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Through the crowd, over the tops of perfectly coiffed heads and shiny hair and glittering jewelry that catches and scatters candlelight, she sees the dark haired man. He meets her eyes and cuts through her ongoing bloody daydreams. The red tint that’s always cast over everything briefly fades for just long enough to regard him curiously. He tosses his head a little and a long lock of dark hair is thrown over his shoulder, out of the way.
He stands out because he is looking right at her, directly into her eyes, despite her hard work in disguising herself as an upper city woman, picking the dried blood from under her nails and dousing herself in perfume to hide the smell of decay that follows her everywhere. Her stolen dress presses her breasts up, pushes her waist in, and the knife she has hidden in her skirts is cold against her skin. His eyes drop down her body, slowly, until they land directly on the part of her dress where her knife is hidden, as if he can see through her clothes and into her body, into her mind through the urge that propels her forward.
She has a secret and the secret is that she is here to kill and noble parties make the best hunting grounds, the best challenge, and the easiest way to strike the fear of death into the heart of the city, to remind the public that Bhaal is here, waiting for them to relax their guard just enough for her to rip and tear her way in and out of their pathetic little lives. He has a secret too and she will learn it is that he’s here for a similar reason, except that he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty and wants to lord over this group of small men and dainty women instead of drenching himself in their blood. They won’t tell each other any of this for a while, but standing in high heeled shoes that pinch her toes and a whalebone corset that keeps her breaths shallow, she can feel it emanate from him, this aura of a delusion of grandeur even more pervasive than that of the nobility that surrounds them.
He smiles an oily, confident smile, tossing his head again to move his dark hair from his face. Low in her belly, the clawing need to kill subsides for the briefest of moments.
.
Through the camp, over the tops of the tents they’ve cobbled together and the simple campfire that flickers softly in the camp’s designated center, she sees the dark haired man. He meets her eyes and cuts through her ongoing bloody daydreams.
She can’t tell exactly what it is that draws her to him. A hint of desperation in the way he looks when he addresses her. The way his eyes linger on her mouth as she speaks. But she thinks it’s his hair, dark and tousled, the ends resting gently against the space between his neck and shoulders, that slope of skin she looks at too closely. She straightens up, trying to look as though she’s just passing a glance. He gives her a cautious smile. The way the flickering firelight catches in his hair triggers some feeling deep in her chest, almost in her heart. She feels something on the tip of her tongue, a fragment of a memory of a dream.
She smiles back, a little. It doesn’t feel right, as if her lips are rusted from disuse, as if upturning the corners of her mouth is something she hasn’t done often, in the clouded and shadowed past that looms over her like the ruins they’re camped under.
Her secret is that she sometimes feels as though she might break her own arm just to relish in the aftermath of the violent act, to see the bone rip through her own skin and taste the blood that spurts out. His is that there is some hungry thing he let inside his body that will kill them all if he isn’t careful. They tell each other, and he doesn’t react that badly to hers, even though deep down she is aware that something is very wrong with this impulse to hurt, to gouge, to bleed.
“I appreciate you sharing that,” he tells her, sincerely.
Some instinct inside her that cautions her to slow down, to hold onto some revelations, some secrets. This, she ignores. There are holes in her head. She looks down her shirt and sees deep, half healed scars across her chest and stomach, as if someone cut her open and took something. She feels lacking, something missing deep inside. And yet this all feels terribly familiar, this moment standing before this dark haired man, having him know about the churning darkness within her, her deep craving for blood, and not flinch away from her.
He pushes a lock of hair behind his ear. She watches the strands curl under his ear, one or two catching in his shiny earring, transfixed.
.
He's on his knees on his plush rug in his opulent, decadent room in his upper city house, the house he clawed his way to the top for, every room suffused with his pride, every inch of every gilded piece of furniture emanating ego. He takes her hand and brushes his lips against the backs of her fingers, barely touching her knuckles. She imagines him biting her hand until he draws blood, imagines drops of red on his pink lips, imagines kissing him and the coppery taste that would linger in her mouth and she can’t suppress a shiver.
He seems pleased to have drawn this reaction from her. “Do you like me down here?” he asks. “Shall I bow lower? Scrape, perhaps? What will it take for you to let me in?”
He tries to sound sincere but his eyes are sharp on her face, cutting through her. All she can be sure of is his patron lord’s edict, his unstoppable desire to rule, to control. Kneeling before her is just another ruse. She takes her hand away and puts it behind her back where he can’t see it quiver.
“Scrape,” she says.
He lowers himself onto his belly on the rug, his cheek mere inches from her shoe. She can see the way his face is set in a smile he can’t hold back.
“How do you like the view?” he asks.
She could stomp on him now, her heel could crush his skull like an egg, and all this would be over. She could go back home to the temple under the city and continue her Father’s will. But her stomach churns at the thought of banishing him. And he knows it, knows her hesitation, is wielding it like a weapon against her.
“Get up,” she says, clasping her hands so tightly behind her back that her knuckles ache. “Before I kill you.”
He gets to his feet slowly, leisurely, drawing himself up to full height. He’s taller than her, a head taller. She has to tilt her own head back to see him when he’s standing this close to her. If she cut his legs off at the knees she wouldn’t need to look up. She lets the thought pass through her.
His eyes dart down to her mouth but only for a moment, long enough for her to notice, long enough for her to realize that she can control him too.
.
He's on his knees on the grassy dirt of the Grove, the sunlight cutting through his hair, alighting on the grooved skin of his chest where the orb sunk into his body. He takes her hand and presses it against his chest, her palm flat against his skin, his hands over hers. A loose thread in her mind is tugged, something feels like it’s unraveling. If she focuses too hard on it, the thread itself starts to disappear. She doesn’t push it. Her hold on what little is left of her mind is tenuous at best. She focuses instead on his hands over hers, warm and steady, and on the heartbeat she can feel through his chest and can’t suppress a shiver.
There is a story here that passes his lips in a hurry, a story of hubris, a story with a terrible ending. Her thumb brushes against his chest, catching the hair there, touching the burned skin from the trail of the orb, wondering whether in her shrouded other life, another man knelt before her like this and asked her to trust him.
Trust. Even the word passes over the holes in her head with difficulty. Gale says, “I’ll leave if you want me to,” and she considers it. A reflex perhaps, a built-in automatic need to second guess, because when she thinks about it for longer than a second, she presses her palm against his chest and quickly says, “Stay.”
He gets back to his feet. He’s taller than her. The curve of her neck as she looks up at him sits on the very tip of her tongue. She opens her mouth to ask him if they’ve met before, and his eyes drop to her lips where they linger for a beat or two. She loses her train of thought.
.
His hair falls back over his shoulders as she pushes him into his soft featherbed. Her knees on either side of his hips dig into the cushions he surrounds himself with. The air is scented with some fragrance that permeates the fabric around her, lingers in his hair, floods her senses. She hates it. There are reminders all around her of her defiance of Bhaal. His hair, shiny and always a little greasy. His hands on her hips, pushing her forward and back, forward and back, fingers digging into her skin. He’s inside her, inside her body, inside her mind. Like the perfume he loves to douse himself in, he’s slipped in between the fibers of the fabric of her body and made himself a part of her.
She scratches his chest hard, just to remind him that she still holds some power in their dynamic, but he only smiles because he knows the truth. The beads of blood that spring from his skin give themselves up like he never will. She can scratch and cut and bleed him as much as she wants, and she does want to. Every touch of his skin against hers is a fight against bruising him, bleeding him, making him into a pile of bones to sit in the corner of her room.
He takes both her wrists in his hand and holds onto them tightly, as if he’s aware of the thoughts churning in her head. One of his hands is still on her hip, controlling their tempo. He’s got her right where he wants her, hands restrained, her very body moving on his terms. The loss of control is jarring. She grinds down hard on him and earns little gasp. It sends a wave of goosebumps over her skin.
“Do that again,” he says.
She bites her tongue, willing herself to stay still, but grinds down again, another wave of something crashing over her as the sound passes his lips again, a give and take of power, but she always gives more than he does and it feels like weakness.
.
The heavy darkness that blankets the shadowed and cursed lands is familiar. No sun, no stars. When she looks up as they sit side by side before the fire, leaning back against an old log, his hair tickling her face, the night is so black it looks as though a giant curtain has been drawn across the sky.
He says he misses the sun, mumbles it as he falls asleep, his open book laying forgotten on his lap. She watches his eyelids start to droop, his breathing even out and get heavier. She likes watching him sleep, watching the thoughts that run through his head slow down just a little. She imagines this is what he looked like before the orb and the tadpole worked their way into his body.
She touches him lightly, her hand on his shoulder. Slowly, he turns his head and presses his lips to the backs of her knuckles.
She tenses slightly.
“Was that inappropriate?” he whispers.
“No. It wasn’t.” She leans in, closer to him, her chest pressing against his, the curve of her breast squeezing against the burned mark of the orb, sending waves of heat rushing through her body. “Can you do it again?”
He kisses her again, this time right at the soft skin of her temple. She shivers. This display of weakness sits under her skin, all wrong.
“Again,” she whispers, pleads.
He kisses her jaw, his lips brushing, barely touching her skin, his beard dragging over her lips and sending a shudder through her.
He's holding back. The usual confidence and bravado is far away now, replaced by something slower and more careful. She touches the mark of the orb high on his chest and his body feels soft and pliant at her touch, like water.
.
He looks at home in his ornate, complicated clothing in his opulent, gilded cage of a house, surrounded by sycophants and liars. The cool press of her knife against her leg under her layers of skirts is comforting. She watches them circle her partner, watches him consolidate his power, and wonders whether she is content to keep her killing to the edges of his circle instead of strike at the heart and end his climb forever.
He looks through the crowd and through her. She looks through him and imagines her knife cutting through his throat, his blood soaking his expensive carpet. She wants so desperately to submit to her dark urge, as much as she wants to defy it. Her hands are balled into fists at her side. A wave of nausea rises within her as she pushes down her need to hurt.
He walks over to her, crossing the room, the crowd parting for him. He always finds her right when she’s at her most fragile, her fingers twitching to slash, her legs light and ready to launch her forward at her target.
“I know that look,” he says. “If I wasn’t surrounded by people right now, I would have you right here.”
Her voice is ripped from her throat, words embedded into a snarl. “I should rip out your spine for parading me in here like a prize. Your blood will taste bitter but I will drink it anyway.”
He leans closer to her, looming over her. “Do it, I beg you.”
His hand is on her waist, pulling her closer. His mouth is hot on her neck.
“A Banite begging,” she says with a bark of a laugh. “Your lord should smite you where you stand.”
“My lord should smite me for much simpler reasons,” he says.
He pushes her against the wall, pressing into her with his body, and she feels hemmed in, caged. The knife strapped to her leg presses into her skin, unbloodied. She is ashamed by how clean it is.
.
He looks at home in this illusion of his tower, surrounded by books that fill the shelves lining his walls. The smell of the sea filters in through the open balcony door. She takes a deep breath of dusty old books and fresh parchment mingling with the water. She can so easily see him here, at home, laying on the couch with a glass of wine or cooking at the stove, alive and well and not counting down the time he has left as the tadpole and the orb wrestle for the honor of who will kill him first.
There is a third outside his body that may have that honor. Watching him watch her, she can feel that sickening urge to cleave him in two start to rise in her belly like a bad meal. She burns with the need to bite into the soft skin between his neck and shoulder. She presses a kiss into it instead, his body warm when her mouth touches it. His hands cradle her face gently. He holds her as though she will break. She knows in her past there is a mountain of people she has already broken.
“I have so much to tell you,” she says, the words spilling out of her. So much to say. A dam of some past knowledge holds back the things she wants to tell him.
“Tell me, I beg you,” he whispers into her skin.
His arms wrap around her, pressing her closer to him. Her head fits perfectly under his chin. She puts her ear over his chest and listens to his heartbeat, the flow of his blood through his veins, and her hands ache to tear him open and fill her mouth with his flesh.
“You,” she says, her voice soft against his chest, melting into his heartbeat, “You’re familiar. Your body. The way you look at me.”
“I understand,” he says. “Loving you is as easy and familiar as breathing. I take a breath and love you in the time between an inhale and an exhale.”
He tightens his hold on her. She sinks into his embrace, unable to correct him, to explain that this has happened before, or maybe it hasn’t. It hasn’t but she still knows, through the haze over her life before the Nautiloid that’s almost too thick to see through, how this ends.
.
She has grown accustomed to his eyes on her, heavy as a paperweight, as physical a touch as his hands on her waist, fingers pressing into her skin. He looks at the crown and she feels lighter, his gaze turned away from her an absence.
She draws her cloak tighter around herself for something to do with her hands that isn’t touching him. There’s a trail of blood behind her, dead servants of Mephistopheles and shades that linger listlessly, watching this theft of their master’s house. Even with the bloodshed that has led them to this treasure, she feels restless, hands twitching to maim. She wishes Mephistopheles would appear so she can tear his limbs off his body one by one and spend some of this pent up rage.
He takes the crown, an unwieldy tangle of metal. She can see it reflected in his eyes, eyes that are wide and excited. He does look at her eventually, when the crown has been carefully stowed in his pack and thrown over his shoulder, but the gleam in his eye remains, as though the crown is seared into his eyes now, a part of him forever.
“Can you feel it?” he asks, his voice low and breathy. “Unspeakable power.” His hand is on her shoulder, moving slowly toward the clasp at the base of her throat that holds her cloak together. As his fingers brush her skin, she feels the shades draw closer, the long dead eyes on them multiplying.
He deftly undoes the clasp. The cloak falls to the ground in a puddle of fabric that pools around her ankles. His fingers drift down from her throat to her chest. The skin between her breasts feels hot, her clothes too tight. Her eyes drift down to his waist, the pack that rests against his side. She thinks about killing him and taking it for herself. From the way he looks at her, almost looking through her, she knows he’s thinking the same thing.
His hand drops to her hip, pulling her flush against him. He's hard, she can feel him against her belly. Heat unfurls inside her, chasing away the thought of the crown, filling her with want. She leans in to bite his lip or maybe kiss it but he pulls away at the last second, readjusting the strap of his pack on his shoulder, eyes toward the exit.
The shades watch in still silence around them.
.
She has grown accustomed to his eyes on her, the gentle check-ins, the softness of his gaze. He looks down at the picture of the crown in the ancient book she stole for him and she feels the absence of his gaze. It feels familiar.
“I knew it,” he breathes, tapping his finger absently against the page, the drawing of the crown on the yellowing paper. “The Crown of Karsus.”
Somehow she’s aware of what this means without fully knowing how, a trickle of knowledge from the indestructible wall someone or something had built to keep her past away from her. She knows the meaning of the drawing on the book cracked open on his lap. She knows the glint in his eye, the thoughts running through his head.
“If I… if I could…” he trails into silence.
She puts her hand on his face and redirects his gaze back to her. He looks at her but his eyes are unfocused, his mind miles away.
“Gale,” she says.
He blinks and refocuses. The gray lines of his folly are stark against his skin. She traces the lines with her thumb, drifting down his cheek and disappearing into his beard. He leans into her touch.
“I’m sorry, my love,” he says. “I was lost in a daydream.”
“A daydream about becoming a god,” she says.
He smiles just a little. “Perhaps. Would you think less of me if so?”
She has to think about it. Before she can respond, he’s kissing her, his mouth hot against hers, his beard gently scratching her face in a way that’s both comforting and indescribably foreign. As though this is the first time he’s kissing her, as if she’s so used to being kissed by someone else that this is a jarring new thing. She freezes, then melts against him. His hands move up and down her back. His touch is reassuring. She leans into it, accepting, accepted.
“No,” she says into his mouth. “If you can do it, you should. In another life, you’d be a god already.”
He looks through her again, eyes soft but dazed, even as he leans back in to kiss her again and she thinks yes, this time will be different, this time will be better.