07-17-2015, 12:33 AM
KINGSLAY
He will follow her forever, leaving blood and bones in his wake, and he will never know why. He will never know why he has waited for these moments, why he has sought them out with promises etched in flesh and blood and glass. He has found and buried hundreds of them that were never close enough, torn them apart from the inside out in search of as little as fragments of likeness. They could not move the way she moved. They could not breathe the way she breathed. There were no galaxies in their eyes. There was no gravity. There was no point.
“Kingslay,” she breathes, and he quivers, because the way his name sounds off her tongue is unlike any of the others (the ones who were not close enough, the ones who could never be close enough) – because the way his name sounds off her tongue is enough to make him forget the crack of bones and the sizzle of warm blood and the way that the smell of burnt flesh can sink into the earth and the air, at least for a moment.
But the tension between their bodies is palpable.
Here she is, pressed against his xylophone ribs, where he can feel the thrum of her heart as it rings through the marrow in his bones. Here she is, and they are flesh to smoldering flesh, yearning and needing like starved animals before a carcass. And here he is, quivering and with skin that rolls again and again along the mountains of his spine, like he could ever belong to something bigger than what he is – like he could ever be capable of needing something more than he needs death. He can feel the unrest as it settles in his soul.
And when she exhales, he watches as her dark eyelashes shut tight against the tops of her muddy cheeks, and he wonders what it would be like to make it so she never ran again. She is so close now, and he could keep her if he wanted. He could hollow her out in minutes; wear her like a second skin. He could bathe in her blood until he ran red with it. He could coil her entrails around and around, into a grotesque crown of innards and gore, and she could never leave him then. He could keep a piece of her flesh lodged between the back of his molars, until his breath ran putrid with the stink of rot and death, and she could never run.
“Have you missed me?” She asks, and he will say nothing while his body will spill everything.
‘You ran,’ he thinks, and suddenly the heat of her body draws him closer, the thrum of her heart draws him closer, the smell of her skin draws him closer – and suddenly, his lips find the skin of her neck and they hover there just behind her ear while he thinks of all the ways to tear her open.
‘You ran,’ he thinks, while he says nothing.
Because she said she never would.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.