Blood Gods: part 1

Hi all! Welcome to the first part of my dark fantasy erotica series. Feedback and ideas always appreciated!
T/W for this part: death, blood.

               She has not eaten for three weeks, consuming only a bitter tea made from stems and roots of varying plants.  Her body has wasted; she has suffered through pain and lack of sleep, and he has suffered it with her.  It has been their last great connection – the two of them wrapped together in the mind, comforting each other, occasionally speaking to each other about memories or simply conveying them across synapses without words, letting the simple look and feel of the moment wash over each other.  And through it all, a bottomless sadness.  He has been unable to keep the thoughts of all his other hosts from rising to the surface, but Celestine doesn’t mind.  His memories are hers as well, and she loves them all as much as he does, because they are one.

               And now, within the hour, she will die.

               Celestine has been his host for twenty-five years.  But she has been his priestess for thirty-five years.  She walks to the summoning room slowly, step by step, the edges of her white robes rustling against the spotless floor of the most hallowed halls in the monastery.  The cloth is rough against her skin, especially against her legs and pubic area, all of which were waxed clear of hair last night by other priestesses.  Priestesses that they both knew well as friends and fellow worshippers.  They had attended to Celestine for all of the days she had refused food, silently watching over her, bringing her the horrid tea and helping her bathe when she had become too weak to wash herself.

               They follow behind her now, silent as always but prepared to catch her if she falls.  But she is determined to make her own way to the summoning hall, through the power of only herself and him.

               Katerine and Mira had both stumbled on this walk, he remembers.

               Celestine doesn’t even respond to the influx of memory.  Her mind is clear as fresh water, even as his emotions roil around in it, making waves but never muddying it.  The effect is calming – her taking in his grief and unspoken wailing, rinsing it clean and returning to him a clear conviction.  This is how committed she is to him.  This is her devotion and worship of her god.  And this is her final act of worship, to ease him on the way to his thirty days of hell.

               He knows better than to argue, plead, or beg.  It’s been centuries since he’s bothered to try, at least in the days leading up to the ritual.  No matter what he ever said, it hadn’t changed anything.  She had never listened, whoever she was at the time, and the ritual had always been conducted without change, even though she knew him – his thoughts, his feelings, his overwhelming love for her – just as he knew her.  She had always known what he wanted, and what he didn’t want.  And he had always known that her teachings outweighed their bond and her own love.

               What brings him around – what always brings him around – is the rumbling of the great gold-plated doors leading to the room.  Within, rows upon rows of candleflame waver as a breeze enters the space, sending the light flickering over curtained walls, plush cushions and pillows and blankets, gold plates and dishes stacked high with fruits and sweets, and four steel manacles and their chains.  These last are coiled up in the midst of the extravagance like snakes on the floor, right behind the circle drawn on the stones.

               Don’t…

               Even Celestine’s meditating clear-headedness is rocked by the sorrow in that word, brought to the surface despite his resolution not to attempt to beg – a resolution he has always broken eventually.  She pauses at the threshold of the room.  The waters of her mind color ever so slightly.

               Don’t go in there…

               She seems about to respond, some emotion rising to the surface.  Something drowned long ago in fervor and reverence…

               But the priests begin their chant – their praise to him.  The priestesses join in on the third line, and one of them – sweet Hadra, Celestine’s friend and his – touches Celestine’s arm to direct her forward.

               Cellie!

               She doesn’t react in any way to his cry in her mind.  She is taking in the words of the chant, speaking them not with her lips and lungs but with her heart and soul.  To him.

               Cellie, please!

               All the serenity of before has been stripped from him.  Every word of praise echoed to him by her strikes him like a branding iron: this is how she’ll show that she loves him, this is how she has devoted her whole being to him.

               He knew.  He knew that this is what happens.  So, he had stopped arguing.  Stopped begging.  Decided to spend these final days and moments enmeshed in love and calm and oneness.  But the sound of the doors like thunder and sight of the manacles beside the circle like pythons waiting for their chance to strike breaks his resolve every time.  Every twenty-five years.  Over and over and over.

               It would never change.

               So why does he scream?

               Cellie, don’t do this!

               Each step she takes brings them both closer to the circle.  Its lines are still glistening, the fresh blood of a goat that has already been taken away.  It will return, roasted and seasoned, as if he will want it.  But now, not even a spare drop of its blood remains outside the pristine lines of the circle.  Some priests and priestesses spend their entire lives training their hands to precisely replicate the width and breadth of the design, the gaps between the circles within circles, the symbols of power, the letters brought to the believers from the language of the gods.

               He doesn’t remember that language.  He can no longer speak it, save for a few words: the words he can read in the blood on the floor.

               Please, listen to me.

               His thoughts are a low sob as they echo in his and her one shared mind.  But she is already kneeling before the circle, their attendants-priestesses-friends arranging the folds of her robe so as not to disturb the red lines.

               Cellar girl…

               The song that she has been chanting in their head stops entirely, though the priests and priestesses continue it.  The voices echo around the chamber maddeningly, but Celestine is shaken.  The silly secret nickname they both have for her, spoken only between them and only in their mind, has reached her.  He grasps at that hair-thin shred of hope, and she feels it.

               Cellar girl, you always wanted to see the stars, remember?  And you always wanted to show them to me.

               Because he no longer remembers what they look like, was the unspoken ending to that plea.

               A sadness bursts from her – a drop from a cup overflowing.  But she holds the rest back.  Still, her thoughts are of the painting in the picture book they had so often gazed at – a page of dark blue, black tree branches poking in at the edges, but in the center pointed spots of pure white with lines of paler blues and green through them, and close gatherings of these white spots in clusters and rings.  The Night’s River, stretching across a starry sky.

               We’ll see if it really looks like that.  The sky.  The Night’s River.

               It’s the wrong thing to say to her.  Because The Night’s River has another connotation to it.  The Night’s River is what you cross to enter the afterlife.

               I’m sorry I can’t show it to you, Lucas, she responds.  But she is not sad.  An exaltation is building in her, so much so that it tugs at the corners of her lips.  But I will see the river for you.

               That’s not what I meant!  Cellie…

               The chant ends.  The priests surround Celestine and the circle and the manacles.  Celestine looks up at them, to make sure he can see them.  The one directly before Celestine – Hermann, the high priest whom Celestine deeply respects and adores, and whom he therefore deeply respects and adores – speaks.  It is a message to him, but it is in the language of the gods.  The high priest speaks the ancient words while looking into Celestine’s eyes, as if she and he could understand them.

               He isn’t even trying to decipher them or commit them to memory.

               Cellie… Cellar girl… we’ll go, we’ll leave.  Together.

               He’s lost all ability to bargain.  Her fervor has reached a height he cannot scale, and he knows it.  When the knife is brought out, he only screams.

               Death isn’t quick.  Like always, it lingers, threatening to pull him into oblivion – into nonexistence.  She feels it with him, and shares the pain of their souls tearing apart, but doesn’t feel regret.  She only feels his regret that he might not have done enough to try to convince her.  That he should have hounded her day and night right up until this fated day.  That he could have saved her.  That they could have found a way to leave together.  She doesn’t even say goodbye as she fades, as the horror and searing pain of death envelopes them both.  She chants that damned praise to him, over and over and over.

 

 

 

               He sucks in air in a gasp that echoes the screams long faded in Celestine’s mind.  His head thrown back, his back arched against the stone floor, he is contorted as he feels the rush of the blood that is his body.  It is pounding in his heart, it is hurtling through his veins, and it is coating his exposed skin and hair.  He pulls in more air, trying to fill his aching lungs, and coughs up blood that had pooled in them.

               His mind is thick and uncomprehending, as if it is filled with blood as well, soaking the neurons and pooled in synapses.  He can hear some sort of chant from far away, though it seems to grow closer.  It is reminding him that something is very, very wrong.

               He blinks rapidly, trying to get the blood out of his eyes.  It stings.  Everything hurts.  Everything is wrong.

               Cellie…

               He calls for the first thing that enters his clearing head, the thought of her breaking through a haze.  But she doesn’t answer.

               Because he is alone.

               He gasps, but not for air this time.  He is suddenly aware – he is lying on the floor, in the circle, and Celestine…

               He turns his aching head to the side.  Her hand is there, pure white save for the thick lines of blood that have flowed from her wrist.  And beyond her hand, her body still draped in white robes, and her face.

               Her face, which for twenty-five years he has only seen in mirrors.  The rounded cheeks that had sagged ever so slightly with age, the lips that she had always insisted were too thin, the wide flat nose she had squished up with a finger to make him laugh, the thick dark lashes over dark eyes that remain slightly open.  But the eyes are empty.

               Seized by dizziness at seeing her from the outside of those eyes, and seized by horror at the recognition, his stomach turns.  He vomits blood.

               She is lifted.  Of course – the priests will take her away.  They will decorate and bury her body within a mere five days.  He will never see her again.  There won’t remain even a painting or sketch to show what she had looked like.  No one will know that she used to dream of seeing the stars.  No one will know that she had liked fire a little too much and had imagined setting the apothecary ablaze to see how the jars would burst.  No one would know that the one chant about him protecting the plants and animals annoyed her so much because it was so repetitive, and that she rolled her eyes and refused to chant it so long as enough people around her were chanting and she wouldn’t be noticed.

               No one will know but him.

               “Wait.”

               The word is little more than dust rising from his throat.  He reaches out a bloody hand to try to take hers, the effort taking all his strength.  But the priests don’t halt; they lift her and lay her on a bier.

               “Wait…”

               Her hood has fallen back, revealing her hair thick and dark and full of curls.  She had used to hate that hair, until he had come to be a part of her.  Until he had loved that hair.

               The priests lift the bier and bear her to the entryway.

               “Wait!”

               A hand takes the wrist of the hand that gropes after her vanishing body.  He hears the clank of the chains as other hands take his other wrist and his ankles.  He doesn’t even react as the icy manacles latch against his skin.  He is watching the empty doorway, as if Celestine might reappear in it, whole and alive.

               But she won’t.  He is alone.

               His head is lifted, a bowl brought to his lips.  Fortified wine.  He knows that there will be no point in refusing to drink it.  Refusing sustenance won’t bring him death, but it will make the suffering worse.  He drinks, the taste sharp and too real, the flow of it down his throat like a deluge.  He is given bread, and though he knows it is fresh and soft it is like breaking stone between his teeth and moving rock through his esophagus.  The blood is washed from his skin with cloths, and the feel of them is the scraping of knives, the water running across his flesh is the skittering of hordes of insects.

               He is in his own body, formed of blood, with no one to share the input with.  It is too much – the tastes, the sounds, the touches.  He welcomes the oblivion of sleep when he passes out.

First post! Just a quick sketch of Ludis, the main character from my series Blood Gods. Racier stuff to come 😘