Page 81 of The Flesh Remembers
Ellie, nothing in this world can ever separate us. We are always a part of each other.
“It’s time,” James murmured, snapping Eleanor’s attention back to the present.
His fingers traced down her arms, over her waist, his touch reverent and demanding all at once.
“Will you make me a god?”
His grip tightened, pulling her closer, their bodies nearly touching, heat coiling between them, thick, unrelenting.
“Or will you keep me as your lover?”
A choice.
A lie.
They both knew James had always been inevitable.
And Eleanor had never stood a chance.
The entire world trembled.
The chant had reached its peak.
The last of the faithful were gone, their bodies now part of the church, the living altar, and the abyss itself. Their final moans still echoed, their pleasure eternal, their last moments burned into the very foundation of this new world.
Eleanor knew what she had to do.
She lifted her hands, tracing the symbols that burned across James’s shifting skin. Her breath was uneven, and her body ached with the weight of what she was about to become.
And then
She spoke the final words.
The universe convulsed.
The apparatus screamed.
James arched, shuddering, his form expanding, burning, unravelling into something too divine, monstrous, and beautiful for mortal eyes to comprehend.
Eleanor felt herself dissolve.
She felt the disk within her chest fully become one with her flesh, and she was the disk, and it was her. She could hear it as if it were a thought in her head. It promised to show her marvellous things.
She did not fall.
She did not die.
She simply became something else.
She had offered herself willingly.
And James had taken everything.
The church ceased to exist.
The abyss was no longer separate.
It was them.
