couldn't get your legs to move fast enough, and the light reaching in through the gap seemed to stretch on forever—further, further, and further still.

You thought back to that day you met Montague and shook his hand, noting how unnaturally cold it had been despite it being a nice day in spring. You remembered the dead blonde woman with mascara tears, and the bodies he used to decorate the tunnels, and the young man who was able to walk away that night believing it was all some shallow quarrel—never knowing he had sealed your fate.

You regretted all of it.

The door was in your reach now, and you could get out, call for help, and go back to running. This time, you wouldn't be tricked into false satiety or let anyone too close. You would see mountains and forests and oceans a thousand times over before you stopped again.

Two years hadn't been enough time for you to accumulate many things, you thought. It wouldn't be hard to leave most of it behind, just like you had before. You would unpack that old duffle bag from the back of your closet, fill it to the brink, and that would be enough.

You had your hand over smooth metal, but that cold reached greater depths in you as the door was pushed shut from behind, light shrinking away through the slot until you were swallowed whole in the dark.

"Hello, darling. I've missed you." He sounded the same against your ear. For a split second, you felt relieved. "Don't worry about cleaning up. We're not staying long."

He clamped damp fingers over your mouth before you could scream.

Some fates are worse than death...

Goro the Merman

It's Mermay! And I have for you a wonderful story of a girl and the merman who terrorizes the beach she is supposed to watch over. (I just watched Zoolander so I'm trying not to make a joke.) Female Reader x Male Merman

There’s loud screaming coming from the beach. You look up towards the window, rushing over as you pull back the curtains. To see a crowd rushing from sandy dunes, some falling over in panic. You scoff, frustrated as you know exactly what has happened. You go outside, taking down the wrap around your hair.

“It’s alright, people! It’s alright!” You shout out to the crowd. “Go to the awning over there, yeah, the green one!” You instruct people where to go after being frightened like that. Storming down the beach, you come to the lapping waves.

“I know you’re out there!” You snap your hands upon your hips. “I’m waiting!”

Something inky black rises to the surface. Then glittering gemstones of eyes look at you. You can tell he’s smirking under the water.

“Goro.” you say sternly.

Bubbles rise up from the water as he laughs.

You lick your tongue along the edge of your teeth and tsk. “What did we just talk about? I told you that this is-”

“A rest stop for the weary,” Goro hissed as he raised his head further out of the water. The black tendrils that covered the top of his head continued to float along the surface. “A beach for the weak. Sands for healing.”

You had been trying to hide the full brunt of your annoyance, but your scowl always came through. He is testing you, because reaction is what he craves. Even the smallest scowl gives him glee.

“That is not my prerogative.” Gor came up onto the beach, stretching out his long tail. The end looked like ripped fabric, going into many various strands and length. On land it looked like wet cloth, but underwater, you were sure it was a spectacle of brilliance.

“I asked you a favor!” Your balled fist thumps against your temple. “This beach earns me my income and you are-”

His mouth split into a great big smile, revealing many rows of teeth. His bright green eyes flashed in the darkness of his scales. He was midnight incarnate, and his scales shone like an aurora borealis.

“I’ll be gone soon enough,” you quickly said before he could add anything. “I run the lighthouse until the first frost.”

Goro’s smile is replaced by something else, something less menacing but more telling. “If not you, then some other fool. Then another, and another.”

“That’s how this job works. Keep the lighthouse, guard the beach, and don’t discourage the travelers!” You put your hands back to your waist. “That includes watching you.”

Goro cracked his neck and pushed his tendrils back from his face. “I am an attraction, same as the sands.”

You narrowed your eyes upon him. “Behave. That is what I am asking you.” You then bent over and snatched a handful of the magic sands. “You’re just lucky I needed more of this to study.”

Goro snickered. “To study. Right!”

You turn to head back to the landing where all the people have gathered.

Behind you, Goro sighed. “I know the secrets to the sand, but no one ever asks me nothing.”

“What are you going on about?” You huff as you face him again.

Goro smirks, his scales shimmering teal then to purple against the black. “Everyone is so curious about how the sand here has healing properties, but they never think to ask me why.”

You rolled your eyes. “Okay then, why?”

He tapped a finger to his wide mouth. “Family secret.”

You asked and got what you expected. “Behave, Goro,” you said sternly. “I won’t tell you again!”

“And then what will you do?” He teased.

You gave him one last look before heading back up the beach to tell the travelers all was safe. Goro was a menace, but he wasn’t dangerous. A fighter, perhaps, but he wasn’t a flesh eater.

Once people were calmed and taken care of, you went back to work. The healing sands were well known, and many had tried uncovering the secrets it hid. Back at your old apothecary, you used to make potions with it all the time. That was, until your apothecary fired you when your experiments blew up the laboratory.

But that’s okay! The lighthouse and beach keeper position was great! You got to study the sand directly from the source, and the lab you made was in a bunker, so if there was an explosion again, you would be the only one harmed by it.

Still, your post here was limited. Once it began to grow cold and the froth on the beach turned to ice, you would be moved off the island and back to the mainland. Which was fine by you, you were never one for the cold, and you had plans to go study spices in Rakshasa Country. You would be surrounded by other students varying from chefs, healers, and your kind. Your only constant company here on the island was Goro, and you had been warned about him.

The previous beach keeper had dealt with Goro for three seasons before giving up. This was your first season, and while Goro was a nuisance, you couldn’t understand why he would make someone leave the island.

Early mornings were your favorite time to go to the beach. The sky was dusky, the air crisp, and there was no one there. You would walk the beach, studying the sands and watching the waves. Whatever gave the sand their healing properties had to come from the ocean, but that was an even bigger mystery.

“Walking all by yourself?”

Above you, Goro was lounging upon some smooth boulders. His cheek rested on his arms, and his eyes focused upon you.

“I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me,” you grunted.

“Awww, how come?” Goro’s tail swished back and forth upon the stone.

“I’m a little busy,” you tell him.

Goro sat up and stretched, yawning loudly, stretching open his mouth to show the sharp teeth inside. “Doing what?” He smirked down upon you. “Making sandcastles?”

You frowned, kicking down a heap of sand you had built. “Just doing some thinking. That’s all part of studying.”

Goro slid down from the rocks and relaxed upon the sands. He grabbed a handful of the sand then let it run through his fingers. “Is thinking what turned your hair green?”

You reached up and touched your hair, gently smoothing it back. “No. A potion I make does it.”

Goro snickered. “You’d fit in better under the water with hair like that. It’s perfect camouflage for hiding in the kelp.” he seemed to pose, raising his long arms above his head then puffing out his chest. There was a stretch of skin along his belly and chest, a soft flesh area that was dark, but flecked with pale speckles.

“Bigger mystery than the sand is why you’re here.”

Goro gave you the most confused and agitated look. “What?”

You shrugged at him. “I don’t know! Seems like a merman like you would have better things to do than stalk around this island, scaring travelers and making extra work for the beach keepers.”

He narrowed his eyes upon you. “These are my home waters. You and your kind are the ones trespassing, if anything.”

“And that may be true. But where are the others?” You motioned out towards the ocean. “If we are such a problem, how come you’re the only one making noise about it?” The ocean lapped quietly at the shore.

Scoffing, Goro rose up. “Noise wouldn’t even begin to describe what I could do.”

You just kept your eyes locked upon him as he slithered down the beach towards the water.

“Maybe one day, you’ll see!” Goro splashed into the ocean, vanishing under the waves that were shaded pink by the sky.

You let out a long sigh before Nara, a kobold whose family made their money by selling the sands, came walking out. Her family was who hired you and all the beach keepers before you.

“Good morning!” She sang.

“Good morning,” you grumbled.

“How is Goro?” Nara knelt down on the sands, drawing a symbol upon it before kneeling her head down to pray over it.

You pouted slightly. “I honestly don’t know.”

Nara rose back up and began using a special scoop to fill her dried gourd. “We used to play together as kids, you know?”

“You never told me that.”

“I suppose we don’t get to talk much outside of business things.” She filled her gourd then stood with it, holding it by the weaved handle. “He’s the only male of his colony, so he’s sent away a lot.”

You furrowed your brow. “How come?”

“To find gifts,” he answered. “That’s why he comes to the beach all the time.”

Well, that answered a question or two. “Is that why he is such a pest?” You followed Nara along the beach towards her family’s home and workshop.

“I know I warned you that he could be a lot to handle. Has he been causing any trouble lately?” She asked.

“Scaring travelers,” you muttered.

Nara’s brow knit together and she hummed.

“What?”

Nara shook her head. “That’s rather well behaved for Goro. Is that really all he is doing? He’s not chasing away? Throwing fish? Tying people’s feet together with kelp?”

You made a face. “No! He’s done that?”

“He dragged the last beach keeper into the ocean one time.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “He really put the last one through some things.”

You were a bit shocked. Goro had never behaved like that towards you. Sure he was annoying, but that was the extent of it.

“If you like it here though, we wouldn't mind keeping you on through the cold season.” Nara walked up the stairs to the workshop.

“Really? I thought the beach was closed.”

“It does.” Nara led you inside where he mother and father were bickering over something, laughing while they did. “But you’re trained in potion making and apothecary stuff right?”

You nodded, instantly greeted with a warm beverage from Nara’s sister.

“We’ve been wanting to expand our business for some time, but we’ve not come across anyone with your expertise.”

You were flattered! “I wouldn’t call myself that,” you laughed shyly.

Nara’s smile brightened. “Think about it. I know you have that study in Rakshasa Country. Trust me, I’d rather spend the cold days there than here. But if you did, there’s a lot we’d love to discuss with you.”

“The study is for just a month,” you murmured. “Maybe I could come back early once it’s complete. Then I could have my own ideas based on what I’ve learned there.”

“We can discuss it further!” Nara cheered. “That sounds like a perfect idea. Get a break from the beach, become inspired.”

You were…relieved? Strange. You would think you’d be eager to leave the island. But over the last couple of months, it’s become a home. Even after you were outcast from the best job you ever had. Maybe that job wasn’t so great?

That evening you went out to check the traps to get something for dinner. That’s where you noticed the trap was ripped to shreds.

“Ugh! Goro.”

“You called?”

Above you on the beach, Goro was laid out flat atop high dune.

“Did you destroy my trap? What am I supposed to do for dinner?” You chucked the wrecked heap onto the ground.

Goro rolled over onto his stomach then propped himself up on his elbows. “It’s not like you caught anything.”

“Well, now I have to fish!” You scoffed.

“Or you could ask nicely.”

Your hand went to your waist. “Ask nicely for what?”

Goro smirked. “For me to feed you? I can find you something really good. You’re not exactly good at catching the delicious parts of the ocean.”

You frowned and avoided his gaze. True. You’d either lived off fish or the kindness of Nara’s family during your stay here.

“Ask. Me. Nicely.” Goro punctuated.

It was either that for fish, and you hated fishing. You let out an exasperated sigh. “Okay, fine.”

“Nicely,” Goro let the word slither from his lips.

You took a deep breath. “Would you please catch me something for dinner?”

Goro sat up on the dune. “Of course.” he leapt off it, splashing into the water and vanishing into the depths.

What was keeping you from believing he was tricking you? You’re not sure, but you stayed on the beach waiting for him anyways. Sitting there, you watched the ocean lap at the shore, the colors of the sun fading into the distant waters.

Then, Goro’s dark head popped up out of the water. He remained still there for a long while, his eyes watching you from behind the black drapes around his head. You stared back, slowly moving from sitting to standing to approach the water.

Suddenly, Goro whipped something from the water and towards you. You dodged, getting out of the way of whatever he threw at you. You gawk back at him, shocked by the sudden retaliation.

“What the hell was that?” You snapped.

Goro was laughing as he came closer to shore. “Keep you on your toes! That’s what.” He crawled to shore, a couple of things tucked under his arm. “Look.” He pointed back.

You turned, seeing what he threw to you laying on the sands. You looked back at him, grimacing before going towards it. It was a roundish shape, a little bit bigger than a small stone. You dusted the sand off, seeing it was a massive pearl. Your jaw dropped.

“See there? I can be nice. You humans like those things, right?” He chomped into a fish. “I love biting the heads off first,” he said between chews.

You rolled the large pearl around, thinking about the fortune in the center of your palm. You could sell this thing in Rakshasa Country for enough money to start your own apothecary anywhere in the Ruby Empire! Glancing back towards Goro, munching on his fish, you couldn’t decide why he would give you this.

“Here,” He wagged a bundle of lobsters at you. “I promised food. I got you food.”

“Thanks.” You slowly approached him again, taking the bounty from his clutches. “Why did you give me this?” You extended the pearl towards him.

Goro shrugged, giving you a curled up lip in reply. “I saw it, and the green in it made me think of you.”

This took you back for a moment. It was a heart skipping moment.

“Don’t act so shocked or anything.” he extended out his hand to you, curling up his long fingers. “Give it back. I chuck it to the depth I found it.”

The pearl became clutched to your chest. “No. I like it.”

“Then good.” A smirk crawled across his face. “Glad to hear it.”

It was a strange smile, one you hadn’t seen from him. It wasn’t one from the joy he got scaring travelers on the beach, or one of boyish pride. It was different, happy, hopeful.

“You should go cook those. They’re best when fresh.” he then shrugged. “So I’ve heard.” he bit into his fish again.

“Yeah,” you’re still unsure of how to respond to him now. “They are.”

Goro licked across his teeth, smacking it. “I guess it’ll be the end of the season soon. You must be excited to get off this island,” he said with a sort of forced laugh.

“Kind of,” you answered. “I have a study lined up in Rakshasa Country. I was going to take some of my studies on the sands to the professors there and see what they thought.”

Goro’s lip curled again. “I’ve never been much of anywhere.”

“Why not?”

His eyes flicked back towards you and he scoffed. “Where else would I go? This island, these waters-” his eyes became distant as he stared out over the water. “I like it well enough. Besides, who else would want me?”

“Oh, I dunno, depends on what you’re looking for.” You sat down beside him in the sand, setting the lobsters aside. You looked at the pearl, seeing the slight green reflection it gave. “I’m sure you could woo a beautiful princess or two.”

“A handsome knight, a powerful dragon, maybe a warlock and witch couple.” Goro stretched his long arms out behind himself and leaned back. “I know I could have anyone I set my eyes on. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” You smiled.

Laughing, Goro stuck his tongue out. “Are you dumb? What else would keep me here? You’re a smart lot, you study, you perform your mad experiments. What would keep you home for so long if you had to?”

You thought of your childhood home. “Well, my family.”

Goro pointed with his tail to the ocean. “Exactly. I have family out there counting on me. I have a job to do here for them, and just so you know, I like doing that job.”

“Who's your family?” You asked.

Goro snorted. “Bunch of chattery women like you.”

Your smile grew brighter. “Do you have sisters?”

“Several.” he sighed and leaned back again. “I was the only one to survive my mother’s first clutch so-” His voice trailed off.

Your smile faded. “Oh? What happened?”

He was scowling, but trying not to let it grow. “My father ate them. Afraid there would be a son.”

“Oh,” you whispered.

“Yeah, oh!” He sneered at you then broke into a big smile. “But I proved his point when I grew.” He laughed. “Oh man, did I show him.”

You looked down then back out over the ocean.

“What about you?”

“I never fought my father,” you replied.

He gently smacked your arm with a chuckle. “No, idiot. Do you have any siblings?”

You shook your head. “No. I was an only child back home. I had lots of cousins and extended family though. The whole village was like a family.”

“Do you miss it?”

A surprising question. “Of course.” You looked back at him to assess his expression. It was soft, another surprise. “Why?”

He shrugged. “No reason.” he then pointed beyond you. “Your dinner is getting away.”

You watched just as your lobsters crawled back into the ocean. You laughed, cupping your hand around your mouth.

“I’ll go get them.” You stopped Goro by putting your hand over his.

You were laughing harder. “No! It's quite alright! Let them go, they earned it.”

Goro eased back, watching your hand touching his. A softer smile appeared on his lips, and he turned his palm so it was like you were holding hands.

Soon, the day came that Nara and her family were shutting off the beach to travelers. The waters were becoming too cold, and soon, wind and ice would replace the balmy breezes and sunny skies.

Packing up, you decided to leave your lab in the basement. After all, you would come back after your study. Sure, you could sell that pearl and use it to open an apothecary of your very own. But the idea of working here on the island sounded right.

There was a tapping on the window. As you were walking it towards it, it opened and a large conch shell was flung inside. It bounced off your bed and to the floor with a loud clatter.

Goro appeared in the window grinning. “Something to remember me by.” He hefted himself up, crawling inside.

“I think I have enough to remember you by.” You huffed as you picked up the conch. “Since when could you crawl up here?”

“Oh always,” he snickered as he lounged luxuriously on your bed. “I just didn’t want you thinking you could command me to spend time with you whenever you wanted.”

“Oh sure.” You set the conch down on the table.

“Will they be finding a new beach keeper?” he teased.

You rolled your eyes. “No. I’m coming back here. So get used to that idea.”

“I just might.” Goro snuggled to your pillow, breathing in deep.

You leaned over top of him while he had his face buried in the pillow. “Are you going to miss me?”

Goro jerked, looking up at you over top of him. His surprised stare turned into a vicious glare.

“I think you are.” It was your turn to tease him, and you were going to take this perfect opportunity. You sat down on the bed so he had no way to escape. “I have reasons to believe it might be a little bit more than that.”

“Don’t go and think so highly of yourself,” he sneered.

You smirked. “You don’t like me then?”

“That’s-” Goro held his tongue. “Get back.” He pushed his hand against your shoulder. “I’m warning you. These teeth of mine can rip apart more than just fish!”

“I’m sure.” You dipped down, giving him a small, soft kiss. One you meant to be playful. But Goro’s hand on your shoulder grabbed your clothes, pulling you in, making the kiss something more, something deeper.

You whimpered, but you didn’t fight.

Goro was the one that released you, pushing you back a bit. “If you’re going to do that then you might as well mean it.”

Your face was flushed, and Goro’s eyes were completely black.

Goro’s hand then completely covered your face. “Humans.” He pushed you back so he could sit up. “You think you know everything.” He put his arms around you, rubbing his neck against yours. “This is how we sea folk do it.” His gills ruffled against your skin, tickling you in a way that sent shivers through your whole back. He then bit your shoulder and your body responded in such a visceral way you lost your breath.

A laugh entered your ear. “If you want to know the secrets of the sands, you’ll have to come back to me,” he whispered seductively. “I’ll only tell you then.”

Locking eyes with him he then butt his head against your forehead. “Promise,” he breathed.

You placed your hand upon his cheek. “I’m coming back.”

“Good.” Goro bit your shoulder, but this wasn’t like all those times before. His breath hitched and his lips trailed against the skin ever so slightly. A tickle went up the back of your neck as his tongue gently brushed against you. “I’ll find you if you’re lying to me.” He bared his teeth to you then left back through the window.

Catching your breath, you realized your nipples were completely solid and your heart was fluttering like the wing of a hummingbird.

In Rakshasa Country, you began your class and took great interest in the study. You even presented your studies on the healing sands to your professors, who decided to take time to study it with the class. Theories were presented onto its healing capabilities, but nothing sounded right to you.

“We would like you to stay on and take on an internship here,” one of your professor’s offered. “I think you could accomplish great things here.”

It was a dream come true for you, a great offer. But it didn’t feel right. “I’m sorry,” you replied, hating to let her down. “But I have a job offer back at the island. I already accepted it.”

She smiled. “I understand. I would much rather work on a beautiful island than here any day. Besides, you can always report your studies and findings on the sands back to me. I’m fascinated by your research.”

You were relieved she was taking it well. “I’ll report back as much as I can.”

“We can still work together then.”

You went back to the island when Nara’s brothers came to deliver sand. You met them at the port, helping them to load supplies and food onto the little ship. They had ordered so much to make it through the worst parts of winter you had to sleep around the cargo.

The ship got in late one evening, and it was later still after unloading everything. You passed out with Nara in her bed, making it home after her family fed you a huge breakfast. Once done, you trudged across the beach with your bag towards the lighthouse.

“You’re back!”

You didn’t have time to react before Goro clobbered you on the beach. You hit the sands and he crawled up your body.

“It’s not even spring! What are you doing here?” He clutched your face. “It’s really you! It is!” He was beaming, eyes wide, teeth fully showing.

“My class ended,” you managed to speak. “They invited me back to start an apothecary business with them.”

Goro rubbed his neck against yours instantly, sighing breathily as he did. Your skin shivered and your body responded in kind to his touch. You stroked up his back, touching the nape of his neck. Something prodded at your hip.

“It’s cold out here,” you whispered.

“You warm blooded creatures,” he snarled. “I want you here and now.”

“Goro,” you whimpered. “I don’t think we-” Your voice choked out as he bit your shoulder. “Wait!”

Your loud outburst made Goro raise up. “You don’t have to yell,” he pouted.

You caught your breath and sat up to look him in the eye. “I’m not going to have much fun cold. And I certainly don’t want sand in my nethers.”

Goro’s lip curled. “Fine!”

You made your way back to the lighthouse where you got a fire going and lit a candle for some light. Goro was waiting on the bed, stroking one of his cocks in his hand. The other quivered at the brush of his knuckles until he switched to it. They were extremely hard and pitch black with a line of white going down the back side where there were linear bumps to the sheath.

“You like me more than I thought,” you said teasingly as you let your hair down.

His eyes followed your curls as they touched against your neck. “You don’t seem shocked.”

“I’m not.” You began working on the buttons on your clothes. “Nara told me you had a thing for humans.” You smirked. Nara didn’t say that exactly but you were hoping to catch a reaction from him for once.

Goro scowled.

You dropped your tunic then pulled up your underclothes, revealing your breasts to him. His eyes widened and he held his breath in anticipation. His fists grabbed tightly around both of his shafts.

“Have you had many humans?” You said with a smirk.

He sneered at you. “Does it matter?”

“No,” you chuckled. “Just wondering what experience you have in pleasuring them.” You stood naked before him then, stroking your hand down your belly and towards your loins.

Goro’s long, dark tongue traveled across his lips. “A sailor here, a sailor there.” He then grinned. “What experience do you have in pleasuring merfolk?”

Smirking, you put your hands upon your hips. “None.”

“Then I guess I’m taking the lead, just to make sure we both have fun.” He held his hand out to you. “Come here. Now!”

“Demanding.” You crawled into his lap, kissing him softly before his teeth came out. He bit your lip, your chin, your neck. He lowered his head down, biting upon the soft flesh of your breasts before breathing upon your nipple. He bit it then nuzzled between your soft bosom.

“I love these,” he moaned. “We don’t have these below the waves.”

His cocks were grinding up against your ass, slippery, extremely hard. They throbbed as his mouth sunk over a breast, suckling the nipple and playing with it on his tongue. You whimpered, grasping his head as the sensations radiated through your body.

Goro chuckled as his fingers went between your cheeks and to your mound. “Wet already.” He rolled you over, hiking your hips up into the air. “Fuck,” he growled, spreading you out and watching you. “Don’t have these either.” His cocks slid up your thigh, rubbing against you until one slipped along your cunt.

“Then what do you have?” You moaned.

“I don’t want to talk about that now. I don’t even want to talk.” The pressure at your entrance, the slight tension of him hesitating. “I want to know how warm you are.” He was inside, deep and hard. He felt like a toy made of glass you once had.

Goro quivered, holding his breath as he lingered inside. He seemed to be memorizing and studying you.

“Goro?” You wanted to make sure he was still with you.

“Just a second,” he whined. “This is why I love humans,” he said in jubilation. He began to move, bucking, thrusting. You cried out, grasping tight onto the sheets. He rammed harder into you, deeper than anyone had reached. He was snarling, growling. He then bit onto your neck, snarling and licking. The sharpness of his teeth added to your pleasure deeply.

“So good. So warm!” Goro cried out. “Wet! Wet!”

You were whimpering, trying to focus on just one sensation, but there were too many. Your head was spinning.

There came a moment where Goro pulled from you and tossed you over. He pressed his cock to your lips, making you suck him. “This is the secret,” he chuckled darkly. “Take it directly from the source.”

He filled your mouth and throat, he went deeper, making you almost choke. It was slightly sweet and very salty. He pulled out, letting his other cock spurt across your face and down your chest.

You swallowed, coughing from the sheer amount he left.

Goro chuckled, still stroking himself as he watched you below him. “Do you feel it yet?” He leaned over you, licking some of his cum from your cheek. His fingers sunk back into you, making you tremble.

There certainly was warmth. It started on your tongue and down your throat. Aches in your body seemed to fade away. There was a lightness to your limbs, a newness you hadn’t felt. There was a flare of energy you thought would take weeks to recover from your journey. Goro’s fingers found a spot inside you that made you cry out.

“There it is. Feel it?” He chuckled. He kept going until it was like you would levitate off the bed.

Even after all that, your stamina hadn’t faded. You laid with Goro, kissing and slowly rubbing together. He was inside you, moving at a purposefully slow pace. He was smirking, proud of his work.

“Taking my time now that I have you,” he whispered.

“It’s nice.” Your arms were wrapped around him.

“If you’d like, I bet I could fill one of your bottles over there so you can study it,” he teased.

You kissed him to make him go quiet. “I think I know where I can get it fresh when I need it.”

Goro chuckled proudly. “That’s not even the most potent thing about us. Mm-” he moaned and stilled to savor the deep unending feeling. “It’s everything about us. Our scales, our eyes, our bones. Generations of us supply this beach with it’s healing properties.”

“Then why not share?”

“We do! We allow you to use this beach.” His eyes fluttered as he moved again inside. “We use what we have now for us. I’m giving you this because I want you. During the spring, you might only receive it once.”

“Why?”

“Because, I have to help fertilize the clutches.” He kissed you softly. “Silly human.”

“So you’re a father?” You teased him.

He shrugged. “Not really. It’s a lot to explain. Right now, I just want to explore.”

(Reference: Ye Hao in "heatstroke" for GQ china)

IMPOSTER

possessed!scholar husband x reader |18+| 3.8k

in an act of self-preservation, your family marries you off into an exorbitantly wealthy family. it's a loveless marriage to a reclusive and reticent man. one day, he informs you of leaving to handle the last affairs of his deceased uncle's estate. when he later returns, you're convinced this man is not your husband...

story warnings; dark content, dubcon, explicit sexual details, masturbation (mc), mirror sex, implications of sadism, classism, animal death (mentioned briefly), grotesque details + body horror, murder, pseudo-victorian setting, I am well aware that this is not how Victorian marriages would've gone — bite me 👊🏻, detail + prose heavy, roughly proofread

this is a concept piece #1 for my upcoming project: the lord of phantasm. please let me know if you'd like me to post the other concept pieces!

sequel piece: root rot

reposted from my deleted blog: theoxenfree.

if you enjoyed, please leave feedback + reblog to help your girl out 💓

In the airless dark of your bedroom at night, you knew the man lying next to you under covers was not your husband. Once he had been, but now he no longer was.

The revelation had come to you before noticing the stillness of his broad frame in bed, certain stiffness which seemed more alike to rigor in a days old corpse rather than a man wrapped in the comforting spell of deep sleep.

His breaths were silent, if he even breathed at all, reminding you of childhood where the floorboards wouldn't creak so loudly if you sucked all the air out from your lungs into your throat, snagging it, holding it firm. Suddenly, you'd be lighter; effervescent; floating across the wooden slabs towards the kitchen past midnight, or out the front door during the years where testing your parent’s patience and fraying the head maid’s nerves was your favorite thing to do.

You’d learned later on, after the loveless vows and complicated legality behind joining your two families, that your husband had a knack for slipping away at night as well. Only, he wasn't at all the sort for flirtatious gallivanting and loquacious rendezvous with secret lovers in dim rooms, smells of mildew masked by a numbingly sweet, perfumey fog.

He was reclusive and reticent; one of those outstandingly brilliant scholars who believed the rest of the world was below him because he hadn't found an equal in conversation or thought. Social obligations—no matter the occasion or person—pained him to where he intentionally brought you as a buffer between himself and whomever was trying to speak to him.

Some of the talk was so astronomically beyond you that parroting the long-winded answers he spoke softly into your ear back to his audience made you burn under the collar from embarrassment and his proximity to you. His peers could not understand why he simply wouldn't talk for himself; meanwhile, they also wondered why someone without their level of formal education had even accompanied him.

At night, he became one with darkness and retreated to the depths of his study across the massive house you shared together. It was part of one of his family’s various estates dotted across the country and his favorite, due to its location near the university where he worked (at his leisure), and its closeness to his only relative he actually cared about.

“My uncle—he has passed. Of complications caused from tuberculosis, I've been told. I was the only family member placed in his will, therefore it falls to me to settle all remaining affairs he may have overlooked,” he said, letting you help him into his heavy, wool coat he left on a hook near the front door. At his side was a hulking suitcase; one he often used for trips that were days—weeks away from home, from you. “He was a far more private man than I, so there's no telling what I'll come across while I'm there. I cannot tell you how long I'll be away. I'm sorry.”

You expected nothing less from him. This man who had only ever touched you once, on your wedding day. He did everything that he was supposed to: tonelessly regurgitate scripted vows he committed to memory, hold your hands, and kiss you at the altar for more than two seconds but less than five, and then gently lead you away once both families were pleased with the performance.

Right after, now as newlyweds, he poured bourbon into exquisite crosshatch crystalware and examined the glistening amber under wan lamplight. He apologized for kissing you, that he wouldn't have had at all if it hadn't been so important for your families.

At the time, it made you feel very ugly and undeserving of the silk and ornate lacework decorating your body. The gold band fitted around your finger was a lofty symbol of acquired wealth, heavy and unforgiving.

“Write to me every once and a while,” was all you could think to say at present, managing your composure well enough as he gripped the handle of his suitcase and leaned into its heftiness on that side. “It'd just be nice to know how you're doing. If you find anything interesting. When you'll be coming home. It gives me something to look forward to.”

“I'll try to,” he said, but looked through you, pierced you, as though trying to see something else. You saw this look most often at events or parties where he'd fixate on a specific point (usually you) and seem to recede inside himself, into his thoughts, perhaps trying to dissect them or make them congeal into something linear.

“Uncle was an eccentric man. There's no telling what he's left behind for me to find. I must go. Be well, my dear.”

Once again, he left you behind without remorse.

Four months passed with agonizing, gripping slowness from the crisp mornings of late autumn into the icy vise of winter and a shimmering white-blue landscape outside your windows. In those days, you occupied yourself as best you could with guests and alcoholic merriment, whisked yourself away to parties and dinners after wringing out the invitations from friends, and spent many sleepless nights sprawled across the floor beside the fireplace coveting self-pleasure.

You imagined it was your husband there with you, immediately a renewed man after his return and finding you boundlessly desirable, fucking you with his cock rather than the freezing metal dildo you thrust inside yourself.

Even once you were finished, fucked out by your own hand and the object gaping you wide, you kept masturbating until you lost sensation, the motions and metal numbing you inside—until the intimacy and thrill of self-discovery had lost meaning to you.

Sometimes, you were found the next morning by a maid like that: thoroughly debauched with the phallus having rolled away nearby or still shallowly pressed inside. You only needed to threaten her livelihood once for her to never speak of it, pretend each time she hadn't witnessed a regrettable case of personal depravity.

It'd eventually become a frequent enough sight to her that she knew better than to look directly at you when she entered the room. Rather, now, she carried a laundered pair of trousers in with her. They were draped neatly over a bent arm, along with a warm and soapy rag in her hand, which she used to lightly clean you of dried fluids. Afterward, she helped you into the new garment.

“You have received a letter from the Master,” she said unexpectedly one morning, after fastening your pants and tucking your blouse inside them. “It's strange, though, because it doesn't feel like a letter. Not enough… substance. Shall I open it for you?”

“No! No, that's alright.” You took the long, pale envelope from her once she revealed it to you, realizing that she was right. There was nothing to it. Light as a feather, but completely sealed on the back with his personal emblem hastily stamped, or more appropriately, smeared, with red wax dribbling away from center towards the bottom of the envelope as if sudden jerkiness had unsteadied his focused pour.

You flipped the thing front to back several times, testing the way the opposite ends fluttered from nothingness within, and glanced aside to your maid.

She looked to be just as thrown.

“You're sure this is from him?” you asked, bemused. “Who delivered this?”

“Why, a courier on horseback, of course!” she said with conviction, so you knew she wasn't lying to you at that moment. It wasn't her habit to weave tales to get a rise out of her employers, anyway. “I even spoke to the courier for a while because I made a comment about it being so light. He wasn't sure about it, either, but the description of the man who hired him matched the Master almost exactly.”

You had found a letter opener on the desk nearby and made a quick cut under the wax to break the seal without ripping the envelope itself.

“Almost? What does that mean here?” you raised the intact flap with the messy seal attached, freeing all of the residual tracks of wax from the paper so that they fell to the hardwood below like pebbles shaken out of a shoe after a stroll through the yard. “The man was either my husband or he wasn't.”

The maid tried to subdue her intrigue of the envelope, turned, and moved onto bunching up the soiled sheet you'd spread out on the floor last night. “Please don't misunderstand. It was him. But, the courier described him as ‘a very interesting and friendly fellow to converse with’.”

“What?”

You were responding to two things simultaneously right then: what your maid had just told you, and the fact that the only content inside the envelope was a single shred of paper torn from an unlined journal.

The maid fluttered back over to your side as you plucked out the slither of paper, letting the envelope fall freely from your hand to the floor. Leaning into your proximity, she read aloud the same three words that your eyes skimmed:

“Father Marius DuMonde.”

Just as you had done before with the envelope, you flipped the scrap back and forth as though trying to magically flip something into existence. Your husband's handwriting was recognizable in the lettering, but it was impatient; scrawled across a page in one journal in his vast collection like he hurriedly walked past, and then ripped it out.

Nothing else was revealed to you in the seconds after, nor in your long, contemplative stare.

“Who is that?” you asked the maid to alleviate a fast yawning gap of uneasiness beginning to make you fidget and fluster. “A priest?”

The maid beamed in awe of your fast deductive skills and nodded eagerly. “It would seem that way! The city has more places of worship than it does homes for the hungry and sick. Although, I suppose a church offers some of those services.” However, the lightness sank out of her face when you didn't reciprocate that enthusiasm whatsoever. “You’re unhappy? What's wrong?”

“My husband is a scholar. A rigid man of science,” you said, bending over to pick up the discarded envelope to closer examine the disastrous wax seal. “He denounces faith in all forms. Why did he write a priest's name to me?”

That maddening thought followed you for days afterward, sufficiently distracting you from all the regular vices you'd come to rely on to fill the void of your husband's absence. Fulfill the needs he'd never tried to meet even while he was around.

You spent your days brooding in the window seats in whichever room was warmest, molding against their domed shape while leaning a cheek flush to frigid glass, eyes bloodshot and watering against the sun’s searing neon reflecting off of a lawn of undiluted, glittering white.

Seldomly, a finch or small vermin would come into your view—hopping or lunging through the snow, making tracks, digging holes, disturbing your beautiful wonderland and almost arousing you into unreasonable outbursts which then inevitably became the servants responsibility to contend with, should any be nearby to provoke you.

It was the early evening during one of your normal watches, just after dinner and a glass of red wine, when a great clamor carried swiftly to you from the foyer of the main entrance. The servants’ voices were a feverish amalgam of nonsensical babbling, high-pitched, and accommodating in a way that made you think of groveling dogs with flattened ears, wagging and tucked tails, bellies upturned to their masters.

“Come! Come quickly!” called your maid from the sitting room door, her shrill, excitable voice a violent jostling in your head, scrambling your thoughts and anger with it. “Master has returned! He's asking for you.”

You delayed the reunion, waiting several minutes after she had gone before standing. You realized that the anticipation you felt swelling in your chest, rising like growth—a malignant tumor into your throat, thickening your tongue and fouling your taste and smell, was because you were uneasy, haunted by the cryptic message he had presumably sent you weeks ago.

A while later, you entered the foyer to see most of the staff had already dispersed and the ones left behind were your husband’s most loyal. There among them, speaking so unremarkably, so casually in a way you'd never witnessed, was your husband. His good spirits and animated gestures as he handed off all his things to many hands were an odd sight, staggeringly unlike his typical dour.

So, the rumor was true. There was something discomforting in that.

Whatever topic he'd been engaged in fell wayside once he took sight of you: standing, waiting, subtly shifting your weight, picking your overgrown cuticles to remedy how nervous you truly felt in that moment. You'd always been a little uncertain of how to deal with him as he was hardly affable, but this—

“Oh my… there you are, my sweet!” his voice was exactly the same, but his way of speaking was too jarring, almost lilting. Unnatural. No one else seemed to notice. “I was worried you may have been cross with me for being away for so long. As it turned out, uncle had far more beneath the surface to find than I once thought. But, all is well! The old man has been laid to rest forever. The estate is in the right hands. I've come back to you.”

Could this man really be your husband?

He came to you in brisk strides with a certain clumsiness to the way he moved, somewhat off. You thought about seasoned drunkards who could walk along a path, but never on a straight line without gently swaying on and off of it. Mostly in control, but never so well to appear normal.

But, you didn't detect that stiff, hot, fermented reek of alcohol on his breath nor any subtle odor sticking to his clothes as he gripped you tight in an embrace. The only one he'd ever given you. Where you should have been over the moon in joy at his profound change in heart, the little sweetness was like an anchor—arms of a sinewy willow pinning you to an even stronger trunk.

“God, you're breathtaking.” He even sounded winded as he spoke, lifting your face up with both hands to see his dark, dark gleaming eyes. You startled from his cold touch, fingertips pinpricks of pure frost and ice as they pushed into your skin, but you felt trying to reach much deeper than that. “Come with me, my love. Let me show you just how much I've missed you.”

As if fantasy had become real, he fucked you relentlessly that night next to the fireplace, consuming you so completely that every orgasm made your insides churn in agony.

He laved at you with his entire mouth, tongue and teeth hardest at work while his hands bruised and fondled you, fingers thrusting up into your tight hole oozing his saliva and your arousal. It was shameful to think that it took this sort of handling from another person to get you off, squeal like a sow.

He fucked you however he could, wherever he could. Rutting you from behind and against furniture, pressing your bare chest flush to frosted over window panes to make your nipples erect and ache from the cold biting them. Then, you were settled on his lap in front of a mirror hanging adjacent across the bedroom, his thighs spreading you wide open before your own reflection where you watched his cock plunge deep, filling you to the base of his shaft, balls slapping your sticky skin.

“Touch yourself, darling.” His throat rumbled, turning over stones and shards of glass, overall sounding very husky. There was something of wheeze that trailed the end of his every word, like he’d been patched for a long time. “Touch yourself. Watch yourself while you do it. Fuck yourself like the whore you are.”

Although the things he said were horribly uncouth, unbefitting of a man of his status and who you'd known him to be, there was great allure in hearing him, obeying his wants. You'd only had one glass of wine that evening, but your head and body warmed and buzzed like you'd had several.

His voice was a raspy whisper in your ears, seeping deep into your mind; spreading; fitting the grooves of your brain like the slow sprawl of sap through the gaps in bark. You were hardly yourself those minutes, those hours onward where you witnessed your reflection stroking throbbing parts, moaning, weeping, cumming until it hurt, and then doing it all over again.

The person in the mirror seemed to be someone completely different, whether simply disassociation from yourself or some hallucination evoked by exhaustion and ecstacy. Your husband had faded into the background, his voice creating sounds and noises, holding the cadence of language while seeming entirely unprobable, unknowable to you.

You couldn't understand him, yet you could, and the things he said were vile and disgusting and moralless. He told you of every way he'd like to fuck you, watch you be fucked; but, mostly, he wanted you to fuck yourself with the bulbous bedposts, the metal phallus held under lashing flames to be inserted next to his own cock.

He suggested orgies where the servants could take turns with you. He had almost convinced you to call for your maid so he could watch you suck on her breasts and lick her clit, while he rammed you from the back. He suggested drugs and whores, robbing the mortuaries, and worse and worse and worse and worse…

The next morning, you were stiff and immobile, bedridden unless two servants came into your room to help you squat on the commode. Your abdomen was tender and your genitals were untouchable, forcing you to lie in bed without undergarments to alleviate the raw chafing that could happen with fabric.

“I'm sorry, my darling. I—I lost control of myself. I got carried away,” your husband confessed later on, his sallow complexion keeping a weird, waxy sheen to it. A mask that fits, but not quite perfectly. Some of his former somber nature had returned to him as he sat on the edge of your bed, caressing the side of your face. He was still ridiculously cold. “Forgive me. I never meant to hurt you. I didn't realize just how desperate I was to see you again until you were in my arms. And then—and then, it was like it was all a dream.”

You thought the very same. You could believe he forgot himself in an uncharacteristic blaze of lust, as men were never taught to be any other way, and most men couldn't fathom the level of restraint he’d had until last night.

Everything else, you'd wanted to believe, was simply imagined after drinking more than you once thought and getting inside your own head full of sinful indulgences.

Still, one thing bothered you: Father Marius DuMonde.

“I need you to go to the city and find him. And show him this paper. Explain to him everything that you know, you hear?” You'd handed your maid the old envelope and scrap of paper, and handed her a generous bag of coins from your own safe. She looked at you, everything else, in bewilderment. “Don't ask questions. If you're able, bring him back here. Beg him if you must. If it's all nothing, he will simply be an honored guest we feed well, house, and send off gracefully the next day. Should it be something…”

“Are you afraid of him? The Master?” asked the maid, perhaps out of faithfulness to him. Perhaps out of devotion to you the most. “What do you think happened at his uncle's estate?”

It would all be speculation and unjustified gossip without proof, of which you had none. So, you told her that you couldn't be sure of anything right now. “Wait until sundown. Take the old pony in the stables, the one that usually lags behind all the rest. Be silent. Be careful.”

The maid did as you asked and left right before the final light was extinguished by indigo nightfall. You were able to move to one of the windows, seating yourself gingerly, watching her lead the sluggish old pony into cover of tree tops and then nothing else.

But, five days later, the maid hadn't returned from her mission, nor had you received any correspondence from her, nor the priest that she was supposed to retrieve.

A week after that, it was revealed to you that neither she or the old pony had made it out of the woods. The details of the old pony were so gruesome you couldn't bear to remember them. But, the maid was found nearly decapitated, head twisted around to face backwards, her pale skin hideously purple and black and swelled where it had been stretched like a strap of wrung leather. It was mentioned she had been disemboweled as well, but you promptly burst into tears and ran from the room before the visiting coroner could finish speaking, leaving him to discuss the rest with just your husband.

That night, you lay next to your husband in bed. The deep silence of night filled your ears with static and crunching cotton, whereas a hum resonated inside your head, your chest, seeping into your bones like a cold blanket of rainfall. The black air took on weird shapes: imagined appendages curling, reaching across the ceiling towards the bed, towards you. Your eyes couldn't focus enough to ward them off, nor the depth of dark your husband's silhouette had at your side.

He was faced the other way, his clothes back to you, completely unmoving. You ventured closer to listen for the thin breathing of sleep, the automatic rise and fall of his body, and yet he could've been mistaken as one of the dead. As dead and gnarled as your maid.

“Who are you?” you asked him. Asked the swirling nothingness in the room. “Where is my husband?”

“You've nothing to worry about, my sweet,” he said readily, so clearly anticipating to have your voice ring out at some point in the night. “He is here with me. Such a selfish, unlovable man. I am the one worthy of this vessel and you. Not he.”

Then, he rolled on top of you and kissed you deeply. Your bedclothes were shucked from your bodies and he pushed your thighs apart to seat himself inside of you. He took you with greedy thrusts, face fitted against the arch of your neck where his breath left a moist film across your skin, but the rest of him was freezing.

Your whimpers of pains were dwarfed by his hot moans into your flesh, teeth suddenly sharper and sinking deep when he bit into your neck. You were trapped staring at the ceiling, wrapped in agony and pleasure, feeling his body under your fingertips beginning to distort and change into something far more monstrous.

a/n; the upcoming story is meant to be my take on the whole possession subgenre in horror. if you're interested in reading it, I suggest you stick around my blog bc I do intend to start working on the actual story here in the next month or so!!

also, father marius dumonde is the same priest from my vampire priest x reader fic—of flesh sin. so, father shaw will be making a reappearance in it.

that’s me. literally me.

hes praying for the liberation of the working class 🙏

last piece masterlist

summary a new family move in next door, your adorable son megumi couldn’t help but befriend the pink haired identical twins, nor could you help the buttflies that sore at the sight of the blond man. will your crush be able to develop into more or will your ex-husband try to win you back?

pairing nanami kento x fem!gojou!reader x fushiguro toji

genre parent!au slice of life!au

warnings mature content, sexual content

updates as often as possible!

one two three four four & a half five six (extra scene) seven eight nine ten

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