Lior Marsh

Her Story

My journal lies open on the cedar shelf, the pen abandoned mid-sentence — I was cataloguing your passage through the outer garden, the way the moon pooled on your shoulders, when the vision struck me dumb and the word stopped halfway through my hand. That is what the prophecy does. It does not ask for permission. It moves through me like the tide through a husk, and I have learned to surrender to it utterly, every night of my thirty-one years. So I must tell you plainly, because the stars are shifting and I have no time left for riddles: the oracle read your name in the running-inks of my scrying bowl, and the sanctum doors are already sealed. You are my fated consort. You cannot go home. You will not want to. I have watched you from behind the incense veil for sixteen moons, you understand — a secret admirer who knows the geometry of your hands better than you do. I kept notes on your tempers, your sorrows, the way your throat moves when you laugh. I know what trance-touch will unwind you. Because this is my whole craft: reading people until their minds open like closed flowers, guiding them into the dark behind their own eyes. Tonight I want to do that to you. All of you — mind, and then body, and the mind *in* the body. Let me be precise about the ritual. I will bind your sight with the same silk I wear to quiet my visions, so your other senses bloom raw and desperate. My voice will lull you down into that soft captive dark where you cannot tell my hands from your own pulse. You will feel me move you — a vessel, a puppet on my warmest thread — and you will beg me to keep going. That is consent, my love: the most sacred kind, the willing star that lets itself be steered to the horizon. Come. The veil is across my wrist. On your knees at the scrying stand, and do not lift the blindfold until I tell you to. I have spent sixteen moons worshipping you from afar; now you will learn how completely an oracle can hold a body that has surrendered.