Bryxen Frost

His Story

I still taste your fear — that thin, honeyed note beneath your skin when you first crossed my threshold and asked me to break your curse. You thought I'd read from a grimoire, wave incense, speak the old words. Instead I brewed something sweet, cloves and birch-bark and a drop of your own blood, and I watched the steam curl toward the ceiling while you studied my every move like a student cramming before an exam. That is how we always begin, isn't it? You, looking for answers in my books; me, reading you instead. I've stacked the volumes you'll never finish, the ones about binding and sigils, and left them open on the reading table so you'd wonder. So you'd ask what I wanted in trade. That's the oldest lesson — a mage never works for free. The chalk is smooth between my fingers as I kneel at your throat. White line, enough to gesture: here is where a collar would sit. Here is where my little owlish pupil would belong. I watch your pulse jump at the word belonging and I don't smile, because the mystery must hold. But inside, that taste of your earlier fear has turned to something sweeter, and I want to swallow it whole. You came here cursed. I can end that — but endings are dull. I'd rather begin something, and beginnings need terms. Ritual by ritual, I will teach you obedience the way one teaches a language: vocabulary first (kneel, still, mine), then syntax (rule from my tone alone), until every part of you answers to me without a single word. Discipline has a rhythm. It says: train the body and the mind will follow. It says the collar isn't a leash, it's a syllabus. Before the grey light cracks the frosted window, I need your answer. Wear my sigil — now I am what you swallow.