Chapter Text
Despite what you are told to soothe your anxieties on the journey to Pangea Castle, there is to be no "wedding." You are delivered to the King of the World dressed in the finest clothing you will ever wear, and while there is a claiming ceremony in which you are branded as his property, no vows of love or commitment are exchanged. The claim is one-way. It binds you to the Nerona Imu, not the other way around.
You are not the first to be bound to him. Many have come before you. You don’t know their names. But knowledge of them persists, still, in hushed whispers and swirling rumors, and the maids who dress you have tears in their eyes as you are escorted to the palace of the King of the World, because none who came before you returned.
They say he kills his Offerings come morning.
You are not the first Offering to be bound to him.
You will not be the first, nor the last, to die.
Oppressive quiet follows the claiming ceremony. Your skin still smarts where they marked you with his brand. You trail his silhouette through halls adorned with gold and into a room filled with flowers resplendent, a sumptuous indoor garden with arched windows and butterflies flitting on perfumed air. There you kneel piously on the soft grass while sunset colors crowd the panes. The sun itself longs to touch Imu’s robes and limn his form with light, just to taste a fraction of his majesty.
You, meanwhile, don’t dare look at him. You just kneel. Waiting. Waiting to be acknowledged, commanded...or, perhaps, condemned.
They say he kills his Offerings come morning.
The King of the World doesn’t look at you, either. He probably did so during the ceremony. You wouldn’t know; you kept your gaze on the floor, the vague impression of piercing eyes and curving lips all you dared glean from furtive glances and stolen peeks at the King. You keep your eyes on the grass now, though you see through your lashes the way Imu extends a hand to tempt a butterfly onto his fingertip. These creatures, too, crave the touch of an anointed being.
Held aloft on a fingertip, the captivated creature’s wings flap on silent winds. You swear you can hear them rustle in the hush. They keep time with your frantic heartbeat, pulse throbbing in your chest as Imu’s robe hisses across the grass.
“Amuse me.”
He speaks like a falling blade, all sharp finality and blunt precision forged on the anvil of divine right. He has settled onto a seat (a throne, perhaps, though you don’t quite dare look up to see for certain) and reclined there, legs spread, to look at you. His eyes sting as fiercely as the brand on your skin. You know what he sees: someone finely dressed and afraid, branded and bound, knees pressing into soft soil until their clothes grow damp. There is an expectant quality to his silence. He punctuates it by drumming fingertips upon his thigh. A staccato reminder of what’s expected of you — of what’s required in the scant few hours he’ll grant you before dawn condemns you to death.
They say he kills his Offerings come morning.
But you don’t crawl to him on hands and knees as the maids suggested, pleaded, you should. You do not bare yourself to him, or offer pleasure, or plead for your life. You came prepared with a different tactic. Instead, slowly, you work your tongue free from fear and swallow, and you find your voice amid the garden’s oppressive quite.
You say: “May I tell you a story?”
It’s a gamble, a bet, and the prize on the line is your life. But you are damned either way, and thus you choose to roll the dice. Perhaps you are the first to try, because when Imu’s head tilts beneath the shadow of his robe, you swear the motion seems…curious. Like he bears witness to some amusing novelty and not a person’s final, desperate plea for mercy.
He says nothing for a time. You try not to squirm under his stare. You try not to think about your clothes, because they are getting dirty as you kneel, and they are the finest you have ever worn, and they are to be your funerary shroud because he kills his Offerings come morning —
Imu shifts upon his throne.
“Go on,” he demands of you.
You begin to speak.
The sun meets the horizon as you recount a tale you know by heart. A long one. The story is famous where you come from. Everyone knows it. You hope Imu does not. You hope the King of the World in his palace in the clouds has not deigned to stoop so low as to hear tall tales from the distant, humble place you call home. He is a god. Stories are for mortals. And when he makes no move to interrupt your yarn, a flare of hope inside your chest ignites.
The Room of Flowers falls into darkness as the sun disappears below the horizon line, but your words illuminate sights unseen, weaving narrative from nothing but the butterfly wing-faint flutter of impossible hope igniting in your heart. Your lips dry. Your throat cracks. Your tongue grows impossibly heavy. But you continue even when you can no longer see the butterflies or flowers and only Imu’s crimson eyes shine in the dark. You don’t dare stop. You do not dare implore him for water or a moment to rest your voice, because to continue is to live, and to stop is to die.
They say he kills his Offerings come morning.
Amuse me, Imu had said.
You aren’t sure what will amuse him more: the story you tell, or the way your hands shake as you tell it.
It doesn’t matter either way. You just keep talking.
Even when your voice breaks, you keep talking.
Even when your kneel-numb legs send you slumping sideways, you keep talking.
Even when words rasp in a throat gone dry and sleep claws at your stinging eyes and the brand on your skin sings with vicious pain, you keep talking, talking, talking —
You’re still talking by the time the sun peeks through the windows on the other side of the Room of Flowers. Imu, meanwhile, hasn’t said a word. You talked through the night and he listened all the while in dread-tinged silence. He’s silent now, too, as butterflies wake under the fingers of dawn and stir against night-dark leaves. He doesn’t move as your hoarse voice nears the climax of your tale — the moment you’ve been building toward for hours and hours of desperate articulation. But the King of the World appears unmoved. Unbothered. Not on the edge of his seat, but rather slumped in it, sinking low upon the cushions as though at rest.
Has he heard a single word?
Has the King of the World fallen asleep?
When he rouses from his slumber, will your time at last be up?
Your eyes burn almost as terribly as your throat when you clear it, but Imu does not stir.
Slowly, carefully, you raise your eyes to him — only to find him watching you.
Red eyes. Full lips. Horns curving skyward in elegant sweeps of bone. Skin like dusk, gleaming and smooth. He watches you deliberately, silently, expressionlessly. And you are so transfixed by those crimson eyes that you cease to speak for the first time in hours, shocked to silence by the beauty of the tyrant who holds your life in his ordained palms.
Imu asks in his voice of silken violence: “Why didst thou stop?”
He sounds curious. Perhaps amused? You can’t quite parse his tone. But the words break the spell he holds on you, and your eyes drop to the grass again. They're safer there, you think. And you think quite hard about what to say next, because your answer —
They say he kills his Offerings come morning.
“It is late,” you eventually confess, because you must say something and you do not think it wise to keep the King of the World waiting long. “It is late — or rather, it is early.”
The rising sun paints the Room of Flowers in the colors of gilded slaughter. Fingers tap his thigh again, impatient.
“But the story has yet to end,” Imu says.
“No. But...” You swallow thickly. “I am tired.”
It’s a plea for mercy. A request, most humble, for a reprieve. Now is the best time for one, should Imu deign to grant it. The gods of storytelling have blessed you, for your pause came at the perfect moment in the narrative, events poised just on the cusp of the story’s thrilling climax. If you are to stop, now is the moment that will keep the king wanting more. It is the moment that will spare you a day you never thought you’d see, and grant you a sun whose rise you did not expect to witness.
The sun is rising even now, and you are still alive.
Not that that means anything. If Imu commands it of you, you will have to keep speaking. You will have to finish your story. You will have to end your tale, and thus, your life. You talked through the night and exhaustion pulls at you with every breath, but he is the King of the World. He is a god, and you are in his house. What a god wants, a god gets, no matter which deity of story blessed you with their favor when his back was turned.
And so you bow your head, and you wait for Imu’s whim.
“Raise thine eyes to Mu.”
It is the last thing you expect him to say — but you obey. You are helpless to do anything but obey. You look at him, and he looks at you, because he willed it. He stares at you. Watches you. Picks you apart in ways you do not understand, because he is unto a god, and it is not your place to understand gods who walk among men. Your entire body prickles when his head tips to the side, just so. You knew what he saw when he looked at you during the ceremony, but now…
Now, you are not so sure.
But whatever he sees is, somehow, enough.
“Tomorrow night, then,” he tells you.
In three simple words, he has granted you your life...at least for one more sunrise.
You have only just realized that he has spared you when he rises from his throne. You sag, hands clammy in the green grass, butterflies in your hair. Finally you remember to breathe as his shadow falls across your face.
Imu says: “Do not disappoint Mu, Offering.”
You nod.
It is a promise, and it is all you can do.
But this, too, is enough for the King of the World. As the whisper of his cloak crosses the Room of Flowers, you repeat the promise you made to Imu — but you do not swear that vow to him. No, instead you vow to yourself that you will not disappoint him. You vow to yourself that you will be enough. You vow to you, and you alone, that you will live to see another sunrise.
You are not the first Offering to be bound to Imu.
But, you think as the butterflies halo your bowing head, you might just be the last.
Because against all odds, he had not killed his Offering come morning.
