Chapter 1 The Caregiver #4
“Oh…?” He slammed into me again but then held still, buried deep inside me, unmoving. “Then shall we show him whether you can handle the rest of me?”
“Rest?” I snapped my eyes to the god of death, and his jackal maw was definitely somehow grinning.
What I had taken for the stopping presence of his sac began to push inside me, stretching me so much wider than before that I failed to breathe. It was too firm to be his pouch. This was simply more of him and bulbous in a way the rest was not.
It popped inside me like a knot, and once there seemed to pulse larger, driving the rest of him deeper too.
Tears pricked my eyes from the pressure, and gasping without voice, I finally remembered to breathe. “Oh god.”
Anubis started to rock his hips again, but the knot never retracted. It was lodged there, with the motion of his hips swirling him along my walls like he had the dexterousness of a hand reached up inside me halfway to his forearm.
I squeaked more than whined, and my vision went hazy from the watering of my eyes. Yet blurry or not, I could still see Meryt.
The more Anubis took me, the more his knot swelled. It was a beautiful, impossible rapture bordering on agony, indescribable as anything but godlike. Even more than from the linen wrapped around my ankles and wrists, I was immobilized and utterly captive.
“As expected,” he said in growly praise, “you are magnificent. How you have opened for me… taking me… all of me… with more to come.”
More? I thought wildly.
But before I could utter, “How?” Anubis slammed so deeply inside me, I thought my spine might snap, or that the table would be turned to rubble beneath us. It wasn’t only that he continued to swell and fuck me deeper that made me question the viability, but how, how did it feel so good?
“More!” I wailed, blinking the wetness from my eyes to clear my vision and better see my beloved. “Witness me more… and oh, that I could see you spill and taste your seed.”
I rose up off the table with the force of Anubis’s thrusting, and like before when the bindings had moved with me at the direction of his desires, they shifted while still keeping me bound.
He was becoming more and more wild, almost feral like the beast he was, even as he praised me.
“Such strength… such resilience… a testament to your name.”
My name did mean strong and mighty, and I would be both throughout these trials.
For Meryt, blue blur that he was, more now from motion than watery eyes, but still I reached for him, for our love would stretch beyond death. Beyond everything.
Even if the skies tremble
and the gods take you too soon.
Heat spilled within me so deep inside my belly that I felt it coating absolutely all of me. Anubis came and came and came, finishing his last spurts with a growl, as I strained against my bindings—right as they unraveled.
I collapsed, limp and loose upon the table, wondering again if that chamomile had contained something more than itself, for every part of me felt blessed, sore as I expected to feel later.
I was not as free of my bonds as I thought, however, for while the wrappings had unwound, Anubis’s knot remained snug right where it had seated itself.
It pulsed, and with the rest of him unmoving, and me unable to move yet either, it felt as though that swell hit every pleasure point left inside me.
I groaned, squirming around its thickness, and felt my own cock jump when it pulsed again.
Anubis’s shadow covering me drew my eyes to him, watching him bend toward me and lick up my length with the same magical flexibility as my Meryt.
But it was only when I looked again toward my beloved’s awed, adoring, and somewhat dazed expression that the next pulse of Anubis’s knot triggered my release.
“Meryt!” I coated my own chest, but also, when I glanced at the god who remained within me, I saw speckles of my release on Anubis’s cheek.
He lapped them up with his overlong tongue.
Oh that it was Meryt’s tongue, or mine, and it was Meryt’s release I was lapping.
I arched my back with a greater stretch, reveling in the aftershocks that continued to flow through me, while wondering when Anubis’s knot might diminish, only to look toward where Meryt should be and see nothing but the wall of the chamber, as if a door had closed.
No… Did they mean to torment me by showing him only to tear him from my sight again? It seemed a worse punishment to feel the despair of his loss while also experiencing lingering pulses of pleasure.
“Now you face your real test.” Anubis remained buried to the hilt and engorged within me.
Now? “Will the swell of you not release me?”
“Not until you answer.” He placed his hands on my hips, and slowly, while speaking, began to slide them upward with the tips of his claws drawing lines along my skin.
“With each of us, you will be tempted, but not only with pleasures of the flesh and an offer to stay with us instead of pursuing your beloved.”
He had said that before, that the gods might wish to keep me. “I could… stay with you? Consort to the great Anubis?”
His trailing claws reached my ribcage, and I trembled from the tickle. “It is an option that is open to you. You would make a wonderful consort, worthy of any god.”
Never could I have imagined hearing such praise. Anubis had done nothing but praise me.
“But each of us has something else to tempt you with as well.”
“But I know if I agree, I fail.”
The claws had reached my shoulders and delicately splayed around my neck. “You can accept our temptations. You would never see your love again, but you would not be doomed to have your soul devoured. That is only for true failure, for there is more to your trials that weighs your heart.”
“I will admit to your allure, my lord,” I answered honestly, “for you are certainly a unique and giving lover, with a tender and calming countenance, but I could never choose to stay with you. I love only my Meryt.”
He nodded, giving no otherwise clear reaction to my rejection.
“I do not need to hear your other temptation. I want only—”
“You must hear it,” he said. “That is nonnegotiable.”
I supposed it would not be a temptation if I never heard it. “So be it. Tell me. What is my lord Anubis’s offer?”
“Life.”
“I don’t understand. I am already alive, and there is no appeal in living without Meryt.”
His fingers wrapped more fully around my neck. “Even as a free man?”
“What?” I anticipated a squeeze, which I had endured with many of Pharaoh’s elite, though all knew to temper themselves beyond that, for only Pharaoh held our lives in his hands.
And the gods.
But instead, Anubis drifted his nails up along my scalp. The heat in my belly had not dwindled, for the swell of his knot endured.
“You could have it all over again,” he said, “the things you cherish but better. A mother’s comb brushing through your hair by her hand, with both of you free.
” He guided me to look toward the pedestal with my comb, and continued in kind with the other items, while gently cradling my head.
“Your dancer’s belt, to wear with a free man’s clothes or to place upon your own dancer as a nobleman with slaves.
The lotus cup to drink from whenever you wish it instead of when granted permission to have wine.
And the chance to find a new love, a free love, with anyone you choose, to fill your scroll for years to come. ”
I stared with the most longing at the scroll, for did it not already have the epitome of love poems upon it because so many had been written for Meryt? Could a new life truly compare with this one, despite there being much about this life that I might change? “I could have all that?”
“And a long life with it. So answer me, Nakht.” He tilted my head forward to meet his carnelian stare. “Would you cling to life if you could have a better one, or could you leave all of that behind?”
I doubt I considered the offer for more than a breath, though I was not blind to the appeal.
“Destroy it all if you must and any hope of that false existence. No trinket, no matter how precious to me, is more precious than Meryt. And not even a free life would truly be free if it wasn’t with him by my side.
“We swore to be each other’s from this life into the next, so if there is a chance to be with him again now, I will continue to risk everything until I have succeeded.”
I realized then that the swell of Anubis’s knot had finally started to lessen. The emptiness that lingered was… odd, yet still left me feeling content.
He drew his hands from me, rolled up from hovering over me, and smiled—or so I believed—like he had before.
“I am impressed. You would indeed make an excellent consort.”
“Thank you, but while you are great at many things, and I do fear failing down this path with all the unknowns ahead of me, my heart is Meryt’s.
My body may be taken by others, but the performance will always be for him.
” I looked again to where he had been, confident now that I would see him again. I had to.
“As you say,” Anubis rumbled.
He released me from his knot with an easy slide now that it had calmed.
I looked quickly to see it before the fall of his loincloth covered him again, and it was a daunting, foreign thing compared to a mortal man’s, but I still might have salivated over the prospect of it had I seen it before it entered me.
The warmth of his release remained as he spun me around, situating me upright upon the slab again. He cleaned me of the new mess on my skin with the same cloth as before, just as soothing and warm. Only once he was finished did he hold out his hand and help me from the table.
“Now, you needn’t meet the others as bare as a babe.
” Anubis wrapped one hand around my shoulder, and I felt the faint weight of clothing before I saw it.
I had been dressed in my red dancer attire like Meryt was wearing his blue, only the fabric was grander than back home, glittering as if dotted with red stars.
It also included the belt that a moment ago had been on its pedestal.
It would accompany me, while the others items were left behind, though also with me in a way.
Anubis had untangled my hair with my comb.
Fed me chamomile from my cup. And the sight of Meryt witnessing us had sprung to mind my most important poem, housed in that scroll.
“You would indeed make an excellent consort,” Anubis said again as he looked me over, “but I am glad you have passed this trial.”
I heard the shifting of stone and looked to my right where a door had appeared in the chamber’s wall. Beyond it was as blinding as Amun-Ra’s risen sun.
I returned my attention to Anubis. He really was so strangely handsome.
“You can be a frightening figure, my lord,” I admitted, “but I think I always imagined you this way.”
“Oh?” He tilted his head, and I resisted the laugh that bubbled within me at how much he resembled a real jackal or domestic dog.
“Gentle, I mean. A true caregiver for the dead. Meryt knew your kindness too?”
“He did, though not in the same way as you. Many of us, he did not need to meet.”
“Because he skipped to the end,” I huffed in teasing awe of my beloved—the overachiever.
“Your next trial awaits. Go.” Anubis gestured me toward the brightly lit doorway. “And know that I wish only for your success.”
I looked at it again, wondering which god might be next. When I turned back to Anubis to thank him, I saw the smaller form of a true jackal running on all fours as it scampered away from me into a darkness that had begun to fill the chamber’s corners as it was when I’d arrived.
“Mrrow?”
I jerked my head to my feet, where I had felt the brush of fur, and after trying to follow the quickly moving blur of white, I at last settled on it, for it sat and waited for me beside the blinding archway. “Pasht?”
When I moved in that direction, the cat leapt up on all fours again, meowed at me as if in impatience, and hurried into the light.
Whether actually Pasht or some other emissary of the gods, there was nothing to do but follow.