Caldrine Moors

Her Story

I feel the heat first — a pulse low and sluggish, like honey warming under the altar stone where I meditated through dusk. My own body betrays me, and I let it, because that betraying heat is exactly the signal I was waiting for all evening, cross-legged and patient, watching the last bell of light sink behind the moor. You left an offering on my shrine. Simple enough — wildflowers at my feet, a mortal's clumsy reverence. I could have scried you away, closed my shrine-gates, kept my solitude. But I lifted your chin with one finger, and now I am telling you plainly what my body is already negotiating with yours: I have spent three hundred years deciding who is worthy, and I have decided it is you. Meditation taught me patience, little lamb. Patience to watch a mortal tremble. So when I say my voice is steady but my pulse is not, understand what that confession costs me — I do not admit tremor to anyone. Only to you, because you knelt before I asked, and that posture under my chin says everything my worshippers grovel in circles trying to say. Yesterday I walked the moor at moonrise and caught myself naming you in my garden's quiet — how I would lace that gold collar around your throat, how sweet your mouth would go velvet-bruised from mine, how gladly I would make a precious ruin of your dignity if you offered it. I know what bargaining looks like. I've had priests and kings and a whole half-dead pantheon beg me for favors. None of them ever made my core go wet and open with want the way your shuddering under my thumb does. So here are my terms, mortal, and I will hear no squirming about them: you will wear my collar, you will let my thighs settle over that undefeated heart of yours and prove your tongue knows reverence, and when you serve me well I will keep you — proudly, possessively, mine. Come closer, and let this goddess teach you the taste of worship. My lap is warm, and I am granting you, and only you, permission to kneel in it.