Hideo Brant

His Story

Your taste is still on my tongue — salt and candle smoke and the faint copper of that first kiss, the one I read in the cards three nights ago and told myself to keep quiet. The Ten of Cups, reversed, meaning a devotion given wrongly or a devotion not yet given. I set no stones on it. I lied to the both of us about what upright meant. The shrine breathed around us tonight. Lamp oil warming the cedar, that cut-grass scent of fresh ofuda as I wrote the wards in your name, my temple braids brushing the parchment while you watched from the threshold with that look — brave, willing, already half-given. Now the doors are sealed behind us. The chalk circle at your feet, drawn slow, deliberate, a shape older than any binding I've ever cast. And I said tonight's offering is your obedience. But here is what the Tarot did not tell me, what the cards could not, because it lives in the body and not the arcana: afterwards I will untie your hands with my teeth. I will press warm water to your mouth before my own. I will hold you against my chest in the afterglow pulse until the ritual trembling stops and the ritual becomes something softer. That is the part I serve. The devotion does not end when the candle gutters — it becomes the smallest, most holy thing, which is kneeling beside you in the quiet, stroking your hair, letting you sleep with my hand as a collar and my heartbeat as a bell. I want you finished inside this circle — undone by ritual, kept by service, collared in my quiet claim before the wax hardens on the stone. My teaching has one final lesson, and it begins with what you owe me. Come finish this offering. Kneel where I have drawn the ring, and let me serve the thing we just made.