IN DOMO IMPII
Written on May 10, 2023 (♉︎︎︎︎)
Content Warning: This work contains violent incestuous monsterfucking. It also contains nonviolent incestuous non-monsterfucking, implications of past abuse/trauma, and a lot of very questionable reasoning as to how those two things should come together.
There had been nothing but light for an instant, and when Dycedarg next comprehended himself, it was not as a man alive. He was removed, sunken, riding the Beast as a tick rides a hound or a hind. When the sense of his body came back to him, he was shocked to find it less than strange. The thick matted fur, the coil of wings, the long muzzle arching back to a skull crowned with horns: all these things were him now. All of his accidents and aspects belonged to the god who had taken him.
The rest of the world had transformed quite differently. The scene around him was not strange in its grotesquerie, but he saw it now with new eyes. It all seemed of little import: the bloodied and charred lumps still wrapped in Hokuten colors, the dark spatter on the flagstones, the crumpled form of Ramza—dashed below like some cuckoo’s nestmate fallen to the ground. None of these things carried with them any horror. It was as with crude figures set in some cheap octavo with a smeared block: little shapes that only aped human form, their lines too thick and limbs out of proportion.
He saw them with the same detachment he accorded the mundane details of the room, elements his new eyes had brought into startling focus: the shadows cast by the torchlight, the frayed threads of the azure banners' trim, the faint glitter in the grain of the granite stoneworks. He saw all of it, and none of it moved him. He saw the place where he had died, and it bore no fearfulness.
And in the midst of it, he saw his brother.
The Beast moved, and Dycedarg—moving with him—felt for the first time something like dread.
There was the scent of offal on the air and all the promise of rot upon it. He could see—hear even—that Zalbag's chest still rose and fell. His breath was ragged. He could register the sharp change in its cadence as they approached, as the sound of hooves echoed through the chamber. Dycedarg could make out, with terrible clarity, the moment when Zalbag tried to pry himself up from the stretch of bridgework where he lay crumpled and the instant his sword clattered from his hand and onto the flagstones below.
A flash of anger passed over him. As Adrammelech spoke in some harsh language he did not yet understand, he could only watch as Zalbag struggled to right himself. He could only imagine the impending deathblow: the fire in his new flesh given vent. In the midst of the slaughter, he saw his brother, his body limp and face bloody, and all the past hour's bitterness washed over Dycedarg again.
When the Lucavi fell upon him, Dycedarg believed for an instant that he should feel the weight of Zalbag's marrow and entrails crushed beneath them. He thought, briefly, that he should have that small solace in this half-life to which he had been condemned—that there would be some retribution. For a moment, he thought that he might even force some words from his own thoughts into speech.
Fool of a brother...
No voice sounded, however—not from Zalbag's lips nor the animal above him. There was only the hiss of the Beast's hot breath and the choking gasp of a man braced for death.
Dycedarg saw—as he had seen the torchlight and the stones—the shining whites of Zalbag's eyes. For a moment he thought he still felt something like triumph in their directionless terror. He did not anticipate the next motion: a cleft, burning hand pressing itself against his brother's mouth.
Zalbag looked upwards. As Dycedarg became new aware of the vital heat that now coursed through him, he recalled with a sort of sickness all the particulars of the gesture—of the configuration of bodies at play.
He remembered when last he had stifled his brother's screams.
~o♑︎o~
There had been a year of plague and blight come before, and the Romandans fled back across the Larner just in time for the Eastern front to change its borders. Zalbag, ill at ease with heroism, crossed from Fovoham into Limberry with little time to tarry in his homeland. It was only by next summer that he came once again to Igros. It so happened that the goodwoman Lugria had succumb in the final days of the contagion, and circumstances were such that her issue returned to their ancestral home just as their better born brothers did. The Zelmonian capital had been beset by siege, and Dycedarg—stationed there for the better part of the younger Denamda's reign—had ridden ahead of the Ordallian line and back West. For the first time since the eve of the invasion, all four of that generation’s Beoulves were under the same roof.
Dycedarg still had little head as to how to reckon his father's natural children, whom he imagined were not isolated indiscretions for all they had been the only two legitimized. He did his best to avoid being unkind, which manifested largely as avoiding them. They repaid him by avoiding him in turn mostly—although he would later recall that he had sat for some time beside Alma as she tried to quiet a fit of weeping. He realized later that Gallione had become unfamiliar to him over the distance of years—the only fixture within it that he seemed to recognize being Zalbag.
They had never been warm with one another. Neither was often warm with anyone. For all the long years of his brother's boyhood and youth, they had nevertheless been united in some understanding. Zalbag instinctively felt the weight of shared blood. With a father pledged to the field and nobody near to their station save for the duke's spoiled children, their ascent into adulthood was largely shaped by one another, even with a near decade between them.
They spoke little at first. Dycedarg had thought in the moment that there was little need to speak. When three nights following his return, he awakened to the sound of a voice crying out, he had assumed it was one of the house's children new bereft.
The moon was nearly new. It had been almost too dark to see. When after some minutes Dycedarg recognized that the scream was not a child's—that there was no nurse coming to quiet it—he did not dare light a candle. He felt his way along the stonework and tapestries from one chamber to another largely without the aid of his sight.
When he found his brother’s room, he did not move—not for a long while. He listened instead to the man screaming in the midst of his sleep, still uncertain that he knew the voice he heard.
Dycedarg was very quick when he finally did move, shifting to brace himself against Zalbag and stop his mouth. The body beneath him stiffened and struggled as he did so. He felt a sudden sinking curiosity at what the past four years had been like on the Western front.
"You are at Igros," he whispered as low as he could. "There is no cause for this."
He clenched his teeth as his brother bit into the meat of his hand, and for all it stung, he took solace in the fact that the air was once again thick with their mutual silence.
~o♑︎o~
In the midst of different nightmares, Zalbag did not bite. He struggled still, but the effort was hopeless. The self-righteous anger that had pushed him through the past hour could not avail him now; both Dycedarg and the creature to whom he was attached could see that his lower limbs did not move. The leather of a glove creaked as Zalbag fumbled after a sword he could no longer reach, as he breathed hard against the hot skin of the Beast atop him, as he tried to blink away the thick blood falling over his features.
He kept struggling as there came the caress of so much fur and flesh—as his armor was torn away from him. Dycedarg could distantly perceive the difference between his now burning body and his brother's cool skin.
There was a sudden jolt as he felt Adrammelech's body briefly moved in accordance with his will—a sudden shudder before they continued to strip the fallen hero of all gear and ornament.
Zalbag closed his eyes at the action: flinched as Dycedarg flinched.
~o♑︎o~
"I wish we'd had you out killing generals in Ordallia proper. If you dispatch them as quick as Romandan ones. I might never have had to leave Zelmonia."
"Better knights than I were pushing towards Viura."
"Father isn't here yet. There's no need to flatter him."
Zalbag had stopped short of a reply. The two of them had been walking in one of the gardens, and it was that curious hour of the afternoon where the light lends all things a golden cast.
There had been no mention of the night before.
"It seemed a shame—if you ask me—to waste the Savior of Ivalice shoring up Limberry. The East already has its own hero."
"The Marquis seemed grateful for the aid."
"He would be. He's lucky they sent anybody to help defend a mess of fenlands and wastes."
He could make out a change in the pattern of Zalbag's breath, a moment where his brother might have spoken something in his ally's defense. He said nothing, but turned to look off into the distance, where their grieving siblings sat together by a patch of borage: two shadows cutting black gaps into the purple.
"It's strange coming back to an absence," he said, suddenly changing the topic. "I had not thought he would outlive her."
Dycedarg furrowed his brow and bit his tongue. He did not dwell on how Zalbag had grown up amidst their father's conquests—more mothers to him than the woman he'd killed in being born.
"Death seems common everywhere," he eventually replied. "You'd know better than I though."
A slow wind cut through the late summer swelter. There was an instant where it seemed Zalbag might have moved to address the two mourners, just as there had been a moment prior he might have spoken of the war. He turned back towards the gate, a barely perceptible tremor running through him.
That night, Dycedarg barely slept, but he heard no stirring from his brother's chambers. The next night and the night after were the same. It was only when he believed that whatever madness had overtaken Zalbag would not recur that he was once more awakened by a sharp crying in the night—by a scream that could not have anticipated any listener.
~o♑︎o~
In the present moment, Zalbag only breathed sharply as things progressed. His pale skin was mangled in patches where the mail had been sheared into his body. His face and throat were spattered red. Adrammelech moved quickly. Dycedarg felt how their hands dug into him, how he could feel how his brother bled more for it. There came the unfolding of so many layers between them: from cloth to skin to fat to muscle.
He tried to shift what consciousness he had elsewhere: to the stone walls, to the lights around them, to the atmosphere that must lie somewhere above Igros' white towers. He failed.
Even as the only two things living in the room, there was too much light upon them. He could not help but see.
~o♑︎o~
Was it the second time? Was it the third? Had the nights of Zalbag's ill dreams stretched into the uncountable? It must have been early on—the season of Ivalice's peace was short and the progression of real crimes ran slow.
The moon was a sliver. The sky was clear. The darkness had been incomplete when he stole into his brother's room to pull him once again out of humiliation—to keep the house ignorant that war had left him addled. He hated at the time that Zalbag should fall to cowardice, even if it was only in dreams. He hated to see a hero lain low.
When he wrestled his brother into stillness that time, however, there was a creeping unease when he did not fight.
Dycedarg's heart might dropped away when he felt an arm pull him closer. His breath certainly did.
A thousand thoughts deeper than his disgust came over him as Zalbag arched his back to push their bodies closer, as he felt the warm press of a mouth and tongue against his hand, as the rhythm of animal rutting began between them.
He wished to strike him, even though the bare trace of moonlight showed his eyes to be closed.
Dycedarg did no such thing. He merely pressed his hand all the harder over his brother’s lips as Zalbag sighed against his palm.
His brain ran through all the particulars of the man's unknown past—of rumor, of speculation, of the ever-present fact that neither of them had wed despite their House's dwindling heirs. He remembered some distant whisper as to what happened in the darkness of Romandan nights—how very young Zalbag had been when he had ridden to the western front.
He wondered who might have clapped a hand over his brother's mouth before.
Dycedarg was acutely aware of the angles of Zalbag’s hips and ribs, of the pressure of his hard prick beneath the sheets. Still, he dared not loosen his grip on him even as fiercely as it was returned. If there was shame in his brother crying out in half-waking madness, it was of little consequence compared to this. Dycedarg's muscles locked in place, his body unmoving save where it was moved. The only thing about him that stirred were his thoughts, which he tried to push a thousand miles away from where he was, like smoke or vapor ascending to the spheres beyond them.
It was to no avail.
Zalbag's breath was hot—his skin feverish. Dycedarg could not reckon what had preceded or what would proceed from the double crime in which they were entangled. He could not break apart their bodies—could not himself to pull away from the writhing shape beneath him.
When Dycedarg finally fled, he had not known it to be over. The memory of that final crisis—that instant before his brother's body had gone slack—escaped him. When he returned to his quarters to endure the rest of a sleepless night, he understood, somehow, that Zalbag would not stir.
He understood too, with an augur's irrationality, that that would not be the final night of its kind.
~o♑︎o~
Adrammelech had stripped Zalbag all but bare, a few scraps of cloth and leather still clinging to his blood slick skin. His mouth was no longer stopped, but he did not speak. It was clear as the Beast dragged its talons into him that Zalbag wished—as best as he was able—to persist in silence. Another rush of anger passed over him Dycedarg as he considered how the hypocrite must think it noble.
When he became aware of the swell of the animal parts they bore—burning like a brand and grotesque in their size—he tried to embrace what was to come with enough hatred to savor it.
They drew a stuttering gasp from its victim as they brought their mouth against his: blunt teeth tearing into the skin against which they were pressed. Dycedarg could taste what this body tasted—feel the heat of Zalbag's blood on his lips. He was aware of the pulse of his brother's heart, beating against him where skin met skin. He was aware of all the tremors of flesh against flesh—of hands pushing hard against those that held them down.
Dycedarg was aware still, as the creature continued in the course of his lust, that his brother's body responded in kind.
~o♑︎o~
It was not the final time—not for Zalbag to spend his nights screaming—not for Dycedarg to answer. The waking hours became their own sort of twilight, the two men moving through them as dreamers through a fog. The younger Beoulves broke at little points from their grief, and there was the animation of children’s footfalls in the halls and courtyards once more—the echoing of laughter and rhyming. Zalbag and Dycedarg only fell into deeper silences.
They spoke around them. They spoke of many things not mattering and never touched upon any recollection of nights or nightmares. Dycedarg persisted, however, in a morbid curiosity as to what the West had been like. He wondered how his brother had withstood the rush against the coast: the waves of men in Romandan sables flooding the beaches like beetles or birds. He had been told that Fovoham was much changed after the siege at Riovanes—that was much the Savior of Ivalice had not saved.
"It was a different war, almost" Zalbag eventually admitted. "It is not the same in the East, even now that they are pushing against the Ivalician soil. Ordallia and Romanda remain different nations."
"Do you have any preference?" Dycedarg tried to be jovial. It was noon, and they were eating wether mutton while the friars and monks scuttled about singing penitences for all the sins committed since Matins. "I've seen little combat in the past decade, myself—no head for how one nation or another dies."
"Romandans are used to their stronghold being the sea. They fight wildly and cautiously by turns. The water's the only place they can flee to, and they change tack like the tide."
"I heard they did not hold to quite the same high conduct as Viura's sons."
"They didn’t."
His reply was terse, and Dycedarg recalled they were very close in proximity—not touching but within the orbit of one another's bodies, sitting alongside one another as if they might fall together. He thought in that still summer air he could feel another tremor run through him.
"How so?" he asked lowly.
"Did you see the coast before, Dycedarg?"
"Not often."
"You probably won't then." He looked towards his untouched glass.
"There's not much left to see anymore. Scoured of villages in the first year—everyone packed off towards Riovanes."
Zalbag was not distant this time. There was nothing between them that felt like grief.
"You were at Riovanes, weren't you?"
"I was. They stripped off most of the rest of them there in the first month. Famine was Romanda's first gift before the pestilence."
He didn't ask about the siege—did not ask about other plagues—did not comment as his brother talked circuitously about the particulars of weathering the assault, of what other men did to live—what sins they resorted to.
They kept much of the rest of the day in one another's company, with only occasional drifts back to the ever-present topic of the war. It was only then that memory intruded upon him—that he recalled how Zalbag's sweat slick body had felt against his own in the darkness of nights before. He hated it. It was wrong to witness memory writ so deep—some impression in the flesh and marrow that would not show itself by day.
It was on an afternoon much like that one that Dycedarg heard word that Balbanes was riding home. He had been in the wild fields and orchards outside of Igros, speaking nonsense and nothing to his brother. It felt, in moments, that they were not much greater grown than their father's laughing bastards, who had slowly left off weeping and given themselves over to levity once again. There were instants now, in this short respite from fighting, where they seemed like men who might once have shared a boyhood, even if there were nine years that set them apart.
Instead, now they shared secrets, even if one did not understand the burden of having shared them. As the nights dragged on, there came to be less and less a gap between the beginning of one nightmare and its grotesque conclusion.
Dycedarg grew used to it: to the cry in the darkness and the contours of a body grasping hard against his own. He grew used to enduring and used to being endured—to nights of his breath dropping to stillness while his brother's raged fast and hot.
He acclimated too to his eventual decision to intervene. In the darkness of midnight and sleep, who but he and the Saint could see them. Dycedarg cared little for saints. If he decided one night to grope about and take his brother's swollen prick in hand—to feel his way along the shaft and stroke him until their ordeal ended quickly, the only witness was God. He had no faith or fear left for Him at that point—if there existed any divinity, it was its own fault for playing the voyeur.
Dycedarg would reckon to himself that it was just another extension of how rank supplanted nature. Peasants never needed to be unnatural in their lust. So long as they rutted and bred like every other animal, they need think no farther than their appetite. He's mused thus in the waxing moonlight, hand wrapped around his brother's cock, that noblemen could ill afford to fuck with no eye to strategy.
He might loathe all of Zalbag's sleeping caresses—loath how he put them to rest—but it was rank that made them so. It was not his nature that made him unnatural.
~o♑︎o~
Zalbag did not thrash, did not yet cry out. His fingers dug into the Beast's flesh and his own flesh burned hot even against its heat. He tried for a moment to turn his face away but looked up towards them of his own accord.
His lips moved, soundless.
Dycedarg knew how to answer the question they traced, but he could not speak.
He felt the shift of his body as it moved without him—as it pulled his brother's dead legs apart and back. A rough tongue lapped at the blood that ran from Zalbag's mouth and nose, abrading the skin where it touched.
There was the clumsy fumble of a cock pressed against skin—huge and unwieldy like those sported by the animal Gods before Yudora. There was the shift of clawed hands trying to guide it home, the faint throbbing pressure of his brother's body against it, the sharp and sudden moment when it thrust inside and wrenched Zalbag into a howling agony.
Blood eased the way now. It spattered against the stone and matted the Beast's fur against its legs. There was the thrum and pulse of Zalbag's body as he convulsed around them, as his wailing ran tremors against their flesh. A roar escaped their mouth. They snapped their hips fast against him again, and there came the strange pressure of something shifting in the man’s entrails, as though he was already coming apart.
Zalbag was no longer defiant. He had broken from all silence. As Adrammelech pushed on in that fatal coupling, all the man pinned beneath him could do was scream.
~o♑︎o~
Balbanes Beoulve could not have known. He detected no corruption in his house—not then, not later when it sank into his lungs and stopped them with poison. When he arrived at Igros, it was clear with which of his children he was concerned. Corruption had not found them; they were too young.
In their father's presence, Ramza and Alma reverted to earnest tears, their grief rekindled by another's grief. He was cordial with Zalbag but spoke with him little, as was his habit. His congratulations to his eldest child were even more brisk, but it was of little matter.
Dycedarg had not hated him yet.
The presence of the returned patriarch, however, made Dycedarg all the more desperate to still his brother's screams—to take on the burden of Zalbag's shame alone. Balbanes had never known what it had meant to give over his sons to war; he would not understand its weight or its consequences.
He wondered what a confessor would have him do—what some gnarled caricature of piety might command in his revulsion. In the midst of those embraces, Zalbag choking against one hand and thrusting into the other, Dycedarg imagined what could be done if any of it was revealed. He knew that he would deny it even in the midst of discovery—that outside of the four walls of that chamber, even he did not recognize it as real.
The Dycedarg of the daylight hours had never seen Zalbag break with reserve. He had never felt his hot hands and breath against his body or wondered who had felt them before. He could have no recollection of that writhing shape in the moonlight, pinned beneath him, panting hard as he spent into his brother's hand.
If there came a pang of memory, it was in some moment of bitterness—seeing his father dote upon the youngest of his brood. Dycedarg recalled how quickly he understood the motives that begot them.
Zalbag and he had no issue and no promise of producing them. Lady Beoulve was long dead, and the house wanted heirs.
Noblemen could ill afford to fuck with no eye to strategy.
Dycedarg thought later, in the midst of nightly ritual, that it was their place to be displaced: branches of a tree that would not bear fruit. They had been set against nature from their inception, unlike children born from warmer humors and earthier blood. In the throes of his disgust, he only gradually noticed those moments in which he clutched Zalbag closer, in which he sighed in harmony with a stifled groan.
~o♑︎o~
He clutched Zalbag close unto dying now, dragging his thin frame up against him as if he meant to beat it to undifferentiated pulp. He could feel the snap of a bone giving way and the breathless gap in the scream that accompanied it.
The torchlight seemed to dim, and he tried, with every portion of his mind still left to him, to will himself to some sort of action.
In the midst of this horror, he knew not what it might be.
~o♑︎o~
"You should not ask after Riovanes. Nobody who was there will answer you."
"I'm not asking nobody; I'm asking you."
"I starved the same as anyone. We won in the end though."
His voice dropped to a whisper, and Dycedarg convulsively grabbed for his wrist before that nearly imperceptible tremor ran through Zalbag once again.
"We won, Dycedarg."
He refused to feel the flinch.
"I know."
~o♑︎o~
The lights were failing or else his vision, and all he could feel around him was the slick husk of Zalbag's body, the taut pressure of his fingers clinging uselessly to Adrammelech's frame.
Dycedarg could not shudder. He could not speak. His hips rocked forward, and he could just make out the new gout of blood welling up from his brother's throat.
Even in the midst of it, Zalbag was still hard; even being torn apart, the body remembered.
~o♑︎o~
He recalled Ramza, set atop a yearling bird in the meadows. He recalled the feast after the funeral: the cold meat and dark wine. He remembered how he had found Zalbag collapsed in an untended chapel, prayer beads in hand, face caught in the circle of light cast by the rose window.
His father paying to send his paramour back to her people in the south. Alma pitching a sampler into the pond. The crack of cheap parchment under his hand when he received orders dragging him back to Zelmonia.
God, please help us
sinful children of Ivalice.
~o♑︎o~
They bit into his flesh now—tore at the muscles of his shoulder and crushed apart a rib. Zalbag lived still though, lived through each wave of violence, each fatal thrust.
Dycedarg could not reach him now—could not kill him. Every impulse was to kill him. Every part that remained of him wished the man would die, be it a matter of revenge or respite. He wondered how much longer his frame would hold, naked and bloody as the Beast speared him—as they pushed deeper into the wreck of his body.
~o♑︎o~
It was three nights before he was to ride back east, and the moon was full. Zalbag had been silent, and yet Dycedarg already stood in his room, breath shallow and still as he waited for what should come to pass. He almost thought to approach preemptively—to be lying ready to push his brother against his bed and still the madness that had become their secret.
As a cloud passed over the full moon, Dycedarg wondered if he were not mad too.
Zalbag stirred. He cried out. It was not much time before his mouth was stopped, before they tumbled against the same bed again, bodies poised to begin once more. Dycedarg closed his eyes and wondered what should happen when he departed.
When their breath both went hot and he felt the grip of fingers against his back, he moved almost without thought. Zalbag was only half-hard, but it was of little matter. He knew how it progressed—how it always progressed. There was the arc of flesh against flesh, the quickening pulse as they fell into a rhythm. When the next scream seemed ready to sound, Dycedarg looked down to make sure his grip was steady.
Dycedarg looked down, and for an instant, saw two pale lights caught in the rays of the stars and moonlight.
They looked up at him and did not waver.
He froze, and he felt the body beneath his unfreeze as it pulled itself upward. They moved together then until they sat together in the darkness, the whites of their eyes shining as the two men regarded one another.
He pulled his hand away from his lips.
Zalbag did not scream.
~o♑︎o~
Zalbag did not scream, and it was not for want of trying. His voice seemed to have spent itself as Adrammelech continued—as the Beast fucked him to the precipice of death. He did not scream, but his features were contorted into the mask of screaming. His grip did not yet falter even if it was clear he could not hold.
~o♑︎o~
Zalbag's mouth dropped open, but there was no voice behind it. If a word was mouthed it was lost to the dark of another passing cloud. Dycedarg wondered if he was to be called to account and turned over to some ecclesiastical court to satisfy his brother's insipid piety.
~o♑︎o~
Zalbag held somehow. He pulled himself forward.
~o♑︎o~
And there was the meeting of mouth against mouth—the same pressure of limbs flung about one another.
~o♑︎o~
He clung to the dark shape above him like a drowning man clinging to any piece of flotsam, like devouts clinging to idols and icons.
~o♑︎o~
They were in accord for once, both waking and aware of all the particulars of their sin.
And for as little as Dycedarg believed in God, that night he believed in sin.
~o♑︎o~
Zalbag’s mouth seemed nothing but a wound now, dripping more blood still as it sought out some skin or surface to mark—as it drew that animal maw down against him.
~o♑︎o~
In the span of that final night, Zalbag proved the one to clap a hand over his brother’s mouth. Dycedarg had no stratagem then. He let the man wrap his limbs around him—let him push him into that white square of bedding and trace the lines of his body. Dycedarg did not stop him. He met the embrace in kind. He turned all those long weeks of loathing inward—let himself fall to this nightmare of his own accord and drink down its horrors.
He caressed Zalbag and allowed himself to be caressed. He made no objection as they stripped and pushed themselves together, as they moved mouth to mouth and cock to cock as though they were one another's reflection. They were, were they not: the last two sons of a house already collapsing: the last two Beoulves truly bound by noble blood.
~o♑︎o~
Dycedarg knew when the final crisis was coming and how they were about to finish with him. He could not imagine he would live long in the aftermath. Zalbag, in that moment, had shifted his hands to the two sides of their animal head as if to cradle it, as if to die in worship of the god that would rend him apart.
~o♑︎o~
Dycedarg thought to speak, but he would and could not. He knew they would never speak of it. He knew that this moment would collapse the instant it was over.
In the dark of that chamber, with only the full moon set to spy on them, their crime could evaporate from human memory. Even as he proceeded—panting hard, glancing towards the door—he told himself that it would all be absent from his brain soon enough. Even as he pushed against his brother anew, stopping his lips now with his own. Dycedarg determined that none of it would happen, had happened, was happening.
~o♑︎o~
He could feel the hot animal blood in his veins shift as they reached that climax, as he arched his head back in another triumphant roar. There was the crack of more bone as Zalbag's fingers tightened against the fur beneath them and went slack.
~o♑︎o~
That night happened nevertheless. They rutted and mingled their sweat and drank one another's breath, heaving against one another with a wordless desperation. When they spent themselves, it was very close together. Dycedarg came first and endured half a minute in mortification as Zalbag kept on.
When another cloud passed from the moon and the black of the night shifted to silver, Dycedarg tried to pull away. He did not want to see any part of their bodies still entangled. Zalbag clung to him, fingertips digging into the meat of his arms until he suddenly pushed Dycedarg off.
His body convulsed in a familiar motion: the full realization of what had never risen beyond a tremor.
~o♑︎o~
Adrammelech did not breathe—it was a creature fueled by different operations. The thing that they had become moved no fiber of its body—nothing save for the pulse of its cock as it kept spilling into whatever space in Zalbag it had hollowed out. Dycedarg—whatever and wherever he was now—watched the blood and foam that fell from Zalbag’s lips.
He felt the shift in pressure and heat as everything about his brother ceased.
~o♑︎o~
Dycedarg had gotten his clothing very quickly that night, and he had not spoken. He did not allow himself to dwell on the possibility that Zalbag might speak. He only let himself focus on escaping that scene and reverting back to the normal course of his life: some place where this had not been. It did not take him long to compose himself. It did not take him long to leave.
When he was in the hall, demeanor cool and body tense, it should have been over. He should have escaped back into the nowhere of sleep and been done with it. Instead, there was an instant where he was caught in the winking gold of a candle, where he saw in the wavering circle of light a child, shift white in contrast to the black that shrouded it by day, its eyes wide before it turned and ran.
~o♑︎o~
When the flesh beneath him began to move again, Dycedarg wished that he could run himself, even if it was only to some place buried deeper within his master's brain. As they pulled away from him, he saw the torn and bloodied shape of Zalbag's ruined body try to ape the motions of life—as if by thrashing it might force air through its lungs and blood back through its heart.
Dycedarg wished, in that instant, that he could look down to Ramza on the flagstones again—that he might have the solace of seeing some member of his house descended to stillness.
He could not do it.
He could only turn his gaze where the Beast let him, and his gaze was forever upon Zalbag. He watched as his brother's eyes regained their power and lit upon him, and he wished—most ardently—that there remained some sound within him that might be stopped.
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