Exquisite Poison (Original Draft)

Chapter 88 - We Share this Paralyze

Netta could feel the primal roar that filled her, shook with its terrible power even as her body died. And she was dying. Of that Netta was unmistaken of, even as her consciousness waned.

Netta experienced it, feeling her life draining from her in an almost removed manner. If she looked down, she knew she would see Ash lowered to the role of carrion beast. Netta could not bear the thought of watching him, desperate in the throes of his own kind of death, his whole form violently shaking as her tore, consumed.

But, oh, Netta could feel so clearly as Ash ripped and bit, could feel teeth that he had once playfully, lightly, grazed the sharp ridges of against her sweating flesh.

Netta choked, felt blood spurt, wetting her lips like a grotesque parody of lipstick. She grimaced, her face transformed into a tight rictus smile.

They had done a foul job of readying her if they meant to pinion her as an exotic species. After all, she had not been suffocated and her wings would surely bunch up

And she had just emerged from her cocoon. Netta had so wanted to see the color of her wings...

The heat from her chest lost the barbaric, painful cruelty of the act and had gained, instead, a brightness that seemed to usher in a sense of calm.

The tears that she wept were no longer caused by pain, but rather by how overwhelming the rapture of the moment became. Ash ingesting her flesh, her life's energy. Yet it was more than that. Even though it was caused by so disturbing a means, with each piece of her he swallowed, she surely became more of one with her King.

Netta must have closed her eyes, for when she was aware of looking once more, she found that she was no longer laying on the altar. Rather, Netta found that she was looking down, watching as the will-less once-King devoured his tragic bride. He chewed freely through clothes as he did flesh and bone.

Netta shuddered, closed her eyes. The sound, the terrible snapping of one of the bones of her rib cage as her lover tore through it with powerful jaws, seemed to resonate down Netta's spine. She was clutching at her face, as though her fingers could provide an extra layer to her eyelids in keeping out the terrible sight beneath her.

Ashwood's entire upper body was coated red in gore and viscera, the bright red of her blood providing a deep contrast to the heavy gold of his skin. Her blood had baptized her King, stained him with the remnants of her mortality.

When Netta gazed at her body - how could she not - she saw the still quality of her face. Her skin had paled, the golden quality that she had borrowed from her lover tainted with blood and death.

Her maroon eyes, a deeper color than the blood that streaked across her cheeks, her chin, were dark, dull. They seemed to gaze at her, accusing.

She felt it, the moment he bore into her heart. Netta felt her life seeming to rip like a string, loose from its physical moorings.

Netta looked down at Ashwood, devouring her as he lost himself to misery, the madness he had succumbed to. She could not blame the poor man, whose drives and nature had been used against him to fall into a frenzy, his mind all but gone.

His grief seemed to radiate off of him in waves as shock gave way to it, moment by horrible moment.

Netta felt herself moving to him, her hand extended towards Ash's shaking shoulder as though she meant to comfort him. The portion of his mind that lay, imprisoned, as he rended the body of the woman he loved.

The one who had finally accepted him, not as the thing he once was, or even the man he wanted to be, but wholly, totally, as whatever he was, now.