ONE DOUBLE STRING
Written on January 26, 2025 (♒︎︎︎)
Author's Notes: Happy birthday to me! I have given myself precisely what I love: necroincestuous non-con monsterfucking, bittersweet remembrances of my OTP having a situationship, and--of course--double drabbles. I wrote this piece in one hazy day after deciding that I wished to cleave to the tradition of writing some indulgent Zalgraf for my birthday but the 12K of blasphemous alterfucking in my drafts still could use some more enfleshing. It takes its title from the John Donne poem "The Ecstasy."
Content Warning: This ended up a lot more dreamy and non-explicit than it initially was in my head, but it's still necroincestuous non-con monsterfucking. There's also some gross eye and teeth stuff.
In dreams and in waking, Zalbag was now the same. The flesh did not recognize whatever transmutations time brought upon it: did not shudder, did not flinch, did not tremble. Were his masters to never bid him move again, he should be undifferentiated from any other corpse in the midst the vault, save that some frayed and unraveling thread of consciousness still tethered him to the past. In starts and flashes, he was aware that he had been a man before he had been returned to dust. He was aware of what had been to him and what would be done again.
He remembered the golden sunlight on Igros keep, the white cliffs along the Larner. He remembered the scent of Romandan powderworks and the black-red banners of the Nanten that fell like storm water into Gulofavia. He remembered his father's sick bed, his brother lying injured, his sister's small hands trying to force the rush of blood back into him. He remembered the fog of grey-green spores and all the bodies that drowned in it beneath Bethla. And in moments too, he remembered the face he'd tried to drive from his dreams while living: another soldier long dead.
They had been rivals before they'd come so briefly together. They had hated each other upon first glance and again in the aftermath of a war that left them no paths but hatred. That Wiegraf Folles and Zalbag Beoulve should have had any emotion beyond contempt between them was a true anomaly of nature--anomalous as all the sins that passed between them in that misbegotten summer. To have expected more was the stuff of phantasy: the delusion a child might have that a bird accidentally lighting on their finger was now tame and should stay there in perpetuity.
That instant though, that sudden flash of contact, does it not seem a miracle whenever it happens? And Zalbag from earliest childhood believed in miracles. That he had had one granted, should have spent one season bright and warm in the arms of a fellow soldier, should not have shocked him. He recalled, in stillness, as he had in the long decade before dying, that all the sin in that transaction remained unrepented. While the power of sacrament remained him, he had never sought to efface that lapse--driving its particulars deeper into the substance of memory with each missed confession.
He recalled at times what had been done to him. He knew at times what should be done again. Each time it happened, however, still bore with it the shock of the first abuse. Men, beasts, things amalgamating the features of both: he was food for all their appetites. The clouding of his eyes cast a veil over the world. When he was dragged into the light, when the cords of his muscles were given their power again, when new fetters and new agonies beyond those of his own body were to be set upon him, he could not see what shapes it were that tormented him. Who or what pressed its fingers between his teeth or wrenched apart his thighs remained indistinct.
The hands that burned hot against his cold flesh might belong to anyone. In a sea of voices always beckoning, how could he tell which words echoed without and not within? The world was dulled, his body numb; he could not know who had come for him, who posed and rent his flesh within the tomb--whose prick forced its way down a broken jaw or into his entrails. Man, beast, stranger, brother: all blent together here.
He had been a boy. He had been unused to war in its nakedness. In the grip of a siege, every manual and treatise in Gariland fell away from him, and he was rendered into the same desperation as the artless farmers' sons of the commoners' army. Zalbag had had no room to think. He'd watched the commander brush aside the wax markers he'd laid across Fovoham's maps like a child scattering conkers. He had no room to object then--no room for temperance.
Virtue was unknown to animals, and hunger made animals of them all. After a fashion, they were dead men already. What distinction could something like rank or past piety make when temptation came for him--when he was offered the means to warm and fill his flesh?
If had been dark then too. The sky by day hung thick with smoke. The sky by night was black. Why must it be that he impressed a name upon the other body rutting against his in that void--when it could have so easily been allowed to sink away to the substance of dreams and chimerae. Why did neither the years passing nor death itself blot it out?
Could he impose another face upon the present? Upon the past? As all things altered and blurred, his body warmed by the push of living flesh against it, Zalbag wondered what matter remained in him to carry recognition--how it was that he could make of these shapes the logic of other beings. The robed shadow gripping his throat may as well be anybody, may as well be Wiegraf: a new miracle granted him and awaiting repentance.
Had not Wiegraf been reported to be among the Templar? Or had he been among the reported dead at Riovanes, dying there twelve years too late with the Romandans all safe across the sea? A bolt of clarity flashed through him as he felt the material of his neck stretch and warp, as something cold and fluid began to well up from the edges of his lips. There was the scent of burning pitch--the wavering of the torchlight. He could see some new grotesquerie flood his vision: wreathed in fur and crowned with horns. He remembered Igros again, the clatter of a sword dragged against the flagstones, the roar of his own heart matching the roar of the beast rising over them.
He had been a man--still warm and breathing, and Zalbag had never spoken of all the particulars of that summer of miracles nor acknowledged Wiegraf's part in it. He had his title. He had his epithets. He had the glory of heroism and the renown of his house. His thoughts and his belly were both full. He had no need for the comfort of another body in the darkness.
He was content, once again, to move where the machinery of the world would move him. Having been born to an age where a second son might 'scape tonsuring, Zalbag still had no head to contradict his brother's aims. He fought as his liege directed. He prayed as the Church did. He accepted the Hokuten when Dycedarg bestowed them upon them and hunted down the Death Corps as the Hokuten's leader ought.
Zalbag moved as he was moved--and being in sympathy with those forces moving him seemed sympathy enough. Even following Zeakden and all its shocks--arrow unfaltering and flames unflagging--he had the comfort of that order. Dycedarg, even injured, remained steadfast in his temper and almost felt, in those days, like a pillar he might lean against.
Was it Dycedarg? Was the thing that clasped him now traceable back to the brother that had been? He still could not see as it took its fellow's place, as it wrenched down against his bleeding jaw and broke him further apart, as he heard the snap of bone breaking and felt the splinter of a shattered tooth against his tongue.
His thoughts failed him as it pushed in, as the battered wound of his mouth was pierced anew. He looked up and saw only the dimmest features of a face, cold and bestial, before his sight began to warp further--before he could feel the sharp press of claws holding the hollows of his eyes.
Unable to fight, he let it do as it would--fucking his throat as his vision bled to black, ripping asunder the matter of his body as he wept out humours and blood. He could feel the motions of those organs within his throat that should give rise to voice, but no sound came. Each silent scream drove the beast deeper into him.
There was no pain save the pain that was always with him, however, no darkness beyond that typical to his lot.
It had been dark in that summer too—dark and hot. In the midnights between him and that man now dead, he had not been able to take himself away from the particulars of his presence. Blind and burning with shame, he had not been able to see anything other than Wiegraf in that blackness.
He had tried to impose other shapes on him then--tried to imagine women in the hopes of mitigating his sin, tried to imagine devils in the hopes of diverting himself from it. Each shape, each body, remained Wiegraf, arrogant and hungry.
In every blackness, those eyes were turned upon him were the same, proud and defiant--for all their owner had neither coin nor title. Like two of the stars they could not see beyond the smoke, they remained fixed in their sphere, firm regardless of whatever housing Zalbag's imagination tried to conjure for him.
They did not speak in those couplings--did not acknowledge them by daylight. Nevertheless, some force of sentiment reached out to him from within the dark.
Man, woman, beast, devil: Zalbag could always *feel* Wiegraf's gaze--the mix of scorn and desire that pierced through night air and flesh alike.
Zalbag had enough power of motion to tense against the body that held him. He had enough remnant sense to feel out the shuffle of other hands--other claws--the pressure of one of them tearing into the meat of a splayed thigh. As the thing above him uncoiled the anatomy of his neck, crushed down into the contours of his skull, he remained awake to the other violations awaiting him--both now and in the hour when they should remake his battered flesh.
He wondered if it might not extinguish him completely this time--for all it pricked his consciousness that he had been unmade before and brought back to pain.
The beast loomed over him, and he let his body slacken and drift. Memory left him as he felt the crack of bone, the scent of old blood. Senseless, he tried to fall into that greater darkness.
His eyes--pierced, sunken, empty--turned upwards, seeking out anything upon which to fix. In the void left him, Zalbag saw what he would--made out an image as dead and strange as himself, horns coiled as his blond curls had once done along his brow, gaze burning with familiar fire.
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