Now Atiya stood in Screja's residence with his entire body trembling, searching through the rooms for wood, for anything that would burn cleanly and completely.
Not the pages he kept.
Screja's chopped body was the problem.
Two days ago.
"I am tired. Let me go."
Screja did not listen. She had not listened to anything he said for the better part of what he was now fairly certain had become an entire day.
Her body moved with a relentless wild energy that had long since crossed the boundary between pleasure and something he did not have a clean word for.
The ecstasy was real, he could not deny that, immense and overwhelming in a way that made coherent thought feel like trying to hold water in open hands.
That was precisely the problem. It was too much. His body and mind were being pulled apart at the seams by sheer sensation and she showed no sign of stopping.
"Fuck. Ahhhh. Yes."
Her own sounds seemed to make her deaf to everything else. Or she heard him and simply did not care.
Either was plausible.
It dragged on until the light outside the window changed and changed again and he was fairly certain it was now night.
She was using something. Some skill or craft woven into it, sustaining herself, sustaining him against his will, keeping the whole thing going past any natural limit.
He was going genuinely crazy around the edges of his own mind.
She stopped at midnight.
Got up. Cooked food. Brought it to him and fed him with a domestic patience that was almost more unsettling than everything preceding it. Washed him down with warm water and careful hands.
Then continued.
Their bodies were entangled in a feverish knot, every limb and curve pressed together in a chaotic embrace.
Sweat glistened on their skin, mingling with the slick mess of fluids and exertion, creating a sticky, primal tapestry that blurred the lines between pain and unwanted ecstasy. Atiya's mind reeled in disbelief.
'Where the fuck did she get those toys?' he wondered, his eyes widening at the array sprawled before him.
It was a collection that rivaled anything he'd glimpsed in the darkest corners of porn: vibrators of every shape and size, restraints that bit into his wrists, plugs and beads, and even improvised objects that stretched the boundaries of imagination, household items twisted into tools of torment.
She wielded them all with relentless fervor, using her mouth to tease and torment, her lower body to grind and envelop, exploring every orifice and possibility that the human form could endure.
No part of him was spared; she claimed him with hands, lips, and hips in a symphony of domination that left him raw and exhausted.
For two agonizing days and two endless nights, he was her captive, subjected to a violation that stripped away his will, turning his body into a vessel for her insatiable desires, a rape that blurred into an unrelenting haze of sensation.
"Stop... please," he gasped, his voice hoarse and broken, barely rising above a whisper.
"Let... me go," he begged, tugging weakly at his bonds, but she paid no heed as if his pleas were mere background noise to her obsession.
Impatience surged within him like a storm, twisting into desperation as his body screamed for reprieve.
"I am going to die..." he murmured, the words tumbling out in a defeated exhale, his vision blurring from fatigue and overload.
Atiya's mind grew increasingly clouded, a fog of overstimulation and resentment swallowing his thoughts.
'I can't take it anymore,' he admitted inwardly, the weight of it crushing his spirit.
Her seducing, enticing beauty only fueled his torment, those mesmerizing golden eyes that gleamed with predatory hunger, her voluptuous figure curving in all the right places, a siren's allure that had ensnared him.
Her skin was soft and tender, like silk under his unwilling touch, but now it repulsed him, a constant reminder of his entrapment.
He was utterly sick of it all, the endless cycle, the forced intimacy, the loss of control.
'Fuck it,' he thought, a spark of defiance igniting amidst the despair. With a surge of willpower, he struggled against his restraints and muttered through gritted teeth:
"Portal creation."
The intense, grueling sessions over multiple days had drained him profoundly; his Yai percentage, a measure of his inner energy reserves, had dwindled to a precarious 45%.
Activating the skill demanded even more, siphoning away another sliver until it bottomed out at 40%, leaving him teetering on the edge of collapse as the portal began to shimmer into existence.
"Sajibu."
The staff materialized and his hand closed around it.
Screja was straddling him, her lips against his neck, entirely absorbed in herself. She did not notice the portal. She did not notice the staff. She noticed nothing until he brought the head of it down hard against her back.
She pulled back, surprised, confusion crossing her face, her mind not yet catching up to what was happening.
Atiya swung.
The staff connected and Screja's body split in two clean pieces and the sound of it was something he was going to carry for a long time.
"Ahhhh."
He shoved her off him and lay there on the ruined bed and breathed. Just breathed. Long and deep and with the particular quality of air that only exists when something that has been pressing down on you for a very long time is suddenly gone. He stared at the ceiling and let the silence exist for a moment.
Then he turned his head and looked at the room.
"Fuck. What do I do."
Blood on the sheets, blood on his body, blood on the walls. Screja in two pieces on the floor beside the bed. His yai at forty percent and his body running on something fumes adjacent.
He moved to get up.
His legs gave out the moment his feet hit the floor and he went down hard, catching himself on the bed frame with both hands, hanging there breathing through his teeth.
*I cannot believe I am still alive. Two days of aphrodisiacs and whatever skill she was using to sustain it.*
He pulled himself back up slowly, testing his weight against each leg before trusting it.
*She was supposed to be serving me. She was assigned to tend to me before the ritual. If anyone finds her dead the suspicion lands on me immediately and nowhere else.*
He looked around the room and his eyes found the fireplace.
The idea formed and his stomach turned at what it required.
He looked at Screja's body.
He looked at the fireplace.
He got to work.
Now at present the chopped pieces were inside the fireplace, the flames taking hold, and Atiya stood in front of it with blood drying on his skin searching the room for anything else that needed to burn.
With limping steps and a body that complained at every movement he got to work on the room.
The floor first, then the walls, then every surface that had taken blood. He scrubbed methodically, the way someone does when they cannot afford to miss anything, checking angles and corners and the undersides of furniture. When he was satisfied he stripped the bed.
The old sheet he dealt with separately. He scraped what needed to be scraped, transferred it to a fresh sheet, made the bed look lived in and ordinary. The kind of detail that would read as normal to anyone looking in from the outside.
Then he went through Screja's wardrobe.
He was holding a piece up and checking the sizing when the door opened.
A priestess. Short, almost level with him in height, stepping inside with the particular distracted energy of someone delivering a routine message.
"Screja, I know I am interrupting but it is your turn to cle—"
She saw him. She saw Sajibu.
"What did you do!"
Atiya glanced down at the staff.
*I forgot to unsummon it. Tch.*
She was already moving. He was faster. Two portals opened and the knife sailed through one and emerged from the other at a redirected angle and found her neck before she completed her first step.
She was burned too.
He stood in the empty room after and looked around it one final time. Then he gathered every page of the pornographic drawings, tucked them inside his robe, and turned to the wardrobe.
Atiya was short. Thin framed, no facial hair, no broad shoulders or muscular build.
Nothing about his physical presence read as male to a casual observer. He found something that fit well enough, dressed, adjusted the veil over his face, and walked out of Screja's residence into the open air of the village.
*I need to get out this instant. With Leishna.*
She was the only one who knew where the ritual survivor might be. The only one who could guide him out of the mountain. Every path forward ran through her and he was running out of time before someone opened a door somewhere and found something they were not supposed to find.
He moved through the village in Screja's robes, veil adjusted, steps measured despite the limp pulling at his left side. Thin frame, no facial hair, short enough to pass without a second glance. Nobody stopped him.
Leishna was on the couch when the knock came, a bunch of grapes balanced on her stomach, staring at the ceiling with the idle contentment of someone with nowhere to be. She hauled herself up, padded to the door, and pulled it open.
A woman stood outside.
"Sis, what do you want from me."
A man's voice came back.
"I killed them. I can no longer feign ignorance. Help me run."
Leishna stared at the veil for a second. Then she grabbed the wrist of whoever this was and pulled them inside without a word.
She sat across from Atiya and listened while he laid it out. Everything, in the order it happened, without softening any of it. The rape, the two days, the aphrodisiacs and the skill she had used to sustain it. Killing Screja. Chopping the body. The fireplace. The priestess who walked in at the wrong moment. The knife through the portal. Burning her too. Taking the clothes.
Leishna's face moved through several expressions and settled on one she did not bother hiding.
*He is so brutal and cold.*
She fumed quietly on the inside, gripping her own enthusiasm down with some effort.
*I am a fucking fan of yours.*
"So right now I have to hurry. Please help me."
Leishna looked at him properly for the first time since he sat down. The bloodshot eyes. The way he was holding himself upright through sheer stubbornness rather than any physical capacity. He looked like something that had already decided to collapse and was simply negotiating the timing.
"Fine. I will help you. But I will take a price." She held up a hand before he could react. "Your life is not the price."
Atiya flinched anyway and then nodded because he was not right enough in his head to do anything more complicated than that.
"There is a way to steal the sculpture and you are the one who has to do it. Tonight."
That landed and she watched something in his eyes sharpen slightly, the last functional corner of his mind trying to engage.
"Every four days a priest or priestess takes a turn washing the sculpture. Tonight at midnight it was Screja's turn." Leishna tilted her head. "That is probably why the woman came to her residence. Word had spread rather far and wide about what she was doing with you."
Atiya opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
"Since you are already wearing her clothes," Leishna continued, "you disguise as her and steal the sculpture."
She watched his eyes lose the last of their focus mid-sentence.
He pitched forward and she caught him by the shoulder and redirected him toward the couch with minimal ceremony.
He was unconscious before she had finished laying him down, breathing slow and heavy, every line of him surrendered completely to sleep.
Leishna straightened up and looked at him for a moment.
It was noon. Midnight was a long way off.
She went back to her grapes.