“Fuck me!” I shouted. “Don’t stop! Fuck me! Fuck me!”
Vaal lit into me, banging until both Haru and I could do nothing but endure, crying our noises of abandonment together, lips on lips, swallowing each other’s exclamations. I pinched his left nipple again. I was harsh, feeling my son’s power there. I wanted to ram my shaft straight into Haru’s guts. Wanted to sink my teeth into him. Murder him with need.
So close. So close to detonation. But Haru reached the point of no return before me. It began as a ripple of his torso, a hard shove upward with his hips, another. It was all physical at first, and then his true power hit me. The purity, the total purity of it.
I detonated, and it was like in the sessions, an orgasm forming dual waves up to my head and down to my toes, both waves coming back to strike each other in my groin. I soared, and I wasn’t alone this time. I was with Haru, not watched by him, but with him. Vaal flew with us.
Power permeated the space around us. I felt it now: not the ether, not the lines of life that formed a web over the world, just power that crossed the span of space and time and went further. Haru had it caught in the fist of his hand.
Creation. Creation. Ah, Creation…
I couldn’t remember sinking back into myself this time. I couldn’t remember where we flew, or even if we flew anywhere. Perhaps we only soared over the ship and returned. But that fist full of power I remembered, like Haru had drilled it into my gut. I felt incredibly stronger when I recovered my senses, strong like I’d been before my stupidity with the peninsula.
One brief moment of flight with him, and I felt like a true god again.
I was on my back when I recovered. I had a blanket over me. Haru curled against my side. Vaal stretched against his other. I could just see the top of Vaal’s head. I blinked in the mute light of the lamp, wondered how long I’d been out, and raised my head to see if Vaal was awake.
He was. I’d never seen his eyes so soft; despite their unutterable blackness, soft as warm caves welcoming homeless travellers into shelter.
“And now you know,” he whispered to me.
And now I knew.
“But what was it?” I asked. “That power? What was it?”
“Didn’t you cry its name when you flew?” he said.
Oh. My head sank back onto the mattress. “Creation,” I whispered.
“Hmm,” Vaal murmured an agreement. “Through him we shall touch universes.”
I smiled. Yes. Through him. “Fuck, yes.”
Vaal laughed, and my smile became a wry grin. Perhaps I wasn’t as poetic as Vaal, but I could make a succinct point.
“You’ve always been able to make a succinct point,” he rumbled at me. He had such a deep voice in that body. Made my skin prickle, made me think wicked things.
“Taking off a peninsula being one of them,” he added.
“You call that succinct?”
“For a god, yes.”
I sniggered. So did he. We were silent for a bit, and then he spoke again. “We looked for you first,” he told me.
“Did you?” I was surprised to hear this. “Why?” I asked.
“Because Haru believed that whatever, or whoever, had taken your son could not hide Intana from you. He was right.”
“So it wasn’t an accident, finding me on that island?”
“No. No accident. We’ve been sailing into and out of ports for over a year, asking for legends of you or Intana. Actually, some of that searching was easier than we expected, because another Brellin captain sailed near this area about eight decades beforehand, asking the same questions of the people he encountered. When we showed up, some of the older folk remembered him.”
A vague unease filled my mind. “Another Brellin captain…?”
“Yes, a friend of Haru’s. He wanted to sail the world before he retired,” Vaal said. “He sent missives back to Haru regularly, but the missives stopped arriving and he never returned home. After sending out a few ships to search for him, and querying along diplomatic channels, we came to the conclusion his ship sank in a storm. We had no idea he’d been asking about you or Intana. He never mentioned it in his letters.”
“Odd,” I said faintly, still feeling that vague unease. Something bothered me about this anecdote, but I couldn’t think what. Live as long as I do and memory can become a little muzzy at times.
“On our search, we followed Kima’s route,” Vaal continued.
My skin prickled upon hearing the name. I became that much more disquieted, though I could not have related why. Vaal didn’t seem to notice.
“People remembered him and his questions” he said. “One obscure clue led us to seek a black-haired, blue eyed peddler who traded wares down the coast of a certain portion of the world.”
Which I had destroyed. Fine. I’m stupid. I’d liked that peninsula. If it weren’t for that one village with those greedy villagers in it, that portion of the world would still exist.
“It’s interesting how close you’ve been to Intana all this time. He was most likely looking for you before he was taken.”
Perhaps he had been, and what would I have done had he found me? Murder came to mind, because Intana had perhaps only been seeking me for revenge.
“So you just sailed around looking for clues about me,” I said, veering away from thoughts of assassination, because now that I was stronger, I could feel the warning prick of Vaal’s irritation.
“Well, not to start. First I went to visit Blessed Land, hoping she knew your whereabouts.”
I blinked at the ceiling. Vaal had visited Blessed Land? “What happened? What did she say?”
“Not much until after we fucked.”
Shit. Fucking shit.
Vaal laughed at my annoyance. “What? You know what a slut she is. Come to think of it, you’re as much of a slut. You sound just like her when you beg for it to get harder and faster.”
I growled. Not the human part of me, the dragon part. The noise rumbled through the ship. Between us, Haru issued a discontented sleepy sound and rolled into Vaal. I stared at his brown back, then slowly shifted closer to be next to his warmth again. I didn’t growl further.
I looked at Vaal over Haru’s head. “And after you and Blessed Land fucked?”
“She said she didn’t know or care where you were, and we fucked again,” he answered.
Fucking shit!
I glowered at him, and he smiled, but he wasn’t really amused at my expense. His expression was too cynical. He explained why without me prompting.
“She puts a spell on her lovers,” he said, smile collapsing. “It’s not that she’s not an incredible fuck. She is. But with the spell? It’s an unfair advantage.”
“A spell? She enchanted you?” I stared at him, wanted to laugh, just barely refrained. Vaal’s gaze narrowed to dangerous slivers.
“She enchanted you as well, idiot. Think! As if you would stay with a woman, chained to her littlest finger, when she mocked you with lover after lover. You ate the lovers, but not her. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Oh.” A spell. Well, fuck. “So, if you were spelled…” How had he broken free? Was he really that much less manipulable than me?
“Haru walked into her court, took me by the wrist and drew me from off her bed,” Vaal admitted. His expression was mildly discomfited, and so I knew he was very discomfited indeed. “I walked away like a stunned bull that had just been bled for sacrifice,” he ended.
I could only stare at him, stare and think that Blessed Land had seen Haru.
“We keep her the fuck away from him,” Vaal said.
“Damn fucking right,” I agreed. “Shit. How did he manage to escape with you? There’s no way she would have just let him go.” She would have taken one look at Haru and dumped Vaal off the bed to get at him.
Vaal smiled, a chagrined grimace really. “She did just let us go. I think he stunned her, just…stunned her with his assurance. He didn’t even say a word. But once we were outside her c
ourt, he bashed me hard across the face and chased me to the lake through which we’d entered her realm.”
I laughed after all, and I think he deserved it, for all those millennia he had been furious with me for trailing after Blessed Land’s creamy ass. Now he knew.
“Now I know,” he agreed and chuckled as well. “Damn that was stupid, but I had to know where you were. How unfair is a spell to make you want to crawl over and kiss cunny when you’re already willing?”
“I never needed a spell before,” I agreed. “She’s one malicious bitch.”
“You’re both idiots,” Haru grumbled from between us. “Aside from the mother of the Brellin race, you and Vaal have eaten every lover other than me, Blessed Land, or each other, so shut up with your false excuses to defend your injured pride and your long ages of gross stupidity.”
Vaal and I gaped at each other, all our arrogant veils ripped off at once. Haru had just reduced a pair of supernal gods to the ridiculous with only a few words.
I said earlier that I was good at making a succinct point. I displayed this faculty again. “Let’s fuck him,” I said to Vaal.
“All right,” he agreed, and we lit into Haru, who laughed at both of us. But we would make him weep shortly. Yes, we would.
If we wondered that Haru might have put spells on both of us, we kept it deep and quiet in our centres. I, for one, didn’t want to be anywhere but under Haru’s spell, for as long as he was content to have me. I suspected Vaal felt the same.
Hell, I knew he felt the same. And so we made Haru weep in retaliation for his mirth and his wisdom, and we flew again, higher than before.
Ah, it was such a better spell. Where Blessed Land had pinned us to the earth, Haru let us soar wherever we willed, whether this was up to the ether where I had been born, or down into the depths from which Vaal had first manifested. He let us soar, and that was a better sort of spell than anything.
That night, that night with Haru lying between us, I dared a true sleep, and I slept better than I had done in centuries.
No. Better than I had done in millennia.
The dreams. The dreams were mute. No whispers. No heat of pressure making me squirm in my sleep. No tenuous, bubbling surface on the verge of exploding into a thousand wailing voices. I thought he’d given me the strength to at last still the unending cacophony, and perhaps he had.
But what Haru gives, Haru can also take away. I had yet to learn this. Yet to learn that voices and bubbles and an explosion of screams was the future he would bestow upon me.
And if I’d known…
If I’d known, I’d still have swum in his wake and let him throw off the net that kept my myriad bubbles locked in. How I adored him, enough to suffer anything.
But had I known, I would still have quailed like a coward before swimming in to accept my fate.
Chapter Ten
Power comes to a god by few means, the fastest the consumption of mortals with self-awareness akin to our own, though no one who isn’t a god can truly understand the awareness that comes with divinity. Suffice it to say that mortality at least comprehends the potential of divinity, and this makes humanity a delicacy of much worth.
Vaal was particularly inclined toward accruing power through consumption, perhaps because of his shark nature. I don’t know. Earlier on, I used to think it was because he’d come into being as a god of lesser strength compared to me, and so he’d taken the easiest road to catching up.
To be honest, I liked devouring souls, and the resultant spiritual terror, as much as he did. I’m an animal. What can I say? It is in my nature to eat. And humans…humans just taste so good.
But over time, I found I liked company more than terrifying everything around me, and so let mortals approach and worship me, and found therein another means to gather power. Worship sends to a god, a bit at a time, some of the power that belongs to the life net that strings over the world. It’s a potent net, and a gentler form of sustaining one’s reserves.
This is not to say that I didn’t continue eating mortals. I demanded my sacrifices, not nearly as many as Vaal did, but I had them. Most often these were mortals of whom I had grown fond, mortals who had received some of my essence in the way of affection.
My seed, in other words. The juices of sex. Never did I let a mortal survive that had taken my seed. Most died after the first coupling.
Even Intana’s mother, a most intriguing woman whom I coupled with for a span of seven years, I’d consumed. She’d been certain, before then, that I’d truly loved her.
I had. I still ate her.
Those that Omos takes, Omos takes into his belly.
That’s an old proverb. The mortals of Verdant came to think of it as the highest honour, but Haru knew perfectly well that it was an abomination, and he was determined to put an end to the practice, at least with regards to myself and Vaal.
I pondered this as I watched him climb the rigging with his crew. A storm was almost upon us, and the men lashed down most of the sails in preparation for running with the tempest. The sea was already rough, enough that the angle of the rising bow forced us to grab for handholds. Whenever the ship came down, we plunged through spray into deep troughs, lunging like we’d crash straight through to the sea floor.
The sailing was about to get rougher. Haru, being a madman, had kept up more sails than any sane captain would employ in such weather, up until now.
A madman. Yes, he was that, to consort with such as Vaal and I. What did he really know? He hadn’t been born a divine beast. How could he understand the need to rend and destroy, to destroy something more precious than the physical shell?
Monster.
What? I blinked. Had I heard that?
Yes. Monster. Demon. Not divine, not a god, just something vile. Is that all you want to be for the rest of eternity? Something vile?
I’d definitely heard that. I glowered up at Haru, but he didn’t bother to look at me. Bastard.
Not by the standards of my people, O bastard of the universe, he answered.
“I’ll come up there and eat you!” I shouted. His laughter hit me on the face like flower petals spraying in the wind. I smiled despite my irritation.
Get out of my head!
I have given you how much energy these last few days, just by shoving my fist into your dragon gut? And yet you still think to insult me with thoughts of metaphysical murder. I will not get out of your head.
Oh, go complain to Vaal!
You think I don’t?
I knew he did. I knew. Vaal had left the ship just minutes ago, with a put upon look just after he’d complained of feeling a need for the taste of blood. Most likely it had been a hankering for blood and soul.
So. Did I miss out on a lover’s spat? I asked.
Yes.
Yes. I regarded the angry sea to the fore of the ship, thinking of our nature, Vaal’s and mine, and wondering if it were even possible to suppress the need we had for rending spiritual meat with our fiendish teeth.
Demon. Yes, I’d been named a demon in many cultures, present and past. The term was as true as god, I supposed. It all depended on perspective.
“Uneducated brute,” Haru said at my side. “That’s my perspective.”
I looked down at him, only just realizing he’d been contemplating the sea with me for a while without my being aware of it.
“Are you trying to make me eat you?” I asked, annoyed that he’d successfully crept up on me.
He grimaced, not quite looking at me. “Go ahead.”
Damn him. “I don’t want to!”
“Yet.”
I growled. The dragon me. I growled, and the noise seemed to bring the storm directly on our heads. With the wind and spray slapping into us, Haru grabbed the wheel from his first mate, and he grinned like I’d never seen him grin. Wild, welcoming. He’d been waiting for this, wanting it to happen.
“Safety ropes!” he howled above the noise.
“Done but for you, Lord! And Omos!”
his first mate howled back.
Haru only grinned again. He didn’t want safety ropes on him, nor did I want them on me. His first mate knew it and backed off, grinning as well. He grabbed hold of a mast and waited for orders while his captain wrestled with the wheel. At last I saw those muscles in Haru’s arms and shoulders really work.
I’ve already said he wasn’t built large, but with lines that were at once muscular and youthful. When his muscles knotted, I finally saw some hint of the age in him. There was definition in those limbs, definition that came of years of hard work, too many for a stripling boy. Creation, I want to fuck him into the wheel.
“No interrupting!” he bellowed at me.
I growled again, and he only grinned again. Well, fine. This was his game. Let him play it. But I was peeved. Very.
How could he believe I’d ever want to really eat him when he could shove a fist of power into my gut so easily? I really wasn’t hungry.
He laughed. I knew it was because of me and not the storm. There was something cynical about his mirth, though, and I stomped off to grab some shrouds near the rail, too annoyed to be near him without wanting to shake him, or bite. A little.
Damn him. I loved him. I really did. Had I ever tried to eat Vaal, for example? No.
“Vaal was too difficult for you to eat, you cold-hearted fucker!” Haru roared at me. I spun to look at him, surprised more by his rudeness than his vehemence. He turned the wheel suddenly. The ship lurched and effectively dumped me overboard when the next wave came crashing up over me.
I hit the water, then went under as a mountainous wave slapped down over my head. Fuck. I let the human part of me fade and went full beast for the first time in centuries. I didn’t normally dare this, in case some errant spy of Blessed Land’s happened to be about, or Vaal’s. But since I was in Vaal’s territory at the moment, and Vaal and I were in love again, I didn’t worry about him or Blessed Land.
To swim. To feel the water on my scales, the coolness of it rushing over my coils and smashing my whiskers flat to my muzzle. To stretch until I was a limber eel in the ocean, and then whip my flanks from side to side in a race with the foam sailing the wind ahead of me.
Loved Him to Death: Omos of the Ether Page 10