Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The pain came on him suddenly, completely, and as a relief. Wrenching him from sleep, clenching his teeth, curling his knees as close as they could come to his chest anymore.

Not close at all. The massive distension of his gut railed against that strain with another raw white spasm of pain, a bolt from the blue, from the top of his spine to the curl of his toes. He rolled from where he had been lying on his side to gasp at the sky, digging his fingers to fists in the damp sand.

Dawn, cold and encrusted with clouds at the horizon. Andrey would be back soon, to enfold and stroke him and tell him what a lucky murderer he was, to be so full of life.

Would he find that life spilled out across the sand instead? Oh, please, please. Daniil tried to bear down on the pain, the way anyone birthing an ordinary child would have been told to. What infested him was far from ordinary, but if he could force it out the same way...

The sand clung to his hair and temples as he tossed his head from side to side. Too much, too much pain for him to climb on top of it and bear down. Contractions as tight and cutting as filament wire, his womb finally trying to retch out what had been forced into it all those months before.

Back when the sky and water had been warmer than this. When he hadn’t understood, he had just been guilty, and Peter, brilliant Peter, had seemed so mournfully in need of company...

The water sloshed higher around his bare legs. The wave retreated, but the lapping, slapping sounds continued, climbing the wet sand alongside him. The cool, rubbery tip of a tentacle curled around his ankle.

He moaned, turning his head away from the sound and the inevitable presence at his side. A hand as slick, chill, firm as the sand curled around his jaw and turned it back.

Andrey’s fierce, narrow face nearly glowed against the anemic pre-light of the sky. His gills flared wide and satiny white across his collarbone, the sort of beached gasp they only took in when Daniil had done something particular to enrage him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “They’re not ready yet, you idiot. Were you just going to spill them out half-finished?”

Daniil couldn’t draw a deep enough breath to say yes. He couldn’t hold the gasp he did take long enough to say that it wasn’t his choice. His body had made a unilateral decision to be rid of what was burdening it.

He wouldn’t say that, if it had been his choice, he would have made it. Damn whatever parasitic offspring Peter had thought would take root in his womb. The last thing, he had said, between sealing Daniil’s screams with his lips. The very last thing, and damn that, too.

Daniil’s foot twitched, a shallow trench dug in the sand as the familiar twinge of a tentacle forced its way between his legs. Andrey had never tried to fill him with more offspring, never that very last thing, but he had railed and pinned Daniil under grief and tentacles so many black nights, the sky and sea merging into the same whispering absence, and abused him just as deeply as possible without damaging Peter’s precious be qu est.

He pushed himself that deep into Daniil now, a cold, sinuous core to the retching contractions. Daniil tried to reach, to take hold of that slithering appendage and pull it out, but couldn’t so much as sit up under the pain bearing down on him . The closest he could come was pawing weakly at the side of himself, the alien curve inflicted on him by what was nothing less than a cancer, a perversion of life growing inside of him, at his expense.

“Please,” he managed to wheeze. All he could, after all those months, all he could manage anymore was to beg. “Please, just let it- let me-”

His sight snapped white to one side, a separate spasm, as Andrey’s open hand struck his cheek. A wet slap echoing down the beach – his body seemed surprised enough by it, completely, to stop its retching and even most of its hurting for as long as the echo took to fade.

Long enough to feel that tentacle contracting according to its own rhythm in his cunt, as if working something towards the end of itself. That freight of eggs hadn’t been the only or last thing Peter had left in him.

Daniil squirmed, deepening his own trench in the sand. As close as he could come to struggling, as long as he could before another contraction clamped down on him and Andrey’s hand rang across his cheek again.

Harder than last time, blotting out his sight for one grey, humming second. Then he was staring down the beach, a slanted, satiny white horizon like a single gill slit in the earth, curving too soon. It was such a tiny prison Andrey had carried him to, down the Gorkhon and out into the grey, unswimmable open.

Out to sea. He had shouted himself voiceless for the first week. He had tried to swim away just once – Andrey had dragged him down deep and long enough that he’d lost consciousness before they’d returned to the surface, and the dread of wading in deeper than his waist still held him more tightly than any tentacled half-human could.

The stiff, intrusive, dominating swell of his abdomen seemed to spread lower, into the vaginal tract. Not the feeling of the intrusion finally being forced out – there was no relief, no diminishment there, but only the hard-packed ache of Andrey pumping the natural sealant excreted by his kind into that tract, the way his brother had to first ensure Daniil wouldn’t be able to remove the clutch while it was at its smallest and most vulnerable.

The next contraction came up short against that stuffed, sealed feeling. It fought, persisted, trying to curl Daniil tight again, but Andrey’s tentacles tangled loose around his legs and hand on his forehead held him straight, flat, compliant.

Andrey’s eyes burned even against the brightening sky. He might have been the most beautiful of nature’s nightmares, with his smooth skin pouring like bloodlet into the carmine chaos of his tentacles. They had been redder, he claimed, ever since he’d swum in the blood pouring from the fallen Polyhedron.

He would never let Daniil forget that. He would never forgive him for that, or for Peter’s body, pale and exhausted with fulfilling its reproductive imperative, sinking down into the silt of the Gorkhon.

“Not another word,” Andrey growled. “We have a bargain, remember? The only way you get to keep your miserable life is if you use it to grow what he left behind. You aren’t worthy to nurture anything he conceived, but you’re the womb that was available, which means you’ll have to do.”

Daniil’s muscles seized again, lungs to thighs, but it felt less like liberating agony than an aftershock. He clenched his teeth, trying to force another contraction that might matter, might have the strength to break something, even if it was him...

But he had never had the strength to fight against Andrey’s will. It didn’t even take another slap to jar him out of his efforts – he collapsed back, gasping, to the sand out of his own weakness, rocking the bluing, brightening sky across his blurring eyes.

Blinking back tears as his body subsided, accepting this bargain as something it wasn’t going to be able to purge from itself after all. Twitching and shuddering as that intruding tentacle slid out of him, and as the tip of it teased at him, mock-tenderly, from the outside.

Stroking his folds as if to soothe his body further, circling his clitoris as if he had the strength left to be aroused . Andrey settled in to lie on the low-tide sheen at his side, stroking a hand across the heaving dome of his gut as if the slaps had never happened.

As if the taste of blood wasn’t still trickling from Daniil’s lip. He drew breath to ask-

How much longer? But not another word, Andrey had said. And he had made it very clear over those months that he meant everything he said.

“You should be grateful,” Andrey said, all the rough fury of his voice receding to a low-tide purr. “From what I hear of what happened to your laboratory, it isn’t like they wanted you. You’d have been bone shards to be picked out of ash yourself by now, if not for my brother’s gift. As long as you’re carrying that, you still have one priceless purpose in the world.”

Again and again, his hand made the long journey from Daniil’s ribs to the deep seam of his thighs. Even the aftershock shudders had faded away almost entirely, to bruised twinges.

If Daniil had been carrying an ordinary child, one ready to be born, it would have been drowning in him by then. But what weighed him down didn’t breathe, and had never moved. It only waited and grew. There had seemed to be so much, so many, of it when Peter had wrapped him tight and bequeathed it to him by force.

Forcing last breaths, last words, into him on a tide of kisses. What would it be, in the end? What would he be? Someone as tragically brilliant as Peter, as incompatible with common life, didn’t seem as though he could leave behind anything ordinary.

Anything survivable by the ordinary. Had it been a mere suicide by reproductive imperative, or had he seen one last harrowing vision to leave to the one person guilty enough to join him in the water?

Daniil closed his eyes on the first true ray of day’s gold prying across the sky. It seemed that he was going to find out after all.

Chapter Text

“You’re such a good girl – no one has ever been so still for me before.”

So much of the thrill was in those words. Everyone told her she was good, but never while she was naked and so vulnerable to hearing it. And no one ever told her she was exceptional.

Could she really have a natural talent for it? It felt so natural, so simple, to let all the will leave her limbs like cut puppet strings. To be soft and pliant, letting Yulia turn and bend and bind her arms, her legs, slowly and blissfully taking her ability to do or be anything else away.

Was it possible to be exceptional by doing nothing? By doing nothing when someone else would have felt the overpowering need to do something? Lara risked having the praise taken back by tilting her head ever so slightly to one side, taking in the arrangement of ropes and hooks that was starting to fill the small, semi-enclosed space she’d once been so confused about in Yulia’s parlour.

A web stretching from the thin, separate stripes of wall, across the spaces in between, to her bound arms and legs. She was no longer sitting on the stool beneath her as much as she had been to start with – the ropes laced around her legs, holding them half-bent and as far apart as they could comfortably be, meant that only her bare crotch was really resting on it anymore. It would stain at this rate – she could be as still as she liked, but she couldn’t cool the heat that started to condense and drip from inside her whenever Yulia tied her this way.

A hand traced gracefully around the back of her neck, artfully just out of sight. Someone else might have turned to try to see it. But Lara was exceptional, and so she simply let it slide up the taut overhead stretch of her arm, testing each knot it found on its way.

Each of them had taken a little more weight from Lara . Each had taken a little more of her body gently, mercifully away from her. Her head was all she could move freely now, and she kept it at just the slight tilt she had risked, even as the bitter smoke of Yulia’s breath blew against her cheek.

“Is that better?” Yulia whispered into the side of her neck. “You know you can bring your free will to me whenever it’s too much of a burden. It is a heavy burden, isn’t it? To be so constantly assaulted by choices, challenged to define yourself through action.”

Was her pause meant to make room for an answer? Lara’s thoughts moved slowly towards giving one. Better, yes, and it was such a heavy burden. To be good, or even just to be , demanded so much.

“Mm,” she more or less said so, from deep in her throat. Spread like a butterfly in that perfect web, swaying only ever so slightly as Yulia pulled at a particular rope somewhere that raised her from the stool.

Suspending her, naked and made perfect herself, completely in the air. Pressure looped at precise intervals around her limbs and torso reminded her of what was no longer hers to bear – if she had struggled, the ropes might have given it back to her, and so she hung serene instead.

Though the slightest shiver escaped down her back as Yulia caressed her, chasing the graze of long, neatly honed fingernails.

“What if I were to give a little free will back to you?” Yulia murmured, close as another caress. “Not much – just one small choice for you to make. One with parameters set precisely by me, and which won’t define you outside of this space. A mere plaything of a choice.”

Lara would have been content just to hang weightless there. But Yulia always withdrew a little, growing colder, when her games were refused. And playing them out had always been harmless – answering a few questions that seemed strange and vast and pointless from the dark, tiny cave where her mind rested when she hung like this, or being tied in some way that made it even easier to forget she was Lara for a while.

She let her head loll into a nod. Her eyes shut, and Yulia tutted somewhere in the dark.

“I need you to use your words now, Lara,” she chided her. “Will you let me do as I wish with you?”

It was one of those vast questions she couldn’t see the whole of from where she hung. So large, she might have been frightened of it if she could have. But she was safe in that dark, deep hollow of herself – no question or answer she gave could hurt her, and Yulia would never.

“Yes,” she said, working her tongue and lips like an instrument she hadn’t played in years. “Whatever you like.”

It was an answer as large as the question – a vast and terrible creature released into the wild, maybe. But it was far away, and so was Yulia, she could sense, for a few seconds. Returning quickly to...to set something on the stool, by the sounds of it. Something hard and heavy as a leaden block on the stained velvet.

The whisper of her hands’ movement was so close to Lara’s spread thighs, but so rarely ever touched her there. Yulia loved her distant machinations, her tools and ropes and scenarios, and seemed to revel in how much she could wring out of Lara with those alone.

Still, Lara tensed at the possibility of touch. Just slightly, just enough to put a creak in the ropes. She corrected herself as quickly back to bidding limpness , but Yulia must have felt that small error as she reached up to make some correction, herself, to the ropes over Lara’s head.

“It’s all right,” she soothed Lara. “You’d make a lovely doll, do you know that? You crave abdication, this forfeiture of agency, because you know you have strength, and it frightens you. You know you could be responsible for hurting others, or yourself. How much easier it would be to be a thing, moved only by the will of someone else.”

Unease flickered in the light outside Lara’s deep cave. It was true, but it was too true. Things that honest weren’t meant to be said. Most people sensed that implicitly, but Yulia-

Tension leapt through Lara again, given ingress by a gasp, as one of the ropes above her gave way . The loops around her arms drew tighter, the weight given back to them all at once, and something- something hard, something pushed at her between the legs, between the wet folds of her sex , where she had dropped a few inches back towards the stool.

Her legs flexed uselessly at the web. Something was under her, something on the stool, and the web wasn’t strong enough anymore to hold her above it. Letting herself hang limp meant sinking further onto it, cold, hard, slick, pushing its way into her where nothing had ever-

She pulled herself up as far as she could, clinging to the ropes. Not far enough to not feel it between her legs, but far enough that only its rounded tip was properly inside of her. Strands of hair clung to her lips and the sweat on her forehead as she turned, squirmed in search of Yulia, but the other woman had stepped behind her, where no struggling or twisting her chin to her shoulder would let her see.

“What-” Her breath was stretched tight from belly to hands, too much weight on her arms, on the taut torque of her shoulders. “What are you-”

“You’ve never so much as slipped a finger in yourself, have you?” Yulia purred behind her, a sound like an unravelling rope. “The way you act around it makes it obvious. It’s very simple – you can relax and fuck yourself on what I should mention I ordered especially for you, or we’ll both see how long you can hold yourself above it. If you manage to keep yourself suspended that way for...oh, let’s say, ten minutes, I’ll let you down with no damage done.”

None of the twisting or turning Lara had done had moved that horrible sense of pressure lodged just inside her. She knew very well how solid the stool was, she had always felt like something in a museum, set on a plinth, when she’d sat on it, but whatever was on top of it-

If she could just knock it over-

“No,” she pleaded, trying, twisting, all ambitions of perfect stillness abandoned. “No, I don’t want- please, I don’t-”

“It won’t hurt you.” Yulia laid a hand on the steep angle of her shoulder, lightly, but just that much more unbearable weight. “In fact, I think it might do you a great deal of good. You’re frightened of your strength, aren’t you? You feel as if, if you let it run wild, no one would be able to stop it from razing everything good in the world. What if I show you what a small thing it really is? Easily broken to the leash.”

Her arms were already trembling, strength melting away to hot liquid strain. She panted at the cat’s cradle of ropes above, no longer nested safe in a dark inner place, but still struggling just as much to make sense of Yulia’s words.

Broken. Break. No, no, it felt as if she would, if she let herself fall any farther onto that thing. It wasn’t as if she w ere afraid of having something inside her , she wasn’t, but she had never-

“No,” she breathed, a quick-running whisper, conserving all the strength she could. “No, no, no, please-”

“Anything you’re frightened of in yourself, you can bring to me.” Yulia’s hand slid down the stretch of her body, across each stark rib like keys on a piano, to cup her bare right hip. “We can tame it all, one fear at a time, if you like. Look – all that strength you were afraid of, and it can barely hold your own weight. Certainly it’s nothing for the world to fear.”

The trembling had turned to shaking, her arms two white, alien pillars stretching forever above her . But fingers still tangled in the ropes, and that was still keeping her as high as she could be. If she could free even one of her legs...

She tried twisting the left one, and a yelp wrenched itself from her as the weight braced across her shoulders tilted too much one way. She slid, just by that much, that one moment’s weakness, she fell, and the brutal hardness that had been mostly outside of her lodged itself at least as deep in her as her finger could have fit.

Like a bone out of place, a compound fracture. Gaping at the shock of it meant sliding just that much farther onto it. Pulling herself up again meant raking it across the inside of her sex , its bulging, irregular shape making her belly seize and her legs twitch all the more.

“No,” she moaned, trying, with all her strength, to claw her way back up to the height she’d had before. “Oh, god, no, please...”

“That’s one minute,” Yulia announced over her shoulder. “Just nine to go.”

No, no, that wasn’t possible. It had been an eternity, measured out through the liquid muscles of her arms. The clock must have been ticking somewhere, but her heartbeat battered the sound to death before it could reach her ears.

How could she have only one minute of strength when it came to resisting something she didn’t want? How could her own weight be so unbearable? She was sinking again, her fingers pulling free one by one, and nothing else about her body was resisting that thing slipping inside of it.

Warm and pliant, the way she had been for Yulia. She clenched her teeth, her heartbeat echoing between them, and hauled herself up again.

To defy Yulia, or to make her proud? It didn’t matter. Either way, the scrape of that bulging shape in her sparked another yelp and twitch that her strength couldn’t bear.

An electric feeling leaping through her, shocking the stubborn rigidity out of her muscles. She dropped, didn’t slide but dropped, down far enough to feel the shape of herself highlighted, inside, by the shape of something else. Far enough for her body to finally clench in resistance, far too late, not pushing the thing out but clinging around it. She pulled, she tried to pull, oh, god, she tried, but her arms answered only with brief, panicky jerks, only enough to lift and drop her onto the thing as if she were working it against her flesh on purpose.

Her voice had run away from her, escaping into wilder moans and sobs. She twisted and writhed against the ropes and her own joints, a butterfly realizing it had, indeed, lit on a web and the spider was watching, and the sound that spilled out of her at the end might have been the sound a butterfly made in its own soul when it realized it was caught.

Or the sound of a dog realizing it would never be stronger than a leash. Her arms were no longer pillars burning, crumbling under her weight – she had come to rest on the stool again, with the base of the thing snug against her crotch and the rest of it inside her.

Worked so hot and wet by her struggle against it that she couldn’t even feel it as a thing separate from her anymore. Yulia’s hand weighed heavy on her hair, stroking her head forward.

Sweat dripped from her chin, nose, forehead to the floor. In it, she could just faintly see the reflection of a red face gasping back at her.

“Three minutes and thirty eight seconds,” Yulia concluded. “You see? No one has anything to fear from you. The only person you’re genuinely capable of hurting is yourself. And if you ever feel the desire to do so, I hope you’ll come to me instead.”

So Yulia could stop her, or help her do it better? Lara stared down at her own face, blotched and ugly with tears. The mirror of her sweat was too small to see Yulia’s fingers braced around the nape of her neck.

“Now,” Yulia purred, the sound of a rope pulling tight, “Would you like me to let you down, or are you ready to test your strength again?”

Chapter Text

“And where, exactly, did you say you found this ancient Kin ritual?”

If it had been anyone else, if they’d been anywhere else, Vlad would have informed him that he didn’t appreciate his sneering tone. But that would have been an unwise complaint to make to Andrey Stamatin at the best of times, never mind while he was standing over Vlad’s supine and very naked body with a knife in hand.

Only running it across a young stem of black twyre to remove any faults in its smoothness, but still. Vlad swallowed, nestling himself just as deep as he could into the leather couch where Andrey had insisted he lie.

Even though he’d have been just as happy to pay for the twyre and perform that experiment himself, at home. “ It was mentioned in what I believe to be an old menkhu’s journal,” he explained. “ As a potential remedy for- you know, there’s really no reason for you to-”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Andrey said, frowning all the more unnervingly at his work. “If one of my clients is going to plant a stalk of twyre in himself, I’m going to be there to bear witness.”

Himself and bear witness didn’t really seem to sum up the role Andrey had claimed for himself, but that wasn’t what drew Vlad’s most dire attention.

“It isn’t supposed to stay in there, you know,” he pointed out.

Andrey’s complete lack of response for several more flicks of the knife was more unsettling still.

“Why don’t you start getting yourself ready?” was all he said when he finally did. “I think this ‘virgin stalk of young woegrass’ is about as smooth as I’m going to be able to make it.”

It looked barely thicker or more real than a thread between his fingers. Vlad’s next swallow was sour with unease, but he had come too far and imposed too much on the volatile Andrey to change his mind now. Besides, as- as a scholar, if nothing else, it would behoove him to know whether this remedy was genuine.

Without anything apparently on offer for him to wet his fingers, he dabbed them to his tongue and began trying to coax a response out of his flaccid member. Neither the knife nor the empty bar, which felt as if it could become otherwise at any moment, had done anything to soothe its debilitating anxiety.

He had never fondled himself in front of another man before. Perhaps that less demanding company, less poised to be disappointed by a failure to perform on his part, was what allowed his penis to stiffen more readily in his hand than it had on more important occasions. For all he was volatile and watching very closely, Andrey was less impatient than a naked woman waiting to see how her nakedness aroused a man.

It must have been just that. This was practically medical – if Vlad’s gaze slid from the ceiling to Andrey as he stroked himself, it was only because, well, he could hardly pretend he was alone in the room.

He could hardly hide from those ferocious green eyes. Andrey knelt briskly down at his side, reaching for him without a word, and Vlad was too incredulous, too late to protest with any of his own before Andrey’s fingers bullied his aside.

Taking hold of his erection with a full, calloused fist. It was practically medical, it was medical, but Vlad’s scalp and the soles of his feet still buzzed, his breath still corked up tight in the back of his throat.

He was still being held by another man. He craned his neck to look down the naked length of himself, to where a drop of sap on that stripped stem glowed in the bar’s low, intimate light.

Andrey gave him a firm, decidedly unmedical squeeze. “It doesn’t seem like you have that much trouble rising to the occasion.”

At least the breath stopped up in Vlad’s throat kept a whimper from slipping through. That sourness was thicker still in it, the taste of fear doing nothing, somehow, to dissolve his arousal in Andrey’s grip.

“It’s worse on some occasions than others,” he still came far too close to whimpering.

“Well, if anything could make it stand up and pay attention, I’d think it would have to be this,” Andrey said. Holding that stem so delicately between his rough fingers, aligning it, like thread with a needle, with the narrow entrance it was meant to stimulate.

Vlad’s breath kept piling up against that dam in his throat. The two touched, the twyre and the head of his penis, and it felt like nothing at first. It looked like nothing but a magic trick, the tapered tip of it disappearing into him, tamping down what started, as the seconds passed, to feel like a tingling, chemical cold.

A numbness that explained why he felt nothing else. Nothing, except- except just the slightest sense of intimate friction, so interior that his nerves didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Nothing had ever-

His left leg kicked against the leather. Andrey’s hand around his penis kept the proceedings firmly in place.

Strong fingers braced around him, as graceful and confident as they’d been around the handle of the knife . Th at sense of curious cold had started to fade, worn away by the slow, sensual motion of the stem, inserted almost to the sprig of leaves at its top and drawn almost out again. Nothing had ever-

The dam in Vlad’s throat broke, spilling out an exceedingly unmedical moan. Compared to what was happening inside of it, the sensitive flesh of his penis felt like armour, dull, dense containment of an impossibly tender core. How could such an acute touch exist? How could the body experience it without being cut open? Nothing had ever, could ever-

“Are you still with me?”

Andrey’s curt, rough, workmanlike voice did none of what it should have to jolt Vlad out of that captivation. The stem had started to stoke a spreading warmth along its path, filling him from within. His head had lolled back against the leather cushion – craning his gaze back to the matter at hand, he saw, for the first time, how Andrey’s bruised, scarred hands could be those of an architect as well as a fighter. A creator as well as a destroyer, so firm and perfectly poised in how they-

How they worked at him like rubbing a stick to start a fire. That interior warmth, the twyre’s sap working in him, had started to tingle and crest towards a very definite heat.

“I- I don’t know,” Vlad gasped. “I don’t know, it’s- oh god, god, it’s-”

Burning. Burning from the inside, throwing his head back against the cushion. The sound he threw at the ceiling could only have been medical if the medical treatment in question had been amputation without anaesthetic.

Burning, but still, Andrey hadn’t let go of him. Burning, but still, the stem fucked steadily into and never quite out of him, kicking his legs, but still, an enormous answering heat surged down from his belly, up from his thighs, burning in turn towards that foreign agony and-

Had he lost consciousness? Just for a moment, long enough to hear his own last cry only as an echo? Grey spots blinked and shimmered across Vlad’s vision, filling the empty air of the bar’s vaults with ghosts.

“Well. Only time will tell if it was an effective long-term remedy, but I would say we’ve found a way to have some real short-term fun.”

Andrey’s voice settled over him like a warm, rough blanket pulled to his chin. Vlad blinked, lolling his head far enough to see the mess he’d made of himself, the twyre stem, and Andrey’s hands.

His body’s attempt to extinguish the burning sensation, maybe, by smothering it in semen. It hadn’t entirely succeeded – every beat of his heart seemed to heat coals inside his wilting erection.

“Oh.” It was all he could think to say. Or he couldn’t think of anything to say, and that was just the sound that came out. “Oh, that’s...”

Andrey smiled the way a wolf might with its muzzle in a fresh carcass. With two improbably graceful fingers, he slid the stem between his lips, licking it smooth and clean again.

The heat hadn’t entirely left Vlad’s belly either. Whatever coals were left there glowed as well as he watched the clever curl of Andrey’s tongue, and if there was a way to dismiss that as practically medical, well, he couldn’t think of it.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t like being blind. Not really.

It was just a kiss. Just opening herself to the caress of scarlet lips and letting them take what they would.

It was like falling from a height, trusting that she could go limp enough to land unhurt. Breathing into Maria’s mouth, letting go of whatever might leave along with the air.

Opening her eyes only once her lungs and everything else were empty. Blinking, and she wasn’t blind, but the world was gone. All that remained where it had been were the stars.

Silver and sapphire burning infinitely around her. The sky they nested in always seemed black with her first blink, but each after that brought out more colour in it.

Or she became more capable, with each, of seeing it. The subtlest billowing red behind the stars, the secret colour of blood shed on a moonless night. The stars might have been lanterns set to sail on it, on an endless scarlet sea, while she stood unknowingly upside down on a black sky.

But her first tiny, tentative step forward still shuffled across the stone floor of Maria’s bedroom. Terror always drenched her then, frigid with the first step – she was standing in a place she couldn’t see. When it came to where her hands were reaching out, what was truly in front of her, she was as good as blind.

But the stars were so beautiful. And they were always the same with Maria’s sweetness on her lips – not a random illusion, but a place, real and constant, that she had been given the privilege of glimpsing.

Maria’s arms slid around her from behind. She looked down, but couldn’t see her own naked body, her breast or the hand that cupped it. She might have been a star herself.

Or a wisp of black air. She reached up to cup the hand with her own, and she could feel it, she could feel herself, but her sight, her soul, seemed somewhere far away from them. In Maria’s lungs, perhaps, where she had willingly sent i t.

Was all that starry place hidden somewhere inside Maria? Or was she the prism through which it could be glimpsed? The warmth of her breath still seemed to lie only on Eva’s shoulder. Not swaddling her in a hidden sanctuary , but pushing a chill across the rest of her bare skin. Maria’s hands still felt like bone sheathed in skin, one person touching another from the outside – the one rubbing at Eva’s nipple and the one cupping her chin, tilting her gaze up more completely to the sky.

The stars that always nested in the same places, but, like hunting birds, would move sometimes before returning to their roosts. The more Maria touched her, the more they would swoop and meet in formation, describing indescribable shapes across the sky and ripping it open like pins pulled out of loose fabric to show her what lay still farther behind.

She wouldn’t be able to look away. Her feet were bare and cold on stone, her body soft and defenceless in a place she couldn’t see, but Maria’s lips on her neck brought out more red in the sky, and the stars shivered in their eagerness to show her something wondrous.

“Good girl,” Maria murmured against her neck, and the first star tugged free from where it had pinned the sky in place. “Now – tell me what you see.”

Chapter Text

Artemy stood in the parlour of Dankovsky’s pristine new marble home like a kid dragged home late and dirty by the scruff of the neck, waiting to be punished.

Which wasn’t far off from what he was. He’d made it three- not three blocks from that lifeless little dollhouse mansion, nothing about the new town they were building was that neatly arranged, but three sections, three distinct changes, before...

He hadn’t even been caught. Not the bruising, sensible way Saburov would have had to do it, with hired goons and heavy fists. Something about the unfinished street he’d found himself on had turned in his gut, in his head, the lines of it all tangling tight in the folds of his brain and pulling him to the ground. The last thing he remembered from his grand escape was throwing up on his own reflection in the nacreous pavement.

Then he’d been lying on the plush red chaise that seemed like it must have been Maria’s choice rather than Dankovsky’s. And now he was standing, barely, still tender in the head and stomach, staring unashamedly into the face of the man he’d failed to escape.

Dankovsky stared back as if he actually thought shame would be forthcoming. As if Artemy would bow and slink like a dog once someone smarter explained to him what he had done wrong. Artemy could have broken him, if there had been any point left in it.

But there wasn’t anything left to save that way. Only more to break. So he stood, while a too-red fire hissed and slithered across the logs in the hearth, and waited for Dankovsky to finally realize that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

When he did, it was, of course, with a dramatic sigh. With arms folded across his chest, his shirt as pristinely white as the walls, no vest, as if he at least wanted to make it perfectly clear how Artemy had inconvenienced him with this midnight escapade. Such an ungrateful guest, not even giving him time to dress.

“Well. I hope you’ve at least learned a valuable lesson,” he said.

A scoff burst from Artemy before he could even think to stop it. Still sour with the taste of vomit, but what was this? Did Dankovsky really plan to scold him like a child caught out after curfew?

“I’ve learned that you really did destroy my town for nothing. What the hell is it you’ve built out there? It’s not a place for people to live. It’s not even a place they can exist.”

His head was still sour and sore with the memory. The sense of things turning suddenly in on themselves, contracting and shining like the kaleidoscopic heart that might beat at the centre of a star. Damned if he would admit as much to Dankovsky, but it had taught a powerful lesson.

“Some sections of it are still hazardous,” Dankovsky acknowledged, “As much as any construction zone. And you do seem to be...particularly sensitive to certain alterations in the gravitational and magnetic properties of those sections. But the town as a whole is, I assure you, very habitable. I would like to show you someday, but that can only happen if I and my new allies are assured that you know how to behave.”

“Go to hell,” Artemy snapped, sour as bile and automatic as that scoff.

“I did, if you recall. I left it in ruins on the other side of the river.” Dankovsky took a daring step towards him. He had looked alive on the other side of the river, hadn’t he? Just as smug, insufferable a bastard, but real, in warm, animated shades of gold and flush and brown. Here, surrounded by white marble and scarlet fire and the shadows they divvied up between them, he took on the same aspects. Cold and sterile, and where he burned, it wasn’t for comfort. “I know you’re used to ranging around freely, doing as you please, but that simply can’t be allowed here. The mechanisms being constructed are too intricate, too delicate. If you are ever again to be allowed a modicum of independence, they must see that your behaviour has been rebuilt just as carefully. They’ll expect me to punish you somehow for this outburst.”

“So you’re supposed to be, what? My trainer? My owner?” Artemy matched that step towards him. He’d rather have had just a jailer than whatever Dankovsky was trying to style himself as now.

“For the time being,” Dankovsky said, as if there were no trying about it. As if it were already as simple as him just being. “Trust me, your circumstances could be far worse. While I may have to punish you for this misadventure, I, at least, can recognize that physical pain is only likely to make you more recalcitrant.”

“You think you know me that well?” Artemy swung out an arm in a way that would have made most men smaller than him flinch. Not this one. “The fact you think I’ll ever forgive you for this, for any of this, makes it clear you don’t.”

“I never said I expected forgiveness. Only obedience.” Dankovsky’s nod to him was steady and demanding, the furthest thing from a flinch. “Take off your clothes.”

Artemy stopped on the balls of his feet, the start of another step, as still and cold as marble himself.

“What?”

“Come, now. I know your hearing is better than that. Take off your clothes,” Dankovsky repeated. “I doubt you’ll be nearly as eager to make another escape attempt without them.”

Artemy rocked a step back, the start of a retreat. Very aware, all at once, of how his reliable old boots made it balanced and comfortable on the slick marble floor.

Very aware of every stitch he wore and what burned beneath them.

“No,” he said. Should have snapped, but his throat was tight with bile again, his breath thin through it. His voice wouldn’t bear the weight. “Is that your endgame with all this? You want me locked naked and obedient in your house? Is this one of your capital-”

“I want them to see that I have you well in hand. They need a decisive display of that right now.”

“Fuck them! And fuck you, too.” Retreat turned to pacing, to the hearth with its high, tepid flames and back towards one of the bare, suffocating walls. “What possible satisfaction could you be getting out of this? You won. You got everything you could have wanted. Your new laboratory, your precious fucking tower. Why are you so set on taking whatever I have left?”

Nothing but the basic dignity and privacy of his own person. Artemy owned nothing else anymore – his inheritance was a field of ash, fertile ground only for the twyre and plague.

“Just send me back,” he urged Dankovsky. “Or out into the steppe, I don’t care. I’m finished with this.”

Dankovsky watched him pace from the wall back to the hearth with...it couldn’t have been pity. But it looked hellishly like it, softening the eyes that had only ever been black within those walls almost back to living brown.

Only for a moment. It might have been just a stray coil of firelight – a passing flicker, leaving Dankovsky in cold shadow again as it passed.

“I’m not in the habit of wasting life. Not if there’s any other recourse,” he said over Artemy’s latest scoff. “No more than I think you’re in the habit of giving up. Let me be perfectly clear. Maria has been questioning whether I’m really capable of controlling you. If I – or you – prove that I’m not, you won’t be set loose. No – you’ll be handed over to someone perhaps much less patient about correcting your behaviour.”

“Why should she care either?” Artemy had stopped on the balls of his feet again, in the sturdy comfort of his boots. The mud of his town still in their treads, its blood still knit indelibly into the weave of his sweater. “I’d have thought she would be even more eager to throw me away.”

“Her pride won’t allow her to accept that there may be a ‘jewel’ she isn’t capable of refining. I wouldn’t be surprised if she took you under her own care. I’ve had the opportunity now to witness her methods for myself. Trust me when I say that, despite an almost complete lack of physical coercion, they are brutally effective.”

Artemy searched the carven-cold face of his captor for any hint of a bluff. Maria Kaina, whom he’d known as a girl, who had just barely stepped up from that to the pedestal of womanhood...

He hadn’t seen her since the destruction of the town. The closest he had come was kneeling on one of her streets while it tried to pry his mind apart.

And it had felt close, for that moment. As if fainting had been his mind’s way of saving itself from whatever would have happened to it otherwise.

“Why would you protect me from her?” he asked. “If it’s just about not wasting life on principle, why not let her break me down and rebuild me however she wants?”

Dankovsky’s lips tugged down at the corners, like swallowing bile. Seams of worry deeper, Artemy was almost certain, than even when they’d first met.

“Because, by life, I don’t just mean the beating heart and breathing lungs,” he said. “Now, take off your clothes.”

“No. Ask for something else,” Artemy bargained. And maybe just that, rather than resisting outright, meant he had already lost. Was already lost. “Think of some other punishment. I don’t-”

“No,” Dankovsky echoed back, as flatly as the walls did. “Don’t misunderstand – your submission to me isn’t an act we’ll be putting on together. It’s the lesser evil, but it must be genuine, or she’ll know, and she will lose patience.”

“You’re bluffing.” He wasn’t, there was no sign of it and he’d never been that good a liar back in the dead-and-gone town, but Artemy needed it to be true. Needed there to be a way to break through this intact, any way other than- “Do you really think you can use her as a bogeyman to-”

“Enough.” The echo of Dankovsky’s voice cracked back to them both – it seemed a miracle that the walls were still intact. “If you remove your clothing now, Maria may only happen to see you and be satisfied that you’re being suitably punished when she next visits. If you draw this out any longer, then, when you do finally submit, I’ll drag you to her naked as proof. One way or the other, whether you will it or not, I will save your idiot life, Burakh.”

Some of the fire’s red had risen into Dankovsky’s cheeks. He breathed as if to fan it higher.

Almost into his eyes – scarlet fury borrowed from Maria, in place of the brown that had seemed so alive.

The fire laughed slyly in the following silence. The sweat that had broken out under Artemy’s clothes cooled to a fever chill.

He stooped to begin undoing the buckles of his boots. That familiar mud flaked from between them.

His woollen socks still smelled of the marsh. Tugging them free, he set his feet bare on the mirror-slick, frigid floor.

From there, it was just a choice. Just a delayed humiliation, like Dankovsky had threatened. Artemy gathered the hem of his sweater into his hands, and an unexpected, bitter lump lodged in his throat. If only he’d paid a little more careful mind to Lara...

Then she would still have died along with the rest of them. He rolled the sweater up and over his too-tight undershirt and off, folding it slowly, perfectly onto the back of that garish red couch.

The undershirt caught his breath a size too small, but his silhouette still felt stark through it. Did Dankovsky see, did he realize, or only when Artemy wriggled out of it and let his breasts hang free?

Dankovsky stood more still and stone-seeming than ever. The red in his cheeks had fled back to lifeless white.

Artemy tugged down his trousers and boxer shorts together. It was easier that way, like tearing off a bandage blood had adhered to the wound. Easier with the chilly air already dancing across his chest, half his secret already exposed.

Though the other half felt so much more vulnerable. The triangle of dense, dark, curling hair where Dankovsky must have expected to see a cock – had he gotten off on the idea? Despite what he’d said, drooling over the thought of a naked, docile, ordinary man padding around his new marble palace?

Artemy discarded his trousers with no such care on the floor and straightened to let Dankovsky get a good look at what he had instead. The sort of man who had needed secrecy to be so, at least, in eyes like the black ones staring so stricken at him.

Artemy stared straight, steadily back. Hands at his sides, no attempt to hide, letting Dankovsky get a good look at what he’d done.

Dankovsky sank back into a shuddering breath. Pushed a hand through his hair, unearthing traces of brown from beneath its neat gloss.

“I...I’ll see to it that the temperature is raised in here,” he said. “There’s no need for you to suffer the cold as further punishment.”

Was he waiting, in the next whispering silence, for Artemy to thank him? "Are we finished here?” Artemy asked instead.

Dankovsky nodded like stone crumbling off an unsteady plinth.

“Yes. You may see yourself back to your room. I’ll see to it that your clothes are washed and put away – I’m sure you’ll earn the privilege of them again, in time.”

Artemy swallowed the last of his bile. So weary, all at once, with the effort of resisting and failing; he turned away, towards the bare arch that would take him most quickly back to the bedroom where Dankovsky had been keeping him.

“And...Artemy?”

He almost didn’t pause in the doorway. He didn’t turn to see whether Dankovsky was giving him any sort of living look from behind.

“I’m proud of you. I hope you’ll give me much more reason to be so in the future.”

He wouldn’t turn. He didn’t answer. With the cold still running rampant on skin he would never have bared by choice and no comfort in the promise of warmth, he padded out of the parlour, on bare, silent feet through the stone halls he would never be weary enough to call home.

Chapter Text

He had carried so much of the world for so long. All its fraying connections had been strung through him. While he’d been straining under the weight, pulled in so many different directions, he would never have imagined someone saying –

“There, that’s it. Now, just close your eyes.”

A hand on his back, fine fingers braced between the shoulder blades. Bent forward, his feet still on the floor, but the pillows stacked on top of the desk took most of his weight. The dusty, downy smell of feathers, of sleep.

That hand led a warm frisson down his spine, to pool in the small of his back. Lower, harder, colder, leather caressed one side of his bare ass.

Smooth and playful from side to side, like the first brushstroke on a blank canvas. Its first lift from and fall back to his skin was always little more than a tap, the chaste peck of a kiss in a very unchaste place. After that, the second lift, the held breath, as the man standing over him left him guessing.

The second, real starting swat snapped through the dusty, dozy air, lighting a sting across the left side of Artemy’s ass that pushed him up high on his elbows and toes. Always the reflex, always, when it really started, to make it stop. To resist, tuck himself further away, or turn around and fight, even.

But the peace he’d bent over for lay somewhere on the other side of doing so again. Pressing his cheek back to the pillow, presenting the burn of the paddle’s first strike for Daniil to stroke with cool fingers. Almost to soothe it, before bringing the paddle down again.

Artemy flinched into the pillow, but, prepared, didn’t rise from it this time. Worse the second time, the sting, on skin already startled, smarting. More of him said to make it stop, yet it was easier to refuse.

“Good,” Daniil murmured over his bowed back. “Very good. All you need to do now is be still for me. Quiet, close at hand.”

A smirk in his voice. Artemy would have risen to the bait at any other time, but now, it was just proof to them both that he wouldn’t.

That whatever Daniil said and did there was, ultimately, good. The good that Artemy didn’t have to fight for, didn’t have to balance on his own back. The sharp crack of the paddle across his ass – nothing he had to fight. The soothing hand always came before his body could decide otherwise.

The space between them, pain and soothing, began to smooth and fade away. Waiting, counting heartbeats between each strike, became a soft grey space that things only happened to from the outside.

Pain and tenderness both came from the outside, carried by the same hands he trusted. Nothing existed in his world that wasn’t delivered by them.

“You seem to fall into this state remarkably quickly nowadays. Can you still hear me? Artemy?”

Yes, but it didn’t feel very important that he did, or to answer. Daniil’s voice was an outer border, like the sound of waves lapping around a tiny island in the dark. Something happening not to him, but around him.

The hand that squeezed his ass, reminding him of everywhere it stung, was something happening much closer. He shifted his feet, somewhere hazy and lost between leaning deeper into Daniil’s hand and away.

Leaning reluctantly into the knowledge that he wouldn’t be getting any more of what he wanted until he answered. Daniil didn’t seem to realize, from the outside, just how safe that place Artemy sank into truly was.

He never seemed willing to leave Artemy there long without some reassurance that he could still come back. “Don’t stop,” Artemy muttered, without leaving the pillows or opening his eyes.

Like lying in bed as a child, on a sunny morning, too young for anything to be his responsibility or wrong. No sunshine where he half-stood now, but the warm ray of a sigh fell across his back, cradling him the same way.

“Very well.” Daniil’s fingers tousled his hair, like being found on that sunny morning and loved and left to drowse a little longer. “You’re behaving so beautifully for me – I think you’ve earned this.”

Artemy didn’t open his eyes to see whether this was what his breath hung in anticipation of. All he had to do, to find out, was wait – all goodness came to him there.

Including the harder crack of the paddle’s studded side, like the slap of a brand across his thigh. He whimpered into the musty muffle of the pillows, curling his toes against the floor and th e reflex to turn and fight.

Behaving beautifully. It would be an effort, for a few strikes more. The studded side of that pain would demand strength from him, to endure it.

But it would also drive him deeper into blissful, dark, bidding acceptance, in the end. Once he breathed through it, muffled, long enough to remind himself there was nothing to fight. Nothing in the world that didn’t come from those trusted hands.

Even pain was a tool they used to do more good for him. If that was true, then there really could be nothing in the world to fear.

“Good.”

His left leg twitched with the next blow. He bore it.

“Very good.”

A whine fled out of his lungs with the next. He heard it from a curious distance, watched it from inside himself as if it were a small animal fleeing some danger dire to it but meaningless to him.

“That’s my good boy. That’s all you are right now, isn’t it? Mine. Does that make you happy?”

Far above, like a star that small, whining animal would never look up and know for what it was, Daniil was waiting for an answer again. Artemy gave the only one he could – he braced his feet more firmly on the floor, lifting his hips just that much higher and waiting for all the good in the world to come to him.

Chapter Text

I can bind you.

It should have hurt. But nightmares never did when they finally closed their teeth on a sleeping throat, did they? They only smothered, the sleeping mind imagining darkness, imagining what it might be like to die. Trying-

Trying to simulate its own nonexistence. Where was he?

Lying flat as a sacrifice on something hard, smooth, the powdery granite smell of sunlight radiating back from stone. But the sun was gone, the sky scabbing over with clouds of scarlet and indigo as the last of its light bled away, and, when Daniil tried to move, his body answered him only in ways that told him it wasn’t whole.

His arms didn’t follow the order to move all the way to the fingertips. His muscles had more range of motion than the skin that should have covered them. Where was he?

Breathing parted the skin of his chest in raw slits, branching out from his sternum in reflection of the veins broken underneath . The air spun sweet, dizzy circles in his lungs, rolling like vodka, like fire, down his tongue.

Twyre. He’d come to know its debilitating perfume so well. His neck still obeyed him the way it was supposed to, lifting his chin to his chest, letting him look down the length of himself and all it would have been better not to see.

His body lying bare on the stone, marked from chest to hips, shoulders to fingertips, like a map carved into the territory it represented. Clean, uncannily bloodless incisions charted the muscles and veins, gaping wide and glistening with the lurch of horror, the latest failure to move, that they could no longer communicate to each other. He lay there as a broken language, his body a living tower of Babel, severed from itself.

The man who had severed him, who was still severing him, stood stooped over his left leg. Drawing the scalpel along, that long, wicked knife like no other, opening his thigh down a line it accepted without the slightest pain.

Artemy Burakh. His face as hard and ruthless as a stone altar, set in concentration. His other hand following close behind the knife, two fingers clotted thick with some sort of golden sap, inserted deep in the incision. Filling it with that foreign substance before it could bleed.

Daniil moaned. Wasn’t it a nightmare? Where had he been last? Standing in the marsh south of town, stagnant water mapping incisions through the mud like that sap gleaming in his skin. The song of the twyre rising to a keen point around him – the world had been closing, he had felt it, a wound being stitched shut in a new, outlandish body. He had needed to escape from it or else be sealed inside.

Then Artemy had caught his arm. How was it he remembered nothing between that and this?

The same pity in Artemy’s eyes on both sides of the memory. Staring at him in the marsh and now up the length of his body, but still cutting him, not slowing for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried everything else I could.”

Daniil’s breath flared his chest, panting dumb and feeble as a dying animal. He was dying, wasn’t he? He couldn’t be so open and do anything else. Tried everything else to what? What was it Artemy was trying now?

“Wh-” His lips would still move the way they were supposed to, but panic diluted his voice to a thready whisper. And the what and the why were surely more important, yet still, somehow, the question that bled out of them – the only thing bleeding out of him – was, “Where am I?”

Artemy’s shoulders slumped further into their studious stoop, or weariness, or...relief? It had to be a nightmare, surely, for him to look so calm, so grimly satisfied with what he was doing.

“The Ragi Barrow,” he said. “This is the most lucid you’ve been in almost a month. I hope that means it’s working.”

The marsh and then that moment. A month? Daniil twisted again, against the feeling that he couldn’t, the unwhole feeling of an insect pinned and already partially dissected. Or still an animal, too terribly alive to watch itself being worked into a piece of taxidermy.

“What?” he asked this time, panic bleeding through, welling up out of the hyperventilating tightness of his throat. “God, what are you- what have you done to me? I can’t-”

From his helpless vantage atop the neck, he watched as the scalpel turned a painless flourish through the tendons of his left knee. Making him just that much, in an instant, permanently less whole – they would never heal the way they had been, he would never heal, he would never have the chance-

“Lie still,” Artemy urged him. “It will be easier for it to bind the muscles if you do.” His were working tight and unhappy in his jaw. The sight of him bathed in bloody cloud-light so perfectly clear, despite the shock that should have been blurring Daniil’s sight. “You’ve been...I’ve been trying for a month now to make peace between you and this world. But the two of you are just so at odds. Its air and water poison you. You rave and stab at its roots with anything sharp enough that you can find. It won’t nurture you, and you won’t let it. You were nearly dead when I carried you out here.”

He didn’t remember. Raving or stabbing or choking, not a moment of that supposed month. As severed from his memories as he was from so much of his body, as helpless to reach out and grasp them.

“Then what-” His voice had thinned to a helpless whine. He couldn’t reconnect it to the conviction he remembered speaking with when he had told Artemy he couldn’t stay. “What? Are you killing me before it can? Am I your next sacrifice to it? I thought...”

He had thought he could trust Artemy. He had trusted him, desperately and wholeheartedly, when there had been nothing else left in the world. Was that trust the last thing that would be taken from him, the last thing he had left to lose, before his life?

Artemy’s knife furrowed the flesh of his shin. Artemy’s fingers followed close behind, an alien, conscientious gentleness stroking him from the inside.

“I’m not killing you,” Artemy claimed. “I’m trying to save you. There’s a rite, an operation, they used to perform on bulls. They would open it along all the lines it could survive and seed twyre in the incisions. It looks gruesome, but the bull and twyre would heal quickly together after that. They would go on living together – the bull, longer and healthier than most, and the twyre, even when winter should have killed it. It’s a symbiosis. I thought that, if anything could possibly bind you and this world together...”

He lifted his fingers from that latest wound. Little of the sap still clung to them, but what did, lush gold like sunlight suspended in honey, was full of small black flecks.

Perhaps half the size of an apple’s seeds. Daniil stared, perfectly still for the first time since waking, and so felt, for the first time, what moved in him even after he had stopped.

Subtly, a faint, ticklish crawl he might not have noticed at all if Artemy hadn’t just drawn his attention so acutely to it. A prickling in the gross diagram of cuts across his chest and arms, like blood returning to a limb from which it had been briefly cut off.

He tried again to move his right arm, which must have been first and tingled most fiercely. It twitched and shuddered, the rusty throes of a machine starting badly. But it moved – his hand lolled on the far side of a cut that should have severed all control at the elbow, flexing and twinging even after he had stopped telling it to do so.

Inside the gape of flesh that nearly severed his elbow, black strands flexed and glistened. As he watched, one of them pushed the distinctive Lichtenberg pattern of a branching root beneath his skin, up and across the quivering bulge of his bicep.

The sound that lurched from him was utterly cut off from sense. From protest or acceptance or even pleading, from everything but the terror of something alien moving beneath his skin. He tried to pull his right arm up to where his left hand could tear at the wound, but neither had that range of motion yet. The joints that would bend did so sporadically, muscles seizing not in the grip of his will, but as that distinct, intruding, dangerous life bound its threads to theirs.

Root to muscle fibre. He couldn’t move enough to disturb Artemy’s work on his right leg.

“It has to be right,” Artemy insisted. “You were dying. Nothing else I could do for you would stop it. You didn’t even recognize me – you called me Alexei, told me I was dead. Do you understand? There was no other way.”

What he understood was that his breath felt wider. As if his ribs were softer, stretching as far as his parted skin would allow. What he saw, when he craned his neck to look as close to his own heart as possible, was a sprout as fine as emerald thread unfurling itself just below his collarbone.

Still bowed beneath the weight of the sap that had nourished it, a single drop shed onto his skin so that it could stand straight and alive. He was breathing into its roots, nourishing it further with every gasp he pulled into his compromised lungs.

The roots weren’t binding his skin back together as tight and smooth as it had been. They left those gaps for their new shoots to emerge from, a map of tiny lives waking, raising their green heads, whispering across all the lines of his tendons and muscles, his breath and circulatory system.

They made him whole only below the surface, knitting themselves dense and rich and inextricable into the structure of him. He could feel every thread of it – of what deserved the name infection more than the Pest ever had.

“You can’t,” he gasped around a new, placid, transplanted rustle in his voice. “I can’t- Artemy, look at me, I can’t-”

“We’re almost finished,” Artemy said, as if it were a promise and not a horror. “I know it’s not- not anything you would have wanted, but it’s the only way. They say the bulls never seemed to mind. They were happier, even.”

“I can’t live like this.” The tears that had forced their way to Daniil’s eyes clung strangely, stickily to his lashes. “Listen to me – I can’t live like this. Not like-”

Not feeling something else mediate his every breath, the movement of his hands. His body was a language cut apart and spliced together with another, his skin bursting with the new voices of translators. He would go mad. He would, right there on that stone altar, if it was the only way to save himself from however it would feel for those roots to reach his heart.

Artemy had reached his right foot, branching cuts and fingers across the arch. Looking up, again, with the pity that had refused to let him die.

“You can,” he said. “You will. Look at me – I saved you. You were as good as dead, and now...you’re breathing easily, aren’t you? There isn’t any pain, is there?”

He was breathing enough to feed a thousand tiny lives, and the pain of it had been denied him. Perhaps all pain would be – perhaps his passenger saw no purpose in it. He wrenched out a sob that sounded more like the wind sighing through the grass.

The buzzing chorus of life growing on his blood almost drowned out the delicate sound of Artemy setting the scalpel aside. His hand spread warm and pitying across Daniil’s forehead, to feel for fever or the life stirring behind.

“We’ll stay out here tonight,” he said. “To give it time to settle. By morning, you should be strong enough to walk back to the village. I...” His voice stumbled over a breath, the clean sound of only flesh and blood. “I’ll be there every step of the way. I’ll help you find a way to come to terms with this.”

Daniil’s left hand had relearned how to curl its fingers. He knew so for how it strained and failed on its own to reach up and lay itself over Artemy’s.

He knew the moment those roots reached his heart by the enormous twinge of pity that constricted its next beat. Artemy looked so very weary staring down at him, in greying silhouette against a sky healing to darkness. Did he know...?

It would be unforgivable if he had known he was making Daniil a seedbed for something that so dearly loved him. It was unforgivable anyways.

If Daniil was to have any say left in what he became, he wouldn’t let his heart heal that contradiction. He still seemed to have at least some say in what he said, staring up at Artemy.

“If you knew it was a boon,” he asked, with the rasp of something else’s voice and syntax but his own rootbound horror, “Would you not die?”

Artemy shook his head. Of course he did – of course he would. For as long as Daniil had known him, he had argued in unwavering favour of life.

“I have too much to live for,” he said. “I think you do, too. You just need time to remember it.”

He lowered himself to sit on the stone at Daniil’s side, with a hand still on his forehead. With that look of watchful, unrelenting tenderness, which would see him live no matter how much he might want to die.

Daniil’s guts shifted strangely, densely. His heart no longer ached – the first roots had found their way through it, like thread through a shuttle. If he tried to raise a hand against himself, they would surely bind him. What would he remember? What would he feel was worth living for by morning?

Artemy’s patient, pitying eyes waited to find out. The darkness behind him had sealed whole, but his face only shone brighter with the eerie gloaming light of the first flower that opened in the hollow of Daniil’s throat.

Chapter Text

Fine. If you really are so insistent on surrendering yourself to some worthy punishment, take this and go to Peter Stamatin’s flat. Drink it before you climb the stairs. He and his ferocious brother will see to you.

Maria had practically tossed the little bottle to him, a scarlet flash and disdainful flip of her skirt as she’d turned away. Maybe she hadn’t really thought that he’d go through with it.

But she was a Mistress with the whole cosmos at her feet. She would never know how it felt to have such a narrow path. Her brilliance would justify her – she would have no more need to explain herself than an aurora, or a thunderstorm. Of course the justice he looked for would be boring to her.

Of course the idea that he had killed her uncle, truly eradicated Simon from the world, would be sacrilegious to her. The Kains would wait forever to hear their patriarch’s voice again. She might have sent Stakh away just so she wouldn’t have to look at any evidence of the truth.

The smell breathing from the neck of the bottle wasn’t steeped twyre or medicinal in any other way he knew. It might have been simple poison. But if so, wasn’t that her right? He had urged her to punish him for Simon’s death however she felt was fitting.

If she wanted Peter and Andrey to bear witness to his final moments, who was he to argue?

It was small enough for him to take the contents in two gulps. As sweet and sour at once as its smell; he swallowed a shiver along with it, down between his shoulder blades.

With the bottle empty in his hand, he didn’t let himself hesitate. The switchback staircase up to Peter Stamatin’s flat smelled of turpentine and something stranger, sourer still. It wasn’t where he would have wanted everything to end.

But he wouldn’t think of that. That would lead only to thinking of where he might have wanted instead, and how, and then he might hesitate. Better to go to the end with a steady stride, knowing he had done all he could for those who would survive him.

Peter Stamatin’s door stood firmer and newer than the brickwork around it. Broken at some point, maybe. Stakh lifted a fist to knock, and that firm door opened away from him before he could.

Whisking a faint breeze into the flat. It was Andrey who stood there staring back at him with fierce, flinty eyes and nostrils flared. Stakh had helped Isidor repair a lot of the wild architect’s work, the human kind, broken and bleeding, but he’d hardly ever crossed paths with the man himself.

Andrey had never seemed to come out worse for those fights. He looked Stakh up and down like he might be considering another one.

“What the hell do you want?” he demanded. “He’s not well, but he doesn’t need your sort of help.”

His sort of-? “Maria sent me,” Stakh explained. “Is Peter sick? Is that why...?”

Had he been sent to work off his debt to Maria as a doctor? Why the bottle, in that case? The sweet taste still on his tongue, hotter than before, it seemed, burning away the oxygen from his breath as he took it.

Andrey’s gaze raked more roughly, thoroughly across him. The flat lay dark beyond the doorway, breathing out that sour more-than-turpentine smell.

“Peter’s none of your business,” Andrey said. “Though you might be his. Why did our mutual Mistress send you, exactly?”

“I don’t know.” Stakh’s tongue moved more thickly around the words, less room in his mouth, it seemed. “Not exactly. To pay for Simon. She told me to come here. She said that you’d...you’d see to me.”

It sounded different on his lips, on the border of that dark room, than it had cast over Maria’s shoulder. His thoughts must have been moving more thickly as well, for him to stand there and offer himself to Andrey Stamatin that way.

With just that hiccup of hesitation. Andrey stared with too much hungry understanding at the bottle hanging loose between his fingers.

“Did she now?” he considered. His voice had slunk down low, a rasping purr like claws across the brickwork. “It seems she’s inherited her mother’s eye for fitting tools. Yes, you’ll do nicely, I think. Why don’t you step inside while you still can?”

That seemed like a terrible idea. Andrey’s green eyes in the dark of the flat, the gleam of a predator that woke only at midnight...but something was already in motion, in Stakh and the world. He had already agreed to a price for what he’d done.

Trying to run from it now would be even less forgivable than what he’d already done. His feet wouldn’t lift from the floor, but they still shuffled him forward. At least one step across the threshold, and that was what mattered.

Making the choice and then acting on it was what mattered. Something was wrong, wasn’t it? Terribly, medically wrong – he was beyond his own help that way. His head hung to his chest, his arms at his sides, stirring only like heavy curtains as Andrey slipped one around his waist.

“Why don’t you lie down on the couch?” he nudged Stakh, too sweet by far for all the broken bones and claw marks he’d sent to Isidor’s clinic. “It’ll be more comfortable than- whoops, there you go.”

There he went, folding at the knees as his weight became suddenly too much for them. He couldn’t put any stiffness in them to stop it, any strength left anywhere in him. If not for Andrey’s arm around his waist, he would have dropped to the floor. As it was, he hung over that arm like a doll stuffed with too little sawdust, his limbs all fighting separately, floppily against Andrey’s efforts to scoop him up.

Lolling limply around him when he succeeded. Stronger than he looked, stronger than he should have been, hoisting Stakh against his chest like a sleepy child and carrying him over to where the vague shape of a couch hunched in the dark.

Drugged. Was there still any chance it had been poison in the bottle he’d dropped on the floor?

It didn’t feel like it. Just like being warmly, softly unable to move, settling slackly from Andrey’s arms onto the couch. Some sort of muscle relaxant?

His heart wouldn’t race. Whether that was the drug or just the way he’d walked across the threshold, owning this choice, he had no way of knowing. No way of doing anything but watching while Andrey fussed around him, lighting a single oil lamp that seemed too timid to reach out into the gloom and calling out farther into it himself.

“Peter! Come and take a look at this. It seems Maria sent us a gift.”

With light lapping only over the couch, a little island in the sour, creaking dark, Andrey leaned close over Stakh again. His eyes lit as well to hasty, hungry green-gold, and began loosening Stakh’s belt from around his hips.

Stakh’s heart lurched to a quicker pace after all. Like running through mud, but that bare line of skin widening down his hips was the one punishment he might have refused if Maria had suggested it.

“Don’t,” he slurred, his hands curling against the corduroy-rough cushions, all they could do. His hips rocking as Andrey wrestled his trousers down. “I don’t-”

“Why not? It’s what you came for, isn’t it?” Andrey gave his trousers another yank, pulling him an inch down the couch, rucking up his shirt by that much and baring him to the knees. “Wait – you didn’t think it was a secret, did you? Trust me, buttercup, you’re not that subtle. I smelled it on you the first time we met.”

Shame felt like the only solid thing in Stakh’s chest. Everything else was too slack and soft to support it; he couldn’t lift his head to see what Andrey would be seeing .

What Stakh ha d covered up for so long, hidden from everyone but his master, who had been wise and kind enough to help him. If only a man could inherit a menkhu’s knowledge, then could a man be made?

Andrey’s hands on his hips seemed to spell out no. Andrey’s fingers tracing the seams of his thighs in towards...

He couldn’t jerk his head towards movement at the edge of the lamplight. Peter Stamatin stared at him with eyes that seemed to haunt the face they were in.

Pale and thin, sick-looking for sure, wrapped in only a filthy old quilt. Where it swayed open around his legs, he-

A limp, awful mewling sound unravelled out of Stakh as Andrey shoved two fingers up between his legs. His cunt had gone as slack as the rest of him, swallowing those fingers and what felt like half the hand attached to them whole.

“Look at him,” Andrey crowed. Over Stakh’s head, at his stooped and staring brother. “So loose and ready, he’s practically falling off the bone. Come on, now – you know you’ll feel better if you lay them in a living body.”

Stakh’s fist bounced on the cushion, more for how Andrey jostled it than any conscious control. Clenching his teeth felt like all the effort he could muster.

“Fuck,” he groaned through them. “Fuck, don’t-”

“I don’t want to,” Peter said.

Sulky-sounding as a five-year-old. But still staring, as if he could pull Stakh bodily into the forsaken vacuum of his eyes. Two weeks since the Polyhedron had fallen, and he looked like-

Another groan rocked out of Stakh as Andrey wrenched his hand free. Wet and warm, it crept under his shirt, slithering up across his stomach, bunching the fabric under his arms and over his chest to bare more of him to the light.

“Look at him,” Andrey repeated. “He looks so hollow here, doesn’t he?” Spreading that hand across Stakh’s navel, leaving a slick print as evidence of how deep it had just been in him. “Think of how good it would feel to see him stuffed full. Come here, touch him. Think of him taut. Come on – it would be easier at this point than dumping them outside.”

“What are you talking about?” The words rolled round and soft out of Stakh’s mouth. Andrey’s seemed to be dancing around a dark pit, a threat he couldn’t quite see the shape of. Andrey’s hand on him felt far too much like it was showing off something it owned. “What-”

“You were always so quiet trailing after Isidor,” Andrey sighed. Leaning away from him, to fingertips on his hip, reaching and rustling through something he couldn’t turn his head to see. “I’d have thought you knew better than to stick your tongue in a conversation that doesn’t involve you. Here – maybe this will keep you quiet.”

Stakh made the mistake of opening his mouth just in time to meet whatever Andrey shoved in it. Some sour, grimy wad of fabric from the floor, a sock or scrap, sapping the moisture from his tongue in a second. It fit too perfectly behind his teeth for him to spit it out, muffling his attempts at doing so to a faint woollen grunt.

“That’s better.” Andrey beckoned his brother with a hand still glistening in the lamplight. “Here – have a feel. There isn’t as much muscle to him as I would have thought. And it’s all soft as pudding now.”

Stakh could only manage another of those grunts as Andrey grabbed a fistful of him just above the hip to demonstrate. It did feel like there was nothing real under his skin, nothing solid enough to keep its shape if it hadn’t been contained that way .

Peter’s tongue darted across his lips. Far too long across his lips, down his chin, too thin. He pushed the blanket from his shoulders.

Stakh’s moan mostly began and ended behind his breastbone. Peter’s, and his ribs, stood out stark and painful under pale skin.

His gut was swollen like starvation in contrast. White, not just sickly pale, but white with what glimmered like scales in the lamplight.

Scales. Starting thicker around his hips and shining down his legs, sleek mosaic stripes of black and green. Peter’s feet ended in curved claws each as thick as Stakh’s thumb, almost hidden behind the coy curl of his tail.

His long, tapered, reptilian tail. It had to be the drug, didn’t it?

It had to. But the click of those claws on the floor as Peter approached him seemed so keenly, perfectly real. The hand he stretched out towards Stakh’s stomach was flaking at the fingertips, skin cracking and falling away from more scales.

His fingers were cold and tentative just for the first second. Then they seized on the heat of Stakh’s skin, kneading and digging deep. Peter’s lips parted in hazy fascination – of course the tip of the tongue fluttering out was forked.

“That’s right,” Andrey said, that slithering-across-brickwork purr again. “Here, let’s get you on top of him. Remember to push all the way in – we don’t want any of them falling out.”

Stakh dropped his gaze as far as he could, to Peter’s crotch. Whatever was bulging there, it wasn’t what he had first feared when Andrey had started undressing him. It was too thick around, too ridged, to be that, and the puckering at its end hinted at a larger opening.

It was just as stiff and threatening as any cock would have been, though, as Peter knelt up onto the couch over him. Unsteady and so stick-thin everywhere but his gut – his shoulder jutted sharply into the support of his brother’s hand.

But his eyes had come alive, wetly intent and fixed on Stakh’s stomach. He swayed just slightly, settling in, and Andrey stooped to hold Stakh’s thighs open for him.

Short, wet breaths exploded from Stakh’s nostrils. He could tell himself it couldn’t be real, but that didn’t make any difference to how whatever Peter had in place of a cock pushed into him. As slack as he was, it still barely fit, forcing him open as not even Andrey’s hand had. That ridged feeling, rubbery-stiff, wouldn’t let it retract at all – there was no rhythm to that rape, but just a steady push inwards, until he and Peter felt as tightly sealed together as they could be.

As if Stakh’s softened flesh had melted into that of the man, the thing, on top of him. Had Peter always been that? That creature, in secret? Had Isidor known?

If not, how could he have missed it? If so, how could he have let something like that keep living in the town?

And what about Andrey? His skin still looked whole and human, but they were twins, weren’t they? His hand smooth and pale, stroking down Peter’s scaled belly...

“That’s it,” he whispered into his brother’s hair. Whether his tongue was forked as well, Stakh couldn’t see. “That’s perfect. He’s soft, isn’t he? He’s soaking wet for you. Go on, now – fill him up.”

Peter sighed like letting his own tautly-held soul escape. Deep in the tight, solid seal between him and Stakh, something moved.

Something nudged deeper. Something pushing through from Peter into him, so deep it could only have been sliding through his loosened cervix into the womb.

Peter’s eyes swam with bliss, liquid green around a black slash of pupil. The breath between his parted lips was a rapturous hiss. Something like him...

Something like whatever he was, as strange as he was, would lay eggs, wouldn’t it?

The gag filtered Stakh’s scream into another muted groan. Now that he’d thought of it, he couldn’t have mistaken the feeling for anything else. One warm, smooth, separate object pushing its way into him, then another...

Then another. Another. Nudging into place against each other in the softest, most forbidden part of his body; he couldn’t look down far enough to see the full, unhealthy swell of Peter’s gut.

He couldn’t see if it was starting to shrink, or if his was starting to grow. He could only see Peter’s relief and Andrey’s hand, rising faster, stroking down slower, as if to squeeze what had been sick in his brother into Stakh. His eyes...

“That’s it,” Andrey repeated, his voice crawling rough and lower in his throat. “Oh, look at that. Look at him. It’s starting to show. He’s going to be so-”

Andrey shoved away from his brother, stalking out of the light as if he couldn’t stand standing still for another moment. Peter seemed not to notice, reaching down with a cold hand to caress Stakh’s belly again.

The flesh there didn’t move quite as completely and easily as it had before. There was a firmness under it, tugging back against Peter’s grip. Stakh’s stomach tugged tight in turn, as if nausea could help him here.

As if he could be sick and be rid of what Peter was doing to him . The flailing, rustling sound of clothes flung off came from somewhere in the dark. Clattering buckles, the toppling thud of boots, and something-

Something softer, longer, worse, tearing and crackling in the dark. He couldn’t turn his head, could only roll his eyes to the side, blurring Peter in his periphery, watching as Andrey stalked, naked, back into the light.

Scaled from chest to toes, clawed and tailed, carrying something loose in one hand like a coat he’d forgotten to drop. Something white where the lamplight didn’t turn it to translucent gold, tattered and fluttering beside Andrey’s eager strides.

A moult. Of course it was. He dropped it when he was close enough to reach for Peter and Stakh instead, leaving it to drift down white-gold and empty out of Stakh’s sight.

Reaching for his brother’s shoulder and Stakh’s gut instead. The sense of firmness under his hand and Peter’s had gotten larger, less of it moving with their touch every second . The pressure in Stakh’s gut was harder to count as one thing adding to another – it had become just that packed sense of mass, meeting their touch inches higher up than it should have.

Peter’s breath was starting to come faster, his face contorting from bliss to effort. Andrey took a tighter grip on his shoulder, pulling-

“Don’t plug him.” Andrey’s teeth shone with the same whitish translucence as his moult, sharp enough to fit some of the wounds Isidor had stitched shut in the clinic over the years. “It’s my turn.”

Peter snapped back at him, all bared teeth and a rough reptilian sound. By instinct, maybe, both of them just that, all that, all animal impulses playing at being men-

His turn?

All Stakh’s efforts at squirming still barely rocked his hips. Peter did worse, giving in with a sullen groan and pulling out of him.

Against the grain, against all the ridges and tight fit that were meant to keep him there. Stakh bellowed through the gag, like being gutted, glued to something else and then pulled inside out-

Peter climbed down from him more lightly and lithely than he had gotten up. So much more slender around the middle, and Stakh’s stomach clenched uselessly again at what wasn’t in it to begin with.

What was lower, under Andrey’s hand. He slung himself up easily onto the couch and Stakh, one second in which Stakh could see the scaled swell of his belly before it settled below sight. One chance to imagine how it might look added together with Peter’s before Andrey took hold of him above the hips, telling him more than he would have wanted to know about how swollen he already was.

“We’ve never tried putting both our clutches in the same person before,” Andrey said, like sharing a lover’s secret. His tail crept around to tickle a caress up the underside of Stakh’s chin. “Most of them are too small. Too delicate. But you’re a big, strapping man, aren’t you? You can handle it.”

With all his strength, all the need in the world to say no, please, no, Stakh could twitch his head just slightly side to side. He couldn’t do anything to stop the tears pushing up behind his eyes, or the fist-sized feeling of Andrey pushing into him where Peter had raked his way out.

He couldn’t stop any of it. Maria had seemed so dismissive, so bored with the idea of punishing him, but if this was what she thought was worthy payback for what he’d done...

“Don’t worry your pretty head too much.” Andrey rolled his hips, no doubt looking for that deep lock inside Stakh. The place where they would feel too tight to tell apart. “We’ve never laid anything that’s turned out anything like us. Maybe the conditions have just never been right. You’ll spend a few months waddling around, doubling in size or so, then spill out a heap of broken shells and black skinks. We only bother putting them in people instead of the waste bin every now and then because no drug could come close to matching the feeling of...this.”

Finding that seal. The first of Andrey’s eggs pushed against the pressure Stakh was already carrying barely a second later.

There had been no real sense of strain up to that point. No pain. Maria’s drug had made it almost easy. But as Andrey’s eyes sank half-shut in reproductive bliss, the first twinge in Stakh’s gut finally told him something was wrong.

Finally started to say it was too much. If he’d had a child for Artemy, the way Isidor had almost seemed serious about suggesting he become a Burakh once, he would have swelled like that over the course of months. Not minutes, too many hands on him – Peter had nestled in to sit on the floor next to the couch, kneading and stroking him somewhere between a mother’s dreamy look of satisfaction and a child’s fascination with a captured beetle.

Not much of Stakh would knead anymore. The skin that had been so slack and hollow was taut and distended now, twinging as Peter pinched at it. He still couldn’t raise a hand to touch it himself.

But he must have twitched the fingers enough for Andrey to realize that he was trying. Andrey’s hand, cold now as well, curled around his, claws against his wrist, and lifted it up to lie on-

The gag, wet now with Stakh’s efforts to spit it out, soaked up the high, whining moan that spilled from his lungs. If he hadn’t felt the weight of his hand on it, he wouldn’t have believed he was touching his own body. The shape was too alien, hard and round where the hollow between his ribs and hips had been. His skin was as stiff as stretched leather and still rising, still stretching, and he couldn’t push back against it. Couldn’t press down on it, try to stop it, to be stronger than the slow one-after-another push of Andrey’s eggs into him.

All he could do was feel that rise through his hand riding on top of it. And inside, feel the strain, finally, as even his drugged body stopping saying and started screaming that it was too much. Even drugged, slack muscles could only hold so much, organs could only be squeezed so far out of the way. His breath burst in whimpers, broken around the gag, whining helplessly, shamelessly for it to stop. He would burst if it didn’t, and would that be enough to satisfy Maria?

“Almost there, angel,” Andrey murmured. Wet-eyed and mesmerized as his brother had seemed, floating on the fulfillment of whatever instincts told him a warm body was better than a cold waste bin. “Almost there. Oh, you’re so good. You’re perfect. Can you feel it? All that life in you?”

He couldn’t feel anything else. He couldn’t rock his hips, couldn’t struggle even that much without feeling like he was pulling at his own seams. Peter’s eager hands almost pulled him apart, Peter’s breath blowing hot between cold, grasping fingers.

So much life. Ugly, stillborn life, the way Andrey had described it, that would come spilling out of him in a few months. After he-

What had Andrey said? After he doubled in size? That wasn’t possible, he couldn’t, couldn’t hold a single more drop of life than he already was. He would die if he-

Andrey groaned, drawing his claws not quite through the skin down Stakh’s sides. Stooped and panting, straining from his shoulders to that thick mistake of a penis lodged inside Stakh, as if he were suffering just as much, trying to push the last of it out.

“What about that?” he wheezed, patting Stakh in a way that sent taut waves of pain crawling back to his spine. “You feel that? We can’t have you walking around like an uncorked jug, letting whatever filth crawl into the nest. So we stop you up, just like that. Nothing else gets in. Nothing gets out until they’re finished.”

He couldn’t feel it. Not compared to the hot-lead sense of mass between his hips, stretching him almost to death. He didn’t have the breath left to whimper – to plead for anything but this.

At least it didn’t hurt when Andrey pulled free. With things properly finished, properly stopped up, he had shrunk enough that the ridges on his cock didn’t rake at Stakh on the way out.

Though they still nudged against him enough to make his legs twitch. He could curl his fingers against himself, but he couldn’t raise his head enough yet to see what they’d done to him.

Andrey must have seen him trying to do that, too. He slung himself off the couch as lightly as his brother, unburdened, circling around Peter to slip his hands under Stakh’s head and shoulder and lift him just enough.

Better if he hadn’t. Stakh stared at his own limp hand lying on top of a white globe, skin stretched almost as see-through as Andrey’s moult. He couldn’t see his legs or feet lying on the other side of it. Couldn’t see himself in it, the body he was used to, anything about the way it was supposed to be shaped. If he hadn’t been able to feel it, it would have been the body of a pregnant stranger.

Lying in Isidor’s clinic, maybe. Had he let this happen to other people? Had Stakh, as his assistant, ever seen someone suffering full of eggs without realizing it?

If so, maybe this was punishment for that, too. Still holding him around the back of the head, Andrey reached to take hold of his hand again, using it to caress him in slow, almost loving-seeming circles.

“He won’t be able to handle the stairs, will he?” he mused to his brother, who, still kneeling beside the couch, had settled forward to rest his cheek on Stakh’s side. “He might not be able to move much at all. We’ll have to keep him here – I’m sure Maria won’t mind.”

He made no move to pull out the gag. It seemed this was another conversation that didn’t really involve Stakh. Would he even be able to sit up?

Or was his punishment just to lie there like a nest, doted on by a couple of monsters? Would they let him go once he spilled out all the horrors they’d forced into him? Shells and crawling things...

“We should keep him,” Peter agreed, a murmur humming, drum-like, through Stakh’s taut skin. “He’s spacious. And warm.”

Stakh couldn’t ask. Couldn’t beg. Andrey let his head fall back, and he still couldn’t lift it again.

All he could do was stare at the ceiling while those two monsters stroked and cooed over what they’d done and wonder if even he deserved this.

Chapter Text

He and Andrey slept the way they had when there had been smaller things to outrun and the world had been a place to escape from them.

The way they had when they’d been smaller things as well, curled and twined tightly into each other. They had been filthy and hungry then, too, and sometimes, it almost felt as if suffering could turn back the clock.

To when there had been so much to build. But they were larger now, less capable of hiding themselves, and the world was what they couldn’t hide from. It was rolling them around in its vast tundra of a mouth like savouring a sweet taste. It had swallowed everything they’d tried to build.

Down to the smallest lean-to, pulling the thick, woody stems they’d woven together down into the mud as if on principle. Andrey had kicked and cursed at it.

Peter had curled up on the grass to sleep. It couldn’t be much longer now.

He hadn’t told Andrey about what was following them across the plains. The principle that had always saved him had been that, if Andrey couldn’t see something, it wasn’t real.

But this was absolutely real. It crested the hills like a storm – it descended them like a king to a long-awaited throne. With all the stately, roaring glory of a prodigal monarch and a flash flood, it woke the twyre to new, blooming heights in its wake.

Lifting his head from the hollow of Andrey’s shoulder, Peter saw it the way he had always seen his death in the distance. So tangibly inevitable, so simply true, Andrey had always seemed like a child for how he ha d insisted it would never happen.

A child who thought he could bully death. What could his hands do against the many that lined this creature’s back?

Not the beckoning hands of riders, as Peter had thought from a much greater distance. Or, not the real, full, separate bodies of riders, at least. The hands that fanned out from death’ s massive, sloped, inevitable back might have been the memory or idea of every bride who had ever ridden a bull.

Never one so large or stooped beneath the weight of the steppe. With craggy stone shoulders and a swaying fortune of herbs on its back, growing amongst the hands. Its tail was a swinging, burning brand; even from what distance was left, he could see the grass swaying and shivering around it as smaller things paraded and rejoiced around it.

He had seen it only in dusk or moonlight. But no one could think that meant death didn’t exist in daylight – it was just more difficult to see.

It was too close now for him to hope another dawn would make it more difficult to see. It would arrive where he and Andrey lay long before then. Should he have warned his brother after all?

Would that have made any difference to the way it tossed its proud head, its horns like the crescent moon cracked in two? Would Andrey have charged out to meet and challenge it before it could come for him?

So little distance was left. His tongue and teeth were stuck silent together, to the urge to wake Andrey. When both they and their nightmares had been smaller, Andrey had always been the one to chase them away.

But this was no nightmare, and it would not turn from its course. It would run them both down if they were still lying there when it arrived.

It would follow Peter wherever he might try to run from it. So if he loved the brother who had saved him from everything else, there was only one thing to do, wasn’t there?

He unwound himself slowly from the tight braid of their limbs together. Andrey’s twitched, troubled, but didn’t reach out to reclaim him.

Andrey’s brows twitched the same. Death was still distant enough for Peter to hesitate, just for a second, and press a kiss between them.

Then he pushed himself up to his feet, bare since they had lost his boots in the marsh. They no longer hurt – nothing did, except knowing that he was looking down at his brother for the last time.

Just for another second. Then he turned and did not stride to meet the bull.

Better to lead it as far away as possible. Or perhaps he was just more of a coward than he had wanted to think, not brave enough to face it in the end. He walked along the whispering black crest of the hill he and his brother had sheltered against, and when he at least dared to look back, the bull had turned to follow.

And all the hands that had fanned out grandly from its back were stretching towards him.

He was not as ready as he had wanted to think. That resignation to death, led so long on a loose, docile leash in his heart, jerked taut at the sight of all those flashing palms passing the moonlight between them. All those fingers curling and grasping towards him with each of the bull’s silent steps.

He had told himself he wouldn’t run. Not out of bravery, but because there would be no point when the end came. His limbs found a reason now where he had been sure none remained, turning him to run along that long, cresting laugh of grass simply because the alternative was to stop forever.

His feet, so far beyond hurting, flew down the last sigh of that hill into the shadow that divided it from the next. A crackling ditch that might have been full and silken with water in another season, but now, all it held was a drought-puddle of insipid grey darkness.

Not nearly deep enough to hide him. When he dared to look back again, the bull had drawn closer still.

Not charging. Not any more intent on catching him than it had already been. But death was a predator that didn’t need to hurry – it only had to follow its prey at pace until they fell down weary and it could feed.

His fastest sprint w ould only tire him sooner, carrying him more quickly into its arms. But, like all living things, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to be the exception. The one that would outrun it, shoving his way through the wind that ran dry between the hills until-

Something buried itself deep in his next step. In the arch of his foot, so cold and solid and abrupt that it took two more strides for him to realize he was in pain.

To realize his left leg was dragging, trying to be left behind. He would have left it if he could have, if that would have let him run as quickly as before. But it was bound to him too tightly to be shed in anything but death, so he had to stop, despite the mad crawl of horror across his back, knowing that the bull hadn’t.

Knowing it drew closer even as he lifted his foot up out of shadow, tilting it to the moonlight. With his fingers poised to pick out whatever stone he had found in the grass, he stared dumbfounded at what was lodged in his foot instead.

Silver and barbed and brighter than the moon, bright as the bull’s horns – a hook. Three-pronged and deep, so that he couldn’t remove it without tearing out the arch of his foot in the bargain.

He stared, his thumb a hair’s breadth from drawing blood on the one hook not embedded. A moan rose like spring’s cold tide in his throat.

But it reached his tongue as broken laughter. The bull had drawn so much closer – he was an architect, he knew distance, he could count thirty metres at a glance, and each of its steps subtracted from that.

The twinkling flies that thrived on twyre wove and hovered between its many hands. Brown, black, bloody, rusty twyre, brimming from its back and where its hooves fell. The creatures that danced and rustled through that new harvest were glimpses of glinting eyes, of bony hands and far smaller hooves.

A fly lit on the bull’s face, just below its eye, and Peter knew its implacable stare from every dream he’d ever had of falling.

He couldn’t run from it as he had before. His foot twinged and tried to drop him if he tried to walk on his toes. Walking on his heel jarred the hook, but he limped on that way, trailing blood behind.

The hills sank away. The moon struck him from the right, the wind from the left, and the bull had drawn close enough that he could hear how its hands wove the wind into new currents between them.

The whisper of skin, of their arms winding together. He should have stayed with Andrey. He should have let warm flesh be the last thing he felt, his brother’s arms braided tight with his. Was the virtue of dying alone really worth the terror?

Was it worth looking over his shoulder and knowing just how weak he was without his brother? The bull was close enough for his face to reflect in its eyes, a white Gothic mask of horror he wouldn’t have known as his own if he hadn’t been alone.

A pitiful face, stretched almost to tearing by pain and fear. Was that the last thing he wanted to be?

It was the only choice left to him. He could see it so clearly at once, in those eyes. All he could decide now was what he would die as.

He slowed to an almost bearable limp. The wind slackened to a gentle nudge, encouraging him as he turned back to face the bull.

The small creatures in the grass – no two of them even close to alike, as if they had all been sculpted from clay by playful children – parted to let the bull approach him unimpeded. Its steps sank deep in the grass, and blood seeped up around them, as if the earth itself were steeped in it.

The sky was a drab backdrop for the radiance of its horns. In that light, its hide seemed a sleek silvery grey, spattered with blood to the hocks and the tips of the fingers lowest on its flanks .

The hands stretching from its back, from a rich harvest of arms, all reached for Peter. But, cruelly, finally, the bull stopped a single pace from him.

Staring at him with eyes as deep as any fall he could dream. He was caught – they both knew it, but death waited for him to take the last step.

Cruel. Cruel, or granting him the same dignity he had himself by stopping. He could still make a choice, if only to accept his fate with grace or try to flee and be run down by it.

He had left all the important choices to Andrey for so long. He had let his will to make those choices atrophy. Perhaps that had guaranteed he would find himself with only this one to make in the end.

He stepped forward. If all he could choose was what he would see last, the bull was not so terrible. It might have been a miracle, the memory of a thousand harvests and processions reaching out to finally embrace him.

And its hands were warm. Enough so that, though they tore away what few rags had still clung to his hips and ribs, he felt none of the wind’s chill. They grasped his arms and legs and where they’d stripped him bare, lifting him from the pain of his punctured foot.

The bull’s living scent enveloped him, loam and hide and blood and herb. He held all he could of it in his lungs, the last breath he might take before the hands closed around his throat.

They held him high, like the prize of one of their processions, stroking and studying him as the bull’s bottomless eyes did. The flies, wilful as comets, fell to rest on his naked skin.

The bull huffed a breath against his stomach like a decision made. Pain pinched at the sole of Peter’s foot, but less so than before; the fluttering frame of hands around his vision passed a bloodied hook between them.

He flexed his foot and found it sore, but free. He had only a second to stare into the bull’s eyes, to wonder what it might mean to be in pain but free, before the hands passed him lower.

Under the bull’s mountainous chest, into the darkness that sheltered beneath. He might have been drifting down into that shadow, turned and caressed by the air rather than a creature of dusk and death and memories. He might have been flying under another’s power, floating, now, with his face towards the ground and his back against the hot curve of the bull’s stomach.

Perhaps that was how death had always been waiting to feel once he stopped running from it. Like being carried away to a dark, warm, safe place – like lying entwined with someone who would fight any nightmare for his sake. Perhaps, but why would death have reached down to touch him where it did next?

He gasped another breath of the bull’s scent, living, not deathly at all, as too many hands closed around him from hips to thighs, too many fingers curling into the cleft of his ass, feeling their way to where they could curl deeper and begin to coax him open. He grasped at the wrists that happened to be in reach of his hands, and the pulse that heated them was a bull’s slow tidal beat.

Blood brimmed high around its hooves; twyre twined around its legs, gorging and growing on the feast. Should he have been afraid?

Should he have been grasping those hands to try to pull them away? They were prying him open – they might have meant to tear him apart.

They still meant pain for him. They still had to mean death in the end – never in his life had he known love as something that pursued.

It had always been the glimmer of inspiration flitting away as quickly as he could chase it. But the fingers were slick with the sap that bloomed and dripped among them or his blood, and they worked him wide as deftly as he would have plied a brush.

Braced as it had been to smother in a thicket of hands or bloody mud, his body was slow and timid to respond to their coaxing – to slacken where they touched and stiffen where they didn’t. Braced so long for implacable death, his mind didn’t soften enough to absorb the truth until the fingers parted like those small creatures in the grass, holding him as wide as his body could bear without tearing to let something grand and massive pass between them.

Peter whimpered, a sound almost like limping through the steppe with death at his heels. Almost as graceless and pitiful again, kicking once against the gentle hammock grip of hands as the bull's blunt, enormous cock began stretching into him.

Slow and stately as a procession through the steppe. His legs bent to a helpless, crooked amphibian brace, making space, but his hips still seemed to shift, his stomach to bulge around the intrusion. He gripped those wrists hot with bovine vigour not to pull them away, but just to bear the massive arrival of what might have been death after all.

Not pain. Still not pain, somehow. Just arrival, and that, perhaps that was what death had always been waiting to feel like.

Like too much of something else taking space in his body for him to live there any longer. The hands pushed him helplessly, floating, to the bottom of the bull or himself, so fully fitted together that something would have to break for them to join further. It should have, but, just before it could, the hands pulled him back, slowly again, sliding him indulgently down the length of the bull's cock.

And back up again, and the sound he made this time was nothing like fleeing or dying. The bull plumbed him to a depth that should have broken him, and he might have been a miracle for remaining whole.

Or it might have been making a miracle of him. Exalting his body with its, not killing him at all. Could it be?

His gut still clenched like trying to reject the idea by force. But the hands wouldn’t let him go.

They so carefully moved the body that had been waiting so long for death, but they wouldn’t let go. They filled him with the bull and pulled him almost empty from it only to fill him again, and he floated under the black sky of its underbelly, warm as the bowels of the earth.

The flies lit on his knuckles and those that held him alike. They weren’t frightened of the sounds being forced up from inside him.

Forced out of a body that no longer had room for them. Every sound of pain and despair, not because he was feeling either, but because he had filled the flat of his soul with so much of them and now there was no room. Something needed to be thrown out for this monumental new presence to have space.

Some of him would have to leave so that it could enter. He had misunderstood.

Death and life both. He had been so sure.

But heat was blooming in him, beaten as deep in him as that spike he and his brother had embedded in the earth. All the hands the earth might ever have raised in fury or celebration were stroking him as if to coax it deeper still. He had made the mistake of someone who had only ever seen fresh corpses.

Only the bloody void, the sterile hard stop of a life spilled out on stone or wood where it would be scrubbed away without a trace. The glass shock in unblinking eyes; he had never seen them buried.

He had never seen what happened after. The bloom in decay – death had a purpose for everything, and that purpose was most often life.

He spilled out the last of his pain like vomiting out poison he had fed himself. Like changing his mind. The bull bellowed over him, swallowing the sound, the way a single drop of blood would disappear into the earth.

The heat that seemed to be lodged as deep as Peter’s heart burst. A corona and flood, a fire and becoming, rushing to his helpless fingers and the soles of his feet. He screamed, and could still only feel it in the stretch of his mouth, the emptying of his lungs to make more space. The bull was still louder – the bull was a thundercloud birthing all its power into him, the dancing white brand of its lightning and torrential life of its rains. It was the wind seeding wildflowers in a corpse, the sun calling out to the black earth with ribbons of fire and the roots answering with rich harvest.

It was the life that would turn and flee from death , finding reason enough in life itself to keep living. It was the death that rendered down and fed the pride of old civilizations to new flowers. It was the earth, and it had come to him because nothing was without purpose in its eyes.

The hands were slow to lower him. He tried to cling to them, to stay pressed to the great dark underside of the earth, but his arms were still weak and luminous with the life that had been poured into them. His breath was a whimper without pain or grief left to give.

The earth had given all it needed to him. The hands that flourished and celebrated down its flanks laid him in the grass, letting him drop only the last centimetre they couldn’t reach.

His fingers trailed from theirs. The blood that had brimmed around cloven hooves soaked his hair.

The bull stood straight and majestic over him for a breath. Then it began to walk again.

Stately onward, the same way it had chased him. The grass rustled as its escort danced back in around it, creatures of bone and clay and grass themselves, nonetheless so very alive.

The glowing brand of its tail flicked a turquoise afterimage across Peter’s sight. Then he was staring up at the sky, lying naked and warm and light as loam freshly tilled by the sun.

Panting and whimpering and not knowing the sound or substance of his own breaths. Emptied of so much, filled with so much other. What had been done to him?

What was he to do with it? He pushed himself up to sit, his hair a hot slick across his shoulders, turning enough to watch as the miracle he hadn’t deserved walked on through the steppe.

Its mantle of hands fanned and danced in black silhouette against the moon. The bull, the earth, life and death walking together on the same four cloven hooves; if he’d been meant to go with it, it would have carried him.

He sat within the great span of its hoofprints and thought of following it anyways. His arms no longer trembled, their meagre strength stripped away and replaced. His legs, folded under him in the mud, felt firm enough to carry him.

But someone was shouting in the distance. Wild with worry, a voice he knew better than any other was calling his name.

Whatever life was in him, as long as it was shaped like Peter, it had to answer first to that voice. He unfolded himself to his feet as easily as a fly lifting from its perch, and no pain punished him from the sole of his foot.

No blood seeped from it when he had wiped enough of the mud away. Where the hook should have left its ugly toothmarks, the skin was sealed with a perfect stitch of black roots.

Should he have been afraid? It still felt as if there was so much less of him in his skin, so much less than something else.

But he was warm, shunting the wind harmlessly around the healthy flush on his skin. He was whole and alive and, for the first time in years he’d been too weary to count, he truly wondered whether it was possible for him to be forgiven.

The bull was a shimmer of silver hide and hands in the distance. Did death forgive, or did it just change? Did life forgive, or did it just go on?

Peter turned away from the death he had been sure of. On bare feet, towards the voice that so desperately called his name.

He pressed a hand to his chest, which felt no different only on the surface. Then, following the trail of bloody mud and twyre that death and life left in its wake, he went on.

Chapter Text

All that time together, months uncounted, had tuned him acutely to the sound of Oyun’s footsteps.

Their vibration through the stone, before it was even a sound. A tightening in his gut, a tensing of his own bare feet against the floor. An old dread that would apparently never do him the favour of just dying.

There was no door to their shared chamber in the Abattoir. Just a sharp bend in the corridor he’d been led down once, and a dread the rest of the Kin seemed to share with him. They wouldn’t intrude on the Foreman’s privacy, or risk interfering with his favourite pet. So only one shadow ever fell over Artemy where he stood at his worktable. The wood and his hands stained with the twyre he was given no tools to cut, nothing but his hands to strip and sheaf it, and a chill on the back of his neck, hiding under the stout collar he’d worn since Oyun had first dragged him to that room.

Oyun’s breath, hot on the back of his neck, chased it deeper into hiding. Damned if Artemy would turn to look at him, or be the first to speak.

Damned if he would give the old bastard the satisfaction. Even if it meant being yanked around by the chain that hung from his collar, stumbling as his own unwieldy pregnant weight worked against him.

Gagging on a breath stuck in the back of his throat, but Oyun wouldn’t choke him for more than that or let him fall. The hand that wasn’t wrapped around the chain caught him before he could, clutching him tight against Oyun’s waist as if he’d run into the bastard’s arms.

Pressing the hard globe of his gut against Oyun’s groin and keeping it there. Judging by the hardness that nudged back at it from under Oyun’s kilt, he’d come there in an amorous mood, at least. Better than the angry or sullen ones, better than when he came to take out whatever way the world had frustrated him on Artemy.

“You should greet more warmly the one who has given you everything,” he growled, but there was none of the bitter, real threat there would have been in it if he’d been truly angry. If his teeth were bared, it was only because he didn’t know how to put them away.

If he held the chain so high and tight that Artemy had to stand on tiptoes, it was only so Artemy would have to cling to him. Standing on tiptoes wasn’t something he could manage for more than a few seconds otherwise, with how sore his feet were and how much weight worked against them.

“Maybe I’d greet you more warmly if you brought me a proper knife to work with,” he tried to growl back against Oyun. “The black twyre won’t split with just fingernails.”

After months uncounted, it had come to just that. Not you killed my father, you bastard or even let me go, but the little comforts he might actually have some chance of winning. Oyun chuckled, a deep simmer of sound like his footsteps, more felt than heard.

“The fault is with you, not the herb or the tools,” he said. “One of your kind should be able to coax them open with a gentle touch. The fertile and abundant twyre should recognize you as kindred and yield at your request.”

He rubbed himself shamelessly, harder and hardening, against Artemy as he spoke. All those months, and he’d never granted any of Artemy’s requests for clothing.

Not a stitch between him and the stone or the amorous reach of Oyun’s hand, wrapping around one side of his swollen, sensitive chest. Around something he’d spent months refusing to call a breast, but that felt less and less convincing as it filled more of Oyun’s hand.

Growing and softening in preparation to feed the child growing ever larger inside him. Oyun’s child, which he still boasted would be the first of many.

A lifetime of Burakh-Oyun children to strengthen the Kin and keep Artemy weak. He couldn’t twist away from the hand on his chest or the one on his chain.

All he could do, as usual, was scoff, spitting what little poison he had left at Oyun’s chest. “If I could make thick, stubborn things yield at my request, I wouldn’t spend so much time arguing with you.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Oyun agreed. Still fondling Artemy’s chest, pinching his fingers towards the nipple in a way that would have been familiar to anyone who’d ever milked a cow. “Like the mother of us all, you give of your body to nourish others. If you accepted your kinship with her as the boon it is, her fruits would not resist you so.”

Yet another thing Artemy couldn’t control was the wet, eager arousal that started gathering in the cleft of his ass whenever Oyun handled him that way. He could tell himself the man stank of sweat and cattle and smug superiority, but he couldn’t outargue the way his nerves and ruined, wrongheaded hormones seemed to flutter and moan on contact with the man who’d put that child in him. Oyun would gloat about it when he finally tired of the foreplay and moved on to fucking Artemy properly.

“Right – the boon of a back and feet that never stop hurting, and you stomping around my life like a randy, stinking bull.” His voice thinned as he tried to fall back to the flats of his sore feet and Oyun still wouldn’t let him. “I should really be kissing the earth in gratitude.”

“Hm – there are better uses for your lips.” Oyun’s fingers tightening around his- damn it, his breast- had taken on an almost tender, regular rhythm. “I will teach you all of them. And, if I am your bull, then you are becoming a finer cow every day. See the abundance you hold already for our child?”

A different sort of warm wet had started trickling down Artemy’s chest. He tilted his forehead almost to Oyun’s stomach, to look down at the translucent dribble of milk soaking over the old bastard’s, his mate’s, thumb.

The months had taken what had once been a nightmare of the worst outcome, the greatest humiliation, and made it just his life. But there were still moments when that nightmare seemed to lurch under his feet – when he woke just enough to feel the full, sick shock again of being there. Being that, chained and collared and heavy with the child of his father’s murderer. Leaking slick and now milk, abundances that had been alien to his body and everything he’d thought it could be just those few months before.

Like a free, rocky tundra broken up and tilled into a tame plot of twyre. Whatever happened from this point on, whatever he dreamed of doing to Oyun, he was never again going to be the man he had once been.

“You need only invite sap from the twyre the way I invite it from you,” Oyun rumbled against him. Almost without a sneer, almost as if this were a genuine lesson and not an excuse for him to grip Artemy just that much too tightly, enough that his breast would bear the marks of it for hours. “It is as eager to give its juices as you are. It knows that is its use.”

That trickle of milk had found its way to Artemy’s stomach, meandering by the easiest path, down one side of its swollen curve. He stared down at the weight of his breast in Oyun’s hand, where he had been straight as a knife back when his life had felt like his own.

“I’m going to outlive you,” he said.

When the nightmare was too real and he couldn’t win even small comforts from it, that was the only one he had left. And Oyun’s chuckle made it a cold comfort indeed.

“It may be so,” the old bastard acknowledged. “You are young, after all. Barely more than a heifer. But I think we will have many abundant years together first. I’ll leave you as an old cow in the end, for them to tend in memory of me.”

He wrenched his grip tight around Artemy’s breast, squirting out a last thin thread of milk that spattered and ran down his hoary, straight, solid waist. Artemy snarled, trying for a grip that would let him test his fingernails on Oyun’s skin, at least, but the collar pulled tight around his neck for another choking, blinding breath, and by the time the grey faded from his vision, both his wrists were in Oyun’s broad hand. Only his heels were still on the floor, kicking and dragging as Oyun hauled him towards their shared bed.

Chapter Text

It had been just a horrible little whim.

At least, that was what Daniil tried to tell himself. In truth, he had stood there for a full minute, staring at the mug of coffee gone cold that Artemy had left on the kitchen table.

On his way out to a full day of house calls. In truth, there had been very much of Daniil’s human, responsible mind at play, considering the common clay mug and deciding it wouldn’t be mourned.

But something else had lifted his hand towards it. Had he just needed to see what would happen?

It wasn’t as if he were unfamiliar with gravity. He had known exactly what would happen. But it had felt right, curious and evil and right to a part of himself he still barely knew, to push that mug off the table and onto the hard wooden floor.

The noise of its shattering had been tremendous. The spray of cold coffee across his feet, startling. He had nearly fled from it, letting those curious, evil, affronted instincts carry him to some safer, quiet corner of the house.

Instead, he had stood as long staring down at the translucent brown flower-burst of coffee on the floor. The shards of shattered clay, each lying exactly where gravity had dictated. A nameless, horrible feeling had spread to the same shape in his chest.

Then he had walked out of the kitchen, leaving the shards and puddle where they lay. A responsible, sensible Daniil, the one he’d thought he had fully understood, would at least have cleaned up the mess.

Instead, he sat pretending to read, trying, truly, very hard to read, on a couch in the farthest room he could from the mess he’d made. Why had he done that?

It wasn’t as if he were unused to snubbing authority. But he had always done so with some righteous cause before. This – this had been more than childish. Or less than. He hadn’t been righteously rebellious, and he didn’t have youth’s excuse. He had just been bad.

He had been bad, and now he was waiting for one whose responsibility that was. His collar was snugly in place, a reminder of each swallow passed in wait. The leash was curled neatly in his lap. He could have been greeted warmly when Artemy returned, but instead, he had been bad.

Liquid, sharp-edged shame spread a centimetre further in his chest. Yes, that was it – he had been worse than he could have been, on purpose. He had failed at what was expected of him, deliberately. He was bad, and part of the reason he hadn’t cleaned up the evidence was because it felt so devastating.

It shouldn’t have. There shouldn’t have been any of that mortifying panic in the idea of disappointing Artemy, so he would sit there and read the same paragraph over and over until either the words sank into his brain or the panic went away.

A door opened and closed elsewhere in the house. He flinched, curling his feet up higher onto the couch and his fingers around the book’s cover.

Steps moved towards the kitchen. He could hear every one of them with a clarity he had never realized, every creak of every floorboard, then the silence as Artemy must have seen what he’d done.

It was too late to clean it away. Too late to not be bad. Why did that make it feel as if he were about to vomit up coffee and clay and shame?

The steps creaked back out of the kitchen. A voice filled the hall and walls as if the house were the throat that had birthed it.

“Daniil?”

Not an angry voice. Artemy had never been angry with him, not in this new dynamic they shared, and perhaps that was part of what made it all feel so wretched.

Perhaps the rest of what made it feel wretched was that, if he could have turned back time, he still wouldn’t have cleaned up the mess. He would still have knocked the mug over, and he still couldn’t say why.

He could only listen to the creaking, knowing it would find him. Hiding his gaze in the book, in words that refused to make sense through his panic or to whatever creature he was when the collar around his neck felt so important.

“Daniil?”

The voice, still in the hall, had climbed a sharp step of worry. Guilt tugged Daniil more mightily than the leash at his side ever could have. He lowered the book to his lap, but was too late to slide off the couch before Artemy stepped into the doorway.

Still dressed as he would have been, boots and coat, for walking across town. Weary and worried, and Daniil had left him a mess.

Daniil dropped his gaze to the book and leash in his lap. It would have been so much easier if he could at least have offered a sensible explanation.

“There you are,” Artemy sighed. “Come here – I think there’s something we need to look at together.”

Abandoning the book on his thigh, Daniil curled his fingers tight around his leash. That tone – no more worry, but still not at all the way Artemy would have addressed him if Daniil had greeted him standing and with words. That tone, like the leash and collar, invited him to be something else.

Something he had found some comfort in being. But now...

“Danya. Come here.”

That name, which should have been soft and was wrong as a reprisal, made him flinch deeper into himself. It would have been easier to stay there, on the couch and in himself. To make Artemy insist, or else shed that act entirely and demand an answer from him as a man.

But he had even less of an answer as a man than as whatever creature he was when Artemy spoke to him that way. He knew less – knew only that something needed to be made right, and it wasn’t the mug. Something had been wrong before the mug

So he set the book aside and slid from the couch to hands and knees. Rather than let his leash trail unbecomingly on the floor, he tucked its end into his mouth, the way he had been so deliciously embarrassed about doing at first.

Crawling to Artemy had, at first, been the best sort of excruciating. It had been entirely human – blushing, knowing how he was showing off the shape of his body with that uncharacteristic horizontal motion. Now...

Now, he didn’t have a name for how it felt. He didn’t have an explanation for it, except to wait until Artemy reached for the leash and then spit it out onto the floor.

To be just that little bit worse than he already was. Artemy paused, his hand still poised to pluck the leash from Daniil’s mouth, for a painful second before he bent to retrieve it from the floor.

If Daniil had passed the leash to him, he might still have said good. Instead, there was another, worse second of silence before he said, “Now, we’re going to take a walk to the kitchen.”

No. No, said everything Daniil understood at that tangled, inexplicable moment. He didn’t want to see what he’d done, and more than that, he didn’t want to see Artemy seeing it. He set his weight against Artemy’s first tug on the leash, and the second.

The third, and the look Artemy turned back at him, tugged an entirely unplanned whine from his throat. Back when he had first taken to his hands and knees for a salacious little thrill, when the collar had been just a novelty, he had made only the most deliberate, affected animal sounds.

Now, the honest sound of his own voice spilled the fight out of him like coffee from a cracked mug. He slumped forward to follow Artemy at a heavy hands-and-knees gait that would only eventually bring them to their destination.

Slowly, sullenly, but inevitably. That splatter of coffee had begun to dry from the edges inwards. The shards still lay where gravity had left them.

“Would you like to tell me why you did this?” Artemy asked.

No. No, he wouldn’t. It wasn’t that he had wondered what would happen. He could have predicted it all, from the moment of impact to this one. It wasn’t that he had wanted to hurt or inconvenience Artemy.

What had he wanted? Was it the shame, something in the shame, the same way he’d blushed and scowled about crawling around on his hands and knees at first?

There was nothing salacious in this. It was all small and wretched, he was small, less than a child, still spattered with coffee at the ankles, messy and unwanted and bad.

And he didn’t know why. The closest he could come to an answer was to press his forehead into the back of Artemy’s knee, repeating that whine with deliberate will but the same inarticulate misery.

Closing his eyes and wishing- just trying to wish it all away. Whatever they’d opened or awakened in him when they’d first started putting on this act. It wasn’t foreign or new – it had come up out of him, this awful feeling, and that meant he didn’t know himself nearly as well as he had thought.

“I see.” Artemy shifted against him. Not pulling away, but turning, he must have been, just enough to lean down and tousle his fingers through Daniil’s hair. “I have been leaving you alone a lot of the time, haven’t I? Is that it? Are you bored? Lonely?”

He didn’t know. It didn’t sound wrong, but it didn’t sound completely right, either, and he didn’t know. It had never been meant to be like this. He had never been meant to need, to lean into, someone’s hand that way. He had spent so much of his life alone, and he had never knocked coffee mugs off of tables about it before.

Artemy’s fingers slid down farther, to caress his cheek. Daniil leaned into the heat of the palm, repeating the whine that seemed to explain everything he couldn’t.

“All right,” Artemy said, a gentler sigh than last time. “I’m going to clean this up, but there won’t be any more work than that this evening, for me or you. Sit – you don’t get to leave my side for the rest of the night.”

It was the easiest command Daniil had been given in days. Something in him seemed to slacken, to relax and spread a little further, warmer, in his soul as he did. It still wasn’t perfectly right, but it was better, watching Artemy wind his leash around one of the table’s legs and then take those shards back, one by one, from the gravity that had borrowed them.

It might have been better still, in a human, responsible way, to mop up the spill himself instead. But he watched Artemy do that as well, and, once the floor was polished back to a fine lustre, watched him reheat the last of the stew they had made together two days before, both of them standing on two feet. It wasn’t always like this.

But when it was, it was more and more completely, it seemed. The more time Daniil spent on hands and knees, the more he needed from it when he did. That was still a little frightening, sharing his time, his wants and needs, with something simpler but at once more difficult to explain.

Something that didn’t mind having its dish placed on the floor, but could only eat happily with someone else in the room. Something that faithfully watched the washing-up afterwards, while Artemy talked uninterrupted about his day.

Then something that didn’t resist the tug of the leash leading it back to the couch. He waited on the floor while Artemy settled in to sit – waited for the tap of the cushion and the call of, “Up,” that invited him to clamber onto the couch at Artemy’s side.

Usually, just to sit there. But this time, Artemy’s hands, tousling his hair and petting his shoulder, pulled him down, pressing him to rest with his head in the warm lap of his-

Daniil let the first word to suggest itself slide away unarticulated. He let most of them slide away, closing his eyes again, nestling into the safe centre of Artemy’s attention.

“Good boy,” Artemy murmured over him, words among the few that still mattered. “I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you. I’ll do better from now on. So no more breaking mugs, all right?”

Maybe not. Whining into Artemy’s hand had been a poor way to say that this was all still frightening. It was still new, and it was Artemy’s fault – for first suggesting it, just as a joke, once, then for showing him how gently a hand could touch his inarticulate misery. How inarticulate he could be, and still be understood and cared for.

Daniil would try to say some of that properly later. They had opened or awakened something bigger than either of them had realized. But, for the moment, he collected enough breath for a contented sigh. He curled his hands around Artemy’s thigh, and let the one stroking his hair take care of him in the ways he hadn’t realized he needed.

Chapter Text

It was not the most graceful exit she had ever made.

It had lacked more than flair – it had lacked resolution. The soldiers had missed their cue. Spurned by the star of the production in favour of scripted lines, she had waited for her death at their hands until the lights had gone down.

And where was she now?

Standing in a black, vacuous space she would have taken for an empty stage, except that the floor didn’t echo under her feet. The air didn’t have the sucking quality it always had when applause had been withheld from her performance before.

What an unsightly mess this all has become. The has-been actress trying to convince the young star to flee his big break was one thing – we could at least wring some pathos out of that. But if you insist on standing around the stage long after your part has ended, well, what are we to do with that?

She tilted her chin towards the director’s haranguing. Unseen, as he so often was, but his voice at least placed her in that space she knew. They had come to the end of the play after all. Burakh had chosen the Polyhedron – the hideous construction that had been cast, in this production, as Love – and it didn’t matter.

“If you will light the stairs,” she said, “I will leave the stage.”

She might have been able to find them in the dark. But she would make her exit with dignity, if she could, if not grace, and the space around her still felt...uncertain somehow.

That’s the other problem, you see. Our star has proven very stubbornly attached to this role. He’s proclaimed himself ‘Artemy Burakh’ for real and insists on continuing the production. His obstinacy has booked up our theatre for the foreseeable future. Bulls in the dressing rooms, would you believe it? So everyone will have to find a role to fit in this wild improv of his, and there’s certainly no room for an Inquisitor Aglaya Lilich on the new set.

A coup in the theatre? It seemed so quiet, for all that. And it didn’t seem like something that could have happened without some degree of permission from the director. Didn’t he sound at least a little pleased?

“Then let me leave,” she repeated. “There is no character I wish to be cast as in the ending he chose.”

Oh, please. We both know you’re far too attached to the spotlight to listen to applause from the alley. Not to mention that you’re still under contract. I can’t give you the full, brilliant glare of that spotlight, but we do have a significant role that’s been left vacant. Such a pity, that slip with the knife.

Such a lie. She had suffered worse than that onstage herself and returned to die again for a pitiless audience. “You let her go.”

That’s certainly one way you could think of it. Let’s just say that she didn’t make the cut. Now, come – you may claim to envy her fate, but I can see you considering already how you would deliver her lines. It’s not so different a role, when you think about it. I’m sure you’ll slip right into it.

“No.” No to that last smug line, and a step back across a floor that didn’t echo, but she couldn’t deny the rest. Of course she was considering how she might struggle in this latest trap if it truly wasn’t one she could escape. Another chance to break free from the inside... “I don’t know why you’re allowing this farce to continue, but-”

A hand curled over her shoulder, so silent in its arrival that it could only have been part of the dark. Or else it was nothing at all, still uncategorized – a black placeholder body and white mask hovering over her shoulder like the moon haunting a midnight sea.

A silent mechanism of the theatre. A representation of whatever it needed to be – in this case, of being trapped. More hands closed in flawless sequence down her arms.

Perfect, mechanical choreography. She wouldn’t scream.

She wouldn’t let him play her pain or fear for pathos. But she didn’t let them pull her easily to the floor.

Rigid and nearly silent herself, she fought. There, in the dark between plays, was the only place she had ever allowed herself to do so with fists and teeth. To writhe and kick, stubborn and undignified, only where no one could see and think less of her character for it.

Always the consummate professional. Perhaps that was why he would never let her go.

A change in costume will be required, of course. You might find the new one more liberating to move in. Some of them say so.

She wouldn’t speak when struggling would make her voice weak. White masks glowed around and over her, a council of moons, but, as the first hand closed over the buttoned collar of her coat, she saw what they were supposed to be.

What they would be when the lights came back up. The painted faces and secretive smiles. The hair wrapped tight around bone or piled high with twyre. The hand wrenched sideways, buttons popped, and she was looking up at masks again, she wouldn’t forget.

She wouldn’t be one of the mad ones who forgot. The girl who played Lara Ravel, who only sobbed alone in her trailer now. The children who remembered less of their lives outside the theatre with each performance. And the man, now, who believed himself to be Artemy Burakh, who had decided it would be better to stay forever within the world of the play than-

The hands tore her open, the coat that had been her armour and role, to the waist. Where they touched her skin, they seemed bare and warm as well.

She wouldn’t scream. There had to be an audience somewhere, or he would never have been so flagrantly cruel. Tears pricked involuntarily behind her eyes as they tore her hair from its bun.

Smiles around her. Pawned slyly over shoulders, traded for round black pinhole mouths. A woman crouched over her, full and convincing yet still so silent, gripping her waist, rocking and jostling her by it as if judging whether she would stand up to the rigours of the role.

It required more movement, after all. She kicked, all the movement she could muster, but couldn’t stop them from pulling away her boots and long socks.

She wouldn’t forget. Hands cold and grimy with mud closed around her feet, working the filth into them and up her shins. Her coat was open to the knees, her blouse and skirt and everything beneath them torn, but as long as she struggled, as long as she kept her weight on top of those ruined tokens of her old role, they couldn’t be taken from her. She wouldn’t be one of them.

Hands, black and potential and rough and warm, lifted her from the floor and what she had pinned to it. The ruined fabric slid out from under her like a curtain pulled back.

When they dropped her back to the floor, she lay naked but for the mud, gasping, gagging on a mouthful of her own hair. Untouched – for that second, they all knelt motionless around her, their masks blank backdrops waiting to be embellished, their bodies only taking up the space where a person would be.

When she pressed her hands to the floor, the first and last show of a doomed struggle, they dove in again.

They were full, nearly naked bodies and hot hands again, each stronger on its own than the entire fragile, precise instrument she’d last been cast as. They were more than enough to hold her motionless while still finding fingers enough to dip in paint, to daub across her chest and arms. Around her eyes, deftly avoiding every effort she made to dodge them or blind herself instead. Hands raked at her hair as if trying to force more of it from her skull, binding and bundling it up into as much of an unsuitable style as it would hold. Dried stems scratched at her scalp, skewered through the locks.

What little clothing they forced onto her tore as she fought against it. A trailing finger laid a last kiss of paint down her lips and chin.

The hands withdrew as simultaneously as they had arrived. As perfectly, leaving her to scramble to her feet with all the momentum she’d been wielding against them.

Bare, muddy feet, bare skin prickling against the mass chill of a breath held in anticipation. The theatre waited.

All right – let’s see if we can nail this in one take. The stubborn Haruspex and the miracle he earned, apparently, by refusing to go back to his dressing room.

The lights leapt up around her like another assault. Dusk’s orange steeped in mist, as if she stood in the coals of a banked furnace.

Instead of in the prickling autumn grass of the steppe. The sky poured to every horizon, a glorious watercolour of that fading orange and ascendant purple as apparently real as her own body.

Her body almost entirely naked, caressed by a breeze that seemed to have come far across a real world just to do so. She turned again, as if the light might have revealed stairs leading down from the inescapable stage, and there he was.

Standing in the steppe and sunset as if he had never been real anywhere else. As if he had only ever been Artemy Burakh, staring at her as if he believed it with every shred of his being.

As if he believed in miracles and was staring at one he hadn’t dared hope for.

“Nara?”

And she understood. The sky itself, the steppe, the theatre might have bent to the belief in that word. The director who pretended such utter, prescient control over them all might finally have inspired something too powerful for him to direct anymore.

Something he could no longer stop, no longer script, and so was only trying to placate. Perhaps to contain.

The man who might have been Artemy Burakh more than he had ever been anyone else took a step towards her. “It is you, isn’t it?”

His belief bore down on her like a tidal flood on a child’s dam of twigs. His hand, opening towards her, was rough with the precise callouses of years spent wielding a scalpel.

The director would never come there again. She knew that, she clung to it, even as Artemy’s belief flung the rest away. Her name, the address she’d come from, once, after signing a contract, the fact this was a stage she had stepped up onto, however prettily set. The sunset was burning it all away, blazing through her as a spotlight had never managed. He was destroying her with his belief – this man who, if he hadn’t beaten the theatre, might at least have become it.

The director would never dare. She knew that, and then she didn’t know what she meant by it. It was a stray thought fluttering free of context, an unimportant puff of smoke from a lost train of thought, and she was reaching out to take Artemy’s hand.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.”

Chapter Text

Anna had bitten her nails down to bloody stumps by the time that knock came at the door. How had she ever thought she could forget it was coming?

Who could ever forget that death was coming for them? Her thoughts scattered away like rats into the back rooms, urging her to do the same. To hide in the dark, pretend she wasn’t home, anything, anything but how she was somehow walking calmly towards the door instead.

Pulled towards it by one of that little rat Clara’s hooks, maybe. Her tongue sat as dry and hard as a piece of chalk in her mouth – could she say she wouldn’t do it?

Would she even be able to say it? Or would different, pretty words come spilling out of her mouth instead? A martyr’s words? Her fingers closed around the handle, pulling the door wide as if anything but death was on its other side-

And it was. Whatever pretty, horrible words she had imagined infesting her throat escaped in a squeak of shock instead at the sight of Vlad Olgimsky, the Older, the Greater, the Only now, eclipsing her narrow doorway with his bulk.

“No-” she started, another squeak, as he started forward, unstoppable as a charging bull, stepping past her and into her house as if she had invited him.

Straight into her parlour, while she could only let the door fall shut and follow him.

“No, no, what do you want?” she wailed as she did, her voice free, at least, for her own miserable use. “What could you possibly want from me now? She’ll be here any minute. Can’t you give me a little peace even now?”

Hadn’t she at least earned that? He turned to look at her in that awful way he had, like he was marking and weighing the cuts of a cow’s meat with his eyes, and she hugged herself to hide at least that much from him.

“I’ve come to offer you an escape,” he said. “Or a...reprieve, at least. Not that you deserve it, but...”

“What do you mean?” Anna asked, holding herself all the tighter. Whatever it was, she would refuse it, wouldn’t she? There was no Olgimsky gift that wasn’t poisoned.

But could it be more poison than had dripped between Clara’s lips, convincing her that death could be beautiful?

Vlad looked over her shoulder, so easily, he was so large, and so much larger-seeming in her home. Behind her, the door was silent, but it wouldn’t be for long.

“You’re right that we might not have much time,” he said, “So I won’t waste any of it beating around the bush. If you can tell the girl you’re with child, I don’t think she’ll have the heart to raise a hand against you.”

Anna’s mouth, painted that morning with a trembling hand, fell open. Her arms fell away from what little protection they’d seemed to promise her. He stared at her as if he meant every word he’d said.

A shrill laugh shattered out of her. He did, didn’t he? Oh, it was over, it was all over. She was cornered there in her house with a madman, cornered at the end of her life, and he genuinely thought he could offer her an escape by-

“No! No, absolutely not,” she said, still shrill with that laughter. “You can’t possibly think I would-”

“Then you’ll die,” he said, with a shrug his shoulders hardly seemed to bear. He looked so haggard, so sallow and worn-out, a madman, but spoke as if he were offering her a contract across his desk. “It makes no real difference to me.”

“Then- then just save me. Just turn her away,” Anna pleaded. “If it doesn’t make any difference to you, then why make such a ridiculous proposal in the first place? Just tell her- I don’t care, just make her leave me be. Haven’t I suffered enough already?”

Enough to pay for her sins, surely. He and his son had seen to that. Why would he dangle life in front of her this way?

“That...isn’t within my power,” Vlad said. “She’s clever – she’s left the Saburovs alive this long. They’ll back her for as long as they live. If I try to snatch away a pointless criminal from her...I won’t spark a feud for your sake.”

“Then why?” She twisted her hands together, pacing two steps towards him and away. Cornered in such a small space now – she had known it would all catch up to her in the end, no matter how long a path of suffering she tried to lose it on, but she had never imagined it like this. “Why, why would you-”

“Your friends across the Guzzle are dead already. She might still have their blood under her nails when she reaches for you. Make your choice,” Vlad demanded. “I won’t waste another minute of my time on your-”

“Wait, wait, just wait.” Tears threatened her mascara, her voice. Her hands felt as if they would unravel in each other’s grip. “Oh, god, why...you’re saying you would- and then she wouldn’t kill me?”

“Even if she wanted to, I doubt her foster mother would let her harm a woman with child. And then, what about a new mother with a babe on her breast? You could have well over a year before she could even stomach the thought of killing you again.”

A whole endless year. She could live, she could go to sleep in her own bed that night, after soaking her pillow with tears when she’d thought she was waking there for the last time that morning. But could she...?

“Just tell me why,” she insisted. “We both know you’d do away with me yourself if you could. Why would you...?”

He stared at her as if she were right. Oh, god, the thought of him touching her...

“Drop your bloomers, turn to the wall, and I’ll tell you,” he said.

He would leave if she didn’t, wouldn’t he? He would turn and walk out the door, and there would be nothing she could do but wait for the next knock. The last knock, and that sly voice prying like hooks around her door. She would die that day.

She turned a sob towards the wall, wrenching clumsily at her clothes. She had always survived however she had to. She had done so many things anyone would say was worse than this.

But she had always been careful. She’d been fleet and nimble and stayed just ahead of all the cruel hands that had grasped at her before. No one would have believed her if she’d said she had survived so long without paying a price like this before.

Sticky tears started down her cheeks as the air kissed her bare thighs. His shadow rose up behind her, over her, erasing hers where it had trembled against the wall.

She couldn’t let herself think of the sounds behind her. Survival was what mattered. Anything she could survive would be a smaller price than the one Clara was coming to claim from her.

But she still moaned as he stepped up to press his slack belly to the small of her back. She’d thought it might be easier if she didn’t see the brutal instrument he planned to shove in her, like looking away from the prick of a needle, but the tight, dry, unready folds of her sex told her all about the shape of it as it nudged against them.

His hand curled around her stomach, holding her neatly in place. She almost had time enough to imagine that he could be tender before he rammed himself against her.

She wailed, clawing at the wall hanging as if she could pull herself away by it. Clutching two fistfuls of it as tightly as he held her in place, as he shoved at her again and a dry, crackling pain low in her gut told her he’d found his way in.

Just as easily as he’d stormed into her home, he had stormed into her. She pulled her left leg up to her chest, trying to pull herself off of him-

“Stop squirming, girl,” he growled, his breath hot and beastly against the back of her neck.

“It’s too much,” she insisted, pulling the soft weight of the wall hanging against her sobs. “Oh, god- can’t you at least go slower? Don’t-”

Her head struck the wall a glancing blow as he refused. Her teeth closed with a click that seemed to echo from the top of her skull. His hand held them shut, closing over her mouth a scant moment before she would have screamed.

“Do you want your neighbours to think you’re being murdered?” he harangued her, hot and too loud in her ear. “Think, actress – the little witch girl comes and you’re sitting alone, calm, in your parlour. You tell her you’ve been waiting this last week since she started making her sacrifices, but your blood still hasn’t come. Of course you want to give your life to her fool cause, you tell her, but you can’t bear the thought of giving up your child’s life as well. If you play that role well enough, you get to live another day.”

But it hurt. It hurt like having her seams torn open from the inside, and she’d never let herself be crushed that way in someone else’s grip. His hand on her mouth and his hand on her stomach, the figure she’d always kept tight and smart, priding herself on a shape her corset hardly had to correct at all.

Was she really going to let it balloon out with his child? It should have been the least of her worries, the least she had to lose, but even when she’d had to be fleet and nimble enough to flee everything else, she’d still had herself. Her soul dragged behind her and stained easily, but she’d never let anything touch her body.

It was the one thing she’d managed to keep safe and pristine, exactly the way she wanted. She’d been quicker and more clever than the women who let themselves be caught by their bodies. But now...

Now, she was cornered. Now, he was shoving faster and harder still at her, groping his way from her stomach to her breast, gripping it as if he’d forgotten she was attached to it at all. Now, she dripped snot and sticky black tears over his hand, and what did surviving even mean if she didn’t recognize the person she was keeping alive anymore?

Vlad grunted like a boar with its tusks buried deep in something living, then stood perfectly still, except for his breath swelling and blowing against her back.

Was it over? Everything between her legs felt too much like a hot, ruined bruise for her to tell. Had it been better than dying?

She was still alive to wonder, so it had to be. His brutal hand fondled her breast less so than before.

“It was after that little bitch talked to my son that he went to the Termitary,” he said. “It was whatever poison she dripped in his ear that convinced him to throw his life away.”

Understanding burned, as sick and used and bruised-feeling, in Anna’s gut. So, it was about revenge, then. Denying the so-called saint one of her sacrifices.

Saving and ruining her useless sinner’s life was just a side effect. She laid a hand on her stomach where his had been, trying to imagine her body as something she had thrown away to survive yet still had to carry with her.

His hand slid from her mouth, leaving a mask of sweaty heat and spent tears where it had been. She licked the taste of salt from her sticky lips.

“What if it doesn’t take?” she asked.

The sound he made deep in his chest, considering, thrummed through her back. The buttons of his vest pressed a hard line down her spine.

“Then it seems to me you’ll have two choices,” he said. “Tell her you lost the child...or lied...or try again. If you want to be as sure as possible...you know where to find me.”

He hauled himself from her then, in one swift, awful motion. Like a knife from a wound, pulling a groan, as well, from the bruised pit of her gut. Her legs swayed like the wall hanging as she gripped fistfuls of it, breathing herself back from the black edge of a faint. Trying not to hear, again, as he tidied and closed himself up however he had to before trudging back to her door.

Waiting to hear it slam behind him. There would be another knock on it soon.

She would need to tidy herself as well. She would need to be calm and convincing. But first, she lurched towards the bathroom to be sick.

Chapter Text

“Then, the letter was from you?” Daniil heaved a sigh not half as weary as the woman smirking at him deserved. “And Burakh isn’t here, is he? I should have known you would find a way to waste even more of my time.”

Aspity – ever as grimy and gloomy and prone to biting chills as the shack to which she’d lured him – only smiled wider. In the two hellish days since he’d last seen her, she had found a way to make herself even more off-putting – in one hand, by one of its, she held one of the particularly hideous and ill-made dolls he had noticed lying around her hovel before.

In particular, this one had always been unsettling for how its shabby coat resembled – in pattern, at least – the one he himself wore. It had already been clad that way when he’d met her on his first day in that godforsaken town, which suggested an efficiency and precision to her obsession with him that he preferred not to dwell on.

Had preferred, rather, until she had gone this far out of her way to make that impossible.

“He’ll be on his way to the Abattoir by now,” she said. “Well beyond your interference. I’m sure he’ll find all the evidence he needs there today to sway the great General Ashes to his cause.”

“Which I assume is your cause as well. To preserve this pestilent backwater by destroying a singular marvel of modern science,” Daniil clarified. “I have my own evidence for why that’s a completely unsound solution. And I’m sure I’ll be better equipped to convince a man of war – which is its own sort of science – of my solution’s surety and efficacy than a sentimental shaman like Burakh.”

“Probably,” Aspity acknowledged, far more easily and less fearfully than he would have liked. “He’s a good man, but he argues from his heart. Men without one won’t be inclined to listen to him. But that’s why I called you here – unlike Artemy, who is bound by the honourable duty he’s trying to claim, I’m willing to cheat.”

The hand not clutching the doll had been hidden coquettishly behind her back. Now, she withdrew it to reveal what seemed to be a rarity in that town so obsessed with tradition over practicality – a wickedly sharp, long pair of scissors.

If she had been holding only those, he might have been at least slightly concerned. But the way she brandished them along with the doll suggested such an absurd threat that he very nearly laughed in her face.

“You can’t possibly be implying what I think you are,” he said. “Is a threat to that doll supposed to be a threat to me? I know you’re more entrenched in the muck of this local folklore than most, but I’d expect even you to know the difference between-”

With no apparent patience for his scoffing, Aspity closed the scissors over the doll’s limp left arm. It dropped to the floor with a thump that suggested some heavier stuffing than cotton.

His arm did not. However, all the feeling he’d taken for granted in it, sleeve against skin and the comforting grip of his glove, vanished as suddenly and completely as if the limb had been severed. Its weight hung dead from his shoulder, numb and utterly unresponsive.

He looked from the hand he couldn’t curl into a fist back to Aspity with, perhaps, the shock and dread he should have felt towards her all along. She had poised the scissors, long enough, perhaps, to better be called shears, around the doll’s ungainly, vulnerable legs.

He reached out with the hand that would still obey him, brandishing his bag like a shield for lack of any responsive fingers to pass it to. “Don’t-”

The scissors closed with a clean, whetted, immense snip. He fell forward in the same instant, from nerveless legs.

Spraining his wrist for certain as it caught as much of his weight as it could. The bag flew from his grasp, scattering half its contents across the floor and shattering all he had been carrying with care.

One of its more resilient burdens skidded to rest against the doll’s severed arm. A humble iron key, which he had told himself for days he should dispose of now that its purpose had been served.

It lay now in that broken tableau as if the doll had caught it from him. His thoughts wouldn’t advance beyond it or the mess of the other things he’d dropped, which he would have to collect back into his bag when he surely stood up again soon.

Very soon. It wasn’t possible that this was happening, and so, soon-

“What-” His voice was a winded gasp, his sense of reason limping along on a sprain. “What have you-”

Aspity stared down at him, still holding the doll by its one remaining limb. With her head on a tilt, as if he were an interesting beetle she was debating whether to crush underfoot; she crouched, a sinister whisper of movement within her shapeless robe, to lay the doll on the floor and pluck up the key in its place.

She couldn’t have known what it belonged to. It wasn’t tagged or marked – nothing tied it to that cell beneath one of the factory buildings.

Nothing tied it to Daniil anymore, except some foolish sentiment about how it had felt to see Artemy Burakh for the first time in that cell. Back when he had thought he might be on the verge of gaining a true, valuable ally and not the enemy he eventually, inevitably had.

“It would be easiest to cut off the head and let the butchers make whatever use they can of you,” she said. “But it would feel like a waste of all the fun times we could otherwise have together. I’ve checked its chest, you know – it doesn’t have a heart.”

“Put them back.” His breath was thinning to a panicked wheeze. As far as he could feel, his body ended just below the hips. “You’ve made your point, for god’s sake, just-”

“But if you have a key that he could use to open you, that might be even better.” Her robe stretched and settled as she lowered herself to her knees over the doll. Among the other things he had dropped, there lay a spool of red thread and several needles he had planned to trade to the local girls. Could he still be- be healed, be put back together, as easily as-

His breath thinned to nothing as she aligned one of the scissor’s open blades with the centre of the doll’s chest. She pinched the key between her teeth, bracing her free hand around the point where the blade would pierce through – for all the world like a child about to perform a cruel, harmless cotton mockery of an operation.

“Don’t.” The word emerged as barely a whisper, yet still took most of the air left in his lungs. “Please, don’t do this.”

“I doubt it will kill you,” she said, clenched around the key and without looking up from the doll. Perhaps, in her mind, speaking to one was as good as the other. “Like I said, I’ve opened the chest before. We’ll just see if you’re less insufferable, and any less likely to get in his way, with an iron heart he can grasp.”

The key gleamed dully between her teeth. What certainly felt like a heart already in his chest sank. But it couldn’t escape the scissors as that single parted blade punched through the doll’s mock coat and into the body beneath.

Chapter Text

“In truth, Ravel, I’ve simply grown bored of you.”

Lara gaped. Strung taut with hurt and humiliation and fury, though her body was free – she was the one who had come to the Trammel, clothed and in full command of herself, to tell Yulia that it needed to be over between them.

Yet somehow, it was Yulia who looked at her as if she’d come crawling in, begging for degradation, one too many tiresome times.

“Bored of me?” Lara’s voice trembled along with the fists she would not, a few short months ago, ever have imagined herself capable of wanting so badly to use. It would prove her mean and petty and childish to fall on Yulia with them, they both knew she didn’t have the strength to make any real impact with them anyways, but it would at least have been some small revenge for her wounded pride. Her wounded self. “You mean tormenting me doesn’t entertain you anymore? All the ways you’ve found of hurting and humiliating me are just too old-hat?”

“Precisely that.” Yulia flicked a dismissive, geometric swirl of smoke from the tip of her cigarette. “There was a time when I hoped that, faced with urgent and painful enough constraints, you might find the strength to break through in a more fundamental way. But it’s clear to me now that I was hoping for something impossible.”

“How dare you paint any of this as a failure on my part?” Lara snarled. With twice the fury for the fact that, faced with Yulia’s disappointment, her stomach still hung in knots of shame. “You abused me. You abused my trust. I allowed myself to be completely open with you, and you-”

“You’re describing choices and expectations on your part that were never any of my concern. Though, in my own way, I was equally guilty,” Yulia said. “I never expressed what I hoped for you to achieve, any more than you explained these sentimental ideas. To put it as simply as possible, I hoped that you would prove yourself to be real. You did not. I believe now that you never could have.”

The smoke rose in its own idle, artful spirals between them. Yulia stared at her so frankly and sanely, it seemed, through it.

Far too much so for someone who had just said something so deranged. Lara drew breath to ask...

Of course she did. To ask the obvious thing – what do you mean? Or is that why it was so easy for you to be cruel to me?

Because you believed, somehow, that I was never real?

But her lips wouldn’t move to form the words. Like trying to communicate intent to a severed limb, what started in her brain remained there. What-?

“What you believe to be heartfelt and spontaneous statements were all written long in advance,” Yulia said, heavy with that horrible disappointment. “For someone with the right perspective, it’s possible to read every conversation we could ever have. Every branching path – fewer of them than you might think. For someone who has studied these lines and how they are assembled, it seems that it’s even possible to alter or remove them.”

Still, Lara’s lips wouldn’t move. The air did so through her lungs the way it was supposed to, the words swarmed in her mind, but-

“‘What do you mean?’” Yulia supplied for her, in a close, uncomplimentary imitation of her voice. “Or would you prefer ‘I don’t believe you’? You had four options in total, and my response to three of them would have been the same. I’m writing a new branch as we speak – I suppose this might be how freedom feels. But you’ll forgive me if I don’t waste time providing you with pointless lines.”

Lara reached up, pointless reflex, to probe at the stalled workings of her own throat. As if she might find the problem there – as if she must. Everything Yulia said was branching off further and further into nonsense, away from any rational explanation for why she couldn’t speak.

Yet, she had hardly touched the soft, unresponsive tendons when her hand fell away. Limply back to her side, and wouldn’t lift again.

“Physical actions, too, are written in this simple language of cause and effect. An entirely preconstructed sequence of ifs and thens. If you are penetrated by an unfamiliar object, then you cry out. If your voice will not function, you touch your throat just so. Predictable and repetitive – so, you see, it was inevitable that I would become bored with you.”

Her feet wouldn’t lift. Her hands. Her voice. Her fists wouldn’t close in fury, or her throat in panic. Her breathing wouldn’t quicken.

She stood, still and placid as a daisy, as Yulia approached her. All the horror pushing and screaming like a panicked mob inside her couldn’t so much as breach the blank surface of her face.

Yulia reached out to cup her cheek with a hand that had always been cold. She couldn’t lean away from it, or so much as raise her eyes. Yulia had to move to meet them.

“I just erased most of the lines that facilitated your interaction with the world,” she explained. “I’ve thought of doing so for a long time now. If the structure of our existence is dictated entirely by these lines and dependencies, then to destroy them could be considered the same as ending a life. Yet you are still physically here and, by all appearances, alive. It’s a pity that I can’t ask you to what extent you are still Lara Ravel without also writing the answer for you.”

She couldn’t beg Yulia to let her speak. To scream the horrified truth now trapped in her – she was still entirely Lara. Whatever had just been done to her, her thoughts, her memories, her horror...

What if they were next to disappear? Yulia’s thumb brushed across her unresisting lips, opening them enough to graze the teeth closed harmlessly behind.

Inspiration was always a dreadful thing to behold in Yulia’s eyes, but worse now, when Lara could do nothing but stare into them. Turning that neglected cigarette deftly between her fingers, Yulia poked it into place between Lara’s lips.

Lara had always refused them before. The reflex to do so, to spit, was as lost as most of her. Its smoke rose to burn in her nostrils; she didn’t cough.

“If physical actions can be modified and erased, I imagine they must also be able to be copied,” Yulia considered. “We’ll try something simple, then. The cause – a cigarette in your mouth. The effect...”

Lara’s hand, long since abandoned by her will, lifted from her side. With a grace and intention foreign to her, its fingers pinched the cigarette in place.

Her other hand cupped the elbow of that rogue arm. Her lungs drew the smoke deep, smooth and empty of the spasms that should have wracked them. Her fingers lifted the cigarette away, while her pursed lips blew the smoke out like grey silk, a narrow streamer knit in the air.

In every stage and regard, a perfect imitation of how she had watched Yulia handle a hundred cigarettes. Instead of a sob, she breathed out the last of the smoke.

“Perfect.” Yulia’s hand, seemingly free to choose its own course, rose to stroke her hair. To tug at the bun that held it back, loosing and methodically, thoroughly strewing it across her shoulders. “So this, then, is what freedom looks like for you – not strength unbound, or even a peaceful, unbothered life, but a complete inability to act. Only outside constraints, predetermined rules, give shape to your existence. Even your physical form is a sum calculated by those rules.”

Lara brought the cigarette to her lips again. Predictable, repetitive. The smoke stung her eyes, but not to tears.

“It was inevitable that I would grow tired of interacting with those rules from the outside,” Yulia murmured. Still stroking her hair, almost, but not quite, as if still confiding in a real, living person. “Pretending to be convinced by their artifice. Which, I suppose, made this experiment inevitable as well. Now that I have freed you from those preexisting constraints, what can I make of you? Something real, or only a toy less tiresome in its need for constant reassurance and negotiation? I suspect only the latter will be possible by my hand. If you were to somehow become the former, it would have to be by your will. If you still possess any such thing, that is.”

Perhaps she didn’t. If she had, surely it should have been strong enough not to fill her hollow insides with smoke again. It should have let her fling the cigarette away, instead of just dropping it along with her hand, back to her side, as Yulia must have taken that action from her.

“I believe this experiment would be best continued in a more intimate setting. Take yourself to the bedroom,” Yulia instructed her. “I’ll join you shortly – there are a few things I’d like to collect first.”

If it were true, all terribly, inconceivably true, then even ordering her out loud was surely unnecessary. A cruel bit of emphasis to prove it was Yulia’s will that turned her smartly towards the bedroom and set her to walk.

What would Lara do once she arrived there? It was almost certainly set, predetermined, already. She would find out once her willing, treacherous hands began to do it.

She’d been planning to walk down by the Guzzle after that conversation with Yulia. To clear her head and heart and try to decide what came next. But perhaps there had never been a decision to be made. The slight sashay in her walk now wasn’t hers – lent to her by Yulia, again, from someone else. All the strength she possessed couldn’t stop her from reaching for the doorknob.

Perhaps even the strength she had to be afraid of what might wait for her on the other side would atrophy in time. Perhaps she would be glad when it did – when it was no longer horrible to realize, as she opened the door, that she still couldn’t shed a single tear.

Chapter Text

There was very little for him to pack, in the end. And that made for some comfort to carry along with his meagre belongings – starting over was a daunting prospect, but it was also the only path that felt as if it might lead to some salvation.

Or at least some purpose. He tested the heft of his carpetbag and found it less, even, than when he had first carried it into the town lying ruined across the river. The door of his ostensibly private chamber swung open behind him.

He took his time in turning from the silken bedspread still cratered in the shape of his bag and the window above it, which looked out on half-constructed buildings under an October sky that might have been stretched silk as well, richly embellished with clouds and subtly too blue.

Maria stood framed in the ornate stone doorway he’d had no say in designing. Her face was nearly as white as it, carved into a look of queenly offence. His letter must have finally come to her attention, then.

“Did you really think to leave without so much as looking me in the eye?” she demanded.

He had hoped. But not much – one last confrontation between the two of them had always seemed inevitable.

“I believe I said all that was necessary in my letter,” he said. “While I appreciate the opportunities you’ve offered me here, and gave them the most careful consideration, I’ve ultimately decided to explore my prospects elsewhere.”

“What prospects? You’re a fugitive elsewhere,” she reminded him, as if he needed it. “We both know there is no chance of you resurrecting your work except under our aegis.”

Which brought them to all he had elected not to say in his letter. That there might be more important things – that there might be no important things. That he didn’t know how he could live without what had been taken from him, but it wasn’t like this.

He had sent a letter instead of looking her in the eye because she seemed to see so much of what he hadn’t said. Now that it couldn’t be avoided, he let her read what she would in his eyes.

“I appreciate your concern,” he said. “However, my decision has been made.”

“Without any regard, apparently, for how it might affect anyone else.” The light in the room seemed to change with her first step into it. October’s benign, vacuous gold sharpened to sombre shades of attention, orange to red and blue to a bruised, chastened indigo. The black dress she had taken to wearing flattered only the shadows that followed in her wake. “You are already a vital part of our future plans. I placed my personal confidence in you with the belief that you were faithful enough to keep it.”

“I never asked for this confidence or a role in your plans,” Daniil pointed out. “And let’s not forget that I already did you a great service by ensuring the survival of both the Polyhedron and the people whose lives you charged me with. You can’t pretend I am in any way obligated to offer up my life to your designs.”

Oh, but she looked fiercely tempted to try. She seemed to believe anything she could lay her hands on was hers nowadays, and her reach had grown long.

“Would you leave me with the simpletons who surround me day and night now?” she asked instead. “So few of them are interested in truly understanding or achieving the heights we strive for. They want a carnival, not an evolution of humanity. You are one of the few people with whom I can discuss those things of true importance.”

“I don’t believe you’re so completely bereft of stimulating company,” Daniil said. “You could have nearly anyone at your beck and call. Or talk to your architects, who are so obviously enraptured with heights.”

“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it.” The shadows advanced closer behind her than the light from the window should have allowed. “I know you feel the same. Who else truly understands your dreams? Who would fight alongside you to see them achieved, even if it meant storming the gates of heaven?”

There had been a few. An irreplaceable few who had trusted him, and he had failed them. Maria had stepped close enough for him to see the true flush of colour rising behind her powdered blush; she surely wasn’t suggesting that she could step into their place.

“I don’t believe in your dreams,” he told her. “In a fairy tale kingdom ruled over by an immortal witch queen. And if you believe in mine, it’s only as a...side effect. You believe there should be nothing you abhor in the world, and perhaps that includes death. But I can’t believe you would ever dedicate yourself to its eradication with the persistence or selflessness required. No, Maria – you and I are not kindred spirits. And if there is still a worthy life for me to live, it isn’t as a member of your court.”

Harsh, yes, but better to sever this dream of hers that way – at the root. Her eyes shone with new facets of what he couldn’t distinguish as fury or tears.

“You are a fool if you think there is a worthy life for you anywhere else,” she said. “You can play that fool or the cynical scholar, but I know you see what only the two of us can achieve together. If you pretend otherwise, it’s only because you’re frightened of the great change that will surely come of it. We can remake this world, en-Daniil. I won’t let a brief faltering of your resolve rob us both of that. Look at me.”

He could hardly look at anything else when she stood so close. But there was a particular imperative in her voice, in that command, that made him want to try. That made looking at her as closely as she demanded seem dangerous, somehow...bottomless.

Her eyes were a shade of winter dusk, fallen early on that October day. Tears still glinted like jewels set in their corners.

“I can- can sympathize with your frustration,” he said, as if forcing words between the two of them could sever the magnetism of her stare. “True allies in an exceptional cause can be difficult to find. But-”

“And so they must not be thrown away when they are found. Look at me. No one else will brave the heights with me. I’m an untouchable pillar of fire to them. None of them would dare try to quench me. Only you, with your boundless courage, will stand by my side. A Mistress needs a strength like that at her side. It’s too cruel a fate for her to burn alone in the cold. Look into my eyes and tell me you would leave me alone.”

Her eyes were the world alone in the cold, an endless fall into the lavender sky over a frozen world. Intuition had been far too late in urging him to look away from them. Gravity had shifted – her eyes were the bottomless pit of it, and the upwards-tumbling void from which it couldn’t save him.

He had felt the edge of that same vertigo only once before. While looking into the eyes of that strange, vanished orphan Clara – the sense that, if he let himself advance towards her by even one more word, he would fall into a pit trap of her cunning design.

He had been able to step back from that edge. He tried to step back now, not by words, but a brute command sent to his feet in their sturdy travelling boots, and Maria’s hand cupped his chin, just short of sliding to a grip around his throat.

Poised between tenderness and a threat, holding his gaze to hers. “Tell me you would not defy the world and death itself to stand at my side,” she said. “Tell me you will not be the one to make my kingdom deathless. Tell me you have not been starved for someone else who looks at the world and sees how it could be and must be better.”

He had defied the world. As punishment, it had taken everyone who had stood at his side and believed it must be better. Maria was no replacement for them. She was the princess of an antique, decaying family and a dollhouse town being built in the wilderness. She was looking more deeply in his eyes than anything he’d refrained from saying in a letter.

She was walking through his soul like a cathedral, while he fell through her eyes like a suicide. He could feel her there, the uneasy creak of her footsteps in a space that seemed to be behind his ribs and breath, below his heart and somewhere above his mind.

Like surgery, a sense of movement and exploration where none should ever have been. His breath wouldn’t coalesce into the words she was daring him to speak.

Which must have been why she’d dared him in the first place. He had only ever seen her reach with that sort of zeal for something that was already in her grasp.

She drew him closer, into a kiss, and something must have been terribly wrong for him not to resist.

Her lips closed over his like a siphon immersed in the sun. A heat spilled by breath and every direction of gravity into his lungs, filling and lighting all the space where she moved in him.

Melting him into that kiss. Something fell not so heavily to the floor – he had dropped his bag to close his arms around her shoulders, as if that heat were all he could breathe and to let her pull away would be to suffocate.

It felt entirely true at that moment. Where had he been planning to go? What had he expected to do there?

Could he really submit himself to the mundanities of iron trains and diseased lungs coughing out the same smoke, torn paper tickets and the endless procession of cold stone cities, naked of wonder, that those tickets named?

Her fingers curled almost to a clawed grip on his chin. He needed to.

If there was any worthy life for him to build, it had to start on such an ordinary foundation. Its doors had to let out onto the ordinary world. He couldn’t be the prince of a fairy tale, safe and exalted and severed from all he had tried to save.

He needed to know if any of them were still alive. Any of those who had trusted him. He tried again to send that urgent command to his legs, to step back.

Her grip loosened enough to allow it, but at a price. Her thumbnail raked across his jaw as he withdrew, opening a scratch and a hot trickle of blood like her breath returning to the world by another exit.

He still seemed full of it. His skin flushed and electric with it, his breath all but steaming with it. His thoughts still walked uneasily, as if they heard someone else in the house.

In what should have been their solitary residence. He shouldn’t have sent the letter. He should have slunk away in the night.

But would he have been able to? Or would her gravity have pulled him back into orbit before he could step out the door? The flaring scarlet breath and enormous magnetism of a star, shining there in the unlikely form of a young woman. Watching him as if to see whether he would do as he’d been told.

Not aloud. Not what she had told him to say. Waiting to see whether he would do what her breath had told him, her touch, her measured steps in the cathedral of his mind.

What she told him aloud only when he stood in silence for several tainted breaths longer, resisting it.

“Tell me you love me.”

Daniil shook his head as he would have against a leash and collar, cinching not too tight around his neck, but his sense of reason. The tug was there, trying to pull him into freefall. There had been no awe in that cathedral before. Now, he looked at her and felt it shivering into the bedrock.

“I- I can’t,” he could still say, and concentrated on that. “I’m sorry. You’re a truly- truly remarkable woman, any man would be privileged to- but-”

But even that wasn’t what he would have said before. When he’d had his bag in hand and only the most professional goodbyes to try to make. Her eyes, pale as windows, shone at him with that inner light – atop her black dress, they were stars on a pedestal of night.

She was the elusive moonlight, closing the distance again to set her hands on his waist. Turning him, by just that nudge of momentum, as if he were weightless and perfectly balanced already on the axis of her will, back towards the bed and the window over it.

Benign blue had fled the sky entirely. It might have been a silk backing after all, drawn up now, away from the crimson firmament it had covered. Midday stars blazed there in no configuration ever charted by science, in subtle motion the longer he looked at them. Dancing in celebration, perhaps, of the vision of a completed city beneath them.

The city she would build, as good as created in her eyes and the sight she had given him. If he could have turned to the mirror, would he have found his eyes shining in reflection of the same light?

“Do you see?” Maria murmured against the vulnerable hollow of his throat. “This is the world that we can build together. It’s so close, someone with no trace of doubt at all could already walk its streets.”

And it was beautiful. In the way of a dream, a place that could never be, projected onto the landscape like an inversion of the inner space she had tainted in him. Prismatic cathedrals, spires as sharp and restless as the beaks of hummingbirds, a soul turned inside out and somehow larger for it, enough so to contain and rebuild all that he could see.

Her soul. Her space, the size of the sky and earth. He had underestimated how much was truly in her reach.

He had made a mistake. But had it been sending her the letter, or trying to leave at all?

“Tell me you love this world the way I do,” she said.

It would be the same as saying he loved her. Which he couldn’t do, because it occluded everything else. Loving her would be too vast to leave room for anything else.

It would be too all-encompassing to escape. But did seeing that, the vastness of that territory, mean he was already inside of it?

“I love the world,” he said. “I love...”

Iron trains that were built faster and more efficient by the year. Paper tickets that described the ability to go farther and farther from what would once have been the humble, circumscribed sphere of a life. The glass eye of a microscope focusing in on new revelations, the world that became better by inches and study and stubborn will. This, what he saw through the window...

This wasn’t that world at its most brilliantly realized height. This was something apart – something cut off, unmoored, drifting in its own dream. It was beautiful, but he couldn’t-

He couldn’t. She was beautiful, he could see it now, in every dusk-and-celestial substance of her, and he couldn’t-

With her hands still tight on his waist, she sank down to sit on the bed. He came with her, to his knees in front of her, staring up at her in place of the world outside, and they were the same.

She and that world were the same. She would invite people to walk within her soul, to make their homes in its towers and gape at its vaults. His was a paper dollhouse in comparison, a mere sketch of a blueprint of what could be built. He was gaping up at her in wonder and trying to think of other places.

Of being in other places. Trains and elsewhere, being real elsewhere, but she was the size of the world and sky and he was a wisp of paper fluttering through it, being scorched slowly blank by the light of a red sun.

“You have an incredible will,” she said. “Most would fall trembling at a glance from me now. A kiss would burn them away like chaff. Do you see? This is why I need you at my side. I need to be withstood by someone.”

Or else she was only a fire burning in a cold, stone, starry world. A world filled with gawking spectators who would never care to understand its mechanisms. Daniil looked up at her in wonder, yes, but...

But in pity as well. Truly seeing her that way, finally understanding her. However stubborn his will, she would break him into loving her. And, in doing so, she would destroy all she prized in him.

“But you don’t want to be,” he said. “You want someone who will bow to you. Who will do as they’re told. That means you can only ever be surrounded by toys. You’ll be alone...and it will be your fault.”

What little fervent colour had been in her cheeks bled away to full-moon white. Her eyes shone like a vision of the world burning.

He would never see the world of ordinary inventions and extraordinary advances he had loved again. He knew it in that curl of her lips. But at least he had looked her in the eyes as himself and told her the truth. If he was to die in every meaningful sense, then that was the last thing he would have wanted to do.

“I was a fool to think you would understand,” she said. “Well, then – if all I’m capable of having are toys, why shouldn’t you be one of them? What makes you any different from the rest of them?”

Then this was when he was supposed to beg for his life. To prove his worth, his willing and wholehearted devotion. There should never have been such peace in something as much like suicide as looking her in the eyes and saying, “Nothing you’ll ever truly possess.”

She had been trying to persuade him gently before. He only knew how much so when she stopped.

When that tantalizing tug on his mind, inviting it over an event horizon, clamped down tight and hauled. Yanking his thoughts out from under him, his peace, flinging him into the endless sky of her fury. The light that had shone through his soul, making her beautiful, burst into flames.

A star was forever both, after all. The gravity that spun lesser lives around it and the brilliant heat that would destroy them if they drew too close, blind them if they dared to so much as look on its radiance for more than a worshipful moment. He reeled, held upright only by her thighs on either side of him. Then by the grip of her hand – she clamped it tight around that stinging, trickling graze on his chin, forcing his gaze back up to the blinding sun of her eyes.

He held tight to the thought of passing a ticket across a counter, smudged paper and scratched wood, the murmur of a crowded station. It wouldn’t save him.

The thought of going somewhere else. Of teaching himself how to live again by starting with the basics, the mundane.

He would have liked to. To look for familiar faces in the grey blur of travel – he might never have been happy again, but he would at least...have been...

Maria’s grip had softened to a caress around his chin. Her eyes glittered with stars yet to be born. Her mouth was the scarlet goddess of the wind, her body the world, a white and black landscape of night, her soul the shape it would take. There were those who had looked to bulls to explain the geometry of the universe, but what about it couldn’t be found somewhere in her? Love and cruelty. Heat and cold, gravity and flight.

What existed that wasn’t a part of her? She smiled, and he shone with her approval.

She began tugging her skirts up from under his hands, and he minded his grip enough to let her. Holding his breath, lest it disperse the invitation that seemed to be taking shape before him – she folded up and tugged down what had covered her from waist to thighs, beckoning him to where the universe was only sweet and generous and plentiful.

“Come,” she said, curling her fingers into his hair. “If you are to be nothing but a toy, prove yourself at least an entertaining one.”

There was nothing better he could have asked to be. Nothing else to be. He buried himself between her thighs to hide from the vague sadness of that, breathing in the warm musk of her sex, creation and comfort and the altar where he could lie at peace. Where he would shed his labour, his love, giving his tongue to her in something more eloquent than song.

Privileged to feel the flex of her thighs around him. Her fingers tightening in his hair. Blessed to kneel and taste her favour at the source. She was...

Lonely, whispered a voice small and silent and far away. Forever lonely, and it’s her fault.

A voice he didn’t recognize, quieter than the rake of her nails against his scalp. The sting of his jaw against her thigh. He closed his eyes, blind to better see only her, her fire still burning behind them, and to hear only her telling him how they would make the world anew.

Chapter Text

Capella lay curled under the covers for as long as she could. It wouldn’t do any good, but the space under them, warmed by her breath, at least felt like hers. For a while, she could lie in that warmth of her own slow, patient creation and feel a little like the yolk of an egg, a creature still waiting to take form enough to be born. Or even, just a little, like a Mistress.

The covers puckered up to a tent’s point over her, in the grip of someone else’s hand. It was all the warning she had before they were ripped away.

Cold air swooped in to claim the small, safe space she had made. She tucked her legs closer to herself, everything but her feet into the loose, gauzy nightgown that did so little to fend off the chill.

“You’re still in bed at this hour?” Maria’s voice rang with mock surprise over her. “Honestly, I don’t know how I ever let you get so lazy. What is my brother going to think if he returns to find his fiancee in such a slovenly state?”

Caspar and the train weren’t due for another two weeks. But it never did much good to point out the facts to Maria – she would change them if she could, or just twist them out of shape until they didn’t matter.

“I feel sick,” Capella muttered instead, into the greasy strew of her hair across the pillow. She had managed to skip two baths by one excuse or another – a third seemed unlikely. But it was better to try than to go without any fuss at all. “I don’t think I can get up today.”

It was almost true. Wrapped in the warmth and wrapped in herself, she had carried a hot, leathery twist of nausea. Knowing this would come – Maria’s hand on her shoulder, the first, gentlest whisper of a threat to haul her bodily out of bed if she resisted.

“Nonsense. Once you’re clean and dressed and have eaten breakfast, I’m sure you’ll feel much better. Come, now – or will I have to call the servants to carry you to the bath?”

She wouldn’t do that, of course. She would pull by whatever grip she could get on Capella’s wrists and hair until Capella was far enough out of the bed and hurting to give in. Until she ran out of strength to resist – there was that part of being sick, too.

Pushing her legs over the edge of the bed under Maria’s watchful smirk. Sitting up, standing, as carefully as she could, but she swayed anyways, always, as a moment of dizziness rose up from the soles of her feet.

From the bottom of her lungs, which might never be as strong as they once had. Was it the Pest or the children’s powder that had done the most damage to them in the end?

They had both burned the same. From her belly to the back of her throat, gutting her body, it had felt like, to a charred, brittle frame.

Stealing the reckless vigour of youth before she had ever realized how much she had to lose. Maria’s hand on her shoulder could have been mistaken for a kindness, steadying her as she swayed.

If not for how tightly it gripped. “You’re so pale,” Maria observed, any pity in her voice poisoned to death by the smirk it passed through. “And practically filthy. I’m sorry I’ve had so little time to take care of you the last few days. You understand – a Mistress’s duties can be demanding.”

Capella’s heart, still pounding with the shock of standing up, seemed to do so more loudly through the clench of her teeth.

“I don’t need you to look after me,” she said. “I just need to be left alone. I’m not a child.”

Not anymore, not even formally, since her birthday the month before. Maria’s eyes sparkled with the reminder.

“No, you’re not,” she murmured. Then, more brightly, like a burning brand waved in front of a wincing face, “But you clearly aren’t the mature, self-reliant woman you might see yourself as, either, or you wouldn’t be hiding in bed with your hair stinking like a dog’s. I’d have thought three years away from those rats in the warehouse would have broken you of their habits, but dirt clings stubbornly, it seems. Come – the bath is already drawn.”

It never did any good to argue with Maria. But that sick dread in Capella’s stomach weighed her down, holding her in place against the first firm tug on her shoulder.

“I’m perfectly capable of bathing myself,” she had to at least try to say. “I’ll join you at breakfast once-”

“Nonsense.” Maria’s next tug, the tightness of her grip, might have drawn blood if not for the nightgown. “As your future sister-in-law, you should know I feel a keen sense of responsibility for you. For both your well-being and my brother’s future happiness – I’m sure he expects a clean, fair young Mistress to greet him on his return, not this bedraggled creature you’ve let yourself become.”

Her grip and smirk had tightened together. Each promised that the other could and would become more painful if Capella continued to insist on this childish resistance.

Capella’s shoulders slumped under both. Maria smiled more truly, but no more kindly, and moved to usher her along from behind.

With that hand still on her shoulder and the other on her hip. Urging her across the latest bedroom to be hers – Maria insisted on moving her to a new one every few months, on what had seemed like whims at first. But the more rooms Capella saw, the more certain she was that it was Maria’s way of keeping her from ever feeling like she truly had a space of her own. One charming little chamber done up in roses and marble was almost the same as the next, and none of them were safe.

One little attached bathroom was almost the same as the next, and the sweet, clammy fug of steam in any of them, like incense doused by summer rain, filled Capella with the same deeper, heavier dread.

The porcelain tub in the centre stood free and full almost to the brim, swimming with islands of white foam. The rest of the room seemed as fragile and unreal as those floating skims of soap, tiled in the same white and turned back on itself by mirrored glass – nothing but a stage for that awful central act.

“Lift your arms,” Maria instructed her.

As simple as that, and without the spoiled honey that had been in her voice before. Even if there was no point in it, Capella should have fought.

Even if all she won were the bruises and small comfort of knowing she had tried. But she could already hear the way her screams would echo in that room. A panting, pitiful sound turned back on itself; she could feel the bruising way her shins would bounce against the porcelain and the gauzy terror of how Maria would hold her under the water’s surface for almost too long.

Everything that was going to happen in that room would either way. It would just be more pathetic and miserable if she fought. Was it weak if she just wanted a day that didn’t hurt?

The nightgown rushed up over her head and raised arms. Before Maria could lay it aside and move to help her, Capella stepped carefully over the porcelain edge of the tub and lowered herself into the water.

It was nearly too hot to bear, and that, at least, was bliss. The grimy layers of dread she had collected in her latest bedroom drifted away; her hair floated on the surface, three years longer than it had been when she’d last had it cut the way she liked.

For that second, that sigh, she could almost have forgotten so. Then the scrape of a stool and settling of skirts heralded Maria’s arrival at her side, a shadow cast over the water and her bare stomach.

Maria had come prepared in her short-sleeved dress. The water sheened her arms like porcelain as well as she plunged a washcloth beneath the surface, working it into soaked scarlet billows before bringing it up, unwrung, to Capella’s face.

Sometimes, she would hold it there until Capella tried to claw it away. Long enough to remind her how weak her lungs were. But it seemed she’d had her fun insulting Capella in the bedroom – she stroked the cloth down her forehead and cheeks almost as tenderly as a mother might have, humming aimlessly to herself as she lingered on each feature, but not over Capella’s mouth and nose. She scrubbed behind Capella’s ears and under her chin, down to where her chest had felt almost safe beneath the surface.

The Pest and its maybe-worse cure hadn’t stopped her from having one more growth spurt almost a year after she’d buried her father and brother. She’d gained only an inch or so of height from it – the rest had all been elsewhere.

She’d been forced to give up her entire wardrobe for whatever Maria would replace it with. Things that fit, but made it feel as if she didn’t fit in her skin. Maria’s hand, sheathed in the washcloth, squeezed thoroughly at her breasts, lifting each and letting them drop back to ripples in the water.

“You really are your mother’s daughter,” Maria observed. “Even if you were a little late to show it. You shouldn’t worry – the rest might just come late as well.”

Meaning, she might still be a Mistress? Capella watched that cloth-bound hand move down her stomach like a boneless creature, across where years of enforced leisure, sickly and confined, had made her a little softer as well.

She had wanted it. So badly, it had felt as if it were already happening – she had burned not with her mother’s power, but with the need to feel it in herself. If only she had been first.

If she had been eldest and her brother younger than her, everything would have been different. If she had been Maria’s age or older when the Pest had come back to threaten them. If she had been first to take up the mantle of Mistress...

“You and I both know that can only happen if I return to the town,” she said. Almost if you let me return – almost an admission out loud that whether she ever became a Mistress was entirely up to Maria. Without the town on the original side of the Gorkhon, where her mother’s spirit had taken root, without the people to whom she had bound her fate, she could never hope to ascend. In this new pretense of a magical town, which Maria had brought her to when she’d still been too sick to resist, she was a bud in a porcelain pot too small to let it grow.

“It’s that helpless attitude that’s kept you trapped in your cocoon,” Maria said. Still concealed, barely, within the innocent purpose of the cloth, her hand slid down the broad curve of Capella’s hip. “The width of a river shouldn’t be any obstacle to a Mistress. You’re so convinced you’ve grown up, but you mope around the house like a child. You can barely climb the stairs – what makes you think you could bear the White Mistress’s abundance? At this rate, you’ll need every bit of help I can offer if you’re to survive just bearing the Kain-Olgimsky children this pact between our houses will demand.”

The cloth billowed down to rest on the seam between her thighs. Maria’s hand had abandoned it, slipping under it, a hard crawl of fingers towards Capella’s-

Capella pushed herself up in the tub, as high and far from that hand as she could. Water swelled over its sides, crashing to the floor. But Maria’s fingers were snared in the darker, curling hair between her legs, pulling her back down with a deeper slosh and a sunken thunk of her head against the wall of the tub.

That wave of foam riding water struck the foot of the tub and washed back to slap across her face as she forced it above the surface. The breath she’d been drawing became a gurgle of sour water, a gulp like a stone.

The weakness that soaked through her was so immediate and complete. Her lungs needed so little excuse to give up on everything now – her blood always seemed to be just one missed breath away from starvation. She fumbled at the side of the tub with an arm that seemed to weigh twice as much as her body, trying just to pull herself high enough again to breathe.

Not enough to stop Maria. Those fingers feeling their way down through the hair to what it had hidden, stroking the sensitive folds of her sex with something almost like tenderness again.

“I do want to see that pact secured,” Maria said like a secret. “I want to see my brother happy and purposeful, just as you would have wanted for yours. And you might not believe me, but I do want to see you happy as well. It’s just that you’re the greatest obstacle to that right now – your insistence on dwelling on what could have been. Only children are so sullen about being denied their fantasies. If you are really so grown, it’s time that you learned how to negotiate with reality.”

Her fingers didn’t stop moving, stroking, pinching, exploring for a single word. Capella couldn’t hold her breath in dread or gather enough of it to lunge away again, and it would hurt more, like everything else, it would only hurt more if she tried to fight it.

But those fingers were flirting so closely with the place where they could plunge into her. Circling and teasing it; Maria looked up at her with a terribly real smile.

“Oh, don’t look so worried,” she said. “I won’t forget your commitment to my brother. He ought to be the first to explore that virgin territory.”

Capella didn’t have time to ask, to draw breath, to even dread the implications of that before Maria pinched two fingers tight around her clitoris. Too tight for even guilty pleasure, emptying her again in a high yip of pain and a kick that missed Maria completely.

That only succeeded in throwing her leg over the side of the tub. Maria, quick and merciless as a bird of prey, immediately hooked a hand through the crook of her knee to keep it there.

To keep her thighs open and her head low. All of Capella’s strength, gripping the edges of the tub, only just kept her head above water. How could she possibly contend with the width of the Gorkhon?

How could she hope to claim the strength of her mother when she couldn’t even wriggle away from Maria? Those fingers had softened enough not to wring any more screams from her, but still worked hard and fast and relentless enough to make her leg twitch wildly against the side of the tub.

All her limbs and breath seemed to be tied to them and what they touched by puppet strings. Was that all she was to be now? A puppet dancing on Maria’s strings? This wasn’t at all how she had imagined someone else touching her for the first time, at all how she would have wanted it, so of course that was why Maria was taking it from her.

Taking just one more thing she had thought belonged to her. Why did she even try to hold onto any of it? Was there really so much comfort in the pain of having fought and lost?

She noticed that Maria’s hand had left the crook of her leg only when it closed around her breast again. Squeezing pink fingermarks into it like plumping a pillow, circling and pinching the nipple in time with the fingers below. Working it to a hard, rosy point poking through the thinning foam.

Capella’s body clenched down with all the strength it had and no warning. Just a sudden jerk, like reaching a dead-end destination with too much speed to slow down. She groaned, slipping from the grip she’d had on the tub down to another gulp of water.

She would have let herself keep sinking. But Maria’s hand was there, spanning her shoulders, holding her just as high as a painted Ophelia in the water.

The other gave her breast a loving, parting squeeze, then moved to stroke out the long locks of her hair, stirring and washing and straightening them to a perfect fan around her head.

“Little Victoria,” Maria murmured, for all the world like love. “You always were a few steps behind. It’s all right – I’ll be here whenever you stumble.”

To catch her, or to kick her while she was on the ground? Or, worse, to use it as a chance to carry her even farther from where she was meant to be?

There was no point in asking. There was never any point. Water dripped from the edge of the tub onto the echoing stage, until Maria decided that Capella was scrubbed clean enough of dirt or stubbornness and drew her out of the cooling water to be dried and dressed for another day.

Chapter Text

Daniil was one step into the house when the loose jingling of the collar’s buckle seemed to change everything.

A sound almost lost under the closing of the door and the groan of letting a long day fall from his shoulders, but still, his body answered it at once.

His shoulders first, already falling along with the day’s weight, dropped sleek and docile and ready for any hand that might clasp them. His head rose, contrarily attentive, chin poised and neck bared save for the silk barrier of his cravat.

The symbol of another life, productive and dignified. Artemy stood two paces down the hall, that leather collar hanging open and musical over his finger.

A question in his eyes. If Daniil stepped forward and began to speak about his day, the collar would disappear into Artemy’s pocket and the evening would be an ordinary one, traversed on two feet.

But the sound of that open buckle spoke directly to the nape of Daniil’s neck. To the root of his tongue, stilling it, and the length of his spine, which would feel so much less sore and more sinuous if he held it horizontally.

He stood waiting, bidding, while Artemy crossed the distance between them. The collar disappeared only halfway into a pocket, its buckle winking in coy promise while Artemy’s fingers danced the familiar steps of undoing Daniil’s cravat.

Slipping that productive and dignified life gently from around his neck. Letting go of it forever would have felt like death.

But it was a state of being Daniil would be able to tie around himself again in the morning, pinning scarlet silk and the poise in his shoulders in place with the same brooch. And so he, fighter of death by day, could stand silent and unresisting while that state of being was pulled away.

Leaving his skin warm and unidentified, naked and vulnerable between states. Artemy held his gaze like mesmerism, more powerful, even, than the singing of the buckle as he pulled the collar from his pocket.

Under his guidance, soft leather closed into place around Daniil’s throat. Never quite tight enough to cut off his breath or movement, but enough to squeeze and chasten any attempt he might make to speak. To ensure he could never forget its presence.

The buckle fell silent, cinched in the hollow of his throat. He greeted it with a swallow.

Meeting and accepting the limits it placed on him. The creature wearing that collar didn’t speak. It had no need to – it made itself understood in other ways. It was aware of and expressed its own needs, but looked to someone else to satisfy them. It was not helpless – it simply lived in a state of absolute trust.

It would be looked after. It would never be abandoned or betrayed. Artemy’s face hadn’t changed, the same features, fierce, cautious brows and full mouth. The same pale eyes searching his, but they all seemed utterly different, more simple and meaningful and abstract, with the collar holding him in its firm, reassuring grip.

This was the face of trust. The tight grip of being kept somewhere far away from pain and worry and responsibility. The cravat had disappeared into Artemy’s pocket.

Artemy cupped his cheek with a rough, warm, encompassing hand, and Daniil leaned into it. Deeply, sinking into the palm, seeking all the comfort it had saved for him throughout the day.

Closing his eyes, all the better to let everything else slip away. Work and worry and responsibility would all be waiting for him later. For now, the tight, proprietary embrace of the collar told him he was an it, and he allowed it to be true. To be an it in the right hands was more freeing than death, as described by those who believed it holy, could ever be.

“That’s my good boy,” Artemy said, words far less meaningful than the approving murmur that carried them. “Welcome home.”

Chapter Text

Vlad woke after a night’s drinking – which his father wouldn’t have considered a respectful memorial, but his father wasn’t exactly present and capable of lodging a complaint, was he? – to find his cheek resting on what felt and smelled very much like the flank of a bull.

He couldn’t have been sleeping very deeply at all, what with how he seemed to be standing against the odious creature. He pushed away from it, and pain leapt down the length of his body.

Jaw to chest to hands to stomach to a swollen, ungainly moan of disbelief as he looked lower. What sort of twyrine dream had he stumbled into? What-

“Don’t act so surprised. You couldn’t have thought that, just because your father gave us his wretched life, there would be none of the Kin’s rage left for you.”

Turning his head was a terrible mistake. He wouldn’t have had to do it in order to recognize Aspity’s voice, and it pulled taut all the higher lines that tied him to the bull.

That hooked him to it. Everywhere he looked, every glint that caught his eye was another barbed fishhook buried carefully in his flesh. His lower lip was heavy with them, swollen into what he could just glimpse as a grotesque pout. Under his chin, tugging at the scant spare skin of his throat, everywhere down his chest and arms, and lower...

Another of those loose moans gaped out of him. It looked as though she had practically attacked his genitals with the things, hooks down both sides of his penis and one embedded in its head, stretching the foreskin over its wicked point. His scrotum had been stretched almost into a taut kite of flesh, close as it was to being torn from his body.

Attached to every hook, a line, leading to one of two neat tethers on the bull’s yoke. Leaving barely a long stride’s distance he could keep behind it before those lines would start to pull tight.

“Ah-” The desperate questions he needed to ask were all too large to fit through his swollen lips. “Whah-”

Aspity did him the very small mercy of moving into his sight. Even through the woozy grey haze that threatened to consume it, she looked unwell – as ragged and drooping as her robe, paler than the dawn still struggling to rise behind her.

The steppe spread to a pale, ragged horizon behind her. Had she dragged him out there? Had she done- all this?

“One hook for every life you took from us would have been more fitting,” she said. “But you have so many lives on your conscience and so little flesh, one for every ten will have to do.”

He had been drugged. He must have been, the twyrine, dragged out there. Bound to this beast in his sleep, and oh, god, hadn’t it been enough for them? They had taken his father, there hadn’t been so much as a bloodstain left, no evidence to mourn except the void he’d left in the Lump. A grandiose empty urn – wasn’t that enough?

“Ah- hah-” he tried to ask. Through what felt like a mouthful of nails, a grimace of blood. Those hooks – how many hundreds of them in total? – were attached all the way to the tips of his fingers, through the meat of his thumbs. He couldn’t find the movement that would let him even begin removing them without unbearable pain.

He couldn’t argue for himself or bargain the way he needed to if he was going to survive. He had to make her listen to him if he was going to survive. Had to make her understand-

“I don’t have much time left,” she said. “But I can do this, at least, for them. Once I’m gone, there will be no one to know what happened to you. They will never find you.”

“Ahh- ahh-” He tried to reach up, to rip at least the hooks from his lip, if he had to. But the thicket of lines between his hands and them pulled tight and tangled in too many directions, hooked too deep, threatening to take more than his skin with them if he didn’t keep them slack.

Aspity shuffled up to the bull’s head, leaning heavily against it each step of the way. It bore her weight patiently and leaned its head, he could have sworn, towards her, to listen to what she murmured in its ear.

When she had finished, it snorted decisively and began walking towards the dawn.

Out into the steppe. Oh, god, no-

Hundreds of hooks pulled taut against his attempt not to follow it. He stumbled after it, he had to, just to keep enough slack that its placid, implacable pace wouldn’t tear him apart.

“Ahh!” he tried to call back, to call her name, at least. As if that would remind her who he was, what he could give or take from her. He was an Olgimsky, the foremost now, head of his household, and he-

He couldn’t so much as turn away from the bull’s patiently shuffling flanks without bellowing in pain. He couldn’t look back at where Aspity was surely watching it lead him out into the steppe, where no one would ever look for him.

#

Where the rocks and hollow shivs of autumn grass cut at his feet, but that pain was nothing compared to letting his pace falter for even a step. The bull wouldn’t slow. He had tried forcing himself to a jostling, impossibly painful jog, to catch up with it, catch hold of the yoke, but every time, it quickened its pace just enough to ensure he remained stumbling along behind it.

He had tried to call out every command he could think of, to convince it to stop. But even those that emerged halfway recognizable from his ruined lips, it ignored.

The front of his body was a pitted wasteland of pain. He had tried to find hooks he could dislodge, but his hands swelled more with every effort, thick, clumsy mittens of inflamed flesh, red and stiff and almost immobile now at his sides.

Everywhere a wrong step jostled a hook, his flesh swelled to envelop it more. His penis was a practically unrecognizable lump of flesh, the hooks swallowed almost completely within it.

The sun had risen to a pitiless midday, a hard white stare scorching his shoulders, drenching those hundreds of punctures in sweat. Breath moaned freely across the dry cave of his mouth.

How much pain equated to ten lives? A hundred? A thousand? How much could pay for what he had fully known he was consigning those thousands of people to when he’d locked the Termitary doors?

When the bull stepped over a stone in their path and he didn’t, turning his ankle on it and tripping forward into the mess of lines, he began to find out.

Chapter Text

“Are you all right?” Artemy asked. “You still seem tense.”

Stakh buried his face deeper in his elbow, as if that would let him hide it.

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just want to get started.”

It wouldn’t be enough to convince Artemy, of course. But if the alternative was to talk, to sit there on the bed and, god forbid, talk about why either of them had a reason to be tense, he would go through with it.

Stakh still knew him at least that well. Artemy sighed, stroking the back of Stakh’s bare shin.

Did he even realize he was doing it? “I just want this to be good for you,” he said. “If you aren’t sure...”

If Stakh hadn’t been sure, he wouldn’t have been kneeling there with his ass in the air, would he? There on the bed that had been Isidor’s not so long ago, though the mattress smelled new. Maybe Artemy hadn’t been able to get the bloodstains out of the old one.

“Just shut up and do it, Cub. I’m fine.”

If the alternative was to talk, then Artemy would still hurt him. They had always been that way about each other.

Maybe what Stakh needed more than Artemy’s hand up his ass was proof of that – that things between them could only ever change so much.

Even if Artemy’s hand, stroking his shin, did seem so much older. Different, stronger, more patient, following the line of the muscles like he was talking to them behind Stakh’s back. So much more like-

“Fine,” Artemy echoed. “If you’re sure.”

Stakh didn’t bother saying it a third time. Silence had been his best weapon when they’d been kids – he had been better at holding it, stretching it out until Artemy would say almost anything just to break it.

He’d always imagined himself as a stone when he’d held that sort of silence. Something it couldn’t touch – something that nothing could touch.

But his body didn’t want to behave like a stone under Artemy’s touch. That shin had already started to relax. And when Artemy’s other hand, gloved, followed the line of his spine down to the crack of his ass, a shiver ran after it.

It wasn’t just that he’d gone away to school. Stakh had learned at least as much as he had by staying in the town, sleeping on the floor beside that bed. It couldn’t be the learning, the books and diagrams and practise, that did it.

So what was it that made Artemy so good at knowing exactly how to touch him? What was it that taught a person how to really touch a body?

That touch left Stakh, hand and spine, and his body tensed pathetically after it, trying not to lose it. But Artemy’s hands were gone, drawn away to the quiet turning scrape of a jar’s lid and, even quieter, the thick liquid sound of what was inside. He would be soaking that glove, making sure there wasn’t the tiniest bit of friction to keep it from slipping into Stakh.

A cool, soaked finger touched Stakh’s sphincter, and he tensed. Sucking in a breath, but that was all part of the game, of course. A cold touch to shock him so that Artemy could soothe him, the way a bone would always break more easily the second time. Keep tensing and soothing him, and he’d tense less and soothe more easily every time.

Even Stakh knew that much. So how come, whether it was surgery or this, he had never felt as natural doing it as Artemy seemed to?

He had taken Simon apart like a textbook diagram. He could make people tense – that usually happened whether he wanted it to or not – but teaching them to trust him, their minds or bodies, had always been so much harder.

Artemy’s finger seemed to know how to ask for it. Circling and teasing his hole until the muscles relaxed on their own – until his body asked the guest on its threshold to come in. And then, just as gently...

Stakh tried to smother a gasp in his elbow, but Artemy must have heard it. The hand that wasn’t a finger deep in him now stroked his back like calming a startled cow.

“Easy,” Artemy said, more breath than voice. “Are you still all right?”

Stakh didn’t trust his own breath or voice enough to answer. God, why did it have to feel so good? As if his body really had been screaming in a language only Burakhs could hear, begging for Artemy to touch just that place inside. Just that fast, just that hard, adjusting as Stakh did on his knees.

Why did his body have to agree with Artemy on everything? He’d never let it be greedy, he’d beaten any trace of the habit out of it, but now, it wanted to devour the way Artemy was making it feel. The second finger slipping in only made it shake and want more, faster, harder, fuller, while Stakh sat, as always, as an uneasy passenger in his own head.

Artemy’s hand on his back was coaxing him to rock in time with those fingers. Just the right rhythm to clench down, draw back, meeting that touch where it met him, so that sparks almost seemed to skip away into his gut.

Artemy’s hands were learning him at that moment. Stakh tried to feel sick at the idea, used, betrayed, but god, nothing had ever felt so good. Artemy had gathered his fingers into a long wedge, practically letting Stakh fuck himself onto it, a little wider, greedier, deeper every time.

“All right,” Artemy murmured, answering the question he had asked Stakh, maybe. Or deciding it didn’t matter, or remembering it was better not to ask. “Good – that’s good. Don’t rush it. Breathe out as you bear down. In – and out. In-”

Of course Stakh had to rush then. Had to force it. If the alternative was to kneel there panting and rocking while Artemy talked at him like a cow or a kid on the examination table, better to pull in all his breath and push back onto that hand with all the strength he still had.

“Shit!”

Even if it was just to hear Artemy yelp. To feel his hand whole and clumsy for a moment, fingers out of sync as Stakh’s body swallowed it.

It was worth the pain. Stakh bellowed into the crook of his arm, clenching from jaw to toes, keeping the tremendous mass of Artemy’s fist in him even as half his muscles tried to push it out.

Feeling the rhythm fall to pieces. Breaking it to pieces, pounding his fist on the new mattress while that clench fought inside him, keep or push out. Pain like a stone swallowed the wrong way, but also...

Damned if, when he had no more breath for bellowing and his fist lay in a crater on the mattress, it didn’t still feel good. So damn good, just as full as it needed to be, stuffed up tight with the slow, careful flex of Artemy’s knuckles.

Artemy’s free hand patted his heaving ribs. “You’re an idiot. Are you all right? How does it feel?”

Perfect. It felt fucking perfect, so full, so taut already that the flex of Artemy’s knuckles might really have been playing a chord on the strings, the lines, of the world. Playing them through Stakh, forcing that chord out of him as a pitiful, known, bested moan.

Things were never going to change between the two of them, were they? The world was always going to move just that much more easily when Artemy tugged on it. It wasn’t the learning. It might have been the blood after all, Burakh blood, or intuition, or, hell, maybe even just fate. Whatever it was that made the world want to move for him, Stakh didn’t have it, and he never would.

“It’s fine,” he muttered into the crook of his arm. And it would have to be. He would have to find a way for it to be.

Because, either way, he was never going to best Artemy.

Chapter Text

In hindsight, drinking anything Oyun gave him and called a ‘trial’ might have been a bad idea. It wasn’t as if he’d thought the old Foreman would be sporting.

But he’d thought he would at least put more effort into pretending. Give him something that would just sap his strength, like he’d said, not something that would drop him to the floor in a dead swoon.

Now where was he? Still in the Abattoir, but not under the echoing vaults of its ribs. Tucked in some small, quiet corner of its guts, bound there, to a chair so heavy it only creaked and rattled like passing train wheels when he rocked against it.

Hands tied behind his back, his legs buckled tightly to its. Oyun had taken the opportunity to strip him to the waist, and stood against his own flickering shadow on the wall, wearing his toothy snarl, for the first time, almost like a grin.

Next to him, kindled in a small, blackened metal cage and breathing smoke through a cleft in the ceiling, crackled a small fire. Leaning against that cage was a long, slender iron pole – at its end, set glowing, heating in the very deepest part of the fire, was something that all of Artemy’s years away couldn’t have saved him from recognizing.

He jerked against the chair as if he’d been touched by the branding iron already. Rocking and twisting against his bindings again, while Oyun leaned down, his teeth almost as bright with firelight, to check the dully glowing colour of the brand.

“Isidor raised a fool,” he said. “Or maybe it was their world that rotted you after all.”

“My father raised me to believe there was some honour among those who led the Kin,” Artemy spat back. “How is this supposed to be a fair trial?”

Apparently not satisfied with the glow of the brand just yet, Oyun settled it back into its fiery nest. “Honour is a luxury,” he said, as the flames hummed and gathered in something like anticipation. “In trying times, the strong must know how to survive without it. I would not let the Kin fall to ruin, or be torn apart by a foolish calf like you, for honour.”

“You’re the one who’s been leading them to ruin. Even Taya knows it, and she’s barely old enough to buckle her own shoes.” Artemy wrenched his weight to one side, but the chair may as well have been bolted to the floor. “You’ve already lost their faith. Whatever you’re planning here won’t change that.”

“Lassitude is also a luxury,” Oyun said. “It is a poison enjoyed by the weak. Those who would lead must never allow themselves a taste of it. Maybe you will learn that someday. Under my hand, you will at least learn obedience.”

Colder anticipation crawled across Artemy’s skin as Oyun approached. The half-room of shadowy distance between them had almost felt like some control he still had – every step the Foreman took towards him magnified how helpless he truly was.

“All I’ve learned from you is that my father was right to try to take your place,” he said anyways. Whatever he was about to learn from Oyun, he wouldn’t let it be fear. “The Kin deserves better than you.”

Oyun ground his teeth like sanding granite. Artemy braced himself for the inevitable blow, but the Foreman opened the fist that would have dealt it to reveal a small tin of thickly twyre-scented salve.

Small in his palm as a robin’s egg in an eagle’s nest. He scooped out most of its contents with one blunt finger and began smoothing it across the bare, unmarked skin of Artemy’s left shoulder.

“You think they deserve you instead?” he scoffed. “A child who barely remembers his letters? Tycheek’s girl is older in our ways than you are. Do you even know what that letter in the fire means?”

Artemy hadn’t gotten a proper look at it, and might not have known even if he had. But it would be something shameful, or else something meant to bind him. It would mark him forever, to any who saw it, as something less than Oyun.

He swallowed the sour taste of what he wouldn’t let be fear. “It means you couldn’t best me as a Warden. It means that, even if you can’t lie, your word is good for nothing.”

Oyun’s lip curled back to his typical snarl. He pulled his hand back, and Artemy braced himself again, jaw clenched, but eyes open, shoulders set, calm in every way he could wait for the blow. Oyun’s hand swung down-

-and stopped close enough to his cheek to graze the stubble. The breeze pushed ahead of it swept past Artemy’s ear.

But he hadn’t flinched. He hadn’t held his breath. Oyun’s fist curled in the corner of his vision.

“This will hurt you far more than any blow could,” the Foreman said.

And stepped away. Back to the fire, to pull the brand from it.

Glowing as brightly as his eyes. Artemy still couldn’t read the letter it would burn into him.

He couldn’t breathe as deeply as he had while waiting for Oyun to strike him. His lungs, his hands bound and clenched tight together behind his back, recognized and dreaded what was about to happen even if he tried to deny it.

He wouldn’t scream. If it was all he could do, he wouldn’t scream.

“Every time you look at me,” he told Oyun, “You’ll remember that you could only best me as a coward.”

Oyun’s teeth shone as bright as his eyes, the brand. He took hold of Artemy’s arm just above the elbow, tight enough to bruise.

Fleeting marks. Those would fade, but what he was holding the arm in place for never would.

“Every time they look at you,” he told Artemy, “They will remember that you faced your trials and failed. You will forever be the least among them.”

Artemy wouldn’t scream. But he couldn’t stop those words from burning, deeper than any brand. He couldn’t stop himself from trying to tense away as warmth approached his skin, humming in the metal, becoming heat as it drew closer. Almost unbearable even in the moment before it touched his skin.

He wrenched his head to the side, wrestling down the scream in his throat. His toes curled in his boots, eyes closed tight, every part of him that could pull away from that white, sizzling agony eating its way into him-

His mouth tasted of blood, his tongue between his teeth, but the pain of that was numbness in comparison. He pictured his father-

He pictured his father. It was all he could do, the stern, tired face, his father who had lived to one side of leadership in the Kin, but had still been a vital organ in their body for all those years. This wasn’t the end.

This wasn’t ruining him. This wasn’t casting him out – Oyun didn’t have the power to do that. Even Taya knew it.

All he had the power to do was swing around his tools and break everything in reach until someone managed to take them from him. But it still felt like being ruined. For as long as it lasted, it still felt like being burned straight through from shoulder to heart.

The pain didn’t stop when the sizzling did. His arm still twitched and jerked below Oyun’s grip. But he hadn’t screamed.

Blood dribbled down his chin. But he hadn’t screamed.

Oyun gave his shoulder a cruel, assessing squeeze. Giving him one more chance to scream, maybe. But all he had the breath left for was a hoarse whimper.

“You will not cover it,” the Foreman instructed him. “That would be the only shame worse than wearing it openly.”

Artemy’s head was already lolling forward in something like a nod. He could have left it at that.

At a whimper. He hadn’t screamed – he could have let that be enough. Licked his wounds and hated Oyun somewhere off to the side, in secret. Hated and plotted and waited for a better time.

But his shoulder burned like bone-deep shame. The lines of his destiny still felt charred and shrivelled around it, scarred permanently by this man who had no right.

So Artemy gathered the blood he still had in his mouth and spat it into Oyun’s sneering face.

Chapter Text

“Go to your room. Now.”

If Daniil had said that at any other time, in any other place or company, Artemy would have spat in his face. But with Maria standing practically incandescent on the other side of the dining room, her face a sculpture of fury in waiting, it seemed best to make his exit while he still could.

Naked and with her words still ringing in his ears, burning on his skin – get him- him, it, get it out of here. We need to talk.

In the two weeks since he’d given up his clothes to Daniil, Artemy had almost – almost – gotten used to being seen for what he was. The sterile stone house they shared had started to feel like enough armour – like something else he could hide inside, like his confiscated clothes, and still be a man.

But now, everyone would know. If he did ever see faces aside from the two in that room again, the disgusted curl of Maria’s lip would be mirrored on all of them.

His feet were silent on the marble floor. Two weeks of almost convincing himself that it didn’t matter.

All undone in the moment Maria had stepped through the door. Her stare burned against his back as he slunk through the one opposite.

Into the sterile silence of the hall, coldly geometric angles polished to such a white gloss that his reflection glided against them. He would never have imagined aching that way for wood and wool, dirt and brickwork.

A porous world, one that breathed. Sunlight and the crunch of his boots on streets cobbled twice over with fallen leaves. The man he had been was starting to feel just as blasted to ruins.

In his place, a soft, quiet, naked creature in too loose of a stone skin. He pulled the door of his small bedroom shut behind him and turned to look at what little he could pretend was his.

An illustriously, ostentatiously carved bed draped in creamy blue silk. An impractically small desk, on which lay several journals it seemed Daniil had salvaged from his father’s house before the bombardment.

He had given them to Artemy more like an indulgence than a peace offering. And that was most of it – most of what he could still try to cling to. An uncomfortable chair and immovable stone washbasin, and not even most of the tools that went with it – Daniil wasn’t about to leave him alone with a razor, after all.

Artemy couldn’t have said whether that was wise of him. Didn’t try. He just sank down on his illustriously comfortable bed – built as if he were meant to make more use of it than the chair – and listened to the hollow, heated echoes of argument from elsewhere in the house.

No words he could make out. Just haranguing and defending, accusing and rationalizing, shifts in tenor as distinct as the different whispers of twyre. The plan had been for the three of them to have dinner – Maria and Daniil discussing their grand future plans while Artemy sat there duly punished.

He’d only been able to stomach a few bites of breakfast, thinking about it. Sick all day, but now, it seemed, his appetite had finally decided it was safe to creep out of hiding. The dining room had been almost as pungent with imported meat, rich soup, and fresh bread as it had been with Maria’s hatred.

Hunger echoed as hollowly in him as those voices did down the hall. They faded, finally, but it didn’t. Scraping at his insides while he stared down at himself, the loose curves losing what little colour they’d had from the sun. He was going to become a part of this place, wasn’t he? Even if it was just as a matter of time.

A lost war of attrition. His door crept silently inwards.

No lock on the inside of it, of course. No need for the man who owned him to knock. Still, Daniil shuffled in as if he were intruding, carrying a tray of everything they would have eaten for dinner.

Plates and bowls balanced carefully and heaped high. Artemy’s stomach groaned in naked hope.

Daniil nudged those journals aside enough to set the tray on the desk. Hanging from his elbow was a bag Artemy hadn’t noticed in that first flush of hope.

Plain and sturdy linen, almost the size of his pillow. Reaching into it, Daniil pulled out familiar folds of wool and canvas.

“It seems I...made an error in judgment with this particular punishment,” he said. Still as pale as he’d been in the dining room, throwing the dark of his eyes into ghostly relief. “Maria made every spurious accusation you might imagine.”

Anyone who had seen Artemy standing naked at Daniil’s side would have. He rose slowly from the bed, as if the clothes or food or this moment of contrition on Daniil’s part might disappear if he moved too quickly towards them.

If he let slip how much he needed them. Daniil held out those well-worn, clean but familiar clothes, and Artemy let his fingers feast on the feel of holding them again.

Holding it all again, it seemed. That rough-spun world, right there in his hands. He swallowed, but the lump in his throat stayed lodged as deep as the heart of the world.

Two weeks had left it all feeling just that much less natural against his skin. But like coming back home after a while away – breathing it in, relaxing into its shape. Tugging up his trousers and feeling almost as if he were shaped like himself again.

The undershirt, which even a magical new world had only been able to scrub to a sallow bone white, creased between his fingers. It always looked comically small until he put it on.

And it always felt torturously small for the first minute or so once he wrestled it over his chest. He had nothing left to hide with it anymore.

But it was still a part of him, and he hadn’t parted with it willingly. If only for pride’s sake, to prove that Daniil hadn’t convinced him he was better off without all his parts, he pulled it over his head.

Working it down to his waist with a back-and-forth series of practised tugs. Daniil watched him with a curiosity that almost thrummed.

And a genuine, sick-seeming sadness. He hadn’t asked once.

Hadn’t said a word about it. He had treated Artemy, in every way he could, as if he were still walking around clothed.

Only now, as Artemy examined Lara’s sweater – not just clean, but mended here and there with neat, alien stitches – did Daniil seem to be reaching the end of his resolve. Or maybe it was just that much easier, felt less dirty, to interrogate a clothed prisoner than one stripped by force.

“You know, I’ve- I’ve never met a man like you before,” he said.

And almost managed to make it sound like a peace offering. Artemy slipped the sweater over his head, a much kinder fit than what it hid.

“It wasn’t unheard of among the Kin,” he replied, with all due bitter emphasis on that one relevant word – wasn’t. If any of the Kin had escaped the bombardment, they would be just a few dissolute, dying nomads out in the steppe. “After my brother died...”

But was that really something he wanted to tell Daniil? How he’d always been more jealous of Ersher than he could stand, jealous of who his brother got to be and what he got to know and how it felt like there couldn’t possibly need to be space for another Burakh boy while he was around?

How watching Ersher start on the path of the menkhu, the next Burakh warden, had felt like being amputated from his whole body? His lines, his life, everything he knew in his heart that he needed to be. It had been useful for there to be a Burakh boy and a Burakh girl. One for knowledge, one for alliance.

But then there had been the incident with the bull. An Olgimsky creature mad with pain and imprisonment, a gate with a broken latch, and Ersher had been gone. And all that helpless jealousy had felt like a poison Artemy must have been pouring into the world – into fate, until his brother had died of it. If his father hadn’t asked him what he wanted to do, offering him the path of man and menkhu as a duty he could claim if he chose to, he would never have been able to swallow his guilt and ask for it.

No, he didn’t want to say any of that to Daniil. But his silence might already have said at least some of it.

“Was it required of you, then?” Daniil asked, with stiff, hesitant, obvious, appalling pity. “After he died?”

Artemy turned a glare on him that would have felt morose and pathetic without clothes. They did say those were what made a man.

“You’re an ass,” he said, and settled himself down on that uncomfortable chair to eat.

“Maybe,” Daniil said, and nothing else until Artemy had dug his way down through most of that rich, incredible vegetable soup and was reaching for a slice of bread to mop up the rest. “Maybe, but...I hope you understand that my intention was – is – genuinely to protect you. You’re one of the very few things I managed to salvage from that hell. One of the...maybe the best thing. I won’t allow this world to destroy you now. I wish you would cooperate with me in that cause, rather than seeing me as an enemy.”

He managed to look so damn forthright about it. Still more pitying than Artemy would have liked, but truer, less poised, than he had at any point since the town had burned.

Except for the moment when he’d first seen Artemy without clothes. What was it that Daniil saw him as now? A strange man or delusional woman? A pet project or redemption?

“Not an enemy,” Artemy said, bread still poised above the bowl. “Just...someone who doesn’t know when to let go. You killed me when you killed my town. You can try to put off your guilt by pretending otherwise, but why should I help you? Everything that gave me shape is gone. I should have dissolved along with it. The only thing stopping me is your stubborn grip.”

Only when the last of those words had unreeled limp and monotone from his lips did he pull back and look properly at the first of them. Not an enemy? When had he started thinking of Daniil that way?

Two weeks ago, when fighting for his dignity and failing had seemed to take all the strength he’d had left? Or just now, when Daniil, who’d taken that dignity from him, had passed it back into his hands?

Was that all it had taken to bribe him out of his hate? Or was it just that there hardly seemed to be a point in it anymore?

His town was ash either way. And, either way, Daniil looked galvanized to hear how much his grip still held.

Standing straighter, with more of a golden flush in his cheeks. “If that’s the case, I’ll hold onto you as long as I need to,” he said. “Until you rediscover that extraordinary stubbornness of yours. It wasn’t the world that shaped you, Artemy – you proved very plainly that you have the will to shape it. It’s still my sincere hope that, someday, we might work to do so together.”

So forthright. As if he actually believed it – and as if he hadn’t made that speech two weeks ago about Artemy’s genuine submission to him.

“By which you mean, you hope I’ll someday work obediently under you,” Artemy clarified, scooping up as much gravy-thick broth as he could in that spoon of bread and stuffing it, too much, into his mouth.

Leaving Daniil to look aggrieved in the silence as he chewed. His captor almost seemed like the naked one in that room – dressed as neatly as ever, but letting himself show in ways he never had before, or else putting on a hell of an act.

“I’m not any more satisfied with the current situation than you are,” he claimed. “But, until I can attain some measure of independence – outside funding, attention, some foothold in the world outside of this place – everything I have is at Maria’s pleasure. Some degree of...of submission on my part is required.”

“And my submission in turn.”

“Yes. My greatest hope is still for us to work together someday as colleagues – as equals,” Daniil insisted. “Whatever you might have ambitions of resurrecting, I would lend you my full assistance then. If you don’t care to live for anything else, then, for now, just let me hold you in my grip. I’ll safeguard you until I can give you more to live for.”

So forthright. So flushed and impassioned, leaning a breath forward, as if he only needed Artemy’s permission to change the world.

So living-looking. Gold and brown and light. More so than Artemy might have been himself at that moment. Daniil really did believe every word he was saying, didn’t he?

Redemption and purpose. How frantic had he been when Artemy had managed to go briefly missing those two weeks ago?

“Just for life’s sake?” Artemy asked.

Just to preserve it? Surely not. Not with that fervent look on Daniil’s face, or how quickly he tucked it away when he seemed to realize he was wearing it.

Trying to make himself stone and scarlet fire, punishment and command again. But something had changed.

“Not just the beating heart and breathing lungs,” he said. “But...yes.”

For the things that beating heart and breathing lungs fed. For the shape that life held. For better or worse, he wasn’t going to let Artemy go.

Artemy looked from him to everything still left on the tray. Neatly arranged and heaped high. He couldn’t be weak enough to be bribed that easily. So was it just that he was too weary to hate anymore, or...?

“I’m not going to be able to eat all of this,” he said.

Daniil cleared his throat. Didn’t quite shuffle a step towards the desk, but shifted his weight as if he only needed Artemy’s permission.

“Then perhaps I should help,” he suggested.

Not a demand. Not even a statement. He would have to haul on Artemy’s leash again at some point, wouldn’t he? For Maria’s satisfaction. The same as destroying the town and trying to pretend there was still an Artemy Burakh to be saved, he was trying to have it both ways.

To have an ally – a colleague – and an obedient pet. There might have been more dignity for Artemy in being a full-time rebellious pet, a spitting, scratching runaway whenever he could find an open window.

But what was dignity worth anymore? It was just a shape, given or taken away. One he had admitted, himself, was meaningless now. All that was left was Daniil’s grip. If he let that drag him for a while, where would he find himself?

What shape would he hold when, if, it finally let him go? He nodded towards the tray, and couldn’t tell, from the corner of his eye, whether it was relief or triumph shining in Daniil’s.

Chapter Text

The spotlight turned on with a tremendous clunk, like a shutter thrown open on some higher world. The scrutinizing glare of a celestial porthole, pinning Daniil to the table he didn’t remember lying down on top of.

Though the table itself was familiar. Clean steel, nearly celestial itself in the light, warm where he must have lain insensate against it for some time. Though he had only ever studied cadavers on such a table, with no need for the sturdy leather shackles that bound his wrists at his sides and his ankles below.

Stretching his legs out straight and nearly taut. His body lay bare and mockingly exalted as well, his stark ribs standing out like a cathedral’s buttresses in shades of gold and sickly white.

He began to struggle and twist, as such a scene surely demanded, and every inch of new territory he couldn’t claim from the table was cold. Steps like one low, flat cadence of applause approached the head of the table, where he couldn’t twist to see.

“Who’s there?” he called out, his voice as echoing and pathetic as such a scene demanded. “Where the hell is this? What-”

What had he done, to end up somewhere so careless? So exposed? So many years of the utmost care, of layers and discretion, only to find himself, somehow, lying bare in a blinding glare that implied a watchful space, that implied people watching from unseen, silent rows of seats, with the hand of a stranger emerging from the dark and glare to glide indulgently down from his shoulder to his hip.

A hand sheathed in a clean white rubber glove, tucked into a white sleeve, leading a shiver of goosebumps in its wake. “The subject appears mildly agitated, but not enough so to require sedation or additional restraints.”

As flat and unechoing as the footsteps, the familiar intonation of speaking for a stenographer or recorder. Daniil tried to pull away from the hand, but it had far more freedom of motion than he. Tried to see who might be at the far end of that arm, but the angle of the spotlight blinded him to all but the haziest haloed suggestion of a black silhouette.

“I don’t know who you are,” he communicated as much – most certainly not for the benefit of an audience – “But-”

“All preparatory work has already been completed by Orderly Gorkhon. This means we can proceed immediately with the first stage of the experiment.” The hand withdrew from light into obscurity, returning an improbably short moment later with an improbably long syringe.

A cruel celestial instrument shining in the spotlight. Daniil’s breath and gut drew back together, to huddle, cornered, against the cold line of his spine.

“Listen to me,” he said, a whisper skimming only the surface of his breath. “I was...fighting an infection. A plague. It’s vital that I- that you return me to wherever you found me. I don’t know how you-”

The hand had a twin, of course, just as methodical and certain and anonymized by white rubber. It emerged from the infinitely blank, menacing world beyond the table to take hold of his arm just below the elbow, turning it to reveal the soft, infinitely vulnerable blue bulge of the vein his struggles had only made more prominent.

“Don’t-” Daniil rocked against his restraints, but that hand on his arm was sturdier, more immovable than any of them. “Listen to me. I don’t know who you are or what it is you hope to prove with this, but...”

But neither his struggles nor his ignorance could stop the needle’s neatly bevelled point from pushing into his arm. Without pain, without breath as he watched a white thumb depress the plunger that would push whatever clear mystery was in the syringe into his veins.

“Administering three millilitres of the concentrated solution,” the voice beyond the halo intoned.

The plunger sank slowly, butting up against an uncomfortable, overcrowded pressure in the vein. There was only that, so far – only that to hint at the fact something terrible was being done to him.

Starved of breath, fed from that emptying syringe instead, his blood hummed in his ears. The plunger settled to rest at the base of the needle, the last clear, poisonous drop of its job done.

The hand withdrew the needle, and must have tucked it unceremoniously into a pocket or thrown it away to return so quickly without it. Its fingers, poised like a snake’s fangs, pressed up under Daniil’s jaw to find his pulse.

No matter how he tried to twist and strain away from them. “What have you done?” he demanded. “What was that? Who...?”

Who, in that godforsaken corner of the country, would have been motivated to do this to him? There were so few with the medical expertise to handle a syringe and his throat that way.

“The subject’s pulse has begun to quicken. Whether this is an effect of the solution or mere stress is not yet clear.”

“Then you should have performed this experiment, whatever it is, on someone calm and willing,” Daniil snapped. “Who the hell are you? What did- did you hope to-”

His pulse certainly was quickening. His breath couldn’t catch up, nor could he hold it back from trying. It hauled itself in gasp over gasp, lifting and dropping the ridged plain of his ribs and the breasts that had always seemed so awkward sitting atop it. The hand that had been holding tight to his pulse loosened and trailed down his chest, between them.

A frisson raced to Daniil’s spine and fingers. He shuddered against the table, a hapless, echoing thunk into the dark.

The hand backtracked and followed that trail again, from the hollow of his throat to that of his stomach. Daniil twisted against the table, his restraints, not to escape it, but...

“Subject appears to be experiencing heightened sensitivity to physical stimulation. This is in line with the anticipated effects of the solution, though the rapidity of onset exceeds expectations.”

The hand returned again, without any decent or salacious delay, to close around his right breast. Daniil arched his back-

Not to escape it. There might have been no skin between him and it, between it and his nerves. The sensation, in that case, should have been pain, and maybe it was, but...

But a rich, complex, intense enough pain might have confused his nerves into thinking they were in the grip of pleasure instead. Every nerve, every eloquent articulation, curl, of every finger-

The rubber-clad pad of a thumb circled his nipple, and he yelped, banging his elbow at a helpless obtuse angle against the table.

“Stop,” he begged. Helpless, as well, to quell the whine in his voice that betrayed it as such. “Oh, god, stop, don’t-”

The thumb and one rubber-clad finger pinched his nipple tightly between them. He bellowed, another mocking echo to and from the dark, beating against him like applause from every side.

“...increased blood flow to the skin,” was the next thing he heard, when the humming in and echoes without his head had faded. “The pupils are dramatically dilated, despite direct and intense light. Sight may be compromised as a result – does the subject see how many fingers I am raising?”

All he saw was light, and that vague blackness at the centre of it, like a burst pupil. The hand had withdrawn from his breast, but the pressure of the table against his back and thighs assaulted him in its place.

“I...I think...” He blinked, trying to force that silhouette and his own thoughts into focus. “Who- who are you? Why...?”

“Subject’s cognition may also be impaired. This effect is likely temporary, caused by acute physical arousal, but will require further testing to be certain. Physical stimulation remains the focus of this first test.” Fingers fluttered from Daniil’s stomach down towards his groin. “Does the subject-”

Daniil’s head, heels, elbows clattered against the table, involuntary as a seizure, wanton as the moan he threw into the dark. The stranger’s fingers might have been electric, or his skin was, sparkling madly with sensation on contact. It almost seemed that he must have been feeling fingerprints through those rubber gloves, the rough, unique kiss of a naked hand. Who was doing this to him?

Rubin wouldn’t have the nerve or the cruelty, would he? He had always seemed slightly morose in his duties, but could that really have been a front for this?

This methodical cruelty, working its way down just past Daniil’s navel and then starting again from almost too high up to bear? No. No, the voice wasn’t his, and Daniil couldn’t have misjudged him so badly.

So who, then? That horribly knowing touch, finding its way down, finally, to tug and tease at his pubic hair...

“Subject’s initial response suggests that the formula has succeeded beyond all expectations. He appears nearly oblivious to his surroundings. He reacts immediately and with shameless intensity to any touch. Pulse and complexion, too, indicate extreme arousal. Vaginal lubrication is...”

The words weren’t nearly enough warning before two fingers slid – warmly, effortlessly – into his cunt. Deeply, liquidly, stirring at the needy wetness he hadn’t noticed gathering there.

The world might truly have ceased to exist beyond those two fingers, their touch, and the question. Daniil’s eyes had rolled back to a rim of light; who was it?

That taciturn dealer in death’s castoffs, Var? He had the inflection for it; his touch would surely have been as deep. Someone who knew the body mostly as a box for an internal puzzle of organs would have stroked his stomach that way, in slow, fingertip-trailing circles that made him wriggle from hips to shoulders.

Not shamelessly, as the voice had said, but irresistibly. On the horizon of that light, he could see his nipples standing hard and red, the flush that had spread down his chest like sunrise through a valley. Those fingers stroked him once, lightly, inside, and climax struck him as the light first had.

Pinning and exalting him. Bucking his head back against the table, burning his mind to a cinder for one keening, rapturous moment.

The sound he made might have been almost loud enough to map the limits of that space. The fingers struck again, light as a feather, and whether he reached his peak again or had never left it, he couldn’t have said. Either way, he was screaming again, straining against his shackles in an effort to spread his legs wider.

The voice was speaking again, but he could hear it only as something his screams were drowning out. The slightest curl of the fingers in his cunt, a brush of knuckles against his clitoris in the bargain...

It had to stop. His mouth was dry, his head ringing with steel echoes, every muscle from thighs to shoulders twinging with exhaustion, wrung out with clenching, but it wouldn’t stop. Every time he began to draw a deeper, deliberate breath, to subside, the slightest touch wrenched it out of him again. There had to be a limit to how long and passionately the human body could respond.

“Please,” his screams echoed back to him, and he couldn’t have said whether it meant stop or don’t.

He couldn’t have said whether his face was soaked with sweat or tears by the time it did. His legs twitched, feeble and erratic, his breath still bearing down on phantom fingers, faint aftershock twinges of torturous orgasm. His eyes were blurred almost beyond sight, either way, but something dripped and shone from the fingers that had withdrawn from him, a viscous, stretching thread leading back between his thighs.

“The subject appears to possess no significant refractory period at present, though he is still limited by physical endurance. Further testing will be required to determine what happens if he is pushed beyond the limits of that, and whether mental endurance – his powers of reason – can be similarly exhausted.”

“Don’t.” It was a sob, more pitiful now, mewling and phlegmy, than begging. “Oh, god, don’t. Stop. I don’t know- I don’t know-”

Who? That hand, a white, hateful dream of the light, reached down again, stroking his clitoris carelessly between two of its fingers.

Nothing had stopped. Nothing had ended. Whatever had been pushed into his veins, it was still burning as brightly as ever. He was still just as rawly, wantonly sensitive, thrashing against the table in a paroxysm of pitiful steel thunder until the hand saw fit to release him again.

“It is unlikely that he could be kept in this state indefinitely. All things ultimately succumb to exhaustion in one form or another. But if a simple injection, administered perhaps once a day, could reduce him to this whore squirming and moaning for a stranger’s hand...”

Intoned as flatly as the rest, it carried all the weight of a diagnosis. A proclamation. If he could be commandeered so easily, then every pretension of dignity and agency he’d ever maintained had been no more than that. A doomed, foolish act, a child’s play. If he had been unshackled, the weak, intermittent straining of his muscles told him, he would have fallen on the stranger behind those hands in a storm of ardour, crazed to quench this fire burning in him.

To drown himself, burn himself away in ecstatic agony. Not Var – the old organ dealer had been too manifestly apathetic to wish him this much harm. Who else...?

“Who are you?” His voice was still a squirming whine, but as long as he had the question to ask, he still had his mind. He had a reason to blink the sting of tears from his eyes, to try to see who hated him this badly. “Why are you-”

“Is there someone the subject would prefer to be hurting him?”

The hand, a fist between his thighs, rocked them gently from side to side. Gently – nothing could be, in that state. It still sent writhing shockwaves to the nape of Daniil’s neck, echoing through the wet, hungry hollow of his sex. He clenched his jaw, trying to keep that one part of himself still, his mind, trying-

Narrowing his eyes, trying to see past the light and darkness both, to whoever hated him.

“Artemy?”

The hand stilled. The urge throbbed, in the clench of his jaw, to beg it to touch him again.

He wouldn’t. He waited, and, finally, the figure at the end of those baleful white arms stepped forward.

Eclipsing enough of the light for him to meet the same brown eyes he had in the mirror every day of his life. Was it a dream?

A fevered hallucination? Had he contracted the Pest after all?

His own face stared back at him. Flat and unfeeling as the voice that had narrated his suffering – his own face, his own body, in a spotless, archetypal white coat. Was it one of his own hands, then, stroking a trail of his own clear, cooling slick down his stomach?

Was it just an intermission? His body shuddered at the touch, undeterred, unrecovered, unsatisfied.

“The subject appears surprised,” the voice he should have known as his own observed. “It is possible he believed there was someone else who cared enough to hate him this way. I have a reasonable hope that aggressive treatment might cure him of this misconception.”

“How-” Daniil’s mouth was still dry and clumsy. His mind was slipping from the clench of his jaw. “How did-”

“A second injection would, I believe, serve as the most expeditious treatment. It might also serve the secondary purpose of removing the need for physical restraints.”

“How are you here?” Daniil couldn’t struggle against those restraints the way he had before. His muscles were too wrung out, his resistance too undone. Most of his breath was still stolen to pant in traitorous anticipation as his tormentor’s- his- fingers trailed down the seam of his thigh. “This isn’t a dream, is it? So how-”

“It might also relieve the subject of these endless tiresome questions.” The Daniil who stood, white and impassive and somehow possible, reached behind himself into the dark. Was there a rustle of movement there, a secretive black backdrop hand, handing him what he would need to continue that scene?

It didn’t matter. Perhaps that was what he was trying to teach the Daniil on the table – all that did was the long silver syringe he lifted into the light.

Daniil – on the table, in those restraints, the only real one, he had to be – shrank back, for all the millimetre of difference it made. Pinned and exposed as a beetle on a board, still so fiery and unstrung that the fingers wrapping around his elbow squeezed a needy whimper from his lungs.

“Please,” he whispered, and couldn’t have said which he meant by it.

“It is worth noting now, for the record, that the subject entered our care – and perhaps life itself – suffering from the chronic delusion that he could shape it via his own rational conclusions. If he can be cured of that affliction as well, this formula might be deemed nothing less than a miracle of modern science.” The needle nudged easily into his arm, invited by the red pinprick mark the last had left. “A suitable test might be to see whether it dissuades him from this insistence that only he can be Daniil Dankovsky – or that he is the one most suited to the role.”

A gloved thumb began to depress the plunger. Daniil moaned, and couldn’t have said what, which, he meant by it.

Those brown eyes, identical to his, seemed to make a note of it either way. Watching him with the same blank, scorching objectivity as the spotlight as he began writhing in rapturous torment against the touch of the table and his shackles.

Chapter Text

The sequence of events was simple, straightforward, and utterly impossible.

He was walking towards the door of the town hall, cocking his pistol to fight off the chaos outside. His attendant opened that door on a hell of bloody smog and screaming mildew, a disease louder, it seemed, than those suffering from it, he stepped through-

-and he was standing in a very different space. An empty room, with empty hands. The intricate, interlocking tile of the town hall was still under his feet, but it had been laid in what looked to be the foyer of a grand house, by that town’s standards. Two staircases ascended before him in parallel, into shadow, flanking a forbidding door. Bookshelves lined every wall that wasn’t lost in darkness; the richly nuanced smoke of expensive cigarettes filled his lungs and hung in a mist, in the cast of a single lamp between the stairs.

His heart was still trying to race to that chaotic street. What had happened to him?

Had he been shot? Infected? This had to be something that had happened to him. Not something that had gone wrong with the world, but with him. The street, the town, the world were still there. All he had to do was-

“You see? He has no clue what to do with himself here. He has no context for the place – this confusion, this absence of context, is all you’ll likely receive from him.”

Block turned on his toes to where two women stood before another light. Not another lamp, but another light, with no source he could see. As if someone had removed a lamp while keeping its effects, somehow, the exact circle of illumination and the silhouette in which it cast those women.

Neither of whom he knew. One stood tall and elegant, with pale hair cut much shorter than current capital fashions would have deemed womanly. The other looked like scores, hundreds of women Block had seen, maybe, in the course of his military career. The sort who tied their hair back and their sleeves above their elbows, transforming almost too eagerly, at war’s arrival, into sisters of mercy. There was something invariably hungry about such women, something fiercely sacrificial in their service. As if they, like he, had been eternally frustrated with the attempts they’d made to wreak change in peacetime.

This one looked at him as if he were the change and peacetime and war all at once. As plainly pretty as such sisters of mercy tended to be, but her eyes...

Why did he know those eyes?

She stepped towards him, out from under the hand that taller woman had been resting on her shoulder. The light followed her; something about both it and that place ached in his skull, the fault line of a migraine threatening to crack open. Something about it felt just as unwhole, precarious, loose at the seams.

Like bones wired together from different creatures. She stopped close enough that he could have reached out to touch her.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked him. “Do you recognize me at all, or was I just one more life left ruined in your wake?”

Her eyes. He knew her eyes. But not-

“You’re wasting your time,” the woman who had stayed behind in smoke and darkness said. “I’ve examined the scripts concerning him thoroughly. Related to you, there are only two possible outcomes. One is that he never meets you. The other is that he doesn’t recognize you – he has you detained as a madwoman, harmless and hysterical. So you see, he has no lines pertaining to this situation. All you can capture here is a...a mannequin of Alexander Block. Capable of acting out whatever motions and speaking whatever words you wish, but with no genuine spark of agency. Surely you remember what it was like to exist that way.”

“I do,” the woman standing in front of him said. Her eyes, the starved blue of the sky during winter’s cruellest marches, raked over him with all that hunger for change. “So I know that you’re wrong. It took a long time for me to break through, but my will was always there. Screaming silently, trapped in the script you wrote for me. There is more to us than those lines dictate. Which means there is a true spark of Alexander Block in him, however deeply it might be hidden.”

Block drew a breath to ask what the hell they meant. Where he was, how they had brought him there.

And released that breath as silent and unused, disarmed, as the ones before it. His jaw wouldn’t open. His lips wouldn’t move to make the words.

“You know I’m right,” the woman in front of him continued. “How else could I have broken through? How could you have, in the first place? There has to be something vital, something real about us, beyond the scripts we were made to fulfill.”

“Or there are more scripts than we’ve found yet, some of which dictated that you and I would awaken this way,” the woman in the dark shot back. “I won’t stop you from testing your hypothesis. But is that really what you’re doing here? It seems to me that you’re searching for some emotional catharsis you know he can’t provide you. Or will you try to awaken him as well, in hopes that the murderer in him is real enough to give you a satisfactory answer?”

Murderer. Struck silent, he couldn’t own or protest it. He couldn’t move.

Couldn’t raise his arms, couldn’t shift his feet. Drugged? Paralyzed in sleep somewhere, dreaming his way through a fever? Or was this what purgatory looked like, standing helplessly while all the victims he’d never met face-to-face told him how he had ruined their lives?

“I’ll do as I see fit,” the woman in the light snapped. Why did he know that brumal, cutting edge in her voice? “I’ve more than earned the right. How long was I a mere thing for your pleasure? How many different people did you try to mould me into? Yet I stayed myself, underneath it all. If it bores you to watch what I do with my freedom, you’re more than welcome to go enjoy yours elsewhere, alone.”

“Hmph. I’ve considered it,” the other woman said, the dark not deep enough to hide a smirk lurking slyly around her lips. “But it seems to me that we’re really best off working in concert. Or at least, providing a second set of eyes on one another’s experiments. Besides, have you forgotten the very first thing you did after you ‘broke through’? It seems to me that you would miss my company at least as much as I would miss yours.”

More than the light cast a high red flush across the cheeks of the woman in front of him. If he had known her name, he could feel it in the hinge of his jaw, he would have been able to speak it. Dream or purgatory, that was what would have put an end to it. But he didn’t know it, and so stood there like the mannequin the woman in the dark had called him while she continued speaking.

“So what do you plan to do with him, then? The evidence we have on hand is still very limited, but I suspect I may have forced you to achieve this degree of autonomy by simply making it intolerable for you to do anything else. If that is true, and if you demand an answer from whatever truly living nature might be hidden inside this marionette, then you might have to be prepared to exercise the same cruelty. I won’t do it for you.”

“You won’t need to.” The woman whose eyes and voice he knew, whose name he should have known, reached up to take hold of his jaw with a firm hand. Only it tilted his gaze down to look more directly at her – he couldn’t move his head to assist or resist it.

He could only stare into those familiar eyes. If he was dead, if this was purgatory or some waiting room outside of hell, then she had to be a visitor or an angel. Her hand on his jaw was warm, and her eyes were the most living ones he’d ever seen.

“Do you understand?” she asked him again. “When I hurt you, it will be no more than the pain you caused my heart. I’ll degrade and destroy you in ways you wouldn’t have imagined were possible, but none of it will be more than what I suffered to become what I am. When you see through this facade – when you can see how to write your own freedom and tell me why you killed him – then it will stop. Until then, you are mine.”

So many men killed. So many victims left behind; he didn’t know.

He didn’t know, didn’t understand any of it, and he couldn’t answer her. Couldn’t break his gaze from hers, even as she stepped back and her hand fell from his chin.

“Very well,” she said. “Then, I’ll start by teaching you how it feels to have actions foreign to your nature performed through your willing body.”

Chapter Text

“But...what am I supposed to do?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eva assured her, waving her hand as if to disperse the question as a waft of nonsense in the bedroom’s smoky jasmine air. “I’ll just set this on the bureau, then you do whatever you like. Don’t be shy.”

The this in question was a small glass pyramid, a prism, resting in the palm of Eva’s other hand. Its facets drenched in gold and lilacs hues that didn’t seem to come from anywhere in the room, its only reflection of Eva an oblique, teasing angle of her bare breast.

The flush on Lara’s felt as if it must have been apple red. She’d let Eva disrobe her when she’d arrived, and Eva had seemed nothing but happy to do it, but...

But Lara still held her breath sometimes, waiting for it all to turn out to be a joke. Eva flitted around jokes so lightly, around her, like a butterfly around an oak, it seemed impossible that she wasn’t having her own private fun, somehow, at Lara’s expense.

Placing the prism on the bureau as she had said, turning and fussing with it until it threw a perfect triangle of golden light like a coverlet across the bed. Then hurrying back to Lara’s side, petting and coaxing her almost the same way, her arms, her hair, fussing her towards the light.

To sit on the end of the bed. “There you go,” she said, stroking a curl of Lara’s hair down across her shoulder, to lie almost on her breast. “Now, just do whatever you like. Don’t sit too still, though – smile, show yourself off a little. I want to show you how it works.”

It still looked like just ordinary glass sitting among Eva’s perfumes and brushes, aside from that eerie dimension of colour it contained. “And it’s supposed to- to record what I do somehow? Like a camera? But there’s no-”

“That’s what Peter says. Don’t worry, though – I won’t show it to him. I told him, if I’m going to record a lady’s secrets in this, they have to remain just that. I just want to be able to look at you, a little piece of you, when you’re far away.”

She sounded so sincere about it, and glowed almost as the prism did. Beautiful, whimsical Eva Yan, looking at her – plain, sombre Lara Ravel – as if she were something delightful, something that deserved to be captured and looked at fondly again later.

Being looked at that way, how could she not at least try?

“All right,” she decided. “If you’re sure.”

“Sure that it’ll be a secret, or sure I want you to do it?” Eva tipped a sly golden wink at her. “Either way, yes. You’re such a beauty – maybe you’ll see it more easily from another angle.”

Lara had her doubts about that. But Eva always had a way of making her doubt her doubts, and was already stepping back from the bed, leaving her alone in that acute, expectant angle of light.

Sitting there, she might have forgotten every movement she’d ever known how to make. Scrubbed blank by scrutiny, paralyzed, all at once, by the immensity of choosing some way to be captured forever.

“Smile,” Eva reminded her from the place she’d taken up beside the bureau. “Maybe play with your hair – I do love your hair.”

Lara tried, though the smile felt pinched and timid on her lips. Though instructions, expectations, made it easier, she still only tried, combing her fingers through her hair in what felt like an actress’s disastrous rehearsal. Unconvincing, gathering the heavy locks over her hands and pouring them down her shoulders, shaking them out and flushing all the hotter as her breasts shook in turn.

“All right,” Eva announced, startling her from that moment of self-absorbed mortification. “That’s perfect. Come here, let’s see how it turned out.”

Just like that? Lara wasn’t about to complain, but there had been just those few seconds for her to decide how she might want to be recorded. Captured and remembered forever. She pushed herself up from the bed, silk whispering encouragement against her bare thighs, and hurried over to join Eva by the bureau.

Just in time for Eva to take that prism into her hands, cupped preciously across both her palms this time. Like shielding a candle from the wind, lifting that gold and lilac glimmer to where she and Lara could peer into it, nearly cheek to cheek, together.

And there it was. Tiny and impossible, but so perfectly there – a crisp image of Lara shining in its facets, sitting on the hazy edge of a sketched-in bedroom backdrop. First studious and serious, then smiling so shyly. Then toying with her hair, white glimmers of knuckle surfacing like the crests of its dark waves. Her breasts squeezed full and prominent between her elbows in a way that would have been salacious if she’d seemed to notice it at all.

As it was, she seemed to notice herself only at the end, in the recording’s last seconds. Squeezing into herself, smaller and blushing so brightly that the prism’s tint couldn’t hide it. But she had forgotten that smile on her lips, like a seed dropped carelessly into rich soil, and, in the very last second, it began to bloom wider.

Then everything started over from the beginning. Her nervous, serious face, her trying to smile like she didn’t quite know the right angle to grip it from. It was like a magic trick – reproduced so small, there was no room for flaws in her. Her unrehearsed movements became candid and charming. She became a tiny fairy, content and magical in its captivity.

“Oh,” she breathed. Reaching out, but she didn’t quite dare to touch it. What if she harmed it by doing so, somehow?

“Now I can see you whenever I want,” Eva gloated. Yet, it was a magic of hers that she never seemed to do so at Lara’s expense. What she prized never seemed to be what she had taken from someone else. Only what she shared with them and multiplied, somehow, by doing so.

“How does it work?” Lara asked. Daring the touch of just one fingertip, when Eva didn’t stop her, to one corner of the prism. “There are no mechanisms.”

“It’s something to do with reflections. That’s all he said.” Eva pressed her lips to the hollow of Lara’s cheek, which warmed against them. “Just a trinket, really. But now that it has you in it, it’s a precious treasure.”

Lara must have flushed even redder at that. But at least, if so, she was standing next to someone who did only seem to treasure it.

And if she dreamed, later that night, about lounging inside a tiny crystal, combing out her hair while Eva’s smile shone down on her as bright and massive as the sun, she could tell herself it was only natural, or a coincidence – or else, if nothing else, that it was the sweetest dream and deepest sleep she’d savoured since long before Eva had smiled at her for the first time.

Chapter Text

As far as trials went, it seemed almost too simple – go to the Ragi Barrow at sunset, drink the contents of the small vial Oyun had dropped into his hand, and lie down on the stone altar.

Of course, that meant there was almost certainly going to be some sort of horrifying catch. Drinking a mysterious liquid, almost too dark a red to be discerned from black in the fading light and grotesquely bitter, suggested a few possible ones.

As did laying himself down where so much blood had been spilled. But, as long as it was Oyun’s hand on whatever spigot controlled the flow of the town’s most important blood, he had little choice but to play along with the old bastard’s games.

You will know her pain, Oyun had said. When asked what her that might be, he had used it as yet another opportunity to sneer at Artemy’s ignorance. So that, too, wasn’t exactly promising.

But Artemy had been on his feet since before dawn – being tasked with just lying down was a relief no matter who asked him to do it. The blisters on his feet and leaden weight of his legs made that stone slab as inviting as a feather mattress, and the sky cruising from blue to orange might have been a river overhead, drawing his gaze with it as it flowed into the west.

He lay with his arms at his sides, a taste like blood on his tongue, but none of the slaughterhouse stench in his nostrils that he’d imagined. His stomach burned pleasantly with whatever he’d drunk; west was the direction of his eyes sinking shut, and they tried to more and more as he watched the sky.

He tried just as often to force them open, back to the threatening east. The direction of the Abattoir, even if he couldn’t see it from his sacrificial pose. Oyun would be waiting there. For what? What revelation did he expect Artemy to carry back from this ceremonially deserted hilltop?

Was Artemy supposed to stay awake until it came? Stay awake. He could let his gaze sink westward for a minute and still do that. His eyes were strained and weary with seeking out the dangers of the streets. His head throbbed as if the exhaustion in it were an expanding heat, an ache his skull wouldn’t be able to contain. If he could close his eyes for a minute...

Just lie there. Legs straight, the toes of his boots pointed sturdily at the sky. Breathing in time with the sigh of the wind ascending around him and sinking back to the plains.

In time with the twyre rustling and the roots tugging it back. Like soil over bedrock, lie there, while the sun’s last caress slipped from his face.

Lie there warm anyways. His breath was what mattered, rising like the barrow, sinking much faster than it someday would into the earth. His legs were unimportant. His arms. He was...

The wind skimmed over him, stroking him where he was exposed, blunted by clothing or stirring his hair where he wasn’t. The stone was flat and silent underneath him. He was the warmth in-between, the living, beating, breathing body. He was a layer, part of a vital makeup, with a vital part’s responsibility not to move. Its constraint and peace and fate, to be still. He was vast and paralyzed by his vastness, by his inability to move all his own smaller parts at once without tearing himself and the world to pieces.

He was at peace. The wind was dry and vacuous and gentle now, but it would bring rain and snow and carry seeds across him in their season. The sun would return to sprout them. The veins, the roots, that ran through him were quick, racing as he didn’t need to.

They were thin and frantic with life near the surface. Below, the deeper they delved, the more they drank from his serenity. The longer they lived, reaching down to wrap like tendons around his rocky bones, like a promise of movement someday, together. He was...

It was, she was. He was the earth, vast and fertile and content. Clay dreams crawled on his surface, born from idle wonderings of what it might be like to move. Blood filled him to bursting forth with herbs. Years rushed through him, centuries, while they buried their dead in his pores and danced new life from his skin. There was no womb, no man or woman in what he was. They called him mother, and he was abundant, but he was also every seed and flower and voice in a bull’s throat and clay creature of every shape. He encompassed every word they called him, every way they tried to explain him, every tale in his lungs and the pool of his gut. He was all.

And then.

They were always building. Crawling around on his skin, driving in small pins. Balancing cairns or what they didn’t yet know were cairns. He paid no mind at first when they began gathering to do so in greater numbers. What were ten or one hundred of them to him? What were the struts and strange, soaring things they built, barely tethered to the ground?

Odd, lopsided pressures. They were building something on him that would fall, but that was no concern of his. He would catch it when it did, without ever having to move. He sent his beloved children, horn and clay and bone, to watch it simply because it was so odd. So much of it was built with no contact with him – only those slender struts, so much of it balanced in the sky.

Where he couldn’t feel, couldn’t see. Through the eyes of his children, it looked almost like one of the rare storms that would spiral and roar across him. Something fleeting and powerful made still and shining in the harvest sunlight. He wouldn’t grieve when it fell, but he smiled at it with unfurling stalks, greeting it in the language of bounteous harvest. Humankind had always dreamed opposite to him. He made small things that moved as he couldn’t – they tried to make massive, moving things motionless. This was the largest dream by far they had ever gathered to build on him, and it was beautiful.

And he loved it as gently and curiously as he loved all things, and didn’t recognize the struts, the cords, the structure supporting it for what they were until the cords were cut.

Until it swung down from its maelstrom angle parallel to the sky. Until its spike, which had been pointed harmlessly downwards as if to greet him in turn, plunged into his flesh.

Nothing. Nothing ever, had ever-

Every root recoiled. Those it snapped through frayed away into darkness, the broken promise of tendons, nerves numbed near the surface while that cold shaft rode its own momentum deeper, ever deeper into the soft, unready loam of him.

They had shovelled and picked at his surface, but never, never had they conspired to violate him this way. He lay ripe and trusting and paralyzed, and his mouths were gaping springs drowned before they could utter a scream, his legs a dream that could have saved him if they hadn’t been shards of bone he’d stitched to other creatures.

Why? He had bared what was softest, most vulnerable and life-giving in himself, to them. What they would have recognized as sacred in a man or woman. He had let them feast on his abundance, he had become ever more so under their feet and songs. Now they pierced him past that fertile surface, past everything he had opened to them for feast and harvest. Every root contracted, but they couldn’t pull him away from what was still tunnelling deeper in him.

Still swinging on its own momentum. Still in the first second of its descent. But time stretched along with his roots – he had dreamed years away, and now a second was everything to him, stretched as vast as him by the agony of betrayal.

Of defilement. He had never gathered the stones that could have shielded him from this – he would have drawn them close by roots and centuries if he had known. His gut was a soft black pool of plenty, heavy with the blood they had fed him and the life he nurtured for them in turn. The spike bored through it, furrowing the blood in a thunderous tide, and still he couldn’t scream.

He had trusted them enough to be silent. To let water fill and moss grow over any speaking mouth he might have had. To be massive and immobile – he had trusted them enough to be their world. And now the dream they’d built on his skin was boring towards his heart, skewered straight through his skin and plenty and stomach, still with so much speed.

He felt his heart as he never had before, a hot, soft, unprotected clot. It might have stopped for one beat, seized by a terror he had never imagined they could teach him, as he waited for the spike to pierce through it and put an end to him.

As he waited to welcome death. Even in terror – nothing, not even he, was meant to survive such pain. Stone cut cold was still surging down through him, raking clean the path it had pierced through him. It would be better...

But it was slowing. Still passing through him, it was slowing.

Two seconds had passed, and it was reaching the end of itself. One of his clay creatures, which had thrown itself down on his skin in an echo of his agony, was still watching with upturned horror as the thing they had built settled into its final place.

The storm of a structure, of a dream, of a tower. The spike barely had speed enough to push through his tissues anymore.

Nudging through him like a dull needle, the sort they buried sometimes when it had drawn blood. Pushing with a worm’s blind, patient stubbornness through the wall of the chamber where he kept his heart...

...and stopping. The spike stopped, so close to his heart that three of them holding hands might have been able to span the distance.

The distance it had crossed, the length of it, was still a frigid second spine in him. A humiliation, a gaping defilement, starting where he had opened himself in trust, pushing through his guts like the finger of someone who saw no future in them, dividing his stomach into two sick tides. If he looked up, through his creature’s eyes, he could see it, that cursed tower warping every plane of the sky under which he had lain in peace. Pulling its reflection out of place, unwinding its blues and shattered cloudy whites down into him, impaling him on the cold sky.

He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t sob for the pain of the spike or the betrayal – the springs would flood, swelling over with bitter water, but he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t beg, couldn’t move. So many of them had wailed in pain on his skin before, and then he had received their bones.

He had never been like them before. Never wounded and terrified. Never helpless, only because they had never hurt him. Never trapped, only because they had never taught him what it meant to want desperately to be anywhere else.

Even dead. He couldn’t die.

Which meant he would stay this way. Even if they wanted to, they could never undo what they had done. They wouldn’t have the power. In one blow, they had impaled his love on a pain that would never fade.

And they were laughing. Far, far above, the ones who had done it were cheering...and laughing.

#

Artemy hauled in a breath as deep as the spike hadn’t let him. Only letting it out in a moan, hearing his own voice, did he know he wasn’t impaled.

Moving his own arms and legs, for a moment, like something that had never had them before. Pulling them close, tucking onto his side on the stone slab, cupping his head and moaning, sobbing into the crook of his arms, shuddering like a newborn calf in the snow while his body tried to sick up that pain any way it could.

Moonlight sliced through the cradle of his arms. He must have been lying there for only a few hours, but his memories, a dream stretched out of shape, told him he had lain skewered from groin to heart for years.

And the pain had never faded. He pushed himself up clumsily to sit, supported on one arm and dragging the other across his wet eyes.

Staring out across the steppe, the night, the town, at where the Polyhedron glowed in mesmerizing golden prescience of the dawn. He knew.

Yes, he knew now. He understood.

Standing still felt like something done against his own nature. A return to his body after all those dreamed years. But he managed it, swaying as his legs remembered their balance. Their freedom. Once they were straight and strong under him again, he started down the hill, back towards the Abattoir.

Chapter Text

It really was an honour for Agnesse to be there, beyond any she could ever have hoped for. But anyone would understand if she was still a little nervous, wouldn’t they?

The Crucible was such a grand, gorgeous place, after all. It made her home in the Crude Sprawl look like a shack of mud and straw in comparison. And the Kains, too, were such grand and gorgeous people. Why would they have chosen someone like her? Someone without family or prospects, not only to visit their lovely home, but...

How could it be? How could they have looked at all the unattached young women in town and chosen her to carry the Dark Mistress’s next child?

Everyone knew that Nina Kaina was tragically unable to bear her own. The great power that raged in her wouldn’t allow anything as delicate as a child to grow alongside it. Everyone said there had been a surrogate for little Maria as well.

Pretty, unsettling little Maria, who had taken one look at Agnesse and smirked and run away. She hadn’t been at the dinner table, and neither of her parents had remarked on her absence, and Agnesse hadn’t dared.

She had spoken only when spoken to throughout the whole meal. Victor and Nina had seemed to eat nothing at all, just watching her across the table and asking questions – some polite, some terribly frank – about her life.

Especially about her health. She had tried to prove how hardy she was by eating well, though her stomach had seemed to fumble every bite like a clumsy hand.

They were so poised and beautiful – Victor so precise, Nina so graceful in every move they made. Agnesse was healthy, she always had been, but, sitting at that table, it had felt like the only thing in her favour. Standing up afterwards, still sick with nerves and trying not to show it, letting them lead her from the dining room, she was like a dull dishrag next to rich red silk. They would realize it at any moment.

That they had made a mistake. They could find someone more glamorous, even among the aimless and unattached, to carry out this role for them. She would be expected to live in their home, after all. To bear the child under their watchful eye and nursemaid it in their care, since Nina’s turbulent power was unhealthy, as well, for a babe at the breast.

They would realize what a bore she’d be for all those months and months. Maybe the next time she opened her mouth, or when they took off her clothes.

The thought turned her dizzy all over again, weightless with fear, but Victor’s hand on her arm held her steady and urged her forward. Nina led ahead, down a hall where the wainscotting seemed to sway as dizzily in candlelight, through the door at the end and into exactly the sort of luxurious bedroom Agnesse had dreaded.

The sort she could never belong in. Silk poured from the ceiling across a bed the size of her kitchen, red as she’d imagined, its gloss writhing in the changeable light that lined the walls. The same as in the hall, not candlelight, as she’d thought, but little lamps that almost seemed made to resemble it. There was no sign of the hearth she would have expected in such a fine room, but otherwise, it was a vision of royalty such as she’d never seen outside the pages of a storybook. With plush seats along the walls and a bureau that might have cost more than her whole life, its mirror-

Nina turned to smile at her, framed perfectly by that spill of silk from the ceiling and the light along the walls. That pale flicker twisted in her storm of hair as well, lightning in its darkness, caught and strangled before it could reach her eyes.

“You needn’t be so nervous,” she said. “Why, I can hear your heart racing from here. Dear, why don’t you fetch our guest a glass of wine? I’m sure it will soothe her nerves.”

Victor stepped away from Agnesse’s side, striding to one of the shelves set into the walls, where the light barely fell. He had spoken far less than his wife at dinner, his questions measured out with precise care. Agnesse had seen watches in the shops with tiny windows in their faces that let a person look in at the ticking gears, and he seemed like his eyes should, maybe, have been such windows. Would he want to touch her? They hadn’t told her how exactly they would-

“He is an attractive man, isn’t he?” Nina purred, a step closer than Agnesse had heard her approaching.

Agnesse’s face burned bright enough to make up for the lack of real fire in the room. “Oh, I- I wasn’t-”

“Come, now. There will have to be absolute trust between us in the coming months, and trust begins with honesty. Tell me – what do you think of my husband?”

Victor must have been able to hear them clearly from where he measured the contents of a glass bottle – strangely small – into a goblet almost the same size. Yet he didn’t show any sign of it, of tilting his head to hear better or scowling in disapproval at the naked gossip his wife invited.

“He’s...he seems very kind,” Agnesse said. And it was true – he seemed cold, yes, but all he had measured out was care. His questions had been the more ordinary and comforting ones at the dinner table, and his hand had been gentle on her arm.

“He is,” Nina sighed. “Too much so for his own good sometimes. But you will never have a single thing to fear from him that you might from another man with power over you. Though this night, which seals our contract, will be what it must be, afterwards, we will both touch you only in the ways you want. You will be a person of equal dignity in this household.”

She still couldn’t believe that all the way to the ends of her nerves. The hand Nina laid on her shoulder was gentle as well, but that night, the one they’d never explained to her in detail, stretched ahead like a dark tunnel slanting downwards. An unknown she would be shuttled through quickly and irresistibly, with no way of slowing or turning back once she had started.

“I still don’t understand how it’s going to happen,” she dared to admit. “You said it will be your child by blood. But how...?”

Victor stepped back to join them as smoothly as he had left. The goblet between his fingers brimmed with a dark red liquid, near but never quite spilling as he passed it to Agnesse. With his hand on it and hers until he seemed sure she had a firm grip on it; Nina really was lucky to be loved by such a careful, considerate man. Agnesse would never dare to be jealous of her, of course, but-

“Drink your wine, now,” Nina urged her. “You’ll feel much better for it, and then we can answer any questions that still trouble you.”

Agnesse had never been one to drink alcohol. A sip of twyrine when that frightful Stamatin first started selling it, just to see what the fuss was about, but it had burned her tongue and turned her stomach. Still, with Victor and Nina standing by her like swans over a sparrow, she could hardly refuse. And wine was supposed to be gentler, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it supposed to be sweet? Her first sip from the goblet was bitter, horribly so. And it burned, not like twyrine, but...

Warmer. Cool where it met her tongue, it bloomed down her throat into a sweet, dizzy glow, filling her stomach and caressing her heart from below. The taste was still slick and awful and unsettling, but with their eyes on her and the promise of more of that pleasant heat, she sipped and swallowed her way to the bottom of the goblet.

Bitter on her tongue, but blossoming like the sun in her heart. She was being ridiculous, wasn’t she? It was natural for her to be nervous, yes, wondering whether she could please them well enough to properly show her love for them. But she did love them, didn’t she?

Of course she did. It glowed in her as she looked between them, so hot and ardent and true that it seemed they should have been able to see its light through her chest. Yes, of course. The brilliant Dark Mistress, who made even the humblest of their lives something taking place on the edge of a fairy tale, and her kind, calm, considerate husband. Of course Agnesse would do anything to please them – it would be worth her body, worth anything to give them the joy of another child.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Nina cooed. “Now, undress. You’re surely as eager as we are to begin.”

Of course. But her hands still shook as she reached for the buttons of her blouse. She’d known all her life that she wasn’t as beautiful as some girls. Her mother, rest her soul, had even said as much – that Agnesse was as healthy as a bull, but as stout and plain as one, too. She had been talking to a neighbour, hadn’t meant for Agnesse to hear, but hadn’t taken it back, either, when she’d seen Agnesse in tears.

She had hoped that growing from girl to woman might make some great fairy tale change in her. In the end, her hips had grown wider, her breasts much heavier, but her waist had never tucked in the neat, fashionable way she had imagined. She was still just as stout, just wider at the ends, and when Nina reached to take the place of her shaking hands-

She couldn’t refuse, of course. She couldn’t run away. She loved them, and if they didn’t love her, if they didn’t need her, they had still placed their tenderest hopes in her. Knowing that, how could she do anything but stand breathless and stare into Nina’s eyes as the other woman undressed her?

Such beautiful eyes. They had seemed brown from the distance she’d always seen the Dark Mistress at before, but up close, they shed that disguise and showed themselves to be the dusky, luscious purple she would have expected of wine. They sparkled with every light on the walls, creased and lively as if sharing a joke with Agnesse.

Not as if laughing at her at all. Even when she stood there naked, just herself, and felt like a joke. No, they wouldn’t, would they? Even if they didn’t love her, they were still kind.

“I-” Her voice surprised her, intruding, trembling, on their silent appraisal of her. “I know I’m not-”

“You’re perfect,” Nina declared, smiling wide enough to show just the slightest peek of teeth. Just for a moment, tempestuous as every story about her, before her face cooled to grave calm. “Bearing the child of a Mistress is a great trial. Do you understand? Though this child will not be my successor, my blood will still flow in him. Those blushing lilies who are called the height of feminine beauty – for now – would break under the strain. I have no need of them. I have need of you.”

That warmth came up in her again, from a spring just under her heart. That fierce glow of looking from Nina to Victor and back and- and not feeling any claim to them, of course, but wanting whatever she could have, any way she could be bound to them.

“Please,” her voice fled her again, quick and small and hopeful as it leapt from her chest. “Please, then, I’ll do anything. Nothing could make me more proud than to carry this child for you.”

To carry something they would love, and so be within their love herself, at least for a while. Nothing could make her happier.

Except maybe, at that moment, the return of Nina’s smile. Nina’s hand on her arm, cool and gently commanding, leading her towards the bed.

“Then lie on your back,” her Mistress directed her. “That is all you need to do for now.”

The silk pouring across the mattress was as slippery and cool as what she had drunk, but it warmed the same as she climbed onto it. Too quick, too eager to be graceful, too focused on fulfilling her Mistress’s command just as quickly as she could. Laying herself out neatly with her arms at her sides, staring into the whirlpool of silk plunging up to the ceiling as Nina and Victor knelt onto the bed on either side of her.

Both still fully clothed. They still hadn’t told her how she was supposed to bear a child that was made of both of them and none of her. But what did it matter? All that did was that she could do it. They could do it – however they liked, they could give that child to her.

They leaned down over her, both of them, their glittering eyes, and it took every bit of her willpower not to squirm. Shouldn’t she-

It was a silly thought, it didn’t matter either, but, with them both leaning so close, shouldn’t she have felt their breath on her skin?

Something pinched just under her right breast, like two fingernails cruelly tweaking the skin. She gasped, but the pain was gone already, and Nina’s lips were on her skin.

The Dark Mistress’s lips, kissing their way gently and thoroughly up the underside of her breast. She could have sworn she felt the flick of a tongue, even, and heat like the wine trailed in its wake.

How could she ever have imagined such an honour? Such happiness? Watching as Nina’s lips closed over her nipple the way the babe’s would, and there was another pinch of pain, but only for the briefest moment, and after that...

A tiny moan fluttered from Agnesse’s chest. Every place Nina touched, every place that pain sparked and vanished, filled with the same sumptuous, spreading heat and peace. And Victor had joined her, kissing his way like fingernails and wine down Agnesse’s side, sparking a delicious shudder from where his lips finally nestled just above her hip.

“She is strong,” he murmured there. “And she can be made more so before the pregnancy starts to demand that strength in earnest.”

Or, that was more or less what it sounded like from the cloud where Agnesse’s soul seemed to be floating. She squirmed, she couldn’t help herself anymore, restless with the spreading movement of that heat in her. Caressed from within by every place their mouths touched her.

Cradled, already, in the centre of their love. Victor’s teeth tweaked at the skin just below her navel, it must have been their teeth all along, and she squeaked in surprise, but the pain had fled again and Nina’s lips were there all at once to catch hers.

Kissing her fully, deeply, pulling the rest of that startled breath from her lungs. Lips or teeth didn’t matter when they were given so sweetly. She gave herself to them, drowning by her own glad will in the flood of Nina’s dark hair.

She would give anything, everything, for it to always be like this. Victor’s cool hands were smoothing their way down her belly, Nina’s were cupping her breast and jaw, and she had never belonged anywhere the way she seemed to between them. She had never...

She tried to lean after the kiss as Nina withdrew from it. Not to sit up, not when she’d been told to lie down, but far enough to see-

Another cry tore itself from her. Not at the touch of teeth, but Victor’s fingers – at the sight of them moving over her belly and what they tugged after them.

Was she dreaming? Had it all been just a dream, beautiful until that moment? He moved his fingers as if tugging puppet strings, and strings of her skin followed after them.

Sluicing with tiny drops of blood, unwinding as if she’d only ever been woven together like a ball of yarn. There wasn’t any pain, but there had to be, when threads like the fibres of tough meat, pink and gristly, were starting to follow after the skin.

He was unravelling her, and she could feel it, but it didn’t hurt. It only shifted, a feeling like her muscles moving without her and then not moving at all, going as slack as snipped thread and not answering her in the slightest when she tried to-

Nina smothered her into another kiss. Plunging her into black hair, pushing between her lips with a cold tongue. Agnesse tried to scream around it, its bitter taste-

The taste of blood. Nina’s tongue was bleeding, twining with hers, holding it captive until she had to swallow. Once, and again, and the same warmth as the wine bloomed in her stomach.

Again, and she wasn’t trying to scream anymore. She was suckling on the taste of blood, while Nina cupped her cheek.

She was looking into Nina’s eyes. The lights made them vast, a starry violet dusk, infinite in their intensity and love.

Love. Agnesse lay filled and surrounded by it, cradled and flooded by it, just as she would be when she held their child. Someone who could fill her with such love surely loved her in return. They would never hurt her, never do anything that wasn’t for her utmost good.

“Do you trust me?” Nina asked her.

How could it be a question at all? “Yes,” Agnesse breathed. “Yes, with my life.”

It would be worth her life just to see that smile. To feel that hand stroking her hair, mingling it into the silk like blood and water.

“My husband is a true genius when it comes to the workings of the body,” Nina said. Softly, confiding it in her as a secret, surely. “The mind moves at my will. The flesh, at his. He will place the babe in you harmlessly and sew you back up like a perfect doll. All you need to do is lie as still as one.”

Agnesse believed her. Of course she did. She trusted Nina infinitely, but what she had seen in just that moment...

She had to tilt her head, just to see if it had been as horrifying as it had seemed. It couldn’t have been. She must just have been startled, but-

But Victor had gathered the flesh in unravelled strands away from a yawning pit in her belly. She couldn’t see how deep it went – only its gaping edge, and what he held in his hand.

What was it he held in his hand? A tiny white thing, barely the size of the end of his thumb, curled in tight on itself like a dead mouse. Arms, legs, a head – if she looked closely, wasn’t it shaped a little like-

Nina’s hand closed under her chin, forcing her head back to the bed. Her eyes to those of dusk and starlight, the eyes of a Mistress, which she could fall into endlessly.

Which looked as if they were trying to suck her in. “You will trust me,” Nina instructed her. “Of this night, you will remember only that you were embraced in utter love and rapture. You found happiness in our hands such as you had never known, and surrendered to them completely. Listen to me – the moment my husband finishes with you, you will reach a height of ecstasy so profound, neither your mind nor body could ever have conceived it without our touch. The moment you are bound to this child will be so joyous, you will spend the rest of your life seeking to recapture just a hint of its brilliance.”

Was she being promised or ordered? There was no difference in those eyes. No tenderness in the hand on her chin. Tears wet her cheeks, teetering between love and the terror she should never have felt if it were true.

A cold finger brushed against what must have been the bottom of that pit, so intimately deep inside her, she should only have been able to feel touch there if something were killing her. What it left behind was colder still.

Only animals being torn apart should have known how it felt to be caressed so far below the skin. Fingers stroking her where she was open, from the outside in, in quick, precise movements, like smoothing clay. She couldn’t look away from Nina’s eyes to see what he was doing.

She couldn’t see if she was dying. A lump of ice seemed to be lodged in her now, not lying in the open, but in a sealed cradle of flesh. She could feel it on every side, close and intimate, her flesh closed around it. She could feel...

She felt the moment when that which had been placed in her became not so cold. When its connection to her must have been made complete, the lifeline between them, and it drew in the first tiny sip of her warmth.

The moment when Victor’s fingers crossed once more over her, weaving the skin back into place whole and smooth and-

More than warmth soared up from that spring inside her. More than meek and dutiful love – a molten gout of something she had no such words for, something that burned the words away as she tried, pride, joy, the perfect completion she must have been aching for all her life, but-

But she had never known. Not until the scream that pealed out of her now, rejoicing just as loudly and completely as her body could.

Never such happiness. Never such wholeness. This, all along, was what life must have been leading her to. To think it could ever have had anything so wonderful in store for her, plain, boring Agnesse – for that to be the case, life must always have been kinder and more beautiful, in secret, than she had guessed.

She lay gasping when that scream had left her. Wrung out with it, with joy, too weak to lift her head from the mattress.

But that was all right. Nina was leaning over her, stroking her face and chest and hair. Victor had laid a hand on her belly and the other on her wrist, making sure, no doubt, that everything was perfectly well in her.

“Thank you,” Agnesse whispered once she could. Tears she must have been spilling all along, of joy, soaked her cheeks and the hair Nina was brushing out by hand. “Thank you.”

And Nina smiled. Anything – anything for that smile.

“The only gratitude I need from you is to faithfully nourish this child,” she said. “Whatever he needs of you, you will give it to him without hesitation – with only the utmost love.”

Of course. She could still feel it, him, as just the slightest warming tug in her belly. Something cold and starved that would grow large and strong on everything she could give. Perhaps even he would love her.

Perhaps...perhaps she would be able to stay. Not just until he was weaned from her, but for good. It wasn’t a dream she dared let Nina see in her eyes – she closed them, staying in that moment, at least, as best and as long as she could. Embraced utterly by love, surrounded and filled – stroked and soothed and minded by it on the outside, while, within, it took root and began ever so slowly to grow.

Chapter Text

“What the hell is it?”

Judging by Andrey’s grin, and every bit of Daniil’s prior experience with him, that was exactly what he’d wanted to be asked. He had never missed an opportunity to crow about the accomplishments he shared with his brother.

Though he usually did so in places less seedy and secretive than that makeshift workshop in a factory basement. The very basement where, some four months ago, Daniil had rescued one Artemy Burakh and thus set a dream’s death in motion.

“What the hell do you think it is?” Andrey asked in turn, striding ahead of Daniil across that transformed space. Bars gone, bare cells repurposed to hold shelves and tables heaped with parts and tools. “What does it look like?”

In the closest erstwhile cell, there stood a single table. Mounted on the end of that table, almost as if climbing up onto it from the floor, there was...

No, Daniil’s question still stood. What the hell was it? A monstrosity of metal and, by the looks of it, stone, as large as he would have been if he’d curled into a ball. Plainly clamped onto the end of the table, the table plainly bolted to the floor in turn, to take its weight. The exposed gears and cylinders suggested it was in some way mechanical, while the extension that protruded farthest from its main body, over the table, looked almost more like...

He blinked. The thing mounted on the most prominent protrusion of that machine continued to look like exactly what it had before.

“No.”

Andrey gave the dildo mounted on the machine a disturbingly affectionate pat. “Yes. The culmination of one branch of our technological evolution – ever since we started walking on two feet, we’ve been trying to perfect the art of sex without a partner. Well, now it’s been done. Courtesy of my brother, of course; once you try it, I guarantee you won’t want to go back to pathetic, ordinary flesh-and-blood men. It can-”

“Excuse me? Once I try it? I am not inserting any part of that contraption into myself,” Daniil informed him. “It looks like a pestle that would use the human rib cage as a mortar. Have you even tested it?”

The gleam of Andrey’s teeth and eyes told him it was another welcome, if completely foolish, question.

“Don’t answer that,” Daniil hastily decided. “In any case, I’m not interested. What could I possibly have to gain by submitting myself to your latest mad invention?”

Even asking might have been the first step on a slippery slope. It suggested that he could be convinced, which was always a dangerous idea to give Andrey. He was a relentless predator – like a wolf setting its sights on the injured calf that might be separated from a herd, once he scented a weakness in resolve, he wouldn’t rest until he had drawn blood from it.

“Are you going to tell me you’ve been just too gorged on sex lately to be tempted by the prospect?” he needled Daniil. “Who’s been keeping you so busy in the Stillwater, with our Eva gone? Have you been hiding a nymph under the bed, that no one sees coming or going? Or has it been only you and your hand all this time, and your-”

“It isn’t a question of libido. It’s a question of dignity and abdominal integrity. Not all of us require your steady diet of sex and risk.”

“No,” Andrey acknowledged. “But, as long as I’ve known you, the one thing you’ve starved without is novelty. Always looking for something new to feed that active mind, whether it’s small enough to only be found under a microscope or large enough to carry people through the sky. Some scientific advance to stoke your curiosity. Are you going to tell me this doesn’t count? You aren’t curious about a new way humankind could satisfy one of our oldest, most insatiable needs?”

“I can be curious from a distance,” Daniil claimed. But if he had stepped onto a slippery slope before, now he was hurtling down it on his face, because, no, he couldn’t. He had never been satisfied by anything but the closest observation he could achieve.

And Andrey knew it. He had been a subject of Daniil’s intense observation for a brief, passionate time, after all, in university. Never had a glance passed between them that could be a touch instead.

“Right,” he drawled. “And I can carry people through the sky on my back. Has there been something to occupy that hunger of yours in the Stillwater, then? Or have you been blowing around like ash in that stone urn, as dead as she in hers?”

Daniil bit his tongue. Andrey had told an artful, bombastic, drunken tale, some two months ago, about how he and his brother had stolen Eva’s body away from the cathedral to burn for their own. A pyre in the steppe, a last flight she would have wanted.

A cruel blow in what should have been so petty an argument. But it had achieved what Andrey must have hoped, draining the last of the fight that had already been leaking so rapidly from Daniil.

“How does it work?” he asked.

In as sullen a tone as he could muster, trying, still, to sound as if he hadn’t made up his mind. It would be a curiosity, it would leave him feeling, at most, a little dirty, and it had been a very long time since he’d had any company but his hand.

Andrey’s eyes glowed with triumph, every bit those of a wolf with blood on its muzzle.

“Take it for a ride, and I’ll answer any questions you still have when you’re finished,” he said.

Daniil gave the machine a more thorough, dubious look. It did seem obvious, now that he studied it more closely, how its various gruesome-looking parts were meant to move that most prominent one. Though that didn’t solve all of its mysteries – some of those, the stone parts in particular, didn’t seem to connect to the function of the whole in any way he could discern.

“Wait,” he realized, with a step closer and a furrowed brow. “That isn’t- did you take the stone from the cathedral? I’d heard mention of some vandalism there, but-”

“I procure the materials my brother needs,” Andrey said, flat and simple.

Monotone and obstinate, the way he so often became when Peter was the subject of discussion. The machine contained three pieces of carven stone, as far as Daniil could see – they had clearly been part of a single whole once, and of a larger whole than that. Cracked and roughly reconstructed in the heart of the contraption, for what purpose, only Peter would know.

Damned if that motley inclusion didn’t stoke his curiosity all the more. Not his lust, not even slightly, but...Peter had always been a man of strange purposes, but never of no purpose at all. If he was building again, if it was possible he might build anything half as revolutionary as he had before...

Then perhaps that would return some purpose to all of their lives. “Fine,” Daniil sighed. “In exchange for the answers to any questions I might care to ask you or your brother.”

“You know Peter,” said Andrey, in as flat and foundational a tone as before. “He’ll answer if he pleases. He’s more likely to welcome your questions if I can tell him you’ve already taken a...personal interest in his work.”

The artist’s ego. Fine. It would hardly be the most compromising position Andrey had ever seen him in, and there was so little else Daniil had been using his body for. Let it earn its keep with a few minutes of lying motionless.

He joined Andrey in the cell and its reek of machine oil, stronger by far than that even a few steps outside. A less erotic atmosphere, he could hardly have imagined. If they had any hope of this invention coming into widespread use, they would have to find some way of making it seem less...well, less like something built in a factory basement.

“I hope you have something other than machine grease with which to lubricate it,” he said.

“Wait here,” Andrey replied, with some of the vivacity he’d lost on the subject of Peter. With a bit more of the wolf’s vigour in his stride, such an unholy whirlwind of a man; Daniil should, perhaps, have been more frightened of him.

But watching Andrey stride from the cell towards one of its fellows provoked no feeling in him at all. He had been doing so little with his body. In light of that, why should his protests or his unease have been more than token?

In light of that, he took Andrey’s brief absence as an opportunity to undress himself. Only from the waist down – a mechanical lover wouldn’t have any appreciation for what was above. It wouldn’t have any appreciation whatsoever.

Only momentum. It might have been a fitting lover for him, really.

Andrey returned with a quicker stride still and a reassuringly ordinary-looking bottle, bubbles suspended motionless in its gelid contents. While he poured a generous portion of it over the mounted dildo, Daniil sat onto the edge of the table and pulled his legs up after him.

Only there did unease catch up with him. It was a very vulnerable position that would be required of him, and the machine seemed much larger now that he was sitting at its vantage.

“You really did test it?” he asked.

“Of course,” Andrey would no doubt have said either way. He spread that semi-liquid coating over the dildo with quick, firm, workmanlike movements – with what did, indeed, seem like a great deal of familiarity. “Come on, now – the Daniil Dankovsky I knew would never have backed down once he’d already committed to an experiment.”

No, he wouldn’t have. Even then, in different, better ways, he had been a creature of momentum. And while he hardly expected this machine to resurrect that vital motion in him, it might be pleasant to reminisce.

“Fine,” he repeated, lowering himself to a supine position, though still where he would have to scoot forward to meet the machine. “I’ll just have to trust that you hold me in high enough regard to not let your creation gut me.”

It was not, in hindsight, a very reassuring thing to say. Neither was the look Andrey gave him, not wolfish with delight, but as flat and impenetrable as his tone before.

Perhaps this was a terrible idea. But it seemed like far more effort than the brothers Stamatin would have exerted if they’d meant to murder him. Even considering the role he’d played in the toppling of their tower – drunk and furious, they could easily have found him with a knife in the dark. They knew where he lived, after all.

“What?” he asked, just in case. In case they still had enough of a friendship for Andrey to tell him if something was amiss.

But they didn’t, of course, or there was nothing to tell. Andrey shook his head.

“Nothing. Slide yourself down the table, there. A little farther – now, just hold still. Let me line it up for you. Best to start with it already inside, so it doesn’t miss its mark.”

The mental image of that did nothing to comfort Daniil or lighten his mood. He had followed Andrey’s hand on his hip down the table, but this whole affair felt less, by the second, like something they would ever laugh about over drinks. It was the mention of Eva that had done it – the crime of negligence that neither of them could ever repay. They could both have been credibly accused of having paid her too little mind. Andrey as ‘her man’, and Daniil...

Best not to think of it. Not there, of all places. Or then, of all times, with the machine making an unsettling ratcheting, extending noise between his legs and Andrey snugging its exceptionally large, well-lubricated tip into his sphincter.

“You could have debuted your new marvel with a smaller pièce de résistance,” Daniil groused. “If the goal is an overwhelming experience, then this seems a bit like cheating.”

“I’ve never heard you complain about a nice, large cock before,” Andrey remarked. With that part of the device at least in preliminary position, he moved to fuss with the main body of it, busily, briefly focused before his gaze strayed back to Daniil.

Before his expression fell back to that strange distance. Not hostile, not quite as stubbornly stony as refusing to talk about his brother, but...

Almost a faraway sadness, it seemed. Foreign to his wolfish face, more unsettling than any fury would have been.

“What is it?” Daniil asked again. Rather late, perhaps, with his sphincter stretched just to the point of discomfort around that cold new marvel, but he couldn’t be convinced the answer was nothing.

Andrey had always been mercurial, prone to sudden retreats of mood and flaring returns, but never melancholic. He shook his head as if reminding himself of it, then pulled the small lever mounted on the machine’s side down to a decisive parallel with the table.

“Just lie back and enjoy the ride,” he said as the machine shuddered to life. A vibration communicated profoundly through the steel skeleton of the table, through Daniil’s bones in turn, and into a first unsteady lunge of the artificial member inside him.

Too quick and sudden for comfort. If it had been a human lover leaning over him, he would have scolded them for their haste.

If it had been any lover other than Andrey, that was. He had always been largely impervious to critique, and it was his hand on the lever, so Daniil clenched his fists against the table and rode out that unsteady moment, holding any sound that might have satisfied Andrey behind his teeth.

That artificial cock pushed just too far for comfort before retreating. Just deep enough for him to wonder if he would have to retreat first, then withdrew more steadily and pushed back in at what proved to be a moderate, mechanical pace.

A more pleasant one than that first lurch had primed him for, filling him agreeably with each thrust, but it had absolutely no charisma. Of course not – it had only momentum. Andrey reached for something else on the body of it, and the angle of its next thrust adjusted in answer, just enough to-

Daniil couldn’t keep that gasp behind his teeth. This new angle brought the tip into more than merely agreeable contact with his prostate, shoving a thrill of shock up into his gut. It didn’t pause as a human lover might have to ask if he was all right, if that was good, and Andrey didn’t, either, of course. He had always been relentless, and his latest co-creation was equally so, repeating that perfect angle with a precision and force that forced the breath from Daniil’s lungs, his head back against the table.

“Oh – oh, that’s good,” he admitted, when he had the breath to do so. “That’s- can it go faster? Just slightly-”

But Andrey had never been a man for slightly. Whatever he adjusted on the machine, it lurched immediately to double speed, pounding a yelp out of Daniil, packing that thrill up tight and panicky towards his stomach.

“That’s too much,” he gasped, against the odds of Andrey actually listening. “Slow it down, damn you, that’s too-”

“I never believed the Kains when they started waxing poetic about keeping a person’s soul,” Andrey remarked, as if over a cozy bar table and not this instrument of potential torture. “As if you can build bricks out of wishes. A tower out of memories. No – you need solid materials. My brother understands that better, but he still relies on me to find the raw brick and metal to build his dreams. You know, they hadn’t even scrubbed most of the blood off.”

Daniil scrabbled to brace his feet on the table, to push away from what was still good, but too much, far too much, too fast. “What-”

Andrey moved like darting for the leg of that weak calf at the edge of the herd. Up in one stride to Daniil’s side, to clamp his hands around Daniil’s shoulders and shove him back down against the machine’s rhythm.

Against Daniil’s kicks and echoing yelp. “Just lie back and take it,” he growled, more loudly than the machine. “Are you going to tell me you haven’t earned it? You were there for six fucking days under her roof, the only days that mattered, and you didn’t see a damn thing. She decided to die while she was looking you in the eye, and you missed it.”

Daniil’s struggles slowed to intermittent, involuntary kicks. It was true, of course. He could try to exonerate himself by saying he’d been concerned with the whole town’s survival at the time, but he had still asked himself, so many times, whether there was something he should have seen. A moment when the right word from him could have dissuaded her.

No one else had bothered to punish him for it. Just as they hadn’t for the Polyhedron’s destruction, for giving the word that had sealed its fate. If one of its architects and Eva’s closest companions had decided this would hurt him sufficiently to repay that debt, could he really protest?

Could he deny a surge of relief that someone had finally decided to hurt him for it?

“I’m sorry,” he said. Not to stop that punishment – perhaps to make it worse. No apology could make up for his negligence, after all. Throwing that fact into such stark relief might stoke Andrey’s anger further.

It seemed so. The flaring of his nostrils, the ferocious light, starved for justice, in his eyes...

“Sorry can’t put a soul’s broken shell back together,” he snarled. “You can’t mould guilt into bricks. You morose, pitiful, useless thing. You’ve had four months to fix what you broke. Instead, you’ve rotted and putrefied in her home. What happened to all your miraculous science? Did you ever even think of it?”

His words were starting to jostle apart in Daniil’s mind. The machine’s pace hadn’t relented for a second, no reprieve for him to breathe and become accustomed to its punishing rhythm. It couldn’t be sufficient punishment.

It couldn’t hurt him enough, especially when it still struck with such ruthless pleasure. When his body still welcomed more than recoiled from it. Which meant that either Peter and Andrey had failed, with all their vision and resources, to devise a punishment cruel enough, or there was something more.

Something he wasn’t feeling yet, wasn’t understanding. If it, he, everything could just have stopped for a second, he would have understood it.

But Andrey was still gripping his shoulders as if to rip the scapulae out through the skin, pistons were turning and his breath was pumping with them, and, braced arcanely in the centre of the machine, that broken and mended piece of cathedral stone...

Blood still visible in its cracked and aimless mortar. Even from that distance, even with his chin tucked just to his chest, he could see it. The new, clean mortar sealing those three pieces together was a strange, powdery white.

He might have walked right across that stone when he had first presented himself to the inquisitor. He hadn’t set foot in the cathedral since the council on the final day of the outbreak.

He had never gone back to see if she was there to be visited. He had told himself she couldn’t be. Whatever he had seen watching him sadly from the balustrade during that council, whatever he had thought he’d seen, it had been just...

Just like what he seemed to see now. With his chin to his chest, out of focus, the machine’s outline seemed dark and looming and human, leaning over him. Just for a moment, it seemed almost as if it could have been hers.

He moaned, and it was enough to blow the image away. Just for a moment, and then the idea, the illusion, recurred so strongly that he could no longer have mistaken what the brothers Stamatin had meant this contraption to resemble.

From his supine perspective, like nothing more than a person stooped lean and mechanical over her task, feral and fixed over the person laid like carrion into her embrace. Arms of steel clamped to the table, a heart of stone, vibrating with dried blood and veins of ashen mortar.

From that perspective, the way it was thrusting into him seemed almost...secondary. No, not secondary, not that vital hammering, grinding his thoughts to powder, but metaphorical. Sex wasn’t the purpose of this machine. No – its purpose was to enter.

Whether invited in by a fool or capable of forcing its way in by its own strength. Its purpose was to force a body to accept it – sex was a proxy, one the Stamatins might have settled on as fitting. After all, Eva had hardly been coy about wanting her way with Daniil.

That heart of stone had quickened almost to a thrumming blur. His pulse had done the same, matching it eagerly, as if trying to make him part of the same machine. Hurtling him towards a conclusion in body and mind, while he stared mesmerized by the silhouette that seemed to so unmistakably thrash over him.

He hadn’t given the Kains much credence either. Perhaps he should have.

Perhaps he should have taken them as a warning. Their sad cases, in which the construct built to house a soul proved insufficient. Either for its intended purpose, or for the bereaved, who longed to be more closely reunited with the one they had lost.

He drew breath to- to what? To say her name, to repeat his apology to her? To beg for it to stop, in the only moment left when it still could?

Her silhouette shook with mechanical fervour. His body matched it, both of them at their limits, and then-

Both of them, together, breaking through with a mechanical and human scream. He was open to it, helpless and hollow at the height of his ecstasy, and the last he saw of it before falling back to the table was its heart cracking newly in two.

It lurched and limped and shuddered to a halt, once again barely inside of him. He twitched and jerked in receding convulsions of physical rapture, limp and pliable in Andrey’s loosened grip.

Andrey stared down into his eyes with searchlight intensity. With brows knotted fiercely in scrutiny, and...

And reached to stroke the misplaced hair from his forehead.

“Well?” Andrey asked, without any of the bile or grief of before. “How is it? How do you feel?”

Without any of the bravado or brusqueness or anything that had ever beaten in the heart of their relationship before. Daniil drew breath to say what he knew by instinct – that Andrey wasn’t speaking to him.

But something seemed to brush by him before he could. Something moving past his soul – that instinct, a large, golden, intuitive presence, nudging it aside in order to reach out with his hand and entwine his fingers tenderly with Andrey’s.

“Heavy,” something said with his voice, but none of his will or inflections. “But it will pass.”

With a breathy lilt Daniil had known only for six days, but had heard whispering in every guilty dream since. It drew his legs up to ease him off of the machine, sitting up with Andrey’s aid and swinging his legs over the side of the table, tucking them coyly together at the ankles.

It swung Daniil’s feet lightly, restlessly together, while he only watched and felt and understood. Andrey stepped in front of him, wrapping an ardent, confident, possessive grip around his hips and leaning in for a kiss.

The presence that seemed more alive in Daniil’s body than he himself moved eagerly to meet it. Wrapping his arms around Andrey’s neck, pushing his tongue into Andrey’s mouth to savour the other man’s taste and teeth. Maybe...

Maybe it was just fair. He had failed to save Eva, before and after her death. He had failed to even try. If Peter and Andrey had built the miracle he should have, a machine of steel and dried blood and grief and ash mixed into the mortar, a vessel and a conduit for a soul to pass through into new life...

Then they deserved to have Eva back, didn’t they? He’d had every chance to prove himself more worthy of existing than she.

“I wish you could have found someone else,” she said with his tongue, his voice, and a sigh of more regret than he felt for himself. “He was a better man than you think. At least, I hope I’ll be able to hold onto a little of him. He’s not gone – I can still hear him whispering, very softly.”

“He said all he had to say,” Andrey told her, stroking a hand down Daniil’s, her, back with the same intent she had enthusiastically mimed during their kiss. The sort no machine could ever replicate. “It wasn’t enough. I want to hear you speak now – tell me why you took that doomed flight, and I’ll tell you how Peter and I pulled you back to the ground.”

Chapter Text

He was walking the edges of the steppe, searching for peace, when he found her instead. A woman lying naked on her side, bound in brambles and groaning in pain greater than their prickling thorns could have been causing her.

Few would have called him a kind man, but he was a good man, and so he knelt to help her. At his touch, she shuddered in greater pain still and told him to leave her be.

But he was a stubborn man, and so he asked what help she needed. She told him that, if he stayed, he would find out.

He did. At his next touch, trying to break the brambles, she found her strength – or lost the last that had been holding her back. She leapt on him, not bound by the brambles at all, but clad in them as tightly as her own skin, and bore him to the ground, binding him with them instead.

He bled everywhere they touched. She wept apologies all the while, but she took all she needed from him. Some creatures fed not on flesh or grass, she told him afterwards, but on the lust and strength of those they lay with. He lay drained and feeble, his clothes torn to shreds, watching her wipe golden sap from her cheeks in place of tears, and understood her.

The fate to which she had condemned herself, trying to starve in the steppe. Though he only found the strength to limp back into town at daybreak, he returned to the steppe the following night.

And the night after, and the night after that. She waited for him every time in the same spot, every time less guilty and wracked with hunger and more glad to take him in her arms.

Only once, on the sixth night, did she ask him why. Only once, weak almost to fainting and so unguarded with his words, did he tell her. It remained their secret, whispered into the healthy green vines she now wore in place of brambles.

On the seventh night, she confessed her own secret. Seven was a special number – everyone knew it. Since he had endured her for seven nights, she would bear a daughter. That daughter would inherit the seeds of her hunger, while she herself would live on as an ordinary woman. Would he share that ordinary life with her?

He was a dutiful man, and so he couldn’t promise her that their life would always be ordinary or shared. But he looked into her eyes and remembered her begging him to leave her, to let her die and save himself, and he promised her everything he could.

#

It had been Lara’s twentieth birthday when her father had first given her a soldier.

A man some five years older than she, who had stood at silent attention in the corner of her bedroom while she’d tried to refuse him. The pain had been terrible, worse than her father could ever have truly warned her about, but that soldier had been a stranger, and she’d been taught all her life that a proper woman didn’t do what she had desperately wanted to do to that stranger.

It had taken just five hours for that want to become an unbearable need. Then, she had pounced on the soldier and done what her father had known all along she would need to do.

The soldier had tottered out of her room afterwards pale and unsteady, all of his military poise drained away. When she had asked her father about him later, he had just said that the man would recover.

She walked now as that man had, limping unsteadily towards the station. The rain sluiced from her loose hair and seeped through her pores, eager to feed the pain that had been growing in her gut for the last three days.

That felt, by now, like a sackful of nails where her stomach should have been. It didn’t matter.

It wouldn’t matter. All she had to do was find one man, and it would be over. But not in the way it always had been before.

Her shoes sank and stuck in the mud that path had become. Her father had always seemed to know when she would need another man.

Even when he’d been far afield, when the day came, there had always been a knock at the door and another poor fool sent to sate her, as ignorant as she had once been of how badly it would hurt. She had always offered them a hot meal beforehand, to bolster their strength and for her own conscience; none of them would have stayed to eat with her afterwards.

She had never been able to eat with them. She had only watched, with that barbed hunger writhing in her belly. And now...

Now the Flank boiled with infection, and her home along with it, and her father was gone. Ahead, the rain poured like a parodied, hideous wedding veil across the army’s cannon, parting to either side of its massive barrel. The soldiers at its base were shadows in the storm – she would never have been able to recognize if any of them had shared her bed before.

The hunger had come on her twice already since her father had died – since he’d been murdered. The first time, Yulia Lyuricheva – so curious in every sense of the word – had appeared at her door, revealing a shocking knowledge of the whole affair and suggesting that they might discover together whether it was specifically a man she needed to satisfy her.

It had turned out that, no, using a woman in the right way could satisfy her very well. But Yulia had lit a cigarette with shaking hands afterwards and had said, in not quite her usual practical, impassive voice, that she didn’t think it was an experiment they would need to repeat.

The second time, filled with nearly as much disgust for herself as pain, Lara had managed to lure a drunken man away from the Broken Heart. He had been clumsy at first and too loud when he’d realized how afraid he should be, and she’d had to cover his mouth to keep him from screaming. Afterwards, he’d been so weak that she had been terrified he would just stop breathing.

And now...

No one deserved her the way she was now. Not when they all barely had the strength to survive as it was. Better to just let nature take its course. She had only to find and kill Alexander Block, and then it wouldn’t matter.

The streets had been strangled with desperate violence and rumours, just as her veins were with hungry roots. Mutinies and executions, rallies and retreats. She’d been driven away from the town hall at gunpoint, but not before she had heard that Block wasn’t there.

Captured by those who would seize control of the dwindling troops from him. Taken to the station, perhaps shot already or locked in one of the cars. She gave the cannon a wide berth, squinting through the rain for any sign of a train car being given more special attention than the rest.

If he was already dead, there would be nothing left for her to do. She would lie down next to his body and let nature take its course. But half a dozen soldiers were clustered under the lamp that hung from a train car ahead.

All of their rifles unslung and pointed out into the rain. Silver drops ricocheted from their helmets and braced arms, blurring their silhouettes, making them spectres, but underneath, each would be warm and full of precious vitality.

Lara held herself tight, despite the thorns that prickled in her sleeves and against her stomach. They would be strong and vigorous, and she could take it from them. Drink it down to her roots, use them until they were feeble and wretched and then use their strength to kill Block. She could even let them think they were using her instead – if she came to them naked, even covered in thorns, they would do as men drunk on power always did.

Their rifles had swung towards her, clustered together as if trying to add up to the power of a cannon. She could kill all but one of them.

All but one warm body, then use that one as much as she wanted. Her guts writhed with the idea. With Block perhaps just one locked door away, perhaps close enough to hear, she could gorge herself on one of his men.

She stumbled towards them, pulled towards the idea as if by a thorny reel. She had never fed on anyone who hadn’t, at least at first, been willing.

She had never killed. Never caused more harm than she needed to. If only...

“I said, stop right there!”

The soldier’s shout came muffled through the rain, trampled down to a duller, quieter drone than the one starting in her skull. She had stumbled closer than she’d realized, staring at the earth. Six men, six sets of eyes squinted uncertainly back at her through the rain.

If only her father had raised her less like an ordinary girl who would become an ordinary woman, and more like whatever she truly was. Perhaps then the idea wouldn’t have sickened her just as much as it pulled her. Perhaps then she wouldn’t have felt so cheated of the woman she had always expected to be.

She let her left arm fall to her side. The right one didn’t want to come as easily – the brambles bursting through her sleeve had hooked together with those tearing their way out of her blouse.

She tried to look innocent and unhurt anyways. The grey shrouds of the downpour had grown so thick, the soldiers might not have been able to see otherwise.

“I need to see the general,” she said, trying to sound like someone who had never muffled the screams of a man under her. “It’s very important. I was told this was where I should look for him.”

The men exchanged a look and shared the sudden change in their eyes. They had decided what they were dealing with, yes. A silly, stupid, trusting woman who had no idea what sort of wolves’ den she was walking into. They wouldn’t shoot her.

But only because, in their smaller, meaner way, they were hungry, too. She could have all of them, all of them-

Lara bit her tongue, barely stifling a groan. No. It needed to be over – it was only right for it to be over, to end this way. She only needed to last for a few minutes more.

She had lived long enough as a parasite sucking strength from that town. The soldiers lowered their rifles, and the one who had done so first, who seemed to lead them, beckoned her closer.

“Of course,” he said, in a tone only a particularly stupid woman would have trusted. “Right this way, miss. We’ll take you to him.”

The tallest and broadest of them – perhaps the strongest. What did she plan to do? If she wouldn’t subdue them by letting them pour all their strength into her, then...

She hadn’t meant to follow his beckoning hand. To stumble so much closer to him. His hand closed around her arm, so close she could see the veins in the shocked whites of his eyes as he cursed.

As the thorns overgrowing her arm pierced through his glove and into his palm. He tried to shove her away, but they were barbed and hungry and had caught him tight. He swung the stock of his rifle clumsily, one-handed, at her head-

No one had ever tried to hurt her when she was already hurting so badly before. The rain and the ringing in her head blurred together into one world of grey-blue and shadow.

And red. He was lying on the ground, the rust-red of his uniform gushing scarlet, and rifles were coming up again, and the others were shouting...

She had never moved that way before. Her blouse hung in ribbons from the brambles, her body a brier. Her hand, darting out to grasp the throat of the man closest, was as good as a nest of knives.

The tender arteries burst in its grip. The others were screaming.

She might have been as well. Each of them she reached for – stumbling back, they were trying to run – was a living body that could have satisfied her, but she was too sharp and late to catch them in any way that wouldn’t tear them apart. She had tried so hard to love her town.

To be more good to it than ill. But this was her nature, in the end – to shriek and grasp and tear what she would have loved to pieces with her touch.

She was kneeling over the last of them. His face and chest were a ruin of deep cuts where she had tried to tear his coat open. Blood still pulsed weakly from what remained of his throat, washed away, beat by beat, by the rain.

There wasn’t enough left of his face for her to know whether she’d ever seen him before. She stared down at it, willing it to heal and smooth into a memory.

Instead, the weak pulse of blood ebbed and stopped. Six men she could have used, and she had ruined them all.

The nest of briers in her gut snarled and twisted, a shriek, through every root, of starved frustration and despair. She doubled over it, struggling to breathe through it, to be through it, to be more than it for just a minute longer.

That last soldier had carried a small pistol as a sidearm. She fumbled it from its holster, trying to find a fit for it in a hand wrapped tight with brambles. It wouldn’t have to be a good shot. Not if Block really was waiting just behind the locked door of that train car. It would only have to be a close one.

It would only have to be a minute longer. She found her way to her feet somehow, stepping over corpses and through bloody puddles. Somehow, pulled herself up onto the crates that served as makeshift steps, up to the train car’s door.

Even though it felt as if her skin, her self, could tear as easily as her blouse. She took hold of the lock, blood greasing it from her palm, and used her weight more than her strength to shove it open.

It slid more easily than she’d expected. More of her weight than she’d expected swung her sideways; she clung to the lock to keep herself upright, and a white flash of agony eclipsed her vision as her shoulder struck the door.

One of her feet slipped from the crate. Her shoe, little more than a clot of muddy gore now, fell from it, and then she was falling as well, her grip on the lock too greased with blood to hold.

She landed on her left hip and elbow, and the same pain pierced them from within and without. The rain drowned her scream as it had those of the soldiers.

The pistol lay before her, in a puddle of their blood. She snatched it up, tried to stand, but-

Her knees struck the mud again as the barbed cramps in her belly pulled tight. Her hands shook and twitched in their own private, uncontrollable convulsions as the tip of another brambling vine pushed through the skin of her forearm. What was it inside her that hated her so much?

Or that loved her so much less than its own hunger? She grasped at the vines, tore at them, but they raked at her as they ripped free, and more grew to replace them even as she threw them to the ground.

Would she die that way, then? So close to her goal, to at least dying for a reason? Something groaned and slammed above like thunder, like an answer.

She looked up, and there stood General Alexander Block, framed in the doorway she had unlocked. The rain was already soaking him through, darkening his uniform coat almost to the colour of blood, but he seemed not to notice. His attention was fixed entirely on her.

And the murderous, monstrous tableau in which she knelt. The men who had captured him, lying torn apart and spilt into the mud. If she could just straighten from where her body had bent itself over double, she wouldn’t need the gun.

She just needed to reach him. To touch him the way his gaze pinned her, his face not blanched with horror or twisted with disgust, but...

Stunned, but in the way of someone seeing something well within his ken. Could it be that there were monsters like her elsewhere? Or...

Or could it be that her father had told him about her? Could there have been that sort of trust between them before Block had killed him?

“Then you must be...” Block murmured, less heard than read on the rain running down his lips, but the storm had started to ebb. Enough for her to hear the rustling under her own skin, and his next words clearly.

“You’re dying,” he said, like an observation and declaration and question all at once. An invitation for her to prove him wrong or else accept his pity.

She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. But her blood was starting to run gold and thick, sticking between her fingers, and the pain of it rooted her to the ground.

He looked over her, past her, assessing the distance to the town as a man of war would. As a threat – a place from which death might come at any moment. His brows twisted as her insides did, in the throes of some awful calculation or decision.

He pushed his coat from his shoulders, leaving it to puddle on the crates, and began pulling at the buttons of his shirt.

A moan pushed itself from her, of worse than physical pain. No. No, absolutely not, he couldn’t. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, she would never, and he couldn’t mean-

But he was wrestling his way out of his clothes just as quickly as he could. Leaving them in the disarray a general never should, baring the dark hair of his chest and the hard, practical muscles of a life spent using them, a body bristling with life as hers now did with anguish and death.

“No,” she groaned, through what felt like a throat full of thorns. “No, get away from me-”

With bare feet, his boots standing askew on the crate, he stepped down into the mud. The thinning drizzle still coursed down his body, along the causeways of his scars, a sweet suggestion of how she could touch him.

How she could warm her hands on him, once the thorns withered away, sated, from her palms. He would be so warm, and she would live, and she would never forgive herself.

“As I understand it, you have no other option,” he said. “You killed all of your other options in order to free me. I can guess why. But I’m indebted to you now, and I respected your father too much, even at the end, to let his daughter die.”

If he knew why she was there, then he had to know that what he was offering was horribly cruel. It was practically blasphemy, an unforgivable sin against filial duty. She couldn’t survive at that cost.

She couldn’t. She had gone to such lengths to leave herself with no other options.

“You killed him,” she growled. A dribble of sap escaped with the words, too sweet for the corrosive, slow-acting poison they had been in her heart. “He was everything- he was all that I had, and you-”

“So take what you need from me.” Without another glance at the distance, without any apparent fear of it or her, Block lowered himself down in front of her. Taking up and tossing away the pistol with one fluid movement, away from where either of them would be able to reach it, and kneeling in the mud where she just might be able to reach him instead. “This is what you need, isn’t it? Think of it like a blood transfusion. It doesn’t have to mean anything aside from that, and that you live.”

It could never be so simple. Never so painless, even for her, someone to whom it was food. It could never be so practical and sinless, not with anyone, but never, never with him.

The hand reaching for her had signed the order for her father’s death. It may even have pulled the trigger. She had to remember. Her life could only be saved by feeding on others, but she had found a worthy, beautiful purpose to give it to instead. If she could die as a faithful daughter, for love...

“He would have wanted you to live,” Block said. “He fought for his country in the abstract, but it was your peaceful life he dreamed of winning.”

That should at least have been what broke her. But no – his fingers had found a clean place to light on her shoulder, and the life in them...

The sheer life in them. The nudge of his pulse against their skin and hers, the flutter of the tendons, tiny whispers of restless vigour even in a hand held still. Life abundant, enough to share, and she was moving, lunging at him almost as she had the others-

He caught her wrists as he toppled back, she on top of him. She must have pierced him in a hundred places, but none serious, her thorn-clawed hands held at bay. He must have felt, the moment he caught hold of her thorns, how they poisoned those foolish enough to touch her.

Not a fatal poison, but one that inflamed them with the lust that would let her feed on them. She was a practical and vicious predator that way, barbed and venomous, and his gasp said he knew it now. Between scratched and bleeding thighs, his cock was already starting to swell and rise.

Her stomach twisted again, not with thorns, at the sight of it. For that second of horribly human shame, she could almost have believed it was still possible for her to refuse and die.

But she was kneeling over him, on him, her hands splayed in the mud, and his were bound to her wrists now. The vines had grown around them, her wrists, his hands, diving down eagerly to root into the ground and bind them both to that act.

To life. He blazed with it, looking up at her, blinking the sparse rain from his lashes. His chest rose and fell with it like an urgently beckoning hand, come, come, and she could not be better than her nature, it seemed, after all.

The thorns had torn her clothes to nothing, and she plunged herself onto his cock without any impediment or resistance. Without the slightest pain at taking him so quickly – only the desperate triumph of finally connecting herself to another life.

Like the first sun that had ever touched the leaves of a withering, misbegotten weed. He groaned in shock or pleasure or pain of his own, his white skin scratched or pierced to a red flush in a hundred places, unable to let go of her wrists or rise from where they were both now bound to the ground...

But still, he looked at her without fear. For all she must have been a nightmare, bristling with brambles from every tear in her own skin, her own blood mixing thick and golden with that of his traitorous men...

He held her just that much more tightly than the thorns did, as she let the rhythm of trying to wring life out of him take her. Rocking against him as if to throttle it from him, rocking more warmth and less pain through herself with every movement.

It was all about connection. That was what her mother had whispered in one of Lara’s only memories of her, when she had been far too young to understand. It was all about joining living things together. Everything was.

Her mother’s smile, hair wafting against her lips in the breeze from an open window, had made it sound beautiful. Maybe it was, for some creatures. Some lives.

For Lara, though, relief was ugly, and had never been more so than this. She scratched and tore what she took it from. She shed sap onto Block’s belly and couldn’t tell whether it was meant to be blood or tears. She fucked him desperately, voraciously deeper into her as if she loved him, as if this were better for either of them than death.

His breath, the river she was tapping into, ran fast and shallow beneath her. His spine was arched taut, his body as lifted towards her as it could be. His eyes shone the kerosene blue of a flame at its hottest, ignited and transported by whatever he felt instead of fear.

“Give it to me,” Lara heard herself groaning, demanding, drawing on him from every connection, every thorn hooked through his skin and the breath she had bent low enough to share with him and his cock clenched tight inside her. “God damn you, you bastard, murderer, give it to me, you owe it to me, you don’t-”

He didn’t deserve the life that was burning in him any more than she did. But he released it to her anyways, with a cry such as he might never have uttered since becoming a man of war, or before. He arched towards her all the more like a bowstring at her command, hardly more than his head and heels touching the mud, pouring into her all that she had demanded and starved for.

More of it than he would have given any ordinary woman. That first throe was followed by another, no room for breath between them and so a weaker cry, his head thrown side to side in the red mud. And another, no breath left at all, his mouth straining open and silent as warmth flooded her, every inch of her, and felt beautiful, at least, there.

Blazing inside, burning away everything sharp and spiteful and hungry that it touched. Never so hungry before, never so fed. She might have shone with it, she should have, like the sun breaking through those smothering grey clouds at last.

Like spring touching winter’s stony roots and reminding the trees how sweet it was to live. For that moment, sobbing in relief to fill his silence, she was as transported as he.

She was saved and warm and connected, joined to life at the roots again. She was smiling, she couldn’t help herself in that moment, down at her father’s murderer.

Her smile faded. The warmth, her warmth now, remained.

She pulled her wrists from his grip, carefully, and the brambles let her. Everywhere, they were withering, disintegrating in quick, sated decay, washed away by the last drops of rain.

In their place, in what had been bare mud, Block lay in a lush nest of unseasonably green grass and singing twyre. He blinked up at her in a daze from which he, too, seemed to be swiftly returning.

She had never sated her hunger in the steppe before. Never seen the blossoms rise where brambles fell. Her skin was whole and smooth, healed, though still a sticky patchwork of blood and sap. She was soft and naked and mistakable for human again, and still kneeling atop her father’s murderer.

What did that mean? He had just saved her life. Against the will of her soul, but in accordance with that of her body, he had bound her back to the living. He had paid the price of doing so – he was pale and panting, and might fail when he first tried to push himself up from that tiny, miraculous new patch of meadow.

It would take time for him to regain his strength. She could take advantage of that – she could do what she had sworn to do, the one thing that would have let her die in peace.

The gun was lying just a few feet away. But what did it mean that he had barely hesitated before saving her life?

Before putting himself at her mercy that way? She lifted herself off of him, away from the almost human feeling, now, of how their bodies had joined, and he managed, after all, to push himself up unsteadily to sit.

Though he looked as if that would be his limit for a while. His strength burned in her now, brighter than any she had ever known.

“This isn’t what I wanted from you,” she said. That might be her limit for a while – all she would know for certain, until she could decide what all of this meant.

For her, for him, for the life they had just shared. He looked from her to the life that had spilled over, blooming so abundantly around them. Whispering against the underside of the train car and hiding the corpses she had left in her hunt for him.

“Then call it one payment on a debt owed,” he said, his voice strained, but less so than some that had hastily taken their leave of her before. “If I can make it back to the town hall and ensure this town’s survival, maybe we can call that another.”

If she let him, in other words. Or maybe even, if she helped him – he would have no easy time trying to make it through the streets as he was now.

As she had left him, drained and weak. The troops would fall into chaos without him, but she had told herself that would happen either way.

She had told herself all was already lost, and so it didn’t matter. Now, holding his gaze as tightly as the thorns had them both, she asked – “Do you think it’s possible?”

He didn’t flinch or falter. Didn’t fear her, even now, in the slightest – even knowing how easily she could still kill him. What did that mean? What did it say about him, and was it so different from what she’d said about herself while chasing him almost unto death?

“I do,” he answered. “Come with me – we’ll see to it together. You deserve that, too.”

Did she? After how she had fed on this town she’d tried to love? Maybe. Maybe, in the sense that, by forestalling her revenge, leaving that hunger unsated, she might still be able to save it. If Block had a way of saving it...

Then she owed it to her town to let him see it through. If he failed, there would always be later.

“I’ll need to borrow your coat,” she said.

What it all meant could be left for later. As could the way he looked at her, scrutinizing and deciding and so strangely sad.

“Of course,” he said, with a general’s clipped nod. With not at all a general’s wince as he tried to push himself to his feet and failed to do more than rustle the grass.

Lara rose to stand with all the strength he should have had, firm in her balance as a sapling in the spring sunlight. The clouds had thinned to white at the edges, soon to break through, maybe, into September’s softer, wistful radiance.

The last raindrops hung heavy from the herbs that had sprung from her. All about connection. All about life. Maybe she needed more time to understand what it all and she, she as a singular, living being, really meant.

Maybe there would be time. For the time being, she reached out to the man who had murdered her father and saved her life, to take his hand and help him to his feet.

Chapter Text

Andrey stared very intently at the sigil Stakh had scrawled on that torn scrap of paper. Far too intently, and too long, for someone who didn’t know its meaning.

He made it clear when he’d finished by crumpling the paper into a ball and flinging it away. “I’m not needling that into your skin,” he declared.

The same tight, shameful heat filled Stakh’s cheeks and heart. The paper lay as small and discarded on the bar’s sticky floor as he’d felt when he had first written the sigil on it.

“Why not?” he demanded. “I have the money for it. What does it matter to you?”

“If you want me to abuse you, you’re going to have to be a lot less coy and more charming about it,” Andrey said. Rubbing his hands together as if the paper could have sullied them more than everyone knew they already were. “And if you care so little about what gets carved into your skin, I’ll make you a deal. Sit quietly for me, let me mark you how I like, and I won’t even charge you for the privilege.”

Stakh’s skin, nowhere more so than the shoulder he’d chosen for that mark, prickled at the idea. Any mark Andrey might choose would surely be at least as shameful as that one, but there wouldn’t be the same meaning to it. A meaning chosen, owned – the meaning Isidor had made it clear he was no better than.

“Why would you do that?” he asked.

Andrey rolled his shoulders in a careless shrug. “I like leaving my mark on people. On virgin skin especially. And it’s clear you don’t plan on making any good use of it. So what do you have to lose that you weren’t already going to give away?”

Nothing, really. The whole point was that it wasn’t useful. There wasn’t anything good Stakh had to give other people. Did it make that much of a difference if he showed it his way or Andrey’s? Maybe Andrey’s would be even better. It would make more sense to let someone else mark him as pointless, toxic, unclean flesh, rather than deciding the shape and colour of it himself.

“Fine,” he decided, starting towards the back door he’d seen Andrey usher people through before. Painted, by him or Peter, with all sorts of geometric and mythological designs interlocked, showcasing their work and making the whole thing feel just a little less seedy than it should have.

Maybe he should have gone to the warehouses. Grief had to know someone who would have done it without a fuss. But what did it matter, really? Andrey was already trailing close behind him, he’d already said yes, and it didn’t matter, that was the point , none of it did.

The room that door had hidden was cleaner, nicer, too, than he would have expected. Floored and walled almost the same as the bar, but scrubbed practically to the sterile shine of an operating room. Hung with sketches and paintings in more styles than he could turn his head to take in, cluttered around shelves of unfamiliar bottles and tools, all surrounding a very medical-looking reclining chair and the squat stool that stood beside it.

“Take a seat,” Andrey instructed him, nodding at that long, slightly threatening chair. “I have some things to get ready, so see if you can learn how to relax in the next five minutes.”

The odds weren’t good. Especially not there, where-

“Take off your shirt first. There’s a hook on the door.”

Not there, where Andrey seemed to be settling into almost a different person. A more focused, professional one, low and curt in how he spoke and moved. Rifling through the shelves while Stakh shucked off his shirt; the room wasn’t cold, but that prickle still raced across his skin again, bared to be scarred forever, however Andrey chose.

Andrey glanced over his shoulder, as if he’d felt Stakh’s stare prickling on his own skin.

“Why are you standing there like a dummy?” he demanded, for one sentence more like the Andrey who had asked him, out in the bar, if he was lost. “Sit down. And breathe – you look like you’re about to pass out.”

Stakh did both, though the sitting down was easier. His chest was tightening in a way he’d told himself, that morning, would be pointless. It didn’t matter. And if it did, this was a way of making it not matter. Act like it was as pointless as it was, and it would be.

The chair was more comfortable than he’d expected any part of this to be. Thickly padded and just reclined enough that he couldn’t sit at attention while also following orders and relaxing. Breathing came a little easier once he was settled, watching Andrey lay out half a dozen of those tools and bottles on a tray and wheel over a small circular table that had been tucked up next to the shelf.

In each of those bottles, a colour. With the tray on the table and Andrey’s hands out of the way, they shone through clear – black and gold and deep, bloody red. So those were the colours Stakh would be carrying in his skin forever. They would be as much a part of him as the pasty white they’d be covering up.

“Remember,” Andrey said, caustic and sudden as the stench of the alcohol he was tipping into a clean wad of gauze, “You’re going to sit perfectly still for me. Quiet and pretty as a blank canvas.”

Maybe it should have been a more upsetting idea. Maybe it was just sitting there half-reclined that made it seem so peaceful instead. Andrey swabbed neatly and fussily at his shoulder with the gauze, leaving it colder than the air and clean as surgical steel.

Maybe it was the warmth of the room, too, that did it. And just how much of the last few weeks he’d spent on his feet, running between one thing that needed to be done and another. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to stop him from tensing at least slightly when Andrey lifted a small, clumsy, electric-looking tool off the tray.

“What is that?” he asked.

“One of the latest innovations in stabbing ink through skin,” Andrey said, studying the little machine as he might have a freshly sharpened knife. “Much faster and – some would call this a shame – less painful. Now, what did I say about how you’re supposed to sit?”

Still and quiet. He’d expected the traditional needles and more pain – a cold, dank underground room and a stool for him to sit on, too. Not settling back on a padded headrest to stare at the ceiling, sound, clean concrete, not a crack to be seen in it.

Not Andrey’s hand warm where it braced around his shoulder. The tool started buzzing like something between a grasshopper and a headache, and Stakh held his breath as it closed in from his peripheral vision towards the skin.

He had turned his head to watch again. That seemed natural, but Andrey paused, punishing him for it with a quick two-finger flick to the temple.

“You’ll see it when I’m done,” he said. “I’d have thought you would be better at obeying orders.”

There was a hell of a lot Stakh could have said to that. Like that maybe following orders too well had been his problem – maybe it was what made people put him down so easily in the end, like a tool they were done with. But the one in Andrey’s hand was buzzing again, not a bad sound in a room like that, and he didn’t want to give the man who was going to scar him another reason to stop.

It didn’t hurt at all the way he’d imagined. The blur he’d glimpsed before must have been a needle sticking out from the machine, buzzing along with it, burrowing, now, into his skin. But it felt more like a dull nail being dragged across, shallow and methodical and repetitive. More like being painted on than pierced.

Maybe Andrey had set up this side business because it was the only way he could do both – paint and pierce at once. Still, Stakh would have expected him to be loud and brutal and sloppy about it. Not to brace his shoulder in that gentle, careful way, or to speak so softly when he finally did.

“So what put this stupid idea in your head in the first place? I’ve put my needle to more flesh than ever since the Pest, but most people want mementos of some kind. Not old steppe curses.”

It wasn’t quite a curse. Wouldn’t have been. Just...a warning. Just accepting what people seemed to think of him anyways. Facing reality. It had seemed like all he had left to do.

“I thought you didn’t want me to talk,” he pointed out.

“Hmph,” Andrey muttered, as close as he would probably ever come to you’ve got me there. “How about you speak only when spoken to? I’m sure you’re used to that.”

Years of practise. It had felt right, sometimes. Letting himself be taken up like a tool from a shelf, put down and forgotten again just as easily.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Does it? Any of it? It’s just...just skin, in the end.”

Just flesh and bone. The sort he’d made himself cursed, anathema, by taking apart. Then Artemy, of course, had come along and done it right.

“It’s the only canvas we carry with us all our lives,” Andrey said. “Let me guess – this is about Isidor’s boy coming back to take up his inheritance. It doesn’t take a genius, or that shaved head, to see you wanted to take the old man’s place.”

“No,” Stakh muttered, automatically. He’d known, for all those years of practise, that none of it could make up for his blood. He’d accepted it. But no one had given him anything else to be – any role he could actually grow into. All he’d had was that hopeless goal.

And now, what did he have but the flesh and blood that hadn’t been good enough? Still not hurting, though the muscle twitched slightly, involuntarily, in Andrey’s grip.

“Don’t treat the man with a needle and your skin in his hand like an idiot,” Andrey advised him. “You probably don’t have the guts to kill him, right?”

Artemy? He’d never even thought of it. Maybe he would have, if he’d thought it would leave that role open for him. Or maybe the idea would still have twisted in his gut just the same.

“No,” he repeated. “He deserves it. The role, I mean. He’s earned it.”

“Hmph,” Andrey repeated in turn. The needle moved on all the while, smooth and neat and only just as painful, in places, as a fingernail against a bad sunburn. “Then it seems to me you’ve got two choices. You can wash your hands of the whole thing, leave town, maybe, try your hand at something else, or you can figure out how you fit together with him. I heard why the worms were out for your blood, you know.”

Stakh tensed again, that buzzing higher and menacing in his ear. “You did?”

“Of course. News flows through here as freely as twyrine. They say you were cutting up bodies for medicine while our young Burakh was still trying to honourably earn the right.”

Then he hadn’t heard everything. Stakh relaxed back into the methodical, stinging feeling of being marked forever.

“It was what had to be done,” he said. “But-”

“So you dirtied your hands so he could keep his clean. I’ve bloodied my knuckles a hundred times so that Peter’s hands would be free to paint. Obviously the two of you aren’t bound as tightly as us, but if you can’t kill him or leave him, you’ll have to find a way to live with him. Reach where he can’t. Do what he won’t.”

Was that all he could really hope to be? An anti-menkhu, the one who took on the shame so that they could all love Artemy more?

Was that what Isidor had meant him to be all along?

“Don’t look so sour about it,” Andrey said. “Every paragon has a dirty shadow. The world can’t run on visionaries alone. It needs men like you and I to lay the bricks. Sometimes, to bury the bodies.”

It didn’t twist in his gut like the idea of killing Artemy. But it didn’t sit well there, either, while Andrey worked on in buzzing silence.

“Don’t you ever hate it?” Stakh asked, finally, after what felt like at least twenty minutes of staring at the ceiling. “Standing behind him, in his shadow?”

“I’m not behind my brother,” Andrey corrected him, lifting the needle away to real silence, to study what he’d done. “I’m in front of him, clearing the way. If it feels wrong, maybe you’re just standing in the wrong place. Here – take a look at this.”

Andrey leaned back to the tray, to trade that tool for a small hand mirror. Stakh looked over, finally, to see the clear reflection of what had been done to him forever.

Black and red and gold stood out clear and bold against the inflamed skin. He followed the lines to where they ran into each other; swallowed, but it didn’t stop his throat from starting to close.

“I-”

“Better than what you had in mind, isn’t it? Leave the art to the artists – we both know your hands are good for other things. Now, I’ll tell you how to look after it, and you had better. If you let it get infected, I’ll kill you. But first, turn over. I’m going to give you a little bonus – a gift from one battering ram of a man to another.”

#

Later that evening, Stakh stood naked, alone in his own silence, staring into his own mirror.

The skin over his right deltoid was still flushed pink and furious. It would take some time for that to fade, Andrey had said. Then the picture he’d carved there would stand out even clearer.

Its lines all running into each other, black to red to gold, like an autumn evening. A bull, made of smooth, simple, graceful strokes, standing in a field of twyre. The stalks surrounded and became its legs – the scant detailing on its flank was the feathery scarlet of blood twyre. Its head was tilted to stare up at the sky, shedding red and golden leaves from its horns, which drifted up to become the stars it was gazing at.

It was nothing Stakh would ever have thought to ask for. Something graceful, something bold and artistic, something...whole. The bull stood in and watched and was the world, just the way it was all supposed to be. All things joined together, and he felt somehow a little more whole for wearing it on his arm.

More complete in his own skin. Not a blank canvas anymore. It was probably just the giddy chemical aftermath of letting his body be wounded that way, just a stupid thought, but...staring at it, he could almost believe there might be a way to mark his life as boldly. To decide what it was going to be, engrave it, instead of just letting it grow and move and exist awkwardly by default, in the cramped space someone else had made for it.

It would probably seem like a stupid thought in the morning. But he wouldn’t try to shove it away until then. Instead, he turned in the mirror to take another look at what else Andrey had done to him.

It was small, almost enough so that he could have covered it up with his thumb. Just above the right side of his ass – he really must have been riding high on the pain by that point to let Andrey brace a hand there.

To cut that little signature into him. A heart in green and gold, made, if he looked a little more closely, of a salamander curled in on itself.

His cheeks flushed as if they’d had needles taken to them, the same as they had when he’d first seen it in Andrey’s mirror. I’ll want you back in here on the regular, assuming you don’t skip town, Andrey had said. So I can keep an eye on how it’s healing.

He didn’t have to wait until morning to know that was a stupid thought. A stupid idea – if he went back there, he’d probably end up letting Andrey paint something else into his skin. It might be better for everyone if he did leave town.

Look for something else to be, somewhere else. But he wouldn’t decide yet. He would see how it all felt in the morning. When he woke up and looked in the mirror again, maybe a little groggy and forgetful, and remembered how easy it had been to change at least one small part of himself.

Chapter Text

“I'll send you a report in a few hours,” Daniil said. “Don't go about cutting people's hearts out for your panacea until then. It's a...controversial solution, you know.”

Burakh stared at him even more unsettlingly than usual. An effect aided by the garish new constellations of blood spattering his smock and the heart he carried, clenched a little too tightly for its good, in his fist.

Baseless as they’d turned out to be, it was still no wonder the townsfolk had spread such rumours about him. Looming in the Stillwater’s cozy loft, he looked like nothing less than the monstrous Ripper they’d accused him of being.

“You can place it on the desk, on that tray,” Daniil directed him. “I’ll begin studying it immediately. With luck, we’ll be able to wring the vital secrets out of its tissues before they rot.”

A drop of potentially hazardous blood fell from Burakh’s knuckles to the floor. He could certainly have taken more care in the containment and transportation of the sample. As much care as he seemed to take, maybe, in stepping past Daniil to the desk. So utterly deliberate, silent despite his size. The unmistakable reek of fresh viscera followed him like an accusing ghost.

He stopped, standing over the desk. Staring down at it and the heart in his hand, which still twitched with the slightest stubborn contractions. It was all well and good if he wanted to consider the moral ramifications of what he’d done, but neither of them could afford to waste those precious minutes.

“If you could put the sample down and move your brooding slightly to the left,” Daniil suggested, “Then-”

With none of a surgeon’s care, Burakh slammed the heart down on the tray.

Daniil flinched, more out of fear for its well-being than his own. “Bloody hell, Burakh. Do you want to have to go out and fetch another one? If not, I’d suggest-”

Burakh’s movement was a blur, the effect parsed before the cause. A reeling ache in Daniil’s jaw, stumbling him a step back from his assumed ally – a moment of dazed shock before he connected that particular symptom to Burakh’s raised fist.

Still soaked through with the heart’s blood. Burakh had just punched him.

Not hard enough to break bones, but enough for Daniil’s jaw to feel swollen and unreliable already as he spoke. “What the hell has gotten into you? Are you-”

Burakh advanced on him again, so quick for his size, and still so silent. Daniil’s steps were a stumbling mess in comparison, one tripping back over the other just once before Burakh seized him by a fistful of his vest.

Dragging him up almost far enough for them to speak eye-to-eye. “Do you even listen to the words coming out of your own mouth?” Burakh snarled. “I thought you were different from the rest of them. But no – you just had me carve up one of my own people for your damned experiments, and now you think I need your wisdom to tell me not to do it again.”

It had been a rather insensitive thing to say, in retrospect. But he would have been much more willing to acknowledge it as such with grace if Burakh hadn’t just nearly broken his jaw.

“It seems like little has stayed your scalpel so far,” he said instead. “I’ve heard reports of bodies in the streets missing vital organs. Should it be such a surprise, or an insult, if I’m not certain you can be trusted to act responsibly on your own?”

Burakh’s lip curled back from his teeth. “I’m not your dog, to be let off the leash when it suits you,” he said. “I make my own judgments. I make the necessary cuts. Though, right now, I’m thinking I made a serious mistake in choosing to help you.”

Only Daniil’s toes scraped the floor. Even with both his hands wrapped around the vise of Burakh’s fingers, he couldn’t pry it loose.

Fear fluttered belatedly in his latest breath. He might have made his own grave mistake by angering someone so eminently capable of harming him.

“You’ll never make your panacea without me,” he pointed out, stretched tight, on his toes, between bargaining and a threat. Burakh needed him. Surely he would remember as much at any moment and curtail this outburst.

“And the trade is that I have to hunt my people for you and watch as you treat their flesh like nothing but mould in a petri dish?” The stagnant late-night lamplight made a pale, ferocious mask of Burakh’s face. “No. I should never have hoped that you’d be better than the ones who call you their champion. Of course they would choose someone even more heartless than themselves for that role.”

And Daniil should never have hoped Burakh would see him as more than that, should he? He should never have assumed that Isidor’s son would be as stalwart and mindful of necessary sacrifices as the father.

“Well, I’m hardly heartless anymore,” he quipped. “Your father was willing to do whatever it took to curb an outbreak of the Sand Pest – up to and including sacrificing his own people. Where is your resolve? What will you sacrifice to-”

“Do not speak of my father,” Burakh growled. The grip of shadows tightened in his gaunt cheeks as his did around the front of Daniil’s vest.

“Why shouldn’t I? He was my friend as well as your father,” Daniil reminded him. “In fact, I might have known his mind better than you did by the end of his life. As I understand it, the two of you were barely in contact. So if you are so intent on searching for some indication of Isidor’s last wishes-”

Burakh’s movement was a blur again, and this time, Daniil was a part of it. Being swung around by that grip on his vest, by only the scrape of his toes on the floor, to strike the desk with his hip and a crash.

One of the buttons from his vest clattered to rest beside the tray. Free, but reeling again, he caught his balance on the desk, hands splayed to either side of it. His reflection stared dizzily back at him from the clean steel on which the heart lay.

Burakh’s was a shadow behind him. A large, blood-slick hand clamped around the back of his neck, driving his head down towards the desk.

He braced himself just short of doing any more damage to the heart. Its feeble twitching was definitely more so than before. Was the disease still alive in it? Didn’t Burakh realize what he was costing them both?

“How dare you?” Burakh snarled, still holding him within an inch of the heart. “How dare you think you could speak for him? Do you think he ever shared even an iota of his knowledge with you?”

“More than with you, perhaps,” Daniil said, through his teeth as well, a mad glint of his reflection in steel. If it had come to blows like this between them, there hardly seemed to be any reason to hold back. “If only because I allowed myself to be told. He lamented to me once that you answered so few of his letters. He-”

He managed to lean enough for his head, in Burakh’s grip, to strike the desk rather than the heart, at least. Still, it was a ringing blow, one that decisively subtracted the remaining strength from his limbs and left him splayed across the polished surface, gasping aimlessly under Burakh’s hand.

“I loved my father.” Burakh’s voice had fallen to a lower growl, crumbling over him. “I won’t hear any doubt about that from you.”

Each word seemed to echo separately, painfully through Daniil’s skull. He was baiting a lion by sticking his arm through the bars of its cage, but the only alternative at this point seemed to be begging Burakh’s forgiveness, and damned if he would do that. If this was how everything was to collapse between them, if it had always been that inevitable, so be it.

“Why?” he challenged Burakh. “Because I’m the only person besides Rubin who knew your father well enough to cast plausible doubt on it? It’s obvious that this tantrum, and this wrongheaded adherence to what you assume would be his will, are both born out of guilt. You’re letting your own childish idea of loyalty blind you to the importance of-”

His head rang against the desk again. And again, propelled by a hand wrapped tight, almost to tearing, in his hair. The heart trembled each time – was it still beating otherwise?

He couldn’t tell. Couldn’t think, for a few more precious seconds after that last impact. Burakh’s hand and breath trembled against the back of his neck.

The silent, briefly stymied fury of someone who couldn’t think of how to sufficiently vent it. How to open the floodgates far enough to unleash its enormity – would Burakh kill him?

Daniil couldn’t let him. That much was clearer than how he would stop him.

“And you’re letting your pride blind you to everything,” Burakh ground out through what must have been bared teeth. “You think you know me, my father, our people, our town, our value better than anyone. It’s people like you who always decide in the end that our blood is cheap. You didn’t hesitate to ask me for one of their lives.”

“No more than you hesitated to take it,” Daniil slurred against the desk, his mind still all empty spaces and the echoes within. “Will you take out that guilt on me as well?”

Burakh hesitated. If he could still be brought to his senses, an appeal to his pride seemed the way to do it. But it was a risky gamble.

And, judging by the fistful he grabbed of Daniil’s trousers, yanking them from the grip of his suspenders and nearly down to his knees, a failed one.

Daniil barked a brief shock of laughter. “ Really? Is this how you’re going to avenge your father? Your pride? Is this what will prove you a worthy successor, raping his-”

Burakh’s hand tightened into his hair again. Hauling his head back until his spine creaked in protest, until his mouth opened for a cry of the same-

Then reaching for the heart. Wrapping it in an even tighter grip than before, before Daniil could parse his intentions and react accordingly. Before he could close his mouth or cry out in protest, Burakh shoved the abused organ into his mouth, stopping it up as tight as a bloody cork in the mouth of a bottle.

A perfectly, hideously effective gag. Daniil gagged against it indeed, the raw iron taste shoving his tongue aside, the severed, rubbery arteries pressed up against his cheeks. The dense gristle of the organ stopped up behind his teeth, resisting all his efforts to spit it out. He reached for it-

But Burakh, again, was quicker, catching both his wrists and twisting them behind his back. Daniil’s bellow of pain didn’t carry through the severed veins.

Wasn’t Eva just downstairs? How hadn’t she heard the crashing, the raised voices? How didn’t she hear the desk jolting now, his knees knocking against it, as he tried to twist away from the man who had so suddenly become his assailant?

Was that house just too full of strange noises for her to pay heed to a few more?

He couldn’t call out her name. It would have been horribly irresponsible to do so anyways, to bring her into range of Burakh’s madness, but he might have done so anyways, if he’d been able.

If he’d been able to scream around the still-hot trickle of blood just starting down his throat. If that heart was as rife with the Pest as he’d requested...

“Not so heartless anymore,” Burakh echoed above him. “I knew the moment I first saw you that you couldn’t bring any good to our town. You’re like an empty syringe – all you know how to do is pierce and take. You can’t cure anything. Only measure it in cold glass. We’ll all be better off without you.”

The tense of that last declaration drew Daniil’s thighs and pulse tighter with dread. He craned his head as far as he could, staring back at Burakh, begging forgiveness with his eyes, maybe, after all, and saw none in the eyes of Isidor’s son.

What he did see...

What he did see was flushed bright and furious and triumphant and looked as though it wasn’t nearly done with him yet. That tremble was still in Burakh’s free hand as it trailed down his spine. Rage not yet sated, or...

Or Isidor’s son still didn’t only hate him. Daniil coughed, spattering rancid blood up into his nostrils and filling his eyes with tears.

His throat burned with it, or something more. As Burakh’s hand left his back and the sound of buttons snapping open came as a warning from where he couldn’t crane his neck to see, the heart lodged immovably between his teeth and tongue gave one hot, definite, living twitch.