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Enosh
Throughout my existence, I had stood in valleys now covered in water and climbed mountains now crumbled. I had conversations with kings surrounded by riches and beggars rotting in rags. I had seen the sky on fire and the seas turn to endless ice.
Decades. Centuries. Eons.
Never before had I had a wife.
A mortal so selfless and true, she’d negotiated with a god to gain rot for those children she’d never birthed. Little over a month with Ada, and she conflicted everything that had been true to me for two hundred years.
It did nothing to cure my obsession.
I lounged on my throne, one leg perched over its armrest, watching my wife with utter fascination. How she gingerly trailed the hairs of the brush over a young blossom, the lack of a chain allowing her to turn the throne room into a garden of thorns and roses. More curious was how she grabbed the next brush from Orlaigh’s rot-speckled hands with not a trace of disgust stalling the movement.
The strangest flutter came to my chest, touching me in a place where I ought to be numb. Ah, my little one called me heartless, the world I had created cruel; yet it had produced a woman so at ease around the remnants of death, she had begged me for rot instead of fainting at the sight of it.
A most perfect mate.
My woman, my wife.
My queen?
“You may leave us, Orlaigh.” I rose and descended the dais, only to sit beside Ada and glimpse into the depleting oils. “My little one is ru
Her eyes remained fixed on the sway of yet another vine, but it didn’t escape me how her blue eyes flicked to me for a fraction of a moment. “Don’t bother sending the old woman for more. I’ll run out of canvas even sooner.”
Ah, my mouthy wife and her snarky remarks, pointing out the lack of bone at any opportunity that presented itself. Whatever her simple upbringing, when it came to convincing me to open my gates, she lacked no ambition.
I hooked a finger underneath her chin, bringing her mouth close enough to mine that I sensed the heat of our lips merge. “There are always the bridges.”
“And leave our child with nothing to paint on once he’s old enough? Whatever will he do all day?”
“Perhaps I will take pity on a corpse outside and turn it into a doll.”
“Bone cradle, skin tunics… heavens, an arm to play stick and hoop, and someone’s skull for a rattle. That has to take at least three.” Her eyes ensnared mine with stomach-fluttering intensity. “Taking pity on one simply won’t be enough.”
An unexpected laugh escaped me, no matter the somber truth of her words. “Ah, I am gaining the sense that my wife will not stop pestering me.”
“A husband’s lot until he dies.” She shrugged, chewing down a self-satisfied grin. “Or in your case, for eternity.”
Mmm, such was the ignorance of her mortal mind. She didn’t understand that I favored an eternity plagued by her ambition over a single stroke of time without her by my side.
I raked my fingers along the back of her neck and into the warm weight of her tresses to cup her head. “Ought we to negotiate anew? Your silence on the matter in exchange for three corpses?”
“You haven’t been around a lot of women if you think a woman’s silence comes so cheap.”
“I have not.” I brushed my lips along the corner of her mouth. “You are only the second living woman I have touched, yet you are second to none.”
Her heart gave a single, out-of-rhythm beat as she blinked up at me. “Sometimes you say the nicest things when you’re not busy threatening to throw me onto a pile of corpses.”
“My pleasure.”
There was a faint scoff. “I’m not sure I have anything left to offer.”
“Start with a kiss.”
Her lips tingled so nicely as she wet them in anticipation. Her mouth brushed over mine, letting my pulse quicken alongside hers. I shared in this sense of weakness claiming our muscles as our faces drifted together. Breaths mingled. Lips co
And yet…
A single muscle tensed at the back of her neck as it often did whenever we touched, refusing to ease on its own, no matter how I stroked, caressed, thumbed—no, it remained stiff and stubborn, a manifestation of her unyielding mind, turning our kiss stale against my tongue.
My thoughts wandered back to how she’d pushed me away at the tavern; her beautiful eyes filthed with the promise that she will never have affection for me. Something utterly inconsequential to a god, and it shouldn’t bother me so.
So why did it?
We’d come to an arrangement, hadn’t we? My little one had given me her vow to remain by my side, to always return to it. With loneliness banished, what else was there to want?
Nothing.
No, nothing.
Except, perhaps… her mouth straining on the thickness of my flesh, while my cock fucked the back of her throat until that cursed muscle gave.
“Open your mouth, little one.” Fist curling in her hair, I pushed her head down while taking myself out with the other hand. “Take me between your lips and suck. Mmm, yes… like that.”
Oh, what a dutiful little wife she proved to be, ru
“Yes, ah, you do this so well, my precious wife,” I moaned, caressing her hair and the shell of her ear in the way that never failed to soften her. “Take me deeper. Mmm, so perfect.”
She swallowed my cock in greedy gulps, letting her lips run over the thick veins feeding my shaft, only for a new rush of blood to swell them further. My crown imprinted itself at the very end of her, a mere finger-width from a muscle that… would… not… give.
The way I gripped her hair tighter barely eased the heated itch around my knuckles as I pushed her head down, feeding her thrust after thrust of my hips. Little coughs tingled around my crown—more intense when her throat clenched—letting my testicles rise with my approaching release.
Gripping myself at the base, I pulled her mouth off me, watching how rope after rope of seed splattered onto her face. It caught on her lashes, painted her pink lips, and dripped down from the tip of her nose as I held her still.
Ada glanced up at me from glistening eyes. The harder her cunt throbbed, the more her diaphragm tightened. Nothing but a spreading extension of that knot in her neck, refusing her complete surrender to us. And what was it to me, a god? Was my wife not mine, married and oh-so perfectly marked with my seed?
“You did well.” A knuckle cracked as I eased my hand from her hair and pulled her up for a kiss, tasting myself on her lips. “Go to your room and clean yourself up. Choose a book while I wash in the spring, and I shall bring you release upon my return, then I shall read to you. Go!”
As she stumbled to her feet and then down the dais, I willed the muscle in her neck to surrender. I made what she failed to do on her own, what I could not inspire, the act leaving me dull and tired.
I shucked off my shirt, letting it drop to the dais as the leather around my legs turned to the finest powder waiting on my command, then headed toward the spring.
The moment I entered the cave, warm moisture settled on my cheeks, the air woven with traces of salt and minerals from the mountain in which the Pale Court sat. A welcome change to the staleness of ash clinging to my skin, which faded as I sunk into the hot water. It would return soon—it always did; a constant reminder of the pain I’d endured.
Sudden coldness gripped the surrounding stone as a familiar voice whispered, “Enosh…”
I might have been immortal, but even I shuddered when Eilam loomed over my shoulder. “Yarin had an excuse but, if I remember correctly, I owe you nothing.”
“Aside from an apology.” Eilam stripped from a threadbare tunic that must have been centuries old, slipped into the water, and tilted his head back to soak his eerily white hair. “You stole the mortal woman from underneath me, turning her final breath into one of many more to come.”
My muscles tightened. “What is it to you?”
“There ought to be—”
“Balance!” Yarin emerged from the corridor with the gutted corpse of a man shuffling beside him, wedging a sigh from me. “How blessed I am to arrive at such time where I can listen to Eilam’s awe-inspiring lecture on balance. On my word, it gets more exciting with each century he repeats… Oh, are we bathing? I love to bathe!”
My temples already ached at his grinding chatter, but they pounded when he slipped out of his boots. “I do not recall inviting either of you.”
Eilam stared at how pearls of water ran down his arm, my brother so wholly unaccustomed to his form, something so simple as water ru
My molars ground together. “Are you threatening my wife?”
“Enosh!” Yarin gave an exasperated gasp. “I believe he just threatened your wife.”
“Death threatens your wife.” Eilam gave a lazy shrug. “She is only mortal, after all. Nothing but flesh and thought and breath. Insignificant.”
I gripped his hair and pushed his head underwater, letting the splash of droplets mingle with Yarin’s chortle. Bracing against the way Eilam struggled and fought, I hooked a leg around his, ripping him off balance, only to watch my brother drown. As equal as we were in strength, Eilam had the dexterous development of a child.
Only when he expelled his final breath and drifted seemingly lifeless on the surface did I let go. “Why are you here? Again?”
Yarin huffed. “Is that a way to welcome your favorite brother?”
“A thoroughly high-handed statement.”
“Considering that Eilam is currently drifting on the water, thinking he’s dead where he ca
I didn’t so much see the man’s guts dangling from a gaping wound in his belly, but sense how it bounced and twisted with every shift in his balance. “You broke it.”
“I broke it,” he said, his tone void of any culpability over it. “Luckily, I happen to have a brother who can fix—”
“No.”
“—and I happen to know that I am his favorite, so he would never deny me this small favor.”
“No.”
“Your wife is quite right… What a bastard you are,” he said and leaned his head back against the edge, expelling a breath toward the gray stalactites looming above. “Let me tell you, Enosh, I am no man of casual infatuations, but I have grown quite fond of this one ever since Airensty.”