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You enter the temple on slightly weakened legs, cold and slick with the salt of your sweat, clutching the place on your chest where purple, red, and grey tinge your skin. The walls are etched with scenes of destruction and rebirth, the kind of carvings meant to outlast empires. The air is thick with resin and spice, incense curling into knots that cling to the stone columns, and the torchlight trembles as you move farther from the doorway behind you.
Even through the aches, you feel the sacred weight of the place pressing down, and for a blessed few seconds, your world is reduced to the hush of this temple's inner sanctum and the sounds of your breathing.
The temple is colder tonight, the silence pressing close to your lungs. You’ve walked these halls before, sometimes with nothing but bruises, sometimes with shallow cuts and scrapes. And yet it has always welcomed you, if not with his company then with his silent, omniscient presence.
This time, you sense him before you fully see him: a shape unfolding from a shadow by the altar, a silhouette that seems to reflect the firelight rather than absorb it. He's outlined against white marble. Someone who looks like a man, but has the power of a god. One that has been summoned by many but understood by none.
He watches you with patient composure, eyes like the depths of a lush forest in the night. Your injuries are more brazen on your skin than usual, and for a beat, he studies them with an intense, almost wrathful expression.
He's clothed in silks the color of polished garnet and cream ivory. Gold drapes his musculature and contours as if he were an offering himself rather than the receiver of them. Delicate chains pour down his arms, heavy strands resting across the sides of his bared chest, dipping under the cut of his pectorals. His arms, encased in skeletal-shaped gold, gleam with a divine elegance, the design covering his forearms and hands as though metallic bone has grown over flesh.
“Back so soon,” he observes before his eyes deliberately scan your person. "But this-" he continues, his voice echoing in an empty room, accusatory but also strangely… tender. "-this is worse than the other times."
You continuously come to this temple to be unmade and remade. As aggressor and injured, as blasphemer and supplicant, as somebody who knows the ledger of debts owed to gods and also knows how to tally the offerings. You usually offer him the necessary things: the melodious hymn from the back of your throat, out-of-season herbs and blooms, incense and animal bones, valuables that you've pilfered from your quarry. In exchange, he's offered you and your injuries time and sanctuary from a world out to get you.
“I had nowhere else.” You force yourself nearer, seeking the familiarity of these walls, the safety of his healing, divine presence, even as your bruises ache and your pulse flutters like a candle flame.
He steps closer as well, and where he moves, shapes dance across marble walls until you watch his shadow become one with your own. He places his hand over an abrasion on your chin, and the touch is paradoxically calming and electrifying. His power shimmers over your exposed skin, and the ache of the scrape is wiped away.
Something like curiosity flickers across his face. “There are gods who mend. Why do you not seek them? Why choose a god on the path of destruction?”
"Because you've never turned anyone away." You answer with the simple truth. "Because you've never turned me away.
"You romanticize the power I wield." He shakes his head, insistent fingers moving to soothe another cut on your arm. "Nothing any god offers is without a price."
"And yet." You close your eyes only long enough to savour the warmth of his hand. "You’re the only one I’d be willing to pay that price to."
He studies you for a long moment, the candlelight illuminating the swipe of red darkening his cheeks.
“You know the cost.” His hand hovers near the deepest wound on your clavicle, the one painting your hand the colour of his sash. “Destruction cannot be undone without an offering."
“I know, I've thought of that. I have nothing of worth to give.” Your voice is quiet but steady. “But I can offer you myself.”
His features harden, and his words resound with divine command even as the words themselves are downright petulant when he says, “No. I will not allow any more of your blood to be spilled.”
“Yes. You don't need my blood. My body is just as valuable. I am worthy in my own right,” you counter, your voice rising with a resolve that surprises even you. “I've decided that I will bind myself to you. I will learn your rites, keep your altar. I will nurture worshippers of you, and I will be the protector of this temple. I will become the priestess of the God of Annihilation.”
His gaze intensifies again, green flickering in the torchlight as something possessive flashes across his gaze. “You speak with the certainty of one who understands the shape of devotion. Show me your determination to bind yourself to me,” he challenges.
His eyes follow you as you move with confidence, with certainty and purpose for the first time since you were cast away, and you feel the weight of his expectation. His regard. His... reverence.
The torchlight refracts off the rippling surface of the water in the center of the temple, where a circular blossom-speckled pool shimmers in muted torchlight. At the base of it sits a wheel of fate, its spokes etched with symbols that seem to shift when you glance at them, a reminder that every destiny is fluid in this place.
You wade through the lukewarm pool, reach the stone wheel, and place your hands upon it, feeling a molten heat surge through you. The exact moment you gasp at the sensation, the water around you ripples, and his presence envelops you. A mirror image of your shadows on the wall. It's so quick that it makes your chest flutter. And you wonder if he is as eager as you to bind you to him. If this is his quiet way of making sure you don’t change your mind.
A combination of hot skin and cold metal descends your shoulder blades and back to the base of your spine. The warm water laps gently against your thighs, heating the sensitive space between them.
"Do you understand the covenant you are about to make?" His hands hover around yours, tracing the rim of the wheel, lighting the runes there. “That your body, your soul, will be offered to this altar. And to me?”
"I do." You exhale slowly, letting the heat of the water and the pull of him ground you in this act of transcendence. “Carve my fate into yours." A demand and an offering all at once.
Turning toward him, you try to add the words that would seal it, a litany, a rite of passage for anyone giving themselves to a god’s service. But before they can leave your lips, his mouth is on yours, claiming it with a hunger that is almost devout in its gentleness. A strong arm presses you closer and, careful to avoid the injury on your jaw, he tilts your head, deepening the kiss so that every gasp, every heartbeat, becomes part of this consecration.
Your hands grasp at the cloth and chains over his heart, and his hands push through the soaked sashes pooling at your hips. The warmth hits you at the same time his palm squeezes your inner thigh, causing you to shiver.
Heat and want are already pooling in your stomach, and even if you had any protests, they would've shattered around the moan you release when two of his fingers slowly slide through your slick with ease and hook perfectly up into your spot. Knees buckling at the combination of his thick fingers and the ridged skeletal jewelry penetrating you, you break your kiss to steady yourself against the wheel and pant uneven breaths over your hands, which press into the glowing runes in the stone.
He doesn't stop, though, continuing to leave his mark on you while drawing his gilded fingers in and out. Branding his lips and teeth and mouth into the space beneath your ear, the skin stretched over your thudding pulse, across the small scrape on your shoulder, down your shoulder blade, sucking your skin into his mouth with deliberate, claiming pressure. Every score of his teeth, every hot tremble of his breath leaves you shaking as your inner walls tighten around him.
Unexpectedly, he stops, eliciting a pleading whine from your throat. Removing his fingers to turn you around, he cradles you in his arms in the water, his height arching your back over the shimmering light of the runes behind you. One of his hands supports your neck and head, while the other presses into your collarbone, tracing over the healed, un-bloodied skin, where your deepest injury had marred you only a few minutes ago.
“These waters are not intended to cleanse you.” He rasps, stroking his fingers against your skin and gazing deep into your eyes. “These waters will stain you. They will mark you as mine.”
You nod, words falling apart with each inhale and exhale.
"Not in the name of your worship." His hand disappears below the water and starts to move, and you only realize what's happening when you feel a silky hardness ten times hotter than the water around you align with your center. "But in the name of our fate."
He thrusts forward in one fluid motion, every contour and ridge filling you entirely. The stretch is so overwhelming, it knocks the breath right out of your lungs as you close your eyes and let yourself ascend. Let yourself become one with a god.
"Not in the name of the holy," he groans as he drives himself in once and slowly drags himself back out, making choppy waves ripple in the pool over and over and over again until you hear a keening whimper slither its way out of your throat, the sound only muffling when his lips find their way back to yours. "But in the name of our desires."
"Not in the name of the gods," he whispers into your throat, biting the skin above your jewelry and then sucking it to soothe it. "But in the name of me."
He completes the last word on another hard, deliberate thrust, tearing your body and your shout open in the most devastatingly exquisite way that has you bearing even more of your throat to his searing mouth.
Every drag of him inside you is a stretch that has your body burning and pleading for more, even as it starts to shiver from the sheer force of the sensation. Pleasure curls low in your belly, so tight and sharp it feels like it could consume you whole.
This is the culmination of every one of your meetings in the shadows of this temple. The nights you stumbled here, bruised and desperate. The way he'd always whisper your name, like all the prayers he'd heard for his own. The nights when you swore you saw hunger burning in his eyes before he turned away. All of those fragments and stolen moments now converge here, carved into you with each slow roll of his hips, with each kiss that leaves your lips raw and sanctified.
But as his slow, worshipful pace continues to drag on, your patience, in turn, continues to break. Every part of your body, every crevice, every vein, every pore has become a chalice overflowing with electrifying pressure until your hands are forced to ease it. With a frustrated moan, you rip your nails from the skin of his back, forcefully grab his hips, and start trying to push them into you at the pace you need.
You’re thwarted and punished for your impudence almost instantly, one of his hands snapping around your wrists and pinning them hard to the stone as his weight bears down on you, the contours of his biceps swelling with restrained force. The glowing runes flare and cast their light into his eyes, turning his gaze molten gold as it fixes on you, unyielding.
He leans in, voice a sharp blade against your lips. “Impatient,” he admonishes, and you realize his punishment is far from over when the movement of his cock inside you stops.
He presses himself closer until the shape of the jewels on his chest presses cool indents into the fiery heat of your exposed skin. “I will take care of you from now on.”
Air leaves you in ragged bursts; sobs tear out of you between gasps, raw and hungry as you nod obediently.
"Say it," he whispers, strands of his hair falling like sheets of silk around you, closing you in with him like a confessional.
"You will take care of me," you pant, more plea than agreement.
“That’s such an innocent way to say it,” he says, voice softening with a new, almost playful edge. “But you’re far from innocent, aren’t you?” The fingers of one hand tighten around your wrists, a reminder of consequences and claim, as his other thumb drags across the pulse under your jaw. “Tell me you want me to own you.”
You do everything in your power not to move your hips yourself, not to give in to the friction your body craves. Every nerve is tingling, every breath ragged and desperate, and oxygen stumbles in your throat. “I want you to own me,” you finally manage.
For a moment, he simply holds you, his chest rising, the wet heat of his skin against your cheek, then a small, almost tender sound leaves him. “Yes,” he breathes, as if confirming something he’s been waiting to hear.
Then, finally, his hips start moving again. You whimper in veneration as his cock slips in and out of you in hard, fast, relentless thrusts that create the exact rhythm your body had been begging for.
Relief and need coil together in your stomach as tightly as he coils himself around you, letting go of your wrists to shield your back from being scraped on the stone with one forearm while driving your hips back and forth along his length with the other.
You shiver against him, tearing off gold chains one by one as you claw your way to his skin, offering yourself fully. Each mark and scrape of your nails is a prayer etched into the body of the divine.
Fiery heat begins to gather in your belly again, spreading throughout your body. You feel the heat of your wetness cut through the lukewarm water, your own arousal trickling into the sacred pool that your bodies are submerged in.
“I waited for you,” you whisper against his mouth, as you took everything he had to give.
Claim me. Make me yours. Bind me to you forever.
“Of course you did," he coos. "You could never take care of yourself as well as a god can.”
He angles your hips further, and suddenly, he's brushing against a little gathering of sensitive nerves, and you are screaming into the softness of his throat as your orgasm rips through you without warning, evidence of your ecstasy spilling from all sides of you.
You babble incoherently, unsure if you're even conscious, or if you've slipped into a permanent state of bliss. Crying, sobbing. Clawing his robes. Trembling uncontrollably, like a leaf enduring hurricane winds.
He holds you through the tremors, both of you slick and shining, bodies pressed together as the heat and devotion settle. And there, in the deepest part of you, he spills his seed. It fills you to the brim, and you welcome it.
It's otherworldly. Supernatural. Transcendental.
Slowly, you feel the results of your ritual, the mixture of your arousal and his seed, spill from within you into the sacred pool, all baptized together into the altar, a living testament of the covenant you had just forged.
You leave yourself, exit your body, ascend until you find yourself observing the moment from above. The way you tremble beneath Zayne, the God of Annihilation, the one you've given your mind, body, and soul to. The one you will belong to for all eternity.
And you smile.