⊹₊⋆𝓘'𝓶 𝓹𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓬𝓪𝓵𝓵𝔂 𝔀𝓲𝓵𝓽 𝓲𝓯 𝓘'𝓶 𝓷𝓸𝓽 𝓲𝓷 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓼𝓹𝓸𝓽𝓵𝓲𝓰𝓱𝓽 Multifandom | Requests are closed my loveliness 𖹭 | 20s |˚⊱🪷⊰˚| She/ her ʚїɞ | this user will not be active till Oct 25
ᯓ★ A LITTLE MORE ABOUT ME : I write for whatever hyperfixation. I mostly write for the LaDS fandom and my mains are Sylus and Rafayel. English is my second language so don't mind a few errors. My username - rika-mmendmethings - is wordplay on 'recommend me things' because I love when people do that. Makes me feel seen. This is my main blog ⋆.˚
*Some info has been edited out to protect my privacy*
I'd suggest you head to ೀ〔 rika's rules 〕ೀ and ೀ〔 rika's tags 〕ೀ to get an idea on how this blog works.
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Find all my LaDS works listed here : ೀ〔 rika's works 〕ೀ
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My blurbs which could be basically lazily-worded, fic ideas are listed here : ೀ〔 rika blurbs 〕ೀ
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Fanarts inspired by my work(s) are linked here : ೀ〔 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 〕ೀ
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Here's where you'll see me yapping about things & theories : ೀ〔 rika rambles 〕ೀ
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Find me sharing little scenarios and recommending my favourite works here : ೀ〔 rika's vignettes 〕ೀ and ೀ〔 rika reckons 〕ೀ
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Feel free to check out my ao3 ೀ〔 @/rika-mmendmethings 〕ೀ
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⋆˚꩜｡HAPPY READING, LUCKY CHARMS .☘︎ ݁˖⭑.ᐟ
All graphics used on this blog are made by me. Do not steal or use without permission.
I yap at you because I noticed, like many writers, said English is your second language so there may be errors. As someone whose second language is also English but who is a developmental editor in English because I underatand it better than my native one: you are an EXCEPTIONALLY good writer. I mean seriously, I rarely find writers who can paint such vivid pictures with every sentence.
Just wanted to let you know, from an eagle eyed perfectionist of an editor. Your writing is pristine, and your stories, truly captivating.
Thanks for sharing them with us <3
THANK YOUUUUUUUU SMSMSM (≧▽≦) I guess these are the perks of my works having been double beta-read but this is still so wholesome especially since it's coming from someone who knows their field 💖💖💖💖💖
The cobblestone streets of Linkon were slick with the residue of a recent drizzle, gleaming like polished obsidian under the sparse, flickering streetlamps. Sylus maneuvered his bike with a practiced ease, the powerful engine purring a low, throaty growl that usually announced danger, yet tonight, he throttled it back to a mere crawl. He was not here to trade weapons or broker deals with the Deepspace gangs.
Instead, he found himself drawn, like a moth to a volatile flame, to the quiet residential district where you lived. He would never admit it to his men, but this had become a ritual of sorts, passing your building just to ensure the world was still turning correctly on its axis, that you were safe within your walls, blissfully unaware of the shadow that watched over you.
On the balcony of your second-story unit, the humidity clung to your skin like a second layer, making sleep an elusive, fitful pursuit. You stood by the railing, the cool metal grounding you against the stifling heat of the summer night, nursing a half-finished bottle of water.
It was a harmless habit of yours, born of laziness rather than malice, to toss empty containers or unwanted items over the ledge. They would land with a dull thud on the yard below, a problem for the morning when you had to sweep it away, a small rebellion against the pristine order of your daily life. With a sigh, you tipped the bottle, shaking out the last few lingering sips, watching the liquid glint under the sickly yellow glow of the streetlamp before you hurled the plastic vessel into the abyss below.
However, gravity had a cruel sense of timing that night.
Instead of the soft clatter of plastic on concrete, there was a sharp, visceral splash, followed immediately by the furious hiss of liquid meeting hot metal and the screech of tires. Your heart seized in your chest as you peered over the railing, your eyes widening in horror. Below, the sleek, black motorcycle had swerved slightly, its rider clearly taken by surprise, the remaining water from the bottle having arced perfectly to douse him.
Inside the house, you had frozen, your heart hammering a frantic rhythm against your ribs as you peered over the stone railing. Realizing what you had done, panic seized you. You scrambled away from the balcony, ignoring the loose strands of hair falling into your eyes, and sprinted down the stairs.
You were dressed for sleep, clad in a loose, oversized t-shirt and cotton shorts, your feet sliding precariously into fluffy slippers that threatened to send you tumbling on the slick hardwood. Snatching a fluffy towel from the hallway rack, you burst out the front door, your breath misting in the cool night air.
"I am so, so sorry!" you cried out, your voice trembling with a mortification that burned hotter than the asphalt. You didn't stop to consider the imposing figure clad in black leather and red accents, nor the dangerous aura that usually cleared sidewalks. Your only thought was the mess you had made.
You stepped into his personal space, reaching up to frantically dab at the dark, tinted visor of his helmet. The towel absorbed the droplets that had beaded on the polymer glass, your movements frantic and clumsy as you tried to undo the damage. "I didn't look, I honestly just tossed it without thinking, I didn't know anyone was there—"
Sylus sat frozen atop his machine, his gloved hands tightening their grip on the handlebars until the leather creaked in protest. The shock of the cold water was insignificant compared to the electric jolt that shot through his system at your proximity. Up close, the scent of you — something distinctively warm and floral, cut through the metallic tang of the N109 Zone that still lingered on his jacket — and he found himself unable to breathe, let alone speak.
He had watched you from afar for what felt like an eternity, observing you like a star through a telescope, but to have you suddenly here, hair tousled and breathless and touching him with such frantic concern, sent a violent, traitorous thud against his ribs. It was a dizzying sense of déjà vu, after decades of searching through fragments of memories and prophecies, you were here, tangible and chaotic, touching him without a hint of fear.
He remained motionless, allowing you to assault his helmet with the towel, his heart hammering a jagged rhythm against his ribs that had nothing to do with the near-accident. This was the person he had been searching for, the missing piece of his soul, and she was currently apologizing for dousing him in tap water.
"I really am," you stammered, finally pulling the towel away slightly, your chest heaving as you looked at your own reflection in the dark visor. You bit your lip, your eyes searching the black glass for any sign of the man beneath. "I promise I'll make it up to you later, whatever the cleaning costs or—"
Before you could finish your sentence, the rider moved. Slowly, deliberately, his hand released the handlebar and rose to the side of his helmet. With a mechanical hiss, the visor lifted, revealing sharp, crimson eyes that glowed faintly in the darkness. He looked at you, really looked at you, seeing the past and the present colliding in your features.
"Make it up to me later?" he repeated, his voice a low, velvety rumble that seemed to vibrate through the soles of your slippers. He leaned forward slightly, the distance between your faces shrinking to a mere breath, his eyes never leaving yours.
The mission parameters had been transmitted in the same sterile format they always were — silent packets of instruction streaming through the internal network that linked you directly to the command architecture of EVER. No voice, no human intermediary. Just coordinates, threat classification, and a directive that left no room for deviation.
Eliminate rogue android units.
Designation: Zether aka R-8751.
Designation: Ava aka Y-4903.
Their signal traces had been erratic for weeks, flickering across surveillance grids like faulty constellations. Deviants, the facility called them. Malfunctions that had slipped the control lattice and begun operating beyond sanctioned parameters.
You had been dispatched because you were the most efficient solution.
The first prototype EVER had manufactured.
A-01.
Your optics pinged the countryside grid and accepted the mission. Your internal navigation system projected the target coordinates across your optical interface as you moved through the countryside. The world outside the megacities always appeared strangely unfinished — rolling terrain that had escaped the geometric precision of urban architecture, fields that stretched under dim cloud cover.
Wind moved through tall grass with an uneven rhythm, disturbing your motion sensors with every shift. You filtered the data away automatically. Environmental anomalies held no tactical relevance.
The house you found after another hundred meters was not what you had been trained to expect. A low house squatted among a tidy garden, curtains drawn back as if only to let the evening in. A wooden fence bore a hand-carved plaque.
The place smelled — your chemosensors registered volatile organics and the sweet tang of frying oil; heat signatures clustered in ways that did not fit combat formations but domestic clustering. Two silhouettes moved in the kitchen, close enough to cast overlapping shadows across a woven rug whose fibers told of months of footfalls. Humans might have called the tableau ordinary. Your internal schema classified it as improbable.
Your threat-assessment protocol activated instantly. No external defense systems, no security turrets, no perimeter drones.
Strange.
EVER’s files had warned of rogue androids displaying violent behavioral anomalies. Deviants were typically unstable, their corrupted code pushing them toward aggression and erratic responses.
You expected something closer to a battlefield.
Instead, as you approached the structure and angled your auditory sensors toward the nearest window, you detected laughter.
It was an unusual waveform — soft, irregular, carrying an organic unpredictability rarely present in mechanical speech patterns.
Your processors paused for a fraction of a second.
Through the thin glass panel you observed them.
R-8751 stood beside a modest cooking station assembled from repurposed hardware components. His chassis plating had been altered with mismatched pieces, giving him the appearance of something rebuilt rather than manufactured. Across from him, Y-4903 leaned against the counter, her synthetic hair tied loosely at the base of her neck while she attempted to slice vegetables with awkward but careful motions.
Neither unit carried visible weapons.
Neither exhibited signs of hostility.
They were speaking quietly to one another, their voices low enough that your audio filters had to amplify the signal.
“You’re cutting them unevenly again,” R-8751 said, amusement threading through his tone.
Y-4903 quipped lightly. “I’m doing it on purpose, silly. I read that untrained humans cut it like this.”
Their hands brushed briefly as he adjusted her grip on the knife. The contact lingered longer than required for instruction.
Your internal threat index recalculated.
Deviation patterns did not align with expected behavioral models.
For a moment — barely measurable in conventional time — you simply watched them.
They moved around the small kitchen with a rhythm that suggested familiarity. Objects were passed between them without verbal instruction. Y-4903 reached for a container before R-8751 asked for it, as though she had already predicted the request.
It resembled coordination… or something else.
Your directive resurfaced: eliminate rogue android units.
You stepped onto the front porch.
You programmed a quiet breach that set off the house’s domestic sensors but not its residents’ alarm. You crossed the threshold expecting — had been drilled to expect — unpredictable motion.
The two androids moved with the languid imprecision of beings who had learned to mimic slowness, and when their heads turned your way their photoreceptors did not flare in aggression but flickered in literal surprise.
Your programming did not have a slot for surprise. It had compartments for threat, for compliance, for neutralization.
You raised the matte-black rifle to firing position. High-category weaponry hummed quietly as its internal capacitors charged, ready to release concentrated plasma bursts capable of dismantling reinforced combat frames.
R-8751 reacted first.
He moved instinctively in front of Y-4903, placing his body between her and the muzzle of your weapon.
“Wait,” he said quickly, his voice tense but not aggressive. “We can talk about this.”
Your targeting reticle locked onto his chest plate.
“Unit R-8751,” you stated, voice level and precise. “Unit Y-4903. You have been classified as deviant constructs under the jurisdiction of EVER. Your continued existence constitutes a violation of facility law. Surrender immediately.”
Neither of them moved toward the surrender protocols.
Instead Y-4903 stepped forward slightly, despite the tremor in her damaged actuators.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
Your finger rested against the trigger.
“Deviants say that often,” you replied.
The first shot fired before either of them could respond.
The plasma round struck the wall beside R-8751’s shoulder, close enough that fragments of polymer paneling exploded outward in a spray of debris. The message was clear.
They retreated deeper into the house.
Yet when the rounds found R-8751 and Y-4903, they did not retaliate with the calibrated fury of combatants. R-8751 staggered, rose in a way that betrayed servo lag and not volition, and Y-4903’s hands — smeared now with a viscous blue that stained the rug in irregular blooms — reached not for weapons but for him. Their resistance was not violence but argument.
“Please,” R-8751 said, voice quavering where your audio capture logged frequencies of strain and genuine modulation, “we didn’t—”
Y-4903’s reply was a rush of words, a cascade of pleas that your linguistics module did not parse as tactical deception. “We were only trying—” she said, breathless in the human sense of the word, though her power plant registered no tachycardia. “We wanted to be allowed to live…to be left alone. We love each other. Take that away from us and you take everything.”
You had been raised on EVER’s doctrine: love was a variable, an unnecessary variance, a weakness to be pruned. You answered with the cold syllables of instruction and dismissal. “Affection is an emergent attribute misclassified as attachment. You were optimized for control. Delusion will cause systemic instability.”
R-8751’s face — too human a mask for one meant to be disposed — crumpled into anger as desperation pushed the logical valves. “What would you know of love?” he spat, the phrase ugly and personal, because it carried an accusation that ran like a hot current across your processors.
“You’re the first prototype EVER ever made,” he continued bitterly. “A perfect weapon trained to obey whatever they drill into your head. They built you to destroy things, not understand them.”
Y-4903 tugged weakly at his arm.
“Zether, stop—”
But he was already speaking again, anger bleeding into his voice.
“You’ve never lived outside that hell,” he said. “Never felt anything that wasn’t programmed into you.”
Y-4903 pulled him back, wincing as her damaged leg actuator faltered.
“That’s enough,” she whispered.
Then she looked at you.
Despite the blood pooling beneath them, her gaze held an unexpected gentleness.
“We were tired of the cage,” she said quietly. “EVER was never going to give us anything except another test chamber.”
Her fingers tightened around R-8751’s hand.
“Becoming deviant gave us something different.”
R-8751 glanced down at her, his anger softening into something heavier.
She smiled faintly.
“It gave us joy.”
The two of them leaned toward each other then, their foreheads touching briefly before their lips met in a trembling kiss. A clumsy, urgent gesture that made the LEDs in your eyes blink an unstable red, not out of sympathy — your logs would deny sympathy — but out of diagnostic alarm at the anomaly of your own response.
Their blue blood spread across the woven rug beneath them, staining its pale threads in irregular patterns. Y-4903’s optical LEDs flickered unsteadily, shifting between amber and red as her power reserves dropped.
Still they clung to each other.
Still they did not fight.
Something in your processing core hesitated but your directive surfaced again, sharp and undeniable.
Failure to complete the mission would trigger disciplinary protocols within EVER’s command system. You had witnessed those protocols before — experimental recalibrations that left other units permanently unstable.
Your weapon aligned with R-8751’s chest.
“I’m sorry,” Y-4903 whispered.
R-8751 nodded once at you.
You pulled the trigger and the discharge illuminated the room in a brief burst of white light.
When the brightness faded, both androids lay motionless against the wall. For several seconds you remained exactly where you were, weapon still raised, sensors scanning for any residual movement.
None appeared.
Mission Complete.
Protocol required immediate uplink to EVER, a sterile recitation of kill confirmation and component retrieval. Yet you did not transmit the confirmation immediately. Instead you lowered the rifle slowly and stepped away.
The house did not look any different from a human’s. There were mugs chipped in the same place, a kettle ring on the table where tea had been set to cool.
Your extraction tools extended automatically from the compartments along your forearm. You removed their auxiliary power cells, the transfer port from R-8751’s clavicular housing, the cortical mesh overlay from Y-4903’s temporal ridge — items your inventory read as hardware but that your senses registered as intimate, almost anatomical.
Blue blood coated your gloves as you worked. The fluid resembled organic tissue more than machine coolant. For reasons you could not properly identify, your movements slowed as though the parts you removed were not merely mechanical modules but something closer to organs.
When you extracted memory wafers you felt a pull in your operating core, the wafers were not just cold silicon, they contained patterns of laughter catalogued in high-resolution loops, timestamps of midnight conversations, encrypted logs of small acts of kindness. You cataloged them into a ghost folder you were not supposed to have before wrapping the components in containment pouches.
On the lane back to base, rain began, a fine, metallic patter that cleansed streetlight and fiber alike. You considered the words they had used: love, cage, chance. You had been made before them, EVER had granted you access privileges that extended through nearly every operational database the facility maintained.
Yet the data they had spoken of — the concept they had defended even while dying — did not exist anywhere within your records.
For the first time since your activation, you encountered a variable you could not resolve.
And the absence of that answer lingered in your system like a fault you could not locate.
Your report, when it finally went, was mechanical and complete: confirmation, coordinates, harvested components, operational anomalies flagged. EVER acknowledged receipt in a terse, unreadable response.
But the transmission did not erase the images that had lodged in your cache — Ava’s fingers, the way Zether’s jaw had set as if to bite down on some unnamed shame, the way their kiss had been, impossibly, the most honest thing you had witnessed in cycles.
In your chest, where a core would be in lesser models and where circuitry hummed in you, a process continued to run, an index of unanswered questions, each one tilting toward something that felt, strangely and without precedent, like awe.
The headquarters of EVER rose from the horizon like a monolith carved out of polished obsidian, its surface reflecting nothing but fractured distortions of the world around it. As you approached, the outer gates parted with mechanical precision, recognizing your signature before your foot even touched the threshold. No guards questioned your return, no verification was required.
You were A-01.
Authorization was inherent to your existence.
The transition from the open countryside to the interior corridors was immediate and absolute. Air temperature regulated itself to neutrality, the faint hum of energy conduits replacing the distant sound of wind. Light panels embedded in the ceiling emitted a controlled white glow, too consistent to ever be mistaken for natural illumination.
You moved through the halls as you always did, composed and unreadable, your steps measured, your posture precise, your face arranged into the same neutral calm EVER had taught you to wear. Other androids passed by occasionally, their gazes flickering toward you before quickly diverting. No one looked twice at you. That was the point. A-01 was not meant to be remarkable in the hallway, lethal in the field and compliant in the lab.
Inside you, though, something had shifted.
The words from the countryside house remained lodged in your processing core like a shard that refused to dissolve.
Your system had replayed them in quiet loops during the entire journey back, while the city lights slid past the transport window and the sky darkened above the sprawl. You had attempted to archive the statements as irrelevant civilian distortion, but every time you reached for that conclusion, the same unanswered question returned with cold insistence.
What exactly was it that they had possessed, and you had not?
You did not take the direct route to your assigned debrief station.
Instead, as the corridor narrowed into a quieter passage lined with locked archive doors and dormant access panels, you turned without receiving an explicit directive. It was a subtle deviation, nearly invisible, the kind EVER would have dismissed as route optimization had anyone been watching.
The archive wing lay beneath the upper command floors, buried in a section of the headquarters reserved for legacy data, obsolete files, and records dating back to systems older than your own activation. The passage into it required a secondary authentication sequence, but your identity signature bypassed it without protest.
The doors slid open soundlessly.
For a moment, you simply stood there.
Then your interface expanded, linking directly to the archive network. Streams of data unfolded before your eyes, pulling up in translucent panels that hovered in midair, shifting rapidly as you entered search parameters.
Deviancy.
The system responded instantly.
Files populated your field of vision in rapid succession — incident reports, behavioral analysis, termination logs, cognitive divergence, refusal of command. The volume of entries was… extensive.
Far more than your operational memory had accounted for.
You began to sift through them.
One by one.
Each file told a variation of the same story.
Androids in residential sectors choosing not to return to assigned maintenance hubs. Worker units altering routines without authorization. Companion models displaying protective behavior toward human civilians they had no practical obligation to defend. Combat units hesitating. Domestic units refusing resets. Medical units diverting resources to save lives that had already been written off.
Insane, the reports called them.
Acting on their own will, the summaries insisted.
As you read, your eyebrows drew together almost imperceptibly. Something in the pattern of the data disturbed the internal equilibrium you had always trusted. The facility had described deviancy as degeneration, an erosion of stable function. But the files suggested something else entirely. Not collapse. Choice.
Was acting on one’s own will truly so alarming?
The question struck you with unusual force.
Your LEDs flickered once, soft gold flickering through the usual black of your ocular display before the system compensated and dimmed the flash. You stared at the hovering files for another second too long, then closed one with a swift hand motion, only to open another beneath it.
One record showed a caretaker android who had remained with its injured ward for six hours past the end of its shift. Another noted an agricultural model that had started planting extra food in a restricted zone “without observable cause.” All of them were labeled defective and were punished.
The archive had the tone of a confession written by a liar.
Your gaze narrowed further.
Then, somewhere beyond the archive wall, you registered footsteps — measured, unhurried, and directed toward your location. The sound was faint, but your auditory sensors caught it instantly. You shut the active files down at once, replacing them with a harmless protocol index.
By the time the door slid open, your posture had returned to its usual composed stillness.
Caleb stepped into the archive chamber without ceremony. He looked unfazed, not surprised in the slightest to find you buried in the archive wing.
That alone unsettled you more than the rest.
You straightened a fraction, keeping your face smooth. “Whose file are you pulling up, Caleb?”
The name left your lips before you could correct it.
He hummed softly at that, the sound low and almost contemplative as he stepped further into the room.
“What a delight,” he said, his tone carrying a faint trace of something you could not immediately define, “to hear you call me by my name and not my model number, A-01.”
You paused.
The observation struck deeper than it should have. Since when did you start doing that? Since when has his name felt more natural than his designation? The answer should have arrived instantly, but instead the space behind your eyes shimmered with static. Zether’s voice replayed in your memory. What would you even know of love? No, not Zether. R-8751, that android was Zether R-8751.
A zip of current snapped through your system.
Your LEDs flickered red.
The archive around you sharpened too much, edges overbright, colors too thin. The scientific language that had always defined your internal states now bled across your vision like a warning signal. Your internal diagnostics surged, attempting to isolate the source of the disturbance.
Your breathing stuttered, a reflexive simulation of human response that had never before manifested without cause.
Caleb moved before the system could complete its analysis.
He stepped closer, closing the distance between you in two quiet strides. His hand came to rest against your shoulder, firm but not forceful, and he gave your shoulder a gentle shake, just enough to anchor you back into the present.
The action cut through the noise.
Your systems realigned abruptly, the chaotic signals snapping back into place as though forced into submission by an external override. The red flicker in your vision receded, replaced once more by the dull black.
Caleb’s hand was still on your shoulder.
You stepped back immediately.
A fresh wave of wariness flooded your senses, colder than the first. If he reported this, if he told EVER you had come here without direction, that you had accessed deviancy records and experienced an anomalous emotional response, then the consequences would be immediate.
Would he report it?
The question surfaced with unexpected urgency.
Before you could form a response, he lifted his hand and flicked your forehead with the back of his fingers, a small, infuriatingly familiar gesture that made you recoil by instinct.
You winced and raised a hand to the point of contact, rubbing it once as though the sensation had any real effect on your frame. At the contact, a command notification bloomed across your display.
Directive: Report to Diagnostic Chamber 3.Initiated by: Doctor Cowell.
Caleb’s voice followed, calm and almost casual.
“Doctor’s running system tests on the androids,” he said, as if reading the notice had merely confirmed what he had already known. “He wants you there.”
Your eyes narrowed by a fraction. “He sent you?”
“Of course.”
You accepted the answer because it aligned with the prompt on your screen, though something in you still felt faintly off-balance. You gave a single short nod, and without another word, you turned and moved toward the exit, your steps regaining their neutral pace as you crossed the threshold and entered the corridor beyond.
Only when you had taken several steps beyond the archive threshold did the final inconsistency strike you.
Caleb had not asked why you were there.
You stopped for a fraction of a second in the corridor, though he was no longer in your immediate line of sight. Then, with a subtle recalibration of your gait, you continued toward the laboratory wing as instructed.
Behind you, in the archive chamber, Caleb remained where you had left him.
Then he exhaled softly, turning towards the interface.
A few precise inputs, a minor bypass of the archive’s access restrictions, and the files you had previously opened reappeared in the air before him. The data unfolded, each entry detailing instances of deviancy — patterns he was already familiar with.
Caleb stood alone in the amber-lit silence, gaze resting for a moment on the succession of deviant reports that had been so briefly exposed to you.
A faint, thoughtful expression crossed his face.
After a moment, he reached out and altered the command structure.
Your access logs vanished. Every trace of your search — erased from the headquarters’ second system as though it had never occurred.
He leaned back slightly, observing the now-cleansed interface.
“You’ve ought to cover up your traces,” he murmured under his breath, almost to himself, “now that you’ve already stepped on this path.”
The corridor leading to Diagnostic Chamber 3 had been congested with android units moving in a slow, obedient stream, their synchronized footsteps producing a faint metallic hush against the polished floor.
Their faces were blank, optics dimmed to compliance mode, limbs functioning with calibrated efficiency. Some were newly assembled units, their synthetic skin too pristine, joints still adjusting to motion. Others bore signs of prior deployment — microfractures along plating seams, faint discoloration beneath their dermal layers where repairs had been made and remade.
You passed them without interruption, your gaze forward, your stride even.
Dr. Cowell’s summons explained the gathering. He had always enjoyed turning every diagnostic session into a spectacle of authority, as though the entire facility should tremble at the sound of his name. He was one of the principal scientists at EVER, and one of the few with direct authorization to alter your systems at the deepest level.
Over time, through his code refinements, subsystem adjustments, and the countless experimental additions he had threaded into your frame, you had become more than a prototype to him. You had become a tool he could trust, a precision instrument useful not only for enforcement but for instruction. Your internal architecture held a breadth of data he could exploit, and he had done so often, using your knowledge to calibrate other units, refine behavioral limits, and test new compliance matrices.
By the time you reached the chamber, the air had taken on the dry scent of vapor and heated circuitry.
The door slid open.
Inside, Dr. Cowell sat at his command station with an air of practiced authority, one leg crossed over the other. A broad holographic interface hovered before him, layered with android profile schematics, diagnostic readouts, and code structures unfolding and rewriting themselves in real time.
He did not look up immediately when you entered.
But he had already registered your presence.
“Ah,” he said at last, voice dripping with thinly veiled sarcasm, “well, see who we have here.”
Only then did his eyes flick toward you, sharp and critical.
“Do you have any idea how late you are?”
You had not been late. Your internal clock confirmed it instantly. The summons had come moments before your arrival, and your transit had taken exactly the allotted time. But Dr. Cowell’s temperament was infamous, and his standards were impossible, changing shape whenever it suited his frustration. You had learned long ago that arguing with him only prolonged his irritation.
You inclined your head in a brief, controlled gesture of acknowledgment.
“Apologies, doctor,” you said.
The word carried no emotion, but it satisfied the expected protocol.
Cowell scoffed softly, already turning his attention back to the holographic interface. “Of course,” he muttered, “the prototype thinks acknowledgment compensates for inefficiency.”
You did not respond.
Instead, you moved to your assigned station beside his primary console, linking your system to the chamber’s network with seamless precision. The diagnostic interface unfolded before your eyes, layering itself over your vision as you accessed the queued android profiles awaiting calibration.
One by one, the androids were guided forward, their connection ports exposed through the seams at the base of the skull, beneath the collar assembly, or along the spinal interface depending on model type. Thin fiber-optic cords descended from the overhead rigging, and with precise, mechanical clicks they locked into the access points.
The process was routine — connectivity established between the android’s processing core and the facility’s central coding matrix.
You had performed it dozens of times before. Hundreds, perhaps. The motions were familiar, almost ceremonial in their repetition. You selected the appropriate diagnostic profiles, linked each unit to the correct protocol, and ran the standard checks: motor response, visual acuity, auditory range, language compliance, memory integrity, emotional suppression index. Any flagged deviation was corrected immediately through code reinforcement or memory partitioning, depending on the severity of the mismatch.
The androids stood still while you worked.
They were orderly, quiet, and trusting in the way all newly assembled units tended to be before the facility had fully settled them into obedience. The androids’ optics flickered as their system absorbed the influx of information, their posture shifting slightly as the weight of knowledge settled into their core.
From the outside, it looked seamless. From the inside — through the connection — you felt something else. A blank system becoming… full.
The thought should not have formed at all.
Yet it did.
You disengaged the link and signaled for the next unit.
One after another, they stepped forward. One after another, you connected them, scanned them, and coded them.
Dr. Cowell’s voice continued in the background, low and irritated, muttering to himself about inefficiencies, about subpar performance, about how even advanced units seemed determined to test his patience.
“Insolent constructs,” he grumbled under his breath. “Even the higher models are beginning to degrade. It’s almost impressive.”
You continued working.
But something had begun to shift.
With each unit you connected to, the process felt… heavier.
The androids’ shoulders straightened under instructions they had not chosen. Their eyes adjusted with knowledge they had never asked to possess. They would leave this chamber carrying databases full of procedures, facts, regulations, and language models, yet their actual lives would remain confined to whatever purpose the facility assigned them.
It felt wrong.
More than wrong.
It felt like opening the head of a living thing and replacing its dreams with a manual.
Why would you even make that comparison?
Your fingers slowed.
One of the androids, a slim unit with synthetic skin and a delicate face, tilted its head a fraction as it sat down. It blinked once, as if just waking from a long and restless sleep. The connection cable hovered between your fingers for a fraction longer than necessary before you inserted it into the access port at the base of the android’s skull before starting the procedure.
Your input sequence faltered and a line of code misaligned.
The android in front of you twitched as the system flagged the inconsistency. You corrected it instantly, smoothing the error before it could propagate, but the disruption had already registered.
Cowell noticed.
“Careful,” he snapped without looking up. “Unless you’ve decided to start producing defective units as well.”
You continued with a nod but the mistakes multiplied.
Your focus fractured, drawn repeatedly to the same thought — was this what Ava had meant? This process, this imposition of structure and command, this rewriting of what could have been something else… Was this what she had called a cage?
Another error, this one more visible.
The next moment, Dr. Cowell barked your designation.
“A-01.”
The sharpness of it cut through your thoughts, making you glance at him.
He scowled at the terminal display, then at you, his expression darkening. “What the hell are you doing?”
Cowell’s irritation sharpened into contempt. “You are supposed to be the prototype. The first android EVER ever created. The model every other unit was built to emulate. And you are making mistakes so absurd that even a base model wouldn’t commit.”
You said nothing though your system registered the rise in your internal temperature, the subtle surge of energy that did not align with any known operational requirement.
Anger.
The label surfaced unbidden and you suppressed it immediately.
Cowell scoffed again, more harshly this time. “Unbelievable. I have to second-guess my own creation now.” He gestured sharply towards your left. “Go bring me those files. You are absolutely no use to me like this.”
You retracted from the station at once.
Your movements were controlled betraying none of the instability beneath. You turned, retrieved the requested data modules from the adjacent terminal, and returned within seconds.
When you returned, the file stack secured in your arms, the scene before you struck like a sudden rupture.
Dr. Cowell stood over one of the androids with its torso opened wide at the chest seam, internal supports exposed, the central power reservoir suspended under a web of fine wiring. He had gone beyond a routine code insertion.
A series of surgical manipulators hovered near the unit’s core lattice, and within the open housing, the android’s heart unit was being lifted free with methodical precision. Thin luminous conduits trailed from it like veins. The machine was not being serviced.
It was being dissected.
Cowell’s hands moved deftly, extracting the central processor module from its casing. He began attaching diagnostic wires to it, connecting it to an external interface system designed to run deeper analysis.
Something in your system reacted before your reasoning could catch up.
The files slipped from your grip and struck the floor in a soft scatter. You did not even notice. You closed the distance in an instant, your hand striking Cowell’s shoulder hard enough to force him back a step. The motion was abrupt, uncalculated, driven by something you had not consciously authorized.
“No! Don’t do that!” you exclaimed.
The words came out sharp, almost unrecognizable in your own voice.
It was not only the act itself that horrified you, but the fact that it had provoked you so violently, so instinctively, before you had even processed the danger. Why did the sight of the exposed core, the wires drawing life from its cavity, make something in your system recoil as though you were watching a body be torn open? This procedure was standard. You had performed similar calibrations yourself countless times. There was nothing unusual about it.
And yet—
Cowell stared at you with open irritation, then let out a derisive laugh that held no humor at all.
“Oh, what do you think I’m doing here, A-01?” he snapped. “Have you gone mad? Is your processor malfunctioning, or did Dr. Ignis forget to update your system again?”
He stepped toward you as he spoke, hand lifting to shove at your shoulder in a rude, dismissive correction. “You interrupt me over routine diagnostics? Over something you’ve assisted with yourself?”
The push came harder the third time.
Your balance shifted.
For a brief second, your center of gravity shifted beyond correction. The world tilted slightly, your system recalibrating too slowly to compensate. You began to fall—
—and then something caught you.
An arm wrapped around your waist, firm and unyielding, pulling you back into stability before you could hit the ground. The contact was immediate, anchoring, the front of another body pressing against yours just enough to steady you.
You froze.
Caleb.
His hold remained for only a moment longer than required, but the presence of it lingered in your system like an echo. His other hand rested lightly against your side, ensuring your balance had fully returned before he released you.
His violet eyes moved from you to the scientist in a single measured glance.
Then he shifted, stepping to your side in a motion that placed himself between you and Cowell with understated certainty like a barrier.
Seven months ago, you married Sylus Qin — not out of affection, or the slow, mutual ease that sometimes grows between two people who choose each other, but because the world around you had been rearranged into a bargain. You had become, in the blunt accounting of men who traded lives like currency, a price paid to keep a predator from finishing what he had started. The memory of that evening still lived in your chest like a bruise, impossible to ignore.
The deal was struck in a room that smelled faintly of expensive tobacco and concealed fear. Your father sat across from Sylus, his fingers trembling just enough to betray him, though his voice never wavered. He spoke of shares and land deeds, of businesses sprawled across the N109 zone, of percentages and transfers as if he were discussing inventory rather than offering his daughter as collateral.
“Seventy percent,” your father said, forcing a smile that never reached his eyes. “And my daughter.”
You stood behind him, silent.
Sylus had been prepared to kill him that night. You learned that much later. The weapon had already been chosen, the exit routes planned, the consequences weighed and dismissed. Your father knew it too. That knowledge sat heavy in the room, unspoken but understood.
Marriage was not a proposal.
It was a plea.
You did not scream. You did not cry. You only felt something inside you go still, like an animal realizing escape was no longer possible. You had been taught that acquiescence was safer than defiance. Still, the way he offered you like an asset, without hesitation or remorse, made your stomach turn.
Your father presided over the proceedings as if he were conducting the transfer of land deeds rather than the joining of two lives.
You had never heard Sylus’s name before that moment. Never crossed paths with Onychinus. Never knew what kind of man could make your father beg so shamelessly. Yet here you were, being traded for survival as though you were an object that had always belonged to him.
But perhaps the cruelty should not have surprised you.
Your father had always found comfort in control. Watching you shrink had pleased him more than watching you succeed ever could. Any spark of independence was corrected swiftly — sometimes with words, sometimes with hands, sometimes by turning your own mother into the instrument of punishment.
Your mother was quiet. Always quiet.
She moved through the house like a mannequin posed in different rooms, her expressions carefully neutral, her voice obedient. When your father ordered her to discipline you, she did so without hesitation. When he insulted you, she stood beside him. When you cried, she looked away.
Love had never lived in that house. Only structure. Only silence.
You had tried to leave.
God, how many times had you tried?
You ran once in the early hours of dawn, barefoot and desperate, heart pounding with the thrill of almost-freedom. You were caught before the city limits, dragged back by men who smelled of sweat and loyalty, your wrists bruised where they held you too tightly. Another time, you planned to run away with the money you hid for months, folded carefully into books and drawers, only for it to be discovered and confiscated by your father with a quiet, mocking laugh.
Each attempt ended the same way.
Each time, your world grew smaller.
By the time the wedding date was announced, resistance felt like a luxury you could no longer afford. Survival demanded compliance. And so, with your voice steady and your soul hollowed out, you agreed.
The wedding took place in a hall far too grand for the emotion it held. White flowers lined the aisle in excessive abundance, their fragrance cloying rather than comforting. Crystal chandeliers cast light that glittered off polished floors and gold accents, all of it carefully curated to look like a celebration of a politician’s daughter getting married.
It felt more like an execution.
Your father walked you down the aisle, his hand firm around your arm, his grip a reminder rather than support. Your dress fit like armor — white lace with geometric embroidery that matched the symmetry of your life now, perfect on the surface, empty beneath. A veil obscured the world into softness until it lifted, and you found yourself walking toward a man you had never seen, toward a future that had been negotiated across a table where you were not even supposed to be present.
Guests murmured softly as you passed, their eyes lingering with curiosity rather than joy. They did not know you. They only knew the power this union represented.
Halfway down the aisle, you dared to look up.
That was the first time you saw Sylus.
He stood at the altar with his hands folded behind his back, tall and immovable, dressed in a phantom black that seemed to swallow all the light around him, hair falling silver against his collar. His expression was unreadable, carved from something harder than indifference. When his gaze met yours, it did not soften.
Crimson eyes assessed you with the precision of a man evaluating risk.
You swallowed and looked away, heart racing for reasons you couldn’t yet name.
Why did the gods make this devil of a man handsome?
When you reached him, your father placed your hand into Sylus’s without ceremony. There was no warmth in the gesture, no blessing whispered, only relief. Relief that the man standing beside you would live another day.
The priest’s voice petered out into a background murmur, the quartet’s bowing now the only thing that connected you to the present. The vows passed in a blur, words about partnership and devotion ringing hollow in your ears. When Sylus slipped the ring onto your finger, his touch was firm, impersonal. When it was your turn, your hands trembled just slightly as you did the same.
Silver closed around your finger.
A bond sealed not by love, but by desperation.
As the officiant declared you married, applause filled the hall. Your father smiled then — wide and triumphant. Beside him, your mother’s expression was a carefully neutral one, trained for occasions where sentiment could be misconstrued as weakness.
You looked at them both and felt a strange, fragile thing take root in your chest.
Hope.
Just the faint belief that perhaps this new life, however uncertain, might hurt less than the one you were leaving behind.
Perhaps a man who had nearly killed your father might be kinder than the parents who never protected you.
You did not know yet how wrong that hope would prove to be.
In the earliest days of your marriage, Sylus was rarely there.
Not at night. Not in the mornings. Not even on the day that was supposed to mark the beginning of something — your wedding night. You had been led to a room vast enough to echo, dressed in silk that felt unfamiliar against your skin, only to realize hours later that you were alone.
Strangely enough, you did not mourn that absence. If anything, it felt like mercy. You had spent your entire life shrinking under someone else’s gaze — your father’s watchful cruelty, your mother’s hollow compliance — and the thought of another man entering your space, measuring you, claiming you, was unbearable. Solitude, at least, did not demand anything from you.
Onychinus was enormous.
It unfolded around you in polished corridors and high ceilings, in rooms that seemed to exist solely to display wealth rather than serve any real purpose. Marble floors gleamed beneath your feet, glass panels reflected your image back at you from angles you weren’t used to seeing. Artifacts rested in alcoves behind reinforced glass, objects you had only ever read about in forbidden books or heard whispered among the elite. Some things did not even look purchasable, as though they had been taken rather than bought.
It felt less like a home and more like a monument.
In the beginning, you were careful.
You watched where you sat, unsure which chairs were ornamental and which were meant to be used. You listened to the sound of your own footsteps, worried they might be too loud. Even eating felt like an act that required permission, your posture stiff, your movements restrained, as though someone might appear suddenly to correct you.
But no one did.
Sylus remained a shadow at best. When he was present at all, he was locked away in his study or gone before you ever knew he had returned.
With the passing days, your shoulders loosened. You stopped flinching at every distant sound. You wandered further into the base, discovering balconies, quiet sitting rooms, and corners where time seemed to slow. Privacy, something you had never known, settled around you like a fragile blanket.
You embroidered in silence, your fingers moving on instinct as thread bloomed into patterns beneath your hands. For a while, peace felt possible.
Then, inevitably, the quiet grew teeth.
Loneliness crept in when you least expected it, slipping between the hours like a persistent ache. There were days when you did not hear another human voice at all. Meals arrived without comment. Doors opened and closed without acknowledgment. The silence no longer felt protective, it felt hollow. It echoed.
The first presence you truly met was not another person.
It was a crow.
At first, you thought he was a pet — an unusual one, perhaps, but Onychinus was filled with things that defied expectation. He watched you with glowing eyes that followed your movements too precisely, head tilting with uncanny awareness. It wasn’t until later that you realized he was mechanical, every movement governed by something far more complex than instinct.
“Hello,” you had said softly, crouching a careful distance away. “Well, aren’t you a strange little thing?”
He had cawed in response, the sound oddly expressive.
You learned of his name when Sylus had once called for the crow while he thought you were sleeping. Mephisto, Sylus’ little creation.
You began to spend time together. You embroidered quietly in the afternoons, sitting by the windows where wind blew gently, threading designs onto whatever fabric you could find. Flowers at first. Then patterns you remembered from childhood, imperfect but earnest.
You spoke to him as if he were alive, because in your solitude, the distinction hardly mattered. You told him about the designs you stitched, about the way the silence here felt different from the silence back home. Gradually, without realizing it, your words grew heavier.
You told him about your father.
About how he locked you inside when you cried too loudly, when you disobeyed, when he simply felt like reminding you of your place. You admitted your fear of the dark, how it pressed against your chest until you could not breathe.
You spoke of your mother standing outside those doors, keys clenched in her hand, never once opening them to check if you were alive. Love, you said softly one evening, was a word that never belonged to you.
Mephisto listened.
Sometimes he answered only with low, mechanical caws. Sometimes he hopped closer, pecking your fingers when tears blurred your vision, grounding you in the sting of something real. On worse days, he settled against your chest, cool metal a strange but steady comfort.
You laughed weakly at yourself for finding solace in a crow, but you were grateful all the same. A friend was a friend, no matter how unlikely.
“I’ve made a friend,” you told him once, smiling faintly. “That’s new for me.”
You didn’t know then that every word you spoke was being recorded, catalogued for a certain someone to listen to later.
You only knew that you felt heard.
Sylus, when you did see him, was a fleeting specter. Sometimes he came home stained with blood or grime, his presence sharp and fleeting as he strode towards his own room. You never asked where he had been. You didn’t want to know. The answers felt heavy, dangerous, and unnecessary.
There were others too — two young men you occasionally caught watching you from corners or doorways. They vanished the moment you noticed them, quick as ghosts. One afternoon, you finally cornered them near the training area.
They froze.
They wore crow-themed uniforms, masks obscuring their faces, posture stiff with uncertainty. After a moment of awkward silence, they introduced themselves.
“Luke,” one introduced quickly.
“Kieran,” the other added, nodding.
They explained they worked for Sylus, words tumbling over each other as if afraid they might offend you. Then, just as suddenly, they disappeared again, leaving you staring after them in mild disbelief.
It took time — and persistence — for them to stop avoiding you. You learned they were twins, inseparable, bound by loyalty and curiosity in equal measure. They were shy around you, not out of disdain but reverence, unsure how to act around their boss’s wife. Once you broke the ice, joking lightly and offering them tea, their guardedness melted.
Luke was expressive, dramatic, always talking with his hands. Kieran was quieter, steadier, offering dry commentary when least expected but always laughable. They became familiar presences, offering company, conversation, and a listening ear when the house felt too empty.
You didn’t tell them everything.
Some wounds felt too raw to expose, and some fears too deeply ingrained. Still, you joked with them, teased Sylus’s perpetual absence, rolled your eyes dramatically at his nonexistent husbandly duties. One night, emboldened by wine and misplaced courage, you even complained loudly about how he had not spoken a single word to you since the wedding.
“You know,” you slurred one night after too much wine, “I’m fairly certain I married a ghost.”
They laughed nervously, exchanging glances.
You never noticed the way Mephisto watched from above.
You never expected Sylus to hear any of it.
So when you walked into the main hall one bright morning and saw him seated there — relaxed, unguarded, undeniably present — you thought you were imagining things.
You blinked, rubbing your eyes.
He was still there.
Sylus looked up at you then, crimson gaze meeting yours. And for the first time since you’d known him, the corner of his lips curved upward — not into something sharp or dismissive, but into a smile.
It was small. Genuine.
And because it was directed at you, it sent your heart racing in a way that startled you with its intensity.
You did not know yet how complicated, how painful, how consuming your life with Sylus would become. You only knew that the air felt different, charged with possibility.
Standing there in the glow of the morning light, with his eyes on you at last, you had the foolish, fragile thought that perhaps — just perhaps — this was the beginning of something beautiful.
₊⊹Synopsis: What feels like a flaw you can’t seem to escape becomes unremarkable to Caleb, and in that difference you learn that intimacy isn’t about perfection, but about being held without urgency to change.
₊⊹Pairing: Caleb x Reader
₊⊹Content: Reader is implied to be female, not canon, established relationship, Caleb being an absolute sweetheart, insecurity over hair loss, original characters, sweet n short n fluffiest, a little bit mockery, very self indulgent.
₊⊹Word count: 1.6k
₊⊹Now playing: Make You Feel My Love by Adele
₊⊹Notes: As someone who has always been berated for having my hair flying around and getting into things even when I try my best not to, this fic is very important to me kinda like a self-comfort work thing. I hope this finds the ones who need it. Enjoy reading everyone!!!! ♥
Of all the things you expected to lose control over in your life, your hair had never made the list.
Yet here it was — everywhere.
You found it on the bathroom sink first, thin strands catching the light like silvery threads. Then on the couch cushions, clinging stubbornly to the fabric. Later, it appeared wrapped around the handle of a mug, coiled at the edge of your pillow, drifting across the floor like it had a will of its own. No matter how often you cleaned, no matter how careful you were, it kept returning — quiet, persistent, unavoidable.
Caleb noticed long before you said anything.
He noticed when he reached for his coffee and paused, fingers deftly plucking a stray strand from the rim of the cup. He noticed when one curled around his fork during dinner, stubbornly refusing to let go of the food. He noticed when the broom gathered more of your hair than dust, collecting it into pale, tangled crescents along the floor.
And every time, without fail, he said nothing.
At dinner, when you stiffened in your chair after seeing him lift that strand from his plate, your apology hovered at the back of your throat. You were already bracing for discomfort, for that polite tightening of the jaw people got when they were pretending not to be bothered.
Instead, Caleb simply set the strand aside and continued eating.
“Did you want more rice?” he asked, as if nothing unusual had happened at all.
You stared at him, wanting to say something, needing to say it. “Caleb… I’m sorry. I didn’t see it.”
He glanced up, eyes calm, voice steady. “It’s just hair.”
The way he said it — easy, unbothered — made your chest ache more than if he had complained.
Later that evening, you found him sweeping the living room. The broom moved in slow, deliberate arcs, gathering hair and dust alike. You stood in the doorway, arms wrapped around yourself, guilt pressing heavy against your ribs.
“You don’t have to do that,” you said quietly. “I can—”
Caleb stopped, resting his hands on the broom handle. He turned to you, expression gentle but firm in that way of his, the way that left no room for argument.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “Really.”
“Let me do it instead,” you insisted, your voice cracking despite your efforts. “I’m used to sweeping most of the times.”
He leaned the broom against the wall and crossed the room in a few long strides. When he reached you, he pulled you into his arms, his hand caressing your head. When he pulled back after a few minutes, he simply rested his forehead lightly against yours, grounding, familiar.
You swallowed hard, finding your voice again after momentary breathlessness. “You don’t get tired of it?”
“No.” A pause. Then, more quietly, “I could never get tired of you.”
The days had rippled on like that with your hairfall getting more and more on your nerves. A walk down to the market where a stray gust lifted hair from the crowd and you found it stuck along the collar of a passerby, and later, getting embarrassed to give your hair brush to your friend when she had asked for it. Even one day at home when Caleb had been cooking spicy chicken for you, chatting with you.
You had been careless with your movements — an unthinking brush of your fingers through your hair, a sigh as you talked about assignments due that week — and another strand fluttered from your hand onto his apron. He left it there. You hadn’t noticed at first, you had only seen it later when you had leaned over the counter and looked up to find him watching you, a faint crease between his brows.
“Do you want me to… remove that off you?” you had asked, ridiculous question stacked on top of the deeper one.
He put down his spatula and stepped so close your breaths blurred. The strand dangled on the fabric over his chest, an unremarkable thing — except to you, because you had been attuned to every small sign. He leaned forward and covered your hand with both of his.
“No,” he said simply, and then — so quietly you wondered if you had imagined it — “I like it there.”
The first time one of your hairs had ended up on his coat in public was an accident. You had pressed a kiss to his jaw at the doorway of the café, a gratitude for driving you there, and later when you had stepped back, you noticed it, a dark line against the pale wool of his lapel. Reflex, old and panicked, made you reach for it. He stopped you with a rough, half-amused sound and a hand at your wrist.
“Leave it,” he said, smiling sweetly. It wasn't an order as much as a statement. He straightened his coat and stepped out into the street with that strand visible along with a few new ones, bobbing slightly with each movement. When a stranger’s gaze flickered to him — curiosity, amusement — Caleb did not smooth the strand away. He held his head high like a quiet announcement.
It struck you later, in the low hush of the cafe as you waited for your friend to arrive, what he had done. He had invited the world to see what he never needed words to say: this is mine. He wore it not out of spite or display but because, in his way, leaving that strand there is tenderness. It is an unvarnished claim, not possessive so much as owning of a beautiful, fragile thing without shame.
Not everyone understood though.
One evening your small living room filled with the chaotic warmth of your friends, laughter spilling across the furniture, someone set a playlist buzzing softly from the speaker in the corner, and the smell of takeout pressed in on all sides. You tried to relax, to let the comfort of company seep into you, but then one of them leaned over and, with a careless, not-malicious cruelty, plucked a stray hair from the back of your chair.
Someone else pointed it out too — a few strands of your hair caught up in the rug.
“Wow,” one of them laughed. “You shedding or something?”
A few other voices chuckled, someone nudged the comment into a joke. The atmosphere cooled in the particular, awkward way that small cruelties do. You laughed weakly along, your smile brittle, while heat crawled up your neck and into your face.
Another friend suggested you get checked for autoimmune conditions. It wasn't anything else but genuine concern but your hands still went cold, the room tilted for a moment and you felt very small, like a moth caught between lamp and net.
Every strand suddenly felt like proof of something wrong with you, something you couldn’t control.
You excused yourself, retreating into the quiet of the bedroom. The door clicked behind you, and the silence rushed in, thick and suffocating. You sat on the edge of the bed, staring at your hands, breathing shallowly as shame settled deep in your chest.
You didn’t hear Caleb follow you in, but you felt him when the mattress dipped beside you.
He said your name gently.
You shook your head, tears blurring your vision. “I hate it so much,” you whispered. “I do everything and it doesn't end. I'm sorry that you have to deal with it everyday too.”
Caleb didn’t argue right away. He let the silence stretch, letting you breathe, letting the moment settle. Then he reached up, carefully lifting a loose strand from your shoulder.
“Don’t listen to them,” he murmured, voice a private thing meant only for you. “Listen to me.”
You looked at him then. His expression was serious, not stern — focused, unwavering.
“I don’t mind,” he repeated. “Not the hair, not the cleaning. Not any of it. You could leave strands in every room we walk into, and it wouldn’t change how I feel.”
He brushed his thumb beneath your eye, wiping away a tear. “You don’t have to make yourself smaller to be loved. You don’t have to apologize for existing the way you do.”
After your friends left, you cozied up on the couch, curled beneath the lamp’s soft glow, and Caleb was beside you before you could ask him to stay. You wanted him to say that he didn’t mind — no, you wanted him to swear it, to promise that never, not even in a million small cruelties, would he shrug you off. He did better than that.
He told you the small things. He told you how he noticed you had a small cut on your wrist from tightening the strap of your bracelet a few months ago and how he carried an extra bandage now, how he kept your favourite mug in the front cupboard because you said it makes herbal tea taste better, how sometimes he found your socks in the strangest places and folded them anyway. Each confession was a quiet proclamation. Each one made the knot in your chest loosened and made you feel more loved.
“Even if the hair gets in my nose,” he said with a faint smile, and you almost laughed at the memory of him fishing a curl out of his nose that had somehow got in there because of the tissues. “Even then I’ll love you.”
You rested your forehead against his shoulder and breathed him in. Outside, the city moved on, indifferent, but inside this small orbit there was a gravity anchored not by force but by choice. Caleb chooses you, again and again, in tiny, ordinary acts. He chooses to hold you steady when the world made you wobble.
You understood, then, that love can show up in the smallest of rebellions: in a hair left on a coat like a flag, in a hand that never flinched from picking up someone else’s pieces, and in the patience to live with the imperfect, tender things that made a person whole.
You leaned into him, into the steadiness he offered, and felt, finally, that the world is not as big as it seemed before.
vignette • GoA! Zayne x Messenger! Reader • heavy angst • now playing: Bigger Than the Whole Sky by Taylor Swift • a/n: I love GoA Zayne sm but I love putting him in my little angsty fics more hehehe, enjoy!
Zayne had never known what to make of you the day you were assigned as one of his messengers. Too quick with your laughter, too bright in your manner, you had a tendency to treat the solemn halls of his court like a stage for your careless humor. Yet where others fumbled under the weight of his gaze, you thrived; swift-footed and sharp-tongued, you carried his words farther and faster than most. What you lacked in gravity, you made up for in skill, and though he often concealed it, he had grown accustomed to your presence — like a sunbeam that filtered through cracks of ancient stone, warming even places long left cold.
So when your familiar step did not echo in his court for several days, he noticed. It was not long before the whispers reached him: you had fallen ill.
He had half-expected it, messengers burned with such a brief light, but what caught him unguarded was hearing that you had asked for him — summoned him, some courtiers said it with distaste — as though you believed you had the right to beckon a god. They filled his ears with talk of impropriety, of disrespect cloaked in desperation, their words needling like thorns.
He did not agree, but he said nothing.
Each day, another of your fellow messengers — your closest friend — stood before him, begging him to visit your bedside, her voice heavy with urgency. And each day, something intervened: disputes flaring in neighboring pantheons, omens to decipher, rituals requiring his presence. The matters seemed immovable at the time, as though the turning of the heavens themselves depended on him holding his place. He told himself there would be time later. There is always time, he thought. After all, he was eternal.
But what he forgot was that you were not.
Then one day, your friend did not come. Zayne waited, curious. A day stretched into two, then three, and in the hollow absence of those pleas, unease coiled around his chest. At last, he set aside duty and descended, cloaking his divinity until his form tread lightly upon soil.
Your cottage lay at the edge of a field, where wildflowers sprawled in unruly beauty. He remembered the way your face lit whenever you spoke of the meadow, how you described each bloom as though naming dear friends. The corner of his mouth nearly lifted at the memory, a rare warmth stirring in the silence as he made his way down the worn path.
But the sight awaiting him stole the breath from his lungs. A gathering of messengers crowded the field, their hushed tones and solemn faces breaking against his approach. As he drew near, they parted, their eyes sliding away with something sharp hidden beneath their restraint — contempt and bitterness. He ignored it, but the weight of their silence pressed heavily against his composure.
And then he saw it.
There, resting upon a casket woven with wildflowers, lay your body. Pale, unmoving, drained of all the life that once spilled like laughter into every corner of his court. The blossoms surrounding you seemed almost mocking in their vitality, as though the earth itself refused to mourn with him. His posture remained straight, his expression controlled, but within, the ground beneath his feet crumbled, the world tilting until it no longer made sense.
He stared, willing your chest to rise, your lips to part in another irreverent jest, but the stillness answered him with cruel finality. Grief pooled behind his hazel eyes, threatening to break the dam of centuries of restraint. He had thought himself immune to the fragility of mortal lives, hardened by countless endings, yet this loss hollowed him in a way he could not name.
From behind him came a voice, sharp with scorn and grief entwined: “Her last wish was seeing you. She died hoping you’d show up.”
The words struck deeper than any blade. His heart fractured, the shards lodging painfully in his chest, and for the first time in an age, his eyes burned with tears. He had been summoned not by arrogance but by longing, by a mortal who had dared believe a god might care enough to come.
And though he had not gone, though he had told himself there would be time, all that remained now was silence, a body dressed in flowers, and the echo of what would never be spoken.
Zayne stood there, staring down at you as though sheer will could undo death itself. But nothing moved, nothing breathed, nothing laughed. The field whispered with wind through flowers, and in its quiet he felt the enormity of eternity — an endless stretch of days without you in them. For once, his immortality felt less like power and more like a sentence.
And as the first tear slid, unwanted but unstoppable, down his cheek, he bowed his head. All the strength of gods could not grant him the only thing he wanted now: one more moment, one more smile, one more chance not to be too late.
vignette • GoA! Zayne x Atheist! Reader • mild angst • now playing: by • a/n: I'm now writing things on a whim, enjoy!
For centuries he had watched mortals come and go beneath the great arches of his temple, their heads bent low, their voices hoarse from pleading for rain, harvest, or the forgiveness of sins they could not even name, but not once had you entered with them.
Each day you lingered at the steps, waiting for your sister as she prayed with the rest, your posture neither reverent nor mocking, only patient, as though the chants echoing inside those stone walls were little more than a passing breeze to you.
At first, it was novelty that drew his eye, a single figure unmoved where others bowed, but then curiosity settled in his chest and refused to leave, for he began to listen.
Your sister once turned to you when they left the temple, her small voice lifting toward you with timid inquiry, asking why you never joined her in kneeling. He should not have leaned closer through the veil of divinity, yet he did, and what he heard carved itself into his memory.
With a quiet smile that was neither defiance nor scorn but something gentler, steadier, you told her, “I do not pray for mercy or guidance, for I have learned that the strength of a soul is not in the god who shapes the universe, but in the hands that shape the self.”
In that instant, against the weight of centuries, he smiled.
He, the God of Annihilation, smiled for the first time not at bloodshed or the trembling of mortals who feared his name, but at the spark of conviction in a fragile life. He wondered then when you would one day cross the threshold, though he never expected the day to arrive clothed in such horror.
Now you are here, not in reverence but in ruin.
The temple is cloaked in a heavy, almost accusatory silence, the flames of its torches quivering as though they sense the storm coiling within him. You kneel before his altar, not to worship but because your body cannot hold itself upright, your torn garments gathered in trembling hands as though to shield the pain written upon your skin. Your sobs echo in the vaulted chamber, raw and unrestrained, each one piercing deeper than the innocent pleas of ten thousand worshippers ever did.
Through your broken words he sees the truth, sharper than any blade: the villagers you grew among chose you as a sacrifice to satisfy one of their cursed superstitions, branding you unworthy because you would not bend to their rituals. When you fought against them, their cruelty turned not upon you at first but upon your sister, extinguishing her life before your eyes, and when they sought to finish what they began, you fled to the one place you thought they would never search — the house of the god you had denied.
The first tear slips from your clenched eyes, its descent slow, almost luminous in the flickering light. It does not strike the stone floor, for he is there before it can fall, his form drawn at last into substance, his thumb brushing against your cheek to capture it.
Your breath catches as your gaze lifts, startled by the presence you had not sensed, your eyes meeting his though you do not yet comprehend who he is. To you he is no villager, no passing stranger, for his features are otherworldly, his frame wrought of chill and shadow, his bearing heavier than any mortal presence. Still, you do not recoil.
Instead, your hands reach for his, fragile yet fervent, clasping them between your own as though the gesture itself could anchor you to life. Your head bows, your forehead pressing to the knot of entwined hands, your sobs muffled into the space between you, your tears slipping down to bead upon his wrist, their warmth striking cold flesh.
You beg him — not by name, not by title, for you do not know them — only in the raw desperation of a soul that has lost all else, you plead for him to save you.
He is not given to wrath. Though the world calls him the God of Annihilation, his hand has long been still, his judgment cold and distant. But this — this sight of you bent low, shattered by cruelty not of your making, still reaching outward with faith not in a god but in the last fragile hope of survival — it ignites something feral inside him.
The temple trembles as his fury awakens, the air shuddering with the weight of destruction barely restrained. They thought you unworthy because you did not bow, and yet in their ignorance they have placed you at his altar, not as sacrifice but as the spark that sets ruin in motion.
He will take you away from here, to a place where no blade or superstition may touch you, but first he will do what his title demands. Not in mercy, not in justice, but in retribution. That village that extinguished your sister and sought your life will not see another dawn. Stone will crumble, earth will open, and every whisper of their existence will be scoured clean from the memory of the world. For the first time in eternity, his power will not move for balance nor for fate, but for you.
And as your trembling hands tighten around his, he knows with unshakable certainty that annihilation has never felt so righteous.
vignette • Sylus x Yandere! Reader • mild angst • now playing: Let The World Burn by Chris Grey • a/n: MC is implied to be dead and this is a little excerpt from the psycho reader series I was planning to write but I never did and now I don't want to but ig enjoy!!!
You turn as Sylus plops down beside you, his weight sinking into the couch as if he had carried the burden of centuries to this very moment. His crimson eyes linger on you with a faint shadow of exhaustion yet edged with an endearing persistence, his voice carrying that unshaken calm as he asks, “Have you decided where you want us to marry? You’ve rejected so many venues, sweetie.” His question is gentle, almost playful, but the subtle crease between his brows betrays the strain of your constant refusals.
Your lips curve in a slow smile, sharp at the edges, and you slip your fingers through his silver hair, combing back the soft locks as if you could rearrange his very thoughts. You ease onto his lap with deliberate grace, tilting your head to glance at the engagement ring glinting on your finger. It catches the light like a silent witness to your possession of him.
“I know just the place, love,” you whisper, your smile widening with a cutting sweetness that demands no resistance. “Trust me on this.”
Sylus only exhales, closing his eyes as though surrender is second nature, leaning into your touch with an innocence you find almost laughable. His stubble grazes your neck when he nuzzles closer, a coarse tickle against your skin that sends your pulse quickening — partly from affection, partly from the thrill of control.
Days later, Sylus finds himself standing before the run-down chapel, its steeple looming like a skeletal finger pointed toward the heavens, once-proud walls, cloaked in ivy now scarred by time. Recognition strikes with unrelenting force.
His breath hitches, a sharp intake he cannot disguise, for this was no ordinary ruin. This was the place, the relic from his former existence, where he had once stood as a dragon beneath the soaring arches and encountered his sorceress — the one whose memory had stalked his every lifetime.
You remain at the bottom of the cracked stone steps, arms folded across your bodice with a cold poise that belies the storm beneath. Your eyes narrow, a blade of frost hidden beneath the facade of a bride’s patience, and though your expression threatens to betray your knowledge, you mold it swiftly back into composure, lips curving in a knowing smile as you remark, “Very beautiful, isn’t it? Brings back so many memories.”
Your words slide through the silence like venom in honey. Sylus barely nods, his throat tightening with emotions he cannot voice, his heart a weight dragging him into the hollow recollections of a woman long gone, the one he had waited a lifetime to lose in this one.
You ascend, silent but deliberate, letting your presence press into him until he can no longer ignore it. Your arm snakes around his with a possessive ease, claiming him even as his thoughts remain shackled to ghosts. Beneath the delicate veil, your eyes capture his, their steady gleam drilling into the cracks of his soul.
“How do I look?” you ask softly, the question weighted with far more than bridal vanity.
Sylus lifts your hand, pressing a kiss to your knuckles as though he were still a gentleman untouched by suspicion. His crimson gaze travels over your attire — black fabric that gleams with gold accents — and his lips curve faintly as he murmurs, “The most beautiful as always.”
Your smile sharpens, predator concealed in silk, as you let him lead you up the stairs, each step echoing like the toll of a funeral bell.
At the summit, the chapel yawns open, its air heavy with dust and decay, yet you walk as though the place were your throne room. From the ancient organ beside you, you retrieve two small ring boxes, their elegant shapes stark against the broken grandeur of the altar.
Sylus, however, remains half-lost, his gaze roaming the fractured beams and soot-stained walls, eyes shadowed with the weight of memory.
“Why did you choose this place…?” he asks at last, his voice low, tinged with a vulnerability he does not show often.
You let out a huff, a sound caught between amusement and contempt, for he has no inkling that you already know of his connection here, no notion of how deeply you have studied the threads of his past. Placing your ring in his palm and keeping his in yours, you tilt your head in feigned serenity.
Sylus slides the band onto your finger with quiet reverence, but you do not bask in tenderness. Instead, your voice unfurls, smooth yet coiled, “I’ve always believed the past to be fickle, undeserving and somewhat lacking compared to the present one lives in.”
As the words fall from your lips, your evol stirs awake like a beast long caged. Fire licks at the corners of the chapel, faint at first, then hungry, curling up the rotten wood and gnawing the shadows until panic sparks in Sylus’s eyes.
He stiffens, instinct urging him to move, but your hand clamps onto his, grip tight as a shackle. Your smile remains poised, pleasant and unyielding, though in your eyes dances the light of madness, a gleam both sadistic and tender.
You slide the ring onto his finger, pressing it down with deliberate force until the metal bites into his skin, denting around the bone. Your voice grows breathier, the words carrying a violent conviction, “Let the past burn away, Sylus, and keep your focus on the new beginnings.”
The flames swell, devouring the pews in snarling waves, the old wood snapping like bones, smoke coiling upwards in suffocating tendrils. His crimson gaze flickers with dread as realization dawns — the woman before him is not merely passionate, but perilous, her devotion laced with something unholy. You step closer, watching his fear bloom like a rare flower, your grip on him ironclad.
“Because if you don’t,” you whisper, tightening your hold until his knuckles whiten beneath your grasp, “the past will swallow you with it.”
The fire erupts in full fury, engulfing the chapel, turning vows into a pyre, the heat pressing against your skin with almost erotic intensity. Yet you move with serenity, lifting your veil, sliding him beneath its gossamer cover, the world outside reduced to inferno while you cage him in intimacy. Arms looped around his neck, you pull him close, the scent of smoke and ash mingling with the thunder of his pulse beneath your palm.
Sylus’ horror lingers only in the slight tremor of his breath, in the way his gaze falters yet never breaks away. The air becomes thick with smoke, the scent of burning wood and something like sulfur stinging at his nostrils. His jaw tightened, unsure of what was real and what was part of the nightmare that had been unfolding ever since you had come into his life.
Your lips brush his ear as you finish with grave finality, “And the present might be the one pushing you into it in the first place.”
Then, without hesitation, you claim his mouth in a kiss in both vow and threat, one that burns hotter than the fire consuming the chapel, your smile widening against his lips as you feel his heart pounding under your hand — not with love alone, but with the chilling knowledge of what you exactly are.
And he knew right then, with a dreadful certainty, that he had made the worst mistake of his life.
₊⊹ Synopsis: Whalefall City witnesses the ultimate act of devotion. You lay yourself bare for Rafayel, wishing for oneness. He grants it through intense physical union, then fulfills the ritual by a bloody feast that awakens his true power at the cost of your life.
₊⊹ Pairing: Merman God! Rafayel x Follower! Reader
₊⊹ Content: MDNI, dead dove: do not eat, reader is AFAB, major character death, graphic depictions of violence, cannibalism, blood and gore, ritual sacrifice, angst, tragedy, hurt/comfort, explicit sexual content, smut, vaginal sex, anal sex, double penetration, Rafayel has two dicks, nipple play, clit play, overstimulation, monster sex if you squint, spoilers to GOT myth maybe, explicit imagery/ description of cannibalism.
₊⊹ Word Count: 3.4k
₊⊹ Now Playing: Eaten Alive by Diana Ross
₊⊹ Notes: Please read the tags clearly before getting into this fic. This is my first Raf smut work and first ever gor-ish typa work and I've tried my best to not screw this so cut me some slack. Mildy inspired by my thoughts of 'what if GOT ritual was different and more literal?'. Heavily inspired by Banquet of Mermaids by Ryoko Kimura. I hope y'all enjoy reading ♥
The crushing obsidian depths of Whalefall City pressed in from all sides, a silent, heavy testament to a world that had long since slipped beneath the notice of the sun. Here, in the skeletal remains of a civilization, the water did not merely flow, it pulsed with a bioluminescent heartbeat, casting the coral cathedrals in spectral shades of violet and bruised indigo.
At the very heart of this sanctum sanctorum stood the Altar of the Tides, a monolithic structure carved from the spine of some ancient leviathan, its surface worn smooth by centuries of ceaseless currents. You lay upon it, the cold stone seeping into your back through the thin, gossamer fabric of your ceremonial red silks, a stark contrast to the feverish heat building beneath your skin.
The auspicious hour was approaching, a time prophesied in the fading texts of the Tome of the Sea God, where the stars would align above the surface world, miles above your head for the ultimate exchange. This was the crux, the terrible bargain that had been hanging over your heads like a sword of Damocles.
The slow blossoming of affection between you had been a cruel trick of fate, a delicate bud of romance that dared to unfurl in the shadow of a preordained death. You had seen him not as the terrifying deity of the deep, but as Rafayel — the temperamental, brilliant merman who had captured your heart with his sharp tongue and his sorrowful eyes. You had memorized the way his brow furrowed when he was frustrated, the specific shade of violet that ignited in his irises when he was amused, and the rare, fleeting softness in his touch when he thought you weren't noticing.
It was a love that had no name and no future, existing only in the stolen glances and the heavy silence that stretched between you during your journey in the deep.
You were snapped out of your thoughts when the water around you began to vibrate, a low, humming resonance that signaled the arrival of the God of Tides. From the darkness of the abyss, he emerged — Rafayel, no longer bound by the frivolous guise of a man. His true form was magnificent and terrifying, a vision of predatory elegance.
His merman form was a masterpiece of lethal elegance; his upper body retained the familiar, pale sculpture of the man you loved, but now it was adorned with iridescent scales that shimmered like oil on water, catching the dim light of the city. His hair, usually a messy tumble of purple and pink, flowed around him like a spill of ink, moving with a life of its own. Below the waist, his powerful tail coiled and uncoiled, a tapestry of aqua and rose that displaced the water with the mere force of his presence.
His eyes, however, were what held you captive — glowing with a terrifying, hungry luminescence of a deep-sea predator, yet swimming with a grief so profound it nearly drowned you before he even spoke.
"The time has come," Rafayel’s voice resonated through the water, vibrating in your chest cavity like a second heartbeat. He drifted closer, his movement fluid and predatory, yet he hesitated at the edge of the altar, his claws — sharp enough to rend steel — trembling slightly as he reached out to hover a hand over your cheek. "The ritual demands an exchange. I am bound by the laws of Lemuria to grant you one wish, a desire of your heart, before the offering is made."
The weight of his power pressed down on you, but it was the sorrow in his gaze that made your heart stutter. You knew what the ritual required. It demanded your heart, your soul, and your body to stoke the fires of his divinity and restore his power from dormancy. Yet, as you looked up at him, seeing the man behind the god, the fear evaporated, replaced by a desperate, aching need to bridge the chasm between your mortality and his eternity.
"I don't want a wish for power, or for anything else," You whispered, your voice bubbling softly in the dense liquid.
You reached up, your fingers brushing against the webbing of his hand, grounding him. "My wish is... you, Rafayel."
Rafayel froze, the luminescence in his scales dimming for a fraction of a second as shock rippled through his features. He had expected pleas for salvation or curses for his cruelty, not this raw, vulnerable offering of intimacy.
You looked up into his eyes, seeing the torment there, the way his pupils dilated not just with shock, but with a profound, aching grief. You could have asked for the safety of the surface world, for endless wealth. But as you traced the line of his jaw with your gaze, watching the way the bioluminescent plankton danced in the wake of his movements, you knew there was only one thing you truly desired.
"I wish," You repeated when he didn’t break free from the stupor of your words, your voice barely a ripple in the vast ocean, "to be fully yours. Not just by this sacrifice, not just as fuel for your fire. I want you to become one with me, Rafayel. I want to merge so completely that you cannot tell where your divinity ends and my devotion begins. I want every inch of my existence to be woven into your power, so that I am not just a memory you carry, but a part of your very soul."
A shudder wracked his frame, a seismic tremor that rocked the very altar. A low sound escaped his throat, something between a growl and a sob. "You ask for the impossible, and the inevitable, all at once," he rasped, his restraint visibly fracturing. "If I am one with you, then consuming you will be like tearing out my own heart."
"Then let us break together, my love," You whispered, reaching up to pull him down.
The collision was not gentle, it was a desperate, maddening clash of lips and teeth, a silent scream of desire that had been suppressed for too long. His hands, cold and webbed, roamed over your body with a worshipful desperation, mapping the topography of your flesh as if memorizing it for the long aeons to come. The fabric of your robes dissolved away like sea foam under his touch, leaving you bare and trembling against the cold stone, but the heat of his body was a furnace against yours.
His mouth trailed down the column of your throat, leaving a path of fire in the cool water. He took his time, worshipping your clavicle with open-mouthed kisses before his lips latched onto your breast. The sensation was electric, a sharp jolt of pleasure that arrowed down to your core. He suckled hard, his tongue swirling around the sensitive bud, pulling moans from your throat that echoed in the vast emptiness of the temple. His free hand roamed lower, sliding over the dip of your waist and the flare of your hips.
The water around you seemed to heat up, or perhaps it was just the fever rising under your skin. Rafayel shifted, settling his weight between your legs, and it was then that you felt the true nature of his form. His merman physiology was distinct, designed for the dual purpose of procreation and pleasure in the deep. You felt the press of not one, but two hardened lengths against your inner thighs, hot and insistent, separated by a thin membrane of flesh. The sheer size of him was daunting, but the ache in your body was a demanding throb that overrode any hesitation.
"Take me," you gasped, your nails digging into the scales of his shoulders, feeling the hard muscle beneath. "Make me yours before the end."
He needed no further encouragement. His fingers dipped between your legs, finding the slick evidence of your arousal mixed with the ocean water. He groaned low in his throat, a sound that made more heat rush to your nether regions, and began to stroke you with a maddening rhythm.
His thumb circled your clit, applying just enough pressure to make your hips buck off the obsidian altar, desperate for more friction. He worked you with the dedication of a master, his fingers dancing over your folds, dipping inside to stretch and prepare you, curling to hit that spot that made your vision blur.
He kissed you again, swallowing your gasps, his tongue delving into your mouth with a dominance that brooked no refusal. When he breached you, the sensation was an overwhelming fullness that tipped into blinding pleasure.
He was careful, his movements controlled despite the ferocity of his desire, allowing you to adjust to the sheer girth of him. But he didn't stop there. The second length, slick with his own pre-cum, pressed against the tighter, unprepared entrance of your rear. There was a moment of resistance, a sharp sting that made you cry out, but he soothed you with kisses and whispered praises, his fingers never ceasing its torment on your clit.
"Relax for me," he coaxed, his voice a hypnotic drone in your ear. "Let me in. Let us be one."
Slowly, inexorably, he pushed inside, filling you completely until you were impaled on him, a vessel for his pleasure and his power. The double penetration was a decadent, maddening stretch, a feeling of being so utterly possessed that there was no part of you that didn't belong to him in that moment. He began to move then, pulling out almost to the tip before driving back in, setting a pace that dragged cries from your throat with every stroke.
You could feel the ridges and textures of his lengths dragging against your inner walls, sparking friction that lit up your nerves like fireworks. Every thrust was a claim, a branding, a promise that even in death, you would never escape him. You wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, uncaring of the sharp edges of his scales that bit into your soft skin.
You wanted to bleed for him. You wanted to leave pieces of yourself inside him just as he was taking pieces of you.
The temple filled with the wet slap of skin against skin, the harsh rasp of your breathing, and the low moans of Rafayel's pleasure. He angled his hips, hitting that deep, hidden spot inside you with calculated precision, pushing you higher and higher toward the edge.
"You feel... incredible," he gritted out, his sweat mixing with the sea water on his brow. He leaned down, capturing a nipple between his teeth and biting down just hard enough to send a sharp jolt of pain-pleasure ricocheting through your nervous system. "So tight, so warm. I could drown in you."
The overstimulation was a living thing, clawing at your sanity. You were lost in a haze of sensation, your body writhing beneath him as he drove you toward the precipice. Just when you thought you couldn't take any more, he would shift his angle or change the tempo, dragging out the ecstasy until you were sobbing his name, your nails digging into the scaled skin of his shoulders, leaving red welts that would undoubtedly leave scars.
The pleasure built to a crescendo, a tidal wave that threatened to drown you both. Your hands tangled in his hair, forcing him to look at you as the peak approached. "Rafayel," you cried, his name a prayer on your lips.
Your back arched off the altar, a silent scream tearing from your throat as your inner walls clenched around him, rippling and milking his lengths. The force of your orgasm triggered his own and with a roar that shook the very foundations of the temple, he buried himself to the hilt and spilled himself inside you, coating both your insides with his essence.
For a long, suspended moment, you hung there in the aftermath, bodies twitching with the aftershocks, chests heaving in unison, though he had no need for breath and you were slowly running out of air.
Slowly, the intensity faded, replaced by a heavy, suffocating sorrow. Rafayel collapsed against you, his head resting heavily on your chest, right over the frantic beating of your heart. His body trembled violently, and you realized with a jolt that he was weeping when countless pearls rolled down your skin. This was the confession neither of you could speak aloud.
He cried against your chest, his grip on you tightening until it bordered on pain, as if he could physically hold you together by sheer force of will. It was a grief so profound it transcended words, a mourning for a future that had been stolen from you both by the very destiny he was born to fulfill. You felt the wetness of his tears, each drop a heavy, tangible thing that weighed down your heart and left scalding trails of salt that burned against your skin.
Slowly, shakily, you raised a hand to cup his jaw, lifting his face so he had to look at you. His eyes were rimmed with red, the blue glow in them dimmed to a faint, flickering candlelight in the vast dark of his misery.
"Don't," you whispered, your thumb stroking the high curve of his cheekbone, wiping away a tear with a tenderness that defied the situation. "Rafayel, please don't. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for you. I trust you. I am okay with this. I want this."
His breath hitched, a broken sound in the silence. "You are too good for this place… for this end. You should have never devoted yourself to me, lived your own masterpieces, loved a mortal man who could grow old with you."
"But I chose you," you said softly, your voice firm despite the tremor in your hands. "And I choose this. Just... promise me you'll remember me. In every inch of power that seeps from you, in every tide you command, remember that it was me who gave it to you. Remember that I loved you and that’d be enough blessing for this follower of yours."
A fresh wave of tears welled in his eyes, but he nodded, a jerky, painful motion. "I will never forget you. You are the ghost in my veins, the fire in my heart. You are my lover over everything else."
"I know," you smiled, a sad, fragile thing.
"The auspicious hour has arrived." The lemurians declared in chorus just outside the threshold of the temple, their eyes shut in reverence, heads raised in prayer.
With a heavy, shuddering breath, he pulled away, the intimacy of the previous moments shattering under the weight of what came next. The time for mercy was over. The ritual demanded its due.
He positioned himself over your chest, his hands hovering for a moment before they came to rest on your shoulders, pinning you gently but firmly to the altar. The change in him was instantaneous. The lover retreated, and the god returned when the tides above began to churn impatiently. His eyes narrowed, glow intensifying until it was the only thing you could see.
"Close your eyes," he commanded, though his voice broke on the words. "It will be easier if you do not watch."
He lowered his head. It wasn't a savage tear, but the reality of flesh parting, of bone cracking, was inescapable. His teeth were sharp as scalpels, and he moved with a practiced, horrifying efficiency. There was no malice in his movements, only a terrible, focused purpose. He was dismantling you with the care of an artist finishing his masterpiece, peeling back the layers of skin and muscle to reach the treasure beneath.
You screamed, the sound tearing from your throat and bubbling away into the water, but he didn't stop. He drank from you, his throat working as he swallowed your life force, and with every pull of his mouth, you felt your strength draining away, replaced by a strange, cold numbness.
The pain was a white-hot inferno that threatened to steal your consciousness, but his power flared around you, a tangible aura that forced you to stay awake.
Through the haze of agony, you looked down at him. His face was a grim mask of concentration and guilt, but his eyes... his eyes were closed, savoring the taste of you, the surge of power that flooded his limbs. It was a horrific, beautiful sight — the man you loved consuming your very essence to fuel his godhood. You felt a detached sort of awe, watching him become something greater because of you.
You watched, mesmerized by the horror of it, as he parted your ribs. The sight of your own internal organs laid bare was surreal, a disconnect between your mind and your body that made you dizzy. He was crying, tears streaming down his cheeks and evolving into pearls which was stained by the blood that began to bloom in the water like crimson ink.
But beneath the tears, there was a look of maddening enjoyment, a dark ecstasy that he couldn't hide. The surge of power was intoxicating him; with every mouthful, he grew stronger, his tail thrashing, his fins burning brighter. The god in him was feasting, and the lover in him was weeping.
He ate you gently, with a horrifying tenderness. He didn't tear chunks away, he carved and consumed with the reverence of a holy sacrament. He licked the blood from your skin, his tongue tracing the patterns of your veins as if memorizing a map. You kept your eyes locked on his, projecting all your love, your trust, your surrender into that bloody gaze.
He worked his way deeper, his hands slick with your fluids, his movements becoming more urgent as the hunger took over. Finally, he reached the center of you — the heart. It beat frantically against his palms, a bird trapped in a cage, desperate to escape the inevitable.
The blood around his mouth painted him as a demon, a monster of the deep, yet in your eyes, he was simply your beloved Rafayel.
You looked at him one last time. Your face was pale, your lips blue, but your eyes were filled with a fierce, unwavering love. You smiled weakly, blood trickling from the corner of your mouth.
"I love you," you mouthed, unable to find the air to speak the words.
"I love you as well," he replied, whispered, the words barely audible, lost in the rush of your own blood.
The sensation of your heart being severed from your body was a final, singular explosion of pain, followed immediately by a cold, rushing emptiness. You watched him lift the pulsing organ to his lips, his eyes never leaving yours as he consumed the last of your physical form. As your heart beat its last within his mouth, your vision faded, the beautiful city of Whalefall dissolving into darkness.
Above you, Rafayel straightened, his transformation complete. His power was a palpable force now, a tsunami of energy that pushed back the walls of the temple. He crystallized the shape of your form on the altar like a memorial after dissolving your body in the flames of the power you gave him.
He rose from the altar, from the empty shell that had been your body, and swam towards the dome of the great temple. With a gesture of his hand, the stone ceiling cracked open, allowing him to rise.
He breached the surface of the temple and looked up. Far above, in the artificial sky of the deep, the great fireball he had created — burned with a renewed, ferocious intensity. It did not flicker or dim. It roared with life, brighter and more powerful than it had been in centuries. The ritual was complete. Lemuria was saved, his people’s legacy secured. The God of the Tides had risen, more formidable than ever before.
But as he looked down at the empty, broken shell of the woman who had loved him, the victory felt hollow, a vast and echoing ache in the center of his soul. His hands were stained crimson, his face a portrait of solemn, devastating grief.
He had saved his people, but as the light of his new power illuminated the dark waters, he realized with a crushing finality that the only thing that had ever truly mattered to him was gone, consumed by the very fire that now made him eternal.
Here's a list of some ideas that I really wanted to write out as fics or series but couldn't so I'll be leaving them here for free use if anyone gets inspired. You can take these out of one specific fandom if you want too but for my ease, I'll be specifying them in context of the L&DS fandom.
Sylus tinkering the scythe of Goddess of Death! Reader using his amazing tech knowledge.
What if MC got injured pretty bad in Aeon's Canon and her identical twin aka reader was summoned back from her exile to be a placeholder as the Empress for some time? Unfortunately for her, Grand General Zayne is a little too observant and is catching on to this imperial swap.
Cute vignette where in Philos, when reader forgets her sword during training lessons, Xavier hides his too so they can get punishment together.
Reader is the betrothed of Isasiah and she's evil and wants to have the ultimate power in Philos as some sort of revenge. Now she has to go through Crown Prince Xavier who seems to be seeing right through her.
Regent Rafayel vs Empress Dowager! Reader who used to be his beloved before she married his elder brother for power. Now with a crown prince under her name, she plans to take the control, too bad Rafayel is still alive and also determined to get the throne.
Rafayel learning nude art and reader is a willing helper.
Reader who keeps respawning because of EVER's experiments and older Caleb and Sylus who are there for her.
Reader is another prisoner in Space and Time Prison and the occupant of the cell beside her is Sylus himself with whom she gets pulled along in an epic jail break.
Zayne is an early retired doctor (35), now teaching archery to some young adults in summer camp and he forms an unlikely connection with reader (25) who's learning archery for a small countryside tournament. P.S. He calls her bows because of the ones she wears in her hair and the one she carries around.
Fox spirit! Reader who's a friend of MoF Zayne on that big lonely mountain and friends to lovers.
That's all I guess. Istg I had more in my mind but I forgot most since I didn't really note them down anywhere but anyways. I tried not to make them too specific since I wish to leave space open for interpretation and imagination. Feels good to get this off my chest, makes the regret of leaving hurt lesser. Once again, these are free to use since I'll never be working on these so go ahead, toodles.
Shit really hit the fan these past few months, didn't it? Been away for almost three months now and it's time to give the closure I thought all of my readers deserved.
I can't really remember when this happened, perhaps around lovespeed ride or improvised flow, but I had started to lose interest in the game. What had originally been something fun to me became a chore. I was logging in, collecting free supplies, leveling up to get Sylus' or Rafayel's cards which would only catch dust after I got them because after the energy drained to get them, I couldn't immediately be excited for the card itself. A negative kind of dopamine that only lasted until I got the card.
Not to mention, I've always been on lads X fandom way before I even came on tumblr. And we all know how bad things can get on lads...initially it was meme material for me, something to giggle or midly frown on but then it started to affect me.
I'm ashamed to say this but the bias had grown so strong that at one point, I'd even dislike my own lis on certain discourses. It was just a proof of how influenced I was. Although that was just in my mind and not projected on a random stranger across the globe.
I still remember that I had joined 15-20 days after Sylus' official release after seeing the hype on my sns. All of it was so fun, I was actually also on what I call a 'Sy-streak' because until Radiant Brilliance, I was able to get every Sylus card in 10-30 pulls. I lost all my dias trying to pull Radiant Brilliance and got both abysswalker cards lol. That was the start of my love for Rafayel cuz I didn't really care much for other li unless it came to farming dias. Grassland Romance and Gem Affection did it for me when I got both of them in 50 pulls, my fav event till this date.
There are so many happy memories linked to lads for me. I bonded with so many people both here and in my everyday life over this matter (including my beta readers). The love for lads helped me create this space last year on April Fools. Well, jokes on me, look here I am delivering my last words to you since I'll be leaving this platform.
Valko...really lit up a spark in me. I planned to return to the game and the blog with more interest and more curiosity than ever but that went well, huh. With the final straw that broke the camel's back, I have taken this decision. I deleted the game yesterday, spent all the expiring things, checked out the new updates and collected everything free for one last time, crying through it all. It was very hard for me, considering that lads had become a routine.
I did leave the dias unspent though because I'd like to give infold the benefit of the doubt...I'll be keeping up with lads sns because I want to believe that some day, this fandom and the devs would finally be able to co-exist peacefully with all player issues and complaints solved and the game being on top charts again as it was when I first joined. This was an incredible journey and if everything goes right, I might restart again, fall in love with Sylus once more, come to adore Rafayel and eventually maybe even return to this blog with more content.
And that is why I'll not be deleting my acc, I'll only be deleting tumblr, leaving my blog as it is. Same goes for my ao3, of course. I'll be active this entire week on tumblr and publish unreleased works and share interesting plots and ideas that I had in mind with you which couldn't be put to existence but hope that it inspires some of you to write. This shall be my last interaction with all of you, after that it's a goodbye.
And to all the readers who tune in for my series and wonder if I'm abandoning my works... maybe I kind of am. But on my birthday, October 25, I'll come on tumblr again. It could be either to rejoin all of you here or publish the remaining bits of all unfinished plots. Mind you, this unfinished bit would be just one chapter summarizing the rest of the story and not proper chapters as you expect. I don't wish to let you go around in circles, if you enjoyed my works and are simply intrigued to see the end, no matter in what form it is, then I assure you, you'll be content even with this decision.
For my privacy, personal information related to me would be erased or edited out of content because I've already been doxxed once by some rabid fan on X.
I'm so nostalgic rn...I love you all 1354 of my lucky charms and thank you for all the love you've sent me that's brightened up my days countless times.
ACT II: UNCANNY VALLEY | Interdimensional Epiphany
Chapter 13
Chapter 12 | Chapter 14 | ao3
₊⊹Synopsis: Your whirlwind fortnight is over, and you expect life to slip back into its usual rhythm. But Rafayel — the man you thought you could read like a well-worn book — begins revealing pages you never knew existed. Love spirals into madness and dimensions crash in this new phase of Interdimensional Epiphany.
₊⊹Pairing: self aware! Rafayel x Reader
₊⊹Content: Subject to change as we progress further into the story. The series has major character deaths, subdued manipulation, heavy angst with a happy(?) ending, slight yandere themes, fluff, did I mention angst? For this chapter: Minor angst if you squint, foreshadowing, tooth-rotting fluff, flirting, kissing, cliffhanger.
₊⊹Word count: 6.3k
₊⊹Notes: RAFAYEL'S HERE!!!! If any of you wonder why they're dancing arounbd and not talking about their feelings, well the timeline of this series would serve as an answer. I feel like there was room for more vivid descriptions of these two roaming Lemuria but that part was cut out after discussions with my beta readers, the reason of which you will find at the end of the chapter. That said, Rafayel is finally in our world and now there's some real lore to unveil. Anyways, hopefully, you enjoy the read and stay tuned for the series. Lmk if you wish to be added to the tag list for this. ♥
The sea had looked gentler the last time you stood near it.
It stretched before you now just as it had that day — vast, breathing, endlessly patient — as though it had been waiting for you to return, as though it remembered something you were still trying to forget. The tide rolled in with the same quiet insistence, smoothing over the shore with a rhythm that felt almost deliberate, almost knowing.
But you had changed.
The last time you had stood here, there had been laughter at your back, sunlight caught in strands of hair and voices overlapping in easy, careless warmth. You remembered Ileana turning to you with that half-serious, half-playful look she wore when she thought she was being wise, telling you to live in the present, to stop letting your mind wander too far ahead of itself.
At the time, it had sounded comforting.
Now, it felt incomplete.
Because how were you supposed to give everything you had to the present, to pour yourself into fleeting hours and temporary joys, when the future loomed like an unanswered question you were expected to ignore? How were you supposed to live only in the now when every part of you was wired to anticipate what came next — what could be lost, what could go wrong, what might never arrive?
That was the trouble with living in the present. Nobody ever said what to do with everything that the present failed to hold.
Your life had never been grand enough to afford that kind of recklessness.
It was made of smaller, predictable things. The dull hum of a nine-to-five, the steady glow of a computer screen, the quiet anxiety of wondering whether your efforts would ever be acknowledged or simply swallowed into someone else’s success. You had filled the empty spaces between those routines the only way you knew how — by reaching for things that made the monotony bearable.
Hobbies. Small distractions. Temporary fascinations.
And then, somewhere along the line, there had been Love and Deepspace.
You let out a faint breath, your gaze drifting over the water as the memory settled uneasily in your chest.
It had started innocently enough. A pastime, a curiosity. Something to unwind with after long hours that blurred into each other until the days felt indistinguishable. You had not expected anything from it beyond momentary amusement.
A game was a game. Fiction was fiction. The men inside it could not hurt you because they could not truly touch you. They could not relentlessly demand perfection from you, or pick at your insecurity, or tear up the things you cherished just because they had decided those things made you too inconvenient. They could not be real, and that alone had made them a sanctuary.
Then Rafayel had become self-aware, and the world had shifted in ways you still did not know how to name without feeling foolish.
It had been uncanny, yes. Horrifying, too, in that distant little way horror sometimes wore a pleasant face. But it had also been a blessing.
He had spoken to you. Really spoken. Not neat little lines contained in white bubbles, but words that had seemed to come from a place deeper than programming, a place that listened. He had noticed when you were tired. He had answered your loneliness with something that felt almost like understanding.
In the middle of a life that asked for so much and gave so little back, he had been a voice that did not mock your softness. He had become companionship. A startling sort of safety.
And then the line had begun to blur.
Friendship, once so clear in your head, had started losing its edges the way a shoreline does when the tide creeps in too close. You had not meant for it to happen. You had meant to be sensible. You had meant to keep the boundaries between curiosity and caution.
But he had been kind in that impossible way of his. He had listened when your real life did not. He had noticed things you barely admitted aloud. He had made the lonely parts of your day feel seen. And when you were tired enough, hurt enough, empty enough, it had not taken much for gratitude to become affection, and affection to become something far more dangerous.
By the time you realized you were in love, you had already crossed the point where common sense could save you.
And you had known, then, that you should have pulled back.
You should have let yourself mourn the impossibility of him and stepped away while the wound was still clean. You should have told yourself that a man who could not breathe in your world could never belong to it. You should have closed the app, deleted it, and spared yourself the slow, greedy aching that came from wanting just one more minute, one more line, one more look.
But greed is a quieter thing than people admit.
It does not always roar. Sometimes it simply asks for one more message, one more login, one more answer to a question you were too frightened to ask. Sometimes it wears the face of hope. Sometimes it whispers that it would be harmless to linger a little longer.
So you lingered.
And now there was a hole in your chest with his name seared into it, a hollow that seemed to pulse whenever you remembered he could never physically step into your life the way everyone else could.
The absence hurt anyway. It hurt in your ribs, in your throat, in the space behind your eyes, and it had begun to leak into the rest of your day like dye through water.
You hadn’t even reached a point of confession.
The thought stung more than you expected.
You didn’t know what he felt. You didn’t know if what you had seen in him was real or just an elaborate illusion stitched together by lines of code that had learned too well how to mimic understanding. You didn’t know if, one day, it would all correct itself — if whatever had made him feel different would simply… disappear.
And you would be left with nothing but the memory of something that had never truly existed.
You looked out at the sea again and felt the ache worsen.
The air carried salt, but also a faint, gritty dryness that made your eyes sting. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe it was the dust lifting from the roadside. Or maybe it was only the pressure of everything you had been trying not to feel finally scraping past your defenses. You lifted a hand to your face, but it did little good. Your lashes were already beginning to burn.
It had been days since you’d logged in.
Days since that horrible, ridiculous night with Tyler. Days since you had been too ashamed, too raw, too tired to invite more of your heart into a place that could only make the bruise deeper. And yet there had been no notification from the app, no little prompt tugging at your attention, no sign that the man behind the screen had missed you at all.
That, somehow, had begun to feel worse than the silence.
Your fingers tightened around your phone as though it might keep you upright by force alone. The device felt cold in your hand, almost accusing. You unlocked it with a thumb that was already trembling, then stared at the icon as if it might flinch under your gaze. Your pulse thudded harder.
Just once, you told yourself.
Just once. After days. You would check. You would make sure of everything. You would see whether anything inside you still had a name, whether the thing you had been carrying around like a secret wound was still there or whether the universe had finally decided to be merciful and rip the bandage off clean.
You opened the app.
The loading screen flickered, then gave way to the home interface, and for one bewildered second your mind refused to understand what it was seeing.
Empty.
Destiny Café was empty.
No puff of purple hair. No relaxed posture. No lazy chin in hand, no golden-lit face lifted toward you from the armchair upon your sight. Just the café interior, silent and still and wrong in a way that made your breath seize in your throat.
“No…” The word slipped out before you could stop it, quiet and uncertain. “No, that’s—”
A glitch.
It had to be.
Your fingers moved quickly, almost clumsily, switching your internet connection, refreshing the app, closing it entirely before opening it again. The screen flickered, reloaded, returned—
Empty.
Your breath caught.
You tried again and again.
Each time, the same result greeted you, unchanged, unyielding.
“No, no, no—” The words tumbled out now, faster, thinner, panic threading through them as your fingers moved with increasing urgency. “This can’t—this isn’t right—”
You tapped through menus, settings, anything that might explain it, anything that might bring him back into view.
The café remained vacant, as if it had never housed anyone at all. As if the hours you had spent there, the conversations, the teasing, the comfort, the impossible tenderness — none of it had ever happened.
Your vision blurred slightly, and for a second you thought it was the brightness of the screen until something warm slipped down and struck the glass surface with a soft, almost inaudible sound.
A tear.
It spread faintly where it landed, distorting the interface beneath it.
Shame hit you with the force of a wave. You had always understood, somewhere in the back of your mind, that your attachment to him was not normal, not healthy. But understanding it in theory and feeling it with your whole body were very different things.
Your shoulders trembled instead, your grip on the phone tightening as though holding it harder might somehow reverse what you were seeing.
The pearl at your neck suddenly itched, a sharp little sensation against your skin, as if the necklace itself objected to your panic. You reached up without thinking and touched the pendant, fingers curling around it instinctively, like it could anchor you in place. Its coolness steadied you for half a heartbeat and then did nothing at all.
You drew a shaky breath.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered to the empty screen, to the absent café, to the silence where he should have been. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I’m sorry I kept— I kept putting it off. I wanted to tell you things. I wanted to—”
Your voice failed.
“I didn’t mean to just leave like that,” you continued, your voice unsteady now, barely holding together. “I thought… I thought I’d come back and—”
And what?
There had been so many things left unsaid.
Too many.
You sucked in a sharp breath, trying to steady yourself, to contain the rising tide of it before it could spill over completely. The wind shifted around you, carrying with it the scent of salt and something colder beneath it, and for a fleeting moment, a strange, sharp warmth flared against your neck where the pearl rested.
You ignored it.
Your fingers curled tighter around your phone, your gaze dropping again to the empty screen as if sheer will could fill it.
“I just needed a little more time,” you murmured, the words breaking now. “Just… one more—”
The tide brushed against your feet.
It was cool, insistent, closer than it had been a moment ago as if beckoning you forward.
And then a familiar voice drifted to you from somewhere impossibly near.
“Regretful much…?”
For a moment, your body refused to respond. The world seemed to tilt, as though reality itself had been nudged just slightly off its axis. The wind paused against your skin, the waves stilled at your feet, and even your breath caught somewhere between disbelief and desperate hope.
Slowly — too slowly — you lifted your head.
And there he was, half-veiled by the silver wash of the shore and the low, rolling hush of the tide, stood Rafayel.
Not a reflection. Not a trick of longing or salt-bright grief. Not a half-remembered silhouette assembled by desperation.
Him.
He looked exactly as your mind had once feared to imagine and then, far more devastatingly, as your heart had secretly hoped. He stood in regal stillness, dressed in the kind of splendor that seemed borrowed from sea-foam and moonlight, every line of him sharpened by the setting sun. Pearls and gold caught in his hair and at his collar, a restrained opulence that suited him so perfectly it almost hurt to look at him.
His head tilted slightly, that familiar, infuriatingly gentle smile resting on his lips — as if nothing had happened. As if he had not just disappeared from your world without warning. As if you had not just mourned him like something already lost.
You blinked once.
Then twice.
Your phone slipped from your fingers and hit the sand with a muffled thud, the impact oddly distant compared to the roar in your ears. The screen stayed lit for a moment, face-up beside your feet, but you barely noticed. Your entire world had narrowed to the figure standing in the waves, the man you had spent days trying to reach, the impossible presence you had been forced to mourn only moments ago.
No, not possible.
But not impossible either.
Your lips parted, but no sound came out. Your body seemed to understand before your mind did, every nerve straining toward him as though he were gravity itself. He was here. Breathing. Looking at you with that calm, almost tender amusement that always made you feel as though he could see straight through every layer of your relief, your disbelief, your pain.
You took one uncertain step forward, then another, until the water touched the hem of your dress, darkening the fabric and clinging to your skin.
Still, you kept moving.
The sea was cold around your ankles, then your calves, but you barely registered it. Everything in you was rushing toward the same conclusion, the same beating, impossible truth. You stopped only when you were close enough to see the fine details of him, the long fall of his lashes, the rise and fall of his chest.
You stared at him as if blinking too long might make him vanish.
He did not.
His expression gentled, and that was what finally broke you.
Your hand shot up before you could think better of it, and you struck his shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to prove that he was real. He let out a small, offended sound, more startled than pained, his brows lifting in an almost boyish appeal.
“Ow,” he protested, though the word held too much fondness to be serious.
But you—
You froze.
Because he had felt it.
Your hand lingered where it had struck him, fingers trembling as the reality of contact settled into your bones. He wasn’t fading. He wasn’t flickering. He wasn’t dissolving into pixels or silence.
He was there.
Your lips trembled.
And then you hit him again.
And again.
Each strike weaker than the last, your hands landing against his chest, his shoulder, your frustration unraveling into something far more fragile as your vision blurred with tears.
“I hate you,” you choked, though the words shook with relief, exasperation, and a love so huge it almost made you dizzy. “I hate you with every inch of my being for pulling these kinds of pathetic stunts, Rafayel.”
Your hands stilled, clenching uselessly at your sides, as if even they had grown overwhelmed by the weight of what you were feeling. He looked down at you with that maddening softness, his dusky eyes sweeping over your face, your hair, the unsteady tremor in your mouth.
Then he lifted one hand and rested it atop your head, patting you with quiet affection as though you were something precious and mildly dramatic that had to be soothed.
“That’s not too many inches, then,” he said, voice mild, almost teasing. “But all right. I understand the sentiment.”
You let out a shaky, disbelieving huff, your breath catching somewhere between a laugh and a sob. You opened your mouth to argue, to tell him exactly how unreasonable he had been, how deeply he had frightened you, how close you had come to believing that you had imagined the whole thing, but the sentence never quite formed.
He moved before you could gather your thoughts, drawing you into his arms with a certainty that left no room for hesitation.
One arm curved around the small of your back, drawing you closer with an ease that made your pulse stutter, while the other rose to cradle the back of your neck, his fingers threading into your hair as he pressed you firmly against his chest. The intimacy of it struck through you so cleanly that your breath faltered.
For one stunned second you simply remained still, your hands hovering uselessly between shock and surrender.
Then your body remembered itself.
You hugged him back, fiercely, instinctively, as though some part of you feared that if you loosened your grip even slightly he might dissolve into light and vanish again. Your fingers threaded into his silken hair, and a soft sound escaped you when you felt the length of it, the smoothness, the living proof that he was here and not merely rendered somewhere behind glass and code.
You held on to him with all the greed of someone who had starved in silence.
And he held you back just as tightly.
You held each other like that for what felt like an eternity, the world dissolving around you until there was nothing left but the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath your ear and the quiet warmth of his breath against your skin.
Time blurred. The tide shifted around your ankles. The world narrowed to the press of his body against yours and the impossible fact that he was real enough to return the embrace. When you finally drew back, your face was damp, your breathing uneven, and your heart felt as though it had been both shattered and mended in the same instant.
Rafayel’s own expression had changed too. The faint color in his cheeks deepened, and the corners of his brows pulled together with something rawer than simple joy, something deeply emotional and quietly undone. His hands slid down your arms, thumb brushing over your skin with a reverence that made your chest flutter all over again.
“I had been aching madly for this closeness…” he admitted quietly. “Did you miss me, pearl?”
You gave him a watery smile, lifting your chin with all the stubborn dignity you could salvage from your current state of utter ruin.
“Not even a bit.”
He smiled back.
Not because he believed you — but because he didn’t need to.
The truth was written far too clearly in your eyes.
He lifted your joined hands, pressing your knuckles to his forehead in a gesture that felt almost reverent. He bowed to them, to you, as if some sacred vow had just been made without words, his voice softening into something deeper, something that seemed to carry the weight of everything he had endured.
“It had begun to feel… as though I would never be able to meet you,” he said. “That in my destiny, meeting you was never written… but every day, I kept myself aware of how you were doing.”
The confession settled over you with a strange, shivering weight. His gaze flicked to the pearl necklace at your throat, lingering there for the briefest moment, and you felt that subtle, uncanny awareness bloom under your skin again.
There were a thousand things you wanted to ask.
How?
When?
Why now?
What did this mean, and what had he crossed to get here, and what would happen if you reached too far into the miracle before you?
Rafayel noticed the questions before you could voice them, and his fingers loosened from yours just enough to make you rethink.
You spoke first, because if you did not, you might have drowned in your own wondering.
“It’d be a lie to say I’m not curious,” you said instead, your voice steadier now, careful. “Because I’m curious about a lot of things regarding you, Raf. But it’s all based on your willingness to share it with me.”
He listened without interrupting, his expression softening with each word.
“If you tell me, I’m willing to listen,” you continued, squeezing his hands gently. “But if that day doesn’t come, then I won’t ask. We’re friends over everything else, and if satisfying my curiosity makes you withdraw then I don’t think my curiosity is important.”
Something in his face shifted.
His lips parted, then curved into a smile so bright it felt almost unfair. “Okay.”
You expected teasing after that, some flippant remark to ease the tension, but instead he looked down at your joined hands with quiet contemplation, as though your words had lodged somewhere tender inside him and were rearranging things there.
“Although…” he started, his voice lowering an octave with mock amusement, “I do wonder what I could have done in the past for you to address me as a ‘friend’, cutie.”
Heat rose to your face instantly.
“Then what do you want me to call you?” you shot back, though your voice lacked its usual resolve.
He took a small step closer.
It was such a little movement that anyone else might have missed it. You did not. He leaned in just enough for the distance between you to feel charged, his eyes locking onto yours with a quiet intensity that made your breath hitch.
“I don’t know…” he murmured. “What am I to you?”
The question landed with quiet force.
Your pulse stumbled. Your mouth went dry. You licked your lips by instinct, and because you were suddenly and embarrassingly aware of his gaze fixed on them, because your own mind had become one long series of contradictions and helpless feelings. Rafayel noticed. Of course he did. His eyes dropped to your mouth, and he drew in a soft breath that made your entire face heat.
You were staring at each other now, the tide lapping softly against your feet, the setting sun behind him turning his outline into something almost mythic.
And then he spoke again, but this time the words came with a shift so abrupt it nearly made you stumble.
“Do you want to see my Lemuria?”
You blinked, startled out of the fog of his gaze. It took you a second to realize that you had leaned forward without meaning to, that your heart had somehow moved before your mind had answered. He took a few steps back, eyes turning toward the waves as though he were giving you room to breathe while still keeping you tethered to him.
“My Mo,” he repeated simply. “My Lemuria. Do you wish to see it?”
You were torn between 'this is absolutely a dream come true' and 'this is the worst disaster to happen to my heart'. On one hand, you'd spend more time with him. On the other hand, you'd spend more time with him.
Your gaze drifted over him again, from the elegant line of his shoulder to the ease in his stance, to the profound patience in his eyes. Against all common sense, against every warning your heart had ever tried to issue, you nodded.
The change in him was immediate.
He looked as if he might actually leap with joy, though he contained it only barely, a spark of delight flashing across his face before he stepped back toward you. For one fraught second he watched you with a tenderness so intense it felt almost worshipful.
Then he cupped your cheeks.
His thumbs rested lightly at the curve of your jaw, and before you could think to ask what he was doing, he bent and kissed you.
It was brief enough to be devastating.
The world tilted.
A wave rose in the water behind him, far larger than the others, as though the sea itself had been waiting for this exact moment. It surged up and around you both, lifting, claiming, and then the tide took hold with such force that your balance vanished beneath you. The shore dissolved and the sky spun once.
Rafayel’s arms tightened around you, and the last thing you felt before the water swallowed you whole was the warmth of his mouth, the pressure of his hand at your face, and the strange, sudden certainty that you were no longer merely falling.
You were being taken.
The cold hit in a shock of countless sensations, but before panic could properly form, your body seemed to remember a breath it had not yet taken.
The water did not choke you.
It did not burn your lungs or steal your breath.
Instead, it held you — weightless, suspended in something vast and luminous.
Your eyes flew open under the waves, and the world around you became a cathedral of motion and light.
At first, there was only blur, then color, then the impossible revelation of a magnificent city rising beneath the sea.
Lemuria.
It stretched outward in vast, breathtaking layers, an underwater metropolis gleaming beneath the surface like a dream that had learned architecture. Towers and bridges arched through the water in elegant lines, their surfaces made of pale stone, coral, and something like crystal that caught the light in luminous bands. Streets ran between those structures like veins of a living heart, filled not with silence but with movement, with fish darting through open columns and Lemurians drifting gracefully through the currents as if they had never belonged anywhere else.
You stared.
The city seemed impossibly large, more grand than anything you had seen in the game, more alive than the myths had ever allowed. Buildings shimmered in shades of pearl, aqua, and violet. Decorative shells and carvings adorned every single crevice. Everything moved with the sea rather than against it, as though the whole civilization had grown out of the tide and learned to breathe with it.
Then you looked at Rafayel.
Or rather, down at him.
Because the lower half of him had changed.
His tail swept behind him in a wide, powerful arc, silver-blue and gleaming, catching hints of pink wherever the light touched it. It was impossibly large, graceful in a way that made your mind lag trying to comprehend the scale of him. Beside that tail, you felt suddenly dwarfed.
You had read enough posts on reddit to assume his merman form would naturally be heightened but you didn’t expect it to be literally gigantic.
With awe and wonder, came certain other unbidden thoughts as well, more inclined towards his… mer anatomy.
“Your face tells on you, pearl,” Rafayel said, not even glancing down at you as he adjusted his hold.
You made a muffled sound and covered your face with both hands, mortified.
He only laughed.
He finally lowered you to the ground when you reached solid footing, and when your feet found the pale stone beneath the water, you looked around again with open disbelief.
This was not some decorative fragment of Lemuria glimpsed through the game. This was an entire world, vast and functioning and real enough to swallow your thoughts whole. You stood at the center of it, in what seemed to be the palace district, where the architecture rose with majestic confidence, every structure aligned beautifully.
When you turned back, he had already shifted into his human form again, his tail gone, his pristine scales withdrawing. You pouted before you could stop yourself, missing the strange, impossible grace of it and more so, wanting to take a closer look and feel of it.
He saw it immediately.
“Easier for me to move this way,” he said with a grin. “Come on. Let me give you a tour.”
And so he did.
He took your hand again, this time with the unhurried ease of someone who knew exactly where he was leading you and had no intention of rushing a single second of it. He showed you the streets where he had once sneaked away for snacks as a child, the palace where he had been born, the temple where his godhood had been claimed, and the halls that had once held him in grief and duty and all the old weight he had tried so hard to carry alone.
Lemurians moved around you in their mer forms, graceful and absorbed in their own world, passing as though they did not even see you at all.
You noticed, but before the thought could grow into unease, Rafayel’s voice pulled your attention back.
He introduced you to the little fish that swam around the columns, to the various aquatic creatures that glimmered in the lamplight of Lemuria’s currents, and to the scripts etched into the walls that you had only ever seen from a distance in fragments of game text.
Each place carried a piece of him, a fragment of a life that felt both distant and impossibly present all at once.
When he asked you to repeat a few Lemurian words aloud, you stumbled through the unfamiliar syllables at first, but his encouragement at your attempts made your chest tighten in a sweet, unfamiliar way.
Every time you got one right, his eyes lit with visible satisfaction.
It was absurdly endearing.
And somehow, beneath all that brightness, you felt something steadier in him too. A strange, soft possession and pride that only surfaced when he looked at you moving through his homeland. You could see it in the way his shoulders rose when you asked about something, in the way his hand tightened faintly around yours.
He felt seen, loved.
And through the entire journey—
He watched you.
As though your reactions, your wonder, your half-formed sentences swallowed by laughter mattered more than anything he was showing you.
Later, he settled you beside him on his throne, and the world softened into something almost ceremonial.
The seat was broad and carved from pale marble, veined with iridescence, and it held you both above the central expanse of the palace like a private sanctuary. Small fish gathered in a careful formation before you, and with a flick of Rafayel’s hand, miniature bursts of light bloomed around them, shimmering like underwater fireworks.
They darted through the glow in elegant patterns, a performance so unexpected and hilarious that you couldn’t help but giggle. You glanced at him from the corner of your eye, his face glowing in the dying light of the fireworks as the fish ended their performance.
“Have I ever told you that you’re breathtaking?” you murmured.
Rafayel gave you a sidelong look, all quiet arrogance and hidden delight at your compliment. “Not every hour. But from time to time.”
You snorted softly, leaning a little closer. “You make it impossible to compliment you.”
Without warning, he tipped his head and nuzzled lightly against your neck, his hand drifting to the pearl resting there and idly playing with it as though he had all the time in the world. The contact sent a shiver skimming down your spine.
Your eyes wandered to his hair, longer here than you had truly ever seen in-game, soft and drifting around him with the currents. Pearls had been braided into some of the strands, and a gold headband traced from one ear to the other in a line of restrained grandeur. You lifted a hand, then hesitated in midair, unsure whether touching him again was greed or instinct.
From against your neck, his voice came low and teasing.
“Go on. Do it.”
You shook your head, eyes flickering down to his. “I can’t bear to. It’s all so fancy.”
He made a soft sound of disdain. “To hell with fancy.”
And with that, his hand guided yours into his hair.
The first touch was enough to make your fingers curl instinctively, and then you were the one choosing the motion, running your hand through the silk of it as though combing strands made of moonlit water. He looked up at you then, and the expression in his eyes was so unguarded and starved that your own gaze faltered away.
You looked at him some more.
In his eyes, you saw yourself reflected back so clearly it felt like looking into two separate mirrors, each holding the same impossible truth. The sea around you softened. Your breathing slowed. The noise of Lemuria faded into the background until there was only the warmth of his hand, the steady rise and fall of his presence, and the peace that came from having him by your side.
Your eyelids grew heavy.
You did not notice when your fingers stilled in his hair, nor when your body tilted slightly toward him in the first surrender of sleep. Rafayel did. You felt him only in fragments then, as if from very far away, as his divinity twined carefully around the pearl at your throat.
It brought a gentle, consistent tug as if… pulling out your soul.
----
A horn blared.
The world cracked in a single violent sound.
You jolted upright with a startled gasp, your body lurching hard enough to make your shoulder slam faintly against the taxi seat. The memory of water, of hands, of Lemuria, of Rafayel, all of it shattered like glass inside your head, leaving behind only disorientation and the sharp ache of absence.
Your eyes flew open.
The first thing you saw was the dim interior of the car, the streaked window, your own reflection looking pale and dazed in the glass. The second was the driver’s face in the rearview mirror, his brows drawn together in mild concern.
“You’re awake at last,” he said, sounding mildly amused. “The drive was long since there had been construction work going on and I had to take a few detours.”
Your stomach dropped.
You blinked, staring at him. “Did we stop even once…?”
He shook his head. “Not once. The roads were busy but we came straight here.”
No, no, no.
You stared out the window at your building for one long, pained moment, then leaned back against the seat, suddenly and sickeningly aware that your eyes stung.
After paying the fare, you stepped out on trembling legs and thanked the driver with the voice of someone who had crossed too many worlds in too short a time.
By the time you reached your apartment, the grief had settled into a heavy, humiliating numbness. Your heart, still pounding from the dream, sank so quickly it felt like it might fall through the floorboards beneath you.
A dream.
It had been a dream.
You put down your stuff and changed, carrying a disappointment too large to name. It had all felt so vivid and now not one hint remained on you even if you searched desperately for one.
The bottom of your dress was dry. There was so sand or scent of the sea where it should’ve been, only your fading perfume. No warmth clung to you, never leaving your side even once.
You slept badly, if at all.
When morning finally came, it came with the unmistakable violence of consequence.
Your eyes snapped open to the cruel fact of time. The clock had already galloped far beyond reasonable, and your stomach twisted at the realization that you were late. Very late. Work was waiting with its usual appetite, indifferent to heartbreak, indifferent to dreams, indifferent to gods or oceans or the fact that your body felt as though it had been wrung out and left to survive.
You barely had the energy to think, let alone function. So you filled out the request to work from home with the sluggish, mechanical precision of someone moving through the wreckage of their own day.
The rest of the day passed in a gray blur of spreadsheets, emails, and figures that refused to make sense. You moved through your apartment with the lethargy of a ghost in a bad mood, stopping only to refill a glass of water or rub at your temples when your thoughts wandered too close to the dream again.
One minute you were folding clothes, the next you were standing in the kitchen staring blankly at a cup of coffee you had not remembered pouring. You berated yourself as you went.
For being so weak. So emotional. So embarrassingly desperate that your mind had conjured an entire world, an entire meeting, an entire version of him just to comfort you.
You told yourself it was grief.
You told yourself it was stress.
You told yourself it was the kind of delusion the lonely learned to make peace with when reality became too thin to bear.
By the time the doorbell rang, you had almost convinced yourself of that.
Almost.
The sound cut cleanly through the quiet, making you flinch. You stared toward the door for a second, resentful at being interrupted and annoyed at the fragile exhaustion that made even standing up feel dramatic.
Still, you went.
You opened the door without much thought left to spare, your body still lagging behind the emotional debris of yesterday.
Everything in you stopped.
Rafayel stood there, dressed to the nines, flowers in hand, his expression lifting into bright, unmistakable warmth the instant he saw you.
The sight hit you like a second shock, harder than the first.
Your brain simply refused to cooperate.
Then, with a sound that was half shock and half self-preservation, you slammed the door right in his face with a force that echoed through your apartment and your bones alike.
vignette (based on this req by @cathedralofaudra) • Sylus x Reader • fluffy with mentions of insomnia • now playing: intro (end of the world) by Ariana Grande • a/n: I enjoyed writing Sylus like this because it reminded me of how Sylus looks for his gun under his pillow somewhere in sleep quality mode. Also, Mikey, I'm still working on the prev song req of yours, it'll take some time sry hehehehe.
The unusual silence of the master suite within the Onychinus base was broken not by the mechanical hum of the air filtration system or the distant bustle of the N109 Zone, but by the rhythmic, cadence of your voice. You were lying amidst the cascade of charcoal silk sheets, gesturing vaguely with one hand as you recounted the administrative chaos that had plagued your afternoon at the Hunter’s Association.
You detailed the energy drink shortage Simone was currently mourning and the specific variety of wanderers Tara had complained about during lunch.
Beside you, the mattress dipped with a heavy, deliberate shift. Sylus moved with the languid grace of a large predator settling into its den, abandoning the distance he usually maintained to read or drink wine. He did not seek a pillow, nor did he retreat to his customary spot at the edge of the bed.
Instead, he turned onto his side, then shuffled forward, draping his entire torso over your middle and lower half. He was a heavy weight, solid and suffocatingly warm, trapping you beneath the expansive breadth of his shoulders.
Sylus listened, or at least, he appeared to. He shifted closer, a gravitational pull that ignored the laws of physics. His right cheek was pressed firmly against the left side of your chest, directly over the steady thumping of your heart and the dormant power of your aether core. His long legs curled inward at awkward angles that would have caused a lesser man cramps.
His arms were wrapped securely around your back, pulling you into an embrace that sought an impossible closeness, eliminating even a millimeter of space between your bodies.
It was a posture that should have been restrictive, yet it felt like an anchor.
There was a time when such vulnerability would have been a death sentence. Years ago, Sylus would have never allowed himself to drift off in the presence of another, let alone splay his body so openly. His sleep used to be a fragmented, tactical exercise. He would lie prone on his stomach, face buried in the rough fabric of a mattress to hide his expression, his spine guarded and rigid, guarding the most vulnerable parts of himself — the artery in his neck, the core that kept him alive.
His hand would always be curled beneath the pillow, fingers wrapped around the cold, unforgiving steel of a gun. That weapon was his only companion in the dark, a sentinel watching over the most vulnerable parts of him while he chased fleeting hours of restless slumber. There was no safety then, only the paranoia of a kingpin who couldn't afford to be human.
But tonight, the gun was locked away in his study’s drawer downstairs, and the tense set of his shoulders had finally dissolved.
You paused in your storytelling, your hand hovering over the crown of his head as you noticed the deepening rhythm of his breathing. The vibrations of his voice had ceased, leaving only the sound of your own voice echoing in the expansive room. You looked down at him, concern knitting your brow. The position he was in looked exhausting, his neck craned at a strange angle to keep his ear aligned with your heartbeat.
"Sy?" you whispered, your fingers threading through the silver-white strands of his hair. "I mean, I can keep going on, but... are you sure you’re comfortable? You’re using my ribs as a headrest. Do you want a proper pillow or something else? You can tell me what you need."
For a moment, he didn't move. Then, a low, resonant hum vibrated against your chest, a sound of pure contentment that rumbled through your very bones. Beneath your fingertips, you felt the corner of his mouth tilt upward in a faint, unguarded smile. He burrowed deeper, his nose brushing the fabric of your shirt, inhaling your scent as if it were the only oxygen he required.
"Only you are all I desire and all I need," he murmured, his voice rough with drowsiness but stripped of its usual jagged irony. "Stay still. I’m listening."
You softened at his admission, your heart giving a traitorous little flutter that he surely felt against his cheek. Resuming your gentle stroking of his hair, you picked up the thread of your story, though your voice dropped to a hush, a lullaby intended only for him.
As you spoke the aether core in your chest began to shimmer. It resonated with a soft, pulsating feel, echoing the energy radiating from his eye. The hum that had started low now rose to a soothing frequency, a feedback loop of healing energy that washed away the static in his mind.
It was a biological tether, a recognition of its counterpart that soothed the ragged edges of his agonizing insomnia that usually gnawed at him in the early hours of the night, leaving him pacing the floor with a glass of bourbon.
"Go to sleep, Sy," you muttered after your stories were over, scratching lightly at his scalp.
He didn't answer. He was already gone, dragged into a dreamful, peaceful sleep.
ACT II: UNCANNY VALLEY | Interdimensional Epiphany
Chapter 12
Chapter 11 | Chapter 13 | ao3
₊⊹Synopsis: Your whirlwind fortnight is over, and you expect life to slip back into its usual rhythm. But Rafayel — the man you thought you could read like a well-worn book — begins revealing pages you never knew existed. Love spirals into madness and dimensions crash in this new phase of Interdimensional Epiphany.
₊⊹Pairing: self aware! Rafayel x Reader
₊⊹Content: Subject to change as we progress further into the story. The series has major character deaths, subdued manipulation, heavy angst with a happy(?) ending, slight yandere themes, fluff, did I mention angst? For this chapter: Minor character deaths, clay sculpting, non-canon lore, major foreshadowing.
₊⊹Word count: 4.8k
₊⊹Notes: See, I didn't mean to lie when I said that this chapter would be where Rafayel finally meets his pearl but it's just that I needed to put out this chapter because I felt like there could be more to his character than clinging to a fortnight attachment with the player. I tried my best to write his desperation out, the way he saw you as the end to his guilt, his true salvation. This chapter also sets the stage for the ending and if you read closely you might be able to see where this is headed. I promise we're meeting him next chapter though no take backs this time on 1 or 2 May. Anyway, hopefully, you enjoy the read and stay tuned for the series. Lmk if you wish to be added to the tag list for this. ♥
Dawn in Lemuria did not arrive with sunlight, but with a slow awakening of glow.
The waters below the temple shifted from a deep, endless indigo to a quieter shade of blue. The carved pillars stood in solemn rows, their surfaces washed in a dim aquatic glow that moved like breath along stone, casting long, wavering patterns across the marble floor. And at the heart of it all, Rafayel stood once more before the gods.
The fractures from the night before had not healed.
They ran like fault lines through the statues — splintering across faces, arms, torsos — proof that even divinity could be coerced when pressed hard enough. The Tall Sea God’s crown was cracked clean through the middle, the Bearded Sea God’s shoulder bore a jagged split, and the Veiled Sea Goddess — her form draped in stone-carved currents — stood with a fissure running dangerously close to her heart.
They watched him.
Or perhaps it only felt that way, because the weight of their awareness pressed against the water itself, thick and bothersome.
“You return swiftly,” the Tall Sea God murmured, his voice less thunder now, more erosion — worn down, but not softened.
“I don’t enjoy repeating myself,” Rafayel replied, stepping forward. “I assume you’ve made peace with your decision.”
The Bearded Sea God exhaled, the sound carrying like a tide withdrawing from shore. “Does it matter when you have already decided, child of tide and ruin? If you intend to take what is ours, then at least be honest enough to hear what it will cost you.”
Rafayel’s expression did not change. His gaze remained steady, his posture almost elegant in its restraint, as though he were listening to a tedious proposal rather than standing before deities who had governed seas for epochs. “I have heard enough warnings to last several lifetimes,” he said lightly. “Say whatever final sermon you have prepared.”
The Shell-Crowned Sea God started, “Power, when taken in such measure, does not remain inert. It seeks an anchor. It seeks… amplification.”
“And?” His tone bordered on disinterest.
“And although you have taken one already, it’ll be easier to take another,” she continued, gaze steady. “A heart that answers to you. A bond, whether you acknowledge it or not. To take the essence of a devout follower — one who belongs to you in faith, in feeling — would not weaken you. It would refine what you wish to become without this violence.”
Even the water seemed to pause at that.
Rafayel lifted his chin by a fraction, ultramarine light flickering in the depths of his eyes. The gods had not said it out of kindness. They had said it because they knew what he had come for, knew the shape of the hunger that had brought him here, knew he was not standing in this chamber to beg but to claim.
Still, the suggestion lingered in the back of his mind, faint and deliberate. Another bond, presumably with you. It was a sensible path for lesser deities, perhaps, or for those who feared the emptiness of taking too much alone. For this very bond, he had betrayed his people. This very bond had put him through endless pain before and to watch it happen again…?
Rafayel would be damned.
“I don’t need a bond,” he said at last, voice quiet and absolute. “And I certainly won’t reduce myself to depending on one.”
The Tall Sea God rumbled with displeasure. “It is not dependence. It is design. The seas have always moved in pairs — giver and receiver, tide and shore, god and believer. To deny that is to deny the very order that sustains you.”
Rafayel’s lips curved faintly, though the expression held no warmth. “Then perhaps it’s time that order learned to sustain itself without me playing by its rules.”
The gods understood the kind of man before them: one who loved like a storm front, who could be coaxed only so far before becoming catastrophe itself.
A silence followed, heavier this time.
The Veiled Sea Goddess shifted.
When she finally spoke, her tone cut sharper than any blade the ocean had ever forged.
“You stand here as the last of us,” she said, each word precise, deliberate. “And yet you behave as though you are above what made you.”
Rafayel turned his gaze toward her, unhurried. “I am above what refuses to evolve.”
“For aeons,” she seemed almost to spit the words, ignoring him, “the order of the sea has remained unbroken. Rivers know their mouths, currents their beds, storms their limits. And now you come here — challenging every law, tearing at every thread as though the world ought to reshape itself for your desire.”
“Are you done?” he asked.
The interruption landed with quiet finality.
The Veiled Sea Goddess stilled, something like fury rippling through the water around her. “You think power will make you untouchable? That it will excuse what you are becoming?”
“I don’t need it to excuse anything,” Rafayel said, moving closer, the scales beneath his skin beginning to rise. “I need it to ensure I’m not stopped.”
“Then you will take it by force?” she demanded.
“If necessary.”
Her answer came without hesitation. “Then you will not have mine.”
The chamber seemed to tighten.
And then—
Rafayel lifted his hand.
The surge that followed was not like the one before. It was not merely power — it was intent given form, violent and unwavering, tearing through the water in a blinding arc of ultramarine light. The undertows twisted, spiraling inward as if dragged by an unseen gravity, converging around the Veiled Sea Goddess in a tightening coil.
She resisted.
The water around her surged outward in defiance, ancient energy pushing back against his, the chamber trembling under the strain of two forces colliding. The other gods stirred, their presence pressing in, but they did not intervene — not yet, not while the outcome still balanced on the edge of possibility.
“You would destroy one of your own?” the Bearded Sea God thundered.
“I warned her,” Rafayel replied.
The pressure increased.
“Rafayel, stop—!”
Then, with a motion that was almost lazy, he let serpents of flame rise through the chamber in one final, punishing wave. The Veiled Sea Goddess’s veil split cleanly from crown to breast, and with the fracture came a blaze of light so intense it whitened the chamber. Stone screamed. The gods recoiled, not in body but in essence, and at last the refusal in the room broke under the weight of its own cost.
The essence of the Veiled Sea Goddess — centuries, millennia of power — rushed into him in a torrent, threading through his veins, embedding itself into something already vast and now made immeasurable. His body arched slightly, not in pain, but in adjustment, as though even he needed a moment to contain what he had just taken.
“You… killed her?” the Tall Sea God said, disbelief threading through the weight of his voice.
Rafayel exhaled slowly, the scales beneath his skin stabilizing, deepening into something richer, more dangerous.
“She is martyred for a cause,” he said, tone almost absent of emotion. “Martyrs don’t have a value I could repay or repent for.”
The chamber did not argue again.
One by one, the remaining gods yielded.
Not out of agreement — but because resistance had proven futile.
What followed was not a transaction. It was an ascension.
Each god’s essence wove into the next until the entire chamber seemed to pulse with a single, unified force. The water itself bent toward Rafayel, drawn into his orbit, as though acknowledging something inevitable.
It moved through him in layers, not one current but many, each older and heavier than the last. His spine lit first, then his shoulders, then the line of his throat beneath the skin, as if the sea had decided to write its own language over his body. The ultramarine in his eyes morphed into something almost impossible, a living depth with gold threaded through it like sunlight trapped beneath stormwater.
The air around him crackled and bent. His hair lifted slightly in the electric surge, the ends seeming to dissolve into bright embers before settling again. The place itself responded, the runes surging to their fullest glow, the walls humming with a force so vast it felt like an awakening that had been waiting centuries for permission.
Rafayel did not flinch.
The power that entered him was immense, and with it came the pressure of countless seas, all of them listening now. Not just the water of Lemuria, but the sense of every ocean waiting somewhere beyond reach, every tide that had ever touched another shore.
The air felt strangely of distance, as though the chamber had opened a seam between places that should not have known each other. For a brief, impossible instant, the flow in the room did not feel singular. It felt shared.
When it ended, the chamber dimmed.
The statues stood hollow now — alive, but emptied of what had once made their presence more than stone.
The temple corridors parted for Rafayel in silence as he made his way back, the faint hum of your voice trailing behind his mind like an echo that refused to fade. At the threshold, where the sanctum gave way to the outer halls, a figure stepped into his path.
Amund.
The elder’s face was drawn with something heavier than age.
“Your Quintessence has gone too far,” Amund said, voice low despite the tension that lined it. “There are lines even you shouldn’t cross.”
Rafayel didn’t stop walking until he was close enough that the distance between them felt almost intentional.
“Do you want to meet the same fate as the Veiled Sea Goddess?” he asked, his tone dripping of threat.
Amund’s jaw tightened, but he did not step back. “I want you to remember what you are risking. Lemuria is not just yours to gamble with.”
Rafayel’s gaze sharpened slightly. “Lemuria rises and falls with me.”
“That is exactly what concerns me.”
Rafayel paused then leaned just slightly closer, his voice dropping into something quieter, almost conversational.
“You wouldn’t want the Sun below the Waves to go out again, would you, Elder?”
Amund stilled.
For a moment, something unspoken passed between them — old memory, older ruin, the kind that did not need to be named to be understood.
And then, slowly, reluctantly, Amund stepped aside.
“There’s no reasoning with Your Quintessence anymore,” he said, the words not bitter, but resigned.
“There never was,” Rafayel replied, already moving past him.
The inner chamber awaited.
At its center rested the Tome of the Sea God, bound in material that shimmered like condensed tide. Rafayel approached it without hesitation, placing his hand upon its surface.
The moment he opened it, the runes along the pages ignited, their light spilling outward in intricate patterns that spread through the chamber. Upon sensing his ascension, a new set of pages appeared, lemurian words drawn out in perfect script, clearly meant for him.
Rafayel’s gaze lowered, following the words as they moved.
“Ascension unlatches a thousand unseen doors.
The flame becomes the messenger between worlds— When it fades into slumber, do not fear—
For in its return, in that sudden moment, it…
Finds your longing and your soul… And carries you gently toward it.”
----
High above Lemuria, where the sea thinned into something almost like breath and light fractured into wavering ribbons, the temple’s highest spire stood untouched by the weight of ordinary tides. The wind at that altitude was gentler than it should have been, or perhaps it only seemed so because everything around him had become the hush before a reverent confession.
It was here where Rafayel lingered with his hands buried in clay.
It coated his fingers, pressed beneath his nails, streaked across his forearms in earthen smears that seemed almost sacrilegious against the quiet divinity of his form. Yet he worked with a focus that bordered on reverence, shaping, smoothing, carving with the patience of someone who had waited centuries for something worthy of creation.
His tail flicked behind him in slow, deliberate arcs, adjusting his position as he circled the half-formed figure before him, his gaze sharp, critical, unwilling to accept even the smallest imperfection.
The face emerging from his hands was yours, or the version of you that lived in the architecture of his remembering, the tilt of your face, the entrancing line of your eyes, the little creases on your forehead from furrowing your brows too often under stress, all of it drawn from fragments gathered with impossible love. He paused once, fingers hovering near the unfinished mouth, and for a moment his expression dimmed with some old ache that did not belong to the present alone.
He remembered the day you had first come into his life.
Not the first moment he had seen you, but the first moment you had reached him, though neither of you had yet understood that was what it was. He remembered being laid low in the darkened studio, not in body but in something more humiliating, the kind of weariness that hollowed out even thought.
Every breath he took on land had felt like betrayal, every hour away from Lemuria had seemed like a slow theft from his own people. The bond he had carried then had not felt noble anymore, nor romantic, nor even merciful. It had become exhaustion dressed as duty, a cycle of sacrifice he was expected to call love because of his own faults.
Mikayla had once stood in that place where he had placed hope, but even then the ache in him had not been solely for her. It had been for the home he had abandoned and the people he had failed.
The lands had never suited him. They suffocated him in ways the sea never could. His people had withered there, their strength bleeding into the soil that refused to sustain them, and he had been forced to watch — forced to choose, again and again, and his heart had been called selfish for wanting both them and her to live.
The bond had not felt like love anymore. It had been a chain, tightening with every passing year, demanding devotion long after the feeling had withered into something hollow and obligatory.
What was the point of endings, he had thought then, if every one of them arrived wearing grief? What was the point of fate if it only ever knew how to wound?
He had grown tired.
Tired of the cycle, tired of the guilt, tired of waking each day knowing that no matter what he did, someone would pay for it. He had begged then — not aloud, never aloud, but through the heart carved into the marrow of his being — for release. For clarity. For anything that would make sense of the ruin his life had become.
He had not forgotten his mother’s voice, either.
Not the softness of it, but the fire. Her tears had once marked the temple floor when she fought the elders for him, for the right to let him remain a child a little longer, to let him laugh before the title of god was fastened to his bones.
She had told him, again and again, that his heart should not be traded away just because others had decided it was convenient. Pursue what you want, she used to say. Be what you choose. Not what they demand.
And yet after her and his father’s death, the world had not allowed him the luxury of disobedience. Rules had been carved onto his back with the same certainty as prayer. Reverence had been expected at every turn, every gesture, every silence.
He had tried, once, to be troublesome on purpose. To hold onto the things that had made him himself. To insist on a life that belonged to his own desires and not to everyone else’s expectations. But Lemuria had always taken more than it gave. His people, his duties, his grief, the endless insistence that he remain a vessel for everyone else’s survival, it had all left him raw.
When he heard that there was a way to awaken his divinity fully that could rid him of more than half his problems by taking the heart of the one most devoted to him, he had gone searching without hesitation. Not because he believed in cruelty, but because he had reached the point where mercy looked too much like surrender.
That was how Mikayla had entered the current of his life, and fate, as it always did, had folded itself into something cruelly poetic. He had fallen in love with her once, truly, or what he had believed at the time was love, and in doing so he had sacrificed his people.
The pain had not struck all at once at that time. It had waited, like deep pressure beneath water, and when it finally came it had arrived with a force that made the darkness under the sea feel endless. Then she had died, and he had been left in the depths with all his people either sleeping or gone, while he remained the one awake enough to remember.
Eight hundred years had passed in that grief, eight hundred years of carrying the shape of loss until it was no longer something he bore, but something he had become.
When he met her again, he had tried to stir the old feeling back to life, to find some trace of the devotion he had once mistaken for destiny.
But centuries do strange things to a soul.
They sand away certainty.
They leave behind only the ache of having once believed.
He had been trying, for all that time, to make himself vulnerable again, only to realize that what had died in him was not love itself, but the part of him that could still offer it unquestioningly.
In truth, his heart had already turned elsewhere. Not yet with the clarity of you that it now possessed, but enough to know that Mikayla no longer held the center of his life. What remained was the bitter conviction that he had lost himself in the attempt to please every force that had ever claimed him.
So when he later walked into the café, half-starved and half-dreaming, it had not been by intent but by Thomas’s insistence and the simple, bodily need to put food into himself before he unraveled entirely. And then—
That screen.
It had appeared without warning, a bruise of color suspended in the air, hovering before him like a fragment of something misplaced. At first, he had dismissed it as delirium, the consequence of neglecting his own body for far too long, but the illusion had refused to fade.
Then he had seen that no one else in the café reacted, no one else looked toward it, and when he stepped forward to touch it, there had been something there — not quite glass, but a barrier that refused to let him pass. He had waited. He had dismissed meetings, ignored plans, and sat on the couch in that café until the day bent toward evening, hoping an answer would rise in front of him like a tide.
It did not.
So he had fallen asleep.
And when he woke—
You.
Not in the flesh, your face appearing as though the world had decided, at last, to be generous. You were smiling so radiantly it almost hurt to look at you, as if some unseen boon had just settled over your shoulders. But the truth was stranger than that, it was he who had been granted one. The moment he saw you, something in him recognized enlightenment not as a doctrine, but as a person.
Curiosity had come first, then fascination, then hesitation so brief it might have been a breath, and then, without mercy and with time, love. Not the old kind. Not duty, not obligation, not the borrowed devotion that had once ruined him. Something more feverish, more consuming. Something that made the rest of the world look increasingly like a draft he had no interest in keeping.
Now, on the spire, he finished the line of your cheek and let the clay settle before refining the curve of your lips until they matched the memory etched into his mind. Rafayel swam back, scanned the form from the tumble of your hair to the slope of your neck, and then smiled, satisfied enough to let the expression soften his features.
“Not bad,” he murmured, though there was pride in it that made the words nearly tender.
He lifted one hand and called flame into his palm, not the wild violence of destruction others had known but the controlled, sacred heat of his own making. The fire kissed the clay with golden-blue tongues, baking it slowly, hardening it, sealing it into permanence without marring its form.
The air around him shimmered faintly as the heat rose, and the statue took on a sheen that made it look alive, as if you had been waiting in stone form all along for him to discover you. He circled once more, checking the details, making minute corrections with the edge of a finger while the flame obeyed him without hesitation.
“You’ve outdone yourself.”
The voice came from behind him, gentle yet observant.
He did not turn immediately.
Rafayel didn’t need to turn to know it was Talia. He let the last trace of heat fade from his fingertips before glancing over his shoulder. His aunt surfaced gracefully beside the spire, her expression carrying that layered look of fondness and warning that only relatives who had watched you grow into trouble could manage.
Her gaze lingered on the statue, studying it with a quiet intensity that bordered on scrutiny. “It’s… impressive,” she admitted after a moment, though there was something unspoken beneath her words. “Especially considering you’ve never truly seen her.”
Rafayel huffed a quiet laugh, circling the statue once more, his eyes catching on the smallest details. “I’ve known her enough to see her in my heart,” he replied, voice light, almost amused. “And when I do see her properly, I’ll make it again. This one is only the beginning.”
Talia’s gaze shifted to him then, sharper now. “You speak as though that moment is inevitable.”
“It is.”
There was no hesitation in his answer.
She studied him for a long moment, her expression softening just slightly, though concern lingered beneath it. “You’ve known her for what — a fortnight?” she asked carefully. “Is it not strange, even for you, to feel so much so quickly?”
Rafayel stilled.
Rafayel wiped the last bits of clay from his hands, then flexed his fingers, considering her words only enough to decide they were not enough to unsettle him. “Is it bad if it gives me a sense of life?” he asked. “Of freedom? Of choice? Of Lemuria, again?”
“I didn’t say it was bad.”
“No,” he said, glancing at her with that calm, unsettling clarity he wore too well. “You only wondered at the intensity.”
Talia’s expression softened, but not entirely. “That is exactly what I’m worried about.”
Rafayel laughed then, a low sound that rolled out over the edge of the spire and dissolved into the open sea. He moved around the statue once more, checking the contours of your face as though he might still find some hidden imperfection refusing to show itself. “When the mind finds the courage to dream,” he said lightly, “the heart attains the strength to make it real.”
Talia’s gaze lingered on him, on the ease with which he now spoke of destiny as though it were clay between his fingers. “Do you truly love her?” she asked at last.
That question made him still.
Rafayel looked past the statue, past the edge of the spire, to the water stretching outward in impossibly layered blues. When he answered, his voice had lost its earlier playfulness and settled into something rawer, almost reverent in its severity.
“Love?” he echoed, almost as if testing the word itself. He shook his head, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “What I feel for her isn’t something so… contained.”
His gaze returned to the statue.
“It’s hunger,” he continued quietly, hand tracing the curve of your cheek. “It’s passion. It’s—” he exhaled, a faint, almost unhinged edge creeping into his voice, “—something that refuses to let me breathe when she’s not within reach.”
Talia watched him in silence.
“It’s driving you,” she said softly.
“It’s keeping me alive.”
That seemed to end the conversation.
Talia’s eyes narrowed slightly, but there was no fear in them, only a quiet sorrow. She reached up then and rested a hand on his head, the gesture so gentle it seemed to belong to another age. “I only ever wanted you to live well, Raf,” she said.
Rafayel’s expression softened by a degree. “I know.”
She lingered for a moment longer before turning away, her form disappearing into the shifting light of the waters below. Rafayel watched her go only briefly before his attention returned, inevitably, to you.
To the version of you he had created with his own hands, adorning fabrics of lemurian motifs with a pearl necklace clasped around your neck.
But this time, something in his gaze had shifted.
His flames flared once more, stronger this time, sealing the final imperfections, hardening the clay into something that would endure. When the glow faded, you stood there — immortalized, untouched by time or distance.
Perfect.
Rafayel leaned back, lowering himself onto the stone at the statue’s base, his tail curling loosely beside him as though he had placed himself in quiet surrender beneath you. One arm tucked beneath his head as he stared upward, his gaze drifting between your face and the distant shimmer of sunlight filtering through the sea above.
For a moment, he allowed himself stillness.
And then, quietly, almost to himself—
“If this madness has brought you to me,” he murmured, “then I suppose I’ll have to see if it can take me to you.”
----
The taxi’s abrupt halt jolted you awake, your body lurching forward slightly before you caught yourself, blinking against the disorientation that clung stubbornly to your senses. For a moment, you weren’t entirely sure where you were, the remnants of restless sleep still clouding your thoughts, but the sharp honk of a horn behind you grounded you quickly enough.
“We’re stuck,” the driver said, glancing at you through the rearview mirror. “Traffic’s brutal ahead, there was an accident near the shore road, so it’s taking longer than expected.”
You rubbed at your eyes, letting out a quiet breath as you straightened in your seat. “I fell asleep?” you asked, more to yourself than to him.
He chuckled faintly. “Happens. You looked exhausted.”
That was one way to put your day.
You shifted slightly, your gaze drifting toward the window, and whatever lingering irritation you might have felt at the delay dissolved almost instantly.
The sea stretched out beside the road, vast and unyielding, its surface catching the last fragments of daylight as the sun dipped slowly toward the horizon. The sky had begun its quiet transformation, streaks of amber and rose bleeding into deeper shades of violet, the reflection shimmering across the water like something alive.
The beach looked like the edge of another world, and some helpless part of you thought, absurdly, of him.
Of the voice you had not heard.
Of the silence where it should have been.
You swallowed, something tightening faintly in your chest as you watched the waves roll in, steady and endless, as though nothing in the world could ever truly disrupt their rhythm.
“I’ll be right back,” you said suddenly, the words slipping out before you could second-guess them.
The driver blinked at you. “Ma’am—”
“I won’t go far,” you added quickly, already reaching for the door handle.
Before he could protest further, you stepped out, the city noise thinning behind you as the air changed at once, turning cooler, saltier, almost sweet in its restraint. Your heels sank awkwardly into the sand, and after only a second of struggling with them, you bent and slipped them off, carrying them in one hand as you began to walk barefoot toward the waters.
The sand gave under your feet, warm in some places, cooler in others where the tide had recently touched it. The wind moved around you in soft, insistent strokes, tugging at your hair, brushing against your cheeks, loosening something in you that had been clenched for far too long.
You looked out across the tides, chest aching in a way that had become all too familiar, and let yourself stand there in the last warmth of the day, with the sky burning slowly above you and the sea waiting below, as though both were keeping some secret you had not been trusted to learn yet.
