A GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEAUTY;

Words turned into embers, the bones they’d gathered together acting as the kindling, and oh,how Marcel loved how the both of them felt the incessant need to bring this game as intimate or as voyeuristic as their desire pulled them. Discussion wasn’t needed - deities did not negotiate, they simply knew, and the two of them were no different. It was proven again and again, only the flick of a nod and Marcel’s legs came to press her into the bed, his fingers tight around her neck as he loomed over her, twin smirks parted in breathless euphoria. Or how she only need to peer up at him from beneath long lashes and hooded eyes in a crowded room and his clothed cock was pressing against the swell of her ass as strangers danced and waltz.

Other than Fabius, or perhaps even moreso, Zelda was the only one who seemed truly matched to Marcel’s thirst for chaos, his own lofty goals of making his divinity known (to say his goal was to usurp the divine throne would be redundant - this was already done and far behind him), his compulsive, ritualistic need to spill blood, and together they partook, and it was so much more potent alongside the other than if they’d done it alone.

“I’m sure they did. Your sounds, verbal or otherwise never fail to make me swell and throb. I’m sure they were kept up all night by how you keened to my voice and all the ways I’d turn you inside out with my cock.” His words were pressed against her ear, his fingers splaying out against her wetness, dark eyes flitting to Markus, and he smirked when  he saw that the boy had slowly fallen to his knees. “You were always such a marvelous tease, how godlike my patience must have been for me to  sit there and talk about academics and global affairs with father while I knew my come was on your tongue.” His inhaled sharply at the effect of his words, her words, her teeth and tongue mingled on the heat of his skin, and he slowly brushed up against the soft curve of her thigh. “As soon as father and mother had left the room, I took you against the dining table as it creaked and protested, filled you again and again and painted your face and tits and watched it drip off your chin.”

And she was on her knees, as she often was when it was the two of them and Marcel’s cock was straining against his trousers, although this time the air was crackling with the electricity of an audience. She took him deeply and completely and Marcel groaned, perhaps the hoarsest sound he made so far, and he pushed himself further into wet, pliant heat. He was harsh and fast because he knew Zelda needed it, saw the satisfaction swimming in her tears as she choked herself on his cock, and he knew the sounds of her tongue lapping at his cock head were arousing her just as much as they were him.

“Darling sister could do this for hours,” Marcel added at Markus with a breathless chuckle, grunting softly when she pulled off him. “She’s done it before.” His hand in her hair pulled her up back so she was standing, and he pressed a slow, languid kiss to her lips, licking him off of her mouth where he could taste him, before leading her over to where Markus sat. The boy watched, as if in a trance, palming his desire through his pants as the two of them neared. Marcel laughed at the sight and said, “You’re in for a treat, boy.”

He didn’t prepare her with fingers, he could see her slickness from where he stood, and instead he grabbed her leg and helped Zelda prop it up against the wall behind Markus so that her cunt wasn’t even a foot away from his lips. Marcel slowly slid his cock against the wet heat of her folds, teasing her entrance as he bit and licked at the crook of her neck. “Always so wet for me,” he groaned against the shell of her ear, an intimate muttering between the two of them, and he thrust himself in to fill her completely. “Tell him how it feels to have daddy’s cock inside you, princess.”

She could feel him growing behind her, and not just in the way he was against her thigh. He was swelling in size and height and breadth until all she could feel and see and think was his breath and his hands, hot torso pressed up behind her. If there was an inch of space (exterior or interior) that she could have turned to that was not occupied by Marcel, she did not know it, nor did she care. She looked only temporarily at Markus, defeated and trembling as he was, and there was something gold-amber about her eyes puncturing him through the darkness, holding him to his spot like the nails of a crucifixion. It was feline and predatory and languid all at once, acknowledging that they - tangled together as they were, she and Marcel - were both shelter and storm, and they had room for none but the other. Their visitor was witnessing as close to a miracle as this age would ever see.

“We went again and again until it broke.” She added definitively. Her voice sounded like shipwrecking ribs. She watched Markus ( -- And we will break you too, boy). “I told mother it had been an accident the next morning, when she asked -- that our play had gotten rough. She tried not to show it, but she was angry. She said that kind of action wasn’t becoming on a young lady of my age. It was almost as if she knew exactly how we played.” There was a hot-ice shiver in her bones. Zelda was focused on her companion once more, not the tribute in the corner. She lost a piece of her breath to the way his hand grazed her thigh, to their fantasy. Her palms ran over the clothed architecture of his chest and up his neck, locking around the back of it. “Do you think she knew - that either of them had a clue as to what their glittering, debased children were doing under their noses?”

Darling sister could do this for hours. She’s done it before. Again the fact and fiction was blurring, leaving only one hedonistic, smoke-filled truth. Her smoky chuckle layered over his. “Let’s be fully honest, brother. I’ve spent whole days on my knees with your cock in my mouth -- - and I’ll do it again.” And again. And again. She rose easily at the command of his fist in her hair, pliantly opening her mouth for him as his hot lips and tongue pulled a short moan from her. Her thumbs hooked into the sides of her panties to drop the material from her hips, the slight material pooling around her heels. -- And so she followed him where he lead her, bare and naked and stripped down to nothing aside from the glittering things around her throat and ears and the added four inches underneath her soles. Zelda’s thrumming chuckle added to Marcel’s as she ran a hand absently over Markus’ cheek. “Oh,” She cooed as her finger ran over his bottom lip, the sound dripping with a kind of affectionate condescension one gives a pet (he wore no collar, but their names were being branded into his skin with each passing moment) -- then the same syllable was repeated, but with an entirely new coating. The moments of surprise that persisted through their likened minds were grand ones, Zelda’s breathy response to her leg being propped against the wall proof of his effect on her still. Her lips had curled in cheshire cat pleasure, and if she had not been so intent on being fucked in just a moment, she would have turned around and clasped Marcel’s jaw in her hands to tell him how lasciviously genius he was.

Instead, Zelda’s head dropped back onto Marcel’s chest as he teased her, her eyes closing as his cock passed easily through her abundant slickness. His heat between her thighs and at her neck gave way to another rumble of a groan. “Only for you,” She answered lowly, and it was fact, just as much as it was fact that there were others - many others. But none of them could twist and turn and own her the way Marcel did. One of her hands had reached up to pinch her already pebbled nipple, but the suddenness of being filled up had her instead crying out and reaching to brace her palms against the wall.

Worry, darling…

Lola knew the buoyant voice instantly; the woman who purred, threw the line with her smirk then hooked you with a wink. Her charms were a song, the kind made of wind-chimes on a spring afternoon — a tune that failed to make Lola go weak in the knees as it did for so many others. If anything, it was amusing to watch, and even better, those charms usually came with a toy. Toyswere something Lola was much more interested in.

                                          — — - Particularly with how you                                                       could b r e a k them.

Her spine rolled back to straighten her posture in cat-like fashion, browns igniting at Zelda’s mention of a surprise. Her gaze wasn’t lit with the flames of fury — no, it was the other kind of heat. The one that demanded a blood sacrifice, that warmed her center and made her feel at home, truly alive. It coaxed a smile to the surface, though no matter how her lips curved they never looked soft, always malicious, hungry, and it did little to hide the fangs underneath.

She tossed her dark locks over the other shoulder at Jeremiah’s introduction, her smirk spreading like wildfire, eyes ablaze as she set the cue stick aside. “Jeremiah,” she cooed, flattening her palms against the wood to slide atop it, crossing lean, bare legs in front of her with the grace of a dancer, alady — it was a thin veil over a viscous atrocity. Lola was shameless in her half-dressed state; his opinions would mean nothing come the end of the night, or week depending on how much fun he’d be.

“Zelda’s awful pretty, isn’t she?” Her eyes remained fixed on the man, her head merely canting toward Zelda to punctuate her comment. She didn’t simulate innocence, didn’t bat her eyelashes and pat the empty space next to her, she just watched as he eased himself further into the room, still and quiet, a cheshire cat licking her whiskers. Her stare dared him to come closer, to peer upon the marvel that was them.

                                              He was lucky.                     Not many got to stand in awe of their wonder.                                 Not many got to live through it.

“You always do bring me the best surprises,” she spoke to Zelda with fondness, a rare fluctuation in her tone, one often exclusively reserved for nights of true indulgence. Lola didn’t need Zelda’s charms when the woman made a perfectly suitable partner-in-hedonism.

“Get us some drinks, Jeremiah.”

That Zelda was a narcissist could not be contended: there was no reflection she treasured as well as her own, yet there was a separate kind of raw, shaking satisfaction she gleamed from observing her roommates faces. She knew them all in varying shades of intimacy, but upon each, Zelda knew their crevasses and lines of their profiles as well as the chips and bumps in her ceiling -- with none of the mundane nature. She watched Lola react, and she  p u r r e d .

This was enough. This was what she wanted: that flexible roll of shoulders, the tight-string pull of lips. Those barely admissible reactions that would be lost on all others, but not on Zelda. She did not drag out the deaths at her hand out of cruelty -- it was not purely to cause drawn-out pain. Zelda was invested in the slow burn, though she lived at a quickened pace: she wanted the satisfaction of watching realization (of death, love, lust, it did not always matter which) bloom from first petal to last.

Forget Eden, that was where Zelda’s eternal garden lay.

She looked up from her needle-tight observation of Lola only when her lips parted and gave way to his name. Then her eyes were feeding themselves on him, how his eyes churned hesitantly - and than all at once - over Lola’s bare legs. 

“Ah, hi -- Lo-la?” He intoned, as if he might swallow the syllable before spitting it out, testing that he had been handed the right name. Zelda nodded at him in confirmation.

(And she too was shameless: Zelda’s awful pretty, isn’t she? She offered no opposition. She only dropped her head to the side and stared, a promise of something tucking into her mouth along with the bottom lip she dragged in with her teeth. I am, aren’t I? Tell me I am). Jeremiah rubbed at the back of his neck, chuckling at the ground before turning back to Zelda, who was waiting expectantly for him. “She sure is.” Zelda giggled. It was too innocent to be innocent; in that paradox lay her perpetual innuendo.

“There’s a cart in the den over there, darling.” She pointed in a vague direction. There were drinks in every room, if you looked hard enough. The confusion on Jeremiah’s face didn’t totally ebb as he walked away, though he tried to smile through it.

“He’s quite lovely,” Zelda spoke to their silence after Jeremiah had abdicated the room with a kind of detached fondness. “I almost considered keeping him.” She hoisted herself up onto the pool table’s wooden edge, crossing her legs and looking at Lola with her mouth open, serrated blades shining between her teeth. “Almost.” She turned briefly at the sound of clinking glasses in the distance.

“Yes, but none of them are half as smart as me.” Nikki smirked in self satisfaction. “We weren’t all born into money Zelda.” She smiled to show she didn’t mean anything by the comment. “Most of us have to work to gain it and work even harder to keep it.”

“I know.” And she winced, because she did know. “And it sounds an ever so droll lifestyle, Nikki dear, I don’t know how you continue to do it.”

Hope brought his hands up to his lips in a gasp. “Zellie, how could you ever say such a thing? It’s adorable and everyone deserves to wear one.” He probably made a poor defense for the hat, knowing that it probably didn’t suit Zelda’s standards. “Never underestimate online shopping, Zel. I think it would look adorable on yo?>u.”

“It’s --” Zelda pinched a side of the hat between her fingers and lifted it, her nose crinkling. “What is it?” She dropped the seemingly offensive fabric just as quickly, her mouth wrinkling to match her nose. “I have no interest in online shopping. It’s like plastic flowers. There’s no real texture to it.”

“Oh.” Zelda answered, but it was a flat, bored syllable. Working hard. How very odd. She watched the screen’s rapid motions blankly. “Don’t you have -- other people for this?”

“Oh you have no idea Zelda.” Nikki looked up from her laptop and ran her hands-complete with expertly done French manicure-through her (salon styled) hair. “If anyone ever tries to get you into computer programming just turn them down because they do not love you and do not care about your well being.”

“If someone asks that of me,” She drawled, standing up from her reclined position to saunter towards Nikki and drop her arms around the woman’s neck, leaning towards the computer so she could see exactly what technical function she didn’t care about. “I’m afraid to say they would be a very dull person.” Zelda rested her temple on Nikki’s head, peering with mild interest at the screen. “Now what is this all about, my love? What are you doing?”

Madness necessitated chaos.

Most nights, Zelda and the other seven where the cause of the chaos - not purely in creating a kind of monstrous, loud bedlam in the streets, but by upsetting the imposed lawful order of the world simply by spilling a little blood (how fragile man-made things such as law are).

But other nights – very few, nearly nonexistent, in number – the chaos was struck upon Zelda and the rest. Such as now, with broken bonds discarded on the floor like sacrificial animal bones and screaming quiet littering the Estate’s basement rather than screams. It hadn’t been her plan for the evening to chase her toy in a game of predator and prey (she had already won that above ground, in a subtler match of wits and bared legs), yet it was not an unwelcome twist. As an agent of chaos, Zelda as bound to enjoy it, after all.

Still, when she had found her victim’s absence rather than his body when she returned to where he had been restrained earlier, Zelda had been quick to text Fabius - Come to the basement. Now. - as an act of precaution. Her man was drugged and disoriented, would be lost amongst the nefarious winding halls of his prison, but he was large and strong and could have choked the life out of Zelda with just one hand. She waited in the barren, sterile hall next to the door until she heard Fabius, then reaching a hand out to grab above his elbow.