Alonso flees the men who have mortally wounded him, but the desert is an unforgiving place for a dying man. He tries to find a place to rest until the end, but instead finds someone who can both soothe his pain and utterly consume him.
The desert expanse stretched horizon to horizon, bleached with light, and absolutely still except for the panting, sweating, bleeding man who half stumbled, half crawled up the sides of an arroyo to a mound of stone. The pain in Alonso’s side was burning now and his shirt was wet with blood despite the aridity. His vision was beginning to blur and an ill placed step sent him tumbling to the ground, the impact jarring his shoulder. He struggled to his knees and looked out and down across the dry valley from which he had fled. A column of white dust rose against the immaculate gradient of blue sky and Alonso knew that his pursuers rode to find him still. He had lost his pistol and his knife already, and though he missed them he knew he would not be able to do much to defend himself now. The man rose to continue his flight, but as he did so he felt something in his insides snap and his vision went white with pain.
I’m dying, he thought, and after the sudden realization hit, I won’t give them the pleasure of finding me while I do. They’ll need to see my body before they go back.
He looked up at the rocks and saw a place where an overhang sheltered a shallow hollow.
A good a place as any. Nice and cool in the shade. And it might keep the scavengers off until I’m actually dead.
The climb up was excruciating, every pull of his right arm agitating the wound further, but the holds were good and he was in too much pain to notice how the rough stone cut into his palms and knees. At last he reached the lip of the hollow and hauled himself up inside, panting, and curled up where dust had collected on the floor over centuries.
Water.
It was suddenly all he could think about. He knew there wouldn’t be any here. None, before the end. Alonso opened his eyes, thinking to distract himself from that overwhelming need by looking for a more comfortable place to lie down when he saw Her.
Sweat had matted his dark curls to his forehead and over his eyes, but even when he brushed them away and waited for his vision to focus, he saw her still. A beauty all in black, from the lace veil obscuring her face, to the velvet trimmed boots on her feet watched him from where she reclined on a bed of stone and embroidered cushions. She was propped up on one elbow, and when she took a little morsel from a platter beside her, the veil fluttered with the movement of her hand and breath, exposing her berry dark mouth. A ewer of silver waited on the floor, its sides glossy and damp with the little condensation that the air could produce.
It must be cool water, then.
Had he been well, he would have surely been wary of her. Nothing about her, from her sudden appearance in the middle of the desert, to her finery, to the way she looked at him seemed natural, but now, curled up and dying on the floor, he could manage no distrust, and only to beg her to ease his pain.
“Please,” he whispered, unable to manage more with his throat gone paper-dry. “Water.”
His head drooped back to the ground. His eyes closed, strength gone. There was the soft rustle of her gown, the breath of air over his skin, the shadow of her bending over him and he felt her hand brush his forehead, so cold he shivered at her touch.
“You are dying,” she said. And, after a pause, “but you do not have to be.” Finger slender as pale as bone brushed over where his wound gaped open to the air. “I could heal you, if you wish”
“There’s coming back from this,” coughed Alonso. “I can feel it burning in my stomach now.”
“Pledge yourself to me, and it can be done. And you will have all you wish to drink” Where her fingertips touched, the pain eased to a needy ache. He groaned when she took her hand away and it returned.
“Fine then, I…pledge myself. Please, ma’am, just give me water.”
“With this, you are mine eternally,” she said before she took a mouthful from the ewer and, cradling his head in the crook of her arm, kissed him deeply.
His eyes shot open as soon as she had taken his lips, so overwhelming the sensation of cold that entered him with the water, soothing and agonizing simultaneously. She lingered, but not long enough, and he sought her lips with his own with the little strength he still possessed, greedy now for her touch. He could see her face now, looking up beneath the veil and her dark eyes crinkled with mirth.
“There will be more,” she said with only a hint of some malice he could not figure out, “but first I must wash you.”
The pain returned when their lips parted, worse now that he was so fully aware again. He groaned as she pressed him gently down to the ground and he was startled to find how irresistibly, effortlessly strong she was. Panic washed over him as the pain throbbed and he squirmed to chase a position in which he could breathe deeply again.
“Be still and stay as I put you,” was all she said and he felt himself obey.
One by one she unfastened the buttons down his ruined shirt, his suspenders, his trousers, and stripped him of his boots. Then, with a cool hand on his wound, she hoisted him to his knees and he cried out, no longer heeding the hunters beyond the hollow.
“Stop fighting me. Relax your body,” she whispered, her fingers digging into his flesh. He arched his back in the pain of it, but she pulled his back tighter against her chest until he forced his body into limpness as well as he could, panting. By the time she had finished stripping him, he felt the mugginess settling over his thoughts and vision again and he struggled to balance upright, leaning into her chest when she removed the arm she had used to both support and restrain him. He felt cold water drizzle down his neck and back and his breath hitched with the shock of it. More poured over his shoulders and arms, and she spread the moisture over every inch of skin with her fingers before moving down his spine, wrapping around his ribcage, before filling the hole in his side to the brim with the numbing water. She lingered there, feeling inside his abdomen the surfaces exposed to her probing touch. He felt only an uncomfortable pressure until he risked a glance at what she was doing.
A hot flush washed over his face and he looked away from the probing of his fingers, a combination of violated, aroused, and when he realized his arousal, ashamed.
What is wrong with me?
She did not miss his reaction either. As he groaned, she chuckled softly, twisting her finger one last time for good measure, before settling him on his side in her lap where he could bury his blush in the silk around her thighs. Her hand cupped the firm, well muscled flesh of his rear, kneading into his damp haunch and then following the stream of water to where it pooled between his cheeks. He flinched as she spread him, but she did not linger there as long as she had with the wound.
“Another time for that,” she laughed then gave him a light spank as he desperately clutched at her skirt and tried to remain absolutely still.
His thighs and feet were washed as well before she rolled him over to lie face up in her lap, working from toes to head on the other side. It was easier to breathe now, but his blush only deepened as her fingers and the water washed up his inner thigh and lingered there , cupping his sack with a satisfied hum. He hadn’t been able to look at her since she had turned him over, but now he chanced a glance. She was predatory. Hungry. The blush in her cheeks was deepening and her mouth slightly parted. And her eyes, those deep pools like the darkness under the earth, caught his own and he could not tear himself away, not even to blink.
He felt a rush of blood to his groin and she broke the spell of their eyes to look down to where her hand grasped and fondled him, his cock achingly hard now in her hand. She bent down and kissed along the inside of his thighs, then bit hard . Alonso writhed under her, nearly smothered by her chest as she drew blood. Wild eyed he felt her kissing and nibbling along his sack and the underside of his cock. He froze when she looked at it with the same hungry look that she had given his thigh and he could do nothing but breathlessly plead, “n-no, please not there!”
“No? Only a moment ago you pledged yourself to me.”
“I did, but, you can’t, ma’am…”
“Mistress. Or my Lady. And I can do as I please but,” and she nibbled almost too roughly and he clenched his eyes shut, “I won’t. I have an interest in you remaining intact .”
He blushed furiously at that and his hips bucked into her hand unbidden, but her attention drifted up his body before he could figure out, in that drowsy, hazy lust, if he was still afraid.
“Stay still and be good. I’ve nearly finished” she said, low and quiet and commanding as she gave his left nipple a sharp pinch. His inhale was a startled hiss through clenched teeth but he nodded slightly and relaxed back into her lap, pain all but forgotten now as her hands ringed his neck with the barest claiming pressure, then meandered through his hair, traced his brow, the structure of his cheeks, the lids of his eyes, his sharp, straight nose, before returning to the mouth she had claimed first.
He was so very tired now, lulled by the attention she had given him, that the water spilled down his jaw, collecting in the hollow of his throat. She traced the bow of his lips and then pushed her finger inside to feel the damp heat of his breath. Tentatively, he let his tongue lap against her, the smooth lacquered nail sharp as a claw at the tip. She hummed with approval and he savored her fingers and the water that clung to them, licking and sucking. Slowly she pulled them away and he whined, but they were replaced with her lips again, strange and savory. She took his tongue between her teeth and, in the midst of so much pleasure, bit down hard enough to draw blood. He felt it fill his mouth, ferric and hot, and she drank deeply of it before pulling away again. Alonso saw her wipe away a spot of red on her cheek and then was finished. She looked utterly pleased with him and she shifted his body so that he could curl more comfortably across his lap. Despite the chill of his damp skin and the new and much more pleasant aches on his thigh and chest, he felt his eyelids grow heavy and succumbed at last to his weariness.
Alonso woke naked and shivering on the stone floor as the light of the setting sun streaked golden through the opening to the sky. Unease settled into his stomach when he realized he could remember only the Lady and the immediate hour leading up to finding her in the cave where he presently lay. He remembered the pain of his wound acutely and with calloused fingers felt below his ribs. The man found, instead of muscle and organs open to the air, an ugly purple knot of scar tissue - tender, but no longer torturous. He looked around for the Lady and found her in the shadow, looking out across the desert landscape.
“You’ve rested long enough, my sweet. We must go if we will make it to my palace by nightfall.” At my sweet , Alonso blushed, but made to get up as he was bid. He was still weak, so weak that he could only stand up with the support of the wall of the cave, and that effort left him panting. He looked around and found the cave empty.
“My clothes…” he said. She shook her head.
“After the second part of the ritual, you will be dressed in fine garments as only a queen’s consort should be. But for now, you are merely my slave and cannot keep the garments from before you came into my house. Now come here and close your eyes until I am done.”
The unease grew at that and did not come to her immediately, though part of him wanted to. She only looked him up and down and scoffed. What, shaking like a leaf and naked, you’ll disobey she who saved you? Who you swore yourself to? Do not forget the mere thimbleful of.power I have shown you already.”
He swallowed hard, knowing he had nothing sensible to say, then stood beside her. She unpinned the veil from her hair, which fell unbound in a dark cascade down her back, then draped the black lace about his shoulders, kissed him gently, and moved away with the rustle of something like wings. He opened his eyes and found himself no longer naked but fledged all over in feathers the color of an oil slick, transformed completely into a great black raven. Greater still was the bird who watched him from the perch overlooking the desert, his cruel-beaked Mistress. She cocked her head toward the entrance and when he did not move, she shoved and pecked, forcing him to plunge into the air or risk being bloodied. With a great flapping of wings she took flight after him, showing him how to move his transfigured body so that he no longer fell but flew, aided by a kind of muscle memory knotted into the spell on the lace.
The desert beneath glowed golden in the evening light and the sky stretched all around in bands of yellow, orange, and lavender. Alfonso did his best to keep up but had begun to flag with exhaustion by the time the Lady began to spiral downward. Below them was a cliff into which a palace was carved into the white rock, flanked by a scattering of other dwellings. Landing was harder than flying. The Lady demonstrated first, swooping into a perfect gentle stall in order to drop gently onto a wide pavilion in front of the palace gate, but Alonso missed his timing and came down hard, tumbling onto his face with the momentum of it, right in front of a ring of spectators solemnly gathered there to greet the Lady on her return.
With a rustle of feathers, she returned to her womanly shape and with a gesture across Alonso’s back reminiscent of removing a shawl, he found his own naked body returned as well, the veil stripped away and once more in the Lady’s hands. So suddenly exposed, he glanced frantically at the crowd and found no single other human face among them. Instead, a dozen or so animal-headed men and women pressed close together in the pavilion, carrion creatures all. They leered and salivated at him, bodies half-dressed and tense with constraint and barked out not a few remarks that he could not understand. At the front of the crowd waited a distinguished looking vulture-headed man and three coyote-headed attendant maids who bowed low and, after speaking with the Lady in that strange language, shooed the crowd away. She beckoned for Alonso to follow and he was relieved to obey, the attendants a respectful distance behind.
A few more instructions and the servants retreated. The Lady parted a curtain to reveal a circular chamber. There, brightly woven rugs adorned the floors and walls and huge cushions were scattered about the floor with blankets and quilts folded neatly atop a low wooden table in the very center. Candlelight flickered and splintered in many colors from behind the jewel like glass of hanging lanterns.
Alonso remained in the doorway a moment before the Lady pulled him into the room and tossed him down onto the cushions. She was on top of him in an instant, kissing him fiercely, first his neck, then down along his jaw and down his throat. He swallowed hard as she lingered there, looking up through long dark lashes. She pulled away just a moment to smile down with pleasure before returning to take the flesh between her teeth and bite down, drawing blood and a hiss of pain. He struggled beneath her, but she was inhumanly strong and pinned him fast into the pile of pillows.
“You pledged yourself to me for my mercy,” she cooed, “and now you will be my most delicious treasure, my plaything, my pet, my concubine. A prince to all my subjects for as long as I desire you.”
“Earlier you called me your slave,” he said frowning and trying to keep his voice calm.
She laughed, “that too. I am a being who must either possess or consume completely.”
She gripped his chin to turn his head for better access to the other side of his neck. His breath caught in his chest as she bit again with absolute relish. He felt the little bit of resistance he had managed since waking up in the cave start to disappear as she marked and bled him.
“And how could I not? Did you not see my people salivating to taste you? A living man in the flesh brought all the way here and I am the only one who can so much as touch you.”
She ran a rough tongue along his collarbones and nibbled her way down his sternum, pausing above his heart.
“You gave me your mouth with your oath and our first kiss,” she hummed in his ear. “And this,” she gripped his hardening cock, “I will have tonight. But here,” she placed a hand to his chest,” is something I must have that I cannot reach. You will bring it to me, as your very first act of devotion. But that is a matter for tomorrow. Now, undress me. I wish to touch you as I feast upon you.”
She allowed him to sit up and with trembling hands he unbuttoned the bodice of her gown and the wrists of her sleeves. He slipped black silk down her shoulders to pool at her waist then worked it over her hips and onto the floor. She eased him backward again and shifted to straddle his lap, not quite touching his quickly hardening erection. She lowered to rock her slit down his length, her pleasure obvious in the bloom of her cheeks as she pleasured herself with his body. He rutted up against her, aching with desire, but for his trouble he was rewarded with her hand in his hair twisting painfully and a sharp nip on the shell of his ear. “Behave yourself, my sweet treasure” she whispered savagely and he felt fear mingle with a kind of awe in his gut as she grasped his throat. The man nodded, the blood in his ears throbbing and his vision dimming. He clenched the cushion in his hands to keep himself from moving again. She continued pleasuring herself until he felt her shudder and clench her thighs to grip him until her climax subsided. He groaned when she lifted herself away. “P-please, my Lady,” he begged when she had relaxed her grip on him enough for a full breath again.
With a slender finger, she reached inside herself and brought it to his lips, “here, taste what you have done for me.” She forced her finger inside and his eyes widened. A shy lick was all it took before he lavished the finger, and the others that joined it, with dutiful affection. “Much better,” she said before pulling them out again. “Time to earn your keep.”
She pulled him up to his knees and guided him inside her cunt. He thrust and she consumed him; his head swam and she raked her talons down his back and along his ribs, leaving a trail of ruby beads behind. He arched into her touch and when she knew he was very very close she gripped his old wound hard, raking the flesh.“Give yourself to me,” she demanded, feral.
He did, the pleasure and the pain mingled making the sensation keener than any he had ever felt as she engulfed him utterly. He rolled off beside her, spent, their mingled fluids dripping down onto his belly. Already he felt his eyes begin to shutter, but she turned on one elbow to face him, taking up a dab of the pooling mess onto her finger and licking it with relish.
“Sweet treasure, you haven’t cleaned up yet.”
“My Lady?” He murmured, his mind a compliant and uncomprehending mess, until she took his chin in hand and dragged him to her cunt, his spend oozing out onto her leg and set him to lapping up all that remained before she settled him beside her for a long and blessed sleep.
Alonso awoke to the cool light of morning and the rustling of linens. The Lady was long gone, but he was not alone. It was one of the coyote headed servants, dressed only in a kind of white wrap skirt which left her rather well endowed and very human looking upper body completely bare. “You are awake at last, little morsel,” she said with a hard look as he tried not to stare. “Get up. I need to dress you properly and our most noble queen has asked for you.”
At the mention of the Lady, Alonso bit back a groan, his fine cuts across his skin pulling with every movement from the last time he had been in her presence, but whatever magic she had worked in their lovemaking made him compliant to her demands, even delivered in the mouth of this abrasive creature. Instead of arguing, he simply stood and allowed her to do her work, which he did with a tense efficiency. When she finished with him, however,he certainly didn’t feel dressed; he also wore a kind of wrapped white skirt, shorter than hers, made of a very finely woven linen. On top of that, an overskirt covered his backside and hips, this in brightly woven geometric patterns in goldenrod, rust, and turquoise and with a scalloped edge. Finally, a flat woven belt with silver beaded tassels kept everything together about his waist. The coyote-woman appraised him skeptically, evened out his hem of the underskirt with a tug, then tutted her approval before fastening around his bare shoulders a black cloak attached to a wide collar of linked silver plates, polished until they gleamed. He was given no shoes, but rings, bangles, anklets all in silver followed until Alonso’s limbs were heavy with them. Finally, the servant held up large silver discs to his ears, then frowned.
“Ah, they aren’t pierced,” said Alonso. “Will my Lady mind?”
“She will, but she’ll kill me if I so much as nick her favorite treat. You’ll have to go without. Now, follow me.”
He followed her barefoot through an arcade surrounding an internal courtyard open to the sky from inside the mountain itself. The white blossoms of datura, big as his hand, sprawled from pots along the path and an ancient juniper twisted skyward from a cultivated bed in the center and fragranced the air.
Two guards with crow’s heads flanked a heavy double door and eyed Alonso with what he suspected was gastronomic interest, but allowed Alonso and his attendant to pass to where the Queen awaited. His breath hitched when he saw her again; yesterday he had been drowning in a haze of pain, then exhaustion, but now he was rested and only the shallow scratches down his back, the scabbed over bites on his neck and thighs, and the all over soreness from their lovemaking hurt at all. Even that was somehow as pleasurably satisfying as painful.
Now, she truly looked like the queen of this terrifying people, from the high silver comb in her hair, to the mantle of iridescent black feathers about her shoulders, to the leather booted foot upon the footstool. She was beautiful, but hard and cruel looking, and he knew that whatever will he had once possessed to oppose her was now gone.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the attendant bow, a gesture he quickly copied.
“Majesty, the human from your chambers,” she said.
“Thank you Tiva, you may go.” The servant left and Alonso suddenly felt very exposed. He swallowed hard, clasping his hands in front of himself to keep from fidgeting.
“Princeling-to-be, those clothes suit you even more than I thought. Come kneel here beside me, you must be hungry.” He obeyed, feeling heat rise to his cheeks at how willing he was to sink to his knees beside her, yet also appreciative of the cushion no doubt placed there for his comfort.
“This is where you will attend to me every day that I have no other task for you. Beautiful ornament that you are, I desire to see you and to enjoy how your scent has mingled so much with mine. There is nothing more appetizing.”
She reached out to feed him from her own hand, but he turned away shamefaced. “I can feed myself,” he muttered.
“Yes, you could, but it would not go well for you,” she chuckled. “The rite by which I saved your life is incomplete, the power fragile. Do you not remember what I told you last night?”
Alonso very much remembered last night, though the details of what she said were slow coming.
“I need your heart. Today you will go and retrieve it for me.” He frowned in confusion but said nothing until he caught a whiff of the fresh flatbread she was having with her breakfast. His stomach growled. “What does the rite have to do with you feeding me?”
“This is the food of the dead, just as the water I gave you to drink and with which I washed you was the water of the dead. By my hand it transforms you into one of my own. But should anything pass your lips except that it comes from me before the rite is complete, you will become what you were bound to be without my spell; not a carrion eater, as we all are, but a corpse to be eaten. Why do you think my subjects look at you with such hunger? They can still smell your own imminent death on you, though less strongly now that you smell so much like your mistress.”
Again she offered him a bite from her hand and this time he took it, more than a little pleased and ashamed at how it felt to be fed like a favorite pet. He supposed he was one now, and judging by the silver at his wrists, he was to be quite a pampered one at least. His mind wandered as they continued their meal in pleasant silence. If my companions saw me like this…
His companions? He suddenly realized he could not remember their faces. He tried remembering where he was from, what he had been doing before he found the Lady, and realized that he could remember nothing before the gunshot tore a hole in his belly, and very little of his flight into the Lady’s cave. He was distressed for a moment until the Lady’s hand came to rest on the top of his head, stroking his black curls. Then all thought to before seemed so unnecessary and far away.
Breakfast was done and servants entered to clear away the table and food. Finally the Lady stood, looming over the kneeling Alonso. At her call, the crow-men guards entered and stood to either side of her, tense with readiness and hunger. Alonso woke from a kind of stupor at their approach, but the Lady’s hand in his hair stilled him.
”Tonight, the entire city will celebrate our union with a great feast and you must bring something to contribute to the meal. Do not forget what I most desire and remember my warning. Now, go; my guards will lead you to where you must go.”
After a kiss to the Lady’s offered hand, Alonso went out, trailing behind the guards, who started chatting at each other almost as soon as they had left the presence of the queen. They reached the cliffside where Alonso had arrived with the Lady the evening before and his head swam to look out over the desert from such a great height. From his left came a sound like an umbrella opening. Alonso turned and saw one of the guards already transformed and taking off into the sky.
“W-wait!” he cried, “how do I do that?”
The crow-man to the right tutted scornfully. “The lady gave you that too-fine cloak for a purpose, tidbit. Do as I do.”
The crow wrapped himself in his own, much worn cloak like a blanket. As soon as he did so, he hunched into birdshape and was off and flying. Alonso did the same and was soon sleek with black plumage, save for a ring of silver-white around his neck. Flight, however, took quite a bit of tentative flapping and these companions were far less patient tutors than his Lady had been. Eventually, he caught a good wind beneath powerful new wings and tried not to think about the ground as he joined his companions circling above.
The morning was clear with a slight crosswind and eventually Alonso forgot his fear of falling enough to enjoy the sensation and the view of long lavender shadows of morning raking across the land. Cottonwoods outlined dry creek beds between stretches of bare earth and short yellow grass and blooming rabbitbrush. The topography was familiar and he vaguely remembered studying a map of it at one point, committing the names of each rise and fall in the terrain to memory, but those names, and the context around such thorough study, was lost, like everything else before the Lady and the cave.
Alonso followed the descent of his guides toward where a salt flat bordered the slope of a rising mountain. This place was especially familiar, but not just from distant study. They were following the path he had the day before when he had been bleeding and dying, but in reverse. The man’s mouth felt dry at the prospect of seeing his pursuers once again, though with a beat of his wings he remembered gratefully that he was as safe from their recognition as he could possibly be. The guards swooped up then to perch on the wind bared branches of a juniper, leaving Alonso to manage his own, significantly improved, landing on the ground. “Go on,” one said, “just there, over the ridge.”
Alonso hopped a few feet, still a raven, and peered over the ridge to look down into a curving draw. The air there was absolutely still but not silent for all the swarming flies. Bodies of men he knew, or knew he should have known, lay scattered where they had fallen. Insects crawled over their open eyes, their lips, and whichever wounds lay open to the air, drawn as all desert creatures are, for the moisture there. The smell of death hung heavy in the air and Alonso the Raven felt an obscene mixture of nausea and whetted appetite at the scent.
The living were long gone from the place of bloodshed, whether still chasing him through the wilderness or back to town with their spoils, Alonso could not tell. He did, however, know that whatever the Lady had sent him for was close by. She had said she wanted his heart, but he wasn’t sure what she meant. His own heart had been secure under her fingers - she could have probably ripped it out of him somehow right then and there with no need to send him out into the wasteland to find it. He couldn’t remember a particularly special trinket lost in the battle and he could remember no bosom companion to take captive, so he carried on, casting aside his bird shape to better scramble along the ground, hoping some answer would present itself. It wasn’t until he started hauling himself over a boulder that he knew, with the strongest wave of paralyzing dread he had ever felt, exactly what the Lady had wanted him to bring back. There, sprawled over the rocks, lay his own corpse staring up lidlessly into the sun above.
He retched then, though after the long flight there wasn’t enough in his stomach to bring up much more than bile. Alonso chanced a second look, trying to will himself past the horror of his own belly split open to the sky, but a plume of flies ascended at the sound of a rock tumbling from his feet, and he fled down the draw, past the other dead, and onto the shore of the dry lake, trembling in the shade of an outcropping.
The morning was already old when he found the bodies, and the noon sun’s glare made the world look flat with the shrinking of its shadows. Powder fine dust whipped across the dry lake, driven by the light but unrelenting wind and coating Alonso with a layer of white grit.
She wants my heart. My actual heart. I have to split apart my own dead body to take it out and I can’t. Why did I have to find that cave? Why did I promise myself to her? She’s some kind of a witch. Or a demon. And I belong to her. There has to be a way out of this, before she bewitches my mind again.
He jerked his head up out of his hands, looking for a place to go where the guards she had sent would be unable to find him. He knew they watched and had beaks and talons that would tear at his bare skin. Before him was endless white, the razor’s edge horizon indistinct in the dust. Nowhere to go .
Just then he heard a crack and saw, a mere arm’s reach away, a buffalo gourd vine heavy with fruit, burst open and dripping with juice and seeds . His mouth watered and he remembered the warning the Lady had given him as he knelt by her table. I could eat the food of the dead. I could end it now.
He crawled to the fruit and took it up in his hands, feeling a cramp in his side where the newly healed wound lay. He remembered how it felt, burning from the inside and how it felt to be so thirsty that he would sell himself to a stranger for a cup of water. And he knew that, in his weakness, he would not face that willingly again. The gourd slipped from his hands, splattering stringy orange flesh across the ground. Then he climbed, heavy hearted, back to where his body lay waiting.
His corpse lay unchanged and this time Alonso was able to force himself close enough to touch it. He held his breath against the stench as he surveyed the body. It’s - his - shirt was torn and belly split, but he wasn’t sure how he could actually find the organ, much less cut it out, nor did he think his present resolve would last for many attempts. He had brought no weapon of any kind, but searching around he found a knife, lost in his escape perhaps, or cast aside by one of the other fallen men, he could not remember. It was sharp, but even so it took a few strokes, much shifting of foul entrails, and much pausing to gag and catch another breath of vile air to finally expose his prize. He cut it away from its attachments at last and drawing it out from beneath his ribcage seemed like some strange midwifery.
Alonso was covered in his own gore, heart in his hands, when he found his escorts further down the draw where they perched atop the body of one of his late friends, plucking at his eyes with gusto. They squabbled over bits of flesh a moment more before the three of them returned to the cliff palace, carrion heart clutched in Alonso’s shining claws.
It was nearly evening when they returned. The pavilion in the front of the castle was a riot of color and noise; banners snapped in the rising wind and long tables had been drawn out and laid with marigolds as a garland. Musicians played and the carrion eaters danced in whirl of yips, howls, caws, and shrieks. The Lady waited on a throne brought out and set atop a dias, splendid in silver set with turquoise and iridescent black. At Alonso’s return, the vulture-headed steward called loudly for silence and a hush fell over the assembly, every eye turned to the procession. The Lady rose to meet her bloody prince, who carried forth his gift with human hands, and knelt to present it to her with all the reverence as he might have offered up his heart to a deity.
“My heart, my Lady, it is yours,” he said, and with the struggle of biting out those words, felt the last of his resistance to them slip away. A gentle smile graced her lips as she took the organ from him, lifted it high to examine it in the evening light and then savagely bit and tore a chunk of it away, swallowing the piece whole.
“The rest of my consort’s gift will be a delicacy, enjoyed by all those who join in celebrating our union tonight, “ she announced to a riot of cheers before holding it out to him. “And your prince shall enjoy the first bite.
No, no, no!
A voice in his head screamed, but his will was no longer his own. He took her hands in his, lifted them to his mouth, and swallowed down his own putrid flesh. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes and his stomach cramped in protest, but it was done. What remained was handed over to be enjoyed by the throng and the Lady settled him trembling at her feet. He drank much and ate little, grieving even as a kind of contentment settled over him as he leaned against the Lady’s leg. She stroked his hair and he dozed as the light began to fade, celebration stretching long into the night.