"Nor shall he meanwhile suffer any evil or harm, until he sets foot upon his own land; but thereafter he shall suffer whatever Fates and the dread Spinner spun with their thread for him at his birth, when his mother bore him." Homer's Odyssey 7.195

"Nereis. You conjure me."
Before time. Immortal.
The cyclic churn of
heaven and earth, sky and sea.
Fire and water, day and night.
The yin and yang
of life's collective pulse.

"Lovers, we are. Enemies.
My immortal beloved."
One does not exist without the
other. In this neverending dance
of Life and Death.

Her mouth parted slightly further, the black steel bisecting the view of her lips and chin, not to mention a goodly portion of her throat. She nicked herself, a delicately wrought movement with the knife that was so subtle he might have dreamed it. But when the furl of dark-heart scarlet ran down her chin, he'd know better. She leaned at the waist then and rubbed her messy mouth and chin right up the near to bursting meat of him from root to crown, only to proceed to rub her face all over his crotch. The way animals mark eachother, and their territory by scent. Rubbity rub rub.

Under no compulsory edict of his own however, he did lick his lips. Most especially upon watching the razor tip of steel dance its crimson dance upon her bottom lip. The Metal Worker was none too aware of where his reality and his lucid dreaming may have blurred into one another, if at all. For it seemed that over the past year or so, he had breached the demarcation between the alternate planes quite often enough that he never questioned much in his mind anymore. Another breath sucked inward hitched his chest, for as the woman leaned over his stiffened pike, touching him here and there with her wet bloodied lips he was again wrought with overwhelming prickles along his entire network of nerve endings. Instinctively too, his fingers presently clawed against the floor rose and twined themselves in her mass of dark hair as he gazed down upon the crown of her head.

There was no grace here, no elegant way about it. She did not just go for the easily mouth-able rigid shaft of him. She went everywhere. She mussed him with her wounded lips, she matted the bed of hair at his groin with her blood. And then when he was veritibly soused with streaks of sticky crimson, she glanced up from between his legs and slowly crawled from between them and up his body. Her face was that of a sated larless that was fresh from the feast, her nose, lips and chin awash in blood. Straddling his waist, she whispered, "Nercin vacl... the bath of the gods." With deft ease, she sliced across each of her palms and quickly laid the dagger beside her knee resting at his side. Balling up both fists and reaching out so her hands were just above her face, she let the blood slowly well from between her fingers. It was a startling color, so richly red creasing between pale slender grasp. And when the drops fell, she let them go where they may. His cheeks. His mouth. His chin. It mattered now... her own tongue poked out slightly as if she yearned to catch one of those droplets on her tongue, the way children do when they dance in the rain.

Surely at this point any other fellow would have been considerably spooked. Perhaps freaked to the melting point. Not the everyday little tea chat going on here, and few of his kind would have even gotten purposely within touching distance of this woman to begin with. Even as she crawled into his lap to curl her limbs round his waist, he'd cling to her hair, which was a mass of unkempt wildness by now. Overall, it was not the picture of pure health, this scene. And should anyone have randomly burst in, it might have scared the intruder out of his or her wits. The tip of the woman's tongue was rather like the teasing head of a hith, and though he made slight attempt to pull her by the hair and guide her mouth to his, it was not with enough force to entirely disturb this rather fiendish ritual of hers.

It will change you forever. With the snaring of her disheveled mane, and the soft pressure of his fingers tugging her close, Athamé leaned in and brushed her blood-drizzled mouth to his. Then she did something cruel. So very cruel. She swiped across both his eyes with her coated fingers and gave him a macabre racoon's mask of vitae. For there was far more going on in this firmament of raptured mating between seer and shaman, and so she annointed his eyes so he could he see it. How would the sheering of the two realms appear to him. To her, it had always appeared as if the very world around her blazed to a fiery halocaust, the sky and grasses curling up at the edges like burning paper. Chunks of this ashen remnant would float away, revealling beneath it the gossamer threadwork that lay behind the scenes. It was much like ripping out the upper cover and the basting of a quilt and examining the stitching. How would it appear to him? But no matter how reality melted away from his vision, she would begin to tranform slowly before his eyes.

Instinctively his lids closed as she wiped her bloodied smears across them, and for several moments he'd been reluctant to open them again. Blinded for those brief ehn, his fingers curled down to fists in her skewed locks. It stung. His eyes stung. And for that brevity of lapsed time, it had even made him forget about the painful burn in his one hip where she'd taken a good bite and ingested that little bit of his flesh. Yet in all this, the desire to join mouth to mouth had not diminished one iota. Very slowly then his lids peeled apart, to reveal a blurred world stained red. The woman curled round him transposed behind this crimson film into a completely obscene and prurient deviation of beauty. I am burned... my eyes... burned.


Nais. The waifish Seer was the embodiment of that elemental diety, her corporeal husk encompassing one-third of the trinity of possibilities. Her abilities found their foundation in water. Her scrying pool. Her bloody omens. Her way of weaving dreams, and the metamorphisis was as slow to surface as it would be for Vedric's vision to clear. A blue line bled from beneath her eye, rounded it and spread like wild-fire along her skin. And delicately, a curly cue tatoo lightly would down one cheek. Her eyes actually colorized, for all their pitchy black, but then that blue color seemed to want to everywhere, even if it was to make sapphire out of obsidian. And most amazing of all, was where she'd smeared blood on him, he was glowering like a bed of banked coals. Even the small bloody fingerprints where she'd rested her hand at his side were like tiny demon tears. Fiery lttle flame petals as if his flesh was melting away for good. And now, she took her bloody palms and started coating him, beginning with his chest, and more than covering him up with blood, it seemed she was carressing him until he literally burned. Hallucination? It had to be.

Nereis. It was as if he were coming alive for the first time, from an aeon spent in limbo. Not only did his eyes burn. But his flesh did too. There seemed to arise from him a hissing noise, though no longer from a pent breath expelled between clenched teeth... but almost as if the touch of moisture conflicted, convoluted his searing heat. His own vision remained red through its bloodied film... or perhaps he was seeing her now through a haze of umber red flame. You conjure me. His own mouth twisted into a slight grin that vanished just as quickly, while the woman turned him into a fingerpaint canvas of bright red artwork.

So, frightfully symbiotic, they were two opposing electrons captured in the nucleus of an atom, and then everything flickered and it was only Athamé washing Vedric down with her bloody hands, she straddling his body in the most carnal of ways. She leaned down, flattening the cush of full breasts against him and desperately sank her lips to his. She worked for this one, suckling, tugging, lapping him at the corner of his mouth. And tranferred the ceremonial dagger into one of his hands. The fall of her hair was a dark backdrop, a shadowy canopy for this feverishly deep kiss that did not smack of wanting to get off, but more.. wanting to get in.

Her initial kiss was broken after the first few licks, though a scant fraction of a hort lay in the chasm between. And between the few breaths, his gaze dropped from her eyes to her bloodied maw. Fingers still tightly woven, tangled in her hair... he pulled her back to him, sealing that communion... til it was broke again... and the ceremonial blade transferred from hand to hand... hers to his. It was the first time he had actually touched this blade. Not even crossing this line when she had brought it to him, expecting him to handle it once before in the heat of a forge. For a moment, he'd merely studied its weighted tang. The slender feel of its ancient design. And it was a good feel. A right feel. In his hand. Vedric took hold of one of her wrists and drew her injured palm upward, where he pressed his lips to her bloodied cut and allowed them to linger for just a few moments' time. And then he mimicked her, drawing the knife's razored tip diagonally across his own calloused palm. First one, then its mate. With nary a flinch of pain or the least hesitation.

It was amazing how a shank of steel was the quintessence of trust, the pith and seedlings of Athamé's soul. She hadn't any reservations about placing the blade in the metal worker's care, and dark eyes flicked to study how his thick fingers embraced its hilt. There was simple artistry in the tensions of his hold, how he seemed to adjust the angle of his wrist to the distribution of the weapons weight. Could an oracle be spellbound? Perhaps. She was deeply moved and on the tail of that meaty emotion, came the prickly sparks of excitement. Her belly actually clenched with her sudden ravenous hunger. It only increased watching him slice each palm, baptizing her dagger with an offering of blood and tingly sharp pain. Rising a hort from where their mouths, she stared into him, riding the darker steel of his iris down into a cork-screw spiral that led into the eternal black void of his pupils.

Following this slicing of his palms, he did the unthinkable. The blade's hilt was deftly turned round with the flick of a wrist, as if he knew this dagger on intimate terms. And it's sharply honed tip was dragged over his left pectoral, diagonally and right across his nipple where his heart pounded to some tribal beat below the flesh. And there it seemed as her gaze locked to his, held for those few fleeting moments, spellbound. His belladonna stare still quite dilated, as if beneath the influence of some potent narcotic. A long slow breath expelled now, between his parting lips. The blade was laid aside, slowly set to the edge of her thigh and left to balance there. And he held open his bleeding palms, fresh with their obscene stigmata. My blood I give freely to thee, my seraph. My Nereis. Atham... my soul and my conscience.

She did not wince to see him cut into himself, from point-to-point-to-point. If he were opening those gashes so that she might embalm herself on his thick, rich blood... she was in Zion. A heartland cordoned off from all reality, where this mating ritual melded effortlessly into the scheme of things. Athamé couldn't take her eyes from him. She never wanted to shut her eyes of this beautiful beautiful brute. She wanted to be cut to cut with him, so her smaller hand slid with obvious relish against his, slowly pairing up until their wounds were aligned. Her fingers dipped easily between the cracks of his and they were so bound, yet in another way. She was too high on his body to suckle from what he offered so she scooted down down down, until his cock had grooved between her soft pink netherlips. And I .. sip you, swallow you, so that you heal me. Live in me. My god, my Prometheus.. my need.
Her silky mouth sealed over his cut and she drew on it, milking it.

In this half-tango with fingers laced, he stretched out his arms with hers and pulled her close. Closer still. Once she mounted his still stiff pike and her mouth closed soft upon his severed flesh, he dropped his head back slowly, losing his gaze somewhere to the ceiling of her chamber before his lids sank closed once more over his scarlet painted eyes. Beneath her where he still sat with his limbs folded one over the other in their lotus, he was not much in a position to thrust himself more deeply into her body. Nor was there any urgency to alter this present state. It was her dance, afterall. The Seer's primal dance. The one without shame and without regret. The one that opened her up to bestial drives, devoid of conventional control or inhibition. Vedric was on fire again, from head to toe, from the inside out. As passion coursed through him in this Binding ritual. It's fever no less pitched than it had been that fateful night many moons ago, when he'd laid her to the raw earth with its upturned sod ... and slowly raped her.