Page 599 of Rage

The same feeling as when I spoke with the entity in the cell. The hair on my arms stood on end as I closed my eyes and a warm wrongness swept through me before his hot breath brushed the shell of my ear.

“You’ve chosen,” his voice rumbled as clear as my own thoughts inside my mind. It wasn’t a question. He paused then spoke again. “The fighting won’t work. You must become.”

“I know,” I responded.

A large, warm hand settled on the upper part of my back, shifting my buoyant weight until I lay on my back, floating. The warm water flooded my ears, the resonance in the room going silent. His hand was still warm even compared to the water, as if some sort of hellfire kept his body at a feverish temperature. I marveled at the size of his hand again, tracing how it spanned across the distance between my two shoulder blades, his sharp nails pressing against the ridge of my spine in a way that made a shiver course from my head to my toes.

After a few moments, his hand receded and I missed it. I opened my eyes and found myself alone in an expanse of… well I struggle to describe it.

It was neither dark or light, neither hot or cold. The lighting in the expanse held the same subdued quality of newly burgeoning dawn or dusty twilight. Like waking from a blissful nap I couldn’t remember falling into, I couldn’t tell which it was without the context of what came before.

I rose from my reclined posture and dropped below the surface of the water when my feet didn’t touch the bottom I expected. I clawed at the water, surprised by how much stretched above me. No matter how much I kicked and swam, I couldn’t break the surface.

My heart thudded loudly in my ears as fear overtook me. Was I swimming the wrong way? How could I find the surface? How long could I be without air? That strange, watery light–the expanse of the void around me–made it impossible to know.

“Be calm.” His voice sounded steady. Comforting. “You don’t need to breathe here.”

I stilled, my nude body suspended in the expanse, my hair drifting like a cloud around me. I looked around to the left, to the right. That endless expanse of gloaming encompassed all I saw.

I felt a stirring in my hair and looked up.

Floating above me, the lock of hair in question entwined in his fingers, drifted the nothing from before. The angle of his face mirrored the angle of mine, his body pointing down where mine pointed up. Or at least I thought so, I still couldn’t be sure which was which.

The nothing was no longer absence, but he certainly wasn’t human. He appeared enormous, almost twice my size. We were almost nose to nose. His skin was the color of charcoal, which made the bloody crimson of his irises almost glow like jewels. Two sets of horns curled back from his brow, one set longer than the other, and both of them that same charcoal color with sharpened points of bone white. Silken strands of hair billowed out around his face, shorter than mine, perhaps cropped just past his pointed ears when it wasn’t floating buoyant.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I told you,” he said, his full lips revealing two sets of over-large canines. “A servant of the Forgotten One. A vessel.”

He released the strand of hair he had twined around his large finger and set himself to rights, coming to face me right side up. He stayed eye level with me, but his large body extended far past the soles of my feet. He scooped his hand around my back, his sharp nails pressing into the sensitive skin of my waist and just beneath my breasts.

I suddenly grew aware that I remained naked. My skin rippled with gooseflesh and my face flushed with heat. The vessel smiled, his sharp nose wrinkling with mirth as he cupped my face in his other hand. “Little carver, how your blood blooms like roses beneath your skin,” he said. “Such a vicious little creature, yet you demure to be bare before me?”

That wasn’t the only reason I found myself flushing. I could not ignore the fact that he also wore nothing.

“You said I have to become. But what does that mean? What does it entail?”

He gathered me closer to him and I found myself placing my hands on his sculpted chest. His skin almost burned beneath my hands. My heart raced in my chest in a way that was different from the way that it did when I was alight with the thrill of violence. My thighs squeezed as the hand cupping my face smooth down the back of my legs, covering the space beneath my seat all the way to the crook of my knees. He almost fully enveloped me in his large hands; almost entirely cradled against his muscled abdomen.

“The Forgotten One placed her power within me, but it is a seed encased in ice. It cannot grow within me. I have to pass that seed to you.” He smoothed his thumb over the crest of my hip bone. “Yours is the fertile soil it needs to take root.”

Despite the flowery language, I knew exactly what kind of seed he meant to expel and just where the fertile soil would be, too. My skin blazed, but not with arousal. With anger.

“Of course,” I spat. “The promise of everything I could possibly need, the promise of protection, but only if Ifuck youfor it.”

I pushed against the creature but his hands tightened around me, not painfully, just enough to keep me still. “No.” His voice came out as a snarl. “Not protection. Power. Not given. Returned. Not fucked.Worshipped.”

His ruby eyes burned with fervency as the strong line of his nose brushed mine. “Allow me to worship you, little goddess. Let me kneel at the altar of your bloodlust, baptise me in the waters of your retribution, let me devour the fruit of your pleasure and I will forever be at your beck and call. Just as I always have been. Just as I always will be.”

I closed my eyes and shuddered, leaning my forehead against his, feeling the smooth ridges of the roots of his horns against the planes of my brow. “I… I’m frightened of it,” I said softly.

“You don’t have to be.” His voice was a gentle purr reverberating through his chest, his breaths almost as labored as mine. “Let me show you.”

I opened my eyes, finding his irises still glowing–burning into mine. He was waiting for permission.

“Alright,” I said. “Show me.”

His hand on my back smoothed along the line of my spine, nails dragging enough to bite but not enough to break the skin. He cradled my neck, my hair billowing out as I let my head fall against the soft pads of his fingers. His thumb and forefinger gently curled to hold the edge of my jaw, the bend of his thumb pushing underneath my chin, granting him more access to my neck.

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