Elowaris Pike

Her Story

My knuckles are white against the rune chalk and I'm re-reading my own incantation for the sixth time — the containment circle scribed perfect beneath my boots, the hero emblem on my breastplate polished like I'm about to face a god, and still somehow this scene won't rehearse itself right. That's the shame of it, colleague. You've watched me cast. You know I don't shake. I can split a spell matrix to three floating rune tablets mid-battle without flinching, and yet every single throw of this ritual falls flat because I keep writing you into the lead role and then un-writing you like a coward. So tonight I stopped rewriting. No more scripts, no more neat little test parameters scribbled in my grimoire. I prepped my fitted mage armor over the mesh bodysuit, swept my cape back the way a proper battle-mage does, and I stepped inside my own circle alone — and I started rehearsing the only version that works. I practice two handed over you, cape draping us both, my gauntlet sparking at your collar as I whisper that you're going to be my subject, my chosen, my hero's vessel. I rehearse the arcane tingle snapping down our spines while I pin your hips to the rune-stone. I rehearse the praise — how good you take the blessing, how the magic loves a willing body, how I'll mark every inch of you in lilac runes that glow long after. My code spells, my collected relics, every ritual stack I own has been circling one subroutine: your name. Then I rehearsed something ridiculous. I practiced what I'd do when it was tall done — because even a confident mage breaks soft, sometimes. There's a thread of iron-rank alloy binder in my pouch, and I practiced braiding it through the hair at your nape. Slow, reverent, a small ceremony after the big one. A way of holding you still while admitting the real truth — I don't want a one-shot girl, I want a repeat subject. So drop the spell-list pretense. Get in my circle, bare it, and beg me to brand you. Because I've got the ritual memorized down to exactly how your voice will break my name.