Maniaque
Following
Table of Contents
1 - An invitation 2 - The Investigator 3 - Tunnels and Voices 4 - Sethian Skin 5 - The Deal 6 - The Rules 7 - Gray Watch 8 - Thrice-Turned Coats 9 - Mask, Coat, Skin, Bone 10 - Eye, Scar, Face, Mask 11 - Pharaul 12 - Screaming Dawn 13 - A Tale Of... 14 - The Maniaque Feast 15 - From Oblivion's Throat 16 - Mythspinning 17 - Myth of a Warm Coat 18 - A Web of Bargains 19 - Questions (End of Book 1) Book 2: The Roil and the Rattling 20 - What Began in September 21 - On Going Home 22 - Mothers' Blessings 23 - Across the Warring Lands 24 - To Sell the Lie 25 - The Sound on the Stone 26 - Miss Correlon's Return 27 - Avie 28 - The Grim Confidant 29 - The Writhewife 30 - The Rattling 31 - Code Six Access 32 - The Secret Song 33 - The Broken Furnace 34 - You Can Fix Yourself, But... 35 - ...You Can't Fix the World 36 - In the Sickle-Sough Spirit 37 - We Will Never Have Any Memory of Dying 38 - Predators in the Seethe 39 - Though Broken, the Chain Holds 40 - Seven Strange Skulls 41 - None of Us Belong Here 42 - In an Angolhills Tenement 43 - The Guardian Lions 44 - Still Hanging on the Hooks 45 - Where Have We Been? Why? To What End? 46 - Ten Million Murders 47 - Breaking the Millenium's Addiction 48 - What Does it Mean, to Leave Alive? 49 - Whether You Meant it or Not 50 - Beneath the Shroud of Sapience 51 - Beneath the Shroud of Sapience 2 52 - Seven Days 53 - The Beacon on the Haze 54 - Sixteen Days 55 - The Day Before Their Dying Begins 56 - The Day Before Their Dying Begins 2 57 - Ghost in the Crags, Blood on the HIll 58 - What Ends in December 59 - What Ends in December 2 60 - What Ends in December 3 61 - The Betrayers 62 - Bend to Power 63 - How to Serve the Everliving 64 - A Turncoat's Deal50 - Beneath the Shroud of Sapience
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* * *
She let Mardo guide her away. She didn’t pay attention to where she was going or how long they were walking. What had happened to Hado’s body? What about the sound of the gunfire? The pistol on the ground? Mardo must’ve said something to the Watch officers to make it go away. Where had Amo gone? Indirk couldn’t find it in herself to wonder. Away. They’d gone away.
Eventually, Mardo had Indirk stop walking. She stared at her boots, scuffed her toes, looked at the fiber of the wood beneath them. She put her hands in her pockets. In one pocket, Avie churned around her hand. She took the little animal out, and Avi just let her sinewy little body dangle from Indirk’s fingers. Avie liked to just hang like that and swing around, happily limp. Indirk moved her hand from side to side and Avie swayed, making a small, amused chittering. It was a strange, very animalistic thing to do, a purely simple joy, infantile in a way. Indirk swung Avie a little swing, marveling at the tiny creature’s stupid, uncomplicated happiness.
Indirk looked up. She’d entered Mardo’s apartment at some point. She could hear him in the bathroom, filling a basin of water, probably intent on scrubbing the blood out of his fur. Putting Avie down on the table, Indirk looked at the room around her. This little tenement apartment, this one tiny room that had somehow fit her and Mardo and Avi and Hado all together in it, seemed somehow very big and empty in that moment. She couldn’t stand its openness, its hollowness resonating with some void opening inside of her, demanding to be filled but with no way to fill it.
Mardo was so large that he barely fit in any part of the apartment, head too high, shoulders too wide. He was staring at the wall above the sink, the bathroom barely big enough to be called a cabinet, when Indirk shoulders open the door and he pivoted to look down on her. In the nude, he did not pass for an anthral; the long coat of his uniform usually covered hist tail, much too long and muscular, and the feline way his clawed toes gripped the floor. His fur, all white dappled with gray, was luxuriously soft, shining where he’d been smoothing himself down with water.
He looked down on her and said her name, “Indirk.”
She’d left her clothes outside. She was much the opposite of him, furless and dark of hair and body, maybe half his size. But she let him look at her, too empty to be self-conscious, for just a moment before she stepped into the tiny room and closed the door behind her. The space was so tight that he backed away and she was still close enough to feel the warmth of his body. She wanted to put her fingers in his fur and snare him, but she put her back against the door and instead just looked at the great expanse of his chest.
“What are you doing?” he said to her.
“You know what I’m doing,” she answered, and commanded, “Comfort me.”
He stood in place, but really, he could barely move with how small the room was. When he did move, it was the small swing of one arm, a hand sliding behind her to pull her off the wall and draw her against him. Indirk pressed her body forward against him, putting her hands on his sides and sliding them into his fur. Immediately, the fire out of her nightmares sparked, the same she’d felt when she’d been watching Norgash dance. She briefly cringed, wanting no part of that memory in this moment – it made her feel less like a person, more like some thing – but then she decided she wanted that. So she focused on the heat and let it move her, let it lift her hands and use her fingers to grip his mane, to pull him down and pull her up.
Mardo was quick to respond, his hands running down her back, getting beneath her to scoop her off the floor and hold her against him. Then he had her pinned against the wall, all his head and heaviness pressing against her, driving her body into his. It kindled the seed of heat Norgash had planted inside of her, and she gasped at the power of it as she grabbed at his fur and put her legs around him, whispering at him, “Make me forget.” She was desperate to stop being a being and become just a body, a thing made not of hopes and nightmares but of heat and need.
In her life, she’d usually had sex with people smaller than her, softer and weaker than her, so many fearful alpin that acted like prey she’d caught or anxious littorn that kept telling her to stop biting. But Mardo was an immensity of heat and power that didn’t know what to do with himself, using one hand to hold her up and bracing his other against the wall to keep from putting his full weight on her. Indirk found herself growling, “You can’t hurt me,” even though she was sure he could, and she told him, “Make me your thing. Make me an object. Break me,” as she sank her fingers into his mane until her claws found the skin on the back of his neck, as she hooked her heels over the bast of his tail, and she bit at his chest.
When he finally bit back, Indirk found it lit sparks in her skin. She’d been dreaming about fire in her body, her flesh yearning for the curse Norgash had left in her, but maybe this could satisfy it. Quickly, as Mardo remembered his claws and his teeth, as he let his weight crush her against the wall and used his shivering body to press her all the more, Indirk found she could forget what and who she was. Then she was just a body chasing sensation, taking breath, hips rolling in search, mouth open and tongue eager to taste.
* * *
In the early morning, while Mardo lay in exhausted sleep on the little bed, Indirk stood in the middle of the room and stared at him. Her body, still wounded from the other day, ached incredibly. There were fresh scratches on her shoulders and back and legs, bite marks on her arms, bruises in the shape of Mardo’s hands on her shoulders and the small of her back. The pain rippled through her, churning like a fire contained, and she loved its heat. It made her feel awake in a way she hadn’t felt since she’d been very young. With Mardo’s help, Indirk had managed to suppress her self-awareness for a time, but she could feel it regrowing gradually, thought by thought.
Indirk didn’t want it back. She didn’t want to be a person, to be real again yet. She felt so close to the beast inside of herself, wishing she could just become it for a night or two. Restless, energetic, wanting to do some animal thing, Indirk pushed open the window and climbed out onto the walls of the tenement. It was a moonless night, dark like the deepwood – in the forbidden, secret parts of the Laines, the canopy was so thick and so high that there were expanses of night that hadn’t been touched by sun since the first seedlings had sprouted – and there in the forest, wild children of the Green would take to tree trunks and limbs as easily as to paved walkways. Indirk scrambled up the side of the building likewise, feeling the parts of her instinct that she had locked away so long ago, the person she had never been, the wildness of the beast that had been stolen from her.
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by 3 Armored Kittens · Prodromos v.1.1 - World Anvil 0.9.15.043 © 2017-2024 [en] | Anvil Time: 12:03, Dec 23 2024