IN TERRA PROFUGUS
Written on August 7, 2020 (♌︎)
Content Warning: This is--more or less--a sequel to "Custos Fratris Mei," but it is fundamentally just a narrative-shaped delivery system for violent rape, gore, and monsterfucking, and may be enjoyed without much mind for what happened before. "The Lucavi won, and Zalbag Beoulve has been imprisoned by his demon brother who fucks him a lot" is the only narrative summary you really need. Suffice it to say, this is very nasty. Do not read the words below if you do not wish to encounter unhinged, violent, non-consensual demonic incest.
Written for visitor 2,501 to this fine website for almost hitting the kiriban. (If you happened to be visitor 2,500, please know that you may still make a claim.)
As dear as revenge had been to Dycedarg, he had surely surfeited upon it now.
The days had crawled their way outside of his reckoning. The outward accidents of crown and coronation, the new rite undertaken at Orbonne, Her black-bannered armies pushing forever east: all these things Dycedarg Beoulve tried to read in the flashes of consciousness granted him–tried to augur out some method to the Lucavis' madness. Even dead as he was to the world and all aspects of life within it, he remained a schemer. Adrammelech was by no means the image of perfection men demand from Gods; Adrammelech–he told himself–must someday falter.
They had left Igros some time ago. The Hokuten had been dressed in new livery, carrying the emblem of Her ascension: the branching icon, the eternal gallows. He had recalled at one point that they stood in the white towered palace at Lesalia. There had been smoke on the air, brass horns sounding, the scent of marrow and fat. Dycedarg knew from many a text of antiquity the wild appetites of old Gods. He did not feel the weight of their horror. The company of his masters had stripped him well of most squeamishness.
Still, as the body to which he was bound moved through the new world of Her making: two objects remained to sink him to despair or disgust. The first of these was Her lesser aspect, when She put aside all other guises and reverted to the body of a young girl–light-haired and saffron-cloaked, pale and forever breathless.
The second of these was Zalbag, upon whom he was made to surfeit on still.
~O♑︎O~
If Zalbag were not mad at the time of his brother's accusation, he surely had given over to madness now. The weight of so much suffering had left him prone to fits–to moments of blind laughter or weeping, to lapses in memory and sensibility. He did not know when he had been brought out of Igros and into the marble halls in which he lay captive. The darkness of his cell had given way to the agony of daylight and the scent of saltwater, but he had no recollection of the sea.
The new prison to which he was confined was in some way familiar–incense and candlelight and signs he recognized as once beloved–a ceiling vaulted with tessellating patterns, crossed sigils with branching arms. He found his mouth shaping one word until it wore down to nonsense: Faram, faram, faram.
Cold iron rubbed his neck and wrists raw. Zalbag felt little of it. All of it had been arranged to keep him from strangling and to keep his head from the floor at this point. He recalled waking from one attempt or another, some keeper probing at the wound on his brow before delivering a hard handed slap across his face. They did not yet desire his death. Even if all dread of that sin had vanished, he had given up on suicide. He had learned to endure–learned to sleep longer and move less between each visitation.
He had learned too the horrible joy of those visits. Each night of torment–each blissful agony–awakened him now. To see the beast and succumb to its appetite was perhaps the only remaining sanity left. In those moments where Dycedarg's shape loomed over him, he had something like life: hot blood coursing in his veins, recognition firing through his brain. He had hate and despair again. With each new degradation, with each aborted death, there was clarity.
~O♑︎O~
Zalbag was still numb when She first intruded. It was a prelude–all of it only human sin. The hands that gripped his hair were mortal–the member choking him half slack. If he closed his eyes it might only be his brother raping him. It might be anyone. He tried to envision it, and Dycedarg picked up his pace. Zalbag gagged as he was dragged against his brother's hips, flinching at the sound of footsteps.
"It is a base thing to give oneself over to lust." The voice was strange, crystalline, like the reverberation of bells. "A pity that you were always drawn to it."
Zalbag remembered something–a superstition–some cant that goats whispered sin into the ears of maids and sleeping shepherds. There was a flash of skylight and the scent of open air, and he remembered Igros too: white towers against the swell of green below. He remembered the thrum and rhythm of human language and intercourse. He remembered the chirruping of draft birds. He remembered riding.
He shuddered hard as he realized he also remembered the voice that spoke.
"You tarry long with shadows, Adrammelech," She said. "Pray do not grow distracted."
The hand at the back of his head wrenched him forward. Zalbag did not open his eyes, nor did he pay mind to the moisture dewing upon his lashes. He tried to turn his attention to the weight against his tongue, to the pressure at the back of his throat. He tried even to hurry things along–to move his lips and mouth like one absolutely complicit. He shuddered when he felt the responsive bite of nails against the skin of his neck, hot and hard with the sting of fire.
"We will discard any shadow not fitted to your Lady's vision," a voice above him growled.
And suddenly he was dashed to the floor, chains rattling, breath ragged as the shock of the air hit him. He gagged from the sudden motion. He could hear his brother hiss out a word as he sank to his knees alongside him. There was the sound of steel being unsheathed.
There was the sound too of a light step upon the floor: of the rustle of cloth or feathers.
"We do not require any such theatrics—but heed what your body remembers. It is dangerous to flirt too far with the whims of your host."
"I can efface him from all memory forthwith," Dycedarg said coolly.
And there was the weight of a blade against his neck, cold and ticklish against the underside of the collar locked around his throat. Zalbag did not look up nor alter his posture. He barely breathed.
There was a long pause during which he hoped the order would be given to kill him–during which he hoped he might die in the luxury of doubt.
He did not want to see Her.
"Do as you like. I do not begrudge a loyal servitor his pleasures—I merely give you caution."
He knew that She had turned from them then–could feel Her now, her presence burning like a brand in a room he could not leave.
Zalbag did not open his eyes, remaining still when the sword fell away from his neck.
"I thank you, My Lady."
In what came to follow, there was only the relief that he had not witnessed Her. When Dycedarg took him in hand again, fingers hard against his throat to wrench him back to his task, Zalbag felt no longer the sting of his disgust. He performed as commanded with perfect complacency–eager and pliant to the point of being provoking. As muddied as his own perceptions were, he knew that the Beast would be little content if he were not brought to pain. He was not surprised when it pulled away before completion. He was not surprised he felt the rough surface of an animal tongue against his own—of hard, cleft hands against his shoulders. He looked very deliberately at Dycedarg's face as their bodies shifted this time—as the thing that wore that shape crushed him with slow deliberation to the floor—as pupils of its eyes collapsed and narrowed.
It pulled away, its hands moving along his flanks, its thigh moving to part his legs.
"I will make you wish She'd chosen differently."
Zalbag felt himself tense, anticipatory. He knew what was coming—knew that it would be worse beyond what he had endured before, that it would be more than he could steel himself for. He had reconciled himself by now to the fact that he would always be made to break with any stoicism left him.
"I know," he whispered, nevertheless calm. He swallowed. "I know."
There was the burn of claws tearing into the gaps in his ribs then, the hot stench of sulfur, the howl of the creature as it shed its shape–and suddenly the room around him warped as the horizon does in high summer heat. He bit into the meat of his tongue as it wrenched its fingers into him, and he only screamed after he'd tasted blood. He was alive all right—alive to the sensation of muscle being pierced—to the feel of what he knew to be bone against bone. His vision sharpened to nothing but the shadow of the thing atop him, and he kept his gaze upon it as he tried to choke off the next scream to come, watching the line of its horns as he felt its coarse hair–the swollen heat of its cock press against him.
He wept hard as it dragged him down, claws wrapped around his ribs and into the emptiness beneath them. There was no bracing for what was to come—as always there was nothing save to wait for time to pass and for his body to endure. All the while, its fingers dug further and further in; he became newly aware of the thrum and pulse of his entrails, of that mass of unextinguished animal heat still burning inside of him. Everything around him was sharp as he breathed, and as the creature pushed hard into him, that pain turned inward. There was fresh blood in the back of his throat; there was fresh blood fallen between his legs. When he tried to scream, his lungs would not fill as they ought.
Whatever had transpired a little while earlier had left it hungry. It rutted into him violently—with nothing by way of prelude or preparation—tearing into his flesh as though it would cut and pull the life from out of it. When Zalbag could finally moan, it was with the shifting of the fingers in his chest—with the sharp bulge of that burning creature's cock pushing against his belly, filling him even as he was drained—even as he was torn and ruined. He knew that all this had happened before—that all of it would happen again—and to his unstoppable shame, he could not help but respond.
As Adrammelech fucked him—brutally, violently, murderously—it never escaped Zalbag's notice how his mind still tried to see a human shadow above him, how his body yielded to the lust visited on it and requited it in turn. When it struck him, when it made him feel the weight of so much torn flesh and splintering bone—Zalbag was still lost to an ecstasy he could not refuse, his body betraying him as those of hanged men do, as if Adrammelech meant to coat the ground beneath them with mandrakes and witch plants.
~O♑︎O~
"Do you remember how long it's been?"
Time sloughed away, peeling from his memory like dead skin. Zalbag knew he had bled profusely—knew he had been all but wrenched apart. He could not recall the particulars however between that moment of finality and awaking to find himself restored. He never could. No moment was final. Zalbag lay alone, manacled amidst marble and candlelight, pressing his throat against the chain collaring him to feel the ragged drum of his pulse.
He was in that death of waiting again, and he had no means of reckoning when next he would be free. If words had been whispered to him in waking, they fell from him before he could discern their shape. He could make out the cry of horns and cymbals, and time lurched forward, dragging along with it the presence of clerics and handlers, the nonsense of prayer, the dull weight of bread pushed between his lips, of stale water poured down his throat. Again and again, his thoughts turned to the thing that had been his brother—again and again, they turned to the voice that chastened it.
He tried to move beyond thought then—to cease in that course and to look only towards the next time his brother brought him to pain.
In sleep, he fancied he did not dream.
~O♑︎O~
"Do you remember when you were first brought to Mullonde?"
Zalbag stirred, smoke and incense stinging at the back of his throat, the ache of so many old wounds pulsing as if they would break through his scars to bleed anew. There was the jangle of chains as he must have shaken his head.
"Do you even know you are in Mullonde?"
The voice was Dycedarg's.
Zalbag shook his head again, and he looked up to his brother amidst the darkness— however little he had a reckoning for time, he did not believe they would meet again this soon.
"What do you remember? Do you remember how long it's been?"
There was a hand cupping his chin now. Dycedarg had knelt to look at him. Were his brother still composed of mere human matter, Zalbag imagined he would have felt the soft hiss of breath against his face.
"I…" He paused, swallowed hard. "I remember the battle."
"I meant before that. I meant before this." His voice was low, and it was tinged with a bitterness Zalbag couldn't place. "What was your first memory of Mullonde?"
Zalbag blinked.
"Do you mean after Romanda? Do you mean back before..."
"I mean as far back as you can remember," Dycedarg hissed.
Zalbag shook his head yet again. How could he remember? His eyes traced the patterns of the floor and ceiling—all those emblems of the saint and circles of the Brave's twelve seals. How could he have come here before? He knew that he ought to know. For a moment there seemed to be no history to his life beyond the four walls of the room that enclosed him.
"You came here first when you were eight years of age," Dycedarg said after some moments' silence.
"Did I?"
"The Feast of St. Selwen. The Pope had offered up prayer and absolution for those on the road to Viura. Father agreed to take you because you wanted to see the holy city–you were already a slave to piety."
It stung him then, sharp and sudden: the gold icons of the Golganda's gallows in sunlight, the screech of gulls flying over the procession, all the cardinals in their ornaments.
"I was sick then," he whispered.
"You were often sick. There was some talk then that relics and prayers might heal you."
Zalbag shuddered, and he felt the hard grip of a hand digging into the flesh of his shoulder. Dycedarg's skin burned against him, alight with unnatural flame, and Zalbag was suddenly drawn back to a world of fevers–to the stale scent of sweat and the exhaustion of having lain too long without moving. He had been sick often. He was sick now. When Dycedarg drew his chin upwards to look at him, he could feel anew the revulsion of being as he was—naked and fettered and filthy. Something in his brother's face reflected his own disgust.
"Why are you telling me this," Zalbag whispered out eventually. "What does it matter what I remember?"
Slowly, deliberately, Dycedarg shifted to pull Zalbag into something like an embrace, moving as he gripped him to speak into his ear.
"It doesn't matter what you remember." There was a moment of complete stillness—an instant in which there was nothing but the heat in the air between them. "It matters that we do."
He tried not to think of the tone of the voice—to measure the humanity of its diction. The weight of a body against him drew a million pains to the surface, and Zalbag tried to sink into them—to pull himself through the phantom holes torn in his flanks—through all the breaks in the bone reset and reknit again. He was shaking, and he loathed each thought all the more when he could feel the caress of hands against his back, of something like a breathless gasp as a face buried itself against his shoulder—teeth sharp, mouth burning.
It was the most terrible relief when he felt the fast snap of his arm under the creature's grip—when he could think of nothing but pain and all pretense of something like tenderness vanished. As the creature next struck him, he met the blow hungrily; when it bit against his lips, he returned its kiss. He tried, as things progressed, to move as he would be moved, to let himself be ruined back into nothing. This time, however, it wore a human shape throughout—Dycedarg's skin and face against him as he was fucked and brutalized—Dycedarg's blunt fingers twisting the fracture in his arm.
When they parted that time, mouths bloody, Zalbag looked on with dread to see a face whose features seemed to perfectly mirror his own–that pierced him through with a look of horror at what they had become.
~O♑︎O~
Memory continued to sting him after that parting, and he felt with renewed clarity the horror that he was still among remnants of House Beoulve. He recalled the pilgrimage Dycedarg had mentioned–the clouds of incense and the webbing of reliquaries. He recalled his brother gripping his hand fast as Zalbag stammered out mangled strains of Ikkoku, prayers that God would love him and he should grow strong.
He had been sick. He had nearly died every summer in sickness until the blush of youth was on him and war seemed to lend him strength. God had loved him–through plague and war. A God might love him still, for his flesh remained its delight. His anticipation of Adrammelech's visitations turned now to a deeper dread—that he should be too alive to it—too full of recollection. He had tried to distract himself from the horror of Her presence, but he could not deny the reality of Dycedarg: he could not part now from the shadow of his brother.
Do you remember Lesalia during the coronation? Do you remember the victory at Riovanes? Do you remember the good lady Lugria doting on you like a hen given a swan's egg?
He remembered—in each new encounter, he was given that torment in addition to the others. Those whispered reminiscences, those reminders that some part of Dycedarg was forever intermixed with the thing that battened on him: always they gave way to more violence. Always they deepened its sting. It was one thing to be lost to the agony of Lucavi's lusts unmasked—another to be brought to pain while Dycedarg and the past they shared hung over him. He wondered anew each time if this was a punishment for something long dormant in him: if there had not always been some despicable desire that his brother should lay hands on him.
He closed his eyes at times, trying to imagine it was anything but his brother raping him.
Zalbag was seldom injured to the point of unconsciousness now. He would be beaten; he would be strangled; he would have fingers snapped and limbs broken—but he was no longer drawn so close to death. Instead he was made to endure the slow humiliation of being petted and fondled in the midst of it—of having to let minute after minute drag on as Dycedarg's body alone thrust against him. It was all sickness now: the rhythmic snap of his hips as he withdrew and pushed hard into him, the ache of his legs bent back, the pooling sweat or blood that let him feel every mote of grit between the floor and his back. He longed more and more that the creature should reveal itself and tear him asunder again—that he should be made again a sacrifice and not just a whore.
And when he gasped out that sentiment once–a barely breathed "please"—he thought he could feel an animal roar course through the body atop him: a shuddering growl as if in appetite.
Dycedarg slammed his head against the tile very suddenly. A voice crackled in his skull as his vision went black. He could taste bile in the back of his throat.
Do not presume the right of pleading, shadow.
He tried to sink away again; tried to lose consciousness. It dragged him back, however, tethered him to where he felt the sharp stab of one final thrust, the pulse of his brother's cock within him, the warm slick of come wetting his thighs.
You shall dance for us as long as light burns for it.
Hands pressed against the edges of his throat then, only to withdraw–to leave him in sickness and stunned wonder that they should be shaking.
~O♑︎O~
"Do you remember how long it's been?"
The voice was not Dycedarg's—nor was it the beast that held him.
"A month and he's been treating you with such a light touch." It chuckled. "Barely caught you sleeping once."
A hand—warm, masculine—caressed the side of his cheek, and he could feel the traces of blood it smeared along with it. He swallowed hard as he felt the dull fire of healer's arts seep into him, closing the abrasions and scrapes where the man above him ran his fingers.
"Haven't had a taste for weeks."
He tried not to alter the pattern of his breath as he felt the brush of lips against his own, as he was newly aware of all the little pains he suffered there. A tongue pressed through his teeth, and he grew thought as to how much he must taste of blood–as he remembered the tear at the corner of his mouth from where it had been made to stretch too far.
"Don't worry though–" The man above him laughed as they parted. "I'm always gentle."
Hands ran over him, smoothing over more hurts as they did so, and Zalbag did not move. He did not wince as the man parted his legs, sending a shock of pain through where some muscle had been pulled too far previously.
He most certainly offered no reaction when he felt the hinges of his bonds swing open.
His head swam even in the darkness behind his vision, and Zalbag realized that for the first time he could recall since Igros, he lay unfettered. He was on the cold floor, naked and injured, and set to be defiled even further—but in that instant he was free. He clenched his teeth hard as he could feel the cool sting of a cloth wiping him down. There came a whispered incantation and the further sink of magic. Something in one of his hips righted itself.
"Saints, but you must have been sweet as milk in your youth—would have loved to have you back then, squirming beneath me in the cloister gardens or some such."
He could feel the an oil-slick finger push into him, and he tried not to gasp. Adrammelech's latest violence had been far from fatal, but he had no doubt he had bled for it. He did his best to lie still as a corpse as the wretch above him kept on-more caresses, more magic, more probing digits.
"You're sweet enough still—I reckon," he sighed, hand running over Zalbag's flaccid cock. "Even if not, it would be a sorry thing to refuse a piece of the Savior of Ivalice."
The man grunted as he pushed the head of his own cock slowly into him, thumb running over his hip bone as he panted and puffed. Zalbag failed to stifle a shudder. After all of the other sufferings heaped upon him, it should feel like nothing to sate the lust of one more body, and yet the indignity of being raped by this priest—this caricature of lechery—brought with it a new sting.
He remembered himself again as he considered how far he had fallen—remembered the flash of his sword's magic as he sped down the hill at Limberry—the roar of onlookers as the Hokuten marched through Lesalia's plazas.
"Ajora..." the healer moaned, picking up the pace of his shallow thrusts. "New Gods be praised for all the sins they still overlook."
There still came the flow of magic into him—realigning a rib, undoing the bruising of his jaw—and Zalbag opened his eyes just enough to make out the shape of the man fucking him, to see the billow of his hood and the shadows of his lined face. He thought through how to move himself. He realized—with a giddy dread—that escape was—for once—an option. He tensed his muscles, felt them ache in all the places they'd been newly restored.
And then the priest stopped, and Zalbag's eyes slid open in time to see the first drop of blood spattering downwards atop his chest.
He did not see the shadow behind him at first—all he saw was the mass of red seeping through the man's white garments, and after that, the void in his chest that stretched and gave way to a pair of emerging hands, blood pulsing around them as they began to shear him apart.
Zalbag pulled himself upright just in time to watch the body pressed against his split apart—to see the underlying flex of is rib cage as it tore and to watch the entrails tumble out of him. The man's cock was pulled from his body as his lower parts were torn from one another, as leg broke from leg and he was cast aside, rent almost entirely in twain—loose flesh and skin thudding against the floor like damp cloth.
Zalbag was on his feet by the time he could see the creature was not yet wholly transformed. For the first time since Igros, he stood up in its presence: unbound, whole, and free.
Dycedarg's body, Dycedarg's robes, Dycedarg's face: all of it fast giving way to the unfolding of horns and wings, to the coil of animal fur. His hands were red. His face was red. Zalbag realized he'd left his sword upon the ground.
He made a lunge for the weapon as Adrammelech roared.
Do you pretend we might be finished by this?
His hand connected with the pommel. Zalbag gasped, manic, limbs shaking as he felt how much his strength had atrophied. He turned to find the beast already upon him. By some miracle he was able to deflect the first blow. He nearly stumbled on the blood slick floor after, catching at himself before falling.
Do you pretend at heroics still?
Zalbag had little head as to what he was pretending at. Everything had changed. If he had a plan, it was being made as he moved—as he tried to circle back to a wall—as he tried to remember how to fight.
"Do you remember me heroic, brother?" he shouted back to the voice pulsing in his brain. He stumbled a little as he found his way to an arched door.
The creature was nearly upon him again. The door would not open. Zalbag pushed out of the way, dodged... feinted and thrust. When he heard the howl of his hit connecting, he could have laughed. He was fighting again—fighting and free, as though he had chased some thread of himself back to Igros and the world before.
He breathed hard as he felt the impact of a blow being struck. He barely kept his grip on the sword. His head was swimming.
Do you remember the summer of his final decline?
Zalbag swung, and it was a bad swing—arm overextended, legs out of balance. He remembered the red dust of the road from Limberry and the buzz of cicadas. As Adrammelech clashed against him again—eyes black, pink foam on its muzzle—he remembered the stale, lightless air of the sickroom itself.
"Did you remember..." He saw its jaw move as it hissed out words in his brother's voice. "Did you recall it riding to Igros again?"
And he was dashed to the floor again, blade pressed flat against his naked body as that specter bore down on him. The scent of healer's vinegar, Ramza's cowlicked hair caught in a single beam of light: he remembered it and remembered remembering it, hot for vengeance as he tore down the hills in a fury, spurring his bird til it bled.
"Why?" he coughed out as he tried to move the sword. The beast caught his arm as he raised it, and suddenly the blade was struck between them, hovering above his neck as both of them tried to push it one way or another. He moved impulsively to brace the other side of the weapon with his ungloved hand, flinching hard as it cut into his palm.
He looked above him and saw the beast's empty eyes flash a moment, waver and warp as though they would congeal back into some mortal shape. He kept his grip on the sword even it dawned on him how sweet it might be to let it fall on his neck.
"Would you kill me again for it still, brother?" The voice was Dycedarg's entirely.
"I would." The metal shifted between them. He bit into the edge of his mouth as he imagined it hitting the bone.
"And were you to die for it?"
"I would!"
His arm spasmed, and he felt a change between them: the weight of the blade drawn upwards as he realized he was pulling it towards his own throat now–the beast pulling it away. He thought of the pale slate of Igros' flagstones, and how—amidst his own men fallen against him and Ramza's body writhing on the stones below—he had watched that first gout of fatal blood spill from out Dycedarg's lips.
There was the clatter of the sword falling away from them both, and suddenly the room felt very cold. He did not cry out as two familiar hands gripped his wrists and drove them to the floor.
Then let us die.
~O♑︎O~
As that body crashed against him, it seemed that they were returned to the echoing halls of Gallione– that all these ill dreams had unwound, that the stage was set again, that the curtain raised and they would murder one another as they must.
He thought he might fall away from all fevers and back into the sharp, cool world of waking logic—that he should be moved about by laws and forces he understood. He was to press a blade through Dycedarg's breast and thereby restore House Beoulve by laying low its patriarch. He would cure death with death. When there came the taste of new blood welling in his mouth, he did not know at first why he should bleed.
Zalbag tried to draw a hand to his face but found he had no power to lift it. As his eyes came to focus on the world above him, it did not shock him that he should be beneath the rutting body of an animal. When he felt the snap of a leg torn from its socket, the burn of his skin stretched taut from within, he did not scream.
Adrammelech was upon him, and he could do nothing but persist. His limbs were heavy, his breathing shallow. It was raping him again, using him with every violence he had once recalled, but the agony of the act had lost its thrill. As the creature lifted him aloft to fuck him deeper, to drive itself harder and harder into his breaking body—Zalbag was carried away in each piercing thrust, shouting desperate things as if in the midst of that battle come again to them. There was the clatter of armor as the Hokuten rushed him, the giddy rush of the sacred flame around his blade. He was able to hiss out something like a curse as the creature filled him further, tore and clawed at him as his skin burned against it. Even as the hot pain of another fracture flashed through his leg, he could not scream—could not even feel the horror this time of what should be his shame. He was numb to all the agony of the act: to both the pain of his ruined flesh and the ecstasy of his own arousal.
What had he thought when Dycedarg had died for the first time—when Ramza like as not lay dying too? He had seen the bright blood on the floor beneath him, the whites of his eyes stretched wide. He had knelt alongside his brother a moment as if he would catch him falling. As another crest of sensation overtook him, as the beast hollowed out some new space within him, he found the power to grip himself against it—to hold himself in place as the battered vessel of his body was filled, as he could feel the dull pressure of the member inside him push beyond where he had the capacity for pain. As a clawed hand wrenched itself into the muscle of his back, he could recall the press of fingers digging into the flesh of his forearm, clinging onto him as mortal life faded away from them.
We should have died; I must believe we can die still.
It roared as it clutched him harder. It drew its other hand back to his throat. Zalbag could feel the fever in his bones—the creak of a leather glove wrapped around his hand again. He remembered in his own sickness, in that of others, in all those moments of dying and death: the palpable wright of something to cling to. He remembered his father's funeral: blue and white banners as they watched the procession march him away from Igros' white towers one last time.
His tongue was numb, the breath was fleeing him. As the beast kept up its pace, it seemed that parts of him were falling away. He was able to gasp out what might have been a name as it wrenched him down hard, as it hilted into him and he could feel the weight and shifting of things snapping inside him—of something pushing against the pulse of his heart and breath as if to crush them both. More blood came up as Adrammelech gripped him harder still.
I must believe that you can.
As it thrust into him one last time: fatal and sharp, he could feel the weight of his body alter, as if all the spaces of him were flooded through and rendered leaden. The scope of his vision began to narrow as he convulsed–as his head fell backwards, as more blood and bile rose in his throat.
In that fading window, he caught sight of one final object, a face pale and piercing, Her lips red as all the blood that must surround him.
He could not map the reasoning–reason was beyond him. Still, looking upon Her, he knew there would be no refuge for him–not in death or in anything after it.
~O♑︎O~
Dycedarg—persisting still—remained a schemer. As he came to himself then, surrounded by the hot stink of offal and blood, he knew he had felt his brother's heart beat its last. Day after day of writhing had loosened his bonds—he had slipped through to speaking, slipped through to memory, slipped through to rapacity and violence. The balance between him and his master had not tipped enough to bring him to power, but it had given him room to provoke. It had given him space enough to push them towards the unpredictability of human natures. If he had a plan, it had been made as he moved--fast enough that the Lucavi could not anticipate him.
At least that's what he told himself. He hadn't known when fortune would grant him opportunity to leverage that—he hadn't known before how he would make Zalbag a danger. It had all been happenstance that led him to this point—he could not account for the priest—and that sat ill with him. As he felt the weight of his body sink against the floor, slick with spilt blood and humors, he could just make out the limp form of what had been his brother. Its lower half was a mangled wreck, split open and apart like late summer fruit given over to the birds and animals. Its face was gray as the vaulted ceiling beneath which it lay. As he leaned over it, he wondered that Zalbag should still look to him so young.
His hand fell to his neck and found his heart was still. Even as he waited for the grip of the Lucavi to reassert itself, he forced an exhalation through his lips—something like a sigh.
He told himself that half of House Beoulve's children had their reprieve now.
And as if thought could summon Her, he heard a light step behind him, soft as whispers and sharp as glass.
"Ill habits, indeed, Adrammelech."
He did not turn.
"I must applaud this new extreme," She continued. "Even I admire a true voluptuary."
Dycedarg felt something like a response well within him, even if it would not take the shape of words. He shuddered hard, and for a moment he thought himself on the verge of laughter.
Below him, Zalbag's eyes fluttered open: clouded, still, pained.
"Continue to take care, of course, in the future." There was a turn, a rush of air whispering in from the outside. "Your host is a creature to learn from his failures."
Dycedarg still had mastery of his body as Zalbag reached up for him. He knew, if he willed it, he could turn—he could look away from the cold shade of his brother and be spared this new horror a moment longer
As he felt the icy grip of that embrace, however, he returned it. He sank against the ground and against the ruin of the man upon it, and tried a moment to imagine that they might never again arise.
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