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"Now, my lady," said the priestess. "You will come to no harm. You will suffer no pain. But please, only do not offend him."

The words were probably not as comforting as the priestess meant them to be. She could only imagine what the bride was going through, so suddenly brought to the temple, bathed, anointed with scented oils, prayed over for nearly three hours, and now escorted to the chamber of her husband, the Lord. The priestess had never even been alone with him, much less touched him, but she had faith in the benevolence of the Lord all the same.

One could only imagine that such faith wouldn't be of much comfort to an outsider.

The Lord dwelled in the top of the tower, alone, as always. That would change soon, as would he. They stopped before the grand white doors, where the priestesses all said one more prayer together, then opened the door and ushered Ardan inside.

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He seemed mostly fascinated in touching her, in as much as something faceless and inexpressive as he was could seem any particular way at all. He left one tendril to her grasp as others formed, still careful as could be as they slid over her body. There were so many things to touch on a human. The hands, the arms, the soft hair haloed around her head, her legs, her robe...

Two smaller, more precise tendrils prodded at her robe, seeking how it functioned to cover her. Her skin was warm and soft and unlike anything he'd ever felt-- fire was warm, but it burned to touch it. Her warmth felt good, tempted him to enjoy more.

Even in his haste to pull her robe apart and place his first tendrils against the bare skin of her stomach, he took it slow. He must be slow, the priestesses all told him, slow and delicate. It would not do to harm his Bride, no matter how eager he may feel to pour himself within her, to change for her, to form his unsculpted essence into something inspired by her.

With some fiddling, he pulled away the fabric of her robe and set to tracing the shape of her body, its resemblance to what they taught him.

It was a word they used sometimes, and one of the priests had used it with regards to her earlier. He did not know what it meant, but he remembered it, and he connected it with the sight of her lying beneath him. She was beautiful.

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.

As far back as he could remember, his world has been nothing but this room, cold, hard stone. But she was soft and warm and unlike anything he's ever come into contact with. He could very easily amuse himself with fascinated touches all day. But there was a task to be done, and the priestesses told him not to tarry too long. Though he did not understand the idea of fear, they told him his bride might have it, and the sooner he could allay such a thing, the better.

A tendril around her leg pulled itself free from her thigh and he chose it to begin the more intimate ritual. Now that her robe was off, she better resembled the diagrams they'd schooled him with. Between her thighs, he recognized the anatomy of a human woman, as they'd showed him, and he recalled what he was meant to do.

The tendril was slow and tentative as it settled against her pubic mound, as they warned him it was a sensitive place. He must be even more delicate with her here. With a few wriggles, he felt out the lay of things, the entrance to her body. Gently, gently, gently. He thinned the tendril a bit and as carefully as a virginal man might test a finger, he pressed only an inch or so inside her.

Such warmth. Such softness. He could already feel the energy within her, stirred up by the ritual thus far. In joining with her, her holy transformation into the Vessel would be complete, and he could begin his own transformation. He moved slowly, pressing a little deeper inside before sliding back out again, his immense strength held back to little more than a thread as he eased her into the claiming.

Whatever happened, she told herself, she had to stay calm. Whatever was going on around her, whatever the entity to whom she was married was about to do to her, she had to lie still and remain compliant. she repeated the thought, the command as a litany in her mind. Be calm, do not fight, be calm, do not cry out, be calm, do not run, be calm, be calm, be calm...

But it was a battle against her instincts. Every inch of her, every tiny cell in her body that had evolved from those of the primitive proto-humans who had fled from wild animals and survived the cruelties of nature was commanding her to get up and run. To escape this gigantic predator that had sunk down on top of her and was prodding at her vulnerable body. Her legs were shaking with the compulsion, her fingers twitched convulsively, her stomach seemed to writhe within her like its own trapped creature. She was breathing in deep, silent gasps like one who was running, exhausting herself just from the effort of staying still. Her back and the backs of her arms and legs were quite numb from the frigid stone but her front felt overheated, steamed as if she had been leaning over a boiling cooking pot for too long. She could feel sweat on her forehead that made her body shiver all the more with cold.

But the effort of controlling her own body was as nothing compared to the concentration with which she was spending on him. She was so blinded by his ethereal shroud of darkness hovering just above her face that she could hardly tell that her eyes were open; but her other senses were sharpened to keenest needles in her desperation to decipher what he was doing. The sensations she was feeling against her skin were truly bizarre: there were more long limbs smoothing across her arms and legs and whispering over her torso and caressing her sides than any man had; she had lost count of how many there were among the tapered tips and heavy, lithe sections that she could only call his "arms" in her head. They did not feel like a man's arms, either: for all that she had never been touched like this before she knew that no human's body felt like this. They were covered in skin much like hers, it was true - the flesh was smooth and supple and yielding like that of a man in his prime, and it was hairless like a man's underarms or palms; and underneath the skin was the unmistakable definition of muscle, tougher than flesh or fat but much more pliant and elastic than bone; and all of it was warm, alive and solid. But that was where the similarities to the human body ended. There was no shape to the appendages that writhed and curled around her, no defined wrists or arms or thighs or fingers. They were just - long, muscular tubes, thicker and stronger toward one end and tapered off in a single tip toward the other. There was no joint or bone within them: they were uniformly, infinitely flexible strands of flesh. Even a serpent has a backbone, a head and a jaw, some definable features to give it a beginning and an end; her new husband had none of that. Above her was the mass of shadow that seemed to make up the better part of his body, so close and dark that she could not even see it move; on top of her torso was the weight of those indefinable coils of muscle, pressing down just lightly enough to allow her to breathe; at her limbs and the outlines of her body were the softly tickling tips, busily and unendingly moving against her. His body did not smell like that of a human, even when one limb brushed past the side of her face; there was no sweat or musk or even the unnatural scent of oils that men sometimes used to improve their appearance at their weddings. She could smell only the faint whiff of wax from the candles around the circumference of the altar, although those were entirely outside her sight now that her world was comprised only of the space beneath the shroud of his shadows. And as absent as the smell of him was the sound of him, for she could hear neither the sound of his breath nor the creaking of joints as he shifted his weight to touch her. There was only the sound of her own quick breaths and the smell of the soaps and oils used to prepare her as a bride. Nothing at all but her own body and a few alien pieces of her husband.

Suddenly there was a movement among the random, languorous movements of his limbs. She could not see it, but she could feel in the heat and weight removed from her leg that one of the long tentacles was moving. She braced herself to feel it settle again, perhaps against her face or across her chest, though her body was already so tightly braced that she could hardly become any stiffer -only to jump with a muffled gasp when it settled low on her abdomen, its tip touching against the mound of skin where her legs met. Her heart picked up speed from its already frenetic pace, beating so quickly that her chest ached and the black world before her eyes seemed to swim.

Slowly, methodically, the tip of the limb slithered down her pubic mound, slipping easily into the tight space between her clenched thighs. She could feel its progress as a thin trail of heat, like dripping hot water from the bath down her dry body. It insinuated itself into that space and stroked the silken, vulnerable flesh, sketched out the shape of her, smoothing down the press of her thighs and then curving back up to touch her sex. Her hands clenched hard at the strange tickling sensation; her teeth ground together but she did not dare move. It was caressing the cleft of her now, finding where she could be opened and pushing gently but irresistibly inward, forcing her thighs apart to accommodate its narrow shape. It parted her carefully, its movements slow and delicate. It stroked the smooth, still dry walls of her outer labia, a minute line of tickles further inward. She swallowed hard, battling hard against the urge to jerk away. It found the closed shell of her inner labia, ghosted its thin, exploring tip against the heated flesh - her fingernails bit hard into her own palms - and then pushed on, ever in toward her center. It caressed her here, too, on the soft inside of her final defenses, trailing random patterns of sensation across hot, living tissue. And then it was at the core of her, the tight ring of muscle that already convulsed minutely from the stimulation. A languid, gentle last push, a bizarre sensation as the limb seemed to narrow and shrink against her - and then the limb was penetrating inside of her body.

Ardan's eyes were wide above the moving tentacles, staring into the nothingness above and around her, her body as unmoving and immovable as a stone. She had sucked in a gasp of frigid air and had not let it out; her sides and chest were quite still and her legs were pressed hard together. She could feel her husband touching her all over, on every part of her body, inside her body, an invasion for all that it was not brutal or bloody. Her thighs were squeezing against the length of tentacle pressing down between them, her knees were slightly raised and her feet were planted against the smooth stone altar. She could feel more keenly than she had felt anything in her life the narrow tentacle sliding its way inside her, pushing her open so that its heat mingled and sparked with her heat and the tight muscles inside of her pulsed against it. She could feel it as it pushed in, withdrew... pushed in again, inevitable. Her hips pressed flat against the altar, the muscles of her belly stretched taut. Unbidden, she let out a soft, keening moan.

The motion began tentatively, gentle pumping in and out of her as they both got used to the sensation. He found it more fascinating than arousing, at this point, though it stirred something in him that he'd never encountered before-- some warmth he could not give a name to, some blooming thing in the depths of his being that he couldn't identify, but that he wanted to understand. And she did not seem to be in pain (the priestesses explained to him the signs.) Tense and still, yes, resembling the stone even in her softness and warmth, but the noise she made... they did not tell him about that noise.

He pulled her knees apart, only slightly, so that he could witness it. The sight of his limb thrusting inside of her. It got easier, little by little, her body making way for him, to where he experimented with widening the tendril, though only a little at a time. She could not feel what he could, the essence within her that he could now sense, as though he'd uncovered it buried inside her. It would feel no different than the air leaving her lungs after a yawn as he sampled it, taking it within himself as he continued to pleasure her, and restored nearly as quickly as a breath. His first taste of his Vessel-Bride's purest nature, that which would transform him from the morass of darkness into... into...

He must finish the ritual first. Excited as he was, it would do no good to hurry into the process, lest he lose his concentration and come out like some... well. He could not get any less formed. He would contemplate on it as he watched his pretty wife reacting to his ministrations.

It felt so strange, this thing her husband was doing to her, unbelievably, unspeakably strange. Ardan had imagined what it might feel like to make love with another person: she knew the mechanics of it from her work with Mistress Izun and felt no shame in experimenting with it herself. But her brief forays into sex had been nothing like this, like coupling with another. This was submitting her body to another being, another entity whose thoughts she could not know and whose actions she could not predict. She lay still and stiff on the altar, on this forced bed of rituals she could not understand to a being that she could not trust, and felt her most vulnerable parts bared to him.

She tensed as husband thrust in, the muscle of her straining against unaccustomed pressures. There was a weight on top of her, it pushed her against the stone of the altar; her entrance clenched around him. As he pulled out the pressure was released, her muscles relaxed - only for him to thrust in again. It did not hurt, exactly, not enough to make her gasp or cry out. It ached, a vague, flat pain inside of her as she stretched around the intrusion. It felt strange, felt wrong, like a seal had been broken, like the boundaries of her body had been invaded. Her hips rocked slowly against the polished stone beneath her; the nails of one hand bit hard into the tentacle it was still unconsciously gripping. She took deep breaths against the rhythm - expand her chest and inhale as he entered her, exhale as he pulled away. Inhale - and exhale, inhale - and exhale.

And then a new sensation was growing inside of her, a gentle deflating that had nothing to do with her breathing. It was as if something was trickling out of her body, not air, but -

- But then it was back again. Some reserve inside of her had been topped up again, something indescribable had been put back together. The invasion of her body had not stopped, but something else...

Another rush of pressure, a strain, an ache. He was pushing in farther, her body was yielding to more of him. A withdrawl, a contracting. Another thrust -

"A-ah!"

Her hips jumped; her heart stuttered in its beating from the pain as her hymen broke. She shut her eyes, though this did not change the quality of the utter darkness around him. She must relax, relax and breathe through it. Her husband would not want her to cry out.

Pain. That was pain. He slowed suddenly, orange eyes shifting in the mass as though tilting his head at her. They said it might hurt her a bit, but he had no hope of telling if it was the correct kind of pain or not.

Still, though he slowed, he did not stop, continuing to move in and out of her while his other tendrils touched her. Something was stirring within him. Her essence, mingling with his own, already doing things to him. He'd never known sensations like this. Never known any sensations at all, really, but it felt as though some new thing was forming within him, like a pearl forms within an oyster (a metaphor he would not understand at all.) He was gaining things. After an existence marked by nothing but absorbing what he was told, things were happening inside him on their own.

The ritual was nearly finished. He need only... well. They said there would come a point when her body would "climax," though he had no idea what that meant. Only that it would provide him more of her essence and seal their bond as husband and wife, that he might begin to change. But he was already changing. How would he know when he was through?

One new change rumbled from deep within the mass, suddenly. It started as low as a cat's purr, then grew into an almost moaning roar. The utter silence of the Lord shattered as his new voice erupted from within, grew to nearly ear-piercing volume, then broke away. He looked almost startled by it, slowing his thrusts again for a moment. The orange eyes blinked for the first time. Then his tendrils lifted her hips, tilting her body for an easier entrance to continue taking her.

She was breathing in gasps, quick and arrhythmic, no longer able to hold on to the beat that she had forced herself into. Her breath was being forced out of her by his thrusts, as the weight of his tentacles moving on her abdomen and chest pinned her down with each stroke into her. She could not get enough air to fill her lungs, she knew she was going to start hyperventilating and the muscles inside of her were raw and sore from the broken seal of her hymen. She could feel the stickiness of blood mixing with the strained slickness inside of her, the wetness he had forced forth when he had touched and caressed her. It hurt and...

...And suddenly he was slowing. The limb still pushed itself inside of her, still stretched her in ways that made her ache, but - he was slower, gentler once again. Her eyes slid open. Above her, within the dome of his shadows that made up her entire world, she could see the big, emotionless orange circles of his eyes. They were at an angle, cocked the way one might cock one's head out of curiosity. She'd seen him do this before, but she had not been sure then if he really had been feeling any emotion so human as curiosity then. She gulped in a breath of air gratefully as he slid out of her, let her hips and thighs relax slightly toward the altar beneath her while his tentacle was not forcing them upward at an angle. She breathed deeply, staring up at the eyes that really did look like they were curious about something. What was he wondering about? What had made him look this way at her? What had made him slow down? Was it that she had cried out - that she was in pain?

She gasped through her teeth again as he thrust inward, renewing the pressure. Her hips canted upwards, her toes and fingers curled as the girth of his limb passed through the raw muscle of her entrance and sank in, rubbing against the sore remains of her hymen and opening her more and more deeply. She latched her fingers around the tentacle that still lay under her hand. She was not certain if it was meant to be comforting her, or even if she'd hurt him by digging her fingernails into its smooth, black flesh. She was not certain if he would take kindly to her moving it, or if he would take her direction as an affront and start hurting her again for it. But he might be curious about her, and so she had to try. She let her knees close briefly as he slid out of her once more, the lithe shadow-flesh and muscle more easily out past her inner labia. She moved her hand to try and lift the tentacle -

When the rumbling started. Out of nowhere, out of everywhere at once, all around her tiny world made up of his shadows, a low, thrumming sound. It reverberated through the stone altar, reverberated through her flesh, made her already hard nipples pebble and her throat work to swallow. It vibrated against her back, her legs, through her hips, made her pelvis thrum as he began the long thrust back inside of her. His tentacle was humming with the reverberation, her body was moving in counterpoint, her muscles pulsed and vibrated minutely against him as he penetrated her. She was pinned down under his weight, the rumbling was getting louder, louder, it was hurting her ears; his limb was pushing into her until her muscles stretched and screamed against him, her entrance fluttered around him and she was helpless against the wrench of pain it caused inside. She lifted her hand from the tentacle that she had been holding and was about to strike it hard with the palm of her hand to make him stop -

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the noise stopped. She stared up at the orange eyes above her, frightened of the sheer size of her husband, the fact that a mere noise from him could have hurt her. Her hips flattened briefly against the altar again as he pulled out of her but her heart continued to pound, her breathing was still uneven and her body remained taut. Had he been rebuking her for trying to move him? Had he wanted her to continue to lie still until he was finished with her?

But then the huge orange eyes blinked. She would have assumed she was imagining it, had her senses not been sharpened to a needlepoint on his every movement: just for a fraction of a second the eyes had gone dark against his shadow, then in the next fraction of a second they had popped into existence again, sunset orange. He had blinked his eyes, like a living human. She tensed again he gave another thrust inwards, rocking her hips back with momentum, opening her for him by another tiny, aching measure. Then she gasped aloud as two other tentacles wrapped their smooth muscle around her hips and tilted them up, canting her back at a sharper angle, lifting her legs so that they were spread wide and her feet hung in the air. She could see where their bodies connected now over the plane of her body; the tentacle shone with her wetness as it slipped halfway out. When it thrust in again it moved faster, deeper: she threw her head back against the altar with a soft cry as the soreness inside of her flared from the friction. She wanted him to stop, wanted to tell him he was hurting her in words he would understand.

Breathing hard, she lay her hand back on the tentacle that she had been gripping. Gently, carefully, she wrapped her fingers around it; if he would let her, she would begin to lift it and move it down her body. She stared up into his eyes, biting her lip as another thrust rocked through her. She spoke in a breathless whisper.]

Ah- Please...?

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A month late. But HELLO

OHAI. Not to worry, I'm happy to tag whenever we get the chance!

should be back to a more consistent schedule here now!

Aaand now it's my turn to be a bit late! Apologies, the end of term slowed me down a bit.

No problem!

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