XIX. Blackreach and Blacker Hearts

The moth’s carcass smouldered, wings fused to a cigarette butt like a failed origami angel. Evelyn traced the curve of Georgia’s hip, her touch tender as a grease fire. For three breaths, the room held still—the kind of quiet that lives between a trigger pull and the bullet’s verdict.

Georgia’s sweat cooled on Evelyn’s tongue, tasting of copper and comfort. “You’re trembling,” she murmured, not unkindly. Her thumb brushed the charm welded to Georgia’s clit. A flicker of something human crossed her face—regret, or its regret, or its piss-poor cousin, nostalgia.

Then her pupils split vertically. Serpentine.

Evelyn’s hips stuttered mid-thrust, the gold hoop piercing in her cock grinding against Georgia’s insides like a socket wrench on rust. Georgia felt the shift—muscles coiling beneath skin, a tremor that had nothing to do with pleasure. Her legs spread wider against her will, tendons straining like puppet strings.

“Let’s tell you a story,” Evelyn purred, her voice oil-slick and clotted. “Starts with a woman who forgot her own name.”

Her claws flexed, drawing twin ribbons of crimson down Georgia’s thighs. “Michelle. Pathetic alias. Evelyn Prime playing non-magical girlfriend before the war.” A wet click in her throat. “Sorry. Not sorry. Fuck.”

Evelyn’s next thrust tore skin from Georgia’s inner walls. “Stop—!” Georgia choked, blood trickling down her thighs as her hands scrabbled uselessly at the sheets. Fingers moving without her consent to grip the headboard—like a violin strung with barbed wire.

Oh, sweet thing,” Evelyn crooned, her canines lengthening as she licked the wound. “Forgive me,” she whispered against her blood-soaked finger, then snarled. “All that magic resistance, burned away thanks to your wife. Nothing left but meat.”

She snapped her hips harder, the ridges of her cock carving fresh welts. “Scream properly. I want relics to remember you by.”

Lanie’s body lunged—a marionette jerk of limbs—her half-formed snarl dying as Evelyn’s magic yanked her tendons taut. Evelyn didn’t even glance back.

Evelyn casually flicked her finger. Lanie’s eyes glazed over, her pupils dilating into voids as her jaw unhinged with a wet pop only magic could cause. Terror etched itself into the cracks of her skin. Georgia’s panicked body locked, joints fused by invisible solder.

“Lick,” Lanie hissed, but her voice frayed—dragonfire guttering to embers. Georgia obeyed, her neck craning against protesting vertebrae. The flat of her tongue dragging a shudder from Lanie’s hips even as her chest split.

“Evelyn, the old Evelyn… oh, she lived. Loved diplomats. Loved dryads. Loved those sexually amorphous were-things… she loved everything until she loved only George—”

“Six months,” Evelyn sneered. “Domestic rot. Pancake breakfasts. Letting George—” The name cracked like a rifle shot, “—play hero in alleyway scuffles. Thought she’d found peace in that mediocrity.”

Her laugh curdled. “Peace smells like bleach and unwashed diapers, you know.” A pause. Scales rippled up her arms. “I’d apologise for the stench, but we’re well past courtesy.”

Georgia tried to stop but could not. Lanie’s thighs clamped around her skull like hydraulic presses. Femurs creaking like unoiled hinges as Georgia’s unwilling tongue continued its assault.

“Stupid bitch rejoined the fight,” Evelyn continued, talons scoring Georgia’s hips. “Left her white knight without a note. Didn’t matter that she carried his brat—warrior’s honour.” The words dripped acid. “Pregnancies make for terrible battle readiness, turns out. Captured. Dumped in Blackreach. Prisoners there? Your conquests, Georgie.”

Her claws retracted with a wet schlick. “Should’ve protected them. Should’ve protected her. My fault. Her fault. Your fault.”

The mattress creaked like a gallows rope. Georgia’s magic writhed beneath her skin, the tattoo rippling. “I didn’t command—”

“—but you didn’t stop it!” Evelyn’s roar rattled the bourbon bottles on the nightstand. One shattered. Glass shards rotated in mid-air, then slammed themselves into the wall. Spelling SORRY-SORRY-SORRY in jagged cursive.

“Blackreach’s warden kept his version of peace. His rules. When they stripped her naked, carved her up like Sunday roast.” Her claws sank deeper, Georgia’s hips lifting obediently to meet each brutal thrust. “You were too busy brokering treaties to notice that your rabid dogs needed leashes.”

Lanie’s hand slid to Georgia’s throat against her will, thumb pressing the fluttering pulse. “Listen,” she growled, but her nails trembled.

“Prime survived nine weeks,” Evelyn said, voice curdling. “Nine weeks of piss buckets and rat bites. Ohh... Fridays were special—gangbang night.” Her rhythm stuttered, a fractured moan escaping her lips. “Apologies. Not apologies. Keep still.”

When news of the armistice did come out… Guards panicked. Made every night a gang-rape party aiming to kill. Sixth guard used a dagger—” She mimed twisting, “—here. Made her sing hymns of agony while they took turns.”

Georgia’s sob tore loose. Her hands clutched at Evelyn’s thighs, pulling her closer even as she screamed: “I came as soon as I heard—”

Evelyn slammed her into the headboard, the wood splintering. “After she bled out in a pig trough!” Spittle flecked Georgia’s cheek. Her next thrust gentled for half a heartbeat. “No. No mercy. Can’t.”

“Three days too late. Nine fucking weeks of her whispering your name like a prayer.” Evelyn’s voice broke. “Died thinking you’d ride in, sword shining. Never knew you’d already moved on. That her absence barely itched.”

“She died with your name rotting in her teeth!”

Georgia’s magic surged, the tattoo cracking. Her body began to shift—hips narrowing, shoulders widening—before Evelyn's claws sank into her ribcage. Halting her transformation in its tracks.

"Stay. She commands it."

She leaned closer, her darkness dripping like a broken sieve—obsidian horns, forge-pit eyes.

“You liked Michelle. Might’ve loved her, given time. But she was just… practice. A placeholder till Lanie entered your life.” Her finger traced Georgia’s neck. “I’d let you beg if it mattered. Doesn’t matter though. Fuck.”

"Meanwhile my girl moldered. Your spawn turned to black sludge in her belly. Drip-fed prison filth through IVs made of guard cum."

Georgia remembered her through her tears.

“Fixed it,” Michelle announced in triumph. Cotton sheets inside the dryer smelled of thunderstorms and rosemary. George pretended not to notice the sparks still dancing on her fingertips.

“Sorceresses shouldn’t need stupid recipe books,” she’d hissed, throwing the spoon that hung embedded in the old kitchen wall long after she was gone.

The diner booth, 3 AM. Michelle’s laugh, warm as a whiskey pour. Her hand on his knee. “You’re different,” she had said. “Not like the monsters.” He simply smiled and kissed her. Never once did he ask her why she flinched whenever she saw him in uniform.

Months later, he’d see the scars on Evelyn's body, but only today did Georgia understand.
“Why her?” Georgia rasped.

Evelyn’s laugh was a bone saw chewing through sheet metal. “Couldn’t slum it with you apes in my true form. Male draconic energy’s… loud. Like a jackhammer in a chapel.” Her hips pistoned, each thrust carving a fresh wound where pleasure bled into punishment.

“Needed a warm body. Got word of Prime’s suicide, teleported in for a soul-merge. Thought I’d wear her corpse like a weekend fling.”
Georgia gagged as the gold hoop snagged her insides. Evelyn leaned down, her breath reeking of burnt hair and funeral lilies. “Should’ve chosen better,” she muttered, almost to herself. “Soul-merges? Messier than a back-alley autopsy. Prime’s husk fought me like a rabid dog. No good memories left—just claws and teeth and Blackreach’s rot etched into her marrow.”

The merge… Her voice faltered, scales flickering at her temples. “Wasn’t just her flesh I took. Felt every violation, every blade bite, every drop of filth they unloaded into her rotting womb.”

A muscle twitched in her jaw—draconic, involuntary. “Xanathar—dragon-god of conquest, breaker of citadels—crawled onto a Blackreach parapet that night, ready to leap.”

“Her pain was battery acid in my veins. Only thing that stopped me from taking the plunge? Her scream in our shared skull—not fear, not sorrow. Fury. A firestorm in mortal flesh, screaming to be weaponised."

Lanie’s nails involuntarily dug into Georgia’s scalp, drawing blood. In agony, she whispered, “Lick,” even as tears streaked her frozen face.

Georgia had no choice but to obey, her body betraying her completely now. Her tongue moved with precision, puppeteered to force a moan from Lanie’s throat.

Evelyn watched, her grin a rusted bear trap. “Feral little thing. Should have been ash long ago. But that gutter-born bitch bloody well clawed her way back. Made me... feel her... feel EVERYTHING!”

A pause. The room held its breath.

“Wanted a powerful meat shell,” Evelyn hissed, talons flexing. “Crown of lightning hidden under all that blood.” A shudder racked her frame. “Apologies taste like bile, don’t they?”

“Didn’t know her agony would become my compass.”

“Given a decade or two to grow?” Her voice softened, almost reverent. “She’d have chewed through warlords like bubblegum. A sorceress ruling dragons. But you—” Her claw traced Georgia’s jugular. “—left her to die. So I made a deal with the beast inside her. Let her rage eat a piece of me. Ripped those guards apart one by one.” Magic nullifiers don’t work on dragons; you know that, Georgie.”

Glass crunched underfoot as she adjusted her grip, shaking her head, trying to fight a thought. “No! Regret’s for weaker creatures.”
 
 
XX. When debts come knocking.
 
Seventeen years ago.

---

The prison door exploded inward. George stood haloed in prison floodlights buzzing like fat wasps, plasma sword humming like a hornet’s nest in a toddler’s fist. The stench hit him first—copper, shit fermenting in summer heat, pork left smoking on a meth-lab grill. Reports had called it a massacre. Rogue sorceress. Guards butchered. He’d expected a monster.

Instead, he found her
.
His genitals lay on the ground like rotten plums fallen off the tree. Her head snapped back when she heard his footsteps. Her gaze met his. Their eyes met. Hers weren’t eyes anymore—feral, enraged, like shattered shards of glass, catching moonlight in all the wrong ways. Blood painted her lips in a clown smile, too red, too wide.

“Stand the fuck down,” George growled, blade raised. Protocol demanded it. Duty demanded it. His fear demanded it louder.

She lunged. Not with magic—with teeth. A feral snarl tore from her throat, feral as a junkyard dog with a firecracker up its arse as she raked his forearm. They traded blows, they grappled, crashing into stone walls. Her knee found his gut; his elbow cracked her ribs. She fought like a starved beast, violent, jagged, and uncontrolled fury.

He pinned her against the wall, plasma searing the air near her temple. She twisted, teeth sinking into his wrist until tendons popped. He slammed her skull against stone—once, twice—her growl dissolving into a wet choke. The sword kissed her throat. She stilled, chest heaving, eyes rolling like loaded dice.

A guttural snarl ripped from her throat—“Vashtak’ra! Kess’vahl dremora!”* The words slithered, ancient and venomous, a dead tongue’s curse. Eat shit and meet your ancestors.

“George, stop!”

Lanie’s voice shattered the air. She staggered into the cell. “Look at her,” she pleaded, raw as a skinned knee on gravel. “Look.”

He did.

Evelyn’s hands trembled, fingertips twitching as if plucking invisible harp strings made of nerve endings. A flicker rippled across her cheekbones—skin mottling black and green, like grease and smoke. Her dress hung in tatters, threads clinging to hips crisscrossed with scars. Cigarette burns in perfect rows, finger-shaped bruises purpling her thighs. A bite mark crescenting her breastbone too precise for battle, too familiar for war. The knuckles of her left hand gleamed raw, flesh torn back to reveal bone—she’d gnawed herself down to the gristle.

Lanie’s voice cracked like a whip. “You’re not slaying a monster.” She gripped George’s wrist, forcing the plasma blade’s glow to illuminate Evelyn’s throat. A collar of bruises, rope burns snaking beneath her ears like devil’s ivy. “You’re executing their victim.”

The sword wavered. Evelyn’s breath hitched—a wet, broken sound, the gasp of a punctured lung. Her gaze locked on George’s, and for a heartbeat, the savage glaze crumbled. Tears welled, spilling over her filth and blood-caked cheeks. Carving channels like acid rains, ruining fertile lands.

Recognition flared.

Her pupils constricted—human again, terrified. A flinch tore through her, violent as a snapped bear trap. “N-no,” she rasped, voice shredded. “Not you. Not you. Nononono—”

Her spine hit the wall.

She curled inward, arms clutching her stomach like she could stuff the child back in—the one they’d scraped out with a guard’s boot heel and a laugh. A scream tore loose—not rage, but anguish, the sound of a soul unspooling into a void.

Then silence.

She collapsed, limbs splayed like a discarded puppet. Lanie surged forward, cradling Evelyn’s head in her lap. “Stay with me,” she begged, tears dripping onto the woman’s cracked lips, each drop hissing where it struck blood. “Just… breathe. Breathe through it. I’m here.”

George stood frozen, plasma sword slipping from numb fingers. Cell walls throbbing like a meth-head’s neck vein. The guards’ corpses surrounded them, grinning in death. One still clutching a rusted dagger—blade notched from peeling skin, handle stained with more than blood.

He fell to his knees. The cell walls pulsed harder now, breathing in time with Evelyn’s rattling gasps. “No more,” he choked, gagging on bile and the metallic tang of complicity. “Never again. Never. Never. Never.”

Somewhere, water dripped. The sword’s hum faded to a moth’s last wingbeat.

 
Back in the present.

---

“You abandoned her!” Evelyn roared, scales erupting down her arms like armour forged in a foundry of grief. “Eight Fridays, they took turns. Every time they carved pieces of her away. Ninth week? Every night she was… A muscle twitched beneath her eye, a tic that hadn’t existed before Blackreach.

“Every night they… So during the battle we prayed. Artemitra’s altar reeked of Prime’s tears. Two souls, one oath—” Her voice splintered, the dragon’s growl fraying into something smaller, human. “Let him lose what I lost. Let him break as I… she did.”

The unspoken truth hung like a hangman’s rope between them.

She’d carved the oath into her bones that moment. By the time George lowered his sword, the curse had already fossilised. Artemitra’s magic cared nothing for remorse.

Georgia’s breath stuttered. Evelyn leaned closer, her rage dissolving into something raw, marrow-deep. “You were supposed to be the good one, but you simply weren’t good enough,” she whispered, smoke curling from her nostrils like a snuffed candle’s last breath. Her scales rippled, obsidian fracturing to reveal patches of skin—Michelle’s skin, scarred but still soft.

“Eight weeks of your lover’s betrayal. Her absence... And then, her helplessness when you needed her most. Your manhood ripped from you? Every child Lanie carried? Gone. Sluiced out in rented suites and clinics that smelled of lemongrass and shame.”

A lie. A truth. A curse’s demand.

In the cell, seventeen years ago, she’d seen George’s horror too late. She had cemented that vow to make him suffer as Prime had suffered and then to end him.

Lanie thrashed against the hold, a raw sob tearing loose. “Evelyn—! I didn’t know—”

Evelyn backhanded her. “Ignorance doesn’t absolve you. This is your penance.” Her voice softened, cracks spiderwebbing through the venom. The dragon's rage receding like a tide dragged backwards. “I know you love her. This time though, love means letting the knife twist.”

Georgia collapsed forward, wrists grinding against spectral chains. “End it then. But why chain us to this… this funeral masquerade?”

Evelyn’s laugh was a shard of broken choir, her scales flickering—dragonfire guttering.

“Because the curse isn’t just yours,” she said, her human teeth flashing briefly behind serpent lips. “Artemitra demanded symmetry. A life for a life, degradation for degradation.” She knelt, tilting Georgia’s chin up, no malice left—only exhaustion.

"You think I wanted this? To be the blade instead of the hand?” Her thumb brushed his jaw, a lover’s caress etched with barbs. “The curse needed an ending. A death blow to seal the pact.”

Lanie snarled, embers glowing in her throat. “Take me instead. My wings, my hoard, anything.”

“Too late.” Evelyn’s talon hovered for a heartbeat. Then it struck.

Georgia’s ribs cracked like porcelain under a tank tread. Lanie’s scream fractured as Evelyn ripped the heart free, its rhythm stuttering in her fist. Georgia slumped, vacant eyes locked on Lanie as her neck fell free from between Lanie's legs. Betrayal etched in her final gasp. Not of Evelyn, but of the vows they had shattered.

“Seventeen years cursed," Evelyn murmured, cradling the blackening heart. Her claws trembled—as the curse unravelled in her veins. “Now you’re free. We both are.”

Lanie’s scream tore through the room—a sound that might have summoned tornadoes in another life, if the world still bothered to listen. Her paralysis broke and she scrambled to Georgia’s body, charred hands pressing the ruined chest. “You promised—” Scales sloughed off her arms like autumn leaves from a poisoned tree. “You swore you’d stay—!”

Evelyn stared at the heart crumbling in her fist, its ashen flakes drifting like funeral silt. Michelle’s voice surfaced one last time, a moth trapped in a dragon’s throat: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—”

“It had to burn,” Evelyn rasped, voice stripped to a rusted wire. “The curse had to run its course. Even regret couldn’t unbind it.” Her talons plunged into her own chest, ribs splintering like kindling to mirror the hollow where Georgia’s heart once beat. Blood spilt along with ichor-black smoke coiling from the wound.

"Artemitra!" Evelyn howled, pounding her breastbone until scales split like eggshells under a boot. Blood welled, then sealed—flesh knitting itself raw and pink before their eyes. “The hunt’s done! The debt’s paid! Take me instead!”

She clawed at the air as if tearing at the goddess’s veil, her talons snapping and regrowing in grotesque time-lapse. “I surrender! By right of conquest, her victory was earned. By the maggot-soft rot festering in my marrow, take my heart, my wings, my fire!” Her voice broke, a dam crumbling. “Just… give her back.”

Lanie lunged, teeth bared—then froze. Not from magic, but from the raw, animal wrongness of Evelyn’s grief. The dragon wasn’t snarling now. She was a marionette with cut strings, talons still buried in her own flesh, keening a dirge only the damned could sing.

Evelyn’s eyes met hers—dragon-glow dimming to funeral-parlour fluorescence. A silent plea, strung on barbed wire: Finish it. ‘Crack my spine. Let me choke on the mercy I never gave.’

Memories ambushed Lanie. George’s voice, whiskey-rough and frayed at the edges, murmuring against her nape after the first miscarriage. “We aren't soldiers anymore. Just… gardeners now. Planting seeds in salted earth.”

“Gardens rot,” she slurred.

George pressed their entwined hands to the fresh scar below her navel. ”So we plant again.”

The wedding band she had taken off those weeks ago suddenly weighed thirteen pounds.

“No,” Lanie snarled. Not gentleness—refusal. She lunged, seizing Evelyn’s wrist. Talons tore free from the dragon’s chest with a wet pop, trailing filaments of shadow that lashed like live wires. “You don’t get to tap out. Never.” She hauled Evelyn forward by her matted hair, roots tearing loose like stitches from rotten fabric. “Fix her. Now.”

Evelyn convulsed, laughter bubbling between cracked lips. “Can’t resew a shredded quilt, darling. Curse did its—”

Lanie backhanded her. The blow split Evelyn’s cheek open, revealing muscle fibres twitching like dying crickets. “George owed you nine weeks. You got seventeen years. Now fix it.”

They collapsed beside Georgia’s body—two women tangled in a grave soil embrace. Lanie pressed her forehead to Georgia’s sternum, searching for a heartbeat she already knew was absent. Evelyn’s claw hovered above the cavity she had carved, trembling.

“Tried,” Evelyn whispered. A confession, not defiance. Her talon traced the jagged edges of Georgia’s ribs—white bone peeking through ruined flesh like piano keys through burnt velvet. “Built the curse tight as a hangman’s knot. No loopholes. No redemption arcs.”

She inhaled sharply, the sound whistling through her perforated lung. “Death was the only mercy left.”

Lanie’s hand found Evelyn’s nape, grip gentler than either deserved. Fingertips brushing the downy scales beneath her hairline—a gesture stolen from George. “Then we’ll be beggars.” She guided Evelyn’s claw to Georgia’s chest, their joined fingers slick with ash and regret.

“Try harder.”

Magic sparked—feeble, sputtering. A necromancer’s first fumble. Evelyn’s breath hitched. “Lan, I—”

“TRY… PLEASE!”

The room dissolved into light.

When the glare faded, Georgia lay whole.

Not alive—repaired. Skin flawless like doll porcelain, lashes feathered against pallid cheeks. A mortician’s masterpiece. Empty.

Evelyn sagged against Lanie, her remaining magic spent. “Can’t… can’t reignite snuffed candles.”

Lanie pressed her lips to Georgia’s brow. A moth battered itself against the windowsill, wings powdered with attic dust. Somewhere, a faucet dripped in rhythm with Evelyn’s slowing breaths.

“Should’ve let you kill me,” Evelyn wept into Lanie’s shoulder, her tears sizzling where they fell.

Lanie’s teary chuckle rattled. “Tempting.” She carded her fingers through Evelyn’s hair, matted strands parting like swamp reeds in a poisoned marsh. “But George always said… Mercy’s just vengeance wearing Sunday best.”

They clung to each other—” Take it all. Give her back”—their final wails dissolving into a voiceless haemorrhage. The sound of a thousand childhood music boxes wound backwards until their springs snapped.

Somewhere, a moth’s wings calcified mid-beat. Some debts outlive the debtor.

But outside, the night didn’t care.

It just kept chewing.
 
 
Continued in Part 8