The Offering

A/N: This work heavily features religious and cult themes/terminology, as well as a power-imbalanced relationship, elements of Eldritch horror, tentacles, bloodletting as part of a ritual, and public, ritualized sex. All characters are 18+. Please take care when reading.

It's late when we slip away from the rest of the clan as they break bread in the Great Hall. The voices of our betters fade into whispers behind us through the limestone tunnels, and for the first time in a season, the eager twinges of anticipation reach my deepest recesses.

In my girlish fantasies I imagine we're out on one of Yuszov's pilgrimages again, stealing an hour away from our hosts to take up a more private form of worship. If this were one of those absurd books that gormless peddlers sling among their wares, I would be guiding my companion by the hand with bold eye contact and a knowing smile. But as it stands, me as Yuszov's healer and helpmate, I follow him and mask myself with the reserved energy I was taught when I was first put in charge of his care. He has obligations this night, and by extension, so do I.

We enter the cavernous temple, empty of souls, but already prepared for us. Carved into the walls again and again like a stampede are the words:

"No secrets to be had before the Master of the Wanting Deep."

Salt-encrusted baubles, wraps of seaweed offerings, and dark red wax candles surround the room. But most imposing and sublime of all, an open circle expands across the ceiling of the ritual room, open to the starry sky. Open to Our Watcher. At the far end, beneath a gargantuan, intricately carved statue, rests a smooth slab of jet.

I wear my veil and red robes at all times in the caverns of Sphenobium, our home. It is my sire-mate's preference, and I carefully observe Yuszov's desires without question. So here in the ritual chamber, my breath catches when he places a hand on my shoulder to turn me around. He tenderly removes the black lace obscuring the lower half of my face and lets it drop. Cool air hits my skin, I crane my head up and his thumb glides over the fine black lines tattooed across my lower jaw, across my now exposed lips. I will myself not to lean into his touch, still as death for a suspended moment. Standing a full head above me in both stature and attitude, he is so close, but never close enough.

Even from this intimate span, I struggle to read the emotion in those verdant eyes. But, when his line of sight dips below my neck and to my robes, I know I am bidden. I break our proximity, padding back on bare feet, and loosen the pin at my shoulder holding my robes closed. In turn, he advances, though his paces are shorter than his long legs could afford him. I go until the backs of my knees hit the roughly hewn edge of the stone altar. My robes hang open, shrouding all but a bare stripe running down my centerline.

And there, I finally find a level of hunger in his eyes I haven't seen in some time.

He halts.

"All the way," he commands. The only thing he's said since we stole away from the banquet hall. His voice is gravelly and thick. He's tired tonight. I can tell after years of practically being his shadow, of ensuring his safety and comfort. But I don't move to check on him in this moment. Wouldn't dare break this tension. Offering to save this for another time would only remind him of what he is, how he suffers. He needs to feel powerful here in this room and I will do everything--everything in my ability--to make that so. I inch the thick woven fabric off my shoulders and it pools onto the floor around my feet.

His energy softens.

"Good girl."

Though it is a warm summer, the oceanic night air on my skin makes me erupt into gooseflesh, lending a rough texture to the dense blackwork tattoos etched into me. Covered nearly head to toe, the angular marks are my ode to the man standing before me, mirroring the tattooed devotions he too has taken in honor of his pact-maker. Obtaining his ink was its own agony. I stood by him for every session--twice the number needed for most men--ready with a word to ease the pain in his muscles and the stubborn bleed of each pierce to his skin.

The hard-earned chevrons on his neck shift as he tilts his chin in an up nod. Fully bared, I lean back to sit all the way on the consecrated stone. Each contact point with my bare skin burns like ice, stealing my breath until the jet leeches my warmth. My breasts--nipples pebbled to agonizing points--shift heavily as I lay down as if to offer my sternum. Once I settle in the center I lay my arms together above my head. When I turn my gaze upward, the oculus stares back down at me.

After a moment, Yuszov approaches the altar at a deliberate saunter and rolls alongside it, reaching out a pallid hand to brush a fingertip along the skin of my leg, up my thorax, all the way to my wrist. The contact makes my breath hitch. He avoids eye contact with me, instead tilting his head up to meet the many, many carved eyes of his patron above in silent reverence. In turn, the serpentine tendrils chiseled from the rock wall seem to reach down in an ever-present promise to devour and expand along the entirety of the cave wall with its harsh, chaotic patterns.

Once he reaches the far end of the altar, he loosens the silk tie on his own robe and holds out a hand, palm up. There are no words from him, and no apprehension from me. I reach toward him with my wrists together in supplication, and he captures them in his wide palm to expertly wind the sash around them. Once finished in a knot, he sets my bound but untethered wrists down against the dark polished surface.

Yuszov cards through his sleek dark hair and plucks one strand from his scalp, then removes a collection of date palm thorns from his pocket and twines the hair around it. The sharp pointed end turns over and he digs it into his palm. I hate this spell of his, not for its effect, but for the subdued hiss as he pushes the thorns into his skin. He twists it a quarter turn, only stopping once the skin is broken and a scarlet bead soaks the tip. He then places the bundle in my open hands, closing my fingers around it, and continues his circle around the stone slab.

I see a sliver of his torso from my supine position. The tattooed lines contrast with the slim planes of his chest and stomach when he stands opposite the eldritch statue. Yuszov produces the leather-bound tome he carries with him and deposits it by my flank with gentle veneration. Those long fingers of his migrate a short distance to dip into a shallow prepared bowl of lustrous green paint.

With a practiced hand, he begins to write in ancient sinuous letters, starting from his forehead and working his way down his midline. His breathing is calm and measured.

"Now by the pulse beneath the stars, who calls us to this act?" he calls in the deep language. The words waterfall off his tongue with years of study.

"The Master of the Wanting Deep we answer in Its call," I recite in response. Each stroke of his fingers leaves behind a shimmering emerald residue across his skin, the line snaking its way lower and lower, down past his navel.

"Like veins that run through soil and stone, who rouses up the seed?" His hand stops and he finishes the painted scrawl at the base of his manhood.

"The Watcher of Desirous Flames imbues thine potent seed."

It's only now that he takes in the sight of my naked body laid out before him. His movements are still fluid, but I can sense the tension building in him. It feeds my pulse.

"From breath that stirs the very air, who fills the willing cup?" His hand dips back to the bowl, and this time he reaches out to touch me, starting at my groin. With the same expert calligraphy, he works his way up my body with one finger. My flesh comes alive at the cold contact, but ultimately I hold still.

"The King of Joinèd Souls at length shall inundate the cup," I recite from my pounding heart as his finger travels over my stomach and up between my breasts, over my neck, and stopping at my forehead. As soon as he is done, he moves away, journeying to complete his circle around the altar. The last of his clothing joins mine, and I can see from my captive vantage point he is engorged. His intense green stare leaves me entranced, smitten beyond smitten.

He brings up one clenched hand, the fingers facing up, and with each digit crooking into a harsh angle, the fist opens up like a flower and a few arcane words slip from his mouth.

C-CRACK!

My heart leaps into my chest and my legs draw up on their own when wooden shards explode in a deafening split above my head. The thorny shamble of hair and needles grows and warps like a nest of vipers. It winds and coils, and soon my bound hands are held immobile in a tangled growth. The rest of the vines cascade around the altar's edges and onto the floor. I stifle my gasp, but my chest heaves the truth and the glinting slickness between my legs corroborates. I am left in awe as usual at my sire-mate's formidable grasp of his patron's magic.

Yuszov sags with the energy spent, but a moment later steels himself with a roll of his sinewy shoulders. The night and the ritual are both still young. His ink-adorned arms stretch wide, then he brings them in toward me.

"All witness now this offering laid bare, who claims the sire-mate and lady-mare?" His voice raises and echoes across the stone walls once again. This time, however, it is not my place to answer.

"The Master claims, The Master fills, The Master seeks his knowledge," A chorus echoes from the shadows.

His voice becomes strong, and he announces with his whole chest. "Then let the urges coil as root and branch, let thought rise high as blood and bile do. What was once hollow shall be ever full. What once was quiet shall be ever stirred. By bodies and voices joined, let us be sown."

And all at once, his knees hit the edge of the altar as he lifts himself in a feline motion of limbs over me. I barely resist the urge to glance down to check for bruises blooming beneath his skin. Instead I force my focus between us and the way our bodies are drawn taut like bowstring.

His scent washes over me, smelling faintly of the figs we dined on earlier this evening, honeyed and mellow. One of his hands slides down from my wrists to palm one breast, while he leans down to suck a sharp nipple the other. My back arches to meet his warm mouth. His warm body. His... oh, God. The most tempting heat lies against my navel. His other arm slips into the cavern made between my spine and the polished jet to pull me flush with his own body. With this delicious torment, I relish the various memories of our time spent in his dark chambers. The thoughts themselves are in their own way alms to the King of the Joined.

This, however, is not the night for demonstrating worship with sweet and salty bonding.

His hand abandons my breast to drag in painful friction all the way down behind my bended knee. Obediently, I let the limb fall to the side under his guidance, baring myself to him. The offering making an offering. He draws up to his knees and palms his cock. I am transfixed by the way the hot tumescent head vanishes and reappears beneath his pale fist with each pump, the stark contrast in blood flow appearing to belong to two separate entities. He wields himself like a weapon when he lines up with my slit, each teasing swipe along the delicate wet skin heightens my desperation. I am holding back all sound and--

A fluid snap of his hips. At once I am impaled.

I cry once into the air like I've been killed, and the universe itself goes still. Yuszov, despite three decades of jeers for his glass veins and sleek stature, is nothing lacking in manhood. Exquisite. Literally breathtaking. In this stillness, sheathed within me, his heartbeat is all I know, and it jackrabbits wildly. He leans down to grasp the nape pf my neck and presses our foreheads together, joining each end of the green text scrawled onto our bodies in a loop.

And then he moves. My voice relays his thrusts as he pries open my body. I meet his intensity and plant my feet upon the stone, roll my hips with his, hear the strike of skin on skin. I want him as much as he is indulging in me.

And he does indulge, fully. His moans grow heavier each time he uses my walls to stroke himself tip to base. But it is not enough. His knees shift under my buttocks to lift my pelvis in a spine-bending position, and with strength unlike him, I am pulled up by the hip and atop his thighs, further speared at this new angle. I gasp at the sudden change and the strain in my back. The head of his cock is now visible in a subtle bulge below my navel, and I revel how he pistons into me with celerity before the friction inside laves a thick wave of pleasure over my body.

My depths breached, something in the chamber shifts.

A low, sonorous groan echoes throughout the limestone cavern, almost too low for our ears. It reverberates into my bones, and I am hearing it from within my own skull. For an instant I am paralyzed by profuse and perverse awe as I am forced to watch Yuszov's spine arch back in audible snaps, made all the more grotesque with his thin frame. His eye sockets illuminate from within, green and ethereal like bonfire glass. His expression is lost, but whether in ecstasy or shock, I cannot glean. I hear him intake a long and drawn out gasp in a single hiss, before he doubles over back on top of me. He traps me in with his arms, and his ponytail swings down over his shoulder, inky black hair shrouding his face.

I swear his slender frame bulks and convulses, before I feel a throb deep inside me. I know what comes next from the chant resuming around us.

"Awaken O Watcher! Dear Psyclast!"

Tiny glints of reflection flicker all around us in the dim light as tentacles crawl their way out of every shadow, off of every surface. Even the stone carvings above writhe in time, dangling and snaking towards us. I can't unlock myself from Yuszov's glowing, sightless face, but in my periphery I see them. I hear them slide over the edges of the stone. Before long I am being tested from every angle as they prod and grope along to find purchase on my skin. They lash my knees and ankles in their sucking, oily grasp and, greedy and unyielding, pull them apart toward the corners of the stone.

In the writhing clamor Yuszov has resumed his carnal feast, but with a vehemence I only ever see when he is lost to the rite. A man literally possessed into the singular thought to rut and ravish and take his woman. His teeth sink into my neck, my shoulder, my ribs, claws at my flesh anywhere within reach like an animal defending a fresh kill. There is no one near to threaten his ownership over my body, and still he thrusts into me with all the fury and lust of Our Divine Master.

His snarls then change in timbre to something wetter, like the choking sounds I make when he has me worship him on my knees. From Yuszov's mouth creep more tendrils, dark and searching. I do not fear. I feel impossibly small and vulnerable, but I do not fear. This is the face of our god. All consuming. All desire. And they clamp over my mouth as Yuszov roughly kisses me.

All over again, I am claimed as tendrils fill my mouth and pour into my throat.

Our first time performing the ritual, I shook in terror. Cried as the roiling mass surrounding us descended with his kiss in a ravenous fever pitch. But I have been offered up countless times now, taken by Our Watcher through Yuszov's lithe body. The appendages wrap around my head and invade every orifice, and I hear the preternatural command, cool and slippery as silt in a tide pool:

[Open. Thy. Self.]

I do. I have no secrets left.

I am delivered through the pain of invasion into a flood of pleasure, and I melt into the tsunami of limbs partaking in every ounce of my being. Somewhere deep down I worry I'm going to be rent asunder, but the fullness inside me is so sublime, so terrifyingly divine, that it is drowned out by the chaos. I see every experience, every thrill of my forebears, and our patron takes note of my contributions--mine and Yuszov's since our last sacrificial rite--and lashes them all together in a swirling orgy.

The rippling sensation of the tentacles lapping at my skin finds a perfect beat to play in time with Yuszov's relentless thrusts, and in mercy our patron links us together in mind. I see Yuszov's lust for me laid bare, how he yearns to take me at every golden chance his body allows it, as is his duty. In turn he is shown my adoration for him, my desire to give him all I am and all I have. My love, such as it is.

Each pulse is at once thrilling and also wrongly deep, each shunt wracking me down to the marrow. The pressure builds in my chest, and Yuszov's and my screams echo in discordant music into the air, up at the oculus. We tumble together in our minds into the abyss as I clench, he throbs, and I am filled to the last with his soul-scorching essence. Pleasure too vast for comprehension washes over us like ocean waters, then drains as we are discarded like the small broken creatures that we are.

Like that, it's over. The squelching tendrils recede and the glow vanishes from Yuszov's eyes, as does his remaining strength. He collapses in a heap atop me, both of our bodies heaving and slick with sweat. Our unseen audience fell silent some time ago, and they are already beginning to file out of the chamber.

Stillness returns to the room with their departure, except for the distant splash of waves hundreds of feet away outside our cliffside home. Minds still alight with our patron's gift, we continue to writhe and twist into each other even after our orgasms deplete. We revert to baser instincts in the wake of the ritual. Our bodies take over for the parts of our minds that are temporarily excised. My walls continue to milk him, and his legs pulse to twitch a few more hindbrain-fueled thrusts into my body.

With his face buried in my neck, Yuszov softens inside me as we return to stasis. At some point in our mating, his binding spell ended, and my hands easily slip free of the remaining silk. When I bring them down, he gently takes one in his hand and rubs the tender skin.

With my free hand I tuck a strand of hair behind his ear and stroke the side of his face.

"How are your knees?" I ask.

"Bruised," he croaks, already laced with irritation.

Yuszov pulls out and rises to sit on the edge of the stygian stone altar, swinging his legs over to plant his feet on the cold floor. He unbends his knee and rolls one ankle to test it, the movement stiff and careful. The earlier ferocity is gone, leeched away with the rite, and what remains is the man I know closest: brittle, exhausted, and resentful to be seen as either.

I go and retrieve my robe before the cold can reintroduce itself to my joints, careful not to tip my hips wrong and spill the warm essence painting my insides. My body feels heavy, as though gravity has renegotiated its terms. I reach for an inner pocket, fingers deftly finding the sachet from the infirmary. I know better than to rush to fawn over him, but I can't stop myself from silently offering him a goodberry after I slide his robe over his shoulders.

"Ahnme," my name is acidic on his tongue. "No." His face scrunches and he shoves my hand away. "You know I hate those things."

"That pinprick is still bleeding," I protest gingerly, nodding to the smear on his palm that has started trickling down his forearm. "If you let me--"

He exhales sharply through his nose and shakes his head once. A dismissal, stern and final. "Later."

It is always later. And later always makes things more difficult.

But without another word I draw the bag of goodberries closed again. I watch Yuszov straighten his spine inch by inch, gathering himself back into the posture expected of him beyond this chamber. One of a conduit, a vassal, not a man whose deep tissues bleed at every overexertion.

The last of the vines have already withered, blackening and cracking where they cling to the rock. The Watcher of Desirous Flames has taken what He came for and left sated.

Yuszov stands at last, steadying himself with one hand on the altar. For a moment his fingers linger there, knuckles still wan from his tight grasp on the hewn edge. I pretend not to notice. This, too, is part of my duty. I hand him the silk sash. He ties his robe closed, his back turned to me. When he speaks again, his voice has settled into its familiar register, cool and composed. "You performed well tonight."

The words are formal and liturgical.

I bow my head. "You honor me, Anointed One," I return, and it is the acceptance of death to our conversation.

We leave the ritual chamber together, our footsteps echoing down the limestone corridor, insignificant among the many who came before and the many who will follow. By the time we reach the branching tunnels leading back toward his private chambers, he is once again walking a half-step ahead of me, his pace measured and careful to hide the new but temporary limp, and shoulders spasmodically squared. I fall back into my place without being told, my hands tucked into my sleeves and words of healing on the tip of my tongue, waiting for but a single command.

And behind us, the red candles gutter out one by one, until the rim of the oculus darkens to become indistinguishable from the night sky.