by Alisa Woods
A whisper of feathers and then nothing. Sound reverts to the background level of grunting and moaning. I wait another minute, then two. When I’m sure they’re gone, I lower my wings and peek up.
Terah floats outside my cage, a lazy smile on her face, fully clothed in her black leather outfit again. “Hello, sweet thing.”
Fear races through me. I scoot back in the cage.
Her smile falls into a pout. “Aw, don’t be like that.” She looks around. There are no other angelings nearby. Elyon is a long ways off, on the distant platform with a host of angelings administering pleasure to him. Terah turns back to me but lowers her voice. “I’m not here to steal your virginity, boy of light. I’m here to help you.”
I don’t trust her. Not even a little. “Help me how?”
She scowls. “Do you want to get out of here or not?” She glances around, but everyone is preoccupied with their sex-making.
“Are you serious?”
She shrugs. “Okay, fine. Be that way.” She peers with interest at the other angelings, perhaps looking for a coupling to join.
I edge forward in the cage. “Wait.”
She turns back with an arched eyebrow.
“Why would you help me escape? You were the one who captured me.” It seems like a reasonable question in a thoroughly unreasonable place.
She stretches and flexes her wings. “I got what I wanted, boy of light. And orgasm from an angel. I realize you’re not savvy to these things, but fuck… those are amazing. The orgy afterward isn’t bad, either.” She gives me a lascivious grin, then she shrugs. “I figure I owe you something better than what Elyon has in store for you.”
I’m not sure I believe her, but I’m not seeing many other options. “Won’t he be angry with you?”
She smirks. “You think I don’t know how to slip a thing or two past the boss? Do what I say, follow my lead, and when this is all done, trust me, Elyon will blame someone else for the escape of his pet. But we need to do this now, boy of light.”
I swallow, but it’s clear the time to escape is favorable—literally everyone is distracted.
I give her a careful nod.
She raises her hand and flicks her fingers at my cage. The constant hum of the magic that binds me ceases. Before I can think what to do next, she’s sprung open the physical bars that remain and flitted inside to seize me by the shoulder.
“Don’t just travel out of here, okay?” she says in a whisper. “Not yet. Come with me.” Then she twists and drags me through interdimensional space with her.
We end up in a room with the same black crystal walls as the cavern, but they glow with a softer light. “All right,” Terah says, releasing me and stepping back to look me over. “Yeah, you’re pretty much a mess.”
I glance around, suspicious. “I thought you were helping me escape.”
“I am, little angeling of light.” She gives me an impatient scowl. “Do what I say, remember?”
“But why are we here?”
“So many fucking questions.” She sighs and steps forward, more closely examining my wounds. “You’ve got the stink of half the Regiment on you. Elyon will sense you leaving with all that shadow magic. And no matter where you go, he’ll easily track you.”
I frown. “But how do I—”
“Leave that to me.” She takes my hand which has a blade strike across the back. The inky tendrils of shadow magic are half up my arm. She clamps her mouth to the wound, suddenly, and it makes me jolt. But then she breathes in, and I can feel her sucking the shadow magic straight out of my body. There’s a blissful relief that follows its retreat. When she’s finished, the wound is gone. “See? Easy.” She clasps my hand and straightens my arm, bringing her mouth to another smaller wound on my bicep. I’ve heard of angelings delivering a blessing, an infusion of life called a life kiss—that was my plan with Beatrice’s father to battle the fatigues of his illness—but what Terah’s doing amounts to the reverse. She’s drawing out the magic that’s poisoning me.
The relief of it suffuses me with bliss, like a blessing straight from Markos.
Terah pulls away from that wound and scouts for another. “Elyon will be busy fucking his angelings for a while,” she muses. “We have a little time yet before he exhausts them. When that happens, he will rest.”
“Rest?” I ask, but she’s found her next target, a slice across my shoulder. She locks her mouth onto it and draws the poison magic out.
I breathe a heavy sigh with the release.
She pulls away, wiping her mouth and grinning. “You didn’t think angels rested? Well, probably not angels of light. They never do anything so taxing as an orgy with a hundred angelings.”
“Truth,” I say, my head swimming a little.
She’s looking for the next wound to heal.
I point to a particularly deep cut in my side, lifting my arm to give her access.
She nods and angles her head down to it. She whispers against my skin. “Once he’s in his stupor, that’s when we get you out of here.” Then she locks her lips to the wound and draws in a breath.
The relief and light-headedness are even more intense. I lean into her ministrations. When she’s done, the room seems to tilt a little.
“Whoopsie,” she says with a chuckle, holding my arm to brace me. “How about you sit down for the rest of this?” She conjures a bench from the wall made of the same black crystal.
I nod, still woozy, and settle hard on the bench. My wings are still out, but they’re helping me stay upright, so I leave them.
Terah kneels in front of me and targets a slash across my knee. Her lips on my skin charge it, and watching her suck the shadow out of me flushes me even more. She moves to another cut further up my leg, brushing aside the edge of my toga to reach it. One hand braces against my knee while the other presses against my chest, holding me as she clamps her lips hard onto the wound.
A small sound escapes me, and I’m laboring to breathe. An ache low in my belly seems to throb with each sucking pull she makes on my skin. She’s humming now, and I don’t know why, but I don’t mind. I’m too focused on watching the small slide of her lips against my skin.
Then I see something move under my toga, between my legs, and with horror, I realize that my penis is rising, erect like Elyon’s and the other male angelings in their heat of Lust. I’m flushed with embarrassment, hoping it will stop, praying she won’t notice. But as soon as she finishes with the wound, she catches sight.
“I just… ignore that…” I gasp, air seeming in even shorter supply.
“No problem,” she says. But then she lifts my toga and exposes my inflated penis.
“What are you—”
She grabs hold of it and plunges her mouth down on it.
“Gah!” I cry out, the sensation like an explosion in my mind. I lean away from her, trying to shove her away, but she’s clamped hard onto it, pulling and sucking with the same fervor as on the wounds. “Ah! Terah! Stop…” She bobs her head and strokes with her hand, and my protest grows weak under a surge of Lust that eclipses all thought. My vision doubles as she attacks my shaft with her hot, wet mouth. Up and down, sucked-tight mouth and hard-wrapped hand, it feels like she’s sucking the life right out of me. I grip her head, intending to stop her, but instead, I find myself grunting and pushing her down harder, urging her to take me deeper in her throat, crying out with each stroke. “Holy… angels… of… light…” I pant. She goes faster at my urging, and everything tightens inside me. I’m convinced I’m about to explode. I cry out in fear and pleasure-pain, and then suddenly… my shaft twitches and gushes and shoots seed into her mouth. An endless stream of pleasure that gushes through my body. She keeps bobbing and sucking, pulling every last wave of this pleasure from me.
Every ounce of angel energy I possess is drained with it.
When she finally releases me, I am limp. My burgeoning shaft is deflated. My entire body is boneless. I am slumped against the dark crystal wall, as Terah rises
from her knees, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and grinning at me.
“Well,” she proclaims. “That was just as much fun as I thought it would be.”
My chest squeezes. What have I done? How easily did I succumb? But it’s not until my sluggish gaze travels from her self-satisfied smile to her midnight black wings and back to my own… that my heart stutters in my chest.
My wings are black.
“Nooo!” I cry out, heart spasming with the realization.
I am shadow.
I lurch up from the bench and whip around to be sure, but yes… the full length and breadth of all my feathers are glossy, obsidian black. Just like Terah’s.
“No,” I sob, clawing at them. “No, not this. Not this.”
“Oh, yes, this.” The grin is wide on her face. “I guess there’s no point in fleeing now, is there, little angeling?”
Angeling of shadow.
I crumbled back to the bench, fists curled, body wracked. Then I scream all the Wrath that’s boiling under my skin. There’s no point in holding it back.
I am nothing but Sin now.
My flesh still burns.
It’s been a day, at least, and I can still feel the shadow magic burning under my skin where Elyon marked me. Angels of the light forbid us from defiling our bodies with tattoos, saying our forms are holy representations of God’s love for humans. We may not alter them. It’s partly why angelings wear so little clothing compared to humans as well—we are not to cover that which God has created. That, and the angel burns bright in us, making normal human clothing uncomfortably hot.
But I’m in shadow now.
Listless. Dark winged. Marked and claimed by Elyon’s Regiment. My legs hang over the side of my cage, which swings above the darkness below. I’m no longer locked in, physically or by magic. I could return to Markos’s Dominion at any time—only he would rightly slay me as a threat to every angeling of light in his domain. I peer over my knees at the welcoming dark—I have no idea what’s down there or how deep it goes. If it were deep enough, the fall could kill me. But maybe not—angelings are hard to kill.
But apparently easy to turn.
My hands grind against the bars of the cage on either side of me. I was so naïve. Innocent of the entire idea of trickery, in a way only a stupid angeling of the light on walkabout for the first time could possibly be. My Fall was so easy to orchestrate, it could arguably be sourced to Pride not Lust. Why did I trust Terah? Did I think I knew so well how to read an angeling’s face that I couldn’t be taken in? That I couldn’t be made a fool?
A dark, magic-inked fool.
A rush of feathers beats the air, alerting me just before an angeling arrives and clings to my cage. It’s another female.
“Go away,” I say, still gripping the bars. I give her a glare.
“Elyon’s gone,” she says, flashing me a lascivious smile, just like the last three. “But he’s given permission show you the way of the shadows.”
“You mean have sex.”
“I mean you need a good fuck, fresh meat.” She glares back at me.
“No, I do not.” I turn my back on her and pray she’ll leave. The last two did, but the first one forced me into battle to convince her. Apparently, I am the new toy that Elyon has given every angeling license to play with, and she felt she was due her turn.
The current angeling must feel the same, for she is crawling across the bars toward me. She swings down, suddenly in my face—
I scuttle back in my cage, away from the open door, narrowly avoiding contact with her. She grips the bars on the sides of the door and arches her back, thrusting her breasts toward me. She is beautiful, as all angelkind are, and I think she means it to be some kind of seduction, but all I see is the Lust burning in her eyes. More Sin.
I am made of Sin now.
“I could change your mind, Tajael,” she says with a leer.
“How do you know my name?” I flick a worried glance at the tight space of the cage. I’ve trapped myself if she brings the fight inside.
“Everyone knows your name, light boy.” She grins.
Her words surge up a level of Wrath I can’t contain. “I am not of the light.” I lurch toward her, and she leaps back. Then she gives a short blast of angelsong as she takes flight.
My ears ring, and I stumble back with the shock—her song was a weapon—but she’s already leaving. And the burst of Wrath has drained me. I stumble to the side of the cage and cling to the bars to stay upright. Every fear I had growing up in Markos’s realm has come true. That I was born of Sin. That to Sin I would return. All the training, all the lessons, all the fervent attempts to master the Virtues in their infinite complexity and nuance… all of it, for nothing.
A cascade of Wrath spills from one thought to the next. Markos ought never have rescued me. Had I grown up here, I would at least have a chance to survive. I would know nothing but Sin. But now… now, I know what I could have been and the torment of that…
A scream of frustration works its way up from the depths of my chest, and I can’t contain the anger any more than I could stop the pleasure Terah made erupt from my body. I open my mouth and release it, a full angelsong of fury, then I take a running leap from the cage. I soar and sing, the power of my song buffeting those nearby, clinging to the walls, fucking and fighting, one long orgy of violence and sex that apparently defines this place. Having announced my exile from my self-imposed prison, I cut the song and just glide, joining the slow churning hordes, the constant stream that circles the cavern.
But they keep a distance from me now.
Most are done with sex—sated, I suppose. They’re engaged in skirmishes or what look like organized bouts, or they circle or cling to the walls. I let my mind fall blank as I skim the edges of the cavern, a vast slightly oblong shape that disappears into darkness both above and below. I go around and around, doing nothing, seeing nothing, and most especially, feeling nothing. The horror of my situation is abstracted out into a single-minded drive to just fly. After more circuits than I can count, I come to a slow realization.
This place is not only made of Sin… it is boring.
There is no joy. No spark of life. No challenge to be met, no goals to be strived for. Sin is not just debauchery and pain… it is terribly banal. A dullness of the mind that only the sharpest of feelings—pleasure and pain—can break through. As I glide by the couples who are fucking and the mobs fighting… their eyes follow me. At first, I thought they might come after me, attack the way the females had tried. And their eyes shone with that intent. But it was more than that.
I was new. I was interesting.
Even Terah spoke of it, staking the claim to my defilement. Saying it was fun.
Not merely depravity for depravity’s sake… it was an alleviation of the boredom.
As I slowly circle, I realize I cannot possibly exist here for long. It’s too contrary to my nature. I will find the depths of the cavern and dash my skull against its bottom. Or I’ll tempt a mob of the shadow ones to break me irrevocably with their blades and their magic. I was born of Sin, and now I am nothing but Sin… but I can still choose.
I can choose how it ends.
I’m so deep in my thoughts, with the hot rustle of cavern air across my wings, that I don’t notice Terah alongside me until she’s already there.
“Flown the coop, baby bird?”
“I am not a child,” I say, my voice still rough from the angelsong blast.
She makes an obvious gesture of looking at my sex. “No, you are definitely not.”
“And I will not have sex with you.” We’re gliding past the platform end of the cavern, circling back toward my cage.
“Not even a little?” she asks hopefully. “I mean, I think you owe me. I did give you an orgasm. Pretty sure it was your first as well.”
“I owe you nothing but Wrath.” I bank to avoid a skirmish of feathers and blades and give thought to acquiring a weapon. Not that I would have to figh
t my way out of here—I have nowhere to go—just so I might invite a level of attack which might end me.
“You’d better park that attitude before Elyon gets back.” There’s enough concern in her voice—genuine concern—that it draws my gaze. She grins. “I’d like you to live long enough to figure out you really do owe me a few mind-blowing orgasms.”
That sparks my interest. “And how might I die?”
She frowns. “Any number of ways, if you’re not careful. Look, you’re in a good position here, sweet thing. Elyon’s got a thing for you, and you turned quickly. He’s all primed to offer you a spot in one of the higher squads. Maybe even work your way up to Magis.”
“Like you?” I ask, eyebrow lifted.
She smiles. “Yeah. Like me.”
“Does he often kill his Magis?”
Her frown returns. “That thing with your father was unusual. Most Magis are too smart to fuck up that badly.”
“Then I have no interest in becoming Magis.” I bank again, coming back toward the black crystal platform. My side still burns with the tattoo Elyon gave me, claiming me for his Regiment. If they tore apart my body thoroughly enough, maybe there would be no sign of it when they were done. Then again, no one outside the shadow realm was likely to ever find my body.
“Wait,” she says, surging ahead then coming up short, forcing me to stall out in my flight or crash into her. We’re hovering near the platform. “It’s a little early to get all Death Emo on me. Come on, kid. It’s not that bad.”
“I am not a child,” I repeat.
She gives me an exasperated look then moves to block my attempt to fly around her. “Hey! Listen up, asshole. I’m trying to help you.”
