Slowly, Sweetly
Thorns was no place for Adele to be. Well, more specifically, the small human town near the edge of that particular part of the Shadow Lands. In the past three days she had seen things no one should ever have to see.
The children were the worst part.
Death drew the color from this place like water against a pastel sketch. Reds, greens, blues and all the rest blurred together into a sticky sludge gray. It was worse when it rained.
Not that she had a choice. She’d vowed to herself that she would watch over Zao’s unborn. She’d cut a lock of her hair, sent it back to Jade with Quin. She’d sworn with that act that as soon as the children were safely born, she would return home. She would return to the arms of her warm loving mountain. She would once again sit at her brother’s feet while he braided her hair. She would smile and listen quietly to the sound of Arbat reading his texts.
The mother of Zao’s children was wild. She could see, there, how the two could have fallen into each other’s arms. Too young and foolish to even realize what they were doing. She imagined them, running blind through the world laughing. They didn’t need to care. They didn’t know that they should. That was why it didn’t surprise her much when the young women snuck out of her care and fled her watchful eye. Children never realize why they are watched, only that they do not want to be.
So Adele had tracked her to this little town too close to Thorns. Did the girl know? Could she conceive how dangerous a place this was? Adele hoped not. She’d turned over every pebble, asked every man women and child. All of them told her, without question, she would have to seek the girl deeper. That perhaps she’d entered the Shadow Lands themselves.
This night, this third night in this little by-way to Hell, Adele stood alone in a room in an inn listening to the sound of the rain.
She closed her eyes and pretended it was the same rain that fell in Jade. That the sound was just the same as it was against her bedroom window. It wasn’t. This place was hollow, even it’s sounds seemed to echo wrong. She was thinking about emptiness when He first came.
She felt a hand slid slowly along her belly. It stopped, having wrapped around her. She could feel a figure pressed against her back. Slowly, and deliberately, another hand brushed her jaw up to her ear. Fingers ran slowly through her thick red hair, brushing it away from her neck.
It could have been the caress of a lover. Only, no one but Gannon had her permission to touch her like that. These hands were not Gannon’s hands. These hands were slim, almost delicate for a man's. What was more, they were cold. Ice cold. It froze her down to her spine and she gasped.
“Let me go.”
"I will not. You enjoy my touch." It wasn’t a question. What was more, they weren’t words. Not in any way she had understood them before. They were thoughts from an alien mind. They brushed against her psyche and imprinted gently but firmly into her mind.
“I enjoy your touch.” She did, though, step away from him to turn and face him. Her heart jumped in her chest and she felt dizzy.
He was beautiful enough to be a Fae. He was beautiful enough to be a spirit. He was beautiful enough to be a God. He was too beautiful to be real. Looking into his eyes broke her heart and made her long suddenly for an oblivion in which nothing existed but the lack of beauty. “What are you?” She asked finally when she could find her words.
“I think you already know.” He spoke aloud this time. His voice a deep rumbling bass that she could feel in her knees.
“Why are you here?” She wrapped her arms around herself protectively. Though, it offered only minimal security. Her body betrayed her, longing as it did to feel his touch again. She stood her ground, at least for the time being.
“Because I love you.” His lips slowly turned up at the edges into a lonesome smile. “I saw your Light from place which I rest. I have been drawn to you, like a moth.”
She looked at him as if she couldn’t comprehend the words. “Love…. Your kind doesn’t know how to love.” She couldn’t see him liking himself to the moth. He was surely not the one who ran risk of being consumed.
“Untrue.” He said, stepping forward to take her wrist in his hand. He pressed it against his chest. To her surprise she felt a heart beat there. “We are not dead, not in the way you understand it. I feel, as you do. I think as you do. I desire…. As you do.” He drew her in, breathing out along her neck. “Let me in to your Light. Let me paint an illusion of lies around you. Let me slowly kill you.”
She closed her eyes and slowly swayed. His arms encircled her. “I don’t want this. My husband will come and stop you.”
He chuckled into her neck. “He will not. Besides, sweet Adele, by the time I’m done with you, you won’t want it to stop.” She became then, acutely aware of his breath on her neck. She felt with a slow spreading horror, something hard, teeth, brush her skin. She gasped, tensed and waited. There was no pain at first. Just a strange pushing against her skin; though not against her skin at all. The wound he created was in her spirit. Creating two pinprick holes in her soul so that he could slowly sap away her life essence.
She came to know him as Sweet Slow Destruction. For the nights that followed he would hold her captive with his strange magic. He did as he promised, he drew a web so tight around her she forgot everything she knew to be true. All that was left was what he said, and even that she knew was a lie. When she shared his bed, it was like dying a little bit at a time. Of course, thanks to his sweet poison, she thought for that time that death was just exactly what she wanted.
Her husband never came. That was when she knew that she had lost him to time and distance. Or perhaps she only thought that because of the spell Destruction had her under.
Months passed, she was never rewarded with the death she surely had earned by now. Though she begged for it sometimes between the lash and the feedings. He’d laugh and promise her “All in good time my love. You are a bottemless well to me.”
And then one night he didn’t come. He seemed to have vanished the way he’d come, without warning. She’d escaped by chance of circumstance and only barely with her life. Her health was shattered, there was nothing left to retreat back to Jade and hope she lived long enough to recover.
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