A Love Beyond Time

The Star, the Bloom, and the Shadow

T.W.: Brief descriptions of sexual violence

In the beginning, there was no light—only longing.

And from that longing came creation, and from creation, sorrow.

Thus the heavens learned to dream, and the dream became the world.

Shinsenkyō — Horai, The Grand Castle

Night fell swiftly over Shinsenkyō, and the sun slipped beneath the vast horizon of the sea, carrying with it its warmth and purifying glow. With its descent came the turn of darkness—the darkness of the mind and heart, where monsters wait to awaken, where claws and hunger stir, and where desire burns unrestrained.

Within Horai's Grand Castle, that darkness took shape.

In Zheng-Yu's chamber, even the candlelight seemed subdued. Shadows breathed across the silken curtains that veiled the great bed—shadows locked in a grotesque waltz, one large and devouring, the other delicate and struggling. The fabric fluttered like a witness unwilling to see, quivering with each motion, the outline of fragile hands trembling against it—fluttering, shivering, desperate to escape the predator's reach, only to be folded back again and again by spindly arms, like a moth trapped beneath a monstrous spider.

The macabre dance continued, a duet of breath and broken sound. Whimpers, gasps, the low snarl of something once divine but long since corrupted.

Zheng-Yu's eyes gleamed with feverish light as he gazed at the male pinned beneath him.

Ah, how he had missed this. Missed everything about him.

His face with features so exquisite and ethereal, they seemed painted with brushstrokes of starlight by Heaven's own fastidious hands. His tear-filled tanzanite eyes that sparkled like the pristine lakes of Mount Kunlun on Winter's first dawn. His supple body with sleek muscles that bunched and tensed with every shiver and quiver. His proud defiance that eventually melted into despair.

The Grand Master's thrusts quickened, became increasingly savage as desire bloomed into hunger and hunger flared into madness, fed by the limerence coursing recklessly and endlessly through his heated veins. A shudder rippled through the fragile frame locked within his ruthless grasp. And those lips parted breathlessly—red and wet and swollen—while those hands, so small compared to his, lifted to his shoulders.

On the curtains, the silhouette of small hands reached towards the large mass hovering above, held against it, pushed it back. For the merest of seconds, one split into two. However, the large mass quickly lowered, spread, and devoured the small hands. Two became one once more.

Zheng-Yu's mind blurred reality with imagination, merged obsession with worship, blending and mixing everything until he could no longer tell which was which, until he became tangled in the fantasy. In his fevered longing, he called a name that was not the one of the trembling body beneath him, but an echo from the past. A ghost that had haunted him relentlessly.

"Yu-Hu," he murmured, voice raw. "My little Yu-Hu, my little beauty. You are finally back with me."

The candle flames swayed in rhythm with his delusion, and the bed creaked madly in tune with his increasingly savage thrusts.

"You can feel it, don't you, my dick so big and hard inside you? You love it, don't you, little bitch?" The murmur deepened, lowered, turned into a growl. "You love it when I am all the way inside, right?"

The body in his arms started quaking with ecstasy, and broken whimpers filled the smoky air.

On the curtains, the waltz became a frantic whirlwind of frenzied, erratic moves. The shadows locked together in a tight embrace, then disentangled almost violently, before clashing in unison once more.