Cesare watched the blood-soaked girl walk to the stairs; a path of bloody footprints left behind her. Soaked in blood and clothed in victory, she was carnage in its most base and striking form. A dark corona of sexuality unfurled from her, caressing across the crowd, sending them to a fever pitch. She was sex, blood, and slaughter, the living daughter of the Dark Mother, an avatar of the blackest of sexual desires. She didn't accept the depraved needs of the crowd, she glorified them.
Anastasia took the stairs with slow, sultry grace, knowing Cesare would be waiting for her. Reaching the top, she considered him over the small space that divided them. Drinking in his body with hungry need, her eyes swam with cruel desires.
Anastasia had gloried in the pain filled body under her, straddling her victim as he screamed his life away between her thighs. The chant of the crowd as they worshipped her for every tortured scream she tore from brutalized meat. It wasn't only desire, it was the hunger of the Ebon Flame bleeding into her mind, its spiteful desires joining and warping her own.
The ebony waters had risen, drowning her in dark depths, driving her to fuck the boy, to take his flesh into her own, to possess his seed and soul in an orgy of perversions. To lap up his agony, feast on its terror, and feed the beast that tore at her guts. Only one thread had kept her from falling into the blessed, raging night, of sinking into the defiling flames, and that was getting back to Cesare.
The blending of her soul with the Ebon Flame was bare in her eyes. Harab Serapel fed on monstrous desires, they gloried in sadism, domination, submission, and masochism. It was ambrosial, the very stuff that fueled the baneful Ebon Flame and the Harab Serapel's decadent souls. That's why she fed on Cesare. Degrading, violent, sadistic, and cruel, Cesare's soul was an everlasting wellspring of violations. Steeped in years of hate, born in the sewers of man, honed on the innocent whetstone of a child. It wasn't just Anastasia that wanted him, it was the force that had birthed her soul.
Cesare caught her as she lunged at him. Anastasia's lips hit his with bruising force, taking his mouth in vengeful need. She thrust into his mouth, her tongue a darting thing that devoured. Blood-soaked clothing smeared across his hands, tightening his arms around her, he met her need with his own.
With single minded focus, her hands swept down his back, pushing into his pants, she gripped his ass hard, nails digging into flesh. A low moan escaped her as she felt his blood run under her fingers. She wanted to hurt him, to drink his pain, it fed the damp heat between her legs.
Tangling his tongue with hers, he drank in the blackness spewing from her soul. Greedily taking it in, Cesare exulted in the pain she caused him. Wet hands slippery with blood, pushed into her skirt and under her yoga pants, taking her soft ass into his hands, squeezing hard enough to bruise. Anastasia breathed an aching whine, pain and pleasure blurring, leaving no lines to cross.
A feverish, sickly sexuality burned from her as hot as the Ebon Flame. She wanted to devour him, to gut him of life, leaving only ash behind. To dominate and master. To hurt him and see him writhe in agony. It was part of her, a genetic code written into bone. A cat's desire to mount the female and tear at her until blood filled its mouth.
Pushing her back, he pinned her to the banister, gripping the back of her head he plundered her mouth with his tongue. Her nails carved into his ass, spilling blood down his legs.
Growling, he wedged his leg between her thighs, Anastasia's hot core riding the hard muscle. A low moan of need breathed into the air between them. Pulling back, he met crazed dark eyes of perverse desires. Revolting against his control, she pushed forward, snarling at Cesare's controlling grip.
"Back. It. Down. Princess." The dark words rumbled through the air, shadows clawing deeper into the darkness. Black despair on a wedding day, melancholy tasting of old hate, the words tainted the air with viciousness. "Dial it down or I'll turn you over this banister and fuck you raw." The growl resounded through the air, reality straining under its unholiness.
She met his eyes for an eternal moment, her fire as hot as the sun and black as midnight, but it couldn't compete. He was the cold of the void between stars, the endless bitterness of an abandoned child, the madness of teenage suicide, the pure evil born in the heart of an innocent babe. His soul devoured her heat and screamed in a glassine voice for more.
Shuddering in his arms, the heat slowly dwindled off her body, streaming into the cold emptiness of his soul. "I'm ... good" The weak words didn't change their positions. Cesare liked her this way, pinned against the railing, riding his thigh with her wet heat, breathing his air. Her own hands showed no desire to move from his slowly bleeding ass.
"It's the joining," Kali said from beside them, eyes skimming over their embrace without concern. "Cesare's pushing you closer and closer to the Ebon Flame. You're joining with the source of our power, maturing at a super accelerated pace. I warned you."
"It's changing me," Anastasia said, statement and question in one.
Reaching out to sooth her, Kali stopped at Anastasia's flinch. "No more than puberty did." She sounded old and weary all of sudden. "We're creatures of the flame, child. It's who we are, we can no more run from it than we can from our own souls. We feed on Desiderium, the blackest of desires, it's what we're made of, the sacrament of the Ebon Flame."
"I've never been attracted to … this," Anastasia said weakly, her hands coming out from under Cesare's pants stained in blood.
"There was a time when you thought boys were gross too," Kali said, words soft from centuries of use, the same conversation playing over thousands of years.
Cesare let Anastasia go slowly as the girl's eyes clouded with confusion. "You have to be careful. As you fall deeper into the abyss, you'll join with it, taking its desires, its evil, into your soul." Kali eyed Cesare briefly before looking back at her daughter. "I told you that you'd need an anchor, someone that can bear the flame. Weakness breeds cruelty, turning the need to inflict pain into a need to torture and kill."
Anastasia nodded, eyes clearing as new facts settled into place, her life realigning. She met the ancient woman's eyes evenly. "That won't be a problem. I only ever plan to be with Cesare, unless you think he's not strong enough to face it?"
A slow, tight smile cut across Kali's face. "Interesting, you plan to only have him, yet you won't commit." The words drained the blood from Anastasia's face. "You're fooling yourself, thinking you can keep him as an option while you hold for a partner to feed ambitions hunger. Do you think Cesare's going to stay unclaimed for long? Do you think he'll wait while you hold out for a more connected cock?"
Shaking her head, Kali laid a possessive hand on Cesare's shoulder. "I have nothing in life that's like him. When I leave here, I'll walk into a world where no one cares for me. No one sees Kali, no promise is made without self-interest, no love is given without payment. People take; they tear what they want from your heart and soul, offering worthless promises in return. The greater your power, the shred from your soul. A child believes they can have it all, an adult realizes everything costs, you sacrifice what you want, for what you need. Which is Cesare is to you, because I know what he is to me."
Caught in her mother's words, Anastasia's face slowly transformed from defiant to horrified. Sex is easy to find, lust as cheap as promises of love. People are selfish, needy things, more than willing to drown you so they can stay above the water. To put off commitment for some mythical parade of whores willing to sell themselves was as worthless as sand. Only loneliness and melancholy exist when you live for the future instead of butchering the moment for every piece of meat you can glean from its bones.
Breaking from the scene, Cesare left the box without a backward look. It wasn't the best send off, but life was like that, if it noticed you were down it couldn't resist kicking you in the balls as you tried to get up.
Hitting the ground, the silence of the crowd struck him. They'd cheered for the others in terrified whispers and ecstatic chants, but they had only silence for him. The boy he'd fight waited at the slaughter line. Inky hair kissed his shoulders, black eyes watching Cesare shrink the distance between them.
Where there was life there had to be not just death but ravenous un-life. The Onibi was a creature born from that corrupted desert of un-life, it killed plants by being near them, sucking the life from people with a touch. They were the unseen cancer you could never shake free from, the poison in the water you couldn't taste. Living death, they killed by presence alone, their touch distilled death.
Its eyes ran over him, puzzled at his lack of weapons. Of all the Furies, everyone had thought Cesare would come with a crutch, a trick to even the odds. Puzzlement gave way to wariness as Cesare closed the distance.
The Onibi could kill with a touch, lethal for a human to even be near, it ate at the world, poisoning the air and stripping meat of life. Immune to energy in all its forms, it was intimately familiar with its weakness, distance the one true way to kill them, arrows, bullets, and spears, anything that kept it away. No one was deranged enough to get close and fight it hand to hand. It begged the question what Cesare knew that it didn't.
Still more than twenty feet from it, the Onibi acted, better to take a slap on the wrist then let the madman close. A pulse of diseased corruption burst from corrupted flesh. Malignant black spots grew across its skin, devouring porcelain white, leaving a dusky matte in its place. Grass withered, turning yellow, succumbing fully into an oily, diseased black.
Its aura raced for Cesare, grass dying in its wake, an oily stain that kept pace with the sprinting edge of un-life. The Root Chakra sprang open as the Kundalini raised it head, serpentine hood shedding clean light across his soul. Fiery prana saturated muscles and bone, strength blooming under a scarlet touch.
Aleph cut his senses, replacing them with stark reality. The aura became visible to Cesare, a smoky dome of energy sucking the life from the grass, stripping air of oxygen, tainting the world with gluttonous hunger. Foul and disgusting, the Onibi was a conduit for something beyond the veil of reality, pulsing veins running off its body, disappearing into dimensions of alien madness.
Beth surged into his skin, riding the deep anger of a mother whose child's threatened, an unrelenting fury that met the black wave with single-minded resolve. He wasn't sure it would work. It hadn't protected him from the match he'd burned himself with, but the aura of un-life wasn't the innocent hunger of flame, it was a midden heap of giggling madness and wanton greed. Beth met the power with every bit of strength she could push through Cesare's rotting flesh. Her anger was a hot presence in his mind, burning the tendrils that invaded his body with holy flame.
She couldn't make him immune without turning his soul to ash, nothing but tinder before the holocaust of her power. Tendrils worked around her protection, latching onto his body, tearing essence from meat with lascivious need. It hurt, like hot pokers twisting into flesh, probing for sensitive spots to nest.
Before he'd been Alexandra's juice bag, it might have shaken him. But nothing came near to that cold fire racing through his veins, her pleasure born from his bleeding. There were no words to chain and reason with the violation and domination she laid on his mind and body. Stealing his life, drop by drop, relishing the agony flavored blood, wallowing in the ecstasy of the violation. No, this couldn't touch that.
Gritting his teeth, Cesare pushed through the pain, and stepped deeper into the aura. The Onibi's eyes widened, shock and fear flashing across its face. Nothing could stand in its aura without the torment shattering mind or dying swiftly as life was wrenched screaming from body. The aura didn't just hurt, it killed, who'd stay inside a cauldron of tortured hell carving bits of life off second by second?
Any idiot can take a life. A true killer pushed through danger, pain, and slaughter, to take its prey. A killer hungered for murder in the way of a starving child left hollow and alone. There was no plan B, nothing kept in reserve. Committed in a way humans could never understand, an animal killed with everything on the line.
Stalking through the death field, Cesare kept his pace to a steady prowl. This was as much about the pageant as it was winning. This show was for the jackals eyeing him from just out of sight. The ones that walked in the shadows and wondered if he was strong or lucky. Cesare had to make a statement, being strong was second to being seen as strong.
It didn't matter if you were strong, it only mattered if people thought you were. Some of the baddest motherfuckers alive fought everyday just to keep their thrones of rotting flesh and diseased shit. But those seen strong, they got breathing space to gather power.
Shaking off its shock, the Onibi slid easily into a fighting stance. Taking on a glossy darkness, death gathered around its fingers. Weapons would corrode and break apart under the thing's corrosive aura. No blade could match the lethality of its fingers when its malignant aura saturated cells and flesh.
The moment collapsed around Cesare, razor sharp instincts dissecting seconds. Truer than thought, purer than morality. His body changed, muscles relaxing and tightening in strange ways, his walk turning feral. A grin, tight as a slum lords, spread across Cesare's face as adrenaline dumped clean and beautiful into his veins.
He wanted this, craved the fight as deeply as women's wet heat. Cesare gloried at the feel of carnage on the air as it slid across his skin with a lover's caress, barbed chains of behavior falling from his shoulders. He didn't need to hold back, not when his life was the prize. He could revel in the pain of his victim, the tearing of flesh, the breaking of a boy into quivering meat.
Stepping into the boy's strike rang, the Onibi was a blur of black. Cesare weaved under the defiling black of its punch, contorting with a serpent's instinctive grace. The boy was recovering from his punch when Cesare's fist drove into the Onibi's side, breaking ribs and tearing a pained grunt from the monster.
Glittering fingers of corruption snatched for Cesare. Sidestepping away, his body moved on instinct informed by senses birthed before the gods. Cesare's kick flashed out, cracking into the man's knee with shattering force, tearing tendons and breaking bones. Screaming, the thing collapsed to one knee as the leg buckled.
Lunging wildly, the things hand grabbed Cesare's ankle. Prana was torn out through flesh, pain as hot as the burning cold of the arctic. Cesare's fist hammered down with terrible force as his scream of void black hate sundered the air. The shoulder joint exploded apart, muscles torn from moorings, flesh ruptured, splintered bones ripping through flesh. The hand that gripped him, convulsed open, the Onibi's high pitched scream lancing through the air.
The snap kick unfurled, gathering power from legs, multiplying with the swing of hips, turning explosive from the power of his core. Cracking into its head, the kick tore off its nose, leaving a weeping cavity, deforming its face with bone shards from shattered bones. The aura shredded under the agony; wisps of dark energy devoured by the world's cancerous life energy. The arena filled with the boy's wet whines of pain.
Cesare kicked the Onibi onto his back. Reaching into the broken meat of its mouth, blood, spit, bone, and teeth swimming in a sewer of shattered boy. Pushing deep, Cesare grabbed the things tongue as the boy gurgled agony at him, eyes rolling in terror. Taking grip of the scarlet worm, Cesare stood in one smooth motion, ripping the things tongue from its gaping maw.
The tongue rested in his hands, a fleshy, red slug trailing strips of meat. No one cheered his win, no one clapped for him, no one was happy he'd won. Greg's awed voice came quietly over the speakers. "See No Evil. Hear No Evil. Speak No Evil." The three mutilations the Furies had punished the Hitokiri with.
Nothing more came from the announcer, nothing needed to be said. The brutality of the Furies spoke for itself. To challenge the Furies was to lose everything. Not just your life, but your family, friends, body, and mind. The Furies would ravage you, take everything, leaving you in the ashes of your dreams. They weren't fighters playing a game or kids trying to assert dominance. The Furies were utter annihilation, degradation, agony forever more, amen.
Dropping the tongue, Cesare turned and started back to the box seat where the women stood at the rail. In that silence, a stray clapping started, scattered groups of kids standing up. They wore black shirts with a silver wolfs head on the shoulder. Spread through the stadium in isolated islands, they stood tall, clapping under the eyes of the school. He recognized his students and some of the kids they'd helped. They were no more than a handful or two, but they stood and clapped in quiet congratulations at his win.
The arena was as quiet as the grave except for the steady clapping. Taking the stairs, he heard the students exit the stadium. A lot had happened today; they'd gotten what they'd come for and then some. Whispers spread, everyone trying to make sense of the upset.
They'd wanted him to fail. Cesare was a lightning rod for controversy, turning the school upside down with his unchecked ruthlessness. The people he helped were a minority, the cast offs and unwanted, no one cared if he was helping them. It they'd cared in the first place, he'd never have had to step in. Cesare had overturned thousands of years of tradition in only a few months, spit in the face of the strongest, and created a place that teetered on the edge of chaos.
The women waited at the top of the stairs, they didn't clap or scream congratulations. It would be disrespectful, making it seem as if they'd doubted him. No one knew how hard he'd worked to get to this place, how much of his blood he'd spilled or how he'd maimed his soul.
Even with the work he'd put in, he hadn't won with skill. His strength hadn't taken the gold, not even the Sen he'd mastered with Tamlin. Beth's benevolence had saved his ass. It had only been a guess, a thin thread to base his life on, but when you walked the edge as a way of life, odds had a way of turning meaningless. There would come a time when his luck ran out, when only skill would do, but that hadn't been today.
Eyes burning with emotions too pure for sanity, Alexandra opened the gate for him. She glowed with pride at serving a man like him, ruthless, merciless, cruel, and vicious. In her world, those words meant strength and she wouldn't serve a man that didn't embody them. Desire had sparked her soul at the bloody fight, twisting into barbed arousal at the Onibi's terrorized screams. They locked eyes as Cesare passed her, acknowledging things they'd never had words for. Falling in behind him, she faced the others with him.
Alexandra believed in him, craved for him to carve a place for himself out of the screams of his victims, but the others didn't have her faith. They eyed him with a mixture of curiosity, raw calculation, and shock. They'd thought they knew what he was capable of, until now. The Onibi's death field was unstoppable, it had no counter, killing anything that lived without question.
The change was seen in eyes, a tightness to lips, and the set of the shoulder, realization stamping flesh with knowing. The unknown depths to his strength, the certainty that if he continued to grow his power would eclipse their own. Relationships are based on power; every one of them stamped with dominance played out in heart and soul. They'd thought his powers were limited to sneaky tricks and strategy, that fact was proven misshapen and false.
"How?" Anastasia asked, eyes running over his body as if she could spot the change.
Smiling, he accepted his duffel from Alexandra. "I found allies with a vested interest in seeing I stay in one piece."
Frowns marred the three women as they realized he wouldn't tell them. It was hypocritical to hold back; they'd been more than honest about their powers. But they were strong, feared, and respected, they had more ace cards than he had cards in his deck. Surprise, daring, and trickery, were all he had, backed by a few actual powers. They weren't on his side, they were gunning for number one, themselves.
Kali nodded, eyes hard and sober. She understood why he held back, maybe even approved, but that didn't mean she liked it. Walking forward, she kissed him gently. "I have to go. Your fight was magnificent." The words were fired back at him as she made for the bleachers where her harem waited.
Accepting a paper from Micheal, she was talking even as she read. "I need to know exactly …."
Anastasia came up on his other side, watching her mother's swiftly disappearing form. "So goes my childhood. She walked away more than she walked toward me." Anastasia's eyes cleared, banishing sorrow back to the sewer that had birthed it. "Don't let it bother you, a lot of people depend on her, and in the grand scheme of things our feelings don't mean more than their lives." It came with the ease of long practice, a mantra created of a child's need to understand why mommy never had time.
Great people were all the same. It didn't matter if they were good or bad. They gave themselves to the world, burning up to fix it, willing to die for what they believed in. They lived and died for a cause, power, peace, justice, god, land, or money, it was all the same. Each of them made the choice that what they fought for was more important than their families. Show me a great man, and I'll show you a neglected child.
There was no way around it. The day only had so many hours and every minute you had to choose what was important. Where you spent your time was where you left your love, what you nurtured with your attention is what you'd be known for. Gandhi's known as a man of peace, not a man who loved his children and put them first.
"Let's get some food," Cesare said, pulling the unresisting Anastasia with him. Alexandra stepped close, hands pressed between them. He knew where he'd spend his time, knew what he'd nurture, and what he loved, the world had never even been in the running.