inside of you, in spite of you

The nightmares have plagued him for days. Incoherent visions wherein he is flayed to the bone, eviscerated by some unseen force that, though it hides its face, is nonetheless smiling as it tears him apart.

A fever heralds tonight’s set of mental horrors, gripping him tight in its clammy fist, leaving him barely able to stand. Hours now it’s raged—probably he should drag himself to the infirmary, but little comfort awaits him there; just another priestess sick of the sight of him. Too many times he’s been shoved into the cold hands of a Mistress of Arach-Tinilith these past eight years, always with blood in his mouth and no explanation as to why. At least these days it’s just blood; no more chunks of flesh, scraps of skin, tangled knots of hair and nail and bone.

Vizaeth’s stomach cramps viciously, and he groans. From his sprawl on the floor, he hooks a wavering, pale-red mage hand around the chamber pot and yanks it to him in time to choke up a mouthful of watery blood. Eight years. He wipes his mouth with the back of a hand so grey it might as well belong to the corpse it ought to be. Eight years exactly.

Sweet Lolth, his head hurts.

Another cramp doubles him over, and this time thick, deep red splatters the chamber pot. Too deep, too dark, clots sticking to the porcelain. His skin feels stretched, paper thin and glistening with sweat—hot, why is it so damn hot in here? He struggles free of his clothes, shallow breath scraping the swollen walls of his throat. Water. He needs to drink something, flush out the infection. He directs the mage hand to the jug on the nightstand, but as its fingers close around the handle it flickers out of existence. He tries to call it forth again, and nothing happens.

“Fuck!”

Blinking away tears of frustration, he struggles to his knees. Even that effort leaves him wheezing, exhausted, a rolling ache radiating through his ribs. His heart, giving up at last? He presses a hand to his chest, feeling his pulse thundering beneath his palm, and something presses back.

His eyes go wide. He jerks away but there’s no fleeing it—it’s inside him, a hard, shifting shape stretching up and distorting his skin as it twists and turns. His stomach bulges, and something strokes him from within, finds the scar that runs down his centre and traces up it from below like it intends to slice his seams.

A spasm knocks him forwards onto all fours and he retches. Blood splatters the floor; bright blood, fresh blood, rupture red. His arms shake as he stares at it, and he tries to make a sound—a cry, a plea, a simple moan of terror—but what comes out of his mouth is a hand.

It pushes forwards, clawing blindly at the air. Slick fingers grope his face; his stomach churns, but he can’t vomit. His throat is too full.

Knuckle by knuckle, more fingers force their way between his lips. They tangle in his sweat-damp hair, using him as an anchor to haul inch after inch of skinny grey arms free. His jaw cracks wide and then wider, surely broken. There’s a snap somewhere deep in his chest; blinding white pain splits his head, and with the sound of tearing flesh the thing in his mouth falls forwards as he collapses backwards, landing with a heavy thump between his sprawled legs.

He lays there, panting, as it rises to its knees. Slowly, it pushes long, blood-clotted white hair back from its face.

“No,” he rasps. The room spins, tilts sideways. “No, no—you’re dead.”

“Am I?” Xunhrae cocks her head. She runs her delicate hands up her stomach, over her blood-slick breasts. “I don’t feel very dead.”

“You’ve always been dead.”

She crawls to him, exactly the way he crawled to Veryan the night he broke the Szarkai’s wrists. Even her smile is the same; that predatory curve, devoid of anything but hunger. Then he’d known nothing but the pretence of lust, a veneer of bravado over soul-searing disgust and inexperience. Now he knows more. Now she knows more.

“You aren’t real. You can’t be real.” Her hands slide up his thighs and Vizaeth squeezes his eyes shut. “You’re not real,” he repeats the words in a frantic litany as she pushes him to the floor. “You’re dead, you’re not real, you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead—”

Xunhrae straddles him and his body reacts to her touch because it’s Vizaeth’s body and Vizaeth always reacted and he’s Vizaeth now. She takes his face in her hands.

“I only die when you die,” she says. “You’re still me, and I’m still you. There’s no hiding from that.”

She sinks onto his cock, hot and wet and so very real. His hands find her waist; hers, his chest. She is him. Who else could she be?

Xunhrae rolls her hips, taking him deeper, crying out because she hates this, they both hate this. Her nails dig into his shoulders as she kisses him, her tongue thick with the metallic taste of his own blood.

“This is just like when we heard Her, isn’t it?” she whispers, and the whole world shifts.

Red, stretching out forever. Above, great white ropes tangle across the arterial sky—no, not ropes. Webs. Strands of web as wide across as Sorcere is high, with the dark specks of spiders traversing their impossible spans. Errdegahr’cressen, the Demonwebs; sacred terminus, place of the final trial, home and hell for all true faithful, sullied by the presence of his mortal flesh. Its beauty threatens to cleave his mind in two.

Xunhrae grabs his wrist. “Touch me,” she commands. He resists, but her grip is iron. She forces his hand between her legs. “Touch me.”

His fingers make clumsy work of her clit. She growls her frustration as she takes him again and again and again, her revulsion as tangible as the spiders that creep ever closer to their hateful coupling. So many of them, and more every moment; from fingernail-sized weavers to great silver creatures half the height of Narbondel. Lolth’s curious children, come to see who dares impose upon their Mother’s hospitality.

“Do you remember what we used to dream of?” Xunhrae asks. Something bites his hip and he arches up with a cry.

“Her!”

“Can you feel Her now?”

“I can feel you.”

“It’s the same thing.” Spiders cluster over his hand, squirming between his fingers. Xunhrae’s head falls back on a deep moan as their tiny bodies wriggle against her, subtler and more skilled in their motions than he could ever be. “Do you still want Her?”

“I never stopped wanting Her.”

There’s a pulse, then. Physical, spiritual, beneath his skin and of it. Xunhrae clenches around his cock with a shout of pleasure and Vizaeth bucks his hips, desperate suddenly. He surges up, clutching at her breasts as though he means to tear them off. Xunhrae crushes her mouth to his, a black widow clinging to her cheek, and her hands wrap tight around his throat as he comes.

A hand settles on his shoulder, light as a cobweb. He breaks from Xunhrae with a gasp, spit and webbing strung between their lips, and looks up at Lolth.

She’s naked, as they are, perfection carved from purest obsidian. Her long white hair trails up behind Her, woven into the reality She owns, beaded with egg sacs and crystallised ruby souls. She doesn’t speak, but his name vibrates out of Her, making the web beneath them tremble. Buried deep in Xunhrae still, he comes again—eight egg sacs burst at the same time as he does, spilling dozens of tiny black bodies over Lolth’s face.

The hand on his shoulder lifts to his chin, and Lolth tilts his head up with Her perfect fingers to meet Her perfect mouth. She kisses him, all gentle venom, then turns and kisses Xunhrae, whose hands are now both between her legs, covered in spiders, fingers as frantic as the whimpers that issue from her throat. She can’t speak, so Vizaeth begs for both of them.

“Please.”

Lolth’s smile splits four ways as Her jaws open, and Xunhrae howls in ecstasy as Her fangs close around them. Red muscle squeezes tight, undulating, infinities of wet flesh pressing them together in the sacred darkness of Her gullet. His hands sink into Xunhrae’s stomach; hers slide between his lungs to cup his heart. Lolth’s throat presses close around them—the pressure of Her abyss cracks their shins, their thighs. Xunhrae’s spine snaps, and she gasps. Vizaeth feels her spasm around his cock, so deep inside her now it’s more a part of her than him.

“I die when you die,” she whispers. “There is no you without me.”

And she pushes her face into his chest to sink her teeth into his heart as Lolth crushes them to nothing.

Vizaeth bolts upright, a thin, raw, wheezing terror hissing from his throat. Sweaty sheets enweb his legs and he claws his way free, scrambling up the bed until his back’s against the wall. All he can taste is blood. He spits a clot the size of a molar into his palm and for a moment all he can do is stare at it, trembling. Then he flings it aside in favour of a panicked inventory of self: his body—his body—is just as it should be, the same as it was before he passed out. If he passed out. His fever has broken and his head no longer pounds, but his skin is all over tender, shivery and sensitive, and he’s hard. Brutally hard.

He sags, bit by bit remembering how to breathe, and that’s when he sees the bloodstain between his legs. A low whimper chokes out of him and he shuts his eyes. Counts to ten.

When he opens them, the blood is still there. Hands shaking, he skates his fingers along the inside of his legs, feeling for a cut, a scratch, but there’s nothing. Just unbroken skin from knee to groin, and he’s still so fucking hard.

Vizaeth closes his eyes again. He slides down the bed until his hips fit over the bloodstain, puts his hands between his legs, and thinks about Lolth.