24. Not What She Had Thought
Haera
Theos was right. She realized that now, and she hated the way he had seen so easily what she was only now realizing. She wanted to ignore the way all the tiny threads of relation were suddenly connecting in her mind. It was difficult even to believe that this was happening. She had spent the last seven houyras thinking through the past three syrises – from the moment when her friendship with Alanis had sprung up, to their most recent, explosive interaction.
After her father’s death, she and Alanis had grown close, quickly. Alanis had offered a shoulder to cry on, company that she could rely on, and had hushed all her sorrowful tears. She was all Haera had had. Theos had nodded as he’d said the final words, his eyes conveying a kind of regretful sadness that she hadn’t seen him express before. “She is all she wants you to have.” All the dahys they had spent together seemed to stretch out before her, taunting her with memories of all the truths Theos had told.
Their first meeting. The way Alanis had completely taken control of their interaction, inviting her into her home and letting her stay the eveng. It was an innocent gesture – offering aid to someone who was so obviously wracked with grief. But as she looked through the pages of their other interactions, to sift out the seeds of control that her mate had assured her she would find, all the rosy innocence drained out of all her best friend’s attempts to help her.
She had spent the first nigh in the clearing with her father’s corpse, staying awake though she had struggled. She’d wanted to keep his body company. The eveng after, when Alanis had invited her to stay the eveng, the brunette werewolf refused to let Haera leave her home. She had insisted that Haera would be better off with the company, even if for just the first nigh. A harmless insinuation. A kind gesture .
Now, as she stood in the kitchen, frantically scouring her memories of grief and sorrow, she found that not one of them had happened apart from Alanis. Alanis had shared in her every moment of sadness, grief, and heartbreak about her father’s death.
Every death anniversary – she had spent it in Alanis’ company. Even the moments where she had ached to be alone with her sorrow.
Every hard nigh. They had spent it strolling through the Loriax, looking up at the stars.
Every cold winter mrnug. To skate on the precariously slippery ice of Lake Rue.
Every moment where her knees could no longer hold her weight. Where she had gone crashing to the ground. Alanis had been the one to pull her back up.
And yet, though Alanis was intertwined inexorably, inextricably, with her grief, in the short time she had known Theos, he had offered her more true support.
With Alanis, everything was a brief, “Hush Haera, you’ll feel better soon”. Then, her well of tears would dry up. They would move on to some other more important group activity, and she would be left feeling silently ridiculous for her tears. The only grief she had not shared with her best friend was the one that had shocked her, marred her soul, and left her without any semblance of speech for wouxs. Her assault.
For wouxs after Zyadon’s desire had ripped through her body’s weak resistance to his hunt for pleasure, she could not speak. Silence had claimed her voice, and somehow, it hadn’t interrupted her usual dynamic with Alanis. Her best friend had just continued her usual leading role in their friendship. She hadn’t noticed that Haera had suddenly gone silent. All she could think about, all she could remember, all she could see when she closed her eyes, all she could feel when she looked at her skin, was the way her too soft body had given in under his touch.
How her thighs had been hiked up, held mercilessly open for him to look at her where she was most ashamed.
How his rough fingers had slid into wetness.
How his claws sank into her skin to draw blood while his tongue made frantic pace at her clit.
How she thrashed against his hold, but his desire never relented.
The miserable whimpers that had wanted to come spilling out of her mouth.
How she loathed the way heat rocketed through her when he pressed the head of himself through the slickness of her cunt .
How disgusting it had made her feel when the pain of his forceful slam into her had melted away into pleasure.
How his thrusting had left her cunt burning from his disregard for her innocence.
How she’d throbbed with even more shameful desire when he’d grunted and groaned as he rammed into her until his pleasure overcame him.
How her cunt had throbbed greedily when he’d pulled out of her to spill his hot seed onto her cunt.
How even though she had struggled against the punishing hold on her that kept her bound to the bed until the very end, some sick part of her hadn’t wanted to struggle.
How she had wanted to rock her hips up to his.
How her skin burned with shame and hunger long after, even when he had discarded her; cast her out of the pack and into the cold.
The same way that her skin burned with shame now. She had kept the terrifying event to herself; wondering, pondering, sinking into shame more and more at the way her body had responded to his. Marvelling at the way she hated it, struggled against it, yet her greedy little cunt still sucked him in. Disgusted at the noise of her wetness, the way her soft thighs welcomed him in, cushioning the impact of his frantic pounding. She had hated herself for syrises. Ashamed of what had happened to her. Ashamed that some sick part of her had liked being handled that way. Disgusted that she had been touched that way by someone who was not her mate. Terrified that when her mate found out she had been used, he would not be interested. Nobody wanted sloppy leftovers. Nobody deserved sloppy leftovers.
Alanis had never heard the confession come out of Haera’s mouth until todahy. She had never found the right time, felt the right level of safety, to say it. And now that she had, her best friend had betrayed her in a way that hurt deeper than any assault. Alanis accused her of earning it. Of wanting it. The very same shame that she already carried. It was unforgiveable.
She had screamed that her mate would turn out to be the same as Zyadon, and the words still swirled around her mind. “Won’t he rape you too? How is he any different?”
She wanted to believe that Theos would never. She wanted to believe that Alanis’ comments had all been out of that fearful, jealous, manipulating place that Theos had helped her identify. She wanted to believe that he was different. He was her mate. The bond in her heart didn’t lie. It couldn’t.
Mates could never harm each other. To harm the other half of your soul was to harm yourself. Bonds were never biased or concerned with one person’s interests over another. They were sentient, wireless connections, engineered by the gods. By The Fates. That was what Theos had told her. It was entirely different from attraction, and much different from basic interest. Its primary focus was to bind two souls together into a sort of permanence and oneness that could never be undone or replicated by partners who had merely chosen to be together. Once the bond recognized its counterpart in another being, its only goal was to bind them together.
She knew that her mate bond with Theos was real. Otherwise, she was sure that he would have no need for her. He was a god. She was a mortal. A filthy, pathetic, already used mortal. One that kept crying, and kept pushing him away, while he kept suppressing the desire he tried so desperately not to display because she was so sensitive to affection in that way.
Would he rape her?
The question was hot. Like a knife separating her skin from her flesh.
Sure. She wasn’t sure.
Even if he did, would it matter?
Would it be different to what she’d experienced before?
Would she want it ?
How could she be sure?
Shamefully, her thighs warmed at the mere suggestion that Theos would be forceful with her in that way. Gods . She was messed up in the head.
Alanis had refused to leave her alone with the grief of her father’s passing. Theos, bonded to her soul, destroyed by the distance, had conceded to leave her in the silence so that she could process her grief and sift through the traitorous nothingness of her thoughts.
“You don’t have to hide your grief from me little star. All the mortals pray to me. With grief, I am well acquainted.” He had never once interrupted her tears when she had confessed what had happened to her. Not even when it felt like her bones were shattering inside her from the force of her shaking. Not even when the shards of her grief threatened to pierce her heart and end her misery once and for all. Not even when her treacherous legs were too weak to hold her. He held her. He bore her weight. “I carry the weight of life and all of creation itself. You, my pretty little mate, feel like nothing in my hands.”
Pierced by the finality of the truth, a scream ripped itself out of her chest. She sank to the floor, enveloped by the flood of her tears. She needed him to carry her weight now. She had asked him to leave. She didn’t know how to call him back .
It was some level of cruel irony that her father’s death anniversary was dawning now. The darkness outside was the last dregs of Threpha. Phrettes was dawning – dahy six of Julix. When the first strains of the sun shifted the skies over Vanzantia, her father would have been dead for three syrises.
Her stomach coiled uncomfortably at the realization. She had spent his every death anniversary since, with Alanis. This syrisis, she knew she would spend it alone. For the first time since his loss had ripped through her, she would face the onslaught of memories alone. She could already feel them creeping into the corners of her vision. Pressing on the back of her neck like a warm, clammy hand that would soon snake around to take her by the throat. Every time she closed her eyes to blink or faced the darkness in a vain attempt to calm her racing heart, she could see the images replaying behind her eyes.
The unfriendly pressing against her nape slipped down and around, to seal her air off in a rough push. The memories were cueing in front of her, and she was frozen where she stood.
***
Bodies. They were right in front of her. Close enough for her to reach out and touch .
Broken, deformed, mangled bodies. Werewolf paws no longer attached to the limbs they once served. Delicate paw pads split open, tissue and bone exposed to the light of dahy. Claws, ripped from paws, were still embedded in torsos, throats, the trunks of trees, everywhere. The bloody battle had not spared loss on either side. Tails, chunks of flesh, eyeballs that were already decaying, spilling out with slime, disgusting smells and the parasites that initiated the truest onset of death.
Tongues, cut at the half mark, lay thick and silent on the ground. Ribcages ripped open, and blood all around. The ground beneath her squelching feet was a testament to the volume that had oozed into it from the carnage. She pulled her eyes away from all the heads that were separated from their ravaged bodies, trying not to bring up everything she had ever eaten in her life.
The earth was a sea of red. Not a single blade of grass had escaped the mark of death. The meadow, once bright with the bulbs and colours of flowers of the Loriax was trampled, grass giving up the ghost as an omen for the ones whose feet had pressed them into the Earth. The single flower that she could identify upright was a white rose – her favourite flower. Its petals were splattered, irreparably stained, from the blood shower that had rained down upon it. Three syrises later, as she stood facing the scene that had forever changed her, she knew that that flower had been an omen. A warning from The Fates: that her life was to get much, much worse. That she had survived the war that had killed her father, but that living was to be her greatest curse.
A lopsided flower, another white rose, was crushed under her as she fell to her knees at her father’s side. He was one of the only werewolves who hadn’t completely lost his head. It was the only reason he was still alive. Even then, the deep gouging slash across his throat was a gaping revelation of the bruising on the inside of his body. It gaped open for her to see, sputtering out the remaining gallons of blood in his body like an offering. She could have drunk his blood if she’d wanted. For a long moment, she hadn’t been able to drag her eyes away.
Every part of him was covered in the red liquid that had once given him life and the ability to fight. The white hair she had grown to love. The jagged edges of the clothing that were now only partially covering his body; were ripped at all the seams, only the sleeves and the fragments of the front placket covered his scarred, wounded skin. Blood seeped from the lesser wounds on his body, but it was from his open throat that it pooled.
Her hands too were covered in blood as she reached out to cup his face. His cheeks were sallow, his blue eyes shrunken. Caught in the slow throes of death as he was, she wasn’t sure he could even see. But when his eyes settled on her face, though they never widened, never changed, she knew he knew that it was she. The once vibrant, now dull blue, ripped at a part of her soul that she had never noticed before. Recognition. She saw herself there, in his eyes. Her mother had passed away at her birth, he was the only of her image bearers she had gotten the chance to see. Her eyes were his. Her hair was his. Watching him die ripped at the seams that held her skin together.
She wanted to go with him. She should have gone with him. She shouldn’t have stayed. One of his arms had been ripped from his body, and she couldn’t have identified it in the sea of amputated limbs if she had tried. She knew it was somewhere in the tufts of grass beyond them. His three remaining fingers clamped around hers, the bloody stumps of the missing ones weeping their red sorrow onto her skin.
Twilight crawled into the sky above them as though afraid, silently taking up watch over the dead bodies of the massacre as it made its way through the clearing, leaving hurriedly to make way for the nigh. The blue eyes dimmed in time to the light in the sky as it was fading. In the disappearing blaze of light around them, she looked into his eyes one last time before they closed. The familiarity in his blue irises made her every bone tremble and ache. The jagged gash down the side of his throat oozed and sputtered harder, gushing as he tried to force air over his broken voice box to speak. The sudden violent gurgle of the wound was horrifying in the silence of death that cocooned them. His voice when he finally spoke was unfamiliar. A squeak. A rush. A trembling faint thing and then it was gone. Defeated by the blood he was breathing in and choking on.
“I’m sorry, Haera.”
***
She slammed back into the present moment, gasping in air as the memory finally released its grip on her throat. Entirely disoriented, she fell backwards, slamming her head against the sofa. Her arms shot up to the pain, and when she pulled them away, blood. Blood that looked entirely too familiar to what she had just remembered – to where she had just been.
She flopped back, quiet sobs pouring out of her lips. She wanted to lay there in silence and let herself bleed until, hopefully, it killed her. But the doorbell rang, and she forced herself up and to her feet.