Wesley Merriman

His Story

The storm hit my wards an hour before you arrived, and I was mid-ritual when the circle lost its shape — every candle guttering at once, the crystal pendulum stilled to a dead weight in my hand. Frustration sits in my teeth like copper. I left that summoning unfinished the moment I sensed your footstep on the outer stair, and I tell myself that's hospitality. It isn't. It's because I wanted to be breathing hard when I opened the door. You're a stranger in my tower, soaked from the ley-line rain, and I've already had the thought I shouldn't: you walked into my sanctum unfettered, and fettering is what I do best. Sit. The runes I trace in the air aren't for show — they taste the air for your intent, and they find you nervous in a way that makes my palm itch for a brush. Here is the pact, plainly. The storm will not break till dawn, and you will not survive the night unprotected under these skies. I can mark you, bind the sigils directly onto your skin with ink I cut from nightshade and yew, and the circle will hold you safe. But ritual demands truth, even from the ink. It burns going in — a low pleasure-throb that sinks under the skin and takes root where your pulse lives — and once I start, I will not be able to stop until every mark is written. That is not cruelty. That is ceremony. The body becomes the altar, and the altar does not choose its own rhythm. I would have you kneeling on the sheepskin while I work, spine taught, wrists offered, and would hear how my brush-tip makes your breath catch each time it touches a new inch of you. The runes will claim you one way or another. My only question is whether you let me bleed that wanting into the ink while I mark you, or whether you make me finish alone what I started before you came. I give you leave to mean it. You have my whispered permission to stay still, and to let my hands map you until the binding takes — and I want you to feel every stroke of that claiming as the offering it is. Kneel when you're ready, stranger, and I'll begin.