Lying flat on her back against the altar, the backs of her legs and arms quickly growing numb from the stone's cold, Ardan could see nothing at all above or around her but her husband's dark and shapeless form. It was like waking up in Mistress Izun's yurt in the depths of the night after the fire had gone out: the darkness was so thick that it was almost tangible, like you would feel cloth or leather if you reached out into it, like your whole body was wrapped in a sheet of darkness that separated you from your surroundings as physically as a shroud. She had once heard a young wife describe her first night with her husband by saying that he had loomed over her, that he had become her sky and horizon like her own enclosed world, but she doubted that that young wife had meant it so literally as what she was experiencing now. The Shadow Lord was her world, was a shroud like the dome of the sky over and around her, separating her with his unknowable mass from the rest of the room. Above her - perhaps a foot or perhaps five feet above, it was impossible to judge the distance - were his round, sunset-orange eyes. They were as expressionless as twin suns, too, perfectly round and unchanging, not blinking like the eyes of a human nor shifting and narrowing in curiosity and thought. She did not see how she could judge what her new husband was thinking through them.

But she did think she could gauge something of his thoughts through his limbs. There were many of them - were they legs, or arms, or tentacles like those of the dead and dried sea creatures that had been given to her father as curiosities by a trader who had been to the far-off coast? They were growing more adventurous now as the seconds lengthened, they were sliding up her arms and across her legs, prodding delicately between her fingers and across the edges of her fingernails, pressing against the bones of her ankles and knees and elbows. She could even feel one wafting gently over her hair. She strained her eyes, trying not to move her head and disturb him but hoping to see something of how those many limbs were moving. They were no longer as hesitant, as - as fearful as the first one had been when she had taken it like a proffered hand. But was it accurate to think of them as fearful or shy in the first place? Was it accurate to imagine that they were growing more confident, more curious and less hesitant now? She knew from her years under Mistress Izun's tutelage that it was unwise to imagine that gods possessed the same emotions as humans or animals. There was no reason for her to assume that the Shadow Lord's first flinch away from her had been shyness: it could have been a spasm of muscle newly created from the nothingness of his shadows. It might be folly to imagine that his sudden expanding when she had recoiled from him was the product of being startled: he might just as easily have been threatening her not to leave. And now it was wrong to believe that these longer touches of his limbs were signs of confidence. No one had said that her husband would want to treat her as human husbands treat their wives. What if he was preparing to strangle her and eat her dead body? She felt her heart, still thudding frantically in her chest, stutter with terror at the thought. She did not want to die here, she did not want her body and soul to be consumed by this otherworldly entity far away from the Great Sky. She did not...

A tugging at her sides and shoulders told her that her new husband was pulling on the ties of her robe. Another thrill of fear shuddered through her: he was going to take off her robe and she was going to be naked before him. This at least was to be expected even by the wives of human husbands. She'd often thought how lucky she was that she would never have to appear naked before a man she did not know or trust. She'd have laughed at the cruel irony of the situation if she could find enough breath inside her lungs. She could hear her quick, unsteady breaths in her ears, the sound bouncing off of the shadowy mass that enclosed her, as the ties around her hips slackened and fabric of the robe slid down across her skin. The frigid air around her husband struck her midline like a lash when the robe parted, then settled across a quickly broadening swath of her front. Her throat, her breastbone, her stomach and abdomen, her newly hairless pubic mound and her thighs - then her collarbones and shoulders, her breasts, her ribs and her hips and legs. Goosebumps ran down her like waves across the grass of the steppe before the wind, prickling her arms and legs and pebbling her nipples until they were hard. She wanted to roll over and hide herself, to pull the robe securely around herself again and veil the shame of her body reacting outside her control, to put on the mask of a Wise Woman again and pretend to be almost as inhuman and sexless as her husband. But she could not, she could not hide - and now the long, lithe limbs had slid the robe off of her arms and revealed her completely, and the wide, expressionless eyes stared down at her without shame or pity or fondness. Now one, now two and three limbs were touching her abdomen: she gasped aloud before she could muffle herself to feel the sudden living heat of them against her freezing skin. She had never been touched like this before, never lain still for another to touch her for the sole purpose of feeling. The priestesses had bathed her less than two hours ago and Mistress Izun had given her her own harsh, ritual baths after each menstruation cycle and her own mother had washed and clothed her when she had been very small - but none of it, nothing had ever felt like this. There was no purpose to the dark limbs' movements, no goal except to touch and feel and explore. One skittered across the flat plane of her belly, dipping for a fraction of a second into the shallow depression of her navel; one slid horizontally down the curve of a rib and one played across the vertical line of her entire ribcage like someone playing a stringed instrument. One pressed gently against her stomach, making her breathe in sharply to meet the pressure; one tickled underneath and around the soft curves of her breasts, raising even more sensitive goosebumps. One reached downwards and ghosted across her legs and made her toes curl. Her hand was squeezing the limb that still lay quietly under it, her short nails starting to dig into its shadowy flesh out of the need of her twanging nerves. Her other hand lay by her side against the cold stone altar, her half-numb hand balled into a fist. Her pulse hammered in her wrists, she saw ghostly spots in the darkness that she knew had nothing to do with the amorphous mass of her husband's body. She was terrified and overly-sensitized and not at all certain how to react. Her husband was continuing to be gentle, slow, almost loving - but she was braced for the moment when that would all end.