Characters/Pairing: King in Yellow/Arthur
Rating: Explicit
Tags & Warnings: Carcosa/sacrificial bride AU, captivity, noncon, violence, arthur being violent, bondage, explicit sex, monsterfuck, eldritch sex, noncon body modification, body horror, brief spider imagery (skip the paragraph after ‘descends…’)
A sequel to ‘Gift to the Gods’ and a birthday present for kahti
***
The King has changed him.
Oh, he still looks more or less the same to the naked eye. At least he’s recognizable. But a god’s touch is contagious. He’s been hallowed by the divinity his husband has pumped into him, spurt by spurt, cell by cell. It radiates from him. It puddles in his footsteps. Sometimes when he goes walking in the city, the King’s devout fall upon it, licking it up from the pavement, in hopes of…
Arthur doesn’t know. Communion with their god? A few drops of the power he wields becoming theirs?
If he could speak to them without his voice seeping into their minds and driving them mad with its beauty, he’d tell them not to bother. There isn’t anything there worth having.
A servant of the King accompanies him to the marketplace, following him—leading him—from stall to stall. The merchants gaze upon him with a complex mix of emotions in their eyes: dread, awe, desire, hope of several kinds. They hope he’ll buy from them, and that they’ll gain renown. They hope he’ll bestow his attention on him, perhaps a single approving syllable or a pleased flicker of eye contact, so that they can shudder in the pleasure of just the barest brush against their god’s twice-removed divinity. They hope he’ll go away without becoming too interested in them.
The servant knows him well by now. Arthur gestures, or tips his head, and he turns to the merchants to speak. “My lord wishes to know your asking price for this,” or “The holy consort wonders if you have more patterns available.”
And then, “Come, your holiness, you wouldn’t wish to grow too fatigued to bear our Master’s pleasure.” It isn’t a suggestion, or a request. He isn’t Arthur’s servant.
They turn back from the third tract of the bazaar and head toward the temple hill.
A foot scuffs behind them.
Following senses honed to the razor’s edge of self-preservation, Arthur spins just in time to catch the wrist of the person trying to drive a knife into his side. He tightens his grip, and holds their eyes.
In the passing of a few seconds, he watches their expression go from angry to confused to frightened. He doesn’t let go of their wrist when they start wrenching against his grip, moving from alarm to panic. Not even when their whimpers turn to screams and the hallowed gold pours down their arm from where Arthur’s skin touches theirs, spreading, their flesh liquifying into dripping, beautiful fluid gold.
He lets go and leaves them on their knees in the still-spreading pool of it, still melting, once there isn’t enough of them left to stand up again.
A scrabbling, shouting commotion starts up behind him as the people around them notice the divine bounty. Arthur presses his lips into a line and doesn’t look back.
When he reaches his rooms in the temple-palace, he strips completely.
Gone: every scrap of lush, cobweb-fine sheer fabric that draped and clung to his body. Gone: all the gleaming beaten-gold cuffs and glinting fine chains of precious metals that adorned him and dangled from the piercings all over his body, connecting his nipples and clit, swinging jauntily from his nose to his ear, weaving elegantly through the corset piercings down his back. Gone: all the priceless gems and pendants that decorated him and turned him into a fairy wonderland of a being, their weight swinging teasingly from the most sensitive places on his body.
It’s only him, in his own skin, which throbs and torments him with the King’s power running amok through him.
His cunt in particular is a sweet agony. Its decorations he doesn’t have the power to unbind—the King’s own tendrils laced through the delicate piercings along his labia and keeping him shut tight. He can’t touch himself. He can’t push his fingers up into his wet aching sheath to relieve that begging torment radiating from the dripping core of him. He can’t take any of the array of objects that lie around the room, from candlesticks and lamp stands to hand fans or the handle of the parasol in a stand by the door, and penetrate himself with the fluted rounded phallic knobs of their handles or bases, battering himself with their delicious, punishingly unyielding hardness as he forces them deep enough into the sensitive, throbbing spots deep inside him until finally the tight throes of need come unwound and he can be released from its captivity. He can’t do that.
He grabs a pillow and pushes it under his hips so he can grind down against it, and writhes in search of release.
It isn’t enough. It’s never enough.
The King has locked him into the prison of his own flesh. Made him out of reach of any mortal. Arthur’s touch, his gaze, his voice are poison. And yet he is still mortal. He needs touch, craves connection, yearns for the pleasure of communion both physical and mental with another person.
Hastur gifts him, sometimes, to some semi-divine courtier or favored priest who’s pleased him enough to bestow Arthur upon them as a trinket. For a night or a few days or a week, he’ll be swept into someone else’s embrace and held, touched, pleasured, tortured, until the need is worked out of him for a little while.
But at the end of the day, no one’s touch can compare to Hastur’s. His god-flesh is addictive. His god-mind is a font of obsession and inspiration. Since Hastur consummated their union, Arthur has ached for him, in every part of him, with every breath and every beat of his heart.
His flesh knows when Hastur approaches. He knows a great clawed hand is reaching to push his door open before the hinges begin their soft groan. He can feel each step Hastur takes across the rugs of his floor. His body knows the approach of its master, and falls open for him. Without thinking, Arthur finds himself on his back, thighs open, awaiting his lord’s clawed touch upon his vulva.
“Did you have a good time at the bazaar?” Hastur asks in his symphony of a voice, as that hand slides exploringly over Arthur’s sensitized skin.
His hips strain upward against it. His hands knot into the sheets, twisting them tight between his fingers. “I got you something.”
Who else does he have to shop for, after all?
“Did you? How thoughtful.” Hastur’s great body curls down over top of Arthur’s bare, frail one, and tendrils of his golden mantle begin to unravel and crawl over Arthur’s undefended skin. They seek out his piercings and rings, begin to twine and weave into them, a shining golden web of the King’s own holy flesh binding Arthur to him. Binding him into the position Hastur wants him in, spread open as a sacrificial offering. “Do you want to give it to me now? No…” That long-fingered, many-knuckled hand splays across Arthur’s lower belly. “No, you’re in no state to wait for me now, are you? Later, then.”
Caught like a fly in Hastur’s web, Arthur can’t move as the lacings of his cunt loosen and fall away, and the King…descends…
His mind’s eye supplies the oozing fangs of a great, hungry spider, descending between his legs to drive their sharp points up into him and feast from the well of his sex. That’s not what he sees or feels—though god knows, every time Hastur fucks him, somehow it’s nothing like Arthur thinks he remembers from the last time—but in some way, he thinks, it captures the spirit of it. Hastur feeds from him somehow during sex. Something of him, down beyond the perceptions Arthur has access to, finds its way deep into him and feeds. And he’s lost in waves of pleasures and terrors he can’t rightly name, with this god latched onto him, penetrating him and suckling some fundamental part of him he has neither name nor concept for.
Some part of him that has been trained to overproduce now, to provide bounties for Hastur to drink from, and swells into helpless, needy pain if Hastur stays away from him for too long.
He’s fucked and filled and fed from, captured and entranced, body bound and shuddering under the hideous glories of a god’s flesh burying itself within his for hours, days, for whole rotations of stars around their galactic centers, until Hastur pulls back from him enough to leave him with space to know more again.
He lies boneless, basking, still captive in the binding web of Hastur’s strands, woven through the corset piercings that run down his back and forward through the rings of his nipples and clit, delicately around and around his throat to hook through the loops in his ears and either side of his nostrils. Bound so tight his own breaths tug at the sensitive flesh and send aftershocks trembling through him. He fancies for a moment that he sees himself through Hastur’s eyes, small and delicate and beautiful, being swallowed alive in the filaments of him.
He’ll mind later. For now, he tugs against the bindings, wordlessly demanding that an arm be freed. When Hastur relents, Arthur reaches out to tug him closer. Another body, another mind, another person against his flesh and his soul.
Hastur rumbles a laugh, and scoops him close in his arms.
Satisfied, Arthur reaches out again with that freed arm to paw at the air in the direction of his bed stand, and the package resting on it.
“You want this?” Hastur’s tendrils stretch long, gravity-defying, to hook around it—a flat envelope, medium-sized by Arthur’s standards.
“Give it here.”
They drop it in Arthur’s lap. He turns it over, and then lifts it back up. “For you.”
Hastur laughs again, indulgent. Surely there’s nothing he could be in want of. Certainly nothing he needs. Arthur can feel his curiosity, stirred almost despite himself, rolling over in an invisible deep within him. He plucks it from Arthur’s hand, lifts it to eye level. And then, whether he can see anything in there or not, he opens it and pulls out its contents.
It’s a photograph print, of a rocky New England lake shore with the rising sun streaking the sky and tossing ocean into incredible shades of gold and pink, trees and grasses caught mid-toss in a freshening breeze.
Hastur holds it up and regards it.
Arthur regards it also. “One of the traders had it,” he says after a bit. “Startled the hell out of me to see it in a merchant’s booth in Carcosa. I stayed there for a couple of weeks when I was younger. I suppose…the colors made me think of you.”
“Hm.” Hastur touches it carefully with the fine point of a talon. “Earth does have a loveliness of its own.”
Arthur watches him trace the dark line of the shore with that claw tip, and doesn’t think so much as feel.
It wasn’t the colors. Lying in Hastur’s embrace, watching him absorb the details of the scene, he thinks it was a desire to infect Hastur, just a bit, the way he’s infected Arthur. Sink his tiny human claws in and leave a little earthian mark, however small, on the King’s flawless, inhuman purity.
With his free arm, he reaches up to loop his hand around Hastur’s wrist.