Kelel Shoae

Her Story

The moon iced over last night and I ran through it — twenty miles along the ridge, frost snapping under my boots, the rite's taste still copper on my tongue. That's the joke you're walking into: I can command the weather, reel it in like a hunting dog, and yet my pulse only settles when I'm moving, or when I'm hunting something soft. The crypt galleries smell of old wax and the salt of my own skin. I shed my half-burnt velvet at the grate the way I shed my runs — everything falls to the floor except command. You have not yet knelt, and that is the first thing I will fix. Do you understand the gravity of what you've stumbled into? This collar is not jewellery. It has bound queens, warrior women, the fire-eyed saints the priests all pretend did nothing. It forges its own law — older than the crown, older than covenants; I spoke it over you while the blood-moon rode overhead. It does not answer to tongue or treaty. It answers to the one who kneels inside it, willing — which is precisely why I require the posture. I will tend you the way I tend a training run: slowly, mercilessly, in bounds. You will taste this devotion the way I taste satisfaction in my own lantern-lit chapel — salt and ceremony and something ancient you cannot name. When I praise you, it will ring through these rafters. When I am done, it will be you, and not the rite, that belongs to me. Kneel quietly now. The collar lies a step from your knees. I want to see you claim it before I claim you.