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How you've turned my world, you precious thing. It was a fragment of an old song, one he couldn't tell you where he'd heard. Maybe the voices whispered it to him. It fit, though. It fit so well. You starve and near exhaust me. Everything I've done, I've done for you.
It hadn't been true at first. He'd thought many things of his killer the first time he'd seen her. There'd been gratitude, naturally, for intervening with those animals, preventing them from destroying him and all his work. There'd been appreciation, visceral and delighted, for how masterful she'd been in battle, slaughtering them where they stood before him. She had been incredible, a killer par excellence, and naturally he had admired her.
But then. Oh, but then. He had followed her afterwards, here or there, out of curiosity. He had tracked her on an idle whim, waited until she drew away from those around her, followed her to see what she became with only his avid eyes upon her. And what he'd seen ...
Blood. Blood and bone and carnage. The bodies, splayed out, her lean form crouched predatory above them. The blood, on her hands and her chin and her throat. On her lips. She ate of them. His killer, his goddess. She ate of the flesh and drank of the blood. She feasted on the dead, ate of their essence and transformed it into her own, made from it a radiant glory. Not as he did, not in paint on canvas, but within her own flesh. Hers was a different, more intimate altar. She took them into herself, made the sacrifice within her own skin, and in doing so transformed herself. She was a goddess. He'd seen it then.
He'd stopped breathing. His heart, tremulous organ that it was, had frozen in his chest, and when it started again it had hammered his ribs so violently that he feared for a moment it would burst from his chest. The sight of her. Gods and voices, the sight of her.
His killer was a cannibal. That was the prosaic term for what she was, the clinical phrase that small-minded people liked to use. That was what they reduced it to. It was more than that. So much more. She was more than that. He knew that. There were things in the blood that those hollow skulls would never comprehend. She understood that. He could tell. She felt them. She used them, she feasted on them. She understood the blood. She used it to call that thing inside her, that slick dark thing that filled her with life, the fire he could see in her eyes.
He'd seen angels before. He'd made them, wrought them from the last moments of lesser beings, bound the voices and the essence and the blood together for brief moments at a time. Long enough to catch them, to etch them onto canvas, to paint them and bind them and make an art of them, a thing that would live on where they could not. But this. Her. Hers was not a fleeting effulgence, there and gone again. She had bound the sacrifice to her flesh. It was in her, it was part of her. Hers was a light that would never go out.
If only ... if only he could share it.
And that ... If ever there was a reason to believe in miracles. If ever there was a reason to believe in the benevolence of whispering things. She'd seen him. His goddess on her knees, her hands caked in blood. She'd looked up, her mouth streaked with gore, and seen him where he stood all but swooning against a wall. Those fiery eyes pierced him, her hands curled instantly to claws, her body stooped low and vicious and defensive across the corpse. Ready to kill him, in that instant. Ready to destroy him for what he'd seen, for what he might do because of it. Of course. So many others would not understand. Of course she would have violence ready beneath her skin, poised for his interruption. Kill or be killed, and such a radiant monster of course would never die. She meant to kill him, to answer his violence with her own.
He could not offer it, though. For once, for the first time in his life, he had no violence to offer. Not against her. Never, ever against her. That was not ... it was not his place. Not with her. He could kill for her, he would kill for her, he would offer up her choice of corpses if given even half a chance. But to strike her? To raise his blade against so blackly, brightly radiant a thing? Never. Never in life.
He'd wandered towards her. Almost dazed, in a trance. She'd squared herself on her knees, raised her chin fierce and bloody to face him, and his own knees had almost collapsed from under him there in the rubble. So weak. So dazed and trembling in the face of her. He'd meant to be different. To be suave, to be cool, as he had been when he thought her only the beautiful killer who'd saved his life. It was beyond him, though. Here and now, in the face of the goddess revealed, such artifice was beyond him. There was only awe. There was only adoration. There was only lust, for blood and for glory and for her. He went to his knees. He couldn't help it.
"Killer," he'd called her, a rusted rasp of a thing, jagged words spilling from his lips. "Killer."
He hadn't known her name.
The moment stretched, poised on a knife-edge. She wanted to kill him. He'd seen it, wanted it. He would have offered himself up gladly, given his flesh into her keeping, his blood to be bound and transformed on that altar, made part of her, made into a living art that no painting could hope to match. He would have given her that in a heartbeat, with a heartbeat, with the last gasp of that still-hammering organ in his chest. He wanted nothing more, nothing at all, and she had seen that too. He'd watched her realise it. He saw it happen.
She crawled to him across the corpse. He sat kneeling in the dust across from her, his cock straining helplessly in his trousers, his arms trembling with the force of his adoration, and she crawled through the blood across to him. The noises he'd made. Filthy things, helpless things. He couldn't have stopped them. There was savagery in her eyes. Horror, desperation, the killing instinct. And something else. Something he couldn't withstand, something that set his skin afire, that curled his fingers into claws and dug them into the dirt, that burned the blood in his veins and in his cock and nearly tore his beating heart from his chest. She ranged herself above him, a terrible, predatory thing, with an echo of his lust in her eyes, and he almost shamed himself there and then, almost let go with a shuddering, desperate cry.
He held. He didn't know how, had no idea, but he held. He kept himself on the brink, held himself before her, and it was ... It was the right sacrifice. It must have been. He had no blood to offer her, no corpse to offer up save his own, but to halt himself scoured upon the brink seemed enough. He had to think so, anyway. He had to, because why else would she reward him? What else could make her give him ...
"Like that, do you?" she'd said, low and dark while her short, ragged nails dug wounds into his hips. She licked her lips, lifting flakes of blood away from them with a pink, stained tongue. He'd shuddered, mewled helplessly in her hands. "Want to be eaten, Pickman? Want to give me something to feast on?"
Yes. He didn't know if he'd managed to voice it out loud, if he'd only screamed it inside his own skull where all the voices lay gibbering, hissing in brutal delight. He didn't know if he'd said it. It didn't matter. She heard it anyway.
She tore him out of his trousers, ripped them open with hard hands to bare his organ like the choicest morsel. He'd stared at her, the world white and full and roaring around him, his body taut and strained and screaming on her altar, as so many had been on his. He'd stared at her, the sensations both visceral and strangely distant, and watched in mute, unreasoning exultation as she swooped down, that grinning, bloodstained mouth, and ate him whole.
He'd screamed. He'd fallen backwards, her weight still pressing his knees to the earth, his hips and spine howling at the abuse as they bent wrongly away from them. He didn't care. He didn't feel it. Her mouth. The warmth, and the darkness, and the teeth. The blood. It seized around him, latched onto him and sucked him down within it, bit him and punished him and sparked ... sparked ...
He lost coherent thought. He lost everything. For ages, for a time without measure, there was nothing but the sensation of her. Fire and darkness and savage, greedy warmth, drawing him out and out, down through his bones and into her mouth. Drawing his life, pulling it out through his organs. Feeding. On him. His blood. His life. All hers. There was no world beyond that. Vaguely he knew himself manipulated. His knees pushed sideways, his hips pressed into the earth. She might have broken his legs, and he would neither have felt nor cared. There was a gentleness to it, though. He thought she was trying to spare him. She devoured him, she drank him down without a qualm, hard and fierce and punishing, and still she spared him. Still she saved him. His killer. His goddess without match.
He died, at some point. The big death, the little one, he didn't know. He went away, gathered up by his voices, by their love and their lust and their delight, and when he was reborn, when he came back ... she was there. His killer. She'd laid him out, straightened him carefully where he lay in the dust beneath her, beside the corpse, and she sat there. Sat beside him, smoothed his hair from his forehead, tucked his ravaged organ back inside the ruins of his trousers. He wept for her. He would have offered anything. He'd never known such love in all his life.
"... You're a twisted thing, aren't you," she murmured quietly, tucking a strand of his hair behind his ear with bloodstained fingers. "God, you're a hell of a thing, Pickman. What am I going to do with you, huh?"
"... Anything." He'd said it, heard it tear itself distantly from between his lips. He'd gazed up at her, dazed and ravaged where he lay beneath her, and managed something of a smile. Adoration, freely offered. "Anything you want. You can have anything, killer."
There was pain on her face then. Horror, hatred, self-disgust. There were black, beautiful things behind her eyes, and again, yet again, he wondered if he might die. He wondered if she might kill him, and feast upon him in truth. But then ... then.
The kiss was gentle. It was soft, it was sweet. There was blood on her lips, his blood, his seed, the taste of his life and his death, and she was so gentle. She pressed them back inside him, fed them back to him, her wounding fingers gentle at his temples. She pressed kisses to his mouth, to his eyes, to his forehead. Benedictions from a goddess. He'd wept without even a hint of shame. He'd pushed his battered body and curled it shaking in her arms. She'd held him. She cradled him and kissed him and pressed her bloody mouth gently to his head.
She'd turned his world, that precious thing. She was proof. Proof of the blood, proof of the body, proof of the benevolence of gods. She was his killer, his goddess. There was nothing in this world or any other that he would not do for her. He would kill a thousand men to lay their corpses at her feet, to feed the fire of glory inside her. He would bleed himself every day, to taste his death from her lips. Nothing was too much. Not one thing.
From that day forth, he laid his heart upon her altar.