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Water of Life
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“I am hunting something, and in turn that same thing is hunting me, the beholder; the hold beyond. I am the line between. I am the teeth of God.”
- Sleep Token
You wake the next afternoon with Dathomir"s sun already at a half slant, making a red slash across your legs. The sheets are a tangle, but somehow you made it back to bed the night before. Everything"s mussy, bleary around the edges from too much blackroot tonic, your muscles sore from dancing around the bonfires that lit the mountains in a long chain --
Every peak ablaze.
And every window to every hut in the Night City had been lit up, the caves and quarters of the Nightbrothers offering libations for new friends and visitors alike gold and green in the night. The revels had lasted until morning, pathways through the grave thorns lit with candles and brazier light leading to secluded alcoves where your memories get a little hazy -- all you know is that you"ve never seen anything like it, any place else in the galaxy.
Lord Maul really knows how to throw a party.
The thought brings a smile to your face, even though you haven"t seen the man -- more a legend by the way the Nightbrothers speak of him: he"s the one responsible for Dathomir"s restoration, but he doesn"t partake of the third moon festival. He"s yet to make an appearance, as far as you know, but there are plenty of Nightbrothers, all of them keen on demonstrating their artistry in the games, many looking for partners to dance with, to play host to visitors wanting a taste of the authentic, revived Dathomiri magical traditions -- and your hosts have been more than accommodating.
Everyone is looking for something, that’s why you"ve come here. What you don’t yet know is the question, though you’re sure there’s an answer:
Something missing. You’re sure here you’ll find it. Whatever it is.
You shift, the sheets slipping, and realize you might"ve gone overboard on your very first day. Everything aches, your muscles sore from all night spent in the grave thorns and the caves, and you"re tender in places you hadn"t expected -- your breasts, your thighs too. Your shirt shifts and that"s when you notice something"s different -- there"s paint striped everywhere across your body beneath your sleeping clothes.
Gold and smeary and shimmering, like you"d cuddled up to somebody painted with those pretty sigils the Nightbrothers use to invoke virility, prowess, and stamina in the hunt --
A memory flickers, there and gone like a moth against a candle and back to the darkness.
You swallow, the soreness registering as something not so awful because maybe there"s a reason your clit feels so tender. Like someone lavished it with affection, leaving your cunt warm and wet, eased open for whatever came next.
Your body throbs with the disconnect, and like a ghost, you can map the places where someone touched and squeezed, offering pleasure in exchange for your memories of the event, because while you remember a body to whom you enthusiastically consented, his face is a blank in your memory.
A glance at the bedside mirror reveals finger streaks across your throat to your chest, and following the mark, you remember the weight of that hand undoing the straps of your dress. Fabric pooling around your feet in one of the caves where the brazier light made oil-slicked muscles shimmer. Gold and ochre. Gold eyes in a masked face.
Parting your legs, there"s a little shimmer on your inner thighs too. A peek down your shirt reveals gold smudges on your breast and belly, and something flickers on the periphery of your awareness, rising like a vision from the depths:
Teeth against your neck. A heavy cock between your legs. And you, breathless and desperate, clawing marks up a Nightbrother"s back as he braced you with gold-painted hips, the rough praises offered in whispers as he slipped you down each of his three ridges like something sacred --
No names. No faces.
Why?
The question follows you as you use the refresher and dress for the second night"s observances, the flutter in your belly a telltale sign that whatever you"d expected, the reality was better.
Your thighs are already wet from the thought, and startled, you don"t immediately notice the gathering of masked Nightbrothers who linger around the visitors" campground, so many cave huts already open to the evening breeze. It"s muggy, as heavy as a weight on your shoulders, and you"re glad of the light fabric -- your nipples pebbling with the attention as two young men, slouched together and trading murmurs over their cups, give you a look over as if they"d been expecting your re-appearance.
One is golden, and the other a burnished bronze -- both in half-masks. Only one reveals the bright, white of his teeth in a smirk that is suddenly so familiar your thighs are slicked from the memory of those lips inviting your tongue to taste his.
He rises to standing, his friend forgotten as you stand there quivering, uncertain and hungry, suddenly, to know the identity of that masked stranger who carried you back to bed after your pleasure was spent --
Who tucked you in with calloused fingers and a kiss to your forehead.
A cup is thrust out before you, blocking your path to follow. The burnished one fixes you with a grin that is all predatory interest.
In the distance, you hear the first twin heartbeats of the ritual drums, with more joining in as a rhythm begins to echo around the mountains. Up high, the bonfires are being lit for the night.
"For the revel," the Nightbrother says. His amber gaze gleams in the dim. "Everyone drinks."
It"s the same smoking concoction you imbibed the night prior without thinking to ask what was in it. This time you"re more cautious, your fragmented memories evidence to what it does to those who consume it.
"What is it?"
His grin is as sharp as his cheekbones. "The only worthwhile thing this place has ever offered," he says. "These are the Waters."
Your flesh ripples with frisson, the emphasis on the word no-nonsense. The telltale green of ichor means the brew has some magick in it.
"It opens your mind to the Spirit," he explains. "Just a little. Like a door being held open an inch."
"Then what happens?" you ask him.
He lifts a shoulder, but his gaze glitters. "Whatever the Spirit wishes. All who drink the Waters submit to its desires -- we are mere performers for Their entertainment."
Somewhere beneath the overhanging trees, the golden boy in the mask is waiting, an arm draped over the limb of a felled grave thorn, his trousers low on his hips. He curves a finger in your direction, and you think for a second he"ll offer a repeat performance.
"Whose?" you ask, taking the cup from waiting fingers, but the same urge that tips the drink to your lips doesn"t hear his answer.
Your feet move of their own volition, wending deeper into the darkness where that gold gaze turns appreciative, a little smirk curling up his mouth at the corners when his thumb streaks paint down your chin, tipping your face to his and parting your lips for a barely-there kiss. He breathes you in, and you can"t help but shiver at the sensation that you"ve already given yourself over to this man"s whims. His touch is teasing — light strokes against your thighs and upper arms, your stomach. It’s inviting. It’s heady. You want to sink into it, but you sense you’ve another engagement this evening and he’s just warming you to the possibilities.
Whatever it is, you want more of it. More of that swimmy feeling in your head, a lightness in your chest, the soft press of fingers at your waist pulling up your skirts as colours grow brighter, the darkness darker, the drums louder as fires light the grave thorns from within where the largest blaze of all sends up sparks to twin sickle moons waiting above.
At the centre of the grove, there is an altar.
People are dancing around it. Writhing, really -- grinding against each other. Some are exhausted already, given over to the ecstatic celebration, collapsing into each other where hands and teeth take over.
"Tonight, you won"t need this," your paramour tells you in that raspy, soft hush you remember all at once as he pulls your dress over your head.
There are others around the bonfire in a similar state of undress, and if modesty was your concern, you needn"t have worried. This is a presentation, you realize, as your limbs shed gravity and your skin tingles in the heat, because your golden boy"s kiss is chaste against your knuckles, your clothes in his fist when he beckons you to, "Dance for him, love. Don"t be afraid."
You know why the warning in a breath --
There"s space for you on the stone plinth. A flicker unravels you as you take it in, but the drums are so loud that you can"t stop yourself from taking a step, and then another as the shroud of smoke tumbles from the dancers undulating into each other, and you see Him at the centre of the crowd:
He"s like a god -- seven feet tall at least, every muscle carved in perfect relief. Hard pectorals. Thick thighs. A narrow waist. Perfection embodied as the hunter the Nightbrothers favour, the crown of his horns as tall as one of your hands at least.
Largest of any Nightbrother you"ve seen, his cock glistens with someone else"s spend as he pins down his partner with one enormous hand and sinks back in half way. He"s too big. It"s all they can take -- if the soundless ‘o’ of their mouth and squeezed-shut eyes are any indicator. His face twists into a grimace. He doesn’t reach his end. It’s over quickly. His partner is left shaking — his effect on them debilitating.
But you see the splayed legs, the open mouths; the sound of slapping skin too loud to drown out the pleasure sounds of release and relief. Bodies are scattered and twined together where the dance devolves into a chase, and the capture puts someone on their knees before you, hands groping and mouths opened in ecstasy as the rapture takes over. Fingers grasp at you, but you know your place in the tangle, where desire chases relief and bodies fold together. Someone fills the empty spaces, cries muffled by moans; sucking sounds --
You move away, swaying under the sound of the drums, a perfect rhythm to match twin hearts but your single one races to catch up when your gazes lock.
He finishes one partner, and takes the next without pause, his cock sinking into a mouth to clean it off.
The shudder you feel mingles something far more base than yearning. There’s desire, surely, and a little fear, but your thighs are wet when you touch your body, your nipples peaked and skin pebbled though the night is warm and the gold smears of paint on your stomach and shoulders are marks left by the other Nightbrother. Your vision blurs a little at the edges. It’s another moment before you recognize one smear is a symbol —
Like he’d marked you especially for this ritual… after unwrapping the gift.
Somewhere on the periphery, a murmur of sensation trembles through the darkness, but you can’t see beyond the braziers into the forest, and fingers tug you into the undulating dance that sweeps you closer to the warrior at the altar a moment later.
Everything tingles as you wend forward, the edges of your vision darkened. There’s clarity in the portrait painted, because while he brings the next to completion with a few shallow thrusts of his hips, that stern leather-made expression is fixed on your small form on the periphery of the bacchanal -- hesitating at the certainty that you can take him. You’re not sure. You’ve never seen someone so enormous. So unsatisfied by the effort he puts into giving anyone who falls under his hands the pleasure that they beg of him.
He gives them their release, one after another, but there"s no joy in his expression, and he never falters save to watch your careful progress, spinning through bodies like a wayward comet.
His gaze behind his mask is as bright as the firelight, an intensity that leaves you questioning when he pumps his cock into his fist, stepping backward so you can see all of him --
So you can fit into the space he’s left vacant on his altar.
Everything falls away, and the next thing you know, those large hands lift you from the hips, placing you down onto fire-warmed stone like an offering to those twin, sickle moons. They burn bright and red overhead, your arousal coating his thick fingertips when he leans in and you can see the details on his mask -- the harsh lines of his eyebrows and that deep, creased frown offset by stitched lips. A God who cannot speak his desires -- his fangs are hidden. He can only demonstrate them when one digit slips in, and then another to stretch you to your limit.
Something flickers, the forest smearing into so many colours that you know the concoction you drank is working through your system.
The voice that reaches you is muffled, but its timber is an earthquake, shaking something loose inside you as if you can feel his pain. "I am His servant this evening, and this is His blessing," he tells you. "Will you accept what I give you?"
You nod, and his thumb touches to the bundle of nerves at your apex, your body angling into his grip as he curls his fingers.
Any answer you give him is ragged. Desperate. Clawing up his arm at the feeling of fullness when he lifts you a little, one-handed.
"Ride it. Take your pleasure."
On the periphery, out in the darkness of the forest, something circles. Something watches. When you glance over, your stomach twisting at the knowledge that not everyone is so preoccupied at this bonfire, you don"t see anything -- but you feel it out there.
"I am here, little one," he reminds you, and shaking, you find the ember-warm eyes behind that scowling, fearsome mask. They look a little sad.
He"s been so generous with so many sated people, but none have offered him what he deserves --
You lick your lips. "On one condition," you breathe.
He appears taken aback at first, tipping his enormous head as if to indulge you while his thumb rubs a patient circle around your clit, spilling your juices into the palm of his hand, and then intrigued.
“You would make demands as if you’ve earned it, little one.”
He’s far too patient — far too confident that you"re just like the others — but you have his attention. His cock bobs between you like an invitation, leaving splashes of pre-come on your thighs.
“You’re his aspect,” you breathe, the brush of his cocktip distracting. It drips. Your fingers tremble when you pick up a droplet, bringing it to your mouth. Shivering from the taste of him — salty and a little wild — you ask, “But you’re still a man under that mask, aren’t you?”
His attention lingers on the way you sucked your finger between your lips, he rumbles his amusement, but the resonance lingers: weighted with purpose.
You want him inside you. You want to squeeze him so tight that he can"t possibly resist the temptation to fill you so full that you can taste him. The Water is heady and your overconfidence stunning, but you"ve never been so desperate to please someone so burdened by the grace he"s been given.
"Tell me," he murmurs.
The forest seems to still, every croak and burble falling quiet as you whisper, "You let me worship at your altar too."
You kiss those stitched over lips so carefully that he goes rigid, and another to his cheek even though he can"t feel it.
The grave thorns sway gently, but everything inside you becomes a torrent, your body responding to the loss when he withdraws, pulling you closer so that you feel the brush of his cock over your belly, your breasts, your throat as if he was marking his territory in musk and sweat.
The hand that closes around your neck is enormous. He could crush your throat. He could snap your neck. But he doesn’t — his touch is reverent.
"You could take it slowly, little one. You could have as much as you want.”
"I will," you say. "That"s what I want, I —“
But there"s a greater part of you that wants to know what it"s like to be fucked raw.
"I want it all."
Your eyes stay open, but the loss of yourself is imminent as the pulse of the drums take over and you lose yourself to the body lowering itself to yours, more careful with you than all the others because the markings on him transfer to your skin, making these compacts sacred when he lifts you to straddle him, his cock kneading your entrance, thick and slicked already for gravity to do the rest.
You wrap your arms around his shoulders, the tips of his claws making indentations in your thighs. He lowers you slowly over the tip, already throbbing to life at the stretch and sting, his fingertips stroking the point of connection, opening you further to accept a little more of him. Potions on his fingertips -- the kind that tingle when they touch your skin, loosening the tensions. Some Dathomiri concoction that lubricates and leaves your body more receptive.
The last thing you hear is the rumble of his assurance, all that power restrained in his tense muscles, all of it tightly controlled. "Are you certain --"
Thighs already shaking, you breathe out, "Tonight, I want to fuck the Fanged God."
A chuckle leaves him that is all masculine, all heat -- he sits down hard on the altar, taking you with him to the hilt, to the teeth. Your vision goes white -- his eyes fluttering shut the last thing you see.
...
When you wake, the moons have risen once more. The third evening"s revels carry from a distance, pushing through your open window with laughter and songs from the feast. It"s the last evening on Dathomir before the festival concludes, but what the night promises you"re unsure.
Wisps of the newfound knowledge linger beneath your skin in small aches and soreness, a tenderness between the legs, the bruises on your hips, the smeared paint from shared sigils, but there"s evidence on the sheets that anchor the surfacing memories that don"t quite hold their shape —
Pieces of a whole that warm your skin with heat when you think of those large hands, that enormous cock stuffing you to the brim. So big it"s like you can still feel him, and his spend — there"s come everywhere, still warm when it seeps from between your legs.
You"re pleased, but you"re not sure why exactly. Maybe it was a blessing. Maybe your mystery man appreciated your fervour for him too. The aches of your body are a distant thing because Dathomiri potions doing the work of renewing fatigued muscles and sore skin. You take a stim. Verify again that your contraceptive chip is active. Wash in the cold, clear spring waters that trickle from the natural refresher, and dress, finding a few scratches beneath your ass and on the backs of your legs that you swipe ointment over to dull the residual sting.
But while you"re certain you"ve been fucked thoroughly, and by someone much bigger than you thought you could accommodate, your flesh warms at the memories half-drenched with pleasure — a feeling even greater than the confusion. Like you’ve done something secret and sacred, known only to a few who’ve come here to partake in the old ways.
He had lovely eyes: that much you know with a certainty. They darkened, and burned for you all night. You’d longed to kiss him, but he never once took off his mask — unlike his golden brother who watched on the periphery but never joined in, that perfect, hungry grin haunting your memory.
— Taking turns, maybe. Sharing you between them.
But you can’t shake the feeling of a shadow overlooking the festivities — watchful and silent, but unwilling to join in for whatever reason.
There"s a cup waiting for you on the little stool outside your hut this evening, a guide you don"t recognize directing traffic to the other side of the mountain through the swamp to the gathering spot where the Nightbrothers had set out a feast to celebrate your last night together. Already, the other visitors have meandered away and out of sight.
You"re the last to leave, it seems, but the feeling that possesses you flutters in your belly with the sort of insistence that begs trouble. Certain that no one is watching, your skin damp from the humidity and tickled by your boldness, you toss the contents of the cup into the bushes. This might be one last night to remember everything, because to put this adventure in striking detail into a safe place in your memories is too tempting.
Maybe tonight you"ll even meet your lovers. Maybe tonight you"ll see their faces.
Buoyed by the prospect, you skip down the trail and into the swamp.
There are no guidebooks for Dathomir, the place is occulted: a secret founded by the syndicates in the years before the Empire finally fell. What you know of its natural beauty is twisted, a fact evidenced by the gnarled trees and creeping mists that overtake the paths and encourage you to wander into the mire and muck where your dress snags.
The Force is at work here, certainly, but the Nightbrothers’ treat it differently. It’s part of the appeal: they’ve no fear of things that others would shirk from. Part of this festival honours that, you think. They remember the way things were, and these three nights spend under Dathomir’s moons are meant to celebrate what they’ve reclaimed.
You’re so lost in thought that you don’t immediately realize you’ve wandered off the path until the creek and burble of the swamp falls away to nothing. It’s a peculiar feeling, the silence descending like a curtain to cut off everything —
No burble of water, no croak of insects. Not even the gnarled trees offer a groan of complaint at your passing.
You keep moving.
When the lights of the feast fail to manifest, and only the occasional wisp of swamp gas fades from green to nothing and darkness descends do you realize the difference:
The silence stretches, weighted with the oppressive patience of a predator.
Palms sweating, you turn, your human eyes straining to catch some flicker of movement between the trees, but the sense that you’re being followed never relents.
If the Gods are present in Dathomir’s rituals, you haven’t wondered what you’ve been celebrating these past two nights: the magick here wilder and more ancient, those who celebrate Him touching the raw nerve that the Jedi nor the Sith were never rumoured to dally with.
All Nightbrothers wear His faces. You gathered as much from the masks, the legends — sometimes a monster, others a humanoid creature — but what you didn’t expect at all was the one that didn’t.
The shroud of darkness slips back, but with your hammering heart and uncertain legs, you start — stumbling into the bracken before you can really process that all that expectant fear’s left you incapacitated. A sound escapes you as from the shadows, two gleaming, firebright eyes slit open.
The contrast is so sharp that you stumble, blinking away the afterimages as if it would make any difference: you’ve trundled not the muck, the water and mud sucking up your legs. You’re stuck.
Is it a Nightbrother? A creature, you wonder? Certainly the swamp is full of them.
Whatever it is, its stillness is the most troubling, because you’re certain if you cry out, no one would hear you.
“Hell-hello?” you manage, your voice cracking as a frost rimes your soul. The cold is sudden. Impenetrable. And while you struggle to free yourself, that swamp God watches you with the eternal patience of knowing you’re trapped and it can savour the experience.
Its face never manifests. Somehow that’s worse, because when the darkness swallows those two burning irises, you realize he could be anywhere.
You don’t think, you only tumble hands first into the silt and boggy water, covering yourself in the muck as you lose a sandal and crawl to freedom. The path twines in four directions, a crossroads that could lead you deeper into danger, but with one glance over your shoulder at the spot where you last saw the creature, you can’t muster the hesitation as his whisper fills your skull on a breath that teases you open in ways that make everything seem insignificant:
“To look upon the face of the Fanged God with wide open eyes is to know true terror, my dear: a truth that is near-inconceivable.” A shuddery breath, as if he savours the feeling of power it gives him to remain cloaked in shadow. “And yet here you stand, shivering and hopeful for a glimpse despite every warning, your protections stripped away as if it were nothing.”
The Waters — they had a purpose.
“They protected you from all the beauty, and all the horrors. Didn’t they?”
He’s inside your head, you realize. He can feel what you’re feeling; see what you’re thinking.
Laughter follows as you turn, seeking out the source of that deceptive velvet smoothing over the promise of certain violence. Power like this doesn’t belong to mortals; to men…
From your left, the shadows shift. There’s nothing there of course, but his voice falls over your body raising a shiver. Your nipples pebble. Your thighs slick. And the invisible invitation of a caress made by ghostly fingers creeping beneath your soaked dress causes every muscle to shudder.
Right beside your ear, he murmurs, “I appreciate someone who looks upon my world with wide open eyes — a rare and foolish quality: bravery.”
You’ve never been more vulnerable. You’ve never known the feeling of a fist wrapping around your heart with a strength that could make it skip or pulse, but the knowledge that he sees you while you can’t see him obliterates every rational thought.
You’re already running.
His promise trails you: “And when bravery is tempered only by self-preservation it’s heady.”
The swamp devours you, tearing streaks into your clothes and skin as if to flay off the last bits of your humanity. Beneath your skin, your pulse is a bomb set on detonation — and every snare, trip, and stumble is one faltering lurch closer to an inevitability you hadn’t considered: that which watches from Dathomir’s shadows has hungers not quite forgotten. You’re someone’s prey, and every so often, when the laughing snap of jaws in the darkness urges you in a different direction, it occurs to you that you’re being herded.
Indeed, maybe when the moons overhead are covered in streaky clouds and you find yourself falling into a gully with a splash and a shout do you think that in the old days, this is how it would have been:
The strongest and most fearsome chasing down their quarry, the scent of fear and pheromones and sex mingled together the strongest magick. Your body is clumsy, your limbs uncoordinated, and when you fall with your scraped knees and bleeding palms, exhausted at the feet of a craggy stone outcropping do you realize that there is no salvation at all for those who stray from prescription.
“Rituals are important,” says the voice.
On your knees before him, your fingers in so much red dirt that you’re covered in it, you look up to find that it’s a throne carved directly from the foot of the mountain. The being that sits upon it beckons you to him, but it’s not your body that obeys his command — something else pulls you to him, your gaze downcast but so, so tempted.
“They remind us where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. What we long for. What we deny ourselves when everything is illuminated — I prefer the night.”
Durasteel is dull even in shadow, you think, examining his feet.
“You prefer to hide,” you tell this dark Lord, this fallen son you’ve heard of in rumours and whispers.
Black robes trail through the dirt, indifferent that Dathomir creeps up his hem with every step, working its way into every fissures and joints, staining the metal. The palm offered to you is black, the knuckles red and marked through, but he is different. He’s not a Nightbrother — he just looks like one.
“I enjoy the privacy. Especially when in delicate company.”
He doesn’t waver, but he wants you to take the hand that’s offered. Unable to help yourself, you look up from your kneeling position, and into the face of no mortal being — because those features in such a fearsome, handsome face surely belong to a god.
He was right:
The effect of his quirked lips and narrowed assessment nearly destroys you.
You recover. You have to. Even and especially when the calloused flesh of those warm, strong fingers wrap your wrist and draw you to standing:
He doesn’t tower, but he has presence, and he does not release you. Instead, you fall into his orbit with shaky legs and a weakening resolve that you’re somehow safer having seen him like this: unmasked and unadorned, and that you will not survive his company to tell anyone about it.
“You chased me,” you accuse him, half-hearted.
“I determined that you were worthy.”
Of what, you wonder?
His grip doesn’t falter, but you don’t steal back your fingers either.
A branch rustles, announcing the presence of two others -- two brothers whom you’re acquainted with intimately enough to shiver from the suggestion of so many missing moments. Maybe they’re here to remind you.
“My siblings,” he says, the word choice significant — not just brothers through clan, but by blood. “And me.”
Lord Maul draws you nearer, and this close you understand the difference: whatever burns in his gaze knows starvation. You are a solution to hungers he dares not speak.
“Mindless abandon,” he corrects you, pulling the thought from your head. “The edge of all things beyond the boundaries of this existence, and maybe farther because why else celebrate the loss of the self in these festivals if you cannot surrender to something greater?”
“Surrender?”
The word ripples through you. It has the desired effect — better than the hallucinatory desperation created by Dathomir’s Waters. He smirks. You understand — the effect is the same:
It lowers your resistance to your most base nature. No rules. No inhibitions. A rite of inversion, where men are like Gods, and the Gods —
“Enjoy the same indulgences as men,” Maul finishes for you.
“Would you willingly, knowing that your consort is a monster?” he asks.
His heartbeats beneath your palm are heavy, the chest beneath zeyd cloth broad and strong, and hot even with the buffer of fabric between you.
“On one condition…”
The largest of the three grunts a laugh. “She is fond of those.”
Maul tips you chin up on the crook of his finger, the other drawing you into the hard heat of his closest inspection. Against your thighs, you can feel the cold durasteel of his prosthetic limbs, as unyielding as the rest of him. You know in that moment you never had a choice in the matter, that some whim of the Spirit has drawn you here, and there is only one answer.
“Tell me, my dear.”
Desire spills over the edges until the scent of him in your mouth suffuses your being. You don’t tremble, but the wet clothes clinging to your body are a burden. He holds your stare, scrutinizing you as you shiver, dirt smeared and losing your nerve by the second.
“I would invite all your company,” you manage. “If this is my last evening.”
He considers this, a slanted glance to his brothers all the confirmation you need, really, because when he pulls you nearer, tipping your face up to meet his, you know his patience has brittled to thinness. You can feel it stirring against your hip with the whirr of servos and firing nerve-connectors, the temperature differential compensating when he explains beneath his breath:
“Synthskin and filament, cybernetic augmentations meant to simulate satisfaction. Are you afraid?”
His lips are a hairsbreadth from yours. “Yes.”
“Excellent.”
His kiss isn’t exploratory. It’s devouring. It’s dominance. The bend of your body beneath the will of the Dark Side itself, funnelled into form with the intention of destroying the weak to weed out what can’t be broken. You gasp into the sweep of his tongue as it flickers heat through your body, the taste of blood and fire and teeth razing against your nerve endings when he sinks them into the gap between your shoulder and your throat to feel the muscle breaking —
It’s the most demanding sort of desire, because the fingers clutching you to him could shatter your bones but the best they do is strip you of your clothes in one sharp tug that sends the tatters to stone and clutches you to him with the sort of desperation that you know, on some level, he sees you as his salvation.
There’s blood on his lips but his gaze is lidded and his smile ragged, the whole of you wrapped around him as the shadow of his robes parts to press you against skin and durasteel when he sits on his throne and you fall to writhing against the cock that pulses and whirs against your labial lips. The vibration humming through you is decadent. Impossible. Wretched. When you cry out, the sound is more profane even than the mouth that laps against the pucker of your ass —
It’s perfect. It’s torturous.
He won’t let you clutch at him. Wrists grasped in one hand, he lifts you high enough to split your legs across his hips and take every inch when he lowers your body like a token, an offering, a sacrifice to honour Him, but what is Maul if not His extension? What are they all — these Nightbrothers whose large hands warm your breasts and knead a knuckle into your clitoris? What have you forgotten in exchange for the heavy pressure against your ass, filling you to the brim when your resistance breaks and the golden one sighs into your ear, “You’re doing so well, love.”
“Those that offer supplication willingly should be rewarded,” Maul says, but his brother’s large hand encircles your throat, and you can feel so much more than those just rewards when the biggest of the three boys lowers his mask and you catch a glimpse of perfection before he spits on your tongue, and then you know it firsthand when he braces a foot on the throne and feeds you the first three inches of his cock to choke on.
Your eyes water. You see stars. The clouds part. You come. You gag. You fall apart. Fingers leaving bruises. Teeth and claws carrying you higher. And Maul — his eyes dark as he slants his satisfaction, the sharp jut of his hips bruising your inner thighs as you squeeze his sensors, tripping into the next wave of pleasure as all three brothers’ affections lift you higher —
Maul knows what you’re searching for, and he intends to deliver you:
You cry out in pleasure. Words lose meaning. Everything is feeling.
“Transcendence,” he hisses.
And you know what you’re feeling as you shatter: a touch of divine intervention —
Rapture.