── AND IF HEAVEN WERE TO TOUCH ME, IT WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH
kuras. the fallen angel sits with you in confessional as you ruminate on all you never dare to grasp for yourself.
Your knees ached, pressed taut and numb against the cold steps of which you’d been genuflecting upon for the past hour. Or had it been more than that? To be aware of the passage of time was to not fully immerse yourself in prayer with the gods, but the hymns did not come to you so easily anymore. Perhaps they never did. Grief weighed your lungs down like smoke, even in this holy house.
He stirred beside you. Kuras. Golden-eyed and beautiful in the way that made you want to kneel and repent for the sole action of loving him.
“I must confess,” you said, voice hoarse.
“Tell me,” he spoke, softly, the most divine thing you’d ever known. To speak to him felt strangely akin to repentance, but something horrid churned in your gut, and you shook your head.
“What of my anonymity?” you asked, half-joking. It sounded bitter upon your tongue.
Kuras’ eyes lowered briefly, hiding behind the shield of slender black lashes. The silence wrapped around your silhouettes like an invisible fog, thick and smothering, broken only by the distant chime of a distant bell. Then, Kuras’ voice emerged, gentle against the dark shroud of melancholy settled all around the room, illuminated only by the hazy glow of the candlelight.
"You know that what is said in this chamber will never pass my lips," he told you, words like a whisper that floated in the holy space between your vessels as a promise, a covenant. “The gods do not see us here.”
The words that come out of your lips were hoarse, caught in your devotion and hypocrisy. “Does it matter?”
To that, Kuras said nothing. His golden eyes flit to the candles, thousands lit over what could very well be a millennia and moulded into a single wax entity sprawled over the stone altar. Perhaps he thought of you two of you, melded and fused together to be one body, one soul. The very thought was blasphemous. It should not have made your heart sing.
He had fallen for you, you knew this very well. There was little you did know of his time in that kingdom that so many of your priests and priestesses have only dreamed of, but you were sure of this: you were the very reason he had decided to fly too close to the sun, why he bled molten gold and why he was doomed.
You were too, no matter how much you may have tried to deny it. It was only a matter of time before your own fall was recognised, and then comes your fall from grace.
The gods did not see you here, but what was once devout and holy in you and Kuras were aware of what you had done.
HOUSE OF ERIDIA ── touchstarved x reader, high fantasy au
“Among the monarch's most intimate inner circle was their Master of Whispers (...) sharp and cunning, the mastermind of an intricate network of spies and informants that ran through the high aristocracy within the walls of the palace, down to the most slimy backwaters of the kingdom's outskirts. The truth of LEANDER’s threat, however, laid within his charm (...) it is said that not even his most beloved Eminence trusted him.”
Leander was devoted— as devoted as a man of such skill in less than legal information brokering could be, at least. Often times you wondered whether he was worth trusting; so much information he laid out at your feet like a suitor would bestow upon you with golds and jewels and fine silks, and just as much he kept away from you. Perhaps it was unwise to bestow upon the fickle position of Master of Whispers to a man who shared your bed, but never his own secrets-- or perhaps you thought too much of him. You did, after all, cradle your own secrets to your chest.
“To one such as the monarch, who clung onto their religion as if it were drywood amidst the furious seas, KURAS was a strange sort of salvation in himself (...) rumoured to be otherworldly, golden-eyed and infinitely wise not only in his knowledge of forgotten, they claimed him a lost eldritch being, shunned by the highest deities of the sky. Others said that he was a deity himself. But what deity hid in the shadows of the throne and kissed the feet of the mortal that sat upon it?”
Amidst the fickle serpents' game of politics and war, there was a superficial solace to be found in the religion you were raised in as a child. From that faith, your devotion extended to a gift from the gods laid at your door, the golden-eyed angel that you were not quite sure existed till they bestowed him to you. Strangely enough, he treated you with the same sort of reverence— as an acolyte might to their own deity. Yours was a strange relationship, a push-and-pull of prayer and religious guilt. Both of you hid your unholiness within a facade of worship and idolatry. You did not know why he has come, but you knew he saw you for what you were and bent the knee anyway. Be not afraid, he said. And so you were not, blindly so.
“The paramour was flame-haired and quick of the tongue, an exotic pet that graced the bed of Their Majesty easily enough once lured with the promise of lavish gifts and security (…) VERE traded his ugly iron shackles for a prettier set of golden chains, but he was not so cunning so as to let himself be lured in by the false promises of what he called “these damned monarchs”.”
It was not an uncommon feat for monarchs to take paramours even after marriage, but if the whore picked from the streets of silk was pretty enough, it could warrant the envious whispers of enraged nobles no matter how high a position one may hold within the royal family. Fortunately, Vere played the game of thrones well, you must admit. Of all the lovers and paramours you've taken over the course of your rule, he is the one you have to worry about defending in court the least… though his knowledge and skill holds up a different problem for you entirely. Perhaps your Small Council does speak some truth when they warn you of the lies he could entrap you in…
”THE STRANGER came like death on a misty night in the dead of winter. Who were they? What reason could they have to lurk around the castle halls, to indulge themselves in the benevolence of the monarch of which they did not worship? What did they seek, and why was Their Majesty so eager to offer their aid?”
A ruler as kind and benevolent as yourself was not so arrogant so as to be oblivious to the suffering of the smallfolk. Many called you naïve, too young to carry the burden of the crown, but you have inherited centuries of peace from your parents, and are intent on continuing such tradition. That is, perhaps, the reason why you welcomed MHIN into your palace that night, turning down your council’s suggestions of torturing them — where they’ve came from, why they’ve come, how a commoner possesses a gift for the magic arts. You offer them bread and wine and a place of rest, speaking nothing of how you’ve noticed their eyes flit about— not warily, but searching. It is naïvety then, in your hopes that MHIN finds what you seek in you, despite your sureness that you will one day stand at opposite ends of a looming war.
“Rare was a monarch who did not indulge in illicit affairs, whether it be a matter of simply flesh or true romance— but what transpired between Their Majesty and the creature of Crimson Grotto was so twisted that their story was told as both urban legend and warning even a millennia afterwards. But in the most desperate of times, even the most noble of the gods’ chosen are capable of such sin.”
AIS was already a figure of urban legend when you came to him him, a sopping wet half-adult playing dress up in an oversized crown and velvet robes weighed down by the grimy water that stained its hem. He never did tell you whether the stories you’d heard were true, only confirmed that yes, he is capable of what you beg him for. He thought of you foolish, to make a deal with an eldritch creature — or, at least, the vessel of one — but he realised too late that he’d gone off the deep end with you when it came to this deal. In the end, there was only his hope that they would not liken you, so good and so bright, to the hopeless thing that is whatever is left of him. Or, perhaps, it will be a last mercy to both of you, to be known in history side-by-side, mentioned alongside the other always— like a single entity.
