02-24-2019, 08:40 PM
and lord, I fashion dark gods too;
He could keep her like this indefinitely, he thinks. He could give her purpose – to be his, and his wholly – as they wile away hours or days or weeks in here, in illusions, in death, in rebirth. She might even like such a thing, a willing captive, fodder for the illusions, a body to take and break and make and a mind full of memories to be picked apart.
He smiles at her request, pleased and surprised. He had not known what she would say when asked of her desires, but this was unexpected. His own eyes flutter closed for a moment, remember the old kingdom - his old kingdom. He keeps a fondness for it too, even after all these years - it was where he first ruled, after all, a king crowned in blood.
(It was where Gail had ruled beside him, their mortal kingdom. He wonders, then, what Gail would think of Ryatah, of all this.)
“A wise choice,” he murmurs, and he sifts through her mind again, for whatever hazy visions of the Valley that she retains. He mixes these with his own memories, and around them the world shifts again, into his recreation.
It is not the true Valley, there is a dreamlike air to it, smudged by the time-weariness of their memories, but it is his best recreation of the old kingdom.
“I miss it too, sometimes,” he says – and a part of him does, though it’s not the place so much as the memories it held. The Valley played host to his becoming, in many ways, where he first knew power, where he first spilt blood. He moves through the familiar land, and then pauses, letting her take the area in.
“I made Pangea to keep a kingdom that was of my blood, but it’s proved a poor substitute,” he continues, a strange honesty. Pangea was made from his own sick magic, made in the throes of the reckoning, when he should not have had magic at all. And it shows – it had never been a healthy kingdom, had not survived its abandonment, and even after he brought it back, it faltered.
“The Valley, though…there’s nothing like it.”
He touches her, lips to her throat, her neck, her back, in the faux-lushness of the grass, and this time, he does not withdraw. He has been patient, but the gnawing awareness of her body has lurked ever since he brought her here – it was why he’d waited until she’d birthed the last set, was it not?
He prolongs the moment still, not on her yet, savoring the strange nostalgia of being in the Valley. It makes him almost feel young and stupid – he’d been a bloodthirsty, reckless king, so impatient, but there had been such a base satisfaction to the acts.
(There is such a base satisfaction in her, so pliant beneath his touch, so eager. They’ve done this before, and there is nothing about her that is unfamiliar, but he is edged, drawn out by their time in his lair, spurred by the Valley around them.)
“Our children will be heirs to an impossible kingdom,” he murmurs, though the children are yet unmade, he can see them in his mind’s eye already – daughters, a pair of them.
Further back now, to the slope of her hip, the planes and valleys of her body, and then he is done waiting.
She feels as he remembered her, yet not, made different by the new history forged in them, by his intimate knowledge of how she looks, drowned; the act changed by this dream of a long-gone kingdom.
(Changed, but the same. He bites at her withers, leaves her marked and pregnant.)
“A good choice,” he affirms again, casting a final look at the kingdom, “I hope it was as you remembered it.”
The Valley blurs and bleeds then, and they are back in the lair, the last noises of the Valley’s birds and crickets fading to nothing.
c a r n a g e