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weirdfeet16

Jul 24, 2025

hcneymooners

୨ৎ if i let [her] do this to me, what else will i allow? ( anything, anything, anything. )

fairytale!pazzi ft. god!paige x mortal!azzi. men & minors dni.

wc: 11.5k.

synopsis: a god comes to collect a debt from the fudd family. azzi offers her four impossible tasks instead.

cw: explicit sexual content (oral, fingering, overstimulation, power play), intense power dynamics (god/mortal), dom!paige, sub!azzi, possessiveness, erotic coercion, emotional manipulation, predator/prey dynamic, hunting/chase kink, religious/mythic imagery in sexual contexts, mild degradation, praise kink, control as intimacy, consensual but overwhelming encounters, magical influence, blood (non-violent and symbolic), death/rebirth themes, childhood trauma, murder (past, described), grief, divine horror, body horror, the inherent eroticism of being chosen by something bigger than yourself.

notes: almost died writing this, but we finished it! never kill yourself. ally: 0, the urge to make everything a gift for her moots: 10 billion. this is for the perfect lyra ( @lloeysol ), literally for no other reason except i feel she deserves it, and for niyah who kept me sane.

as always, feel free to tell me what you think. all my love.

love was a malignant creature when it became war.

you never forgot the little details: the darkened eyes of your beloved as they attempted to rip the teeth straight from your mouth, the curve of their slender fingers when they tilted your chin to look full of regret, the color of their veins as they bent to kiss you goodbye.

love was a very odd, twisted thing when it became about a blood draw. nevertheless, it was an addictive battle.

the land was owed, and the fudds had a daughter.

it wasn’t truly the land, more like something beneath it. something with older teeth, hungrier roots. it had been a long time coming. the earth died a million small deaths each day, bled out through root and stone, only to resurrect itself in the space between one heartbeat and the next. this was the way of magic: eternal, cyclical, patient as a tide.

but the magic was tainted now, twisted, deformed by human machinations like a song sung backwards until the melody turned to screaming. human greed had gutted it. human fear had twisted its silver threads into something blackened and brittle, until the very air split with its wrongness and revealed the inner earth like a carcinogenic wound. the instability threatened the human life that was left, threatening to eat them all from the inside out.

if left unchecked, the snake would eat its tail.

the fudds had been left. they were farmers, or had been once, back when farming meant more than coaxing life from cursed soil. they had children to think of, futures to tend like fragile seedlings. so they made the bargain that desperate people always make: they mortgaged tomorrow for today.

they needed life, a future. but like most mortals, paige found them foolish and transparent, their future attempts at deceit glowing fever bright as they begged at her feet. so, she had been cruel. had solidified it by cutting an eye from the patriarch and a tooth of the matriarch.

they always believed there was a way out: a death before collection, a trade-off, a simple slide of memory. as if forgetting could make a debt disappear. as if death were an escape rather than just another door.

paige never forgot. she was older than forgetting. she never could, which was why she was what she was. she was there when the first human learned to lie, and she would be there when the last one learned the price of truth. she never forgot a debt, never released a debtor until the scales balanced once more. the magic they had borrowed to save their dying land would be repaid; paige would regain what she’d loaned.

and so, when the fudds had a daughter, paige recalled how daughters were always the most interesting collateral.

the girl’s name was azzi, and she had been born with the debt already written in her bones, already poisoning her blood like a thread of foxglove. she would be twenty-one when paige came to collect. old enough to understand the weight of what her family owed, young enough to believe she might outwit a god.

paige had been collecting debts for millennia. she had never been wrong about how these stories ended.

she had also never met azzi fudd.

azzi had not been born with the knowledge that she had been born a bargain, but she knew she was different. katie, her mother, knew she was dangerous.

there was a thin line of control wrapped around the crook of her eldest daughter’s brain that constricted with every moment she spent disguising her true self. azzi was an uncomplicated child, which meant she was the worst. nothing on this land was conceived kindly, but azzi remained sweet as jam throughout her infancy and cried thick, riviera tears every time she didn’t get her way.

but soon she noticed her mother was unmoved, so she stopped, letting the moisture bead upon her palms like pearls until she tightened her fingers around them, snapping them apart at the surface. it wasn’t that katie didn’t care, but more that she didn’t deign to look at her when she knew azzi was being dishonest —slippery—and so katie turned naturally cold, becoming a wall of flesh and blood.

her father, timothy, was different. more malleable. azzi loved him for it.

she took love wherever she could find it, living as a ravine of a woman. uncontrollably. incessantly. more than she ever needed to be loved in her life. at times, it was suffocating, but she was selfish; she would never give it up.

when azzi was a few months from twenty-one, she woke up riotously. knew that something was wrong.

she’d been attempting to sleep. her eyes fluttered rapidly like a hummingbird’s heart encased in the skin, her lips bitten and swollen from repeated nightmares and sticky screams she kept swallowing. the one time she’d let them loose, the one time she’d revealed her visions to her mother, katie had struck her. had urged her to be quiet, to spoon herself full of whatever it took to render her dreamless. azzi never shared them again

but on a night far before her twenty-first year, she lurched up in her bed, the linens welding to her skin as she heaved. she bit sharply on the inside of her cheek, the copper tang of blood filling her mouth. she swung her legs over the side, the pale of the moon settling along her skin like a slab of cool butter on hot bread.

she stumbled her way into her bathroom, spat into the basin, and the water pinked up to her wrists.

i look at her, she looks at me, i look at her, she looks at me, she thought.

she said it every night post-waking, and it hadn’t changed, not in the penthouse subject to her mother’s living, where she shattered a mirror. not in this great, big savannah house that threatens to swallow her whole, where her father hoped to shield them from the world’s imminent collapse. the nightingale in the massive willow in their front yard sang its heart out, the shrill chirps ringing for years in her ears.

azzi was tired, really. she’d been trying her best for a long time, but clearly something was trying to reach her, and she could not repress it any longer for her mother’s comfort.

she kept the water in the sink full for a minute with the pink of her latest night terrors, wiping the rest of her nosebleed with two long fingers and reaching blindly to the right of her for her tarot deck. they were bone white, dark blue, a lattice of geometric patterns relapsing over one another on the card backs. they reminded her of porcelain, and sometimes she dreamed that they were.

she muttered an incantation in the old language, plucked four cards, threw three into the water, and kept the fourth face down, slipped into the crack between her mirror and its frame on the wall.

the first card was the moon, and it floated upright. illusions and unconsciousness. the second she’d pulled was the tower, again upright. broken pride. the third was upside down, the blue sparkling like sapphires in the wet of the water. the emperor. a loss of control. helpless.

not a single one correlated with her zodiac sign. well, except for the one in her hand.

death.

transformation. scorpio.

azzi lowered herself to the tile of her bathroom and let her curls fan beneath her. the reading was always the same, and the fourth card never changed. she closed her eyes as the cards melted in the water and bled back into the deck.

the fourth card stayed upended in her palm as if it knew that she needed it to stay. transformation. she settled into another nightmare, the blood of her cheek fresh in her mouth.

in this one, she was still in the bathroom, but something was holding her down. she looked up, brown eyes a pit beckoning for a fall. above her, a woman. the woman was beautiful, unerringly so, in the way that almost every natural disaster was beautiful: devastating, inevitable, wrong in their execution. beautiful, the way winter was beautiful when it smothered everything that had once risen. beautiful, the way a blade could be if it caught the light just before it lowered for the cut.

the woman’s face was symmetrical to a degree that made azzi's eyes water, as if her mind couldn't quite process features that had never known imperfection, had never learned the small mercies of asymmetry that made mortals bearable to look upon. skin like polished marble, but a slab that had never been touched by a chisel’s tongue or weather’s hand or time or love. hair the color of wheat fields before harvest, but wheat that had never known drought or plenty, had simply always been, would always be, could never be otherwise.

her lips were the exact shade of arterial blood but not painted, never painted. for what paint could match what flowed in the veins of gods? when she smiled, her teeth were too white, too sharp, too many. it was a smile that spoke of study, of observation and learning, of practice.

wrong.

but it was her eyes that made azzi's stomach lurch and twist and know itself prey. they were bright blue and then bled into a bruised winter sky as it strayed further from the pupil. the colors reminded azzi of hypothermia, something akin to the last thing you’d see before drowning, or the color of your lover's lips when they've been dead and avalanched for more than three days.

wrong.

ancient eyes in a face that had never aged, never changed, never been anything other than this terrible perfection. they held the weight of millennia: every debt collected, every bargain sealed, every mortal who had begged for mercy and received only mathematics.

she moved with liquid grace, every gesture deliberate and flowing, as if gravity were a suggestion rather than a law, as if the world bent around her rather than the other way around. when she reached down toward azzi, her fingers were long and pale and beautiful as carved bone, as barren branches, as the ribs of an animal long dead and perfectly preserved.

wrong. wrong. wrong.

azzi could see that beneath the flawless skin, there was nothing. no pulse, no warmth, no life as she had understood it. only the terrible abundance of immortality, the weight of never dying, never changing, never being anything other than exactly what she was.

there was a great buzzing in azzi’s head, a horrible drone that only silenced when the woman’s feet met the floor. there were no tiles beneath her skin, only smooth puce stone. she leaned over azzi, then knelt as if she couldn’t quite put a finger on her image.

she reached down, curled a long nail over the neckline of azzi’s nightdress, and split it down the middle until her breasts and hips were bared. azzi felt heat rise, her nipples harden, her toes twitch.

she knew what this was, who this was. mistakenly, she’d thought the world too modern for it.

again, that droning. azzi’s mouth opened, an unnatural unhinging of her lips, and the woman leaned in until she could drag her pointed, pink tongue along azzi’s teeth. her throat moved gorgeously as she swallowed, azzi’s spit now a wet, warm line down the pink tissue of her inner body,

the buzzing ceased. azzi still couldn’t move, but she knew, innately, that she could understand her.

“hello, little debtor,” the woman said, and her voice was honey poured over broken glass, birdsong in a graveyard, every lullaby ever sung to azzi now distorted through a blasphemous overlap.

“soon,” the woman crooned, her voice low. “i will come to collect.”

when she woke, azzi found herself bare. it was then that she began to hunger for this other woman’s evil.

✤ THE FIRST TASK: DEATHLESS.

paige came on a tuesday morning, dreary and slow, which seemed unreasonably ordinary for the arrival of a god.

azzi had been expecting something more dramatic. thunder, perhaps, or the earth splitting apart like an organ opened. instead, she woke to silence so complete it felt as though she had rolled into her own grave overnight. the birds had stopped singing. the wind had stilled. even the ancient willow in their front yard stood motionless, its branches hanging like dead hair.

she found her parents in the kitchen, frozen mid-gesture. her mother's hand suspended over the coffee pot, steam curling upward in impossible spirals that never dispersed. her father's mouth opened around a word he'd never finish speaking. their eyes were open but empty, seeing nothing, as if someone had simply… paused them.

“clever,” said a voice behind her, and azzi's blood went straight to ice.

she turned slowly, already knowing what she would see. the woman from her dreams stood in their doorway, but she was somehow more in the flesh. more devastating, more wrong, more beautiful than any sleeping mind could conjure. she wore the shape of mortality like an ill-fitting dress, her divine nature bleeding through at the edges.

azzi couldn’t fully look at her. not even as paige stepped forward and fingered the thin golden chain that led to a small cube of onyx and deep salt.

“lovely amulet,” paige continued, stepping into the kitchen with that liquid grace. “i considered being far more dramatic. lightening, thunder, floods, the whole performance. but i didn’t think you needed anything more to expect my arrival.”

she paused. “you've been dreaming of me, haven't you, little debtor? you knew i was coming.”

azzi's tongue felt thick and useless in her mouth. “my parents—”

“are perfectly safe. time moves differently around me when i choose. they won't remember this conversation.” paige circled closer, predatory and patient. “though i could make them remember, if you prefer. let them watch as i collect what's owed.”

“what do you want?” azzi snapped, her rage flaring.

it was misguided, paige thought. she was understandably frustrated with the past bartering of her bloodline, one that may as well be ending with her, considering how things with her brothers were going. paige looked idly out of the window, to the pale grey tombstones in the yard.

paige smiled, and it was exactly as unsettling as it had been in the dream. “you know what i want. you’re not a stupid girl.”

“i’m not a girl,” azzi hissed back.

“you are to me. i’ve been alive for a long time, and in that time, your family borrowed from me. magic to heal their dying land, power to make things grow in poisoned soil. wealth.” the god smiled wider. “the debt came due on your twenty-first birthday.” she tilted her head, studying azzi like a curious cat. the smile never ceased. “though i found myself… impatient. you've been calling to me in your sleep."

heat flooded azzi's cheeks. the dreams, the visions, the way she'd been waking with her body thrumming with want—

“don't be embarrassed,” paige murmured, close enough now that azzi could smell her. first came ozone, like filtered starlight, then something else, something that made her mouth water. it was grittier, threatened debasement, felt sweet and tensile, and threatened to make her cunt drip. “mortals always react to divinity, though what those reactions are differs. it's only natural that you'd hunger for what i am.”

“i don't—” azzi started, but the lie died on her tongue.

“don't you?” paige reached out, not quite touching, and azzi felt the heat of her anyway. her nose burned as she took in a breath. “that’s all your bloodline does. all those of your name are so erroneously hungry. it is the same i can taste it on you. the wanting. it's delicious.”

azzi forced herself to step back, to think. this was it, her one chance. “what if—what if i could offer you something else? something more interesting than a simple collection?”

paige's eyes sharpened, ancient and calculating. “i'm listening.”

“a game,” azzi said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. “a series of challenges. if you can complete four tasks of my choosing, you will release my family's debt entirely.”

“your choosing?” paige's eyebrows rose, and for the first time, she looked genuinely surprised. “how presumptuous.”

“and if you fail?” azzi continued, ignoring the way paige's mocking made her stomach flutter.

“i don't fail.”

“then you have nothing to worry about.” azzi lifted her chin, squared her shoulders. “but if you do, if you refuse even one task, then you leave. forever. the debt dies with your departure.”

paige was quiet for a long moment, and azzi could practically see her weighing the offer. the god in her was insulted at being challenged by a mortal. but there was something else there, too. curiosity, maybe. or boredom with millennia of simple collections.

“four tasks,” paige said finally, and there was danger in her voice. “and you think you can set them for me?”

“yes.”

“very well.” that terrible smile again, but now it held something different. anticipation. “give me your first task, little debtor.”

azzi's heart hammered against her ribs, but she forced the words out. “bring me something deathless. something that cannot die, cannot fade, cannot be destroyed. you have until sunset.”

“and if i succeed?”

“then i'll give you the second task,” azzi said, and there was something hungry in her own voice now that made paige's eyes darken. “and you'll have earned it.”

paige breathed harshly through her nose and lifted her hand from her hair. the girl was an unforeseen complication. accepting the challenge had been more for her amusement than anything else, but she was realizing that the girl meant to win.

which meant paige could not pretend to play fair.

now, she bent at the edge of a lagoon with her teeth clenched so greatly that the squares threatened to crack. with a broken yelp, paige snapped her ring finger off, screaming weakly through her teeth. the earth shuddered beneath her knees and leaped up, pain coaxing it forward as its god cradled her mangled hand.

water began to seep up and around them, gathering around the protruding bone as paige curled around herself in a brief moment of agony. the hand had already begun to heal, but not before several drops of golden blood fell on the face of the severed limb. her hand was whole by the time she stood up again.

here, the water wanted its gifts whole, not mottled and broken.

the transformation had completed itself in the time paige had spent doubled over her stomach in stark pain. giving herself up was never easy. in the clay, a slim scepter now lay where her finger had once bled, thin enough to swallow. the metal shone with smoky quartz and pearl, the top tapering into an arrowhead, flowers inlaid along the line of the silver, unfurling like an infection. it went between physical and not, at times dissipating into smoke between her fingers before becoming substantial.

pearl for loyalty, a bargain acknowledged.

it will never be enough, the earth moaned, but it will be something.

“i know,” paige murmured, then she turned away.

paige returned as the sun touched the horizon, painting the sky the color of fresh blood. she thought of the easy give of a slit throat.

azzi had spent the day pacing, wondering if she'd been too clever for her own good. what if paige simply refused? what if she'd misunderstood what deathless meant entirely? azzi herself hadn’t known what she meant. what if—

“doubting yourself?” paige's voice cut through her spiral. she stood in the doorway again, but something had changed. her perfect composure appeared cracked at the edges, marred, smudged. for a moment, something raw was revealed underneath.

"what have you brought me?" azzi asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

paige stepped forward, and for the first time, she looked closer to a mortal woman. in her hands, she cradled something that wasn't quite there. a long line of light and shadow, intertwined with the stocky bodies of jewels, that hurt to look at directly. when azzi finally could weather the sight long enough, she realized it resembled an arrow.

“do you know what you asked of me?” paige's voice was softer now, tinged with a sickly quality. “something deathless. something that cannot fade.”

azzi's breath caught. “what have you brought me?”

“a memory,” paige said, and the shimmer in her hands pulsed like a heartbeat. “a little death, as the french call it. la petite mort. the moment when the body transcends itself, when pleasure becomes something beyond mortal comprehension.”

heat flooded azzi's cheeks. "that was not—i didn't mean—"

"didn't you?" paige's eyes were knowing, devouring. "you asked for something deathless. i remember everything. this memory has lived in me for millennia. it cannot die because it never truly lived—it simply is. will always be. as i am.”

the object grew brighter in paige’s hands, a tight sliver of silver. now it looked like a solid bolt of metal, smooth and warm and impossible.

"but here's the clever part of your request, little debtor," paige continued, stepping closer. "to give you something truly deathless, i have to give you something of myself. i have never died, and i never will."

azzi's heart hammered against her ribs. "what happens when i touch it?"

paige laughed. it shrieked through azzi, rattling her jaw. for only a brief second, did azzi know what it was like to laugh as a god did.

“you won’t be touching it.”

azzi’s mouth opened, intending to question what paige meant, but she had no chance. paige struck.

in a flurry of movement, a great unfolding of limbs like that of a heron, paige clutched azzi tightly to the hard line of her body with one pale hand. with the other, she pushed azzi’s mouth further open and slid the arrow in.

azzi let out a high, keening noise of terror, and paige squeezed her waist. “suck.”

azzi did.

the world exploded into sensation.

she was no longer herself. she was only a bed of nerves, their beginning and their end. there were hands on her skin. gentle, reverent fingers that worshipped as something finite.

then they sank deeper. rougher. palming the meat of her thighs, thumbing the folds of her until she bloomed open, wet and wanting, like fruit warmed too long in the sun. she was slick, embarrassingly so, the pleasure pouring out of her in viscous, honeyed pulses that clung to her inner thighs like melted sugar.

there was no rhythm to it. only escalation. a pressure building behind her eyes, behind her hips, behind her ribs. she couldn’t breathe. didn’t want to. her lips parted, teeth clenched, a thin line of drool sliding down her chin. she was being fed a hunger that wasn’t hers.

she swallowed it anyway.

it was exquisite. obscene. she could taste it in her mouth: iron and nectar, ozone and deep, deep salt. something hot and golden and rank. the slice of off-color sweetness that could only live in the rot of overripe things.

every dig into the warm, tight clutch of her cunt made her legs weaker. her toes curled. her stomach fluttered.

outside of the memory, paige only held her more tightly as azzi began to fall. those brown eyes were open but devoid of coherence. her head fell forward and tucked into the crook of paige’s neck.

paige could smell her now. her too-many teeth ached.

inside the memory, someone bit azzi’s body. neither kind nor cruel. only a taste meant only to mark. the pressure bloomed deep in her thigh and sank into the bone. her body tightened around it, trying to keep the sensation from slipping away.

she moaned. quietly, here, but deafening in paige’s inhuman ears.

the hands did not stop. they coaxed more from her. pressed at the softest parts until she pulsed around nothing, a hollow needing to be filled. her clit twitched. her mouth watered. it was unbearable. it was perfect.

there was a sweetness behind her teeth she could not name. milk skimmed off the surface of something darker. her body held the taste like an antiphon. her pulse stuttered. her hips moved without her.

then the crest. silent, like a bell struck underwater. her thighs locked. her belly clenched. the pleasure broke clean through her, shivering the veins.

it was then that azzi understood why they called it a little death. because for one perfect moment, she ceased to exist as anything but pure sensation, pure joy, pure transcendence.

azzi came like a flood against a dam. roaring, overpowering, inconceivably strong.

she shuddered once more, then stilled. there was wetness between her legs. her lip was bleeding where she’d bitten down. her body had taken it all.

and worse, it wanted more.

the god held her upright. said nothing. waited. watched her with those abnormal eyes.

"well?" paige asked. "was it deathless enough for you?"

azzi could barely speak. "who was she? in that memory?"

something flickered across paige's face, longing maybe. "she was me."

silence. azzi flinched, tried to step away, but paige held her steady. with a single crook of her finger, she coaxed the smoke from azzi’s throat, the memory unspooling into its arrow form once more. it shimmered faintly in her palm.

azzi moaned, soft and involuntary, as it left her. paige pressed her hand to the girl’s neck, massaging gently, her touch too careful to be mistaken as kind.

only then did she let go.

azzi stumbled back, breath shivering in her chest. “your first task is complete,” she said, though her voice trembled.

“and what did it cost,” paige murmured, stepping forward, “for me to bring this to you? for you to taste it?” she was close again, close enough that azzi could feel the heat of her. godly, wrong, too much. “because i can smell it now. the wanting. that ache. you’ve tasted of me.”

she leaned in, voice low. “will you ever be satisfied with mortality again?”

azzi didn’t answer. her second task curled and died behind her teeth. she was beginning to understand: in forcing paige to play her game, she had made herself part of it.

they were no longer simply collector and debtor.

they were something far more dangerous.

paige drew back, just to the threshold. the last of the sunlight spilled over her like blood in water.

“do you want to continue, little debtor?”

azzi gave a great shudder and swayed forward.

“azzi,” she corrected, “and yes.”

paige tilted her head. smiled, slowly. “very well.”

again, that great and terrible droning. when azzi lifted her head, when the noise lifted itself from her, she found herself without her god.

✤ THE SECOND TASK: NAMELESS.

at their second meeting, paige found that the girl had dressed like the collateral she was.

azzi sat stock still on her bed, head bent in what appeared to be prayer if paige didn’t know better. she watched through the window, took in the brown bird's bend of her neck, the thinness of her throat.

there was something about her throat.

azzi had draped herself in midnight blue silk that held starlight captive in its weave, the fabric pooling around her like a conquered ocean. golden threads spiraled across the gown in patterns that might have been constellations or the last of a language now unknown. vines bloomed into impossible flowers along the hem, each petal picked out in thread-of-gold so fine it seemed to whisper with every twist and crawl of her spine.

her long, dark curls had been swept over one shoulder, crowned with a circlet of silver leaves that seemed to have grown there rather than been placed. a single jewel—deep as winter night, red as heart's blood—nestled at her throat, suspended from chains that layered like sliced light against her brown skin. if the moon were a woman, this was proof of her first bleed.

the bodice hugged her tightly, outlining her form with pearl hands that left a row of milky buttons down the fabric, each one carved with symbols that shifted meaning depending on the angle of light. the sleeves had been fitted close, embroidered with thorns and roses that seemed live when viewed from the corner of one's eye.

she knew her worth and, in vain, had tried to protect herself. nevertheless, paige entered the room like death into a cemetery.

not a sound, not a footstep. already at home. her body dissipated into smoke at the threshold, slipped through the open window like night wind, and coalesced again behind azzi, who had not moved.

she didn't have to. paige already knew her.

a long, pale hand—impossibly smooth, inhumanly cold—reached out and fingered the curls beaded at the nape of azzi’s neck, where the heat still pooled. she brushed them aside as one might part silk, savoring the sensation.

it was satisfying to see the way her touch took, to see azzi clench minutely, to clearly remember the heat of what had last occurred between them. the smallest shiver at the base of her spine. a tightening of breath.

paige watched with amusement that bordered on reverence. she remembered the heat of azzi’s mouth, the way her body sang when touched. the little debtor was a slow-blooming thing, unsure of her body as it mutated with its need.

“you dressed up for me, little debtor,” paige said at last, voice low, curling like smoke around azzi’s ear. “was that wise?”

azzi gave no answer to paige’s question. didn't move.

and so paige circled her like a predator might, a slow orbit, every step a drag of gravity. her eyes were half-lidded, expression unreadable, but azzi could feel the scrutiny, the attention like lips applied to skin.

paige came to stand before her and knelt. it was one long, awful motion that made her robes sigh across the floor like smoke sucked by the body into a chimney. her hands, long-fingered and precise, came to rest on azzi’s knees. it was light, shy of possessiveness, but not weightless enough to be sweet.

simply placed, as if marking the beginning of something.

azzi’s breath stuttered, her lungs frozen, still. her thighs tensed beneath the silk.

she still hadn’t looked at her.

so, paige looked. paige stared as if trying to recall her from the inside out. her mouth parted slightly, her head tilted, and azzi had the unbearable sensation of being mapped, measured.

then, a hand, slow and sure, slid upward along the outside of her thigh, brushing the fine embroidery that lined her gown. again, the god was so careful not to give more than what she must have known azzi needed.

there was no lifting it. only tracing. feeling. an innocence that belonged to a child’s curiosity.

azzi finally looked.

and there she was.

paige’s beauty was more unnatural than before, abnormal, slightly displaced. it came across as studied, too fine in its symmetry, down to the way each lash fell like a painted detail. her eyes had changed again. now they were slate, rimmed in pink, the look of something carved from ice and touched by salt. her skin had no pore, no flaw, not even the pulse of blood beneath.

she was all perfection, and it was wrong.

so wrong that azzi wanted to press her mouth to it, to devour it. to feel that cold, dead skin under her tongue and know it had been made to be tasted. swallowed.

paige leaned in, slowly, until her face hovered just above azzi’s chest. she didn’t kiss her. but she almost did.

and that ache—the absence of it—made azzi’s whole body throb.

paige closed her eyes. breathed in, deep and indulgent, as though azzi’s scent itself was a kind of nectar. her nose brushed the hollow of azzi’s collarbone, ghosted along it. the gown shifted, wrinkling beneath her immortal touch.

somewhere beneath the fabric, azzi’s nipples had hardened, painfully tight. she thought of the last time, of those hands in the memory that pulled apart her cunt to reveal the gummy pinkness of her most inner self. she imagined it to be paige once she was alone, had shaken over her own fingers, her body a forest fire.

it was unbearable.

then paige pulled back, smooth as the run of water over stone.

“you fought with them.” at azzi’s slow blink, paige clarified. “with your family. you asked them about our deal.”

azzi recoiled, space now necessary as her latent grief pooled in the depths of her stomach. her hands trembled in her lap, clenched to keep from reaching. she turned, eyes wide like two pools of night.

paige’s teeth ached.

when azzi finally spoke, it came out in a hush, reverent and wrecked.

“i have your second task.” paige rose but still stood beside her. “bring me something nameless. something unknown, undiscovered, unearthed. you have until sunset.”

paige glanced at the other woman, eyes buzzing with an unsettling energy. azzi saw the god decide whether to abide, and watched as she conceded to following the script.

“and if i succeed?”

the same words from the bestowment of the first task.

“then you’ll receive your third,” azzi said, and paige said nothing.

paige was back quickly.

the ease with which she had seemed to complete the task irked azzi, who rose with a great noise as her jewelry came like an avalanche down her neck and wrists. by now, she recognized that paige was playing a different game, that the rules of the tasks were slowly being respun around her. it vexed her deeply that she was unable to see the true web.

paige had changed from before. azzi’s memory faltered when it attempted to remember what she had worn before, but she knew it was not this.

now the god appeared before her with those same pink-rimmed eyes, but her hair was more white than blonde and bled down her back to the pale cruxes of her ankles. she was suited in all black, her robe high-necked and spilling into an endless pool of midnight mist.

she seemed antsy, uncertain of herself before azzi, but azzi could not find it within herself to take that advantage. instead, she clawed the circlet from her hair and tilted her head until her curls fully spilled ‘round her face.

“what is it, then? what have you brought me?”

azzi knew her tone was insolent, but to her surprise, paige said nothing to correct it. instead, she settled on the bed, the mattress’s body groaning like a body under the knife. in her hand was something white and small.

“do you know i chose bargaining as my domain?”

azzi was quiet, unsure of whether or not she was being asked to answer. paige was not looking at her. it was clear that something inside of her had been stirred, that something deep inside of her—something almost far removed—had been wrenched with a brutal twist of the wrist.

“when you have nothing to believe in, every god seems to be the right one. you don’t ask questions, for this is your answer. you don’t need to know who i truly am, how i came to be, what is lurking beneath my mind and skin. i am simply worthy of your worship because i am there and i am reaching out.

“this was good for me,” paige continued, her body sagging. azzi moved subconsciously to steady her, her adornments moving with another shriek of gold against pearl. “i did not, in any way, have to remember.”

“you do not—” azzi began, but she felt a surge of power lick the back of her teeth and dive into the hot redness of her throat.

“i do,” paige said, her tone unnamable. “it is our deal.”

silence, for a moment. the god seemed small then, a young girl as she looked down at the mass in her hands.

“i was one of the youngest. my mother struggled with pregnancy, so several of my siblings died before me. i was always deemed unnatural, unpleasant. i could hear it, that divine frequency, the world’s tether to something older and sicker than any of us ever could be.

“by the time i learned to keep this observation to myself, i had already donated myself as something less than anyone else in that house. it was a hard winter. harder than the ones your family experiences now, but of course, since you have never known what i have, you cannot see that this version of the world is softer.”

azzi shifted in place, her throat still magically squeezed into silence.

“every winter, during the darkest week of the season, there came a caravan. it was bursting at the seams with people: the elderly, children dressed in bright fabrics that hid empty stomachs and broken teeth, young women with bells around the ankles, strong men who were one instance away from breaking down.”

something rank and vile began to populate the lining of azzi’s belly. she suddenly felt dizzy, helpless to stop the wave of understanding that followed.

“they offered us entertainment, a bright light that could not be shone by the kingdoms leagues away. but a performer has to be paid. we were poor, evil creatures without a penny in sight. but these men, the designated leaders of the troupe, were kind. generous. malleable. payment did not have to be in a typical currency.

“so, i went. i was the most trouble. my mother, i think, always hated me. i’m not sure why, but i am not in the habit of trying to understand it.”

azzi clutched at herself, her chest suddenly too small for the pain that was in it.

“i died in a ditch beneath an oak tree,” she said, with a voice as light as milk over breakfast.

no more prelude. no more sorrow.

“my parents sold me to a man for food and coin. at least, that was the reasoning. i think they just wanted me to die. they had too many mouths, and mine was the smallest.” her gaze flicked to azzi’s lips, and lingered. “quietest, too.”

azzi tried to breathe, but she found her throat growing tighter and tighter.

“i fought and i escaped,” paige said simply, “and was killed for it. i don’t remember much, just the neat slice of my throat, like a smile, and the thought that this was the warmest i’d ever felt—covered and blessed by my own blood.”

she shrugged, her mouth quirking when she looked over to find azzi’s face eschewed in a tight twist of horror.

“my body was never found. which means,” paige finally tilted her palm toward azzi’s heavy gaze, “that this was never discovered.”

azzi reached for the item without thinking, slightly drunk on the sudden press of paige’s body behind her. her first thought was that paige’s skin was surprisingly soft, almost as tender as velvet. her palm appeared lamb-black, her lithe fingers folded outward in faux reverence. she thought, foolishly, that it might be a jewel. that paige had gone into some hidden ruin to find a gem never named. a childhood trinket.

but it rattled.

azzi’s stomach tightened. she could not peel her eyes back, no matter the urgent curl of her stomach.

what lay within wasn’t whole. five small bones, blanched by time, still curled in the shape of a hand that had once clutched something. the tips were broken. one still bore the crescent indent of a tooth, like someone had tried to gnaw their way free.

azzi reeled. her body knew before her mind did. a hot surge rose up her throat, burning like battery acid. she jerked backward, tumbling off the bed and cracking straight into the ground. she turned away, the image rolling along her brain, the bones scattering like marbles along her bedroom floor. she clapped to her mouth, her shoulders shuddering as she flipped onto her knees, but it was too late.

her palms hit the ground with a wet sound, and she vomited, bile slicking her chin.

above her, paige remained still. preternaturally so. her shadow fell long across azzi’s body. she said nothing. she didn't have to.

the girl was clever, no matter her naivety. the gift was unmistakable.

it was a hand. her hand. a god’s hand, gnawed and buried and lost. five bones, unsung, unfound. until now.

azzi looked up, trembling, face wet with spit and tears and snot and some strange new understanding. and paige—oh, paige—watched her with a softness that bordered on indulgent. like she had fed azzi something sweet, and now waited for it to rot.

azzi watched as paige’s face began to fall away, the skin splitting and coiling backward to reveal the mess of bone and torn muscle. azzi watched, terrified, as the god’s jawbone began to move with her speech, raw ivory stained red.

“paige madison bueckers. that is the name of what you held. she is gone. i am here. she decomposed, but i ascended.”

paige leaned down, that terrible face closer and closer. azzi fell backward, a hand at her chest.

“you asked your family about our bargain,” paige murmured, voice coiling like a snake along azzi’s brow.

the same question as earlier. azzi gave a stilted nod.

“you fought with them.”

azzi nodded again, whimpered. paige’s hand came to cradle the back of her head, gentle now, nearly obscene in its tenderness.

“my family gave me up before i had a name worth keeping,” paige said, almost sweetly. “they called it survival. i call it what it was.”

she pressed a kiss, cool and chaste, to azzi’s temple. her lips left nothing behind, and somehow that was worse. azzi looked up at her then, tears caught in her lashes, mouth parted like she’d just surfaced from drowning. bile still sat pulpy and pale at the edges of her mouth.

paige’s face finally covered itself again. she straightened, peering down at azzi as if she were nothing more than a spider to be crushed beneath her shoe.

“if you fight this, if you attempt to delay collection, to dispel it, you strengthen the chance of death. your family will deal and deal and then deal again. there are only so many ways out i can offer you.”

the god’s mouth hardened.

“wipe your face.”

the air split. all light in the room flattened.

then she was gone.

✤ THE THIRD TASK: SOUNDLESS.

paige arrived looking more like a woman than she ever had. it was as if she had traversed the continent in order to get it right, to study the presentation of others to better her own.

she stood in the fields in men’s clothing—a large, white billowing linen shirt and brown trousers rolled at the ankle—but the shirt was open at the neck to reveal the divine length of her throat. azzi could see the beginning curves of her chest, and she blushed from where she gazed upon her goddess from the kitchen window.

paige had the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, exposing forearms that were lean and corded, and on her fingers sat thick bands of gold. rings that looked ancient when azzi focused on them, kingly. the cut of her jaw appeared sharper today, more angular, as though she had borrowed something essentially masculine from the ether to adorn herself with.

it made azzi's stomach flutter in a way that surprised her. she thought of paige’s hands curved around her hips, her hair like a shroud around her as she held azzi down.

idly, paige turned this way and that, her hair coiling out in the coy kiss of the wind until it spread fully like a blanket of fool’s gold. upon closer look, azzi realized her feet were bare, but even the dirt shied away at the thought of soiling her.

there was something different about the god’s bearing today. the terrible perfection remained, but it had softened at the edges, become something meeker than predation. she stood with her hands loose at her sides, patient as winter waiting for spring, and for the first time since their meetings began, she did not enter uninvited.

azzi found herself moving without decision, her body carrying her through the kitchen door and across the withered lawn. each step felt uncomfortably weighted, as though she were walking toward her own sacrificial altar. the morning air tasted of copper and coming rain, caking beneath azzi’s tongue, but beneath it lay something sweeter.

“i did not call you,” azzi said when she reached the edge of the field. her voice came out smaller than intended, childlike in the vast space between them.

paige's smile was different too. smaller. nearly shy. “i frightened you the last time.”

it wasn't a question. gods, azzi realized, probably didn't need to ask about the obvious.

“you showed me your bones,” azzi replied, and there was no accusation in it. it was simply what had happened. “you told me how you died as a child.”

something flickered across paige's features. surprise, perhaps, that her little debtor could speak of it so plainly. “yes. i did.”

“do you miss her? the girl who died? the life that was taken from you?”

paige was quiet for a long moment, her head tilted as though listening to something azzi couldn't hear. when she spoke, her voice carried the weight of centuries. “i don't know. sometimes i think i'm what she became when she refused to stay dead. sometimes i think i'm what ate what remained of her." she stepped closer, close enough that azzi could see the otherworldly blue of her eyes. “does it matter?”

it should’ve mattered. it should matter that the woman—god, creature, thing—standing before her had once been small and betrayed and afraid. it should matter that those perfect features had once belonged to someone who bit their own fingers trying to escape a shallow grave.

but all azzi could think was that it made paige more terrible and more beautiful all at once.

“right then. your third task,” azzi said, lifting her chin. she was in nothing but her sleep shift, a red shawl draped along her shoulders to ward off the morning chill. her feet were bare too, though the earth accepted her gladly. “bring me something soundless. something that i could never hear with my mortal ears.”

paige's expression shifted, became something ancient and amused. “you’d like me to bring you a gift that makes no sound.”

“yes.”

“no.”

the refusal shocked azzi, and she stared at paige, her pert mouth parting to show the slight prominence of her two front teeth. paige laughed.

“how delightfully literal you are, little debtor.” paige extended her hand, palm up, an invitation. “but what you seek cannot be brought to you.”

the air around them began to shimmer, bending like heat rising from hell’s hearth. azzi felt the world tilt sideways, reality growing thin as spider silk.

“come with me,” paige asked of her, but there was no choice.

the field dissolved around them like watercolors in rain, and azzi found herself stolen away.

she woke in snow and found the world a cathedral of deep blue silence. her body ached, unused to transport by a god’s hand, and she tried to push past the pain, to make a better effort to assess her surroundings.

paige had deposited her into a pocket of woods throttled by winter’s hand, the trees tall and scraping the sky with dark, spindly limbs. the land belonged to no earthly season. the winter light filtered through bare branches like liquid sapphire, drenching and drowning every bit of this reality in shades of twilight and calamitous dream.

the snow beneath her feet—still bare—was warm, confusingly so, and it gave way like down feathers with each desperate step. it was as if a thousand swans had been killed and stripped clean for her comfort, the bones bleached and set aside, picks in between immortal teeth. her nightshift, thin cotton meant for sleep, not survival, clung to her skin like a second self, translucent in the light.

it took her another long moment before she realized that she could hear nothing. once the connection had been made, panic flared hot and branding in her chest. there was no sound; there was nothing.

not her ragged breathing that she felt tearing at her lungs like an animal, not the whisper of fabric against her thighs, not even the thunder of her heart that she could feel hammering against her ribs like a caged bird. the silence was absolute, divine, and terrible. it pressed and pressed and pressed against her eardrums until they ached, until the absence of sound became a strange kind of music.

without any sound, azzi found all other instinct heightened. her memory shuddered, molted until a remembrance took place, and the instructions of her goddess rolled to the forefront of her mind.

you must keep away from me.

paige's voice echoed only in her hindbrain, an innate inscription in azzi’s bones, spoken in that field before the world collapsed into nothing. such simple words for such an impossible assignment. how could she keep away from something that existed everywhere and nowhere, something that moved like shadow and could strike her like lightning?

she had no answer, but she knew that if she stayed still any longer than the deal would become forfeit. and so she moved, a great stumble forward, her shift catching on phantom thorns that left no marks but sliced and stung like dry ice. the fabric tore at the hem, then higher, baring more of her legs to this strange world. she felt exposed, hunted, but something deeper stirred in her belly. something that recognized this as more than survival.

another understanding. here, she could finally see the full spiral of the web, the larger game at play.

this was courtship. empyrean and brutal and erroneous.

clever girl, came her goddess’s voice. the words were too loud for such a human head, and azzi fell again, clutching her curls in agony. though i ached to tell you, i knew the truth would find you.

a branch cracked somewhere to her left, though she heard nothing. she only felt it, the vibration through the earth, up through the bones of her feet, settling in her spine like a tuning fork struck against stone. paige was close. closer than close. the very air tasted of ozone and that deeper scent, the one that made azzi's mouth water despite her terror.

she ran.

the nightshift rode up her thighs with each stride, the cotton growing more transparent as it absorbed the odd, oppressive moisture of this otherworldly winter. she could feel paige's attention like hands on her skin, mapping every errant step, every flutter of fabric, every heaving breath azzi herself was unable to hear.

she knew she could never sleep in this shift again, if it survived this. every moment she spent entombed in it would come with the recollection of what it meant to be coveted by something far older than her, far darker. something that answered the fallacies within her own body.

distracted, azzi almost missed the appearance of a fallen log in her path. it hadn't been there a moment before, she was certain, but she adjusted in the final second, leaping and warping her body into a graceful arc through the frigid air.

still, it was not entirely enough, for her landing was clumsy, one ankle turning sharply on a dune of snow, sending her sprawling. the shift tore further, now barely covering the curve of her ass, and when she pushed herself up on her hands and knees, she felt eyes on her.

watching. drinking her image in. heat bloomed between her legs despite the cold, despite the fear. or maybe in spite of it. she knew that to be caught meant nothing fully benevolent. paige would take her, would open her along her fingers, just as she nearly did in that bathroom when azzi first looked upon her face.

azzi forced herself upright and kept running, but she could feel the rules of the bargain shifting around her. the trees seemed to stretch when she wasn't looking directly at them, branches reaching out to catch her hair, the warmth behind her knees, the soft inner skin of her arms. the intention was not to harm, and never to pain her, but to slow, to make her slip, to give whatever pursued her more time to close the distance.

she pressed deeper into the blue maze of this god-made winter, her feet now completely numb but still beating with the rush of blood, still sinking into snow that felt as inconsequential as silk. that was the danger—to assume there was none. the world around her had become liquid, dreamlike, a place where normal rules bent and broke. she couldn't tell if she'd been running for minutes or hours. time moved differently here, mangled, a thunderous pressure like the run of horses.

again, another obstacle, this time a root that wrapped around her ankle like a lover's fingers, gentle but insistent. azzi went down hard. the snow cushioned her fall, but the sudden, severe splay of her limbs urged her shift into finally giving up its ghost. the whispered shriek of the material’s tear was lost to the divine silence, but azzi felt it like a caress.

cool air against overheated skin, the knowledge that she was now more exposed than clothed.

when she rolled onto her back, gasping soundlessly, she saw her.

paige stood twenty paces away, perfectly still among the blue-black trees. she had changed again. no longer wearing men's clothes. no longer wearing anything at all.

her hair was loose, bloodless, so white and moving relentlessly in a vicious wind that azzi couldn't feel, and her eyes. her eyes were the exact shade of hypothermia, of suffocation, of the last thing you'd see before the cold took you. and they burned to the point of discomfort, an imagined pain rising along azzi’s skin, the most vivid hallucination.

they stared at each other across the tundra, predator and prey locked in a link like prisoners related by the interlocking of their chains. paige's lips curved in that dreadful smile, and though azzi heard nothing, she felt the word more than saw it shaped by those perfect, bloodless lips:

beautiful.

then paige was moving, not walking but flowing forward like ash, and azzi scrambled to her feet. the remains of her nightshift clung to her shoulders and little else, the cold air a shock against her nipples, her belly, the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. she could feel wetness there that had nothing to do with the sleet melting against the fervent, mortal warmth of her body.

she ran again, but it was different now. less desperate flight, more ritualistic determination. she could feel paige behind her, taunting her by remaining near enough to view every sway of her hips, every flash of smooth brown skin, every vulnerable curve revealed by paige’s cruel machinations—but never near enough to catch. the pursuit was leisurely now, inevitable.

a god had all the time in the world.

azzi's foot snagged on the hint of something, another root or maybe nothing at all, and she fell forward, grasping against the trunk of a tree to try to steady herself. the bark was surprisingly temperate, twitching like a heartbeat beneath her palms.

when she looked back, paige was the closest she had ever been, her presence so immediate that azzi could see the otherworldly perfection of her face, the inhuman symmetry that made her eyes water.

there, azzi could see paige’s naked, unflinching hunger.

the tree at her back seemed to shift, bark becoming smooth as human skin was capable of, branches curling down to curl around her shoulders like claws. she was trapped by the iron fist of divine attention, by the knowledge that running was only a futile part of the game they were playing.

paige approached with a casual gait, her mouth widening as she made to claim her prize. the trees bent away from her passage as if unwilling to witness it again, as if even the forest remembered the first time azzi had seen her. eventually, azzi could see the pulse that wasn't there in that long, long throat.

eventually, paige stopped.

her lips moved. though azzi heard nothing, the words settled in her bones like prayer: you are caught.

the hunt was over. whatever came next would be something else entirely.

paige’s touch was expected, inevitable as illness. but it was different now.

paige no longer looked at her with the remove of a collector. she looked at her the way wolves looked at what they circled, at what they planned to eat. her hands hovered, trembling minutely with the pleasure of achieving her goal. she didn’t touch what remained of azzi’s clothing, not yet.

instead, she glanced up at azzi’s face, and in the bleak cobalt light, her smile was agony.

“i was going to take everything from you,” paige murmured, finally. her voice blended with the swells of the blizzard around them, but azzi felt it under her skin. here was the world returned, her hearing renewed. “do you understand? do you remember? the first time?”

azzi’s lips parted. her voice didn’t come, but her nod was slight and sure.

“you were shaking in that bathroom, on the floor,” paige continued. “trembling with something more than fear. it was like your body already knew mine. even when your mind refused. even when you still believed only in fairness.” she reached up, finally, and her fingers brushed along azzi’s calf, the pads of her fingers dragging slowly, sap over the heart of a maple. “that’s when it changed. when i changed, when i stopped wanting your family’s debt.”

she shifted in place, her body brushing against azzi’s as she did so. every inch of her was bare—pale and incoherently radiant, the illusion of humanity stretched thin over eternity—and yet she reached for azzi as though it was her who might be mutilated.

“i didn’t tell you only because it would be more fun that way. you were so curious, so unyielding. when you looked at me like that, half in love with a perpetual monster, i knew your mind needed stimulation. i needed to let you find your way to my true intentions.”

paige’s hand slid higher.

“you asked for something soundless. but do you know what’s louder than any silence?”

azzi shook her head.

paige leaned in, lips at her ear, voice made only for her marrow.

“willingness.”

then, with the same unhurried cruelty she had once shown in a half-forgotten bathroom, paige tore the last remnants of azzi’s nightdress. it split like wet paper, like scabbed skin under persistent nails. azzi’s mouth opened without a bead of sound, and the cold swallowed the bones of her gasp whole. her breasts, her belly, her cunt all lay bare to the blue light, and the flush that plundered her chest was more desire than shame.

paige looked like she might be conquered by the sight, but she wasn’t. she would never allow herself to surrender to anything.

instead, she cupped azzi’s face rougher than before, like michelangelo with a hand around his david, held her gaze as her other hand slid between her legs.

“you are always so ready,” she said, and this time there was a shake in her voice. “even when you fight me. especially then.”

azzi nearly doubled. her hips stuttered forward. the roll of those fingers over her swollen clit made her whole body jerk like something freshly snared. paige’s knuckles brushed over the slick proof of azzi’s arousal, then retreated like a tease. her other hand came to the back of azzi’s neck, shook her slightly like a doll to bring her out of lust-induced haze. to drag her back, to see her.

“you were already wet for me halfway through running,” paige said softly, more a mockery than a marvel. “your body knows mine. that’s why i changed the terms.”

she curled two fingers inside azzi like she meant to keep them there forever. azzi’s head lolled, her lips wide and her eyes rolled in wordless rapture, her body arching into the touch. paige curled her fingers like she was memorizing a prayer, and azzi’s legs nearly gave out.

the forest around them howled as it held witness.

the pressure was unbearable, but not from the intrusion. from the intimacy. the precision. paige moved like she had been carved for this, as if azzi were nothing but a doll to be used, as if her very birth was the eventual fulfillment of a prophecy only paige had known.

if this was defilement, azzi would be proud to bear the illustration of the aftermath. she wanted her goddess to dig into her, cunt and stomach and mouth, to leave something behind. she wanted her goddess.

she wanted—

“no longer my little debtor,” paige whispered, driving deeper. “you made yourself an offering. a brave rival, too, but you were always an offering.”

azzi’s head dropped back completely. paige let it. her throat arched like a girl about to be slaughtered. maybe that’s what this was; maybe this was paige’s altar.

maybe this was abraham and isaac, except isaac was isabella, and god delivered herself to her mouth and claimed her before the knife did. maybe isaac-turned-isabella did not know the difference because anything divine and ceaseless feels like a blade, feels hotter than clean then over.

“you were born for this,” paige said, voice near reverent, breath near her lips now. “to be caught.”

and azzi, slick and bare and throbbing, could only taste blood in her mouth.

she tried to speak, tried to deny, tried to moan, but her body was too full. it expanded over her noise, her breath, her language. all that remained was sensation and the vision of paige, shining and obscene, taking her apart with fingers and teeth.

this was no longer a task. there had never been a task. it had all been a choosing.

and all the while azzi had already been chosen.

azzi came suddenly, her body locking up around paige’s fingers with a helpless rhythm, a stuttering quake that began in her spine and bloomed outward like infection in the blood. her mouth opened in a perfect, silent ‘o’, no sound but the wide-eyed plea in her gaze as her orgasm crested and broke, wet and molten and sweet, dribbling down paige’s hand like syrup from a split fig.

her pleasure was made visible like never before, hot slickness coating the fingers still buried inside her, seeping past the knuckles in gratitude, in acquiescence. paige watched it happen, her thumb brushing once, just once, over azzi’s pulsing clit like the period at the end of a prayer.

she bent, blonde and frightening, to kiss her.

blood in her mouth, and azzi didn’t know whose it was.

and she didn’t care.

✤ THE FOURTH TASK: PAINLESS.

azzi did not have a chance to administer her final task. paige simply appeared to her and dismissed all of it.

“no more of this,” she said, her tone firm. “i want something different.”

azzi blinked. her lips parted, her fingers still wet with the tincture she’d brewed for sleep, borne of poppy and passionflower.

“you—what? what do you mean? you don’t want the final task?”

she sat up wildly in bed, and she hated how desperation made a slave of her, how it so clearly had her deep in its clutches, painting her movements with a pitiful urgency. was this rejection? was she only good for one thing?

“no,” paige said, stepping closer.

azzi was unsure of whether she had spoken aloud or if paige had only heard her, a hand anchored gluttonously in her hindbrain.

her goddess was kinder in her form this time, illuminated not with the cold light of the dead, but something gentler, awful in its own way. some fever dream of spring.

“i’m simply no longer interested in collecting.”

azzi stared. she was winded without having been touched.

“then what is it you want?”

paige’s face shifted, and azzi realized that that was the question.

✤ THE FIFTH TASK: MATE / LESS.

there was a silence between them, thick as a wedding veil and just as translucent. paige stepped forward, and forward again, until the hem of her robes brushed azzi’s feet. she gazed down at her with a pale echo of hunger from the forest.

“you,” she said simply. “bound to me. beyond a night. past centuries. for as long as the moon pulls the sea.”

azzi could only look at her.

“speak.”

finally, azzi found the words.

“you want me as your consort.”

“yes.” paige’s voice dipped into her mouth like a sacrament. “i want to wear your name inside mine. i want to wake beside you in the ruined gardens of time. i want your sorrow, your sickness, your teeth, your youth. i want your last breath and the one after that.”

azzi felt something loosen in her chest. the end of the world. the start of a new one.

“that is not an easy thing to ask of me,” she said softly.

“no,” paige replied. “but it is yours to choose.”

azzi turned away for a moment. paige came to sit beside her, a hand firm on azzi’s stomach.

“this is all that i have. either way, you were gone, azzi. you were the cataclsymic end to your family’s greed. you were to go by their hand, but at least, if you do not love me, you can at least go by yours instead.”

azzi turned back to her then. her god, this woman, this terror she loved, and cupped the hard line of her jaw.

“if you think i do not love you, then it is only because you have not existed long enough to understand what it means to do so.”

paige’s mouth fell open, but this time azzi silenced her. her answer was not given in words, but in the way she leaned forward, bending forward, and tilted the god’s head to be kissed.

somewhere, in a kingdom long buried, a temple shook away from the earth’s crust and rose to the surface. its pillars groaned as the deal was closed.

the final task was struck through. a new name took its place.

this was ascendance.

✤ EPILOGUE: ENDLESS.

they meet by a shore that hadn’t existed in azzi’s mortal life.

beneath them, the beach sleeps slick and black, wet with night. above: the endless flood of metal and light, a bridge carrying cars like blood cells, a flow that never stills. the world has turned electric, sleepless, but the sea always remembers.

paige arrives first. barefoot in the sand, cuffs rolled. her shirt is a formal button-down, long-sleeved and white as bone. her trousers are creased and acute, a color pitched darker than black. even now, she remains severe to the point of discomfort. still a god, always a god.

azzi comes next, a mirage, her slip dress clinging like water, a shimmer of champagne against her skin. she walks barefoot, the tide licking her ankles. the dress is from a time older than this one. azzi struggles often to let go.

there is no fear in her face now, only memory, only that unbearable clarity that comes with time.

they don’t speak. they never do.

azzi steps closer, until their hands nearly touch. the sea hisses a greeting, and paige’s hands flutter as if to wave.

in the distance, a car horn cries out like a gull. time wavers. somewhere behind them, the old world bows its head and closes its eyes for good.

azzi concedes first, reaches out, and touches the other. one hand, light at the jaw, like she is granting permission. paige follows easily, bending to kiss her until she is sweet and soft in her hands.

paige pulls away, resting her forehead against azzi’s as she winds a cool hand along her waist.

she says nothing, but as always, azzi hears her like a wound in her head.

wife.

azzi’s smile is inevitable.

✤

🀢 — azzi, goddess of second-life.

a lesser-known modern deity, azzi presides over second chances and reclaims those once used as collateral in others’ bargains. often invoked by the nearly-lost—the sacrificed, the betrayed, the discarded—she represents survival as return.

iconography associates her with thresholds (shores, dusk, liminal states) and offerings made in twos. her mythology emphasizes reclamation: she does not reverse fate, only answers it.

common epithets: bargain-maiden, she who was spent, patron of the nearly lost.