Chapter Text
I believe it was in the tender years of my eighteenth spring when the veil of mortality first descended upon my eyes. Perhaps younger, perhaps older - it matters little now - since what lingers is the revelation itself: the knowledge that the ones who walk beside me are destined, in time, to sink into the embrace of the earth, and that I, too, shall one day stand upon the grave of one I hold dear. It was not death itself that struck me, but the inexorable certainty of parting - that dreadful truth which teaches one, if they are not altogether blind, to revere every fleeting breath, to clutch with trembling hands at each memory and to treasure with fervor the fragile hearts of those we adore.
There are men who confess affection with honeyed flatteries, gilding their words until they ring hollow as glass. Others choose to heap upon their beloved countless gifts, mistaking gold for true love. Yet, above them all, stands another kind of man - a specimen whose love is not spoken, nor purchased, but enacted. Such a human does not content himself with poetry or wealth; his highest delight is to abase himself joyfully in service to the one he cherishes, to make of his own life an offering for his goddess.
Idia was this kind of man. At your feet, between your legs, he became the sinner before the holy, and, in the sanctuary of your body, he adored you with a love so unrestrained. It was not the clumsy lust of the thoughtless, but a yearning that sprang from the marrow of his soul, a hunger not only to please, but to sanctify you with the only worship he knew.
His tongue wandered across the church of your flesh, savoring what you had already offered him a hundred times over - your juices and broken moans. It was a curious spectacle, this man imprisoned in the endless cycle of service, looping as if eternity itself had decreed that his fate was to worship and nothing more. How long had it been? Minutes? Hours? You, dear reader, might be tempted to count - but what does time matter when the senses are in revolt, when the soul trembles at the brink of a lust too delicious to be condemned as sin, and too delirious to be praised as virtue?
He persisted. And here lies the irony: a man who once believed himself condemned to solitude, exiled from the communion of bodies, now found himself tethered entirely to yours. I confess, you too, gentle reader, may have harbored that thought - that you would never be touched, nor touch another - and if you deny it, you are lying to yourself. Yet see how life mocks us: the recluse becomes a worshiper, the timid becomes audacious, and the unworthy finds divinity in the curve of a mortal body.
There he was, Idia, entirely consumed by his singular mission: to render you divine in his eyes, to raise you from woman to goddess by the sheer devotion of his act. Perhaps it was ridiculous - ah, most things are, once we peel back the veil of passion - but in that absurdity lay his truth. And if truth be absurd, then perhaps only in absurdity do we find anything resembling love.
His tongue - cold, wet - drew its circles upon that small altar of flesh already exhausted from so much stimulation. Mercy was begged, not in words, but in the trembling of your limbs, in the convulsions of a body caught between torment and ecstasy. Yet, though every nerve screamed for respite, your soul betrayed you with a single demand: let it never end. Your cries grew louder, so loud indeed that any wandering soul passing by his chamber might have mistaken you for a sinner - or worse, a saint descending into ruin. And yet you did not care. You, so “depraved,” so “degenerate” - terms bestowed with great generosity by those who secretly envy the very excesses they condemn - remained enthralled, enslaved to that exquisite delirium.
This intoxication of the flesh differs little from the intoxication of the mind. Your surrender was no nobler, no wiser, than the staggering drunkard’s devotion to his bottle. Those same poor devils who dare call themselves poets, writers, lovers - what are they but addicts to their own illusions, swilling verse as though it were absinthe, hoping it will excuse their mediocrity? And yet, who among us is free of such weakness? So let us not judge. If his tongue was your wine, your forgetfulness, your madness, then perhaps you were wiser than those self-proclaimed visionaries. For at least your intoxication was honest, and left no pretense of philosophy - save, of course, the philosophy I now impose upon it.
The man prostrated between your thighs was, I confess, a spectacle bordering on the pathetic. Tears welled in his eyes, not from pain, but from the sheer sentimentality of it all - as though every taste, every drop of your desire, were too sublime for his frail heart to endure. He wept, poor soul, not because he suffered, but because he believed himself honored. Yes, honored, to drink from the very chalice of your body. What a curious thing: to cry over pleasure, as though sin itself were too holy to be borne without tears.
And perhaps it was. His sobs, pitiful to some, charming to others, were almost virginal in their innocence. Imagine a soul lost in the darkness of their own heart meeting the sun for the first time - blinded, trembling, unable to decide whether to worship or flee. That, dear reader, was his condition. A smile, cruel and tender all at once, blossomed upon your lips as your fingers tangled in his flame-like hair. You pressed him closer, fastening his face against your own sex, commanding him wordlessly to continue his devotion, to make you his last temptation, his final sin. And he obeyed - ah, how he obeyed! Not with the dignity of a knight before his sovereign, nor even with the cunning of a priest before his god, but rather with the fidelity of a mutt that knows only to kneel and lick the hand - or in this case, the flesh - that grants it affection. Laugh if you will, reader, but is this not the essence of all love? We fancy ourselves noble, poetic, sublime - but in the end, do we not crawl, weep, and abase ourselves before the beloved, as pathetic as this boy, as animal as this mutt?
And if you find the comparison unworthy, I challenge you to look closely into your own heart. You may discover, to your horror - or amusement - that you, too, have licked the dust for the sake of love.
But here lies your gravest mistake: you treated him as though he were nothing more than a mutt. Now, I may do so without consequence, for I am not a character bound by flesh and vanity, but rather the pen itself - or, more precisely, these mechanical keys - that dictate the path of your story. You are a prisoner, he is a prisoner, but I am the gaoler. It is a comforting superiority, one I admit with a smile as sardonic as it is shameless.
Yet in the scene itself, the script betrayed you. You seized those flames - blue, tinged with pink - and sought to grind against his trembling face, expecting obedience, expecting the pliant docility of an animal too stupid to resist. But then came the unexpected: those thin hands, so often fidgeting with cowardice, closed upon your thighs with a force that belied his meager figure. The marks they left upon your skin were proof enough that this was no mere mutt’s grip, but something more dangerous - something inconvenient to the fantasy you had composed.
You looked down, and he looked up. What did you see? Your own disappointment reflected in his gaze, like a mirror tilted cruelly toward you. For he denied you - yes, denied you - the freedom to ride his submission as you pleased. He shattered the illusion of your dominion with the audacity of restraint. And in that moment, the fool who was meant to be your worshiper rose, abandoning the altar of your sex as though the rite had ended before its climax. A curious inversion, is it not? That the one condemned to servitude would suddenly remember his will, while the one crowned as goddess discovered her impotence. But then again, what is desire if not a perpetual exchange of chains - sometimes clasped upon the neck, sometimes upon the wrists - and always, in the end, upon the soul?
He licked his lips as though sealing a covenant, and soon his fingers descended, trespassing into the temple of your body with a precision that betrayed both knowledge and malice. They sought and they found that secret point of delirium which makes the strongest tremble and the proudest weep. You writhed, you arched, you twisted upon yourself as though trying to escape the very bliss you demanded, and in your cries his name escaped - this time, as supplication. You begged, though you cloaked it in moans, for more - stronger, faster, deeper… something bigger hidden inside his pants. In that moment you longed to be not goddess, but a cherub cast from heaven, fallen and branded by his touch.
And he knew it. Oh, Idia knew it with the clarity of a man who has studied his own cowardice long enough to savor the chance of mastery. Thus, when your soul approached its brink - when the abyss of pleasure opened before you - he withdrew. The moment collapsed like a cathedral gutted by fire. You looked upon him, into those yellow eyes that glimmered both with devotion and cruelty, as though love itself had grown fangs. Your disappointment was sharp, but his satisfaction even sharper.
Perhaps, for Shroud, submission had become too insipid a flavor. Perhaps the true intoxication was not in kneeling at your altar, but in toppling it. He discovered, in that instant, that denial was a rarer wine than fulfillment, and that to rip ecstasy from your grasp just as you reached for it was the sweeter pleasure a sadist could have. And so he resolved - whether consciously or instinctively - to make this his new duty: to lead you by the hand to paradise, and then bar the gate at the final step. Do not rush to condemn him. You have, in your own way, done the same - dangling hope before another, only to retreat at the last breath. We call it prudence, modesty or virtue, when in truth it is but a subtler form of sadism. He had simply stripped away the mask and let the cruelty of love reveal itself naked.
After all, you had enough, had you not? Or perhaps enough is only what the other decides you deserve.