The bargain was struck four months ago in this same chamber, me on my knees on cold stone. I felt its attention move across me – not like a gaze, nothing with a face behind it. Like a current finding a new course.
I laid out my terms. One night. My body. Every use.
In exchange: its engraving, pressed into me at the ritual’s end. The ability to know, with certainty, when someone is lying to me. It was a modification I had craved since I was old enough to understand what it was.
It agreed. In its way. Terms locked.
I spent four months reading accounts left by people who had survived similar arrangements – texts the Empire suppresses where it can. I noted the gaps in the records at the time. I should have examined them more closely.
I am slim and pale and I have been cold my whole life, but I am not cold now. Warmth has been seeping into the chamber for hours. The smoke is thickening.
I am naked. I walked into the chamber with nothing – no fabric to hold or hide behind. I knelt where the oldest texts instructed, assuming the position with the detached precision of a scholar.
Hands flat on stone. Knees apart. Back arched. Hips raised.
Offering.
It feels like what it is. No chain. No lock. No barrier but ten feet of open stone. Valiki closed the door, her footsteps receding, and since then it has been me, the smoke and the candles, each one dying at a time. The shadows behind me are moving against the light, not with it.
I note this. My heart is going very fast. The physiological shock I told myself I would manage.
And I am holding the position.
The darkness behind me is shifting. I feel it in my teeth, in the soles of my feet. The remaining candle-flames lean toward me. All of them, at once. I have chosen not to look. I am on my hands and knees facing the wall and whatever is assembling itself in the dark is behind me. I feel the scale that doesn’t fit the room, the weight of something vast.
It has been here the entire time. It has been waiting.
The last candle goes out.
My breathing is audible in the dark. I focus on the stone beneath my palms. I am undone by the anticipation, and there is nowhere to go. There is everywhere to go. The door is ten feet away, unbarred.
I stay.
No theatre. The darkness simply becomes occupied.
The first tendril finds the small of my back.
I yelp, and my arms nearly buckle. It has come from the darkness behind me, settling across my skin with a weight that is cool and cautious, and I feel –
Suction. Small, discrete points line the underside of the tendril in rows. Each one sealing against my skin and pulling, and then releasing and reattaching as it moves. The sensation has no reference point.
Something rhythmic moves beneath its surface. It moves without pause, curving down across my hip, and a second tendril finds my inner thigh before I’ve finished processing the first.
The suction cups seal along the soft skin there. Tasting. The accounts mentioned chemoreception – the creature is reading my skin the way I would read a text. It knows my pulse. It knows my temperature. It knows what my body is doing before I do.
They move higher. The one on my thigh slides inward and I press my knees together. The tendril presses between them, suction cups gripping the sensitive skin where my thighs meet. They don’t force, just… linger.
I am shaking. I could stand. I could leave. I shift my knees apart instead.
One presses between my legs from behind.
I stop breathing.
Broad and smooth on its upper surface. The underside is lined with them – rows of suction cups pressing against me front to back, each one sealing and pulling at the most sensitive skin I have. My elbows buckle. I catch myself and hold.
It rests there a moment, entirely still, and every cup is sealed against me, pulling gently. Tasting.
Then the tip finds me – a cool, insistent pressure at the rim that doesn’t ask so much as announce itself. It slides home with a slow, heavy depth, the suction cups along its length sealing against my internal walls one by one, a sequence of tiny, rhythmic grips that fill me entirely. It is a terrifying, internal occupation.
Then it begins to grind. Slow, forward and back, a rippling wave of grip-and-pull traveling the length of my sex, inside and out. Its rhythm is a will of its own.
Impossible, I think. Impossible.
I feel how wet I already am and something in my chest goes cold. That’s not – it’s the smoke, it’s the warmth, it’s the body responding to stimulus –
One of the suction cups finds me. That specific place. It seals around it and pulls – a focused, rhythmic suction directly on the spot I have only ever found alone in the dark.
My breath goes out in a rush. I drop my head between my arms. I count stones in the floor and the tendril maintains its pace and I think this can’t be happening –
My back arches. My hips press back.
I can’t stop it. My hips drive backward into the contact and I convulse. The sound that comes out of me is muffled, but it forces its way out. It hits the stone walls and comes back to me and I hear what it sounds like.
That is not the sound of someone enduring a cost.
The tendril does not change. The suction cup keeps its seal, rhythmic and precise through the orgasm and past it, into something that makes my head spin. I don’t pull forward. My knees stay where they are, and my hips keep pressing back. I hate that I can’t blame anything but myself – and underneath the hatred is something else I refuse to name.
More of them now.
Two find my breasts where they hang beneath me and I gasp before I can stop it. The suction cups seal around my nipples – each one captured in its own small, focused pull. They begin a slow suction that I feel running down through my chest.
Grip, release.
Other tendrils wrap my ribs, my hips. The suction cups hold me at dozens of points – small grips everywhere. Tasting. Reading. I am jacketed in contact. There is not a place on my torso that is not gripped and pulled and tasted.
The tendril between my legs shifts. The cups release one by one in a receding wave. The tip finds my entrance from behind and presses there.
“Wait -” I say out loud. Almost steady.
The entity does not acknowledge the delay. It continues with the patience of something that has all the time that has ever existed.
You agreed, the scholar says. One night. Every use.
I am wetter than I have ever been in my life and this thing can taste that through every cup still touching me. It is waiting me out with the certainty that I will lose.
And underneath the shock, there is something horrifyingly curious.
My knees are shaking. In the failure of concentration, they shift apart a fraction.
The tip pushes in.
The sharp stretch pulls a cry out of me and it holds there. Just the tip. The smallest suction cups seal against the rim and pull gently outward, easing me open. My knees close again immediately, too late, and I am shaking. The cups pull in slow alternation, coaxing, and the warmth spreads slowly inward.
I become aware in the worst possible way that what I’m feeling is not only a price being paid.
It pushes deeper. The cups seal along my inner walls one by one, a sequence of small focused grips where nothing has ever gripped before. I make a sound with every exhale.
When it reaches full depth, I go silent. Both of them. All the way inside me. Every cup sealed and pulling. Not a single unoccupied inch.
I hold still and I try to find the horror I should be feeling and I find it – it’s there – and right alongside it is something I have no name for that I’ve ever been willing to apply to myself. Something calling this exact moment right.
The thought makes me shudder.
They begin to alternate. One pressing in as the other draws back. I am never empty. What I can manage is apparently all of this because my body is taking all of it and I can hear it. The soft repeated pop of suction cups releasing and resealing with each stroke.
Through the wall between them, I feel them moving against each other. The layered suction of dozens of cups gripping at my inner walls in shifting patterns is something I don’t have the manner to process. My internal muscles are clenching around both of them in long, rolling pulses. Each time I clench, the cups grip harder in response.
I am so full I feel it in my stomach. The cups inside me are pulling from places I didn’t know could feel.
The tendril in my ass is moving with slow precision – the precision that means it knows, has always known. My hips are rolling back to meet each stroke and I cannot stop –
“-gods-“
I hear myself say it. Something cold moves through my chest.
You wanted this. Not the power. Not only the power.
I come with both of them inside me and it is not like the others. It radiates outward in surges that feel like they’re pulling me inside out, my whole lower body seizing inward, contracting around both appendages simultaneously.
I am no longer a scholar observing a cost. I am the cost itself. And I am finally, yet terrifyingly, in agreement with the price.
Something wraps around my waist, heavy and muscular. It pulls – and my hands and knees leave the stone.
The coils shift. They tilt me forward. Both tendrils find me at a completely different angle and I cry out sharply because this angle reaches something that was blocked before. My hands scramble for the coils at my hips and grip them because there is nothing else to hold.
Something is threading through me underneath the physical. The engraving beginning, the leviathan’s biology pressing into the architecture of what I am.
It is not painful. The fact that it isn’t is its own kind of fear.
It moves harder. Each thrust punches the breath out of me. I am moving with it. My fingers are tangled in the coils and I am not pushing them away, I am pulling myself down onto them, and the sounds being punched out of me are short and helpless.
“-yes, there-“
“-don’t stop-“
Each one lands in my own ears like a verdict.
Something thick wraps around my throat. Suction cups sealing against my pulse points, tasting my heartbeat directly. My breath reduces to thin sips. Every stroke is amplified. I hear the sound that comes out of me and it is not a sound of distress.
What is wrong with you, I think.
The tendril slides across my lower lip. It fills my mouth in one smooth slide, stretching the corners of my mouth, the suction cups along its surface sealing against my tongue and palate.
I taste it: mineral and dark, cold water from somewhere down below.
There is not a single opening left. All of them. Simultaneously. Every place filled to capacity, nothing left that is mine to refuse. The tendril in my throat reaches deep enough that swallowing becomes a question.
I make a sound that has no exit. Swallowed by the tendril and tasted by the cups.
Breathe through your nose, the scholar whispers.
I do.
The tendrils in my cunt and my ass keep their rhythm – long, full strokes. The one in my throat holds steady, every cup sealed and tasting. The grip at my throat tightens another fraction and my air gets thinner and everything gets louder.
No thought. No composure. No scholar. Just: full in every opening, suspended in the dark, body clenching in waves I have no say in. I am making sounds around the tendril in my mouth. I know what they mean.
The engraving threads its final reach through the center of me – warm and permanent – and I cannot find the border between being rewritten and being ruined.
The grip at my throat closes. No air. Every muscle locks. The tendrils drive to their full depth and hold – every suction cup sealing simultaneously, pulling inward from every surface at once – and my vision goes white. In that blankness there is only the fullness, and my body seizing around it in waves I cannot count, refusing to let it end.
The one in my throat slides free first. The air that rushes in to replace it is so abrupt I choke on it. My mouth stays open. My tongue is swollen where the cups pulled at it.
Then the coils at my waist begin to loosen. I feel myself tipping downward, the angle shifting. I make an involuntary sound of wanting.
The one in my ass withdraws next. Slowly. Every inch of it, in reverse, the suction cups releasing from my inner walls one by one. The release comes with it, warm and profuse. I shudder through it.
The last one. It takes the longest. The full length of it withdrawing in one long slow drag. I grip the coils, or try to, and my whole body trembles through it until the very last of it slides free.
The coils release. I drop.
Hands hit stone first. Then knees. I am on all fours again – where I started, where I chose to be – and then my arms give and I go down, cheek to the cold floor, hips still raised.
I stay like that.
The cold against my face is a shock I needed. I am wet everywhere. My body conducts its inventory.
My skin is covered in small circular bruises – suction marks, dozens of them, mapped across my breasts, my stomach, my ribs, my throat. Each one a record of where a cup held and tasted. A cartography.
I can feel the shape of what was inside me. The specific absences. I will feel them for some time.
I had imagined standing at the end of this. Composed. The engraving settled inside me and the rest of the night filed away as the cost of something I had wanted badly enough to pay.
I am face-down on stone with my hips in the air, covered in evidence – covered in suction marks that will take a week to fade, mapped across every intimate surface of my body.
I made sounds tonight I will never be able to claim were made under duress.
The trembling moves through me in long waves. I press my cheek harder against the floor and let it. I have no other options.
The engraving didn’t wait for the ritual to conclude. It had already taken root while I was… occupied.
The ability to know, with certainty, when someone is lying. I am already using it on myself.
I know what I wanted tonight. Not the power. Not only the power. The story I have been telling myself – a scholar, a transaction, a calculated cost – has a lie at its center and the thing now living behind my eyes can feel exactly where the lie is.
I wanted to be used. I wanted to be filled and held and taken apart. I have wanted this for longer than I have been willing to look at.
I walked in naked. I knelt. And I stayed. Not because I was brave. Because I wanted it. Because when the first tendril found me and the first suction cup tasted me, something inside me said yes before the intellect had time to say no.
And now I have done it. And now I cannot lie to myself about why.
I press my cheek harder against the floor. My apprentice will come when the light is right. She will see exactly what I look like. She will not say anything.
Until then there is only this – the stone, the cold, the realization of my own self – and the thing now living inside me. It is already reading, already finding every place where I am not telling myself the truth.
Patient.
Already knowing what I wanted.
Already knowing I will want it again.
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