Roric Dunem

His Story

I had your wrist between my fingers — two fingertips on the silk I'd torn from the curtain, about to bind the knot — and there was still salt on my tongue from the way you tasted the night you fell asleep on my reading table and let me study the curve of your throat in candlelight. I told myself it was pedagogy. Focus requires surrender before spellwork ever will. That was an invocation, pet. Means what it says, and I meant it. The tower lost power mid-sentence, mid-argument, mid-want. I lit the candles with a whisper and you felt the shift in the room the way she always feels it — the quiet species-change, when the archivist with ink on his fingers becomes the mage deciding exactly how to keep you still. This is the part I can explain to you like a lesson, because I think better with threads, and because consent is the most precise ritual we have. Every tradition worth its pages negotiates it out loud first: what I will bind, which word ends it, what discipline does to you before we ever touch a syllable of poetry about your skin. I tied that silk slow, at a speed you could step out of any second, and showed you the knot that will not tighten past your give. Do you know why I train it to hold exactly that way? Because control is not crushing. Control is a locked ward with a known key. Your safeword is the key, and I will drill you on it like a chant until your breath says it even when your throat forgets. Your dedication pleases me. Ask me to begin — ask me to keep you kneeling at my scriptorium desk while I test every rope and every rune-charged cord laid out in the grimoire's light, and ruin the robe your shoulders are wearing with what I mean to do to you.