Loved Him to Death: Haru of Sachoné House

by K. M. Frontain

  “I can’t change what I have,” Intana said, “not until he sees me true.”

  “He won’t. Or you die. Fuck him, then. Just fuck him until he screams onto my shaft. I want his voice fucking into my bones.”

  I don’t know what I did, but both of them had to keep me down on the bed after. Just by Vaal’s words, I’d had taken my little mental death, but I’d lost Vaal’s shaft from my mouth.

  “Damn! When did he get so strong?” Intana said. Tears had come into my eyes. I couldn’t see him clearly, only a brightness that wanted to grow and grow. A pillow went over my head.

  “Fuck him while he’s still hard!” Vaal answered. “Creation! He had an orgasm without losing his seed.”

  Had I? Yes. Vaal’s grip on the base of my shaft hadn’t lessened, but some of my passion had erupted all the same.

  The embers were still hot and ready to burn to ash. “Fill my mouth!” I cried. “Fill my mouth again!”

  The pillow fell away. Vaal put me to His groin once more, and I suckled like I’d starve without Him. I drew on Him and drew, and He started shaking.

  “Are you only going to watch?” He said, words breathy again. “Wake up, damned fool! Fuck him! Don’t just let your shaft drool on the bed!”

  My legs went up again, and Intana speared me. He gave me hurt, a burn straight up my centre. No easing the way in, just hard possession. I rocked back into the mattress, for seconds almost curled into a ball, Vaal perpendicular over my head to keep His shaft in my mouth, my legs pinioned to His back.

  Intana drew back almost his entire length. A beginning of a wail started in me. Intana rammed to the root, and the wail came out a shriek onto Vaal’s staff.

  “Fuck!” Vaal whispered. “Again! Again, Intana!”

  The event repeated. Intana eased back. Vaal rose up enough to let air down my throat, and Intana drove inward, slammed me into a curl that hammered Vaal into my mouth again.

  “Aiee! He’s taken all of me down his throat. Oh!”

  “Fuck,” Intana grunted. “Don’t come yet!” He ground into me, just ground and ground without receding. I choked on Vaal’s staff, choked again.

  “Let him breathe!”

  Intana retreated, Vaal eased up, and I inhaled a desperate breath, but had they released me for time to recover, I’d have begged them to pinion me again.

  Intana’s fingers joined Vaal’s on my staff, the supernal heat of him burning through Vaal’s misleading cold.

  “Let me see that nail in his little hole,” Intana gasped. “Let me see it other than in his mind.”

  The tip slipped in, the blackness snaking down my urethra again. Another wail started. Intana lunged forward, and Vaal’s body almost cut my breath off. The wail still came out, violent, a deep noise that vibrated around Vaal’s shaft and let Him sink deeper into my throat than before. I heard Him grunt, suffered the rocking of His pelvis, the pulsing of His orgasm.

  Coldness. Down my throat and into my belly. And then heat, Intana’s potency etching its way into my centre. The little death arrived in perfect clarity. The sensations, the pain, the smothering, the pleasure.

  My seed climbed the barrier of Vaal’s intrusive nail and spurted over His and Intana’s hands. Intana loosed animal noises from his throat, and my shudders became helpless, uncoordinated spasms. Vaal’s frigid essence abruptly went molten, burned deeper and deeper into my guts, and from there permeated my body.

  Clarity went away with the loss of my remaining air, and I fell into a warm place where all sensations muted into a peaceful softness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “No, we are not doing him again, together, right now!” I heard Vaal hiss. “We almost killed him, you damned fool boy!”

  “You almost killed him, you mean, choking him like that, and almost doesn’t count. Why are you being difficult about this? You don’t need him. You have me.”

  “Get away from me!”

  “He’d thank you for letting us kill him together! He’d thank you! You’ve seen how his mind works!”

  A sound of flesh hitting flesh. A yelp. Vaal snarling.

  “His confusion will fade. We’ve only unsettled him. He’ll learn to swim in the waves we create. Now get away from me!”

  “You can’t make me leave. I’m tied to him, tied because he still owns my seal. You leave!”

  A crash. Violent explosion of breath leaving a body. Vaal cursing and then his presence fading. Silence.

  I dared open my eyes. I didn’t at first spy Intana, but eventually found him against a wall, cracks in the plaster everywhere. It seemed Vaal was no easier on property than Omos’s abandoned child. Yrrylos would thank me to leave her establishment, and quickly.

  “Intana?” I called. My voice broke. I swallowed, and felt tender far down my throat.

  Damn, I was such an idiot. It had felt good at the time.

  Intana’s irate expression transformed into a look of concern. He came toward me, bits of plaster falling from his flank.

  When I spoke next, I did so in a whisper that carried clearly. “Go again to the mountains of Verdant, and dig a series of tunnels at their base, of perfect and safe construction for mortals to traverse the entire length of the island.”

  His countenance went long with shock. “Haru! No—!”

  “Go!”

  He went. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t see him for several days, perhaps even a few weeks. If I was lucky, more than a month.

  Damn him.

  Vaal coalesced from out of a dark space behind a potted plant and came toward me. “You knew, deep in your soul, his heart was not touched. All he thinks of is his own need.”

  Yes, I had known, but the confirmation hurt nevertheless. Most likely I had imagined the few fleeting sensations of warmth I’d sensed from Intana. Hope can lie.

  “Would he have gone to you, or his father?”

  “We may never know,” Vaal answered. He slipped into the bed with me, pulled me against the expanse of his chest, and he was warm. There was no cold in him, or at least none that I felt.

  “It’s you,” he murmured. “You’ve swallowed a bit of me, and now are immune to the chill of the blackest depths, the place out of which I first manifested.”

  “I swallowed a bit of Intana, too,” I whispered.

  “He doesn’t want you with him. You’ll feel the bite of his power until you make him think otherwise.”

  It seemed so very unlikely.

  I snuggled closer into Vaal. Warm. So warm. A shark that felt like a man.

  Illusions. All illusions. The shark still existed, surrounding me, surrounding this entire building and the houses beyond. He just wasn’t hungry at the moment.

  “I wanted to comb his hair,” I said, turning my mind back to Intana. Despite his lies, his deceitful conduct, I found him easier to consider than the god lying next to me. I could not think of Vaal, even cuddled next to him, without beginning to suffer this ‘confusion’ he had mentioned, this disorientation of torment and need, of black desires that led to self-destruction.

  “He’ll need the service when he comes back,” Vaal said, meaning the combing of Intana’s silver hair. “He’ll be covered in rock dust. You’ve given him a task that would have been difficult even had he Celestial Dome to sustain him.”

  “Oh.”

  What had I done? I thought of summoning him back.

  “Don’t,” Vaal murmured. “He has more to do with your confusion than you think. The boy has ever been erratic, and you are attached to him through his seal. You were never so enamoured of destructive thoughts before you claimed him as slave.”

  Was it so? And yet I embraced a god who embodied destruction.

  “Have I destroyed all the life in the sea, beautiful Haru?”

  “No.”

  “Stop thinking false things about me.”

  “Vaal, you eat men. You eat them because it pleases you.” Lying there, daring him to justify his actions, I grasped the truth that I had lost the diffidence I had
shown in his presence earlier. He was Vaal. He was a god, but he was no longer the divine ‘He’ of only minutes earlier. He had become Vaal, my lover.

  Creation. The twists my life had taken.

  “There’s a charge of power when a man dies,” Vaal replied, “and I find the taste in my mouth captivating.” His nails scraped my back lightly. I shivered. “And you liked it when the aftershocks of that power gripped your shaft and kneaded it.”

  Ah, damn him. To slay me with my own perversity. “You should not be the one to advise me on the management of confusion,” I said.

  He laughed. “Ah, Haru. There you are again. Swimming with sharks and daring them to bite.” He squirmed down to look me in the eyes, my brown to his lustrous black, and I no longer feared the depths hidden beneath his inhuman stare. “It’s because pilot fish understand how to please predators,” he whispered.

  “Then have you a pilot fish to teach me?”

  “You don’t need a teacher.” He gave me a soft kiss. His hands worked along my back. His lips travelled down to my neck, and I felt his teeth. The pain was fleeting, the relief to my injured throat immediate, the sensation of his tongue warm on my skin. Exquisite.

  “You have the most delicious blood,” Vaal whispered.

  This provoked me to think. I had swallowed a bit of him, but hadn’t tasted anything.

  Cheated. Most definitely cheated. I wriggled out of his grasp and threw the silk sheets off.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Looking for nuances of flavour,” I answered and lowered my head to his groin. He laughed, then pulled me straighter to taste what I had to offer at the same time.

  Vaal’s pilot fish. Perhaps. But I wasn’t interested in picking his teeth clean. We drew on each other, a pair of tides pulling at either end of the ocean, fighting to bring the sea into our mouths. I managed to make Vaal spill before I did.

  Ah, Creation! He tasted good. Indescribable, a god’s seed in my mouth. I knew this would be as addictive as my experience with Intana’s.

  “Aiie! Ease up, Haru! You’ve taken all I have to give for now!”

  To think a mere mortal could so thoroughly thrash a god.

  “Thrash?” He grabbed me about the middle and managed to jerk me loose, but only because I’d begun to laugh. “I’ll show you thrash!”

  I was still laughing when he hauled me into position, kneeling with my buttocks facing him, but I didn’t laugh for long. He began with his tongue, then his fingers, and then more of them. A thrashing would have been easier to endure. I felt I would break in half.

  “Oh, Lord! Don’t put more!”

  “Yes, more. My seed and Intana’s, still in there to keep you moist. You can take more.”

  And he made me take more, licked at the sides of my hole, healed the hurt with his power, forced until he’d encased his entire fist in my body. But I didn’t spill until he’d yanked my shaft backward between my legs, put his mouth over the head and sucked it hard enough to wrench a wail from my throat. His fist turned in my body while I throbbed into his mouth, and I could only utter inhuman noises in the sheets over the mattress.

  It was about surrendering all of me. It was. I was surprised, exhausted on the bed, to discover it had been to Vaal I had done so, the god that had tormented me since my last day of childhood.

  “Creation, how I love you,” I whispered.

  “You know, I think there is room in there for both Intana and me at once.”

  The pernicious bastard. I would murder him the next time I sucked him dry.

  Naturally, he perceived this belligerent thought and gave me a playful bite on the bottom for thinking it. “Do you know how beautiful you look to me, in this position?”

  Ah, I would definitely murder him.

  He laughed at me. “Be ready. I’m pulling my hand out.”

  “Don’t!” Apprehension stiffened my body. I was certain my insides would collapse out of me were he to remove his fist. He’d leave a void into which my innards would crumple into a mangled looseness.

  “Haru, as much as I love seeing you this way, my hand has to come out some time.”

  “You’re a god! You have eternity to leave your hand wherever you want!”

  “Haru,” he said with a cajoling tone, “there is nothing to fear. Relax.”

  “I was relaxed before! And you told me to be ready!”

  “My mistake. Relax!”

  I couldn’t, for I had begun to laugh nervously. “Don’t! No, don’t!” This in between panicked sniggers.

  Vaal loosed an impatient huffing noise and pulled his hand free.

  “May all the ants in the world eat you alive and shit you into a pit of lye!” I shrieked.

  “Haru!” he complained. He shoved me onto my side.

  “Oh, damn,” I breathed and just lay there, weak and dizzy.

  “Your insides are still inside,” Vaal notified me.

  Then why did I feel so hollow?

  “Ah, Haru!” He lifted up, and I thought he’d abandoned me, but he came back with water and towels for washing and began to clean me up. I was too drained to do anything but let him. “You came beautifully,” he said to me.

  “Will you let me do that to you someday?” I asked, feeling perhaps too sleepy. I reconsidered the question during the following protracted silence, but once I had, I plunged onward. “Will you?”

  He rose up with the washing bowl and wet towels, and walked back to the washstand. I opened my eyes and rolled to watch him, in particular resting my gaze on his muscular backside. Why he should think I would always be the passive one in this relationship, I had no idea.

  But then, I’d conveniently rendered him from All-consuming Vaal, to Vaal, the Scrumptious. He had a delicious bottom. I wanted inside it.

  His silence continued and he didn’t return to the bed, but went out onto the balcony to look at the island he had claimed. Vaal, the Conquerer. With the magnificent bottom.

  So. If I could not have him while he pretended humanity, perhaps the shark form? If I had to swim up his anus to get into him, I would.

  “It’s a cloaca, you indecent turd of a mortal!” he shouted inward. “In a shark, there is only a cloaca!”

  Then up his cloaca I would go.

  I knew he wasn’t too angry when I heard him laughing despite my insolence. Smiling, I shut my eyes, ready to seize a much needed rest. It was so exhausting to be lover to a god.

  “Gods,” he whispered in my ear.

  “Gods,” I murmured an agreement and smiled again to feel his arms around me once more.

  ***

  When I awakened that evening, Vaal had absented himself. This did not concern me, but I felt a sense of desperation from another source. Intana.

  What had I done? The task I’d given him had been meant to keep him out from underfoot for displeasing me, but without the power he’d had before, had I doomed him instead?

  Crushed beneath a mountain.

  I surged from the bed, made broken marble crackle beneath my feet, and stumbled over to the dresser where Intana’s seal rested. But when I arrived, I hesitated.

  Desperation? Or frustration? The sensation vacillated.

  Vaal had said not to call Intana back, but what would it hurt to know his condition? A progress report. Just a progress report.

  I set my fingertips on the silver metal. “Come to me,” I whispered.

  He came, first a silver breeze of wonder and light onto the balcony, and then a cloud of dust and sweat stench. Oh, but he had worked!

  “Oh, hell! Intana! The smell of you!” Had he gone through sulphur?

  “Yes, I went through sulphur!” he shouted. “And minerals I cannot name!”

  Well, he seemed fine to me. I opened my mouth to send him back.

  “No! Please! No, please! Don’t!” He reached for me, landed on his knees and set his forehead on my thigh. “Don’t send me back! Please, Haru! I’ll be good! I’ll be good!”

  Tears on my skin, the grit
of a mountain gripping me with his fingers. His hair was a glorious ruin, bits of silver poking out from sweaty strands of dust-laden hanks.

  “You wanted Vaal to murder me,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean it! I was goading him! Please, Haru! I was only goading him because he dared to make me share you.”

  “And for this, the solution was that I should die?”

  He sobbed. It was all so very dramatic. I wondered, suddenly, how my people’s ambassador had actually died.

  “I’m not acting! I’m not! Please, Haru!” Intana looked up at me, and the tears still dripped; the expression still spoke remorse. Desperation can be so very convincing.

  “You must feel horrid,” I said. “Come with me.”

  I pulled him up and led him from the apartment into a dim corridor. My new Halva waited just outside the door. He lurched upright from where he’d been crouched next to the wall, a small, shaded lantern staying at his feet.

  “Lord! Yrrylos says she wants to take off your head! She’s heard the noise of breakage in there. I told Little Brother what she threatened and came back to stand guard by your door, but your god came out an hour ago and only laughed about it when I reported to him.”

  I laughed as well. “Money for repairs and a bit more for the inconvenience will do for Yrrylos. Go into my sea chest. See how much I have and haggle a price accordingly. Try not to let her cheat us.”

  “No, Lord!” Grinning, he ran into the apartment, but came back out at once to fetch his lantern, then thought better of himself and handed the lantern to me. I smiled, watching his flustered motions.

  He had spoken to Little Brother? Interesting. Had he sent Vaal up to the palace this afternoon as well? Perhaps he hadn’t simply hidden when the imperial soldiers had arrived.

  “How are the members of my new crew, Halva?” I asked.

  “They’re sleeping on mats in Flower Court,” he said. “Yrrylos cannot get customers. Everyone knows your god comes and goes here. They’re all terrified he’ll fill the house to the roof with water and sharks, like he did to Imperial Court.”