Recent content by Keres

The moment his blood touched her tongue, she knew she had erred. The pain she’d drawn from him was satisfying, yes, but the blood itself was not mortal. It burned. Sweet, metallic, and wrong, and the moment she swallowed, it flooded through her like liquid heat. Her pupils dilated, swallowing...

Keres held his gaze, refusing to look away even as the whip slid like a serpent over her skin. The handle’s path down her throat left fire in its wake, and when he looped the cord about her neck, the rasp of leather made her pulse stutter. It wasn’t fear, it was rage, raw and shaking, fighting...

Satisfaction burned through her like fire in her veins. The shock that had flickered just briefly across his face filled her with a dark, dangerous delight. She had caught him off guard. The Shrike. The untouchable, unshakable tyrant. Her lips curved faintly despite the leather in her mouth, her...

Pain muddled her senses, casting a haze over her mind as she struggled to focus on him. Her chest heaved with each ragged breath, black eyes blazing at him despite the drowsy weight in her limbs. When he shoved the handle of the whip into her mouth, gagging her, she let out a choked sound...

The bite of the whip was too much to ignore. Each strike tore a ragged cry from her throat, her body twisting as though trying to flee the pain though she had nowhere to go. The chains rattled above her, holding her upright when her legs could no longer bear her weight. Blood ran down her form...

Keres flinched at the whip’s crack, her chest tightening in dread as the air seemed to split with its song. “I took him to bed… because you told me to,” she bit out, teeth clenched, eyes glistening as she stared up at him, defiance and fear tangled in her gaze. Her words died on her lips as the...

Keres frowned at his words, shaking her head sharply. “I have no attachment to him,” she bit out, the defiance in her voice wobbling only slightly under the weight of his gaze. Her eyes flicked to the whip in his hand, and then to the wooden rod he chose instead. Her stomach turned. Her jaw...

Her heart jolted as the second manacle snapped tight around her wrist with a metallic click, the sound sharp as a blade in the silence that followed. The chains went taut, biting into her skin as she glared at him from beneath the shadow of her lashes, her chest rising and falling in short...

All he had to do was repeat that one word, and her blood turned to ice. The way he said it, soft, curious, mocking, it crawled down her spine like a cold hand. She tried to keep her chin high, her jaw locked in defiance. Tried to match that glacial stare and hold it. But then the air shifted...

What he had just put her through - ripping the souls from three living beings- was a mark upon her own. She could feel it, heavy and festering, seared into the marrow of her bones. Her body trembled from the effort of it, from the strain of holding so much alien power that it still clawed at her...

Everything was so fucking loud, the pressure in her mind a physical thing, claws scraping in her skull, trying to pull it apart. He was still pestering her, and she snapped up at him, turning to face the battlement, her bleeding hands trembling by her sides. “No!!” she screamed, her voice raw...

The soul was a raw, howling thing inside her head, thrashing at the edges of her consciousness. It wasn’t words but terror and pleading and the weight of all its memories, and for a moment, the noise threatened to drown her clean away. Then Shrike’s voice cut through it, cold and clear... Get...

It felt wrong, deep in her marrow. She had used her blood to bargain with the dead before, to coax them near and barter for whispers, but never like this, never to wrench a living soul loose while its heart still beat. The ritual pressed at the edges of her being, cold and terrible and...

She feels the answer in the air before it comes, the Shrike’s clipped permission like a blade in a hand. She frowned, but didn't answer him. Her jaw tightened instead, and when Gwyddion stepped forward, the horned steward’s soft words caught her off guard. Captive to captor.. It seems the...

The voice inside her skull felt like ice under skin, intimate and obscene all at once. It burrowed in, naming things she had always skirted at the edges of, and the mention of them, of tearing a living soul free, made something in her recoil. “N-no,” she managed aloud first, a stupid little...