This first instalment is world building. It’ll heat up, I promise.
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The world was sideways, and half buried in darkness. He stared lazily out across the flat white expanse that seemed to stretch for hundreds of metres into the distance. He blinked and stirred, lifting his left cheek and opening his other eye, the world now righting itself and emptying itself of the darkness he had seen with half his face buried in the night’s snowfall. He leaned on his left elbow, seeing now that he was catching snow as it fell, and that it blanketed him in a white haze.
He pressed his back into the tree behind him, feeling the ridges and grooves press through the fabric caught between he and it, savouring the massaging pressures and sturdiness of it against him as the first haptic deliverance of the day. The enormous oak that he had picked for the night’s slumber was ancient and wide. At its spreading base, it was covered with leaves and creased gnarls that were impossible to distinguish as being either part of the tree itself or whole other beings that had clung to the tree as a life force and grown on their own from its enormous girth, parasites on its tenebrous body. It was cloudy above, with the morning light of the sun being so crushed into obscurity that the light was dull and hoary. He felt the softest breath of breeze against his newly bared left cheek.
The clearing in which he’d slept had the previous night been dark as the night itself, the black, sodden roots of the trees encircling the ground absorbed what little light the new moon’s sliver had cast on the earth beneath. Now, despite the clearing being overhung with boughs that closed about it, snow had fallen, breaking through the shield that the canopy made from the sky. Now it was white, almost too bright to look at, despite the dull light of the new day. He stood cautiously. The breeze was somehow silent, the way the world always seems when it snows so softly, the sound of the forest creaking being absorbed into the very ground and damp trees.
Silian extended his back to stretch and loosen some of the snow which covered his entire right profile. He reached his full height, shivering from the pleasure of his back articulating, straightening inside him. His skin was pale, the same as the light and sky, and soft like the snowfall. None of it was visible but for the ears, about the throat, his face under his hair. He was covered in silken fabrics that pressed to his skin from the saturating ground and opening skies. Layers of the silk covered his frame, long swathes hanging off him at the arms and chest and waist. Pressed to his back too was a cape, which billowed in the dry winds but which now pressed to him too. His hair was almost black like the woods and lay messily athwart his scalp, pressed down over his forehead and at its most adventurous parts, across his eyes. He had a stolid countenance now as almost always.
He looked out past the oak whose base would have shielded him to the east of any sunlight which crept through the forest’s wall. This way was where they would find their answers. He had not seen her in days now. He wasn’t worried; he was somehow missing the disruptions of her presence though. Silian had spent centuries on his own, and had no reason – no desire – to be anything other than alone. The noise of others was tiresome, distracting from the silence he could otherwise be enjoying.
Silian pulled the cape over his head, the hem of it falling over his eyes with his hair, obscuring into darkness now the top of the world. He set off past the tree, burying his hands in the folds of the silks, pressing into the forest.
He owed her this. He had come with her to repay what she had done for him in Killain. But he would have come with her had she not done for him what she had done in Killain. He would have come just to hear her jittery laugh as she spoke about her home and her family. He did not know this in his mind at the time; only in his bones. Now he knew it in his mind, which he hid there like the forest was hiding him from the light of the world outside.
The forest was dark, somehow darker than the night before, deeper and more compressed about him. He did not stumble or falter in his footfalls, striding deliberately and insistently amongst the towers of tree that engulfed this morning’s world.
He hungered but was not distracted, comforted knowing that the exterior of the forest was dotted with hamlets and roving kins of people. Men and women with hot, dark red blood, filled to bursting with it. He could so easily dart to the edge of the forest tonight and lure someone from their home to the forest.
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She sat with her back to the tree, using it as a wall to rest against, shivering. Her hair sat across her forehead and eyes, plastered to her face and body, a bedraggled pink shock, down over her coat. She pulled her knees up to her chest, pulling the tops of her thighs to her breasts, yanking her coat about her fiercely, as if her fury of movement would banish the cold. Her fingertips now pushed her hair out of her eyes to each side, and she brought them back to her face to rub her eyes, as much in shivering delirium as in frustration at herself. She shook her head and cast her eyes back downwards at the cavernous empty forest floor below. It was many metres, maybe the height of two men, to the ground.
She had spent the night on this branch, whose warped base was flat and wide enough to keep her body from falling in the night. She had woken, shivering and miserable. She could not escape this cold, could do nothing to shield herself from it in the winter. No fire would stay, and making it herself would do nothing but exhaust her beyond compare. Even Silian would not be able to stop her feeling this cold other than by devouring her, putting a stop to all this… feeling. Indeed, it was something she had wished he would do these past months. It had been moons since they had had to resort to her giving herself to him, so replete was their path with people that it had been the least of their worries how he would subsist. But at least this way she would stop feeling, just for a bit.
The days before, she had found nothing, no trace of her quarry. She swept the hair from her eyes once more and stood, her tiny body but eight inches tall on the tree.
With a tiny spring at the knee she jumped from the branch and dropped straight, cushioning her own fall by slowing before landing. She landed on her feet and reached under the fern at the base of the tree that she had placed her cape under, attempting – hoping – to keep it dry from the night’s onslaught of snow and the forest’s oozing moisture. She yanked it out and shook it off, placing it over herself, sealing it at her neck with her index finger, the cape covering her whole head, hiding the brightness of her hair.
Saphonia shot straight up now, into the canopy, hovering in the greenness. She grabbed at an unlucky leaf, tore it from its host and held it aloft, her forefinger and thumb clasping it. She twiddled the leaf, moving her finger over her thumb so that the leaf spun in a green blur, then moved her finger back quickly so that it blurred the other way. The sheet of its body was almost as broad and long as her chest. She let the thing go, watched it fall all the way to a bough directly in her sight still, before it drooped lazily and continued to fall, now out of her eyesight, to the branches she had shot past just then to come up here. She yawned now and shook her head, rearranging her coat and cape, lifting her knee in front of her and clawing at the dense fabric that covered her foot, put there by her to shield her from the cold. It was doing a very bad job of it.
She put her foot back down beside the other one and she sunk her hands into her pockets. She wished she could shake off the cold of this dreadful forest!
She shot forward and up, brushing against the leaves and above the roof of the forest, into the light. Despite the dreary mist which laid on the earth and the dark grey of the sky and the incessant snow, her hazel almond-shaped eyes were blinded by the sudden light. She pressed forward a while and then dipped back down. Nothing still, just empty forest. She flung herself back up, dipping in and out of the dark forest, looking, searching.
At least, she thought to herself, if she found no hint of the barrat, she would find a meal for Silian and bring it to him. She would watch him devour a person, a woman, she hoped. She wanted to see the special lustful heat in his eyes as he penetrated the skin of an unknowing person, especially a lady. She daydreamed lazily as she skimmed the forest top, wondering where she would find someone and how she could convince them to follow her to him.
Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/lqegjl/silian_and_saphonia_part_1_of