Art of Teryte // Temptation to Self-Annihilation (Patreon)

Consider me tempted... :D Another artwork of Teryte done for my wonderful friend and co-author and generally an amazing person and writer - Aksan. It's a delight to do these artworks monthly. The stories are incredible, I definitely encourage everyone to read!

Here goes another great one... <3

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Blood, dried by the heat and cracked by her effort, fell away from the woman’s snarling features. Her parched mouth was too dry to drool, even as it hung open, slack, and her ragged breath heaved through it. And so the flakes were drily crushed as she dragged her weak form over them and into what she once called the village hall. Now it was strewn with the very people that had lived their lives here. Crawling through the viscera corrupted every memory it touched of the world before: friends’ faces twisted in their death throes; the tattooed script adorning her father’s skin, an aspiration since her childhood, flayed away into strips just big enough for her to recognise it and regret it; and over it all a smell like a spiced hog roast, permeating from the other end of the collapsing structure.

Self-indulgent mastication, the sound of good food being shamelessly enjoyed; perverted by scale, it overwhelmed even the crackling fires. A pause, and swilling, glugging, a family dinner of wine gone in a moment. Feet still lashed together, the woman forced herself towards the sound, towards the smell. It turned sour and rancid in the mouth, as if aware of its sinister purpose. For a moment it felt like it moved towards the smell of beef, that rare treat upon the broken tables she crawled past. A pause, and a scoff. All sound faded but for the crackling fire, her own pained, hoarse breath, and his, rough and sticky with spoils of his conquest clinging in his throat. She lifted her head to the sound of it being cleared and was washed by the hot breath, intense smoke with a sulphurous edge.

Even knelt low to use the human table, the gold-crowned tyrant was immense. Wide, muscular form picked out with golden platescales on his upper body that burst with flickering light, like a tree burning from the inside. Scars covered the immense flesh from tooth and claw, and spear and arrow alike. The sharp, jutting beardscales shifted side to side with a grinding noise as golden eyes scoured her. Grabbed around the neck and head she was hauled up onto the table. Stripped bones were brushed aside with the woman as he settled her, sat upright, on the edge of the table, near the end. Tiredness threatened to slump her, but the claw that was left under her jaw, behind the bone, became the hook she hung from. The last of her strength kept it from drawing blood.

Fully within the heat of the dragon now, she felt herself examined, too weary to care as her hair was drawn back, or her skirts lifted. A knot formed in her core as the binding that held her legs together was torn away. Under the scintillation of those eyes, her tension must have made it through the caked mess on her face in some form or other. Letting her legs hang limp, the huge figure reached for his goblet of wine; as it was emptied on her face she couldn’t help herself, gasping for the sweet relief of liquid on her lips as a scaled thumb rubbed her face clean.

“Thirsty, thirsty girl,” the voice grumbled, sounding like a part of the fire that had spewed from those same lips just hours before. “Does she want more?” The finger beneath her jaw followed, or perhaps led, the nod of her head. “What is it worth?” Wakefulness shot through her form, and her body was fully her own again, even as she spread her legs and offered it away. Another scoff, a pause, and a chuckle; the huge head shook as he refilled the goblet from the cask and drank.

“Is that not what you want from us?” she asked with what would have been a teary note if she had them to spare. Instead it was rough crackling that shaped her voice.

“It is . . .” the dragon rumbled into his wine before draining it. “But you are bold to presume it is yours to give when I could take it just as easily.”

“They say some of you prefer it when we offer ourselves . . .”

“Is that what they are saying of my brothers now?”

She nodded, took in breath to speak, but was denied.

“You broke free from your bonds—did the others?”

“They flee.”

“And they will suffer for it soon enough,” the dragon muttered, still felt through all of the woman even as the creaking words barely used his voice. “I had hoped that whatever woman broke from those bonds and crawled not from, but to, the flame might have something more to offer than spreading her own legs.”

“What else does a beast like you value?”

A bone was lifted and its meat slowly stripped away by the gleaming fangs, long and thick as her thumb. “Can you cook? Blend spices?” With the words came an open dish of red powder shoved her way, bringing with it tears at its violent scent.

“No . . .”

“Can you . . .” Huge fingers rubbed together as he sought the word. “Ferment? Distil? Brew? No. Can you make wine? This?” The goblet came close enough for its fruity scent to erase for a moment the horror around the woman, before it was snatched away and her head shook as it fell. “Then why would I waste it on you, whose only skills seem to be speaking and spreading her legs?”

“I can hunt.”

“Your fellow humans?”

“Deer, boar, pheasant.”

“It has been a long time since I’ve bothered with any of those,” the dragon muttered, pausing a little as he saw the woman’s eyes widen at the spread of cooked meat upon the table and chuckling. “Why would I hunt twice?”

A dry gulp was all she managed.

“It is not your fate, if that is what you fear.”

“After all, I have to live to bear your seed,” she rasped to her feet.

“As is the purpose of all your kind,” the tyrant added, like a proud parent or mentor, grinning as he poured more wine. “Do you read?” The words were met with raised brows, and the golden eyes watched as a drop of wine freed from them was plucked up from her cheek by eager tongue. “Your knowledge, is it read, or simply heard?”

“Both,” the word fell from her lips, the first step on a path she realised too late she was taking, “I can read, and write, but there are not too many texts out here, so I listen to the travelling merchants and—”

A book had been dug out of the bag beside the table and was presented to her now. “Read.”

Taking it up she found herself holding a journal bound in reddish-brown leather, unengraved, but firmly imprinted with the shape of a hand, once, often, held by a creature of habit. The opening pages were scratched by pen or lead in a hurried hand, then scribbled or rubbed away.

“I said read.” The dragon’s words took up his frustration with familiarity and ease.

“I am finding where to begin,” she croaked in protest, trying to stay on the composed side of pleading, “There is naught yet worth reading.”

“Anything she has written is worth reading,” he growled.

“‘Dear—’, ‘I fear that—’, ‘—tulip—’, ‘Whatever may yet come—’, ‘My name—’.” She threw the fragments out and then met the golden eyes. “Let me find where she first wanted this to be read?” Silence was all she got as she began her search. A few pages more and a block of erased text with a note, a huge number, it had been erased twice and replaced. It took a moment to parse it, and longer yet to find it in the irregularly numbered pages. She scanned it, spotted the margin note before she began and sighed at its new destination.

“Does this bore you?”

“It intrigues me,” she admitted, beginning towards the back of the book. “But it is complicated, she has tried many times to write the first words for you.” A pause, planned, and the book closed around her fingers. “If you wish to hear her words more clearly,” she said before an involuntary hesitation, “Then some more wine would sweeten my voice.”

To her surprise it came by his hand, supporting her and the goblet as he aided her through the remains of it. This time she noticed its saccharine edge, brought on by the warmth it had taken on in the presence of the dragon. Drinking from the goblet she felt the spices he left on it begin to tingle on her lips. From bloodstained hands she felt a gentle touch.

But, as quickly as it had happened, the moment passed. Now her attention was back on the page, this was what she had been looking for, and she was glad fatigue subdued any emotion that made it to her face.

Do not read this aloud, you’re good at following instructions if you’re here, heed that one. In reading this you are in the early stages of being my successor. I will not tell you what path to walk, but I will tell you this: he is honest, he never touched me in anger or in lust, and I mean every word of what follows on this page. Now be a good girl and read the next paragraph for him before he worries.

An involuntary glance at the dragon saw how low his patience had burnt. There was a vibrant intensity to the gold eyes as they drew close, looming over the book before he said again: “Read.”

My beloved, and my rock, I am sure by the time you hear this I am long returned, and I would be offended if this moment came too soon. I tried to write these words a hundred times, sat in your arms in a thousand places across this wonderful world. But only now, as I realise who would be reading these words, do I feel I know where to begin. You gave me something incredible, something so much more than a simple human life. And I spent it giving you words and guidance; there is more still in these pages now you have found your key to them. But this journal is not for you, it was never for you; it is for my successor. Be kind to her, and treat her as you have treated me. But for now, for you, I’ve two things to say. I hope it has been a while before you tried to replace me, I know what I meant to you. Take her to visit my ashes.

As the dragon let the pregnant silence grow, the effects of the wine on the woman’s famished stomach began to tell. Too thirsty to consider it. Too hungry to resist it. Swaying as she sat upon the table the huge hand of the dragon met her side to steady her.

“You crawled into this burning hall, because you want to live?”

A single trembling nod as the book was closed and held tight in her arms.

“Yet you knew well that I wouldn’t kill you.”

“It wasn’t death by your hand that I feared.”

“Do you even understand what you fear? What you are considering?”

For a long while she stared at the book in her hands, before hugging it to her chest again. “Did she?”

“No . . .” came the slowly rumbled response, “I don’t believe she did.”

“Do you think any human could?”

Huge horns tipped from side to side for a moment before they shook. “I can’t see how any mortal could.”

Her fingers fidgeted as she avoided the scouring eyes, finding their way into the shallow depressions that the author had left on her journal. “How long have you carried this alone?”

“A century, give or take,” he grumbled, “And yes, you are the first to read from it.”

“She knew her successor would be a woman.”

“Men want it too much,” he said, finally getting her attention as his own turned away, the thoughts he shared well-formed and practised as he pronounced them to the burning hall, “The power I have: to take any woman I want, to destroy at a whim, to have everything permitted by my will. Men want it. I cannot trust a companion who is seeking vicarious indulgence, to do as I do, or even just to collect the scraps of my table. They are unchanged, still a simple human and subject to all the weaknesses therein.”

Tracking around the room the woman’s eyes caught the bodies of the men she’d known. The men she’d grown up under the gaze of. The men she’d been told to steer clear of, never be caught alone with, by her mother. Even through the layer of ash and violence that lingered over everything she could recognise their shapes. Legless forms, tossed aside by the power that was. Dragging her stinging eyes back towards the hulking figure and the cooking fire, it was less than a village she mourned.

“Womanfolk, you support each other. You’re bonded by having lived beneath the oppression of men who wished they were me since long before I took my place above them. For you to stand with me takes something more than the substitution of your desires. To walk this world beside me a woman must become a creature beyond simple human fare.”

When he finally turned back to her, he scoffed once more. Horror gripped her mind and held back thought. It left a confusion she tried hard to chase away as soon as she felt it on her face.

“I’ll make this simple for you,” he began with a snort of hot, foul breath, “The woman who crawled in here, bound, burnt, but wanting to live . . .” The dragon waited for her nod. “She will die soon and there is only one choice left: do I kill her, or will you?”

Her eyes had fled down to the book a while ago, noticing something was offered, brandished almost, to make the monster’s point. Trying to imagine drawing a blade across her own neck, an act she had felt so sure of her motivation for when she had begun her crawl, failed, bringing only tightness to her throat. Even trying to feel the claws close around and end her as she had feared they would at first touch brought nothing. At least that fate would come through inaction.

The shape was shaken again, finally drew her eye and she saw what was being offered. Horror, confusion, whatever effect the wine had had, it all fell away as for the first time she let herself admit what it truly was. “You want to eat, to drink, to leave here?”

The woman nodded as she took the proffered, well-dressed end of the femur. This close the spice was almost overwhelming, masking the smell as it finally left the familiar.

“Then you must be reborn, something more than simply human, something more than . . .” The hand that had just held the other end of the bone gestured around the hall and then back to the morsel. “Something more than them.”

How it burned in the nose was nothing compared to the pain it caused on her lips. On the rarer side, the blood of her community, her former community, dripped from her mouth onto the journal that had fallen to her lap. By the time she looked for the stain it would be lost amongst the countless that had come before, defining the colour of the binding.

“Good girl.”

The hand returned to her side as she tore into the offering. To her hunger it was no different to any of the roast meat that had come before, and more would be needed to sate her. To her mind the pain that burnt into her core was as worthwhile as the nourishment. Some dying part of her thought it apt that such a meal should hurt.

“I suppose then introductions are in order if you are to be my companion,” he said with a newfound energy, “I am Sancthor, if you hadn’t already figured that. And you . . .”

What pause he gave was not enough to choke down her most recent, stinging mouthful.

“You are Eliza.” He voiced the words with the same surety that had spoken to the natures of men and women. Mouth empty, words failed her, and so her bloody lips hung apart for a moment as the huge form pulled her along the table. Taking her fully in his arms, he was indifferent to the bloody meat he caught between them, but careful of the journal, setting it aside. Following where his hands led she embraced him. Arms around his neck, collecting a dozen cuts and abrasions from his rough form, her forehead met his. “It is good to have you back.”