s

for seven days, dancers were encouraged to challenge one another, to perform variations for instructors with the silent, ravenous hope of replacing a peer. it wasn’t enough to be perfect. you had to be better than the girl next to you and prove it. again. again. again.

pavane house taught artistry, but it sharpened ambition first. it did not care for you to be modest. if you hid during rehearsal, you would hide on stage, which meant that you were undeserving of having all eyes on you. it was, unfortunately, a very effective practice. it acted as an incubator for a mass hatching; there was something perversely satisfying about seeing the skin these girls shed by the end.

winter brought the most brutal switches, especially in years where swan lake or the nutcracker claimed the season. even at twenty-three, paige understood: no one outgrew the hunger to be cast as a princess.

she hadn’t been prepared for her first. three years ago, a girl named sienna had been ousted from clara midway through a friday rehearsal. instructors had known since wednesday that she would be a switch-out. 

sienna hadn’t wept. she’d walked off-stage, past the front mirror, and straight into the studio bathroom. her face had been hard as she passed the glass, her cheekbones rippling with how hard she clenched her jaw.

paige found her three minutes later, an ancient instinct urging her to go check. the leg had sat limply, shattered clean through, white bone pressed to the black-and-tile. blood so bright against that art deco flooring. 

 sienna had said nothing, even when the ambulance had been called.  paige never did ask whether it was on purpose. she’d bitten the question back.

pavan house had only asked after the girl to inquire if any lawsuits were bobbing in the water. 

however, azzi had come in the spring. and she took to it instantly. there were no nerves, no reverence. azzi danced like she’d been bred for blood.

they’d cast giselle that spring, a rare seasonal shift, chosen for its difficulty. paige remembered her entrance clear as crystal, pointe shoes milky, scuffed at the tops, and broken-in within an inch of their lives. her hair had been slicked into a perfect planet, the circle tight and dragging her face back with such severity that paige couldn’t help but wonder if it wounded her to smile. 

her leotard had been a deceptively sweet, mint green that grew cruel with her movements once she began, spined tightly along her thighs, pressing hard enough to make the small veins there pucker and press forward as if aching to crawl free.

she didn’t want the score from giselle. she danced to a remix of vivaldi’s summer ii that crawled down paige’s spine and stayed there. there was nothing modest about her. nothing cautious.

“she has no room for any other feeling,” an instructor had said after, and with that, the initial giselle had been erased, and azzi fudd had become the newest piece of flesh the other girls strived to tear apart. 

technically, paige was supposed to supervise these classes. not choreograph, not critique. only assist. her job was to offer open, pale hands when ankles rolled, count measures, and remind the newer ones how to breathe when their lungs felt crushed.

but pavane house didn't care about the lines between things. instructor. rival. witness. paige had been all of it since she'd aged out of the main company last year.

paige couldn’t help but recall the way the light had caught on the sweat at azzi’s collarbone. how she’d watched and told herself she was only noting form.

paige told herself a lot of things.

the studio offered no refuge from whatever feeling azzi fudd called from her inner recess. its walls, white as milk and just as silent, seemed to watch. lights buzzed cold and clinical from above, casting shadows sharp as a blade point. the floor, obsidian-polished, reflective, and pitiless, mirrored every fumble and fracture. you could never escape your mistake, singular or plural. 

there was no softness here. no room for weakness. only the slow, aching scrape of tendon against time. the house had been designed to feel militant. dance, a co-founder had reminded them, is war. ballet is the front line, what it is known for. in some ways, you will die twice.

she thought perhaps, with only two years between them, that they could form a camaraderie no matter how brittle it may be. she foolishly thought of them twisted together, separate from the teenagers and younger girls who watched them, twenty-three and twenty-one, and thought of them here long beyond their time. she was misguided, as she often was in the face of her desire.

azzi had long hair when she arrived. paige told her it suited her when she once saw it down, hands trembling in the large pockets of the pale lavender hoodie she always wore. azzi had looked at her, long and hard, before extending her gratitude for the compliment. 

three weeks later, that length of curls was nowhere to be found. her hair sat shorn and curling at her shoulders, just long enough for a bun.

it was then, with a leaden sickness, that paige understood how they would be.

every giselle season twisted into its shape, sculpted by the particular self-mutilation of the dancers in that year’s cast. however, it always arrived with the thick scent of rose and iris swaddled in the dense embrace of baby powder.

the first practice post-switch started as it always did: with the sharp crack of pointe shoes being broken in. the studios were flooded with them, the floors rendered partially invisible underneath a sea of pink ribbon. paige shifted through them to help locate proper sizes and thought of how most of this pink would soon be speckled red.  

the first week set her body abuzz, the girls more settled with the outcome of casting now that they understood they could only outperform in the roles that they were given. this meant that paige was being accosted with questions when the main instructors weren’t available, which left her no time to search among the willow bodies for azzi’s stark one. still, she found time and opportunity. 

despite azzi’s clear rejection of paige’s offered alliance, she found that they still ended up aligned in some ways. one of them was their penchant for coming into the house to slip into whatever studio was abandoned for a solo warm-up.

stretching the body, coaxing it into malleability, begging it to be agreeable—this all was a private conversation between skin and bone. it was wildly uncomfortable to try to do it in front of the other girls, so full of silent criticism.

paige didn’t know why she still warmed up, why she still pushed and strung her body along the path of that dilapted dream of who she used to be. she managed to delude herself into interpreting her body’s screams as singing, managed to warm her pain into pleasure as her tendons strained and her knee shuddered weakly under her weight.

she wasn’t stupid enough to jump, but she spun as long as she could until she tripped and tumbled. she did this every morning, unfolded herself into mechanism after mechanism until the sun watered her skin with weak light and her sweat was indistinguishable from her tears.

it was here that azzi first found her. they were dressed in complementary colors. 

paige had slid all six feet of her body into a tight, black leotard and slicked her blonde hair into a bun full enough to bite into. azzi was draped in a deep navy blue, the pelvic bend of her leotard as high as ever. her inner thighs called to paige, golden-brown and corded with proof of her dedication to her craft.  

she had worn leg warmers, the morning still swinging like a pendulum between the frigid touch of winter and the softer breath of summer. it was unsure of itself, as it always was during spring, which meant the girls infested the house in an odd mixture of insulating clothing that was shed by the day’s end. 

paige felt something like shame crawl along her back, and it slit her open to climb inside the more she glanced up at azzi from where she lay on the ground. azzi didn’t seem the type to strive to make the world sweeter and probably only saw paige’s body twitching with tension and pathetically forgiving under the lightest of pressure.

paige finally looked away, rolling to her side and curling her legs inward until the muscles relaxed enough to let her rise to shaky feet like a lamb.

azzi said nothing, only stepped around her to lower her bag, navy like her leotard, to sit against the seam where the mirror met the floor. paige caught the edge of her reflection there, warped slightly by the scuffed glass, and realized she was panting like a dog.

she turned her head. bit her tongue. felt it throb.

azzi began her warmup. it was so much more controlled, every motion tighter than paige’s had been and unmarred by violence. every shift deliberate, measured, and entirely internal. her back didn’t waver in its arc; her legs unrolled delicately like a chain uncoiling. she bent at the waist and let her hands dangle toward the floor, not touching it, hovering with all the grace of something dead then resurrected.

paige didn’t mean to watch. she just couldn’t help it.

azzi was stunning in motion, and maybe even more so in stillness. her expression stayed fixed—composed, cool, unreadable—as her body ran through its familiar paces. paige’s limbs felt full of splinters in comparison. she imagined the cracked gears of a clock trying desperately to keep time with a well-oiled metronome. 

analog against digital.

the silence hung like a rope around them, rigid and oppressive.

paige’s mouth grew perverted, opening and closing helplessly as if she wanted to speak but then lost all she was meant to say. it was five minutes of this cycle, then azzi was the one to break it. she didn’t look at paige as she did, at least not directly. she lowered her body to the floor, legs split at a perfect angle, twisting her torso with ease as she glanced into the mirror to address paige’s reflection.

“you warm up like you’re performing for pity,” she said flatly.

paige blinked. “excuse me?”

azzi shrugged, rolling one shoulder. “just an observation. it can be easily…misconstrued by the other girls. you don’t want to give them ammunition.”

“i—,” paige began, and azzi’s face slipped briefly into amusement. “i don’t remember asking you about any of this.”

“no?”

“no. you’re just trying to be a bitch, but politely.”

that earned her a glance, a proper twist over the shoulder. azzi’s mouth ticked, not quite a smirk, but something in that lineage. 

“no,” she said. “i’m only acknowledging you like you’ve been wanting.”

paige didn’t have anything to say to that. nothing appropriate. only a hot spike of something in her chest. she was unable to identify it as rage or mortification. maybe it was all webbed together.

her throat felt full of glass, so she stood, brushed herself off, and crossed the room as if she had a destination in mind. she didn’t. just wanted to put space between them. she felt azzi’s gaze against her spine like a palm, steady and cold.

“i meant what i said,” she heard azzi say behind her.

paige stopped walking. “what part?”

“that the girls will tear you apart if you give them something to bite. they already disrespect you during classes.”

paige turned then, slowly. “i don’t give them anything.”

azzi was back on her feet now. standing with her arms crossed, head tilted slightly, like she was trying to decipher paige’s body. she wasn’t nearly as heavily coded as she aimed to be. 

“yes, you do.” azzi sighed, arms dropping. “you reek of jealousy whenever you watch them dance. it’s understandable, but still, you must get it under control.”

paige’s hands curled, balling into fists. she felt her skin split under the half moons of her nails. 

azzi began to walk away, seemingly satisfied.

“what have i done to you?” the words shot out of her, expelled by her humiliation.

“what?” azzi’s voice was low. she stilled, spinning in an elegant half circle so that she could better see paige. 

“since you—since you’ve gotten here, you’ve treated me like i’ve done something to you. you’re always talking to the other girls, but you never talk to me. i complemented you and you told me to ‘fuck off’ in your own way. i mean, do we—have i messed up? whatever it is, i—”

azzi cut her off, her voice thin and soft. “i didn’t cut my hair because of you.”

“yes, you did,” paige snapped. “you did it almost immediately after i told you i liked it, even though the other girls said the same thing.”

azzi smiled without warmth. “that wasn’t the reason, despite what you’d like to think.”

paige scoffed. “i think that you don’t like me. that you hate me for some asinine, irrational reason that you made up in your head.”

“ooo, asinine. such big words,” azzi cooed, her voice threaded with sarcasm. 

they were toe-to-toe now, close enough that paige could smell the faintest trace of sweat and violets on her skin. azzi’s eyes were impossibly dark, their abyss of brown framed by long lashes that spidered out with an odd grace. they were thick with mascara, but unclumped. paige watched her blink once, slow and decisive.

“i don’t hate you, paige,” she said, voice incredibly even as if every cell in her body was committed to the cause. “i’d have to think about you to do that.”

paige’s cunt began to leak. once again, with an inert nausea, she understood how they would be. 

she didn’t move. didn’t speak. just stood there in that terrible, shimmering stillness, shame blooming hot and sudden behind her knees.

azzi tilted her head again. “did i say something wrong?”

paige’s jaw worked, but no sound came out. guilt began to bleed into her. out of her, too, mixing with her sticky-slippery arousal.

azzi leaned in a fraction, her tone suddenly sick and soft. her lips stretched tight against her white teeth, rose pink, the bottom one threatening to burst.

“oh,” she said, “you liked that.”

𝄞 SECOND POSITION: THE EXCHANGE OF POWER IS NOT ALWAYS SEXUAL, BUT IT IS NEVER NOT INTIMATE.

paige flinched. it was slight, only a blink, only a half-step back, but azzi saw it. of course, she saw it. she saw everything.

“i didn’t,” paige said, too fast, too rough. her voice cracked on the second syllable. “don’t flatter yourself.”

azzi’s lashes swept upward, slowly. “i’m not flattering myself. i’m observing.”

she stepped back fully now, leaving the moment behind like a peeled-off skin. the morning had tilted toward gold through the stained studio windows, and paige could see the flecks of dust catching in azzi’s silhouette.

she looked unreal. unburdened by the light, but no less hardened beneath it.

“you always this cruel?” paige asked, her voice hoarse.

azzi considered that. “only when i’m provoked.”

“i didn’t provoke you.”

azzi smiled finally, fully, and viciously. “you exist, paige.”

that shut her up. for only a second.

suddenly swallowed by strength, paige stepped forward, her fists still clenched, arms held a little too stiff at her sides. “you don’t know anything about me,” she said, low and shaking. “you think you’ve figured it all out, but you haven’t. you didn’t even see me until you walked in here this morning.”

azzi’s face didn’t change. but something behind her gaze shifted. less cruelty now, more scrutiny. like she was slicing paige open just to see what color her insides were, to see if her blood flowed with the same shakiness she danced with.

“i see you,” she murmured. “i see right through you. that’s why you’re so upset.”

paige opened her mouth. closed it again.

azzi took another step forward, so close now that the tips of their toes nearly touched. pointe against pointe. her voice, when she spoke, was quieter than ever.

“you want to be pitied,” she said. “you want to be friends, so that you have someone to lament to. you want to be like you were before. because no one has given you that yet. so you flailed in front of me, in front of all of them, hoping someone would notice how close you are to drowning. you were putting yourself on display, paige, and then you got upset when i didn’t look at you the way you wanted.”

“i am not putting myself on display,” paige said, but the words barely made it out of her mouth.

“i said you were. you stopped once i began to look at you, really look at you.”

“bullshit.”

azzi didn’t respond. she didn’t have to. 

she only looked at paige, and it was enough.

the air between them was ruinous. paige felt like she might cry or collapse, maybe even claw her skin off until she was shredded to pieces along the floor. anything to make azzi look kinder than she did, just once.

but azzi wasn’t being kind. not to paige. and she didn’t plan to be.

she clearly prided herself on strength, both personal and the kind that belonged to other people. and paige wasn’t strong. at least, not anymore.

so she did what she should’ve done. she stepped back. she turned her face, revealing her side. she didn’t run, but it felt like it.

“i have to teach the second-years in ten,” she said, her voice brittle.

azzi said nothing. she bent again, reaching for her toes, unbothered.

just as paige reached the door, she heard a final offering tossed in the barest tone of amusement:

“next time, warm up like you mean it.”

the memory lingered like heat, drawing paige’s mind to its very edges. she stared at her ceiling, naked chest heaving, her nipples pink and pebbled and bordering on red from the way she had twisted them. her legs were spread, the space between them soaked with the rush of paige’s best attempts—and total failures.

she’d gotten just close enough to cry and then fell into crying completely, forgetting the rest. her pleasure became confetti, but her body was not the party it fell on. 

she pressed the heel of her palm to her eyes until she saw color and suffocated the sobs, until her breath felt less likely to stutter out into something ugly. the ceiling above her was cracked with veins of ancient water damage, a bruised map of places she'd never go.

the room was cold now. her body, limp and shivering in the after-storm of its own refusal, looked foreign to her. shiny with sweat. pale like beached wood. spread and gutted open, and still not enough. she curled her fingers, vaguely ashamed of their familiarity with her skin, the way they knew where to press and still couldn't deliver. still couldn't make her feel anything like what azzi made her feel just by looking. just by knowing.

that was what she couldn’t let go: the way azzi so easily established how much she knew, how much she suspected about her that paige herself hadn't even dared to name. never out loud; not even in her head, really.

the problem was that paige had not known how to fill herself after her energy, after she had spun out and off the stage for the foreseeable future. the hole in her had remained empty, unfilled. her blood circulated throughout her veins with no way out. she pushed girls into position, ironed their errors out, then bit back the burn of grief as they perfected it before her, moving forward as she stayed stagnant. 

it was a plague; it was the closest she felt to being possessed by the blackest evil the world could offer.

paige bit down on the inside of her cheek until the taste bloomed bitter and metallic. her thighs slid against one another, and she flinched, chafing not from pain, but from the humiliation of her slick cooling in the air.

her failure still clung to her like dust under her breasts.

she hadn’t known she could ache like this. not from absence, but from confrontation. azzi hadn’t touched her, hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t even raised her voice, and still, paige had unraveled with all the grace of thread pulled from a hem.

she rolled onto her side and curled inward, knuckles to mouth. the breath that escaped her came out small and stunned. not a sob. not quite anything.

tomorrow, she’d have to face azzi again. she’d walk into the studio, posture just a little too straight, and pretend she hadn’t tried to get herself off to the memory of someone scolding her. she’d act like she was fine. she’d pretend she didn’t still feel azzi’s verbal lashing under her skin like rising welts.

the thing about a performance, though, was that one always knew when it was fake. especially when becoming someone else was your livelihood.

paige had never been good at being someone else.

the morning after came with no apology. pavane house was bleached within an inch of its life in the sunlight.

light crawled across the floor like it was hunting her, and paige hated how her body flinched at it, still sore, still sore about—. she dressed quickly, hands shaking as she yanked her leotard over damp skin. it was as gray and worn as she felt. her bun came out too tight, punishing.

in the mirror, her reflection looked haunted. her eyes were glassy, collarbones jutting out from under her skin. her thighs were bruised on the surface, and she hoped her self-afflictions wouldn’t seep through her tights. she pressed her palms to the barre, flexed and pointed until her tendons whined, anything to burn the memory out.

azzi arrived late. she slipped in after paige had ample time to stew, time to build scaffolding around herself just for it to be knocked clean through.

“fuck,” she muttered under her breath, her throat growing tight as she almost fell. 

no one noticed, though the room was steadfastly becoming crowded as more girls filed in. then she pushed off the barre, gathered herself into some semblance of focus, only to find azzi gazing at her with that full mouth pursed over the plastic ridge of her coffee cup.

she was quiet, bundled in a sleepy lilac sweatshirt that hung off one shoulder, curls damp and gathered at the nape of her neck. no swagger, not today. just softness, almost like an apology. her eyes flickered away and swept the room, then returned to catch paige.

she held. for too long.

paige blinked, eyes burning, and looked away. her stomach flipped. 

azzi didn’t say anything at first, only set her bag down and began stretching near the mirror, close, but not too close. respecting paige’s unspoken perimeter. but when the class began, she moved with deliberate lightness, her technique still devastating but her presence muted. there was no heat. no provocation.

paige began to loosen, turning her attention to the younger students who were stumbling through the choreography, including the dancer who, despite his youth, had been selected to play the gamekeeper. the class passed through the hands of time. too slow, too sticky, as if trekking through syrup. 

paige’s cues were uneven; some came too softly or too fast. she counted out loud even when no one needed her to. she convinced herself that someone silently found her useful. her throat dried out, but she kept going, like she could pace herself into dignity. her neck burned.

azzi didn’t misstep once. every plié was a dare. every extension of her limbs was a fucking threat.

then the pas de deux segment began.

“fudd, with me,” paige barked, voice hoarse.

azzi’s brows lifted at the use of her surname, amused, but she stepped forward, as obedient as she never truly was. their hands touched briefly in demonstration, and paige hated how her breath snagged. hated the way her ribs contracted underneath the shear of azzi’s fingertips, shaking when azzi’s arm slid behind her waist for support.

her voice was gentle, barely above the ambient breath of the studio.

“are you okay?”

paige flinched.

it was small. a twitch of her jaw. but azzi saw it. of course, she did.

“i’m fine,” paige snapped, too loud, too fast. she distanced herself from azzi as much as she good, left a perfect slice of space.“why wouldn’t i be?”

azzi paused and pressed closer, tilting her head like she was studying something under a microscope. something skittish that threatened to break from the dish. paige was that something.

“you just look…” she hesitated. “not like yourself.”

paige turned fully toward her, halting the exercise. her mouth was twisted, eyebrows drawn so tightly they could’ve snapped.

“and you know this how? despite your arrogance, you have no idea what i typically look like,” she said, venom-soft. “you talked to me once, and now you think you’ve got me mapped?”

azzi’s face didn’t change, but paige swore she saw it: some small tenderness, pulled back like a tide.

“i was just checking in on you, paige.”

“well, don’t.”

a beat. 

azzi nodded, slowly. her mouth twitched as if she’d just been handed proof of something she already suspected. she stepped away without a word, back into her space by the mirror, but her reflection wouldn’t stop looking at paige.

paige’s hands shook as she adjusted her top, lacing it into tighter form so that it would better hold her. her throat was so dry, it could’ve burst into flame.

as soon as they were allowed a break, azzi slipped out of the studio. 

she walked down the empty hall, smiling falsely at some blushing ingenue, the floorboards sighing under her steps, before she ducked into the stairwell. cool air. brick walls. no mirrors.

finally, she could think without watching herself do it. well, rethink.

paige bueckers was proving to be a collection of missteps so far. azzi may have pushed too soon. she thought of the blonde, how blue her eyes grew when she was degraded by azzi’s mouth.

she’d spent the entire class looking as though she might cry. she hadn’t, which azzi was grateful for. she would’ve been disappointed by that.  no, she’d stood stockstill and trembling, nerves too raw to name. her lips had parted, breath inflated with panic. her hands, usually precise despite her obvious desperation to be one of them, were clumsy. her limbs seemed too long for her body all of a sudden. 

like a deer that hadn’t realized it was bleeding. or a child just come into its skin.

azzi pressed her forehead against the wall and exhaled. she wasn’t upset.

this was, more or less, what she’d anticipated. paige had always struck her as the type who prized control because she had so little of it inside. the lashing out? inevitable. the defensiveness? childish. but familiar.

the truth of the matter was, paige wasn’t ready to be seen, not the way azzi saw people. she certainly hadn’t asked for it, though her actions seemed to, and maybe azzi had been unnecessarily candid in how she had exposed her: the hollowing. the spectacle of competence with no soul behind it. the ache for recognition was hidden under all that snide little bravado.

azzi swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. she truly hadn’t meant to be cruel.

no, that wasn’t right. 

she hadn’t thought she was being cruel. it had felt like truth-telling. a gift. but paige had flinched from it like one would do from a raised hand.

azzi closed her eyes.

she would have to be gentler. not weaker; she didn’t know how to do that. but softer at the edges, more inviting. 

that was the thing about dominance. it wasn’t about control, not at the core. it was about knowing when to loosen the reins so your subject reached for them on her own. so that they would turn and hand them to you, assuming that you knew what was best.

paige was toeing the line, testing the waters. azzi had to let her. 

azzi smiled, a touch too sharply. she felt her face contort, and she redrew it, settling it into something less sinister. she pushed off the wall, smoothed her sweatshirt, and left the stairwell.

she’d herd paige, leaving her with fewer, better options than to run toward her.

next time, she’d choose her words more carefully. 

because there would be a next time.

𝄞 THIRD POSITION: VIOLENCE IS A FORM OF ATTENTION.

paige began to stay late to avoid her. it did nothing. it never was going to. 

azzi pushed at every border she had, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional. even at times, spiritual. she was like an invading country, her army of thought stronger than the traditionalist holdings of paige’s own. she knew nothing of how to become one with her, of how to align themselves so that the mess of whatever was beginning to spiral did not spoil the house’s bridge to another world. 

though azzi would be the only one on stage during the show’s lineup, any distrust and discord between the cast and staff would stain it. it was inevitable. dance, especially ballet, was easily affected by even the smallest tremor of emotional turbulence. 

tell me what you are, paige wanted to scream. she didn’t. 

instead, she loitered behind the other girls until she was left alone and then stumbled gracelessly back up the stairs to her favorite studio. it was the oldest, the flooring a bit cracked, but not in a way that warranted true concern. the mirrors were streaked and abandoned after endless attempts to clean them, but paige didn’t mind. she liked that the obstruction made her unknowable, that she couldn’t see herself clearly.

she dumped her backpack on the ground and boxed herself into a dark corner as she stripped herself of her hoodie, the oversized fabric pooling into a smear of cream and camo print. she shrugged off her tights, causing a run through them. she had to pull her leotard down to get them off, and she tried her hardest to ignore the way the cool air against her chest made the guava-pink peaks of her nipples rise to attention. 

finally, she was unclothed enough. just her bare body against the white, nylon blend of her dancewear and the matching leg warmers stretched haggardly over the heels of her scuffed shoes. it was an unhealthy form of practice, but she didn’t care. she felt unmoored, so deeply outside of herself that maybe only the threat of pain would bring her back.

still facing the wall, she shoved a pocket of her bag open, scrambling for her phone and hurriedly opening it to her warm-up playlist. she urged the volume to go as high as it could go, shoulders relaxing slightly when the low wail of a cello began to flow out of the speaker. she set it on the floor and turned to walk to the center of the room, eager to begin even without stretching. 

the urge died as quickly as it had risen. she stopped.

azzi was on the floor. azzi was here. again.

she glanced idly at paige, legs bent into a butterfly shape with her hands clasped around the front of her toes. paige felt herself go bloodless, remembering her messy disassembling of her clothes in that corner. she’d been turned around; she hadn’t checked for anyone else.

her mistake.

they hadn’t talked in two weeks. the last time they had spoken was when paige had tried to do her job. 

azzi had fallen wrong. her partner didn’t catch her center, and her hip hit the sprung wood with a sound that made even the janitor outside the room pause his sweeping.

“you need to hold yourself.” paige’s voice had sliced the silence like a razor. “you’re relying on him too much.”

azzi had refused to look at her. to anyone else, it would read as embarrassment, but paige could see the way she forced herself not to do it. with her breath sharp and her jaw clenched, azzi sat crumpled still on the floor, chest rising like a sail filled with an angry breeze.

“i did hold myself,” she’d snapped. “he just—he fucking missed it.”

paige had stepped closer. she had been able to see the bruise blooming already, purple like ink spilled from a shattered pen.

“that's not the point. you should’ve compensated.”

azzi had finally looked at her then, lashes stuck together with sweat and cheeks bright from exertion, or maybe rage. there had been a slip for a moment, a look of what paige suspected was satisfaction before it was dispelled. 

“you don’t even dance anymore,” azzi said quietly. flat. deadly. “you just stand there and watch. you don’t get to talk about what it feels like.”

paige had gone cold, and the other girls in the room had hushed almost immediately. her hand was out before she could stop it. 

crack.

azzi’s face had whipped to the side, lolling lazily as she moved it back over. paige felt her jawbone creak, the clench of it so close to becoming an injury. she had fled, ducking out of pavane house and onto the main road, where she sobbed into her hands. 

she hadn’t seen azzi watching her from the window, her mouth performing a contortionist act of regret. 

now, here they were, and paige still found herself unprepared. azzi extended her legs and bent forward, grabbing the soles of her feet and pulling herself until there was an uncomfortable pop of her spine. she settled backward and then said,

“you have a lovely back.”

paige’s eye twitched.

“what?”

azzi gestured at her body, hand lazily sweeping over its line. “when you took your tights off, it peeked out. you’re stronger than you look.”

there was a cold break behind paige's ribs, a splintering like an egg against the rim of a bowl. a bone-fracture silence. then:

“you don’t get to tell me what i look like. not after what you said to me.”

azzi went still, turned her head to better canvas paige’s expression. “paige.”

“you told me that i don’t know what it feels like to dance anymore. as if i don’t know what it costs.” her voice cracked on the last word, and she felt its vibration along the tissue of her knee.

azzi stood, slow and shaking, toe taped, left ankle weak. it’s then that paige finally registered that azzi’s leotard was half undone at the back, gaping like an open wound.

“i shouldn’t have spoken to you like you didn’t.”

the admittance made paige shudder, and she pressed a hand to her face, her thumb and ring finger making deep indents into her skin. they went pale with the force of her grip. 

“why are you being nice to me?” she muttered.

azzi sighed. “because i went about you the wrong way. you’re a lot more delicate than i initially thought.”

something in paige whited out, and then it was heat. it wasn’t a proper fight or even a simple scrap, but a collision. hands at arms, forearms pressed together, azzi shoving, paige grabbing, twisting, rolling. they hit the marble floor hard, breathless, limbs locked.

paige ended up on top, elbows braced, face inches from azzi’s. her hand was rooted far into her curls, nails scratching at the scalp. streaks of dust dirtied her leotard, and the air was thick now. nothing moved. she could hear azzi’s heartbeat, a low, primal tremble between them. 

and then—

paige's mouth was at azzi's thigh. her lips, her teeth, brushed the yellowing bruises, and azzi jolted like someone pulled her out of her own body.

but it wasn’t a pain response. it was something else, a version of the same jerking paige had done fruitlessly just nights before.

paige understood she had hurt her, but her body had not moved in a way that begged for mercy. it was similar to the moment right before you start crying. not the tear, the heat behind the eyes. 

paige breathed out raggedly as she slid her hand down to confirm. she cupped her hand slightly, as if to hold water. she could feel the moist heat. 

azzi was wet.

her spine went taut, her fingers dug into paige's shoulder, and for a second, they were both frozen. paige pulled back as if she’d been burned.

azzi didn’t turn her face away, unashamed. she said nothing.

paige scrambled off of her, chest heaving. 

“s—sorry. ‘m sorry.”

azzi stayed splayed out for a moment longer, the edges of her lips arcing in pale amusement. then she sat up, reached over, and dragged a fresh pair of blood-red pointe shoes from behind her. 

“i wish you weren’t,” she said, voice rasping with its honesty. 

then she began to break the shoes in.

once paige was home, she stumbled through her apartment until she stubbed her toe and fell onto the edge of her bed. the hit speared through her, made her body a prostitute of agony for what felt like years. 

as she lay there, she felt her stomach grow warm.

she thought of the sound azzi’s shoes made when she broke them in earlier that evening.

the whip-like crack. the bone-like snap.

the flesh of them giving in, reshaping around her.

paige bit her lip hard enough to taste blood. it was dark; there was no lamp on. her hand found its way between her thighs, slipping between her swollen folds.

she thought again of the breaking, of how each pop and split echoed like cartilage cracking. how the shoe had surrendered to her foot like skin to a blade. pain never seemed to make azzi falter, only bloom.

her fingers pressed into her faster. paige ground down to better reach herself. 

when she came, it was with a sob, high and sharp and broken. the kind she used to make when she was smaller and still thought crying fixed something.

paige clutched her stomach, face buried in her pillow. the shame was imminent. she couldn’t think, mind blurred by the onset of an orgasm three weeks delayed.

somehow, through it all, she heard when her phone buzzed.

paige startled like she’d been slapped, face rising from the wet cotton skin of her pillow with a low gasp. she got up, uncaring of her cum dripping down her inner thigh and stumbled around trying to find that goddamn backpack. 

when she did, she shouldered her way through the mess of it, hand closing around the sleek, cool metal of her phone.

one new message. no words. just a video. the number was unsaved, but paige knew who it was. had seen it deliver messages in the company group chat.

paige opened it on instinct, her heart vibrating so hard that she fell to one side. the moment it began to play, she went still.

it was grainy, low light. shot from below.

azzi’s hand worked between her thighs, the camera angled to capture the brown arch of her stomach, her mouth slack and eyes lazy with pleasure.

she was moaning wantonly, breath skipping in her chest.

“paige,” azzi said in the video, breathless.

the video cut off.

paige folded over herself, hugged herself so that her fingernails dug into her back. she closed her eyes, bending forward until her forehead was against the tile of her kitchen. the video replayed in her memory.

paige.

she screamed, but kept most of the noise behind the white wall of her gritted teeth.

the world’s plot to dismantle paige bueckers was a relentless one, because not even two days after the video’s delivery, pavane house held a cast dinner to celebrate the first objectively good run-through of giselle. 

the table stretched long and dark, its wooden face draped with at least three layers of lace. there were so many candles that paige felt almost like a house on fire, the heat oppressive against her steadily pinkening face.

across from her sat another instructor and, by design, she was sure, the immovable azzi fudd.

azzi had worn a mini dress, her long legs slightly shielded by its sequined hem. the whole thing was a viscose dream, an olive green that darkened toward the end. the sequins bled into a beautiful charcoal sketch of what paige thought to be historical, domed buildings with fronds of palms drawn in between. 

old columbia, azzi had said when another dancer had asked.

paige felt shabby in her sleeveless navy blue, pleated issey miyake mockneck and the chicly baggy black slacks she’d tugged on beneath it. she hoped her insecurity wasn’t wafting off of her despite the constant stream of compliments from the other girls, many loosened by the quality alcohol.

your arms, one had gasped, and paige had smiled thinly. god, i’d kill.

thank you.

now, she swung the base of her ponytail over her other shoulder, thumbed at one of the small braids plaited in the front before tugging subconsciously the swarovski diamond hanging from her helix. 

“you have good taste.”

paige froze minutely, then slid an olive into her mouth. it was only after she spat out the seed that she made eye contact with azzi.

“i didn’t plan the dinner.”

azzi laughed. paige hated that it was beautiful.

“no, i meant your outfit.” azzi nodded her head, then pointed delicately to paige’s piercings. “and your diamonds. i always wanted a piercing, but i’m terrified of needles. i know it's better to do it that way than with a gun.”

paige nodded in agreement. ate another olive.

“i got a belly piercing, then called it quits.”

paige almost choked, the video reappearing in her mind's eye, before she swallowed down the pit with a healthy swig of white wine.

“that’s…nice,” paige finally settled on, and azzi’s smile grew wider. 

paige resisted the urge to place her head in her hands.

instead, she stared down the table and fixed her eyes upon a girl eating voraciously, practically shoveling forkfuls of smoked salmon into her mouth. paige had heard the other dancers whispering, their cutting remarks about their envy over how she refused to deny herself the pleasure of a good meal and still maintained her weight.

paige had once heard the same girl retching from the hallway of the house, on her way out after a rare early end. 

her fork scraped porcelain. her appetite had vanished. she felt the lining of her throat burn as more salmon was swallowed. 

 by the time the table began to dissolve, first in laughter, then in movement, paige’s face was warm enough to sizzle. she was probably red. her skin prickled beneath the wine, the flames, the way azzi had stopped speaking but kept an eye on her as if threatening to expose her. 

someone else reached for the bottle beside her. paige barely registered the clink of glass until it was refilled again by a set of unringed fingers.

after a while, she noticed the number of bodies thinning. she turned and saw that azzi was saying goodnight to the others: hugging the senior ballerina beside her, kissing someone’s cheek. the sequins on her dress caught every flicker of candlelight, making her look like a small empire walking.

paige went to leave, too. this would be a good opportunity to disappear without azzi attempting to follow. she didn’t need to linger. she stood, ignoring the call of her name and the note that she hadn’t finished her glass.

“you walking?” azzi’s voice caught her at the coat rack, gentle. lighter than it had been all evening.

“yeah,” paige muttered. she reached for her jacket. her hand was trembling.

azzi didn’t wait for permission. she stepped up to paige’s side like she’d been invited. paige didn’t stop her. she didn’t know if she could.

they walked in silence at first. the wind had teeth tonight, nipping at the space between paige’s blazer and her shoulder blades. she kept her hands in her pockets. azzi didn’t.

for a while, paige tried not to notice the shift, the way azzi steered them gently left when they should’ve gone right. the familiar landmarks of her walk home were missing. or rather, replaced. something in her gut clenched, but not hard enough to make her stop. not yet.

they kept walking, paige testing azzi’s countenance by opposing her natural direction. when azzi pulled left, paige chose the next right ahead. she tried to veer them back along the path to her apartment, but azzi kept pace easily. paige’s throat began to tighten, and she raised a hand to tug anxiously at the ends of her ponytail. 

it was only when they turned onto a narrower street, one squeezed with tall brick sides and no street lamps, that paige finally stopped walking. her voice felt like a thing she had to wrench up from her chest, some body she was unearthing from the grave.

“you shouldn’t have sent that.”

azzi didn’t pretend not to know what she meant, though her hands flexed almost imperceptibly. she just tilted her head, eyes vast and endless in the dark. “i wanted you to see it.”

paige almost laughed. her throat was too tight for it. “you wanted me to watch it. to be humiliated.”

“yes,” azzi said. “but you didn’t have to finish it, or rewatch it.”

it was a vague guess, but the shame flooded in like a returning tide. paige wanted to sink her teeth into the vein at azzi’s neck. instead, she looked away.

“you’re not taking me home,” she said after a moment, quietly. less accusation than confession. “this isn’t my street.”

azzi didn’t respond right away. her heels clicked softly against the pavement. she stopped walking when they reached a building paige didn’t recognize by name, but one she must have passed a dozen times before. the light over the entryway was gold and low. a warm bruise against the cold.

“no,” azzi said at last. “it isn’t.”

she stood along the top step, mouth parting. paige thought of a lotus blooming.

“i don’t think you really wanted to go.”

paige didn’t move. azzi didn’t touch her. 

she just turned, keyed in the door, and slipped inside.

a beat passed.

then paige followed.

 𝄞 FOURTH POSITION: THE BODY KNOWS WHAT THE MIND CANNOT SAY.

the door clicked shut behind her, and paige stepped into warmth.

dark wood gleamed beneath her sneakers, and the further she moved inside, the more rugs softened every footfall. the walls were painted something nearly black, maybe green or oxblood or plum, impossible to pin down in the bleeding light from shaded sconces and candles already lit.

azzi’s home was decadent, something paige knew to be intentional. she closed her eyes, toeing off her shoes and pulling her hair loose as violet and a mature vanilla seeped into her. her head felt heavy, her mind dizzy, and she found that she was much more tired than she realized.

she crawled forward, taking azzi’s world in. 

a velvet settee was crouched beneath the window like a sleeping animal. a tray sat on the ottoman with figs and some half-melted chocolate truffles, abandoned like someone had simply forgotten to care that they’d been indulging.

the apartment was unapologetically lush. highly lived in. it made paige feel like a plastic bead in a high-end jewelry box. out of place and not built to last.

azzi moved with easy ownership, pulling her heels off by the door and padding barefoot toward the kitchen. she poured herself a glass of water but didn’t offer one. paige wasn’t sure if that made her feel dismissed or desired.

she still hadn’t spoken. she was watching. waiting.

paige was halfway to saying something brittle, something stupid like “nice place”, when azzi broke the silence.

“you always act like we have more time,” she said, voice low. “we don’t.”

paige furrowed her brow and opened her mouth. closed it.

“you’re wasting this,” azzi continued, stepping forward. she abstained from touching paige, but came close enough that paige could feel the warmth of her body. “all this shame. all this pretending you don’t want me.”

paige’s jaw tightened. she blinked. her chest rose sharply. “you think i—”

“i understand you,” azzi said.

and that—that was worse.

because it wasn’t a guess. it wasn’t a reach. it was soft. it was true.

paige looked at her. another tense twenty seconds fell away, and then paige’s face crumpled and her body shattered like glass.

“i need you to touch me,” she cried, and azzi’s face almost mutilated itself with satisfaction.

“i know.”

azzi kissed her.

her mouth was soft but assured, coaxing rather than claiming. paige let her. then paige gave.

her jaw slackened, and the rest of her followed like a marionette whose strings had been loosened. she stumbled forward into azzi’s heat, catching herself on azzi’s waist with both hands as though some part of her had forgotten how to stand.

azzi made a small sound, somewhere between a gasp and a moan, low in her throat, and it broke paige open further. because the sound was grateful.

azzi kissed her again, deeper this time, her teeth catching purposefully on paige’s bottom lip. paige whimpered, giving azzi just enough space to slip her tongue in and lap around the cavern of her mouth. her hands slid to azzi’s hips, her grip tightening as if she needed to anchor herself there or drown.

she wasn’t even sure when she’d begun to cry.

azzi noticed. of course, she noticed. she broke the kiss, a string of saliva stretching and splitting between them, and pressed her forehead to paige’s.

“look at you,” azzi whispered, stroking her fingers just beneath paige’s jaw. “all that hardness. gone.”

paige shook her head. her lips were red, parted, wet. “i don’t know how to do this.”

“i do,” azzi said. 

she leaned back in, kissed the corner of paige’s mouth, her cheek, the salt trail on her skin. her hands moved downward, worked at the button on paige’s slacks. she was so methodical, as if she were redrawing paige from the outside in.

her hand found paige’s cunt, stroking it through the cotton of her boyshorts until she could practically feel a heartbeat. paige kept gasping, her voice giving out the closer it came to revealing the truth of how she felt. azzi paid her no mind, grinding the heel of her palm against her until she felt paige’s pussy drool through the fabric and onto her hand.

she pulled back with a hum of pleasure, recanted her touch, and tugged paige forward. her touch was harder now, more difficult. paige moaned wetly as azzi grasped the base of her neck, then slid a hand up and experimentally tugged a handful of white-gold hair. 

azzi watched her, catalogued her every reaction as if she were a scientist collecting data. there was a moment where paige stood painting, pupils blown wide, before azzi moved. she dragged paige, tender but unyielding, until she could arrange her on the couch.

she forced paige down, tugged her blouse over her head to reveal the strapless, navy lace bra that was a touch too small. her tits threatened to spill, pale and smooth like the moon caught by human hands. azzi reached behind her, flooded her lungs with that dark violet spray, and snapped the clasp open.

paige’s chest expanded as she let out a breath, her tits heaving right into azzi’s open hand. azzi thumbed at the nipple, rolling it until paige twitched and tried to spread her legs. her cunt was hot, pink and drizzling and winking and azzi did nothing to quench its thirst.

instead, her mouth parted, and her teeth peeked out as she watched paige writhe. then she dropped her hand, standing overly still before raising it and bringing it down experimentally. the slap caught across her full chest like a lit match, making paige squeal. 

she keened, eager for more. 

azzi smiled crookedly and didn’t slap her again. 

“look at you,” she murmured. “you acted like you were so above this. but your legs are shaking.”

paige didn’t respond. couldn't. her breath caught in her throat.

she wasn’t even fully undressed, her pants shoved halfway down, the fabric twisted tight under the curve of her ass. her spine was pressed against the back of azzi’s couch, knees parted because she made her, and azzi was standing above her with a hand in her hair, and paige’s want by its neck. 

the hand came loose, and then paige was watching as azzi knelt. 

“you rewatched that video. i know you did. did you finish?”

“i, um,” paige swallowed, blinking to try to clear the haze from her mind. “i couldn’t, but i—but i kept trying.” 

“mmm,” azzi said. she took two fingers and slid them underneath the seam of paige’s underwear, tucked them inside the hot pink of paige’s weeping cunt. “i think that you’re so disconnected from how your body is now that you keep hoping it will be something else when you do touch it. probably why you couldn’t get yourself to cum.” 

paige clutched the edge of the sofa, nails dragging harshly across its material as azzi began to fuck her. she tried to spread herself further, but her pants prevented her from doing it successfully. “azzi, please.”

“girls like you always think they know everything. even about their own bodies.” azzi said. her fingers are soaking wet already, paige’s arousal spinning down her wrist like cream-colored rain. the duo moved slowly, dragging out shame. “you can never just enjoy it. there’s always a problem somewhere.”

paige gasped, tried to close her legs now, but azzi wouldn’t let her. the girl didn’t even tense. just braced one hand against paige’s inner thigh, gentle, firm, unmovable. she was terrifyingly strong. still in her dress, hair pinned back. she fucked and fucked and fucked paige, breath quickening the more paige struggled in place.

finally, paige came for the first time and azzi abused her clit as the blonde arched backward with a small scream. the bend of her neck was so pale, so open and unprotected. azzi thought of digging in her teeth.

she leaned back, sliding her fingers out with an obscene 'schleck.' it was then that she looked at paige, her brown eyes almost black with greed. carefully, she moved her fingers upward until they were dangling above her mouth. then, she parted them so that paige’s cum could spin frothy and sticky between them, like spider’s silk.

azzi dipped them into her mouth, practically scraping the back of her throat with her nails as she sucked every inch of cum off of them. she gagged, eyes watering and then overflowing, but didn’t stop until she felt her fingers were clean. she pulled them out with a soft ‘pop’ and then reached forward again to tug at one of paige’s nipples.

then she slid downward and fucked her fingers back in again.

“please,” paige choked out.

“please, what?” azzi didn’t stop moving, kept her eyes on the hungry suck of paige’s gummy pussy. she continued to work her fingers with calculated cruelty, curling just right, pressing that awful, perfect spot.

paige was weeping now. there wasn’t a single shred of sadness in her body, only heat. she had never been one for overstimulation, but she found that she felt different now. maybe she was one for azzi.

 she could’ve cum alone from the unbearable humiliation of how her hips are bucking into it, how her body was clawing toward something she’d swore she didn’t want.

“naked, weeping, and covered in your own cum and you can’t even tell me what you want. your problem,” azzi said, soft and final, “is that you don’t know yourself, paige.”

and then it happened. 

a strike like lightning. a candle wax spill of shame. paige screamed. the sound ripped out of her throat, raw and panicked, and then her body surged, gushed; everything wet, wrecked, and helpless.

her vision blacked out. she clawed at the armrest, at herself. her legs snapped shut around azzi’s hand, but azzi didn't flinch. she barely moved.

when it was over, paige was sobbing. quiet, hiccuping pulses of emotion.

azzi leaned back on her heels; wiped her hand on paige’s stomach. said nothing.

she didn’t need to. she continued to be proven right.

paige was still twitching when azzi finally moved again. not away, but closer. her fingers were still slick and dripping, her breath easy and irritatingly composed. and then, without question or warning, she leaned in.

paige flinched, her realization too late. azzi’s mouth was on her, tongue soft and focused, lapping up what was left of her like a wolf finishing a kill. still so methodical.

it sent paige reeling.

“oh, unh, fuck—” her voice cracked, went high. “no, no, no—fuck—”

she tried to twist away, kicking her way out of both her slacks and underwear, heel catching on the back of the couch, one arm scrambling for leverage like she might climb out of her skin. her hair stuck to her cheeks, sweat streaking down like tears.

but azzi only grabbed her, sighing as if struck with immeasurable disappointment.

her grip wasn't brutal, but it was sure. two hands clutched, one on paige’s hip and the other wrapped firmly around the back of her thigh, and pulled her back down like she weighed nothing.

paige cried out, hand gripping her own throat as she shook.

“fuuuuck. oh, god, please. please,” her voice was dissolving. her legs were trembling. her fingers were grasping now, trying to hold onto something.

and azzi. well, azzi adjusted. mouth still suckling, but slower now, tender in a way that felt just on the border of cruel. then above it all: a name.

whispered. almost sweet.

“i know, baby.”

just that.

it leveled paige.

she whined, hips rocking uncontrollably, a low, ugly moan bubbling out of her chest as her nails dug into the armrest, into her thigh, into anything. she slumped, uninterested in fighting any longer. she only wanted to beg, to plead, and she didn’t even know for what.

azzi continued. this was the lesson.

not the fingering, not the overstimulation, not the squirting. not even the avid sobbing.

it had been this the entire time: paige bueckers could be held down by none other than herself. she needed to be.

so, azzi didn’t stop. she didn’t even pause. she only spread paige apart, drew her wide enough to embarrass her before leaning in and licking a hot strip up the hill of her pussy, slow now, so slow, like she was coaxing something out of the dirt. her hands stroked up and down paige’s thighs, never soothing. claiming.

“can’t believe you’re still so sensitive,” she murmured, almost amused. “you liked that too much, huh?”

paige couldn’t answer. she was soundless. her eyes were wild, wet and wide and unfocused, mouth open in some half-formed word—maybe please, fuck, maybe something new and undiscovered.

her hands flailed, then clutched at azzi’s shoulders, her hair, the edge of the couch, anything to keep her grounded. but she was already falling again, spiraling back into that helpless ache.

“i can’t,” she moaned, but her hips betrayed her, rocking up into azzi’s mouth like she needed it, like she'd die without it. “i can’t, i can’t, i—”

“shh,” azzi breathed against her, flicking the point of her tongue around paige’s swollen clit. “yes, you can, baby. you want to.”

she leaned in more, properly smothering her face into paige’s tight cunt. with one hand she held down her stomach, and with the other she spread the folds of paige’s pussy until that ball of nerves was isolated.

azzi put her teeth around it. she bit down, quick and cautious. the pain was sweet.

that was what did it.

something snapped. paige screamed again, not sharply this time, but hoarse, her whole body tensing so hard it bowed off the couch. her legs kicked, twitched, her hands fisting behind azzi’s neck, and she came.

it was harder than before, wetter, louder, her voice a ragged, desperate sob.

“fuck. fuck, shit—” her throat went raw with it.

she couldn’t stop shaking. she was making only noises now, small, broken ones as if she’d forgotten what language was. her whole body was flushed and red, stretched past its limit, her chest heaving like she’d run miles.

and azzi?

azzi looked beatific.

her face was slick with paige’s pleasure, her hands still holding her open, steady. her eyes were still so dark, but her smile was soft. pleased. she looked high as paige felt, high off control and victory. off the confirmation of who paige really was.

she leaned up, finally, finally, and kissed paige’s thigh. a little reverent, a lot smug. then her cheek, near the bone. then her lips. 

it wasn’t demanding, only an intimate deposit of affection. as if to say: this is what you are now.

paige whimpered and reached out.

azzi came to her. 

“atta girl,” she whispered.

the words hit her like a needle to the blood. paige pressed her thighs together and let herself drift out.

 𝄞 FIFTH POSITION: WE LOVE ONLY THE PERSON WE CAN EAT.

backstage was stained dim and golden, oppressed by light that smudged its edges, softening the world into interchangeable silhouettes. everyone here was about to become someone else.

paige closed her eyes and listened to the rustle of tulle, the distant tuning of strings. the faint chemical sweetness of hairspray and powdered resin floated in the air like incense.

she sat on the chaise near the mirror, blazer unbuttoned, sleeves pushed to her elbows. she looked strange in her body, leaning to the side woozily as if unburdened. it was as if something had been scraped from her ribs in the past few months, and now this was her aftermath to carry as a secret. her hair was pulled back clean, stolen away from the sharp peaks of her face, her lips still bitten pink from where azzi had kissed her in the stairwell minutes before.

her thigh grazed azzi’s when she crossed her legs. she was too close to the vanity, but azzi didn’t move away.

“i think about you constantly,” paige said. her voice was quiet, dry, but not dishonest.

azzi didn’t look at her right away. she was adjusting her bodice in the mirror, slow and sure, the glittering edge of her costume catching the light with each shift. her mouth curved. not surprised.

she raised her gaze, met her eyes through the mirror.

“i know,” she said simply. 

she rose and stepped closer—not to paige, but toward the stage.

silence settled across it.  paige’s knee twitched, and for a moment, she thought she could hear it calling her name.

the hush beyond the wings coaxed every girl onto their feet, a firing squad of white tulle and pink.

the overture was beginning.

it wasn’t truly the land, more like something beneath it. something with older teeth, hungrier roots. it had been a long time coming. the earth died a million small deaths each day, bled out through root and stone, only to resurrect itself in the space between one heartbeat and the next. this was the way of magic: eternal, cyclical, patient as a tide.

but the magic was tainted now, twisted, deformed by human machinations like a song sung backwards until the melody turned to screaming. human greed had gutted it. human fear had twisted its silver threads into something blackened and brittle, until the very air split with its wrongness and revealed the inner earth like a carcinogenic wound. the instability threatened the human life that was left, threatening to eat them all from the inside out. 

if left unchecked, the snake would eat its tail.

the fudds had been left. they were farmers, or had been once, back when farming meant more than coaxing life from cursed soil. they had children to think of, futures to tend like fragile seedlings. so they made the bargain that desperate people always make: they mortgaged tomorrow for today.

they needed life, a future. but like most mortals, paige found them foolish and transparent, their future attempts at deceit glowing fever bright as they begged at her feet. so, she had been cruel. had solidified it by cutting an eye from the patriarch and a tooth of the matriarch.

they always believed there was a way out: a death before collection, a trade-off, a simple slide of memory. as if forgetting could make a debt disappear. as if death were an escape rather than just another door.

paige never forgot. she was older than forgetting. she never could, which was why she was what she was. she was there when the first human learned to lie, and she would be there when the last one learned the price of truth. she never forgot a debt, never released a debtor until the scales balanced once more. the magic they had borrowed to save their dying land would be repaid; paige would regain what she’d loaned.

and so, when the fudds had a daughter, paige recalled how daughters were always the most interesting collateral.

the girl’s name was azzi, and she had been born with the debt already written in her bones, already poisoning her blood like a thread of foxglove. she would be twenty-one when paige came to collect. old enough to understand the weight of what her family owed, young enough to believe she might outwit a god.

paige had been collecting debts for millennia. she had never been wrong about how these stories ended.

she had also never met azzi fudd.

azzi had not been born with the knowledge that she had been born a bargain, but she knew she was different. katie, her mother, knew she was dangerous. 

there was a thin line of control wrapped around the crook of her eldest daughter’s brain that constricted with every moment she spent disguising her true self. azzi was an uncomplicated child, which meant she was the worst. nothing on this land was conceived kindly, but azzi remained sweet as jam throughout her infancy and cried thick, riviera tears every time she didn’t get her way.

but soon she noticed her mother was unmoved, so she stopped, letting the moisture bead upon her palms like pearls until she tightened her fingers around them, snapping them apart at the surface. it wasn’t that katie didn’t care, but more that she didn’t deign to look at her when she knew azzi was being dishonest —slippery—and so katie turned naturally cold, becoming a wall of flesh and blood. 

her father, timothy, was different. more malleable. azzi loved him for it. 

she took love wherever she could find it, living as a ravine of a woman. uncontrollably. incessantly. more than she ever needed to be loved in her life. at times, it was suffocating, but she was selfish; she would never give it up.

when azzi was a few months from twenty-one, she woke up riotously. knew that something was wrong.

she’d been attempting to sleep. her eyes fluttered rapidly like a hummingbird’s heart encased in the skin, her lips bitten and swollen from repeated nightmares and sticky screams she kept swallowing. the one time she’d let them loose, the one time she’d revealed her visions to her mother, katie had struck her. had urged her to be quiet, to spoon herself full of whatever it took to render her dreamless. azzi never shared them again

but on a night far before her twenty-first year, she lurched up in her bed, the linens welding to her skin as she heaved. she bit sharply on the inside of her cheek, the copper tang of blood filling her mouth. she swung her legs over the side, the pale of the moon settling along her skin like a slab of cool butter on hot bread.

she stumbled her way into her bathroom, spat into the basin, and the water pinked up to her wrists. 

i look at her, she looks at me, i look at her, she looks at me, she thought. 

she said it every night post-waking, and it hadn’t changed, not in the penthouse subject to her mother’s living, where she shattered a mirror. not in this great, big savannah house that threatens to swallow her whole, where her father hoped to shield them from the world’s imminent collapse. the nightingale in the massive willow in their front yard sang its heart out, the shrill chirps ringing for years in her ears. 

azzi was tired, really. she’d been trying her best for a long time, but clearly something was trying to reach her, and she could not repress it any longer for her mother’s comfort.

she kept the water in the sink full for a minute with the pink of her latest night terrors, wiping the rest of her nosebleed with two long fingers and reaching blindly to the right of her for her tarot deck. they were bone white, dark blue, a lattice of geometric patterns relapsing over one another on the card backs. they reminded her of porcelain, and sometimes she dreamed that they were. 

she muttered an incantation in the old language, plucked four cards, threw three into the water, and kept the fourth face down, slipped into the crack between her mirror and its frame on the wall.

the first card was the moon, and it floated upright. illusions and unconsciousness. the second she’d pulled was the tower, again upright. broken pride. the third was upside down, the blue sparkling like sapphires in the wet of the water. the emperor. a loss of control. helpless.

not a single one correlated with her zodiac sign. well, except for the one in her hand.

death.

transformation. scorpio. 

azzi lowered herself to the tile of her bathroom and let her curls fan beneath her. the reading was always the same, and the fourth card never changed. she closed her eyes as the cards melted in the water and bled back into the deck.

the fourth card stayed upended in her palm as if it knew that she needed it to stay. transformation. she settled into another nightmare, the blood of her cheek fresh in her mouth. 

in this one, she was still in the bathroom, but something was holding her down. she looked up, brown eyes a pit beckoning for a fall. above her, a woman. the woman was beautiful, unerringly so, in the way that almost every natural disaster was beautiful: devastating, inevitable, wrong in their execution. beautiful, the way winter was beautiful when it smothered everything that had once risen. beautiful, the way a blade could be if it caught the light just before it lowered for the cut.

the woman’s face was symmetrical to a degree that made azzi's eyes water, as if her mind couldn't quite process features that had never known imperfection, had never learned the small mercies of asymmetry that made mortals bearable to look upon. skin like polished marble, but a slab that had never been touched by a chisel’s tongue or weather’s hand or time or love. hair the color of wheat fields before harvest, but wheat that had never known drought or plenty, had simply always been, would always be, could never be otherwise.

her lips were the exact shade of arterial blood but not painted, never painted. for what paint could match what flowed in the veins of gods? when she smiled, her teeth were too white, too sharp, too many. it was a smile that spoke of study, of observation and learning, of practice.

wrong.

but it was her eyes that made azzi's stomach lurch and twist and know itself prey. they were bright blue and then bled into a bruised winter sky as it strayed further from the pupil. the colors reminded azzi of hypothermia, something akin to the last thing you’d see before drowning, or the color of your lover's lips when they've been dead and avalanched for more than three days. 

wrong.

ancient eyes in a face that had never aged, never changed, never been anything other than this terrible perfection. they held the weight of millennia: every debt collected, every bargain sealed, every mortal who had begged for mercy and received only mathematics.

she moved with liquid grace, every gesture deliberate and flowing, as if gravity were a suggestion rather than a law, as if the world bent around her rather than the other way around. when she reached down toward azzi, her fingers were long and pale and beautiful as carved bone, as barren branches, as the ribs of an animal long dead and perfectly preserved.

wrong. wrong. wrong.

azzi could see that beneath the flawless skin, there was nothing. no pulse, no warmth, no life as she had understood it. only the terrible abundance of immortality, the weight of never dying, never changing, never being anything other than exactly what she was.

there was a great buzzing in azzi’s head, a horrible drone that only silenced when the woman’s feet met the floor. there were no tiles beneath her skin, only smooth puce stone. she leaned over azzi, then knelt as if she couldn’t quite put a finger on her image.

she reached down, curled a long nail over the neckline of azzi’s nightdress, and split it down the middle until her breasts and hips were bared. azzi felt heat rise, her nipples harden, her toes twitch. 

she knew what this was, who this was. mistakenly, she’d thought the world too modern for it.

again, that droning. azzi’s mouth opened, an unnatural unhinging of her lips, and the woman leaned in until she could drag her pointed, pink tongue along azzi’s teeth. her throat moved gorgeously as she swallowed, azzi’s spit now a wet, warm line down the pink tissue of her inner body,

the buzzing ceased. azzi still couldn’t move, but she knew, innately, that she could understand her.

“hello, little debtor,” the woman said, and her voice was honey poured over broken glass, birdsong in a graveyard, every lullaby ever sung to azzi now distorted through a blasphemous overlap.

 “soon,” the woman crooned, her voice low. “i will come to collect.”

when she woke, azzi found herself bare. it was then that she began to hunger for this other woman’s evil.

✤ THE FIRST TASK: DEATHLESS.

paige came on a tuesday morning, dreary and slow, which seemed unreasonably ordinary for the arrival of a god.

azzi had been expecting something more dramatic. thunder, perhaps, or the earth splitting apart like an organ opened. instead, she woke to silence so complete it felt as though she had rolled into her own grave overnight. the birds had stopped singing. the wind had stilled. even the ancient willow in their front yard stood motionless, its branches hanging like dead hair.

she found her parents in the kitchen, frozen mid-gesture. her mother's hand suspended over the coffee pot, steam curling upward in impossible spirals that never dispersed. her father's mouth opened around a word he'd never finish speaking. their eyes were open but empty, seeing nothing, as if someone had simply… paused them.

“clever,” said a voice behind her, and azzi's blood went straight to ice.

she turned slowly, already knowing what she would see. the woman from her dreams stood in their doorway, but she was somehow more in the flesh. more devastating, more wrong, more beautiful than any sleeping mind could conjure. she wore the shape of mortality like an ill-fitting dress, her divine nature bleeding through at the edges.

azzi couldn’t fully look at her. not even as paige stepped forward and fingered the thin golden chain that led to a small cube of onyx and deep salt.

“lovely amulet,” paige continued, stepping into the kitchen with that liquid grace. “i considered being far more dramatic. lightening, thunder, floods, the whole performance. but i didn’t think you needed anything more to expect my arrival.”

she paused. “you've been dreaming of me, haven't you, little debtor? you knew i was coming.”

azzi's tongue felt thick and useless in her mouth. “my parents—”

“are perfectly safe. time moves differently around me when i choose. they won't remember this conversation.” paige circled closer, predatory and patient. “though i could make them remember, if you prefer. let them watch as i collect what's owed.”

“what do you want?” azzi snapped, her rage flaring.

it was misguided, paige thought. she was understandably frustrated with the past bartering of her bloodline, one that may as well be ending with her, considering how things with her brothers were going. paige looked idly out of the window, to the pale grey tombstones in the yard.

paige smiled, and it was exactly as unsettling as it had been in the dream. “you know what i want. you’re not a stupid girl.”

“i’m not a girl,” azzi hissed back.

“you are to me. i’ve been alive for a long time, and in that time, your family borrowed from me. magic to heal their dying land, power to make things grow in poisoned soil. wealth.” the god smiled wider. “the debt came due on your twenty-first birthday.” she tilted her head, studying azzi like a curious cat. the smile never ceased. “though i found myself… impatient. you've been calling to me in your sleep."

heat flooded azzi's cheeks. the dreams, the visions, the way she'd been waking with her body thrumming with want—

“don't be embarrassed,” paige murmured, close enough now that azzi could smell her. first came ozone, like filtered starlight, then something else, something that made her mouth water. it was grittier, threatened debasement, felt sweet and tensile, and threatened to make her cunt drip. “mortals always react to divinity, though what those reactions are differs. it's only natural that you'd hunger for what i am.”

“i don't—” azzi started, but the lie died on her tongue.

“don't you?” paige reached out, not quite touching, and azzi felt the heat of her anyway. her nose burned as she took in a breath. “that’s all your bloodline does. all those of your name are so erroneously hungry. it is the same i can taste it on you. the wanting. it's delicious.”

azzi forced herself to step back, to think. this was it, her one chance. “what if—what if i could offer you something else? something more interesting than a simple collection?”

paige's eyes sharpened, ancient and calculating. “i'm listening.”

“a game,” azzi said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. “a series of challenges. if you can complete four tasks of my choosing, you will release my family's debt entirely.”

“your choosing?” paige's eyebrows rose, and for the first time, she looked genuinely surprised. “how presumptuous.”

“and if you fail?” azzi continued, ignoring the way paige's mocking made her stomach flutter.

“i don't fail.”

“then you have nothing to worry about.” azzi lifted her chin, squared her shoulders. “but if you do, if you refuse even one task, then you leave. forever. the debt dies with your departure.”

paige was quiet for a long moment, and azzi could practically see her weighing the offer. the god in her was insulted at being challenged by a mortal. but there was something else there, too. curiosity, maybe. or boredom with millennia of simple collections.

“four tasks,” paige said finally, and there was danger in her voice. “and you think you can set them for me?”

“yes.”

“very well.” that terrible smile again, but now it held something different. anticipation. “give me your first task, little debtor.”

azzi's heart hammered against her ribs, but she forced the words out. “bring me something deathless. something that cannot die, cannot fade, cannot be destroyed. you have until sunset.”

“and if i succeed?”

“then i'll give you the second task,” azzi said, and there was something hungry in her own voice now that made paige's eyes darken. “and you'll have earned it.”

paige breathed harshly through her nose and lifted her hand from her hair. the girl was an unforeseen complication. accepting the challenge had been more for her amusement than anything else, but she was realizing that the girl meant to win.

which meant paige could not pretend to play fair. 

now, she bent at the edge of a lagoon with her teeth clenched so greatly that the squares threatened to crack. with a broken yelp, paige snapped her ring finger off, screaming weakly through her teeth. the earth shuddered beneath her knees and leaped up, pain coaxing it forward as its god cradled her mangled hand. 

water began to seep up and around them, gathering around the protruding bone as paige curled around herself in a brief moment of agony. the hand had already begun to heal, but not before several drops of golden blood fell on the face of the severed limb. her hand was whole by the time she stood up again. 

here, the water wanted its gifts whole, not mottled and broken. 

the transformation had completed itself in the time paige had spent doubled over her stomach in stark pain. giving herself up was never easy. in the clay, a slim scepter now lay where her finger had once bled, thin enough to swallow. the metal shone with smoky quartz and pearl, the top tapering into an arrowhead, flowers inlaid along the line of the silver, unfurling like an infection. it went between physical and not, at times dissipating into smoke between her fingers before becoming substantial.

pearl for loyalty, a bargain acknowledged. 

it will never be enough, the earth moaned, but it will be something.

“i know,” paige murmured, then she turned away.

paige returned as the sun touched the horizon, painting the sky the color of fresh blood. she thought of the easy give of a slit throat.

azzi had spent the day pacing, wondering if she'd been too clever for her own good. what if paige simply refused? what if she'd misunderstood what deathless meant entirely? azzi herself hadn’t known what she meant. what if—

“doubting yourself?” paige's voice cut through her spiral. she stood in the doorway again, but something had changed. her perfect composure appeared cracked at the edges, marred, smudged. for a moment, something raw was revealed underneath.

"what have you brought me?" azzi asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

paige stepped forward, and for the first time, she looked closer to a mortal woman. in her hands, she cradled something that wasn't quite there. a long line of light and shadow, intertwined with the stocky bodies of jewels, that hurt to look at directly. when azzi finally could weather the sight long enough, she realized it resembled an arrow.

“do you know what you asked of me?” paige's voice was softer now, tinged with a sickly quality. “something deathless. something that cannot fade.”

azzi's breath caught. “what have you brought me?”

“a memory,” paige said, and the shimmer in her hands pulsed like a heartbeat. “a little death, as the french call it. la petite mort. the moment when the body transcends itself, when pleasure becomes something beyond mortal comprehension.”

heat flooded azzi's cheeks. "that was not—i didn't mean—"

"didn't you?" paige's eyes were knowing, devouring. "you asked for something deathless. i remember everything. this memory has lived in me for millennia. it cannot die because it never truly lived—it simply is. will always be. as i am.”

the object grew brighter in paige’s hands, a tight sliver of silver. now it looked like a solid bolt of metal, smooth and warm and impossible.

"but here's the clever part of your request, little debtor," paige continued, stepping closer. "to give you something truly deathless, i have to give you something of myself. i have never died, and i never will."

azzi's heart hammered against her ribs. "what happens when i touch it?"

paige laughed. it shrieked through azzi, rattling her jaw. for only a brief second, did azzi know what it was like to laugh as a god did. 

“you won’t be touching it.”

azzi’s mouth opened, intending to question what paige meant, but she had no chance. paige struck.

in a flurry of movement, a great unfolding of limbs like that of a heron, paige clutched azzi tightly to the hard line of her body with one pale hand. with the other, she pushed azzi’s mouth further open and slid the arrow in.

azzi let out a high, keening noise of terror, and paige squeezed her waist. “suck.”

azzi did.

the world exploded into sensation.

she was no longer herself. she was only a bed of nerves, their beginning and their end. there were hands on her skin. gentle, reverent fingers that worshipped as something finite. 

then they sank deeper. rougher. palming the meat of her thighs, thumbing the folds of her until she bloomed open, wet and wanting, like fruit warmed too long in the sun. she was slick, embarrassingly so, the pleasure pouring out of her in viscous, honeyed pulses that clung to her inner thighs like melted sugar.

there was no rhythm to it. only escalation. a pressure building behind her eyes, behind her hips, behind her ribs. she couldn’t breathe. didn’t want to. her lips parted, teeth clenched, a thin line of drool sliding down her chin. she was being fed a hunger that wasn’t hers.

she swallowed it anyway.

it was exquisite. obscene. she could taste it in her mouth: iron and nectar, ozone and deep, deep salt. something hot and golden and rank. the slice of off-color sweetness that could only live in the rot of overripe things.

every dig into the warm, tight clutch of her cunt made her legs weaker. her toes curled. her stomach fluttered.

outside of the memory, paige only held her more tightly as azzi began to fall. those brown eyes were open but devoid of coherence. her head fell forward and tucked into the crook of paige’s neck.

paige could smell her now. her too-many teeth ached.

inside the memory, someone bit azzi’s body. neither kind nor cruel. only a taste meant only to mark. the pressure bloomed deep in her thigh and sank into the bone. her body tightened around it, trying to keep the sensation from slipping away.

she moaned. quietly, here, but deafening in paige’s inhuman ears. 

the hands did not stop. they coaxed more from her. pressed at the softest parts until she pulsed around nothing, a hollow needing to be filled. her clit twitched. her mouth watered. it was unbearable. it was perfect.

there was a sweetness behind her teeth she could not name. milk skimmed off the surface of something darker. her body held the taste like an antiphon. her pulse stuttered. her hips moved without her.

then the crest. silent, like a bell struck underwater. her thighs locked. her belly clenched. the pleasure broke clean through her, shivering the veins.

it was then that azzi understood why they called it a little death. because for one perfect moment, she ceased to exist as anything but pure sensation, pure joy, pure transcendence.

azzi came like a flood against a dam. roaring, overpowering, inconceivably strong.

she shuddered once more, then stilled. there was wetness between her legs. her lip was bleeding where she’d bitten down. her body had taken it all. 

and worse, it wanted more.

the god held her upright. said nothing. waited. watched her with those abnormal eyes.

"well?" paige asked. "was it deathless enough for you?"

azzi could barely speak. "who was she? in that memory?"

something flickered across paige's face, longing maybe. "she was me."

silence. azzi flinched, tried to step away, but paige held her steady. with a single crook of her finger, she coaxed the smoke from azzi’s throat, the memory unspooling into its arrow form once more. it shimmered faintly in her palm.

azzi moaned, soft and involuntary, as it left her. paige pressed her hand to the girl’s neck, massaging gently, her touch too careful to be mistaken as kind.

only then did she let go.

azzi stumbled back, breath shivering in her chest. “your first task is complete,” she said, though her voice trembled.

“and what did it cost,” paige murmured, stepping forward, “for me to bring this to you? for you to taste it?” she was close again, close enough that azzi could feel the heat of her. godly, wrong, too much. “because i can smell it now. the wanting. that ache. you’ve tasted of me.”

she leaned in, voice low. “will you ever be satisfied with mortality again?”

azzi didn’t answer. her second task curled and died behind her teeth. she was beginning to understand: in forcing paige to play her game, she had made herself part of it.

they were no longer simply collector and debtor.

they were something far more dangerous.

paige drew back, just to the threshold. the last of the sunlight spilled over her like blood in water.

“do you want to continue, little debtor?”

azzi gave a great shudder and swayed forward. 

“azzi,” she corrected, “and yes.”

paige tilted her head. smiled, slowly. “very well.”

again, that great and terrible droning. when azzi lifted her head, when the noise lifted itself from her, she found herself without her god.

✤ THE SECOND TASK: NAMELESS.

at their second meeting, paige found that the girl had dressed like the collateral she was.

azzi sat stock still on her bed, head bent in what appeared to be prayer if paige didn’t know better. she watched through the window, took in the brown bird's bend of her neck, the thinness of her throat. 

there was something about her throat.

azzi had draped herself in midnight blue silk that held starlight captive in its weave, the fabric pooling around her like a conquered ocean. golden threads spiraled across the gown in patterns that might have been constellations or the last of a language now unknown. vines bloomed into impossible flowers along the hem, each petal picked out in thread-of-gold so fine it seemed to whisper with every twist and crawl of her spine.

her long, dark curls had been swept over one shoulder, crowned with a circlet of silver leaves that seemed to have grown there rather than been placed. a single jewel—deep as winter night, red as heart's blood—nestled at her throat, suspended from chains that layered like sliced light against her brown skin. if the moon were a woman, this was proof of her first bleed.

the bodice hugged her tightly, outlining her form with pearl hands that left a row of milky buttons down the fabric, each one carved with symbols that shifted meaning depending on the angle of light. the sleeves had been fitted close, embroidered with thorns and roses that seemed live when viewed from the corner of one's eye.

she knew her worth and, in vain, had tried to protect herself. nevertheless, paige entered the room like death into a cemetery.

not a sound, not a footstep. already at home. her body dissipated into smoke at the threshold, slipped through the open window like night wind, and coalesced again behind azzi, who had not moved.

she didn't have to. paige already knew her.

a long, pale hand—impossibly smooth, inhumanly cold—reached out and fingered the curls beaded at the nape of azzi’s neck, where the heat still pooled. she brushed them aside as one might part silk, savoring the sensation. 

it was satisfying to see the way her touch took, to see azzi clench minutely, to clearly remember the heat of what had last occurred between them. the smallest shiver at the base of her spine. a tightening of breath. 

paige watched with amusement that bordered on reverence. she remembered the heat of azzi’s mouth, the way her body sang when touched. the little debtor was a slow-blooming thing, unsure of her body as it mutated with its need.

“you dressed up for me, little debtor,” paige said at last, voice low, curling like smoke around azzi’s ear. “was that wise?”

azzi gave no answer to paige’s question. didn't move.

and so paige circled her like a predator might, a slow orbit, every step a drag of gravity. her eyes were half-lidded, expression unreadable, but azzi could feel the scrutiny, the attention like lips applied to skin. 

paige came to stand before her and knelt. it was one long, awful motion that made her robes sigh across the floor like smoke sucked by the body into a chimney. her hands, long-fingered and precise, came to rest on azzi’s knees. it was light, shy of possessiveness, but not weightless enough to be sweet. 

simply placed, as if marking the beginning of something.

azzi’s breath stuttered, her lungs frozen, still. her thighs tensed beneath the silk.

she still hadn’t looked at her.

so, paige looked. paige stared as if trying to recall her from the inside out. her mouth parted slightly, her head tilted, and azzi had the unbearable sensation of being mapped, measured. 

then, a hand, slow and sure, slid upward along the outside of her thigh, brushing the fine embroidery that lined her gown. again, the god was so careful not to give more than what she must have known azzi needed.

there was no lifting it. only tracing. feeling. an innocence that belonged to a child’s curiosity.

azzi finally looked.

and there she was.

paige’s beauty was more unnatural than before, abnormal, slightly displaced. it came across as studied, too fine in its symmetry, down to the way each lash fell like a painted detail. her eyes had changed again. now they were slate, rimmed in pink, the look of something carved from ice and touched by salt. her skin had no pore, no flaw, not even the pulse of blood beneath.

she was all perfection, and it was wrong.

so wrong that azzi wanted to press her mouth to it, to devour it. to feel that cold, dead skin under her tongue and know it had been made to be tasted. swallowed.

paige leaned in, slowly, until her face hovered just above azzi’s chest. she didn’t kiss her. but she almost did.

 and that ache—the absence of it—made azzi’s whole body throb.

paige closed her eyes. breathed in, deep and indulgent, as though azzi’s scent itself was a kind of nectar. her nose brushed the hollow of azzi’s collarbone, ghosted along it. the gown shifted, wrinkling beneath her immortal touch.

somewhere beneath the fabric, azzi’s nipples had hardened, painfully tight. she thought of the last time, of those hands in the memory that pulled apart her cunt to reveal the gummy pinkness of her most inner self. she imagined it to be paige once she was alone, had shaken over her own fingers, her body a forest fire.

it was unbearable.

then paige pulled back, smooth as the run of water over stone.

“you fought with them.” at azzi’s slow blink, paige clarified. “with your family. you asked them about our deal.”

azzi recoiled, space now necessary as her latent grief pooled in the depths of her stomach. her hands trembled in her lap, clenched to keep from reaching. she turned, eyes wide like two pools of night. 

paige’s teeth ached. 

when azzi finally spoke, it came out in a hush, reverent and wrecked.

“i have your second task.” paige rose but still stood beside her. “bring me something nameless. something unknown, undiscovered, unearthed. you have until sunset.”

paige glanced at the other woman, eyes buzzing with an unsettling energy. azzi saw the god decide whether to abide, and watched as she conceded to following the script.

“and if i succeed?”

the same words from the bestowment of the first task.

“then you’ll receive your third,” azzi said, and paige said nothing.

paige was back quickly. 

the ease with which she had seemed to complete the task irked azzi, who rose with a great noise as her jewelry came like an avalanche down her neck and wrists. by now, she recognized that paige was playing a different game, that the rules of the tasks were slowly being respun around her. it vexed her deeply that she was unable to see the true web.

paige had changed from before. azzi’s memory faltered when it attempted to remember what she had worn before, but she knew it was not this. 

now the god appeared before her with those same pink-rimmed eyes, but her hair was more white than blonde and bled down her back to the pale cruxes of her ankles. she was suited in all black, her robe high-necked and spilling into an endless pool of midnight mist. 

she seemed antsy, uncertain of herself before azzi, but azzi could not find it within herself to take that advantage. instead, she clawed the circlet from her hair and tilted her head until her curls fully spilled ‘round her face. 

“what is it, then? what have you brought me?”

azzi knew her tone was insolent, but to her surprise, paige said nothing to correct it. instead, she settled on the bed, the mattress’s body groaning like a body under the knife. in her hand was something white and small.

“do you know i chose bargaining as my domain?” 

azzi was quiet, unsure of whether or not she was being asked to answer. paige was not looking at her. it was clear that something inside of her had been stirred, that something deep inside of her—something almost far removed—had been wrenched with a brutal twist of the wrist. 

“when you have nothing to believe in, every god seems to be the right one. you don’t ask questions, for this is your answer. you don’t need to know who i truly am, how i came to be, what is lurking beneath my mind and skin. i am simply worthy of your worship because i am there and i am reaching out.

“this was good for me,” paige continued, her body sagging. azzi moved subconsciously to steady her, her adornments moving with another shriek of gold against pearl. “i did not, in any way, have to remember.”

“you do not—” azzi began, but she felt a surge of power lick the back of her teeth and dive into the hot redness of her throat.

“i do,” paige said, her tone unnamable. “it is our deal.”

silence, for a moment. the god seemed small then, a young girl as she looked down at the mass in her hands.

“i was one of the youngest. my mother struggled with pregnancy, so several of my siblings died before me. i was always deemed unnatural, unpleasant. i could hear it, that divine frequency, the world’s tether to something older and sicker than any of us ever could be.

“by the time i learned to keep this observation to myself, i had already donated myself as something less than anyone else in that house. it was a hard winter. harder than the ones your family experiences now, but of course, since you have never known what i have, you cannot see that this version of the world is softer.”

azzi shifted in place, her throat still magically squeezed into silence.

“every winter, during the darkest week of the season, there came a caravan. it was bursting at the seams with people: the elderly, children dressed in bright fabrics that hid empty stomachs and broken teeth, young women with bells around the ankles, strong men who were one instance away from breaking down.”

something rank and vile began to populate the lining of azzi’s belly. she suddenly felt dizzy, helpless to stop the wave of understanding that followed.

“they offered us entertainment, a bright light that could not be shone by the kingdoms leagues away. but a performer has to be paid. we were poor, evil creatures without a penny in sight. but these men, the designated leaders of the troupe, were kind. generous. malleable. payment did not have to be in a typical currency.

“so, i went. i was the most trouble. my mother, i think, always hated me. i’m not sure why, but i am not in the habit of trying to understand it.”

azzi clutched at herself, her chest suddenly too small for the pain that was in it.

“i died in a ditch beneath an oak tree,” she said, with a voice as light as milk over breakfast.

no more prelude. no more sorrow.

“my parents sold me to a man for food and coin.  at least, that was the reasoning. i think they just wanted me to die. they had too many mouths, and mine was the smallest.” her gaze flicked to azzi’s lips, and lingered. “quietest, too.”

azzi tried to breathe, but she found her throat growing tighter and tighter.

“i fought and i escaped,” paige said simply, “and was killed for it. i don’t remember much, just the neat slice of my throat, like a smile, and the thought that this was the warmest i’d ever felt—covered and blessed by my own blood.”

she shrugged, her mouth quirking when she looked over to find azzi’s face eschewed in a tight twist of horror. 

“my body was never found. which means,” paige finally tilted her palm toward azzi’s heavy gaze, “that this was never discovered.”

azzi reached for the item without thinking, slightly drunk on the sudden press of paige’s body behind her. her first thought was that paige’s skin was surprisingly soft, almost as tender as velvet. her palm appeared lamb-black, her lithe fingers folded outward in faux reverence. she thought, foolishly, that it might be a jewel. that paige had gone into some hidden ruin to find a gem never named. a childhood trinket.

but it rattled.

azzi’s stomach tightened. she could not peel her eyes back, no matter the urgent curl of her stomach.

what lay within wasn’t whole. five small bones, blanched by time, still curled in the shape of a hand that had once clutched something. the tips were broken. one still bore the crescent indent of a tooth, like someone had tried to gnaw their way free.

azzi reeled. her body knew before her mind did. a hot surge rose up her throat, burning like battery acid. she jerked backward, tumbling off the bed and cracking straight into the ground. she turned away, the image rolling along her brain, the bones scattering like marbles along her bedroom floor. she clapped to her mouth, her shoulders shuddering as she flipped onto her knees, but it was too late.

her palms hit the ground with a wet sound, and she vomited, bile slicking her chin.

above her, paige remained still. preternaturally so. her shadow fell long across azzi’s body. she said nothing. she didn't have to.

the girl was clever, no matter her naivety. the gift was unmistakable.

it was a hand. her hand. a god’s hand, gnawed and buried and lost. five bones, unsung, unfound. until now.

azzi looked up, trembling, face wet with spit and tears and snot and some strange new understanding. and paige—oh, paige—watched her with a softness that bordered on indulgent. like she had fed azzi something sweet, and now waited for it to rot.

azzi watched as paige’s face began to fall away, the skin splitting and coiling backward to reveal the mess of bone and torn muscle. azzi watched, terrified, as the god’s jawbone began to move with her speech, raw ivory stained red. 

“paige madison bueckers. that is the name of what you held. she is gone. i am here. she decomposed, but i ascended.”

paige leaned down, that terrible face closer and closer. azzi fell backward, a hand at her chest.

“you asked your family about our bargain,” paige murmured, voice coiling like a snake along azzi’s brow.

the same question as earlier. azzi gave a stilted nod.

“you fought with them.”

azzi nodded again, whimpered. paige’s hand came to cradle the back of her head, gentle now, nearly obscene in its tenderness.

“my family gave me up before i had a name worth keeping,” paige said, almost sweetly. “they called it survival. i call it what it was.”

she pressed a kiss, cool and chaste, to azzi’s temple. her lips left nothing behind, and somehow that was worse. azzi looked up at her then, tears caught in her lashes, mouth parted like she’d just surfaced from drowning. bile still sat pulpy and pale at the edges of her mouth. 

paige’s face finally covered itself again. she straightened, peering down at azzi as if she were nothing more than a spider to be crushed beneath her shoe.

“if you fight this, if you attempt to delay collection, to dispel it, you strengthen the chance of death. your family will deal and deal and then deal again. there are only so many ways out i can offer you.”

the god’s mouth hardened. 

“wipe your face.”

the air split. all light in the room flattened.

then she was gone.

✤ THE THIRD TASK: SOUNDLESS.

paige arrived looking more like a woman than she ever had. it was as if she had traversed the continent in order to get it right, to study the presentation of others to better her own. 

she stood in the fields in men’s clothing—a large, white billowing linen shirt and brown trousers rolled at the ankle—but the shirt was open at the neck to reveal the divine length of her throat. azzi could see the beginning curves of her chest, and she blushed from where she gazed upon her goddess from the kitchen window. 

paige had the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, exposing forearms that were lean and corded, and on her fingers sat thick bands of gold. rings that looked ancient when azzi focused on them, kingly. the cut of her jaw appeared sharper today, more angular, as though she had borrowed something essentially masculine from the ether to adorn herself with. 

it made azzi's stomach flutter in a way that surprised her. she thought of paige’s hands curved around her hips, her hair like a shroud around her as she held azzi down. 

idly, paige turned this way and that, her hair coiling out in the coy kiss of the wind until it spread fully like a blanket of fool’s gold. upon closer look, azzi realized her feet were bare, but even the dirt shied away at the thought of soiling her.

there was something different about the god’s bearing today. the terrible perfection remained, but it had softened at the edges, become something meeker than predation. she stood with her hands loose at her sides, patient as winter waiting for spring, and for the first time since their meetings began, she did not enter uninvited.

azzi found herself moving without decision, her body carrying her through the kitchen door and across the withered lawn. each step felt uncomfortably weighted, as though she were walking toward her own sacrificial altar. the morning air tasted of copper and coming rain, caking beneath azzi’s tongue, but beneath it lay something sweeter.

“i did not call you,” azzi said when she reached the edge of the field. her voice came out smaller than intended, childlike in the vast space between them.

paige's smile was different too. smaller. nearly shy. “i frightened you the last time.”  

it wasn't a question. gods, azzi realized, probably didn't need to ask about the obvious.

“you showed me your bones,” azzi replied, and there was no accusation in it. it was simply what had happened. “you told me how you died as a child.”

something flickered across paige's features. surprise, perhaps, that her little debtor could speak of it so plainly. “yes. i did.”

“do you miss her? the girl who died? the life that was taken from you?”

paige was quiet for a long moment, her head tilted as though listening to something azzi couldn't hear. when she spoke, her voice carried the weight of centuries. “i don't know. sometimes i think i'm what she became when she refused to stay dead. sometimes i think i'm what ate what remained of her." she stepped closer, close enough that azzi could see the otherworldly blue of her eyes. “does it matter?”

it should’ve mattered. it should matter that the woman—god, creature, thing—standing before her had once been small and betrayed and afraid. it should matter that those perfect features had once belonged to someone who bit their own fingers trying to escape a shallow grave.

but all azzi could think was that it made paige more terrible and more beautiful all at once.

“right then. your third task,” azzi said, lifting her chin. she was in nothing but her sleep shift, a red shawl draped along her shoulders to ward off the morning chill. her feet were bare too, though the earth accepted her gladly. “bring me something soundless. something that i could never hear with my mortal ears.”

paige's expression shifted, became something ancient and amused. “you’d like me to bring you a gift that makes no sound.”

“yes.”

“no.”

the refusal shocked azzi, and she stared at paige, her pert mouth parting to show the slight prominence of her two front teeth. paige laughed. 

“how delightfully literal you are, little debtor.” paige extended her hand, palm up, an invitation. “but what you seek cannot be brought to you.” 

the air around them began to shimmer, bending like heat rising from hell’s hearth. azzi felt the world tilt sideways, reality growing thin as spider silk.

“come with me,” paige asked of her, but there was no choice.

the field dissolved around them like watercolors in rain, and azzi found herself stolen away.

she woke in snow and found the world a cathedral of deep blue silence. her body ached, unused to transport by a god’s hand, and she tried to push past the pain, to make a better effort to assess her surroundings. 

paige had deposited her into a pocket of woods throttled by winter’s hand, the trees tall and scraping the sky with dark, spindly limbs. the land belonged to no earthly season. the winter light filtered through bare branches like liquid sapphire, drenching and drowning every bit of this reality in shades of twilight and calamitous dream. 

the snow beneath her feet—still bare—was warm, confusingly so, and it gave way like down feathers with each desperate step. it was as if a thousand swans had been killed and stripped clean for her comfort, the bones bleached and set aside, picks in between immortal teeth. her nightshift, thin cotton meant for sleep, not survival, clung to her skin like a second self, translucent in the light.

it took her another long moment before she realized that she could hear nothing. once the connection had been made, panic flared hot and branding in her chest. there was no sound; there was nothing. 

not her ragged breathing that she felt tearing at her lungs like an animal, not the whisper of fabric against her thighs, not even the thunder of her heart that she could feel hammering against her ribs like a caged bird. the silence was absolute, divine, and terrible. it pressed and pressed and pressed against her eardrums until they ached, until the absence of sound became a strange kind of music.

without any sound, azzi found all other instinct heightened. her memory shuddered, molted until a remembrance took place, and the instructions of her goddess rolled to the forefront of her mind.

you must keep away from me.

paige's voice echoed only in her hindbrain, an innate inscription in azzi’s bones, spoken in that field before the world collapsed into nothing. such simple words for such an impossible assignment. how could she keep away from something that existed everywhere and nowhere, something that moved like shadow and could strike her like lightning?

she had no answer, but she knew that if she stayed still any longer than the deal would become forfeit. and so she moved, a great stumble forward, her shift catching on phantom thorns that left no marks but sliced and stung like dry ice. the fabric tore at the hem, then higher, baring more of her legs to this strange world. she felt exposed, hunted, but something deeper stirred in her belly. something that recognized this as more than survival.

another understanding. here, she could finally see the full spiral of the web, the larger game at play.

this was courtship. empyrean and brutal and erroneous.

clever girl, came her goddess’s voice. the words were too loud for such a human head, and azzi fell again, clutching her curls in agony. though i ached to tell you, i knew the truth would find you.

a branch cracked somewhere to her left, though she heard nothing. she only felt it, the vibration through the earth, up through the bones of her feet, settling in her spine like a tuning fork struck against stone. paige was close. closer than close. the very air tasted of ozone and that deeper scent, the one that made azzi's mouth water despite her terror.

she ran.

the nightshift rode up her thighs with each stride, the cotton growing more transparent as it absorbed the odd, oppressive moisture of this otherworldly winter. she could feel paige's attention like hands on her skin, mapping every errant step, every flutter of fabric, every heaving breath azzi herself was unable to hear.

she knew she could never sleep in this shift again, if it survived this. every moment she spent entombed in it would come with the recollection of what it meant to be coveted by something far older than her, far darker. something that answered the fallacies within her own body.

distracted, azzi almost missed the appearance of a fallen log in her path. it hadn't been there a moment before, she was certain, but she adjusted in the final second, leaping and warping her body into a graceful arc through the frigid air. 

still, it was not entirely enough, for her landing was clumsy, one ankle turning sharply on a dune of snow, sending her sprawling. the shift tore further, now barely covering the curve of her ass, and when she pushed herself up on her hands and knees, she felt eyes on her.

watching. drinking her image in. heat bloomed between her legs despite the cold, despite the fear. or maybe in spite of it. she knew that to be caught meant nothing fully benevolent. paige would take her, would open her along her fingers, just as she nearly did in that bathroom when azzi first looked upon her face.

azzi forced herself upright and kept running, but she could feel the rules of the bargain shifting around her. the trees seemed to stretch when she wasn't looking directly at them, branches reaching out to catch her hair, the warmth behind her knees, the soft inner skin of her arms. the intention was not to harm, and never to pain her, but to slow, to make her slip, to give whatever pursued her more time to close the distance.

she pressed deeper into the blue maze of this god-made winter, her feet now completely numb but still beating with the rush of blood, still sinking into snow that felt as inconsequential as silk. that was the danger—to assume there was none. the world around her had become liquid, dreamlike, a place where normal rules bent and broke. she couldn't tell if she'd been running for minutes or hours. time moved differently here, mangled, a thunderous pressure like the run of horses.

again, another obstacle, this time a root that wrapped around her ankle like a lover's fingers, gentle but insistent. azzi went down hard. the snow cushioned her fall, but the sudden, severe splay of her limbs urged her shift into finally giving up its ghost. the whispered shriek of the material’s tear was lost to the divine silence, but azzi felt it like a caress. 

cool air against overheated skin, the knowledge that she was now more exposed than clothed.

when she rolled onto her back, gasping soundlessly, she saw her.

paige stood twenty paces away, perfectly still among the blue-black trees. she had changed again. no longer wearing men's clothes. no longer wearing anything at all. 

her hair was loose, bloodless, so white and moving relentlessly in a vicious wind that azzi couldn't feel, and her eyes. her eyes were the exact shade of hypothermia, of suffocation, of the last thing you'd see before the cold took you. and they burned to the point of discomfort, an imagined pain rising along azzi’s skin, the most vivid hallucination. 

they stared at each other across the tundra, predator and prey locked in a link like prisoners related by the interlocking of their chains. paige's lips curved in that dreadful smile, and though azzi heard nothing, she felt the word more than saw it shaped by those perfect, bloodless lips:

beautiful.

then paige was moving, not walking but flowing forward like ash, and azzi scrambled to her feet. the remains of her nightshift clung to her shoulders and little else, the cold air a shock against her nipples, her belly, the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. she could feel wetness there that had nothing to do with the sleet melting against the fervent, mortal warmth of her body.

she ran again, but it was different now. less desperate flight, more ritualistic determination. she could feel paige behind her, taunting her by remaining near enough to view every sway of her hips, every flash of smooth brown skin, every vulnerable curve revealed by paige’s cruel machinations—but never near enough to catch. the pursuit was leisurely now, inevitable. 

a god had all the time in the world.

azzi's foot snagged on the hint of something, another root or maybe nothing at all, and she fell forward, grasping against the trunk of a tree to try to steady herself. the bark was surprisingly temperate, twitching like a heartbeat beneath her palms. 

when she looked back, paige was the closest she had ever been, her presence so immediate that azzi could see the otherworldly perfection of her face, the inhuman symmetry that made her eyes water.

there, azzi could see paige’s naked, unflinching hunger.

the tree at her back seemed to shift, bark becoming smooth as human skin was capable of, branches curling down to curl around her shoulders like claws. she was trapped by the iron fist of divine attention, by the knowledge that running was only a futile part of the game they were playing.

paige approached with a casual gait, her mouth widening as she made to claim her prize. the trees bent away from her passage as if unwilling to witness it again, as if even the forest remembered the first time azzi had seen her. eventually, azzi could see the pulse that wasn't there in that long, long throat. 

eventually, paige stopped.

her lips moved. though azzi heard nothing, the words settled in her bones like prayer: you are caught.

the hunt was over. whatever came next would be something else entirely.

paige’s touch was expected, inevitable as illness. but it was different now.

paige no longer looked at her with the remove of a collector. she looked at her the way wolves looked at what they circled, at what they planned to eat. her hands hovered, trembling minutely with the pleasure of achieving her goal. she didn’t touch what remained of azzi’s clothing, not yet. 

instead, she glanced up at azzi’s face, and in the bleak cobalt light, her smile was agony.

“i was going to take everything from you,” paige murmured, finally. her voice blended with the swells of the blizzard around them, but azzi felt it under her skin. here was the world returned, her hearing renewed. “do you understand? do you remember? the first time?”

azzi’s lips parted. her voice didn’t come, but her nod was slight and sure.

“you were shaking in that bathroom, on the floor,” paige continued. “trembling with something more than fear. it was like your body already knew mine. even when your mind refused. even when you still believed only in fairness.” she reached up, finally, and her fingers brushed along azzi’s calf, the pads of her fingers dragging slowly, sap over the heart of a maple. “that’s when it changed. when i changed, when i stopped wanting your family’s debt.”

she shifted in place, her body brushing against azzi’s as she did so. every inch of her was bare—pale and incoherently radiant, the illusion of humanity stretched thin over eternity—and yet she reached for azzi as though it was her who might be mutilated.

“i didn’t tell you only because it would be more fun that way. you were so curious, so unyielding. when you looked at me like that, half in love with a perpetual monster, i knew your mind needed stimulation. i needed to let you find your way to my true intentions.” 

paige’s hand slid higher. 

“you asked for something soundless. but do you know what’s louder than any silence?”

azzi shook her head.

paige leaned in, lips at her ear, voice made only for her marrow.

“willingness.”

then, with the same unhurried cruelty she had once shown in a half-forgotten bathroom, paige tore the last remnants of azzi’s nightdress. it split like wet paper, like scabbed skin under persistent nails. azzi’s mouth opened without a bead of sound, and the cold swallowed the bones of her gasp whole. her breasts, her belly, her cunt all lay bare to the blue light, and the flush that plundered her chest was more desire than shame.

paige looked like she might be conquered by the sight, but she wasn’t. she would never allow herself to surrender to anything.

instead, she cupped azzi’s face rougher than before, like michelangelo with a hand around his david, held her gaze as her other hand slid between her legs.

“you are always so ready,” she said, and this time there was a shake in her voice. “even when you fight me. especially then.”

azzi nearly doubled. her hips stuttered forward. the roll of those fingers over her swollen clit made her whole body jerk like something freshly snared. paige’s knuckles brushed over the slick proof of azzi’s arousal, then retreated like a tease. her other hand came to the back of azzi’s neck, shook her slightly like a doll to bring her out of lust-induced haze. to drag her back, to see her.

“you were already wet for me halfway through running,” paige said softly, more a mockery than a marvel. “your body knows mine. that’s why i changed the terms.”

she curled two fingers inside azzi like she meant to keep them there forever. azzi’s head lolled, her lips wide and her eyes rolled in wordless rapture, her body arching into the touch. paige curled her fingers like she was memorizing a prayer, and azzi’s legs nearly gave out.

the forest around them howled as it held witness.

the pressure was unbearable, but not from the intrusion. from the intimacy. the precision. paige moved like she had been carved for this, as if azzi were nothing but a doll to be used, as if her very birth was the eventual fulfillment of a prophecy only paige had known. 

if this was defilement, azzi would be proud to bear the illustration of the aftermath. she wanted her goddess to dig into her, cunt and stomach and mouth, to leave something behind. she wanted her goddess.

she wanted—

“no longer my little debtor,” paige whispered, driving deeper. “you made yourself an offering. a brave rival, too, but you were always an offering.”

azzi’s head dropped back completely. paige let it. her throat arched like a girl about to be slaughtered. maybe that’s what this was; maybe this was paige’s altar. 

maybe this was abraham and isaac, except isaac was isabella, and god delivered herself to her mouth and claimed her before the knife did. maybe isaac-turned-isabella did not know the difference because anything divine and ceaseless feels like a blade, feels hotter than clean then over.

“you were born for this,”  paige said, voice near reverent, breath near her lips now. “to be caught.”

and azzi, slick and bare and throbbing, could only taste blood in her mouth.

she tried to speak, tried to deny, tried to moan, but her body was too full. it expanded over her noise, her breath, her language. all that remained was sensation and the vision of paige, shining and obscene, taking her apart with fingers and teeth. 

this was no longer a task. there had never been a task. it had all been a choosing. 

and all the while azzi had already been chosen.

azzi came suddenly, her body locking up around paige’s fingers with a helpless rhythm, a stuttering quake that began in her spine and bloomed outward like infection in the blood. her mouth opened in a perfect, silent ‘o’, no sound but the wide-eyed plea in her gaze as her orgasm crested and broke, wet and molten and sweet, dribbling down paige’s hand like syrup from a split fig. 

her pleasure was made visible like never before, hot slickness coating the fingers still buried inside her, seeping past the knuckles in gratitude, in acquiescence. paige watched it happen, her thumb brushing once, just once, over azzi’s pulsing clit like the period at the end of a prayer.

she bent, blonde and frightening, to kiss her.

blood in her mouth, and azzi didn’t know whose it was.

and she didn’t care.

✤ THE FOURTH TASK: PAINLESS.

azzi did not have a chance to administer her final task. paige simply appeared to her and dismissed all of it.

“no more of this,” she said, her tone firm. “i want something different.” 

azzi blinked. her lips parted, her fingers still wet with the tincture she’d brewed for sleep, borne of poppy and passionflower. 

“you—what? what do you mean? you don’t want the final task?”

she sat up wildly in bed, and she hated how desperation made a slave of her, how it so clearly had her deep in its clutches, painting her movements with a pitiful urgency. was this rejection? was she only good for one thing?

“no,” paige said, stepping closer. 

azzi was unsure of whether she had spoken aloud or if paige had only heard her, a hand anchored gluttonously in her hindbrain.

her goddess was kinder in her form this time, illuminated not with the cold light of the dead, but something gentler, awful in its own way. some fever dream of spring. 

“i’m simply no longer interested in collecting.”

azzi stared. she was winded without having been touched. 

“then what is it you want?”

paige’s face shifted, and azzi realized that that was the question.

✤ THE FIFTH TASK: MATE / LESS.

there was a silence between them, thick as a wedding veil and just as translucent. paige stepped forward, and forward again, until the hem of her robes brushed azzi’s feet. she gazed down at her with a pale echo of hunger from the forest.

“you,” she said simply. “bound to me. beyond a night. past centuries. for as long as the moon pulls the sea.”

azzi could only look at her.

“speak.”

finally, azzi found the words.

“you want me as your consort.”

“yes.” paige’s voice dipped into her mouth like a sacrament. “i want to wear your name inside mine. i want to wake beside you in the ruined gardens of time. i want your sorrow, your sickness, your teeth, your youth. i want your last breath and the one after that.”

azzi felt something loosen in her chest. the end of the world. the start of a new one. 

“that is not an easy thing to ask of me,” she said softly.

“no,” paige replied. “but it is yours to choose.”

azzi turned away for a moment. paige came to sit beside her, a hand firm on azzi’s stomach.

“this is all that i have. either way, you were gone, azzi. you were the cataclsymic end to your family’s greed. you were to go by their hand, but at least, if you do not love me, you can at least go by yours instead.”

azzi turned back to her then. her god, this woman, this terror she loved, and cupped the hard line of her jaw. 

“if you think i do not love you, then it is only because you have not existed long enough to understand what it means to do so.”

paige’s mouth fell open, but this time azzi silenced her. her answer was not given in words, but in the way she leaned forward, bending forward, and tilted the god’s head to be kissed.

somewhere, in a kingdom long buried, a temple shook away from the earth’s crust and rose to the surface. its pillars groaned as the deal was closed.

the final task was struck through. a new name took its place.

this was ascendance.

✤ EPILOGUE: ENDLESS.

they meet by a shore that hadn’t existed in azzi’s mortal life.

beneath them, the beach sleeps slick and black, wet with night. above: the endless flood of metal and light, a bridge carrying cars like blood cells, a flow that never stills. the world has turned electric, sleepless, but the sea always remembers.

paige arrives first. barefoot in the sand, cuffs rolled. her shirt is a formal button-down, long-sleeved and white as bone. her trousers are creased and acute, a color pitched darker than black. even now, she remains severe to the point of discomfort. still a god, always a god.

azzi comes next, a mirage, her slip dress clinging like water, a shimmer of champagne against her skin. she walks barefoot, the tide licking her ankles. the dress is from a time older than this one. azzi struggles often to let go. 

there is no fear in her face now, only memory, only that unbearable clarity that comes with time.

they don’t speak. they never do. 

azzi steps closer, until their hands nearly touch. the sea hisses a greeting, and paige’s hands flutter as if to wave. 

in the distance, a car horn cries out like a gull. time wavers.  somewhere behind them, the old world bows its head and closes its eyes for good.

azzi concedes first, reaches out, and touches the other. one hand, light at the jaw, like she is granting permission. paige follows easily, bending to kiss her until she is sweet and soft in her hands. 

paige pulls away, resting her forehead against azzi’s as she winds a cool hand along her waist.

she says nothing, but as always, azzi hears her like a wound in her head.

wife.

azzi’s smile is inevitable.

✤

🀢 — azzi, goddess of second-life.

a lesser-known modern deity, azzi presides over second chances and reclaims those once used as collateral in others’ bargains. often invoked by the nearly-lost—the sacrificed, the betrayed, the discarded—she represents survival as return.

iconography associates her with thresholds (shores, dusk, liminal states) and offerings made in twos. her mythology emphasizes reclamation: she does not reverse fate, only answers it.

common epithets: bargain-maiden, she who was spent, patron of the nearly lost.