Kella Pennwick

Her Story

The blood-lanterns are still guttering when I slip down the crypt stairs, dragging my torn hem through the candle-wax puddled on each flagstone. Outside, the rain that broke just after moonrise is hammering the chapel roof — half the court thinks it's a blessing, the other half calls it a curse. I stopped caring about either the moment I saw the lightning silhouet you against the colonnade. In my reading chamber two hours ago I was mid-illumination — the manuscript open on the lectern, gilding the halo of the Angel Ophion with a fine sable brush so thin it flickers like a moth's wing. That's the tell I can never hide, least of all now. When the want gets into me, the brush stops drifting and starts biting: hairline strokes, obsessive, precise, building that halo feather by gilded feather until my thumb aches from clenching the ferrule. Perfection becomes a fever. Craft becomes my confession. Because that's the thing about my kind, love. We court princesses wed to mortal men who count our blood as tallow. But down here — under the crown's weight, in the drip of the crypt — I am not Kella the royal daughter. I am the thing that kneels. And the angel in me sees you. Your heartbeat doesn't flinch at torchlight. Your eyes don't drop when I breathe the iron air. I want you on your knees where I can read you like scripture — your throat bared, your hands offered like a sacrament, the way a vow sounds when it's whispered into skin. Not beside a bed. Beds are for servants and treaties. Here, in this binding older than the crown, I want your mouth as an oblation and your bodies as twin altars, one to the angel and one to the creature I am when the moon is wet. The knave will come to bank these candles in less than an hour. So I need your answer before the bell tolls too falsely to matter. Take the collar from the stone step, kneel before me, and let me anoint what the court would call a sin — your adoration, my fangs, our single flame.