God Catcher [Fin]

[Verse]

The unit was usually rented, its place right there on the riverfront where the sea deities swam, collecting the run-off from the poisonous factories and turning it into beautiful sweet water again. Smaller companies rented this kind of space, with staggering insurance, to make singular Catches, but Almin Tarker had seen enough success drawing titans from the ether, The Eonverk, to own the gigantic, valved storage. His ace-in-the-hole, Crosser Clau, thought it was vanity that had driven Almin to purchase the admittedly usable space, since the cost could only be justified by renting it out when it wasn't directly in use, or being prepped, anyway.

It was this vanity, though, that had made them both so prolific in the trade of shackling the Gods themselves and passing them to the next buyer for astronomical profit. It was said the Eonverk was the consequence of human kind's beliefs, but there was no doubt a bit of beauty had gone from the world when Aphrodite had been Invoked and then put in an iron belt. Crosser wasn't sure what it all meant, only that he believed it. And that was his counterweight to Almin's vanity.

Crosser, counted among the Inciters, had an open heart, and could believe and conjure faith better than a brimming church, which - combined with a decently built God Catcher Device - could produce from the Eonverk almost any manner of God. It came with crippling doubt also, but he had enough money from the Tarker company to drown that out in the pills of this new era, and its liquid libations too. More than that, he'd find recovery in other bodies, which he didn't mind paying for either. It wasn't hard to find free fare, though, with Crosser's long limbs and face that was both soft complexion and a sharp chin. An edge to the magenta eyes and the dark lashes, which were complimented by the mess of exotically colorless hair. Today he wore the black and gray robes and straps of an ordained Inciter.

Almin's claps spread and died in the large locale, having only the circle of interlaced machines and their control pannels to the side to bounce off. He was shorter by perhaps a finger, but still towering over most, which he used to his advantage in business meetings. He wore a suit, mostly white, and tied his brown hair back. His features were a bit more traditionally carved. He could not afford the artistic wilting of an Inciter. He had to look healthy and strong, gladiator in good tailoring,  for the corporate lions that were his adversaries. "He arrives at last, my golden goose!" he called out to the ceiling though it was directed at his childhood friend in holy garb. The workers finishing the set-up of the God Catcher weren't deterred by the scene. They had seen Gods compressed into nothing but the metal of their chains, two men acting like fools was nothing special.

"You should be glad I came at all." Crosser muttered, wiping the ball of his wrist over blooden lips that had kissed other mouths of flesh and glass today. "This is the third one in as many weeks, Almin. Why do you need so many Gods? Did you even sell the last one? How can you find bidders flush enough so quickly?" But it was only airs. Crosser's heart was thriving, though exhausted. Many dreamed of being Inciters, and those who earned the title could go years without work. Thanks to his relationship with Almin, Crosser was prolific in his trade, which afforded him an attitude toward other companies, and this hateful familiarity with Almin.

"Comon. You're my harpoon, and we're at sea, looking for the Hydra or the Kraken." Almin said and hung an arm around Crosser's shoulders. He waved to the machine around them. "This. This is my ship." It was a bit moot drawing on mythology these days. All fantastical things could be pulled from the Eonverk if the Inciter believed. Still, Almin wouldn't be who he was without this grandeur. "'sides, Ex. Your skills are improving because I use you more than you use that dame at that satin place you like so much."

Crosser shoved his friend with a grin. It was hard and it pushed the brunett a few paces back. They were these kind of friends. "Yeah, yeah, Almin, I'm your whore." he gave and rolled the cylinder in his right hand, his Bearer was already stretching out small metal arms and turning itself to different symbols. It listened to and resonated with his heart. It was mainly because of the Bearers that Inciters had to earn their title, since they became formidable weapons, also. "How about you get out of my office and I'll see what you found for me."

Almin nodded and went willingly, large, playful strides and hands locked behind his back comically. "Same as the last few times, Ex, I don't have a specific God for you. We're just directing the instruments of the Catcher and you'll have to find what you find." Blind fishing. Crosser was getting good at it, even if it was a risky thing, economically, to venture on for a company. It was inevitable, though, since humanity's myths were running out. And they'd been on a roll, lately.

"Well, then." Crosser said and flung the constantly changing Bearer into the air. He was obviously excited, himself. "Fuck you very much." he said upon catching the trinket again. Almin flicked his finger and a controlman started the sequence that lit up the pile of metal in the circle with Crosser. It was also changing, awaiting the form of the God it had to contain. Eventually the floor inside the ring of machines glowered, and the light contaminated Crosser's eyes, too, which carried their innate pink. Inciters had followers too, and now Crosser looked the part of a holy thing.

They lost him to his method for an hour or two. He wasn’t stoic, not a statue, some of his idiosyncrasies alive in the body while his heart followed the thread of the God Catcher to a specific patch in the Eonverk. “Fragments,” he said at one point “you’ve sent me to the pelagics, Almin, you idiot.” Some idiosyncrasies are more volatile than others. But the Inciter did not exit, he continued to turn on his heels, holding up the morphing Bearer like a lantern with cogs and spines.

It was during the third hour that the controlman gasped at the readings pertaining to Crosser’s physical health. “Sir! Look! He’s encountered something. His stress is almost solid!” With that, Crosser fell to his knees on the lit floor, the illumination making long shadows from his chin up to his temples, broken by the pretty fires eating his eye sockets. He didn’t look distraught in a way that suggested bodily harm.

“It’s… This isn’t a God. It’s… her.” The Inciter said, mouth open and staring into nothing. He turned his head to where Almin stood, an impossible implication, since sight in the Eonverk mean blindness on earth. “You—you lead me to her?” he asked draining desperation on his expression.

“Sir, I’m starting the extraction. His heart. It’s not responding to him. It’s building something on its own!” the controlman reached for a purple lever on the panel, but Almin, who wore a determined line on his mouth, shoved him to the floor.

“Get her, Crosser! It’s now or never!” he shouted and flicked a button, which would hail the deity in Crosser’s sights.

“No, I can’t. She’s ours…” Crosser tried, but had already stood up with the Bearer stretched out like a sword to ward off some oncoming thread. The light of the floor swallowed him before it started subsiding again. It revealed an Inciter with spectral eyes, color of the sweetest hues in nebulas, set in a formation of fear and longing and faltering determination. Usually there was war in the body of the Inciter when meeting with their target God. Crosser had hesitation in his, initially. The metals started quaking in their pile on the floor, already trying to fit whatever deity he’d come across. Almin’s mouth was pulsing as he lost himself to the scene. There was no hesitation in him.

“Get her, Ex.”

[VenomousEve]

Every god carried its own genesis. A spark, brilliant inspiration, and the promise of something greater. Once, there had been pantheons for the greatest beginnings. Religions wove divinity into intricate tapestries. The gods were neither the myths that were spoken nor their own substance. An existence of will, and desire shaped within. But most of the old gods were gone now. If their religions had not faded, their bodies had been shackled. The Eonverk had become a lonely place—ghosts flitting into existence just long enough to be torn down from their heights.

When Almin had been a small boy, he’d once been very ill. At that time, Crosser had believed what the friends had both needed: a promise of divine intervention. And so, Zephra had been born into the age of God Catchers. The Eonverk had already been growing quiet when the goddess had blossomed beneath the sea. She had emerged from the waves, expelled into existence on coiling red vines that shimmered like blood in glass. Zephra never had a church, but her worship came from the two children who’d dreamt of her. With her hands on their shoulders, she evolved.

That had been years ago, though. The few other gods who’d blinked into life around her time had long disintegrated into lost hopes or been shackled down to humanity’s insatiable greed. Zephra had remained. Twined around the boys’ necks or splayed across their shoulders, she’d become a goddess of serendipity. It had been what they had formed her as, whether the children had carried such a name. When they had grown older and their hearts had become crueler and grown apart, she’d watched over them still. When a decade had passed without her name on their lips, she watched from a distance

Her persistence came from the devotion of an Inciter un-ordained, captive to his own innocence. The open heart that filled his pockets now had given her an unfading brilliance. She’d been made with their power before it had become a commodity, so she’d not been made to tether. Caught between their unfading source and the regrettable invisibility that is nostalgia, Zephra had been left to watch other gods die. Sometimes, she thought Crosser’s quiet faith was dull. What was a goddess without purpose?

It had made her tired, which was the divine equivalent of hubris.

Zephra lay coiled in the darkness, waiting. She was always waiting, because a purposeless god had nothing else. It was a kindness that time meant very little to dreamt up beings, besides an excuse for bitterness. She spent most of her time sleeping in their memories and playing across their deepest dreams. Almin and Crosser had not truly remembered her in many years. In the apathy of disuse, she had not kept her form. In the deepest still of the Eonverk, she’d become a shadow.

And then a light pierced her self-imposed quiet and her shape was thrust back upon her. Eyes like twin mirrors with the moon in their grasp and four wings unfurling. They blotted out the blackness, pearlescent and invasive. She was expanses of glistening scales and a mouth of sharp teeth behind Crosser’s mother’s lips. Great, curving horns sprouting from hair like oil on dark water, they wrapped forward to arc around her brow like an angel’s boney crown.

She blinked at the Inciter, now a man with his holy robes, and smiled.

“I wondered if you would ever come.” She was the voice of every woman he’d ever considered loving. Zephra reached her hands toward him. “My darling God Killer.” Massive wings stretched to curl around him like the fleeting scent of home, and then she was swallowed into the world of man.

Zephra was smaller there, but her feathered appendages still crashed outward and seemed uncontained by the circle. She was not what Almin had envisioned her as when he was small, but she could be no one else. The goddess did not seem to notice her other believer, the one for whom she’d been made. Her reflective stare was fixed on Crosser, who had brought her here. At one time, she had thought she would be shackled no sooner than Crosser had received his Bearer. But he had never come for her.

Now, standing there before him with her scaled skin shimmering under the pale light, she seemed at least as conflicted as the Inciter who had invoked her. To be remembered was to continue living and to be called was to have purpose, but this was not the purpose of gods.     

[Verse]

The heartlight - sullen furnaces in his head, blaring like the last of a sunset rebelling against its own end - faltered when she looked at him. It was what he had needed when he thought he'd loose Almin. His friend had told him their Zephra had two tails, but even the early Crosser had thought those tails should be legs instead. He'd not known why a man would want an object of desire to be cloven like that, why such eventual availability of intimacy was important. It thrilled a part of him he understood well now, tended to at the silk-lined establishment, to see he had been right and Almin had been mistaken.

"The metals!" Almin reminded with fright in his anger at Crosser's reckless awe. Almin hammered a forceful panel and the humming Selfhurt on the floor that was loosing its light shot at her, biting into her ankles, and attaching to the outer joints of the main bones of her wings. Crosser woke up then, to see her sniped with the reason man could govern gods. He swiped his Bearer once, demanding the last piece to fly and wrap around her throat just as the longest feather of her right wing touched his cheek. It was a lethal thing, the pleasure that stained his face from her contact. Their healing dragoness, with holy blood to raise a sick boy. A woman from the sea that would listen, and that swam around you in dark waters.

Almin breathed at a lower rhythm once the circuit was around her, but something else bothered him profoundly at seeing her eyes at Crosser like that. Gods were confused when drawn, some of them dealt with it by raising their chins and pushing their old rights, but Zephra, the goddess he prayed to when he had his first taste of a woman, looked only at Crosser, like nothing else could matter. Inciters were adversaries to newly plucked deities, not-- he didn't know what her look said.

"You are still a God. But you're mine." Crosser said, voice steady. It was his usual speech, mostly, but Almin would notice he'd not referred ownership to The Tarker company, this time. The Bearer was held in front of Crosser, and its waving arms and spinning gears was a show of turmoil inside. Usually he could pinpoint the symbol that would focus a god right from detection in the Eonverk, but now the multi-shape conduit had trouble expressing a symbol both he and Almin knew by heart. During training, Crosser had been known for his fast Bearer technique, so this kind of hesitation was concerning. He knew what he must do. "Do you accept, Zephra of the depths?" The Bearer grew two prongs and those prongs spoke to the Selfhurt on her body, bending the bones of her wings the wrong way.

They'd not had stock in the gods they'd caught so far, but Zephra was an impossibly intimate creature to them. Hurting her spun dread in their chests but also watered their mouths. Almin was fuming at her attention, how it wasn't on him at all, and Crosser found a deeper appreciation of wielding the chains on something so personal. He twisted the Bearer to have the corresponding tilt to the Selfhurt metals on her. He stepped closer, well within the reach of her wings, confident, because you'd have to be when taming Gods.

"Zephra." he demanded again. "I have called you. Will you listen?"

It was strange to him, then, that she looked nothing like Almin had wanted her to. Instead she was the very image of what he himself had worshiped. He understood now how many of his preferences were on her, and how it compromised his focus. It was almost as though she was his own, personal Goddess. The Bearer was finally turning into her symbol.

[VenomousEve]

She took a step toward him, arcing claws clicking and sparking against the cool floor. Zephra had been a storybook monster and a mother’s authority, the earliest curiosities of a boy’s lust and the prettiness of fear. She had been more powerful for them, because she was beautiful and terrible; a gentle touch for the friends and a ward against their nightmares. It was why she was serendipity, not fate, because she had never been cruel to the two she loved.

When the first shackles snapped shut around her ankles, a shiver reverberated up her body, lifting every pearlescent scale like a rippling wave. It made her freeze in place, the mirror eyes still pinned on Crosser and his bearer. “What, exactly, do you understand of a god’s will?” Zephra asked, though she jerked back when the metal rings flew and held fast to the thickest sweeps of her four wings. The metal threading pulled her back, insisting upon distance between the goddess and her creator.

It wasn’t that Almin was weak—some of his basest desires had been woven into her feathers—but Crosser had always been stronger. Their souls could hardly be compared. That was why Almin stood behind the control panel and Crosser wore the robes. It shouldn’t have surprised either of them that Zephra had been shaped by the Inciter’s vision. Nor should it have surprised Crosser when her sounds were familiar to them both, but intimate only to him. The hitching breath of a pretty blonde who’d often pretended to be a divine catch in the bedroom. The soft hum of a green-eyed beauty that cried when he’d pleased her because she’d known he’d be gone by morning.

Zephra blinked and it was cold when her lashes eclipsed her reflective stare. “Wasn’t I always yours? And his?” she asked, and seemed to noticed Almin for the first time. He was half-obscured behind the machines, but she might as well have been staring through the metal. “My creators, but I am the god and you are not.” She said, inclining her head. The wings stretched, as if she were contemplating an attempt to unbind herself, and then the mechanisms of the device responded.

It was enough to make her hiss, and her teeth seemed sharper then. She arched and, for a moment, the huge wings beat against the chains and lifted her from the ground, stirring the air with concussive force. The pressure would pulse against their ears, dying as she stiffened and slammed back onto the ground. The band around her throat crackled with the taste of her own divinity. “We gods can only accept the will of our believers…” she was laughing. “But bringing me here is to give me away, isn’t it? I, who was always yours?” Zephra sneered a little, like a judgmental sister who knew too much.

“Little boys.” Zephra murmured, but her breath belayed her discomfort. The Selfhurt metals were eagerly reactive to her agitation. And then Crosser was far within reach of even her smaller set of wings, despite the pull of the chain. The huge appendages flexed and pressed against the restraints, which cut beneath the feathers. She folded herself around him anyway. “I should be insulted.” She said, leaning toward the Inciter and the Bearer that was shifted rapidly toward a shape that knew her.

“But I would have died long ago, were it not for that heart of yours.” Zephra reached for him, the tip of one nail just scraping the fabric of his shirt. “Perhaps it’s only fair that you think to tame me?” She wasn’t mocking, but there was a thread of bitterness there. “Do you really remember me well enough for that?” Her feathers brushed his cheeks. The taste of so many formative experiences would flood his tongue. She’d been near him much longer than he’d remember praying to her. The pretty faces that had lit many late-night trysts, the lingering luck that had answered passing wishes to the ether. Even when she’d been waiting, something of her had hovered with Crosser and Almin. Formless, but potent.

Perhaps she’d grown most distant when he’d become more prolific in his work and found sanctuary in pills and bottles. Patient goddess, but jealous too. Did he know when she’d left Almin? “I’m certain I know you better.” Her face shifted until it was the prismatic ghost of a dark-eyed girl he’d been fond of in his innocence. Back when Zephra had been born, and the two boys had needed her. She winced; insolence was insolence, so far as a God Catching Device was concerned. Her face shifted back to the one he’d dreamed her with.

“But, go ahead, little God Killer. As you always have, you have my ear. I will listen.” She pulled back her wings, and it was abruptly apparent how much her shimmering feathers had softened and shifted the light in their grasp. The room was harsh in contrast.   

[Verse]

He had mocked other tradesmen for their weakness when something that fit their theological palled was thrown into the circle with them. Easy to pick at the slobbering heroes then, barely staying on their feet when they were supposed to instill an understanding of inferiority in the mighty things technology had captured. He'd known of many gods, because they taught their stories in school, but he'd wrapped them in iron and programmed spells easily when they'd been put before him.

But now he was met with mother's mouth over enamel shards, saying sounds that he remembered from enduring moments in his memory, from when intimacy meant something. Ah, it was strange to be in danger and be pulled toward her at the same time. To him, arm out, it wasn't as simple as it was when a human god, a god of industry and long numbers, wanted a plaything, a pet or an overpowered sidearm. He wanted her because he'd wanted those things she was built of, in the past. But she was holy to him too. He understood the Inciters that had crumpled and been eaten by their gods before the Selfhurt Circuit could be closed.

Almin dug his fingers into the side of the table that had all the commands of the fantastical machine that surrounded them. He heard her tone when she admitted to always having belonged to Crosser, and him as an afterthought. Almin's ego was harboring cracks for this. His hand reached for a switch that would trigger a series of automated things to pull at her chains. Not only the Inciter had power over the metals. But he didn't pull it.

Crosser was lashed when she drew on their history. A trinity, they'd been. And now he'd brought her here to be consumed by his world, when they'd created her to be above it. To live in the sea. He gripped the Bearer tighter, as though it was a battery of faith, and not just the image of it, in him, projected. Zephra knew the common flaws in men, and she knew which ones were more prominent in her followers. She'd been born out of Crosser's fear of loss. And she'd been brought here today because of Almin's.

Crosser's arm quaked when he saw Theresa's face, her brown eyes set over Zephra's mirrors. He'd prayed to her about Theresa, but he'd not known if Zephra was the kind of god to twine hearts like that, back then. It would have been to ask Poseidon for victory in war on land. But the sweet girl's image brought the hardened Inciter back to when he could hope for such contradictions. Back then there had been no thought of imprisoning Zephra.

Almin had not been so taken by her display, because she'd not worn it for him. His heart had always been on her, and it had fueled his climb through matters of men, which were always matters of gold. Crosser, with his spite and the strength she spoke of, had taken to the path of wrangling gods with his open heart. Almin had to take another way toward their obsession. It was hard for him to see that despite his devotion, Zephra seemed to love Crosser more. It was sickeningly unfair. Gods always rip up men with their favoritism.

"She's lying!" Almin injected, and it was quite a bark. "She's trying to figure out the machine. She'll drown you if you're not careful." he said. There was nothing on the screens to indicate it, but Almin had to shake the two somehow. He was being wronged by their reunion. "Defend yourself, Ex! You know how gods are!" he warned.

Crosser woke up with that, looked at her with accusatory eyes, that were returning to a human shape, with white around the magenta irises. The Bearer took power from vengeance, and clicked into a simple swirl connected to a line above it. The horizon and her curled shape under the water. "Then I'll say this." because she'd told him she would listen. He was prideful, too, and wanted to show her he had power. His free hand borrowed authority from the Bearer and pointed at the clasps on her wings. The metals drew outward, to stretch her span, to crucify her and lift her feet off the floor. It filled Crosser with a dark satisfaction, because all the lovers she was the patchwork of would look lovely like that.

"You're going to serve now, Goddess." he said, coming closer. The hand that did not hold her symbol was steady, some kind of trick in his mind keeping it fast, as it reached for her. He breathed slow when he touched the scales of her body, and Almin rotted inside when Crosser's fingers went from her arm to her collarbone, and down over her sternum. "Y-you're mine..." Crosser said, and it felt right.

"You belong to Tarker!" Almin shouted. It was what Crosser always said. He felt as though he'd sell her to a soulless, perverted merchant before he'd let Crosser have her, now, the way the two went on. Like he wasn't even in the room.

The clasps on her wings dug deeper into her, breaking skin underneath with her own strength. Blood of their goddess. It had Crosser gasp finally, his eyes mortal when the surge from the Eonverk finally vacated him. His hand graced a breast before it crossed her abdomen, counting scales until it could hang on her hip, Bearer pressed up against her other side. So many lovely things he'd made her with. "You'll serve and all the power you have," that we gave you. "Will belong to someone else." His voice would usually be spiteful here, but now it was tinged with surprise and sorrow. He looked at her face, her beautiful horns, and hand't seen that her wrists were not cuffed. "Do you understand? Do you accept servitude?" Out of reflex, the bonds hooked harder into her bones.

[VenomousEve]

Zephra’s stare snapped toward Almin again. How rude. Interrupting, of all things. Hadn’t he done enough? “Shall I drown you both?” Zephra asked him, and the chains rattled and sang when her wings strained against them. She did not flinch when the first golden drops of her blood slithered between her feathers, but her breath hissed from between her fanged teeth. “Almin.” She said his name and she might as well have whispered it against his ear lobe. “We all know that I’m not the liar here. You didn’t make me to lie.” Rather, Almin had been very good at that himself, in some way or another. He’d never needed a patron. Zephra had not been formed to judge sins, either.

For a moment, Almin might have distracted her from the Inciter. Even without a Bearer, even without Crosser’s heart, Almin was still one of her makers. To her, he was less than his friend, but he was also the reason of her existence. Crosser would not have dreamed her if Almin hadn’t needed her too, and Almin’s own faith was in the shimmer of her blood. He might have had her interest, but then Crosser was stretching her like some massive, ivory crucifix and Crosser’s presence eclipsed Almin’s again.

Zephra screeched, momentarily furious, and the glass in the nearest window shattered from its frame. Even dangling, she looked like she could have been formidable. Golden traces of her life slid down the edges of the shackles on her wings, and her chest rose and fell harder when the blush-eyed man drew near. “And you’ve always belonged to him, I suppose.” The goddess muttered, even as her scales lifted against his touch. It might have been a trick of the light, but her horns seemed to have twisted a little higher.

She shivered and gasped when the metals compressed tighter still. “You’ve called me to give me away?” she hummed, and it was Zephra’s turn to stare down at Crosser in accusation. “How worthless.” Crosser’s mother snarled from Zephra’s vocal chords. “Pitiful followers.” Theresa’s sigh billowed from Zephra’s lips. The goddess’s ire was setting the machine dials into a frenzy, and the metals quivered on her limbs. But she wasn’t trying to escape. In fact, it seemed she had no interest in breaking free at all. It might have been that it was beyond her to desire it, because she was a product of the two men who’d dragged her to earth.

Or it might have been the bitter pull of a god and her creator, brought near enough now that they would be obliged to orbit. The glistening white scales were warm beneath Crosser’s touch, pulsing with a reactive energy that knew his deepest self. It was pleasurable, whether either he or Zephra desired it, because it was a realization of purpose.

She couldn’t help but smile tautly at his question. “To whom?” she asked him, and her arms were around him, lifting him up even as the Selfhurt metals snapped tighter. They extended her wings further, lifting her higher from the ground, and she brought Crosser with her. Zephra was cradling him to her bare chest, face bent to bury in his pale strands, her own inky tresses mingling across his shoulders. “Servitude to you?” Zephra was laughing, her breath hot on his forehead. “To Almin? To some unworthy heathen?”

Zephra lifted him higher, so that she might meet his gaze. “Explain it to me, God Killer. Who do you want me to serve?” She asked him, with her lips against his. Did Crosser remember what it was to sleep against the bosom of his goddess? He’d had such pleasant childhood dreams, when she’d held him. She let go of him abruptly, letting him fall back down to the ground. It wasn’t a particularly far drop, though she’d been lofted high enough that she could not have set him down gentler if she’d desired it. Zephra didn’t look as if she desired it. The perfect reflectiveness of her eyes mirrored Crosser’s own expression. A little spiteful, a little sad. A bit like a wounded animal that had once trusted him.

She was in pain; that much was apparent from the readouts on Almin’s screens and the short little breaths fluttering her chest. But, like time, pain could be a remarkably useless abstraction to the divine. Crosser and his Bearer could force a more tangible agony, certainly, but it still required him to overcome her pride—and his own. “You should have left me in the dark, Crosser Clau.” Zerpha said, lips pressed into a thin line. She did seem to understand the situation, but her connection to the two men had likely made it impossible for her not to. It didn’t make this any less of a betrayal. “Instead you’re standing here playing Almin’s games. I’d like to know what you want, little God Killer.”

And it could not have mattered less to the tethered goddess what rift grew between the two friends. They’d been nursing a divide all on their own, long before this moment. So long as they believed in her, she could persist. It did not matter if they believed in each other, So Zephra stared down at him with that inviting question hung between them. Was he willing to show her, at least, what she was to Crosser the prodigy Inciter? It read like a morbid last wish, played to the rhythmic drip of her golden blood leaking to the ground and the straining of her bones.   

[Verse]

Her screech had rattled them both. Signature of falling glass. Their goddess affected by their actions. Almin saw the way her scales stood for Crosser’s hand, and Crosser marveled at the heat, like every shield was its separate nerve, offering something to him. What an unusual, rousing texture.

Almin had been quite invigorated to have her attention, and then bittered deeply when she turned to Crosser again. The world had pampered Almin. The rich are better off than the talented. It was searing to find out so suddenly that perhaps their mother from the depths cared more for the ivory headed brother. Almin gasped as though he’d been punished when she had her arms around Crosser, lifting him with her wings strained like that. Almin’s eyes stung.

Crosser almost dropped the Bearer when he could feel her to him. Her heat was exquisite, and it lulled him and made him dizzy. She smelled like the trees when they were warm, at their first home, and like Theresa’s hairline. But the safe place turned into a courtroom when she pressed him on his insolence. He held the Bearer harder, then. He didn’t say, but he delivered with his eyes that no, not someone else, not even Almin. He kept that defiance when she dropped him, even if it felt like falling naked into winter, suddenly. He landed well, and stared up at her.

The challenge spread in him. There had to be such holy spite in the Inciters. They hammered god’s to the mill. With his Bearer raised, he lifted her higher by pulling her wings further apart. If there were complaint in her bones or joints or mouth, he would revel in it. “I want what any man wants.” He said as though he was visiting her in a house with cloth walls and dark stains. His free hand was out when he told the metals to lower her finally, her ankle rings keeping her legs apart as she descended. Almin bit his tongue when Crosser had her body meet his palm so he could examine the apex of her legs, like he was buying her.

“I want see what you’re like Zephra.” Sacrilege filled Crosser’s soul with hot hubris. He’d dreamed so many things about her design at the secret place, so he wouldn’t know what would meet his searching finger, himself. The boy who’d willed her into the ether would never have done this to his goddess, only privately into defiled cloth, so he told himself he had to do it now. Here I am, grown. He pressed the Bearer to one of her pretty horns so she’d have to look up at him as he examined her intrusively. His mouth watered at the sight of hers and he indulged. He kissed those familiar lips firmly, and pierced her by curling his longest finger, while a command in the Bearer had two metal clasps bend inward, effectively borrowing her own strength to break her right wing as he stole her breath.

Almin had hurried with a tablet to an opening between two rods in the circular machine, staring at the two. He’d meant to tell Crosser to be weary of her free arms, or order him to let her be – press some legal right to her – but had been struck dumb and mute by the Inciter’s actions. It made Almin sick to see the Goddess he’d hunted with someone else. It also made Almin firm with a confusing dread. He’d not been this man before today. It brought him to his knees, and cracks to the tablet’s surface as it fell. He should not be envious of Crosser, but it was impossible not to, when he was having Zephra and fracturing her bones at the same time. With his head lowered, eyes in crazed shadow, Almin searched himself for something, and found a handle in the inner pocket of his jacket. He couldn’t be left behind when if Zephra meant he was lesser than Crosser. His vanity would shatter.

“What kind of Goddess did I make?” Not Almin, I, Crossed asked her, a lewd string of spittle connecting their kisses still, even at half a breath’s distance. There was a place for pride when an Inciter introduced a god to their servitude, but Crosser had never been so swept away. “Would you pray to me now?” he asked between his teeth.

[VenomousEve]

Because she was his goddess, she thrummed with the heat of his own desires. They were hers if he wished them to be, creation of his soul. Zephra licked her lips and it was both inviting and voraciously cruel. Her tongue slipped across her wicked teeth and drew beads of her golden blood over her ripe lower petal. Her feathers rustles when she was lowered, arching up like a triumphant arch above her head. If this was supposed to be submission, then this goddess had never been made to dominate.

Her breath hitched and she sighed like every lover he’d pleased, or hoped to please, like a whimsical chorus from her inhuman vocal chords. The heat of her on his palm might nearly be scorching, a dancing tingle in the slick readiness of her. Zephra made a sound like a purring lion. “Pretty blasphemer.” She laughed, and then she was looking over his shoulder at Almin when Crosser’s digits dared to seek sanctity. It was almost as if she were daring him to challenge his friend’s audacity. Crosser would have their dreamed-up deity on his own, whether the other man had the heart to inject himself in this sacrilege.

She was exactly what the Inciter should have expected, and nothing he could have imagined. A humble human woman, if that woman could meet him as he moved, slipping along his skin like an ocean tide and an unbearable pressure. A lonely kind of ache in the humming search of her soft sweet. It was like she’d been waiting, and now she’d eat him alive, swallowing him into the very core of her being—and he’d come willingly, ferried along by her insistent, slow, surging pull. Zephra was the female form, macrocosmic in pearlescent scales and microcosmic in the arch and curl along his fingernail.

Crosser’s Bearer stole her gaze from Almin, this time, drawing her back into a duet with no room for the dark-haired man who’d determined she should fall today. Zephra did not withhold when Crosser came hungry. Her mouth was his bounty, her bleeding tongue darting. The goddess’ body shuddered hard when the Bearer pressed, and then she lurched and pulled her face away hard as her wing snapped. There was a sound like shattering glass, and something crystalline showered from between the feathers, bathed in golden blood. She hissed, spitting glittering droplets from between her clenched teeth. She had not been able to move far, their breath still mingling. Zephra’s mirror stare refracted the light in a dizzyingly discordant illusion of sparks.

Still, she had not been pulled from the firm seat of Crosser’s palm, and his intrusive digits would feel her being tremble. A storm, anguished, but still rippling. “I am the goddess you wanted. The one you needed, and will need, but haven’t deemed to know.” She panted. Despite the pain, her wing dangling uselessly in its shackle, Zephra’s body explored Crosser’s touch and she had it in her to smile. “Gods do not pray.” She breathed. “But we can worship.”

She had snaked one of her arms around him, and the other had brought her fingers to stroke him. As if to say it was only fair. It was a dangerous game for them both, really, but no god had ever gotten the upper hand on Crosser. Zephra was at once the worst and best suited to be the exception. It was possible that destroying him was beyond her nature, but deities were known to spurn their own ungrateful followers unto their own deaths. It was the curious luxury of seeing inevitable expiration looming. “You waste me, God Killer.”  Zephra murmured, lips dipping a hair away from his. 

[Verse]

It should have been a warning when she fit perfectly against his hand. Every shape was welcoming, and underneath the scales and skin she whispered of promises he understood, instinctively. The fingers were beckoned in, and her magic climbed his nerves at the contact, it pulsed up his arm and offered a thought that she'd be more pleasure if he'd try her with something sensitive and primal. At first the gods so far had never been so pliable, even the ones found in scripture that were really bed-sheet tales. She was not made for that distant kind of worship. There was no reason to chain his hubris. He could have his goddess, because he'd made her with Almin. Her entire flock was in this room.

Her loud complaint roughly pressed at the drums of his ears without objectionable pitch, her wing giving in a most satisfying way, reverberations through her skeleton letting him sense the fracture on her aura, around his fingers, awakening a new addiction in him. He'd been thinking to sacrifice his tongue to smile defiant, but his ocean lover didn't bite him when they kissed. How daunting. He could have her pain in a glittering display, but he wouldn't find her disapproval. He blood went through his head, urged on by her breaths, incinerating through her spells, and he felt more awake to all the details on her pretty. How could he not be sacrilegious, when she was spoiling him so?

Worship, she promised. And when she touched him he felt like someone he'd lost had come back to love him. Passed parent, returned to forgive - and at once she was something he'd craved in filthier dreams. He held on to her firm, deeper, when her hand visited him in a similar way. Under his robe she'd find the only appropriate truth of his elation. His Bearer went from her horn, she was already looking at him like he was important, so it could wave her closer. A string of luminescent dew, hung with stars shining like pearls, still connected his fingers and the home they left in her when he had her legs wrap around him by her ankle clasps. The way he leaned back to make some distance between her chest and his was an invitation for her to get more familiar with the slumbering but filling thing she was courting.

Crosser Clau did not loose himself in the Gods he captured. He showed them their symbols when they came to earth, and he twisted that mark until the gods understood their new role, purpose remade. Rulers into servants by his introduction. Today he'd not been himself. Her faith, her strength, wasn't strewn across a body of many worshipers that had dwindled with the rise of man's own potential - her strength had always been the two boys she'd saved by saving one, and they believed harder now than ever. Crosser's faith was strengthened with the audience she conjured in his hidden length with her hand.

"Then worship me, Zephra. I'll let you." He kissed her again, from above, like he was being benevolent. The gods before had never been so keen upon seeing him. Her punishment was for him, not to teach her. A wicked but warm flash in his already-so colored eyes, when her other wing sung a crude couple of cracks, compliments of the metals that were told to break it. He groaned in his throat, to feel the shattering through the her hips that he'd pressed to his own.

“I think I’ll keep you then.” Goddess and slave. With his hand dressed in her scents and slick, he reached to measure her breast, careful first, as though to paint her, and then roughly, like he’d tried a thousand like her. “If your worship is lovely.” He’d say such words to subdue other deities, but he was teasing now, not trying to instill the advantage of his kind. On her orb’s lower round, he pinched a hot scale, and pulled it free with a swift flick. He considered it and its root before he sucked it between his lips. Bedmate and morsel, you’ll be. If she grinded herself close, maybe she’d suspect her weight might be supported by the enthusiasm she riled in him.

Almin shook where he was on his knees. She’d looked at him, and he felt hopeful. Then she’d returned to Crosser like the sea does to the infinite hollows once its traveled the sand. The likeness’s accuracy made a wound in his belly as he held the object inside his jacket pocket and watched Crosser taste their goddess in a way – if Almin was completely honest with his greedy heart – the richer man had meant to do for himself. Dealing and sampling gods had ignited Almin’s palled into worse sins, and he’d never been of any religion than hers. Crosser should have been a willing instrument, and an unknowing participant. Zephra would disappear somewhere in the books until the Inciter stopped asking, and Almin could visit her in a fortified chamber somewhere, when he wanted to give her his frustrations. Now he prayed quietly for her to use her free arms and predator teeth to hurt their common friend, but all she did was take to his indulgences like they were her purpose.

Almin decided that she was playing out a plot she’d made. She knew their weaknesses specifically and Crosser had always wanted affection like that, fateful. Yes. She was being false in the most intoxicating way. Back when Almin had been sick, the fever made both boys dream that she came down, and they drank from her like children do from mothers. She could heal like that. And Almin had inexplicably gotten better. She always had power over them, in them. She was just building a latter to her own freedom, now, knowing.

When Crosser treated himself to her other wing too,  Almin, in a fit of tumultuous desire, felt in own, ignored length, he wanted to see Crosser torn apart. A possessive man, Almin reached for the panel, and released forbidden commands into the machine.

Crosser - grinning for the decadence of having his own goddess for fare, eating the third scale he’d plucked from her life-giving orb, her gold in his teeth – gasped and gripped the Bearer harder, his pride twitching with his heartbeat against her apex, when the clasps sounded of treason, and the Selfhurt Circuit died in the metals that held her, and fell to the floor with discouraging clanks. She’d be the first free God invited to a world that would enslave her, and she was wrapped around her capturer. Almin thought he’d doomed his friend, but Crosser looked at her with some dark expectance, like he saw something in her that would truly let him have her, anyway.

“There.” The Inciter said, cutting the side of her neck dauntingly with her own symbol. “You are free to worship me now.”

[VenomousEve]

When he drew his fingers away, he might have felt something reach for him. Like twining arms from the deep sea and a promise of blissful death and adoring teeth. Slick and shimmering, she was health and hallucination from her most giving place. There were so many challenges and so much disdain in the way she looked at him. Like it was Crosser who was chained, and not she. The right of gods, perhaps, to hold their pride so high when they had been drawn so low. She did not look away when the shackles drew her legs around him.

Zephra gripped him with her daggered nails, pressing until the promise of pleasure melted into something decidedly less desirable, before releasing him and pushing her palms into his shoulders. She pressed herself against him, hips tipping to tease the firmness she’d threatened. “I can worship, but you should be repenting.” She hissed against his ear. “It’s cold and dark in the Eonverk, God Killer.” A rippled ran through her body, lifting her scales again. Could he sense that she’d grown stronger, even in the confines of the Selfhurt metals? His exploration was prayer too. Subjugation could be devotion. He wasn’t learning another’s religion. He was rediscovering his own.

“You and Almin were silent for so long.” She said. He directed violence against her other wing, another shatter of crystalline shards and gold down her feathers. She lurched hard against him, swinging forward as the long bones in her wings failed against the shackles pinning her, nails digging into his back until she drew his mortal red. Her lips didn’t move, but there was a sound like metal screaming through glass. Like her wings, themselves, had cried out to rail against the irony and injustice of this treatment. “And now you demand worship without an ounce of confession.” She panted, gold slipping down the corner of her lips. Her cheeks, too, were streaked with the shining trails and it was impossible to tell if she was weeping or bleeding.

The goddess was fascinating. She should have been able to kill him on a whim, and yet her deepest existence moved her to please his most base humanity. “You made me a caring goddess.” She breathed, the rise and fall of her chest betraying the humming hurt he’d splintered down her magnificently ruptured wings. “How cruel.” She muttered, and arched against him, her nails still caught in his robes and the flesh of his back. The full round of her chest in his hands, she was the weight of their memories and the miracle of Almin’s recovery. She shuddered when he pulled at her scales. Petals from a rare flower and the familiar taste of forgotten dreams on his tongue.

For all the physical imposition the Inciter bent her with, Almin’s heart wasn’t lost on her. A half of her self, if duller, her unfortunate muse had dark tastes and darker ambitions. She, the healing goddess with all the harmony of the wide sea, had not conceived that discord in her church of two might be her redemption.

When the shackles fell away, her wings folded forward, broken but unaltered in their fantastic size. She moved like a serpent, body gliding in the way Almin had conjured a twin-tailed angel, to wrap herself closer and tighter around Crosser. Her golden blood stained his robes as her heat penetrated the sacrilegious cloth separating her from her captor. For a very brief moment, her teeth flashed and her pretty mother mouth snapped at his ear lobe. A fang pierced the soft flesh, clean and swift, a promise when she had every means to be lethal.

Suckling on his bleeding lobe, she found Almin’s expression over his friend’s shoulder. “Keep me, then.” She hissed, and slid herself against him. Zephra pulled one hand free, her other limbs still tangled around him, and slipped her fingers between them. Holy robes could not keep a blasphemer from divine intervention. When she exposed him, met him with her most sacred self, he’d feel her reaching to wrap around him. The Bearer at her throat, unshackled but oppressed, and by her own symbol—the one he’d made for her—Zephra wrapped around him tighter. Her limbs, and the creeping tentacles that learned the man he’d become. She rippled against him. “Defiler. But you were always the brave one, weren’t you?” She purred. The goddess might have been tending to Crosser’s body, but she was whispering against Almin’s soul.   

[Verse]

It was unfair for him to have her like this. Listening to her holy sense and nodding like it didn't matter unless she reached some final conclusion that she should indeed attach herself to his whims. It was the kind of pleasure one derives from throwing valuables in the well. Like putting footprints on new snow. Like having gods for slaves. But he wasn't applying the wrath, anymore. She understood him, and knew what he might do. If that didn't have her attention, nothing he could think of would.

He ate the sounds of her second wing fracturing and folding for the metals, and it ushered blood into his external strength to tell her he was having a grand time when she touched it. Not all men are made to enjoy the things they pray to, but Crosser's life had given him the ability to perhaps transcend the insanity of unredeemable satisfaction. She could taste shudders on his heat when her nails took his skin. How inventive of her, to use with authority what Bella-Lake had used in desperation when he took her innocence, in the Inciter headquarters, leaving the hopeful without the peace of mind to ever earn her Bearer. The nostalgia brought pleasure through him, when it should have been guilt. Clever Goddess.

Another one, someone he'd purposely forgotten the name of because she'd hate to know that, had bit him for vengeance, too. But Zephra poisoned the ear she'd pierced with a humming something, instead, like hymns were riding his heartbeats, and radiating out into his temples. How loved he felt, and how audacious for drawing more blood from her neck, when she didn't dissolve him when her freedom came. Instead she held him, and freed his man's pride, and held it too. He slowly changed the symbol, as was Inciter tactics to reforge the Gods they tamed. How useless that would be, because her symbol had only ever been what they made it, after all.

He moved her, Bearer taken from her throat to be at her hip, mirroring the other hand, free. Her fit was perfect, and it was tortuously courting his rapture inside. The obedient and taut squeeze from Bella-Lake, and the slick of a longing Theresa. And something unnatural, tailored to hold him, and draw at him. He kissed her again while he kept up the friction inside the shell she'd made for them with her wings.

Almin stared at the scene. His Goddess broken by his brother. It made a stone inside his chest. He couldn't very well deny that he wanted to be Crosser in Zephra's embrace. And he couldn't bear it. He was left on his knees, hand uselessly passed his belt as he watched Crosser have the love and intimacy of their most beautiful, delicious dream. When she spoke to him he groaned first, tainting the trousers that had cost more than any robes Crosser owned. Then, in the ebb of desire, he felt vindicated, shortly.

"Y-yes." he said, and the hiss became wet behind his closed teeth. He stood up, and drew the object out of his jacket finally, holding it with both hands which threaded its ceramic and rubber handle with the evidence of his thick, healthy lust. Brave. They'd thought of him as someone who could only be brave in boardrooms, but she was right. He was as extraordinary as Crosser. "Ex." he said, low, but Crosser who was moving Zephra in a way that would please them both still turned to look at his brother.

Almin pulled the trigger, and a bullet that could have won wars with its head of Sacredite was rejected from its magnetic shell, the charge quiet but the traveling cap whistling against the wind. It punched an entrance in Zephra's wing and a hole through the Inciter. When Crosser fell and gasped, Almin didn't know if it was because the Inciter had put his completion inside their Goddess, or if he was simply breathing his breaking out into the giant room. Brothers, but there had never been blood between them until now.

Crosser breathed against her face as a slower, excruciating collection of pulses rolled out into her. He smiled even though the tunnel Almin's bullet had dug through him connected ribs from both sides. Crosser laughed and leaned his forehead to hers. She smelt like everyone he'd loved were swimming in clear water. He kissed her carefully. Mother's lips.

"We never made a heaven or an inferno for you, because your purpose was never in the After." he said, and wondered if any of the gods he'd killed would be waiting for him, instead. Would the Bearer come with him? Would that be a fair fight? There was no great shine to his blood, it was only dark coming down his lips and chin. Defiant, still. What could he want for, when he'd lived his life putting collars on the makers of the universe, and trysted with his own temple? "So if this isn't your reprimand, you won't find me again to teach me a lesson."

Almin stepped into the ring, finally, dripping gun held to them both. Somehow he'd betrayed all three of them by loving the pair. "Y-you're mine now, Zephra." he said as a command undid all strange and forbidden digital spells to make the metals around her start moving again, eager to go back to where they'd been. She should just have torn Crosser apart herself, when she had her arms free! "Let go of him." he said, and held the coated barrel to Crossers head. "And then come with me."

His love might not be as formidable as Crosser Clau's, but Almin would make sure it was her only choice. Brave.

[VenomousEve]

Zephra might as well have been the sea. Her moods, desires, and revulsions shifted as quickly as Crosser and Almin dreamed them. When the two had been of more accord, when they were children, she had been glass, a mirror, tranquility manifested in her glittering scales. When they had grown apart, she had become something more fractured and partial. Crosser’s faith had driven her, and the perversions of their developing fantasies had hewn themselves to her bones. She had taken the shape Crosser had given her, then, and tucked Almin’s lusts into her breast.

Under the assault of the Inciter’s own wants, she was remade into something deeply masochistic. It was not possible for a god to bow to its followers beneath its own ego, so she could not be shamed or dominated in any way that was not fulfilling to her existence. Instead, her existence simply shifted. A stormy tide, lush with the festering hungers both men had brought with them to this place.

Curious tendrils around his very human intrusion, and gasping laughter on the tip of her tongue. The sound filled the place, as did her moans. The reverberations were physical, echoing along their skin and pricking them with a little of her own ecstasy and the agony twined with it. She could not be returned to the Eonverk, defiled by a human man and broken winged. For a goddess that had coiled, forgotten, this sort of captivity might well have been rapture. And, like the symbol shifting from Crosser’s Bearer, Zephra simply was what they made of her in that moment.

She was filthy and sacrilegious desire contained in that pure and shining vessel, churning monsters with appetites for Crosser’s hot release vying at his length like he’d pierced some other world entirely. Zephra was a mirror, moonlit eyes refracting prismatic light, and she was all the pent jealousy and disdain crawling between her two lovers. They were that, after all, even if Almin hadn’t had the pleasure of touching her yet. Lovers, because they had once loved her and made her in the image of all they would love.

There was a spray of sun-gold blood when the bullet pierced her draping wing. Crosser fell against her and a thousand small needle teeth, euphoric pinpricks along his eager, held him fast within the taut tendrils and her own contracting bliss. He would have lost that much of himself if he thought to pull away from her, and so perhaps Almin had ensured a modicum of safety to his oldest friend’s manhood. Ironic, when its deeds had spurred on such violence.

Her daggered nail found the hole in Crosser’s chest, pressing the digit into his fast-bleeding wound like some terrible mirror of his own behavior. “I was not made for retribution.” She grinned at him, before the metals were returned to her wrists and her hands were wrenched from him. It was a remarkable kindness that withdrew the barbed tendrils locking him into her, as if she thought not to share further whatever suffering Almin had contrived. “I was a healer once, rather.” Zephra sighed, and it seemed her glimmering bare rounds were swollen for want of serving again. It was not hers to give, so much as it was Crossers to take. Almin was, it seemed the one with a voice now. It leant to questioning whether the Bearer had done anything to her at all. To those pitiful things that had made her, she was obliged to be the fulfillment of their behest. 

“And where shall we go?” She asked Almin, reflecting his own expression in her clear stare. Challenging, always, as the divine are inclined toward. A test of faith, perhaps, in an archaic way. “When you cannot even control yourself, you wish to control me?” a genuine question, because she would move as he said. “That seems remarkably unwise, but I have never sat in judgement.” She bent down to where Crosser had inevitably fallen and kissed him once. “Chaos in a church is a terrible thing.” Zephra sighed, her wings hanging from where they sprouted at her shoulders like some absurdly long train. A stolen bride, maybe. She stayed where she was crouched by Crosser. She would follow when Almin moved. He had told her to come but had not yet gone. With her wrists bound again, she could not well lift the Inciter to her breast, but she lingered with curious intention.

“I will lose the greater portion of my congregation if the God Killer dies.” She remarked then. If it was cruel to Almin, the goddess did not seem to see or care. “Is there value, if I cease to exist?” 

[Verse]

Crosser’s being revolted against her touch on the inside of the bullet path. There was a lingering sensation pulsing out of her finger, where the sacredite had ran him through. He imagined this was what love felt like, applied. He was drained, once, of lust, and his spirit had been eager to try her out in a different way – have their goddess like she’d been paid for with a low credit – until she’d learn the sounds he liked. How addictive, her inner, and how tantalizing the barbs. Dying like this had value, too. His eyes took on a searching sheen, as though the Eonverk were behind them again, when she reminded him of her first purpose. He smiled, full of returning hubris, despite his draining color.

Almin and his quaking weapon in his grip of cooling slick stared at the mother who’d abandoned him. He was mad with love, and felt betrayed accordingly. His hubris was deeper set, because he did not have a wealth of faith to support it. He was only a king of human riches, and thought that should raise him to a holy man’s rights. Beautifully human, pure in that sense, instead of Crosser’s dance between two worlds. Her words made sense, like he was watching the strings of reality as she played them, but he shook his head when he didn’t like her implications. Why couldn’t she agree with him? Ah, she was trying to save Crosser. Almin watched the Inciter lift his pretty head for her life-giving breast. The gun sent another priceless messenger, this time into Crosser’s chest, opposite side of his heart. Crosser was tossed back, head to the floor without a lick of healing for his tongue, hair wonderfully tousled over his jeweled eyes.

“Expel him from your love.” Almin demanded, aiming at her. It was more for emphasis than anything else. “He can still worship you if you abandon him.” Damned peasant filth, having more than he should. Almin shook his head. “Say you love me more than you love him. That I’m your favorite!” he breathed through his pressed teeth and felt his chin dripping of tears. How small he felt, holding all the cards. Why was he reduced to asking something he owned to love him?

Crosser coughed, crimson swamp in his throat, rattling with choking bubbles. He turned his head back to look up at his friend, at his brother. He tried to sit, one hand wrapped around her wing to pull him up. He wanted to suckle for the pleasure of it, no matter her ability to save him at this stage. The metals brought her lower because the Bearer still listened to the Inciter. Almin kneeled and pressed the mouth of the gun to Crosser’s forehead, keeping his lips away from her pretty round. “Stop struggling, Ex.” He demanded but his eyes were at their mother’s.

“I can live if both of you are expunged.” He decided, the gun humming with its charge, ready to bark shrill and give a burst of death to inhabit Crosser’s skull. His free hand came between the god and her summoner, softly cupping where she’d held on to Crosser’s length. He slid his palm over her and then looked down at his fingers. Still hot smears of proof. Their betrayal. He made a fist of that hand and pushed the barrel deeper into Crosser’s head. “Denounce him from your faith!”

She would know what was inside the cranium Almin threatened because she was intimately connected to the Bearer. The metals on her hanging wing were given an order from the multi-symbolic tool. Crosser just needed a distraction long enough. The metal would move her feathered extension to whack Almin over the temple, more than likely either cracking the skeletal bowl or sending him unconscious across the floor. It might not save Crosser’s life, but it gave hope. In a way though, Almin would then have his answer, and it would break his heart and make him further vengeful or sullen.

[VenomousEve]

The goddess made a sound that might have been a sigh, if a sigh had the kind of turbulent force of a tempest gale and the lips it passed were the howling depths of the deepest abyss. It rattled the spired frames of the windows overlooking the river and caused the machinery in the room to hum with an excited resonance. “You’re not very bright.” She said, watching her now-captor Almin from where she stayed with Crosser. She had not flinched when the gun bellowed another insult.

“If I cannot love him, I cannot love you. You are both the sources of my creation as much as you are my adoring.” Zephra said reasonably, and there was a breath where the room was still and could hear the thick drip of her golden blood splashing against the abundant red from Crosser’s wounds. “He cannot worship me if I abandon him, because I would not exist to be worshiped.” She laughed then. “I would not exist as myself if I did not love you also, you pitiful man.”

She did let Crosser slump alone then, and thought to go to Almin because she was meant to. Crosser’s resilient will and the technological delight of his Bearer changed that course. It was probably unfair to the man who was willing to kill his heart’s brother, but Almin’s faith and imagination had simply never had the capacity to be as large. Zephra bent amicably to the will of the chains and her little God Killer. “You’ll have yourself smeared across the floor, I suppose.” She hummed. If the image was disappointing to her, it was impossible to tell. She would not outlive Crosser’s death to have reason to fret over it.

Her breasts were heavy, ripe fruit above Crosser’s dying mouth, held in space from meeting his lips by the belligerent kiss of Almin’s gun. Zephra stared at her prodigal child. They were both wayward, in some fashion, but it had always been Crosser’s soul that crafted the rules. If they both had made her perverse, she was Crosser’s wine with a shade of Almin’s color. She did not tremble when Almin touched her, but the curious tendrils swimming within her did seek his palm and caress the new tribute. She strained toward them both, rattling her chains. Her scaled flesh would not touch Crosser’s face.

“I cannot denounce him from my faith any more than I can profess to love you more. I am not a lying goddess.” Zephra said, her mirror stare seeking to swallow Almin in their shimmering dazzle. She felt Crosser’s intention as if it were her own. “Perhaps that’s your fault, Almin. I could give you what you wanted if only you’d made me a liar.” She smiled at him with her razor teeth. “I’d make you believe it deeply too. Euphoria is a trifle in my hands.”

And she was kind enough to plunge him into that kind of dream, a wholly bacchanal satire of all the things he might have hoped Zephra would be for him, when the heft of her feathers were brought hard against Almin’s skull. A mockery that was twice as cruel because it would be as impossibly pleasurable as his mind could conceive. The blow would throw him back, and she would watch him sail like it was remarkably novel. Her arms, drawn back around her God Killer, would draw him to her like a forgiving mother. “Be cautious, Inciter. Partaking of your god’s ambrosia is to subject your fate to the unknown.” She hummed. In truth, it was impossible to know what it would mean. What would be set behind his teeth if he had the strength to latch on? Her subjugation or his rise or the great emptiness of departing in the arms of divinity.

[Verse]

Almin wore a very deep grimace when she rejected his plan, and scolded him. He, who had thunk himself all this way, while the faith-oriented jock Crosser only needed to float along on his ocean of heart-born magic. He wanted so dearly to hear her comply, he wanted to hear it as a confession from her lips, that only looked beautiful to him, not like something he remembered. The way she looked at Crosser made him sick with desire. In his mind he'd already made two  holes in Crosser's head, flailing his pretty, pale hair.

He was mad with lust when her inner reached for him, but it made his palm slick with Crosser's signature. This all poisoned Almin further. He might have given the next bullet to her, in spite, or wrath. But there was no such deceit.

His eyes hollowed out with that empty dream, the one she offered, of her perfect lie. In that little madness he leaned in, closer to their Goddess, and nodded absently. The mirage stretched out from her to embrace him, and his gun hand relaxed at its wrist to balance the ring of the pipe on Crosser's head. Almin mumbled half of a happy sentiment before he was drawn back to their place in the center of the God Catcher Device, with a dull weight growing on the side of his head as he was sent away from Zephra and Crosser. His air went out of him when the floor punched his ribs and he slid helplessly until his face burnt from the friction.

Crosser smiled up at her, and felt at home when she held him closer, fixated on that soft flesh. Rich streams of human pulsated down his jaw. Almin's doing, that business with the sacredite through the Inciter's chest. In something that would have been his last stance, Crosser lifted his free hand to touch her, as though he was bringing himself the last inch before life-lacquered lips gave peck's to her hot, budded secret that only he and his brother knew. He blinked slowly into death, a bad sight for a mother, perhaps, but the first bead rolled bravely down his gullet, and those lips were alive enough to provide him with more then. He kissed that generous softness deeper, and his wounds closed.

He felt a love he'd wanted, one that could have saved him if he'd had it earlier. He didn't know his heart was quilting this world as he was seeing it, tailoring it from his wants, and filling in the valley's of his soul. Endless in every conceivable direction. It could not have been anything other than an ocean, could it, her grace? Every inhale was drowning, to teach him humility in the eye of all this warmth, and then on release, every delicious, exotic thing. Like this, her pleasures, perhaps they could never have been for a child after all, not when he was satisfied with them as a man.

Almin had held on to his bitterness, and used it as an anchor to this world. He had a great fear of dying. He'd raped and eaten too many gods to feel safe. The fear gave him a few more breaths. He left the gun behind as he crawled, delirious limbs but screamingly clear eyes. He thought he moved on the floor forever until he touched something. He cried when his hair was pulled, lifting him along. More torture from the brother who'd already won the world. Almin was going to plead his own case, and ask for help with acid on his tongue before he was silenced with the softest thing he'd ever tasted. Scales.

Crosser, who'd returned with golden flecks in his magenta eyes, kept a good grip on Almin's hair, chastising, but still holding him up to Zephra's other scrumptious round. They were both enjoying their gulps of eternal caresses, the way only the mighty ocean gives. Her two boys, holding on to her to save their lives, in the ring of blasphemy their kind had created. Perhaps she could never have been a slave, at the center of all her worshipers.