Toothy Smiles

“Do you remember what it tastes like?”

“Flesh,” you ask, though it doesn’t sound like a question. "Of course I remember."

“No. The souls.”

Flashing your teeth, you sweep your tongue across your gums as if you could taste it between your canines, mixed with the blood that still drips from your lips. As if the last soul you ate had been a mere few minutes ago and not over a thousand years.

“Of course I do. It’s not a taste you so easily forget.”

Muriel nods, but he doesn’t look at you as he does. Instead he stares down at the soulless meal you shared just a few hours ago, a wistful look in his eye as he watches it's remains rot away. Despite how sometimes he felt aeons more mature than you, the both of you had been born at the same time, made of the same tragedy, forged from the same struggle.

Considering you could still recall the taste vividly in your mind, you doubted that he would so easily forget it, especially considering that he remembered far more of his own old life than you often did. Reverting your attention to the corpse before you, you look at its entrails, scattered across the forest floor, made for easy pickings for the wolves and crows, and eventually after that, insects and fungi. The cavity of it's chest gapes impossibly wide, it's emptiness bringing a faint ache to your own chest and stomach.

“Don’t you miss the taste of it?” he asks you.

“Of course I do,” you reply.

It's been so long since you've eaten a soul, too busy cleaning up after the others who never bothered to properly finish their meals. Careless and crass, believing that the only way to eat a soul was through decimation of the body. It almost makes you scowl as you recall the growing popularity of selling one's soul for things like love or freedom, or artistic talent, or money. As if you could do or enjoy any of that without a soul swirling in your chest.

You say that of course, but it's so easy critique others when you are not the one being offered enticing souls in exchange for simple services and goods. In truth, if someone willingly held up their soul—in whatever format they so chose—and allowed you to take it, you doubt you'd be able to revoke their offer.

Gently, Muriel calls your name.

Turning back, you meet Muriel’s eyes, glass green in the sunlight with a hand pressed against the seam of his chest, fingers dipping past the barrier of his skin, sinking into flesh as if it were sand. You watch in a mix of horror and awe as he reaches deeper and deeper, wrist deep into his own chest, before he finally finds what he was looking for. As he pulls his hand free from his chest, be brings with him a dripping, twitching lump of red.

Like a malformed pomegranate split in half, his soul sits in the palm of his hand, the fractured pieces of the many souls that made up his own, pieces of his memories—his identity—glistening like plump little pomegranate seeds, overripe and ready to rot.

And like some mortal fool he offers it to you.

“What are you doing?”

“I...You heard of that story, haven't you?”

Of course you heard the story. You were there when he first heard it too. Some foolish God had given up their soul to a mortal and fell under their control. Allegedly it had been a War god, but which one remained unclear. Regardless, that left a mortal human, severely lacking the context that made a god what they were, with the powers and ability of one, to do with as they saw fit. It was the travesty of souls. It was the nature of them too.

You were supposed to give up your soul to someone a long time ago. Muriel was too. But that was before you became what you were. After that, there was no one left to take it from you. No one who would dare.

"They say the God gave it to the mortal because he loved them. He... He thought they were deserving... Or something like that. I just..."

You stare at the offering, your first offering since you had been born. Creatures like you with gifts like yours were not often sought out, and yet here stood a creature just like you, your peer, your equal, offering his soul as if you were some reverent precious holy thing. Though you wish you could say otherwise, you can see the earnesty in his eyes. An offering, as they say, from the bottom of his heart.

All the more enticing. All the more harder to deny.

He knows. He knows the connotations of offering one's soul to someone, the connotations of someone like you—someone like him—bearing your soul for scrutiny, let alone bearing their soul to be eaten. Did he want you to re-enact the tragedy of your birth? Did he want you to complete the cycle of it all? Let himself be eaten after escaping it for so long?

Or maybe, just maybe, he just wanted to feed you.

Just as it is the nature of humans to play with their soul, offering it whole or in fragments up to the mouths of your kind, it is in your nature to accept the soul you are earnestly offered.

You are helpless to do otherwise.

Your hand trembles far too much to accept his soul without dropping it, so you hold his hand instead, and lean in, dipping your mouth into his hand to take a bite of the forbidden fruit he offered to you.  The sweetest, most potent, most binding ambrosia floods through your ichor filled veins taking residence in your own soul filling and flooding, warm and all consuming.

It took over a thousand souls to make you who you are today, and of all those souls his was undoubtably the best. The taste of divinity and power are potent on your tongue and down your throat, burning so harshly you felt like you'd bleed.  And yet, at the same time as if cooling it down you could taste other things as well. Tender soft compassion, a squirmingly sweet desire. Fear.

Of all the souls you've eaten before, his is by far the best.

You know him. You’ve wandered eternity with him, you experienced life and hardships and adventure with him. On cold frigid nights, in the husks of human civilizations you've laid in the grass an dreamed with him. You know him. Unlike the many souls that made you who you are today, you know this soul that you have been given the honour to eat.

And knowing makes it all the more delicious.

You swallow, letting Muriel take his rightful place behind your ribs, settled alongside the thrum of your own heart where it squirms and writhes against your soul. Unlike the souls of humans, you could feel Muriel's soul remain autonomous within your chest, it settled against your own, but it was not something that you could control.

Emphasizing that, you could feel his soul grow liquid in your chest, wrapping its way around your heart, and squeezing yanking you forward almost pleadingly. You're unsure if it's the soul in your chest longing to return home, or if it's Muriel asking you to take another bite.

Eyes finally cracking open you find your attention drawn firstly to the soul that still sits in Muriel's hand. It foams and bubbles regenerating with the same speed and squelch as all other injuries do on your body and his, but you watch in awe as it not only returns to the state it had been in before, but it grows as well, new fragments bubbling into existence before your very eyes as Muriel took in new memories into his very soul.

Finally, your eyes flicker to him, and you are met with a stunning sight. On his knees, Muriel leans towards you hand still offered in supplication—the very picture of worship met with pure unreserved pleasure. Mouth hung open in awe drool dripping down his lip, eyes heavily lidded, but still staring you down as if unable to turn away. The image of it rushes straight to your soul, and before you know it, you're scrambling to pluck your own soul from your chest and offer it onto him, eager to find the sensation that brings the god of death to his knees.

Like his, your soul is bubbled with a mixture of memories and the fragments of souls that were used to make you, warped and twisted like some rotted pomegranate, leaking ichor from within.

It takes him a moment to snap from his daze, flinching with every minute brush of your fingers against your own soul as if he can feel things from the thrum of your own soul. Considering how some of your kin treated the humans they recently feasted from, perhaps he could.

It sends a heady rush through you, made physical in the tremble of your soul, each seed squirming like a thousand tiny beetles clustered together and preparing for flight. Muriel cradles your hand in his own, as he guides your offering onto his lips. It's more for his own stability than it is yours, a sharp shudder wracking his body as soon as his lips so much as skim the edge of your soul.

You are not immune to the sensation either, feeling the tender touch of his lips strike you deep down into your bones. It delights you, invigorates you, but it is not enough. It is as if he had filled your very spine with lightning. You wanted more. You wanted to give him more.

You wanted to be eaten.

Finally, his teeth breech your soul. Teeth that tore through flesh and bone, teeth were used to slaughter, they split a seam through your soul, fracturing you in a way that steals the very breath from your lungs and stills the beat of your heart. A reaction of fear, or a response to the break, you aren't given enough time to tell, because that small little portion of your soul disappears into the warmth of his mouth, and you're greeted with the sensation of not merely being eaten, but being savoured.

To delegate the sensation as a mere sum of its components—to say being eaten felt merely like you were being chewed up and swallowed—failed to recognize the electric feeling of being lovingly and rapturously destroyed. The feeling of those shards of yourself being savoured—admired, adored—not by their feel or look but by their taste. His tongue squirms against every bursting piece of you, every slice that's been crushed and ground by his teeth is pressed just as eagerly by his tongue, trying to taste you more, to linger on that flavour that you elicit.

And even more than that—even more than that rapturous sensation—you know why Muriel had stared at you so intently through his pleasure. Even if it would have been easier to simply close your eyes and bask in the agony alone, you cannot bare to tear yourself from the feast laid bare for your eyes. Watching him savour and adore the taste of you, eyes fluttering closed to try to focus on that taste, how you could feel that love and admiration blossom in his own soul, squeezing against your heart. You could not turn away even if you wanted to. Every soft appreciative moan at the flavour of you sent vibrations around that small bite of soul he holds in his mouth, echoing in the cavern of your chest, trembling with the phantom sensations of where your soul once sat.

All too soon the experience is over and you're left with your hand raised, soul still offered to his lips, as if hoping that he would take another bite. As if hoping he would eat you whole.

Instead, he takes your hand, and guides your soul, still foaming and regenerating, back into it's cavern where it belongs, doing the same to his own tucked back into his own chest.

You're about to protest, ask or entice him to take another bite, but being too familiar with your antics, and possibly even more so now, he stops you before you can start with a kiss to your lips.

The tang of your own ichor almost chokes you despite the sweetness of his lips, but even stronger than that, you can feel his soul thrum in delight and rapturous joy from within his chest. You're sure he can feel your soul do the same. Held so close together you're tempted to reach into his chest and pull his soul back out for a bite.

Nothing can stop you. You reach through his chest.

It's supposed to be an impossible feat, to tear into someone else's chest without breaking the skin, but you already know that doesn't apply to you anymore. You are already there, beneath his skin, settled within his soul, just behind his ribs, the same way he sits behind yours. Despite leaning into the kiss, moving and holding him in a way that you know makes him feel warm and loved down to his very soul, he still manages to grab your hand just as your fingers breech the surface of his skin, parting so easily under your gentle ministrations.  

You can feel the spark of pain that strikes his soul as he leans back from your kiss, but his eyes remain vehement in their decision, burning with a fierce determination to abstain.

Or, well, either that or...

"Don't," he pants sounding more pained and needy than he does any amount of certainty or anger. "I... We need to go find something to eat. Please. I'm... I'm starving."

Idly you nod, eager to slaughter someone if only to return to this, but something shudders and squirms in your chest, and while you cannot by any means hear the words, you can feel them, as if they had been etched into your soul.

I need to eat, or else I'll tear you apart.

Rationality escapes you. Still high off of this newborn connection between the both of you, reveling in the certainty of the feel of his soul, in its familiarity and how right it feels to now be a part of you, and you a part of him, you offer up your arm, tilting your head to the side to make it easier to access. He can feel your intentions before you've even said a word.

"Me. You can eat me."

Just as he always does, the god of death hesitates to cause harm. Even as you offer, even as he can surely feel your earnesty and ache in his own soul, he hesitates, mulling the choice over, as if there were some dire consequence to causing you harm. As if you didn't regenerate as easily as you breathed.

You're tempted to argue, but he beats you to it, leaning in to kiss the patch of your neck you had offered to his teeth.

"In exchange," he mumbles, letting his lips and teeth brush against your skin, "you can eat me too."

You drool at the offer, grinning and wild.

Wild as you, Muriel takes his bite.

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You lick the carrion from the bone, chewing as the wolves arrive accompanied by crows, and behind them, maggots. Muriel glances to you checking to see if you're done before he offers the remains to the animals. He doesn't need to of course—glance at you that is, though you suspect he does so now for a different reason than he once did before.

A twig snaps in the underbrush and the wolves jump, haunches raised as they snarl at the intruder.

Lazily, you tear your eyes from each other, as the rustling continued, taking your time before you looked at the mortal who stood trembling before you.

Mouths still dripping with blood you observe the trembling human as he stares at the rotting corpse before forcing his eyes towards the both of you. The wolves upon smelling his fear and sensing his calm, return to eating, though the glance his way sporadically prepared to snap should he dare wander too close.

When he speaks, it's quivering and trembling, as if it was his first time seeing something like you.

"What—" he clears his throat to try again, "what kind of gods are you?"

"Death." Muriel replies, the bright red of his teeth and mouth sitting in stark contrast to the glow of his green eyes. "Destruction."

"Rot," you say, introducing yourself as you pull your own lips back into a smile "Plague, infestation, decay."

"o-oh." The human trembles, eyes dropping to the ground as frustration sweeps across their face, and their hands clench at their sides

If you were any other god, if your titles were kinder, you domain more appealing, you knew the mortal would scream and whine asking you to do as he asked immediately. As if any god would hesitate to tear some self-righteous mortal asunder for the chance at a free soul.

Instead the mortal trembles, placid from fear rather than any form of respect.

“Do... Do you know where the gods of love are?”

Once again Muriel turns your way, and you glance at him, even if you do not need to. There are many gods of love scattered across the lands—in fact, you would argue that there's been a recent uptick in gods who have at least some hand in the domain of love—but to wander into a forest, looking for a heart, you know of only one pair that sits in such a place. Folding both your hands neatly in your lap, you smile even brighter at the mortal before you as if you were thankful for the question.

Beside you Muriel curls around you, and perhaps the mortal sees it as an act of protection, unaware of the minute way he presses his chest against your back, so that you can feel his heartbeat just behind your own. Though he does not smile, his eyes glow with interest, a deadly rapt attention like a wolf seeing for the first time a lamb.

"Us." Muriel rumbles, his graveled voice making the poor mortal step back even as they almost lean in from the interest. "You are looking for us."

You sweep your tongue across your gums, almost able to taste your last bite of soul between your canines, mixed with the blood that still dripped from your lips.