6. Flavia
Flavia
A s my consciousness returned, everything focused down into the intense tingling in my limbs.
The sensation spread through my hands, racing up my arms with a peculiar mixture of numbness and hypersensitivity that made me wonder if I still possessed flesh at all. My fingertips felt swollen, as if a thousand needles danced across their surface.
I tried to flex them, failing miserably.
My eyes snapped open to a world washed in shadows. I hung suspended in his web. The silk cradled my body, supporting my weight while binding me as surely as iron chains.
Every breath sent tremors through the web’s geometry, and I felt the vibrations echo across the grove. The threads pressed against my skin, and when I struggled against them, they seemed to tighten in response to my movement.
Panic clawed at my throat as I tested my bonds more urgently.
My left arm was caught at an awkward angle, wrapped in silk from wrist to shoulder.
My legs were equally contained, ankles bound together.
When I twisted my torso, trying to find leverage, the web rocked gently, stretching without releasing its grip.
The tingling in my fingers intensified, spreading to my toes, my lips, the sensitive skin of my neck. It felt like awakening from deep sleep, but magnified tenfold—as if every nerve in my body had been dormant and was now stirring to painful, vibrant life.
“Ah,” came a voice from the darkness beyond the web’s luminous aura. “So you have awakened.”
I stopped struggling, turning toward the sound. Ysu emerged from the shadows. He appeared human again, his additional spider-like arms concealed beneath his dark robe. Only his eyes betrayed his true nature, all eight tracking my every movement.
“Let me down.” My voice came out rough, scraped raw by whatever poison he’d pumped into my veins.
“In time.” He circled the web slowly, studying me the way I’m sure he studied any other prey in his clutches. “First, we must establish certain... understandings.”
The silk pressed against my skin like dozens of gentle fingers, a horrible mockery of a lover’s embrace—not that I would know what that felt like—and I fought the urge to struggle again.
Instead, I met his gaze directly, drawing on reserves of defiance bolstered by the fact that he hadn’t decided to kill me after all.
“You claimed you would be my bride,” he continued, his tone conversational. “That bargain comes with obligations. Duties.”
Without ceremony, one of his concealed limbs sliced through the strands holding me aloft.
I dropped to the forest floor in an ungraceful heap, silk threads clinging to me, whispering against my skin as they floated on the night’s cool breeze.
Before I could fully regain my footing, his human hand grasped my arm and pulled me upright.
“Come,” he said, already moving deeper into the grove. “There is a spring not far from here where you will bathe me, as befits a bride attending her husband.”
I planted my feet, resisting his tug. It was a small force, one he could have easily overcome. Instead, he stopped and turned back to me, all of his dark eyes focused on me.
“Has my venom caused you to forget our bargain, little human?” His other human hand traced up my neck until he grasped my chin in his thumb and forefinger. “You are mine. You will obey.” His thumb traced over my lower lip, tugging on it slightly. “Or do you no longer desire your revenge?”
I did not flinch. I would not flinch. “I desire it.”
“Then obey.” He flicked his thumb away and his sharp nail cut my lip. I did not wince. I only extended my tongue to lap up the hot bubble of metallic blood that welled up. All eight of his eyes followed the movement with an intensity I could practically feel. I nodded.
He turned away, confident that I would follow him without any more resistance. I hesitated only a moment longer before trailing after him, out of his grove of horrors.
The forest beyond his web was unlike anything that existed in the daylight world.
Ancient trees leaned inward, their branches interwoven in patterns that spoke of centuries of patient growth guided by inhuman intelligence.
Moss grew in spirals up their trunks, and where my bare feet touched the earth, I felt a thrumming beneath the surface—as if the land itself pulsed with some vast, sleeping heartbeat.
Ysu moved ahead of me, his robe billowing behind him despite the absence of any wind.
The fabric drank in the moonlight, creating the illusion that he was a part of the darkness itself.
Occasionally, I caught glimpses of movement beneath the cloth—the subtle shift of his concealed limbs, inhuman joints bending in unnatural directions.
The tingling in my fingers spread throughout my body now, a constant whisper that made every sensation more acute.
It must have been a lingering effect of his venom.
The rough bark of trees my feet brushed against felt sharper than shattered glass.
The cool night air caressed me until every inch of my skin felt raw and exposed.
But it wasn’t just my skin. The fragrance of night-blooming flowers carried undertones of sweetness I had never noticed before. It felt misplaced in this place of death. I heard the soft call of animals much farther into the forest than I thought possible.
We walked a quarter mile through this twilight realm before the sound reached us—water moving over stone. The spring emerged from the forest, a natural pool ten feet across, fed by water that seeped between moss-covered rocks.
The water glowed. Not with reflected moonlight, but with its own inner radiance, as if each drop carried a fragment of a captured star.
Steam rose from its surface into the cool night air, and where the water met the pool’s edges, small flowers bloomed in impossible colors—blues that verged on silver, purples that edged toward black.
Vines crawled up the surrounding trees, with huge trumpet-like white flowers that opened under the moonlight.
I had never seen anything like this before, likely only able to survive because of the pool’s warmth.
Ysu stopped at the pool’s rim and turned to face me, his multiple eyes reflecting the water’s ethereal light.
He turned back to the spring, and without ceremony or modesty, he unfastened whatever hidden clasps held his robe in place.
The fabric fell away, revealing the full plane of his bare back.
The additional arms that emerged from along his spine midway down his back entranced me, the chitin there slowly morphing into black skin.
As he moved, I could see the power of each of his muscles.
Despite his monstrous appetite, he wasn’t soft like many of the Roman centurions.
Every inch of him was carved like the statues in the villa foyer, but he was so much larger.
Like each of his victims was absorbed directly to supplement his strength.
I was so entranced by the shape of him, I hardly noticed as he loosened the cloth at his waist, letting it sag.
A gasp nearly escaped me as the full, naked expanse of his muscular ass was revealed, just as sculpted as the rest of him.
Male nudity had, up until this point, only caused me fear, knowing the consequences it brought.
But seeing him, something so beyond human while still being so perfectly formed sent a foreign sensation building in my low belly.
It felt like a serpent curled up below my skin, hungry and waiting.
He stepped into the pool, the glowing water accepting him as if this place was carved from the earth specifically for his use. The spring reached his waist, and steam rose around him like incense offered to a forgotten god.
When he settled himself against the far side of the pool, he raised a human hand and beckoned me forward by crooking one finger, a gesture that managed to be both invitation and command.
“Come,” he said simply. “Join me.”