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The next morning, King woke before me. I rose out of bed, as I had to do, and I took the sheets down to the river to wash them. He would join me soon afterward, standing next to me as I dropped heavy rocks on the corners of the sheets, pinning it to the earth beneath the water as I scrubbed at it. There was a conversation to be had, but it was not one I wanted to have. I wanted normalcy, that was all I wanted. His hand reached for my shoulder and I instinctively tensed up, recoiling away from him. He pursued, though, touching me anyway.

"What would you like for breakfast?" he asked.

"I'm not actually hungry," I replied breathily, scrubbing away at the stain.

"Surely you are," he began, "you were hungry last night and you barely ate before bed."

"Yeah, that's true, but i'm really not today, not right now at least" I replied.

"Are you alright?" he asked. What a strange thing to ask. I wondered what he thought, if he thought I was alright or not. I wanted to ask "what do you think?" but I didn't want to talk about it.

"My stomach hurts. I'm okay though." I lied.

"Hopefully that will pass. Perhaps you strained a muscle from the vomiting yesterday" he said, and I wondered if he was that stupid or if he was simply in denial.

"Hopefully." I answered. King watched me for a bit longer, stepping close behind me to where both his hands were on my shoulders. I was tense, I could feel my shoulders had rose to guard myself.

"I am going out to do some experiments. I will be back this evening, I promise. I love you, my husband."

"I love you too" I replied, tragically honest.

King would see himself off, and I was alone with the bedsheet, scrubbing until I had gotten the red to become a bit pinker. I doubt it was all going to come out, and I eventually resigned to hanging the sheet up to dry over a tree branch and heading back inside, where I began to work on further tome translations. I made very little progress, though, if any. Every time I tried to lose myself to the text translations, I found my mind wandering. Everything still felt jumbled, as if someone had stuck a fork in my brain and whisked it around, leaving my head a strange slurry. I became angry when I made no progress, slamming the book shut and pushing it away. Nothing could quell the restlessness I had, and I resigned to climbing the stairs and sitting by the loft window, staring out into the yard, watching as the bedsheet blew in the wind.

King came back that evening, and I came to the yard to join him. I'd wrapped a blanket around me to fight the chill, and as he approached me, dragging two carcasses behind him, he'd sling them to the side and ask "are you cold?"

"Yeah. Colder than usual. How was the day?"

"Uneventful. I missed you." he said. My ears perked a bit as he left the carcasses in the yard, remarking "i'll start a fire, come sit out here with me. Have you eaten?"

"No. I didn't really do anything today."

"That's alright. We are in Honeymoon. I should be spending more time with you, anyway. You must be lonely."

"A little, yeah." I admitted.

"I'll take a break from the experiments for a few weeks, we'll spend time together, work toward a child. Surely something will come of it." King said as he prepared the fire, sitting close to the warmth and inviting me to join him. I approached, sitting beside him, wrapped tightly in my blanket, everything but my head and feet guarded by the quilt.

"My experiments today yielded nothing, but I am sure that time will provide something to us." he said, putting an arm around me, pulling me close to him.

"Probably."

I stared into the fire as I felt his arm around me, the warmth of his body embracing me, and I lost myself in the dancing of the flames he had created. My eyes wandered to the smoldering that fluttered above the crackling of the fire, the way they glowed for only a moment before disappearing into the growing darkness of the setting sun, the black between the trees. King was behaving so casually, so affectionately, as if nothing had happened, as if the wedding had ended and we'd returned to the cabin for something loving and memorable. I felt angry, when he touched me, the way his large hand brushed against my body, the way he smelled. It made me furious, and as I sat staring into the deep light of the flame I imagined burning. I imagined what it would be like to push his face in the fire and burn him, to hear him scream in pain. I thought about what it would be like to pry open his mouth, to pull his tongue from his throat and place it to open flame, to make him swallow the red, glowing wood beneath the fire. I stared into the fire and I wanted to hurt him. The thought ran through my body like electricity and I jolted back, stiffening up my posture and shaking my head, trying to free my mind of those terrible intrusions.

"Are you alright?" he'd ask, looking down to me. I had only been by the fire for a moment, but I already had a sweat forming on my forehead. I felt anxious.

"Yeah. I think i'm still sick from the herbs." I said.

"Possibly. That will pass. You need dinner, more than anything. Sit by the fire, and I will go prepare you fish."

"I'm not hungry" I replied.

"You've had nothing on your stomach in almost two days now. You must eat. This is unlike you." he said. I found my eyes trailing back to the fire, to the crackling, to the noise, the beauty of it all, so destructive, so consuming.

"...it hurts to relieve myself right now, so i've not wanted to eat" I admitted.

"That will pass. I can always prepare a salve, to help with healing. After all, I am eager to make love again." King said. The words sent chills down my spine. Love, what a sadistic thing to call it. I rose from the fire and made my way toward the cabin, prompting him to ask "where are you going?"

"To lie down. I need to rest" I said. I never did eat dinner that day, but King eventually forced me to eat for breakfast the day afterward. A few days later, we mated again, though I didn't bleed as much that time. A few days after that, he fed off me again. A week passed, and at that point King had returned to a total sense of normalcy.

It was the afternoon, eight or nine days after our wedding, and I was sitting in the loft, overlooking the yard. King had, as he'd promised, been staying home with me. He'd not left to go for any experimenting in over a week. I couldn't breathe without him asking me questions, stupid questions, that stupid curiosity. It was a particularly cold day outside, so I couldn't imagine going out for a walk or doing anything to clear my head of his noise. The moment we sat together, his hands were on me, groping at me. He'd become so sexually demanding, and any time I failed to reciprocate he'd get fussy, as if it was necessary now. We had a few warmer days, and I had taken to going to the river to rinse for the past few days, but it was getting now to where it was just too cold to be in the water. When he wasn't out experimenting, all he wanted to do was have sex. I never thought I'd miss him being gone, miss him dragging carcasses in our yard, fatigued, uninterested in me. For all I knew, he was getting his rocks off with them too. I never inspected the carcasses.

"Nico," I heard him call from downstairs, nails on a chalkboard to my ears.

"Yes?" I asked.

"Come here," he replied, unsurprisingly. His intentions were as I'd expected, and as I showed disinterest, he'd bristle up a bit.

"Why are we not mating as married couples are supposed to do?" he asked.

"They don't have to fuck every time they see eachother" I replied.

"But, I want to. You won't let me have another partner, and now you are hesitating with me as well?" he asked in return. I was standing by the front window, looking out into the yard.

"I just haven't been in the mood. You used to masturbate before you met me, feel free to do that."

"You aren't treating me right at all" King said. My hands were on the windowsill, and my fingernails dug into the wood, dragging backwards and scratching until my nails splintered.

"Not treating you right?" I asked, still facing out the window.

"No. If you're going to be this averse to intimacy, then there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to work toward a child with someone else. It's not fair." King would say.

"Not fair?" I asked, walking to the bookshelf, picking up an old hardcover. It was caked in dust, having been barely touched in over a decade, and I turned and hurled it at the wall by King's head as hard as I could. It startled him into jumping out of bed, snapping "NICO" as he rose, approaching me. I only proceeded to grab more books, though, chucking them past him with all my might. My body wanted so badly to throw them at him, to watch it hit him in the head, to break the stupid bone shape of his nose, but my mind wouldn't allow it. I'd began to scream out my nose, and after I'd exhausted my supply of books I simply grabbed hold of the bookshelf, my body jerking sideways and finding it light enough to lift, so I twisted my body horizontally and tossed it to the floor, lacking the strength for it to make the distance, causing it to smash into the floor and break.

King made a break for me but I ran, I ran around the table in the middle of the room, upending it and kicking it over before grabbing hold of a chair, tossing it at the wall as well. That would make a rather hard connection against his cabin, King barking another "NICO" as he tried to move to me, the last chair in my hand as I screamed at him, screamed so hard snot ran from my nose and spit formed in the corners of my mouth. I cursed at him, taking the chair by the legs and smashing it against the floor, over and over until it would shatter, leaving me with two splintered chair legs in my hands, both of which I hurled just past King. I proceeded to snap the seat off the remaining chair legs, tossing that as well, before brandishing the remaining chair legs at him directly, my eyes peeled open wide, my teeth bared like a wild beast.

"What is WRONG with you", he would bark at me, having stood there and faced my behavior, the destruction I was wreaking on our habitat. I was, however, far beyond the point of conversation.

"WRONG? YOU--" I snorted in rage, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME? YOU. YOU'RE WHAT'S WRONG. YOU--STUPID--"

Every word that left my mouth was screeched from my throat, forced through gritted teeth, nasally and piercing. The chair leg I brandished in my left hand would then be thrown at him directly, missing him and slamming against the cabin wall before I began to take the remaing leg, first bashing it against the upturned table before taking it to any surface before my eyes in the cabin.

"THE DEER," I smashed some of the shutters off the cabin windows, "THE SERPENT," I beat it against the bedframe until chips started to flick off of it, too dense for me to destroy, "THE FEEDING. ALL THE FEEDING. MY ARM," I returned to the table, throwing the chair leg and instead grabbing the table, attempting to hold it and stomp through the tabletop, "THE DRUGGING, THE NIGHT OF THE WEDDING," I screamed, unable to even name what had happened that night, "YOU. IT'S ALL YOU."

I melted down. I completely melted down, breaking through the table and exhausting myself before bashing my palms against my chest, then brazenly opening my arms, goading King.

"GO ON. STOP ME. STOP ME LIKE YOU ALWAYS DO!"

King didn't stop me, though. Rather, he approached the scraps of wood I had made of the table and chairs, the bookshelf, and began to collect them in a pile in the corner, slowly.

"I am sorry you feel the way you do," King began, "but i'll not have this. I'll not have it at all. I'm going out."

"What do you MEAN?" I asked, having already screamed myself so hoarse that I was being forced by my own body to quiet down.

"You clearly decided at some point in our relationship that my intentions are malicious and thus decided everything I've done to you has been with the intent to harm you. I cannot satiate your paranoia, but I won't sit around and let you attack me."

My expression contorted into a vicious scowl that showed my gums above my upper teeth, snarling at him as I insisted "you ARE malicious!"

"Fine. You hate me, you curse at me, you run from me, now I am malicious. There is no shaking this narcissistic victim role in which you place yourself. I can't win. I'm going out for a hunt. Please try to eat today, you need it desperately."

King had finished piling up the wood in the corner as he made his way out the front door, and I ran after him to watch him walk away as I barked at him to come back. He didn't flinch, and was gone into the woods shortly afterward. I was left alone, in the house I had ransacked, without my husband, without my only form of connection with another living being. I simply made my way back upstairs, laying down on the floor before the loft window, and wept. There was nothing else to do.

He did indeed come home that night, and I wish I could say we sorted it out shortly afterward, but we didn't. We never talked about it. He never wanted to talk about anything. He just came home, acting like nothing had happened, and I felt too tired and embarrassed to address it at all. It was the first time I'd ever had an outburst like that, and I felt a deep, horrific shame at the recollections of the damage I'd wrought earlier, the evidence still all around the cabin, piles of wood, dents in the wall, dents in the bed, the window shutters by the bed smashed entirely. King had brought with him a female deer, tossed her body haphazardly across the yard, looking to me as he told me "she's dinner. Prepare a fire, I will flay her."

I followed his orders quietly, starting the fire, looking to him as he used his teeth and nails to rip flesh off the doe's body, tear her apart, pulling her legs apart until they snapped, broken open in a most revealing an undignified manner. She was on her back, and he beckoned for me to approach, to stand before her as she laid mangled before me. He'd bitten her neck open, her insides entirely still intact. She was swollen.

"Is she pregnant?" I asked.

"Most likely she was. I'm sure they have passed since then."

"...Why would you kill a mother?" I asked, looking up from her to King, who was staring down at the body with what seemed to be the same cluelessness.

"I wanted to understand, how it worked. I want to understand what keeps the child alive, so that we may replicate it in you." he said, getting down on his knees. He would lean his body over the doe and pierce her stomach with his jaws, opening her, eviscerating her torso open and exposing she had, indeed, been with children. I had to turn my eyes away from the sight, but I continued to hear it. I took a few steps backward and stared out towards the direction of the river as I could hear King, exploring her anatomy.

"The placenta could be artificial. If there was something that could be implanted in your stomach..." he murmured, "we'd need an egg of some sort, for both parties to impregnate, but in doing so we would introduce a third parent to the equation. There must be a way to introduce fertilization to the male, some sort of activating of the hermaphroditic hormones."

I didn't care what he was saying, but I knew better than to wander off when he started talking to me.

"You must be able to self-fertilize. I am sure that there is something inside you that can be brought to life, as in all living creatures."

"I've never heard of that," I said, just to satisfy him into thinking I was listening.

"It's in plants, and some animals. I see no reason why, if regeneration is possible, the body couldn't be guided to manifest a separate life entirely. A parthenogenesis, in a way you could manifest one and I could fertilize it."

"My body, make an egg? I don't know if I can do that."

"If I were to open you and implant some sort of womb in you, I am sure your body would deduce it's purpose."

"I...doubt that." I murmured.

"Surely it would. Look at this" he insisted, and I reluctantly looked over to find a large amount of the noise I'd heard moments before was King eating two of the three young inside the deer. They were entirely gone, and his face was slathered in blood and amniotic fluid. One was left, though, and he had it in his hand.

"It lasted longer than the mother did. There must be something about the body, wherein the child can survive even when the host is dead, even if only for a few minutes. That must mean there is possibility for gestating life outside the traditional female womb." he said, holding the dead fawn before me. I could see it had spots beneath it's sticky fluid coating. It must've been close to being born. I could only take a few more steps away from him.

"I don't know, King..." I spoke softly, looking off to the fire once more. He proceeded to eat the last fawn, and dragged the open carcass of the doe to the fire, where he rended off her legs and prepared them over the flame. I took a seat on the opposite fire as him, sitting with my knees drawn together, my gaze into the light flickering before me. The thoughts that had haunted me before, they came again. Every time I stared into the fire, I thought about hurting King. It made sitting in the warmth feel impossible, and as he roasted the deer over the flame I would rise and wander out into the woods a bit, informing him "I'm going to go pee" as I left the yard, heading out into the trees, into the wild once more. I only wandered, though, farther and farther away from the campfire, nude in the cold night air. It was the only place where I could feel any sense of peace in my mind, in the brutal uncaring cold of the forest's night. My skin stung, my breath was visible, and all I wanted to do was keep walking, away from our home, from the warmth.

There was something I found liberating about wandering in the woods, despite the cold, despite the pain in my body as I wandered through the night. I felt as if I was a dog, off my leash for a moment, and I could do anything. I could climb a tree. I could splash in the water. I could find a cool bug, or a little animal. I could kill myself. The fire was distant behind me, and just as I began to savor the powerful silence, the powerful chill, I felt my earth shattered by King's voice calling out "Nico?" through the trees, reverberating off them all around me.

I felt compelled to run, when he called out for me. My feet began operating without much thought. I ran, away from the voice, and I assumed he heard the footsteps because he rose, calling out "Nico!" once more before pursuing me. I could hear his heavy footsteps approaching behind me, closing the gap quickly. He was not only larger, but so much faster than me, and I was starving, freezing. It took him no time to catch up with me, snatching me up in his arms, pulling me into a bear hug that lifted me off the ground as I kicked about, crying out for him to let me go. It was then, the first time I laid hands on King in a hateful way. One of my arms broke free and I thrust it upward, shoving my palm against the underside of his skeletal jaw, clapping his teeth together, causing him to bite his own tongue and stumble back in surprise, letting go of me as I continued to run.

I would not make it far, though, before I found myself at a ledge. How storybook, I thought, looking down at the fall. It seemed unlikely it would kill me, but I would certainly break bones if I slipped when descending, and that scared me more than death itself. I began to run along the ledge's perimeter, trying to find a decline that was safer, and as I ran, King closed the distance again. That time, though, I was not restrained with a hug. I was tackled, two hands shoving me forward, crashing onto my stomach, before King's weight was on me, his arms digging up under my torso and crossing at the front as he snarled in my ear.

"You will not run from me. You will come home and eat."

I was indeed carried home, much more firmly than before, and as I was sat at the fireside, King would sit with me, a hand tightly holding my wrist as he sat me before the deer meat, ordering me "eat."

"No." I protested.

"Eat, or I will forcefeed you. I'll not allow you to act this way."

I simply sat there, unyielding, and King kept true to his word. he would take up the deer haunch into his mouth, chewing it, swallowing it, letting it soak in his stomach acid before his free hand would grab me by the muzzle, gripping it tightly. His other hand released my wrist, moving to my face, where the two hands effortlessly pried open my mouth, his body rising and leaning over me. He brought me to my knees, kneeling over me, and held my head turned upright as he vomited into it, hot, biley deer meat. I began to gag, the taste far worse, far more nauseating than any of the raspberry feedings bad been. The texture was awful, and I could feel the sludge of chewed food sitting at the entrance of my throat, waiting to be accepted. King pushed my jaws shut, using both hands to hold my muzzle closed. He snarled at me, his voice guttural, vicious as he barked "SWALLOW IT". I, of course, fearfully cooperated, swallowing it and feeling my body immediately lurch, heaving it right back up.

King, however, continued to hold my mouth tightly closed, the vomited vomit in my mouth hot, acidic, absolutely putrid on the tongue. I struggled and wailed out my nose, and King responded to this by pinching my nostrils shut with one hand, the other still holding my mouth closed. I was to swallow and keep it down, or suffocate fighting him. I eventually chose the former, and was able to keep down the deer meat.

He repeated the process several more times, until the haunch was cleaned entirely of meat, chewed, and fed into my mouth. I would've insisted after the first forcefeeding that I'd eat it myself, but he gave me no opportunity to do so. My stomach churned with the nausea of his bile and mouth flavor swimming in my body, his regurgitations inside me, and I sat there by the fire next to him crying quietly, rubbing my pitiful eyes with my wrists. What a marriage this was.

---

Very little changed over the next five months we spent together. It had been about a year, maybe a little more or less, I assumed. I'd lost track of time, but the weather had become warm again, so I guessed we were in March or April. I missed Thanksgiving and Christmas entirely, though we attempted a sort of gift giving occasion at one point as a makeshift holiday, when it was still cold outside, when snow was on the ground. I had taken some of the wood I'd smashed and rebuilt a smaller table of sorts, pulling nails from badly damaged parts and using them to make us something that looked more like a children's table. We sat on the floor together, when we ate inside on the bitterest cold days, and we'd began to sometimes burn wood in the metal stove in the corner of the room, something I'd previously avoided due to fire anxiety. His gift in return was a ring he'd found in the river at one point, ironically given to me for our replacement Christmas and not when he'd originally proposed to me. Much to both our surprise, it fit.

There were tremendous amounts of tension throughout the winter months. With the temperatures low and our stress high, we butted heads quite a bit. We had very little sex, and King had taken to going out out for "hunts" only to come home smelling of semen, sometimes with it dried on his belly or hands. He never smelled of another animal, though, so I never made a big deal about it. I'd all but given up on the tome, having lost interest in wanting to learn more about who he was. I just wanted to get by, to make the days pass as quickly as possible, to find some sense of comfort in our connection once more. He'd stopped asking about children, or really asking many questions at all. Our days repeatedly like scripts. We woke, we had breakfast, he went out, I wandered around, he came home, we had dinner, we went to bed. Sometimes, throw in an awkward intimate encounter or a bath, a walk together in the woods, nothing substantial. There was nothing substantial to even do anymore, it seemed. We'd lost the spark that we'd previously had. That was, it seemed, until one day, close to what was probably our one-year anniversary. It was probably mid-April.

"Nico," he began, in a tone that had grown unfamiliar to me, sounding chipper, upbeat, "I am going to the Heart today."

"Oh?" I'd ask, sitting on the porch, looking to him in the yard.

"Yes. I believe I've deduced a way for us to have a child. I want to address it with Athair." he said. I worried he'd be laughed at again, but I wanted to support him just the same. I smiled softly and offered my best, and he approached me and kissed me on the head, departing shortly after. I sat there on the porch, enjoying the quiet of the spring air, the warmth having returned, making it pleasant to sit outside in the nude.

It was then, in that silence, that an idea struck me. Perhaps, in that tome, was an answer to King's questions. Perhaps something in the tome told some sort of old secret on how to procreate in the ways King imagined. He seemed so sure it was possible. I gathered the time, my pen and half-finished translation key and made my way out onto the porch to work on it. I didn't feel the same frustration I'd had in those winter months, when the wounds were fresh, and I delved into the effort with the optimism that perhaps it could save our relationship. Translating went well, and over the next few hours I was able to use pages with pictures of animals to finally form the key, all twenty-six characters. I felt like I'd won the lottery, like I'd discovered ancient treasure, the way I was able to read a page about rabbits written in this strange rune and understand it, albeit slowly.

It was then that I turned to King's page, and began to translate it.

"SLUAGH." There were words like this one, that made me doubt my translation, but as every other word translated correctly, I was forced to accept it must've been an actual term. I proceeded to read the first page about him. The details were largely about this creature, "sluagh", which seemed to normally operate in groups. I couldn't determine if it was a singular or plural term, and the dialogue was old Irish, with the spelling and sentence structure antiquated and difficult to read. It made determining much of the information to actually be, unfortunately, almost impossible for myself. I gathered that they were forest spirits, and that it was unusual for them to be alone, and that they mainly come out at night.

More understandable, though, were the notes that had been written in the margins, the writing of someone who had come long after this book was first published. King's page had several notes on it, and translating them read: "MALLEUS GALAIR. MALE. SOLITARY. VAMPIRIC, ELUSIVE IN NATURE. STACHYBOTRYS INFECTION ON BODY, UNKNOWN VARIENT, LIKELY INTERNAL AS WELL."

Most of that wasn't all that surprising to me, other than the parts that seemed to be Latin or Irish in nature, which I couldn't translate. I knew he was vampiric, and I knew he had some sort of infection living mainly inside his body. The rest of the details felt too medical for me to gather much about what it meant, if any of it even meant anything and wasn't just the ramblings of a madman. I wondered where King had even found this book, and if the writings were even trustworthy.

I eventually took a break, having not gathered much I didn't already know, and not long after I'd put away the tome, King would come back. He had a liveliness to him, and as he approached I'd greet him with the best smile I could muster.

"Athair believes I am onto something" he informed me, to which I sat up in surprise, questioning him further. He explained.

"You will require surgery. Your genitalia will be replaced with a female Lesidhe's, and I will impregnate you."

"What?" I asked, my smile dropped, paused midway at a perplexed slack-jawed surprise.

"Athair believes the regenerative properties of my fungus would allow a surgical transplant to successfully heal. He believes you will have full function and that, if done correctly, you can still live and appear entirely as male."

I had a thousand questions and a thousand "no"s I wanted to hurl at King, but the first thing that fell from my mouth was "where...would you get a female Lesidhe willing to give her body?"

"There is a nearby wood. We will kill her, and take her body. After you are with child, we will merge our woods. Athair has given his blessing."

I found that hard to believe. Athair gave blessing to killing one of the forest's guardians? I asked King "are you sure?" and he nodded with a childlike enthusiasm, like this was a game we were playing, like there was nothing severe about killing one of his own kind and forcing me to undergo a sex change.

"How would I still be a male if you're going to totally overhaul my goods?" I asked.

"We will internalize your testicles, keep them alongside ovaries."

"That...doesn't feel possible. None of this does. I don't wanna have some woman's body parts grafted between my legs, King. This..." I trailed off, looking away from him. It never got better for more than a moment.

"This what?" he asked.

"This feels so insane."

"What does? It's brilliant!" he spoke excitedly.

"Brilliant? Why don't you do it then. You get the surgery. You're already a Lesidhe. It's way less bizarre than taking parts from a whole different species."

"I cannot perform surgery on myself, and you cannot do it for me."

"King, I...don't know. I don't think that'll work. You're running the risk of killing me, getting into these territories. Can't we just..."

I paused. He looked to me.

"Can't we just quit worrying about children for a while?" I asked.

"No," he replied quickly, "and you agreed to sacrifice yourself to me and to aid me in my experiments when we married. It was part of your vows."

"No one said in the vows that that would involve getting a sex change."

"Well, that's what sacrifice can entail. If I must sacrifice a female for you, why should you not rise to fulfill the role for me?"

I rolled my eyes. When he got like that, I'd learned it was better not to argue with him. It only made him angry, and fussy, and it would be my entire night.

"Did you really never have a name before me?" I asked, trying to change the subject. His ears rose suddenly, and his posture stiffening, as if he was on the defensive.

"No, I didn't. Why do you ask?"

"Just wondering."

"No, there's a reason. Why? Why do you ask that?" he asked, approaching me, acting remarkably weird.

"I just thought about that book," I lied, "there's that picture of you in it. I wondered if maybe you had a name before your curse, and you'd forgotten it or something."

"No, I would've remembered that. I've never had a name. No one of my kind has names." he pressed. I agreed, and that was that. He then directed the conversation back to the idea of this surgery, and I rose and wandered out into the yard, tired of sitting as King tried to convince me to let him mangle me.

"Listen, I was tentatively on board at the idea of you putting some sort of womb in me, but even then, I wasn't crazy about it. I'm not letting you just totally...mutilate my body and put some other creature's parts between my legs. It wouldn't even look like mine!"

"How can I inseminate you if there is no way in which the womb can be reached?"

"I dunno!" I yelled. "You're the one spending every day studying this shit, figure it out." I wandered past him, into the woods a bit, away from the cabin.

"I wish you would cooperate more with this." he said.

"I wish it ever stopped. First, I need to learn to trust letting you puke weird foods in my mouth, then I need to kill a deer, then I need to eat a serpent, then I need to help study your mold, then I need to help you experiment on animals, then i'm supposed to carry a child, then I need to let you eat part of my arm, then you--" I paused, "th-then you want me to get a womb. Then you want me to get a whole sex change. All while getting getting my neck bit open once a week. Does it ever stop? When do I get to start making demands? When do I get to ask for more?"

"What more do you want?" he asked.

I grit my teeth, squinting as I looked out at nothing, hissing "just normalcy, King, just for things to be normal. I want us to have a normal relationship."

"Well? How can it be normal if you won't explain to me what that is?" he asked.

"That's a great fuckin' question, King." I wandered a bit farther into the woods as I frustratedly asked "don't you ever just wanna stargaze? Lay around and kiss? Go into town, go see somewhere we've never seen before? Hell, even somewhere else in the woods. Anywhere. Don't you wanna take me somewhere?"

"Are those things you enjoy?" he asked.

"Are they things YOU enjoy, King? What do YOU think a married couple should do, besides have a child? What's fun to you?"

He didn't have an answer, seeming largely focused on the importance of the family in an animalistic way, procreating, hunting, gathering, raising young. Fun was a concept that seemed difficult for him to understand, and as we conversated I felt a sinking feeling that King had his focuses and not much else to him.

That night, we sat around the campfire, having dinner. The feeling of the flame had never left me. Staring into it brought me back to the wedding night, to feelings as real as the moment they happened, to violent thoughts about King. I had taken to stargazing to avoid the glow of the fire, to avoid thinking about making him eat glass, or stomping on his fingers. The stars calmed me down, they made me feel like my suffering was so insignificant, and somehow that alleviated a bit of the pain. We had never addressed it, not even in an argument. I couldn't even speak of it, couldn't name it. It sat quietly in the confines of my body, thrashing about in it's container, my ribcage.

Dinner went the same as always but, afterward, King asked if we could mate, traditionally, before bed. We had barely had penetrative sex since the cold weather had first set in, since our wedding night. I could maybe count the times on one hand, otherwise I'd gotten him off in other ways. I expressed little interest in doing so, offering other things I would like to do, and King looked frustrated, crossing his arms.

"I will just go for a night walk to clear my head" he said, and I knew what that meant. I went to the river, to bathe a bit before bed, and to stargaze more, to think about anything but King. Time passed, though, and he wasn't home. He normally only went on "walks" for about an hour, but several hours had passed. It was the middle of the night, and I began to wonder where King was. I made my way back to the cabin, and stared out into the quiet of the night, listening for something, anything. To my surprise, amidst the deafening silence of the wild, I eventually heard noise in the distance, distinctually unusual. I left the house, following the sound, certain it was simply some sort of animal wandering out past it's bedtime.

I lost track of the noise several times, quiet moments causing me to wonder if I was just hearing things, but then it would return, and as I drew closer I found the sound to be bizarre, like shuffling on the forest floor. It sounded as if something was hurt, perhaps staggering, dragging a leg through the grass and leaves. I assumed King had probably hurt something and left it to struggle, and I hoped to perhaps find it and bring it back to care for it. I followed the sound, quiet as I could be, until I saw it, until I saw him. A tree obscured most of him, but I could clearly see the hunched over back of King, on his knees. I first assumed him to be pleasuring himself, as usual, but as I stood there watching in secrecy, I saw more. Splayed legs, on both sides of his hips, cervine. I could see the hooves, bouncing along with the movements of his body.

As I skirted around the perimeter, I could see it, as hard as it was to accept that I was seeing it. He had the doe on her back, and she was alive, though I wasn't sure if that was better or worse for her. His elbows were on the forest floor, and he had her pinned, inside her. She was lying rather still, seeming to have accepted her fate, as some of us tend to do in those situations. Unlike my own suffering, though, in that moment I felt a swelling anger, the rising anger that had muddled my mind for months now, though this time torrential, out of control. My blood left my torso, flooding to my head, to my arms and legs, to a primal fight response, and I charged at him, with heartache, with rage. I pounced onto his back and grabbed at his face, finding myself incapable of really moving him much. I could jostle him around, but I could not overpower him, and as I tried to pry at his face, he would turn and gnash at me, biting open my arm in two separate spots, jerking his body a bit and causing me to tumble off of him, onto my back.

"LEAVE ME BE" he growled at me, ceaseless in his thrusting, in the way he was bent over her, looming like a shadow over the beast's poor body. I scooted back a bit and found a stick, a good inch or so thick, gripping it in both hands as I swung it at him, striking his back and neck with all my might. He was unflinching, though, like the state of mind he was in prevented him from registering any sort of outside sensation. He snarled at me, though, like an angry dog, like I'd reached for his food.

I was powerless to do anything except bleed, and though I struck him several more times, twice in the head, he'd finish what he was doing, letting go of her, the doe rising and stumbling around before fleeing. King then turned to me, taking the stick from my hand on my next swing and hurling it off into the woods before grabbing hold of my snout, gripping it tightly as my eyes glared wide and bug-eyed at him.

"I am TRYING to understand reproduction. Since I cannot mate with another of MY OWN KIND, and you are unwilling to cooperate yourself, I need to study it in whatever ways I can. Your duty, your sacrifice as my husband is to aid me in that."

I was hyperventilating with anger, and though he had my snout grabbed tightly, I was still able to curse a spitty "fuck you" through my teeth. He released my snout and I took a step back, making a beeline for the cabin. He pursued me, grabbing me a few seconds later, by the wrist, as he always did.

"Nico. Listen." he spoke, and I would interrupt him, cursing at him, berating him, a string of profanity hurled at him as I struggled to free myself, watching my wounds ooze blood down my arm. Our arguing, my protesting and his excuses, it all went nowhere. I was going home, that night, and I told him that. In a moment of slacked grip, I snatched my arm away from his hands and made for the cabin, intent on grabbing my truck keys and leaving. King would pass me, though, hurrying to the house first. I ran to catch him, but he outpaced me, as he always did. He was standing in the cabin when I reached the doorframe, holding my keys in his hands, and as I cursed for him to hand them to me, he held them up before me, as if he was taunting me.

"Does commitment mean nothing to you?" he asked. I made a lunge for his hand and he simply rose his arm above my head, out of my reach. His head would tilt back, his mouth opening, despite my insist cursing and "no"s. He then dropped them, my keys, my only hope of escaping this nightmare, into his maw, and swallowed. I could see them, the lump in his throat, as they disappeared into his stomach.

"You'll be going nowhere. You will stay here and uphold your vows, to sacrifice yourself to me, and to aid me. It is your duty, as my husband."

---

"I am going away for a few days. I am in search of beast other than a deer. They are not working out, and I am sure there is something correlated." King said, standing in the doorway as I sat on the bed, staring out the window.

A month more had passed since the incident with the deer. King had done it several more times, and at first he acted as if he wasn't doing so. He'd come home, reeking of sex, disinterested in me, smelling like cervine musk, and I accused him several times of doing so, to which he denied it, before I finally caught him in the act once more, in which he insisted I was being controlling, denying him his ability to study his abilities as a forest spirit. He swore, once we found a way to have me bear a child, that he'd stop, that he would be faithful to me again, but that breakthrough seemed to be nowhere on the horizon. I'd settled into letting it happen, because it mostly meant he kept his hands off me.

"A few days?" I asked.

"Yes. I do not know how long it will take, but I want to find a canine. I presume my facial shape to be similar to it, and perhaps if I can mate with a more similar species of feral, I can determine if their womb will suffice, since you do not wish for me to mate with a fellow Lesidhe."

"Okay."

"I love you," he spoke to me. I returned the gesture. It is amazing, what one can rationalize, what one can swallow down, when there are no alternatives available. King left in a hurry, and I knew within the day that he was surely going to be hunting ferals in a way that somehow sat worse in my stomach than when he'd just been slaughtering them. I couldn't tell if that was my own disgusting selfishness that resented him cheating on me, or if I hurt for the way they had to carry on with their bodies having been opened by him, as I had. Regardless, I forced myself to think about other things. I had plans that day, plans that had waited for when King was leaving for a long period of time.

It was early in the day, and I set out. I was heading for the cave, for the Forest's Heart, to see it for myself, in a sober mind, and to speak to Athair myself. I had questions I needed answered, and suspicions I needed desperately to have disproven.

It took me well over two hours of walking, much slower than riding on King's back as he ran, but I eventually found the cave. It felt so strange, so...dismal...without him there with me. I felt like I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be, like I was trespassing, but I would push forward just the same. It was so quiet, without his voice, and I felt a strange loneliness, a strange longing for him, and as I descended the rocks down to the water's edge and faced the crevasse where we crawled into the cave, my eyes would fill with tears, which began to run freely down my face. Everything felt so terrible, and I made my way to the crevasse and peered inside, seeing it's black emptiness, void of fire, void of our love. I couldn't help but sob, pulling away, pushing forward. The tears were unceasing, as I made my way down the hill, following the water, eventually finding the entrance to the Forest's Heart.

The strange, burned markings in the earth were still present, yet no longer contained a myriad of fallen leaves covering them as it had before. I could see it clearly, a large circle, some sort of sigil, full of lines, accented with strange shapes. It was Goetic in appearance, and yet still unlike any sigil I could recall from my curious blasphemous phase as a teenager. I had not seen the sigil in the books, but as I stood before it I was certain that this was the entrance. Still, despite my focus, despite my concentration, my requests, my eventually begging, all accompanied by a generous amount of tears, I found no welcome to the Heart. There was no change in pressure, there was no transportation. I simply stood there, alone, in the circle, wondering why I was undeserving of seeing the beauty of the Forest's Heart alone.

That was, until, I saw it, a sense of familiarity. Not far away, I saw trees that seemed remarkably familiar, and as I stood there staring at them it began to sink in. I approached them, realizing I was walking the path we'd walked when we first visited the Heart, though it was now far less vibrant, far simpler, still. The flora was unmoving, still, much less saturated than the world had been the first time King had taken me there. There were no stars in the daytime sky, there was no richer warmth or saturation to the air, and as I walked the path I distinctly recalled walking, I found myself no longer mystified by the beauty of an undulating world, but rather nauseated by the sickening mundanity of it all.

My exploration through the woods lead me to the clearing in which I was certain we had our wedding, the pond where I'd surrendered myself to him. I had to check, for myself, if it was there. Proof. I walked the steps I recalled walking, in that psychedelic daze, lost in the love I had for King, lost in the chartreuse sky, and I would come upon it. It was covered in dirt, laid over in leaves, but it was there. The glass with which we'd cut our palms was there, in the dirt. I could only push onward, though, rationalizing that it all may have been enhanced by the effects of the drugging, but that surely there was some mysticism to the Heart. I wandered around that area for well over another hour, until the sinking feeling of familiarity settled in once more.

I was at the edge of a clearing, and in that clearing was a large tree. It was Athair.

"Hello, Athair," I began as I passed the tree line into the clearing, through the leaves, towards the old oak. I bowed, respectfully, still certain he was real, certain that this was the truth to the Heart.

"I'm Nico, King's husband. I'm not sure if you know him as King, but...I know you know him. He said you two are friends, and..."

I approached the tree slowly, daring to reach my hand forward and place it on Athair's trunk, to find his body no different a temperature than the world around me, than any other tree.

"I just had some questions about him. Could you answer me?"

There was no response, only the whispering of the wind through tree branches, the rustling about of leaves, in the canopies and on the forest floor. My second hand would rise and rest on his trunk, both my palms now planted on his body, feeling the grit of his aged tree bark.

"Athair, could you please answer me? I...have so many things I need to understand about King. I know you two are friends."

Athair offered no sound, no hint at life stirring beneath the bark on the surface of his body. He sat still, cold, shaded by his own mighty crown. My head would lean forward, and I touched my forehead to his trunk, closing my eyes as they continued to stream with tears, having barely ceased since I first arrived at the cave.

"Athair, could you please answer me?" I asked again, to nothing, to no one. My knees began to tremble, and my sobbing would rise again, my nose running with mucus my palms on his trunk began to tense, my knuckles to bend and my fingertips to dig into the bark.

"Athair, could you please answer me?" I asked to the wind, to the emptiness of the world around me, as my knees surrendered, and I slid downward, onto them, my forehead and palms dragging against tree bark, scraping the skin until it peeled away, barely bleeding.

"Athair, could you please answer me?" I asked, louder, to whoever would hear me.

"Athair, please? Do I not deserve this? Do you not care for me, as his husband?"

"Do you not love me?" I asked through wailing, my body on all fours at his roots, howling for answers.

"Does anyone love me?"

But no one answered, and I was left to face the ringing in my own ears being the only thing that chose to acknowledge I was even alive, unlike the tree onto which I'd weeped.

I rose, sniffling, wiping my nose with my wrist, and doddered my way back to the cave, where I stayed for the night, laying in the darkness until my body would have me rise, and I made my way back home. King was still not there. I made myself fish and forced myself to eat before heading inside, lying in our bed. It was early afternoon, and I laid there for the rest of the day, rising only to relieve myself before returning to bed. What else was there to do?

King arrived home on the third day, late afternoon. I heard him approaching and went to the porch to greet him, as I always did, and as he approached he would extend his arms out, as if wanting to hug me. I walked into his embrace, weakly pulling my arms to hug him back, and he would squeeze me as if he truly loved me.

"I believe I have made a discovery." he said. It was then that I realized that I could hear noise behind him, near a tree. He took my hand and walked with me, and tied to a fallen log just beyond our yard was a red wolf, a feral red wolf, scratching at the makeshift collar and leash King had fashioned with rope I imagine he'd found in the woods. He'd tied her to a tree branch, and as I stared at her, I was certain what King had done with her, and why she was here.

"We are going to care for her, to see if she bears a child." He said, looking at her, looking at me, looking back to her.

"Athair isn't real, is he?" I asked. King turned to me with a bewildered look in his eyes. I didn't look at him, I just stared at the wolf.

"He's just a tree, isn't he?" I continued. King would take a step back from me and turn to look down at me, as if he was disgusted with me.

"How could you say such a thing?" he asked with audible offense. I didn't face him, didn't even turn to look at him. Instead, I approached the red wolf and pet her gently, showing her I meant no harm. She bared her teeth and growled a bit, but she seemed to trust me after a moment.

"There is no Forest's Heart. It's just the woods. I went there. You've just been dragging me around on drugs, pretending it was all real." I said. I felt a hand grip me hard on the shoulder, yanking me around, forcing me to face him. His posture was slightly hunched forward, his muscles visibly tensed, his breathing deep, and heavy. He was furious with me, I could see it in his mannerisms. He didn't need eyes to show his anger, his body showed it perfectly.

"You went to the Heart without me?"

"There is no heart. There's no Athair. It's just the forest." I said, a dead look in my eyes. I was barely even looking at him, I had no interest in doing so. His hand clenched on my shoulder and I rose, confidently, to grip it, yanking at him to free myself from his grasp. He allowed it, it seemed, or perhaps he was intimidated by how close I was to the red wolf. He began to speak.

"You do not speak to me like that. Athair is my friend, the Heart is a sacred--"

"Athair isn't real. I'm not stupid. I saw the field in which we married, I saw the glass we used. I found the tree you call Athair, it's just a fucking tree. Spare me the performance, King." I said. I went to move past him, and he did nothing to stop me that time. I went toward the house, and he went toward the red wolf.

"If you so wish to disgrace the Wild as such, then it's no wonder you cannot commit to our marriage. None of this, all we have built, means anything to you."

"Maybe it doesn't. Maybe none of this matters" I said back, and I could feel in my bones that King had turned around to look at me. There were tears in my eyes once more, but I would not turn to him. I would not let him see them.

"You will be kind to her while she is with us. We will learn if she can carry my child, and if so, then we will use a red wolf's womb." he said, reaching down to brush her as she stood there, panting, looking around at her surroundings.

"You're planning to kill her if she's pregnant? For her womb?" I asked.

"Yes, to use inside you. It is the law of nature, lesser creatures are sacrificed for the greater good."

The greater good, what a thing to say.