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THE TASTE OF TERROR

Chapter 6: Where The Heart Is

Part II

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."

Was this the newest death? Not to kill him through claws or beak or belly, but through the very emotion that Alex's tormentor so savoured? He pressed paws to his heart, keening silently at the savage grief, and wondered if this was the pain of it stopping.

There was a slight hiss. Hot, dark muskiness ruffled the bare fur of his back. The vulpine stiffened. The only words he could think to say stumbled numbly forth.

"Y-you... monster."

Damian was silent. Then he said, quietly, "Yes."

Such was his choked misery that the fox barely stopped his weeping at that. "Why?" he mumbled despondently, sinking lower until he was almost hunched over completely,worshipping the altar of anguish before him. "This... this is w-where I..." his heart twisted and tore within his chest, "where I... belong, isn't it? With your... victims." He looked around, trying to swallow the sobs. "D-do I... do I have a picture here, t-then?"

"No." The velvet tones seemed suddenly much more terse than usual. There was an intensity in them beyond what the gryphon might normally have expressed: something... not angry, but with its own passion to it. Alex felt his sobs devolving to a smaller whimpering in his throat, and at last his quivered muscles dared to turn around.

As if a spell had been broken, Damian snatched him up, a single claw engulfing the vulpine's legs and yanking him back. His eyes had the boiling, alien unreadableness to them that they'd possessed before. He held Alex, beak millimetres from the vulpine's chest, gaze searing into him. The vulpine might have been able to look back, to suffer the golden cruelty of them... but no. Alex shrieked, flinching away, squirming uselessly in his captor's steel grip, reduced again to a curled, whimpering ball of pure terror. The source of his despair returned to its true, truest catalyst.

He was barely aware of the burst of blinding movement, as the gryphon swept out with prey in claw, blurring through the vast strange rooms of the palace. That dreadful mortuary vanished, the accusatory smiles gone at last... and with every nerve singing with dread beyond dread, was poor Alex to blame for losing it? His mind was feral, overwhelmed by despair until only a terrified core remained aware: a core which knew that it was preything and could think of nothing else.

And the world was still again. Damian tossed him lazily into the air, letting his body writhe and flail, and caught the vulpine before he touched the ground. They were in another room, this one full of a sea of cushions like before: but these were every one crafted from pure black velvet. Alex was allowed to slump back into the softness, gasping for breath. He saw the gryphon settling again, eyes closed and slightly taut, and his muscles prepared to try and flee. But there was nothing. Nothing to flee to, no-one to save him, nowhere to hide. The little life slowly pulled itself to sit in the darkness which so surrounded it.

It was a moment before Damian opened his eyes again, a slight movement of his massive flanks indicating that he was breathing once more. He smiled towards his prey, folding his claws in the manner he had when they'd first met. "You do have a talent for ending up in unusual places, my dear."

Alex looked back, sniffling slightly.

The gryphon's ears flicked gracefully. "What will we do with us? I doubted you'd find that room of any of them. I would have been happy to let my little explorer roam this place... but my darling, of all the places to find..." he rolled onto his back, stretching in the mass of black, at once playful and serious, and then over again. "Little one. Come. Talk to me."

Alex's throat was hoarse from the tears, as if they'd overflowed down his throat. He hunched forwards, and asked it. "How many?"

Damian looked steadily at him. "Do you really want to know?"

"I..." he paused. "I need to. And s-since when has what I wanted mattered to you?"

"What you want has always mattered to me, Alex. It is the catalyst around which I have centred my entire existence."

Even if only to deny it.

The fox's ears flattened against his skull, but momentarily. He swallowed, and nodded. His tormentor sighed, speaking quietly.

"Numbers mean nothing. But very well." he clicked his beak slightly. "Nine hundred and forty seven. It averages out as something over one each year. My stalking periods do vary considerably in length, you see."

Two replies warred in Alex's shellshocked bedlam of a mind. One got there first because the other one was too traumatised to do so.

"How old exactly... are you?"

The gryphon smiled pleasantly, a tingle of the eternal sadism back in his voice. "It depends. I stopped growing older mortally, at what would, according to this world's solar cycles, be around twenty-two years of age, if you wish to count that. Alternatively, I have existed as I am, in this charming reality, for seven-hundred and ninety-seven years. The total, chronologically, comes to eight-hundred and nineteen."

Everything stunned him, everything hurt him. Alex let himself sink into the dark sea of cushions below. There was something absurd to this, that he had seen the belly itself of this massive creature and yet knew him so little. "And every year, you've just been..."

"Doing what it is I do, yes." Lazily, Damian burrowed through the cushions, pulling himself towards his prey like a shark. "I have enjoyed what hobbies my own obsession allowed me to enjoy outside of itself, but always, always... there has been these desires over them."

The horrific vision pulsed inside Alex's mind. He cringed to himself as the beast surfaced, now only a few feet away. Now the other reply had reached his lips ."How?" he whispered. "H-how can you... so... all of them..."

Shouldn't something like this generate hatred? It couldn't. The monstrosity was just too enormous to be hated. He started keening again, the pain washing through him, and Damian hissed softly and drew closer. "Hush. This, you see, is why I would have preferred for you to leave that alone. I'm already having to adjust our relationship in light of you being under threat from an unknown foe. It isn't helping when you're trying to search for my absent soul."

"Y-yes," Alex mumbled bitterly, biting his tongue hard in an effort not to speak. "B-because... that's all that matters, t-then. Our "r-relationship"."

"To me, certainly." Damian's terseness seemed to be growing, his ears noticeably pulling back against his massive skull. "Alex, I think you need reminding of my position. Did you think I was boasting when I told you I was a sadistic psychopath? Did you think I've been an angelic, sinless creature until I discovered my obsession for you?"

"Why do you ask?" he spat. "You know e-everything! Everything about me! Why do you treat me like something more than... than a toy?"

"Because," snapped his predator, sounding exasperated now, "you are so much more! For the sake of your gods, Alex! I have told you. No-one, ever, categorically ever, has prompted me to bring them back beyond the eternal sleep of my insides. No-one! And yet you... you only make the desire increase every second of your life! I am many things, but I am not going to be accused of empty words. You are my everything. And you think you're just a... a pleasurething?"

"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME, THEN?" he howled. "You... you destroy my life, you save it.... You hurt me... in... in every way possible, and... y-you comfort me as I bleed! You... love me... and you take away... everything! Everything except you, me... _us. _All I-I feel I can know exists in this world is... is... is you."

A moment of silence. Then the mass of cushions shifted, and he felt himself grasped, held, pulled up into an embrace as hot and dark as his despair. The vulpine shifted, squirmed feebly to try and pull away, but in truth it was all he could do to burrow his way into the hot feathers and grasp at their warmth. He felt other feathers, longer, sleeker ones, pressing against his back, and realised he'd never actually felt the gryphon's wings before. But now they were everywhere, wrapped around him, engulfing him in the dark heat of Damian's massive chest as he began to weep again, again, again.

The fox was quietly grateful that this time, his tormentor let him cry his tears without interruption, not even purring at the sensations. Was there true warmth to be find in such an alien breast? Maybe now, now that he had come to realise that all he had to fear was this creature himself.

Time passed, or did it. All that marked the trickling by of his lost life was Damian's low, steady breathing. Alex felt half-catatonic again. This, after all, was where he had slept deepest, as his body was pieced back together. He moaned, slipping deeper in until he was moulded around the curve of the creature's powerful chest.

What if now, he would only be able to sleep if it was in the embrace of these hot, enfolding feathers?

After a long time, conciousness slowly arose. Again, the monster reacted, knew him perfectly, and with a slow gasp Alex was tipped out onto the warmth before him. He sprawled, looking round to be met by Damian's soft, slow-burning eyes.

They watched for a moment. As always, Alex was the first to look away.

He realised that somehow, the gryphon had moved them, now to another room. This was the windowed room, the viewing chamber he'd been watched from all his life. judging by the higher sunlight - almost noon now. It must have been several hours past since he'd sat here, but he'd not realised. There was something timeless about the two of them, of course. One immortal, one already dead.

"What..." the fox tapped his fingers with nervous energy on the smooth wood beneath them, transfixed now by that outside world. "W-what exactly is your thing for cushions?"

Another chuckle. "I do not have a "thing" for them, thank you. They're merely comfortable." Damian's sinuous tail twitched on the edge of his vision, a mockery of primness. He blinked, as if remembering something, and reached beneath one folded wing, drawing out a small paper bag - in his vast claws, a tiny paper bag. "Oh, yes. If we're finished with all this drama..." It was tossed neatly into Alex's lap, the gryphon chuckling as his prey almost fell over in his desire to squirm away. "Hush, hush, little one. I did say I'd bring you breakfast."

Alex said nothing, but he couldn't help but look inside. The paper was hot from it's contents. He peered at them while Damian spoke softly, his voice weaving as he pushed himself a little closer. "Aged sixteen, you took your first holiday away from your family, in the north Aura mountains . You remember, of course, the small cafe you got something from near the bottom of the first ski-lift up towards the top?" The smell overwhelmed his ravenous stomach. The gryphon chuckled. "It was a wonderful time for me. The mountain air was perfect for high-flying cruises, and I could get closer to you than ever before, knowing that your speed on the ski slopes would mean your scent wouldn't overwhelm me. And oh, you were so happy... so free. The only regret really, I seem to remember you said, was that you never managed to try the berry croissants." The fox reached inside, taking out a golden-brown crescent of pastry studded with crimson jewels.He stared at it.

Alex sniffed it, his mouth watering. Damian shrugged. "The place is still there, and it's only a few hundred miles from where we are now. It wasn't far. I feel... My failures to treat you as your perfection deserves meant some mild compensation wa due. And you do deserve the finest I can provide, of course."

Slowly, dully, Alex dropped it back into the bag. "Y-you monster." he mumbled. Damian raised an eyeridge, his tail flicking slightly.

The fox raised a heavy head and glared at his murderer's dark throat - the closest he could come to meeting the horrific burning gaze. "I'm g-going to die." He held back the sobs that would come from such a statement. "I wish I could... just accept it. I wish I could. Y-you think... you think t-that because you b-bring me nice b-breakfast, that's something? That's anything compared to all that you've done? You're... you're utterly despicable." His stomach burned with desire, but he threw the bag at the windows with all the force he could muster, hitting it with a sad little thud. Damian said nothing.

The bag slid to the floor, and part of the fox wished he hadn't done what he'd just done. He was hungry. Very hungry. But his body wouldn't need more nutrition, after all.

He huddled, squeezing his tail, and the gryphon sat silently, shoulders rising and falling in a mountainous rhythm. The gryphon broke the silence only after another few minutes.

"With regards to the cushion... "thing". If you must know, I'd normally line my roost with moulted feathers. Except that's the thing: I don't moult. So I... have to make do with these. They're better, really, because I can add to the collection whenever I want and they're more colourful."

"You... you don't moult?" Alex found himself interested despite all his bitterness, helplessly tagged along with the question.

"I do not." the gryphon pronounced it in a slightly weary, exasperated fashion. "And even if I did, the lost feathers would disintegrate into nothingness within seconds of leaving my body, as does all matter which is part of me. I... don't change, you see. I neither moult nor lose or gain weight nor leave behind even atomic traces.. The mass added from your past bodies, if you're wondering, has had to be consciously assimilated into my own form, not increasing, but_replacing_ my own flesh atom by atom. I don't age. Any injuries can be regenerated instantly by renewing the signature of my body. You see me now, little one, in exactly the same form and dimensions as I have been for all these years, and likewise you see all there is of me. On the world I leave behind not one feather or trace of saliva. I am... a contradiction to entropy itself."

Alex realised in an off-hand manner that the natural fear was subsuming itself again. He frowned, curious and awed despite himself. "And this is all part of you being... what did you say l... last time? Void... touched?"

Damian nodded without smiling, drawing closer again. "Mmm. The word is unusual, isn't it? Everyone seems to get the same equivalent - in my original language it first came to me as "one who is touched by the nothing." Voidtouched is a more elegant translation of the concept. In others it's come naturally as that form, or something similar in their own language. It's clear it is a ubiquitous resu-."

"Wait." Alex looked round at him, feeling a wingtip nudging at his back. Part of him wanted to hug it, part of him wanted to squirm away with all its might. "Others? There are others?"

"Oh, yes. That's part of our problem, you see." Damian's wing stopped nudging, instead drawing around his prey and clasping him against the furnace-edge of his flank. "Imagine creatures like me, Alex. Imagine them coming into contact with each other. No, don't think that," he added, a slight chastising twitch throbbing inside Alex's skull. "That's ridiculous. We're not a very fraternal type."

Alex's vision of his gryphon discussing torture techniques with some other shadowy figure vanished abruptly, to be replaced with one... slightly different, which the beast apparently approved of. "Yes, that's more like it. It's simply... impossible to co-exist. Perhaps the ego is simply too highly-strung."

"So the other ones you know... knew... you've..."

Damian drummed his talons. "Consider it a small act of "redemption". I'm sure many are alive today whose ancestors would have perished, who would have perished themselves, in very painful and inventive ways, if not for my removing of their would-be murderer. Of course, it might have meant I'd been the loser of such a duel instead, and you would now be living a happy, innocent life. Etcetera. However, I'm afraid" he licked Alex's chest again, smiling at the fox's quiver. "that it's not the case. I've been successful so far, and given that I seem to be by far and away the oldest and most powerful specimen I've yet discovered, I don't intend it to."

"Are they... are they g-gryphons as well?"

There was no answer for almost thirty seconds before a quiet, hushed voice answered him. "...No. I've yet to meet a single member of my own genus, let alone species. Most of them, actually, are identical to you little Sentients. My current theory is that the closest worlds to ours, and hence the easiest to transplant creatures from, are naturally similar in their evolutionary conditions. The result is that it's perfectly possible for any one of you to be... one of us."

Alex paled. "How... how can we know? You mean they could b-"

"You're forgetting about me , Alex." the gryphon smiled, watching a cloud ripple across the farway blue sky outside. "My "fellows" aren't notable in the telepathic miasma until they're examined closely, but I make sure that everyone is. I can tell you that to my knowledge, you haven't come into contact with any since I've been watching you. As I said, we're not fraternal, and we're... "born" at a rather slow rate. I'd guess there are a good few dozen in existence on Actura at the most. But, you are correct as far as the rest of the world is concerned. They do indeed," he smiled roguishly, "walk among us."

"That isn't funny." Alex scowled, finding himself leaning back again against the dark heat. His captor purred, but only once, lapsing back into silence. Cuddling into his tail again, the fox looked out through the windows again, captivated by the sudden terrifying unknown it seemed to contain. He'd thought the world was clear, safe enough, hopeful.

"They're not the only ones among us, though, though, are they?" he said, and felt the vastness of the gryphon's flank grow hard as the muscle tensed beneath it. Damian uttered a hiss, but this time the spike of dread it inspired was only instinctive: Alex felt somehow attuned, knowing that at least this time, he wasn't the target of the sudden tension. He swallowed, and mumbled, "These... blank ones. WIthout minds. Are they something to do with you?"

"I have told you the sum of my knowledge on this subject, little one. But logic... well, that much points to yes. How can you hide from a creature who can see your own thoughts? You hide your own thoughts from them." He stood in a single blurring movement, beginning to stalk around the vulpine at his centre. "And of course, since these creatures have become accustomed to complete transparency in the thoughts of all things, the simple intimidation value of stealth is... quite considerable. If you hadn't seen that dark shape, if you hadn't assumed it to be me - I only wish I could have appreciated just how adorable that was at the time - then I wouldn't have noticed it at all, and you would be dead." The gryphon's voice pronounced the words with no emotion. He went on, now speaking seemingly more to himself. "Therefore, we can assume for the purpose of this was genuinely to kill you. The only conceivable reason for such a blasphemy is, of course, your relationship with me. What would be the end result... of... such? What would happen in such..." He paused, head cocked slightly, and then looked back at Alex with a cold glare. "I'm sorry?"

"I-I... I didn't say anything."

"We could hold this entire conversation without that happening, little one. Truth be told I usually let you speak more for the delight of hearing it than simply because it's the more courteous thing to do. I can tell you have a question. Do you want me to have to look deeper into your mind to find the precise words? Speak it."

Taking a deep, nervous breath, Alex hugged his knees and watched his tormentor cautiously. "Well... um... what will happen after me? When you don't..." he would not let himself cry, he would keep his voice steady and face it all he could, "...b-b-bring me back again... what will you do? More... m-more victims?" And_I'm another smiling face on that gloating, gloating wall._

The gryphon stopped, and turned round, gazing unreadably at him. "That wasn't what I said."

"You were talking about my death, weren't you?"

"I was talking about your death _at the hands of another, _Alex. Your death is mine to keep, and I will not let it be taken away."

Alex gave a small and bitter snarl in the back of his throat. "From my perspective, the end result seems similar."

His killer's tail flicked irritatedly. "Regardless, it's not helpful. My actions in a world where we're safe to be together are no longer appropriate."

"You d-didn't answer," the vulpine snapped. "Surely you can bloody see that it's got some personal interest?" But Damian was looking away already, eyes flickering over an invisible map of ideas within his alien mind.

"Does it have to? You won't be aware of what happens afterwards."

"It doesn't interest you, then?"

"Death? Of course, it is my stock in trade. But it's aftermath is meaningless. A bodiless soul fades into nothing, Alex. I've watched it nearly happen to you five times. There is no more to this world. Now, if that is the most pressing of your concerns, little one, I can give you some more pressing ones."

And he was evaded. Alex sat glowering and quivering on the smooth wooden floor, watching his predator slinking towards the windows as the gryphon thought. He wondered how fast his ideas were moving.

The gryphon flicked a claw angrily at the ground, with a loud splintering noise. "Hmmph. Three of my lines of thought are going nowhere, and the other four had major logical flaws from the outset. This is all pointless." Damian sounded bored now. He paused, and groaned melodramatically, rolling over onto a sleek flank. "We're going nowhere, are we. I shouldn't be doing this, now. Not with you here and everything so so precious. I need some more pressing concerns of my own."

He chuckled lightly, closing the golden eyes for a moment. When they opened again, their smile was back.

Alex froze.

"N-no," he stammered, scrambling back. "Please. P-p-please, no. No. No, no, no."

"You think I'm more than an eternal destroyer, Alex. Maybe." Damian stretched, beginning to pad forwards towards him with the terrible predatory grace he'd come to dread above all else. "But I will never lie to you, and that applies to all that I have used to describe. I'm not... noble, or... tragic in any way, Alex. I'm just cruel and sadistic, with a few interesting variations. And you're my prey."

"B-but... please...." he was suddenly against the wall, flattened, nbo, the surface was cool and smooth, he was against the glass, trapped with the world inches away as Damian stalked closer. "No, no, you don't... you don't have to... please..."

"I don't. But I want, and the wanting isn't a desire. It's the lust of gods. I can't breathe for the ache of your taste. Alex, Alex, Alex... you're mine, you're mine for the rest of your life and...mmm... I will make it so." He was getting closer, moving to either side in time with Alex as his preything tried frantically to squirm left or right. "How did I live through those moments with you so close? I could barely think for the ecstasy of it all. But no more."

Feet away. The fox moaned, curling up into a ball, his flesh hissing with terrified anticipation for its old master to return, and hurt it. "W-why here?" he whispered. "I-it wasn't just safety, w-was it? Y-y-you wanted to reclaim me... put me b-back in a world you could control..."

"Yes..." his murderer smiled silkily, edging closer, his flanks rippling as he breathed in great hungry gulps of Alex's scent of fear. "It wasn't without problems, but you needed to be... purified of the taint. Made mine, mine again. Now then..."

"P-problems?"_ _He could barely think beyond a delirious whimper with the terror. "What... you... god, please, no, no, no..."

"Shhh. Alex, my darling little one... I swear I'll never let you go from my devotion. Not again. Our time is ours alone, and it is precious. No matter how shor-"

Alex had no idea how the idea had come into his head. It wasn't even fully formed. A mere second of terrified thought by a mind teetering on the brink of a future full of pain and despair beyond it's own belief. A single mad chance. He would have lost it forever in the very next moment, had it not seemed to have stopped time.

Damian did not move for a long, long moment. Then he said, quietly, his voice layered with more menace than Alex had ever heard, "No."

The fox looked at him, wild and fearful and confused. "W... what?"

"Don't you dare, little one." The snarl let loose a cascade of heavy, musky breath over his bare chest. Part of Alex wanted to scream and cower, cringe and plead. But with a vast effort, he raised his head above the rich scent to look into Damian's white-hot eyes.

"A-am I... am I right?"

There was a loud cracking noise. Damian flexed his talons, suddenly buried six inches into the shattered wood of the floor. Slowly, he dragged them backwards, claws gouging massive, brutal gashes. "Don't."

The fox stared, still flattened against the window pane. He felt his retinas scorched by the boiling intensity of the golden glare. Now he would scream, and let his mind cast away this meaningless revelation, and welcome the the pain to enfold him with its loving embrace...

... but when that was all he had left, what could threaten him?

The shattered, dreadful numbness was suddenly back, drawing him up to his feet. Damian hissed quietly, pinning the vulpine to the wall with his gaze, but again, he didn't move. Alex looked back at him, feeling the ache, the grief, fill him like water, but it was shielding. The raging gold refracted through the misery and diffused, not touching. He took a step forwards.

"Alex." Damian was flawlessly still, frozen in a picture of predatory cruelness. "Don't."

He was in a dream. Or was this still life? Alex took another step, almost falling over. Nothing happened. He trudged forwards once more, one arm limp, the other held weakly across his chest. And still nothing. No tortuous punishment, not even a holding back. He was uninhibited.

Slowly he began to move forwards, feeling like the victim of some great catastrophe which he hadn't actually experienced, only waking in the aftermath. Damian followed with a stealthy tread, choked rage radiating from every feather. "Alex," he was saying. "Listen to me, little one. You're not doing this, you are not doing this to us. I... I won't let myself let you." He was breathing hard now, heated tides pouring over the fox as he met the door and it swung open effortlessly.

They were a parade, a grand procession of madmen through the abandoned asylum. Alex felt as if his limbs were still cocooned in the catatonic sleep, and he had to fight every step, tooth and nail, out of his heavy legs. But he walked. Alex walked, and the gryphon stalked behind, moving swiftly now, back and forth, weaving, shaking now with some unknown nervous tension. "You won't. Alex, you need to understand. You can't do this. You can't."

"You don't stop me." he whispered. Was it a question, a statement, a threat; an emotionless observation? There was another cracking sound from behind, but Damian was still cowed somehow.

"No." he muttered, moving a dark blur to the fox's side, head twitching in tense, birdlike jerks. "I won't. I won't hold you back. I won't hold us back. But I... I can't let you do this. Alex.... please. Please, please. Do not do this. Not to us. Please."

But Alex's paws walked forwards. Now they were in a room filled wall to wall with two vast rows speakers of all kinds and sizes.The only gaps in the armada of black circles was the door ahead.

He took a step towards it, and stumbled, a leg giving out with the weariness. Before the vulpine's knee to touch the ground, it was cushioned, held, and a rush of energy poured into his mind and pulled him back upright. He looked down numbly, where the vast, dark claws of the gryphon cradled his white body. "What do you mean. You won't hold back?"

Damian pulled back, letting the fox stand again and continue his slow trek. "It's not enough." His voice was shaky. "It's not enough to make you mine. So... so I can't stop you. I just can't; it goes against everything my obsession is founded on. I can't, _can't _deny your experience of me, Alex. It's like lying. It's wrong. It's wrong that when I am so intimate, so cruel and so close, that I should have to close parts of myself. But at the same time... Alex, please. Just... choose not to, yourself. Let me wipe it from your mind, and... and... and-" he broke off, uttering a stream of harsh, unintelligible words, quite evidently some strange language's most virulent curses. "It is no good. I can't let myself do that either. Alex, please..."

He understood now why his steps were not aimless, the route was provided for him, inside his head by the same creature stalking around him as he trudged. He was being guided. Damian was beside him again, eyes furious fixed ahead, graceful ears flattened, actually panting with effort. Some part of him might have stood there to appreciate the absurdity of the sight. But he kept walking.

"You... you can't stop me?"

"I _won't _stop you. Do you understand? Do you have any idea what-"

And he stopped.

They were here. The gloating room. Far from the sadistic glee Alex had imagined, Damian simply gave a low hiss of emotion. All around were those dead smiling eyes and murdered faces, but the roles of the "real" creatures in the room had been unexpectedly reversed. Here stood the vulpine, so small and so helpless, and yet standing cold and steady, with his vast tormentor shaking and trembling, claws digging again into the ground. Damian was almost babbling."I... Alex, I can't do it. Not with you of all people. I don't know what it is, I can't let myself know what it is, you see. I don't know what will happen now. Just. Please, don't... they're not reconcilable... I... for our sake, Alex. I'm... I'm begging you. Don't... don't let us... please..."

But still the fox could feel that malign influence in his head, pulling him on. The same creature who was pleading with him was fuelling his merciless assault.

Towards the only locked door in his palace of solitude. The massive combination lock glinted. Slowly, Alex reached up a paw, spinning the first wheel. _Cli-click... Click. _The gryphon actually flinched.

He reached along, moving the next one into line. And the next, and the next. Damian was fully behind him now, each oiled click sending a great tremor through him. "I'm holding it back," he whispered. "Of course I am. I can't experience both... Alex, oh, if we were just predator and prey again, I could gulp you down the moment you'd thought of this, and have no qualms about making my belly torment you all the more for it. But we're... we're..." he gave a hiss as another wheel slid into place. "Oh, what are we now, little one?"

Alex felt his shattered nerves jangling at the mere word "gulp", but simultaneously he felt the cold influence of the gryphon quieting it himself. Helping him. He started slightly, but reached the sixth wheel and spun it slowly as well, the ticks as tense in the cold silence as a doomsday countdown.

"Aren't I a coward?" Damian chuckled savagely, lividly. "All this time, and I've never let myself see both, think of both, creatures like you alongside them... never simultaneously. Close them off for my own sake..." he made a little keening noise. "Well, to hell with my own sake. I give it up for you."

Click. The seventh wheel.

"Well... I... well done. I... only mentioned it... in passing, and you... forged together an answer. And you awe yourself that... I'm... a so-called "genius". Maybe it was deliberate... maybe... I wanted this."

Alex felt a small whimpering noise creeping from his throat. "'when we met for the very first time, __incidentally _ on the same date _...'" _he croaked, _"'to the day, of my own creation, ...'"

And you're not forgetting that date. _The gryphon made a sound which might have been a maniacal chuckle, or maybe a sob. _And of course...

The fox clicked down the digits. "'I have existed... as I am, in this charming reality, for seven-hundred and ninety-seven years.'" Take away one, because it had been a year and a half since they had met, and count the eternities. 0...9...8...7...6.

The last wheel.

He stood back, looking at them. His tormentor's breathing was heavy and slow and dreadful.

1. 1. 0. 1. 1. 2. 1. 6.

The twenty first of the first, the year 1216. Seven hundred and ninety six years to the day since Alex's nightmare had begun. The day that the monster behind him had found this world.

He looked back. The gryphon watched him with the silent expression of a heretic, burning at the stake. The doors clicked, and swung soundlessly open, parting to either side of him. Behind, Damian stopped breathing.

And Alex stared, not comprehending. Then he turned his head; looked at the gryphon's form. Damian's eyes were fixed on the ground, his body coiled as if he was about to pounce. But he was so impossibly, incredibly still that Alex could not even tell that he was alive.

He looked again, the moment expanding in balletic stillness across time and space. This one had been spared no expense. The vast sky, a strange shade of deep, dusky indigo - yet it was not yet night, for there were two suns boiling away, just crested over the horizons - spanned a full three metres across, lavishly painted in ancient oils. Beneath it was a great plain, savannah grass the colour of spun gold spreading away towards distant mountains. Strange trees dotted the land. The realistic, semi-photographic style of it, he might have guessed, seemed similar to the Post-Crusade Renaissance, when whole new elements of light and colour were being discovered to make pictures so real and so exact they captured the very essence of their subject. Subjects.

Numb, stunned, he looked away again, and saw the resemblance instantly. There were four of them, stood resplendent on a crag to the right of the canvas overlooking the vast world beneath. Only two were fully grown, the mountainous cliff below defining their size with the largest at twelve or so feet in height. The male, a powerfully built creature of thick, deep crimson plumage, sat to the right, with one wing extended and draped over the other in a gesture of affection. His companion was slightly smaller and more slender, bright silver feathers gleaming in the last rays of day as she matched her mate's gaze.

Next to them were the other half of their group (pride? Flock?), a pair whose similar flared crest marked them out as kin to the larger two... and the even larger one as well, the one who was for want of a better word "alive", sat silent and livid behind Alex. The older of these two looked to be growing close to maturity himself, his dark purple feathers lying ruffled and over a body clearly close to adulthood, although his wings still shimmered with a more youthful downiness. His head was turned, away from the suns, as he glanced towards the smallest, and youngest, of them - a creature who might have only been the size of a small horse in this world. She was golden and sleek, a lady of infant's beauty, fresh even in the heavy light with the eternal vigour of a young child. This littlest one was instead angled slightly towards the front, as if about to call out to the artist. A gleam between brow and beak hinted at eyes, looking straight out of the painting.

The effect was so lifelike that for a moment Alex expected the turn to happen, the golden gryphon to speak aloud to him. But of course, there was no movement, no life. The group was as frozen and silent as they had been for centuries, as had every other picture in this room.

He still watched the painting for several moments, transfixed by it. All of his numb power and weak bravado, his exhausted ability to defy - that had vanished, as had the normal undercurrent of dread. Alex felt like his mind had been stripped of thoughts in the manner of a bone stripped of meat, unable to withstand the shock of it. What was left for the moment could only crack the silence with a weak mumble. "I... I'm sorry."

Damian did not reply.

Now, he remembered what the thunderbolt had hinted at, when Damian took it for him and saved his life. _Straining as he fled through the forest, his feathers slicked with the blood that had coated the claws of the murderer of his family. _It was... it was merely a past. It had left him with confusion and fear, wondering if maybe the monstrous sadist was more than just what he had seen. It wasn't supposed to be in front of him, in this room of dead smiles.

He looked back at Damian, curling his tail around his ankles. What had he done? What had he, Alexander Williams, murdered innocent, inflicted on his murderer? But there was no change whatsoever. The gryphon was still silent, still unmoving, still burning his molten gaze into the floor.

Dreamlike, Alex turned around to face him fully. "I... I didn't know. I didn't think what I... w-what I'd find. I... I'm s-sorry. I'm s-so sorry." And he was. Despite everything, he actually felt the misery pouring through him. This wasn't right. This wasn't his to pry.

Silence. Shakily, the vulpine took a step towards his killer. And another, and wait! Was there life? He froze like a guilty child, terrified as something glinted over Damian's beak in the harsh, bright lights.

It was a tear. The burning golden eyes, the embodiments of all cruelty, were weeping.

He stopped completely, either too fearful or too confused to come closer or back away, and watched another glistening diamond fall. In that long moment, he felt more wretched than the squirming fluffy morsel he had so often been reduced to.

Then, at last, came the soft whisper of the gryphon. "Twenty one. Zero... one. Twelve. Sixteen."

Alex looked back at the unlocked doors, swallowing in confusion. "I..."

"You didn't see its significance." Damian still had moved nothing except his beak. "Not that I expected you to. I didn't expect you to even imagine a connection between the date and the combination, but... well look how that turned out."

He took a slow breath, quivering a little. "You... you see, it was a way... a way to ensure this door was locked... unless I was ready for it. I would... not be able to open the chasm, until I could think about the date... and... and the day which I died. So... elegant, wasn't it?"

"Think... think about it?"

"It's a technique, requiring extreme mental control: _conscious _forgetting. Unless I allow myself to I will be only vaguely aware that this place exists. Unless I let myself I will not recall any details nor related ideas nor memories. You see?" He sank lower, still searing his dreadful gaze into the floor. "It's the mental technique the world over to contain the unsavoury: put it in a special box or in a special room in the mind and keep it locked up, so your life can go on."

They were silent for the moment. Alex looked back, his voice hoarse. "Here?" The location rankled him. "You... you mourn them... in the middle of all these memories of... of these people you... you murdered? That's just... oh god, you... you..."

There was a sound like the grating of mountains from the gryphon's form. And yet the low growl sounded almost broken, ruined. The mountains were collapsing. Once it had silenced the vulpine's protest, Damian spoke again, his voice at once cold, emotionless, exhausted, and passionate.

"I mourn everything in this room."

Silence.

Alex looked around and back, counting the number of the paraded dead on the walls. He felt his voice trembling even at a whisper.

"You... m-mourn them."

"I know. How can I dare to? I... swallowed their lives." The gryphon moved slowly, pulling up his great head and slowly circuiting the room with those terrible weep eyes. "I should have no right, should I? It is the last great cruelty I make them suffer: to know the terrible measure of the waste of their lost lives."

"But..." this was mad. Carefully, he crouched down, sat between the vast monster before him and the vast misery behind. "If you... if you regret, why don't..."

The rest didn't matter. Damian would see his mind. He would see the spectre of destruction and malicious cruelty, the soft adoring chuckle that heralded pain and terror. There was no mourning in this predatory killer, no shred of regret.

Except...

(I'm)

(so)

(sorry)

(Alex.)

The fox blinked, and now Damian was staring straight at him with golden orbs of fire. But Alex had never even considered what eyes which burned might feel like from the other side. For once, he could hold his gaze. Not because the terrible intensity didn't sear his soul, but because he realised it was nothing compared to the gryphon's experience.

"We are born anew, we creatures of the Void. Maybe we had pasts, mortal lives, but they were burned away. I was chronologically twenty two of your years when I lost mine. I would not have reached full maturity for another fifteen to twenty. But that didn't matter. My body was warped into that of someone twice my age, my mind was taken apart and put back together, and I was spat out into a world beyond my imagining, utterly alone. Not vulnerable, however. It gave me godhood, and then it placed me here. I have seen nothing of the strange force which summoned me. I have never been given orders, asked for payment, given a receipt for all bestowed on me. The only purpose it seemed I existed for... was to exist."

He lowered his eyes for a moment, a slight quiver loosening the liquid crystals which had started to collect there, and then fixed the fox's gaze again. "But even now I am lying. My mind, prodigious as it now has become, was not merely an engine of genius with eidetic memory, perfect mental visualisation and enough processing capability to invent every known major branch of mathematics in the first ninety years of my new existence, centuries before anyone else thought of them. I have come to realise that the silent force which made me immortal needed to give no orders." A slight cock of his head, eyes flicking over Alex's pale-furred body. "I look at you, and I ache for just the sight of your blood. I hear that perfect voice, and I burn for it to cry out in terror. Every... living thing which I come close to or even come into contact with at all... I... am... desperate to destroy. Not merely tempted to but desperate - I don't just desire to be cruel, I am cruel. T-there is a vast difference, l-little one." He was trembling again, the velvet tones a little higher and shakier in pitch. "Like the difference between moonlight and sunlight - one merely reflects, one radiates its desire. I-I... I am pure... and total evil incarnate. And yet... I-I... am aware of what I am... simultaneously."

"I...don't..."

"I told you I was insane as well, and that's true. Pray for me Alex that you will never understand what I mean when I say that I can at once be a creature of remorseless cruelty, and a sentient being, aware of its own h-horror. It's not expressible to any mind capable of working without s-shattering." He sighed, at once piteous and profound, seeming to shatter all his bulk. "And all I live for is to murder. Perhaps... if I, and more of my peers, had been so inclined... there would be no life left in this world by now. "

"But you h-haven't been." He felt cold shivers running up and down his spine. You can't be that powerful.

"You have... no idea how much I can do." Damian did not smile. "You can't imagine what... enraged contingency plans were whirring away as I flew towards your broken body if... if we were ended just like this. What I have ached to do even with you... but I-I didn't... and I don't... Alex, I d-don't do. When I come to this place and allow myself to think freely on what I have become, it is that and that alone which keeps my mind from shattering. I don't do. I hold myself back and focus every ounce of infinite cruelty... onto you."

Alex's ears twitched.

"Is it conscious or not? Do I force my lust to be a scalpel tearing at one life rather than a sledgehammer crushing millions? I... well, I cannot tell. But... but the joy, the pleasure, the all-consuming ecstasy of a single innocent's pain, when I know it so well, when I have drank so deeply of every nuance of it... j-just fits me better. You're mine, little one. Maybe you're my sacrifice. Maybe if I can contort my entire soul around the utter persecution and misery of one single preything, if I can simply make you suffer so much terror, and pain, and despair, that it becomes the equivalent to a hundred thousand senseless deaths, then... then my claws will, at least be clean of that hundred thousand. Or maybe... maybe it's that I understand how much deeper the destruction is when focussed alone. Maybe," He breathed in, his burning eyes shutting, and made a soft, chirping sound. It was only when the noise came again that Alex realised it was a sob. "Maybe I am already monstrous to the fullest extent I can be, with nothing held back, and this really is the cruellest way to be cruel. When I feel the softness of your fragility, the pitch-perfection of your soul, I... I would not give it up for the suffering of a trillion others."

No words. No sounds. Alex felt time spiralling away, except in this place there was none. No life except those who were already dead. No emotion except that which was twisted into its opposite by its own nature. No joy, only pictures of smiles.

He stood and ran to his torturer in a single breathless movement, falling to the dark expanse of the gryphon's throat and wrapping his arms as far as he could around it. He was weeping as well, tearing chokes of grief that might rip his chest apart. It wasn't pity or sympathy - there was no room for any emotion to be solely his own. The collective sadness and anguish of this entire secluded little world of theirs had simply swallowed him up.

The soft silkiness moved around Alex and engulfed him, pulling him into itself, and the gryphon let a low, ravenous keen of despair as he curled closer. They cried together, in the blindness, in the midst of death. It was no more love than it was terror or hatred or desire or anything else on the blinding spectrum of emotions. They were beyond all of it now.

***

Time passed, perhaps a lot of it. Endlessness. When they had regained a little more consciousness, some time later, Alex spoke.

"Y-you... you understood."

The soft feathers shifted around him. "Of course I did. I had only blinded myself before."

Alex squirmed slowly onto his side, lain beneath the powerful heat of one foreleg. "I thought there was something strange about it. Your resistance. It wasn't just that you... that you wanted to "harm me and only me", was it? It was... that they were my family."

"Technically," a note of Damian's sardonic humour had crept back in, "I did not lie to you. When I said that my claim was true - that I had been offset by the idea that I should be affecting others than you yourself - I was, again, being truthful. I never actually denied that there was something else as well."

"Because you... you didn't want to harm them because of who they were."

"Because_ you_ didn't want me to. Because of that want, I felt that white-hot anger, that desperate helplessness. It wasn't the idea alone which shook me, Alex, it was your response. Why... why do you think that was?"

Alex looked up at the dreadful hidden alcove, and back down. He shivered. "I... can't possibly imagine you like... like that." Living. In some sense normal. Part of a greater whole.

"I know. Isn't it grotesque? My dominance is so utter, so perfect, that the mere idea of any weakness, ev is anathema to your perception of me." Damian nuzzled him tenderly and yet it felt truly gentle this time, rather than the sick, ironic lovingness he had always displayed. "Now, ahhh... now, I am godlike. I could return to that world... and crush every threat I had ever felt... but it is lost." He flexed his claws slowly. "Or maybe... I am the lost thing."

"I'm..." the fox rubbed around his sore, tear-strewn eyes. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry about what?" He was held tighter, passed and pushed up to nestle in the snug hollow beneath the broken monster's neck. "Sorry that I still have one avenue to feel pain? Or is it just for a meaningless event that happened hundreds of years before you were born?"

He shook his head, faintly surprised. "N-no. Aren't you reading... reading my mind?"

"No, I am not. You're... enough to me that I don't need to right now. But go on. What was it, then?"

"Well, it was just..." the vulpine bit his lip, feeling a great wave of grief rippling softly within his throat. "I'm... I'm sorry that I never thought there was more to you."

There was no answer. Than Damian said quietly, "I would see that noble heart of yours torn out for daring to say that."

The fox said nothing, somehow anticipating the next sentence to come. "But not now."

"But not now," the gryphon agreed. "Alex, please, don't you dare apologise for anything you've done to me. Your very existence undoes every wrong you could ever achieve. I would make you suffer for blaspheming against yourself..." he paused, for what seemed like a full minute, and then murmured thoughtfully, "...but I think we're... w-we're beyond it now, aren't we?"

The fox twitched his tail out, squeezing it against his chest. "Beyond it?"

"Beyond all the... petty sticking points of my psychoses. What are we now, little one? What are we now? You exist, and I can experience it. I've held myself above being mortal. I've created this concept of a perfect predator, and I've lived it, for so, so long. But not with you, Alex, not with you." He was crying; it cloyed the dark velvet of his voice, but even beneath that there was an unnerving difference to it. "We never... never finished it, did we?"

"Finished what? What are you talking about?" Was fear really rising again in him? After all of this?

"Very, very, very simple, little one. You are mine... but likewise I...I am... I-I...I... am... yours. You are mine... and I am yours.You are mine, and I am yours."

In a swift, sleek movement, the fox was jettisoned gently onto the floor, rolling away as Damian stood to his full height, still weeping. "You are mine and I am yours... Alex, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I feel it now, I feel it!" A weak, shuddering laugh broke from his beak. "I feel the grief, the pain, the agony of all I have done. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You... Alex, we're... we're free."

"What... you... you mean... I... what do you..."

"Hush, little one." The gryphon's voice was cracked and hoarse with the weight of lost sobs, tender as the feathers of his wings as he stretched them out and filled the room with a series of bony cracks. "You have to understand. I can feel all the desire... and yet I can feel the cruelty of what it is. They're not divided. It's not the murderer, and then when I let myself the mourner. I'm both. I can know what an act of horror it is to do...what I do to you... and yet do it." He smiled a sad, insane smile. "It hurts, Alex. At last... my gods, at last I can hurt."

"You can hurt?" his full senses were returning with alarming rapidity. "You mean... you... you... you regret it... and you..."

"Yes..." there was a quiet madness to the soft tones. "I regret the cruelty, and I feel nothing but the cruelty." Damian shivered quietly, reaching up to clasp a claw to his vast, powerful chest. "And it hurts... oh my word, I am suffering at last. I can despair! I... I can weep. I thought it would shatter me, and it has. I'm... my god. We're... trapped, Alex. We're trapped inside what I am...but... the cells are gone. You're with me and I can be with you. Thank you. Th-th-thank you..." He hunched over, keening. "We'll be free today. W-we'll be as free as we can..."

The fox watched him apprehensively, numb soft terror dawning on him. "You mean... so... you don't have... to d-divide the r-torturing and... and this... this regret?"

"Yes." His predator was shaking. "It's agony. But... I wouldn't have it any other way. Alex, Alex... You are mine, and I am yours. You are mine... and I am yours. Oh, little one..."

Pulling himself up, the plaything watched him. "And... and are you changed? Or... you're... y-you're still going to..."

His torturer froze, the elation draining in an instant. He ruffled his wings slightly, tapped his claws on the ground. When he spoke, his voice was quiet once more. "...Yes. A hundred thousand times, yes. Alex, I... I'm sorry. But I told you: I am not a tragic creature. I am just cruel and sadistic, with some variations. I will never, ever, ever stop wanting you to hurt. Even with this... this change, it's only more powerful. Now I can feel myself shatter every time I violate your life... It's wonderful."

Maybe he should never have even dared raise the hope. Alex drew in a desperate breath, one hand dropping to support his body as the fear smashed into his stomach like a lead weight. He nearly broke then... but he could just raise watering eyes to watch the killer. "I... I shouldn't have thought it might change... but I... I-I hoped." A wan smile. "Hope... is all I have left now."

"I know." The feathers shifted as Damian extended a wing and reset it against his flank, quite clearly preparing himself. "I w-will always crush it... and yet... yet you... you rise again. On the fifth hour of my transformation, as my flimsy, terror-borne mental defences were ripped asunder and my mind began to be reforged... I lost all of my hope of ascending beyond what I was becoming. You wouldn't have. You would keep to the purity of yourself... Alex, I'm so... so sorry. Forgive me."

And then he moved and vanished and a blur of vast, dreadful blackness swooped up behind Alex and smashed him with the force of a wrecking ball. The fox could make no sound as he was blown across the room, smacking chest-first into the wall of dead smiles and falling seven feet down onto his back on the cold floor, ensuring that his ribs were broken both in front and behind. The breaks were perfect, neatly and savagely fractured all across his torso.

He gurgled feebly, the pain arcing everywhere like nothing he had ever felt. The skin hadn't been broken... no blood, yet. His lungs were seemingly in shock, too battered to function. The agony was horrific, unbearable. And then Damian reached inside his mind and twisted some strange part, brutally, and it was suddenly ten times worse. Twenty. The last of Alex's breath, tasting of coppery blood, expelled itself in a soft scream - and Damian let loose a quiet yelp as well, padding silently towards him. "Ahhhh... I can feel my misery. So many times I longed that I'd be truly aware of what the cruelty of what I did... now, I'm flying on it. Little... one..."

The gryphon scooped him up, tenderly, holding his limp, quivering form in a single claw and gazing down on him. "Hurt," he whispered, and the thumb-like talon found Alex's cracked sternum and squeezed hard, the fox jerking like a marionette. He managed to gulp a bloodied breath of air and let it loose in another scream, this one more intense, louder, fuller with pain, twitching madly as the fragments of his bones grated with each other. Could he hear the gory sound itself? No, Damian was just purring, or maybe growling, the sound throbbing through the fox's broken ribs.

At last, he was dropped to the floor, a broken toy once more. But not yet done with. Alex tried to raise himself up, and a solid wall of pain tore through his chest. He slumped back down on his belly, eyes level with the vast, scaly talons before him, tears pouring from his eyes. "I... please, f-finish it... o-oh g-g-god..." Was it pain, or was it the gryphon, who he cringed away from as Damian dipped his head low, nuzzling his side until he was rolled over, like a dead body examined by a curious animal. The simple act of landing on his back sent more jolts, and feebly, unable to stomach more than the tiniest sobs without triggering_ more_waves of sobs, Alex began to cry.

Something hot and damp landed on his chest, spreading into the thick, soft white fur, and his poor mind clutched instinctively at the soothingness of the warmth, breaking the line of his sobs with a small hiccup as he looked up. The gryphon was crying as well as he watched him, tears running along his cruel beak and falling onto Alex's chest. His weeping, boiling eyes met those of the damaged vulpine, and he chuckled weakly. "Oh, yes. We suffer together, don't we? Adorable... so exquisitely adorable..."

Another tear fell. Damian followed it down, nuzzling at the fox's chest as his prey cringed away, trying to worm his way into the floor. "Shhh, shhh," he whispered, words heavy with love and death, "You are mine, and... I am yours." and nipped a scrap of Alex's side in his hooked beak and tore along it, ripping his flesh from arm to hip.

The sobs stopped again, quite abruptly. Alex froze, feeling a whole new ocean of agony pouring into him. And then the wetness of the gryphon's tears dripped onto the open, bloodied gash.

Of course, oceans were salt water. The white-heat of the agony stung with it, shaking him until he could feel his broken bones quivering, and the scream, the first real scream, rattled around inside until Alex opened his muzzle and howled, arching his back, trying to clutch at the dripping, gory tear of flesh and muscle. His throat already felt raw, but still he screamed, because it hurt, and they would never stop hurting as long as they lived.

Damian groaned, pressing his bloodied beak into the wound even as he wept, letting tears seep into it, nibbling at the raw flesh and blood, like any bird of prey with their kill. He let his plaything writhe and howl, breathing hard, gorging on great vast lungfuls of the scent of Alex's pain.

It was a long time before the fox's howls finally faded and died into a whimpering silence. Some small part of him realised that he, too, was probably insane. He opened his mouth, and coughed up scarlet.

"You... g-god... w-why c-couldn't you..."

Damian raised his head, beak dripping slightly, and looked down at him with an eyeridge raised. The fox swallowed the bitter taste, and mumbled, "W-why.... why couldn't you j-just let me k-keep hating you."

The gryphon closed his eyes, licking his beak clean with a few slow, savouring lashes of his tongue. He shivered, looking down again. His eyes burned. "Because you're... you're better than that. And I'm worse. You s-should hate me, little one. I find hating myself... incredibly easy. But you're stronger than me."

He crouched low, spreading a claw across Alex's chest with perfect delicacy, letting it just avoid the agony of cracked ribs, and nuzzled his throat. "Maybe this will be the last time. Wouldn't it be better? Kinder, to let it end. But Alex, you're stronger than that as well. I know one day your mind will break beyond all repair. Yet it holds, no matter what I do to you." A talon brushed the fox's neck, tracing a flaying pattern with impossible tenderness. "Of course, that same strength, that diamond core to the snowflake, is why I do it. And continue to do it. You are yet to be destroyed, Alex, and neither you nor I will not find any peace until you are." His tones were almost seductive now, whispering warm, exotically musky breath. "Wouldn't... wouldn't it be.. kinder to give in? To stop your pointless squirming beneath my crushing ego? J-just... just to let yourself die?"

Alex's ruined chest screamed as he raised a hand, managing to place it weakly on the vast, feathered heat of the gryphon's chest. Damian was crying again, it seemed. The fox wondered if it could work that way, if his desperate resilience was conscious. He knew, and his tortured torturer knew, that he'd never be able to find out. "I... I won't. I-I've g-g-got to live."

"I..." the gryphon licked him, tasting his bare fur without blood for the first time. "I know. But I've got to... to kill you."

He lapped the tears from Alex's face, one by one, and whispered, "I'm sorry." Slowly, with the dreadful inevitability of tectonic plates, his beak opened, the hot, fleshy, cavernous cave inching towards Alex. He tried to wriggle away, to escape, and knew it would do nothing, but still, he keened in terror so all-consuming it blinded him until, with the loving gentleness of a murderer, his head and shoulders were once more engulfed.

The fox tried to pull back, felt his ribcage splinter, screamed, nearly blacked out, and was awakened immediately by his face being squashed into the hot, soft surface of Damian's tongue. He spluttered in the choking saliva, wriggling feebly as the pressure of humid, musky air around him changed, dripping ears tingling with the drop, and his body was slurped inch by shivering, bloodied inch into Damian's beak.

"P-please..." he whispered, words empty of anything save terror. "You... p-please, j-just..." but what was there to say? Who was he begging? The monster who murdered him forever, the trapped genius who mourned him? The dreadful abomination who was both simultaneously, and neither could respond. Damian purred softly, the sound shaking his prey's body, and pulled him off the ground. Of course, the gryphon had to squeeze a little to keep him steady. Squeeze around his ruined ribcage.

He howled into the loving heated darkness, wriggling with no regard for the spikes of agony caused by every movement of his abdominal muscles, and spreading his flavour across that rippling, lapping tongue, of course. The fox felt his arms subsumed into the wetness, pulling them up to hug himself. He... he remembered this. What he spent all his days trying not to remember. The heat, the lustful breath washing over, the endless soft, massaging flesh... comfort in the jaws of death only making it more horrendous.

He was lifted again, the gryphon must have been standing fully, his head now raised to the skies, and now the slight squeezing of powerful muscle on the vulpine's tortured body was to stop him from sliding further in too fast under the malicious pull of gravity. Alex tried to kick his dangling legs and hold himself back. There was another lustful growl and, in elegant synchronity, two razored claws slashed across his upper thighs, painting new spikes of agony in his mind and also severing part of his musculature. He might have been able to remember what the name was for the torn muscles, but Alex was more occupied with the new wave of pain tearing into his flesh. He screamed until his lungs had nothing left, leaking blood from torn lips down the hungry abyss before him. "NO! I'M S-SORRY, I'M SORRY... p-please..."

That was cruel. I'm sorry. It was delicious, too. _Damian's mental tones were better at expressing his emotions, apparently. The desire and despair both seemed to thrum through Alex's head in a way normal sound couldn't convey. _I have to... to take every second I can. Your wriggly legs were... unbalancing me, and they weren't inside, so I had to calm them down. He realised that the tremors shaking his descent into his predator's body were not all lustful growls. The gryphon's weeping was stronger again, apparently.

I... I suppose it is, yes. How can I weep in this perfect moment? This supremest of all ecstasies to a body and mind beyond any... mortal bounds of sensation? It's strange... but suffer it... suffer it we must.

He was inches from the rippling dusky archway of the gryphon's throat. The fox cringed into the lapping pool of liquids, his mind on fire, his body burning up with pain. "W... why..." he whispered. "Why d-do we h-have to? Y-you... you and I... neither of us w-wants this. S-so... so... j-j-just why?"

A memory broke through Alex's splintering mind: the first time he had been squeezed into the deathly innards of his murderer, falling into eternal sleep inside Damian's belly, and whispering a feeble plea of "why?". He had died so many times, and the question was still as horrific, and still just as unanswerable.

Damian was darkly silent save for his quiet purring sobs, letting his tongue lap along the ragged curve of Alex's flank to enjoy the resultant twitches. This time though, this death, he was to give a real answer. I... I don't know. Eight hundred years, and I'm no closer to understanding why we, why I must commit all that I commit. All I can do is give in to it.

With a final, sad stroke of his prey's quivering legs, the gryphon's throat convulsed in cruel sweltering fleshy lust, and Damian swallowed.

The heat seemed to double, Alex's claustrophobic surroundings surrounding him suddenly without a millimetre to spare. His head and shoulders was wrapped completely in pulsing, rippling flesh. He felt his shaking sobbing, form squeezed deeper as a minor massaging gulp, or maybe an erratic sob, shook the tunnel around his body and slipped him deeper.

His slender muzzle seemed to be acting like the tip of a wedge: stretching Damian's throat apart to admit the rest of him. He could breath, just, in the sweltering air, and that meant he could whimper, cringe, try to stutter pleas... but now, there was nothing to beg that didn't sound empty. He would never convince his killer to slow the slightest mercy, because even the killer couldn't convince himself. This weakness and confusion of mind was all that was needed to let his instincts take over, leaving him to sob, wriggle and squirm as another solid swallow tore across his body, crushing in a slow, rippling burst which dragged him into the dripping embrace. Alex's chest flared in agony, provoking another burst of desperate action where he tried to wriggle, tried to kick something free, tried to form a word which would have some effect on his - on either of their - hopeless and helpless situations. His ears could hear the echoing gurgles and pulsing of the gryphon's body, waiting for him to join them. He couldn't deny Damian's greed it's prize.

Another swallow, softer and more tender, lapped up his belly into the darkness, leaving just his paws and the tip of his lashing, quivering tail. The fox clenched his fists, biting into the pads on his hands until they started to bleed. The misery, the horror, the endlessness of it all - him and his killer both - was overwhelming him. Alex cried weakly, squirming for what little he could as tears poured, leaping into the darkness before him.

And then, softly, a great heated warmth enveloped his terrified mind. Damian's vaster consciousness, weeping again, clasped itself to its preything, at once blinding the fox with terror and pain and comforting him. Even as his body neared the drop, they were crying. Together, alone in the lonely darkness of the gryphon's throat.

***

And now, we die..

What has Alex done to me. What monster is this now? I am subsumed in the crest of a vast wave, an emotion above and beyond pain and ecstasy, despair and joy. I have never felt more keenly not more painfully. Oh, it hurts. It crushes my never-tiring legs, nearly buckles my nigh-divine form. I stand as if holding a planet on my shoulders, four legs spread, head bowed, tears bleeding from the burning orbs of molten agony my eyes have become. I feel it. The soft, squirming weight sliding into me, squeezing my throat, cutting off unneeded oxygen from my lungs engorging my neck, caressing the opening of my ravenous insides with just a morsel to tease it and raise it's appetite. An immortal who needs no food, consumed with hunger and gluttonous desire. Every hair electrifies me, every breath that shakes Alex's lungs a cacophony of perfect pleasure within as a second swallow, this one gentler, slides his flawless form another few inches deeper. I am...

No, no, no more holding back. No more white lies to preserve the pathetic perfection of my tortures. I am a creature of abysmal destruction and nothing else. I had a name once, but threw it away when everything else was torn from me, creating an avatar of cruelty and pain instead and called it Damian. I stand in the company of the last memories of a thousand innocents lost forever to my cruelty. Every second of my unlife, I have defiled the Kas'ahr, the system of fair hunting, of the preservation of sapient life, upon which my... my silenced family, now only a memory and a daubing of oil on canvas, hoped to build a better world. And yet, as this screams through my veins and my shoulders shake with it, I can simultaneously order devastating muscles to swallow. They are murder weapons all, but I the murderer.

He's closer now, slender hips tickling the edges of my throat as his waist is wrapped in loving murderous gullet. I hold Alex there, at the last real bastion of resistance his body could possibly offer - after this passes my beak and is tucked away, only his legs will be free, and the long, slim appendages will not even be able to try to hold back the tide of swallows. He will be forever mine, his demise only prolonged because it prolongs the pleasure.

I am beginning to sink, my legs to buckle as the ecstasy and the pain tears me into a thousand splinters. I can't stand. I can't stand it. I have to, have to hope that the ultimate hope I have for Alex is true, and that he will die soon if it does. Neither of us will be able to live and bare this agony.

The fox feels the impending tipover, his terrified instinct tries desperately to find some hold to grab onto or support himself, and of course, he feels deliciously fails. By now, every inch of him has been practically submerged in saliva, his body trying weakly to acclimatise to the immense heat and massaging pressure of his surroundings. The only result is, to me, a drop in the intensity of his pained squirming, making it more frantic and yet weaker, more tender and helpless than before. It is wonderful. How can I weep when I feel such blissful submission within me?

Yet I do. I keen desperately as my muscles ripple, the soft warmth embracing another inch of Alex, preparing for the final gulp of no return. This be it. My tongue entwines with the fox's paws, squeezing over him to wring out every drop of flavour and coincidentally prompt a short burst of ticklish jitters which send sparks across my mind. But they only last a moment before the weeping little creature who I've killed and cannot let die slumps, slowly twitching less until he grows paralytically still inside, toes quivering only at the occasional breath of cooler air from the outside world. Then, as I lose control at last and my legs collapse from under me, my silent, sobbing form sprawled on the floor of my room of the dead, I shut my beak and no more air reaches Alex.

Should we speak? Are there words? Once, very likely this time as well, I would have taunted Alex, made him beg, made him understand how close he was to oblivion. Now we are new, our hearts ripped out and fused to one. Now I cannot laugh, only whisper.

I'm sorry.

And the throat convulses, my gullet squeezing itself around its prey and pulling him in. The hips stretch me slightly, and then it's just my little one's legs, trailing and teasing as a sobbing, quivering innocent is condemned again. He slides down smoother than liquid, gliding along the compressing tunnel of flesh with a blissful effortlessness. And still he breathes, shaking the muscle, every frightened quiver a firestorm of pleasure and a downpour of anguish._ For the first time in... eight hundred and nine years, I adopt to pose of dread, feel my claws slipping up to cover my ears, my wings - no longer small and half-formed, now vaster than any of ours - spreading to cloak me almost entirely beneath a feathery cloak against the fear. I remember that storm - the first solar tempest I had experienced, and the thunder, the rocketing roiling cloudscapes, the power of it all it terrified the little black hatchling, curling him into a frightened heap of shivering dread. Then, I had... I had comforters. My storm wasn't weathered alone. Now I curl up just so, huddled now around the pulsing weight of pleasure slipping deeper deep within, and cry again. The storm is inside now, for I am the storm in all it's cruel majesty._

Only when a quiet murmur echoes from the quivering bulge heading towards my stomach, do I realise that I've spoken that in Alex's head. I hear his whimpered confusion in all it's blissful adorable perfection, and my heart stops again. What does it matter. We're beyond everything now, and we've never been more intimate or more alone together.

Slowly, still crying, my stomach accepts its prey with the joy of a long-lost friend. Alex is pressed out into the, dark chamber over the course of minutes, each part of him squeezed by the throat in its loving cruelty as it says goodbye. I feel the ache to let him suffer longer, let the acids rise and burn for hours... days, weeks, how long can a body take, how long can you suffer for me little one, but _ no _. NO.

"Mercy." my voice is cracked, broken, my throat aching with sweet, sweet sensation of its living cargo. I'll be merciful as I can in my mercilessness, but I can only give my darling little one the few small peaces which it pleasures me to have. How else could we comfort each other, snuggle in the darkness, lick his tears as we weep? I'll just curl up, still battened down against the storm beneath my wings, and feel my stomach shift and quiver, the bulge crushed against the floor beneath my own bulk. Poor little fox, forever in the beast's belly. It must be so cramped inside...

Oxygen deprivation is taking it's toll. Alex's mind is dimming, his sobs are growing weaker, his squirms becoming gentler until it feels as though his is caressing my sensitive belly of his own volition, with affection rather than dread. What a wonderful world that would be...

But no, we suffer. Little one?

The trembling little creature stiffens, shivers, curled and surrounded by tight rippling walls of wet flesh. Already the natural enzymes are giving a tingling. He's terrified by that of course, fearing it won't end, it will burn and sear. And that terror is far, far too beautiful to deny,o I am helpless to stop the possibility hanging in Alex's mind. Even as he breaks into a shuddering fit from it, quivering and alone inside me like the perfect preything he is, I let the terror happen. That is the scope of my vileness.

But he doesn't beg. I am afforded that grace which I don't deserve at least. Maybe this was really all it took for your to understand how helpless your pleading was, hmm? Even I can't change my actions, o matter how much I plead.

"I-I..." the little voice, lost in my belly, is growing slurred and sleepy. Alex is mine. Couldn't we just let it end, let his soul slip away into the night? Never. He speaks again.

"Just a... a l-life w-which was free. That was all... a-all..." the little voice, perfect crystal tones, is dying, and already his heart is fluttering like a bird against its cage bars. I have to strain supernatural minds and ears to hear.

"T-that w-was all... you... wanted, w-w-wasn't it? Y-you.. as... well..."

And we're fading, fading, fading as I scream my ecstasy of total despair into the room of the dead. We are gone. We belong here. Together.

Goldeneye 13/02/2014