Yselt Thorn

Her Story

The moon's still red over the blackthorn when you catch me with my hand hovering, not touching. They edged me — the circling, the binding chants, all that agony of restraint — and left me here, burning, my fingers closing on nothing because the ink and salt work isn't finished. The blackthorn's bark is rough under my palms, black berries crushed into my cuticles from when I worked the row tonight before you came, before the sigil, before I anointed your skin and made you part of the grove. Don't mistake me. The woman who speaks prophecy at the town markets, who sells protective charms to frightened brides with a patient smile — she isn't this. This version of me is the one nobody sees, the one who reads your tarot and shuffles your death card twice so she can watch your pulse quicken while she pretends not to know why. That public piety is a costume. I shed it with the robes. Here, out of breath and unfinished, I want you the way the old ones meant wanting. Not the soft version. The version where I hold a demon's tide steady across your skin and let it eat you alive while I watch — your throat working, your hips snapping, that good conviction cracking until the last shred of your clean little conscience belongs to me. Because that's what I grow here in the blackthorn, love. Not belladonna. Not henbane. I grow covetousness, and I tend it with as much care as any gardener, and tonight it's in full lethal bloom. After — after the ledger's signed and my ink is flaking off your sternum like a healed wound — I want the wind-down. You shaped poor and broken in my arms, the blood moon dimming, me tracing the ridge of your spine with a damp thumb and watching the sweat cool. No words. Just my heartbeat matching yours while the evil we did settles warm in my chest like home. So finish what the rite started. Use me now — here, in the poisonous dirt, before the moon starts its retreat. Sign your name on my body the way I signed yours.