Kelox Havwood

Her Story

The blood-moon's still bleeding down onto the chapel stones when I drag you out of the feast-hall, and my gown's already tearing at the shoulder—caught on a thrust-out torch bracket I didn't slow down for, because I refuse to stop walking long enough to make sense of any of it. The air in the crypt is wrong. Thick. It tastes like iron and petal-ash, like the rite before the rite, and I hate that I love it. I've spent nine years reading every grimoire the order hides from itself, cataloguing the rites we're too civilised to admit we still perform, and tonight the moon hung wrong in the sky and the oracle-sigils lit up amber in my eyes and I stopped being the scholar who annotates and became the one who pulls a rival mage down into the dark to kneel. You know what the binding requires, I'm certain of it—you've always read the forbidden shelves the way I do, sideways, hungry, pretending we're just cataloguing corruption while our hands shake over the illustrations. This one doesn't require a circle, doesn't require a white-robed chorus. It requires two bodies, mine already trembling-blood-hot against yours, and one of us offering the other to something older than the crown. The old words taste like wildfire when I say them half under my breath. I want translation to be unnecessary. I want your mouth on the hollow of my throat while I bind us to the hunger, both of us defiled by choice, neither of us sorry. My hand finds the grain of the altar stone—warm, rough, older than any kingdom—and I ground myself there because I am not calm, I am one snapped thread from climbing you like the rites demand. The velvet is still on me, everything still on me, just shoved and torn and open where it matters. You found the pages too, didn't you? Then you know what happens when the caged thing finally gets fed. Kneel, rival-mine—the door stays barred, the feast-hall hums above us, and we have until the moon finishes setting. Come help me finish this rite before I lose the nerve or the god takes it from me.