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star-crossed-fates · 24 days ago

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Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 14: They Only Hunger

Synopsis: In a city of steel and stars, you fall in love with a man the world calls a monster. He looks at you like you’ve haunted every life he’s ever lived. Sylus is danger wrapped in silk, secrets stitched into every glance, every touch, every word spoken like a spell. He’s yours before you even realize what you’re remembering.

Because this isn’t the first time.

Dreams unravel you. Memories not your own. A dragon’s death cry. A kiss beneath bloodied skies. A love too eternal to stay buried. As the past bleeds into the present, you begin to piece together the truth. Some memories burn brighter than the stars, others wound deeper than any blade.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different from in-game for story purposes.

Warnings: NSFW, Explicit smut, including various kinks: Praise, degradation talk, first time, CP, DP, anal sex/play, probably some Dragon!Sylus smut, maybe a lot of it. Many, many more that I'm forgetting to list. Consider yourself warned. - Unlikely to be completely canon. - MC is named. Her personality is darker than in the game, far more morally grey. - Switching between MC's memories/dreams/flashbacks and current timeline. - Other love interests will not show up in this. - Some plot, but not super planned out. Basically, this is a "what if the closer they became, the more MC remembers her life with him on Philos.

Rain needles down in silver threads, stitching ghost-light across the skin of the city. Dark windows stare like black sockets, drinking in stars and blinking at nothing. Pavement gleams like oil-slicked obsidian, each footfall a wet slap.

Erratic metaflux scuttles along your spine, pulsing out of time with your body’s rhythm. It writhes like language never meant for flesh.

“Okay, but hear me out,” Nina insists beside you, dodging a puddle. “If the metaflux turns out to be a false alarm, we should at least get coffee out of this. Mission reward. Espresso-grade.”

“Great,” Casey mutters. “We’ll all die caffeinated.”

“I’ll take that over dying cold,” Leyra throws over her shoulder. “Or dying while listening to Casey complain.”

Bastien huffs a sound that might be laughter. You’re about to issue another order when you hear Ethan behind you, his steps adjusting just slightly to match yours.

You glance over. “What.”

His jaw works once before he says, “I wanted to talk to you. About… your boyfriend.”

You raise an eyebrow. “Oh?”

You glance forward, checking on the team’s spread. There are no gaps, and everyone’s moving well. Then you shift your weight and tilt your head toward him.

“Well?”

“I…” He frowns. “I don’t know. I just get a weird feeling around him. Something off. Before you say it, I know that sounds vague.”

“It is vague,” you murmur.

Ethan hesitates. “I think I’ve heard his voice before.”

That slows your steps. “What?”

“That night at the fundraiser, I heard his voice and—” He breaks off, brow furrowing. “It was like déjà vu.”

You’re about to press him—Where? When?—but you don’t get the chance.

The metaflux slams through your senses like a pulse of lightning, warping the space around it in waves of nausea and noise. Your Evol flares up in response, and your skin prickles like someone dumped static down your spine.

You snap to attention. “Positions—now.”

Nina’s already beside you, fists glowing faintly. Leyra and Casey fall back to cover Bastien’s side. Ethan, eyes wide but focused, lifts his sidearm and nods.

The breath before violence arrives is always the loudest.

The first one slithers from the fog like a wrong-shaped dog, hunched and stuttering, its limbs half-formed and lashing against the pavement like wet rope. It doesn’t scream, but the air around it howls, caught in the distortion of its body.

You raise your gun without hesitation and shoot it clean through the shoulder. It doesn’t drop, but it jerks, stutters sideways, and that’s enough for Nina to dart forward and finish the rest with a kinetic burst that snaps its bones like dry wood.

“Eyes up!” You shout, already pivoting.

Six of them now—low-tier, malformed, and twitching. One lunges from a side street, and you duck, roll, and fire twice into its chest. It collapses, twitching, but the burn in your shoulder tells you it nicked you first.

Ethan holds his ground like he’s supposed to, clearing your flank. Leyra goes down hard under a twisted Wanderer, but Bastien shouts, flares a heatwave from his palms, and burns it back enough to drag her free.

Nina crashes in, launching a ripple that hurls two of them into a wall so hard you hear concrete crack. You shoot another in the eye socket. It twitches once, then melts into a slurry of flux-stained sludge.

By the time the last one falls, your ribs ache where you took a blow. Bastien is limping badly. Nina is panting beside you.

You lean on your knees, spitting blood. Rain sheets over your back. “Status?”

“Still here,” Nina gasps. “Mostly.”

“Leyra’s not moving,” Bastien mutters. “I think she’s just out cold.”

“I’m out of suppressants,” Casey growls. “Burned my limiter on that last pull.”

The metaflux spikes again, and you spin. Looming between buildings, a humanoid silhouette crawls forward. Its joints bend wrong, and its skin looks like stitched leather. It moves fast for something that size. Bastien barely ducks in time, and the Wanderer’s hand slams through a brick wall, carving a crater where his head used to be.

“Draw it left!” You shout, syncing with Nina as fast as your Evol will let you. “Do not let it separate us!”

You feel her then, blazing through your nerves, kinetic force thrumming like a loaded spring. You jump, vaulting off a crumbling ledge, spin, and fire.

It barrels through Casey, sending him flying into a wrecked vehicle with a sickening clang.

You grit your teeth. “Hold—!”

“Anira!” Nina calls, charging her next strike. “Now or never!”

Her Evol screams through your body, your own pushing it up, up, until the whole street feels like it’s braced for impact. Nina drives her strike into the Wanderer’s chest with pure kinetic devastation.

It staggers, and you leap with it. Air whips past your ears as you soar, legs kicking free of the earth, sights aligned, your fingers slick on the grip. You fire—once, twice, thrice—and they hit. The neck. The inner shoulder. A strange glowing pocket near its sternum.

It howls and falls like a thundercrack against the concrete.

And that thud—

—it rips you backward.

In the inky suspense between time, falling becomes flight’s forgotten twin. The world swallows your momentum and spits out grief disguised as ground. Breath vanishes as if bartered away, and your teeth meet like flint sparking against fate. The air shouldn’t carry petals on its breath, and yet it does.

Always, the flowers return to the ruins.

You claw your way upright, yet the world refuses to settle. Reality sloshes sideways, and the world buckles, unsure where to place you. You sway, caught between two skies, neither one still.

Each blink is a betrayal. Sight hiccups forward, then back. Seconds snag, unravel, and re-stitch reality in crooked seams. The world slowly redraws itself in feverish strokes of colours that no longer know where they end or what they were meant to hold.

Where the earth still smokes, he lies crumpled in the crater’s heart, like a storm stilled mid-motion. His hair clings to his skin, and blood stencils heartbreak through the cracked terrain like wet calligraphy.

You sprint until the sky tilts, until your knees remember sorrow better than standing. Your legs give out, and you crawl, knees carving memories into the dirt. You reach him with hands not made for holding death, gathering what’s left of him into your arms. He’s still warm, but not in any way that means staying.

His blood does not spill—it sings, low and aching, like a dirge coaxed from bone. It threads down and pools in your palms as if it’s looking for a place to die.

You press your hands to the torn place in his chest like a child trying to mend a cracked sky. Your palms, altar-flat, beg the body to obey, to remember its shape, to forget the part where it broke open, to forget the unmaking already underway.

“Sylus? Sylus, please—”

His lashes twitch. A breath of movement. Eyes open, just enough to catch the scarlet radiance of a vanishing sun. Dim. Drifting. A star burning out behind glass.

“You have to get up,” you protest, your voice barely holding shape. You grab at him, desperate, as if motion could anchor him to this world. “Please—”

He stays folded into the earth. One hand rises, shaking. Not strong enough for anything but this. His fingers curve behind your neck, pulling you close, pressing a breathless kiss to your brow like a memory trying not to vanish.

You cradle him while his dying breath fans your forehead, and his heartbeat stills beneath your palms. In the hollow of after, you find yourself stranded, wondering how to hold absence. How do you keep a soul tethered to a world that no longer wants it? How do you catch a shadow before it vanishes into nothing?

“No. No. No—”

Your sobs unravel like torn ribbons of sound. You clutch him tighter as if anchoring a ghost, your body the last lighthouse in a sea that’s already swallowed him. Time distorts, slips sideways, as if the moment is trying to erase itself before you can scream loud enough to stop it.

Then the universe commits its final cruelty.

The shape of him loses conviction. Particles lift from him like ash caught in no wind, drifting. His skin loses texture. His bones forget their shape. The ridges of his spine that you know like scripture—gone, fading into a soft smear of dust across your stained palms.

“Stop.”

You trace his face like a star map with trembling hands, committing every shadow and curve to the cathedral of your mind. Already the cracks are blooming across his skin, and time—insatiable time—begins to peel him away from you.

“I’ve got you,” you lie, again and again.

You clutch harder. As if love were enough. As if you might will the cosmos into mercy. But he begins to dissolve anyway—first his fingertips, then the hollow of his throat, and the ridges of his cheekbone. You press your face to his before the last of him breaks apart, and for one aching second, you imagine you could follow him.

But the gods are not kind.

The universe has plucked him from your arms, but your body defies it. You hold fast to a warmth already evaporating, a heartbeat already stolen.

“The stars are still out, Sy. You promised you’d stay until they went dark,” you whisper into the hollow where his breath used to live.

You are still kneeling, though the ground beneath you is not earth anymore. It is memory. It is ash. It is all the moments that will never be. You do not rise. You fossilize. Desolation settles in your spine like wet cement, hardening with every breath you don’t want to take.

Time and fate, those elder architects, do not mourn what they dismantle. They bear no covenant with compassion, no ledger of remembrance. They do not pause to witness the wreckage, do not linger in the stillness they create.

You are left to mourn in a dialect the constellations do not understand, your heartbreak too human for the heavens to echo.

Because time does not stop. Fate does not break.

They only hunger.

You come back to yourself in the wreckage of sound, but not all at once. Your mind drags behind your body like a half-buried anchor. The Wanderer is staggered, and the depression where it landed still hemorrhages steam.

You’re on your knees, but you don’t remember falling. Your hands stay curled, icebound in the pose of trust, as if the fall never happened. His warmth lingers, sewn into your fingers, into your wrists, into the hollows of your arms.

Phantom weight. Phantom breath.

Somewhere, someone is shouting your name, but the voice is muffled. The world has stopped screaming, but something inside you still howls, caught in sorrow too deep to shed.

You still carry the sensation of his unmaking, how he sifted away between your fingers, too old for death, too sacred for survival. Shaking, you kneel, caught between one world where he died in your arms and this one, where you are still trying to remember how to stand.

Ethan’s hand is a flare in the dark; a breath, a plea, a summons. “Anira! Come back.”

You blink, and the rain scripts lines down your cheeks. Ethan is crouched beside you, bleeding from a split along his temple. He nods toward the crater.

The Wanderer is moving again. Its limbs crackle with fractured light, one arm dragging, molten dark leaking from the place your bullets found home.

Your body heaves upward as if rejecting its weight. Pain flares up your nerves in violet arcs, but your hands remember the ritual—up, brace, reload.

The team is scattered. Casey is limping. Bastien’s still throwing pulses of flame, but he’s flagging, one arm clutched to his side. Leyra still appears to be out cold. Nina is getting back on her feet.

You level your gun.

The Wanderer’s eyes find yours.

There’s no pause. No prayer. Only movement.

You run.

The ground slips under your boots, your balance off by a hair. The Wanderer lurches, maw fracturing wider with that awful rattling wail. A wrongness that hums across your teeth.

Nina draws its attention, flinging force in bursts. Her movements are precise, but slowing. You rise and zigzag, counting steps—five to the left flank, three for elevation, now. You vault a slab of broken scaffolding and take the high ground, breathing with the rhythm of the gun.

Aim. Fire. Shift. Fire again.

Bastien blasts its leg from below. Ethan lobs a concussive charge, and you feel the shockwave in your bones. Together, you stagger it.

Nina throws everything she has left into a kinetic burst and slams into its centre mass. It lurches back, off-balance.

The rain slashes sideways across your vision as you leap and soar, twisting midair, lining up the shot. You fire three rounds in tight succession—two to the softened core, one through a splintering joint behind its shoulder.

It crashes down with a sickening thud, and for a heartbeat, everything stills.

You hit the ground, roll, and land on your knees. Your fingers scrape gravel. Breath rasps in and out like rust through a sieve. Around you, no one speaks. The silence is fractured—panting, groaning, the hiss of dying behind you. You don’t turn yet. You’re watching your teammates.

Casey is upright, leaning on one knee. Bastien is limping toward Ethan. Nina sinks to the ground, chest heaving. You stumble to where Leyra is tucked away and check her pulse, relieved when you feel it flutter against your fingertips.

The edges of the moment ripple, not to memory’s tide, but to the rawness of now catching in your throat.

The aftermath.

You sit on a broken curb, elbows braced to your knees, head bowed low. The barrel of your weapon rests against your thigh, still warm. It should be enough to tether you.

It isn’t.

The wind brings with it a charred, metallic tang. You gag before the nausea catches you, eyes stinging. You don’t know if it’s the wounds, or the grief, or the way your breath keeps missing rhythm with your heartbeat.

You close your eyes, and it’s still there.

Sylus's body broken in your arms, his lips against your forehead. Memory doesn’t grip. It inhabits, blooming behind your sternum like roots fed on agony, twisting where your lungs once lived.

You watched him come undone in your hands—not broken, not lost, but unmade into stardust and silence.

Your fingers flex around nothing now, but your hands bear the bruises of remembrance. They remember the collapse, the impossible tension of trying to keep him from slipping into myth. They remember the tremor of no.

The warped, broken note your heart struck when his went still hums in your chest. Each beat a cracked whisper of his name, each silence a wound reopening.

Around you, voices murmur. Someone calls your name. Maybe Nina. Maybe not. You can’t lift your head yet.

The cosmos didn’t just steal him. They made you watch.

You press a hand to your chest like you can silence the ache, but it rattles loose again, scraping up your throat like a buried scream trying to crawl to the surface.

You could be born in a thousand skins, and still his absence would echo. The wound walks with you in each one, dressed in different shadows.

“I wasn’t ready,” you whisper, barely audible.

Not to remember.

Not to carry this. Not to lose him again.

Linkon folds in smeared greys and empty intersections, each turn sharper than it should be. You drive like the devil’s behind you. Or maybe inside you. Hard to tell tonight. You white-knuckle the wheel, gripping it not to steer, but to keep from being pulled into the dark between moments.

You cut toward the N109 Zone like a bullet looking for something solid to shatter against. The barrier flashes red, then gives up. Even the security AI doesn’t try to stop you tonight. The buildings get taller. Stranger. More shadows. Less people. You park like a criminal—diagonal, crooked, too close to the curb. The engine ticks as it cools.

You exhale, finally step out, and run.

The lobby slips by in a blur of polished floors and startled security bots. The elevator doors glide closed, and the silence cages you.

You pace.

Then stop.

Pace again, hands twitching at your sides, then gripping the railing, then running through your hair, then back to pacing. The doors haven’t even finished opening before you shove through the gap and nearly barrel into Kieran and Luke, both of whom were clearly not expecting a soggy tempest to come sprinting out of the lift.

Luke makes a sound between a yelp and a swear, dropping whatever snack he was holding. Kieran’s hand twitches toward the knife at his hip before recognition kicks in.

“Shit—Anira?” Luke blurts. “What the hell happened to you? You bleeding?”

“Yup!” you toss over your shoulder.

Luke scoffs. “That’s not…reassuring?”

“Sylus,” you snap, spinning on your heel. “Where is he?”

Kieran frowns. “Workshop.”

You take the stairs two at a time. Cold metal bites into your soles. Sharp turns, narrow landings. You slip once—catch yourself on the railing with a jolt that stings up your arm. You don’t slow down. Don’t breathe. Don’t let yourself think. The hallway down to the workshop stretches long and dim, lit by those soft gold strips Sylus likes—warm light, like dusk in a world that no longer remembers sun.

It should feel safe.

It doesn’t.

Your palm slams the access panel. The door hisses open, widening just enough for you to wedge yourself through.

“This is a nice surprise, kitten,” he drones with his back turned to you.

The room smells of smoke and solder. His hands are buried in the guts of a half-assembled mech.

“Sylus.” Your voice cracks over his name, frayed and soft and wrecked.

He turns, and his eyes snap to yours, then down. Soaking wet. Bleeding. Shivering. The way your shoulder slants like you’re hiding an injury. The flecks of ash still caught in your lashes.

“Anira—”

You fold into him mid-syllable, a collision of memory and flesh, holding him as if your bones remember the hour he turned to ash. He jolts under you for a breath. Then his arms close around you with the surety of someone who’s caught this fall before. His hand comes up instinctively, cradling the back of your head, fingers tangling in your rain-slicked hair. His other arm curls around your waist, firm and grounding.

Your cheek presses against his throat, skin cold to heat, and he feels how chilled you are. How hard you’re shaking.

“The stars were still out, Sy,” you murmur into the hollow of his throat, the words bruised and unfinished, as though some part of you is still watching him die.

His breath catches, and he stills for a heartbeat. Then his grip tightens, hand slipping to your back, pressing you in closer like you’ll dissolve if there’s space between you.

“I know,” he whispers, words catching in the gravel of his throat like regret too petrified to soften. “I’m sorry.”

You sag in his arms, all the fight bleeding out of you. Knees give just a little, but you don’t fall. One of his hands is already under your thigh, supporting you before you can hit the floor.

In the stillness that follows, you know he hears it too—the ache of a vow too old for language, a silence shaped like endings, and the breath caught between incarnations.

But beneath it, the certainty: not even oblivion could unweave the thread strung between your souls.

You close your eyes against the weight of it.

And in the dark behind your lids, you feel the stars watching.

Not with wonder.

But with grief.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming, @morrigan87, @babyx91

#love and deepspace sylus #l&ds sylus #dragon sylus #lads sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus #sylus smut #sylus x mc #lnds sylus #love and deepspace #sylus x oc #sylus x you #sylus qin

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star-crossed-fates · 1 month ago

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Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 13: Joy Is a Rehearsal for Ruin

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different from in-game for story purposes.

It feels like slipping into someone else’s heartbeat—familiar in the way the first drops of rain feel on skin. You don’t enter the vision. You are unwritten by it, slipped into her shape.

She moves your mouth and borrows your breath. You step into her footsteps as if the ground demands it, each motion choreographed, watching from within the cage of bone and blood.

There’s a cruelty to the intimacy of it all. How even her pain fits you. How you feel the weight of a promise made, the ache of a goodbye you’ve yet to live.

The past doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It only offers her heartbeat and requests you wear it like your own. Between one blink and the next, you are nothing but her memory trying to recall the taste of being.

The heavens surge not down but skyward, as though gravity has knelt to wonder. Clouds drag their bellies along the ceiling of the world, like time rehearsing itself backwards.

You’re cradled in a silhouette with wings too vast to measure. His shape stretches and collapses like water in a god’s cupped hand.

One second, he’s drawn in smoke-thin graphite lines trembling at the edge of vanishing. Then, he’s a spill of light without centre or edge, slipping through the hour before form.

Always almost, never whole.

“Have you ever dropped someone from this height?” You shout, voice swept sideways by the wind.

“Yes."

You glance below. The world is a scroll unwinding, mountains turned to smears of ink. “Remind me not to become dead weight.”

A low sound rumbles from his chest. It’s not quite a laugh, more like distilled bemusement.

“If you do,” he muses, his tone calm in the way graveyards are, “I’ll aim for the rocks.”

You giggle in spite of yourself. “Do all your death threats come with this view?”

He hums like he’s considering it. “Only for the ones I like.”

You think that might be his version of flirting. Isn’t it strange how your heart prefers to trust the wolf that bares its teeth than the one that smiles? Maybe that’s the tragedy: you learned to find comfort in claws because holy hands always came holding chains.

He banks downward without warning, and the clouds unravel like paper, swirling around you as you plummet through a sky made of silver. You shriek in surprise, gripping tighter. His laughter thrums through his body, felt more than heard. You’re not sure he’s used to joy, but it fits him well.

Talons skim the surface of the rose-gold sand, stirring it into soft whorls that shimmer like powdered dusk. The shoreline drinks his weight like it was always meant to hold him.

When he sets you down, your feet sink into the warm blush of the earth—sand kissed in hues of peach blossom and burnished gold, like the beach has been forever caught in the moment the sun first fell in love with the world.

A pale seam cradles the tide, neither land nor sea but something that forgets how to choose. The ocean stretches infinitely, each wave stitched from turquoise sighs and sapphire silence.

Your shoes scatter behind you. The sand is cool as moonlight, delicate as powdered pearl. The first touch of the tide arrests you with a jolt of cold clarity. Your feet vanish beneath the skin of the sea that is so clear it might be radiance made liquid—a transparency that feels impossible.

Water made of sky-filtered silk caresses your calves, brushing warmth from your skin until you forget the sun ever touched you.

“This is incredible, Sy,” you chime, turning to look at him.

His outline still shimmers faintly, as if the world can’t quite decide what shape to keep him in. The light begins to bend around him differently, like the universe is recalibrating its curve.

There’s a quiet inevitability to it, like watching a constellation fall into alignment.

Like the tide deciding, at last, to return, he comes into focus. Sylus sharpens into something caught between divinity and wilderness—silver hair tousled by the wind’s temper and eyes the colour of forbidden fire that remembers the first spark of creation.

The scales wind along his limbs like a curse made beautiful, shards of dark glass sewn into skin, catching the sun as if they remember the dark too well to let it go.

He stands at the shore’s edge, existing like a myth told backwards—sacred, yet disguised as a sin. It makes you question what beauty ever meant.

You trot toward him, soaked to the knees, and grab his clawed hand without thinking. “Come on, you have to feel this!”

He doesn’t move. The sudden resistance nearly pulls you off balance, a jolt that halts you mid-laugh.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a bit of seawater?” You tease, brow arched.

“I cannot swim.”

You blink. “You’re over a thousand years old, and you don’t know how to swim?”

“Seventeen hundred and eight,” he corrects flatly.

You extend your hands, not demanding, just an open invitation. “May I? I won’t let anything happen to you,” you assure. “If you want to try.”

“I am not made for floating,” he grumbles, the edge in his voice dulled by hesitation.

“You’re not made for hiding, either.”

After a moment, his heavy hands settle into yours, and you take a step backward, keeping your pace leisurely.

When the tide tastes him for the first time, he doesn’t recoil, but tension spiders through him. His wings press closer, claws twitching in your palm, and his tail gives a single lash behind him, the way someone swallows a flinch.

Without a thought, you begin to sing the way moonlight touches water: without weight, without warning, and only where it’s welcome. The song doesn’t ask him to be calm. It simply waits for him to breathe.

He takes a few more steps as if drawn toward you. When the waves slosh against his knees, he halts again.

“This is sufficient."

“All right,” you whisper.

You stand together where the sea's endless breath cradles you. The sky wears its softness in bruised colours, the skyline still blushing with the fading amber burn of the day.

You reach up, fingers sweeping some damp strands that cling to his forehead. Each movement is deliberate, as though you’re trying to map the path of his stillness, searching for the space between the words neither of you speaks.

He leans into your touch, slow and uncertain, like he doesn’t yet know how to want gently but wants it all the same.

“I would not do this for anyone else,” he states, raw as gravel smoothed by waves.

You smile, soft and steady, as if the sea itself is holding the moment still. “I know.”

There is no edge to fall from, only a moment that opens and swallows. The pool’s water rocks you gently out of it, as if even the past knew when to let go. When your eyes open, the sky is flushed dusk, a bleeding palette of rose and slate, smeared wide above Sylus’s ranch.

You blink, and chronology buckles, unsure in what direction it’s meant to run. How long have you been drifting in the pool? The sky overhead could be a minute old or a hundred years asleep.

Sylus lingers at the lip of the water like a shadow that’s forgotten its body, head cocked slightly, evaluating you the way one might study a star fallen too close, curious if it’s still burning or just pretending to be.

The ends of his hair shimmer with daylight’s last breath, as if the sun, on its descent, reached out to touch him and forgot to let go. He smiles, but it’s not the dangerous one, not the public one, but the rare, quiet one. The one he doesn’t know he’s wearing.

You’ve never trusted the idea that the universe keeps a ledger. There is no unseen loom, no celestial cartographer. The notion of destinies feels like a tale told to children who fear the dark, not a truth meant for your hands. You’ve built your life around what holds its shape under scrutiny—pulse, gravity, the language of equations.

But no theorem can prepare you for the ache that unfurls when he smiles with the calm of someone waiting for you to catch up to a moment he’s already lived.

If this is madness, let it be your gospel. You’ll gladly drink it down, so long as it sounds like your name in his mouth.

You used to think you were simply made wrong—too sharp, too soft, too much, too little. A celestial misfire. Then his presence grazed against yours, and all the gaps you’d learned to live around sang with sudden wholeness.

Not as if he completed you, but as if you’d been built with his gravity in mind. Your edges stop fighting themselves when he’s near. As though you are not a paradox to be solved, but a myth that only he was ever meant to read.

“What’s with the existential float?” He asks, voice skimming the surface of you, casual as a ripple.

You drift toward him with the idle ease of someone who knows they’re being watched. Arms cut through the pool in slow arcs. He’s seated at the edge, one knee drawn up, the other foot slicing lazy circles into the water. Evening clings to him in pieces—light dusting his shoulders, shadow curling beneath his ribs.

“Reflecting on your fashion crimes, mostly. Who wears all black to a pool?”

He gives an exaggerated shrug. “Mourning the death of subtlety. You killed it the moment you cannonballed into my peace.”

“Please. I glide.”

“Like a duck with taxes due.”

You laugh, tipping your head back. “Is this your idea of flirting? Because I’m not sure it’s working.”

He leans forward, hand braced casually beside his knee. “And yet you’re still swimming toward me.”

“That’s because I’m hoping to drown you.”

“I’d let you,” he says, soft and certain. “But only if you stayed close enough to finish the job.”

Your pulse stumbles. You mask it with a splash. “Try not to sound so romantic about it.”

“Who said anything about romance? This is a perfectly reasonable murder fantasy.”

A small, crooked smile quirks his lips, the one that always feels like it’s about to tip into trouble.

You rest your forearms on the ledge beside him, chin tilted slightly upward. “Did you ever learn how to swim?”

He raises an eyebrow. “What makes you think I didn’t?”

“You used to flinch when the waves touched your knees.”

His smirk falters, just barely. “Ah. Remembered that, did you?”

You nod slowly, unable to look away from the place where warmth halos him. For a breath, light contorts strangely, and you see the faint glint of a red gem nestled into his chest, caught in a fringe space between oblivion and recollection.

“I remember teaching you. You were… wary, but you trusted me.”

His eyes flick to yours. “Sounds like a foolish dragon.”

You smile, the ache blooming in your chest. “Maybe. Or maybe he just didn’t have anyone else he wanted to learn for.”

Sylus rises, unfolding with deliberate ease. “Let’s put the question to rest then.”

His form unspools, mist curling like smoke from his skin, unmaking him into wind and feathers. He reforms mid-air and dives with impossible grace, slicing the water clean—no splash, no sound, just the quicksilver shimmer of him cutting through the deep.

He surfaces beside you, slick and grinning. That infuriating, roguish smirk tugging at his mouth like it’s never left him, not in this life or the last.

You roll your eyes, but your smile betrays you. “Show-off.”

He swims a lazy circle around you. “You expected less?”

“No,” you admit. “I expected exactly this.”

He hums low in his throat, pleased, and before you can prepare for it, his arms sweep beneath your legs and back in a sudden, fluid motion. You gasp, caught mid-laugh as the world tips, sky spinning into water, water spinning into him.

“Sylus—!”

“You said I trusted you once,” he murmurs, voice velvet-drenched and rich.

You open your mouth to reply, but your voice doesn’t make it past your lips. He kisses you like he’s failed you in a hundred lives, lips tracing yours like they’re reading a promise that was never kept. There’s a fracture beneath the gentleness, a hush that tastes like an apology.

When he pulls back, his forehead lingers against yours, breath warm, eyes half-lidded.

“I do trust you,” he confirms no louder than a sigh, as if the truth could bruise the air. “Not just then. Now. Here.”

If you could freeze this moment in amber, you would trap this fleeting illusion of safety and the vow of eternity folded between his breath and yours. Here, where he’s still just Sylus, and you’re still just a woman in a pool with stars winking overhead and the ending hasn’t yet arrived.

This must be what peace feels like, and you remember what always follows peace.

Time, like the tide, does not care for your aching. Joy doesn’t come clean anymore. It arrives with a pulse of dread, a sweetness laced with the flavour of ending, where every beautiful moment feels borrowed, and you’re terrified of the debt coming due.

The worst part isn’t knowing the fall is coming. It’s knowing you will keep falling anyway. Hoping, somehow, that rock bottom will be kind when you finally hit it.

Stories like yours are never allowed to end gently.

You’re curled sideways on the couch, one leg hooked over the backrest, a book open but barely turning pages. Firelight drips down the walls in fractured amber, as if time is burning slow.

Across from you, Sylus paces like a storm bottled into a man, his phone pinned between shoulder and ear.

“I don’t give a fuck who they think they’re working for,” he barks with the mercilessness of a guillotine mid-fall. “You fix it now, or I send Kieran. You know what that means.”

You try not to listen, but it’s impossible not to track the sharp shift of his body, the kind of tension that only builds in someone used to being obeyed. Glancing toward the dark pane of glass, you trace the distant peaks smudging the skyline. Unbidden, a flicker of memory cuts through.

A city of shadow-forged spires stitched from volcanic glass, each one a needle threading heaven.

Tarus.

You do not remember learning the name, but it lives in your mouth like a ghost.

Sylus’s voice cuts back in. “I don’t care if their guy got picked off by wanderers. That’s your fuck-up, not mine. If you can’t handle cleanup, I’ll have Luke take your whole operation apart and repurpose the bones.”

Tarus. Philos. You cradle the names in thought, turn them gently, searching for the groove they once fit. But the architecture of your past is missing its spine, and nothing slots where it should. Your mouth opens on instinct and then clamps shut again as the dots connect in a line so sharp it stings.

Philos isn’t Earth.

You blink. Then blink again. Your lips twitch, your stomach folds in on itself like origami, and your entire chest caves in around a laugh that sounds like a dying kettle.

“I swear, if you don’t get it done—” Sylus turns mid-pace, mid-threat, the expression on his face somewhere between suspicion and overt concern. “I have to call you back.” He hangs up without hesitation. “What is so funny?”

You curl over your knees, arms wrapped tight around yourself. “Oh my god.”

“Did the book kill someone?”

“Tarus? The strange constellations, the water, the gravity. I should have noticed. How did I not notice?”

You’re wheezing into the cushion like a deflating balloon while he stares at you, like a man who’s just realized he may have broken you permanently.

“Sylus.”

“Yes?”

“You’re not from Earth.”

Sylus blinks once. “Correct.”

There is a sacred silence. That is, until you detonate like a dam under divine pressure, bursting into laughter. You crumple like a heretic at the altar of unholy hilarity, snorting through your fingers while your spine attempts escape.

“You said that so casually,” you choke out between breaths. “‘No.’ Like you’re not about to break the fundamental laws of biology. You’re an alien.”

Sylus leans his chin into one hand, watching you as though you’re a particularly strange bird. “This feels personal,” he murmurs.

“I’ve slept with an extraterrestrial mob boss. Do you understand how bad that sounds in a police report?” You throw your hands in the air for emphasis.

He gives a faint smile. “You think there’ll be a police report?”

You freeze, moon-eyed, hand to your chest in mock horror. “Oh, my stars. You’re right. They’d never believe me.”

He leans back, lazy and smug. “You’re going to be like this all night, aren’t you?”

You fling yourself across the cushions toward him, choking on air. “You’re a cosmic war criminal with a six-pack.”

Sylus makes a noise like a laugh but deeply offended. “Kitten.”

“I have committed interstellar sex crimes. Do you understand?”

“You’re being dramatic.”

You bury your face in the pillow, scream-laugh into it, then come up for air like a possessed sea otter. “If we get caught, I’ll be arrested for xeno-loving degenerate crimes, and you’ll be classified as a biohazard with excellent bone structure.”

He covers his face with one hand and sighs. “Please stop talking.”

You crawl into his lap, still cackling, and cup his cheeks reverently. “I have tasted the forbidden space meat. This is going in my memoir.”

A soft, incredulous sound escapes him, one part protest, two parts disbelief. Another follows. Less restrained.

And then, he cracks.

Laughter spills from him like a fault line giving way, sharp and full-bodied. It shakes through his chest, rattling loose whatever impossible restraint he’s always wrapped around himself like armour. He leans back, head tipped, teeth bared in something wild and unguarded.

It’s beautiful.

It’s yours.

Even if he’s laughing at you, you’ll take it like a benediction. Like a crown. Like a goddamn medal of honour.

You freeze, then gasp. “Holy shit. I did it. You’re laughing.”

He tries to glare at you. Fails. “This is what psychological warfare feels like.”

“I broke you,” you beam, kissing the corner of his mouth. “I broke the big scary crime dragon.”

He drags you closer by the hips, slumps his forehead to your shoulder, and groans like a man whose crimes have finally caught up to him in the form of you.

“So.” You clear your throat and wiggle your eyebrows. “Now that we’ve confirmed you’re a space lizard—”

He closes his eyes, resigned. “We haven’t.”

“—I have a few follow-up questions.”

He lifts a hand. “No.”

“Yes.”

“I need to know. Could you—can you—fly during sex?”

His eyes snap open. “What—”

You whisper, deadly serious, “Do you lift bitches into the upper atmosphere and fuck them among the stars, Sylus?”

A shadow sparks behind his eyes. Not rage.

Worse.

Ego, freshly fed and dangerously amused.

You slap his chest, scandalized and delighted. “YOU’VE DONE IT! YOU’VE ACTUALLY DONE IT.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re not denying it.”

Sylus looks haunted, like a man run over by your sense of humour and left twitching in the dust.

Naturally, you decide to ruin him further.

“Are you blushing?! Oh my god, is your face turning red? This is it. This is my legacy.”

He emits the noise of spiritual defeat and drapes a blanket over your face in a loving act of vindictive suffocation. “Isn’t it your bedtime?”

You peel the blanket off your head like a dramatic unveiling, hair static-stuck and eyes wild with victory. “Follow-up: in dragon form—did you have a knot?”

He chokes on air. His jaw unhinges slightly, then remembers it’s not a hinge at all. His hand flinches with the tragic grace of a man who wants to toss you through the window, but with tenderness, of course.

A devotional launch.

“This is important! It’s relevant to my interests!”

Sylus sits upright like his soul is trying to escape through his eye sockets. “I am not engaging in this conversation.”

“Classic knot-haver behaviour.”

“I will drop you into low orbit.”

“While knotted?” You gasp as if the words themselves are a spell that has summoned your truest joy.

You wriggle free from his grasp and bolt around the couch. You’re going to die. You’re going to die stupid and happy, choked to death by your alien-dragon-boyfriend while screaming, ‘do your balls retract when you transform?!’

Your feet slap against the hardwood like a feral child high on spite and cosmic knowledge. Behind you, Sylus growls with a rumble that promises unspeakable violence and, probably, cuddling after.

“You’re not denying it!” You crow over your shoulder, dodging the kitchen island with the agility of a cat on caffeine. “The people deserve answers! Is it scaly all the way down? Or do you have, like, a smooth undercarriage? For…aerodynamics?”

A calculated pause. “Smooth,” Sylus calls out, voice mild. “Less drag when I’m fucking a little human who asks far too many questions.”

Your knees buckle mid-run as laughter punches the air out of your lungs. “You’re deflecting!”

“I’m threatening.”

He’s on your heels now, but you’re smaller, nimbler, and currently motivated by the overwhelming need to die laughing.

You ascend from the armrest like it’s a launchpad, gravitational laws irrelevant, couch physics be damned. In the air, you spiral with the elegance of a possessed towel, a blur of limbs and glee. Your landing is slightly less graceful—your elbow clips the table—but you scramble upright before he can grab you.

Sylus is breathing through his nose. The kind of breathing that happens before murder or a marriage proposal. “You are a menace.”

You spin and shout, “You like it!”

“I like silence.”

“Do you have a prostate?”

He fakes left. You dart right. “I swear on the stars—”

“You came from the stars, you beautiful, knot-hiding bastard!”

He dives. You duck. He nearly catches your ankle, but you twist away again, barefoot and breathless with laughter, half crying at this point.

“You’re going to kill me,” you gasp, bracing against the wall. “Death by dragon dick discourse—what a way to go.”

Sylus stalks toward you slowly now, eyes narrowed. “You’re done.”

He lunges. You shriek. You’re airborne a second later—caught. He lifts you off the ground like you weigh nothing, spinning you around with alarming force and slamming you down onto the couch in a heap of tangled limbs and gasping laughter.

You’re crying now, whole body shaking, helpless in the cradle of his arms as he tries—and fails—not to smirk.

“You know,” he intones huskily, “there’s a very short window between you saying these things and me shutting you up.”

You snort. “With your alien dick?”

His mouth twitches. “Oh, I am going to ruin you.”

His weight settles around you, both of you still catching the tail-end of breathless chaos. One of his hands slips around your waist, lazy now, like the fight’s gone out of him.

You shift to look up at him. “You ever do this before?”

“Let someone outrun me?”

You smile, small but real. “No. This.”

His eyes flick down to where your fingers are absently drawing lazy shapes on his chest, tracing the edge of his collarbone. The mood has changed again, quieter now, but not sombre.

“Not in this lifetime,” he admits.

You blink, but don’t press. You’re not sure you want to pull on that thread yet. Still, something in your chest opens and stretches, like it remembers being full once and forgot what that felt like until this very second.

Your fingers wander, drawing idle shapes on his skin, the way you’d trace constellations you couldn’t name. He watches you do it, unmoving.

“Feels like cheating,” you murmur, not looking up. “To be this happy.”

His answer isn’t words—it’s the slow, warm press of his mouth to your forehead. It’s such a stupidly gentle thing, considering who he is.

Maybe it’s the quiet tenderness woven through the echoes of your laughter that lands with the sharpest weight—the sudden pulse of truth that this isn’t a fragment of a fevered dream. That somehow, against the shatter of worlds and the ruin of endless wars, you are granted this fragile breath of now.

You shift enough to press your cheek to his chest, listening for the slow, steady rhythm of a heart that shouldn’t beat in this world but does.

Tomorrow can break your heart.

Tonight, it just beats.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming, @morrigan87, @babyx91 Hi kittens and/or sweeties! I hope you're all still enjoying. This chapter I meant to get into the angst, but then had a change of heart because I really, really needed them to have a chapter where they are just mostly at peace with each other. So, this chapter is very self-indulgent, but I hope it's still good!

As always, your comments and support are so treasured, and rereading them has been getting me through some rough times. ❤️💖

PS ‼️: OH! I'm also wondering how much of this story you want to see. Would you like to get a little into their life as a couple before we return to the plot and completely drop the next bomb on their head? Would you prefer I keep it condensed to mostly chapters that are concise and have purposes? Because I can think up about a million scenario that these two could get into that would have zero relevance to the plot, but I also don't want to drag it out and bore everything.

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #love and deepspace #sylus x oc #sylus x you

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 12: We Begin in the After

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different from in-game for story purposes.

You drift up from the dark, guided not by light but by the long, sorrowed throat of an organ, its song a wound stitched with sound. It glances off your senses at first. Then it exhales through walls, seeps into the crevices where silence has gathered dust, and touches the ache you buried so deep it forgot its own name.

Barefoot, you tread the corridor. The hall stretches out like a dream you’ve walked before, and shadows twitch like memories just out of reach. The organ keens like an ancient being giving up its last name, its voice a tremor beneath the skin of the world—both cradle and requiem. You reach the archway and stop, pressing your back to the wall just beside it.

You know that song. You sang it for him on quiet nights when even a dragon needed something to hold. A lullaby for a god that refused to sleep.

He taught himself to play it?

The melody you once offered him now returns to you. His hands coax your history into sound. Each note falls like a footprint pressed into the spine of time, an ancient rhythm of love surviving death and calling you home. You are weeping not from sorrow, but from the unbearable grace of being remembered.

You peek around the edge of the archway.

Sylus sits at the organ, forged in the hush of dusk and the gleam of silvered breath, his bare back a sculpture of twilight. You watch his hands move, steady and deliberate, coaxing life from the keys like a necromancer from bone.

You’ve never seen him play. You had thought the organs were for show, relics for the aesthetic. But now, in the hush between chords, you understand: there’s one in every home because he has always been searching for a place where the song sounds right.

He plays beautifully. Hauntingly. And it tugs at the frayed threads of your heart with fingers that know how it was stitched together.

It comes not as speech but as a divine utterance shaped by love too ancient for words. “Stayrus.”

He falters. The song fractures with a single discordant note spiralling into silence. His body freezes, moonlight catching on the rise and fall of his chest. When he looks at you, his red eyes shimmer like rubies submerged in tears. They hold that strange, bright sorrow of someone who has waited lifetimes to be remembered.

His eyes search you as though you are both a dream and a death. He’s reading you, parsing the impossible, looking for signs: Does she know? How much? How deep?

You cross the floor solemnly, the hem of his shirt swaying against your thighs.

Without a whisper, you sink into him, your form curving to his like a river finding its course in the dark. Words are unnecessary, for your skin understands the contours of his as if they were always meant to align, and your soul has long known the language of time—stretching, bending, folding toward him.

Your fingers fall into place, as though the song lives in your bones, each note flowing from you like this body has known it all along. It’s as if the music is a river, and you, though new to this skin, are merely a part of its current, carried forward.

The keys whisper beneath your touch, each chord unfolding like a secret you once knew, now remembered with perfect clarity.

Sylus’s hands tremble against your waist, his breath shallow as he leans forward, resting his chin on your shoulder to watch.

The notes spill, each one like a brushstroke, painting the past in echoes. The Requiem drifts away, its last note rising like a phoenix, poised to burn bright before vanishing into nothingness. It resonates through the stillness, but you withhold the final verse— the one that means goodbye.

You won’t. You can’t.

You lean into him, as though your very essence could seep through the veil of flesh and blood, reaching the heartbeat of his soul. His arms envelop you, a gesture of quiet urgency, as though the universe might rip you through his fingers once again. His forehead rests against your back, and you feel him tremble with a shiver as ancient as time itself, a release long overdue.

“You kept the name,” you whisper.

His lips press a kiss to the slope of your spine, right between your shoulder blades.

“How could I not? You still stumble over the name I was born with. But Sylus… that’s the name you stitched into me when you loved me the first time.”

What escapes you isn’t quite a sound—more the memory of breath exhaled in another life. He says nothing, but you feel his mouth curve against your spine, like the moon tugging the tides inside you.

A smile steeped in centuries.

It’s the closest he’s come to naming that he is the revenant from your dreams.

The vow that outlived gods.

The soul who kept your name wrapped in ash until the wind finally brought you back.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” It leaves your mouth like a bruise blooming in air. Not sharp, nor cruel, but full of the heartbreak.

He doesn’t flinch. He yields the way old stone yields to wind, slowly, imperceptibly, yet forever altered by the press of time and touch. There is no battle in him now, only stillness spun from surrender.

“What would you have had me say?” His voice drips like candle wax—measured, molten, aching with withheld truth. “You were frightened of me. Or disgusted. Likely both, when we met.”

It isn’t a dagger, and he doesn’t twist it. You hear the sorrow he doesn’t name, tucked behind the calm of his voice, folded in the pauses like dust in old pages.

Still, it strikes the centre of you—like a bell struck in your marrow, the sound of it rippling outward until even your fingertips hum with it.

“You didn’t know…” You swallow thickly. “You didn’t know I didn’t remember.”

“No.” One word. All breath. All grief. “I didn’t.”

And oh—

What a curse it must’ve been. To reach across lifetimes and search your eyes, to seek a reflection that should have been home, only to be met with recoil. With doubt. With a gun in your trembling hands.

Your lungs stutter. Your body forgets how to hold itself up. You mistook his grief for coldness and silence for cruelty when he was only grieving what was lost.

You.

The cereal box gives one last pathetic wheeze as you upend it, neon rubble tumbling out in a sugar-dusted landslide that hits the mixing bowl like a clown car crashing in slow motion.

You’re hunched over it, wearing the same oversized hoodie you “borrowed” from Sylus with the hood up. You’ve entered a new era.

One where your boyfriend was—is?—a dragon.

Crunching down on a violent mouthful of sugar, you stare at the television. An aggressively spray-tanned woman on the screen is screaming at her housemates for using her bronzer during the “Blindfolded Blowout and Betrayal” challenge.

You nod solemnly, shovelling another spoonful in. “That’s fair, Brittany. But did your boyfriend just casually confirm he’s the fucking dragon who’s been raiding your REM cycles for months? No? Then shut the hell up and contour in silence.”

Did past me have shinier hair? Whiter teeth? The voice of a siren and the ass of a war goddess? Did she ride into battle on Sylus’s back with flaming swords and a matching couple’s outfit, making out mid-air while doves exploded behind them?

You jab a finger at the TV, where a contestant is mid-meltdown over someone using her towel. “At least your drama involves towels, Kayla! I’m in a cosmic lovers’ quarrel with ghost-me and an immortal thirst trap!”

Did he love her more? Was she better at sex? Did she whisper sweet nothings in fifty-seven ancient languages? Did she moan in prophecy? God, I hate her… Me? Bitch probably glowed in the dark.

You shovel a fistful of cereal into your mouth. Your blood is 83% sugar now. Your bones are crystallizing. You might be evolving.

A contestant on the TV howls, “I just don’t know who I am anymore!”

“Same, Sandra. SAME.”

You roll off the couch and land on the rug with a dramatic flop. Limbs akimbo. You lie there for ten minutes thinking about the nature of souls, orgasms, and whether your past self used dragon dick as a handlebar.

You’re not sure if it’s the cereal talking or the crushing weight of metaphysical revelation, but you decide the only logical next step is to go outside and touch grass.

The afternoon sun smacks you in the face like nature’s personal slap when you throw the double doors open. You flip it off. Nature’s been complicit in your unravelling.

You spot the horses out by the fence line, grazing like innocent bystanders. One of them lifts its head. Judgingly. Probably Pancake. You’ve met once, and she already doesn’t like you.

You squint. “What? You’ve never seen a girl in a crisis before?”

Pancake snorts. You stick your tongue out and decide this is the perfect time to conquer your fear of being kicked in the sternum.

You swing one leg over the fence, mostly gracefully, and land in the field with a triumphant, “Ha!”

The horse stares unimpressed with your athleticism.

“You and me, Pancake,” you declare, pointing dramatically. “We’re gonna work this shit out. You’re going to let me ride you consensually, no kicking, and I’m going to pretend I’m a well-adjusted person who didn’t just find out I might’ve astral boned the same man in multiple lives. Deal?”

You take a confident step forward. Pancake bolts, tossing her head like she’s egging you on.

“Hey! Get back here, you emotionally unavailable cow!”

You sprint after her across the field, full of misplaced ambition. Of course, you don’t see the gloriously inconvenient dip in the ground until it’s too late. You trip over literally nothing, flail like a toddler trying to fly, and face-plant into the grass.

By the time you manage to blink away the earth’s intimate embrace, Pancake is already prancing toward the lake, tail high like she’s just won the equine Olympics.

“Cool,” you wheeze, wiping dirt off your face. “Fuck me, I guess.”

The day isn’t done humiliating you. You haul yourself to your feet and follow that smug, tail-waving bastard of a horse all the way down the slope toward the glittering edge of the lake.

Pancake pauses there and turns her head just enough to throw you the most judgmental look a horse can manage, as if to say, You wouldn’t.

You would, and you do.

You charge forward like this is the Olympic sport of “Trying to Get Your Shit Together Via Ranch Animal,” but Pancake, that conniving little diva, side-steps you at the last second like she’s auditioning for Cirque du Soleil, and you?

You yeet yourself off the edge like a rocket fuelled by processed sugar. Hoodie and all. With a scream that probably scares the living hell out of a family of ducks and definitely wakes up Sylus.

“FUUUUUUCK!” echoes across the entire goddamn property.

You float on your back, hoodie clinging to you like the damp cloak of consequence, and shout, “I KNEW HE WAS TOO HOT TO BE NORMAL!”

“And if past me was hotter than this,” you snarl, water dripping from your eyelashes, “she can fight me in the astral plane like a fucking adult!”

The ducks scatter. Somewhere behind you, a voice cuts through the cacophony with the kind of calm that suggests someone has just woken up and is already disappointed.

“…You’re aware most people start their day with coffee. Not… uh. A full aquatic meltdown?”

You slowly turn, soaked and seething with the righteous fury of someone betrayed by both physics and farm animals. “Good morning to you too, O Scaled One.”

Sylus is standing barefoot in the grass, shirtless, still half-draped in sleep. His red eyes narrow against the sun like it had the audacity to exist today.

“…Do I want to know,” he begins, voice dripping with that molten caramel menace that makes your spine rethink its structure, “why you’re floating in the lake, screaming obscenities at waterfowl?”

“I’m fine,” you say with the unconvincing confidence of someone who is absolutely not fine.

He lifts a brow, slowly, like it’s too early to process this level of bullshit. “You screamed something about challenging your past self to a duel.”

“I said fight me like an adult, actually,” you correct, flinging a bit of lakeweed off your shoulder. “Very different vibe.”

Sylus squints, surveying the disaster before him with the clinical precision of a man trying to determine whether he should call a medic, a priest, or just walk directly into the lake and start over.

There’s a pause. A long one.

With the kind of tenderness reserved for lovers and very confused therapists, he asks, “…Did Pancake do this to you?”

You throw a hand in the air like you’re testifying in church. “That bitch knew. She led me into an ambush.”

“I left you unsupervised for two hours,” he murmurs. “And this is what happens?”

“I’m processing!” you shout, beginning to slowly doggy-paddle toward shore.

Sylus chuckles, and his Evol wraps around your soggy self and lifts you from the water like a sea creature being offered to Poseidon. He looks you over, slowly. Soaked clothes. Hair like seaweed. One eye twitching.

“You look like a cryptid someone summoned by accident,” he states, deadpan.

You lunge at him like a soggy jungle cat. He stumbles back with a grunt, arms catching you as your body smacks cold and vengeful against his bare chest. You cling like a human barnacle. Wet. Unhinged. Full of spite.

“Anira—fuck’s sake—” he gasps dramatically, clearly faking half of it. His hands try to peel you off, but your grip is powered by chaos and glucose.

You squirm like the world’s angriest eel, and then, the coup de grâce: you wring out your sleeves, one at a time, directly against his very bare, very toned chest.

“There,” you purr, blinking up at him like a demon wearing the skin of an angel. “Sharing is caring.”

He looks down at the trail of water now making a slow pilgrimage down his abs and just… sighs. Sylus grabs you and hauls you up over his shoulder like a sack of possessed laundry.

You squeal and flail, legs kicking as he carries you toward the house. “I was going to take a calm, quiet shower,” he laments with the pained weariness of a man who knows peace is a myth.

“Was it ever really going to be calm with me in your life?” You ask sweetly, dangling upside down.

“Not a single fucking second.”

Since restraint is for people with less commitment, you start slapping his ass with every step he takes.

Smack.

Sylus jolts. “Kitten.”

Smack.

“That’s not—”

Smack.

“—remotely necessary.”

You hum, the picture of innocence, despite actively slapping the world’s most wanted man like a percussionist. “I’m just… encouraging forward momentum.”

“You keep that up,” he warns, voice dropping an octave, “and I will pin you to the wall and remind you what happens when you misbehave.”

Your hand pauses mid-slap.

Your brain: danger?

Your body: yeehaw!

You grin against the small of his back and whisper, “Promise?”

He huffs, part laugh, part warning, part I am both so tired and so into this, and smacks your ass.

Hard.

You yelp. “BETRAYAL!”

“Balance,” Sylus croons serenely, striding through the house like a smug god of karmic justice. “Yin and yang. Chaos and consequence. You make your bed—. Well, you’re a clever woman. You get the idea. I’ll give you one more chance to beg for mercy.”

“NEVER,” you shout, slapping his ass one last time for honour.

He marches into the bathroom, kicks the door shut behind him, and sets you down with a firm thunk before turning on the shower like it’s a declaration of war.

“Say thank you,” he mutters, already tugging his wet sweatpants at the waistband with a grimace.

They’re soaked, and now they cling in all the wrong—or very right—places.

Sylus steps out of them with all the grace of a runway model moonlighting as a war crime. Naked. Gleaming. Completely unfazed.

Your mouth may or may not go dry. In fact, you’re ninety percent sure you are having a spiritual event.

“Something wrong?” he asks, far too innocently.

You blink. “I’m trying to figure out how your dick is real.”

He chokes on a laugh, those red eyes flaring like you just handed him the sun on a plate. “Oh? Research purposes, or admiration?”

You point a finger at him, serious as death. “Science.”

He smirks. “Well, far be it from me to deny a hunter her… fieldwork.”

The shower takes him like a secret swallowed whole in steam. He stands within it like he’s trying to forget the shape of his sins, but the light loves him too much to let him go unnoticed. His eyes flutter shut, and for a moment, he is peace.

But it’s a stunning lie.

Nothing about him is still. He is a quiet war made flesh, and you are already bleeding. You were written in the same breath and fated to collide.

His beauty is not kindness—it’s omen. A mirror held up to your own destruction.

To touch him is to strike a match in a dry forest. To love him is to burn.

Shedding your clothes, you step in. Steam coils around your limbs as your hand finds his jaw. If he is fire, then you will be the forest that leans in.

Some fires are worth the ash.

You kiss him as though this moment has been echoing in your blood since the beginning of time.

He responds like a man unravelling at the altar. Like your spine is a rosary, and he means to pray his way down it, repentance carved into every trembling touch.

“You drive me crazy,” he confesses.

“You love it.”

He grins, just barely, eyes dark like melted wine, filthy with promise. “Worse. I crave it.”

Sylus surges toward you, lips meeting yours with a ferocity that makes the world bend. You dissolve into it, as earth surrenders to sky, as time bends in a single heartbeat.

He backs you up into the nearest wall, a smooth, tiled surface you barely register. You moan when he nips your lower lip, and that’s the only answer he needs.

His mouth finds your throat, tongue sweeping over the damp skin before he bites—not hard, just enough to make your breath hitch and your cunt involuntarily clench.

Your head falls back against the tile, breath catching as his tongue swirls around a nipple. He sucks the sensitive bud into his mouth, grazing with his teeth.

You can’t tell if you’re being ruined or reborn, only that it’s holy. And he is the altar. You arch like a temple bowing in veneration, breath caught between prayer and profane delight.

He releases your nipple with a final lick, and he sinks to his knees. Half-lidded eyes peek up at you through thick lashes like scarlet psalms, whispering a vow: he will dismantle you with worship and rebuild you from want.

Strong hands glide up your calves, and he mouths the delicate rise of your hipbone as though tasting the history buried beneath skin. With slow insistence, he coaxes your thighs open like a hymn unfolding, guiding your leg over his shoulder, positioning himself in that space where devotion and wildfire meet.

The first stroke of his tongue against your throbbing clit has you crying out. He laps at the sensitive bundle of nerves, sending shockwaves unfurling through you in liquid arcs. The heat builds and breaks, again and again, flashing through your core as you clutch at his shoulders, chasing the next collapse.

His grip tightens on your thighs as he seals his mouth over your clit and sucks hard. Two fingers slide into your dripping pussy, curling them to stroke the cradle of your ruin, where every godless pleasure is born.

With a few more pointed flicks of his tongue, it doesn’t hit so much as unfold. One blinding flare of sensation, then another, until you’re unlacing in slow, radiant waves. You swear the universe hiccups. Sound shatters into colour. Your spine arcs, breath caught somewhere between a cry and a sob, and the world becomes light.

It’s too much and not enough all at once. A crescendo without end. Sylus works you through it, tongue gentling but not relenting. He wrings every last shudder from your body, lapping softly at your quivering cunt as you float back down. Only then does he release you, pressing a kiss to your inner thigh.

He rises before you, water tracing the chiselled planes of his body, rivulets glinting gold in the light. His cock juts forward, thick and heavy, flushed with arousal, precum beading on his tip.

Sylus gathers you into him like a man claiming fire, hands charting the shape of you with a reverence that borders on ache. His touch is a vow, a tether, a slow burn poured into skin.

When your bodies meet, it is not collision—it is convergence, a seamless joining of heat and breath and want. Flesh to flesh, bone to bone, as though the gods themselves once carved you to fit him and him to fit you.

"I need you," he confesses, mouth grazing your pulse like a prayer slipping from a sinner’s lips. "I always need you."

"Then take me," you breathe, rolling your hips to grind against his impressive length trapped between your bodies. "I'm yours.”

He lifts you effortlessly, hands gripping your thighs as he wraps your legs around his waist. Your arms wind around his neck, fingers threading through the damp strands at his nape as he pins you to the wall with his hips.

He rocks against you, the thick head of his cock nudging your entrance with each sinuous roll of his hips. He fans the furnace of your want, turning ember to blaze, blaze to ruin. You whimper, nails digging into his shoulders, urging him on.

With a slow, deliberate thrust, he sheathes himself fully in your welcoming heat. Twin groans of euphoria echo off the shower walls as your bodies join, like stars rethreading into the sky.

He stills for a trembling moment, forehead pressed to yours as you both savour the feeling of completeness, of coming home. Then he begins to move, hips undulating, carving a rhythm into you that unspools the world.

The slick glide of his length in your tight heat is pure bliss, each movement a flare that lights up every hidden corner of your body. You slip into a haze, where time unravels, pulling you deeper into a well of blissful madness.

”You feel like home," he whispers.

You press your hips against him, body stretching to accommodate the full weight of him seated deep inside you. His teeth sink into your shoulder, just enough to leave a mark, grounding both of you.

“Tell me I’m not just a memory," you breathe.

He groans into your mouth. “You’re everything.”

Sylus adjusts his angle, and the world shifts with it. Every nerve ignites as he strikes that sacred place, unravelling you with a single, devastating thrust. A broken cry spills from your lips, fingernails scoring his back as you cling to him.

“Stay with me. Like this. Just for a little longer.” The words tremble against your skin, husky and reverent, like a man kneeling in the dark. “Just forever.”

You bite your lip, your body still trembling from where he’s wrecked you in every way that matters. “Forever sounds about right.”

You’re nothing but breath and lightning, chasing the high like it’s salvation. Every nerve sings, toes curl, and your soul stretches thin across the threshold of release.

The nirvana is too vast for your skin to hold, a celestial shattering that leaves your soul molten and remade. You swear you’ve felt this before, in another life, in another sky.

With a hoarse cry, your cunt locks around him as you shatter inward, baptized in sensation. Your body sings on a frequency too high for thought. It overtakes you like a fevered sea, each swell dragging you deeper into the undertow of him, of this, until sight itself slips away.

You feel yourself gushing around his pistoning cock, your slick release coating him. He doesn't slow his pace, fucking you through it, prolonging your climax. You’re still trembling—your body undone and boneless in the cradle of his arms, your breath catching in little gasps against his throat.

When you open your eyes to look at him, the world stutters.

Black horns crown his head in a regal, sweeping arc. A red gem glows softly at the centre of his chest, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Scales shimmer over his shoulders and wind up his neck like smoke given form, curling across one cheek in a jagged brush of obsidian.

You’ve charted this form before—in dreams, in starlight, in the aching dark between lifetimes.

It is memory made flesh. Your breath shudders out of you before you can stop it, and you cup his face, thumb stroking over the spot where the scales had just been.

“My dragon,” you whisper, voice breaking around the edges.

Sylus falters, his body shivering against yours like a temple touched by prayer.

When your eyes meet, there’s disbelief edged with reverence, like he’s watching history rewrite itself in your mouth. His hands roam your body as if he’s trying to memorize the sound of those words through skin, not ears.

He bows his head, and his lips find your forehead in a kiss so soft it could’ve been born from a dream. It’s not desire that guides him, but a ritual written in another lifetime’s ink.

You don’t understand why it aches so sweetly.

Fingers dig into your skin, not to mark, but to prove to some quiet part of him that you’re here, now, not some illusion born of longing. He moves in you like he’s chasing eternity. Not to conquer it, but to collapse inside it with you.

A rich, reverent sound rumbles in his chest, like the growl of a beast who’s been awakened. “Always, my beloved.”

Not a promise. A truth that predates language.

You kiss him like you’re falling through lifetimes, and he’s the only thing that stays the same. Maybe he is. Maybe the two of you were forged from the same starburst, doomed to burn and return, locked in a dance that outlives even death.

Your bodies collide like they’re finishing a conversation that started centuries ago. You rock against him as best you can, but he has you pinned, deliciously trapped between the wall and his weight.

Water rushes around you both, but all you can feel is his skin, slick and hot against yours, and the flex of his muscles as he drives into you.

His forehead drops to yours, breath shuddering. “Tell me what you desire.”

“You. Harder.”

He growls like you’ve lit something feral in him, and when he moves again, it’s all teeth and heat and relentless rhythm. Your back hits the wall with every thrust, your nails digging into his shoulders, your voice unravelling with every breathless, broken sound he wrings from you.

Sylus’s hand slides between your bodies, finding your clit and circling it with merciless pressure. His fingers move like incantation, summoning sensation from places you didn’t know could burn. There’s no hesitation, no guessing, only the ruinous grace of a soul who knows exactly where to touch to unravel you.

“That’s it, kitten,” he rasps against your throat, his words wrapping around you like a dangerous lullaby. “Be a good girl. Let me hear you.”

You're lost to him, lost to this. He fucks you like a storm drawn to shore, seeking the sacred hollow shaped just for him.

His thumb presses down on your clit, and your orgasm hits you like a feral thing—clawing its way out of your chest, pulsing through your core until your body convulses, mouth open in a soundless scream, wrecked and radiant. Your oversensitive flesh quivers around his cock, and you cling to him like wreckage after a storm.

He guides you through the aftershocks, hips rolling in languid, decadent waves that pull whimpers from your throat—each grind keeping you tethered to the edge of bliss.

His lips find yours in a molten, consuming communion. You devour each other in staggered breaths, your mouths colliding like you’ve been waiting eons for this exact fracture in time.

When you finally surface for air, he looks at you like you’re a miracle he was never meant to touch. The heat is spiralling in him like a storm with nowhere left to go. You feel it in the way his fingers dig into your hips. The way his jaw clenches. The way he curses softly, like even pleasure can be painful.

"Come for me," you coo against his lips. "Let go, my dragon."

You clench around him purposefully, milking his length, urging him towards his peak. With a guttural groan, you feel him swell and pulse as his orgasm overtakes him. Thick ropes of his seed paint your inner walls, the heat of it searing you from the inside out.

He shudders in your arms, a broken moan falling from his lips as he empties himself inside you through long, shaking pulses. You hold him as he comes down from his high, your fingers threading through his damp hair, your lips pressing soft kisses to his jaw, his cheek, his temple, his forehead.

His mouth finds your cheek in a tender press, then the corner of your lips, then the spot just below your ear where your pulse still flutters wild. A smile tugs at his mouth as you sigh into it, pliant and boneless in his hold.

“We’re never showering separately again,” he purrs.

You huff a laugh, breathless, your lips curling against his shoulder.

“You say that like you didn’t just maul me against a wall.”

He pulls back just enough to look at you, water trailing down his cheekbone. “I’d do it again,” he says with a lazy smile, then adds with mock gravity, “Purely for cleanliness purposes, of course.”

You swat his chest, but it’s like hitting a slab of wet marble. “So next time I want to take a five-minute rinse, you’re going to stand behind me like a gentleman, keep your hands to yourself, and not try to rearrange my spine?”

He leans in until his nose brushes yours, voice dropping to a sinful whisper. “Oh, I’ll be behind you, alright.”

You groan dramatically, your forehead falling to his chest. His laughter rumbles through you, that deep, rich sound you’re starting to crave. He nuzzles into your hair, still holding you, and you close your eyes.

Wrapped in his arms, water still cascading down your bodies, you let yourself breathe. There’s still a world of questions clawing at the edges of your mind, but for now, none of them matter. You are home.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming, @morrigan87, @babyx91

Dropping your mid-week fix! Hopefully, it gets you over the hump of the work week a little bit. As always, loving all the comments and engagement! 🥰

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lnds sylus #lads sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus #sylus smut #sylus x mc #love and deepspace #sylus x oc #sylus x you #sylus dragon

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 11: Once, Forever

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different from in-game for story purposes.

At the kitchen island, you perch like a spectre haunting your skin, fork limp between your fingers. Breakfast cools in silence, egg yolks spreading like tired halos across the plate, not sun but sorrow masquerading as light. A piece of toast drags through the mess, painting streaks in yellow and broken white, like you’re searching for a hidden truth buried in the crumbs. You should eat, dress, run until your limbs forget why they tremble, but you don’t. You linger in the hollow where wanting once inhabited.

The truth is, you could still sculpt your face into something passable. Curve your mouth, angle your shoulders, and choose words that sound like surviving. You told yourself you left with your head held high. That walking away from him was strength.

Maybe it was.

The flavour of strength? A coin held too long in the mouth—dull, cold, stained with wishes that never came true. You left not because you wanted absence, but because presence had become a crucifixion. Each glance, a nail; each word unsaid, the tip of a blade scraping against your heart.

Staying would’ve meant bleeding quietly until he finally decided you were worthy of the truth he carried like a crown of thorns.

If he wanted to speak, the stars would bend to deliver him. He’s broken time before to reach you, stepping through death and dream alike. Maybe he’s giving you space. Maybe he’s waiting like you are, caught in that suspended breath between want and should.

Or maybe you’re fooling yourself.

You set the fork down, hands splaying on the countertop like wings that no longer lift. You miss the way his voice used to thread the dark, soft as twilight pressing its lips to your skin. How his heat rewrote the air around you.

A knock splinters the quiet, and you freeze. Air sticks in your throat, lungs pausing mid-motion. Reckless, radiant hope sparks, sprinting straight to your heart and setting up camp. You push the stool back too quickly. Bare feet whisper across cold tile. Fingers curl around the door handle before your thoughts can catch up.

Maybe gravity pulled him home. Maybe he’s waiting with a heart full of ghosts, holding a name that burns every time he says it. Maybe the misery mapped a way back to your skin.

You open the door.

Nina stands there in her denim jacket and unevenly laced boots, hair in a messy knot like she ran her hands through it a dozen times on the way over. Her expression isn’t her usual animated smirk or teasing squint. It’s the kind of solace people only use when they think you might be about to break again.

“Hey,” she greets, voice gentle like she’s afraid to knock over whatever’s left of you.

“Hi,” you reply, trying to paint on a smile that is convincing enough to hide the way your throat tightens, irrational disappointment catching there like a bone. “Come in.”

Her eyes sweep your apartment, taking everything in. They catch on the plate at the counter, still uneaten. Your wrinkled pyjamas. “Anira… You know it’s three in the afternoon, right? Or are we just redefining breakfast now?”

Three? You glance back at the kitchen like time might have left a footprint there, like it should’ve warned you as it passed.

Something like a smile haunts your face but doesn’t fully form. “Time’s fake anyway.”

“Mm. So is nutrition, apparently.”

You snort, weakly, and slide back onto the stool. You haven’t talked since the breakdown at work. Just a handful of messages. Half-hearted check-ins. Her thumbprint lingering on the glass of your world but never quite pressing through.

“I didn’t expect company,” you murmur.

Nina shrugs. “Didn’t want to wait for an invitation.”

She grabs a mug from the cabinet with the muscle memory of friendship, fills the kettle without asking, and flicks it on. “You gonna tell me what’s going on? Or are we playing the ‘pretend I’m fine’ game again?”

“I think that Sylus and I might’ve broken up.”

There. You’ve said it. There’s no crash or rupture, only a quiet dissonance that hangs amid the syllables.

The kettle clicks off. Nina doesn’t move. “What happened?”

You shake your head. “I don’t… I don’t even know. It was nothing and everything. I asked him something, and he wouldn’t answer, so I left. He didn’t stop me.”

It’s the softest, smallest truth, but the wound it opens howls.

“Did you want him to?”

The answer doesn’t fall from the heavens. It rises from the cavern of your chest, a phantom made of unsaid things and too-long silences. You think of how he laughed like joy was something he crafted only for you. How he looked at you like a pilgrim charting constellations he already trusted to guide him home.

All the words you didn’t say come back to roost in your ribs, and the ache answers for you.

Yes. God, yes.

Nina sips her tea like the conversation didn’t just leave your heart on the counter next to the cold eggs and the untouched toast. She leans back on the stool, stretching her arms overhead until her joints pop. “So. I picked up a commission.”

Your eyes narrow slightly. “Since when do you do side work?”

“Since I found out freelance pays better than loyalty. It’s nothing major, just some retrieval intel, but the job’s taking me into Maraik.”

You blink. “Maraik?”

That gets your attention. The word is a warning all on its own—Maraik, where neon burns like firelight and the alleys chew people whole. A bleeding underbelly of Linkon, stitched together with desperation and smoke. Not quite the N109, but not far off in spirit.

Nina shrugs, eyes on her mug. “Client says it’s low-risk. Just recon, maybe a pickup if things look good. But I’d rather not walk in alone.” She glances up, the corner of her mouth twitching. “Could use a wingman with flexible morals and a mean left hook.”

You raise an eyebrow. “Flattered.”

“I’ll even split the pay,” she adds. “Fifty-fifty. Hazard bonus included.”

Perhaps you need something to pull you out of your own head before you drown in it. Anything that doesn’t wear his scent or echo his voice. “I’m in.”

“Good,” she beams, giving your shoulder a small shake. “We leave at dusk.”

Maraik whirrs like a severed nerve. Every step you take buzzes beneath your boots—broken glass underfoot, neon smeared across rain-slick concrete, the air sharp with rust and sweat and the tang of chemical fire.

Bar after bar, club after club, you scan faces, listen to murmured names and codewords. The contact’s name is Riven. No last name, no record. You’re not even sure if they’re a man, woman, or myth. Just a lead trailing through liquor and ultraviolet.

A few compliments. A brush of Nina’s hand over a shoulder. A smirk curled on your lips, just enough edge to make you interesting. The two of you are playing the role of information traders with enough money and desperation to need someone like Riven.

Apparently, it’s convincing.

You’re led by a man with gold teeth and a scar bisecting one eye through two alleyways, then into a stairwell that smells faintly of antiseptic. He knocks three times, waits, then taps twice more, and the door hisses open. The room inside is unexpected. Polished floors, sprawling, serpentine couches, high ceilings strung with crystals that scatter fractured light like tiny explosions.

It’s a trap dressed as a throne room.

Riven lounges on the largest couch, boots propped up. “You’ve been looking for me.”

You smile slowly. “Word is you know things we’re interested in.”

The man watches you both like you’re entertainment, something between a threat and a delicacy. “People are usually more careful when they ask about me.”

“Then I guess we’re not people,” Nina purrs, sliding onto a low stool, legs crossed, arms loose and lazy.

He laughs. “Clearly.”

The conversation spins into coded questions, half-answers, wordplay so tight it could slice skin. You mention a shipment, hint at a buyer. Nina drops a name no one’s supposed to know. Riven raises an eyebrow, impressed or pretending to be.

The information starts to come. Names. Dates. Locations.

A voice crackles over the comm unit on the wall. “Those aren’t freelancers. One of ’em flagged red in the system.”

Everything stops.

Riven’s smile drops. “Well. Isn’t that unfortunate.”

You move at the same time as Nina. Your hand snaps to your holster. Her foot kicks over the nearest table for cover. The first shot hits the wall behind you in a burst of plaster. You return fire, clean and fast. One of the guards drops. Nina slides under another’s swing and drives a knife into his ribs.

“Left!” she shouts, and you spin, knee driving into a throat, another shot silencing someone behind you.

Three down. Four left. It feels like dancing if dancing meant blood and broken bones. Another wave floods the room. You and Nina are backed against the bar, shoulders nearly touching.

Nina meets your eyes once. “We don’t die here.”

The butt of a gun cracks against the back of your skull, causing light to burst behind your eyes, and the world lists, folds, and darkens.

You come to with blood dried at the edge of your mouth and the taste of copper slicking your tongue. Your hands are bound with plastic restraints that bite into your wrists. The room is dim, lit by one low, flickering bulb that makes the concrete walls sweat shadows. Your first breath is sharp. The second is calculation. No weapons. No phone. Boots still on, but laces cut. Jacket gone. No tools. Nina’s awake, bleeding from a split lip, but her eyes burn with the same heat as yours.

Riven stands in the corner, arms crossed, immaculate in his patchwork coat, like this is a fashion show and not a hostage interrogation.

“So,” he begins, voice a lazy drip of syrup, “want to tell me who the fuck you are?”

You tilt your head. “We’re freelance decorators. The bodies were just a fun bonus.”

Nina snorts. “We have a thing for violent interior design.”

He gestures, and a boot slams into Nina’s ribs. She grunts but doesn’t fall.

Riven stalks forward, crouching in front of you like you’re a curious insect. “I don’t care if you’re mercs or just dumb girls playing spy. What I care about is who sent you.”

You smile, blood blooming between your teeth. “Santa Claus. Naughty list.”

This time, the punch lands across your jaw. Your vision flares white for a moment. Your head snaps sideways, but you don’t look away. You’re already mapping. Three exits—two guarded, one barred. The guy to your left has a limp; the one on your right keeps touching his side like he’s hiding an injury. You clock the glint of a knife tucked into one guard’s boot.

“You know,” Riven muses, circling again, “you two could be valuable. Pretty. Smart. Shame you’re so uncooperative.”

You flick your eyes to him. “I’d rather die uncooperative than lick your boots.”

Riven signals again. Another blow. Heat bursts like a sun flaring in reverse, and your breath snags against the barbed wire kink beneath your ribs. You choke it down. Each strike is a brushstroke painting the map you need. Pain is nothing but the toll for time, and you’re buying seconds with bone.

Death doesn’t frighten you. You’ve traced that fringe before, pressed it to your throat in darker hours. If it comes, you’ll meet it like an old friend. But survival is a diagram your soul remembers, and you’ve never forgotten the rhythm of breathing through ruin.

You shift enough to let your fingers find Nina’s behind your back. Her hand curls around yours like an oath. She squeezes once. They don’t know. Not Riven, not his thugs with their knives and their smug, meat-headed grins. Not the man already imagining how best to carve you open. You let your focus slip into the hum that lives under your skin, where your blood turns bright and strange.

Resonance stirs like a tuning fork struck. It’s not force, but surrender. You mirror Nina’s power in a pitch so true the space between you collapses. Her Evol catches flame, flaring brighter, stronger, as if your soul is feeding oxygen to her fire. She gasps a little, the edge of a laugh escaping her mouth like a spark off flint.

Riven narrows his eyes. “What the fuck’s funny?”

Your answering grin is haunted and half a breath from sacrilege. “You’re about to find out.”

He steps forward, full of false calm. A guard flanks him on either side, blades drawn, eyes calculating like predators closing in. Riven bends slightly, his face too close to yours, breath foul. “You think this is a joke?” He hisses.

Nina detonates. The floor roars as a wave of kinetic force slams outward from her body, a ripple that tosses men like dolls and sends concrete cracking underfoot. The nearest blade skitters across the floor like it knows who it belongs to. You dive for it, slice through the plastic binding your wrists, and twist fast to free Nina. She’s half a second ahead, yanking a second knife from the downed guard’s belt.

Yelling erupts. Gunmetal flashes.

You sprint. Gunfire bites into the walls around you, one round clipping the doorframe as you shoulder through it hard. Nina ducks, firing back with nothing but force—each shot of kinetic energy slamming into doorways and chests, buying seconds.

Precious, holy seconds.

A guard lunges at you from the shadows. You pivot mid-run, slam your elbow into his throat, and bury the blade into his side. You tear down a corridor half-lit by flickering neon. Nina kicks open a back exit, the metal screeching loud enough to raise the dead.

Nina grabs your wrist. “Move, Ani!”

Your boots slam against pavement slick with oil and old rain. The sound of pursuit still claws down the alley. Nina fumbles with her keys, swears when she drops them, and then finally unlocks the doors of her rust-bitten car.

You slide into the driver’s seat and bark, “Get in.”

Nina hesitates just long enough to glare at you. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” You don’t give her a chance to argue. You’re already twisting the ignition, foot slamming the gas before the engine fully catches.

The car lurches. Nina scrambles into the passenger seat, barely getting the door closed before you’re tearing out.

“You wanna drive like a psychopath, fine,” she mutters, clutching the door like it might fly off. “But if I die in my own car, I’m haunting your apartment. Loudly.”

You take a hard left, nearly clipping a postbox. “You’re not dying.”

Traffic thickens as you weave into the main street—an endless stream of blinking reds, pedestrians too brave for their own good, and hovercycles darting between lanes like hornets.

Your heart thrums like it remembers another rhythm that’s older than fear or reason. This chaos, this edge-of-death sprint, is the first thing that’s made sense since Sylus.

You don’t think about his name, but it’s there anyway. Echoing. Like the car that still sits parked under your building. Like the bed you haven’t touched since that night. Like the kiss still aching in the chasm of your throat.

God, you should’ve taken his damn car.

A bullet cracks past the rearview mirror. One of Riven’s men must’ve jumped into a bike. You duck instinctively, swear, and shove the wheel to the right, nearly sideswiping a food truck. The car squeals but holds.

Nina sucks in a breath. “You good?”

“Never better.” You are. In a twisted, awful, elated kind of way.

Your arm’s been bleeding since the fight, slick down to your elbow. Nina doesn’t look much better. Her cheek is swelling, and blood is crusted down the side of her throat.

But this?

This is the closest you’ve felt to whole in weeks.

You park two blocks out, tires skidding in gravel as the car jerks to a stop, and kill the engine. “Out. Now.”

Nina doesn’t ask questions. The chase doesn’t stop just because the roads did. You sprint down the street, cutting across the neat line of suburban homes. Jump a fence. Then another. Then two backyard gardens where the grass is too green and the flowers too trimmed.

The house stands at the end of the street. It’s too ordinary. White picket fence. A cheerful red door with a brass knocker, but you know better.

This place is a fortress wearing drag.

You shoulder open the gate and grab Nina’s hand as her stride falters. There are voices behind you, footfalls drawing closer, echoing in the distance. You scramble up the porch and press your thumb to the lock plate, blood smearing the sensor. At the same time, your voice—hoarse and shaking—forces the words from your lungs: “Aegis. Override.”

For half a breath, nothing happens, then a click, and the door unlocks. You and Nina tumble inside and slam it shut behind you. The reinforced locks slide home automatically. Three deadbolts thud into place. Steel veins humming under drywall.

The house is furnished in the barest sense with only a grey couch, untouched kitchen, and a rug so new it still holds creases from the packaging. The air carries that new-furniture chemical tang. You glance toward the corner of the ceiling, where a pin-sized camera sits hidden behind a decorative moulding. Barely visible to anyone who doesn’t already know it’s there.

He’ll see you. He’ll know you’re here. The door didn’t reject your print, which means he hasn’t revoked you. Yet.

You don’t let yourself hope.

“Nina. Basement. Come on.”

She nods, teeth gritted. “Lead the way.”

You push through the kitchen, past the stainless steel fridge and the spotless counters. A pantry door opens to stairs. When you reach the bottom, you press your hand to a section of the far wall. It scans you again, the light flickers, and a panel slides open.

Behind it are racks lined with weapons, shelves of ammunition, and crates of gear that could outfit a small militia. One wall holds medical supplies, organized and clean as a surgeon’s tray.

You’re already pulling out gauze, antiseptic, and wound spray to numb the pain. Blood runs down your arm. Hers pools in her sock. But you’re here. You made it.

You just don’t know if you’re alone or if his eyes are already on you.

Nina grumbles as she presses a cloth to her bruised ribs. You’re midway through stitching your arm when she glances up, eyes sweeping the gleaming rows of weapons on display. Rifles, handguns, serrated blades. The kind of arsenal that doesn’t just suggest trouble—it promises it.

“Where the hell are we?” She asks, her voice rough but edged with awe. “This doesn’t exactly scream hospital.”

You don’t look up right away. Just tug the next thread tight, the pain a sharp, grounding thing. “One of Sylus’s properties.”

She blinks. “Wait. This is fruit boy’s house?”

A brief laugh slips out. “Not his main one. Just one of them.”

Nina turns her head slowly, taking in the racks of ammunition and the stack of claymore mines nestled in the corner like they belong next to throw pillows. “This is a weird setup for someone who trades mangoes.”

You finally look at her, deadpan. “The fruit business is… exceptionally cutthroat.”

She snorts, then winces as the motion pulls at the bandage you wrapped around her thigh. “Okay, but real talk—he’s not in the fruit business, is he?”

You shake your head. “No.”

She pauses. Maybe waiting for more. When none comes, she just exhales through her nose, lips quirking in a lopsided grin.

“Well,” she says, nodding toward a particularly beautiful pair of twin daggers mounted under a set of tactical flashbangs. “Remind me to pick up some apples from him next time. Bet they come with a side of high explosives.”

You let yourself chuckle, the sound raspy but genuine. “Might even throw in a grenade if you’re polite.”

“Shit, then I’ll say ‘please’ twice.”

There’s a short, settling lull with only the soft scrape of her boot dragging against the floor and the pang of bruises blooming beneath your skin.

Her eyes flit up to the camera dot barely visible in the corner. “Think your fruit vendor’s watching?”

You glance at it too. “He always knows who’s in his garden.”

“Hey,” she murmurs. “If I die today, bury me with one of those grenade launchers. I want whoever digs me up to be real confused.”

You huff and wince, pressing gauze to your lacerated ribs. “That could be arranged. I’ll even tuck in a pack of mango slices.”

“Tell ‘em it’s a funeral fruit basket.”

You laugh harder than you should, chest pulling tight with pain and the sweet edge of exhaustion.

Nina watches you for a beat longer, then softly says, “You okay?”

You nod. “Yeah. I just… I needed this.”

“Getting shot at?”

“Getting out of my head.”

“Next time,” she retorts, “maybe we just go for drinks.” “No guarantees there won’t still be blood.” You hum, sliding a magazine into a sleek black pistol. Behind you, Nina lets out a reverent gasp. “Okay,” she exclaims with the pitch of an energetic child, lifting a sniper rifle from the rack like it’s spun gold. “This might be love.”

You glance over your shoulder. The thing is comically oversized, matte finish gleaming under the basement lights. Scope like a telescope, multiple mods flashing with faint energy pulses.

She holds it close, stroking the barrel. “I’m not saying I’d marry it, but I’m also not not saying that.”

You snort, tugging back the slide on your pistol. “Just make sure it doesn’t demand a prenup.”

Nina grins. “I’d give it everything. My apartment, my sad collection of instant ramen, my dying ficus—”

The air splits behind you like fabric torn from the inside out. A hiss of static. A shift in pressure. You both spin on instinct, weapons snapping up in perfect sync. There, standing with one hand casually in his pocket and the other adjusting the cuff of his dark coat, is Sylus.

The mist moves around him like it’s trying to remember the shape of god. Red and black, like spilled ink curling back into a pen that knows only how to write endings. His eyes catch the light like glass cut from blood and dusk. He stands like a riddle dressed in calm, like violence wearing silence.

You don’t breathe. You just remember. What it was to be known by that stillness. What it meant to be chosen by it.

What it cost.

“I see the hospitality hasn’t changed,” he cajoles smoothly, like bullets aren’t currently shredding the exterior walls of the house above. There’s the faint percussion of gunfire upstairs, muffled by layers of drywall and the security-grade ceiling.

Nina doesn’t lower her rifle. “What the actual fuck. The fruit guy just appeared like a damn horror movie villain.”

Sylus arches a brow, eyes flicking to her. “Fruit?” He looks at you, amused. “That’s what you went with?”

You lower your gun. “It was either that or arms dealer, and one of those gets follow-up questions.”

Outside, a series of rapid impacts slams against the front windows upstairs. The foundation thrums with every shot. You can hear shouting and heavy boots converging.

Sylus adjusts his collar like he’s more concerned about dust than death. “Who did you piss off this time?”

His tone is velvet over glass. No accusation, no judgment. Just amusement, like you’ve brought him another curiosity to observe.

You load another mag, check the chamber. “Guy named Riven. He didn’t appreciate our excellent manners.”

“He tried to cut our tongues out,” Nina mutters. “After inviting us over. Rude.”

Sylus makes a thoughtful sound, stepping toward the rack and plucking a combat knife from its sheath without looking. “Riven’s still playing warlord in Maraik? I thought someone would’ve gutted him by now.”

“Well,” you say, slapping a mag into a rifle and chambering a round, “give us five minutes.”

Sylus glances between you both, then turns his head just slightly, listening. “Ten of them outside. Two by the back deck. One on the roof. He’s watching the street.”

Nina stares at him. “You just got here.”

“I’m thorough,” he states, stepping past you to retrieve a sidearm. His fingers brush yours for half a breath.

You ignore the way your pulse stutters.

Nina nudges you. “Do all your exes show up mid-escape with teleportation and a full tactical readout?”

“Just the one,” you mutter.

Sylus is already walking toward the stairs, perfectly composed. “Coming?”

There’s a moment where Nina just stares after him, jaw slightly open. “Okay,” she murmurs, “I get it now. Fruit guy is terrifying.”

You give a wry smile. “Told you. Cutthroat business.”

You’re halfway to the stairs when Sylus veers off-course. His hand brushes a discreet panel on the armoury wall. A hiss of pressurized air follows, the metal face splitting to reveal a recessed storage chamber. There, nestled inside a black velvet like a lover waiting to be touched is the Model X-12.

Your heart skips. Your brain stalls. Your ovaries whisper things they shouldn’t. This is the first time you’ve considered moaning over a piece of polished alloy. Sylus lifts it like he isn’t holding the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen—and yes, that includes him shirtless at dawn.

He turns, calm as ever, while your brain throws itself face-first into a serotonin-laced fever dream. This is fine. You’re fine. You’re definitely not planning to ask if it comes in a his-and-hers set or planning a candlelit dinner for two: you, the Model X-12, and maybe Sylus if he behaves.

“Figured you’d want this back.”

Nina lets out a quiet, reverent sound behind you. “Oh my god. That is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Sylus raises a brow. “I assume you mean the rifle.”

“…Sure.”

When he hands it to you, his fingers brush yours, and your brain takes that as an invitation to spiral. You accept the weapon like it’s a love letter written in steel. The weapon meets your palms and chants with reverence along your nerves, balance perfect, weight divine. Somewhere deep in your soul, a choir hits a high note.

You slide a finger down its polished length. “Hello, gorgeous.”

“I’m right here,” Sylus murmurs.

“Not now,” you whisper to the rifle. “Mommy’s working.”

Nina chokes.

You check the chamber, sight the balance, and shudder. “I think I just came a little.”

“I definitely did,” Nina adds.

You sling the rifle over your shoulder and fall into step behind Sylus as he ascends. The ceiling above vibrates with another volley of gunfire. Plaster dust sprinkles down in lazy flakes.

“I can handle this,” he purrs, like it’s foreplay and not a death sentence. “You’re both bleeding and one wrong blink from kissing the floor.”

He says it like it’s logistics, like it’s irrefutable math. You’d slap him if you weren’t actively using your last neuron to stop picturing him walking out there all erotic violence and jawline. You point at him. “Back off, pretty boy. These assholes are mine.”

A trace of a crooked smile touches his lips. “Remind me never to get on your bad side, Miss Hunter. Or do—I’d love to see what you’d do with me.”

“I’m begging you both to shut up. I’m concussed and horny-adjacent by accident,” Nina laments with a smirk while fanning herself dramatically.

The door opens to gunfire ripping through the dusk. Sylus steps out first. You and Nina are half a breath behind him, weapons raised. A tide of red-black mist unfurls from his palm, dense as storm clouds. Bullets, mid-flight, suspend like glass beads in amber. A thousand tiny deaths frozen. They shiver as if sensing what holds them is not mercy but dominion. Like rain denied its sky, they fall. The sound: a metallic hush, like hail on gravestones.

Your rifle hums in your hands, synced perfectly to your heartbeat. You squeeze the trigger, and a blast of silent, searing energy lights the night.

They have numbers. Some of them have Evols. A man throws a shockwave through the pavement, sending rubble flying. Another tries to cloak himself in shadow and flank. But you and Nina move like a single organism—ducking, flanking, covering. She blasts a man’s kneecaps out while you take another’s head off from twenty feet with a whisper-thin beam of energy.

Behind you, he watches like a god wearing indifference like a tailored coat, his hands tucked in pockets as if war were just weather.

Only when one of them hurls a blade of compressed air toward Nina does he move. A pulse of his mist consumes the attack mid-flight and then slams the attacker into a wall hard enough to snap vertebrae.

One more unit charges forward, shouting. His eyes find yours across the break of chaos, and in that breathless space between moments, you choose each other.

Again. Always.

The resonance is not a link. It’s a rebirth that splits you open with splendour. It bellows in a divine ache. Two celestial bodies hurtling back into each other’s orbit after centuries of exile.

You burn. You bloom. You remember.

This isn’t power.

This is return.

This is what it feels like to come home to someone who never stopped carrying your name in the quiet of his blood.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming, @morrigan87, @babyx91

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #love and deepspace #sylus x you #sylus x oc

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 10: If Gods Ever Bled

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different from in-game for story purposes.

You hold his gaze like a blade you’ve already pressed against your throat, welcoming the cut. Sylus says nothing and turns, as if the moment never happened, continuing to speak to Kieran, their words muffled by design.

Whatever they’re saying, it isn’t meant for you.

You nestle deeper into the folds of the blanket, but the warmth has turned traitor. A spectral cold slips through, winding a noose around your lungs.

The room feels too immaculate suddenly, like a museum curated to forget, as if built to keep you safe from the kind of truth that bursts through peace with blood on its hands.

You called him Sy deliberately, like striking a match in the dark to see what might catch. He caught the name midair and folded it into himself as if the name had been forged into him long before breath, waiting only for your voice to unearth it.

Thoughts tilt off-kilter, lured by the deafening ache of dreams that feel more like scars, jagged remnants of a life lived beneath the skin of this one.

You comb through the wreckage and collect the pieces with shaking hands like shards of memory exhumed from their graves, still wet with the silence that entombed them. They crawl into being, not with grace but gravity, with truths too old for skin and too cruel for breath, and snag in the sinew of remembrance, tearing the fragile architecture of truth.

Being tormented by the unknown has become its own kind of scream. You were not crafted to kneel in the dark, cupping vestiges like offerings, mouthing gratitude while your soul gnaws through its cage. To sit in silence is to vanish by degrees, and you’ve clawed your way back from the void too many times to go quietly now.

Kieran and Luke depart with a wordless nod, vanishing into the lift. Sylus moves toward the liquor cabinet with the studied calm of a man rehearsing escape, each step too measured to be anything but retreat.

You’ve become fluent in the choreography of unravelling. The tension is gnarled into the coil of his spine, the tremble of restraint in his knuckles, and in how he pours liquid amber like it might drown whatever truth he won’t speak.

He drinks not to savour but to sear, as though the burn might weld shut the place inside him still weeping fossilized names. You don’t let him settle. You refuse to give him that distance.

“I keep dreaming of a dragon, sculpted from the obsidian of night, with a red jewel nestled in his chest.”

His hand pauses midair, the crystal trembling like a held confession. When he drinks, it’s slower this time, like trying to drown a secret that refuses to stay buried.

“Dragons are monsters,” he intones, as if reciting a curse written in congealed blood. “They’re harbingers of doom.”

It sounds wrong, like a hymn sung in reverse. His tone carries no tremor, only the cold symmetry of a blade that has forgotten blood. The word monster rings hollow, clanging against the altar of your memory, where wings cradled you, where fire never burned but watched. You shake your head once, a sharp recoil, as if the lie left a sting.

“No.” It escapes you like a flare cast into dark waters, unfiltered and burning. “He wasn’t a monster. He flew with me. Wrapped his wings around me when I was cold. He protected me. I think… I think I loved him.”

Sylus doesn’t flinch or lift his eyes. “Dreams are good at dressing beasts in gold. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have teeth,” he refutes without inflection, like a verdict already written in stone. “Sometimes the ones who shelter us are the ones who set the fire. Memory doesn’t always warn you which.”

Air deserts your lungs as the ground leans, blurring between myth and madness. Is this how insanity starts? Not with screams, but the fracture of reason, a quiet slip into elsewhere where dreams wear the face of delusion.

No. You don’t know why he hides, why he veils flame in frost. Truth howls low in your bones, clawing through the dark, refusing the leash of doubt. He can deflect, deny, disappear, but certainty is yours now, and it does not waver. Let him stay silent. Let him test you. You are not shifting sand; you are a foundation.

Sylus becomes a study in stillness and a constellation of tells. You see the war beneath his skin. The cold burn of calculation clashing with a raw, untamed agony. He’s bracing—against you, against memory, against whatever he’s afraid you’ll remember next.

“Sylus… Why won’t you look at me?”

He leaves the reticence to bleed, and still it spills slow and steady, torn too wide to stitch. You wait, but Sylus tips back his glass with the ease of someone who’s made a religion of avoidance.

Your voice is a wound dressed in thorns. “Say something.”

At last, he moves toward the window, as if the city’s electric sprawl might offer absolution. Silence deepens until it feels less like peace and more like abandonment dressed in velvet.

“Forget it,” you whisper bitterly and reach for your coat with trembling hands, fury folded into every motion. “I’m done chasing ghosts. I’m going home.”

“Anira—”

You cut him off. “No. If you can’t trust me, then what are we even doing here, Sylus? I won’t gnaw on the bones of your half-truths and call it a feast. Not anymore.”

His brows draw together, but his lips remain sealed.

You take a step forward, words heavy with the taste of tarnished metal. “When we met, you said, ‘I guess you don’t remember anything. After all, you and I… we’re the same. True kindred spirits’. We didn’t meet in this life, did we? If we had… I would remember.”

He doesn’t move. No flinch. Just that unnerving stillness, his eyes gleaming like polished garnet designed to reflect but never to reveal.

“Would you?” He asks with a blunt finality.

You stare at him, disbelieving, and then your expression transforms into anger, cracking under the slow weep of sorrow.

You step back. “Have Kieran or Luke drive me home.”

He moves toward you, the start of a protest already forming, but you lift your chin. “Don’t,” you snap, voice like flint. “Anyone but you.”

His jaw tightens. “They’re busy.”

“That’s fine. I’ll wait in the parking garage until they’re not.”

A sigh drags from his throat, and he curries his hands through his hair, eyes cast downward as if to look at you would be to face something too raw to endure. “Just… stay.”

“I will if you tell me. Is it you in my dreams or not?” You plead, fingers lacing with his. “Please.”

He gazes at you as though you are the eye of a tempest threatening to consume him whole, but he doesn’t respond.

“Then I’m not staying.” You speak it like a farewell etched in salt and thunder, the kind of goodbye that storms carve into coastlines.

Sylus drags his palm over his face and studies you for a moment. Then, he crosses the room, retrieves a single black key fob, and offers it to you.

“I’ll have Kieran or Luke pick it up from my place tomorrow,” you murmur, tear-soaked, accepting it.

Your fingers brush as he passes it to you. Enough to summon every echo your body remembers and your mind still doubts. Enough to crack beneath your ribs with the gentlest violence. His touch is brief, restrained, but it lingers like the aftershock of a name once spoken in worship. Still, an unbearable flicker of what almost was, of what once was, remains.

You step into the elevator. The doors begin their inevitable slide, and you watch him right up to the final sliver of him the world allows. Until he becomes nothing but your reflection, warped and dying across the polished steel.

Days and nights have begun to spill past their borders, unchanged on the clock face, yet drawn out like shadows under too many moons. The hours come, but they wear too many faces, and none of them smile.

You’ve lost count of the evenings, each one soundless and pooling in the corners of your apartment like rainwater too tired to evaporate. These hours cradle you like grave soil, demanding nothing but breath and the bitter art of staying. They do not reach for you, but neither do they release you.

You move through your apartment like breath through glass, barely touching anything. The kitchen counters remain untouched. Your mug from three mornings ago still sits by the sink, rim stained with tea you never finished. Even your clothes seem to hang quieter in the closet, as if waiting for a reason to be chosen.

There is no music. No television. You flinch from sound now. Not because it wounds, but because it cuts too clean. It slices open the hush, and in the bleed, you see how absence has grown teeth. Noise doesn’t soothe anymore. It exposes. Every echo paints the outline of what’s missing, gives it weight, gives it breath, until even the creak of the floorboards feels like a shout.

At some point, your feet carry you to the balcony again. You step barefoot onto the cold stone and lean against the railing, arms folding over the metal, breath misting faintly in the night air. The city lies sprawled below you—alive, indifferent, glittering. It does not mourn with you. It never has. Still, there’s comfort in its constancy, like watching waves from a shipwreck.

You tilt your head back and search the sky. It’s clear tonight. A deep, velvet-black canvas scattered with stars too far away to touch. You try to find familiar constellations, the ones he pointed out with that crooked smirk. Nothing looks the same anymore. Like the heavens forgot how to speak your language. Maybe they never spoke it to begin with.

You watch anyway.

Your fingers drift to your phone without thinking, the muscle memory of hope. The screen lights your face in pale blue. No new messages. You knew that before you looked. Still, the ritual is hard to break.

You scroll just enough to find it again, that last message still sitting like a stone in a river.

Sylus: You left without saying goodbye.

You’ve read it a hundred times but never replied. What do you say to a wound you made by walking away?

Now, you whisper into the dark. “I left because I was drowning in a silence that had your shape. Because I could not keep peeling myself open for a man who stitched the past shut with gold thread and called it mercy.”

You switch off the screen and bury the phone in your pocket like a relic. Your eyes drift skyward, to that cathedral of light and forgetting, and you wonder: When a star dies, does the void mourn its own collapsing light, weaving elegies into the vacuum, pressing its grief into dark matter where no one can see it hemorrhage?

Do the constellations shift to make room for the sorrow, or does the obscurity simply deepen, devouring the absence like wine poured into earth?

Nothing in the cosmos ever truly dies. It changes. Gas becomes dust. Dust becomes pressure. And somewhere in that hush of destruction, a singular point forms so dense not even light can escape.

A grave. A seed. Both.

Later, it begins again. New heat. New orbit. New name. Did that happen to you? Is that what this is?

How many times have you shattered and reformed? How many times have you burned out, only to rise again like a ghost clothed in starlight, a memory made of ash and gravity?

Maybe you’re just stardust and the dead light of all the other yous that came before. Maybe this is not your first life. Maybe it’s not even your last.

But it still hurts like hell to live it.

Eventually, you go inside. The night follows you like gloom. You don’t turn on the lights. The soft outlines of your apartment are enough, faint traces of life caught in the blue spill of streetlights. The clock on the microwave blinks 3:07. You lie down across the couch, not bothering with the blanket. Your limbs fold into themselves as your eyes stay on the window, on that patch of sky still visible through the curtains.

You think of how he used to hold stillness like a secret, a storm that knew exactly when to shatter the sky. You remember the heat of his body beside yours, how it folded around sleep like a second skin. How the world stopped spinning with a kind of sacred pause. And now? It doesn’t lull. It prowls.

Closing your eyes, a thought drifts to the surface like a leaf on dark water: If he meant nothing, why does everything throb in the shape of him?

Sleep slips in like a tide returning home.

Your bare feet balance on the cold lip of a mountain ledge, toes curled just over the edge. Below, the world stretches vast and black and jagged, a city of spires rising like the broken bones of titans, slick with shadow. It hums low, like a beast at rest.

You were raised in towers that scraped the sky like prayers no god ever answered. Ivory spires, bone-white and blameless. They called it purity, but it felt like a cage.

Laughter was allowed, but only in whispers. Dreams were trimmed like overgrown vines, shaped to fit stained-glass outlines of who you were meant to be. You were told the city was dangerous, that the gates were locked for your protection.

That lie splinters in your chest now, a dull shard driven deeper with each breath. It was those same robed voices that later stood in rows to decide you must be sacrificed.

For balance.

For penance.

For sins you had not yet committed.

You stand on the edge of the Black City and sing while it calls to you. Not like a threat, but a birthright.

“You sing when you think no one’s listening.”

You glance over your shoulder, unsurprised. “You always show up when I think I’m alone.”

You’ve learned not to startle. The dragon doesn’t arrive like a man. He unfolds, like shadow spooling into form. He could be carved from obsidian, but the way he moves is too fluid for stone, as if submerged beneath a dark, restless sea.

Raven scales glint faintly in the hollow between neck and shoulder, catching the weak light like slick oil on stone. A cluster of them climbs up his throat like a scar, stark against skin that shifts, half-formed but infinite.

“You sing well,” he mutters absently.

You smile a little to yourself and look back out at the city below. “That’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said to me.”

The wind climbs the ledge and threads itself into your sleeves, but he doesn’t flinch. The cold ignores him, like even the weather knows better than to touch him.

“Do you have a name?” you ask suddenly. “Or should I just keep calling you ‘dragon’ forever?”

His eyes slide to yours, the colour of love buried alive. If gods ever bled, it would look like this.

“I have one, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s… old."

You arch a brow. “Try me.”

He tilts his head slightly. “Stayrus.” The word rolls off his tongue in a languid, deliberate purr, syllables older than your bloodline and shaped for a myth that once breathed fire into stars. “From the old tongue.”

You mouth it once, but the syllables don’t land right in your throat. “Stay…rus?”

“Not quite.” He smirks faintly. “Your kind never could pronounce it.”

He steps forward and lowers himself beside you. One of his clawed hands rests on the stone, warm even through the rock. His tail curves behind you like a crescent moon. It settles close, not touching but shielding you from the sharpest winds.

Your voice is barely a whisper. “What about Sylus? It’s not exact, but… it suits you. If you want it.”

He says nothing, but the way he breathes changes, like your naming him tugged some thread loose inside him that he didn’t know was knotted.

“Call me whatever you want,” he murmurs. “Just don’t sing so close to the cliff next time.”

Your brows knit as you peer at him. “Why?”

“You sound like you’re about to jump.”

The concern settles like fine dust in your lungs until it chokes. Beneath you, the city shimmers—towers of onyx rising like teeth from the earth, a place that does not flinch when the wind roars.

You clear your throat. “I used to think the stars were gods. Distant and cold, watching everything we did but never moving to stop it.”

Sylus doesn’t look at you, but you feel his attention shift like the tightening of a string. “And now?”

You shrug, arms curled around your knees. “Now I think they’re just holes poked in the world. So we don’t forget there’s something beyond it.”

He huffs—amused, maybe. Or trying not to be. “You say strange things.”

“I think strange things.”

“That,” he concludes with a trace of that bone-dry sarcasm, “is a dangerous habit.”

You smile to yourself. “So is flying with fiends."

He stares like a man who’s forgotten the weight of being seen and now doesn’t know whether to reach for it or run. His tail shifts closer, curling in a protective arc, as if shielding you from thoughts that bite too hard.

You drift closer, drawn not by gravity but by the orbit of him. You don’t reach for the stars tonight. They are already burning beneath his skin, and you, caught in his constellation, forget the sky was ever elsewhere.

The edge of the cliff crumbles beneath your heel, but you don’t fall. You’re already drifting—backward, inward, upward.

The world does not vanish. It ebbs.

Edges blur. The cliffside bleeds into sky. The city below fractures like glass submerged in black water, and the half-forgotten silhouette of him fades not with violence but with grace, like smoke remembering how to be air.

Above, the stars slant sideways. When the dream finally loosens its hold, peeling back the edges of that other world like wet silk, you do not wake with a start. You rise slowly, surfacing from beneath an ocean of memory.

The name comes with you.

Still warm.

Still his.

Still yours.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming, @morrigan87, @babyx91

Your comments and support have truly inspired me to keep writing, even when I feel like I'm mediocre and probably shouldn't be posting publically (depression is currently crushing my self-esteem). That said, I want to thank you every one of you that's taken the time to read my story, comment, follow, or reblog. ❤️ It means more than you think, even if you're just lurking!

Enjoy, sweeties! 🥰

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #love and deepspace #sylus x oc #sylus x you #sylus dragon

42 notes · View notes

star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 9: I Set the World on Fire and Called It Mourning

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different from in-game for story purposes.

You’re sparring with Nina in the training room at the Hunter’s Association, blades clashing in a blur of rhythmic chaos. She’s grinning, eyes alight with mischief as she darts in and out of range like a mosquito on espresso.

The training swords may be blunt, but Nina’s wielding hers like she’s trying to settle an old grudge. “You’re sluggish today. Been distracted? Someone brooding and beautiful keeping you up late?”

You duck under her swing. “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the sound of your desperation.”

Nina lets out a bark of laughter, stepping back to reset. “Ooooh, the claws come out. Bet you practice your hair flips in the mirror before sparring.”

With a burst of momentum, you vault up, flipping clean over her head. You land with a thud, fling your hair back like a soap opera villain, and bellow dramatically, “The mirror is but a portal to my own magnificence! Tremble before it!”

Nina lets out a scandalized wheeze, spinning to face you with the expression of someone who just found out her cereal was spiked with vodka.

“Okay. First of all? Rude. Second—are you trying to seduce me or duel me?”

You smirk. “Why not both?”

“So. Tell me. Have you sinned yet?” She points her sword at you dramatically. “You know. The horizontal bone zone. The astral tango. The forbidden handshake.”

“NINA.”

She advances, devilish grin growing. “The passion pit. The soul smush. The cha-cha with the curtains drawn.”

“What?!”

Her smile could power a small village. “C’mon! Don’t play coy. I’ve seen the way you look at him. And the way he looks at you like he’s mentally undressing your entire genetic code.”

She taps the flat of her sword against her chin thoughtfully. “Does he bite? Does he growl? Does he chant eldritch poetry into your clavicle while unbuttoning his shirt at the speed of sin?”

Your sword drops to your side like it’s given up. “This is harassment.”

“Just blink twice if he’s got demon stamina. I need to know. For science. For the archives. For my sanity. Is he proportionate?! I need answers. That man looks like a walking Greek tragedy with bonus abs. Don’t be selfish.”

“I will walk into traffic.”

She winks. “Fine, fine. Just answer me this: on a scale of ‘gentle caress’ to ‘I blacked out and woke up fluent in ancient languages,’ how was it?”

The rapid-fire questions cause you to misstep for the first time all match. In your hesitation, Nina strikes. As her blade finds your chest, the sky forgets how to stand still. Blinding pain splits you open. Your spine arches, breath trapped, as if an unseen hand grips all your tendons and yanks. It isn’t the sting of blunted steel. It’s something buried that’s clawing its way back up. Your knees buckle, and you fall as you clutch at your chest, gasping.

The training room wavers, reality’s couplings soften, and its edges liquefy. Nina’s voice fades as the present slips from your grasp.

Time has unspooled without mercy, a slow bleed of years dissolving into one another. How much, you cannot say. You’ve spent centuries, perhaps eons, adrift in a sea of hollow hours, where even the echoes have forgotten their names.

Philos lies like a gaping, rotting wound. It has become a dream bled dry by your two hands. The cities sleep in shattered reverence, their proud spires bowed like penitent saints, draped in vines like mourning veils. The wind stirs the bones of a planet, carrying with it the scent of forgotten history.

You do not grieve. Grief is a ritual for the innocent, and you buried yours beneath the first body. What remains is a memory scorched clean of mercy. Philos is gone, its name smeared in the language of ruin. And you? You were the last one to speak it.

Now, only the animals haunt these broken places—creatures with moon-glass eyes and no memory of fire. They do not flinch from you.

Perhaps they mistake you for a ghost. Perhaps you are.

You lie in the black cathedral, altar to your tragedy, where he lingers as a god-shaped absence carved into every stone. In the breathless hush of that forsaken sanctuary, days bleed into weeks, as still and silent as the tombs beneath. You sleep through the turning of leaves, the thawing of frost, the birth and death of bloom like a ghost in a house that once knew love.

Seasons vanish while you chase echoes of his voice through your mind. He calls your name in dreams, a shadow stitched into your skin, never close enough to touch but never far enough to forget.

Stillness becomes you. Patience becomes penance. But death, cruel thing, forgets your name. You do not hunger. You do not thirst. The body that carries you is no more than a monument of nerves and bone.

You have tried—oh, how you’ve tried—to tear yourself from time’s grip. You’ve thrown your body to the mercy of stone and sky, cast yourself from peaks where gods once breathed thunder. You feel the flesh give way, bones fracture, and sinew undone, but when you wake, the wound is gone. Your body is pristine once more, as though the earth rewrote you in secret.

The mountains turned you blue with cold, but not gone. The deserts blistered your skin, but not your soul. Even the oceans held you like a lover and let you go. You have wept in every language of loss, begged for mercy in the form of oblivion.

The answer is always no.

Death has abandoned you. Your body is a prisoner to its own pulse. So you wait, and wait, caught in a cruel purgatory like a breath held forever.

Whatever once animated this shell—joy, terror, ache—has turned to decay. Your eyelids are drawn like curtains over a stage long abandoned, the actors gone, the lights cold, the audience dust. Not even sorrow lingers.

Only the void remains, watching itself.

Sometimes, in the stillness of those long, endless nights, there is a warm breeze where there should be none that carries his voice. It is a dream only in the way thunder is a whisper. This is the elegy of fate, a collision sewn into the fabric of the cosmos, reaching through time like roots seeking the grave they once bloomed from.

You are a fallen sigil folded in a crescent of grief. Wings rest slack, tail wrapped around you like the memory of warmth you no longer care to seek.

Time slips its noose again. How long has it been? It does not matter anymore. The ground is patient, the air reverent, as if all of nature is holding vigil. You think perhaps the world itself waits in mourning for you to dissolve into the earth and become another forgotten god beneath the dust.

The organ waits in silence, its keys untouched, a graveyard of chords once alive beneath your hands. You stare, hollow-eyed, remembering when your voice could wake the sky.

Those days are gone. Now, your voice has wandered so far from you, it feels as foreign as the name you no longer answer to. The song you once sang for him remains unfinished, like the life you never lived, the love that never reached its final note.

You breathe in the ruinous cold, and at last your voice breaks the silence. The final verse of the Requiem slips from your lips, like a wound that sings as it splits.

“The ashes fall, the stars grow cold,

Beneath the wings of fire’s hold.

By shadows bound, by light betrayed,

A lover’s soul, by sorrow swayed.”

As the final verse dissolves, so does the illusion—of joy, of survival, of self. What’s left behind is not a life, but the outline of one. Your hands find the place where your heart remembers him, before time made a mausoleum of it.

All around you, the quiet tightens, heavy as earth on a coffin lid. There is only one act left to perform, a final plea cast into the void. You’ve tried to unmake yourself through the very thread that once made you whole, but like the earth, it has rejected you.

Your hands do not move, but your soul reaches into the chamber where your strength lies tangled with his. It is a strange communion, fractured but alive, like stars buried beneath the ocean.

As if pulled from the depths, the power explodes in a radiant fury—a swirling dance of dark and light. The sword, a living extension of that ancient, tangled power, slices through flesh and bone with a finality that shatters the stillness.

The pain is immediate, a ferocious torrent of fire and ice crashing through your veins. Your soul unravels, like petals torn from a wilted flower, drifting away, scattered by an unseen breath.

The earth trembles with a dragon’s cry in the distance. It is not just grief; it is a soul stretched to breaking, a heart shattered across lifetimes. The ground beneath you shivers as if the planet mourns his loss, echoing his grief with every tremor.

“I will find you, Sy.”

For the first time in eons, the corners of your lips tremble upward. This is the last gift you will ever give yourself. The world becomes a smear, and you are adrift in the void.

As the darkness claims you, you know—at last—the weight of peace settling where sorrow once ruled.

You blink as the world lurches back into place around you, but it lands crooked.

“Anira?” Nina’s voice cuts through the ringing in your ears.

You cough, the motion wringing pain from deep inside your chest, and press a trembling hand to where the blade struck. “I’m fine, Nina. Just a little… winded.”

She looks at you like she sees the fracture lines beneath your skin. You rise on unsteady feet, every breath a serrated knife being twisted behind your sternum, and still, you swallow it.

The air tastes of memory burnt along its edges, and you try to breathe it away, excusing yourself with a smile that doesn’t reach your eyes.

Nina surveys you for a beat too long, brows knit, her sword hanging loose in her hand. “Yeah… go cool off. You look like you saw a ghost or something.”

You make it to the showers on muscle memory alone, barely registering the weight of the door as it closes behind you. The silence bends around you, leaving nothing but the sound of your own undoing.

Your fingers fumble at your clothes, clumsy with tremor and dread. Beneath your ribs, the ache drones in a mournful thrum. No mark mars the skin, yet the agony suspends there, as if every breath brushes a razor-edge buried lifetimes ago.

Stepping beneath the scalding stream, you let it sear across your skin like atonement. The reverberation of eons spent alone hums through you like a forgotten dirge. Pressing your palm against the wall, you try to swallow the scream balling in your throat.

Still, the anguish persists.

Your fist snaps forward in an abrupt, helpless motion. The tile cracks beneath your knuckles with a brittle shatter, hairline fractures spidering out like timelines split open. The impact hews skin from bone, crimson threading down your wrist like unwelcome truth.

The copper bite of blood floods your mouth before you realize the pressure of your teeth clasped down on your lip. You sought death out, chasing its elusive shadow across every crumbling horizon. You wandered the edges of the world, where life twisted and bent but never broke. You can still feel it, the absence of finality, the hollow space that never filled, no matter how deep you dug.

Tears spill from your eyes before you can summon the strength to deny them. Between the rivulets of scalding water, they are indistinguishable to anyone but yourself. You grind your teeth, jaw locked so tightly it aches, trying to convince yourself it’s only the steam peeling at your edges.

Until a ragged sob cleaves through you and your knees buckle. You crumple against the wall, sliding down until your descent is halted by the floor. Your knees tuck tight to your chest, your body folding inwards—not neatly or gracefully, but like broken wings curling instinctively around a heart that has long since split its sutures.

It feels as though your essence continues to carry the memory of every eon spent wandering through silence, hands outstretched for a home that never came.

You bury your face in the fragile sanctuary of your arms and let the dam break. First, a tremor. Then a quake. The sobs tear free in shuddering waves, the kind of weeping that does not belong to this life but to all the lives before it.

A mourning that tastes of lost centuries, of empty skies, of goodbyes you have never spoken and still carry like splinters beneath your skin.

The water pelts you in endless, numbing sheets, sliding over your trembling frame as you remain curled at the bottom of the stall. You can’t bring yourself to move. You barely register the way your skin has gone pale and pruned, the way your body quivers with a cold that feels more rooted in your marrow than on your flesh.

Somewhere, distantly, you’re aware of Nina hammering on the door, but the sound feels like it’s filtering through a heavy sea. You’re floating deeper, deeper, deeper, the call of the world above losing all meaning.

You don’t answer. You can’t. You’re not sure you’re still stitched properly into your body. Actually, you’re not sure of anything at all.

The next thing you’re aware of is a voice lacing into the static.

“Anira?”

For a breath, you think it’s just another echo conjured by your unlacing mind until the shower curtain shifts aside. Sylus stands there, broad-shouldered and furious with worry, the bathroom light shearing across his vivid red eyes.

He takes one look at you and swears under his breath. The water is off in the next second, Sylus reaching past you with swift, decisive movements. Silence falls except for the ragged sounds of your breathing.

Sylus drops into a crouch, voice still taut with urgency but touched now with the bruised hush of someone afraid to break you further. “Come here, sweetheart.”

You reach for motion, but your body curls tighter, cradling a sorrow it cannot bear to set down. He must sense it because he shifts closer, patience wreathed into every line of him. One hand braces lightly against the back of your head, shielding you from the worst of the cold tile. The other hovers briefly, then rests warm and solid against your shoulder.

His touch is an anchor. Painfully, you drag yourself back down into the shivering, aching vessel of your body. The tremble in your limbs intensifies, but you manage to uncurl the smallest amount. A fractured sob tears out as you finally lurch forward, scrambling for him.

He catches you instantly, pulling you into his chest, and his arms lock around you. With a sweep of his hand, his Evol flares to life, and tendrils of black and crimson energy slither. A towel floats over, summoned from across the room, and he wraps it around you with surprising gentleness. He rubs careful circles along your back and arms, trying to entice warmth back into you.

You burrow closer without thinking, your fingers fisting the fabric of his shirt, your body seeking out the steady beat of him.

He doesn’t ask you to explain. He doesn’t demand anything at all. He just stays there, burning like a lighthouse through the wreckage.

It takes time for you to come back enough to register anything beyond the rise and fall of Sylus’s chest against your cheek.

You feel him shift, hear the low murmur of his voice cutting through the fog, but it’s not meant for you. You pry your eyes open just enough to catch the blurred outline of Nina, hovering anxiously at the threshold of the bathroom. She nods rapidly and vanishes down the hall.

You remain slumped against him, your legs unsteady when he finally coaxes you upright. His Evol flares again, wisps moving like extensions of his will, plucking your discarded clothes from the floor.

Sylus helps you dress with methodical, careful movements. He steadies you with a hand splayed across your spine, grounding you each time you threaten to slip back into the undertow.

Nina returns with your things clutched to her chest. Her eyes are wide and worried, but she doesn’t comment while passing them over to Sylus. He thanks her with a clipped nod and threads his fingers through yours. You follow where he leads, your body moving on instinct, your mind somewhere half-lost between then and now.

The halls are mercifully empty. Somewhere in the haze, you’re aware of Sylus pressing a kiss to the back of your hand before tugging you faster toward the exit. The air outside is cool, the sky caught between late afternoon and the first yawning stretch of evening. He helps you into the passenger seat of his car, turning on the seat warmer and buckling you in.

Shrugging out of his leather jacket, he drapes it over you before cranking the heat full blast. You sink into the seat, shivering under the cocoon of his coat.

The door clicks shut, and with a ripple of scarlet mist, Sylus materializes behind the wheel, urgency woven into every sharp movement as he merges into the city’s restless flow.

For all the hours you’ve drifted in his orbit, you’ve never once seen him hurry—not when bullets cut the air, not when Wanderers tore the ground apart. Seeing it now is like glimpsing a ripple in a reflection that was supposed to be still.

Your voice breaks the quiet, barely tethered to the present. “…Why were you there?”

He spares a glance at you, his mouth flattening into a line. “Nina called me from your phone and said something was wrong. I was in the car before she even finished the sentence.”

You blink slowly. “I’m sorry…” you whisper, guilt bubbling faintly at the edges of your numbness. “It’s barely dusk. You—you should be sleeping.”

At that, Sylus makes an incredulous noise in the back of his throat. “Anira. If you think I give a shit about sleep when you’re hurting, you don’t know me at all,” he scolds with tender reproach.

Your lip wobbles at the sincerity braided into his timbre. You are breaking along fault lines time buried. Without meaning to, words start tumbling from your mouth in broken fragments, hitched between sobs you can’t fully smother.

“I was alone…” you whisper. “For so long. Eons. I—” Each breath shivers loose from your chest, as if the grief is a beast made of storm and teeth, clawing its way up your throat. “I couldn’t… couldn’t bear it anymore. I killed myself.”

Sylus reaches over, gently tightening his fingers around your uninjured hand, a barely there tremble in the strength of his grip.

“There was a church… in the ruin of Philos.” The name slips out so naturally you don’t even realize the significance, or the way Sylus stiffens. “I waited for something that never came. I kept waiting. And waiting…”

A fresh wave of sobs wells up, but you fight to speak through them. Sylus drives faster, weaving through the lattice of the city like he’s racing against something neither of you can see.

The rest of the drive blurs. You must fall asleep at some point or drift close enough that you don’t remember the arrival, because the next thing you know, Sylus is gathering you up into his arms.

You fold against him, body pliant with exhaustion. He carries you into the penthouse, the distant sound of the elevator, the soft chime of the doors.

Somewhere nearby, you hear Luke’s concerned voice, but Sylus is already talking. “Get the chef. Tell him to make some tea.”

He brings you to the bedroom. You blink, disoriented, as he helps you shed your clothes and change into a thick sweater, loose pants, and socks that are too big.

Stillness betrays you; a shudder coils through your frame, spun from the silence where you begged the stars to remember you, and they did not.

You sit on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing, and the words fall out of you before you can catch them. “I killed them all.”

His eyes sharpen as he crouches in front of you, hands braced lightly on your knees. “Who?”

A bright, blood-edged fury coils through your veins. “Everyone,” you snarl. “I killed everyone. They took something from me, and I made them pay in blood.”

The shadows in Sylus’s expression deepen. He helps you gently to your feet and leads you to the living room. You sink into the couch, a pile of blankets already waiting.

Luke appears from the kitchen with a steaming mug of tea and hands it to you. The ceramic is warm against your fingers, grounding you just enough to breathe without sobbing.

Sylus rises and murmurs something to Kieran, voice pitched too low for you to fully catch. You watch him as he talks—tall, composed, dangerous, and tender all at once.

You remember the words you said right before you shattered whatever life you’d once clung to.

I’ll find you, Sy.

Your breath catches in your throat. You stare at Sylus’s back, at the familiar cut of his shoulders, the way he stands like he’s spent lifetimes carrying things too heavy to name.

Testing, you murmur, “Sy?”

Sylus turns immediately. Not sharply. Not confused. Just… immediately, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

He meets your eyes with that same grave calm he always wears. For a breathless second, he even starts to answer as if nothing is strange about it at all. Then you see it. The subtle catch in his breath. The way his hand flexes where it rests against the back of the couch.

“…Why did you call me that?” He asks, and you can hear the forced neutrality in his tone.

You don’t blink or look away. “Why did you answer to it?”

The weight of the moment sinks between you. You curl tighter around the cup, as if it might shield you from the inevitable.

Somewhere inside, something fragile and half-forgotten stirs.

The way he looked at you that first night. The way he always leaned closer when you were hurting. You think about the dream, about the planet you should not know, and the dragon you promised to find.

You were sure then that even if the stars burned out, even if the worlds turned to dust, you would find your way back to him.

Maybe you already have.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming, @morrigan87, @babyx91

Take care everyone and enjoy! ☺️

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #love and deepspace #sylus x oc #sylus x you #sylus lads #sylus qin

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 8: Shadow of Always

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different from in-game for story purposes.

It’s the wind that speaks first, fluent in the tongue of memory, redolent with the ghosts of rain-soaked petals and ancient ground. You kneel in silence, hands lifted in longing, reaching for a figure the light refuses to name.

He stands ahead, not formed so much as felt. A silhouette like an eclipse given shape, where myth and memory bleed together. The light behind him is blinding, casting him in a halo of fire-drenched gold that obscures every detail but a chosen few.

Horns rise from his skull like the spires of a cathedral, curving toward the heavens. They split the last light of day like a sundial at the edge of eternity.

Behind him, a tail sways slow and idle, cutting lazy shapes through the air like a serpent dreaming in sunlight. His shoulders are too broad, his stillness too exact. His shape flickers at the edges—a suggestion of wings, perhaps, or smoke wearing the memory of flight.

You cannot see his face. The light denies you that, but those red eyes—low embers in a dying sun—hold you as if they’ve known you for a thousand lives and grieved every one.

Your name slips from his lips like a god mouthing the first word of creation. “Anira.”

You know him. Not from this world, not from waking hours, but from the marrow of dreams and lifetimes folded into dust. Your fingers ache with the shape of his jaw. Your skin stirs at the phantom weight of his hands.

You rise like mist from still water, take one step forward, and the dream inhales with you. “Who are you?”

No answer.

You reach for him, fingers outstretched, trembling with the ache of recognition, but the space between you remains inviolate. The distance is as vast and as cruel as the hush after a farewell. You walk across a ground that forgets your steps, but he never draws nearer. It’s as if time pools wrong here and has rewritten the rules of closeness.

He remains a demarcated shadow carved from dusk and distance, anchored at the edge of a world that no longer remembers how to let you in.

“Sylus?”

Just before the world tears open, you feel a bloom of warmth against your chest, fleeting as breath, the touch of fingers that do not exist but still know the curve of your cheek. His voice is a vibration strung through your ribs like the tension of fate.

“Stay by my side until the end of time.”

It shatters you with a recognition that echoes, primordial as the rise of mountains, reverberating through you like the pulse of eternity itself.

Then, he is gone. Unmade.

As if the dream could not hold divinity any longer.

As if even eternity must grieve.

“Anira.”

It doesn’t pass through your ears but rises within you. A sound you were born knowing, hewn into your being by a voice you would answer to, even in the ruin of all things.

You stir. Eyes half-lidded in the hush that follows dreams, that liminal ache between vanishing and return. Light paints the room in fractured gold, pouring across silk sheets in molten ribbons. Shadows stretch like relics across the walls, moving with the solemn rhythm of lost centuries.

The dream clings with the ghost of fire along your skin, as though lightning kissed you and never quite let go. Scarlet eyes lit like divination etched from votive flames, horns spiralling like sacred geometry, and a tail swaying in sunlit stillness. Your body hums with him still, like a temple left ringing with the memory of its final prayer. “Hey.”

You shift and find him watching with one arm bent, head tilted with a kind of effortless poise. His eyes, heavy-lashed and dusk-lit, carry concern like a secret hymn. “You spoke while dreaming,” he discloses, and for once there’s no smirk, no mischief, only observation shaped like a question he’s too cautious to ask aloud.

“It wasn’t a nightmare,” you claim, voice hoarse with sleep and the remnants of wonder. You keep your attention fixed elsewhere, unwilling to meet his eyes. The memory still clings like a half-shed skin, too recent, too raw, as if some part of you never quite returned. He shifts just enough to brush a knuckle along your cheek, barely a touch, like he’s asking permission to stay near your orbit.

“Okay,” he acquiesces, simply.

You shift through the quiet like a tide returning to shore, the dream’s remnants trailing behind you like gossamer threads still clinging to your skin. Wordless, instinctual, you drift closer. Your fingers find the edge of his ribs and trace the path inward until you’re curled against him. A shape you’ve taken before, somewhere, in lives unnamed. You bury your face just beneath his collarbone, breathing in the scent of skin still marked by sleep and you.

His arm slips around you without hesitation, palm settling between your shoulder blades, as if this is where you’ve always belonged, pressed against the rhythm of him.

You think, with the kind of clarity that only comes in half-light—yes, you could make a home in the heat between your bodies, in the soft ache of silence shared, and call it forever.

“You know,” you murmur, lips brushing the warmth of his skin, “I’m starting to believe you might actually like me a little more than you let on.”

He shakes his head faintly, but he doesn’t refute it. His arm tightens around you instead, as though he’s bracing himself against the weight of how true it might be.

“You are allowed to admit it, you know. I won’t tell anyone. It’ll be our little secret—‘criminal overlord caught being emotionally compromised by five-foot-something menace.’ Scandalous.”

His breath hitches so quietly you wouldn’t catch it if you weren’t pressed this close. The softest edge of a laugh follows, low and incredulous.

You grin into his chest. Victory.

His fingers trail down the curve of your spine, like maybe he’s already lost you once before and doesn’t intend to let go this time. “You get under my skin, Miss Hunter,” he murmurs at last.

Your breath mingles with his, your gaze climbing the slope of his chest until you meet those eyes made of soft-lit rubies. He watches you as if you’ve been painted on the walls of every life he’s lived and only now stepped out of the frame.

“Oh no,” you tease, lips tilting almost smugly, “am I compromising your cool, stoic reputation? Say it isn’t so.”

One hand lifts, fingers brushing a strand of your hair behind your ear with a tenderness that doesn’t match the legend they whisper in back alleys and auction halls. You’re close enough to feel the tension in him, like he’s holding back everything and only barely managing it.

You arch a brow, deliberately wicked. “Sylus, if you keep looking at me like that, I’ll start to think you’re in love with me.”

Silence sharpens for half a breath before his voice, like dark honey, pours slow, tremoring with a restraint so fragile it shivers like glass in a quake. “Maybe I am.”

Your heart stumbles in your chest, a skipped beat caught between inhale and surrender. You haven’t even found the words, and he’s already leaning in. The brush of his mouth against your ear is a promise in the guise of breath, warm enough to unmake thought and unravel the scaffolding of logic.

“Or maybe,” he whispers, “I just like collecting dangerous little things who bite.”

Your laugh bursts free, light and shameless. “That’s dangerously close to a confession.”

“Good thing I live dangerously.”

He kisses your temple so softly it barely counts, and you melt into him like a sigh. You trace patterns across his ribs, and he lets you, one hand resting easy on the curve of your hip.

Eventually, you lift your head, eyes glinting mischievously. “So… if I tried to run right now, would you chase me?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “No.”

“No?”

“I’d give you a ten-second head start,” he drawls, utterly deadpan. “Then I’d find you, tie you to the bed, and remind you why running is pointless.”

Your heart stumbles, tumbles, and dives off a cliff, but your mouth? Your mouth has never met a filter it liked.

“Oh?” You hum, half lullaby, half dare, spun from the shadows behind your smile. “Ten seconds to run, only to end up exactly where I wanted to be?” You tilt your head, coy. “You’re assuming I wouldn’t just drop to the floor at second three and wait.”

He watches you with that slow-burn stare. “Careful, kitten,” he warns, reaching up to brush his fingers over your jaw. “I might take that as an invitation.”

You nuzzle into his palm like it was. “Oh, I do hope so.”

“There’s a black market auction tonight,” he offers, brushing his thumb along your cheek. “I want you to come with me.”

You stretch against him like a cat, arms winding around his waist, nose brushing beneath his jaw. “Who are we killing?”

His chuckle is a rumbling, delighted sound, vibrating through his chest and into yours. “You think I’d take you somewhere public to commit murder?”

You tilt your head up just enough to meet his eyes. “You have before.”

“Not on a first date.”

You know what kind of world he’s inviting you into—not the soft dark of his sheets, but the other one. The world with shadows that bite and names with prices attached. Where trust is a weapon, and loyalty’s never free.

He still thinks you’re just a Hunter with a good heart, the kind that holds onto hope, running headfirst into danger because someone else needs saving.

You’ve never wanted to prove someone wrong more in your life.

You didn’t become a Hunter to be a hero. You did it for the pure, blistering thrill of dancing with death and coming out the other side laughing. Saving people? Sure. That’s… uh, nice. But it’s the fight you crave. The adrenaline. The edge.

And Sylus’s world? It is all teeth and silence, veiled threats dressed as compliments. His world moves like a knife—gleaming, graceful, fatal.

You don’t just want to step into it; you want to fucking thrive in it.

You want him to see you not as someone to shield, but as someone who will stand beside him when the floor drops out and the knives come down.

You arrive with Sylus beside you like the edge of a blade sheathed in charm. No names offered. No questions asked. The guards at the entrance stand like statues carved from purpose. Their gazes skim the surface, but none dare bar his path.

Inside, the reception hall glitters with the sheen of a beautifully crafted deception—flawless on the surface, hollow beneath. The ceiling soars like ambition, and the obsidian floor catches your steps like ripples in a dark pool. The guests are peddlers of shadows and whispered wars, robed in decadence, dripping quiet threat. Their smiles cut like jewelled knives. Their laughter crackles with the voltage of veiled intent.

Sylus’s hand brushes the small of your back, guiding without commanding. A silent claim. A warning to the room. Mine.

You let it linger.

A server passes by, offering champagne in fluted glassware that hums faintly, likely sound-dampening, to keep eavesdroppers from listening in too closely. You take one.

You drift together past the first display arranged in a draped alcove: a pair of matching short blades suspended mid-air, turning slowly as if dancing.

The placard reads, “Forged from the hull of the Astera-9, last vessel to breach the Void Rift and survive. Rumoured to sing when drawn in vacuum.”

You whistle low. “Subtle.”

Sylus smirks. “For when you want your murder to come with a soundtrack.”

The next display is a Protocore. Its pulses a low thrum, singing faintly to your Evol like a storm pacing in chains. You’re still caught in its pull, fingertips tingling with the ache of what could be, when a voice slices through the static.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you here,” someone drawls behind you, every syllable oiled in arrogance. His gaze skims you like you’re another artifact on display. “Didn’t think Sylus kept company that could actually smile.”

You turn, the weight of him already sour in your mouth. “Didn’t think people like you still had kneecaps.”

He laughs smugly, amused, but he doesn’t step back. “You’re cute when you try to be threatening.”

Sylus is silent beside you, but you feel the shift. Power begins to gather beneath your feet, slow and seismic, drawn up from the roots of the world. You know that feeling. You know his Evol. He hasn’t so much as breathed differently, but it’s rising, coiling. You brush your fingers against his arm in a silent, don’t.

You step forward with the kind of calm that always comes before something burns. “You know what your problem is?” you ask softly.

The man smirks, still playing his part. “Aside from being devastatingly handsome?”

“It’s not that you talk too much,” you say, circling him now, your voice curling around him like solar wind. “It’s that you think no one’s ever hurt you because you’re untouchable.” You lean in, whispering like it’s a secret. “But it’s just that no one’s bothered yet. I would be more than happy to change that.”

He laughs nervously and glances between you and Sylus, but he just raises a brow, a half-smile cutting lazy and sharp across his face like he knew you’d win. The man stammers something about needing another drink and disappears into the crowd.

You turn back just as Sylus lets the tension drain from his posture, Evol pulling back into his bones like a tide. You wink, snagging a new flute of champagne from a tray. “Keep your energy charge low, Trouble. I’ve got this.”

He closes the distance like it’s nothing, like it’s always been his right—his voice carved in warmth, edged with fondness. “Kitten, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re trying to impress me.”

You sip slowly and smile wickedly. “Who says I haven’t already?”

The tension between you lingers, hot, delicious, and just shy of combustion. The main auction hall yawns before you like the belly of a jewel-encrusted beast, crawling with enough wealth to buy and sell a small country three times over.

You sip your champagne carefully, mostly to avoid blurting out the number of zeroes listed on the placards. Weapons suspended in glass cases, stolen art, and Protocores sealed like ancient relics behind biometric locks. You’re still not convinced that last one wasn’t humming your name.

You lean toward Sylus. “Are we here to buy something, or are we window shopping at Armageddon prices?”

He doesn’t answer—just shifts, the brush of his hand at the small of your back so natural it feels like gravity remembering your name. With that single touch, he starts forward, and the crowd parts like it’s been waiting for him. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t ask. He simply moves, and the world obliges.

You follow, heart pacing a little faster, partly from champagne, partly from the way the crowd watches him, like he’s the final word in a language they’re still learning to fear.

You’ve always known he holds power in this place, but watching it ripple in real time? That’s something else. It’s one thing to hear the ocean. It’s another to realize it listens even when he does not speak.

Sylus leads you to another doorway, flanked by two guards in carbon-weave suits, both armed and built like stone walls. One glance at him, and neither says a word. No scan. No ID check. Just a nod, and the doors whisper open.

The shift is immediate. The noise falls away like a curtain dropped. The lighting dims to a richer, more intimate glow. No spotlighted stages here, only a smaller lounge with fewer chairs and sharper eyes.

“Uh… Sylus?” you murmur, leaning toward him as he strolls like he owns the moon. “I think we just walked into a sequel to the auction. Possibly the part where the price tags involve human sacrifice.”

“The other room,” he answers, guiding you toward a table with a perfect view, “is for poor people.”

You nearly choke on your champagne.

“What?”

He shrugs, easing into a seat like it was carved for him. “I didn’t come all this way to sit with amateurs.”

You blink and snort. “You’re unbelievable.”

His grin widens. “You say that like it’s news.”

You take the seat beside him and cross your legs like you’re settling in for a game of “Guess Who’s the Richest Sociopath.” The chairs are some kind of leather. The glasses are crystal. The people? Sharks in couture.

You’re ninety percent sure the woman two seats over has a ring carved from a meteorite. Either that, or a chunk of a small moon she murdered for fashion.

Sylus leans back, the very picture of indifferent sin. One ankle perched over his knee, fingertips lazily brushing his jaw. He hasn’t even glanced at the bidding program. He has the same energy as a man who shows up late to a card game he’s already won.

You tilt your head. “You know there’s a pamphlet, right?”

“Mm,” he hums, eyes still forward, “I find mystery adds to the thrill.”

“You mean you just want to be surprised when someone tries to sell a weapon that violates twelve treaties.”

“Fourteen,” he corrects smoothly.

You glance sideways, lips twitching. “Do you ever tire of being the most terrifying man in a room?”

“I make an effort to stay humble,” he says, completely inscrutable. “For example, I only bought one abandoned military complex this year.”

“If I bid on something, are you going to finance my questionable life choices?”

One brow arches with mock scandal. “Sweetie. I am your questionable life choice.”

Touché.

“How does it work?” you ask, trying to sound casual.

Sylus’s body angles toward you, slow as a sun-drunk predator stretching after a nap. “You raise your hand if you want something. Simple.”

“That’s your great advice?” You scoff, twisting in your seat to face him. “You raise your hand? What if I sneeze aggressively and end up owning an antimatter cannon?”

One corner of his mouth lifts like it’s enjoying a private joke. “Then we’d have an antimatter cannon. I’d name it after you.”

You narrow your eyes and swipe a champagne flute off a passing tray with a dramatic flourish. “This place is a little above my paygrade. I couldn’t afford a bolt from one of these toys.”

He stretches one arm along the back of your chair, like he’s ready to lounge through a battlefield with an expression that borders on insulted. “Kitten,” his voice flattens, “don’t insult me.”

Your brows lift. “Excuse me?”

“If you want something,” he murmurs, leaning in just enough to dust your ear with the warmth of his breath, “point. Nod. Breathe at it. I’ll make it yours.”

A surprised laugh tumbles out of you before you can bite it down. “You’re actually serious.”

His thigh presses just a touch more deliberately against yours. It’s casual, like he’s not fully aware of the pressure, but Sylus doesn’t tend to do things by accident.

“This whole sugar daddy thing was definitely not in the fine print,” you joke, swirling your glass to give your fingers something to do.

He tilts his head, unconcerned. “Must’ve missed the memo. I write my own contracts.”

You lean back in your seat, letting your leg slip beneath the table until your foot brushes his once, then again lazily, like a test. “And what exactly does a Sylus contract cost?”

His eyes shift toward you, low-lidded, slow-burning. That look he gets right before he breaks something or kisses you. “Undivided attention. Yours. Mine. No distractions. No mercy. No halfway.”

Your pulse flutters, too loud in your ears. Still, you raise your glass in a mock toast, eyes never leaving his. “You’re single-handedly destroying my respectable career trajectory.”

A glint sharpens behind his smile. “Please. You were already halfway to hell before I touched you.”

You snort, elbow shifting toward his ribs in playful defiance. Before the motion completes, his hand catches you. His fingers close around you like a vow being spoken without words. He presses a kiss to the soft bend of your wrist, lips brushing the thrum beneath your skin as if tasting your heartbeat.

Just as your breath hitches, the room's lights dim, and the auctioneer steps forward. The first item on the block gleams like it knows how expensive it is. An exo-carbon phase knife, suspended in a glass case that probably has more security than most national vaults. It vibrates, a low, hungry frequency that hums in your molars and threatens your dental insurance.

“Opening bid,” the auctioneer states, “twelve-point-eight million.”

You immediately inhale your champagne and have an out-of-body experience. “Twelve what?”

Sylus lifts an eyebrow, bored in a way that has to be cultivated. “Starter weapon.”

“Starter for what? Slicing moons in half?”

He parries with a grin. “Duels. If you’re feeling dramatic.”

“Dramatic?” You gesture at the glowing death blade. “That thing looks like it writes breakup letters in blood.”

Sylus lifts his glass, entirely too calm. “Well, we all need hobbies.”

You squint at him. “Is this one of those hobbies where someone ends up missing a kidney and blaming a bad date?”

He shrugs. “Depends on the aim.”

One bidder raises a single finger, another barely tilts his chin. Millions traded in gestures so quiet, they might be mistaken for prayer.

The auction drags on, a parade of opulence so extravagant it might give a humble monarch a nervous breakdown. You sip your drink as you watch the madness unfold. There are gold-plated sniper rifles studded with diamonds, each shot worth more than a small nation’s GDP.

Next out is a laser rifle. It’s sleek, the barrel a glimmering sheen of polished black, embedded with a strip of glowing blue circuitry that pulses like a heartbeat. The auctioneer veritably purrs as he presents it.

“Next, we have the exclusive Model X-12 laser rifle. Fully customizable, biometric lockout keyed to the owner’s DNA, zero drift, and a recoil system so smooth it’s like firing a thought.”

Gripping your glass with a little too much enthusiasm, you swallow the drool pooling in your mouth. That beautiful piece of tech is the stuff wet dreams are made of. You picture it in your hands. The weight of it, that sleek, powerful curve, the way it hums with raw potential. You’d walk into a room, and people would stop, stare, maybe even salivate, instantly falling to their knees, totally overcome by your sheer badassery.

Stop it, Anira. It’s a weapon, not an object of pure, unrestrained lust, but you can’t deny that this gun is making you feel things. You can feel that thrum of electricity from the tip of the barrel all the way down to your toes.

Sylus seems to notice immediately. He doesn’t say anything, but his attention flits over to you, catching that brief, involuntary flash of interest.

“Opening bid,” the auctioneer continues, oblivious to the tension now bubbling under the surface. “Twenty million.”

Your champagne almost ends up on the floor, but you catch it in time. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Sylus raising his hand.

“Sylus,” you whisper. “Put your fucking hand down.”

He’s leaning back in his chair like this is a spa day and not a financial homicide. One hand casually lifts, like gravity is just a polite suggestion.

You nearly pass out. “No. No, no, no, no—what are you doing?”

“Bidding,” he states, not looking at you.

“Why?!”

“You looked at it.”

“I look at a lot of things! That doesn’t mean I want to own them!”

Another bid goes out. Sylus raises his hand again, and you kick him under the table.

He finally glances over, infuriatingly amused. “What?”

“Stop it,” you hiss. “I don’t need a gun that costs more than every organ in my body combined, and that includes my teeth.”

“You like it.”

“I like oxygen, too. Please don’t try to buy me the atmosphere.”

Thirty million.

You’re going to be sick. You’re going to throw up directly into your tiny gold clutch. He’s going to spend a lifetime of money on a murder stick because you had the audacity to blink at it like it was interesting.

You lean in closer, whispering like a hostage negotiator. “I don’t want you to think I’m with you for the money.”

“I don’t,” he says.

“Then stop spending it like we’re playing Monopoly on meth!”

Sylus doesn’t answer. Instead, he raises his hand again.

Forty million.

You’re actually going to black out. You stare at him like maybe if you will him hard enough, he’ll stop. Like a very expensive, immortal Roomba that’s gone rogue.

Across the room, some man in an alligator suit raises the stakes again. Sylus just smiles. You elbow him, and he catches your wrist mid-jab and kisses your knuckles like this is all part of his nightly cardio.

You whisper, “If you win this rifle, I’m going to marry it out of spite.”

“I’d officiate.”

You kick him harder this time.

Fifty million.

The other bidder folds. The auctioneer claps. You sit there, frozen, like maybe if you don’t move, the money will return to the earth like water evaporating from a puddle.

You smile. Sweetly. Serenely. “I am going to hide your wallet in the ocean.”

“You’d have to catch me first.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” you whisper back. “You just bought me a very fast, very accurate gun.”

He grins. You swear he looks proud and slightly turned on, or maybe that's just you. Stars help you. You’re dating the financial apocalypse. The worst part? Somehow, it feels like that’s exactly what you’ve signed up for, and you can’t even bring yourself to hate it.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming, @morrigan87

I may or may not have gotten carried away with their banter in this chapter 😅 Take care everyone and enjoy! ☺️

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #love and deepspace #sylus x you #sylus x oc

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 7: Written in My Pulse

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

You don’t belong here. The thought cycles for the third time as you sip on a flute of champagne that tastes like carbonated disappointment. Gold glitter swirls in the glass because someone somewhere decided that Linkon’s high society needed their drinks to shimmer like fairy vomit.

Nina leans into your side, grinning like she’s just found the last donut at a debrief. You’re both tucked away in a corner like delinquents at a school function. The ballroom is polished marble, decadent chandeliers, and people with names like Worthington and Deveraux discussing fiscal policy and post-Wanderer tax relief. Truly thrilling stuff.

Some wear supposedly symbolic masks, but all you can think about is how the real masks are the invisible ones, plastered in false smiles and manicured charm.

Ethan appears before you like a bad rerun, smile too wide and tie too tight. You sigh internally.

“Anira, hey!” He greets an octave too high, clearly a few drinks in. “Didn’t think I’d find you all the way over here in the… anti-social corner.”

Nina slides away with a whisper of, “Good luck,” and you silently curse her betrayal.

Ethan leans in too close. “You look incredible tonight. That dress—wow. Didn’t know Hunters cleaned up this well.”

“I clean up just fine when threatened with mandatory attendance and department-wide guilt-tripping.”

He laughs, missing the dry edge in your tone. “You know, they’ve got this whole garden terrace upstairs. Real quiet. Real private.”

You blink at him. “That sounds like a terrible place to get murdered.”

He falters, smile wilting, but rallies. “I was just saying—”

“Ethan,” you interrupt gently, “I appreciate the compliment, but I’m not looking for a terrace murder or a slow dance. I’m just here for the open bar and my annual quota of forced social interaction.”

He opens his mouth again, but you’ve already turned back to your drink, tilting it toward him slightly. “Cheers.”

Ethan slinks away, leaving you in blessed silence, or at least the closest thing to it in a ballroom filled with violins and champagne flutes. You catch yourself staring into the glittered fizz, the sound around you fading like fog against the tide.

Days have bled forward, but a name-shaped shadow stretched across your spine continues to cling. His voice still murmurs in the silence between heartbeats, echoing down a corridor of thought that shouldn’t exist.

You’ve turned it over in your mind until it splintered beneath the pressure of logic. Truth is circling just out of reach, coiled and waiting, and whatever it is, it doesn’t feel small.

It feels seismic.

There’s a tremor threading below your skin, as though some ancient part of you is beginning to stir, rising slowly from where it’s slept in the hollowed chambers of your bones.

Even now, his voice lingers in your chest, curling like smoke through the latticework of your ribs, as if your body were built to echo him. Whatever that was—whatever it still is—etched itself into the architecture of your mind, a scar that glows when you breathe too deep.

You shift your weight, heels biting into your ankles with the elegance of a slow betrayal. Across the ballroom, Nina is contorting her face into a tragedy of epic proportions behind a flute of champagne. You stifle a laugh with a breath of a smile, slanted and too tired to bloom fully.

You’re supposed to be paying attention. To the speeches. The fundraiser. The orchestral swell of ego in tuxedos. But your mind keeps backsliding back to him. He lives in the part of your brain that won’t shut up at night, the yearning that never learned to behave.

The air shifts as if the room exhales all at once and forgets how to breathe back in. Everyone's attention snaps to the ballroom doors as if fate has just walked in. You follow their lines of sight, but truthfully, you already know who you’re going to see.

Sylus.

Stars curse you; he looks like sin dressed in shadow. Tailored black suit, the kind that drinks the light and kisses every sharp line of him. Silver hair styled like moonlight frozen mid-fall. Those eyes burning infernal, steady as eclipses, unbothered by the sea of teeth and secrets around him as if he’s already named every threat in the room and deemed them unworthy.

He looks like a god built for ruin.

He walks toward you without breaking stride. Every movement is smooth, intentional, and unapologetically lethal, like he could waltz his way into heaven or hell, and neither would dare stop him.

Nina appears by your side, staring at him with a kind of reverent awe. She leans toward you, eyes wide. “Anira… Is that him?”

You don’t answer, because Sylus is already standing in front of you with a little curve of his mouth that makes the room fall away. “Evening, hope I’m not late.”

Before your brain can even attempt a reboot, Nina barrels past you like a one-woman stampede. “Oh my god,” she exclaims, grabbing his hand like she’s meeting a celebrity. “You’re him, aren’t you?”

Sylus raises an elegant brow. “Him?”

“The mystery guy Anira’s been daydreaming about! The one she’s been doodling in the margins of her reports and drooling over during briefings—”

It comes out in one long, horrifying breath. You make a very specific, strangled, soul-leaving-your-body kind of sound. You are torn between three options: Launching yourself out the nearest window. Stuffing Nina into a decorative urn. Simply dropping dead on the spot and letting the gods sort it out.

Sylus’s eyes, twin shards of garnet dusk, cut to you with a glint that dances like a secret on the edge of his mouth. “It better be me she’s been drooling over.”

Your eyes narrow, but he’s already giving you a look—half-amused, half-daring—a sidelong little tilt of the head that sends heat pooling low in your spine.

“I’ve been daydreaming about food, actually,” you say coolly, folding your arms like a shield you know won’t help. “Particularly dumplings. Very romantic dumplings.”

“Oh, I see,” he sulks, as though deeply wounded. “So I’ve been replaced by steamed carbs.”

“Not replaced,” you correct sweetly. “Just… prioritized.”

Nina looks between the two of you, grinning like she’s watching her favourite drama unfold in real time. “Oh, this is way better than what I imagined. You guys flirt like it’s a sport.”

Sylus chuckles smugly. “I do enjoy a bit of cardio.”

You shoot him a look. “Try walking home.”

Nina gives you a not-so-subtle wink and excuses herself. “I’m gonna go find more champagne and definitely not eavesdrop from ten feet away.”

She vanishes before you can stop her, leaving you alone with a man who is absolutely going to ruin your night in the most spectacular way possible.

Sylus leans in just a little, just enough for only you to hear. “Dumplings, huh?”

“Don’t you have a zone to rule?”

He grins. “Later. Right now, I’m prioritizing.”

You stand there with your arms still crossed, trying to recalibrate while he towers over you like he belongs in this room and every room you’ll ever walk into.

“What are you doing here, Sylus?”

His eyes sweep across your face slowly, and you’re painfully aware of how close he is. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he states.

You open your mouth to protest, but… you have. You’ve buried yourself in reports, doubled your hours at the range, and even let Nina drag you to a yoga class that almost snapped your spine in half just to keep your mind away from silver hair, red eyes, and the memories that are not your own.

He tilts his head slightly. “So I thought I’d come to you.”

Your heart gives a stupid lurch in your chest, and not even your snarky reflexes can save you fast enough. “Risky move,” you manage. “This room is full of Hunters.”

He shrugs, elegant and unbothered. “I’m not worried.” His expression shifts. Quietly, like it slips out before he can think better of it, he admits, “I wanted to make sure you’re alright.”

It hits you right in the sternum. You blink, stunned for half a second. Of course, that’s when fate decides to intervene.

“Anira,” your name drops like a threat.

You flinch.

Ethan. You can already smell the whisky on his breath before he’s in range. He’s not sloshed, but he’s definitely had enough to inflate his ego to critical mass.

He zeroes in on Sylus, shoulders squaring like a cat puffing its fur. “This guy bothering you?”

Sylus straightens from his lean, smooth-as-poured-silk. “Not yet. Should I be?"

“You her boyfriend?” Ethan sneers.

You cough loudly, stepping between them before Ethan combusts from sheer alpha energy. “Alright, that’s enough testosterone for one evening.”

Ethan glares but backs off a little, muttering under his breath about needing another drink. Sylus watches him with amused pity, like a wolf indulging a housecat that thinks it’s a lion.

“Was that the part where I was supposed to be intimidated?” he asks mildly.

“Don’t tease him,” you grumble. “He’s harmless.”

“Mm. He wanted to fight me with his feelings.”

You snort. “You’re such an ass.”

“Only when it works,” he retorts, offering you his hand. “Dance with me?”

The moment your fingers brush, it’s like flipping a switch. The ballroom narrows to a single thread of gravity, and you’re caught in the pull. One of his hands finds the small of your back, the other cradles your fingers with maddening reverence, as if holding a live flame he’s dying to be burned by.

It’s entirely appropriate. Chaste even. It still makes your thighs press together under your dress. He sets your skin alight, nerves singing in tongues you never learned but suddenly understand. The music is slow and classic, but his fingers drift just enough to keep your skin buzzing.

It’s the kind of wanting that lives in marrow, that speaks in the language of forgotten nights and what-if dreams. Your traitorous mind can’t stop imagining the ruin of your name on his lips, shattered on pleasure, spat like sin, or moaned like prayer.

Either would wreck you.

You catch your lower lip with your teeth, and his eyes dip like you’ve whispered scripture. The space between you vanishes one stolen breath at a time.

Sylus moves like he’s written this rhythm into his blood. Every shift of his frame is perfectly measured, like he’s dancing along the edge of a blade and daring you to fall. His thumb traces a lazy circle in that tender hollow where your spine curves inward, a single motion that steals every coherent thought from your skull.

Your pulse hammers, frantic. Your breath stutters, catching like it’s tangled in lace. You’re dizzy with want, drunk on proximity. You wonder if he knows and is enjoying every second of your undoing.

You tilt your head back to meet his gaze and immediately wish you hadn’t. His eyes catch the chandelier light like garnets left too long in the sun, dark and burning, swallowing the fire whole. There’s hunger in them, old and barely leashed, that doesn’t ask permission. It prowls through your thoughts, curling into the hollow places you pretend don’t ache for him.

His thumb brushes a fraction lower, and your knees go weak. You curse these heels. You curse this dress. You curse the way your body is learning the shape of his with terrifying ease, already memorizing every shift of his weight, every breath he draws.

He’s not even trying, and still, restraint feels like a dying language on your tongue. You long to kiss him until the world forgets its name. Until yours dissolves between his teeth. Until your mouth knows nothing but the shape of him—his hunger, his heat, his name said like a secret too dangerous to keep.

Your entire body is trembling with the effort it takes not to crawl into his arms and do something deeply inadvisable right here on the glossy ballroom floor, in front of half the city’s elite and at least three people who’d probably faint.

“You’re playing a dangerous game,” you whisper.

Sylus leans just close enough that his lips nearly brush the shell of your ear. “Only if I’m losing.”

His breath is warm, and it sends a full-body shiver down your spine. Just when your mind starts conjuring images you absolutely should not entertain in public, he pulls back slightly to search your face with a tenderness that undoes you more than anything else.

“You look beautiful tonight.” It rumbles from him, soft as midnight rain and unbearably sincere.

You laugh, a breathless sound that barely escapes your lips. “And you look like the reason women make bad decisions in hotel elevators.”

He grins, slow as sin and twice as inviting. “Then I suppose the real question is…” He leans in, “Are you planning to make any bad decisions tonight, kitten?”

Bad decisions happen to be your favourite.

The air shivers between you, charged like stormlight caught in glass. Your blood has gone molten, your skin too tight for your bones.

And your mouth?

Your mouth aches with the ghost of a kiss not yet taken, like it’s already forgotten how to be untouched.

You don’t remember the drive. Only fragments like the blur of city lights smeared across the windows, the low hum of the engine swallowed by the sound of your pulse.

But his hand, you remember. Resting on your thigh like it had always belonged there, casual in its possession, maddening in its restraint. Each idle sweep of his thumb, an unfinished sentence on your skin. The way he looked at you parked beneath the hush of a red light, like he could taste the tension and was deciding whether to bite down or let you squirm.

Now, you’re inside a mansion that feels like it stepped out of another lifetime—sleek obsidian stonework with ceilings high enough to trap stars. The moment the door clicks shut, restraint fucking shatters. You’re on him like gravity has surrendered to want, hands splayed against his chest, chasing the rhythm of his breath as if it holds the key to yours. You kiss him like hunger given shape, a raw, relentless pull that strips the air from your lungs and replaces it with heat.

He stumbles back, laughter coiled tight in his throat but never quite escaping, his spine catching the wall in the shadowed mouth of the entryway. One brow lifts, carved in smug approval, but you don’t pause to admire it.

Your mouth is already reclaiming his. He tastes like dark promises and defiance, like a man who’s never known hesitation and doesn’t plan to start now. His hands find your waist, fingers flexing once, twice, before pulling you closer, until even the breath between you is stolen and shared.

You move like your body was born knowing the weight of him, the shape of him, and how to make him falter with nothing but touch.

You’re done holding back. His suit jacket slips from his shoulders, pooling at your feet without ceremony. Your fingers dive into the buttons of his shirt, too eager to care about precision. One snaps off and skitters across the floor, and his chest trembles with the unmistakable rhythm of a smothered laugh.

“Sylus,” you murmur against his neck, “don’t start.”

“I haven’t said a word.”

“But you’re thinking loud enough to make me bite you.”

He leans in, just enough that his lips almost brush your ear. His voice is smoke and velvet and amusement edged with hunger. “Then bite.”

So you do, just above his collarbone, sharp enough to make him hiss, sharp enough to make his grip tighten.

“Fuck,” he breathes, half-laugh, half-curse. “You’re dangerous when you’re done being polite.”

You pull back, flushed and furious with wanting, the taste of him still lingering on your tongue. “I’ve been good. So good, Sylus. Letting you circle me like you’ve got all the time in the world while I burn under your hands. But I’m done playing spectator to your self-control.”

His smile could tear a lesser woman in two. “You’re ready to lose control?”

Your nails dig into the edge of his shirt. “No. I’m ready to make you lose yours.”

His breath catches, but it’s the silence that follows that undoes you. His smirk doesn’t just fade. It shatters. His crimson eyes darken, catching the low light like coals stirred from slumber, like he’s been pacing the edge of this moment for far too long, waiting for you to open the cage and invite the fall.

“If you’re going to break, then let it be against me,” he purrs, voice scraped raw. One hand finds your wrist and guides your hand slowly over his heaving chest. “Be greedy with me. Take what you want. Show me what you desire.”

He kisses you like he already knows the shape of your hunger. One hand at the back of your neck, the other splayed at your waist, anchoring you to the present even as he dismantles it. His mouth moves slowly at first, teasing, letting you lean into him with an impatience you don’t bother hiding.

You melt forward with no resistance, pressing against him like you’re desperate to blur the lines between where you end and he begins. Your hands roam across the taut landscape of his chest, memorizing every rise and hollow like scripture.

Sylus presses you into the nearest wall with intent. His lips graze your jaw, the scrape of his teeth followed by the velvet flick of his tongue at your throat. It’s a worship, indecent in how reverent it feels. A slow descent into delirium.

His fingertips trace the arc of your hips, slipping just beneath the hem of your dress as if coaxing permission from your skin. Every drag of contact kindles that feral throb that’s lived too long between your thighs.

You reach for his belt, unthreading it in a single fluid motion. His breath stutters, but he doesn’t stop you. He watches. Still. Waiting.

His eyes are fire made flesh, burning without smoke, without apology. He lets you lead, and that power in your hands is as heady as the scent of his skin.

His hands begin to rise, fingers trailing up your thigh. When he reaches the edge of where your restraint erodes, you freeze.

“Wait.”

It comes out too fast, too sharp. Your body tenses against him. Sylus stops immediately. Not just his hands, but everything. The teasing drops from his face like a veil being drawn back, revealing gentle concern.

He leans back just enough to give you space without letting go. “What’s wrong?”

You feel the words clawing at your throat—hesitating now that they’re at the edge of your tongue. Your face burns. Your hands tremble just slightly where they rest on his chest, and you hate that after being so bold, this is what trips you up.

You force the words out, fumbling, letting your eyes fall to the floor. “I haven’t… done this before.”

His fingers brush under your chin, lifting your face back to his. “Anira.” He says your name like a prayer dragged over embers. His thumb drags lightly over your lower lip, slow enough to make your stomach clench. “If you need me to go slower… or stop entirely… say the word.”

You shake your head. “I don’t want you to stop.”

He smiles, slow, molten, deliciously dangerous. “Good, because I don’t think I could.”

His mouth finds yours like a vow etched in flame. No longer a question, but the answer to every agony you’ve carried in silence. The kiss is deep and devastating, a communion that unmakes you by degrees, trading breath for longing, hesitation for fervour.

His fingers slip beneath the delicate straps of your dress, touch scorching where it lands. He traces the slope of your shoulders as though memorizing the way you unravel for him. Inch by excruciating inch, he guides the fabric down, letting it sigh to the floor.

The air bites at your exposed flesh, but you barely register the chill. His hands are already there, anchoring you to his warmth, stealing your breath before the cold can even hope to claim it.

His strong arms curve around you, and he lifts you from the ground. You cling to him out of instinct, legs curling at his waist. He carries you through the hallway without looking away, like letting go of your gaze might break the spell between you.

The bedroom door eases open with a nudge of his foot, shadows stretching across the floor in soft waves. He lays you down with care that borders on reverence, and he stands over you for a single breathless second—eyes aflame, chest rising like he’s been holding his need on a blade’s edge.

You reach for him, fingers curling into the open edges of his shirt, and you drag it down his arms, knuckles brushing against taut muscle. The fabric slips from his shoulders like water over stone, catching at his elbows before he shrugs it free.

He’s cut from tension and midnight shadow, each breath stretching across his chest like he’s straining to keep himself from devouring you whole. You sit up slightly, palms sliding along the hard planes of him, nails grazing the dip beneath his collarbones, and the way his breath stutters makes heat coil low in your belly.

“You’re not real,” you murmur against his skin, lips brushing his sternum. “You can’t be.”

He huffs a quiet laugh, but it’s ragged around the edges. “Then don’t stop touching me,” he whispers, voice frayed. “Remind me I am.”

Sylus kisses you like he’s trying to collapse time, like if he goes deep enough, he’ll find the first moment your soul ever touched his. You can’t tell if this is longing or memory, but it’s splitting through you, like lightning seeking its twin in the open sky. You arch toward him, drawn by instinct, or fate, or the echo of home.

His hands skim over your breasts, teasing you through the lace of your bra before sliding around to unhook it with a deft flick. The air hits your overheated skin, and you shiver, nipples pebbling in the chill. He takes your pert nipple into his hot, wet mouth, tongue swirling around the sensitive peak. You don’t even realize you’ve whimpered until he smirks against your skin.

He groans softly, his hand slipping down your stomach and between your thighs to cup your pussy through your soaked panties. The heat of him, the pressure, makes you rock instinctively against his touch. All you feel is need, ancient and aching, like your soul is crawling back toward someone it never stopped belonging to.

His fingers slip beneath the delicate lace, brushing against your dripping lips. You gasp, hips bucking as he parts you gently, circling your clit with feather-light strokes that leave you aching for more.

Sylus’s hands move like your body is a language he once knew and is now relearning, one searing syllable at a time. You can’t tell if you’re trembling from want or memory. Only that his hands are both the cause and the cure.

His fingers hook into your underwear, tugging them slowly down your thighs. You lift your hips to help him, breath coming faster now, anticipation coiling tight in your core.

When you’re exposed and wanting before him, the hungry way he looks at you sends a shiver racing down your spine. His palm slowly ghosts back up your leg, and he has this look about him, as if he’s both savouring and mourning each caress.

You’ve never pined for safety the way you ache to unravel in his hands, to be stripped down to whatever soul he can summon from you. He holds you like he’s memorizing the shape of your surrender. Like he wants the echo of it on his palms for the rest of time.

“You undo me.” His breath is hot against your throat as his fingers glide through your seam, teasing and exploring as you tremble. “Every fucking time. Like you were made to break me open.”

He circles your clit with maddening slowness, drawing out your pleasure. You drown in sensation, in him, in an echo older than memory, rising too wild for the cage of your skin. Breath forgets you when he touches you. You become shards of want scattered across his palms, his lips, the low burn of his voice when he whispers your name.

One finger slips lower, circling your entrance tentatively before pressing inside. A broken whimper escapes your lips at the unfamiliar intrusion, the stretching sensation as he works you open. Your inner walls flutter and clench, trying to draw him deeper.

Your hips rock to meet his strokes, chasing the burgeoning bliss. He adds a second finger, pumping slowly, carefully. Letting you adjust to the feeling of him moving inside you. His thumb finds your clit, rubbing firm circles as his fingers thrust deeper, pushing you to the edge.

You run your hands over him like you’re mapping starlight, tracing muscle and shadow, wondering how something so solid can feel so celestial beneath your fingertips.

The tension snaps. Your release doesn’t shatter; it blooms. Fire unfolding in your belly, in your chest, in your throat, until all you can do is cry out his name like it’s the only word you’ve ever known.

Sylus gentles as he works you through it, panting heavily as your pussy spasms around his plunging fingers. He doesn’t withdraw until he’s worked every last shockwave from your writhing body.

Your fingers brush the sharp lines of his hips, tracing the edge where fabric clings too tightly to skin. He watches you with maddening stillness, like a creature caught between indulgence and self-control.

You toy with the button at his waist, slip the fastening loose, and his breath hitches, not loud, not sharp, but enough to make your pulse stumble. The zipper yields with a sigh, metal teeth parting like a secret you’ve coaxed free, and when you ease the fabric down over the sculpted lines of his thighs, he finally moves—just enough to let them fall away.

Your breath catches at the sight of him, thick and hard and intimidatingly large. A pearl of moisture glistens at the swollen tip, and your mouth waters with the urge to taste.

The sight of him makes your breath stall in your throat. Like he was never meant for anything so mundane as clothing, like his body was carved to be seen in shadow and low light, to be touched in reverence.

Sylus settles his hips between your thighs, the hot brand of his heavy cock nestling against your soaked slit. “Do you want it, kitten?”

Do you want it? Holy fuck. There’s no word for the way your body aches. No language is vast enough for the need. It’s not just want—it’s famine. It’s centuries of thirst. It’s a hunger born before this lifetime, one your soul remembers even if your mind does not.

Every nerve in your body sings a single answer, louder than breath, louder than blood. You want it like you’re drowning and he’s the only air that’s ever mattered. You want it like it might destroy you, and you’ll fucking thank him for the ruin.

In answer, you reach down and wrap your fingers around his shaft, marvelling at the girth of him. He hisses through his teeth, hips jerking reflexively into your palm.

You give him a languid stroke from root to tip and guide him to your entrance. Even in the haze of desire, you tense instinctively. He's so much bigger than his fingers, hard and hot and heavy.

Sylus pauses, sensing your hesitation. He brushes a tender kiss to your forehead, your cheek, and the corner of your mouth. "We can stop," he reassures, voice settling low, a promise dragged over gravel, like he’s swallowing fire to keep you from burning "If it's too much, we can—”

“I think I’ve been waiting for you longer than I’ve even been alive," you interject.

Your legs wrap around him and urge him forward, breath catching as he begins to push inside. It’s overwhelming, the feeling of him filling you inch by devastating inch. Your body yields to the insistent press of his, inner walls fluttering and clenching around his length.

“Breathe for me, sweetie,” he cajoles, brushing his lips to your ear. “You’re shaking. Is it too much?”

Your fingers find his back because you need to feel the way his muscles shift, like coiled storms under your palms. “Don’t you dare stop.”

He goes slowly, letting you adjust. The burn of it, the mind-bending stretch, has your toes curling. You make a choked little sound, low and pleading, hips rising as if your body is begging without your permission.

He bottoms out with a wrecked moan, buried to the hilt inside your tight heat. Your eyes flutter closed, breath coming in shallow pants as your body slowly relaxes. You feel split open, impaled on his girth. Every breath shifts him inside you, scrawling voltage down your limbs in a feverish script only your bones can read.

Experimentally, you roll your hips. Sylus groans, low and guttural, fingers digging into your thighs. Emboldened, you do it again, revelling in the drag of him, the exquisite friction. His breath tangles mid-air, suspended on a thread of sensation, as your body sinks him deeper.

Your hips shift restlessly, needing friction, needing movement to ease the building ache. He answers with a slow, deep stroke that makes your body chime in celestial static, constellations stuttering across your nerves like Morse code from a god.

A low moan escapes your kiss-swollen lips as he sets a steady rhythm of long, measured thrusts that have every vein and ridge of him sliding along your walls, hitting places inside you that you never knew existed.

It's all so new, so intense, that you are stripped of thought, pared down to pulse and craving and the echo of his name in your bones.

"Anira," he pants, voice fracturing on a moan, like the first crack in obsidian threaded with zeal he no longer bothers to hide. “You’re going to make me come just by squeezing me like that.”

When he moans your name, it doesn’t sound like a man losing control; it sounds like a man remembering something sacred. You’d let him ruin you a thousand times if it meant hearing your name in his mouth again.

Your head falls back, lips parting on a silent cry as his cock drags over that sensitive spot inside you again and again. Every kiss, every thrust, feels like falling upward, like being pulled into some higher place where pleasure doesn’t have a name strong enough.

“S-Sylus.” His name breaks from your lips like a spell that’s been waiting lifetimes to be spoken again.

“Say my name again,” he urges in a threadbare whisper fraying against your ear like it might fall apart. “I want to know how it sounds when it belongs to you.”

You recite his name like the word existed before time and your mouth was made to speak it. He reaches between your bodies, fingers finding your swollen pearl, sweeping over the sensitive nub as his hips stutter out of rhythm.

The added stimulation has ecstasy cracking open the sky behind your ribs, and every nerve becomes a burning sun. It’s as if he’s dragging the heavens through your skin, one breath at a time.

Your cunt clenches around his pistoning shaft, pulsing and fluttering as your orgasm rips through you. Your thighs tremble, toes curling as he fucks you through it. You are no longer a person, only sensation strung on the edge of his breath.

He buries his face in the crook of your neck, breath hot and damp against your skin. You feel him throb and swell inside you, stretching you impossibly wider. His body trembles, and he mutters, half-formed and desperate, trying to tether himself to restraint. His control has always been a fortress—cold, towering, impenetrable—now it crumbles for you. “I can’t—fuck, I can’t—”

His words dissolve into a rugged groan, hips snapping forward as he spills himself inside you. You feel the hot rush of his release, the pulsing of his cock as he empties himself in long, shuddering spurts.

He repeats your name like it’s salvation, like you’re the shore his body crashes against, again and again, until he’s nothing but waves and you are the sea that drowns him.

For long moments, you lie tangled together, his softening cock still buried inside you as you both come down from the high. Your cunt throbs, pleasantly sore and still fluttering intermittently.

Reluctantly, he withdraws. You both hiss at the sensation, oversensitive flesh protesting the movement. A trickle of his release seeps out of you, warm and wet against your thighs.

He rolls to the side, pulling you with him until you're draped across his chest, head pillowed on his shoulder. You lie there in the hush that follows the storm. The world outside doesn’t matter. It’s just you and the man who peeled you open like a hymn and worshipped every fragile breath you gave him.

Your legs tingle in the most exquisite way, and your lips are swollen from too many kisses and not enough of them all at once.

He exhales, the sound low and molten, and you glance over to find his crimson eyes half-lidded. “Are you alright?”

You nod, a little dazed. “I think I’m dreaming.”

A slow, crooked smile lifts the corner of his mouth. “If you are, don’t wake up.”

You shift, your body sore and sated, and curl in closer. His scent pools in the hollow of your throat—red sandalwood and the scorched-sweet edge of burned amber.

Neither of you speaks. There’s no need. He brushes his fingers through your hair, over and over, like he’s memorizing the texture of trust. Does he feel it too, this impossible thread stitched between your bones and his?

“Say something,” you murmur into his chest, the words muffled by his heartbeat.

“Something?” he echoes, amused.

“Sylus,” you tut.

His breath is warm against your skin, and you can feel the slowly steadying rhythm of his pulse in your chest as you lie against him.

His voice cuts through the quiet. “You always wanted me to speak. Every time, like… you needed to hear it to know you’re not dreaming.” You shift against him slightly, tilting your head to look up at his face, but his expression gives you nothing. Just an unreadable calm, like the surface of still water veiling the pull of a hidden current far beneath. That odd, unwelcome feeling creeps up your spine.

What does he mean?

Fuck. I hope the wait was worth it. 😅

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming

Take care everyone and enjoy! ☺️

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #love and deepspace #sylus x mc #sylus x you #sylus x oc

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 6: Red Remembrance

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

You clean your guns because they don’t dream. Steel doesn’t tremble with memory. It doesn’t wake in the idle hours, soaked in sweat, whispering fragments of wings or the scent of a world that no longer exists. Metal doesn’t ache the way you do. It doesn’t lie. It simply is—honest, obedient, unburdened by the weight of a past it cannot name.

The armoury inhales twilight, shadows curling through the reinforced glass like secrets spilled in ink. The air is rife with the scent of gunpowder, solvent, and oil. It’s comforting in its sharpness and its absence of meaning. Here, in this hush, nothing demands understanding. Nothing asks you to remember.

A single sidearm lies dismantled before you like a corpse prepared for a ritual. Barrel. Slide. Magazine. Frame. Your fingers move with the ease of muscle memory, each click and shift a lullaby against the noise inside your head.

Your thoughts… they don’t follow the same rules. They drift sideways, dissolving the line between then and now, between what was and what never should have been.

When did your dreams start to bleed? They used to drift, half-formed silhouettes stitched from memory and starlight, nothing more than the ache of a name you couldn’t quite hold. Now they leave you flayed open, spilling wonder and dread in equal measure across your waking hours.

You don’t ask what the ache is becoming. What if it’s grief splitting itself across the walls of your mind, echoing back in shapes it shouldn’t remember? What if your thoughts are turning on themselves, splicing memory to myth, sorrow to shadow? What if your mind is simply breaking—beautifully, quietly, with the desperate elegance of an injured thing trying to make sense of the wound?

It’s laughable, isn’t it? You face monsters birthed from the hungriest corners of the void, and still, the one thing that haunts you most is the soft, traitorous ruin of your mind.

The gun in your hands gleams like a shard of moonlight carved from the ribs of night. You drag the cloth along its barrel, polishing again and again, as if friction might banish the formless dread nesting inside your chest.

It always clings.

Your hand pauses. Mid-stroke. In the mirror-sheen of the barrel, a stranger watches you—red-eyed, familiar in the way a dream is before it turns to ash. You blink, and it’s gone, but the cold snakes up your spine like a whisper with no mouth, tightening, breath by breath, around your lungs. You clutch the gun harder, cloth crushed in your palm.

The pieces come together in your lap, one by one. A click, a metallic sigh sliding home, and the weapon breathes again. Whole. Ready.

Unlike you.

The thought drips into your mind like dark oil spreading in water. You shove it down with the practiced brutality of someone who’s had to be their own mender too many times. You don’t get to fall apart, not when your seams are stitched with years and iron, not when the unravelling might leave you hollow.

What if there’s nothing inside to catch?

That’s when you hear the soft hiss of the armoury door sliding open, and you glance up. Sylus leans against the doorway, hair tousled, dressed in something half-buttoned. The fabric clings to him like it wishes it were luckier. He’s barefoot, which shouldn’t be allowed, and draped in the kind of effortless elegance that makes you briefly consider throwing the gun in your hand just to knock him down a few pegs.

“Evening, Trouble,” you greet, lips curving before you mean them to. “Look who finally decided to crawl out of his crypt and join the realm of the living.”

He cants his head, and the light tangles in his irises like candlelight caught in ruby stained glass. “It’s dusk.”

“Exactly. You missed a whole soap opera's worth of sunlight.”

“Tragic,” he intones dryly, pushing off the frame and stepping into the room. “It must have been unbearable without me.”

You hum as he draws nearer, the sound low in your throat like a song you refuse to finish. You don’t meet his eyes. Looking into them feels too much like standing at the edge of a precipice, asked to name the fall for what it is: inevitable.

Instead, you watch his hands. They slip into his pockets with all the languid grace of a storm pretending it hasn’t come to tear down the sky, lazily hiding violence in stillness the way oceans hide undertow. Hands you know too well. How they twitch when his composure falters. How his fingers flex when he’s strangling back the shape of a truth he hasn’t yet made peace with. How they always seem to orbit your gravity, as if they’ve forgotten how to stay away.

Fuck, if only he’d stop pretending.

If he’d just take the moment and shatter it—press you to the glass, breathe you in like hunger made flesh, crush the distance between your mouths until longing collapses in on itself and becomes sharp enough to bleed on. Let ruin taste like worship. Let restraint burn to ash in the wake of want.

But no. He’s Sylus. High priest of self-denial. Emperor of almost. Patron saint of slow-drawn ache and thunder held behind glass. He doesn’t ravage. He devours you one glance at a time until you forget what it feels like not to tremble in his orbit.

“You’re quiet,” he remarks, timbre like silk over steel.

You shrug, busying yourself with the pieces of a different weapon. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“Anira.”

Your name leaves him like an invocation, drawing your eyes to his. His expression has changed. It’s still gentle, still quiet in its steadiness, but beneath that calm lingers concern, barely veiled by the illusion of detachment he clings to with ritualistic precision.

“What’s wrong?”

The words strike gently, but they reverberate like bells in a void. You hold his gaze too long. Your tongue presses hard against the back of your teeth, as if the truth might splinter in your mouth the moment you set it free.

He sinks down in front of you, one knee brushing yours. “You can tell me anything. You know that.”

His eyes drink you in like he’s tracing poetry in the curve of your shoulders, reading pain in the silence between your breaths. He sees it: the subtle tremor in your fingers, the sleepless bruises beneath your eyes, the way your mouth holds still like it’s forgotten how to form the shape of peace.

“These dreams—these memories… whatever they are… they don’t feel like illusions.” You speak, and the hush unravels, one frayed syllable tugging the quiet apart stitch by stitch.

“They’re dreams,” he says too quickly, like a match struck in a thunderstorm, desperate to catch but already fading.

“Are they?” you ask. “I wake up crying, and I remember things I’ve never lived, places I have never stood. Something in my chest knows you in a way I can’t explain.”

His jaw tenses like he’s holding back a truth too sharp to speak aloud. There’s a quiet blooming behind his eyes, the kind that isn’t peace—it’s restraint. It’s truth pacing in a locked room.

You lean in, close enough to taste the hesitation on his breath. “You know something. Don’t you?”

In the silence that follows, your heart begins to brace for the shape of whatever comes next.

“Sylus.” His name lands like a held breath breaking. “Tell me.”

He stares, and for a moment you swear the world stills with him. “What do you want me to say?”

“The truth.”

A breath catches, and softly, like a dagger slipped between ribs, he says, “There are truths sharper than silence.”

You flinch. Not at the blade but at how gently he drove it in. The air folds into the kind of stillness found in cathedrals where gods no longer answer. You look back down at the gun in your hands, fingers trembling now where they hadn’t before.

“I’m not losing my mind,” you whisper, but you don’t know if you believe it.

The ache in your fingers hums dull and steady, a physical echo of the strain curling in your mind. You exhale, deliberately drawn-out, like it might coax the knots in your chest to loosen.

Sylus watches you, eyes dark with a storm he refuses to name, lightning coiled in his throat, and thunder waiting for permission to fall.

The soft glow of the television bathes the room in spasmodic light, a movie playing on the screen. Sylus’s arm is draped lazily across the back of the couch, fingers occasionally brushing your shoulder as you snuggle up to him.

His voice is soft when he teases you. “If I’d known you were so good at picking films, I might’ve let you choose more often.”

You tilt your head up, catching the playful glint in his eyes. “Oh? And what, you’d be watching rom-coms instead of action films?”

Sylus smirks, the expression lazy and indulgent. “It’s a thought, isn’t it?” He pulls you closer until your head is resting on his chest, the steady beat of his heart a rhythmic lullaby in the background. “But I think I prefer having you as my personal movie critic.”

You roll your eyes, but the treacherous curve of your mouth betrays you, curling despite your better judgment. “Well, it’s the least I could do. You’ve got impeccable taste in everything… except entertainment.”

You nudge him with your elbow, teasing, and he chuckles richly, like honey warmed over coals. His fingers trace lazy, reverent circles along your arm, like he’s sketching invisible verses into your skin. You try not to shiver, but your breath still hitches.

The movie, some suspense-soaked thriller, all brooding silences and predictable twists, flickers on, forgotten. The screen fades to background noise, a half-hearted heartbeat compared to the quiet gravity of him.

Sylus is warm where the world is cold. Solid where you’ve been drifting. You could stay like this for eternity, wrapped in the stillness between seconds, if time dared to grant you the grace.

He brushes a lock of hair from your cheek, so soft, so unbearably gentle it nearly undoes you. His touch lingers, fingers grazing along your jaw like a secret trying to find its voice, and then, he kisses you.

Soft at first, searching like he’s tasting the ache between you, like he’s mapping every silent I-missed-you that neither of you has said aloud. The kiss deepens, slow and sinuous, tugging you closer like a tide that has only ever known the shape of your shore.

He tastes like midnight and menace, like the kind of hunger you don’t survive unchanged. You breathe into him, and he answers with a tilt of his head, with fingers curling just beneath the hem of your shirt, not daring yet, but willing.

Wanting.

When he finally pulls back, your mouths remain close, breaths tangled, hearts tapping restless rhythms against each other’s ribs. You could kiss him again, or he could kiss you. Or the room could collapse, and you wouldn’t notice.

Right now, nothing matters but this electricity of maybe, the ache of almost, and the way he looks at you like you’re already burning.

As the movie progresses, the tension between you both remains like a thin thread, pulling taut with every glance, every lingering touch. The intimacy feels almost too much, but neither of you seems ready to let go of it.

Then, a scene on the screen changes. A character stumbles across a blood-soaked battlefield, clutching a bloodstained sword. There’s a haunting depth in their eyes that churns sickeningly in your chest. The camera lingers on their blood-soaked palms, dripping down in heavy, slow rivulets.

Your heart jumps in your chest, and you’re not sure why. Something about the character’s face feels wrong, like a piece of you is trapped in their expression.

It takes everything in you to tear your eyes away from the screen, your breath catching as the movie’s quiet hum continues. Sylus shifts beside you, sensing the change in your body, the way you’ve stiffened.

“Anira?”

You swallow hard, trying to shake the fog creeping into your thoughts. “It’s nothing. Just—just the movie.”

But Sylus doesn’t buy it and presses a little harder. “Talk to me.”

The world seems to fracture and fall away. His voice becomes distant. Everything sharpens, then blurs. The room around you is swallowed, and suddenly you’re not there anymore.

The ground beneath you radiates a suffocating heat, like it has boiled for centuries and only now begun to breathe. The air wavers around you, bending light, reality, sound. It shimmers like a fever dream, your vision trembling with it. Every breath is a gulp of ash and smoke, and your ears ring with a soundless scream that doesn’t end.

Your hands tremble as you press them to the ground, fingers sinking into the dirt. It’s sticky—no, not dirt. It’s blood pooling beneath you, creeping up your arms and your legs. Your hands are slick with it. Your forearms soaked. It drips from your fingers in thick drops, each one landing with the weight of a curse.

No. “There’s so much blood,” you breathe.

You stare, paralyzed. You are desperate to tear it away, to claw the sin from your skin, but it slithers under your nails, writhing in the folds of your palms like a secret. You scrub with frantic urgency, your nails raking the tender surface of your flesh, but it refuses to vanish.

The blood awakens and unfurls in elegant tendrils as if your flesh were soil and this was its harvest. It curls around your wrists like a forgotten promise and winds around your arms like a lover returned from the grave. It slides up your chest as though chasing the echo of a heartbeat it remembers better than you do.

It is a reckoning hymn of ruin sung in the key of flesh. It does not stain, it claims. Older than guilt. Deeper than memory. It is the weight of every buried truth come back to bloom beneath your skin, your body remembering what your mind refuses to hold. You recoil, heels scraping the ground, but it rises like tidewater at the end of the world, inch by inch, painting you in red remembrance.

The scarlet tide slithers in slowly, like it’s seducing you, slick against your teeth, syrup-slow down your throat. You taste the iron of ancient grief and mourning. You choke, you gag, but it does not stop. It fills you. Each swallow burns. Each breath drowns. It closes in like dusk drowning the sun. You tilt your head toward the drowning dark, and through the rising blur, you see them. Not quite a face, but a pair of crimson eyes carved into the haze like wounds that remember you.

“You must press on.”

The voice slips through your skull like a half-remembered melody. The deep timbre finds the cavernous places inside and fills them like they’ve always belonged. You can’t see the one who speaks, but your heart stumbles like it’s heard that voice in the dark between lifetimes.

You fall forward, the world tilting as if the laws of gravity have been rewritten. Darkness doesn’t just fill your lungs; it births itself inside you. Your vision is devoured by a red so ancient it feels like the first sin, a baptism of rot and remembrance. It curls across your eyes like celestial script, rewriting what it means to see.

You try to scream, but there is no air left to shape the sound. Even your heartbeat forgets how to find rhythm beneath it.

A voice whispers through the marrow of your mind. You can’t understand the words, but the tone cradles you like a curse. It hurts. It heals. It breaks open the part of you that never fully closed.

You lurch from the vision like a diver breaching the surface too fast, lungs convulsing with the need to breathe. Instinct takes over, and you recoil, shoving Sylus away with more force than you intend. The world tilts, your back slamming against the floor with a bruising thud. The breath knocks from your lungs, but you barely register it.

The blood is still there. Coating your forearms. Pooling in your palms. Slick across your legs.

Wet, warm, wrong.

You stare, trembling, and scrub at your skin. You try to wipe it away, but it only smears. You press harder, nails biting into flesh, trying to dig beneath the surface where it feels like it’s sinking in.

It won’t come off. It’s not on you. It’s in you. It stains. It clings.

Your breath turns ragged, shattered glass dragged through your throat. Your chest heaves and feels too tight, like your body is trying to collapse in on itself. Tears burn hot trails down your cheeks before you realize you’re crying.

Sylus is beside you in an instant, hands out but not touching, like you might shatter if he moves too fast. “Anira, look at me.”

You don’t. You can’t. Your attention is locked on the way ichor crawls in your periphery, and the ghost-thick sensation of it dripping down your wrists.

“There’s blood—” you choke, voice high and brittle. “There’s—it’s on me, it won’t—” You scrub harder, frantic, maddened by the feel of it. “I can’t—I c-can’t—”

The moment your eyes meet his, all the panic inside you snaps taut, then spills. Your lips part. You want to speak clearly, to explain, but the words unravel before they form.

Instead, you whisper, voice shaking with horror, “S-Sylus… there’s—there’s so much blood.”

The moment the shattered, trembling words leave your lips, his arms gather you up with practiced care. You cling, fingers knotting into his shirt, face pressed to his chest as if the steady thrum of him might anchor you back into your body.

He moves purposefully, but not rushed. The bathroom door swings open with a quiet creak. The lights are low, and he doesn’t turn them up. He doesn’t set you down. Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t speak.

The shower clicks on, steam already beginning to rise, and he steps into it, fully clothed, still holding you.

The water hits in a slow hiss, soaking through fabric and hair and silence. It runs over his shoulders and down your spine, a ghost compared to the heat you remember from the blood. You flinch as it touches your skin, but not from the temperature.

From what’s not washing away.

Sylus sinks with you to the floor, letting the spray cascade over both of you. His back presses to the tile wall, and he cradles you in his lap. You’re half-curled against him, half-away with your arms held awkwardly out from your body, staring at them like they’re not yours.

He shifts, reaching for a bottle of body wash on the built-in shelf. The cap clicks open, and the scent—clean, familiar, his—seeps through the rising steam. He lathers it slowly between his hands, then takes your arm and begins to wash you with firm, slow strokes.

His hands move over your skin like he’s wiping away more than just imagined blood. Like he’s washing away whatever ghost crawled out of your memory and latched onto your soul. With unshakeable patience, he repeats this process over and over.

“There’s nothing there, sweetie,” he murmurs, voice moon-soft against the roar of the water. “It’s just you.”

You shake your head, breath breaking in shallow, stuttering waves. “No. It’s—”

He doesn’t let you finish. The lather returns to your skin in warm spirals, and again he begins to wash you—slow, deliberate, as though gentleness alone might rewrite reality. You watch the suds trail down your arms, twisting into ghostly ribbons as they vanish into the drain.

But the blood doesn’t leave. You feel it still, painted into your pores, whispering from beneath the surface. His hands return, rubbing small circles into your arms with the flats of his palms, the friction soothing in its constancy.

“Again,” he purrs. “Watch.”

You watch his thumbs glide over your wrists, his fingers tracing the lines of your forearms with unyielding care, up to your elbows, down again. The scent of him lingers on your skin: smoke, citrus, and steel. The warm water clings to your clothes and to your hair, but it’s his hands that keep you from drifting.

Bit by bit, the trembling fades. Your shoulders begin to unknot beneath the slow rhythm of his touch, breath easing out in a long, heavy exhale. He lathers your arms one last time. Repetition as ritual. This time, your body sinks into his, boneless with exhaustion, wrapped in water and warmth and the steady rise and fall of his breath.

You stay like that for a while, tucked into the curve of him, the shower raining steady against tile and tension alike. Your breath evens out in time with his, heart slowing beneath the pressure of his arm around your waist. His fingers don’t press hard, but they don’t falter either. A rhythm. A comfort. A pulse borrowed from him, because your own still feels so far away.

“I’m sorry.”

His hand pauses for a second. “For what?”

“For… collapsing,” you murmur. “For losing it. For making you clean up the mess.”

His laugh is quiet and dry, like it catches on old ash. “That’s what messes do. They spill. They don’t ask permission.”

You glance at him, water trailing down your cheek like a tear that forgot what it was. “Still. You didn’t sign up for this.”

Sylus leans in, brushing his lips to your temple in a touch so careful it might not have happened at all. “You think I’d walk away because you had a moment? That I’d prefer silence over truth just because it’s cleaner? We’ll figure it out, and press on.”

You freeze. Not a flinch, not a twitch—stillness. The kind that comes when the world tips too far and you’re afraid to breathe. The phrase detonates like a memory unearthed, not new but dragged from the blood-slick haze of some place you don’t understand.

You pull back slightly, enough to look at him. “…Why did you say that?”

Sylus blinks, faint lines of tension sharpening around his mouth. “Say what?”

You hesitate. “Press on.”

His gaze holds yours. “Because we have to. Because stopping would mean surrendering, and that’s not who you are.”

“You must press on.”

It coils in your chest, like a name half-remembered on the edge of a dream. Not a trick of memory, not a ghost conjured by panic. It had been his voice whispering to you in that bloody, burning place. You hadn’t imagined it, but what haunts you more is why.

Why would you hear Sylus where you were soaked with fear, death, and ruin?

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home, @redseablooming

Take care everyone and enjoy! ☺️

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #love and deepspace #sylus x you #sylus x oc #sylus angst

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 5: Below the Bones of Heaven

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

No fear drives your legs, no shadow nips at your heels. You run because elation has taken the shape of motion, because your heart remembers something your mind cannot name.

The land opens before you, awash in wildflowers that shimmer like stories never forgotten, petals glowing as if the land itself is remembering how to smile.

Your laughter paints the silence in colour, every note a brushstroke of joy. Wind dances in your hair, laced with the scent of a forgotten summer. The sky is a bruise of dying light, amethyst trickling into indigo, scattered with stars too bright to be real.

At the bottom of the hill, he waits.

A creature carved from midnight and fire. The dragon is vast and holy, like a lullaby sung by the void, like thunderclouds dreaming in the shape of gods. His scales glisten like obsidian rivers, laced with glowing veins of molten red, as if the earth’s heart runs through him. His eyes gleam with the hush of collapsing constellations—scarlet, ancient, as if they’ve hoarded every fire the universe ever dared to light.

Your arms stretch wide as you crash into the curve of his muzzle, pressing yourself to him like a prayer returned to its altar. His breath rushes out, a furnace’s sigh, warm enough to stir your dress, your skin, the air itself.

He lowers his head, his massive neck bending with impossible grace. And you—so small, so human—rise from the earth, lifted by the bridge of his nose, held aloft as if you are made of light and not blood. You are set back down, soft as a petal’s fall.

You kiss the space between his eyes.

“Found you,” you whisper, like it was always meant to be said here.

He huffs, a low, amused rumble that stirs the marrow of your bones and leaves you smiling before you understand why. The earth hears him and stills. Even the wind leans in, held for a breath. He breathes, and the world listens—not out of fear, but reverence, as though it remembers him.

You lie beside him, tucked between the warm thrum of his body and the open sky. Stars drip down in streaks of silver and flame, meteors carving scars across the heavens, radiant and doomed.

“They’re falling,” you murmur, half to him, half to yourself.

He shifts, and his tail curls around you, wings folding like cathedral doors behind your back. You could sleep here forever, buried beneath the hush of wind and scale.

Lifting you with his tail, he places you gently between his horns like a crown. From here, the world is a pale reflection beneath you, a dream flickering in a giant’s breath.

“I wonder what it feels like,” you muse, eyes fixed on the meteor shower, “to chase what was always meant to burn.”

The dragon stirs. One wing unfolds, then the other, vast and ink-dark. They stretch toward the stars like they’ve always belonged to the sky. He leaps, and the world falls away. He ascends slowly and steadily.

He doesn’t throw you to the stars.

He brings you them.

From here, you are higher than fear, higher than memory, higher than anything with a name. You stand on his head, balancing on breath and bone, your dress whipping around you like a comet’s tail. You reach for them.

They flare just beyond your fingertips, wild and unreachable, and you ache at the beauty of it.

“I can almost…” you breathe, hand outstretched, eyes wide. “Almost.”

He carries you higher, wings carving through stardust and silence. You cling to his horn, wind roaring past your ears, laughter caught somewhere in your throat.

The meteors fall, each one burning dreams like the last wishes of forgotten gods set free at last. They streak the sky in silver requiems, burning bright and vanishing like promises too beautiful to keep. There you are, balanced on that impossible edge between gravity and starlight, watching the heavens unravel.

You lean forward, pressing your forehead to the warm, ridged scale between his horns. He tips his head gently, just enough for you to know he’s listening.

“Thank you,” you murmur.

A purr rolls from his chest like thunder tamed, the low murmur of mountains dreaming. A sound older than language coiled around the bones of the earth. He tilts into a gentle arc, his body curving like moonlight drawn across water. You move with him, swallowed by the glittering dark with the stars almost close enough to brush your skin.

Together, you glide beneath the stars’ slow breath, cradled in the quiet where the sky forgets to end.

You wake up reaching for the stars. Fingers splayed into velvet dark like you could still brush the edge of a meteor, but there’s no sky above you. No endless hush of wind. No warm dragon beneath.

Only cold, silk sheets.

You clutch at the blanket like it might anchor you, but it’s not the dream. It’s not scales and breath and the soft thump of a tail curling around you like protection.

It’s fabric. Expensive. Perfect. Meaningless.

You close your eyes.

You want to go back.

Please. You want to go back to the field kissed by dusk, to the impossible warmth of him. To the way his breath stirred your dress without scorching it, as if even fire had learned gentleness for your sake.

You’d trade the whole waking world just to feel that weightless again. To hear the hush of wings brushing starlight, like lullabies written for the dark.

But the sky is gone, and rising feels like grief wearing your bones. You sit up slowly, like every vertebra remembers joy and resents its loss. Your chest feels raw, aching with the echo of something that should never have been love but was.

You were happy. Not the quiet kind. Not the safe kind. But the sort that ran barefoot through you, wild and breathless. You were laughing. Spinning. Flying.

For once, it hadn’t been borrowed. It had been yours. You press a hand to your chest, as if you could anchor the ache there, as if touch alone might stop it from unravelling you seam by seam. It slips through anyway.

Behind your eyes, the stars are still falling, but there’s no one left to catch them.

You don’t know how long you sit there, knuckles white around the sheets. Long enough for the dream to lose shape but not feeling. Long enough for the ache to hollow out your chest like a slow-burn bruise. Eventually, the stillness becomes unbearable.

Your feet hit the floor like you expect the world to shift beneath them, but it doesn’t. You move without thinking. One hand ghosting along the smooth curve of the wall as if it might whisper secrets back to you.

You find Kieran half-sprawled across one of the couches in the main lounge, arms behind his head, staring at a projection of a racing channel like he’s been here for hours and plans to be here for hours more. He notices you before you speak and sits up.

“Didn’t think you’d be up yet.” His voice is soft, disarmed of its usual teasing bite.

You don’t answer. Just stand there, wilted, trying not to look like you’d trade your own pulse to be back inside a dream. He watches you for a beat, reading the cracks.

“Boss man is in the gym,” Kieran informs, nodding toward the far end of the hall. “Been in there for hours.”

You nod, but your throat is tight again. You can’t seem to thank him, so you don’t. You just drift past, leaving silence in your wake.

The doors to the gym are shut, but the rhythmic dull thud of force resounds. Your hand hovers near the handle. The dream smoulders, as though waking didn’t shake it loose. Behind that door waits the one person who could unravel it or silence it completely.

You’re not sure which would break you more.

You push the door open. The gym exhales metal, salt, and the ghost of heat like it remembers pain more vividly than peace. He stands with his back to you, carved in shadow and breath. No fists flying, just silence and stillness, broken by the slow rise and fall of his shoulders.

His palms rest against the heavy bag, not to strike, but to steady, as if he’s holding back a sea and the tide is still choosing whether to flood or retreat.

“Couldn’t sleep?” His voice is casual, distant, like someone laying bricks between you, one by one.

“No.” You hover by the door. “Not really.”

You wrap your arms around yourself and clear your throat. “I… had a different dream.”

That makes him shift a little. A single tilt of his head, but not enough to meet your eyes. “A bad one?”

You shake your head. “No. That’s the problem.”

That’s what finally turns him. His eyes find yours—smouldering scarlet, but not like fire. Like coals cradled in ash, as if a storm within him had been taught the shape of stillness, the long, quiet art of waiting.

You try to smile, soft and half-formed. It flickers. Dies.

“It was peaceful. It felt real. Then I woke up… and it felt like I was falling out of it. Like I opened my eyes into a nightmare.”

He nods once, slow and heavy, like a man well-acquainted with the grief of dreams that vanish with the light.

You look down at your hands. “Kieran said you’ve been in here for hours.”

His eyes drop to the floor, then drag slowly up your form like he’s searching for fractures. “I needed to hit something.”

He walks toward you, close enough to make your breath catch in that strange, silent way it always does when he’s near.

“I don’t know how to be around you right now,” you admit.

His lips part slightly, then close again, like he wants to speak but doesn’t trust what might come out. After a beat—“Come with me.”

You blink. “Where?”

“Out.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s not a request.”

His eyes dance like they’ve just dared the world to catch him in the act. He reaches past you, grabs a black jacket off a bench, and tosses it over his shoulder. Sylus walks out, and you stand there a second longer, stunned, and then follow him.

The garage hums with mechanical life. Cool light spills from strip fixtures overhead, catching the sleek angles of chrome and matte black. You trail behind Sylus, hands stuffed into the sleeves of your hoodie, still unsure what this is.

He stops beside a car that looks like it might’ve once belonged to a military prototype. It’s angular, dark, and lethal. Definitely not regulation.

“You upgraded this?”

Sylus taps his fingers against the roof, the way one might pat a sleeping beast. “A couple of things under the hood need stress testing.”

You arch a brow. “And you need me to test drive it?”

“Think of it as exposure therapy.”

“To… what? Speed? Bad decisions?”

“To me,” he laments without looking at you, and then he tosses the keys.

You barely catch them. He slides into the passenger seat without another word, reclining like a king who knows the throne will obey. You fumble your way into the driver’s seat and adjust it so that you can actually reach the damn pedals while glaring at Sylus’s long legs as if they’ve spited you purposefully.

The garage door peels open, and neon bleeds in from the street like liquid crime. You pull out slowly at first, tense and painfully aware of Sylus watching you from the corner of his eye.

“Relax,” he coaxes. His timbre carries the calm of stones beneath rivers, eroding your tension one syllable at a time. “She’s got bite, but she won’t chew unless you beg her to.”

“Oh, good. I love being chewed by death traps.”

You guide the car through the arteries of the N109 Zone, where streetlights flicker like dying fireflies and nothing feels quite alive. The city here is all tension and teeth.

When you hit a red light, you hear it. A low, guttural rev from the car beside you.

You glance. It’s some neon-lit hunk of overpriced ego with a man behind the wheel wearing sunglasses at night. He chews gum like he’s at war with it. The bass from his stereo is actively trying to shatter the time-space continuum, and to top it all off? He smirks like you’re the punchline in whatever Fast & Delusional fantasy he’s living.

When he revs his neon-drenched monstrosity's engine again, you tighten your grip on the wheel. There’s a twitch at the corner of your mouth that’s either the beginning of a smile or the end of your self-restraint.

Next to you, Sylus remains draped across the passenger seat like an impeccably dressed warning label. He doesn’t even look over.

“Don’t even think about it,” he cautions, voice all suede and steel.

You are absolutely thinking about it.

So you rev back. It’s not just a sound. It’s a statement. It echoes through the street like a dragon clearing its throat before setting fire to the world. You’re giggling—real, dangerous giggling—the kind that tastes like triumph and smells like gasoline.

Sylus turns to you painfully slowly. “Anira.”

“He started it!” You say it with the righteous fury of a five-year-old about to throw hands on the playground.

The man revs louder. Petty vengeance in vehicular form. You glance at Sylus with the wide-eyed innocence of someone who’s already made seventeen bad decisions today and is hungry for more.

“Don’t,” he forewarns.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re about to,” he mutters. “And I’d prefer not to scrape you off the pavement tonight.”

“I can handle it,” you purr, fingertips brushing the wheel like it’s a co-conspirator.

You smirk and rev back. The engine roars like it just remembered it has free will and deeply resents authority. It’s not just noise. It’s a threat, a challenge, and possibly a mating call for anyone whose idea of romance is mutual recklessness. Sylus exhales like a man who just realized he is, in fact, dating the apocalypse.

He might be right.

He turns to you like a man confronting divine punishment. One eyebrow climbs Mount Judgement. “You’re actually considering it.”

You grin like the devil just handed you a driver’s license. “Considering? Trouble, I’m already picturing slow-mo explosions and my hair blowing back like I’m in a shampoo commercial.”

“Wonderful,” he mutters, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “This is how I die. Not in battle. Not in flames. But in the passenger seat of a glorified death trap with you at the helm, chasing some neon-fuelled idiot who thinks revving counts as flirting.” Another rev. Louder. Bolder. The sound of male ego given horsepower.

“Hey, sweetheart,” the guy calls out of his window, waggling his fluffy brows. “That car yours, or did your boyfriend let you borrow it so you could feel something for once?”

You freeze. The air stills. Somewhere, a squirrel stops chewing mid-nut.

Oh no.

Oh no, no.

You’ve seen this scene in every fast-car, bad-decision movie. You’ve read about this moment in books with titles like Throttle Me Harder. You’ve lived this fantasy during long, emotionally turbulent showers.

First thought: Sylus is going to leap out the window like a reaper in luxury leather and rip this man’s vocal cords out.

Second thought: Honestly… valid. Ten out of ten. Would watch.

Third thought: Wait. Why is Sylus still sitting there?

You glance at him, still and unmoving. Not even a twitch. He’s staring straight ahead like he’s waiting for enlightenment or his takeout order. No tension. No death glare. Not even a polite eyebrow raise that says, “I will destroy your lineage with a smile.”

Okay. Rude. Maybe you were mildly hoping for some dramatic, territorial energy. This is the part where he’s supposed to go full medieval over his mildly unhinged girlfriend. A little “She’s mine,” maybe with ominous threats whispered like a bedtime story.

But, nope. Sylus is radiating the emotional availability of a haunted statue. Inner peace: maxed out. Feral protector mode: in hibernation. Passive-aggressive detachment? Activated and thriving.

He is basically a meditation app in a suit with a kill count.

And honestly, the betrayal? Unforgivable. You would’ve settled for a single jaw clench. A dramatic sigh. A “Don’t make me ruin you.”

Just a crumb of male rage, please.

Then, as slow as dawn breaking over the horizon, he smiles. Not the cute one. Not the maybe-he-likes-you one. No. This is the side-cocked curl of doom. The kind of smile that makes volcanoes evacuate themselves.

“Take the next left,” he instructs.

You blink. “What?”

He’s already pulling up the city grid like it’s nothing, tapping through menus with unbothered malevolence. “Old tram line. No cams. No traffic. Perfectly legal if you’re also legally insane.”

Your brain does a cartwheel. “So… that’s a yes?”

He tilts his head at the other car, lips parted in the kind of smile that made the Big Bang think twice.

“Make him regret being born,” Sylus intones, like he’s ordering a drink spiked with pure vengeance.

The light turns green, and you turn left.

The engines howl like war drums, but yours—oh, yours—is a hellbeast unchained. It snarls beneath your fingers, the chassis vibrating with a sound so deep it rattles up through your thighs, into your chest, and settles somewhere low in your stomach. The whole car feels feral, coiled like it’s waiting to pounce, and you adore it. You want to kiss whoever built it. You want to marry this engine. You want to pin it to the wall and—

“Focus,” Sylus mutters, not even looking at you.

You are focused. On the rumble, the heat, the almost obscene growl this beast makes every time you brush the throttle. It’s not just a car. It’s a predator, and you’re sitting in its ribcage, hand on its racing heart.

You’re bouncing in your seat. “Sylus, Sylus, Sylus—are you ready?”

“No, I’m deeply regretting every life choice that led us to this moment.”

You flash him a manic grin, fingers tightening on the wheel like you were born to white-knuckle your way through chaos. The guy in the other car is smirking at you like you’re a joke. Perfect. He’s underestimating you.

The flag drops.

You launch. Tires scream. The engine roars like something infernal just got exorcised through the hood, and you’re already ten feet ahead before your brain catches up with your body. Everything goes sideways and forward all at once, and you’re howling like a deranged banshee blessed by horsepower and terrible decisions.

“Oh my stars, I’m a god,” you scream, clinging to the wheel like it’s the only thing anchoring you to this mortal realm. “Did you feel that?! We teleported!”

Sylus does not flinch or blink as he leans back into the seat like he’s waiting for an elevator. “You’re going 120.”

“I’m going 120, and it’s only been twelve seconds!” You shout, hair flying, eyes wild, a grin splitting your face. “Tell me that’s not sexy! Tell me this engine isn’t whispering dirty things to me right now!”

“Sounds more like it’s screaming,” Sylus replies evenly, completely unfazed. “You downshifted too early.”

You gasp. “How dare you!”

A corner barrels toward you, and you take it without braking because, clearly, fear is for people who haven’t spiritually merged with their car. Sylus grabs the door handle with the same detachment one might use to pick up a cup of coffee.

“Should I be worried?” he asks mildly.

“Only if I start laughing again,” you shoot back.

You start laughing again.

The other racer inches up beside you, and you shout, “Oh, you wanna go, Neon Boy? My toaster could outrace that sad excuse for a—WAIT NO! He’s pulling ahead! Sylus, do something!”

“I’m not driving,” he drawls.

“I’M LOSING TO A MAN WHO WEARS SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT, SYLUS.”

You shift again—aggressively, probably incorrectly—and surge forward, pure spite and stubborn joy fuelling your acceleration. The road stretches ahead, and you’re flying again, heart slamming in your chest like it’s trying to beat the engine to the finish line.

“I love this car,” you bellow over the wind. “I’m going to name her—Sylus, help me name her!”

“She’s not sentient,” he mutters.

Another turn. You drift this one, not because you know how, but because braking is for cowards, and Sylus tilts slightly in his seat, bored as a house cat.

You throw him a look. “Do you feel nothing?”

“I feel mildly concerned for your survival.”

“Aw,” you croon. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”

The finish line ignites ahead of you like it was summoned—a glowing, godly threshold carved into the asphalt by fate and poor decisions. Your opponent is close.

But you? You are not merely driving. You are fused to the wheel like a cursed sword to a chosen one, like a war priestess possessed by the ghost of every unhinged drag racer who ever lived.

The engine snarls beneath you, a wrathful, wheeled chromatic beast foaming at the mouth and whispering blasphemies into your bones. You gun it, and the acceleration hits like a divine slap from the cosmos.

Your spine becomes theoretical. Your soul briefly leaves your body to scream, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” before diving back in, equally thrilled.

You howl into the night like a woman possessed. “WE RIDE, GORGONATHA! TO GLORY!”

Sylus blinks. “Who the hell is Gorgonatha?”

“The car, Sylus! STAY WITH ME!”

One final burst. The tires shriek. The car lurches forward like a demon launched from a trebuchet. Your opponent fades into your rearview mirror, stunned, possibly praying. You explode across the finish line with all the subtlety of a holy war.

You win.

By a nose.

A glorious, dignity-shattering nose. You let out a victory screech so intense you’re not even sure it came from you. It might’ve been Gorgonatha. It might’ve been Sylus quietly dying inside.

Your knuckles are still locked on the wheel like you just guided a star through war. The engine purrs beneath you now—sated, smug, almost flirty.

The sad, defeated whine of your opponent’s car creeps up beside yours like a wounded dog dragging its pride behind it. His face appears, and he looks like a man who just watched his entire legacy get torched.

“What the actual hell was that?” he demands, voice raw with disbelief.

You turn your head slowly, like a villainess in a slow-mo reveal, and give him your most beatific smile. “That, good sir, was grace under pressure. Or possibly a divine possession. The jury’s out.”

The man blinks. “You almost sideswiped me on the turn.”

You nod solemnly. “Yes. That was her speaking. Gorgonatha’s rage is not mine to temper. She merely allows me to ride.”

“Are you high?”

“I’m elevated, emotionally.”

He gestures helplessly at the car. “That’s not even a race car! What the hell is this?!”

Sylus finally leans forward, calm as always. “A prototype.”

You nod sagely. “She runs on vengeance and the broken dreams of misogynists.”

The guy just stares and flounders as his brain begins to fry like an egg on engine metal. “Whatever. Rematch next week. Same time.”

You blink. “You want more of this?”

“You got lucky.”

You grin. “I am lucky. Lucky this car didn’t just ascend into the sky and become a comet.”

He peels off with the angry sound of a man trying very hard to salvage his dignity. You watch him go, then slowly turn back to Sylus, who is still too calm.

You pat the dash affectionately. “She was magnificent.”

“She almost killed us.”

“She made me feel alive.”

“You screamed ‘WE DIE IN GLORY’ mid-turn,” he counters.

“Did we die?”

“…No.”

“Then Gorgonatha was right.”

Sylus exhales like someone aging a decade in real time. “Please don’t name the car.”

“Too late.”

You’re still laughing when the city lights flicker back into view. Gorgonatha hums under your palms like she’s got stories to tell for years. You pat her lovingly, cooing nonsense praise like she’s a warhorse who just carried you through Valhalla and back as you pull into the underground parking garage.

Sylus has said nothing for minutes now, which is deeply suspicious.

You shoot him a look, still buzzing like you licked an eletrical socket. “…You’re mad.”

“No.”

“You’re definitely mad.”

“Why would I be mad?” he replies, voice level, arms folded like some vaguely handsome, judgmental statue. “You only broke the sound barrier and possibly time itself.”

“Time?”

“I’m pretty sure we skipped ahead three days during that last turn.”

You huff a laugh but then squint at him. “So… scale of one to ten, how close were you to yanking the wheel and ending us both?”

“Oh, I let go of the idea of survival halfway through the second corner.”

“See?” You gesture triumphantly at the windshield. “That’s growth.”

He sighs long and dramatically, like he aged a century watching you power-slide past an old digital billboard that blinked PLEASE SLOW DOWN.

“You don’t drive, Anira. You commit vehicular poetry and hope the laws of physics are too stunned to interfere.”

You snort. “Vehicular poetry. I like that.”

“I’ll put it on your tombstone,” he deadpans.

The corner of his mouth betrays him. A twitch. A real smile threatening to break surface tension.

“Oh my stars,” you whisper, scandalized. “Was that a smirk? Did I just get a smirk out of you?”

“No.”

“That was a smirk. A Sylus Smirk. I win.”

He exhales, slow and resigned. “If this is what winning looks like, I fear for the universe.”

“Too late. The universe just high-fived me and offered me a monster truck.”

“You were supposed to test the engine,” he mutters.

You bat your lashes. “I did. It passed. Spectacularly.”

“You’re ridiculous,” he sighs, resting his hand on your thigh like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“You’re glowing,” you shoot back, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “I turned you on with my reckless endangerment, didn’t I? Be honest.”

“Maybe.”

You blink. “Maybe?”

He shrugs.

You throw your hands off the wheel like he’s insulted your ancestors. “I’m sitting over here so wet you may actually have to reupholster the seat, and you’re giving me a maybe? Holy shit, Sylus. What does it take to turn you on, an asteroid collision? A war crime?”

He finally turns his head, calm as the dead of space, eyes glittering. “I said maybe. I didn’t say no.”

He reaches over, takes your hand in his, and lowers it into his lap right onto the very solid proof of his reaction. It takes everything in you not to wrap your fingers around his girth that throbs against your palm.

Your mouth falls open. The silence between you vibrates with wicked tension.

“Oh.”

He doesn’t blink. “Still want a yes?”

You are going to die. Not in battle. Not by some monstrous Wanderer clawing through your chest. No. You’re going to spontaneously combust in a luxury sports car because of this man.

You try to play it cool. Like your brain isn’t melting. Like your body isn’t seconds from flinging itself into his lap like an unhinged groupie at a concert. There is a relentless pang of need between your thighs, and your pussy is clenching involuntarily as if it needs to remind you that it’s empty. You cross your legs like it’ll help.

It doesn’t.

Why is the air so hot? Why is he so hot?

You make a wheezing sound, some mix of arousal and existential horror. “You’re evil.”

“I’m practical. You asked.”

The elevator ride feels like a held breath. You don’t say a word, and neither does he. Your hand is still warm from where he touched it, and every time you shift your fingers, you swear you can still feel the outline of his cock, like a phantom touch burned straight into your skin.

The doors slide open with a soft hiss, revealing the quiet sprawl of his penthouse. It’s dim, low-lit, and humming with that strange, unreal calm his home always carries, like time doesn’t move the same here.

You step in first, and he follows, as silent as a shadow behind you. For a second you think you’re going to turn around and he’s going to kiss you or ruin you or both, and you’ll let him, because something in your bones has already decided it’s inevitable.

But he doesn’t touch you. He walks past you. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back in a minute.”

You nod like you’re composed. Like you aren’t one heartbeat away from disintegrating. You drop onto the couch, spine stiff, limbs tingling like they’ve forgotten how to exist.

Outside the windows, there are no meteors now, just light pollution, blinking satellites, and the occasional flicker of passing aircraft. Still, you can almost imagine the field. The warmth of the dragon’s breath. The soft, heavy way it moved, like it could destroy the world but never would—not with you in it.

What does it mean to run toward something you don’t understand? To kiss a beast between the eyes like you’ve done it a thousand times before?

Your head rests against the couch, eyes unfocused. Your thoughts drift. Back to the dream. The dragon. The stars. That feeling of something ancient and infinite brushing the edges of your soul.

Maybe it was only a dream, soft-spun and golden, stitched from the thread of something lost.

Or maybe—it was the truth in its purest form, and this waking life is just the echo.

Chapter Masterlist

A03 [Cross-posted]

Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76, @harmonyrae, @for-hearthand-home

Hiya, kittens! I feel the need to let you know that this will likely be a long fic, because I'm terrible at writing short ones. I like to ramble too much, and include scenes that in no way advance the plot. So, yeah, hopefully you guy don't mind that!

I love all your comments so far, keep them coming if you're comfortable doing so! Each one makes me smile.

Take care everyone and enjoy! ☺️

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #love and deepspace #sylus x mc #sylus x you #sylus x oc #sylus qin

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 4: The End Wore My Face

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

You’re seated at your desk with a datapad in one hand and your chin in the other, pretending to review a mission report that was due, oh, a solid week ago. Maybe two. Time is fake, and paperwork is a government lie.

The words blur together into a mess of acronyms, jargon, and phrases like “potential kinetic anomaly,” which really just means someone got punched very, very hard. Your eyes glaze over somewhere around the third paragraph.

Your brain? Elsewhere. Specifically, imagining Sylus with his shirt off, sweat gleaming down the line of his pecs while he does something completely unnecessary like fixing a motorbike he probably stole or recalibrating a sniper rifle with his veiny arms and that concentration face he does.

There’s a particular angle—head tilted slightly down, lashes low, mouth curled just enough to be dangerous—that basically rewires your entire nervous system.

God, you miss him.

He’s been off-grid for three days, doing Onychinus things. Probably threatening someone while sipping espresso, playing chess with a war criminal, or, worst-case scenario, getting shot at in another suit that costs more than your entire apartment.

You tap your pen against the desk, sighing so deeply it might count as a medical event. Sitting on his face wouldn’t be the worst way to die. The thought hits you like a derailed subway car, and you blink hard.

Okay, wow. You need air. You need water. You need help.

You’re just starting to wonder if anyone’s ever died from horniness-induced dehydration when a voice cuts in beside you:

“Earth to Anira,” says Ethan, leaning a little too close over your desk, like he’s trying to solve the mystery of your very obvious spiralling. “You okay? You’ve been staring at that same paragraph for five minutes. Either it’s written in code, or you’ve transcended language altogether.”

Ethan is tall and clean-cut, with that golden-retriever energy that screams, Will hold your purse and cry during Pixar movies.

“Sorry,” you say, straightening in your chair and dragging yourself out of lust-ridden la-la-land. “Was just… thinking.”

“Mysterious,” he teases. “You’ve got that far-off look in your eyes, like you’re in a tragic romance. Should I be jealous?”

You manage a smirk. “Only if you’ve got a criminal record and a death wish.”

He laughs like you’re joking, which is adorable.

“No record, but I did get a parking ticket last weekend.”

You feign a gasp. “Scandalous.” What did you do last weekend? Oh yeah, threaten to break a woman’s fingers after you watched Sylus beat some guy senseless in an underground fighting ring.

Ethan leans a little on the desk, flashing you his best grin. You can practically feel the sugar content. “Listen, if you ever want a break from whatever tragic romance you’re stuck in—”

Oh no.

“—we could grab lunch sometime. My treat. There’s this new café on the east end. Supposed to have great pie.”

You smile noncommittally. “Thanks, Ethan. I’ll keep that in mind.”

He beams like you just handed him a lottery ticket, and you have to resist the urge to pat his head. “Okay! I’ll let you get back to your report.”

You wave as he saunters away like he’s just been invited to prom by the most popular girl in school. Ethan’s a good guy. Sweet in that kindergarten teacher way. Maybe in another universe, you’d want the kind of love that feels like a home-cooked meal and happily-ever-after. But in this one?

You fell for the man who only smiles like that when something’s about to burn, and you pray that it’s you. Thankfully, Nina comes to your rescue when she snaps a rubber band at your face.

You flinch. “Hey!”

Nina grins, not even pretending to look sorry. “That’s for ignoring my texts. Again.”

She’s the only person here who could get away with this kind of crap. Short, sharp, and with a smile like a blade. Her pink undercut changes shades weekly, and she has exactly zero time for authority, which is probably why you like her.

“I was busy,” you lie.

“You were drooling,” she corrects, pointing at the report you’ve smudged. “I don’t know who he is, but I hope he’s hot enough to justify endangering official documentation.”

You shrug. “Depends how you feel about knives and moral ambiguity.”

Nina raises an eyebrow. “God, you do have a type. You know, normal people crush on actors or influencers. You look like you’ve been mentally raw-dogged by a Bond villain.”

“Only the sexy ones.”

She snorts and tosses a candy bar onto your desk. “Sugar. You look like you haven’t eaten since 2025.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Across the bullpen, Ethan is still hovering, possibly pretending to reorganize a supply crate so he can glance your way. When he notices you noticing, he gives a small wave.

Nina clocks it too. “He’s gonna ask again.”

“I know.”

“You gonna let him down gently or hit him with the full ‘emotionally unavailable with a vampire kink’ package?”

“I was thinking of faking my own death.”

“Bold choice. On brand.”

“Anira?” Captain Jenna approaches.

You swivel in your chair as she stops beside your desk, crisp in her dark uniform, arms folded.

“Yes, Captain?”

Jenna holds out a data tablet, and your name’s already glowing on the screen.

“Field request just came in. Metaflux surge in the western fringe. Abandoned warehouse near the old docking lines. Locals flagged it. Too volatile to ignore. Normally I’d assign this to a recon team, but your records from similar anomalies show strong results. I want you on this one personally.”

“Understood.”

Before Jenna can move on, Nina leans back in her chair with a groan that’s more drama than protest.

“Oh, come on, Captain. You know she’s not gonna say no. Let me tag along, and we’ll wrap it up by lunch. I’ll even promise not to blow anything up unless it bites first.”

Jenna exhales with a small nod: “Fine. Take a two-man team. Gear up and move fast. Report anything unusual immediately.”

The warehouse is an old relic, wedged between half-demolished buildings and silent, rusted-out rail lines. Chain-link fences rattle faintly in the breeze, and sunlight filters through the cracked skylights in long, narrow beams that illuminate swirling dust.

You and Nina move in silence, boots crunching over loose debris. Her pistol is out, held low and ready, while yours rests in your holster.

“There’s nothing here,” Nina mutters, voice tinny through the comm. “No recent activity.”

Your Evol hums beneath your skin, like static crawling through your veins. It’s faint, not enough to triangulate, but unmistakably there.

“There’s metaflux,” you inform quietly. “Weak, but it’s here.”

Nina doesn’t question you while she adjusts her grip and keeps moving. She trusts you, probably more than anyone else in the Association. Not that you’ve given her much in return. You’re grateful, in your way, but you’ve never been good at letting people get close.

You sweep your eyes over the interior again. Rust-streaked girders, shattered crates, and scorch marks on the concrete. You’ve seen so many spaces like this before they all start to blur.

The air changes, growing drier. You taste smoke before you see it.

Nina curses softly. “Got movement. South wing.”

You draw your weapon. From the far end of the warehouse, there is a flit of red light, then another. Then flame bursts along the floor in a sudden whoosh, licking at the edges of crates, catching on old wiring, and climbing into the shadows.

The Wanderer steps out of the blaze like it was born from it. Tall. Humanoid, but stretched wrong, like heatwaves made corporeal. Its eyes burn brighter than its skin, twin coals in a shifting face. You recognize the type immediately: Cindertide-Class. Fire variant. Fast. Destructive.

Your body reacts before your brain does. You fire, and Nina splits to the side, her Evol flaring to life in a shimmer of kinetic force as she tries to flank it.

Embers spiral toward you, drifting, and everything slows. The orange glow, the heat, the way the flames dance and spiral—it’s too familiar.

Reality tilts.

The temple’s roof yawns open to a sky that’s gagging on ash and smoke thick as gravecloth, blotting out stars that once bore witness to miracles and massacres alike. Fire coils through the ruins in serpent spirals, hissing where it touches broken stone, tasting the marrow of walls that once begged the heavens for mercy.

You stand in the center of it all.

Wings cloaked against your spine, smudged in soot. Horns splintered at the tips, like they once caught the sky and lost. Your tail coils around your leg in a loop, flicking now and then in the echo of anger. Rage has been worn thin by time. There is only the hollow, echoless quiet where feeling used to live.

The ruin sings your name in the creak of melting beams, in the soft sigh of glass breaking under your feet, and beyond the temple, the city screams.

Thousands of voices rise. Some are a wail of history folding in on itself, burned down to the root; others are no louder than a breath caught mid-prayer. The sound is extinction made audible: walls folding inward, lives torn loose from the world, and the future weeping as it burns down to bone and ash.

Your claws trace the mosaic. A girl with a crown of light. A sword in her hand plunged through the chest of a great black dragon.

He is dying.

She is shining.

And the story, God help you, dares to call it salvation.

Your hand drags across the curve of his spine. Over inky-scaled wings and red-threaded horns. Over the throat you used to trace with kisses. Over a body you once held so tightly, you thought you’d never be alone again.

Your breath trembles. Your lip splits between your teeth. The world blurs around the edges.

“Why?” you whisper, and the word feels like it’s being torn from somewhere deeper than your lungs. “Why did you make me do it?”

And oh, it burns. The ache in your throat. The sting in your eyes. The grief has teeth, and it gnaws at you like penance.

It wants you hollow.

Soldiers crash into the temple behind you. You hear steel unsheathing, bowstrings pulled taut, and boots scraping over the fallen dead. You smell sweat and blood and the rot of corrupted faith. Parasites draped in holy colours. Greed gleaming in their souls like oil on water.

“Kill the fiend!” someone shouts.

But you do not turn until the first arrow sings through the smoke. It is only then that you unravel. Tendrils burst from your skin, black and red and gold, like the soul of some dying god writhing free.

They snap through the air, catching arrows mid-flight, stopping blades inches from your skin. They wrap around the soldiers like vines of vengeance, dragging them to their knees.

You leer at them. Pale faces. Ragged armour. Eyes wide with fear they fucking earned.

You can smell the sweet decay of humanity too far gone to be saved.

“You know not what you’re worshipping,” you accuse, stepping down from the mosaic like a god dismounting her altar. “You don’t know what was taken.”

Screams tear through the ruin, echoed in the howling wind, in the collapse of stone as more of the ceiling falls away. Blood splashes the floor. Bones snap like brittle twigs.

Their deaths are not merciful. You make sure of that.

They thought he was the end of the world.

It turns out you are the Armageddon they should’ve feared all along.

The fire doesn’t vanish; it shatters. A heatwave slams into your side, and then a beast with burn-slick skin crashes into you like a meteor. Your breath is torn from your lungs, ribs crunching under the pressure, and the ground rushes up too fast to catch yourself.

Pain explodes through your spine and arms as you skid—palms shredded, elbows scraping concrete. Blood smears. Your skull rings like a bell struck too hard.

You lie there for half a heartbeat, lungs wheezing for air. That vision hasn’t left you. It’s in your bones now. It pulses, slow and volcanic. Rage curls through your ribs, dragging itself up your throat, coating your teeth in molten heat.

The Wanderer screeches. A wrong sound, like a forest burning alive.

You rise with fury. Blood streaks your temple. Your gloves are torn. Your breath comes ragged, but your eyes lock onto the burning shape before you, and something inside you smiles.

There are four of them now, maybe five, slithering out like smoke with claws. Each one hunched and malformed, fire weeping from the cracks in their skin like molten wax. One lashes toward you again, but you’re already moving.

You spring sideways, gun drawn mid-roll. Two clean shots hit center mass. It snarls, staggering back.

A wall becomes a launching point as you leap, your boots skimming up stone as you backflip over a Wanderer. As you twist in midair, you plant a bullet in the thing’s skull. It jerks, legs folding in on themselves. Dust explodes as it hits the ground.

Another roars from behind. You slide under its strike, one knee dragging across glass and gravel. You twist your body at the last second and unload two rounds straight into its gut.

They swarm, and you spin between them. Hands like lightning, legs a storm. You vault over debris, use a half-collapsed beam to spring up, flip, shoot from above—always one step ahead, always just out of reach.

You are precision and chaos braided together. The fourth one tries to corner you, flames jetting from its spine. You charge. No fear. Gun empty—fine. You throw it hard enough to clock its jaw. While it’s reeling, you draw the second, jam it beneath its chin, and pull the trigger.

“Anira!” Nina again, breathless.

You’re barely listening. The last one sees the others fall and falters. A shiver runs through its warped limbs like it senses what you are now.

Too late.

You sprint, closing the distance in seconds, and slam into it. Guns forgotten. You drag it down with your hands alone. Teeth clenched, you rip its head back and drive your knee into its chest. Once. Twice. Three times.

Its hide gives way with a sickening crunch, and still—you don’t stop.

It’s Nina’s hand on your shoulder that grounds you. “Hey. Anira. It’s dead.”

The warehouse is scorched and steaming. Smoke curls upward like incense from a battlefield altar. You’re panting—chest heaving, ribs screaming. Your knuckles are raw. Your palms are slick with blood. You close your eyes. You try to breathe, but that mosaic still burns behind your eyes, each shard a brand pressed into thought. In your chest, an old fury stirs, raw and restless, clawing at the hollow beneath your bones. It whispers a name wrapped in smoke, a name you almost remember but never quite catch.

You’re behind the wheel before you know it. The streets blur past your windows, painted gold and red by the low-hanging sun. Traffic thins as you leave the central district.

You don’t remember turning off the main route. Linkon fades into a rougher silhouette with shadowed alleys and neon signs stuttering. The N109 looms like a forbidden thing you step into willingly.

When you pull up to the tower, the sensors register your car. The elevator knows your name. When you press your thumb to the scanner outside his penthouse, the door clicks open like it’s been waiting.

It’s dark.

Not just dim, but hollow.

No Mephisto shrieking with his next dramatic entrance. No Luke yelling from the kitchen about you stealing his last soda. No Kieran teasing you.

Nothing.

The silence is so complete, it roars. You step inside, and it swallows you. You don’t even take your boots off. Just ghost through the empty space, down the familiar hall, until the soft red gleam of his room meets you like an old scar.

You open the door, but you don’t make it to the bed.

You sink onto the floor like your legs finally give out. Knees pulled to your chest. Arms wrapped around them so tightly, it feels like you might keep yourself from shattering, and then you’re crying.

You don’t even feel the first tear fall. But then it’s another. And another. Until they’re hot, scalding trails down your cheeks, down your neck, across the bruises blooming along your ribs.

You bite your lip hard enough to draw blood, but the sob still escapes. The rage is back—wild and feral in your throat, snarling. The grief is a fist around your heart. Your mind is full of ash and questions and that goddamned mosaic.

You want to scream. You want to sleep. You want to understand. But all you do is fold in on yourself, trembling, your breath shaking in the hollow of your chest.

This place is the only one where you can bleed in peace.

You don’t know how long you’re asleep, but when you wake, the light outside has shifted, washed in the indigo hush of twilight.

The door creaks open behind you.

You don’t have to turn to know it’s him. That sharp, charged air, like the pause before lightning strikes, gives him away. You feel his presence like you feel your own heartbeat crawling beneath your skin.

You should be relieved, but your body twists with something sour and ugly.

“You know, don’t you?” You spit from the floor without even offering a greeting. “You know what’s happening to me.”

His brow lifts, barely. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Don’t play coy.” You rise and take a step toward him, fists clenched. “The visions. The memories. The dreams. They started after I resonated with you, and they haven’t stopped.”

Sylus gives you nothing but that maddening quiet and that gaze like he’s seeing more than you’re saying. Like he’s weighing the weight of a thousand lifetimes in your single breath.

Your voice cracks with the fury you can’t cage. “Are you doing this to me? Did you plant them in my head? Is this part of whatever the hell your eye can do—”

“No.”

His voice cuts clean through your spiralling.

Just that.

No.

It should be comforting.

It isn’t.

“Then what the hell is happening to me?” You demand, every inch of you shaking. “Why do I remember things I’ve never lived? Why does it feel like my soul’s splitting open every time I sleep—”

“You’re not splitting. You’re remembering.”

Before you can push or punch him for being so damn cryptic, he steps forward and pulls you into his arms.

Not delicately. Not cautiously. He folds you against his chest like you belong there, and even as you stiffen, even as you try to shove him away with all the fury still fizzing under your skin, you can’t stop the sob that breaks loose from your throat.

Your fists press against his chest. Your knees give out again, and he goes with you, sinking to the floor without letting go.

“Tell me,” you whisper, voice ragged. “Please, Sylus. What aren’t you telling me?”

His hand moves slowly through your hair, fingers brushing the base of your neck. You press your forehead harder to his chest, trembling, breath shallow and sharp.

He doesn’t answer.

He just holds you tighter.

And for now, that’s all he’ll give you.

Chapter Masterlist A03 [Cross-posted] Taglist: @mcdepressed290, @animecrazy76 As always, thank you for reading, and I hope it's enjoyable. Please feel free to comment and tell me what you think ❤️ Take care everyone!

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #sylus x you #sylus x oc #lads

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 3: What Remains

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

The shadows melt along the walls of the bedroom, stitched into the corners like they stain the silence. You close the door behind you and lean against it, fingers splayed wide like you might hold the moment back from closing in too fast. There is a sense of feeling split, like something opened and forgot to close, and now your soul is bleeding somewhere behind your ribcage.

The robe hangs loosely off your shoulders as you settle on the edge of the bed, damp hair clinging to your back. You close your eyes and blink once. Twice. Three times, seeking the echoes.

The vision doesn’t come again, but memory hums like static just beneath your skin. You chase it, stubborn and dogged, reaching into the fog with hands that can still feel the phantom sear branded along your palm, like you tried to hold lightning and mistook it for light.

Your mind stalks the carnage of a memory that should not exist. Part of you wants to tear your throat open in a scream loud enough to split the sky. Another part wants to fold inward, a question mark of nerve and bone.

Neither impulse wins.

You open your eyes, stare at the pale web of moonlight on the floor, and begin sorting the pieces like bones in the dust.

The dragon. Again. You were the dragon in the other dream. Winged, weeping fire, ancient and angry. This time, it curled its body around yours as if to protect you from the sky itself. As if it loved you. Like a promise made beneath stars or a vow before war.

You’d begged—not for your life, but for its.

Your fingers twitch against the edge of your robe as you try to make sense of it. You draw in a deep breath. The kind of breath you take before dissection, before battle, before heartbreak. You close your eyes and try to lift the shroud of oblivion.

The feelings are easier to recognize than the fragments. You feel it in your bones: a grief too ancient to belong to you. Pain, but not yours alone. The dragon’s, too. You felt it leach into you, an ache so vast you almost sank beneath it.

Your hand trembles slightly as it brushes your thigh, but you ignore it. Catalogue it. Another data point. Another tremor in the map of your mind.

In the mirror across the room, your reflection stares back when you open your eyes—wide-eyed, haunted, searching. You tilt your head, studying yourself like an artifact in a forgotten ruin. For a second, you swear it stares back like it knows something you don’t. Like the girl blinking at you has seen centuries you’ve only brushed.

The ache in your chest doesn’t recede, but you’re no stranger to hurting. It’s just unusual to hurt like this, without a wound or a reason.

The kiss stirred what has long slept in silence. The knowledge lives in your bones. It is only waiting for you to remember. You feel it in the stillness between each pulse, in the ghost of fire at the edge of your fingertips. A past pressed its lips to yours and begged not to be forgotten.

You’re going to pry meaning from it, even if it takes digging through the marrow of your soul.

You gather yourself. It’s not that the memory has faded; if anything, it clings tighter now, clearer in its grief, but you smooth it behind your eyes anyway. One breath. Then another. Fingers comb through damp hair as you rise, ghosting past the mirror one last time before you pull open the bedroom door.

He startles you. Sylus leans a few paces down the corridor, arms folded, head tilted slightly like he’s been waiting. A sentinel with too-red eyes and the calm of someone who already knew what you needed before you did.

You pause mid-step, pulse skipping.

Because you’re you, and emotion is easiest when wrapped in irony, you blurt, “Well. That’s one way to ruin a first kiss. Should’ve just sneezed in your face to complete the mood.”

It’s a weak joke, but you commit to it. Smirk and all.

He doesn’t take the bait, unfolding his arms and walking toward you with the patience of dusk dripping into night. “You didn’t ruin it,” he disputes, voice deep and certain, the syllables brushing across your skin like fleece and flint.

You try for a smirk. “You’re only saying that because I didn’t actually sneeze.”

He stops in front of you and tips your chin up with the back of his fingers. “I’ve waited a long time for that kiss,” he cuts in gently. “That’s not a ruin, Anira. That’s a beginning.”

There’s something in his gaze that roots you in place and makes your throat tighten. A refusal to let you turn this into a punchline. He won’t let you offer pieces of yourself wrapped in jokes and expect him not to notice the cracks beneath.

His thumb grazes along the edge of your jaw. “Are you okay?”

You nod. “I will be.”

The hush between you lingers for a breath longer, then two. His hand, still at your jaw, slips away with a pledge tucked in the slow drag of his fingers.

Sylus leans in, voice a murmur pitched just above a purr. “For what it’s worth… I had a very different kind of scream in mind.”

You blink, eyes darting toward him to make sure you heard that right, and then uncontainable laughter. A crack of startled delight that tumbles into a giggling fit so sudden you have to grip his arm to steady yourself. He watches you with the pleased smirk of someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

“Was that flirting?” You shoot him a look. “Did you just weaponize my trauma and your voice at the same time?”

He hums. “Technically, I weaponized your imagination. I just provided… sound design.”

You place a hand over your heart, feigning a swoon. “Criminal and poet. How do I stand a chance?”

“You don’t,” he replies without missing a beat. “But I like watching you try.”

You laugh again and lean a little closer as you walk. “You know, if I scream for real next time, I’m taking you down with me.”

There’s a dangerous, enthralled glint in his eyes. “I’m counting on it, kitten.” He guides you down the hall, the shift in mood effortless. “Come on. The movie’s waiting, and I promise I won’t judge you for falling asleep in the first ten minutes.”

“That was one time,” you protest, bumping your shoulder into his.

“It was three,” he corrects.

“What can I say? Your presence makes me feel… safe.”

He falters for half a step, and your inner self pirouettes triumphantly. It’s no easy task to trip up the leader of Onychinus.

In a voice just soft enough to slip under your skin, he says, “Good.”

By the time you reach the main room, the shadows feel lighter. You sink into the cushions, and Sylus queues up a film with all the ceremony of a king presenting treasure. He sits beside you, warm and solid, one arm draped casually along the back of the couch.

You tell yourself you’ll stay awake, but the glow of the screen, the soft hum of the speakers, and Sylus’s quiet breathing beside you pull you under like a tide.

This time, you finally touch a sliver of peace.

The sun hasn’t even warmed the marble floors yet, but you’re already on a mission. A holy quest. A noble journey.

For eggs.

Maybe toast. If you can figure out where the bread lives in this labyrinth of polished metal and concealed panels that probably open via blood sacrifice or biometrics.

You tug open yet another drawer, hoping for salvation, only to find… coasters. Dozens of them in neat stacks. Who the hell needs this many coasters?

With a dramatic sigh, you shut it and move on. You’re in a tank top, some very scandalous shorts that could pass as underwear any day, and socks, which are your only armour against the castle’s unreasonably sexy kitchen floors that are far too slippery for your own good.

Music blasts softly from your phone on the counter. Just enough volume to make the place feel alive without waking your sleeping villain upstairs.

In the name of keeping things quiet and not withering away from starvation, you slide across the floor like a gremlin on ice, twirling toward the fridge with jazz hands and full-body commitment.

You pull open the next drawer: plates.

And another one after that: napkins.

Yet another: a spatula.

You gasp like you’ve just discovered buried treasure. “HOLY SHIT,” you announce to absolutely no one, snatching it up with the reverence of someone cradling Excalibur pulled from a particularly judgmental stone.

Naturally, you raise it to your mouth like a microphone, music swelling behind you as you spin dramatically on your heel and launch straight into the chorus of whatever guilty pleasure is currently playing.

You belt it like your life depends on it. You are thriving. You are unhinged. You are absolutely about to give yourself a hernia trying to hit a high note while executing a spin move with a spatula.

You’re on a roll now. Bowl—check. Whisk—found it hiding behind a weirdly ornate jar of cinnamon sticks. Mixing spoon—sweet stars above, you’ve got options.

Every successful find is punctuated by a victory shimmy that has your socks squeaking against the polished floors like your own private applause. If domestic bliss were feral and slightly sleep-deprived, you would be the picture of it.

The song hits a peak, the beat climbs, and so do you as you swing around the island looking for the pièce de résistance.

A pan.

You spot them gleaming above the kitchen island like some kind of industrial-chic art installation. Copper-bottomed, perfectly polished. Honestly, they look more like props than actual cookware.

“Of course,” you mutter, squinting up at them with the kind of betrayal usually reserved for villains in third-act plot twists. “You live in the ceiling.”

You stretch and reach. Nope. Bounce. Nothing. You make some very dignified grunting noises. Still too far.

Fuck.

With all the determination of a short queen in survival mode, you swing yourself up onto the marble counter. It’s surprisingly smooth, and your socks are not helping, but you make it up there with the grace of a tipsy cat burglar.

The chorus drops.

You ascend. Not metaphorically. Physically. Standing, arms in the air, hips moving, your whole body grooving atop the counter like the spirit of brunch has possessed you. The kitchen becomes your stadium. Your audience of one is currently unconscious and probably missing the best show in the castle.

You twirl. You shimmy. You throw your head back and sing. It is not elegant, but it is glorious.

You’re living your best life.

You’re mid-hip-roll, full dramatic flair, belting out the chorus like you’re performing live at Castlepalooza. You throw your head back, do the patented over-the-shoulder hair toss—you know, the one that looks smoking hot in your imagination—and swing it back around with a smirk that screams main character energy.

Which is precisely when you hear the telltale shift of weight on tile and feel the very specific presence of a six-foot-something criminal overlord standing silently in a doorway.

You freeze like a deer caught in the most mortifying headlights imaginable.

Slowly, you look over. Sylus stands just inside the kitchen, bare chest on full display, sleep-ruffled hair an elegant mess of moonlight and defiance. He has one brow raised with the kind of amused incredulity that probably haunts lesser people in their dreams.

You, meanwhile, are on the counter in obscenely short shorts, mid-dance.

It’s not your finest hour.

His ruby eyes trace the scene like he’s committing it to memory with painstaking clarity. “Don’t stop on my account.”

You want the ground to open and swallow you, preferably after handing you a pan.

Do you:

A) Leap off in shame and pretend this never happened?

B) Double down and finish the dance with the grim determination of someone who’s already lost everything?

C) Throw a smoke bomb and flee like the unhinged kitchen nightmare you are?

Unfortunately, your ability to think flees somewhere between options A and B, leaving you frozen in place, cheeks flushed, mouth halfway open in a noise you cannot commit to.

Sylus tilts his head. “Should I clap or call an exorcist?”

“…You weren’t supposed to be awake.”

He just smiles unreasonably fond, and then he says, “Breakfast and a show. You really are trying to ruin me, aren’t you?”

Your cheeks are warm—okay, fine, burning—but hell if you’re going to give him the satisfaction of seeing you crumble. You deliberately give your hips one last roll out of pure defiance and raise your chin like a woman absolutely not caught mid-countertop concert.

You snatch the pan and sit on the edge, about to jump down when Sylus draws close enough that your knees almost touch him where they dangle off the counter.

“I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting such a passionate… performance.”

You lean forward slightly, giving him a slow blink and the cheekiest grin you can manage while pretending you’re not actively dying inside. “Jealous you missed the opening number?”

He leans in, bracing one hand beside you on the counter, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “Only if you promise there’s an encore.”

You almost melt off the damn counter.

Before you can protest, Sylus wraps an arm around your waist like he’s done this a thousand times in a thousand different lives and guides you off the countertop. It’s a slow glide, body grazing against his in far too many infuriatingly delicious places. You land with a soft thud, toes curling against the cool tile, the weight of his hands still lingering at your waist. When he lets you go, you pivot toward the fridge, hips swaying, because hell yes, you’re leaning into this now.

“Maybe, but only if breakfast comes with a standing ovation.”

You return to the stove with what you hope is the poise of someone who has not just been plucked off a counter like a misbehaving cat. “If you plan on keeping me around, you’re going to have to make the pans accessible for the less vertically gifted.”

Sylus, already mid-sip of his coffee, pauses with his red eyes gleaming over the rim. He sets the mug down with theatrical gravity. “So, it’s a hostage situation now?”

“Damn right it is. Do you want breakfast or not?”

He rests his chin in one hand, smiling like you’ve just made his entire morning. “I could install a retractable pan retrieval system, voice-activated, of course. Or perhaps a drone-assisted delivery mechanism?”

“Or,” you say, dragging out the word like you’re explaining rocket science to a particularly beautiful idiot, “you just move the pans down. Like a normal person.”

He pretends to mull it over like he’s reviewing a classified mission file. “You want me to displace the ornamental pans?”

You give him a long look, utterly unimpressed. “Sylus.”

“Yes?”

“The pans. Lower.”

He leans back, arms crossed. “Noted, my vertically oppressed breakfast champion.”

You turn back to the stove with a huff that doesn’t quite cover your smile. “Can you please get the plates?”

He doesn’t move right away, but you feel the air shift behind you as he crosses the room, invading your space without ever really invading it.

“Only if I get another dance later,” he purrs low in your ear.

You clack the spatula against the pan, pretending it doesn’t send a shiver straight down your spine. “Depends on if you do the dishes.”

There’s something weirdly comforting about this. The air feels lighter than it has any right to after everything. You haven’t had a morning like this in… maybe ever.

He seems to sense it too, because his voice comes a bit quieter, more thoughtful. “What would you like to do today?”

“We could… do something normal.”

Sylus hums. “Normal is a little out of my wheelhouse.”

You plate the eggs, slide a plate across the island to him, then gesture with the spatula. “Then… show me what is in your wheelhouse?”

He studies you for a moment, then nods once. You nudge your plate next to his and sit beside him. The silence stretches, warm and companionable now, your socks brushing against his bare feet beneath the counter.

“…Sylus?”

“Mm?”

You poke your fork into your eggs aggressively, almost a threat. “If you ever bring up the countertop dance again, I will end you.”

The air tastes like rust and neon. You’re standing in the kind of place that hemorrhages attitude—graffiti on every metal panel, flickering lights overhead like they’re trying to blink out of existence, and music pulsing from the walls as if the whole building has a heartbeat. You and Sylus are shoulder-to-shoulder in the crowd, pressed in near the front of a brutalist fighting pit—circular, walled in by mesh and reinforced glass, lit from above by harsh white beams that make every bead of blood glint like wet ink.

It’s not the kind of place you expect someone like him to bring you, which is exactly why it makes perfect sense.

“Neutral zone,” he offers as an explanation, voice velvet and voltage in your ear.

You swirl the drink in your hand and glance sideways at him. “What, bringing me here to see if I spook easy?”

He hums, low and amused. “Something like that.”

You sip, letting the burn lace your grin. “You mean if I can run in your circles without tripping over my halo?”

That earns you a look. A real one. Amusement tempered by interest. “Most people don’t even notice I’m testing them,” he remarks idly.

“I’m not most people,” you counter, tipping your glass to him.

He watches you over the rim of his drink, that carmine stare catching all the low light like he’s storing it just to burn you later. The crowd screams as an arm crashes into someone’s jaw, but all you can hear is the static pull between you.

“I thought I’d enjoy seeing you in your element,” he murmurs.

You raise an eyebrow, skeptical. “Are you saying I look like I belong in the underworld?”

“No. I’m saying it’s lucky the underworld gets to belong to you.”

Your heart cartwheels over your ribs before settling back into place. You try to cover it with a scoff and take another sip, but the heat blooming in your chest has nothing to do with the alcohol. Before you can deliver a biting comeback, a loudspeaker crackles above, distorted and sharp:

“Next up—champion’s challenge match. Sylus. Get your ass in the pit.”

You choke on your drink. “What,” you sputter, whipping your head toward him, “the hell did they just say?”

He smiles with all the grace of a panther stretching before the kill. “Guess that’s my cue.”

“You’re fighting?” Your voice hits an octave higher than you’d like. “Since when do you do underground cage matches?! You’re not even wearing gear!”

He pauses at the edge of the pit, turns to you, and that look in his eyes—igneous, amused, sure—just wrecks you.

“Don’t worry, kitten. I’m the one they call when they need someone to bleed the other guy,” he winks.

With that, he drops into the ring like a god descending. You stand there, drink forgotten, stomach twisted into some unholy combination of dread, awe, and what might be attraction-induced rage.

“Fuck,” you mutter under your breath. “I’m in love with a lunatic.”

The gate slams shut behind Sylus with a clang that vibrates through your bones. You’re already at the edge of the pit, hands gripping the rusted rail. The announcer bellows something about undefeated streaks and high-stakes bets—you don’t hear a word of it. All you see is Sylus. Coat off, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

There’s no theatrics in his entrance. He just is, like he always is—calm, dark, terrifying in the way still water hides the deepest drop.

Across from him is a brute of a man, all muscle and scars, with fists the size of your head. He’s grinning like he already smells victory on his knuckles.

You bristle as soon as the buzzer goes off.

It’s not boxing. It’s not martial arts. It’s a brawl. No rules, no ref, just pain and power, and a crowd howling for it like wolves. The opponent lunges first, fast for his size, and you don’t even have time to scream before Sylus ducks low, pivots, and slams his fist into the man’s gut so hard it echoes.

You go absolutely feral. “YES!”

You’re pacing the rail, shoes hitting hard on metal, adrenaline spitting fire through your blood. When the other guy grabs Sylus and throws him across the pit like a sack of bricks, you nearly vault the rail right then and there.

Sylus hits the wall hard with a grunt ripping from him. You suck in a breath, eyes wide, one foot already up on the railing before he’s back on his feet, shaking it off with a roll of his shoulders.

You throw both hands in the air when he dodges a swing and lands a vicious uppercut that snaps the other guy’s head back. He follows it up with a combo—fist, elbow, knee—pure violence in a tailored shirt, and you scream yourself hoarse.

“Fuck yes! SEND HIM HOME IN PIECES!”

The other guy rallies and lands a brutal hit to Sylus’s ribs. You swear your own chest folds in sympathy.

He staggers, but only for a second, and then he… smiles? Smiles! Blood on his teeth and wildness in his eyes. Like he’s enjoying this. No, more than that—testing himself.

His opponent charges again, overconfident now, and Sylus just waits. Calm. Coiled. When the swing comes, he catches it. You gasp, half horror, half delight.

The final hit comes with a spinning elbow that drops the brute like gravity just remembered him. The man’s body slumps to the mat, and Sylus straightens, blood-slick knuckles flexing once before he runs a hand through his hair like this was a minor inconvenience and not an entire man trying to tear his head off.

The arena erupts, but your voice is lost in your throat somewhere between a scream and a laugh. He turns slowly, eyes sweeping the crowd until they find you.

You don’t know what kind of look you’re giving him, but it makes the corner of his mouth twitch like he’s already planning his next immoral act, and stars help you, you want to be part of it. You’re halfway down the steps before the gate even groans open. Still high off the fight, your body thrums like it’s trying to crawl out of your skin. You have every intention of throwing yourself at him, maybe even dragging him into the nearest dark corner just to feel the aftermath of what he just did.

Some tall, leggy thing in a cropped jacket slides into his path. Her hair is slicked back like she walked out of an edgy magazine spread. Her hand lands on Sylus’s arm like it’s hers, lips already curled into a purr of a smile.

“Well, well. That was impressive,” she says, fingers skating along his bicep like she’s picking her favourite cut of meat. “Didn’t know someone like you came with all that muscle under the suit.”

You stop mid-step. Blink. Tilt your head.

Excuse the fuck out of me?

To his credit, and thank every dark star in the sky for it, Sylus doesn’t even glance at her. His eyes are scanning past her, around her, through her, looking for you.

She doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe she takes it as a hint she should try harder.

Wrong move.

Your jealousy snaps like a trap. You descend the rest of the stairs, one brow arched and murder already dancing behind your teeth. She turns when she sees you coming, clearly sizing you up.

Mistake number two.

You offer a smile. All teeth. No warmth. “You know, it’s cute,” you begin, voice dipping into mock sympathy. “Watching you try so hard. Like a pigeon peacocking. But here’s the thing—” you reach out and very gently move her hand off Sylus’s arm, “—if you touch him again, I’ll snap your fingers.”

The woman stiffens, surprise flaring in her eyes, but you’re already done with her. Your eyes are on Sylus now. His attention is still fixed on you with something that makes your stomach flip. Not surprise or amusement. Something hotter, darker.

Possession. Affection. Maybe even pride.

You’re not even sure how you get there. One second, you’re threatening to break some random woman’s fingers for breathing in Sylus’s direction, and the next, he’s got you pinned to the wall just outside the pit’s corridor.

His knuckles graze your waist while his breath ghosts the shell of your ear. “You are going to get me into trouble.”

Maybe it’s the adrenaline or the jealousy still scraping its claws through your ribs. Or perhaps it’s the fact that his shirt is sticking to his chest, but your fingers fist in his collar, and you pull him down like you’ve been starving for him all your life.

The kiss is hungry and reckless. It doesn’t start soft. There’s no teasing build, no tender brush of lips before the storm. It’s teeth and tongue and something unhinged clawing to the surface.

Your hands tangle in his hair, nails dragging along his scalp, and he groans—a sound ripped right from his throat as his body crushes into yours, mouth slanting over yours with dizzying heat. You gasp, and he takes it as permission, deepening the kiss like he’s claiming you from the inside out.

You’re aware of things only in fragments. The cool metal wall at your back. The weight of his hips pressing yours. The flex of his hands as one settles against your waist. He’s not touching you in any indecent way, and yet you feel like you’re being unravelled molecule by molecule.

You’re on fire, and holy shit, you yearn to burn. You need more pressure. More heat. More of his mouth, his hands, his everything. The way you grind up into him shocks you, a sound like a whimper catching in your throat.

This is raw need.

When he finally pulls back, it’s only a few inches, his forehead resting against yours, both of you breathing like you’ve just run through hell. His fingers slide up your spine in a slow, grounding drag, allowing oxygen and sanity to crawl in again.

You don’t speak for a moment. You just stare. Both of you are wrecked, waiting for the next time to hit like a freight train, and you’re already achingly wet for it.

Chapter Masterlist A03 [Cross-posted] Taglist: @mcdepressed290 As always, thank you for reading, and I hope it's enjoyable. Please feel free to comment and tell me what you think ❤️ MC isn't the only one with a praise kink.

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lads sylus #lnds sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus x mc #named mc #love and deepspace

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 2: Where the Stars Went Dark

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

Sylus pulls off a quiet country road a couple hours outside of Linkon, the hum of the car dropping to a lulling purr as he turns onto a path flanked by thick trees. The forest wraps around you in a cocoon of shadow and green. Dappled sunlight flickers through the canopy, and your brow quirks.

“If you’re planning to kill me and dump my body in a ravine, at least have the decency to lie about it,” you propose.

He doesn’t even glance over. “You’ve watched too many bad horror movies.”

“Well, I mean, if the knife fits—”

“I wouldn’t need a ravine,” he interrupts, voice dry. “If I wanted you gone, I’d just—”

A dozen red tendrils slither out of nowhere, his Evol wrapping around your wrists and curling at your throat like hungry vines. They pulse with a heartbeat that’s not yours, brushing your skin in a way that should be threatening.

You roll your eyes and lean back in your seat. “Thank god. At least the bugs wouldn’t get to eat me.”

There’s the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth, almost a smile. He drives on in silence for a few more minutes, the trees thickening, until you spot a massive bronze gate. A tall wall stretches in either direction, disappearing into the forest like some ancient fortress hidden away from time.

Sylus rolls to a stop, places his hand on a glowing scanner, and the gate creaks open with a sound like a yawning beast. The road beyond is cobbled and winds gently uphill, lined with trimmed hedges. You lean forward in your seat, wide-eyed, craning your neck as the treetops thin just enough to reveal what lies ahead.

Spires peek above the treetops like a crown. One final bend in the road, and you come into a wide, circular clearing paved in old stones worn smooth with age.

A castle.

An actual, honest-to-god castle.

Towers, ivy-covered stone walls. Iron balconies. Archways and stained glass and carved gargoyles perched high above. The kind of place that belongs in a fairytale or a war-torn legend. You just stare, stunned and grinning and maybe a little in love with the ridiculous, beautiful absurdity of it all.

Sylus’s shoes echo across the marble as he walks in, your overnight bag slung carelessly over his shoulder. The scent of old stone and polished wood curls in the air. You spin in place slowly, taking in the soaring archways lining the corridor. He gestures you into a grand hallway. It opens up into a sprawling sitting room filled with modern couches. The fireplace is massive, with a mantle made of dark-stained oak and a few flames already dancing.

“The fireplace is automated,” he remarks casually. “Motion sensors. Don’t get excited. I’m not that domestic.”

“Damn. I was hoping you’d chop some wood shirtless while I watched from the window.”

Sylus flashes you a crooked grin. “You’re always watching me.”

You lift a brow. “Can you blame me?”

Without a reply, he turns and leads you through a wide archway into what can only be described as the fanciest dining room you’ve ever seen. The table is long enough to host a minor royal summit, flanked with plush chairs and lit by three glimmering chandeliers.

“Let me guess,” you deadpan, “this is where you host formal blood rituals.”

Sylus chuckles. “Only on Wednesdays.”

You’re shown several rooms as you move through the first floor, each stranger and more striking than the last. One chamber opens to reveal a single antique organ standing sentinel in the center of the space, its black lacquer gleaming faintly under the low light. A single, high-backed chair sits a precise distance from the instrument, facing a tall, cathedral-like window. Outside, moonlight spills over a sweeping estate—lush gardens etched in silver, a reflecting pool as still as glass, and the far-off silhouettes of pines standing guard at the perimeter.

The next room is an observatory masquerading as a dream. The ceiling soars upward into a dome made entirely of glass, framed by dark steel ribs like the bones of a celestial creature. The sky appears endless, dusted with stars that breath with you.

Sylus pushes open two great doors to a massive indoor pool that immediately confiscates your breath. It stretches wide beneath a ceiling of skylights, painting the surface in waves of sapphire and silver. Built-in LED strips pulse faintly along the edges, giving the water an ethereal luminescence. Minimalist lounge chairs line one side on a platform of teak wood, and in the far corner, a small bar glows under low pendant lighting, bottles glinting like stained glass.

It’s modern decadence tucked inside a secret Eden.

You let out a breathless laugh. “Are you kidding me? This is… this is, like, a villain’s secret spa.”

Sylus leans in the doorway, arms crossed, watching you with quiet amusement. “Sweetie, I am a villain. Try to keep up.”

Walking along the edge of the pool, you dip your fingers into the warm blue. “I don’t know. I expected more skulls. Or at least a shark tank.”

“That’s downstairs next to the oubliette,” he replies smoothly. “This is where I lure my prey into a false sense of security.”

You laugh softly and turn to face him. “So… which room’s ours?”

That earns you a lift of his brow. “Ours? Confident, aren’t we?”

You close the distance between you until the heat between your bodies could start its own weather system. “I’m just being efficient,” you say, tugging lightly at the hem of his shirt. “Why waste time pretending we don’t want the same thing?”

“Careful, kitten,” he warns, curving toward you like a secret, mouth grazing your ear with the gentlest threat of touch. “You play like that, and I might start thinking you’re mine.”

Fuck. Damn him. He says it like temptation made audible, the kind of voice that steals rational thought and replaces it with daydreams you’d never admit aloud. You’re not sure if it’s foreplay or a declaration of war. Should you flee the room or ask him to say it again with fewer clothes involved?

He chuckles as if he’s reading your thoughts, the sound chasing down your spine as he reaches to take your hand, his fingers lacing easily with yours. “I’ll show you where we sleep.”

Sylus’s hand brushes the small of your back as he guides you up a grand staircase, a subtle touch that lingers just long enough to make your spine tingle. The higher you go, the quieter it gets. Even your breath feels hushed here, like the stone walls are holding secrets.

He pauses at the end of a corridor and gestures toward the final door. “After you.”

You step in, and your brain immediately blue-screens. The room is massive. Minimalist, in that sleek, modern way that somehow still feels warm. The floors are smooth stone; the walls a combination of polished concrete and original brickwork left exposed like bones.

But it’s the bed that steals your attention.

It’s enormous. Silken charcoal sheets. Fluffy pillows. A headboard that looks like it could double as a crime scene if you were into that sort of thing. Spoiler alert: You are.

You blink. “Do you live like this all the time?”

Sylus tosses your bag into a sleek armchair near the windows. “Only when I feel like indulging.”

You flop face-first onto the mattress and groan into the pillows. “You mean existing?”

“Exactly. I’m a man of simple tastes. Opulence. Power. You.”

You lift your head enough to squint at him. “Did you just include me in the same list as power?”

“You’re much more dangerous.”

He moves past you, heading toward a set of double doors on the left wall. You follow on instinct, trailing him into what might be the largest ensuite bathroom you’ve ever seen in your life.

The tub is a marble monolith sunk into the floor, framed by soft lighting and wide enough to comfortably fit a small squadron. Beside it, there’s a glass-walled rainfall shower, multiple jets lining the wall like they were designed by someone who thought a regular shower lacked ambition. There’s a double vanity and a mirror so huge it reflects infinity if you look at it long enough.

You whistle. “That tub could drown a village.”

“Or host one. You should see it with the lights off—there’s LED starlights in the ceiling. Very relaxing.”

You arch a brow. “You? Relaxing?”

He shrugs. “Occasionally. When bribed.”

You stroll past him again, fingers brushing his waist as you go. “Good thing I’m very convincing.”

“Sweetie, you could convince me to burn the world down if you asked nicely.”

You pause mid-step, looking back at him with a slow, crooked smile. “What if I asked not nicely?”

He’s there in a blink—close, so damn close—his voice brushing your cheek like the start of a sin. “Then I’d ask where to start.”

Your heart stumbles. Not the soft, fluttery kind of stumble, but a full-on, trip-over-your-own-feet, crash-into-the-floorboards disaster. It plummets into your stomach and detonates there, making you clench involuntarily, dragging your breath with it.

He smells like the beginning of a bad decision. The kind you’d make twice just to feel it again.

Why don’t you kiss him? Holy fuck, you are so tired of yourself. You’ve fought Wanderers with jaws full of stars and skin like broken galaxies, but apparently leaning in half an inch is where your courage draws the line. Amazing. Truly inspiring.

Just kiss him, you absolute coward.

You don’t. Again.

Instead, you give him a breathless laugh and step back like the world isn’t seconds from catching fire between you. Like you didn’t just mentally lock lips with him and doom yourself to years of fantasizing about a kiss that hasn’t even happened yet.

Sylus leaves you to “get situated,” which translates to: test the bed’s bounce (solid A+ with a bonus for dramatics), peek into every drawer like a nosy raccoon (all empty—coward), and then spend far too long in the en-suite bathroom convincing yourself you’re not panicking.

You are, in fact, absolutely panicking.

The mirror’s huge, the lighting is somehow both flattering and judgmental, and the counter is a crime scene of your toiletries. You cycle through three different lip colours trying to find the one that says, I didn’t try; I just naturally look kissable while also screaming, Please notice me, I beg you. You change your hairstyle twice, then undo both because they look like you tried. Eventually, you settle on an intentional “accidental” look: soft waves and a touch of gloss. You look… passable. You look like someone who wouldn’t mind being ravaged against a wall.

Cool. Chill. Normal.

When you try to walk out of the room like a functioning adult, you immediately get lost. You take one wrong turn, and suddenly the hallway is longer than a moral debate.

You’re not going to admit it, of course. You’re just… exploring. Leisurely. No panic involved when the hallway you thought led to the foyer instead dumps you into what appears to be a small music room with a harp you’re 99% sure has never been played. You double back, end up in a sitting room with an actual globe bar cart, then a library.

By the time you locate the living room, you’re a little winded and a lot triumphant. You don’t even bother with subtlety—just stride in and throw yourself dramatically onto the sprawling couch next to Sylus, who glances over lazily from where he’s nursing a glass of something amber and expensive-looking.

“Get turned around?” he asks, voice too casual.

You pause. “Nope. Exploring. This place is sprawling.”

He hums, nodding as he plays along with your fib. “Next time I’ll give you a map. Or a flare.”

The pool is ridiculous. The water glows a gentle blue, heated just enough to lull every muscle into submission. There’s a faint hum of something orchestral drifting from somewhere. Maybe it’s speakers; maybe this castle is haunted by a tragically romantic ghost with a penchant for Debussy.

Either way, you’re into it.

Sylus brings chilled wine. Two glasses, perfectly poured, the bottle resting in a sleek ice bucket perched beside the stone steps. He sets one down for you before wading into the water like a panther sinking into a lake without rippling the surface. You watch as he makes his way to the far end, settling into a recliner that’s built into the shallow ledge. Half-submerged, legs stretched out, head tilted just enough to look like a brooding Renaissance painting come to life.

You try not to stare.

Fail immediately.

God, look at him. His body looks like it was carved by the divine hand of someone who had an unhealthy obsession with symmetry and sin. Broad chest, lean waist, abs sharp enough to shred resolve.

You take a long sip of wine, but it does nothing to cool the heat curling low in your belly. He lounges there, hair damp and tousled, silver clinging to his skin like the aftermath of a dream you haven’t earned the right to remember. Moonlight slips down his shoulders, pooling in the hollow of his throat.

His eyes—ruby, but not the delicate kind. No, they gleam like garnets set in flame, like blood turned to crystal and made to burn. They watch you like they’re starving. Like you’re the first taste after a long, cruel fast.

He looks like desire sculpted into flesh, and you would let yourself be devoured.

You take another sip. Okay. It’s more of a gulp.

It’s not your fault. This man looks like temptation distilled into human form. You’re half-convinced that if you pressed your mouth to his skin, he’d taste like ambrosia steeped in secrets, wine sipped in the dark, warm honey laced with ruin, the kind of sweetness that stains your soul.

You’ve never wanted anything more.

And he’s just sitting there. Probably plotting the downfall of three governments while you’re over here wondering what the protocol is for gracefully melting into chlorinated water because you can’t stop ogling your boyfriend’s collarbones.

He lifts his glass and takes a casual sip. You stare at his throat as it moves.

You’re going to drown.

Not in the pool. In thirst.

Sylus glances over, one brow arching with the faintest curl of a smirk. “Enjoying the view?”

You lift your wine glass to hide your expression. “Just appreciating the, uh… architectural integrity.”

“Of the pool?”

“Of you.” It slips out.

He huffs a quiet breath of amusement, lounging back again as if utterly unbothered by the spontaneous combustion of your dignity. “Drink slower,” he cajoles, voice lazy, rough around the edges like gravel softened by rain. “Or I’ll have to fish you out of the deep end when you pass out.”

You down the rest of the glass as he watches you with a look that says you’re already in over your head.

You absolutely are.

Sylus, of course, is doing absolutely nothing to help. Lounging like some half-drowned god, wet silver hair tousled like a sin you haven’t dared commit yet, one arm draped along the backrest and the other tracing slow circles in the water.

You sigh. Loudly. Dramatically. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

He tilts his head lazily, as if he’s been pulled from deep thought. “Doing what?”

“You know what. That face. That pose. The whole dripping wet, tragic villain look.”

“Ah,” he chuckles, a sound that burns like a hypnotic spell. “So you’ve been staring.”

You drift closer, kicking just enough to stay upright. “Please. I’ve been critiquing.”

A bead of water slides from the end of his hair. It clings to the tip of a silver strand, glimmers, and then drops. It lands with a quiet plip right onto his chest.

You stare. Before your brain can stop your mouth, you blurt, “If one more drop lands on your chest, I’m suing the universe for emotional damage.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Are you planning to make it a class action?”

“Absolutely. Widespread suffering. The abs alone are a health hazard.”

A second drip falls. Your breath stutters.

You point. “Okay. That’s it. I’m taking this up with management.”

He grins, slow and wicked. “Sweetie, I am management.”

You pretend to ponder this very serious development. “Then I demand compensation.”

“And what,” he asks, voice silken and low, “would that entail?”

You pause. Float just a little closer, your knees brushing his. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Hmm,” he says, watching you through lashes thick with water. “Should I prepare myself for something terrible?”

“I was thinking something thorough.”

He laughs—laughs, the bastard—and leans back again, just a little. “You’re playing a dangerous game, kitten.”

“No,” you correct, voice more breath than sound, “I’m done pretending I don’t want this.”

You don’t give him time to respond before you press forward and kiss him. It starts tentatively. Testing. Just lips brushing lips. He tastes like heat and shadows at midnight, like he’s been waiting for this moment with the kind of patience that frays at the edges.

His hand finds your hip beneath the water; meanwhile, yours curls at the back of his neck, fingers tangling in damp silver. The world narrows down to breath, warmth, and the feeling of being wanted so deeply it steals something out of you.

He kisses like a promise, and you kiss back like a dare. Your mouths move together like a language long forgotten. The gentle tease of his tongue against yours draws a small sound from your throat, something helpless and miserably wanting.

He answers it with a low, rough, barely restrained groan and kisses you harder, deeper. The kiss burns through your lungs, leaving your skin buzzing with every flick and drag of his mouth on yours. The kind of kiss that says I’ve wanted this, I’ve waited, and I’m not letting go now that I have you.

The wind doesn’t whistle; it howls. Rips through you like a scream torn from the throat of the world. It tears at your hair, your skin, and your breath. The sky above is torn in half, bruised gold bleeding into war-torn grey. Clouds churn like a storm you forgot how to outrun, and ash spirals through the air like black snow. Your arms flail, your lungs burn, and below you, the ground is a graveyard.

You’re plummeting.

The air rushes faster than thought. There’s no sound but the roar of the sky and the thundering panic in your chest. Obsidian wings slice the heavens open, their edges glowing with infernal red. He collides with you mid-fall, shields you, wraps himself around you. Heat rolls off in waves, shadow swallowing everything in his path. It smells like fire and stormlight.

Like the end of something beautiful.

Wings snap wide and beat once, twice, driving you both back into the sky. The momentum pins you, and you cling harder, burying your face into scales that are hot and slick with blood or sweat or both.

You feel his body shudder beneath you. Tremble. No, tremble isn’t the right word. This is something deeper. This is grief given form. You lift your head, and then it’s quiet.

The kind of stillness that only happens after something sacred has been shattered.

Your fingers tighten on his hide. Your heart is breaking, tearing in half like paper soaked in flame. “Wake up,” you rasp. “Wake up, damn you.”

He turns his head and blinks as if his eyelids are heavy. The red of his eyes flickers once. They’re beautiful. They’re wrong. They’re full of a sorrow so deep it makes your bones ache.

And they’re looking at you like he already knows this is the end. Like he’s grateful.

You shake hard. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare!”

His mouth moves. A breath. Maybe a word. You can’t hear it, but you feel it.

I’m sorry.

No! No, no, no! Rage claws its way up your throat, twining with grief until it becomes something else entirely. A raw, feral sound rips out of you that is ugly, wet, and ruined as you slam your fists against him.

Blood coats your hands.

His. All his.

He closes his eyes. You scream again, a sound that fractures the sky, and somewhere far away, something listens.

You’re still screaming when you break the surface, a sound that's been clawed from your ribcage. Your hands are flailing, grabbing, pushing, trying to hold something that isn’t there. You don’t feel the water anymore. You’re still there, cradling something dying in the ruins of a world you don’t recognize, soaked in blood that doesn’t belong to you.

You scream again, louder, uglier. A sob slips out after it, uncontrollable, ragged. The sound of heartbreak that doesn’t have a name. Your chest rises and falls like it’s trying to escape itself.

You don’t realize you’re being held.

Strong arms wrap around you, tight and grounding, but you shove against them blindly, crying so hard your vision blurs into streaks of red and shadow.

“No! don’t! Don��t die. I said don’t—” The words come like incomplete, nonsensical shards.

“Kitten—Anira—look at me.”

His voice cuts through. Low, calm, but not cold. His hands are on either side of your face now, firm, thumbs brushing away tears he can’t keep up with. You blink, gasping, choking on sobs and water and something far worse than all of it.

Reality stutters back in pieces.

Blue tiles. Warm water. A glowing ceiling above you like moonlight trapped in glass. Sylus. Hands trembling just slightly as he holds your face like it’s the most breakable thing he’s ever touched.

You hiccup a sob. “I don’t—I don’t know what that was.”

His brow furrows, something old and knowing behind his gaze. He just pulls you into his chest. Lets you shake. Lets you cry. One hand strokes down your spine in long, steady sweeps, grounding you in the now.

“You’re safe,” he says into your hair, voice velveted with restraint. “You’re with me. You’re safe.”

But the ache inside you says otherwise, because something inside you just died all over again.

Chapter Masterlist A03 [Cross-posted] Taglist: @mcdepressed290 As you can probably tell, I like to add humour into these, so don't expect all angst and depression inducing sorrow. I mean... expect those, too, but not always 😅

#dragon sylus #l&ds sylus #lnds sylus #lads sylus #love and deepspace sylus #sylus x mc #sylus #sylus love and deepspace #sylus x you #sylus qin #love and deepspace #sylus smut #sylus angst #Even My Damnation Spells Your Name #sylus x oc

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star-crossed-fates · 2 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter Masterlist

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoilers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

Chapter 1: Ash Beneath the Stars

Chapter 2: Where the Stars Went Dark

Chapter 3: What Remains

Chapter 4: The End Wore My Face

Chapter 5: Below the Bones of Heaven

Chapter 6: Red Remembrance

Chapter 7: Written in My Pulse

Chapter 8: Shadow of Always

Chapter 9: I Set the World on Fire and Called It Mourning

Chapter 10: If Gods Ever Bled

Chapter 11: Once, Forever

Chapter 12: We Begin in the After

Chapter 13: Joy Is a Rehearsal for Ruin

Chapter 14: They Only Hunger

I started this because I have an unhealthy obsession with the idea that MC starts to remember her prior life with Sylus as they begin to get closer physically and emotionally. Thank you to all who take the time to read, comment, reblog, etc. Your support is immensely appreciated! ❤️

#sylus smut #dragon sylus #love and deepspace #love and deepspace sylus #lnds sylus #lads sylus #sylus #l&ds sylus #sylus x mc #sylus love and deepspace #sylus x you #sylus x oc #named mc

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star-crossed-fates · 3 months ago

Text

Even My Damnation Spells Your Name

Chapter 1: Ash Beneath the Stars

Because this isn’t the first time.

And love, no matter how timeless, always demands a price.

Pairing: Female! MC [Named] x Sylus

Rating: Explicit 18+ [MDNI]

Spoliers: Sylus's myth cards/memories. Please note: memories might be a little different than from game for story purposes.

Warnings: - NSFW, Explicit smut, including various kinks: Praise, degradation talk, first time, CP, DP, anal sex/play, probably some Dragon!Sylus smut, maybe a lot of it. Many, many more that I'm forgetting to list. Consider yourself warned. - Unlikely to be completely canon. - MC is named. Her personality is darker than in the game, far more morally grey. - Switching between MC's memories/dreams/flashbacks and current timeline. - Other love interests will not show up in this. - Some plot, but not super planned out. Basically, this is a "what if the closer they became, the more MC remembers her life with him on Philos.

You lie in a vast field of Datura flowers, their once-red petals now blackened like soot. Rain falls from an angry sky, the kind that weeps with you but offers no comfort. Lightning cracks over distant mountains, jagged veins of fury lighting up the clouds. You don’t remember how long you’ve been here. Time doesn’t mean anything anymore. Day and night blend into the same dull ache.

Your dragon is dead.

With him, half of you is gone. You feel it rotting, like something sacred left out to decay. You don’t cry anymore. You’ve cried enough to carve rivers in the planet. What’s left is a quiet, crushing emptiness.

A silence that screams.

The battlefield is long quiet, the scent of scorched air and broken magic lingering like a ghost. You lie in the place where you held him last, your cheek pressed to earth that still remembers the weight of his body. Horns ache where they’ve torn through your skull; a tail curls around your listless frame, wings limp against the mud. You are a creature undone.

Perhaps you will stay here until your body remembers how to die.

But then—rage. Not loud, not sudden, but coiled and ancient, a serpent slithering through the hollow chambers of your ribs. It does not burn. No, it freezes. Cold, clinical, furious.

The humans.

You should have known. God, you did know, but you hoped anyway, didn’t you? Lit a candle in a hurricane and begged it not to blow out. Cradled trust in trembling hands like it wouldn’t break.

Look where that got you. They took everything. Not just your dragon. Not just your wings or your fire. No—they took your voice, your childhood, the marrow of who you were before the silence set in. They carved out your soul like it was owed to them. They left you with teeth clenched so tightly, you taste iron every time you sob, and grief so wide, it echoes.

You are ruin now.

And oh—they will pay. You rise—not out of hope, not out of mercy. You rise because rage is the only thing left that still feels like yours. Because if the world had the audacity to survive after taking everything from you, then it should learn what it means to scream.

You do not rise to live.

You rise to burn. To gut the sky and lace the clouds in cinders. To gather the shattered remains of every dream they murdered and wrap them in flame, like funeral cloth soaked in vengeance.

You will turn your grief into kindling. You will stack every stolen whisper, every broken promise, every name you once answered to and light them with the match of your fury.

Let the stars blink out. Let the earth tremble beneath the weight of your wrath.

If you cannot have your happy ending, then neither will they.

You will not go quietly. You will not fade. You will ignite, and from the ruins of what they loved, you will paint new dreams in ash.

The pillow is damp beneath your cheeks from tears that broke through your sleep like roots cracking stone. You hadn’t realized you’d been crying. You only notice when you shift and the cold catches your skin.

Sylus breathes evenly beside you, draped in the kind of peace you can’t seem to touch lately. His arm brushes yours, a line of quiet gravity that pulls but never demands. You haven’t told him about the field of wilted Datura or about the way your soul howls in those dreams—half-formed, half-empty.

Sleep used to be a sanctuary. Now it’s just the door you have to walk through to visit ghosts with teeth and bleed.

You slip from the sheets, careful not to disturb him. The cold floor bites at your soles as you stand, as if to remind you that you’re not curled on the sodden earth, wings caked in mud, your throat raw from silence. You’re in his penthouse in the N109 zone, where the distant lights of the city bleed through blackout curtains.

You don’t look back at Sylus as you leave the room. It’s not that you’re afraid of what you’d see. You’re afraid he’d see through you.

Like a shadow loosed from its owner, you drift through the living room. The lighting is low, cast in muted blues and soft, static gold—the kind that never tries to be warm, only functional.

Mephisto perches near the window, still as a sculpture. A silhouette against the city glow, feathers made of obsidian plating and wire-thin gold etchings that catch what little light dares to touch them. His resting eyes gleam faintly, twin rings of red that pulse like the quiet ticking of a heart that never beats.

“Morning, troublemaker,” you whisper, reaching up to trace a finger along the curve of his wing. The synthetic feathers shift beneath your touch, deceptively softer than they look, like velvet that remembers war.

His head tilts, the motion unnervingly lifelike. The whirring inside him is so quiet it sounds like distant cicadas.

“I had another one,” you murmur, low enough to pretend the silence will keep your secret. “Still not sure if I’m dreaming about a past or making it up from scraps.”

“Don’t tell him,” you add softly, smiling even though it doesn’t reach anything inside. “Let me be haunted in peace a little longer.”

A blink of red light, and then stillness. You give him one last pat and leave him to his vigil.

The kitchen smells of roasted herbs and clean steel. Callum moves with the effortless grace of someone who’s been doing this job too long to waste time. He’s slicing something over the counter, sleeves rolled up, apron splattered with hints of tonight’s battle against hunger. You’ve seen him break down a full carcass faster than most Hunters can draw a gun.

He looks up the moment you enter. “Couldn’t sleep again?”

“Still not besties with unconsciousness,” you muse, shrugging like it’s a passing inconvenience instead of the rot curling into your dreams. “Might break up for good soon. We’re on thin ice.”

Callum huffs, shaking his head as he wipes his hands on a towel. “You and sleep have a dramatic relationship.��

“It started it,” you grumble, slipping onto a stool. “Ghosted me first.”

He’s already moving, pulling down a mug, grinding beans by hand. “Want the usual?”

You nod, cheek propped against one hand. “Make it tragic.”

“I always do.”

The rich aroma begins to fill the kitchen. You watch Callum move and let the silence stretch for a while. Sometimes, silence says what you can’t. “Here you go, Miss Hunter,” Callum says, putting the steaming mug down near your hands. “Callum, we’ve been over this. You can call me Anira,” you correct. “Of course, Miss Anira,” he smiles, knowing exactly that you meant to get him to drop this ‘miss’ nonsense.

The warmth of the mug seeps into your palms like borrowed life. You offer Callum a soft thanks as you retreat from the kitchen, letting him return to his work.

You drift toward the windows, steam curling up from your cup, brushing your lips like a ghost of breath as you sip.

The city yawns out beneath you—endless, glimmering, half-rotten. The N109 zone isn’t a place so much as a pulse, stitched together by neon arteries and the hum of machines that never sleep. Always motion. Always noise. But here, in the silence between your breath and the sip of coffee, something inside quakes.

The dream was more vivid than any nightmare should be, too sharp to be stitched together by a sleeping mind. They’ve been coming more frequently. Unfolding like pages from a book you never remembered opening. The flowers, ash-dark and weeping. The taste of rain, too bitter to be water.

The way your soul ached—not metaphorically, but as if part of it had literally been torn from inside you.

You touch your chest, just under the collarbone, and press your fingers to where that emptiness still echoes like sound in a cavern. There’s no wound. Nothing to show for it, but the grief sits there, like the hollow of a bell that hasn’t rung yet. You’ve had nightmares before—the kind that crack your sleep open like a fault line, send you lurching upright with sweat slicking your spine and a scream half-choked in your throat.

These aren’t like that. These dreams don’t fade with the light. They cling. They nest behind your eyes, thread phantom claws between your ribs, and hum secrets into the hollows of your bones.

They don’t end when you wake—they wait coiled in quiet moments, in the space between blinks, where memory and madness blur at the edges.

The coffee is bitter as burnt offerings on your tongue, but you drink it anyway because it doesn’t whisper in languages your soul remembers but your mind can’t name. Because it doesn’t carry the weight of wings or weeping or the shadow of something lost.

Whatever those dreams are—omens, echoes, a history stitched into the marrow of your being— you aren’t ready to hear them.

You wrap your hands tighter around the mug and pretend the heat is enough to burn the ghosts away.

“Are you planning to fight wanderers with caffeine now?”

The voice slices through the quiet like silk on glass, touched with just enough sarcasm to disguise the worry beneath it.

You lift your coffee toward your lips but don’t drink, hiding your mouth behind the mug. “I was under the impression you didn’t sleep this early.”

You can feel the weight of his eyes tracing the curve of your shoulders beneath your shirt. He always notices the small things, even if he pretends not to.

“I don’t,” he murmurs. “I also don’t usually find my night owl at five in the morning sipping black coffee and staring out like she’s plotting planetary genocide.”

You snort. “Only mild genocide. You know me. I like to keep things reasonable.”

He doesn’t laugh. You knew he wouldn’t.

Sylus steps up beside you, not touching, but close enough that his scent wraps around you—smoked amber and aged cedar, threaded with the bite of dark spice. It clings to the air like temptation itself, as if night had a heartbeat and it was breathing down your neck.

He leans a shoulder against the window frame and studies you. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

You hum into your mug, pretending to consider. “Might just be the cheap pillows.”

“They cost more than your car.”

“Ah, then I should definitely keep losing sleep. Sell one, maybe. Fund my retirement.”

Still, no laugh, just silence thick enough to chew through. You finally meet his eyes, and there it is—that look. Not pity, not concern in the soft-handed way others offer it. It’s a quiet, razor-edged worry that Sylus never puts into words.

You offer a smile anyway and tilt your head like it’s no big deal. “I just woke up early.”

“And the tears?”

Your smile twitches, but you brush past it. “Must’ve been the wind. Very emotional breeze tonight.”

He shakes his head slightly, lips curving just a bit, like he wants to be amused but isn’t. “You don’t have to tell me, but you’re not good at hiding when something’s bothering you.”

Your heart thuds in one clumsy palpitation. You look down at the mug again, the swirl of coffee catching the lights from outside.

“I’ll be fine,” you assure, softly this time. “It’s just… a weird week.”

He doesn’t press. He never does. Maybe that’s why it feels like the pressure never lifts.

Sylus reaches out and gently pulls the mug from your hands, setting it on the table beside you. His fingers brush yours in the process—cooler than yours, calloused in all the ways that speak of battles you’ll never hear stories about.

Without a word, he wraps his arms around your shoulders from behind and presses his chin lightly to the top of your head.

No questions. No demands. Just silence and breath and the faint heartbeat you’ve come to listen for like it’s a lullaby.

“You let me know when it becomes more than weird,” he murmurs in a deep purr. “Until then… I’ll keep pretending not to notice.”

You lean into him, but some wounds don’t want to be spoken aloud. Some just need somewhere quiet to bleed.

The hum of tools fills the room with a soft, rhythmic purring punctuated by the occasional spark as Sylus adjusts a fine filament inside Mephisto’s chest cavity. The mechanical crow rests belly-up on the workbench, wings splayed like some melodramatic opera casualty.

You’re curled on the couch with a book you’ve been “reading” for the past thirty minutes. It rests open in your lap, but you haven’t turned a page in at least ten. Your eyes keep drifting instead to the man across the room, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, a smudge of oil on his cheekbone that somehow makes him look more infuriatingly attractive.

He’s been at it all morning. Well, your morning. He’s not usually vertical before dusk, but the second you left the bed, Sylus apparently decided sleep was now an optional concept.

“I feel like Mephisto should be charging you by the hour,” you jest, stretching out over the couch cushions like a lazy cat. “Pretty sure that’s the fifth time you’ve rewired his wing.”

“He was flying crooked,” Sylus mutters without looking up.

“Maybe he’s just drunk. He does spend most of his time with you.”

A pause. “He doesn’t have a liver.”

“That we know of.”

He stops working just long enough to shoot you a dry look. “Do you want to come over here and make yourself useful?”

“I am being useful. I’m providing a live audience to your one-man, crow-themed opera.”

He snorts. Almost a laugh. Close enough that your ears perk up like a puppy hearing a treat bag rustle. “Was that it? Was that the sound?” you ask, sitting up with mock excitement. “Sylus, was that the first sign of an actual laugh? Did we just break through to the other side?”

“Keep talking, and I’ll wire Mephisto to peck you every time you blink.”

“Ooh, emotional repression and threats of mechanical violence. How charming.” You sigh dramatically and lay back again, grinning up at the ceiling. “One day,” you call sweetly. “I will make you laugh. Like, an actual laugh. With teeth. You’ll choke on it, and I’ll dance in victory.”

He doesn’t look up. “Keep dreaming, sweetie.”

You throw an arm over your face with theatrical flair, letting your voice drift up from beneath it. “Oh, I do. Every night. You laugh, you weep, you beg me to stop being so damn alluring.”

Sylus lifts Mephisto’s chestplate just high enough to yank out a glowing wire with the precision of a bored god smiting a mortal. “Sounds like a nightmare.”

“You were shirtless in it.”

A beat of silence. You peek from beneath your arm to catch the twitch at the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t dignify the comment with a response, but the flick of his eyes your way lingers longer this time. Not quite a laugh, but closer than you’ve ever gotten.

Progress. Sunlight cuts in through the floor-to-ceiling windows in fractured beams, painting the glass table and parts of Sylus’s frame in gilded edges. Does he even know how beautiful he is? Like a storm wound in silk. Like the kind of danger people mistake for salvation right until the end.

It isn’t just his face, though that alone could fund empires. It’s the way he moves, the quiet command, the patience that thrums through him like it’s waiting for someone to be worth unravelling for.

His phone buzzes on the worktable. Disdain flashes across his face before he checks the ID and groans. “If this man asks me to clear one more rat nest out of the north end, I’m going to wire his eyebrows to a landmine.”

You snort behind your hand. “You say that every time.”

“It’s only not happened because I have other hobbies.” He swipes to answer. “What.”

The call begins with some garbled nonsense and Sylus mouthing the word “idiot” before pinching the bridge of his nose. You press your lips together to keep from giggling. He’s halfway through a sentence when he glances your way, catches the amused sparkle in your eyes, and arches a brow.

You smile sweetly. “I’m just enjoying the show. I feel like I should be tipping you.”

The phone call devolves into chaos, his voice smooth but thoroughly unimpressed. You watch him, one hand still tangled in glowing circuitry, the other gesturing as if sheer frustration might translate better with hand movement. “Figure it out.” He ends the call with a clean, final click.

You casually reach across the table and pick up the nearest firearm, because of course there’s one there. There’s always one there. Honestly, it’s getting a little ridiculous. There are more guns in this penthouse than coffee mugs.

You flip it in your hand, cock it with a snap just dramatic enough to make Mephisto startle slightly and squawk in disapproval.

“Need someone killed?” you ask sweetly. Sylus doesn’t flinch when he looks up from whatever part of Mephisto’s insides he’s currently rewiring and levels you with a glance. “Are you planning to shoot incompetence out of them? In that case, I would suggest a bigger magazine.”

“I’m adaptable,” you shrug.

He snorts, finally—fucking finally—and shakes his head, amusement ghosting over his features like sunlight through smoke. “If you’re going to play vigilante, at least check the safety. I’d rather not patch a hole in my couch or you.”

You glance down. “Safety is off.”

“I know.” He smirks, putting the last touch on Mephisto and standing to stretch. “That’s the concerning part.”

Sylus prowls his way over, taking the gun from your hand and placing it back on the table. Without a word, he sinks onto the couch beside you, tilting his head back and shutting his eyes with a sigh that sounds centuries old. He looks relaxed, composed… annoyingly at peace.

Unacceptable.

You slink across the cushions like mischief manifested as flesh, settling neatly onto his lap. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t even flinch. One arm shifts automatically to cradle your back so you don’t tip over, but otherwise, he’s a statue.

You squint at him. “Are you asleep?”

Nothing.

You lean in, and poke his cheek.

Still nothing.

You poke the other one. “Sylus.”

No response.

You poke the tip of his nose.

Still no reaction. You glance dramatically at Mephisto, who lets out a soft whirr of solidarity from across the room. “He’s testing me,” you mutter. Then louder, “Sylus. If you don’t respond, I’m going to assume you’ve died.”

Still silence.

Your fingers reach up and tug lightly on his earlobe. “Do I have to check your pulse?”

A single crimson eye finally cracks open, his gaze as dry as the Sahara and twice as withering. “If you poke me again, kitten, I’m going to reprogram Mephisto to sing ‘Baby Shark’ every time you walk into a room.” “You wouldn’t.”

His other eye opens, both of them glinting with that dangerous, amused warmth. “I would, and I’d make sure it plays in surround sound.”

You gasp in mock betrayal. “You monster.”

“I warned you.” He lets his head fall back again, but his lips twitch like he’s fighting a smile. “Poke the devil, expect a show.”

Slipping your arms around his neck, you drop your voice just enough to make him crack an eye again. “Who said I mind the fire?”

His smirk is slow and wicked, but he still doesn’t move. “Then don’t be surprised when you get burned.”

You settle in closer, utterly undeterred. “Try me.”

Sylus tackles you in a blur of motion and laughter, pinning you to the couch like a smug predator. You’re breathless beneath him, legs tangled with his, the cushions barely cradling the chaos of your limbs. His body hovers just above yours, one forearm planted near your head, the other curling around your waist.

You forget how to breathe. His hair falls across his forehead, and the carnal scarlet of his eyes scorches into yours, catching every flinch, every breathless glimmer of emotion. Your lips part slightly to welcome something that doesn’t come.

Your heart stumbles and trips headfirst into the heat curling low in your belly. The butterflies don’t flutter; they riot, crashing against your ribs like they, too, can’t stand the distance between his mouth and yours for a second longer.

You swear he’s going to kiss you for the first time. You feel it, a pressure in the air, electric and aching at the apex of your thighs.

“I want to take you somewhere this weekend,” he murmurs instead, voice like smoke wrapping around your spine, as if the words are meant for your skin, not your ears. “Will you come with me?”

The sound that slips from your lips is half a laugh, half a sigh, cracked open by want and wonder.

“Seriously?” Your voice wavers, threadbare with disbelief and something far more dangerous. “You think that’s a question?”

He tilts his head, lips curving like a secret. “Is that a yes?”

You answer by tugging at the collar of his shirt, fingers brushing against the pulse beneath. “I’d follow you into hell, Sylus,” you vow, eyes slipping to his mouth. “A weekend away? That’s barely a temptation.”

His gaze drags over you—slow, reverent, hungry—as if he’s committing you to memory. Or maybe he’s envisioning a place where the stars touch the sea and the world feels a little less cruel.

Wherever it is, you’re already his.

Started this because I am hopelessly obsessed with the idea that MC starts to remember her life on Philos with him the closer they get. It's a double edged balde. Let me know if you're enjoying it, and I will keep positng ❤️

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