Episode 1 #2
Ellisandre hesitated, their hands still playing with the ropes.
“In some metaphorical hell, there’s a ledger.
On the cover is my name, all my names. The pages are soaked in vermillion.
It leaches out over the podium, splashes to the floor.
There are halls filled with ledgers of the same ilk, marked with the monikers of innumerable souls.
Somewhere among this multitude is a ledger marked with your name.
Perhaps it sits near mine, measured with the same weight of carnage.
Perhaps less. Every soul with each of these ledgers is the same and different.
Your soul, Vast, draws mine. Dark choices.
Dark roads. And yet you are still my beautiful boy.
I would know you on a battlefield or in a theater.
Any soul might find my flaws, might see my humanity, might adore my face.
You see the immortal archetype, the reality of the fantastic, the weight of a moment.
The speech of myth spins from your hands.
In a modern city of brick and glass, you summoned your fallen god to the gates of Assyria. ”
Ellisandre’s words poured through Sevastyan’s chest. Ten years. Ten years and they yet had the eyes to see him. He bowed his head. He couldn’t speak.
“When you know what’s written in that ledger, will you judge me?”
“Yes.”
A place in Sevastyan’s heart settled. He leaned against Ellisandre, their breaths mingling. “Goddess. God.”
“I do not require you to say both.”
“I don’t have an epitaph beyond the binary.”
“Use the one that draws you in the moment of utterance.”
“I’ve worshipped you as both. You are both, to me. I don’t know if that’s right.”
“I define myself, beautiful boy. I am both and beyond. You cannot misname me when I am all.”
“Goddess,” Sevastyan whispered, folding into them. “At the museum, you were God, but now . . .”
“Worship, Vast,” Ellisandre whispered.
Sevastyan pressed his lips to Ellisandre’s skin.
They tasted of cinnamon and vanilla, their skin sweet beneath the spice.
He kissed wherever he could. They moved their arms across his mouth, arched their chest into his lips.
He traced the lines of their ribs with his tongue and pressed his lips in reverence to the cleft of their sternum.
Breath by breath, Ellisandre rose up on their knees and higher, giving him leave to nuzzle the soft flatness of their belly, the sharp angles of their hips, the divining line of their thighs.
He was drunk on the permission, weak with their scent, newly starving like a victim of prolonged hunger being allowed the taste of food.
Ellisandre’s hand caressed his head. Their feet were planted on either side of his kneeling form. Ellisandre guided his head towards the root of their body, the center between their legs.
“Worship, Vast,” Ellisandre breathed once more.
Sevastyan lapped at the treasure he couldn’t see, finding the shape of Ellisandre with his lips and his tongue.
Above him, Ellisandre’s breath grew heavy.
Their hands were making love to his head, urging him onward.
He formed his mouth around their arousal and suckled as it grew.
He drew lines down their folds, finding more of the sweetness he knew to be their own unique essence.
He lost himself, the ropes holding him, Ellisandre caging him in, his task wiping all thoughts of the outer world from his senses. Ellisandre’s release gushed over his face. He panted through the deluge.
Ellisandre held him there against their arousal, dripping and panting against their deepest parts.
“Vast,” Ellisandre gasped. They dropped to their knees, capturing his face between their hands again. They kissed him, hard, against his wet and swollen lips. “You will come back, or I will hunt you down.”
Hunt you down. The words reverberated through him. Please, Goddess/God, please hunt me down.
Sevastyan squeezed his eyes against the tears that wanted to flow. He couldn’t, even here.
Once he shattered, he was never going to rise.
Ellisandre’s hand wrapped around his throat, their fingers finding his pulse. They slid from his lap and grasped his cock.
He swallowed beneath their fingers. “Ellisandre?”
“You’re not mine yet, beautiful boy. But I’m going to take you.” Ellisandre’s other hand slid beneath the band of his black shorts, grasping his length. Their hand on his throat tightened, not taking his air, but tightening on his veins. His body bucked against their grip.
“Fall, Vast. Fight me and lose.”
He couldn’t bring himself to stop. His hips bucked up into their hand, wet with themselves, desperate for more. His chest and shoulders shook, straining against the hold on his throat. His vision was already dark, but now there were stars in the blackness behind his eyelids.
“Elli?” Fear filled his voice against his will.
“Fall, beautiful, broken boy. Fall.”
Ellisandre’s hands tightened, taking the last of his awareness as his body coiled and released, taking him over the edge of pleasure laced with terror into the dark.
Ellisandre
Ellisandre lowered themselves to the rug, bringing their senseless captive down with them.
They laid Sevastyan between their legs, cradling him with their thighs.
He looked peaceful now, slack and unaware.
They brushed the hair back from his face and studied him unguarded.
It would be mere seconds before his eyes would open but for this silent moment, he was theirs.
“I will find you. Wherever you go, I will find you.”
Sevastyan
Thirty-six hours later, Korsakov, Sakhalin Oblast, Eastern Russia
Home, for the moment, was a half-abandoned warehouse in Korsakov.
Sevastyan arrived after sundown, having taken a long, circuitous trip from Chicago to the easternmost reaches of Russia.
The building, like other remnants that could be found nearby, was a leftover from the region’s heyday when it had passed from hand to hand.
Russian, Korean, and Japanese signage could be found in layers under peeling paint and loose boards, marks of the shifting tides of power.
It was that history which had drawn Sevastyan to set up a temporary base, an area where he and Rei blended in.
In its imperial era, Japan had forcibly imported Koreans to the Sakhalin region, of which Korsakov was a part.
Korsakov itself was just north of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the four main islands of Japan.
Descendants of those forcibly migrated Korean people remained, even though Japan had long since departed and Russia had claimed Korsakov and the rest of the Sakhalin Oblast region.
Sevastyan scanned his palm against the reader hidden in a panel on the door.
The shortest path was not always the route that others considered.
Jewelry stolen in Beijing could appear in Toronto in a single day with the right planning.
Flights over the North Pole were limited in number and came with difficulties like military interference and weather and instrument limitations.
Unless, of course, the military was the one flying your cargo.
In which case, an item or a person could disappear into thin cold air and come out on the other side of the globe, far from a normal person’s mental association.
Studying the trodden paths of human thought had netted Sevastyan more success than all the economics classes he had taken at the various high-class universities around the world. All one had to do was slip from the path to be invisible.
That invisible path had brought Sevastyan to Korsakov.
A man of Korean descent and a man of multiple Russian heritages turned no heads here.
The western world had largely forgotten the island of Sakhalin, and the eastern world did not consider it any sort of center.
Even the regional airport was north by thirty minutes on roads designed for cars.
The port had no significant equipment. Fishing trawlers went out regularly and came back, plying their trade.
The population had diminished over the decades but a remnant hung on, living quiet lives.
Even roads near the port had no need for a center line to divide traffic.
Not a place for a man of the world. Certainly not one with a reputation for attending operas, haunting art galleries, and accepting invitations to polo matches.
And not a place for his slave.
Except that ships came and went, and space was cheap and unquestioned. With the right resources, the rest of the world was only hours away. It was like hiding in a pocket no one else could see because they didn’t look.
Sevastyan pushed through the door. The cold inner air of the warehouse opened before him.
Pallets stood stacked here and there, and debris from previous owners remained.
Collections of new looking crates were intermingled with the mess, items his teams were moving or storing until the heat died down.
Sevastyan scanned the space and passed through it, heading toward the stairs leading to a closed apartment built above the main floor.
The metal creaked beneath his leather shoes as he mounted the steps.
A catwalk and three-rung railing formed a tiny porch in front of the wall.
There were three windows looking out on the warehouse space, all covered.
Sevastyan turned right, toward the only door.
Another keypad. He pressed in the code, looking back once.
Everything was still. Silent. As it should be.
He opened the door.