by S. Gates
That thought no longer unnerves you.
A few moments slip by with neither of you moving beyond the beating of your heart and your breathing. Ori doesn't even blink, he simply stares at you with his wide black eyes. You realize that, if anything is to happen, it will only be because you make the first move. So, finally, with Amanda's tenuous heartbeat mapped by the machines, ticking away, you do it.
You reach out with the hand not holding the rings, grab Ori's jaw, and apply a bit of pressure near the joint to force it open. He makes no move to resist, doesn't even try to clench his teeth against your intrusion, but his eyes glitter with the ghost of some alien emotion. You put the rings in his mouth, setting them on the center of his tongue.
In pulling your hand away, you catch the tip of your index finger on one of his pointed teeth, slicing it open so neatly that you only feel it after you've bled freely into his mouth. Before you can even register the pain or try to jerk away, both of Ori's hands grip your wrist, and his lips close around your finger. You feel his tongue move against your skin, hot and wet and rough, and the corners of his mouth quirk up.
The air between you crackles with something almost like static electricity. All of the hair on your body stands on end, your skin prickling up into gooseflesh. Everything seems to grow sharper, more defined, and time seems to stretch out around the both of you. The ambient noises (Amanda's breathing, the electronic monitors, chatter in the hallway) slow into nothingness and everything becomes weighty. When you close your eyes to blink, you find you can't open them again. You feel a wave of some intangible something wash over you, through you, and Ori's voice slips into your mind, saying, I accept what is freely given.
There's a shift in your perception as the words tumble around your brain, and it is not subtle. The world is ripped away around you with a great sundering feeling that shakes you all the way down to your bones. Ori pulls your finger from his mouth, runs his tongue over your palm, grazes the flesh with his teeth. You shiver, but don't shy away. His grip on your wrist changes, fingers replaced by his tongue's hot rasp; an inchoate feeling curls in the pit of your stomach like a hissing viper in response, too primal for you to even identify and name.
Open your eyes, Douglas, he says. The sentiment thrums through you as though someone plucked a low E string that was buried in your ribcage. The order would be impossible to resist, even if you'd wanted to (you don't; not anymore).
When your eyes flutter open, your mind is torn by the bizarre sensations of both feeling as if you can see forever and fearing that you have been struck blind. Everything around you is darker than pitch, darker than night, more than just the mere absence of light. The darkness is a thing unto itself that writhes around you with sick twisting undulations that, were you not currently anchored by Ori's presence, would surely make you violently ill.
Ori, for his part, looks strange against the blackness. Previously, he'd seemed mostly normal both in form and coloration, but now he looks ethereal, translucent, and stripped of many trappings of humanity. If you look carefully, you think you can see some of his bones through his skin, like a fish from the darkest depths of the ocean. He's nuzzling your wrist with the most satisfied expression upon his face. For the first time, you notice that he has two sets of eyelids: a humanoid set and a mostly-transparent membrane, which he has closed over his eyes. You can't call them black or empty anymore, surrounded as you are by primal tenebrous forces. Instead, you appreciate now how they resemble the space between stars on a clear night.
Behind Ori, stretching taller and wider than your brain can comfortably comprehend, lays this great massive thing. The first impression your mind receives of it is of a sprawling cephalopod with a bulbous head that holds a seemingly infinite number of unblinking eyes just like Ori's. Its tentacles number far more than that of any octopus or cuttlefish you've ever seen, and they swat lazily at the unquiet darkness as if batting away vaguely troublesome insects. Some of them brush near you and some of them wind around Ori's slender arms and legs. They, unlike Ori, are not translucent. If impossible beings can be said to have skin, the skin of this creature is supple, rubbery, and white like bones scoured to within an inch of their lives or cave-dwelling creatures that have never seen the sun.
Ori drifts closer to you, releases your wrist, wraps his arms around your neck. He nuzzles your cheek. Dearest Douglas, he says, I never dreamed I would see this moment. The words flow through you like something warm and liquid that pools behind your eyes, in your fingertips, at the base of your spine, in your toes. It's... pleasant. A part of you feels as if it should be disconcertingly so, but you cannot bring yourself to care. Ori's body is cool to the touch pressed up against you, his lips surprisingly soft as he nips at your neck. He is so beautiful and pliant and willing that you cannot help but appreciate the form he chose for you.
You should be frightened, you realize, but you aren't. All you can do is move your hands up so that one is buried in the hair at the nape of his neck and the other traces the sharply bony bumps of his vertebrae. His teeth like needles puncture the skin where your neck meets your shoulder, but instead of pain, you feel only a pleasurable pressure that elicits an appreciative hum in the back of your throat.
Without removing his lips from your skin, Ori says, It is time. And you know he's right. In some ways, you feel as if you've always known, as if you were groomed for this specific point in time since you were born. Which you suppose is true; Ori said as much, the second time you spoke to him.
You nod. "Yeah. Let's get this done. We've got things to be and places to do."
Ori's laughter trickles through you, sending a thrill of pleasure up your spine. You're absolutely correct, cherished one, he says. Come. Join Us.
The great beast had slipped your attention as soon as Ori had pulled himself close to you, but it makes its presence known now. The tentacles that had wrapped themselves around Ori's appendages twitch and squirm against your skin, their texture queerly velvety where they touch your flesh. You think that an octopus wouldn't feel like this, followed immediately by the delirious thought that this is most certainly not an octopus.
One of the tentacles winds around your left bicep; another tangles in the fingers splayed across Ori's back; still another starts near your ankle, climbs your leg, brushes your thigh. You try to squirm away, not because you are particularly afraid or because the sensation is unpleasant, but out of some feeling that it's what you should be doing.
It doesn't matter, though. Ori holds you fast, laughing all the while. Relax, he says. He clenches his jaw, digs his needle-teeth deeper into your flesh, and you shudder against him because–against all reason–it feels so good and right. Without any conscious thought on your part, your muscles go slack and you slump against him like a rag doll.
More of the great beast's limbs wrap around you and hold you up. Some of them curl around Ori as well, holding the both of you together with their sinewy strength. One of them strokes your cheek as lazily as it had been swatting at the elemental darkness, the barest tip of it flicking across your lips. As unsettling and surreal as you feel like the situation should be, you can't help but smile and laugh just a little, too. "God," you say, "I've seen enough hentai to know where this is going."
Ori simply hums as he pulls away, licks the wounds he left in your shoulder, leans down, latches onto the flesh at the top of your breast. I can safely say that I don't know what you're talking about, he replies. One of his hands tangles in your hair and pulls your head back so that your back arches and he has better leverage to take more of your breast between his teeth. You and I see this experience very differently. This is not something that takes place in a literal sense, and how we perceive each others' actions depends on how our minds interpret this joining. There's no way for me to see what you see, but it seems to me as if I am tearing the flesh from your bones and devouring you as you feed your entrails to me.
That makes you laugh again. "Jesus, you might as well be eating me the way I see it,
I'm up to three shark-bites already." One of the tentacles around your thigh worms its way toward your crotch. It's only now that it truly hits you that you are standing (floating?) naked in the dark, your bare skin pressed to Ori's, the strange texture of the beast's tendrils sliding against you. Yes, you have in fact seen enough hentai to know what's coming next.
The tentacle lying against your thigh slips between your labia majora. It rubs lightly at your clitoris–eliciting a tiny shudder–before it pushes into you.
It's unlike anything you've experienced before, not as firm as any toys you've used and far more lively. There is a moment in which you almost flinch away, but the desire to do so crumbles in the wake of a jolt of pleasure. Another tentacle joins it, this one more rigid and less flexible. You can't help but gasp.
The beast seems to take that as an invitation. You and Ori are suddenly swarmed with tendrils: large and small, thin and thick, textured and smooth, slick and dry. They slide over you both, leaving barely any of your skin untouched. They tease at your nipples, skate down your spine, prod gently at your anus. Some with suckers attach to the sensitive skin of your neck and work there like a particularly zealous lover.
Name Us. Ori's imploring words echo through your being as he presses his fingers into you alongside the tentacles already writhing there. Name Us, Douglas, and your will shall be done. You shiver against him, squirming with the impossible thrill of it. The beast rumbles, and Ori exhorts you again: Name Us, name Us.
It's all too much. One moment, you are suspended in the darkness being held up by the great beast and Ori, the next your perception goes white with pleasure. It's as if your entire being is suffused with a crackling electricity that can't be contained.
In a rush, everything you lost comes back to you. You recall with clarity that your parents were married on the fifth of February, while the date you woke up in the hospital was the thirteenth of March. The German word for revenge is Rache. The day before you woke up in the hospital, you were unconscious, but before that you had been working a little later than you'd planned; you were tired, sure, but that doesn't matter, his light was red and you had right of way.
But, most importantly, you remember your first date with Amanda. It wrenches at your heart because you loved her so, even then. You still do. But that doesn't matter. She'd shyly asked you for your number while you were waiting for Simon to get off work. Three days later, she'd called to ask if you wanted to hang out. A few months later, you went on your first official date: a trip to the natural history museum with a bottle of rum smuggled in under your winter coat. It was stupid, it was immature, but you can only remember looking into her eyes and thinking that she was the loveliest person on the planet that day.
You latch onto that feeling. Whether Amanda is capable of reciprocating or not, hers is a life worth saving. Simon's is a life worth saving. With the aftershocks of the orgasm shaking you to your bones, you know what to do. Without your conscious input, your mouth forms the words:
"I name you. You are Ori, Heir of the Sharks, Bloodbather, Reaper of Sorrows. You're a shard of Fl'thuum, Ruler of the Lightless Realms, They of Many Arms, Soulkeeper, Devourer of the Morning, They of Sightless Eyes."
Ori curls his lips against your skin in what you're certain is meant to be a smile. Very good, Douglas. And now we name you: Bastard Chosen of God, Dearest to Our Hearts, Vessel of Our Mercy. Ours.
The final pronouncement rings through you, reverberates in every atom of your being, tears it all apart. If it weren't for the fact that you can feel, you'd think that you've been blasted asunder. Maybe you have. Maybe you are too small. Maybe you're a cracked vessel and this moment will see you completely obliterated from the universe. All that would be left are little motes of dust to spin off into the cosmos, cold, empty, and alone. To call it pain is like calling a glacier an ice cube: technically accurate in only the loosest sense of the word and woefully inadequate to express the true breadth of the subject.
It feels like an eternity before you emerge from that moment, but when you do, you are not destroyed.
You think that this is what it would feel like to be a glove wrapped around a hand slightly larger than it was meant for, complete with the sensation of something beyond your control flexing inside your ribcage and abdomen. Without a doubt, you understand that these tendrils can move you if they so choose, just as the fingers will warp the material of a glove. They are quiescent now, leaving you free to do as you please even as the understanding that they will not always be silent fills you to the brim.
At your side, their hand in yours, is Ori. Where before there had been a hint of masculinity to them, now they are utterly sexless and nearly devoid of a human seeming. They are as you have named them: Heir to the Sharks. Blood pours down their face, their throat, their chest, mixes in with the blood that seeps through gills like knife wounds. They grin and it reaches their eyes filled with stars.
For a moment, you see yourself reflected in those wide, glassy scleras as clearly as if you were staring into a mirror. You've been worn clean of color and divested of any outward signs of the sex assigned to you at birth. Your eyes are reflections of those you stare into: round with shock and pricked with tiny points of light. Your piercings look like they've all been ripped out, leaving jagged edges of flesh that ooze ichor like Ori's gills. You glance down at yourself and find your skin to be translucent with a queer writhing blackness hidden just beneath the surface, speckled with additional eye-like growths through which you can see nothing. Everything is painfully elongated and thin with bones like jagged chunks of glass pressed against bleached paper.
It should horrify you.
It does not.
You're filled with so much now. You know Ori inside and out, now that you've named them. Their being mingles with yours and you can see all the ways in which they shaped you. All the ways in which they primed you to be their perfectly broken vessel. They never intended to win with you, had always intended to see how far you could be pushed before cracking and you can feel the intensely fierce pride rolling off of them in waves.
Ori tilts their head to one side. Your gut clenches in the grip of your unseen god, or an emotion queerly like it. You are sure you will learn to tell the difference, given time. "Shall we?" Their words no longer vibrate through you; they speak with their mouth, their shark teeth ruining sibilance in the process.
Yes. Let's go.
The elemental blackness is gone, replaced by the hospital room you'd been standing in not long ago. Amanda rests in the bed just as she had been before, no less wan.
You reach out, rest an impossibly thin hand upon her forehead. You can see something curl beneath your skin toward her. Something stretches inside you and you can see through Amanda as easily as you could see her before. Her spleen has ruptured, one lung has been punctured, both kidneys have failed, she's bleeding out slowly into herself.
It's instinctive, the way to fix her body. The essence of what makes you vessel to They of the Sightless Eyes flows from you and through her, knitting bone, mending flesh, leaving tiny trails of dark splendor in its wake. One moment, she lies there with her life slipping between your fingers, the next she is whole.
A stray tendril of energy brushes against her skull; there were no indications of head trauma, but something there grates against your senses all the same. It feels like a blight or a tumor. A gnarled knot of sickness lodged between neurons, blocking her thoughts. It does not take much to wrap yourself around it and yank it out.
You roll it around in your mouth. It tastes like despair and hopelessness and Amanda's toothpaste. Images flit across your mind: Amanda crying on the phone with her father; a project laying half-finished on Amanda's drafting table; dinner alone; a shouting match with her younger brother; a phone call like the one you had received; a note full of platitudes pinned up next to her bedroom door. There are other images, too, like a scene from one of the fights you had with her not long before the break, or when she called you nearly in tears j
ust yesterday (but you couldn't make time for her; even after all your claims that you still loved her, you couldn't even make time to talk to her for a meager five minutes).
Whatever this is, it has been growing for a while. Of that you are certain. Your extra senses tell you that, though it lacks true physical mass, it had likely grown so large that it pressed against every thought or feeling or sensation she experienced, blocking any goodness from her mind until it seemed reasonable to walk out in front of a bus. Most of it feels like the heavy weight of a father's hand on her shoulder, but you can find a few tiny thumbprints about the size of Ori's nudging (much like the ones you now know are all over your being).
Your ruminations on her mental condition grind to a halt when she lets out a vague murmur. Without thinking, you move your hand to cover her eyelids, which flutter beneath your fingertips like the ineffectual beating of a broken bird's wings. Shh, you tell her, don't try to wake up. It's all right.
"Doug?" Her voice is thin and cracked, but you hear it as clear as a crisp autumn day.
Yeah, you say, I'm here. Don't worry, you're gonna be fine. For a moment, you consider lying to her, telling her that everything will be fine. But that's just it. It's a lie. The world will soon burn, of this you are unwaveringly certain, and you are going to be the spark that ignites the tinder and the wind that fans the flames. Through everything, though, you know that the Devourer of the Morning will let Amanda be safe. Nothing's gonna hurt you anymore.
Silence yawns between you, an ever-widening chasm that reminds you viciously of the way you'd drifted apart. Tendrils of your god have nestled in the fissures of your heart in such a way that the pain is a distant echo of what it once was, but you still feel it. You never stopped loving her.
"What happened?" she finally asks. The fingers of one hand trace the slightly frayed edge of the blanket pulled over her. It takes every ounce of willpower to stop yourself from running the remains of your other hand over the veins in her arm.