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The man who was once called the Bachelor stood calf-deep in the cold and black marsh at the mouth of the Gullet. He was still enough that roots could have sprouted out of him through the worn leather of his shoes and dug into the hungry marsh. He couldn’t say exactly what it was that had compelled him from his bed—merely that he had been.
He’d woken in a strange house that he didn’t even remember entering, shrouded in cold and biting dark. The feeling had been distinctly urgent… like the miserable moment of realizing that there would be no more wondrous dreams to be had if he continued to sleep.
The walls pulsed with a heartbeat of their own, and the body of it was filled with a familiar miasma that made respiration feel like swallowing sand. He was driven not by horror, but the baser and more animal fear of the enclosed space; and perishing inside of it. The open night was by comparison, cool and dark. The night soothed... but he hadn’t dreamed in days.
Will you ever be allowed to dream again ? Or has that burden and that practice has been given to something with greater faculty?
The paths that his mind used to habitually follow had simply closed. He knew they were there but it was as if they had been shrouded in the cold and foreboding dark. Every day up until this one, he’d been braving that darkness like it was a personal affront; trusting that light would follow if he just made himself brilliant enough.
But now, there is no inner-light.
The darkness does not end, and we are fools to think we can change this.
When he’d next opened his eyes—he was no longer in the throat of the suffocating, living house. Pungent, chilling water soaked him up to his aching calves, and he could feel the twinge in a fragile, twisted ankle.
There was no attempting to look back the way he'd come. The familiar pulsating-pain that resulted was the same as when he’d hemorrhaged seven days before; like his brain was trying to push out of the skull that confined it. The nauseating agony made him unsteady, swaying on his rooted feet.
The black sky that stretched out ahead of him was soothing, and the grass promised the quiet of simple whispers. Twyre-sedges rasped and sang, releasing sparkling fairylight spores that made his nostrils burn and his eyes water.
From the way his dry skin now cracked and bled, he knew that he’d contracted the Pest for the second and the last time. After all that had been fought for; it finally ensnared him.
Daniil Dankovsky, Fighter of Death. Dead at twenty-eight. Defeated by his lifelong foe at last.
Shadows stretched out long in front of him had a backdrop of shifting and breathing color. A magic lantern that he would never be able to look at remained suspended and sustained by lofty dreams, and finally recognized as living.
You helped deliver the world where dreams can now become, and you don’t belong in it. There is only one direction left for you, Daniil.
Daniil raised his hazy eyes to where illuminated grass met the black horizon, but his rooted feet would not move. As he looked down to them, he faintly realized that living, blooming twyre-sedges were climbing and wrapping up his legs from the wet of the marsh, joyfully keeping him in place.
Heralds.
Distant sloshing grew closer, paused behind him.
"Where are you going, Oynon?" a rumbling, familiar voice asked. The name it belonged to was now shrouded in the same inexplicable black that drowned them all.
"Into the steppe," came his true answer. "...my nature is incompatible with the world I asked for. So I must go."
"Why?"
"Because I simply must."
The owner of the voice sloshed around, and a broad, blood-scented torso clothed in green and brown interrupted the vast stretch of Asphodel that stretched out before him. Scarlet-stained fingers reached for him, and lifted his chin with a familiar gentleness that Daniil could not assign a name.
He was so brilliant it hurt just as much to look at him as it did to look at the condemned town. Daniil whispered a curse, and wanted to jerk his head away, but found that his jaw was held carefully in place. There wasn't any mistaking the power vibrating beneath the skin. Life was luminous, and larger than the logical sum of its parts. His eyes blazed green with the truth of his beyond-human nature.
“No,” Life refused.
“You don’t understand,” Daniil grit, ears ringing as he fought to keep his eyes open. “I must—”
“No.”
There was no describing quite how it sounded, and the speaker did not not raise his voice, but the command was far beyond the human. Daniil had to drive the heels of his wrists into his eyes in agony, wondering if they were dry enough to simply start bleeding at this rate.
You are a walking corpse. He is a God.
Life sloshed closer; reached for him. He was encircled and drawn smotheringly-close.
“This world is a world of warmth; and it is a world of love, Daniil Dankovsky. I spared this Tower not just for the good of my people, but for the good of you.”
Daniil Dankovsky trembled in the arms of Life, helpless in the face of it.
"I want you to live in the light of a miracle. I want you never to wake up alone and cold again. Will you allow me to give these things to you oynon? Will you embrace me for the sake of lost time?"
A shudder broke in his chest as newborn stalks of twyre stretched all the way upwards from his legs to interlink with his fingers.
For every agony. For all the heartache. For all the death—he was loved in return.
This time when tender hands reached down to lift his chin, he looked up and in. Looking came with the crashing certainty that he would never be allowed to die. His very soul had been branded with a kin-mark that rendered him untouchable to Death, to Plague… even to the very Powers That Be. Long after man's last breath would be exhaled and the last stars in the sky winked out… In the ruins and ashes of all that was; Daniil Dankovsky would still remain.
The pain in his skull stopped. A kiss was pressed to the right corner of his lips.
"I love you," said Life.
"I am yours," came his hoarse whisper.
It didn’t even hurt.
Life took Daniil by the hand and he led him from the sodden marsh. Pulled him towards a place he called 'Olongo .’ Daniil was reluctant to set foot past the gaping black entrance. The reason why escaped him yet, but his body remembered the shock of being struck down to the ground and the wind knocked from his lungs. Remembered an old, blooming pain from his nose and his right eye.
“You will come to no harm,” Life promised him, stroking Daniil’s dry-cracked face with a gentle touch. “There is something you must see.”
Divested of outer-layers, bare of foot and naked from the waist up; Life led him deep into the rust-scented earth. The warm and welcoming dark surrounded them, forcing Daniil to open his ears and strain his eyes. A solid hand still held his own, unwilling to abandon him even as they neared light.
The fanglike cavern walls were bathed in ember-red glow from the great, burning bonfire that crackled in the middle of the gathering. Long shadows were cast by the lithe figures of dancers that sang and spun with the black miasma that hung thick above them, but it didn’t rush, nor did it seize. Sometimes the cloud broke apart, flowing down to ribbon along the line of an outstretched, beckoning arm. The black cloud was an indulgent, gentle partner. It flowed from Bride to Bride, as peacefully and easily as a small brook passing stones.
“Do you see now?” Life asked him, running the tips of his fingers down the dry and bare length of Daniil’s arm, as if in imitation of the playful fog as he closed fingers around his wrist, and lifted it high. “Do you see how the danger has passed?”
The Miasma itself drifted with twisting ease, finding the cracked tips of Daniil’s fingers before traveling down his arm, kissing the shell of his ear as it passed.
Ase hakol be`ahava, it whispered in primordial language that lived in the very roots of his teeth and the marrow of his bones: Let all that you do be done in love.
It was the ancient form of the tongue of his mother, his grandmother and all before, spoken all the way back to Jerusalem and even before, spoken perhaps even once by flickering flame. The cloud lingered for a moment over his heart, eliciting a bone-deep shudder. It shortly drifted down his other arm, and left him to join another partner. Daniil followed it with his eyes, pulse thundering in his ears.
Life turned him around and stole his gaze. Reached across to take his chin so he could press yet another soft kiss to his dust-dry lips before the unjudging eyes of the Brides, and the unjealous eyes of the Plague. Clothed in the ember-warmth of the flickering bonfire—Daniil let himself be kissed.
Life brought him to a wellspring of crimson, from which drinking gave the feeling back to the twitching tips of his fingers. Made his heart beat steadier; restored his skin back to smooth and unbroken elasticity. Viridian eyes crinkled at the corners as Life beamed with pride. He brushed back Daniil’s hair and sealed a kiss between his eyebrows.
When Daniil closed his eyes, he could see a beating heart pierced by a black-iron stinger. Could see the grasping fingers of twyre that bloomed from the site of anguish, and twisted round the spike.
The heart of the earth… the heart of Life.
“I love you,” Life whispered once more.
“I am yours,” Daniil repeated.
Under the light of the Polyhedron, and under a black sky etched with golden constellations that he could not recognize—Daniil Dankovsky laid down with Life.
The very air was thick with the spice and song of joyous twyre mingling with blooming tobacco as he laid back in the grass. Life chased him with an amorous and open mouth, dragging his lips down along the line of his bare neck. His fingers didn’t tremble, nor did they hesitate.
“For all the time, and every mile that passed between us, my body has never forgotten yours,” Life promised him, linking their fingers together and squeezing. He held their joined hands upwards—into the dream-violet light of the spectral tower that hung above them, and traced the contour of his own arm, his own fingers, Daniil’s fingers, and then Daniil’s forearm. The firefly glow of twyre spores floated and flickered around them, filling him with pleasant warmth with every inhalation.
“Can you see it Kheerkhen? See the unbroken Line?”
Like this, there was no place they parted. Like this, he was home.
“I see it,” Daniil promised, pulling Life’s hand closer so he could kiss the tips of his fingers. “I see it.”
Life brought their joined hands to his chest and held them there. Daniil could feel the beating of his impossible heart, feel the heat of his oh-so-human flesh and blood. Daniil could feel the very same pulse against the bare stretch of his back. The body that crouched above him was the human. The ground that bore him upwards was the living rest.
There is not a single part of you that is not loved. Not anymore.
With a heart full to bursting, Daniil pulled himself upward by their joined hands to kiss open a soft and welcoming mouth, before Life roused and kissed him back; detangling their fingers so he could press him down against the vast swath of earth beneath them and pushed so crushingly close that Daniil could to feel that hammering human heart through the mere bone, muscle, and skin that separated them all the more intensely.
Five years of voluntary celibacy had robbed him utterly of any self-control. The open-press of mouth-to-throat sent feeling rushing low, stirring him, making him stiff in mere moments. Life did not judge or joke. Life only smiled against his mouth and guided him to lay back down. There was familiarity to this act… but the memory remained shrouded within the black smoke of ambiguity.
Life slid palms up the bare stretch of his arms and bore his wrists down, where the curling and clinging stalks of blooming tobacco twined around them and held them properly in place. Life’s blunt nails scratched lightly down the sensitive undersides of his arms, making his whole body arch and shiver.
“How could I not love you?”
Life asked the question in a low and simple whisper, while dragging his nails further down and making Daniil’s nipples tighten into hard, sensitive peaks. Life emphasized the ridiculousness of the notion of being unloved by him by rocking his hard sex against the cleft of Daniil’s ass through his thin, fraying, pinstriped trousers. Daniil’s mouth fell open, and his brows squeezed together.
“...you married yourself to me long, long ago. We laid down together to consummate our union before you began your service in my name.”
“I wanted you,” Daniil remembered as Life hooked fingers in the waistband of his trousers and underthings, dragging them down his thin legs. “I wanted to be yours. But you seized me instead.”
“Let me seize you again.”
Life, in all his glory, pushed Daniil’s legs back by his knees before bowing and lowering himself to bring a wet mouth to an eager, flickering entrance. Daniil’s wrists strained and tugged against the tobacco leaves that held fast and did not allow him quarter. He shuddered and squirmed, but there would be no escaping it. Just a glance down only came with the shock of those glowing green eyes locked on his face, like there was no profanity to be found in this act.
A hot tongue dragged over his hole, again, again, again. Life remained relentless. If he paused, he paused only to drag his tongue up, and tug Daniil’s swollen balls one at a time into his mouth with tongue and teeth. He sucked at him, teased… dragged the tip of his tongue up along the prominent vein that stood out.
“Stop holding back, kheerkhen,” Life whispered against the sensitive and exposed glans. “Relax.”
An involuntary shiver made him tense, and Daniil’s flushed cockhead squeezed out a slick pearl of precome.
Life let out a low, belly-deep sound at the sight of it, before he wrapped his long fingers around Daniil’s prick, and then caught the pearl of semen with the tip of his tongue to steal it away with a hot and sudden swipe.
Why is that familiar? Why is this..?
His own mouth watered, and a full-body flush warmed him from head to toe. Life crawled up him once more, and kissed along the line of his jaw with trembling hunger barely contained. Strong palms that burned with intention kept his legs parted when Life’s naked form lined up with his own, and he could feel his virile cock lined up right against him, slick with—
“I love you,” Life whispered, glowing eyes seeking his own, comparable in brilliance even to the incredible spectral tower waiting behind his head.
This was where he was meant to be. It was always where he was meant to be.
“...I’m yours ,” Daniil answered, grateful and beautiful tears rolling down his face before Life nudged him open, and slid all the way into breach.
It didn’t hurt.
The thundering pulse of the earth vibrated beneath him, hammered above him. He could feel it ringing in the rush of blood in his hot ears as he was enveloped by and filled by living, breathing, beautiful earth. The grass surrounding them stretched up to caress and hold him, filling the air with its sweet and earthy perfume. Life bent to kiss him, and was met with Daniil’s own hungry mouth. He bit and he sucked on Life’s twyrine-flavored tongue as he was taken and fucked with all the rightness of the mating beast and none of the sin of the man—so cursed with consciousness.
All he had to be now was a writhing, enduring, flushed body. Blood, muscles, bones, all moving in harmony, all accommodating. He was the rush of feelings buzzing in his skull… he was the grass clinging to him. He was the tobacco plant wound round human wrists. He was the vibrating pulse of the earth and the very earth itself… he was the penetrator, and the penetrated. With the blur and buzz of such impossible ecstasy, he could see himself through Life’s eyes—stretched out and held down under the onslaught of another human body; face flushed with pleasure and expression uncontrolled and open.
Like this he could feel Life’s true and abundant affection. He could feel Life’s incomprehensible, endless love. Like this, he could feel the very piercing thorn of the Polyhedron rooted in his own rabbiting, human heart. Like this—he was the Polyhedron itself.
Life bowed over him, whispered in his human ear: “Now. Now you see it, ” and the crescendo broke. Everything contracted, self shifted and blurred. The furious feeling of pleasure surging from loins up and back down wracked through him as he spilled everything out the tip of his cock, out of of Life’s into himself—filling him with the seed of something impossible, the seed of something powerful and new.
This all was a newborn world of miracles he was never supposed to understand, comprehend, see. And now, Daniil understood and belonged to it wholly. All he had to do—if he so desired—was simply open his ears, and recognize his place in this great and beautiful body. Recognize the love he was wrapped in.
The live tobacco gently released his wrists, and pins and needles tormented his now movable, flexing fingers. Life kissed him one more time before withdrawing, slumping to the side, and gathering him close.
“I love you,” Daniil whispered into his lover’s ear. (The ear of the Town, of the Polyhedron, of the stars in the sky and the blood in the earth… in the ear of the man once called Artemy Burakh.)
“I’m yours,” came the reply, whispered through the wind in the rustling grass. “I’m yours.”