Wedded Bliss

Ythgar strode toward his chambers. Through the leaded window's many facets, he could see the gibbous moon's rise, and as it hung with the bottom just touching the treeline, it was time. As he approached his bedroom, and the wife who waited within, he sternly controlled any flutters which would in another man be attributed to nerves, or guilt, or possibly both. He'd murdered the girl precisely to expunge such weakness, and thus such weakness was mere figment of his imagination. His shoes thudded on the carpeted long hallway. His few dulled senses were at their utmost, straining to listen and catalogue - he knew not why. Distantly, the thought flitted through his mind that he was glad this was Darkshire and not what had been Lordaeron. Not his original wedding chamber. He repressed that thought as well, focusing on memories of the wet pleas the girl had managed to get out as he first saw the gleam of white bone in the red ruin of her back.

Yes. That was a good thought. Pleasantly evil. Far better than these boyish shudders. The heavy dark oak door opened to his touch, and he sought to adjust the focus of his eyes. Strange, how the senses when dead became conscious. Except smell and taste.. he could not make them work. He distantly wondered why he was thinking such thoughts when he was about to truly enjoy sex for the first time in a decade. The room lit with a soft whoomph, as if an inhalation by some invisible dragon. The various flat surfaces bore candles, arrayed in lines like small stout choirboys set to sing a hymn. His trained mind recognized a spell of demonic origins and he wondered privately if his wife knew that when he'd walked northward beneath the ocean's weight, he too had been a warlock.

His wife. This morning, they'd stood in a pleasant little rustic chapel, and a mild priest had spoken the ritual words. No demonic rituals, nor sacrificed goats. No screaming maidens, unless you counted the whore he'd killed the night before, who'd hardly qualify as a maid. The priest showed a definite lack of horns and tail, and no ominous wings sprouted from his back or tore his cassock as he spoke quietly in wheezy tones. They'd had him omit all that tedious nonsense about loving and cherishing.. he hadn't, but he'd managed to make the vows sufficiently vague that Ythgar hadn't felt.. wrong.

Bah, that ridiculous emotion. He mentally growled and dwelled quite emphatically on the girl.

His wife. Right.

Millicent, once Paxineau, lay tucked in the bed smiling like a cat. She was made up as she had been all week, with snow-white eyelids, lips and nails. The effect bleached her completely beneath her curling mass of glossy dark hair. It was not at all unpleasant, and he rather enjoyed the facade of purity overlaid on such a wicked being as the woman he'd wed. He smiled in return, and wordlessly began to strip. Bare, gleaming in the candlelight, he posed for her, standing regal. Letting her examine what she had desired enough to seek out. He knew his body was in excellent condition. Prior to his murder, he'd exercised every day in armour and with his sword, and not an ounce of fat marred the hard lines he'd kept assiduously. After his death, maintaining the state of his body had been simple after his pact with the Legion. And after his conversion to Arthas' forces, the only real changes had been a dusky hue imparted to his skin, a toughening of every sinew, and the obvious blue flames in his eyes. And of course the near-total lack of true interest in matters genuinely carnal.

Only the ragged white scar on his breast where the rapier had pierced him and snuffed his life out stood out as a mark against the dark skin and hard muscle. Millicent's lavender eyes trailed over his nudity, and her catlike smile widened. He unbound his gray hair and let it fall loose to hang down just past his shoulders, framing his face. As silent as he, she lifted one white hand, and beckoned with a single finger, bidding him join her. Ythgar summoned his arrogant confidence, focused on the fact that a woman lay in bed wishing to taste of him, and was able to walk to the side of the lush bed he rarely bothered to sleep in, turn back the covers, and slip into its rustling embrace.

The bed bounced a little as Millicent turned to face him, reaching to touch his face. His darker hands reached beneath the blankets, and felt her rounded, ripe curves. Muscle pressure, like so, and she was fitted against his cooler body, their faces close. He recalled her contours a trifle from that heady night in his carriage, and his caressing hands discovered that surprisingly, almost nothing had changed. Her body's delicious shape was very much the same, from narrow waist to broader curving hips, and up along her spine -

He was startled in his musing exploration as she pressed her face to his, pale lips against his. This was it, then. The kiss began with each striving for control, before she willingly it seemed reliquished it, letting his tongue probe into her warm mouth, and letting him enjoy what he could. Her retreat was clearly tactical, and as his own tongue briefly moved out of the way, the woman who had been Paxineau de Cheraville, necromancer, warlock, and student of things few should ever consider, breathed out hard into her husband's mouth. He felt something hot and sticky enter his throat, and might have gagged if he'd required breath. She broke the kiss, leaning away a little, and he saw something wet, the colour of her eyes, the colour of stolen souls, staining her white lips.

It was like watching something in black and white bleed into colour. It was like watching the sun rise, and feeling warmth on cold skin. It was like nothing he had imagined, even in his own reasonably adept theft of life energy to maintain himself. The first thing Ythgar noted was that his mouth bore a taste. A TASTE. He hadn't had anything taste of anything in ten years, and the shock it produced momentarily stunned him. What she had exhaled into him, had given him, tasted of honey. Of lilacs. Of hot mornings in mossy glades. He heard a moan somewhat distantly, and knew it for his own voice. His whole body convulsed, and he felt a jarring thud in his chest. Another. Another. His heart! It was thumping without his control or will! His jaws gaped a little, reflexively, and the breath whistling in and out was his own.. yet again, it bore no conscious control! Had the former Marquis of Vinguld been able to see himself from outside, as his pleased wife did, he might have watched as the dusky hue of his skin, like something burnt by cold, seemingly thawed, pink, healthy, living skin emerging as the darker hue simple faded. His burning blue eyes too dimmed, revealing the golden-green he'd possessed all his life, without spectral illumination at all. Only deep in the pupils, the blue flames waited, beaten back by this terrifyingly powerful spell, waiting to return.

As his eyes refocused, he could feel his pulse humming in his veins. Blood rushing through his warm, living body. He licked his lips again, and inhaled, and reeled once more. Her hair! It smelled of cinnamon and fragrances he could scarcely name.. heavy floral scents assailed him, and his newly-regained senses both reveled in them and maddened him. He found himself crushing her to him, inhaling her scent, then kissing her again, tasting her mouth, tasting her.. it was beyond belief. She squirmed a little in his embrace, and he realized dimly that he might be holding her more tightly than he ought. No matter, his intoxicated mind laughed, and he found himself licking at her skin only to taste the powders and salts of a warm human woman. She shoved at him, and in her slight aggression he truly found his own. A thrill surged through him, and with it, the molten gold of his oldest hunger. When he looked up at her, eyes alight with primal lust, it was she who laughed aloud, in utmost delight to find the unmanned noble a man once more, and very intent on proving this.

Time passed. He could feel the sweat on his flushed skin, and the ecstasy of his favourite pastime flooded his body with both wild hunger and languorous satiation.

More time. The way the candlelight caught in her magnificently wicked eyes when she cried out his name, arching beneath him, was beyond belief.

The candles burned low. He'd risen after their last bout, chest heaving, skin sheened with sweat, to ring for water. The taste of cold water into his hot throat was enough almost to drop him to his knees in a swoon. Only a drunken need for more of what he'd found in her ripe body's deepest places held him upright. In more ways than one. The glass emptied, he'd turned, hair rustling and tickling about his neck, to grin at her. She smirked back, and he dove into the bed's rumpled covers once again.

Later still, he had the amusing thought as he rose braced on elbows and knees above her, enjoying the slow motions of sated lovemaking, that she might have been wearied by his hunger. Yet each time he'd climaxed, she'd been as eager as he to return to the thrilling, rippling sensations of his body in hers. It was delicious. Exciting. He spared a thought as his wife writhed sensuously under him that the Eredar Ythika must be sad and lonely somewhere, and he laughed aloud to think on it. Ah well.

The light in the room was more the onrushing day than candles now, as he collapsed over her once more, panting for breath, their hearts hammering in unison. His shoulders were wet, the sheets were drenched by sweat and more. She gently disengaged, and rolled a little sideways, rocking her hips and humming something very softly. He managed to summon the strength to roll over, and pillow his head on one arm. He could taste her coppery blood on his lips. And knew his own chest was marked now with long scratches, as was his back. Her white shoulders were stained with red where he'd bitten hard, savaging her as she'd clawed him in one of their more.. energetic bouts. The sensations of such violent lovemaking had been extraordinary, and he felt nearly sated by their excesses. Nearly. He rolled to his side, and reached for her, only to feel a sudden wave of weakness crash over him. His hand fell limply against the damp sheets, and she turned to regard him with upraised eyebrows delicately arched. His tongue felt thick in his mouth, and his heart was too loud. His mind frantically sought for an answer, and found it far more quickly than he liked. His wife had given him the sheer lives of stolen souls. It was a temporary thing, they both knew. And like all such, it was ebbing, the spellwork fading from him. If only he'd realized how that might feel when he agreed.

His pupils dilated, and he felt his body growing numb. His fingertips tingling and then gone. He couldn't feel them. It was almost exactly the same as how it had felt to die, and he half fancied he could feel the same iron agony in his chest as when the sword had entered him. How ironic that he'd spent the night enjoying the proverbial 'little death' again and again, only to feel the large one once again. He found himself gasping for breath, feeling nothing save furious outrage at this.. this theft once more by fate and the world of the life he so enjoyed. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, and he felt himself sinking into the bed, or some black pit beneath it. Distantly, he heard his wife's calm voice.

"I hope you have a name ready.. I'm afraid I am with child, my love."

With agonizing effort, his eyes rolled sideways to see her unconcerned smirk, and her white hands stroking her belly, which he'd known not ten minutes ago had been flat and taut as his hands roamed over it, his body within. Now, there was the slightest bulge, which pulsed as he looked at it - yet so did the room itself, and the strangeness seemed terribly funny as everything took on a gray hue, his body convulsed again, and all things faded into blackness.