Alexi awoke.
He was partially clothed, spent, though he did not remember the orgasm. Dust lay under him, silver blood leaking from the corners of his mouth as his lips parted from agonal gasps, creating frothy bubbles in the quintessential fluid, Green eyes vacant and open. The air was perfumed with phi in the dim, orange light of the dying fire.
The creature he called Dust was nude. There was a knife lodged in the wound in his chest.

Alexi trembled slightly, arms still shaky with exertion, as he leant down to brush his mouth across his eyes, then his mouth, opening and closing in the spasms of the dying, with a strange gentleness, fingers painted in sand and his master's blood. He had drawn a spiral around Dust’s navel.
The beat was still in the Gift Horse's heart, but it was erratic and faltering...
The knife had been set at an angle to the organ, against it, but not -in- it, so that every beat cut the heart a little more and a little more.
Mors and Amor, love and death; both shared their burden with Monos, Pain.
Drawn like a beast to water, he dipped his head, to kiss him languidly as he drank.
Monos, and Hedone.

From time to time he'd convulse, as the vigor of the Horse that Never Tires attempted to reassert itself, but the blade of the knife drove a wedge between it and animation. His eyes would snap open when it did, abruptly awake and aware.
The noises he made… Alexi could not see him in any other fashion than the erotic.
Every motion, every sound...sensual. Life at its rawest.
The scent of his skin, his blood...the softest of sounds, the wet motion of his heart, bared like a snail out of its shell in the hollow of his left breast...
The mage lapped the blood from his open mouth, licking it from his teeth, his breathing quick, but as soft as he could coax it to be, so that he could listen to him.
Listen to him striving for Life.
The knife, by virtue of its position, ticked like a metronome. There was some effort by the Gift Horse to reach for it, to pull it from his body, but Alexi's position prevented any real success. He deterred him when he got too close with a gentle hand on the wrist and a firm push back. He was hardening again rapidly.
And each attempt only made the heart renew the force of its beating, intensifying it.
The sounds he made.
The sounds he made drew the Mage's eyes to his throat, and what he saw there made him hang his head, panting as he dug fingers into the sand beside him. He did not even need to touch himself.

Dust wore the collar. The collar he wore was not made of stone. It was made of bone, as were the manacles on his wrists and ankles, chained to nothing...
Dust made a pleading sound ...low, naked agony over the wet suck of his heart.
The sound was so evocative that he did not need hands to feel the thrill through his groin.
Oh, love...
You couldn't rush life, or death.
But you could beg for it to end…or to begin.

The little man’s fingers bent taut at the knuckles, as if he were clawing at the air thickening in his lungs.
Alexi leaned in, and he kissed him deeply, possessively, opening his mouth, and reached up to grip his jaw firmly, hard enough that it might have dislocated if he pushed up.

"My name...is Master. Call me anything else, and you will never speak again."

He sucked his tongue into his mouth, and after swallowing, fixed his teeth near the base, and bit hard.
Dust labored to draw any breath at all, his right hand, the one Alexi did not have pinned, came up and gripped his wrist...but either he had no further strength than that, or he simply had no fight in him, for all his did was hold it. In spite of his obvious pain, his cock was rock hard, curving elegantly up, its exposed glans neatly arcing to touch just below his navel...
Alexi had come to love that touch. His smell. The way he tasted.
Quarry.
Questing Beast.

The Russian moaned, a thin and needy sound, as he pulled the little man's tongue taut, and then exerted the full strength of his neck and jaw, cutting, crushing pressure, with the edge of his teeth fixed into flesh. He put one hand on his skull, holding it to the ground, to avoid him simply pulling up towards him as he tore it from his mouth.
The sounds he made...

Dust writhed, blood choking from his nose as his airways filled up with fluid.

The sounds he made...
The tongue burst like a plum in the Russian's mouth and hot silver blood ran down his chin, his throat and chest. He jerked, shuddered through, as orgasm rocked him from navel to glans. He did not try and stop it. He had not needed pressure against his nerves.
Dust 's body was straining, chest heaving and lifting as he drowned on his own blood, and the pressure of his agonized presence was more than enough.
Alexi snapped to avoid losing the mouthful of tissue and blood, and worked his throat hard as he swallowed, eyes closed while he chewed, and bathed in afterglow. He ran a hand, bare and pale, over his lover's body, up and down his waist, over his shoulder, soothing him as he died.

His captive convulsed for nearly a full minute, expiring with receding shudders that lapped slowly away, like the tide going out, Alexi watching him coolly as he died with bloodied face and hyena eyes. He had no compunction about masticating on his prize...the soft tongue went down smooth, like liquid light in his stomach. He pulled the knife from Dust's chest, and used it to open the wound along its edges, flicking the blade up through tissues to bare his chest to the dim firelight. The Gift Horse was still, heart motionless.
They were in a circle...the figure was intricate, and beautiful, large enough that they were able to be in the centre without disturbing the lines. They had originally been white chalk.
The inner ring, however, had taken up the Gift Horse's blood in runnels...
It steamed when exposed to the air, releasing raw Phi, pure existential energy, into the surroundings. The silver fluid crept slowly around the lines, seething and wobbling as it tried to take its natural course, but its nature as magic kept it attracted to the intricate geometry...but it did part, longer than it would usually take.
Much slower.
The whole figure thrummed with a quiet, pure sanctity...his life, death, their sex and intimacy.
Alexi slit him from his suprasternal notch, down to the top of his groin, like cutting a curtain. The flesh parted easily, firm, silvery blue. He hovered between the complete humility and engrossing arrogance that was the necessary mental state for complicated magic.
The worshipful state of submission to Life.
The obsessive need, and the entitlement to Know.
What was their secret?
His bones were beautiful, transluscent white, flecked with fiery color.
Ordinarily, he would not have had much time to examine them at length, for Gift Horses dissolved soon after they expired. To keep any part of them was nearly impossible. He was close to tears looking at him.
Tears of Wonder, a touch of grief, emotions that welled up at the sight of the intricate lace of blue arteries and silver veins that veiled his lungs and heart beneath the miracle of his bones. Opal. His bones were made of opal.
Alexi dipped his fingers in a jade bowl beside him, full of dark wine, and let them linger for a few focused moments before withdrawing them and stroking it down along the centre line of his body, over the main organs, murmuring softly.
He touched the sharp-tasting wine to his mouth, to the palms of both hands.
It was ceremonial cleansing...the priests of old would have bathed a whole body in it.
Only when that was done did he begin to seperate organs with the knife and his fingers, unravelling the complex puzzle of his physiology.
Every metal tool he used had to be plated with colors... Contact with plain, unplated tools caused an almost instant disintegration. Instead of cutting flesh, the bare steel would create a sweet smelling puddle. Whole organs would collapse into gelatinous clarity, losing form and all hints of function within frustratingly short periods of time.
But his flesh and organs held their shape on contact with tools plated with colors...

His belly and guts were curiously lacking in differentation. He had a discernable liver, but it was oddly shaped, and embedded in a webbing of pale collegen-like stuff that made up his intestines. Alexi took a sliver of heart off with his knife, and put it between his lips as he freed a sinew, working quickly. The lines were becoming thinner as he knelt over him. The whole circle...taking a heartbeat.
Life could not be supressed for long.
Alexi chewed thoughtfully as he freed his liver. He had gone for his heart before...he knew its shape through having cupped it in his hands, though licking it, stroking it as he climaxed around or over him.

The smell of incense was rising. He had a good memory...bit by bit, he would learn him.
He would learn the secrets his kind held.
There was no final answer as to Why. As he freed one lobe of the large organ, he noticed the tissue was losing color…
…Clarifying… Simultaneously losing all definition as it became clearer

Alexi focused as he could, eyes piercingly sharp. It took so long to prepare each circle...so much effort. The organ lightened in his hands. He would have to sleep for days after he finished scribing everything he could remember past Dust's innate Arcane.
But it was worth it.
Dust 's head had rocked back, mouth open, tendons contracting. Gift Horses adopted a weird pose when they dissolved... knees, feet, elbows, wrists... rotating inward and drawing up. It reminded him of the way a spider's legs drew in when it died, when its heart was no longer pumping fluid into its legs.

Alexi knelt back as the dissolution began, rubbing his forearm over his brow, using the last energy of the circle to fix what he could in his mind. The little man's body turned on its left side, becoming clearer and less distinct...until all Alexi could see were the collar and manacles, still in place.
He held his hands up, the knife still held in one of them with the blade turned away from him. He drew in a breath past the lingering taste of the Gift Horse's flesh.
He had made SO much progress since he'd located them...
People had to die...but then again, people die. That's what they're made for.
He hummed wordlessly, a mnemonic song.
The circle's geometry wobbled, before it vapourised into the air as glowing steam.
Alexi had started eating a bit more of him since he had tricked him into them.
Just to make sure.
Dust would revive again, still manacled and collared. The artifacts bound him in place after a fashion. It had been relatively simple to trick him into them, because Alexi had, at the time at least, been a virgin.
His vision wavered, and he had to pause, drawing a deep breath. That ritual took so long to prepare, so much work.
But bit by bit, he was not only learning, he was recording.
Still kneeling, he reached for a thick ledger, bound in Blue, to begin frantically writing while the image in his mind was still clear. The circle was dissolving rapidly around him as Dust did, but he had time to get a few things down.
Such beautiful bones. It had been the first time he had really seen them. What would a knife made out of those be like?
Alexi made a short note on the page. "Is there a way to make a knife out of opal?"
So many things to learn.
Some of the pages were so dulled that they could not be read. Some were blurred, while others held their ink. He fought with disappearing notations, faded diagrams, lapses in memory. Some were clear. He managed to scribe half a page before his vision darkened and he accidentally smeared over the drawing of the Gift Horse's liver. He knew then it was time to set it down and be content with his recall.
He was so tired.
He did not feel the pen slip from his fingers, but he saw it, and fumbled in vain to catch it. He made to stand, but his false limb was oddly heavy, his motions slack...he went to one knee instead, and then slumped back dizzily.
In the thin slice of time when his gaze was elsewhere, the Gift Horse re-appeared, drawing in his first breath, a breath followed by a thin ragged scream. He did that every time he revived now, ever since he’s been clapped in the manacles and collar.
Alexi rubbed his eyes, gritting his teeth. GOD...it hurt him to hear it. There was something unnatural in the possession of him, he had realized almost immediately, something that soaked his heart in grief.
But it passed.
All things passed.
It was a hard path of study...the more you learned about GOD, the more pain there seemed to be.

Co-written with DanteDeo

Edited by , 1 year(s) ago

Delicious tongue. Alexi gives five stars o/

I enjoyed writing this as much as I do reading it over again :D