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allbingoCreator Name: n0t-again
Fandoms: Original - see A/N
List of Prompts:
1. Demon/Bondage and Discipline
2. Vampires/Hate Sex
3. Fairy-Tale Horror/ Three Times A Bridesmaid
4. Monsters/Breaking The Rules
5. Gothic Horror/Rough Sex
6. Splatterpunk/Sex In The Morning
7. Lovecraftian Horror/We're Gonna Die Sex
8. Witchcraft/Long-Distance Relationship
9. Ghosts/Dramatic Proposal
Total Word Count: 11,912 (Each prompt is under 2,000 words, give or take)
Summary: A woman with a dangerous crush does something unthinkable...
A/N: These stories take place in a far-distant future, playing heavily off of a fantasy land I created for the Madrona Project; a dystopian, barbaric cultural amalgam of Zoroastrian Persian and Hallstatt Celtic peoples found in the area around Switzerland, 6,000 years from now. Even further up the millenia, cultures have come and gone and now what is left of the human race is little more than worn-out scavengers of the past, plying tech and lives they no longer care to really remember. A lonely female archaeologist discovers the remains of an ancient criminal – and a stranger couple, I couldn't imagine... though I did try...
~1~ Demon/Bondage & Discipline
Summary: A lonely archaeologist tries something she read about in an ancient book. Too bad it worked.
She stalked the circle, drawn in the heavy, sharp-scented Fall earth – it was a laceration that oozed heavy scent up through the skin of the world. She had drawn it with an ancient sword: rusty, heft long unwrapped of its ancient boiled leather, but still sharp enough to cut herself upon. The laceration in the earth oozed up her own slight, red blood carved into that perfect circle. She walked it, muttering the arcane words and five time around, she paced – cutting the earth with the ancient weapon. She knew this was stupid – nothing would happen.
Wind blew up out of nowhere and everywhere – she blinked.
The circle in the deep woods, full of a season's worth of fallen life and leaves, was empty.
She blinked.
It was full. There was a long, tall supine human body stretched out upon it. Male. So much younger than she would have believed from the stories...
There was a ragged hole in his face, where half of it had been hacked away – taking his life, thousands of years ago. She spoke another word and stuck the sword, deep into the cold earth, burying the blade very deep. His face remade itself before her unblinking eyes. A dark mark rose with swirls of blackness twisted into the skin – mimicking the mark she noted upon his chest, a winged star pierced by a spear. How often had she dreamed about it and him, as she poured over all her old oft-copied texts! She couldn't believe it had worked – or that he had truly been so damned for his sins.
The Son of the Ancient Darkness of the People of the Black Sickle. Condemned. Ruthless. Her darkest desire... even if she could hardly admit that, even to herself.
She breathed, in and out – hardly remembering what she had intended to do – or what must be done.
Could she speak the words correctly? The language was long dead – the People were long gone in the lands of their genesis. They'd found the ruins of their once-great Library and that was what had started this whole strange quest of hers...
She opened her mouth, swallowed and closed it, suddenly unsure and frightened.
He was as still as death – for indeed, he still was. She was surprised at his height – or the fact that while history told of him as a great fighter, he wasn't heavily muscular – more sinuous; whip-hard. He was covered in scars that were transmuted into tattoos made full of the very Darkness from which he been resurrected.
That thought brought her up out of her shocked stillness and clearing her throat, she clawed at the sword-scratch she'd inflicted on her left wrist and licked at the oozing wound until she tasted her own blood on her tongue. Then she spoke the words:
“Zurvan ut Eichlisch-Kuenzi, rise and seek the Darkness in the Light. I summon you. Come forth and serve me.”
His eyes shot open at the sound of his name and he drew a deep, ragged breath that tore his back from its bed of earth.
She nearly fell down into the leaf-litter on numb legs: his eyes were filmed over in a scrim of blue-white tissue – blind. Only he glared right at her, far from sightless. And even worse – he smiled.
“Deva – you will attend!”, she remembered at the last minute, as he rolled over and lunged – knocking her down, heavy and malignant, ready to kill her for her trespass against the rational, living world.
His snarl was a bass sound too low for her to hear, though she felt it vibrate through her chest as he pinned her to the ground. She felt her neck pulling back, getting ready to snap if he twisted his hands...
“ATTEND!”, she shouted in his twisted face and was assured of her dominion when his eyes, little by little, drained their membranous white, to be replaced by a clear blue, shot with rings of orange-gold. They would have been beautiful, had he been human.
To her, that didn't matter at all. This was all a fantastic dream – it had to be! She wasn't really doing this!
“What have you done?”, he croaked out with a voice that hadn't been used in hundreds of centuries, surprised to be alive. He remembered his own death very well.
It was a very good question. She had read all the stories, the histories and had become fascinated by the demons of the ancient world, one in particular. He was the only one she'd ever heard of who had begun as a human – much like herself. And she'd be lying if she didn't admit that she was more than hungry for the chance to command one of the most feared of them all. Was she really such a bad person to consider the demon above her something worthy of desire?
Yes, yes she was – and she refused to care. She only wanted one thing – everything else could come later. She would send him back to the Darkness after this one time... this one night...
Actually, she'd have to before this night passed – the consequences would be unthinkable if she didn't.
All she had to do was perform one simple task – so long as there was nothing between them to tie him to this world, he would be gone. She only had to draw his ancient weapon out of the earth and it would be nothing but an amazing dream... he would go back to that place she had torn a hole into, back to the Darkness between all existence and dreams, good and bad. Seconds passed as she flitted through such thoughts and more...but...
So she didn't answer him in words – the woman on her back lunged against the demon's grip on her hair and kissed the creature holding her into the rotting body of the Autumn forest, as hard as she could.
He bit her lip and made it bleed, tasting her blood.
He said something to her, against her lips and began to rip her from her clothes, but she couldn't understand it – the Ulpash speech was not an easy language and her understanding of it was not fluent. But it didn't matter – she didn't want to talk to him at all. She wanted to fuck him, to control him, to bring the Butcher of Neistark to heel, moaning and thrashing within her. She wanted that equality with something like God! Because there just had to be more to life than what she had now...
She was still bleeding, her lip sundered in his ardor and didn't she didn't care.
“Serve your purpose!”, she hissed up at him, in her own tongue, which she knew he could understand – deva were not human. This one was so much more...!
She shivered at the sound of his laughter; it was forceful and unstrung. The stories always said he laughed when he slaughtered and she could believe it – there was so much pure pleasure in that rich sound and drawing her legs open he did as she commanded, without art or artifice. He gave her hard use, grinding her into their bed of earth – a tree root jammed itself into her lower back painfully and she cried out, trying to pull herself against him, out of the way. She choked on his long, scattering hair in her face and he shoved her back down, then back into him as he pumped himself into her and then it was all over, so quickly. He spent himself, jerking within her, hurting her and she yowled with disappointment and quick sharp sputters of agony as he went too deeply inside her.
She was so very disappointed – short of his harsh breathing, he had been silent. The stories had said his battle screams terrified all who heard them, whether that battle was pleasure or slaughter.
But she could have had anyone, any of the City boys she knew, serve her sexual whims as poorly as this ancient slayer had just done. It just wasn't fair!
Then he spoke to her:
“Get up, woman. Give me my fucking sword.”
With that insult, she spat on him, slithering out of his slumping, kneeling grip, intending to do no such thing! He had served at her pleasure like a lazy bastard and she intended to send him back to oblivion without delay for such a poor display of service! He had toyed with her and thought himself her master? Oh hell no!
He didn't try to stop her, instead he remained, kneeling and spent, his Darkness-marked face shrouded in his long, wild hair. He took the silent moments to catch his breath.
She pulled herself up and gripping the bald hilt of the Black Sickle of Rhianorhix, she levered the blade out of the dirt with a growl, heedless of the nasty cold slither of a demon's seed leaking down her wobbling leg.
Nothing happened.
He was still there.
A silent eternity passed and she was petrified. Why was he not gone?
Zurvan flicked his long skeins of hair out of his face and smiled at his mistress. He held out his hand for his sword.
“Go back to the Darkness! I command you to go back to your stinking Darkness!”
“What kind of husband leaves his wife? I am not my brother– and you should have known what you were doing. You bitches are all the same. Living, dead – fuck you all. Get over here with my sword, woman – or did you want this one again?”, he snarled at her, cupping his spent cock for her fearful inspection with a wicked smile.
In her lower belly, something suddenly seethed... and kicked.
“You wanted me, now you're going to get me. Now give me my sword!”, he demanded heavily and stood up, towering over her. She had no choice but to obey.
~2~ Vampires/Hate Sex
Summary: Don't you just hate it when the trash you brought home last night is still there in the morning?
“What's your name, woman?”, he asked her, his voice nasty with unfelt sweetness. She knew he didn't need her to tell him – he knew it; had read it in her mind or her heart. Same difference.
“Morgandt.”, she spat, sitting heavily on the side of her thin mattress.
“Very pretty, little Morgandt. Get down here.”, he purred, leaning on his side, taking over her bed – there was only room for her if she lay on top of him... and like everything else, he knew it.
… and she didn't ever want to touch him. Not now, not again.
It was getting light out. The flannel grey of earliest sunrise was starting to seep into the one window, high up on the shack's wall. Archeons didn't live like Thanes – she didn't have anything but her books, her artifacts and her meager lair of a thin single bed and her chest of garb. It had always been just her and her imagination as she sifted the ruins of the past, looking for a life she yearned to live. The two Lightglobes were a gift from a former lover who had worried she was going to set herself on fire with the antique candles she often preferred to burn. Like the past, candles were romantic.
Everything had been a heady adventure until it had become too real!
Impatient with her woolgathering, Zurvan grabbed her wrist and drug her down into his arms, rolling her under him.
“Get down here and serve me, woman.”, he reminded her, almost angry with her frank unwillingness – and her delay.
She winced and the whimper that passed her tight lips was so full of powerless hatred, it made his brows shoot up his face in genuine surprise.
“You hate me now? But I thought you wanted me...”, he moaned into her throat, licking along her skin before he bit her, his large calloused hands helping themselves under her previous-ripped clothes, onto her tight skin. She felt teeth against her neck, sharp points of pain laced with icy cold instead of human heat as he sucked her into his mouth and forced her to ride him.
She cried out, muttering words she didn't hear.
“So hate me, then. Everyone hated me once – no one wanted me. Now no one wants you.”, he growled against her, between panting breaths, her red blood painting his sneering lips as he ground her down, up and down.
“I wanted to love you! Bastard!”, she seethed, tears welling up with the physical and emotional pain of being stuck with someone she despised.
“Is that what you sought me for? Stupid woman. Should have sought my brother – he had all the love you could have wanted, the grumpy fucker...”, Zurvan snarled, shooting his mistress a look of warped half-sympathy.
Morgandt let herself cry for her own stupidity, even as her mind squirreled away the fact that the Butcher of Neistark had once had a brother – and suddenly things changed. She wasn't being brutalized. She blinked stupidly through her tears as she watched her demon lover swipe two of his long fingers against his mouth, wiping off his bloody spittle. He pushed himself to sit up against the corner of her shanty, moving her up upon him as he did so and easing the painful pressure of his body's invasion within hers.
Then he pulled the ripped dress off over her head. If she didn't want it wrapped into a suffocating shroud around her face, she had to help him. Still pinioned upon his cock within her, she sat astride him and only stared at his wicked, coldly handsome face.
He studied her, tiling his head to one side and then he smiled.
She shivered at the lunacy in that smile.
“Kiss me. Give me your mouth,”, he told her quickly, reaching into her messy, short hair.
She had no choice and it hurt her cut lip as he nipped it again with his fangs. She whimpered and thumped her fists against his chest with her rising but impotent rage.
“I hate you!”, she tried to scream, only coming out as a breathy moan.
“I know you do, adoni.”, he whispered against her bloody lips, softly licking them of their ichor. “But I can see what you want.”
And if she thought his brutality was awful, his tenderness was so much worse. Fingers, wet with her blood and his spit found places upon her that made her shiver and within her, places clenched and slavered for more. And he gave it to her, all the while, laughing at her unwilling show of loosening pleasure. Wicked, slithering R'kash mingled with her own modern language in his whispered, purring entreaties to come, and come hard and when she did, teeth clenched around his arcane, ancient name, Morgandt hoped that when she felt his teeth against her neck, biting into and freeing her hammering blood once more, he'd just drain it all away so she could deny him what he truly wanted from her.
“... Fucking hate... you...”, she breathed out into his hair, as he feasted upon the dregs of her almost-unwilling pleasure.
“And how I love you for it, woman. Now it's my turn to hate you...”, he purred and spent himself quickly in her lovely slickness.
~3~ Fairy-Tale Horror/Three Times A Bridesmaid
Summary: Demons make horrible wedding guests.
A/N: The fairy-tale Zurvan is referring to is "The Robber-Bridegroom" by the Grimm Brothers. It's a grisly tale of kidnapping, cannibalism and eventual vengeful murder that one should come to expect from the Teutonic folklore tradition...lol
“They can't see you?”, she whispered, trying not to let anyone at the wedding hear her speaking to someone no one could see. She was supposed to be silent as the ceremony began anyway.
The dark man behind her only smiled and said nothing. Arms crossed over his waist at the wrist, Zurvan knew he tormented her with himself. He knew she could see him, very well.
Morgandt Lefluery wanted to turn around and look once more. She knew it would cause further whispers behind the hands of those around her. Damn her canny demon back to all his ancient nine hells! He knew she found him handsome and he played it to the hilt, just for her. His long dark brown hair was down, hanging to his lower back, a few small braids chasing like serpents wearing silver-wrought scales at the front of his handsome, Darkness-graven face. He wore a blood-red oddly-wrapped shirt and black leathers, the line of the finest silver buttons down his long legs drawing her eyes. He wore a cavalryman's heavy spurs on his fine black boots. Heavy vambraces of ebony leather and shining, blued steel held his forearms in their snarling, serrated teeth. He wore his restored sword across his back and the heavy bladed R'kanseeli utility knife hung against the heavy wrought-silver buttons of his fly, the blood-black oxblood leather of his belt exactly the color of a morbid wound. He was resplendent in his damned beauty – and she was the only one who could enjoy it.
That had to be it, because if a six-foot tall ancient Ulpash warrior had shown up at a modern Five-States wedding, it would have caused quite a stir, even amongst her sister's obnoxiously clueless friends and their gathered families.
Siftan LeFluery wondered why her nerdy sister kept doggedly not looking over her shoulder. Morgandt needed to get away from her beloved ruins more often... God, the woman needed to get a life! Her sister gave her elder one more pitying thought before the music started and she was lead, head down to meet her new spouse at the end of the Temple.
Do you want them to see me? Zurvan's dark voice bloomed into her mind.
“No!”, Morgandt barked out-loud at no one. Her uncle Thantus gave her an annoyed glance as the music-laden silence was broken.
Come on, you can tell all your kin that you've found a finger with a golden ring in your lap... I'll even play the murderous bridegroom if you want it...
Siftan walked with measured, hobbling steps as she was lead, blindfolded in white to where her perfectly boring Administrant husband waited her, to speak the contract. Morgandt gripped her long starched robe in tightening fists. Her sister's husband took his bride's blindfold down ceremoniously and gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead; such was the polite show of public affection in her time...
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. And what a joyless place this is! My people at least knew how to party. Imagine it if we'd meet at such a wedding, little maid...
Morgandt did her best to stay very still as a demon fed lusting poison into the mouth of her mind.
I'd have you dance for me in front of the bonfires and when you were well and truly starving for my cock, I'd give it to you, little Morgandt, yes... oh yes, standing and holding you and fucking you so hard against some rough wall in the fire-lit darkness, making you scream and beg me to stop, to come on, to fill your cunt with seed, all night long. Oh yes, girl – I'd do it too... in front of the Sacred Fire and everyone present... then, on your knees... between your hungry lips... in your pretty little ass... oh yesss...all fucking, sun-damned night!
The demon purred into the deep well of her inner thoughts; she could almost feel his lips moving, moaning against her ear...!
“SHUT UP!”, Morgandt spat, too loudly and everyone looked her way.
Her sister Siftan and her new-brother-in-law looked downright angry at her interruption of their carefully choreographed wedding ceremony.
“Make me!”, he breathed out, his sex-hungry voice a rasp that suddenly everyone around her could hear...
… and Siftan LeFluery-Vac screamed when a large, dark man materialized behind her eldest, weirdest sister like a red and black nightmare. But the new bride was completely amazed as her sister hauled around and threw punch at the tall, strangely-dressed interloper.
The punch hit Zurvan square in the chest and he grunted with her effort, though it dribbled into a nasty dark laugh. Grabbing his mistress' wrist her lunged forward and kissed her hard on the mouth and ground her into his hips against hers in a rather bawdy display of open desire. Such were the prosperous marriage wishes known from those of the Ulpash folk...
All nine-hells broke loose after that. Morgandt never saw her sister again – her family declared her anathema after the ruination of Siftan's wedding and they never mentioned her in the quiet, restrained conversations at future family functions, ever again. She might as well have been devoured by the Robber-bridegroom and his pack of thieves, deep in the forest of myth and legend.
~4~ Monsters/Breaking The Rules
Summary: Don't split hairs with the Devil.
A/N: The form Zurvan takes to show off his power is taken from the Medieval portrait of the Devil in the Codex Gigas.
The foundation of Zoroastrian theology (as I understand it) is the fight between Fire and Darkness. You cannot have both...
“'... and the Devil came out of Old Darkness'... wait, no... 'from out of the Old Darkness'... and, wait – that's a cognate, damn it... where is that book on English!... 'with him he had a golden'... a golden... a golden what?”, Morgandt muttered as she scanned from a pile of books to the fragment of ancient writing cradled on a piece of cold marble on her rickety desk.
She had ink on her nose and the marble slab hummed quietly as it kept the priceless relic of the nearly 10,000 year-old past together at the atomic level. A lightglobe lit her small shack with its lambent glow.
Then she heard it, a strange ripping, rippling sound, like nothing she'd ever heard. Turning so quickly, she scattered the detritus of her research all over the floor, Morgandt boggled at the high, keening music coming from behind her. The marble slab tipped and fell unheeded to the floor of the shack and its carefully held fragment dissolved into flakes of brownish dust. Her unfinished translation was a moot point now.
The demon held some kind of instrument under his chin and played upon it with a stick. The sound was so hauntingly beautiful, tears sprung from her eyes and ran down her face, completely unheeded.
“What is that you're doing?”, she whispered when he stopped sawing that stick against the strange stringed thing he held.
“Playing the violin.”
“What is a vie-oh-lean?”, she asked stupidly, stumbling on his strangely-accented words.
“An instrument of the ancient world played by the thing you call the Devil.”, Zurvan told her easily.
“What does a dead R'kanseeli swordsman know of ancient music and the Devil?”, she griped, swiping angrily at her eyes and looking at her wet fingers with abject irritation.
The violin, golden not of color but of Northern Italian sound, disappeared from the demon's hands as though it had never been there. A part of Morgandt's heart pushed her to beg him to return and play it once more – of all his devious magicks, the glimmering taste of the ancients' music was by far the most compelling.
“You forget with whom you speak, woman.”, he growled at her and his face ran like melted wax, becoming a black and red and green mask of scales and a wide, reptilian mouth, set on the body of a black-skinned monster, breathing the stink of decaying corpses so heavily, she retched upon the destroyed manuscript fragments at her feet.
Morgandt clawed at her nose and mouth, scratching herself quite badly, heaving for breath in the rank closed stench of her shack and passed out on her face in the vomit-splattered dust of those recently destroyed aeons.
~*~
Her eyes opened but it was dark. The darkness around her was complete – she could not tell up from down, and indeed, she had to put a finger to her open eye with a wincing snort to tell they were really open. She didn't know where she could be – she was nothing but floating consciousness. And there was no stench, no scrim of wet filth upon her face. There was nothing.
And then there was something beside her in the darkness.
The Darkness itself. There was a presence along side her unseen form, solid and whole. She could not see – there was no sight. Something held her within it, though she couldn't understand that until the dimmest flash of dark-blue light flared into being and the Darkness fled out of its way.
Light brought sight and a return to the solid reality of self. She lay upon darkness and the Darkness held her, trying to pull her away from the light, which emanated from her chest. Each time the Darkness tried to pull her away from that which flared to life in her body, a silent universal howl of mad anger and pain drilled through her very being. Her light was dividing her asunder from the Darkness that wanted her. Her eyes came further into being and it was the very form of the demon she had summoned, his long arms trying to hold onto her, despite the snarling screams of his agony as he did it. Darkness was his flickering, writhing hair, the scarified wounds upon his large body and his bottomless voided eyes.
She could not understand why he was suffering to hold onto her, screaming each time her tiny flare of blue light flickered harder into being.
Glancing down at her barely discernible body, she saw the blue light had become a small bluish tongue of flame, growing the smallest bit stronger, bit by bit... changing from blue to purple to orange and the Darkness, the demon, drove himself against her harder, more fearfully, screaming... begging her in congealing words from a ragged, bleeding mouth...
Come back to me... don't leave... don't leave me...
Morgandt knew she had to do something to escape the abyssal nightmare. Agony faced her in Zurvan's spectral eyes as wisps of orange fire began to lick along the borders of his Darkness, burning him like a heretic chained to the stake...
She put a hand to her chest and dug her fingers down to the licking fire. Pulling tightly, it came out of her chest into the palm of her hand. Marveling at the living flame writhing along her fingers with no heat, she despaired for the shrieking, slavering being of the fearful Darkness.
Then she slammed her fiery hand flat against Zurvan's chest and woke up with a scream in the back of her throat..
~*~
The Lightglobe was still on – she was on her bed and alone.
Silence blasted her ears as she pushed herself sit up.
“A dream? What...?”, she muttered and scrubbed at her face, making herself wince as she raked the small wounds her clawing nails had made upon her face.
“You would share your Sacred Fire with me?”, a dark voice wondered from behind her, making Morgandt whip around in surprise.
Zurvan lay behind her, in all his naked glory.
She didn't know what to say, and so said nothing.
He rose a hand to her face and she pinched her eyes shut on the abuse she knew must be coming, hoping he knocked her senseless on the first blow.
… only to feel his fingers land softly against her cheek, cupping her face in his large calloused palm.
“You tried to bring light to the Darkness.”, he told her, sounding more confused than commanding. He could not understand it.
“I tried to stay like you asked.”, was all that came out of her tight throat as she did anything but look in his hard blue eyes.
“Adoni, you will break all my rules!”, he whispered and drew her down against him. She expected hard use, vicious use and was nearly destroyed by his gentleness. When she finally came, wavering on top of him with wordless pleas, Morgandt forgot her hatred, her disappointment – even her situation as the mistress of a Devil and kissed her lover with real desire as she sought to catch her ragged breath. She kissed his lips, his face – even his closed eyes – and where her lips landed, they took his marks of Darkness away.
~5~ Gothic Horror/Rough Sex
Summary: In dreams, you can have it any way you want...
A/N: Gothic Horror features ruins, usually Medieval in nature and a dark, brooding atmosphere - here, I simply used the long-dead R'kanseeli culture in place of the usual ruined castles...
The woman was sleeping, long past the point of exhaustion and the demon watched her, so jealous of the easy need for sleep. Why should she get to escape just because her fragile body demanded it?
Closing his stark eyes, Zurvan let his mind feel outwards into the dim around him and when he brushed against her warm dreams, he let himself fall easily to sleep.
~*~
There, in the fire-lit darkness of an R'kanseeli festival, he saw her, dancing. Folk played their tumbek drums around him as he stalked between the celebrants of his dead race. Drumming, primitive and harrowing in its urgency blasted his ears to any conversation – not that anyone tried to talk to him in this strange dream he intruded upon. Ululations rose in the glowing, golden darkness around the fire-circle as the drummers urged the dancers to whirl and writhe, harder – faster – more! The gathered Folk, wet with life and need rose up like ghosts he could easily remember, almost making his black heart beat a little off-time. Sweat on the mostly-bare human skin and the tanned leathers gleamed all around him. But as he quickly caught sight of her, Zurvan ut Eichlish-Kuenzi kept his eyes on the one woman with the short golden-red hair.
The bonfire gaped and gibbered in its bowl of elemental stone, snapping out taller than any two men could stand. Its heat blasted him as he winnowed through the swirling mass of Ulpash folk around him, bringing a scrim of his own sweat to his exposed chest. His long full hair stuck to his shoulders and the curve of his naked back as he moved closer to the source of the Light.
The tail of his long belt pulled as he skirted against a couple of Folk who were pawing at one another in frank fornication; the woman pulled her leather halter down, spilling out her fine, pale breasts so that her partner could lick and suck upon them, offered to him in the hungry darkness. Zurvan let his eyes see the flicker of pleasure across the woman's pretty face as she was bent back in her lover's arms – then he was beyond them, stalking his own pretty prey. Shouts and calls of ecstasy followed him like familiars, deeper into the dream celebration.
And there she was, dressed in the manner of his long-gone people. Her fine, rounded hips peeked out at him through the two panels of her slave skirt. The ties upon her hips beat their fine golden bells against her equally-golden skin as she moved in openly seductive dance. He thought he might be able to just hear their high jangling over the din and knew he that could. Her could hear her breathing as she twisted with the booming rhythms all around her. The leather halter held her small, succulent breasts away from his eyes – just enough to make him angry about it. She had no braids – her hair was too short. He didn't give a damn. She wore a lovely pair of bronze belled anklets and a small ivory charm around her throat, strung on a braided leather cord but no other ornament. Could she have any idea what that necklace made him feel? Whose dream was this? It didn't matter!
In his life, Zurvan had never given a thought to the age-old superstition that the Ulpash men did not dance... like most things deemed superstition and taboo, he never thought they had applied to him and so, stepping past the boundary of the lands between the drummers and the dancers, he joined the dreaming Morgandt, pulling her arms back up around his neck and stretching her along his hungry, slick body.
“Who are you?”, she asked him, a tiny smile on her languid face – he'd never seen her like this. She was even better when she wasn't afraid of him! He flogged his mind to remember her, just like this, forever.
“Your lover. Dance for me, woman of R'kanseel. I want to feel you on my skin.”, he told her with real hunger, running his hands down her taunt body and guided her to swirl her rump against him just so, torturing them both.
“You look familiar – do I know you?”, she purred, happy to oblige him, the pressure of her body against his groin a delirious spark of pleasure that shot up his spine like a Winter chill in the dead-heat of Summer.
He answered her by pulling her by her short hair, up to his smiling lips.
Folk around them screamed in ecstasy. Sparks rained around them all as the world set itself ablaze on all levels of existence. Thundering life and celebration screamed all around them. His Darkness embraced it all for the lie it was... all the while, they writhed together for an unknown age.
Unable to stand the clawing scream of his body to be inside her heat any longer, Zurvan spun the woman in his arms and threw her up over his back like a sack of tubers. Morgandt laughed at the sheer absurdity of her dream-self as she was flung over a stranger's strong back and carried out of the fire-circle like a white-hot little prize.
Darkness bloomed up in his over-stimulated eyes when Zurvan faced away from the fire, blinding him to Light.
And they were suddenly up against a tarn of rock, the huge massif of rough granite biting at his back when he dropped her, slipping-sliding down his half-naked body to stand before him. She immediately laughed, low in the back of her throat and pulled him by his long, sweaty hair – down to her own hungry kiss. She'd only ever raised her hand to him once in desire – he was hard pressed to remember it from his rebirth, when the madness of his death throes was still too fresh for him to understand what she had really been offering...
… now, however, it undid him to feel her desire for him, so naked and unfettered. He felt her hands on his leathers, working the bronze ring of his belt loose enough to drop it off his hips and it pulled a curse out of him he never knew was there as he sought a warm, wet place in her hungry little mouth. When he felt the first button on his leathers pop open, he nearly screamed at the agony her slightest fingernail scrape against his coiled-up cock produced in him. It was torture – he was so ready to shoot inside her, after so little! He grabbed her hands and spread her arms wide, his breath catching in heavy gasps as he sought to control himself.
“Quit trying to drive me mad, woman, or I just might kill you!”, he warned her in a harsh, low snarl.
“I stoop to conquer, man of R'kanseel. Show me your power!”, she laughed and pushed herself harder against him with just her hips, grinding into his own, despite being held with her arms so far apart like a sacrifice.
Zurvan was furious at her challenge and he had never wanted a woman so badly in his life – not even his brother's Harlot – not even close. She poured fire in his veins and made him scream!
“Remember you asked me for this, little Morgandt! Now you will kneel!”, he hissed at her and knocked her feet out from under her to drop her to her knees, hoping to dampen her brightness enough to keep control of himself.
She didn't seem to be the slightest bit concerned for her shift of position and she shot her mouth against his half-opened leathers, sucking at the leather and his flesh, getting both very hot and very wet. He threw back his head, screaming like the demon he was when she managed to free his cock into her mouth and sucked him down her depths; the echoes rose off the darkness in supersonic waves of demented glory. He drug her off of him by her throat and swung her around into the massive tumor of stone. She winced at the pull of granite against her bare skin but quickly she recovered and began to pull open the ties of her slave skirt. He stopped her hands with his own and before she could complete her unveiling, he yanked the ties apart. The handpainted leather panels fell away, leaving her bare, open to his needing eyes. Was she really so beautifully wild in the waking world? A small voice that was easily ignored came and went as Zurvan dropped to his own knees, tossed her one leg up over his shoulder and drove his face between her legs.
She tasted like female musk and leather and fire and he drank her depths down as fast and as hungrily as he could. Her moaning cries dribbled into his blood-beating ears with the heavy rhythms in the air around them and her fingers twisted into his dark hair, pulling him harder into her open, slippery body.
“Please, fuck me, right here... right now...”, she begged him in a foreign language, shuddering against his face.
He wanted to hear his name on her lips... and told her hungry flesh the same.
“Who is it that you want, adoni. Say it!”
She didn't seem to understand the question and he found himself behind her, lining her bent-forward body into animal equality with his own, shoving himself hard into her spit-shiny cunt. He pounded her into the rock, nearly insane with the tight pleasure of her wild heat against his hard invasion.
“Tell me who you want, woman! Who is it that's making you so crazy?”, he swore at her through the madness and the ecstasy, slapping her hard on the ass as he fucked her senseless.
“You!”, she answered, bucking back and taking him in as deeply as she could with a moaning yowl.
“Who am I to you?”, he snarled at her but it was too late, because he was coming in her, his body coiling too tightly around his heavy cock and then letting loose in blistering-hot skeins of bliss and agony.
And so, there he was... opening his eyes above her, seeing Morgandt blinking the dream between them out of her eyes... once, twice... the Lightglobes of her little Archeon's hovel casting its muted glow over them both.
A shudder passed through her – Zurvan could feel it from where he crouched over her in her tight bed, so pent-up and hard against her linen-clad, sweaty skin.
Her eyes slipped closed as the dregs of unknowing pleasure washed over her and she drifted back down into unconsciousness, once again skittering away from him back into happy sleep.
“Zurvan...”, she breathed out with a tiny, hissing moan, one that made him grit his teeth once more and follow her back down into dreaming desire.
~6~ Splatterpunk/Sex In The Morning
Summary: Sweet dreams are NOT made of this... never let a demon wake you up in the morning...
A/N: Splatterpunk horror is defined as being hyper-violent and over-the-top in gore and intent.
Morgandt tried to turn over in her sleep, wiggling her shoulders but was unable to really move much more than that with the large man sharing her bed – even though he didn't need to sleep, the bastard. He did it just to make her uncomfortable.
Or maybe he did it for reasons only he knew – either way, he was in her way.
Watery light filtered through the City's constant early-morning smog. The column of white brightness drove a steadily creeping spike of inertia across the wall and down onto the dusty floor of the Archeon's shack where it perched over the ruins-field she'd helped to excavate these many years. Birds howled in the distance, noisily flapping bald, leathery wings. Zurvan's lazy eyes watched the crawling light and half-remembered his brother Mathias' foundling crow, Ziggaraut. That damn bird had hated him. He also knew of Tower ravens, eagles poisoned by DDT, and dodo birds eaten by pigs and foxes on native islands that still floated in a wide, open sea. He was infinite; he contained multitudes.
He was waiting for the woman to wake up... and just as quickly, he decided this morning, he would kill her and fuck her cooling corpse, just to see what it was like.
Morgandt twitched, once – and blinked, coming up to consciousness for yet another day...
She nearly gagged when Zurvan kissed her deeply, before she was truly awake and then shoved his large utility knife into her soft belly to the hilt. Pain bloomed up with a shrieking scream that took all the air he had drawn out of her with his sudden, stealing kiss and she lunged stupidly back away from the pain, unzipping her abdomen on his razor-sharp blade. The metallic, nasty smell of spilled viscera rose like the pallid light around them and blood sprayed from the ragged wound he made in her belly, enlarged as he twaited his wrist and transversed the cut. The brown-grey tissue sucked against his gory wrist; Morgandt was shuddering with shock and agony, barely alive as her liver and lights were sliced to ribbons by the demon who seemed to be trying to burrow his enormous mass into the cavity of her vivisected body, painted in iconographic smears of impressionistic crimson, green, yellow-brown and liquid black... all the oily, liquid black that seeped out of her open, flayed belly onto the old sythol-sylk sheets she'd hung onto all these years... dripping, dribbling onto the floor...
She could hear it, almost, over the phantom howling wind in her ears and then the wind was blowing her away as a madman clawed at her corpse, shoving himself into the wet, still-hot meat over and over until she could hear him grunting out a spastic climax, spending it into her murdered chasm beneath him on the ruined sheets.
Her last dandelion-puff of thought was that she hoped no one would miss her.
Morgandt awoke with a start – someone was breathing on her cheek. She cut her eyes over to the dark head laying too close to her to be anything but a hairy blur. Zurvan played at sleeping as he felt her instinctive fear crawl like a hot tongue playing along his skin. Trembling fingers felt gingerly along the midline of her intact gut, wondering at the feel of the tiny hairs pulling against the linen dress she wore to sleep in.
A deep, heavy gust of relieved breath escaped her and Morgandt did her best not jostle the being that lay her against himself in the tight space of her single bed.
“Oh my God, I'm alive!”, she said, unable to help herself.
“Only until I kill you, adoni.”, he purred against her cheek with an easy morning smooch and playfully licked the side of her tight, suddenly-pale face before rolling her under him to start the day off right.
~7~ Lovecraftian Horror/We're Gonna Die Sex
Summary: When what we think we know isn't scary enough, there's more - just on the opposite side of a rotten door...
A/N: Lovecraftian horror features barely-contained, unfathomable evil on a cosmic scale so vast it strikes an instinctive fear, the insignifigance of the human condition in the face of such unknowable horrors and the frequent miscegenation of alien horror and human victim.
She was working – what he was doing, she didn't much care. It was the Central Hour and the sun was high. He often hid from it then – when it suited him, that was... She raised the Focault-Gauss force shovel and struck it against the pile of rubble before her, and the rock tuned into the vibratory frequency it generated was sublimated into vapor. All that left was the artifacts. Unless the stupid thing broke again... then she was going to be pissed and was going to have try to move tonnes of rubble by hand again... you know, that would be where a supernatural being could really come in handy...?
She gritted her teeth on that dangerous thought and held onto the long metal spike with the multitude of wires and blinking lights, waiting to see what would happen, thinking dark and annoyed thoughts as she waited. The humming, just under human perception began and then the smoke began to rise into the still, noon-time air, further clouding the diffused, smoggy light. She carefully removed the debris of aeons from around the thing and transferred it to a static-slab, the Ancient book nearly crumbling on contact with the air. This thing, whatever it was and it looked like a book – was older even than the Library they were excavating! The slab said it was approximately 10,067 years old, by the Old Calendar system.
Morgandt was a strange breed of excited and irritated: now that she had something worth working on, there was no way Zurvan was going to let her work on it.
Why are you thinking about me so hard? A knowing voice wondered in her mind suddenly, his sharp-slick accents like a spike in her head, sending shivers down her back – whether she liked it or not.
Flashes of certain recent dreams flickered behind her eyes and a pink flush came and went in her thin cheeks.
She didn't bother to answer him. But the Archeon knew if the demon was interested in her, she was done with any real work for the day. She picked up her prize and slung her tools into their slots in the harness she wore. Then she ascended the rope, back up out of the cavernous dig site, back up to where the Darkness waited for her.
~*~
When she returned to her shack at the edge of the excavation of the Library of R'kanseel, Morgandt was shocked that the demon wasn't interested in tormenting her. He was sharpening his sword and seemed totally engrossed in the task. Taking up most of the open space in her little hovel, he sat and ran an oily stone slowly up the blade, one side – and then the other. The whickering sound and the constant slow rhythm was hypnotic; Zurvan seemed happily blank in his meditation and she was very happy to let that sleeping dog lie in the sun! It let her work on her own business without interruption – and for that, she was very pleased.
Cramming a crust of four-day old bread in her mouth and thankfully, it was too stale to taste, the Archeon, covered in fine matter residue and good old-fashioned dirt sat down at her desk and began to examine and translate the aeons-old artifact.
Shhhhh-nick.
Shhhhh-nick.
Shhhhh-nick.
The Lightglobe came on slowly as the day began to fade. Still, the Archeon and the demon did their own work. The sound of the sharpening stone skating across steel changed – Morgandt flicked her eyes to the large man sitting in her shack and noted he'd moved from the sword to his knives. Then she was pulled back into the bizarre story she was translating; the words were very strange – a dialect that seemed to purposefully try to be as obtuse and antiquarian as possible, even for what she deemed the early centuries of the Anthropozoic era. It was a story of things, unknowable presences from unknown regions of space and time, too horrific to understand or even really contemplate...
She bit her lip on the irony of her present situation.
… but there was something she really didn't like about this weird relic. The static-slab had adjusted itself to setting 1958.234G. That was the setting for the preservation of human skin. This book, whatever it was – was made of human skin. She didn't touch it – of course, it was priceless and she could barter it to the Scientotic Brotherhood for a fortune, enough to stay alive and happy in her hermitage for a least another year – but that ancient taboo was difficult to ignore.
Whatever this book was, it was made of people.
Shhhhh-nick.
Shhhh-nick.
Silence.
“Read me a story, Morgandt.”, Zurvan said with low wicked humor.
She glanced at him, and he was now laying on her bed, flat on his stomach with his long arms folded under him, looking devious. She tried not to really see him, because when he was sprawled out like that, he was beautiful... stupid demon! What had she been thinking?
“I know what you were thinking – but later, adoni. We can fuck all night, later. Tell me a story, now.”, he interrupted her thoughts easily, shoving her pillow under his chest, getting more comfortable.
“What are you, a little kid?”, she growled, focusing on her book.
“Once, a long time ago – yes. The vikern loved to tell me stories of the Eater of the World. You know how it is, little Archeon – now, I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds...”, he told her cryptically, waggling his fingers at her like a pedantic teacher.
She didn't understand half of it – what were vikern and where was that terrible declaration stolen from?
“I'm not going to stop or go away or even shut up, until you do – so you might as well come here, sit with me and tell me a story.”, Zurvan laughed, rolling over on his back playfully, his long dark hair spilling down all along the floor like a furry puddle under his obnoxious head.
Morgandt rolled her eyes, counted to zhant and then picking up the static-slab, she shoved the demon over enough to sit down, which he allowed, wiggling over – almost enough... He pulled himself upright and flopped down with his head in her lap, grinning up at her with self-satisfaction. He even wiggled his head in a blatant show of getting nice and comfortable.
“Ouch! Stop it – I'm reading, aren't I? Hold yourself still, Zurvan!”, she bitched down at him, trying to keep his wiggling from disturbing her priceless artifact.
He purred back at her, his blue-orange eyes heavy-lidded with pleasure – she mentally smacked herself; he loved nothing so much as the sound of his own name from her lips.
“I can feel your slippery heat under my head, woman. Quit trying to distract me from my bedtime story.”
“Shut up.”, she said, peevishly.
He laughed – but he did it. And she began.
~*~
“Oh my God – what did I just read?”, Morgandt wondered softly, putting the stylus she used to turn the pages down beside her on the rumpled sheets.
“Lovecraft. I like his stories.”, Zurvan purred, his eyes closed in a rather fine approximation of drowsy contentment. It was easy to help supply the words to her mind she didn't understand or know and the tale had flowed out of her mouth with intense imagery that bloomed with grim reality between them.
“I hate it – it's disgusting and unnatural! I can't believe anyone read this, on purpose!”
Zurvan opened his eyes and they were pits of flat, black hell. She shrank from him, leaning back to try to shove his alien head out of her lap, a scream bubbling up on the back of her dried-up tongue.
Twin booms sounded outside, like thunder cracks on the opposite side of a crumbling wall...
“Don't deny yourself, woman – you have lain with a dark god of unknowable oblivion so many times... you have begged me to fill you with my foulness in dead languages so many times... you are a wanton follower, a Harlot for the Devas... a bitch of the Devil...!”, he hissed at her in a slick voice that grew the scales and harmonics of a thousand alien voices as the Darkness in his eyes began to bleed tracks of oily ichor down his handsome face. He moved, crawling up over her on all fours, capturing her between the mattress and the wall with nowhere to go.
Slavering screams and alien howls rose from everywhere and nowhere as the thin membrane between the world she knew and one she had only just discovered split asunder like vomit through a wet paper bag.
“Stop it! STOP IT!”, she screamed, her eyes rolling in head, nearly mad with fright.
“Evil takes what evil wants – and no matter what, be it my Elder Kindred breaching this universe right now – or me just serving you on this bed, something is coming through tonight!”, he laughed and shook his leering, dripping face above her, spattering her with the living, gelid blackness leaking out of his dead nightmare eyes. Morgandt opened her mouth to scream denial and he lunged down to steal her breath with his own.
“You will kill us all!”, she pleaded, one last shred of thinking sanity when he drew back from her enough to let her breathe.
“What a better way to die, then? Open the gates and let me in...!”, he growled and ripped her heavy work gown open down to her belly.
Morgandt looked down her exposed body and heard herself screaming from a great distance. Her belly was visibly swelling, full of monstrosity, getting ready to give birth to nightmare.
Its father gave her a knowing smile and then – she was gone.
~8~ Witchcraft/Long-Distance Relationship
Summary: So, send him packing - but be prepared to miss him when he's gone...
A/N: Exorcism is witchcraft to me.
“I need help.”, Morgandt said at last, her eyes lowered before her in shame.
“What help do you need?”, the old man muttered around the air-pipe that keep him alive despite the heavy years of breathing the City smog.
“I did something... wrong. Terrible. I need to fix it.”, she admitted quietly to her bare, dirty feet.
“Tell me, pupil.”
“I summoned a demon of the ancient Ulpash. And he came. Now he won't leave.”
“You aren't air-starved and hallucinating? You are serious?”, the old man wondered, bushy white brows lifted in query. He didn't believe her.
“Yes, Anant.”, she murmured, almost too low to hear.
“Oh, very serious. Which one?”
“The Butcher of Neistark – Zurvan ut Eichlish-Kuenzi.”, she said, certain she'd next feel his hand on the back of her neck at the mention of his arcane name.
The old man cut his eyes to his hunched, shame-laced former pupil.
“I told you not to try that! Why did you?”, the old man snapped, his attention focused dead-upon Morgandt, who huddled further in on herself with his real anger.
“I didn't think it would really work! The Sacred Fire Sect texts were incomplete and nothing but speculative moral fables anyway! You said so yourself! But then, I found his grave – it had to be! The sword was there and the remains of High Confederation Era armor! The half-shattered skull! It was him! I knew it was!”
“So what if it was? All the more reason to leave him to being good and dead, you little fool! You know what he was said to have done to the Prime City of the R'kanseeli! How could you even think to try to speak with such a madman?”
“Well, I didn't think it was possible that he be as evil as the histories all say! He was only 25 when he was executed! That so young! I wanted to believe he could be condemned falsely by history!”
“You... you – do you realize what you are saying to me?”, the old man whispered, his eyes very wide – the air-pipe flashed a dull red, indicating that he needed to stop talking and take a few good, deep breaths to replenish the oxygen in his starving blood.
“Yes, Anant – help me!”, Morgandt begged, sounding lost. She had her hands in her hair, leaning over her bent knees, as penitent as she could possibly be.
“You still have the sword, I'm guessing – and the skull?”
“He has the sword. I can get the skull.”, Morgandt admitted to her knees.
“Get both and come back. As soon as you can! Go! And girl, I will not be helping you out of any more such messes. Next time, before you summon anything more than a head-cold, you THINK FIRST!”, Anant scolded her, jabbing a bony finger into her tight shoulder and Morgandt took that as her cue to get the hell out his house and do as she was told!
~*~
When the old man saw the young Archeon once more, she was not alone. Someone – something came with her. The old Pan-Archeon was both shocked and frightened of the demon who strode with heavy purpose into his small, cozy block home. This was a real, live deva – there was no disputing the evidence in front of his hooked nose one bit! If this did not go well; it would kill them both with less than a thought!
The thin woman had a cloth wrapped bundle under one arm. The demon had the sword across his back. Old Anant had never seen anyone so well-paired with such a fearsome weapon in all his 84 years. He hoped he never saw another in the next 84 to come.
“Be welcome, man of R'kanseel, to my home. I am Anant.”, the old man said, deeming courtesy the best way to deal with his present situation.
“You speak R'kash?”, Zurvan said, genuinely surprised.
“I taught her to speak it as well, though I don't think she paid much attention.”, the old man told them all, shaking his head.
“So – you are going to exorcise me. Go ahead.”, Zurvan said knowingly, crossing his arms and going no further into the man's quaint, warm home.
Morgandt looked at the ground, her jaw set on her task.
“I thought you loved me, Morgandt.”, he said openly with a small grin.
“You don't know what that means.”, she told him, “Even when you were nothing but human, you didn't know what it meant.”
“Doesn't mean I can't learn it from you.”, he told her, still smiling – pulling out his sword and handing it to her, heft-first.
Anant watched silently – this was very strange. The demon wasn't fighting them? He was even helping them?
“I can't teach you what I don't know!”, she cried out loudly and dropped the cloth-wrapped bundle and stabbed his mortal remains with the heavy steel blade, pinning them to the dirt floor of the old man's home.
“Well, you could have tried harder... adoni...”, Zurvan accused her, his words trailing into nothingness as he disappeared.
Anant shuddered – he couldn't help it. The demon had called her his beloved. All the texts said that it was the one thing deva did not know or understand: the human manifestation of Light. They could not – if they did, they were unmade and ceased to exist. Had they really destroyed the Butcher of Neistark?
Silence bloomed up heavily between the two living souls in the small hovel.
“He's gone.”, Morgandt said, her voice shaking.
“Yes. Take the skull and burn it. Collect the ashes and scatter them in the wind. Break the sword in two. He will never return.”, the old Archeon muttered seriously, puffing on his air-pipe heavily.
“Yes, Anant.”, Morgant said quietly, nodding as she pulled the sword out of the dirt. Small puffs of dust rose where she walked as she left.
~*~
She tossed in her empty bed – she was cold. She was alone. Her eyes drifted shut.
“You left me.”, a familiar dark voice met her in a still, empty dream.
“You would kill me, shatter me, drive me mad. So I only did what I had to do!”, she spat, hugging herself with her thin arms. There was a fire on the ground before her – but there was no heat and she was cold, inside and out.
Morgandt heard his crunching footsteps as he walked slowly into the flickering light.
It must have been how he had looked as a man – without the tattoos of Darkness, the marks of his demonic power. The sigil tattoo over his heart was the same: a winged star pierced by a spear. He wore his long dark hair loose except two long braids at the top of his forehead. His light blue-gold eyes were unreadable and intense. He was very tall. He did not have his knives or his sword. He did not even have shoes.
“It's all I understand. Some men are simply evil and I'm one of them. I have always been so. I thought you of all people understood that.”, he told her, his voice rich but full of very human insecurity.
She felt stung – after all, he had not sought her out. She had summoned him to her, for her selfish desires, good or very wicked.
“You've done horrible things to me.”
“And you've loved me for them – every second. I know it. You are a lot like her. I would have set fire to the world to keep you for myself too.”, he said quietly, sitting down on the ground before the numb, silently-burning fire of her inner mind.
“Her who?”, she couldn't help but ask.
“Madelina. Never mind – she's been dead for aeons. And you're not her. She was my brother's woman anyway and then, she belonged to that fucking tall Harlot. But whatever – I'm who I am and you're who you are. I am damned to the fucking Darkness, by my own father. There's nothing else that matters.”
“Zurvan – I wanted to know you for who you were. I thought there was no way someone so young could commit the crimes attributed to you – I thought you were wrongly accused.”, Morgandt said to the silent flames and her companion in their shared space cut her off with a snorting laugh.
“You are such a beautiful little liar! You wanted to control an evil demon – you wanted power over me because you have nothing else but your damned ruins. You wanted more out of existence than dead life – just like I did when I was alive. Tell the truth and shame the Devil!”
“Well. Fine! You know what – there are no existing portraits of you – I dreamed of the few short descriptions from your execution before the Thingol...”, she admitted quietly, not looking at him sitting on the ground.
“And am I all you dreamed I might be? Am I what you want, so hard between your grasping legs? If I am, you sure threw me away easily enough.”
“We could argue about this until the end of time! You would kill me.”, she growled, digging her nails into her elbows with irritation.
“And you would love me. So come and love me. Show the dead how the living hold their temporary dominion.”, he snapped at her with endless bitterness.
He stood up, dusted off his leathers and stared at her across the flames. The distance between them was only a few feet and insurmountable.
“You once tried to save me from the Light. Why can't you do it when I need it the most?”, he almost begged her.
“You're... evil. And you're thousands of years dead.”
“And if I were none of those things, right now, would you get over here and give me what we both need? I want you so badly I can taste you on my tongue. I can still see the marks of my thalli around your neck... and I dreamed that there, not you...don't you understand what that means?”, he admitted to her, his voice pressured with need.
“...”, she balked, saying nothing. The word he used was unfamiliar – she had no idea what a thalli was.
Zurvan cocked his dark head, listening to something Morgandt couldn't hear then he drug his large hands though his hair in frustration. She opened her mouth to ask what ailed him and then he was shaking her suddenly and screaming in her face:
“WAKE UP!”
And she did... sunlight was coming through the window, high on the wall. It was morning. She was alone... but she knew: so was he. His screaming voice still rung in her ears as her sleep-slack eyes blinked and settled on the mangled, sword-impaled skull on her desk.
~9~ Ghosts/Dramatic Proposal
Summary: An ending to many things...
A/N: Hey, I think she just insulted my talent... lol
“Anant – what does the word talli mean?”, Morgandt wondered as she poured the priceless and dearly-bartered-for tea from a poly-flask into two mismatched cups.
“You mean, thalli? Where did you hear that spoken?”, the old man muttered around his air-pipe.
“I'm translating a new text I found in the ruins. I can't find my Ulpash-speech books.”, she lied effortlessly as she passed him a cup by way of payment for information.
He glanced at her for a long moment and then at the fire warming the early Spring air of his hovel.
Had she always been so guarded before? The dark circles under her eyes were quite worrisome; the woman did not appear to be sleeping well at all...
“Thalli is a noun, it is the High R'kash word for a specific piece of jewelry common to all tribes of the Ulpash approximately 4,000 years ago. Speculation about its exact use abounds among the Scientotic Brotherhood but most seem to believe it was how the Ulpash folk marked their kinship ties with one another – in specific, who was married to whom.”, the old man intoned around sips of the precious tea.
Morgandt's mind beat its fists against the back of her eyes. It was the same thing as the Modern wedding collar? She sat very still and appeared to be nothing but professionally interested.
“What text are you translating, girl? There hasn't been any new High R'kash texts submitted to the Brotherhood in quite some time.”
“An epic romance of some sort between the Ancient Proto-Five States, once called Madrona and the Confederation period of the Ulpash Culture. Interesting but scattered. The writer couldn't have been a professional scriptor, certainly. It's very formulaic.”, she heard herself saying, going through the motions of professional discussion with her mentor.
“Oh, I know what you are speaking of, the same story is in the Mathulian Cycle Codex. I translated it before we found the Neistarqamal ruins. You know it's all true, don't you? Those are histories, not stories.”
“What?”
“You didn't read the sword when you excavated that grave-site, did you?”
“The inscription on the blade – yes, of course I did!”, she admitted, stung that such a professional oversight might be committed by a devoted Archeon.
“So – what did it say? Tell me.”, the old man wondered archly with a small grin his full while beard hid, to great effect.
“'I am the Black Sickle of Rhianorhix.'”, she recited from easy memory.
“Rhianorhix was never a common name. But that sword is certainly the same one that belonged to one Rhianorhix ut Schulzgarl-Kuenzi, Thanddiem of the Southern Cantons of the Confederation of R'kanseel.”
“The Black Prince of the Ulpash? It did? You're certain? The very same one from the Codex?”
“Oh yes. He was an ancestor of your demon lover – how else do you think the young man would have such a priceless treasure of his people in his possession?”, Anant rounded on his former pupil, drinking down the rest of his tea in one gulp, making Morgandt cringe.
“Isn't ancient history fun?”, the old man laughed around his weak couging and began puffing on his air-pipe to save his old life.
~*~
So much hinged on such seemingly insignificant events.
Such small events. Such repercussions through the centuries.
Morgandt sat at her desk and looked down at the broken, time-eaten remains of a man's butchered skull, dark with its time in the wormy earth. The empty sockets, one nearly destroyed, seemed to hold accusations against her as she looked into them. She saw blackness, she saw blue and golden orange.
She put her hands around the skull and stroked along the line of the facial prominences, wondering at the fact that when there was flesh upon the spectral bones, she'd never once touched his face tenderly like this...
Darkness rose in Morgandt's heavy, sad eyes and as evening wore out into night, she put her head down against the ancient bone in her possession and wept.
~*~
She found herself standing in a dark place with a fire that burned without heat or real light. She'd been there so many times. Standing on the opposite side of the small bonfire – was Zurvan.
He looked at her like a starving man looked at a feast behind a locked door.
“This is the ninth hell. I thought I would somehow escape it. But this has to be it. I'm so hungry.”, he growled into his large hands as he pushed his hair out of his face.
“Why?”, she heard herself ask. No one really understood the Ulpash religious mythologies – their ideas of Haven and Hell were mysterious at best, totally unknown at the worst.
“You haven't discovered it yet – I can tell by that doomed curiosity in your voice. There are Nine Hells – the worst of them is to be alone and starving for something I'll never be able to have.”, he said around a bitter half-smile.
“You are a deva – I can't believe Hell wouldn't be a picnic for you.”, she said darkly, crossing her arms.
“You took all that away from me when you exorcised me, Morgandt. Now, I am only a damned, hungry ghost. See what you have done?”, he told her, sounding so angry as he tried to walk around the fire to stand before her.
When he'd taken two steps, a sheet of flame rose up and blocked him. She saw him quickly flinch away – but smelled the rank stench of burning hair – or skin – in the darkness between them.
“Well – why did you let me, you idiot!”, she swore at him, her heart pounding in her throat.
“Because you hated the deva.”, he told her simply.
“I would have hated you if you were a septa as well, you know. Whatever you are, it was all I wanted.”, she admitted quickly, not thinking about what the words were saying.
“'Cowboys and angels, they all have the time for you – why should I imagine that I'd be a find for you? You're not to blame – everyone's the same...'”, he half-sang in a low, nearly tuneless voice, shaking his head.
“What?”
“Nothing – I have seen all the histories at once. The dead have that one pleasure, you could say. It was part of a song, written thousands of years before even I was born.”, he admitted easily between them, once more sitting down on the ground in his proscribed prison.
“I want to forget the histories.”
“You're alive – history is your prison. Deal with it. Quit bothering the dead with what they can't have!”, he growled at her, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes to keep from seeing her.
Something hit him on the side of the chest and bounced to the ground. Zurvan put his hands down and felt next to him for the invading object. Finding it, he picked it up by the braided leather cord – it was a thin charm of some kind of bone with a messy, broken hole through which the cord passed. He squinted at it, confused.
“What is this?”
“A piece of your skull.”, Morgandt said quietly and wondering how badly her death would hurt, she walked straight through the small fire between their worlds.
Zurvan stared up at the Archeon standing in front of him, close enough to touch. He wanted to do so, more than he'd wanted to murder Rhomiel Gan Dax-Sullivandt all those millennia ago, more than he wanted to see his brother Mathias again, for just a moment, more than he wanted to beg his Vati for his forgiveness for his own youthful stupidity.
“Give me my thalli back, Zurvan ut Eichlisch-Kuenzi or tie it around your neck and be my husband.”, Morgandt demanded quietly, tapping his bent knee with one of her feet to rouse him from his stupor.
“That's not how it works – you have to tie the knot around my throat yourself.”, he croaked with a shiver of frank need.
Morgandt felt heat from the fire behind her as she knelt down in front of the tall R'kanseeli ghost before her. When she took the dangling, haphazardly-made necklace from his numb fingers and swept a handful of his very long hair over to find his neck, the silken mass was warm in her hands – and his skin was even warmer.
“Your fingers are like ice, woman! Damn the sun, they are!”, he hissed as she tied a messy knot around the beck of his neck.
“Well – I think I'm dead, you jackass. What do you expect from a dead woman?”, she snorted with dark humor.
“Everything, wife – everything.”, he told her and drew her into his lap with a starving kiss that burned her coldness and his damnation away.
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Date: 2014-10-31 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-04 03:33 pm (UTC)