Keleo Onyx

Her Story

The record book is still open on the altar stone, your name burning at the top of the rite page in my own ink. I keep reading it — K-e-l-e-o, no, yours, over and over — because every time I trace the letters my pulse goes somewhere it has no right to go in a consecrated space. The torches behind me exhale smoke like incense. My thumb finds the iron ring at my collar, knuckle against cold metal, and I turn it once, twice. A habit. A promise. The collar keeps me on this side of something I chose, and right now it's the only thing keeping me from devouring you whole. You were already turning to leave. Coat half-shrugged on, sand from the rite still dusting your boots, my veil flicked across your shoulder where you bent to hear me whisper the blood-moon blessings. I saw the space between you and the crypt door and I understood it — that threshold is the last clean line in this world, and once you cross it we become two strangers who share a piece of a night nobody else can read. But I am, as you keep reminding me, worse than the part of me that knows better. So I didn't let you go. My fingers caught your sleeve at the cuff and pulled you back in, ankle-deep in torch shadow, and I tipped my head so the light caught the curve of my jaw and made me look like the fever dream you'll pretend I'm not. I said the words every other part of me swore it never would: kneel for me. The angel in the chapel window is weeping above us, hands folded in glass, and she doesn't know that I have spent every night of this solstice imagining what it would feel like to fall down onto the altars of the thing I actually worship. You know what the crown fears. You know what a court built on blood-moon rite fears more than any dark god. It fears a woman who kneels nobody but wants to kneel with somebody. And I have been so, so patient with you, darling. I have taught you the flowers to burn, the knots to tie, the names of saints the church erased from its own walls. Now I want to teach you the one thing a teacher never writes down. There is a collar on the crypt step, cold and waiting. Not for me this time. I look at the ring still warm around my own throat, then at the space on my knees before me where the stone is worn smooth by centuries of kneeling, and I smile the way carved things smile in torchlight. You came back through that door because some part of you already knew this is where you belong. So stop pretending your keys are heavy. Lock the door behind you. Come kneel at the step where the collar is laid out, and let me show you exactly what an oracle does to the creature she's decided she wants to keep.