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It is truly a wonder what a man can become numb to.
You feel his eyes on you at all hours of the day, yes. A shadowed undercurrent that you must wade through with unending caution, lest it grabs hold of you and pulls you under into its unfathomable depths. A lingering chill by your side at all hours. A silent stillness as you struggle to perform tasks that were once routine. A ravenous predator that stirs within the moment any part of your bare body is exposed, in action or in rest. You see his eyes in every surface, in every passers-by, and even when night falls you dream of those golden flames searing their brand into every ilm of your skin. Yet you persist. You still live, you still wake and sleep all the same, though your slumbers grow ever longer.
He is not always silent, the beast. He cannot implant his own thoughts into your mind as easily as when we were one instead of three, but he whispers in your ear nonetheless. At first it was the odd cold quip at various annoyances, a wry judgment during endless training, perhaps a snarl under his phantom breath when a citizen kept their distance or glared as if you’d brought home a heretic as a consort. Then it was a constant cynical commentary on every action you took, every thought crossing your mind, every path branching out before you, stifling your mind until you struggled to tell which thoughts were your own.
Your form is amateur. The only thing you’ll be hitting like that is your own face.
They’re looking, they’re all staring at you. Disgusting.
Look at you, wallowing in your precious guilt. Sentimental fool. Your platitudes will get you nowhere. It changes nothing. It will not heal my wounds. I am dead, and you forgot. You broke me. You abandoned me. Go ahead and beg for my forgiveness. You belong on your knees.
Quit your self-pity. Do you think yourself the only one who has suffered? Pick up your sword. Perhaps if you keep at this, you’ll finally earn your pitiful salvation.
They see the monster under your skin, you know. Why bother with these tepid manners?
Oh, they go on about their justice, about reconciliation, about noble pursuits and morals. They don’t know one bit about it. If this were truly a just world, their heads would be naught but drops of blood and shards of bone under our boots. Don’t play coy, you’ve thought about it.
This world is a twisted thing, and it’s twisted your heart as well. We must burn it all to the ground and show them the folly of their ways. Deny it all you want, you cannot deny the truth in what I say.
They’re gawking again. Bloody voyeurs. We should pluck their blasted eyes out.
The bitterness plagues your every sense, a brush that paints every scene in unflattering shades. A hero does not feel such unseemly resentment, a hero should be pure of heart and ever forgiving. A hero, like you, does not think these sort of thoughts. It is him, his darkness seeping into your mind.
These are yours too, pretty boy. Don’t even think about running away again. Your wilful cowardice is pathetic.
And a hero certainly does not sully his pure heart with such base lusts like so.
Oh, but idle hands are the heretic’s instruments, isn’t that what your precious Enchiridion tells you? And your hands are very idle, aren’t they?
He watches you at all hours, even in your most private and shameful of moments. Especially then. Your traitorous body and its whoreful vigour, devoid of its usual outlets for release, roars to life. It is an untamed animal that defies your will and runs wild in pursuit of fleeting pleasures. It violates you, drags its claws across your chest and wraps its claws around your flesh.
You can bind it and berate yourself over it all you like. But a beaten dog will bite back.
You do not wish for this.
But you don’t know how to numb the pain otherwise, do you? It’s this, or our blade, is it?
You wish your body would simply align with your pure heart once and for all.
“Please, don’t worry about my wounds, boy.”
“But why do you hurt yourself so?”
“A man of the Fury must always be pure of heart and body both, and
dedicated to service Her will, Lucient. No sooner should you fall to sin
than the claws of the adversary shall drag you to the deepest hells.”
Purity, righteousness, chastity, corruption. Careful with your thoughts, pretty boy. With all this posturing, all those scars on your back, you’re becoming just like him.
Accusations gouge deep into your heart, and so you must run. Your hands go to yourself, your body moves until you cry and howl like wounded prey, you hide from your troubles under the refuge of obscenity, and you pour out your bile and seed until your sickness is cleansed. The highest highs will save you from beholding the lowest lows. Until, inevitably, the depths grab a hold of you once more, and you gouge yourself deeper and deeper to feel something again.
Yes, that was when it started, was it not? His observing.
Instead of your mirror image, or a faceless void, the beast took the form of handsome men. Of people you knew. Sometimes he stole their full appearance, other times he would mix together different traits as if experimenting with a recipe to brew a fantasy tailored to your every taste. The sharp jawline and war-chiselled physique of a stoic captain, the bronzed skin of a travelling merchant you rescued long ago who called you his hero, the languid smile of a minstrel whose songs captured you as a youth. His silver-blue hair and heroic stance. The Azure Dragoon’s caustic snarl. The Lord Commander’s eyes of brightest blue. The beast’s form shifted like the tides just as his whims did, and on some occasions, you would look away for a moment only to see him morph once more.
Often, in the shadows of night, you would feel his golden eyes stare, impassive and clinical. Cold as the hand that sins. He would not take form, but you would know he was there by the way your nerves tremble at nothing.
Fascinating. So this is what you find diverting.
Then there were the moments when your mind is awash with intrusive fantasies, of being bound and unwound by faceless bodies, their identities secondary to the acts they forced upon you. Appendages thrust so deep and forcefully into you that they would shatter your bones had it been reality. Your arms and legs, meant for shielding the meek, now bent and broken in manners not meant for life. Shadowed hands that pulled your head back by your hair until your jaws relented. A dozen sets of teeth that leave a hundred marks on your skin. The blood-pumping press of a knife’s edge against your throat, the splinters of the wooden staff gagging your mouth digging into your gums. The marble statue of the Fury glaring down at you with baleful judgment as you were reduced to something lower than even the most woeful street wench. You would scream and shout, your ego would cry that you despised this while your id, while I, struggled in vain not to feel the pleasure.
You wished to be meat. Something broken and bloody left to rot after it’s been used. For meat does not have to worry about propriety, about responsibility, about anything a man lies awake in dread for. Meat only needs to exist to have value. To be needed. To have people be overjoyed to have it. Meat provides so much by being consumed.
Meat does not need to think.
He would snake in then, filled with a morbid curiosity that bordered on a desire to participate.
Troubled, pretty boy? Your formless dreams hurt you so, it makes a man weep, you know. If you want, you could instead imagine me? Would that ease your pain? Enhance the experience? Go on, try to remember what I looked like.
You would scramble to hide your shame or stop altogether, even if it made every nerve in your body ache, if only to keep the unwanted guest inside from deriving a perverse amusement from your plight. He would play at being offended, moving your other hand to expose yourself once more, plucking away at your craving for connection and weaving it into a web of whispered justifications.
Come now, is this really how you treat someone you “love”? As your “closest companion”, am I not allowed to share in your pleasure? We share everything else, after all.
On one evening, he had taken Sidurgu’s form, and simply stayed silent, sharpening his blade as you sharpened yours. Staring down at you as one stares at a particularly stubborn stain on their finest coat. That was the hardest and fastest you had brought yourself to a peak yet, and the unholy bastard had the gall to puppet his brother-in-arm’s appearance to play at licking the leavings from your groin, his tongue swirling around the head in a way that would make the true article faint from indignation.
“What do you think I would say if I knew you did this sort of shite, Lucient? I barely even know you, and I’m already nothing but another pretty face for you to wank to.” He would growl with Sidurgu’s voice against your loins like steel boots over gravel. He would scrape his fangs against sensitive skin, promising violence. You would whimper, turn away, and your member would twitch anew.
On another, you had the blessed delusion that you were alone, or at the very least that the beast was mercifully silent for once. A blue moon’s chance to endure your compulsion without the constant noise, the constant dread of someone enjoying what was meant to be torment. A moment to ease your soul and, perhaps, take a rare drop of pleasure from the act.
You spent yourself in your hand, gasping as though you were a man caught in a rip tide fighting for breath. Yet as you caught your breath and glanced about, your gaze fell upon, Fury take you, the door to your barracks room cracked open just a touch. And in that gap, you see two eyes of deepest azure. Watching you with that half-lidded interest that the Lord Commander always had.
“Ser Lucient? Are you well? You look to be enjoying yourself.”
“Lord Commander de Borel…! Forgive me, pray do not look here!”
He simply tilted his head, and the good Lord Commander’s dulcet tones wrapped themselves around your neck.
“Ah, by all means, do not stop on my account.” He crooned as he stepped in and locked the door behind him. His gaze had dropped to your halted hand, and his handsome features were marred with a lustful smirk more befitting a brigand.
“Your pleasure is illuminating.”
Time and time again your nights would be plagued by visions of those around you. Their, his taunts forming in your mind before they leave his puppet’s mouth. No matter how far you flee into the depths of your own mind, he would tail you as close as your own shadow.
This night is no different. Your mind is a haze of thoughts buzzing around like countless corpse flies, waiting to latch onto the flesh and matter in your cranium and feast on every fear that lurks inside. The blizzards leave working our body to the brink of syncope out of the question, and you haven’t the appetite for either food and drink or books and poetry. And so here you are, chasing the vermin of your mind away by punishing your body.
He taught us, your good mentor did. He did not mean to, no more than he meant to be a thrall to his drink and do what they say he did to our body. But your hands work deftly to wind the strips of tattered leather together into something resembling the sweeping end of a broom. Just like the tools he used on his own body.
With each lash, you cleanse more of those scabrous sins from your flesh. Each sting is another step towards holiness, towards that fabled perfection we long for. You mutter prayers to Halone, to all the martyrs whose paintings you gazed upon with profane longing as a youth. No wonder you tempted the just to sin, you think to yourself. What sort of person would desire such closeness with death and destruction?
Monster.
One.
Degenerate.
Two.
Failure.
Three.
Coward.
Four.
Unworthy.
Five.
Unloved.
Six.
Lucient.
Seven.
Just what do you think you’re doing?
Your hand drops the lash, and thank the Spear that I have some respite from bearing its sting. The beast watches, as he always does, and as you always do, you cower and cover yourself as if Halone Herself bore witness to your naked penance.
What are you cowering for? This is what you expected, is it not?
It hurts when you do that, you know.
Of course, is that not the purpose of it all? That is what you wish to reply, yet hearing that beast wince in pain at the performance…the spike of perverse pleasure that pierces you then forces airy giggles from your throat. Of course you crave this suffering. Both to punish you, and to provoke him.
With shaking hands, you pick up the lash once more, and flakes of dried blood fall from leathers like scarlet-washed snow. You scourge yourself once more, harder, faster, and no prayers leave your lips. You direct the pain toward the beast, his every twitch inside you another step to the heavens.
Stop that! What in the hells are you trying to accomplish?! It’s pointless!
If you would not heed those words when I whispered them to you, you certainly would not when he screams them in your bones. You cackle, and lash yourself yet harder for his words. The beast’s snarling gives way to yelps of distress, and for once, it is as if you are loved. At last, there is someone to share this love with.
It hurts! It hurts! Stop it! Let go of that thing, damn you!
This feeling is better than any climax you have and ever will experience in your miserable life. The beast is saying his lines like a true villain. The hero is purifying his heart, beating back the dragon through sacrificing his own blood and skin. You are a hero, you are a martyr, you are a lamb to slaughter. The stings layer atop each other to blind you with sparks in your eyes.
There is something new in his presence, I feel it shrieking and sharpening in my form. His fear, as wrapped in his building rage as it is, grows ever louder. Loose threads for you to unravel he and I with, and rewind us anew.
You do not even realize what you are doing, do you? Even as he screams and pleads with you, he is still the beast in your mind’s eye. He only screams so that your guard will come down. So that he can tear you to pieces once more.
Lucient! Listen to me!
He is a temptress, a dragon, a curse on your pure soul who seeks only your suffering.
Lucient, drop the lash now! Let me in!
He is nobody that you would know. You know no one in the world who would love you.
You bleeding cur! Are you trying to kill me? To kill us?
You gasp in a repetitive rhythm, the sensation of sharing your sorrows the most potent aphrodisiac. He wished to share everything, and now you are sharing it all with him. You are punished. You are punished. You are punished.
But I can still stop you.
Lucient!
Something snaps inside us. You know not whether it is damage to our body or damage to our mind. Nevertheless, the beast warps. There is no longer your own voice, my voice, reflected back at you. Only a bestial snarl. Your hand drops the lash as though it’s burst into flames, and instead you find yourself gagging on your own fingers invading your mouth and throat.
Enough. You seem to have forgotten. I’m the one who hurts you.
Your heart drops. All but the fresh weeping wounds on your back run ice-cold. Then you giggle. The beast says nothing. He thrusts your fingers deeper, until your knuckles brush the roof of our mouth. He pulls them out, just far enough to let us breathe, before repeating this agonizing cycle. Unholy heat pools in our belly. Tears prick in our eyes as you struggle against the urge to vomit or bite down to the bone.
Do you wish to hurt? Do you wish to forget? Do you wish to run away? No, you won’t ever do that again.
He turns our head towards the standing mirror, a chipped and neglected thing silently witnessing your decay. Just what is this sorry creature you see in the reflection? He puppets our body, shambling towards the mirror and pressing our hands on either side.
Look at this beautiful face. Such a strong body. Do you think this is yours to destroy? Fool. This is mine now. You don’t treat it the way it deserves to be treated.
“This is…” You rasp. “…my body to—”
He snaps our body’s jaw shut so swiftly, you almost bite our tongue in twain. Is that not enough to turn you from your path? Our right hand strokes the face in the mirror with a gentleness that a villain should not have.
Is that so?
He lifts our fist, and swings it down. Not on the mirror, but on the wall beside it. The impact vibrates through every bone and muscle in your arm. Rejoice, we have finally found a pain that you cannot simply laugh through.
Disgusting little thing. Dithering whelp who cannot bear to live, but is too cowardly to die. You can’t even take care of the simplest of things, the one gift this blighted world gives you. Why do you cling to something you despise?
You cannot answer. Or is it that you do not wish to answer? Do you even know the meaning of that question? I could answer for you. It would be a miserable pile of excuses, but I can certainly try.
I am afraid to die. As all that live are.
Meaningless. That makes you nothing more than a beast.
I don’t wish for those dear to me to despair over me.
The same people who have abandoned you? Those you shut out, refuse to see, refuse to even listen to? Do you care for others by ignoring them until they disappear? Like me?
There is still much for us to do. Surely something that can lift us out of this mire…
And yet you idle about day after day wallowing in your own self-pity, doing the same bloody thing over and over, as if that will somehow move you forward!
The reflection wavers. Then it shatters as if made of glass, each shard pierced with an eye of gold.
I know why you still live. It’s because of me. I am a monster, and I am your keeper. I allow you to live in this body, and you repay me with this pain. Is that it? You think that if you continue to hurt me, then eventually you won’t be the most miserable sack of shite in this city? Or is it because I absolve you from the guilt of wanting this filth? If I take this, you're a victim. If you take this, you're a sinner. Is that it, pretty boy?
“No, that is not…!” You wish to protest, say that you are not what he says you are, but then what are you? Why do you feel the need to resist? Who are you without this narrative to carry you?
When the beast speaks, it is no longer from within our body. It is a snarling whisper, the barest hint of bitter laughter, just behind our ear.
You truly are the worst.
Our hand, still throbbing from the wall, goes to our smallclothes. This is what you expected from the very start. You whimper, make a half-hearted performance out of trying to stop the beast from revealing you, but it is for naught. He wrenches them down, and the chill of the room hits our burning flesh. Fully aroused and already leaking, the faint twitching of your horrified mask into a smile and back again, you cannot deny your intentions any longer.
Enough, I’m tired of going around in circles. At the end of the day, you are nothing but a whore baying for someone to buy you, are you not? Let’s get rid of those useless thoughts.
His grip is a punishing vice. The speed he strokes you with would be considered violence to any other. Yet you wince not from the pain, but from the effort of trying to suppress the pleasure.
Still trying to fight it? Pitiful little pretender. I’ll break you down.
Your own shadow ripples beneath you, boiling and bubbling as it rises to surround you. From the murky depths, tendrils lash up to brace our legs, forcing you to your knees. A single tendril rises up to your face, its formless end morphing before your eyes, until finally you are face to face with your body’s desire. Thick. Monstrous. Promising violence.
Open up. Or I will break you open.
The shadowed phallus pushes against our cheek, then against our lips shut tight. You resist, even as every stroke of its length against our face sends waves of new pleasure throughout our body. The beast growls in the face of your defiance.
Trying to defy now? What for? You will break eventually. Your pathetic cock is already leaking, begging for you to break. You’re practically screaming for this. It’s better than the sword, the lash, or the knife.
As if to strengthen his point, he stops his stroking, instead holding you at the precipice with a grip too loose to inflame your lust any further. Cruel, so very cruel. Will you finally fight against this? Finally tear yourself away from this slip into the abyss?
A pitiful whine begs to escape our mouth. And for that, our mouth must open.
He seizes his chance.
The tendril forces its way through inside you. It tastes of nothing, feels like nothing, until the heady musk of the men you crave seeps from its form. The scent, the pressure as it starts to thrust inside our mouth, very nearly undoes you. He strokes you once more, the rhythm matching the one that invades our mouth. Tears flow freely now, though whether it is from encroaching despair, or the throes of ecstasy, I can no longer say. Perhaps the two are the same to you.
There you go, bravo. You should stay like this forever; not a single one of those bloody thoughts in there.
Reason slips from your mind, though was reason ever a part of the equation? You say his name, Fray Fray Fray, and the sound is muffled by the tendril violating us, forcing your mind blank. He hears you through your struggles though. He hears you, and it is like cream to a cat.
That’s it. That’s the only word you need to know. You were born to be mine, it’s the only fate that will bring you happiness. Forget about being a knight, becoming a hero. Forget anything else in the world exists.
You watch as your free hand goes up to stroke your face, moving of its own accord. In the reflection, you see not yourself, but your shadow. A hundred golden eyes twitched up in a hundred unseen smiles, held up by your strings.
There is only Fray. You needn't suffer this pitiful existence any longer. I will devour you, body and soul, and you will know nothing but ecstasy until this body takes its final breath. And you will thank me for it with every beat of your withered heart.
No. You will not listen to this. This is simply a trick, you must see it too. You cannot possibly mean to give up our soul to him, can you?
Aah, I can’t take this. No matter what I do, you still won’t listen. You need to be hollow. I have to make you see…
The tendril withdraws from you, a trail of saliva connecting you to it in a phenomenally salacious display. You take a gasping breath. In the mirror, you see that our lips are painted with a slight wash of blue. It feels good to breathe once more, for the light-headedness to cease, but I fear that this will not last.
He forces our eyes back up to the mirror, and there is our regular Fury-given reflection. The blood from the scourging has dried in trails down our flanks, rusted claws that cling like memories of the dead. With the sweat pouring down, the shadows under our eyes, and hair curtaining our face, you look as though you have already joined their ranks.
The reflection wavers with every breath you heave through our lungs. Then, it smiles. Ever meeting your gaze, it brushes its hand across its (or our?) cheek, down its neck, across the plane of its chest, tracing the trail of hair down its belly, before coming to rest at that most maddening of organs. He traces it with a trained leisureliness, and you only now realize that he is slick. Slick with your saliva.
What a beautiful thing, this body is you are. Let me be you for a moment, won’t you? We already share so much, and you don’t want to treat it yourself like the treasure it is you are…haah, just looking at it you makes me burn, I need it you, I can’t bear a moment without it you…
You shake your head. This is already a waking nightmare, but to look up and see your own face glaring with inhuman lust and your own body bearing down on you would set you screaming ’til our lungs burst. His smile falters.
Fine. Why don’t I show you how I would treat this body of ours?
The beast swipes out to turn the mirror towards our bed. The tendrils wrapped around our legs tighten, and yet more emerge from your shadow to pull you toward and onto the bed. Warm as they are now, the manner in which they curl ’round our body, squeezing as if to mark the skin, sets our blood to freezing.
Look up, pretty boy. Watch carefully. I won’t let you turn a blind eye to the truth anymore.
Up our eyes go, you cannot blink even as the sight of our body degraded to naught but the beast’s plaything. He begins his strokes anew, heat building below your hips with each torturous caress. His tendrils’ grip pulses in time with his strokes, a maddening rhythm that pushes all thoughts, all will, out of your mind bit by agonizing bit.
I’d sever the heads of all those who put their boots to our necks. I’d feast on their blood to provide this vessel the nutrients it craves. Every single one of those bastards will know to fear this face the same way they fear the Fury’s wrath. They’ll be the ones bowing and pleading for mercy, not you.
The reflection ceases its pantomime of our body’s movements, leaning back against unseen cushions like a harem king utterly lost to his hedonism. He traces his (our) body as he speaks, caressing, fondling, touching with the reverence of an artisan inspecting the highest quality materials for his work. Do you feel our arm cramping now? He has forced you into such a painful rhythm…
Then after we give those shitebirds what for, I’ll take us back to a warm little abode. Bathe this body in water scented with those wildflowers you like so much, wash off the blood we cannot drink. I’ll have us feast on the finest food and spirits we can get our hands on, and it will be all your favourites as well.
Your favourites? There is the faint aroma of spiced milk tea and hot cocoa, fresh baked gratin, meat and root vegetable stew…comforting scents one and all. No, do stop salivating, they are merely phantoms of your senses. Or are our memories so strong that he can ensnare you with them so easily?
He reaches out, though he is naught but a reflection pressing its hand against the unseen boundary separating it from its origin.
You’ll be happy as can be, you know. You’ll realise it. You’ll realise you never want to go back to those days of hardship, when you were naught but dirt beneath the world’s heels. And when you lose yourself in this heaven every night, you will thank the stars that fate brought us back together. You will beg for my guiding hand in the daylight and my embrace when night falls, because it will be the only way you truly feel alive.
Listen not to his siren song; look beneath the surface. Though it is a fool’s errand to ask you that much when your mind is filled with the fantasies he spins and our body is a slave to its compulsions. Your skin burns like hellsfire. You fall forward upon your knees and free hand in spite of his bindings, wondering if exhaustion will take you before he does. You pant through the haze of overstimulation. You whimper.
“Fray…”
Will you plead for him to cease his torment? Will you stop your own twisting of his very being? Heavens forfend, you cannot be considering his offer? You need not say a word. He looks to you, through you, into you with fervent hope.
And, though you cannot see it through our eyes shut tight, disappointment paints his face.
You still won’t listen. You simple-minded hedonist. Very well, continue your prayers. I’ll take my ponze of flesh.
That tendril now prodding at you from behind is familiar. That very one he forced you to service, is it not? It should be painful for it to breach you in this way, but I know it is what you have desired since this night began.
You smile.
He does not.
Did I tell you to stop?
Answering him proves impossible, for your voice is cut short by a masochist’s cry as his shadow plunges into our body. And stays still, Fury smite us all. Just as he says, he only begins to take his pleasure from you once you start where he stopped, once you stroke yourself anew.
You do not have the energy to pretend any longer. You simply give in to his thrusts, the jolts that shoot up our spine and blossom all over our ravaged body. Even the tendrils binding our limbs and body have become a lover’s embrace in your clouded mind. When your hand slows, so does he, and the tendrils that wrapped themselves around your arm throb and clench. As though he is trying to massage the aches from it.
Look, Lucient. You’re a godsdamned treat for the eyes. You look far better like this, rather than freezing your heart inside that bloody armour. Your hands are made to hold mine, not for the shaft of a spear.
His voice trembles, excitement dripping from every word in a manner that both sickens and comforts you. The sight of our body, of you, being ravished and broken down into naught but a weeping supplicant, a hole for sin to pour into, drives him to an even deeper lust. Deeper, faster, you no longer hear me over the cacophony of sensation he plays across our body, into our soul.
Even I…I have tried to maintain my mental walls, if only to ensure he cannot devour you. But, this pleasure…if it lasts any longer, if you keep dancing at the edge with no intent to fall, even I…
Ah, almost there…Just let go! Give in!
It is futile to resist any more. Your eyes barely open, your mouth slack with delirious pleasure. You throw your head back and let out a painfully loud keen as you come undone, a scream he mirrors as he cries out your name. Rivulets of wasted seed erupt from you, coating the very hand that he forced onto you, yet you continue to buck into it long after you have spent your all. You continue to thrust until you are raw, for in your mind, you are silencing the beast’s taunts with your flesh in his maw.
Perhaps, just this once, it would finally be enough.
He pants at the back of your mind, his clipped whimpers scratching at your ears as he rides the final crest of your release. His shadows withdraw from inside you, leaving our body bruised and hollow. He continues to puppet your hand, brushing your thumb back and forth along the tip with a perverse gentleness that makes bile boil in your belly. To him, it must appear loving, as if he were patting a dog on the head for its obedience, but surely he must know the feelings it truly arouses from you.
Haah…how beautiful. My heaven, my hell…my godsdamned dream come true…
You will your eyes to look at the mirror. The beast is gone, and all you see staring back are the remains of his feast. Your chest heaves, and so does the reflection’s own.
Your free hand, which has been clutching your thigh so tightly it has left a bruise shaped like itself, moves to cup your own face. It brushes away the tears that flow freely with numb fingers moving on their own. The relief, the euphoria of an empty mind, is but a base reaction, just as your lungs and heart know to breathe and beat without you. That is what it is. You do not mean to feel pleasure from this, it is not your fault, it is his fault. The compulsions, the fantasies, everything was awoken only due to his presence.
You are still pure.
You are still a good person.
Are you not?
You’re a monster just like me. And no one else in this blasted star will accept you but me.
Like storm clouds blotting out the sky, his presence blankets you. Your chest struggles to rise, breaths crackling, shuddering.
So let’s keep dancing this same dance forever, Lucient. Let’s drown together in this depravity until this damned world disappears. Call me yours, dear. Destroy yourself in my name ’til there’s naught but dust where we once stood.
No. No more. Enough. You close your eyes. You pray, though Halone will not answer. No one will answer. You lie bare on sheets drenched in sweat, your sin sticky and clinging to you as always. You beg for silence. You beg for the evacuation of your soul. You beg, you beg, you beg, but no one hears you.
That’s right. You’re a wretched little creature, a slave to your own shame, let alone those of others. Too weak and meek to be of any worth.
………
But I will never leave you.
Blame me. Hurt me. Cry in fear and curse me. Bend and warp me far beyond what the world has already done. It matters not, if it heals your heart, if it means you will finally see…
After all, I still…