You Remember One Thing For Me by Verity
(to Elizabeth and Rebecca for their words, and to Juliet and Pauline for theirs in retrospect)

The very first morning after she took her words away from him he watched her sleep as the sun rose.

Her name was Lera, and her skin was as pale as milk, dappled gently across her cheeks with sun-sweet freckles. Her hair half-hid her face like a curtain of fire; she slept quietly, her arms bent tightly around her pillow. He watched her breathe in the thin yellow light of dawn; her lips were parted slightly, pale pink and perfect.

Morthos gazed down on her, his lovely little mistress, this girl who had spoken him as her own when he could have begged for no greater mercy than death. Her life had been - as lost, as harsh almost, as his - and she, she had not broken under it, had offered him a way out rather than crush him. She had offered him her trust.

He was so unworthy. He would conquer worlds for her, if she but asked.

When the sun had almost fully borne itself up into the sky, she sighed, a long, unhurried sigh. And then she, this impossibly sweet creature, opened her liquid brown eyes and watched him, unafraid, unconcerned, sleepily appraising.

"Hello there," said Lera. "So what are you planning to do with the rest of your life?"

The temptations were always such an obstacle. He tried to steer Lera from them, but it was so hard; they were genii, Morthos would whisper to her sometimes, sacred and rare, as he might have told a child a bedtime story. She was so precious and delicate to him, like a rose. Naive, in her own way, even as she was so precocious in her magical gifts.

"None of us know the meaning of true freedom," he had said harshly to her once, regretting it a moment later - but her silly ideals would be the death of him, he feared. "Once you have joined a bandit's camp you cannot persist in such a clear-cut view of the world," he had said, another time, and she had argued against her innocence, and that argument, perhaps, was true. Still, she did not know, had not walked the paths of darkness, was ripe for seduction.

Morthos and Lera, he and she, so far away from the rest of the world in this little tower, trying to ameliorate past evils but only enhancing their subtleties. Once she had mentioned the ills a lack of equality wrought upon the minds of all; that was early on, and she mentioned such things no more.

Beautiful Lera. The turn of her pale wrist, her murmured spell, drove him to distraction. Let me protect her, he prayed, to gods or goddesses unknown, as he lay in his bed alone at night, let me keep her true, ever pure.

Oh, but for the ease of corruption - the rot, or fermentation of succulent grapes into headier and sweeter wine, had already begun.

"Love is the noblest frailty of the mind," she said scornfully, bitterly. Tresses of burnished copper lay aflame against the stark black of her robes, burning like her words. She turned away from the window, towards him now. The land outside was fertile and verdant in the framed sunset of the window, a glittering gem - impossible for her to bear, he thought, in such an hour.

"Lera?" She, gorgeous in her bleak rage, looked away from him. "They have told you, then."

"I thought you said-" The words came out in a sudden rush; she twisted around to face the abscess of the window. The cool breeze blew past her, ruffling his hair and hiding her face behind a crimson curtain. "Not Senar. Anyone but Senar."

"We didn't kill him-"

"I felt him die, Morthos. I felt him die."

"We didn't-"

"And I didn't even know what it was," Lera continued, as if in some other world, spellbound by her own horror, "Until the word from the villagers came, this morning. I felt him-"

"We didn't kill him," he said, praying that it might penetrate, give her some comfort.

"What?" She heard him finally, shook her head, not comprehending.

"His heart - stopped. During the riots, before our people ever got there, ever started the burning." He stepped forward, gently put a hand on his beloved mistress's shoulder. She was as sharp and cold as ivory. "Lera?"

"It's so hard," she murmured; to herself, he thought. "We have no room for frailty here, honorable or otherwise."

"That's a price we pay. For knowledge. For... power. For-"

"For kindness?"

He was silent. Lera shuddered under his hand, tilted her head back. Her eyes wet with recent tears shattered him softly, as her words had once, and could have more thoroughly, had she not granted him forgiveness. A thousand sins.

"Morthos?" she said, softly, as if searching for a foothold.

He kissed her, remembering, and forgetting at the same time.

She never knew what lonely was. Merely because she had no slate to compare her life to - Senar- a whisper in her head that she ignored opined - alone in her head. Except for Morthos, now.

And how sweet was the taste of his lips on hers, willing and amazed. Lera moved into his embrace willingly, anything to block out that other emptiness in her head. When he pulled away, breath a little labored, she tightened her arms around him.

"Lera-" Morthos uttered, suddenly, less a protest than an expression of wonderment. She interrupted him with her lips.

She couldn't feel the black hole in head while she was undressing. In the next room, the windowless one, with the couch. Sudden moves, true, but she knew he'd do anything she told him. That has always been the bargain - whether either was the pupil, she's always held the reins. (This is the price we pay, he had said. For forgiveness?)

She couldn't hear anything. She gripped his shoulders with fingers like vices.

Morthos labored to disrobe, finally, unfastening the robe, untying the drawstring of his trousers, finally even with her, shaking. Involuntarily, she whimpered, and he was quick to kiss her, this time with a strange mixture of passion and terror. He trembled against her lips.

"Sssh," said Lera, and she tried again with him this time, firmly if not reassuringly. Untold numbers had gone this road before them, but nonetheless it was newly tread for them, so experienced in other arenas.

"Lera," he said again, this time urgently. She slapped him.

"Shut up! Shut up!" She could do this, she thought, as long as he didn't - "Be quiet." Fury was bred well in her, as much as the magic. She embraced him, almost as an afterthought, and found that he still quaked beneath her touch, still hesitated. It aroused - almost? if that was the word? she found herself lacking of an entirely tangible vocabulary that ached to make itself known on her glib tongue - as much as it comforted.

Patiently, Lera drew him down to lie with her on the chaise, and she moved a hand to stroke his hair, uncertain. His mouth opened beneath hers, and she explored him gently with her tongue. An kind, he moved a hand to her breasts, cupping them, caressing them - she arched her back with pleasure as his thumbnail inadvertently grazed a peaked nipple, and after that he tweaked them both in turn, unmercilessly. She moaned softly into his mouth. The world of physical pleasure was entirely new to her, at least, and mindlessly for once she marveled, a supplicant at this temple of delights.

Morthos lifted his lips from hers, and before she could bring herself to any sort of comprehension required to complain, he put them to her left breast. The hungry tension between her legs was almost unbearable. "M," she said, unsure of whether she was capable of executing more than one syllable at a time, and then he slipped his fingers into the damp cavern between her thighs. She shrieked, and threw a leg over him, belatedly aware that there were other needs than hers that might want attending with an equal desire. He shuddered - arousal, this time, she thought, delighted she could place it. She shifted her hips over his, and looked him in the face, perhaps for the first time truly.

"Are you - sure you want-" She did not even bother to gift him with an answer or a rebuke, but merely reached down a hand to his loins and gently guided him within her, her virtue's loss a pain quick enough that she was able to bear it with ease.

She moved against him as the tides do against a seashore, and when they came, almost at the same time, it was like returning home after a long journey, rushing ashore into the arms of a loved one, dissolving like fireworks glittering against the sea.

"Morthos, Morthos," Lera said, leaning her head against his chest and letting him hold her, as he might a child. She wept then, and he said nothing so loudly as did the steady beat of his heart.

lyrics: Psychic Hearts by Thurston Moore