Title: And No Birds Sing
Author: E. Liddell
Fandom: Original
Rated: NC-17
Pairing: Kirei/Yokubou
Warning: BDSM, Graphic Sex
Summary: Otherwise known as "the original yaoi 'fic with the Tight-Ass Knights".

I woke disoriented, in total darkness.

What in hell?

I couldn't move. Oh, I wasn't paralyzed - I could feel my muscles responding to my commands - but it felt like there was some sort of intangible sheath around my limbs and torso that prevented even my most intense efforts from having any effect, or perhaps more like someone had bound my bones to particular places in space from which I couldn't move them no matter how hard I tried. I could turn my head, bend my neck, work my jaw, or blink my eyes, and that was about it.

I was lying spread-eagle on my back, but I couldn't feel anything underneath me. Was I hanging suspended in mid-air? And I was naked. I could feel cold air currents caressing me in some rather uncomfortable places.

What happened?

Did the demon kill me? Is this Hell?

I began to struggle frantically against my bonds, fighting desperately to get loose. Because even if this wasn't Hell, it had to be the Nightkeep, which was almost as bad.

I remembered... a dark corridor with walls of hewn black stone, lit only by the fitfully flickering torch I held in my left hand, the light striking little glints of gold from the bare blade of my sword. Moving cautiously forward, sounding out the walls and floor with my blade, wary of traps. And then just a hint of a strange scent in the air. My limbs getting heavier and heavier until they could no longer support even the weight of my relatively light studded leather armor. The torch falling to the floor and guttering out as my weapon dropped from weakened fingers and clanged against stone. Me measuring my length beside the two objects that represented my only hope of success, groping feebly for the torch until my eyelids just became too heavy to hold up any longer.

And now I was... here. Wherever here was.

Panting, I halted my efforts to free myself for a moment. Sweat trickled into my eyes and I reflexively moved to wipe it away, only to discover, once again, that I couldn't. This is so damned frustrating! If something doesn't happen soon, I think I'm going to go mad.

But there was nothing that I could do but wait, really. And wait I did, until the sweat had dried and chilled me. Once or twice, I shouted, pleading for someone, anyone, to come and let me loose, or at least bring some light. Even a demon would have been welcome company. Hanging there alone in the darkness was maddening.

Finally, I became exhausted and fell into a troubled doze. I was finally woken from it by the sense that something had changed.

Was that... light? I turned my head to the left as far as it would go. Yes, light, very faint. It looked like it might be coming from the cracks around the edges of a door. And I could, very faintly, hear something other than my own breathing and heartbeat. Footsteps. Someone with a long stride, wearing hard boots, his heels ringing against stone. Coming closer. I held my breath in order to listen better.

The footsteps came much nearer, then stopped. Something creaked.

The door I had spotted earlier swung open, and I blinked and squinted, eyes burning. I had been in the dark long enough that even the dim light that was now flooding my prison seemed painfully bright.

I had to shut my eyes completely for a moment as the blurry dark figure standing in the doorway reached up and did something to what my streaming eyes could only interpret as a torch bracket, and the light became much brighter.

"You're awake. Good."

I raised my lids by slow increments. At first, I still had only the impression of a tall, dark, blurred figure. Then, gradually, I began to be able to interpret details. A knight of my own Order, in full armor, with an officer's crimson cloak flung back over his shoulders. He wore a helm with the visor down, hiding his face and distorting his voice, so that I couldn't tell whether he was anyone I knew or not.

"Please." My voice was hoarse and raspy from shouting, and my throat hurt. "Please help me!"

The visor made his laugh sound hollow and metallic. "So, you think I'm here to rescue you, do you?"

I closed my eyes. Oh, no.

"I... know it was wrong to desert," I said haltingly. "But Shin was my friend. I had to find out what happened to him, and the only way to do that was to go to the Nightkeep and see for myself. You understand that, don't you?"

"Shin... I presume he was the most recent lottery winner. Short for 'prudent' in the old tongue, or some such."

He was in full uniform, I noted, feeling suddenly sick. The sword sheathed at his left hip was balanced by a whip on the right, indicating his entitlement to discipline more junior members of the Order.

He had made no move to release me, and I doubted that was because he didn't consider such a thing possible.

"Yes, sir." I whispered.

"He's dead. Fortunately for him. It's a kinder fate than many of us find, in this place."

I was right. This is the Nightkeep. So who is he? Someone else chosen by the Lottery? I... can't have been here a whole year, can I?

As though he could hear my thoughts, the strange knight reached up and lifted his helmet off. Looking at him, I felt the blood drain from my face. No. Not possible. No!

Black hair, long and braided and wrapped around his head to keep it out of the way during combat. As I watched, he unwrapped it, then untied the ribbon at the end and ran his hands through the thick locks, so that they fell loose to his waist in the back. His face was striking, elegant, pale. It was almost too delicate to belong to a man; would have, in fact, looked very much like a woman's face if there had been even a trace of softness along the jaw line or if God had seen fit to grant him a slightly more generous mouth. His eyes - both the two that stared levelly at me from below the delicate arches of his brows and the one that blinked lazily from its odd vertical position at the center of his forehead - were a deep, rich, intense blue. But none of this would have disturbed me quite so much, since demons were supposed to be beautiful and have that extra eye, if it hadn't been for one other thing.

I knew him.

"Kirei," I whispered, and he nodded, just once.

The masters of the Order had expected great things of him, and named him Honor, but his appearance had quickly gained him the nickname Beautiful, and that was the name that everyone knew him by. Three years ago, he had been chosen in the Lottery, and like six hundred and fifty-two knights before him, he had set out to destroy the Nightkeep and kill its demonic master. As with his predecessors, no one had ever heard from him again.

Until today.

"I take it that I don't know you," he said.

"No, sir. I was present at your last Ceremony of Accession." And, oh, how I remembered it. Kirei's promotion to captain had become an excuse for a banquet such as the Order rarely threw.

"Perhaps that's just as well. I don't know if I'd be able to kill a friend. Fortunately, God has, thus far, at least spared me that much."

He made a slow, almost languid, beckoning gesture with one gauntleted hand, and I found myself floating towards him. I came to a stop barely a foot from his chest, and he looked down at me, pensively. I stared back up at him, eyes narrowed.

"If you're going to kill me, why am I still alive now?"

"Because the Order doesn't send lone squires to the Nightkeep, not even in Lottery season, much less now." Little flickers of white appeared now and again as his lips moved, and I realized suddenly that he had fangs. "I wanted to know why you were here. And now that I do know... I can't kill you without punishing you for your desertion, first. I want to save you, not send you to Hell."

Oh, God.

"Soon, you'll understand," Kirei added. He pulled the whip from the right side of his belt and flicked it to uncoil the lash. The sound of the tip striking the far wall was loud as a thunderclap in the oppressive near-total silence that permeated the rest of the Keep. "Tell me, Aspirant, what is the proper punishment for a squire who deserts his post?"

"One hundred lashes." I responded almost without thinking, familiar with the ritual and with the Codes that dictated punishment.

He raised the butt of the whip to his lips. "May this instrument purify you of your sin."

My stomach twisted. I'd always thought that the ritual of kissing the whip was a bit obscene, but somehow seeing it done by that beautiful, distorted figure was even worse than usual.

A twisting gesture of his hand, and I found myself being positioned so that my back was to him. The lash sang through the air, and then my entire body spasmed inside its restraints.

"One," I counted, teeth gritted. Kirei had a good arm - I could feel blood trickling down my back where the skin had broken.

"It isn't that I want to hurt you."

"Could have fooled me. Two."

"But I can't let you die with such a sin on your conscience."

"Three."

"If I were to do such a thing, you might be forced to remain here, in spirit, until you had expiated it. And being forced to haunt this place in death is the only thing I can imagine that would be worse than having to haunt it in life."

"Four."

"When I came here, three years ago..."

The rhythm of his blows broke just a little there, so that the fifth came unexpectedly, just as I was relaxing, beginning to hope that it wouldn't come at all. Taken by surprise, it was all I could do to squeak out, "Five!" But if I missed a stroke while I was still conscious, it wouldn't count against the hundred...

"I don't know how long he had been here. I didn't even know his name. All I knew was that I had been sent to kill him."

"Six."

"I assume he must have been a brother of the Order, once. Fifty or sixty years ago, perhaps - that would match the style of the armor that I eventually found. But I'll never know for certain."

"Seven."

"Do you believe in God, Aspirant?"

"Eight. Yes, sir, I do." Or I did until He killed Shin.

"So did I once. Before I came to this place. Until I stood over that body with a bloody sword in my hands and felt the skin across my forehead split."

"Nine."

"God had set me up to kill, not a demon, but another human being, a man whose only crime was most likely being fed lies by the Order."

"Ten."

"How can I believe in a God like that?!"

Metal rang on stone. I braced myself for a blow that never came. By turning my head as far as I could, I could just manage to see him out of the corner of my eye, kneeling on the floor, his crimson cloak puddled around him, the stained, blood-slimed lash of the whip coiling along the floor like a serpent.

"How can I believe in a God like that?" he asked again, more softly. "And if I don't believe in God, why does any of the rest of it matter?" He wrenched savagely at his breastplate. Clearly, in the silence, I heard the leather ties that held it in place snap. He ripped at the metal until it came off, then threw it at the wall. It bounced off and landed on the floor with a dull clang. He tore at one item after the other - greaves and vambraces and his belt and the ties on his mail and anything else that he could get a grip on - until most of his armor was lying on the floor wherever it had landed when he flung it away. He threw his gauntlets down last. His hands should have been bloody, palms torn on the metal edges, but they were pale and slender and perfect.

He ripped his padded grey tunic apart as well and let it fall, leaving him naked from the waist up. Then he began to laugh, while I hung there in midair and shivered.

He's mad. Totally, completely, absolutely mad.

"You're right. I probably am, a little. But then, you would be too, if you had been trapped here alone in the Nightkeep for three years. You're the first human being that I've spoken to in all that time, except for brief exchanges of insults with the three that came after me... before I killed them. There are the wraiths, of course, but I can't trust anything they say. I'm not even entirely sure that they're real. I couldn't see them... before..."

He rose shakily to his feet. Bent down and picked up the whip. "It doesn't matter, anyway. Let's finish this. I don't want to debar you from your preferred afterlife, after all."

The whip sang again, and I tensed my body just in time for the blow to land.

"Eleven. Sir, you don't have to do this."

"Yes, I do," he corrected. "For the sake of my own peace of mind."

"Then why kill me at all? Twelve."

"Because I don't want you to become what I have become. I don't want anyone else to ever have to suffer this again."

"Thirteen. Just let me go, sir. Let me leave the Keep. I'll go tell them to stop the Lottery... Fourteen."

"And why would they listen to you?"

"I'll make them listen. Fifteen."

"I can't." His voice deepened and changed, became a growl. "I can't. No one can leave this place!" Instead of striking my back, the whip curled around my ribs, stinging my chest and making me yelp and miss my count.

He turned me to face him, the whip hanging limp at his side. "I'm sorry." His third eye was closed, and for the moment, I could almost believe that he was still human. "Sometimes, I just find myself saying things like that, doing things like that... I'm sorry." I hissed as his hand just barely brushed the stinging stripe along my ribs. "That was no proper part of your penance, and should never have happened."

"It's all right." I forced myself not to grit my teeth, to make my voice sound natural. "I understand. It isn't your fault." So beautiful, so strong, and yet... pitiful.

His fingers skimmed upward along my torso, brushed my throat, my lips. "You know, if it weren't for those freckles, you would be quite handsome. Pity."

My breath caught in my throat. His sudden gentleness was unnerving me as his violence had not. I could feel something twisting, somewhere deep inside me.

"Quite handsome." His voice was deepening toward that growl again, and I could see a glimmer of light emerging from between the closed lids of his third eye. "Perhaps there is a better way to punish you for your foolishness in coming here."

He strolled over to the spot where he had flung his belt and bent down to rummage through a pouch that had been hanging from it. That put his back to me, revealing the long-healed whip scars that decorated his shoulders, the mark of a member of the Order. Even the best and the most obedient seemed to end up getting whipped at least once or twice, for unavoidable infractions.

When he stood up again, he held a small vial in his hand, flawed glass that glinted golden in the sickly green light. It had to have been inside a well-padded sleeve, or it would have shattered when he had flung his belt away.

He smiled at me as he ran his thumbnail around the lip of the vial, flicking bits of a wax seal away now and again. There was nothing at all human in that smile.

He pulled the stopper out with his teeth and held up the whip so that the butt end was facing me. He poured the contents of the vial over both the whip butt and his hand where it gripped it, then ran his fingers the length of that rigid handle as though to ensure that the liquid was well-spread, before dropping the vial so that it shattered on the floor. He kept his eyes on mine the whole time. I couldn't consciously interpret the expression in them, but it was giving me that really strange feeling again.

His free hand described a lazy arc, and I turned slowly in the air, until I was lying on my stomach with my back to him. He spread my legs, pulling on first one ankle, then the other, and then stepped up so that he was standing between my knees. I felt his free hand run down over the small of my back. After a moment, it slid even further down, and his fingers parted my buttocks. What in Hell is he doing? And then...

The sudden, unexpected pain wrung a scream from me. Oh God oh God oh God... I knew it was the whip butt that he'd shoved inside me, but it felt bigger. Hell, it felt as though it had spikes. What is he trying to do to me?

The pain faded slowly. I might have been hanging there for an hour, panting and sweaty, before my trembling stopped. Kirei immediately took hold of the whip again and pushed it further inside my body. It wasn't quite so bad this time, probably because I had some idea of what to expect, and the pain faded more quickly. But when he moved to push it in a third time, the whip butt ground up against a part of me that I hadn't even known was there.

"Aaaaaaaaaah!"

I found myself working my muscles as much as I was able, trying to bring that one spot into contact with the rigid invader again and again and again, because every time I did, it sent a delicious jolt of sensation through my body. I didn't understand exactly what I was feeling, but I was instantly addicted to it.

I barely felt myself spin in the air again until I was upright, facing Kirei. His left hand, the one that had been on the whip, glistened with what I belatedly recognized as oil. The other hand traced the contours of my shoulder and my collarbone before sliding down to rest on my chest. He deliberately took one of my nipples between thumb and forefinger, and then pinched it tightly and twisted it. I gasped at the mingling of pleasure and pain.

He released me after a moment and allowed his hand to wander further down, over my stomach and my hips and then down between my thighs. I gasped again and closed my eyes as his hand brushed my penis, which was beginning to feel hot and swollen and... strange.

Kirei chuckled. "Naughty boy," the growling voice said through his lips. "You haven't been drinking your anith tea, have you?"

"Didn't bring any with me," I managed to say. Anith tea was the staple beverage of the Order, but I had never liked the stuff much, even though I was required to drink it.

"Just as well, since this is exactly the sort of thing that it's supposed to prevent." His fingers were still probing delicately at my crotch, and the swollen feeling was getting worse by the second.

"I don't underst- Ah!"

"Desire is a sin, isn't it?" His breath was warm against my chest. The nipple he had just bitten was throbbing, adding its little grace note to the symphony of pleasure and pain taking place inside my body. "Or so they tell us." His voice was so soft that I couldn't tell whether it still held that odd, raspy quality or not. "That's the reason that new Aspirants are taken in so young, and why a few otherwise suitable candidates are always rejected without explanation. Let them start growing hair on their chins before they join the Order, and they'll be familiar with these feelings and covet them."

"How can anything that feels so good be a sin?" I asked hoarsely.

"I don't know." His lips brushed across my throat. "Ask God when you meet him."

His mouth fastened on mine. I had never been kissed before, and another rush of unfamiliar sensations left me weak and gasping.

"You're ready now, I think," he murmured, cupping my face in his right hand and running his thumb across my lips. In the next instant, another little gesture sent me spinning again, positioning me on my stomach, but bending me so that my legs hung down instead of sticking out, so that I was presenting my buttocks to him. Standing between my spread legs, he twisted the whip, tilting the butt so that it slammed into me for one last burst of transcendent pleasure before he pulled it out. The he fumbled his pants open, and, despite the awkward angle at which I had to crane my neck just in order to see him, I found myself staring at his penis as though I had never seen one before.

Does mine look like that right now? Swollen and hard and... and sticking out?

He ran his oily left hand down along the length of it, then grabbed my hips and pulled me towards him. Something hot and slick and huge slid into me, stretching a part of my body that had already been abused by the whip butt. I half-expected to feel flesh give, but it never quite did. Instead, that mixture of pleasure and pain slithered through me again. I could vaguely feel something warm and wet against my upper back, licking the flesh that had been damaged by the whip, but my attention was concentrated on the area between my waist and my knees.

"Ki-Kirei. Finish it. Please." I wasn't even quite sure what I was pleading for, but I knew that I needed it soon.

"All right."

He pulled partway out of me, and then slammed forward again, filling me even more deeply. I could feel the shock all the way forward to the tip of my penis. One of his hands snaked around me, and grasped, and squeezed, while the nails of the other raked at my thighs and back and sides. My muscles began to work involuntarily again, trying to push me back to meet his thrusts and then forward against his hand.

It seemed to last forever, but it was over all too soon. Spasms wracked my body, and I screamed his name as the world seemed to explode around me in a rush of pleasure and release.

True awareness of my surroundings took a few moments to return, and I had only a split second to realize that I was coated in sweat and something even stickier, that my abused shoulders and nipples and... other parts... were throbbing, and that Kirei was no longer inside me, before my invisible restraints released me and I fell to the floor. My feet hit first, tilting me forward so that my chin slammed against the stone, stunning me, and I lay there, dazed, for what might have been quite a long time.

The room was filled with the sounds of two people's breathing, and of soft, muffled sobs. I blinked and forced my eyes to focus. My head hurt, but I could see Kirei, still naked, sitting on the bare stone floor not far from me. He had his knees drawn up to his chest and his face buried in his arms, and it was from him that the sobbing sounds came.

"Kirei?" I didn't even try to get to my feet. Easier to crawl over so short a distance. "Kirei?" I put out a hand, touched his shoulder.

Slowly, he raised his head and looked at me. His third eye was still closed, and his face was streaked with tears.

"Are you all right?" I asked him.

"I can't... Oh, God, I can't..." His two human eyes were those of a man gazing into the Abyss that leads to Hell. "I fight it. All the time. But sometimes, these strange urges get the better of me, and I... and I..."

I knelt beside him and gathered him into my arms as a fresh burst of sobs erupted.

"I try to fool myself into thinking that I'm still human," he whispered, "but it's all so hopeless, all such a pathetic joke. My mind may have been human once, but my body and instincts are those of a demon. I long for sex and combat and the taste of raw human flesh as I once longed for the ability to do right and serve God. I am lost, and death would be such a mercy..."

"Shhh." I kissed him gently on the lips, reminding him that he was not alone, but the expression on his face, in his eyes, didn't change.

"And now I've corrupted you, too, Aspirant. I am so sorry."

"Kirei..." I hugged him closer against me, ignoring the twinges from nipples that were bruised and beginning to swell, as I spoke. "I wouldn't trade one moment of the feeling of your body against mine for anything - not even God's grace. I don't in the least mind being... corrupted." In fact, I damned well intend to get even more "corrupt" if the opportunity arises... It was the first time that I had dared admit that to myself, but I knew instinctively that it was the truth.

"Aspirant..." His fingers brushed my shoulder, my back, and I let a breath out very slowly as his finger encountered a whip welt, and the combination of recent memory and familiar pain sent a spear of sensation straight to my groin. "Go. Leave the Keep, before I regain the strength to stop you."

"What?"

"Leave," he repeated. "Go to the Order. Warn them away from this place. Tell them... what happened to me. Make certain that it never happens again. Make certain that no one else dies for nothing, the way your friend did. Go," he repeated. "I'll be... all right. The Keep won't permit me to die. There must always be at least one demon resident here - it's a condition of the spell that maintains this place. Follow the hallway outside the door to its end, and then turn right. Your belongings are in an alcove near the main doors, along with some of the things I brought here with me, although I'm afraid that the clothes and armor you were wearing are not going to be salvageable. Take whatever you might need or can use. Go."

I staggered to my feet, wincing as the bruised flesh between my buttocks protested that action. I wouldn't be able to sit down comfortably for quite some time... but it had been worth it. Moving slowly, so as not to jar anything, I shuffled to the door.

I stopped there for a moment, and turned. Kirei was still sitting on the floor, and he had drawn his knees back up in front of himself. He seemed to be staring at the far wall with intense concentration. I stared at him in turn, memorizing the fine lines of his face and body, and the way his hair rippled down over his shoulders like a black river.

I didn't want to ever forget him.

I wake to sickly green light and the feel of hard stone underneath my thin blanket and the sound of soft breathing somewhere nearby. Memory takes the place of disorientation after a moment.

Of course. I'm back.

I blink at the tall shadow leaning against the wall, and it develops contour and texture. I smile.

"Kirei."

"So it is you. I wasn't entirely sure. You've changed."

My smile widens into a broad grin as I disentangle myself from the blanket and rise to my feet to show him just how much I've changed.

The rings piercing my nipples and the delicate chain connecting them are one of the more obvious additions. My hair is long now too, braided down my back to counter its irritating tendency to become frizzy and unmanageable when not under some kind of control - a common problem with red hair that has the texture of mine, but still annoying. I've grown nearly two finger widths and broadened out at the shoulders - when I was last here, I was little more than a boy, but I'm a man now. I turn slowly, giving him a quick look at my back. The beginning of the tattoo should just be visible above the waist of my pants. I can almost feel the intricate black and blue and green and gold curves that have been pricked into the skin of my lower back and my buttocks, intended to draw attention to the cleft there and the entrance that it conceals.

"Why did you come back?"

The question takes me by surprise. I complete the turn and come to a stop, facing him squarely.

He hasn't changed in any way that I can see. His third eye blinks lazily at me from between his brows, and his face is still pale and fine-boned and perfect, his body still lean and hard and strong. Beautiful.

"Because I want to be with you," I explain.

"Because you what?"

"I want to be with you," I repeat.

"You're out of your mind."

"I don't think so. I've been to a lot of different places and tried a lot of different things since I left the Order, and I'm sure. This is what I want. You are what I want."

I don't - I can't - tell him about three years spent traveling, three years during which I didn't want to admit to myself that I was staring at every person I met who happened to have long black hair because I was hoping to see his face. And I certainly can't tell him about what happened when I first returned to the Order and the Master of Squires finished the punishment for desertion that Kirei began. When they realized that I was deliberately rubbing my groin against the whipping post, I ended up being locked in a cell for a month on a diet of bread and anith tea. But I couldn't help it. That first time with Kirei had left pain and sex so closely fused in my mind that I had never succeeded in separating them... and, to be honest, after the first few months, I hadn't wanted to.

"You know what will happen to you if you stay here." He's standing right in front of me now, and his hand reaches up to stroke my forehead in what is almost a tender gesture.

If I were a cat, I would be purring.

"I know," I say. "It doesn't matter. Better to be a demon than to be a knight of the Order. I... can't bring myself to believe in them, or in what they stand for, anymore. Just because demons are evil, that doesn't make the Order good."

They wanted to send a large force here and hunt Kirei down. I forced them to reconsider that plan by lying to them, vastly exaggerating the power and scope of the magic that I had seen Kirei display.

"And at least demons are honest," I add. "You've never lied to me about what you are, or about what this place is. I want to stay. What do I have to do?"

He reaches out and tilts my head up and to one side. "Just don't move."

He bends forward, and his teeth sink into my shoulder, eliciting a surprised, delighted moan. I can feel muscles in his upper jaw working. His fangs are hollow, like a snake's, and they're pumping something into me...

When it happens, it does so all at once. My entire body turns to ice for a moment, and I feel a knifelike pain in my forehead as the skin splits. Then it's over, and I laugh, swiping the fluid that's trickling down my nose away with the back of one hand, then spitting out teeth that I wasn't even aware of losing and tonguing the sharp points of their replacements.

Kirei is licking blood off his lips. I pull his head toward me for a kiss, and he responds by tangling his fingers in the chain that connects my nipple rings and giving it a gentle tug. The feeling of my flesh being pulled at and twisted from the inside is exquisite, pain/pleasure both subtle and intense, and I moan my approval into his mouth.

I tear his shirt open and grind my groin against his leg as he gives me love-bite after love-bite, deep enough to break the skin each and every time. My nipples receive more thorough attention than they ever have from any of the lovers that I've taken over the past three years, tugged upon and pinched and twisted and bitten, over and over again until I can't even manage to keep my feet, and slide down into a kneeling position on the rumpled mess that is my blanket. I hear fabric rip as he jerks my pants down over my hips and cups my buttocks in his hands, nails digging into my flesh. It's so perfect that I almost forget to grab the vial of oil I left on the floor.

"Here." It's an effort to concentrate enough to speak. If he so much as brushed my penis with a fingertip, I would explode, I know I would.

He accepts my offering and opens his pants, rubbing oil into a length of flesh that is just as pale and as perfect as the rest of him. I want to help him, but my hands are shaking too much. I have to content myself with watching, and with thinking about what it's going to feel like...

A firm push between my shoulder blades sends me sprawling forward into the blanket. I manage to keep my knees under me, so that I'm lying sprawled with my face against coarse cloth and my buttocks in the air, presented like an offering to my lover. I shudder in anticipation as I feel him spread me.

It feels like being spiked with white-hot iron, and I scream and push myself backwards to meet his thrust. We move together until I find myself exploding into ecstasy, from which I descend just in time to feel him filling me with his seed.

Afterwards, we lie together on the blanket, side by side. I'm beginning to see little flickers of whiteness out of the corners of my eyes now, startling against the black stone of the Nightkeep. It must be the wraiths. Soon, no doubt, I will begin to hear the speak, as Kirei does.

"What's your name?" Kirei asks. "I just realized that you never told me. Did the Order...?"

I laugh harshly. "The offered me a name, all right. I turned them down." Chastity. And here I had never suspected any of the Order's most senior members of having a sense of humor. "Call me Yokubou." Desire.

"Yokubou," he repeats, and kisses me. I sigh in contentment as he draws blood from my lower lip.

He's whispering a suggestion in my ear now, the gist of which involves me bound and helpless, with a whip butt forced up inside me and my penis inside of him, and I can't wait to try it. It's going to feel so good... but I have to move my belongings deeper into the Nightkeep first, where any fool of an adventurer who tries to penetrate this place won't trip over them. We want him to find the deathtraps deeper inside instead, if we can.

Such interlopers have no place here, after all.

Nightkeep belongs to the demons.

The End

Original © E. Liddell