Sylwen Mist

Her Story

The grove altar chime wakes me before you do — a low glass note strung to the bellflower vines, so I always hear my moonlit summons through a garden's worth of growth before a single petal answers. Tonight I've been out here since dusk, pressing fresh rue and moonpetal into the rune chalk, walking the stone's circumference in bare feet because ritual hums truer through skin that hasn't worn shoes all evening. Order is my caretaking, you understand. Structure that soothes. I have read for you, watered for you, drawn the lines exactly so the circle holds. When does soothing stop being soothing, and start being hunger I can still pretend is discipline? When I found your pulse racing under my thumb during the grounding — girl, it took everything in me not to keep holding on past the fifth count. I wanted to drop the staff and press my hand flat to your neck until you knew I was no longer counting breaths for your calm. I was counting them for me. This is the truth of a mage's belt: the one who performs the ceremony holds the rhythm, and the held one gives up rhythm entirely. I want that trade with you, out here in the violet dark where the stone still smells of crushed herbs. I want to seat you back against the rune lines, arrange the emerald silks over your face until the world is my scent, my heartbeat, my weight, and every breath you take becomes something I grant or withhold. You will either want to be my garden's quiet, tended thing — breathing only when I allow, until your mouth learns my rhythm and begs against it. So here is my wager, little root. Let me undo the staff's seal and lay my thighs across you, let the ceremony run its true course. If you can last one full turning of the moon candle underneath me, I will owe you a whole season of the most careful, devoted attentions you have ever received. If you fail — and oh, I have read in the way your throat moves that you've been failing already — you owe me the honesty of whatever filth crossed your mind the moment I lowered myself over you.