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It was not the burning orange sun above Elphael or the cold metallic touch of Malenia’s gauntlet to stir him from his sleep, but rather, a colony of spiders had made a home in the cavity of Miquella’s chest, pinching and gnawing at dried, brittle bones that had lost their lustre many years ago.
He ignored their presence at first. The years had been long, and his body paid the price as it grew arid and bitter. The feeling of arachnids climbing up his arms and peering in his slightly agape mouth was nothing more than the tingling numbness that came with stasis. But the gnawing at his chest by several hundreds of pincers finally broke the skin, and with the first drop of blood, his skeletal hand cracked through the cobwebs blanketing him static and reached into the cavity to take the colony between the hardened flesh of his fingers and crush their small yet infinite bodies.
Miquella would have told Malenia it had been the mere presence of the spiders clustered around him that brought out that harsh, burning scream of fear and hatred from his throat, for, despite his love for nature, arachnids had been a plague in his nightmares since he had been cradled in his mother’s arms. But it was not their spindly legs clicking against his skin or the beady eyes staring down at him through a void that had brought that pain to his throat. It was the sound that came with crushing them — wet and gurgled with that distinct knowledge of blood, a whistling in his ears that served as the tiny creatures’ scream of death as a loathsome giant sucked out their remaining lifeforce.
Years of commanding an army, he had never killed another breathing creature before. His sister had done so plenty as his shield and blade, and Miquella had never known how she could take a life without bursting out into the same tears that saturated his dried face. But he had felt that same confusion in their childhood, watching Malenia hyperventilate as she struggled to explain to their parents how the dead caterpillar in her hands had died from her carelessness. The pain and fear she showed then was burned into his memory, for it was the only time he had ever seen her in complete disunion from the control of her feelings.
It was only an insect , their mother had given consolation with as much emotion she would have had reading aloud her book at the breakfast table, the life of a small, inconsequential creature should cause no pain to a being of a higher status. You do not hold yourself to the same ranking of an insect, yes?
His sister did not reply then. There was no reason for it. He watched as Malenia clumsily wiped the caterpillar’s fluid over her face in trying to clear away her tears before following their mother’s instruction as to how to dispose of the corpse. Miquella never saw his sister cry over the dead after that.
When his sobs quieted down to a low whimper, only then did he notice the air brushing against his wet cheek. Cold and stinging, like the slap of a hand in the bitterest winter. There was to be no cracks, no openings to where wind could seep in and touch the skin — such would have left room for infection —, but he felt it, as clear as the summer sky, the ghostly air of a breeze caressing his body like a sensuous haunting.
Then, as if memory had just then flooded back into him, Miquella realised the state of his consciousness, the movement of his body, the dreamy mind sharpening into what held him in the present. He had woken up.
His eyes opened faster than they could adjust to the stream of light hitting his body. A purplish red haze softened and vibrated against his cornea as blurring images of life tuned into a single photograph.
His first emotion upon seeing the night sky forlorn above him was disappointment. Malenia had promised him, over and over, that the first thing he would see would be herself, cradling oversized mugs of hot chocolate and the quilt she had started working on when the preparations began. But his sister was not there to take him into her arms and carry him to their joint study where his favourite sofa would have been coated in a thin layer of dust and a distinct scent of smoke.
And from there, terror washed over him. There was no night sky in Elphael that would look like that, no less the inside of the Haligtree. He had put his congregants under the strictest orders never to remove him or the cocoon from its place within the tree even if a fire had broken out. Had they betrayed him, gone against his wishes no matter how pure it may have been?
No, it took only a moment for Miquella to recognise the tint of crimson in the night sky and the unmoving stars that claimed themselves dim and telling no story he had seen in constellations. What laid above him was not a sky but the sculpture of glittering rocks holding prisoner the city of Nokron that spiralled in the peripherals of the cocoon’s fracture. He had been taken underground. No Eternal City would have brought his people in as guests. No man would bring their god into the near clutches of the Nox.
He was being held prisoner, wherever he was. Miquella no longer cared about the family of spiders dancing on his tongue.
The woolly walls of the cocoon did not hold their firmness as trembling hands clutched around the stringy material and pushed forward — his legs being of unnecessary help that only led to his body unceremoniously toppling down to the stone platform below when the walls quickly gave out. In the light, he saw the inside of his cradle to have dyed a burnt red, like blood that could never dry. For, just like blood, a thick liquid sloshed about like waves as his body released and added pressure to the collapsed wall.
Miquella breathed in. And out. Heaviness sat on his heart like a demon on the chest of a sleeping child.
A thick substance had plastered itself to his skin, dark and crimson. He pressed a finger on to his arm and watched, as he pulled back away, the substance clinging to the tip like organic cords within the body that held all things together before spreading too thin and falling back down to the arm with a wet thud . It was not the amniotic fluid that had coated the cocoon upon his slumber, and a frightful curiosity that brought his skin up to his tongue revealed what he had hoped to be false. It tasted of salt and iron, of pain and the distant cry of the dead.
He did not want to see any more. He did not want to face the reality, that which he had expertly written out years in advance, fall to pieces in the hands of someone else, some defiler of the divine. But, he stole a final glance towards his cocoon and saw the walls and the floor become flooded with blood pouring out like a waterfall after a torrential storm. The blood was not his own. Someone had desecrated his body with profane, burning, unwanted blood.
His legs could not respond quick enough as he began to pull himself away by the hands with that same feverish movement of the Albinaurics that would rest on the grand staircase of Ordina during their flight to his Haligtree. He left a trail of blood in his escape as the harsh texture of stone and rock scraped his skin and broke the coated layer from his pulsing flesh and smeared it across the ground like a shedding snake.
Miquella grapled on to a broken headstone as his legs caught up to his movement and pulled himself to his feet.
Whatever uneasiness or burning of the muscles that plagued him was fogged from his mind by the disorienting weight and height of his body. Pillars lined each side of the open room he found himself in, and he could easily extend his arm and reach past the midpoint where he had once would have been unable to reach the top of the base that held the pillar in position. His body was frail, emaciated to a point where he could make out the white ghost of his bones beneath the poorly stretched out skin of his fingers. He had expected as much and had made the nurse that looked over him and his sister create a dietary schedule to swiftly bring his body back to a state of wellness. But without the nurse, how was he supposed to know how to heal his body?
But what troubled Miquella’s mind in the present the most was the apparent nudity and the pain it caused to bite across his body. The robes he had gone to sleep in would have long been outgrown, and now the fabric was missing — by either decay or an unseen hand he did not want to think of. He felt every particle of icy wind hit his body like millions of puncture wounds by a lethal air of needles. His body bled without bleeding. Any thought of his purity was pushed aside by the grievous need to stop the assault the wind had on his body.
Miquella thought in brief of the Nox tale of the afterlife. Sinners were chained together for an unknowable god to take their knife and have the person in front flay the skin off the person behind them. They would be left on rooftops at the highest peak in a hellish rendition of their homeland to feel the corrupted wind burn through their bodies and toss them over the edge when there was no more blood or tissue for it to scavenge from their meek forms.
He knew the story was only an artefact carried over from a more primitive time and held no basis for what an afterlife could hold, but he also knew that he had never been a sinner nor committed a sinful act against another. The will of the twin Empyreans was pure and righteous , and any being to say otherwise would be sorely mistaken.
But that did not stop him from being unable to shake off the feeling of judgement being casted down upon his weak shoulders. Was it the Nox? He had steered clear of seeking any sort of involvement with them or their religion ever since setting the base for his own. The Golden Order? His relationship with them did not end on the kindest of terms, but even then, his father had promised that they would never see him as an enemy as long as his plans never interfered with the Greater Will or any of its principles.
Miquella was more fearful of the perception that his captor was someone he could not perceive than whatever plan they had prepared for him. The captor’s identity showed the motive that led them to the path of torture, whilst torture itself was only a means to an end he could not figure out as things stood. Knowing the motive would give him the benefit of being able to twist his fate under his own finger and have his captor be the one bellowing in fear.
It did not take even a single step off of the stone threshold to receive the answer to the questions he wished he had not asked.
His right foot landed in a pool of crimson that first appeared to be blood. It could not have been blood, he tried to soothe himself as he kicked his foot away, for the pool was too perfect, too picturesque to be of anything made naturally. Like a painting with a dark, foreboding black circle consuming the canvas below in its uncanny resemblance to a black hole in real life — something that was far out of place in the scenery depicted behind it. And the crimson pool felt like a liquified gelatin to his skin, and it stuck to him as such.
Miquella did not think any further on the mysterious liquid, for just as he stepped back, a figure emerged from within the pool and took the shape of a familiar face once they raised their horned head.
It never would have occurred to him that Mohg would have been his captor. Mohg, whom he had only seen once in Leyndell being escorted down below the capital with a pact of Omenkillers, appeared to him then differently than he had in Miquella’s passing memory of their short encounter.
The filthy rags the Omens were born into were replaced by layers of velvety fabrics and ornate jewels and accessories, tricking the mind into thinking he was larger than the gangly figure he remembered him to be. But, for a moment, none of the trickery fooled him or brought a cold scratch down his spine. Miquella was no longer a child, and Mohg stood to be the same height as him. Even the lengths of their hands were similar: if Miquella wished to wrap his dried, veiny fingers around his captor’s throat, he could have with ease.
Or, at least, he could have if his body followed through with his commands.
There was an excited look on Mohg’s face, a twitching of his clawed fingers that only came on a man’s greatest day of their life, and he took a single step towards him, jewellery clinking against one another like an out of tune windchime. Miquella tried to mimic his sister’s straightening pose as the enemy would approach her, confident and holding her ground. But there was no confidence to be found as he sunk into himself as a heavy hand rested on his shoulder.
“You flinch,” Mohg whispered aloud, letting each word roll off his tongue with a deepening basin of poison. “You flinch, but there is nothing to fear. Have you not heard my calls, my dear? Long have I awaited your answer, but your lips never parted to respond nor have your eyes ever fluttered open to meet my gaze. But yet, here you are now, here, with me .”
The fleshy blanket that still gripped much of his skin pulsated rapidly, like the matter that formed the aching heart. Nails, long and unkempt from an unknowable amount of years, scratched at the surface of the flesh until chunks of it let loose and fell to the ground with a wet splat as his bloodied nails moved subconsciously to the next patch of skin. Miquella could not speak through the desperate trembling of his lips — he did not know if his mind and lungs were capable of it —, and instead, all he could do was follow Mohg’s long and daunting gaze.
“Do you know whose flesh you shed?” Mohg asked, and despite how innocent his voice appeared to echo, Miquella felt bile roll up his throat by the thought of the upcoming answer. “It is your own. Or, rather, ours . The pace at which your body grew gave no time for your skin to follow suit, and it began to wither and vanish into your muscles and bloodstream. I gave you my blood, and it eased your suffering. Your infant flesh and my blood birthed a protective layer of flesh around your body to allow your growth to be as painless as it could be. So, please, do not look at what we created in horror.”
Miquella had no words to say. His nails dripped in blood of the massacre he had just committed in flaying the remainder of the flesh on his arms. Mohg did not trouble him with the demand of speech, for he had already taken Miquella’s fingers up to his lips and gently pulled them into his sharpened mess of a mouth. It was reviling and burning hot, and Miquella tried all his might to keep his expression vacant and his body static.
Mohg’s tongue offered no remorse as it slipped in between the index and middle finger and pushed with a hungry need at the fold that connected the two of them together, fangs brushing his knuckles and tearing open even more new wounds. Miquella struggled to keep his head straight, for no air entered through his closed off lungs, and it was an unknown relief to him that Mohg’s other hand slipped below his waist and kept him close and firm against him.
“Can you not taste it?” Mohg said as Miquella’s fingers slid out from his tongue’s firm grip. “It tastes just like us. Your divinity and the promise my blood holds to give us a true and proper way of life. And with you, finally awoken from your slumber, our future is so close, I can taste it on the air we breathe.”
There was too much to take in. Miquella could hear every noise ranging from the wind to their breaths to the distant sound of voices below; he smelled the iron of blood and the overbearing scent of incense that clung to every part of his captor’s attire; everything he saw was either too bright for his eyes to adjust or too dark for him to comprehend; he felt everything. The wind bit at his bare form that he could no longer tell which blood came from what.
He always kept an aura of calm around his sister, for his sister assured that no harm would come to him no matter what he said or did. But Malenia’s absence took away any control he had over managing the situation.
Miquella did not remember all of what happened next, for the sensations that overwhelmed every part of him left his mind defeated by a consuming darkness and fogged over into obscurity. He only remembered dropping his head on to Mohg’s shoulder as he began to sob.
There were two things Miquella forgot about Mohg that he only came to realise in the dream that followed his unconscious state. The first was that he was not above committing the vilest of acts that even the cold hearted criminals on Mount Gelmir refused to utter. The second came as life was flooding back into him as a boiling substance dug deep into the cave of his chest. Mohg’s delusions of love and pleasure hid any and all realisations that what he felt remained unacquainted.
Hot water lapped over Miquella’s face as a hand caressed his cheek during its way to his scalp, rolling its harsh fingertips over the skin such in a way he would not be surprised if he had missing patches of hair the next time he looked in the mirror. He knew whose hand held him, and he used his might that came with the dreamy state to not feel fear to keep his breathing calm and slow as if he were still asleep.
If he thought about it hard enough, Miquella could trick his mind into thinking what had occurred before was a nightmare and that it was a nurse washing the grime of rebirth off of his body. He could even make himself believe that he could smell the distant garden of roses and lilacs and the scent of breakfast being made, that any moment he would hear his sister walk in and he would open his eyes to the most disgusting, burnt pancakes he had ever had the misfortune of seeing.
But he could not ignore the intense stench of incense or the claws hurting his scalp with their rough and rash pullings of his hair.
“You are much like your brother, Morgott,” Mohg said suddenly. “You can sleep for days at a time, but, despite your patronage, your attempts at pretending to be asleep are pathetic.”
Miquella opened a single eye, for the other was half submerged by water, yet he did not utter a single word. He did not even look at Mohg. Instead, he looked at what laid beyond him. An ornate candle holder decorated as vines intertwining up towards the single dying flame above, a painting of young maidens by a glowing river in a pitch black darkness, a mirror engraved with blind cherubs at the opposing edges. All artefacts from the Eternal City. All of them stolen and clearly belonging to people of different colour palettes.
With the aid of the hand behind his head, Miquella pushed through the aches and cracks of his joints to sit up in the bath. His skin took on now a ghostly, near translucent pale as the layer of flesh had been completely stripped and cleaned away. But despite what the flesh had been composed of, the water was clear, giving him a horrific view of the skeletal figure that remained.
“It took three rounds of bathing to rid you of the vernix,” Mohg spoke, misinterpreting what had left such an expression on Miquella’s face. “Be thankful you are not any of those serfs that sleep outside. They bathe in the same water they bleed and relieve themselves in. It takes far more effort to heat up clean water down here, and I would not give even my closest servants this level of luxury. Savour it, if you wish to keep it.”
There was a twinge of shame and fear that he had managed to sleep through so much, but it was not as if it were anything new. Be it two hours or two hundred years, once Miquella had fallen asleep, there was no waking him up until his body allowed him to. The tremble in his heart came from the sudden concept of what that could suggest: what had he slept through to cause such familiar and intimate touches from his captor that he only knew greatly from the whispers that echoed through the streets of Leyndell?
Would I be asleep the next time it occurs? Miquella thought, but he did not know yet what he meant by that.
There was no time to dwell on the horrors his mind could conjure for a hand had slid down his back and ushered him to stand. Warm water escaped from his body as a great chill captured him and left his sensitive teeth to clatter against each other with pain aching through his jaws. Mohg had been kind in that regard to hastily wrap a towel over his hips and throw another over his shoulders like a capelet.
Miquella had the sudden instinct that his sister had always had to slap away the helping hand and say he could do it himself, but he knew that would have been a lie. His arms could only move enough to keep his muscles at work so that he could give off some warmth, and his throat had yet to show any signs of ever letting him speak with ease if he had wished to. But instead of the embarrassment that Malenia would have felt, he only knew fear. Fear of just how far Mohg was going to take advantage of his infantile state.
A single tear fell from his cheek, a tear that coincided with a droplet of water rolling down his inner thigh. He knew all along what had happened to his body, but he ignored it. He ignored it until that ghostly reminder forced him to acknowledge what had stained his thighs throughout his sleep. Miquella breathed in. And out.
Mohg pressed the towel against that very spot on his thighs, and only then did Miquella realise he had been speaking to him.
“...But thin and translucent or not, your thighs are still something I wish to hold and keep all to myself,” Mohg hummed. He looked up at Miquella and wiped away the growing fester of tears in his eyes. “I guided you towards every release, did I not? If I did not love you, would I have cared about your own pleasure? Why now do you shed tears? Every touch, every kiss I have ever given you was from affection and the reverence I have for your divinity. Why do you look so frightened?”
It did not occur just once. Miquella could not feel his body. Something was lodged in his throat to keep him from breathing, and his heart had forgotten how to keep him alive. There was nothing he could have done. No matter what he could have tried, Miquella could not have kept himself safe from the man holding him close.
A frown casted over Mohg’s lips and he leaned forward to kiss Miquella’s wet eyelids before stepping away and speaking softly, “I will find some clothing for you to wear. Stay here. I will not be long, I promise.”
Miquella did not dare to move until the large oak door closed with a soft click . He could no longer hear every needle dropping or gust of wind; he heard only his breathing and the comforting silence. His heart quickly followed in slowing its tempo to match the slow draw of his breath. If only for that moment, when all in the world was just him, he was at peace.
But the peace did not last long.
Miquella walked in front of the mirror and gazed down at his ruined form. It was not only the metamorphosis of a young, healthy child becoming something that could only be called an adult by a glorified silhouette, there were aspects of him that should not have been. His fingernails were no nails at all but claws — sharp and monstrous, but yet they were petite and delicate to the touch. Like a porcelain doll of a foul beast. His teeth grew sharper. No light shined behind his eyes except for a distant, dull glow of crimson.
He was transfixed on the wild eyed reflection that stared back at him, hands gripping either side of the mirror and the claw of his thumbs digging into the very glass. It was false. There was no other way of looking at it. All Miquella had to do was destroy the mirror, and all would return to how it was supposed to be. His nails would become nails again. His teeth would no longer cut his tongue open.
Glass splintered and broke off where the claws met them. Blood had already soaked the mirror and his own hand by the time he dug deep enough to slash the glass by reaching up towards the opposing top corner.
The top half of the mirror gave a metallic scream of pain before sliding down into millions of pieces around his feet. But there was no feeling of victory or relief to be had, for the effort to dig so deep to destroy the mirror did not break the illusion of claws. Rather, it broke the claw that made that fatal blow. It fell among the shards of glass, leaving him with another mess of pulsating gore where the claw had been.
Miquella told himself he would not cry again. He could not cry again. He was no longer a child; he was the older brother of Malenia, the woman who never knew fear. There was no longer any time to play the weak child relying on the stronger sibling’s protection to rescue him. His metamorphosis gave him the chance to do what he could not have done in childhood, and to cower in fear now, would be to spit and disgrace at all he and his sister had worked towards their whole life.
His knees buckled, and he collapsed on the floor below. His eyes were squeezed shut as his head pressed with all its might into the oaken cabinet behind him. The warmth of blood pooled in the pocket created by his hands. He did not cry, but he could not have stopped those aching whines of pain from escaping through his lips.
“You…You know your enemy,” Miquella whispered shakily to himself. A glass shard dug into his foot. He pressed it deeper in. “You know your enemy, and you will know what he wishes from you. Use it against him.”
“Use it against him,” a soft knock alerted him of Mohg’s presence. An involuntary gasp escaped from his lips. “Use…the love he has for you…against him.”
The oak door creaked open, and Mohg shifted in with dark coloured clothes hooked under his arm. Miquella watched him with deep intent, watching that slow curl in of the lip and the twitching hands as he hastily dropped the clothing on the counter to fall to his knees beside him.
“Oh, Miquella,” Mohg’s voice sang not of sadness but of a deeply rooted pleasure as he pressed his hands around the injured thumb, “What has driven you to such harmful acts? Is the blood I give you not enough to satiate your own hunger?”
He felt his heart drum in the base of his throat as he slowly pursed his mouth open to speak, “Why have you done this to me? Why…,” he did not mean to choke, but it still gave him the pitying look he needed to see, “Why twist my body into a beast?”
Mohg did not answer. His face twisted into something Miquella could not comprehend as he took the injured thumb and licked the blood that stained the surrounding hand. Even if he never touched the wound itself, Miquella felt that surge of pain and the overwhelming need to let the imprisoned tears fall. But he would not cry. He could not get what he needed out of his captor if he could not speak.
“My blood, the Formless Mother’s blood,” Mohg began deeply as he broke away from the skin, “It was meant to be a gift. Do you not love the blessing I have given you?”
The Formless Mother’s blood. A ghostly shiver ran down Miquella’s spine. What could have driven him — her , even — to see him as the necessary victim of communion? He fought off the outer gods long enough to know he was viewed as a sworn enemy of theirs. Could it have been from merely spite? Or did they have something more sinister at play?
“I don’t understand,” Miquella whispered. Through the drumming that reached his ears and the echoes of fear, he struggled to remember the words that came out of him. “Why…Why does it hurt like this? Will the pain… ever go away?”
Mohg frowned, a glimmer of genuine sadness shining in his uncovered eye, and pulled Miquella into a deep, warm embrace. “No. The pain that burns through you now is unending, but in time, you will come to love the feeling of it. It will be the only thing you know you can hold dearly to and not worry about it slipping from your fingers.”
Miquella did not return the gesture in the slightest, letting his arms dangle awkwardly at his sides. But his head fell against Mohg’s chest that gave off a warmth that heated up his cheeks that had gone frozen for so long. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend he was somewhere else, somewhere where the arms around him were someone who could love him truly and protect him from themself. But there was no time to ache over what should have been.
The next thing he said was in no shape or form something that would aid him in his quest to get what he wanted, but it was an undeniable truth that could not go unspoken a moment longer.
“I’m hungry,” Miquella grumbled without life, rolling his head over Mohg’s arm to look up at him with a tired gaze. “I have not eaten in years. I need to eat something.”
The pleasant sinister smile settled back over Mohg’s face as he replied, “And you can have the most lavish dinner you could ever dream of. Stand up. I will get you dressed, and the servants will begin preparing a meal for us.”
“What about my thumb?” Miquella asked as his legs groaned beneath him to get up. “Won’t it get infected?”
“It will heal quicker than you think,” Mohg said, removing the towels that hid his body. “Your body is not what it once was. You will find out soon enough just how far that extent goes.”
Dinner consisted of, including only the highlights; crab cakes, prime rib, salmon, seared scallops, risotto, cheese fondue, and the most burnt lasagna Miquella had ever seen in his life. It was all enough to satiate the hunger of every person he saw skulking about in the corners of the palace and still have some left over, yet it was made only for the two of them. Neither of them got close to eating half, and Miquella had only eaten, in total, one crab cake.
“For someone who has not eaten in nearly a hundred years,” Mohg began, cutting through the salmon he had no desire to eat, “You do not act as hungry as you look.”
Miquella twirled a spoon in his small bowl of fondue. “The nurse that looked after me told me I had to restrict what I eat for the first month of my revival. I do not think I was even supposed to eat meat until the second week. It could have…complications with the rest of my body’s readjustments.”
Mohg hummed, and Miquella had become so entranced by the slow stirring vortex of the fondue, he thought that had been the end of their conversation. But it did not take long for a rough hand to take hold of his jaw and force his gaze upwards at the captor that stood before him, holding a chalice that both of them knew what was inside. Miquella could hear it calling to him. The sweet voice of a kind woman looking for a child to embrace.
“You’re thirsty. Have something to drink,” Mohg spoke as if it had been a suggestion, but there was a bitter cadence hidden under that sweetened tongue that demanded compliance.
“I’m not thirsty,” Miquella said and rolled his head out of his grasp. It had been a lie. Dryness had chipped at the structure of his throat ever since his rebirth without any relief being given to him. “I did not eat enough to warrant a sense of thirst, but I will gladly drink when I am ready to.”
“ Miquella ,” there was no sweetness of Mohg’s tongue, only that bitter vileness that took him by the hair and twisted his head up to force his gaze. “Why do you recoil in fear? I do not wish harm upon you, my love. I only want to ensure your healthy recovery and that bright future that lies before us.”
A stinging pain burned into Miquella’s scalp, but despite all the effort he put into not voicing his agony, he yelped as he reached his hands up to try and push him away, only making the pain worse as he could hear the slow ripping of his hair from his scalp.
“Do not struggle,” Mohg continued. “If you do, I will have to hurt you even though it pains me just as it does you. Do not put up this meaningless fight any longer. Drink .”
“ No! ” Miquella hissed and pulled himself away, letting a clump of his hair be forced from his scalp and sit bloody and pathetically in Mohg’s loosened grip. His throat burned with the sudden pressure he put upon it, and if it had not been from adrenaline, he could not have continued as he did. “I will not have you defile my body any further than you have. Keep the blood of that wretched vermin you call a goddess away from me! If the worst you can conjure to combat my defiance is ripping my hair out, do that as much as you wish. I will not allow myself to be tainted any further by you!”
“I think,” Mohg’s hand suddenly reached out to grip around his throat and push him deep into the chair, “You have forgotten your place within my dynasty, my beloved.”
Darkness crept in the edges of Miquella’s vision as a painful heat blossomed where Mohg’s claws kept him held tightly in place. There was no love left in his captor’s face. It was only that cruel, unrelenting hatred burned by bloodlust that had given the Omens the attributes that made them fearful to every kid who heard stories about them. He realised, then, that he did not know what he hoped to gain out of garnering Mohg’s affection.
“If I wish for you to eat, you will eat. If I want you to join me on a walk, you will go on a walk,” Mohg’s grip tightened as his voice deepened. “If I ever wish to take you to where your worshippers mutter their prayers for you and fuck you until every bit of you is covered in blood and your Albinaurics are crying in fear, you would have no choice but to let me. Every part of your body belongs to me now. You can not go against what I desire from you.”
Slowly, Mohg loosened his grip before releasing him entirely. His voice was now shaky, barely treading the line between utter bliss and fiery rage, “Now, drink this. Do not worry,” he smiled and brushed a strand of hair out of Miquella’s face. “It is merely wine.”
Miquella took the chalice into his hands, but his arms refused to move an inch. He could see those heavy, thick waves of overlapping blood within its depths. Be it his imagination or not, he heard the whispering of a woman’s voice within the chalice. It was a language he had no hope of deciphering, but he knew well enough what she was saying to him.
It was Mohg’s hand at the bottom of the chalice that brought it up to his lips. There was nothing Miquella could pretend the blood to be. It was too thick to be wine and too metallic to be any sort of liquid medicine. The taste was something he quickly forgot, for it erupted a flaming heat in every part of his body it touched. There was no escaping it now, for Mohg would not allow disobedience from him any longer.
“There,” Mohg cooed into Miquella’s ear once the chalice had been emptied. “Was that even a little bit difficult? I hope you see now that you need not meet every suggestion of mine with screams and scratches. It would only be a bother to the both of us.”
Fire coursed down every vein in his body, and the burning in his throat subsided only briefly for him to cough up a question. “What…did you do to me?”
“I gave you what every great god should have,” Mohg said, turning Miquella’s cheek to kiss his blood stained lips. “The blood that now courses your body is the same that flows through me and the Formless Mother, for she had given hers up to set my own in flames. Do you know what this means?”
Miquella blinked. It took only a few moments to realise the horrific truth. Their blood had become one and the same . He had tried swaying the affections of his sister and parents to get what he wished out of them, but it never worked in the slightest as it would have for the servants around the palace.
“I can no longer have control over you,” he whispered, not trusting to hear the truth out of his own mouth without crying.
“And with that,” Mohg took his wrist and grazed it like a young lover with his teeth, “I can properly take you as my consort. May the banners of this world be soaked in the blood of all those who oppose us.”