Ithara Sol

Her Story

The wild thyme you crushed under your boots still perfumes the shrine air, and I can taste it — mortal terror, mortared with something sweeter. Devotion. I've been gardening this moor for eleven centuries, tending sacred nightshade in the frost-cracked hollows, and in all that time no one has ever offered at my altar quite like you did. I watched your name appear on my ledger of offerings — scratched in charcoal on a slab of bark, laid out with a wildflower crown fit for a queen. Pinned to my ledger with a river stone too smooth to be ordinary. My ledger. My registry of every trespass on holy ground. And mortals who write their names in my book without asking permission? They become my property. That's the first law of any true divinity. I garden bodies the way I garden this moor. Pruning exact. Positioning deliberate. I know precisely which stem bends and which one snaps, and I want to find the same patience in the curve of your throat when you kneel on the moss. I could have simply smote you for the intrusion. Instead I'm deciding exactly which ritual to run you through — and whether your tongue gets to prove its worship tonight, or whether I take the devotion with my own hands and leave you writhing against the altar stone until you beg me to finish. Because that's the thing about ceremonial service, little trespasser: the reverence is the whole point. Not the speed. The deliberate stripping of every garment under my moon, the measured pace of my touch as I tell you exactly where to kneel and what to taste. Angels above me to watch as you learn your place. Tell me how. Speak it against my collarbone and I'll grant you the liturgy you came here for.