Chapter 1: Kiss of the Void

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The bed shifts as something simultaneously new and familiar settles onto it, easing down slowly until the weight is at rest and joined by a distinctively theatrical sigh if a much more quiet one than usual. Even just from a sigh that scratchy baritone, the one you could imagine growling into your ear from the very first second you heard it, is unmistakable.

For a good deal of time, nothing happens. Long enough for one to doubt reality and their senses. After all, it couldn't have been that sigh. The owner of it is long dead.

After just long enough for someone to almost fall back asleep however, there is a rustling of silks - silk sheets? silk clothes? - before a hand comes to rest on your shoulder. A broad hand, a rare mix of the softness of a pampered childhood with the hardness of the relentless pursuit of a physical mastery. A hand that had been worked rigorously hard, but always tended to with the utmost of care. Straddling the line between gentle and rough, between affectionate and possessive. Again; distinctive.

"Still asleep are you, old friend?"

Your heart skips a beat. Your ears couldn't be trusted. Reality couldn't be trusted.

"The sun will be coming up soon, and yet you remain in the comfort of your linens. I would have expected that at this hour you would be off killing Gods. Or saving kittens from trees. There is no in between for you, is there?" the voice asks, tone lilting upwards with an audible smile. There's a sort of condescending affection in his voice, like chastising a pet for illogical behaviour. The hand on your shoulder roams, up to your hair to gently brush against it then run the tips of fingers through it.

Zenos let out another gentle sigh. "I know you are awake... Or cognizant I suppose. What did you call it? Sleep paralysis?" he wonders out loud. He isn't sure if he can bring himself to believe it. Not because the concept doesn't sound feasible, being subject to addled half-hallucinations creeping into an otherwise normal waking state while the mind freezes from terror sounded completely plausible. As did the theory that it was the very slight fraying of the boundary between this world and the Void, seeing things that didn't exist in this plane but were lurking in the next.

No, it is more that it's you. "It is hard to believe that you could be beset by such a pathetic and glaring weakness, my friend... To think that you could defeat me - thrice, now! - and yet at any time, should any random old thief catch you on the wrong night..," Zenos purrs as he pauses, while his hand trails from your hair down to your neck. His fingers trail your throat. His breath catches. So does yours.

"They could have the pleasure... And deny it to me. What a torturous concept."

His hand moves back to your shoulder.

"But it must be true, mustn't it?... It is not your only weakness. You have many, even if you manage to overcome them in your many hours of need. There is evidence of them all over your body, much as it pains me that I could only ever injure you as much as mere Gods can," Zenos mumbles. He's not sure you can hear him in any case. His fingertips, showing that rare gentleness again, move down your arm. Over the litany of marks, of cuts that weren't seen to by chirurgeons quickly enough not to leave faint scars, some that you had healed yourself. Plenty had been left by Zenos himself.

"You're never as delicate with yourself as you are with others," Zenos muses as his hand trails instead to your waist, carefully pulling back the blankets to do so. His voice growing more confident that you won't awaken. There's a light shirt in the way but he remembers your body and its marks like an old map. His fingers brush past one on your rib cage - you both remember that one, from another night not dissimilar to this - to another on your waist. "I remember when a piece of shrapnel from one of Meteion's blasted planets caught you here, tore clean through your cuirass. After the fight, before ours, you healed yourself... But only barely. Enough to stop the bleeding and little else. Knowing you, you didn't bother with the bones. With others you are so delicate and cautious. You refused to leave that cat friend of yours with so much as a blemish even after I cut her belly clean open. But you, you wear these scars like-"

Zenos' voice catches, and you can't see but can hear the way his eyes light up in his voice. "Is that it?... You like these marks, don't you? Ohh, my dear friend... You truly should learn to communicate better. If I'd known I would have left so many more over the years."

The glee in Zenos' voice is palpable. With his decision made up he rolls you onto your back and in the same motion he's atop you, your glassy eyes finally meeting his. Whether they are frozen in excitement for your returned lover or in the clutches of a night-terror, you do not know. In his casual clothes, the kind of fine silks that he wore whenever he stole into your quarters under cover of nightfall. That beautiful blonde hair framing his beautiful face, belied by the perfect storm of malice and hunger in his icy blue eyes. He'd gone heavy with the eyeliner tonight; he knows you love that.

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"Good to see you again old friend," Zenos rumbles in something between a purr and a growl. He still isn't sure if you can really see him or not. If you can really feel him, if you can feel the weight of the seven and a gods-damned half fulms of Garlean muscle sitting in your lap. But it doesn't matter. With his realization, he knows that whether you can see and feel him or not is irrelevant.

Both of your lover's hands run up along your body, from you belly over your chest, fingers dragging, thumbs pressing, nails grazing, all the way to your neck. That familiar place he loves so much. His hands, his fingers are gentle and careful as they slip around the vulnerable skin, as they lightly press against the vulnerable arteries. Gentle, right up until they aren't. The malice overtakes the affection, and Zenos bares his teeth in a loving snarl.

"I'll make sure I leave you with plenty more marks to remember me by."

Zenos swoops down. His lips capture yours, overpower yours with his hunger, his taste, the sheer loving and possessive affection he has for you, his friend, his enemy, his lover, his pet, his toy, his master. He growls the words into your mouth even as his hands seek to embed the concepts into your skin, even as your mouth fills with the taste of him, the taste of his lips and of his tongue, the taste of copper-

---

You awake with a start, almost throwing the body off of you.

Body?... There's no body. Blankets are bunched up around your torso, heavy on your chest. Gradually, your heart slows. The temperate air of Sharlayan's autumn blows in through the window of your regular room in the Annex, cooling the sweat dripping from your brow.

Nothing more than a dream.

---

You'd gone about a fairly regular morning, done your exercises and set about the 'job' of adventuring. There had been a call about a particularly ferocious mark from the Gleaners, and while you hadn't expected much from the aether-charged serpent it was managing to pleasantly exceed your expectations. You narrowly step aside a bite from its charged fangs then push through a half-rift to the Void to appear behind it, avoiding a sudden eruption of earth at the creature's front in the process. You spin and slash at its side, your scythe digging deep, but not deep enough to stop the burst of electric aether that it releases in retaliation. It stings more than you thought, stunning you long enough for a whip of its fin-like tail to send you tumbling back until you dig the base of your scythe into the ground to both right yourself and prevent a fall off one of the enormous cliffs that litter Labyrinthos.

Alright, well. Perhaps a little too much underestimation, but you're not worried. It just means you have to take it a little more seriously than not at all. You feel the aether you'd been stockpiling welling up, using it to pierce the veil between worlds and pull forth your Avatar. Your Voidsent, the one you had contracted when you had first stumbled upon the Reaper's art-form, to fight alongside you to be your minion, your partner, your guardian.

The aether-drunk serpent before you couldn't possibly know fear, and yet, it almost seems to withdraw as dark aether pours from both the momentary breach of realities and from the creature that emerges. For a moment it only hangs over you, then it fully Enshrouds you. A connection that runs right to the soul, it clings to you, your respective aether pooling together and momentarily becoming one. It is mostly incorporeal, but not entirely, and you can feel the talons of its hand press to one side on your shoulder, to the other side on your neck.

Affectionately. Possessively.

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