Archive of Our Own

“So what will you choose?” Zenos asks again, impatience betrayed by the inhuman steadiness of his gaze. Anyone else would have looked away, provided space while Claire considered her choices by the weight of the fetters woven through them. Anyone else would have offered a smile, an out, a polite attempt at assuring her that either choice would be afforded equal respect.

Zenos offers no such platitudes, offering her subjugation that differed only in the degree to which she acknowledged it. Subjugation by his hand, bending the knee of her own volition to sup on the bounty of fruits and flowers that blossomed within his menagerie — or subjugation with a formless sword pressed against her throat, only ever hair’s breadth from giving her two mouths with which to grin.

“And what if I refuse?” she asks, absently licking at the sweat that had trickled down her face. Ala Mhigo’s sun is unforgiving even while it reclines behind the horizon. Dusk drenches the garden in varying shades of honey.

Zenos smiles, feline and curious, his eyes narrowing. “A pointless question. I know you tire of the boot against your neck. The pointless drivel. The meaningless conquests. A sword dulled not with blood but rust.”

Claire, more given to codices and canes than the tang of steel, bites her tongue. The Prince is no fool; he’d seen her fight, often from fulms above while she gasped and bleed his victory. Zenos remarking on steel is not an oversight, but an intentional choice.

She isn’t sure how to feel about her codex — something typically afforded a measure of near reverence by her comrades — being referred to as a mere weapon. 

It should upset her; as a healer, it should insult her to have that which that breathes life into stagnant lungs compared to the tools that robbed them of it.

It certainly shouldn’t feel like praise.

It should not send a warm thrum of delight along her spine. It should not feel like someone tracing the jagged outlines of a scar and marveling at their texture.

It should not feel like something violet and violent emerging from its shell.

He understands.

More than once she’d found herself clicking her tongue at rarely having occasion to peruse the pages near the back of her tome, now hardened and stuck together from disuse. 

What a waste, she’d think before chastising herself. Rarely needing to exert herself should be a boon… and yet.

And yet.

When was the last time her heart had danced beneath her ribs, heady with the thrill of racing? 

When was the last time she’d felt that peculiar frisson: manic fear? Terror and joy? 

“I can see it in your eyes,” Zenos continues, as if he’d heard the staccato of her thoughts. “You tire of it. You’ve bared steel against those whom you were commanded to slay, yet none earned the right to drink of its violence, of your violence.”

He takes a step closer, arms spread wide as if to embrace her — all of her, including that which unfurls beyond the confines of her tiny frame. To dwarf her physically is an easy task, but to be able to fully embrace the serpentine depths of the blackness, the ugly pestilence — 

— she wants to believe he can, for who else has looked into the maw of a beast and contemplated its fangs?

“Let us drink of one another,” he whispers. “Violence unto violence, pleasure unto pleasure. I know you earn for it, to allow yourself to bleed and drink and swoon to your heart’s content, to abandon the artifice that shackles you.” 

Another step closes between them; he’s near enough that she can smell him: sweat, sunlight, and the dense copper of bloodshed. His eyes are bright, the dying embers of daylight casting them in a strange shade of topaz; beneath them, his lips curve into a smile, as if he can see the cogs turning beneath her skull.

She swallows, meeting his gaze squarely. “And what if your blade fails to slake my thirst?”

His placid smile sharpens, every bit the weapon seeking its mark. “Then I offer my head, and you may place it on a pike of your choosing at the gates of Ala Mhigo.”

“Very well.” She can almost taste the salt of his blood spurting from the carotid, landing on her cheek, her lips. “And if you do?”

His eyes flutter shut, a low purr of approval rumbling in his chest. He is silent for a moment, and Claire hates that the tension sits hot and urgent between her thighs. “When I satisfy that hunger, your appetite will grow ever greedier, and I will be the only one who can sate it. I have no need of treaties; you will be mine and realize the futility of abstinence.”

Wretched arrogance.

“Then prove your mettle, Princeling.”

Stars twinkle countless malms away, humidity settling against the garden like a blanket.

Beneath the boughs of the Royal Menagerie, a ravenous hummingbird — often given to sampling and suckling whatever blooms offer the sweetest aroma — devours a single flower, quaking as its petals open one by one. 

White teeth against the tender slope of her throat, nibbling and biting until she gasps at a sharp ache at her neck. She can hear him almost purr his contentment, lapping at the shimmering warmth that follows his teeth breaking her skin.

Did he… just bite me?

“Auri blood — incomparable,” he murmurs. “You can taste the sea brine.”

Instead of the question she means to ask, a soft moan tumbles from her lips; dull pain and the fine graze of teeth send contrasting thrills of pleasure along her nerves. Her knees buckle, and she finds herself grateful that he’d chosen test her resolve against the steadying brace of an oak tree.

It’s enough to almost make her miss the way his hands, calloused from the unyielding grip of a blade, make quick work of her robes; he unfastens and lowers her hakama almost too quickly for her to feel it, but the unbearably hot fingers crooking between her thighs is unmistakable.

“Ah, but you’re an eager one, aren’t you?”

“Shut up —“ she bites out, though her voice is quickly warped as his fingers explore the peaks and valleys of her cunt. He knows precisely where to please her — the pads of his fingers linger and circle her clit lazily when his steady circuit guides him back to it, but he is just as content to slide them further back, dipping into the crease of her core, spreading her own lust and evaporating the friction between their skin. She can’t help herself; her hips jerk of their own accord.

He finds the perfect rhythm all too quickly, the meat of his palm working her clit while his fingers tease at her entrance.

“Look at you,” he whispers, his breath warm against her ear and the raw wound at her neck slick with his saliva and her blood. “Feel how hot your blood runs, how it hungers with naught but violence to whet its appetite.”

“Wh-what are you—”

His fingers thrust inside her without warning, a sharp ache that strangles her next words. And yet the burn is but an appetizer; she feels herself quiver and clench around him, feels herself roll her hips, pleasuring herself on the cruel digits claiming her, whimpering in heady confusion and arousal.

“I could smell the instant your body responded to me. And you might like to know that your blood did not quicken until my teeth found your throat,” he continues, flicking one of her nipples. “Naught else. Likewise with your cunt. You were silent until I found my mark.”

She hates how heat flares inside her, how his fingers sink deeper, more easily — even as he adds a third and fourth, even as he spreads and pistons them mercilessly. 

She did not blush and demure when other men spoke of the flesh in their mouth or surrounding their cocks, though their tongues tripped over the hard consonant and final purr. It was the only term that suited a woman that could easily snap their necks in twain with her thighs, and yet they feared her, mouths slowing and arousal flagging as their terror stripped their lust.

The word fit perfectly between his lips and around his fingers; he spoke of and pleased it precisely as the thing it was: heat and wet nestled between her thighs, spread for him because she’d willed it so.

“You’ve found your mark. But you’ve yet to claim it,” she says, running her fingers though his hair, pushing down at the crown of his head pointedly. A slow smirk spreads across his lips; he kneels between her legs, hands digging into her left thigh, lifting her leg to rest on his shoulder.

He leans, lips parting, and her thoughts dissolve into oblivion.

There is naught but heat and pressure, levin and brimstone as the Prince fucks her with his mouth. There is no other way to describe it — there is nothing obsequious in how his mouth surrounds her sex, how his tongue searches her folds and laps at the nectar, running tortuously slow along the tender flesh. Even on his knees with his face nestled between her thighs — even with her leg resting imperiously on his shoulder — Claire still feels as though Zenos is taking, claiming, commanding.

This was not the first time a man had knelt between her thighs, memorizing the swell and dip of her sex. Many had before him, and she imagines the Crown Prince of the Garlean Empire will not be the last. A petite woman with exotic horns and scales, she knows her appearance is peculiar enough to entice, her rumored strength dubious enough to test.

None kept their nerve; their mouths ghosted against her, hardly daring to graze her flesh, let alone grant it the pleasure they’d promised. Though she was but half their size, they trembled, pale and spineless.

She had dismissed them all with a derisive snort. Many wanted to mount the Warrior of Light; none had the courage to see it through.

Zenos shows no such fear, easily sampling the bounty revealed as though he’d earned it, as though her body and pleasure were already his to enjoy.

It isn’t until she feels the frigid nighttime air pebble her skin that she realizes why she’s shivering:

Anxiety. A shyness that thins her breath, even while she squirms at the contrast of his mouth like a flame branding her skin. She isn’t sure if the way her nipples stiffen is from the cold or the low burn of excitement between her legs.

“Am I so disagreeable that you must shut your eyes? Come, let me see you,” the hummingbird insists. “Are you ashamed?”

She does not respond, half-drunk on the pleasure of being supped upon. Shame is but a small part of it; she dares not speak of the primal fear, wondering if hummingbirds have fangs.

“You are,” he cries, delighted. “Yet even so, you’ve spread so sweetly for me. Such bravery! Not even the spider lily would let me have her.”

Ignore the taunts , she thinks, willing herself to focus on the clever tongue working within and without. The hummingbird’s claws dig into her flesh.

“Do you know what happens to flowers that unfurl as eagerly as you have? They‘re devoured, sucked dry until they are naught but withered husks,” he croons, tongue delving deep enough to wound, to taste the sap.

Claire grins, lips crooked through the pleasure almost painful in its acuity. “Bold words, Princeling. You’ve still not made good on your threat. I’ve thought of at least half a dozen places where I might mount that pretty little head of yours.”

"Have you?” At this Zenos pulls away, straightening his posture. The sticky wetness between her legs is teased and stroked, his tongue once more replaced by his fingers; his other hand unbuckles and unfastens his trousers. “Tell me.”

One hand grabs her behind the knee, lifting one of her legs while he takes himself in hand with the other. Claire’s breath stutters. Zenos is precisely as she imagined he would be, cock flushed and unyielding, jutting from the patch of downy, blond hair between his thighs like a crude weapon. His hand barely wraps around it, and Claire swallows in mingled terror and bloodlust as she imagines how it will ache.

He runs himself along her cunt, the head of his cock dipping curiously at her entrance — not enough to broach, but enough to ease his passage and sheath himself in her arousal. She’s reminded of a brush mixing different shades of paint, and out of nowhere wonders what kind of perverse works adorn the walls of the place the Prince calls home. She cannot imagine Zenos having the patience to sit in front of a blank canvas until it bled art.

He pauses, breath still. “Tell me,” he says again, softer, and this time he presses inside of her, time tilting on its axis as she forgets how to breathe. It’s as though her limbs and torso have dissolved into ash, her entire being reduced to the lush pleasure of where their bodies join. 

“The gates of Ala Mhigo,” she moans softly, biting her lips as she’s forced to feel every white-hot inch coaxed within her. “I’d let them use your jaw as a door knocker.”

“Cliché,” he tuts, withdrawing before thrusting into her once more, agonizingly slow. “And what of my skull?”

“I’d save that for Little Ala Mhigo, so that they might use it to toast the news of your passing.” 

Zenos’s strokes are slow and indulgent, like a man nosing a fine wine before savoring it sip by sip. “And what of the rest of me? Would you have me decay into worthless bones?”

Claire can’t tell if the husky rasp of his voice is brief offense or his own lust peppering it, but she decides to indulge him all the same. She clenches around him and is rewarded with a sharp jerk that makes her see stars.

“If you prove you deserve something beyond that. Perhaps I’ll use your fingernails to button my coat.”

“They’d draw blood even after my demise; take care never to wear white,” he sneers; his strokes become erratic, as though imagining his own dismemberment has set his heart ablaze.

“I’ll use your teeth as thumbtacks, your hair as piano wire,” she continues, gasping softly as his cock brushes something inside her that’s almost painful in its pleasure. She can feel something like a thread fraying, a spiraling tension near the base of her spine, coiling in her gut.

“And what of my bones?”

“Cutlery and gauntlets—”

“My eyes?”

“Soup garnish, burst of umami.”

Zenos snarls under his breath, breathy and disheveled, his fingers tighten against her hips, bruising. “There’s that hunger — you’d devour my eyes, would you?”

“Of course. Anything more would be a crime.”

“And what of this,” he croons, thrusting harder as she hadn’t guessed which organ he’d meant, and his pace is dangerous. He’s close to coming unraveled, she only a few stuttering moans ahead of him. He seems to pick up on the rhythm of her sighs, his erratic pacing simmering into a knowing song of push and pull that strums on the strings of her pending climax.

Claire sneers. “I’d feed it to the pigs.”

His hands find their way around her throat, thumbs digging into her trachea. Her vision begins to fade to around the edges, her fluttering breaths becoming thinner than silk thread, and thinner still as she feels the blackness in her peripheral vision bleed into the white heat that erupts from her core; the static in her eardrum mingles with the low growl in her ear as a second burst of heat floods her. 

Her consciousness begins to trickle away from her — she can hear each droplet hit the ground as Zenos pulls out, staining the Royal Menagerie’s gardens with seed and blood alike.

The last thing she’s aware of is her own heartbeat, silent beneath her ribs but tangible like a raw wound between her legs.