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It’s exciting, these bonds they’ve forged with Hades’ kingdom. She loves hidden places, and this labyrinth is one vast, aching secret. She likes to walk among the shades and watch their fantasies play out reflected in their hollow eyes as she passes them by. None of them can see her; not really. Even in death they would burn like fatted torches at the merest glimpse of her true form. The goddess of rut and obsession, a formless roil of lost loves, sick desires, and raging need. Men and women have died staring at her, eyes running down their cheeks as they clawed at themselves in white-hot ecstasy. Their own wet dreams and long-held heartaches interest her more anyway, so this is what she shows them in the medium of her soft skin. One in particular has drawn her down through the soporific calm of Elysium and Asphodel’s blazing cataracts to where she stands now in the mouth of a dark temple, listening to a boy’s curses and the hiss and crack of a long, weighted bullwhip.
From the low slate steps, lost in shadow, Aphrodite watches the combatants whirl through the forest of old columns. Jasper and marble crack. Dust sifts down from overhead. The things of the body are hers, and so each bruise blooms over her skin, each cut traces itself along the lines of her jaw and collarbone. And then they fade. Close. The slim figures dart and weave, a lithe young man — Hades’ grinning son — and the blur of sky blue and gleaming bronze she’s come to see. The man’s sword flashes. Aphrodite presses a small finger into the cut that opens like a maiden’s sighing mouth in the crook of her left arm. She shivers, her nail brushing the slow electric pulse of a raw nerve, and withdraws as the gash closes. In a pool of light the boy stumbles, one foot dragged out from under him by the blur’s whip. He falls, sword clattering over the smooth flagstones, and at once is scrambling up.
The whip coils itself tight around his throat, the round leaden weight at its end striking his jaw with a sickly thunk . Aphrodite presses a hand to her throat, savoring the pressure, the mounting constriction. He thuds back to his knees. Almost tenderly, the fury plants a boot on the boy’s spine and hauls back on the whip as his face darkens. He claws fruitlessly at the cord, sword lying useless yards away, and then a final tug, a crack of breaking bone, and the Styx reaches up through stone and darkness to snatch him back to his father’s house in a sudden blast of blood, a crimson pillar thrown up toward the ceiling of the temple. Nothing remains, except for Megaera, of course. Her chest heaves. The long muscles of her upper arms glisten in the pale green light that filters down from the frescoed ceiling.
“You again,” the fury breathes in that fried, lazy voice. Her grown wing stretches, batlike digits straining, and folds flush against her back beside its stunted mate. She turns. She’s spattered in blood, one pointed cheekbone laid open and trails of red drying to a crust between her nostrils and upper lip. Those yellow eyes are half-lidded, reptilian with cold indifference. “Tell me, why slum it down here in the bowels of creation? Not enough legs spreading topside?”
Aphrodite steps down to the temple floor, wrapping her silk shawl with its pattern of rock doves in flight around herself against the chill. Cosmetics form and dissolve against her delicate skin, outlining her eyes in kohl, staining her lips with clay and berry juice, etching her eyebrows with faint streaks of charcoal. Her hair spills over her shoulders in blond coils, dark waves, in icy waterfalls like the fury’s own. This brings a smirk to her lips. Megaera’s scorn can’t touch her. What could hurt a god whose very veins sing with your hidden lusts, whose flesh echoes the desires you keep concealed from the world, from your lovers, from yourself?
The whip sings. A few drops of blood fly from its hissing length as Megaera coils it effortlessly over one shoulder and stalks through light and shadow to meet Aphrodite. She’s tall, her body long and lean and hard, her skin a delicate cerulean dusted with freckles of a darker blue and marred by a thousand little scars. Sharp teeth flash in a merciless grin. How much work it must be to keep that body honed to a knife’s edge. How much denial and joyless repetition. It’s no wonder, Aphrodite muses with a smile as she lets the fury cup her throat in one callused palm, the other hand roaming down over the vellum-soft fold of flesh where her breast meets the delicate skin beneath her armpit, the lush rolls forming at her waist, that what she craves is excess. The crease of a double chin. The hanging velvet weight of a rounded belly. Heavy, marbled breasts like good cheese veined with wine. They fall back together through black silk and dyed sable, stones parting against their bodies, a bedchamber forming in the temple’s fundament at the summons of their shared desire.
She drifts onto the feather pillows and thrills at their coolness against the expanse of her back, heavy folds of flesh and the pillowy shelf of her backside conforming to slick satin. The fury’s mouth is on her nipple. Blue hair trails over her burning skin as she clasps the lean form to her breast, the armor plates of greaves and gauntlets biting into her, claws cupping the weight of her breasts gently. Glow worms hang from the ceiling above, their luminescent discharge beaded on the strands of silk to which they cling. Shelves of strange fungus glow softly from the dripping cavern walls. She inhales the mingled smell of sweat and blood and groundwater, rich and metallic. This is the way the first people worshiped her, swollen breasts and flaring hips, a dream of plenty, of fermented goat’s milk spilling from plump lips and honey and valerian smeared on strong, fat thighs to ease the pain of childbirth. It is a shape she knows. A shape she loves.
She squirms over the pillows, heels and elbows digging for traction in their nest, Megaera following, hunger in those burning eyes, until her back meets the stone of the cave wall and she allows herself to rest against it, breasts cradled in her arms, thighs spread to let her belly rest between them. The fury unbuckles her armor and flings it aside. She unbelts her tunic, ripping the heavy cloth in her haste to remove it. Blood still runs from her left nostril, dripping into her just-parted lips. Her nipples stand out hard and dark from her flat chest, and her cock arcs like a bow against her flat stomach. She climbs her lover with surprising gentleness, careful not to tax her tender skin or lean too heavily against her soft and yielding form, until her knees grip under Aphrodite’s arms and she curls around the goddess, kissing her as though she means to suck her breath out of her body. The whip still dangles from its coil over her shoulder.
“I know what your heart desires,” Aphrodite whispers in the fury’s ear. She licks it gently, her pointed pink tongue tracing the firm cartilage of the pinna, probing at the waxy softness and fine hairs of the canal’s opening. A trace of dreaming lingers there, a dark oneiric aftertaste she lacks the palette to discern. Things are blurring now. Her nature has gorged itself on Megaera’s. She licks blood from the other woman’s throat. It tastes of ash and beaten copper. “Why you covet me. Why you mock me before taking me to bed.”
The fury’s pulse quickens. Aphrodite feels it through the little breast now rising to press against her face. She kisses it, circling the nipple with her tongue, pulling it into her mouth until Megaera’s legs dig vise-tight into her sides and the fury’s claws break the skin of her huge, sloping shoulders. She gasps as golden blood runs over her pale skin. “You want it for yourself. An end to duty. A body meant for love, and not for punishment.”
“Fool,” Megaera growls, pulling her nails free. “They’re the same thing.”
In a trice the whip is coiled around Aphrodite’s left wrist and the fury disengages from her, dragging her away from the wall in a delicious, stomach-tightening rush of imbalance. She falls, the cord biting into her skin, and Megaera steps smoothly around her bulk to bind her midriff, cinching the whip tight into the bounty of her middle. Cross and double, tie and flick, until she lies defenseless on her knees, arms lashed together under her, sweat-damp hair stuck to her face, her body bulging like fresh-risen dough through diamonds and bars of knotted cord. It feels so good to play at helplessness. And more than play. Even for her, a fury is a formidable foe. Nothing guarantees she could escape, if she wanted to.
“Want it for myself?” Megaera’s voice is gleefully disdainful. She prowls through Aphrodite’s field of vision. A cold claw trails over rope and skin. “I have it.” A callused hand pressed hard into the dimpled fat of her rear, squeezing and groping. Her cheeks color. Her eyelids flicker. Sensation in this form is like waves bright with phosphorescent life crashing against a dark shore. An eternal collapse into and echo against something hard and strong and powerful, something that will not give, like the cunt of one of her priests overtaken by divine madness and still spasming in orgasm long after coupling has left it swollen, bruised, and raw. The first slap against her buttocks ripples through her. She sees peacocks fanning their tail feathers in a sumptuous garden. A great sunning serpent washed and kissed by naked maidens. She sees the great red hound that guards the gates of Hades, slaver dripping from his bared black gums and yellow fangs.
Another blow, her body quaking like water into which a stone has fallen, ripples spreading out from that slim palm and settling back into it. A squeeze, nails biting skin, and then a third slap, and a fourth. She feels Megaera bite her own lip in furious concentration. She’s stroking herself gently as she builds her rhythm, beads of blood welling from beneath the bruised surface of her lover’s backside. What is the appeal in striking at the water? To see one’s will reflected in the world, and then to see it fade to nothing. A shout in the dark. Megaera thrusts inside her and she screams, a sound like a swan dying, no mortal woman’s cry of delirious release but the shriek of a god in her power, a fat, milk-smelling idol dripping menstrual blood onto the rude altar of a temple in the hills. Her cunt is molten, dripping golden ichor and clear mucous, crushing itself shut around the length of the fury’s sex. She rocks with each thrust, grinding her teeth, desperate for more, deeper, harder—
It is then her other selves rise up from the bedclothes, shadows of cum and spittle, blood and urine, milk and hair. They stroke Megaera, clustering close around her, whispering to her the secrets of her own desires, the details of her first wet fumblings in the dark of Tartarus, of her sisters coiled around her in a mewling, hungry slick of groping mouths and probing fingers. They dry her tears and clean the scabbed blood from her face. They kiss her wounds until they seal, the skin new and pale, and slip like serpents into her, fingering her anus, licking at the reeking, acrid spice of her armpits, holding her half-erect cock in their mouths and passing it from one to the next, a fancy to be shared among the sisterhood. The goddess feels it all. These mouths share a single throat. These fingers branch from the same hand. A caul of perfumed flesh to hold her lover and let no whimper or twitch escape inexperienced.
The whip falls away from her as she rises to her feet, the cord unwinding itself like an obedient snake. She makes plump fists, dimpled knuckles cracking, and steps daintily toward where the fury lies melted among the tangled silks and satins, hair coming loose from its clasp to fly over the pillows like a spray of open sky, eyelashes flickering over a drunken gaze. The shadows knead her muscles, lick the salty tears from the surface of her eyes, and push phantasmal fingers into the canals at the root of her sex, beneath the loose skin of her scrotum. Gently, gently, in and out. Two of them rise to take Aphrodite’s hands and help her to lower herself down onto Megaera’s open mouth, to press her twitching cunt against those chapped and chewed-on lips, those sharp canines and that acid tongue. Her body envelopes the fury’s like thickened cream poured over fruit. The bruised flesh of her buttocks aches so sweetly as it comes to rest on Megaera’s chest, moving gently with each shallow inhalation.
Darkness. A suffocating fire. The pain is hers. Theirs. A frayed nerve stretched between their bodies. Images flickering along its length. The tongue at work between her quaking thighs. When it comes, will it tear her apart? Will it separate them, or entwine them so that nothing can cut through their red entanglement? Those thoughts are for later. For another time. Another goddess. For now, she has only to scream as the wave breaks and thought dissolves.