Page 20 of Unholy Bond
The room shivered. The mirrors nearest me went black, then rippled as if something large had passed behind them. In the blackness, a pair of eyes appeared.
“Show yourself,” I said.
The air thickened. Then, from between two mirrors, she stepped out. The Seer.
She had no body, not a proper one. She was all cloak and shadow, her face a mask of feathers and her mouth invisible except for the glint of pointed teeth when she turned her head. Her eyes reflected nothing, even in the world’s most overstocked hall of mirrors. She moved with no sound, gliding around the dais in a counterclockwise orbit, one finger trailing along the surface of the bone as if reading Braille.
“Nice place you have here,” I said, not expecting an answer.
The Seer stopped, tilted her head, and then, by some trick of the mirrors, or maybe just by will, she was behind me, breathing down the back of my neck.
I shivered, for real this time.
“You seek her,” the Seer said. The words came not from her mask but from all around, layered and doubled, as if the entire shrine was her vocal cord. “You seek your lost queen.”
I grunted. “You know where she is?”
“Of course.” The Seer began to walk again, drifting between reflections, always staying just at the edge of my peripheral. “But you do not know what she has become. You think to rescue her. You think to claim her for yourself. But she is not yours. Not anymore.”
I felt my lips peel back, a snarl starting at the base of my throat. “Where is she?”
The Seer drifted up the spiral, feet not quite touching the bone. Her hands were tipped in claws, but instead of black, they were luminous, glowing like they’d been carved from glowworms. She reached the top step, then turned to face me. “You do not deserve her,” she said. “You never did.”
I started up the stairs, ignoring the pain as the bone bent under my weight. “Don’t waste my time with prophecy. You want to be useful? Tell me where she is, and I’ll owe you a favor.”
She laughed. The sound made my teeth itch. “You have nothing to bargain with. Your brothers are lost. You are alone. The master of this house will kill you as soon as you leave this chamber.”
I kept climbing, two steps at a time. “I don’t die easy.”
At the top step, I reached for her. My hand went through her, as if she was made of cold smoke and fog, but the sensation stung me anyway, needles of cold burrowing in through my skin and setting the nerves alight. I yanked my arm back, shaking it, but the Seer only smiled wider.
She pointed down at the floor, at the cracked mirror that reflected me in a hundred broken shards. “Look.”
I looked.
The mirrors rippled, the cracks mending for a split second to show a single, perfect image. Not of me, but of Lilith.
She sat on a black throne, her body stretched in regal languor, eyes aglow with a pale blue fire. Lucifer sprawled at her feet, not dead but beaten, her foot on his chest. His face, usually so perfect and composed, was a ruined. His mouth torn, horns snapped, the wounds leaking gold and silver in thick, viscous streams. Lilith smiled down at him, and the smile was not gentle.
The Seer’s voice echoed through the room: “This is what comes next.”
The image zoomed, and I saw myself and Aziz and Levi kneeling before her, heads bowed, all three of us naked and battered. Aziz’s body was covered in wounds, Levi’s mouth was torn at one corner, and my own hands were shackled in front of me, wrists scored with black lines where the Void had tried to claim me.
The next moment, Lilith spread her legs wide on the throne, the skin between her thighs glowing with a black, hungry light. One by one, we rose from our knees, and each of us in turn crawled to her and pressed our mouths to the void between her legs. The room pulsed with the rhythm of it. Three sets of lips, three tongues, three bodies desperate to please her, to worship her, to claim even a drop of her favor.
As we licked and sucked and worshipped, the Void poured from her, tendrils of darkness winding around us and burrowing into our backs, marking us as hers, not Lucifer’s. Each time one of us made her shudder, a new line of black branded itself on our bodies, curling up the thighs, across the back, along the ridges of the skull. It hurt, but the pain was blissful, an addiction that demanded more and more.
Lucifer watched from the floor, mouth open, but powerless. He raged, he spat, but nothing could stop the tide. Every orgasm was a sacrament, every scream a prayer.
I tried to look away, but the mirrors locked my gaze. I watched as I drove my tongue deeper into Lilith, lapping up the black honey that oozed from her cunt, feeling it burn down my throat and then explode in my gut. The taste was sweet and bitter, like blood and candy and gunmetal. I came, over and over, my cock spraying black seed across the mirrors, each spurt carving a new rune in the glass.
When it was over, we collapsed in a heap at her feet. She stroked our heads, purring, and the Seer’s voice boomed out one last phrase: “You will follow her. Or die trying.”
The mirrors shattered, the image gone. I was back in the shrine, on my knees, gasping for air. My cock throbbed, hard as steel, and a dribble of black pre-cum pooled on the floor.
The Seer descended the stairs, her feet making no sound. She stopped in front of me, bent down, and placed her hands on my head. Her fingers were ice, and the cold jolted me out of my trance.
“Remember,” she said. “Remember the path. Do not forget.”
