---
Afterward, the silence was unbearable.
Tae lay sprawled against the cold altar, skin damp, bloodied and marked. His breath ghosted in shallow intervals, eyelids fluttering shut, but his smile remained—smeared like wine across a white cloth. Sated. Defiled. Triumphant.
Kook stood at the edge of the candlelight, knuckles cracked open from stone and sin. His chest heaved, claw marks across his spine still smoking from where Tae had raked him with intention—not just pain, but memory.
He was shaking. Not from exhaustion.
From fear.
“You felt it,” he said quietly.
Tae’s voice was silk-drenched gravel. “I felt you.”
“No.” Kook turned, shadows clinging to his bare shoulders. His eyes gleamed the way a wolf’s might, if a wolf had ever known shame. “The thing. It... entered me.”
Tae sat up, finally, slow and graceful as rot. “Of course it did. You let it.”
“I didn't—”
“You opened,” Tae murmured. “And it came in.”
Kook moved fast—hand against Tae’s throat again, but not pressing, not choking. Just... touching. Still tethered.
“I should kill you,” Kook said.
“You already did,” Tae murmured. “Over and over. And yet here I am.”
The altar shuddered beneath them. The candles hissed out one by one, until only the violet glow of bloodfire lit the chamber.
From the far side of the chapel, the crypt-thing stirred.
It did not move, not physically. Its presence bled forward like cold oil seeping through old linen. Their names slithered along the walls in languages lost to drowning queens and crucified gods. A thousand mouths whispering a thousand variations of desire and doom, all laced together with the same unholy thread:
“Bound. Bound. Bound.”
Kook staggered back. Tae stared at the ceiling, unblinking.
“We fed it,” he said.
“No,” Kook whispered. “You offered us.”
And somewhere inside that cursed chapel, something laughed with all the voices of the condemned.
---
They didn’t speak again until they reached the river that wound through the dead city.
The sky was a dull bruise, sunless, starless, as if the heavens themselves had turned away. The water moved sluggishly, dark with iron and memory.
Tae dipped his fingers into the current and smiled when it hissed against his skin.
“It remembers me.”
“Everything remembers you,” Kook said. “That’s your problem.”
Tae turned. “And yours?”
“I forget.” Kook’s jaw tightened. “Every time you touch me, I forget what I came here to destroy.”
Tae stepped forward, barefoot and unafraid. “Then let me help you remember.”
He pressed a kiss to the edge of Kook’s collarbone—a place no enemy should touch.
Kook’s hands didn’t push him away.
They trembled.
“You don’t want me,” Kook said hoarsely.
“I want to ruin you,” Tae said. “Doesn’t that count?”
“You want to own me.”
“I already do.”
Kook shoved him. Hard. Tae stumbled back, laughing, barefoot in snow and ash.
“I’ll burn you,” Kook swore. “I’ll tear you apart.”
“I’m counting on it,” Tae whispered.
---
Far beneath them, in the chapel that used to be holy, the crypt-thing whispered one final prophecy before sinking back into its pit of silence.
“One will burn the kingdom.
The other will mourn it.
And neither will leave it alive.”
Its body folded into the stone, satisfied. For now.
The river continued on, uncaring.
And somewhere, a church bell rang for the dead—though no one had touched it in years.
---
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