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It should’ve been a simple thing. Pleasant. Happy. Uncomplicated. To visit a childhood home. To reconnect with family.
But it wasn’t for me. Couldn’t be.
Ironborn are complicated. Greyjoys more than most. I don’t know what I really expected by returning to the family I’d estranged myself from for so many reasons. I’d gone inland at sixteen. Run from expectations that scared me and…
To say I never looked back would be a lie.
Home called out to me. Roared deep within whatever the hells is supposed to be my soul. Isn’t that a universal experience? If there is such a thing—and knowing what I know now, I think there is. A longing to belong. To be safe. A sick pull on your psyche, maybe in your bones, that tells you there’s some place you need to be and by all the gods you had better fucking find it or you’ll spend eternity in far worse misery than whatever your fate has in store.
The Iron Islands. The sea. Salt spray on black sands. The heady stink of seaweed and flotsam. The coarseness of rock and the smoothness of driftwood. The proud cliffs slowly crumbling over centuries, millennia, eaten from beneath by wave after wave.
Not unlike me.
Or my whole fucking family.
I didn’t ask many questions as a child after being beaten for doing so by my father.
“Why does Mom look like this portrait of Great Aunt Alys?” Family resemblance, what do you expect, boy?
“Why have you had white hair for so long?” Family genetics, what does it matter, boy?
“Why is the family sigil a squid?” That’s a kraken, stupid boy, the most fearsome creature to ever grace our seas.
“Why does Asha keep saying Mom says we’ll get married for real? It’s just pretend.” Your sister loves you, you should love her too. Idiot boy.
“Why does Mom think Rodrik and Maron are still alive?” She’s honoring your brothers’ memories, as should you, useless boy!
By the time uncle Euron came to stay with us, washing back into port after years away, I’d stopped asking questions about the family. I didn’t ask why he looked at me with his good eye the way he did. Why his long, dark hair always looked damp. Why his wide lips were almost as blue as his unpatched eye. I didn’t ask why he held me so close when I ran to his room after having nightmares. Why his breath smelled of rotted fish. Or why his tongue tasted instead of sand and blood and the sweetest honey imaginable.
I didn’t ask why he touched me the way he did. Or why it had to be our little secret when it felt so good. Or why I kept going back to his bed even when I didn’t have terrible dreams of drowning but not drowning, of my skin sloughing off, of my fingers being webbed and tipped with claws, of an echoing tremor I could feel and hear pulling me deeper into the icy depths.
I didn’t ask why he believed my dreams were more than dreams. Or why he shared his strange blue liquor with me and told me he was a king, a hidden god among men, and I was therefore a prince. His prince.
I didn’t ask why my dreams were stronger but less frightening when I was with him. Or why it seemed like he was there with me, sharing them. Swimming alongside me as if we were both born to the waves. Born of the deep and returning to it in the night. Catching fish with our jagged teeth and dancing in a watery bloom of darkness. Laughing underwater, no bubbles escaping our maws, and hearing the sounds echoed back from so much farther away. Scaled and finned and looking nothing like ourselves but knowing it was us.
“Of course I’m there with you, my prince,” he’d say in the mornings—night clothes and bedsheets sodden with our sweat—after I’d relay my dreams at his urging.
It was all just dreams. Night terrors. Subconscious lucidity brought on by whatever he’d spiked his flask with. Just pretend, in the end. A game we played to lie to ourselves. Like Asha did.
Or manipulation on his part—playing along and feeding into my sick affection for him. Making me rely on him as the only confidante I could trust to listen to me.
My father hated me for not being like my brothers. My mother had gone mad in their wake. My sister played the same deluded games with me that Euron did. Sometimes it seemed they were working together. Other times at odds.
And me in the middle. Torn in too many directions and so left adrift.
Until I fucked off for my own health.
I tried to go back once, when I was nineteen. Having made friends who took me in. Sheltered me from the storm that was my past without asking too many questions. Let me be someone that wasn’t me. That wasn’t the Theon Greyjoy of Pyke, but the Theon Greyjoy of Winterfell. Ironborn transplant and all around funny guy to be around. Never taking anything too seriously, least of all relationships or people. Other than his friends, of course, whom he trusted implicitly. Whose backs he’d have no matter what.
Who couldn’t be trusted around certain illicit substances once he sought them out for help blocking his nightmares.
But when I set foot on Pyke, it was as if I didn’t belong there anymore. No one in town would speak to me. They wouldn’t rent me a room. And the trek up to my family’s mansion on the highest cliff took the better part of an afternoon on foot.
My mother was missing with no explanation. My uncle as well.
“What did you think would happen after the way you left?” Asha asked with a scoff. She wore Mom’s blackstone necklace, an abstract pendant in a twisting inward curving shape that was hard to name. One arm slung around my shoulder, she pulled me close to breathe in my ear, her lips cool and clammy against my skin. “Years and you haven’t called. Haven’t written. Haven’t shown your pretty little face.”
“I couldn’t be here. Everything was…” Fucked up. Messy. Seven shades of abusive, in the end.
“I missed you, little brother,” she said and kissed the side of my face. Kissed her way down to my lips leaving gooseflesh running down my back. And for a moment I kissed back, sank back into familiarity, into the tug of her hands on my hips.
But I pulled away, holding her at arm’s length. I couldn’t. Not again. No matter how much I’d missed her. Missed some of the fucked up things more than anyone should. It was wrong and it was beyond time for us both to grow up and see the world for what it was. “Asha, no. It’s not cute anymore. Maybe it never was.”
Father was less thrilled with my return.
“Why are you here? I have no third son. Only some greenlander in his place.”
Asha laughed.
I tried to state my intentions, to apologize, until his chorus of throaty harumphs made me realize I had nothing to apologize for. So why was I doing it? Some embedded knee jerk reaction.
“Come back when you remember who you are. When you remember the Drowned God,” Balon said without turning from his chair to look at me. “When you remember you’re a damned Greyjoy and what that means. If I ever got it through your thick skull, boy.”
“What is dead may never die,” I said, repeating our family’s mantra, our god’s one promise to his faithful.
Father harumphed again, spittle flying from his wet lips. He turned then, eyed me, looked so strange and old. Hair mostly gone to strings of what was once a proper mane of white, skin sagging on his bones, eyes bulging and rheumy and deeper set than they’d been three years before.
But then that was how our family became old. Young for an age. Middle aged for another. Then melting into disgusting visages of our former selves.
The Ironborn look, they called it on the mainland.
“Words from your mouth, boy. Just words. Paltry. Meaningless!” he spat, each syllable more forceful and hate filled than the last.
“Father, don’t tax yourself,” Asha said.
“Bring me my tea,” he said, waving a hand at her. His nails thick and yellowed, curving over his fingertips like seashells. “And see this stranger out.”
So I returned to the mainland disheartened. Alone after burning too many bridges with my substance abuse.
Enter one Ramsay Bolton into my life. A tall, dark haired, ice eyed force to be reckoned with. Magnetizing. Impossible to ignore. Beautiful in a sinister fucked up way. Full lips and pointed teeth that spilled enticing lies as readily as they spilled my blood while we fucked. A tongue that could do impossible things in the dark. As well as tear a man down just to build him back up.
Ramsay was exactly what I needed when I was at my lowest, stealing things to pawn for enough cash to buy shade. Not because I wanted to hallucinate or open pathways in my mind, but because I’d learned it was what my uncle drank. What stained his lips. What he gave me that helped ease the nightmares into fantasy dreamscapes.
I couldn’t con a pawn shop dealer, however. Not for long. Ramsay called me out on what I was doing. Saw the persistent staining on my tongue when I’d bring in some new piece of jewelry or instrument or computer hardware.
“Big fan of blue raspberry, huh, Greyjoy?”
“Yeah.” My cheeks burned hot at the astute attention.
“Interesting shade of blue.”
I swallowed. Stared at him. Watched his face swim as he smirked with blue lips and suddenly he was Euron. A younger, clean shaven version of my uncle. One eye’s sclera red around black, hair longer and hanging down over his shoulders in a silky array.
I’d asked him once why he wore the eye patch over his “bad” eye even though he could see out of it.
“A gift from beyond. Fit only for a god,” he’d said and lifted the patch so I could pull at his dark lashed lower lid and stare into the void of his iris. My face reflected back at me, my smile distorted and wide, dark eyes glittering and looking as if they’d shifted apart on my face. A funhouse mirror effect.
“You’re only half god,” I’d said, playing our game as always. “Half brother to the Drowned God, you said so yourself.”
“That’s right, my prince.” He held my face and kissed me. Our eyes still open and staring unfocused until I laughed at the absurdity and broke away. “My bad eye sees all the terrible things in the world. All the bad things that can happen. And my good eye—my smiling eye—sees all the happy things. Together, I see all.”
“You’ll watch over me even when you’re not with me, Nuncle?”
“Always. I’m always keeping an eye on my prince and I’m always nearby when he needs me most, no matter where he is in the world. No matter how far away he thinks I am.” His hands wandered possessively. “I may not always look like myself, but you’ll know my gaze.” He arched his dark brows meaningfully, eyes searching mine. “And you’ll know my touch. My kiss. My love.”
I didn’t believe him until I saw Ramsay’s face change. I blinked my eyes and he changed back, smiling still. His eyes both pale as an overcast winter’s day and as gripping as Euron’s impossible sky blue one.
It was just the shade and trauma. PTSD from abuse I had been coerced into not recognizing. I’d been too sheltered to know. And the scars lingered. That was all. It couldn’t be anything else.
But Ramsay drew me in with his keen insight into my situation, my reality. Like a moth to a flame, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew him. That when he offered me a place to crash, it meant more than a near stranger helping another through a rough patch.
We fell into one another easily. And he felt more like home than I could explain.
Delusion. Hope. Need. Too many other fuels thrown on the fire that was what we became together.
Ramsay cut through the façade of me—literally and figuratively. Opened doors into pleasure and pain that did more to settle my mind in exhausted sleep than any drug. Saw into my rotted core and came back for more anyway.
Almost overnight I moved in with him and his dogs. Helicent, Maude and Willow. Scary brutes with docked ears, lean muzzles, short dark oily coats and constantly lolling tongues. A hobby breeder in his spare time. All of them some breed I’d never heard of and couldn’t pronounce—a newer addition to all the major kennel clubs’ official lists of breeds and cousins to the Doberman.
Six months later and it was commonplace for the dogs to sleep in the bed with us even when we tried to keep them out. They always found a way to slip into the room in the middle of the night, likely after Ramsay got up for a midnight snack. I fell asleep with my body pinned under the blankets between Ramsay’s bulk and the curled weight of three canines who’d taken to me faster than I’d taken to them.
They were good girls, always seeking attention. And always following me around the house. Sneaking up on me while I was showering, even though I swore I’d shut the bathroom door. Vigilant beasts that became a comfort while Ramsay was at work.
“If we’re getting married, I want to meet your family,” he said. “You know my parents well enough. They like you.”
I wasn’t sure if I liked them, but they’d become a second family to me. His father in particular didn’t seem to like me much at all—more lies and games that Ramsay told himself that I played along with to keep him happy—but he did seem interested in my nightmares. Called the source bad blood and a lingering issue from my drug habit. No matter how much I insisted I’d had the dreams since childhood. Had me try sessions of leech therapy under supervision of his personal doctor, who had more medically grounded reasoning than medieval conjecture.
But the only thing that helped was shade.
Shade and Ramsay’s hands around my throat while he fucked me. Shade and Ramsay’s blades cutting stinging trails of lines and curves into my skin. Shade and Ramsay riding my cock and sucking at the side of my neck so hard it took my breath away.
I didn’t ask where he got it or how. I didn’t ask why he was happy for me not to find a job. I didn’t ask why he didn’t mind I called him Euron sometimes. Or why he kissed me so forcefully when I did, his tongue almost burrowing into my throat as I sucked the lingering taste of sand and blood and honey from it and felt the terrible ache of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ambrosia, Euron had called it once or twice before sipping from his flask. The food of the gods.
“You’re a god, too, you know,” Ramsay said while he was Euron. While his tongue snaked impossibly around my dick, the tip teasing beneath the gathering of foreskin as if it had a mind of its own. It was half dark in the room. I was too high. Too far gone. Too deep into the shade of the evening to do more than watch transfixed and hear his voice though his mouth couldn’t possibly form the words. “The Drowned God’s own. My brother’s son. My prince, too long you’ve been away from the sea. From home.”
“My father’s not…” His tongue squeezed in undulating pressure. Too tight and not tight enough. Rippling like waves. Wet and hard and soft and I couldn’t think, could only feel.
The room became hazy, foggy, as his thick saliva dribbled down my balls, coated my thighs. His hands grabbed my legs to lift them. Massaged my ass cheeks apart. Spread his drool against my hole and pushed in. All at once. Impossible. Unreal. Holding and squeezing and tasting and fucking and filling the room with the scents of ozone and the salty tang of the sea as we came. Head thrown back, dark hair hanging down to the bed, I floated, eyes wide but unseeing. Stars in the dark. Flashes of pinpoint light wafting by aimlessly. Caught in the unseen current I could feel washing cold over my sweat slicked skin.
A dog barked. My eyes opened. Helicent panted over me, her drool dripping on my thigh in thick disgusting ropes. Ramsay lay beside me, rolling over in confusion at the sudden noise.
It was just the shade turning dark dreams to delights. But maybe it was a conversation we’d had—me and my uncle—resurfacing like dark secrets tended to do. Flotsam washed to the shores of my troubled mind.
The journey to Pyke saw me giving Ramsay a repeated briefing on my family. On the local customs and culture. On how I expected we wouldn’t be well received, even though I’d called ahead to make arrangements with Asha.
My timing had been interesting. For better or worse.
“Mom and Dad aren’t doing well,” she’d warned, a tight edge to her voice. “They want to return. You should be here for the ceremony. The Damphair’s officiating.”
“Father won’t mind?”
“Not if you’re there to support them in the old ways. That’s all he wants, really.”
“And my fiancé? He’s an outsider.”
“He’ll be family soon enough. Just bring him.” Her voice became iron. “Just be here, Theon. Or don’t. You’re good at making your own decisions by now, aren’t you, little brother?”
I couldn’t say no, even if I didn’t believe it was true. When was the last time I’d made a good decision about my life? I was skating by. On Ramsay’s graciousness. On my own delusions of contentment. And I could hear the hurt in her voice. Knew she wasn’t so much upset about losing our elderly parents as she was about losing me, once and for all. The fracture in her fantasy had finally shot clean through.
“So, your uncle is going to assist your parents’ suicide?” Ramsay asked with a smirk as we walked along the boardwalk to the backdrop of the setting sun. My parents had refused to let us meet them at the house, forcing us to rent a room at Pyke’s only bed and breakfast since Ramsay was too good to stay at a motel.
“From a mainland point of view… yes.” There was no sugarcoating it.
“But from an Ironborn perspective…?”
“We return to the sea.” I looked out over the water. Inhaled a lungful of comforting sea air. Ahead of us, people were already gathering on the beach, near to the tide line, forming a semi-circle. A crescent moon of robed celebrants wearing green and black and crowned with seaweed wreaths. I took his hand and smiled fondly. Watched his face flicker between blinks. “It’s where we belong. Where I belong. Where we come from. The Drowned God made us in his image and we return to it when we grow old.” I shrugged. “Some sooner than others.”
“How old are your parents?” he asked, giving my hand a comforting squeeze.
“I never asked.” A lie I sold myself because I didn’t know the answer. Because I had asked and been told it didn’t matter. That parents were parents and children were children.
“That’s something I love about you,” he said as we took off our sandals at the edge of the dock and walked barefoot through the black sand. “You’re wiser than most. You don’t ask questions. You just accept things as they come.”
“What else am I supposed to do?” I huffed a light laugh, lowering my voice as a few people turned to shoot scathing looks our way. But then they parted and let us pass to the front, Ramsay’s hand shifting to grip the back of my neck. A reassuring weight, though his palm was damp. “It’s better to ride the waves of life. I find. Roll with the punches.”
“It’s better to swim with the current, under the waves,” Euron said and bent to kiss my temple.
I laughed. There was nothing else I could do. I knew I’d blink again and he’d wear a different face but still be the love of my life. My protector. My savior.
“Theon!” Mom shouted from her place beside Balon, beside Father at the center of the open space before the water’s edge. “You came! You returned!”
Arms wide she sprinted, kicking up dark sand. Her flesh hung loose from her arms, wagging with her movement, looking as if she’d lost weight she’d never possessed in a short span of time. Her hair had grown stringy and thin like Father’s. Her eyes were strange. Her lips too full and too broad for her once beautiful face. She no longer looked like Great Aunt Alys. She didn’t even look like herself, like Alannys anymore. But still, I knew her. Embraced her. Felt her damp skin encircling me and wetting my cheek and robe.
She looked up at Ramsay next, her glassy eyes unblinking as she stared at him, expression difficult to read.
“Mom, this is Ramsay, my fiancé.”
She laughed, a burbling noise, but reached up to touch Ramsay’s cheek as if she’d known him for some time.
“You brought him back,” she said and hugged him too. “You promised and you did. And just in time.” She looked between the two of us. “Look at him. His lips are stained like yours.” Then her gnarled hand—nails thickened and yellowed into short claws, the skin between her fingers oddly stretched like webbing—brushed back the collar of my robe to reveal some of the scars Ramsay had lovingly made on the side of my neck. “You’re keeping him, then?”
“I see no future without my prince by my side,” Euron said. “I told you all those years ago, when my brother took you, blessed you in his slumber, that what he gave you was only loaned. It was mine to claim.”
She nodded, smiling, tired eyes staring but not seeming as if they saw anything at all, her head tilted to peer up above him. “I am grateful for the time we had. The Drowned God awaits us. As do my other sons.”
Then she spoke words or made sounds from her throat that made no sense. The Damphair called out to her, she returned to join Balon’s side. Bonfires were lit. The offerings of seaweed and fish were burnt so smoke filled the air and made all eyes brim with tears.
Through the haze the Damphair with his long dark braided hair and beard spoke the ritual words passed down through oral tradition. Syllables I knew from other returns. The forming of them subconsciously moving my lips and tongue as if I’d said them a hundred times. Beside me Euron pronouncing every word with native fluency. I could hear his tongue dance wetly against his teeth. Felt his hand tighten on mine, thumb soothing over my skin, his other hand pulling me close, his other hand rubbing my shoulder, his other hand snaking along my neck to stroke my ear.
In the smoke a tearing sound cut through the twin chanting of my priest and my king. Wet plops broke through the words as my parents’ skins collapsed to the sand. Freed, they raced into the waves and disappeared. And I laughed and looked up at Euron. At Ramsay. At the bloody red tongue with a dozen blue-black limbs that came to me in my dreams undulating forward to lap up the discarded skins into its gaping maw. Teeth gnashed and the massive tongue lashed with a sickening but satisfying squelch. Sand sprayed and I blinked, looking over at Asha nearby with smoke stung eyes while the gathered crowd cheered and wailed.
“What is dead may never die!” the Damphair bellowed at the sea.
“But rises again, harder and stronger!” we all called back in a unified cry.
Asha threw her arms around me. “They’re gone. They’re really gone.”
“Did you see it?” I asked, hugging her tightly.
“See them drown? Yes, Theon. What else…? Your lips are blue.” She narrowed her eyes in accusation, held me by the shoulders.
“It’s for the nightmares.” I shrugged.
“You still dream of becoming a mermaid?”
“A fish monster,” I corrected and glanced back at Euron. Wearing Ramsay’s face again. “She didn’t see it.”
“People see what they want to see,” he said and put his arms around me from behind.
“You’ll come to the wedding, right?” I asked her.
She shook her head, looking sadly between us, fingers smoothing over the pendant on her necklace. “You said you were getting off that shit. I don’t even want to know what you just hallucinated.”
“It’s not hallucinations. It’s like Euron’s eye, it lets me see the truth when I’m asleep and when I’m awake.” My eyes didn’t always see what was really there. I could still be fooled.
“You’re insane.” Asha lifted her chin at Ramsay. “If you really loved him, you wouldn’t let him carry on like this, losing his mind.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ramsay said with a shrug. “He seems perfectly lucid to me.”
Her eyes shifted to mine. “You’re with him because he looks like Euron, aren’t you?”
“He is Euron.”
She held up her hand. “I’ve had enough for one day. For one month. For a damn lifetime. Visit when you’re sober.”
Then it was the Damphair’s turn to speak to us, to call us over to him as the gathered guests retreated to the community center for the celebratory meal, but he spoke to Ramsay in the old tongue and only parts of it made sense.
Ritual.
Return.
Drown.
Deep.
Salt.
Sea.
“Take him to visit his father,” the Damphair finally said—a firm command. “It’s been too long. The connection is strained.”
“I’ve been telling him, but—”
“He was right here,” I said, gesturing back to the now empty sands.
“Theon,” Ramsay said with a bright, beaming smile. His lips looked especially kissable in the shifting firelight. “Are you ready to see? To hear? To know how much you’re truly loved by your god?”
I straightened up. Looked to the Damphair, whose expression had hardened to stone. For the first time, I noticed the hairline scars mottling his face in all too familiar patterns. Similar to the ones on my own flesh. And when I looked back to Ramsay, he was Euron again, red and black eye glittering. Smiling more than his smiling eye.
“Of course,” I said. Not asking any of the dozen questions plaguing my mind. Not examining the puzzle pieces of my life or of my family too closely. Doing what I could to not just ride the waves as they crashed into me one after the other, but to do what it was he loved me for: to sink and swim.
The Damphair nodded once, then Euron led me by the hand to where the waves kissed and smoothed the sand. We disrobed, stripped one another bare. The Damphair chanted. Poured water from a large shell over my head, and just like in all my many natural nightmares, my skin rippled and split, painful and raw and aching as if Ramsay had cut me along every scarred seam he’d already rent. My breath caught, mouth gaping as I doubled over unable to voice my terror or respond to the searing pain of my skin dropping off in a hissing, bloody heap at my feet.
“Swim, boy!” the Damphair called with a dismissive hand.
Legs awkward, feet monstrous webbed unsteady claws and hands to match, I hobbled, the familiarity of my body coming back to me with every ungainly step. I raced to the waves, muscles and new skin aching, and dove in, parsing water into needed oxygen through the flexing flaps of gills on my neck. Cold water soothed away the hurt as I swam out, unsure of what I was doing or where I was meant to go other than down.
Beside me, Euron swam as the sea floor dropped out beneath us, looking as he always did in those early dreams. More fish than man with gracefully sharp dorsal spines.
I laughed and swam spirals around him, scaring off nearby fish in my joy. He caught me up and we plunged together, deeper, deeper, until I wondered that my limbs hadn’t yet grown tired. That I could see some distance ahead of us in the murky dark. That the pressure hadn’t crushed my bones into my organs.
Then after what felt like hours or days or weeks but no time at all—the span of a dream, so indistinct and nebulous as to be meaninglessly long or short or both or neither—I saw the city spires I’d only dreamed of visiting. Massive structures like coral melded with stone. Odd curving shapes, bowing outward and inward at purposeful intervals. Spiraling waves and tendrils that gave the buildings the appearance of shifting, twisting and breathing as we swam above and beyond them to the heart of the city.
Other merfolk—or whatever we are—swam freely. Held tridents and spears, but let us pass with reverent unblinking gazes, bowing their heads in deference.
“They recognize their sovereigns,” Euron said, his body rippling with dots of crimson incandescence. His voice rang in my head. Solid and clear and comforting. Another strange familiarity as it always was.
I looked at my arms, my hands, and saw myself glowing with the same crimson patterning. Every glowing trail in the same shape of my shed skin’s scars.
We sank into the city, wove between spires and through twisting tunnels of blackstone. Glossy and reflective and real. Leading to the deepest, largest structure—a dome made of twisted latticework that looked more like tentacles wrapped in on themselves. A massive version of Mom’s pendant. Asha’s now. Larger than a stadium. Larger than any ocean liner.
A cavern stretched beneath, more impressive than the size of the dome, and in the center curled a mass of tendrils.
“A kraken?” The words came out strange from my own mouth but I knew them. And he knew them too.
“Your father. My brother,” he said. “The Drowned God. …Listen. You remember how I taught you.”
The thrum of ocean pressure, of my own blood pumping in my veins pulsed in my ears. But beneath it was a deeper, slower beating of a much larger heart. Sinking down through the dome in a graceful descent, my eyes unfocused and I saw the dream unfurl like sails ready to catch the wind.
Every dream I’d ever dreamed. Every nightmare. Every wish and hope and dare and deeply seeded fear of the wrongness of my soul for taking myself away, for not listening with my whole heart, my entire being when it became too difficult. When the outside world told me the lie that it was true and the truths I held dear were lies. When make believe and games were smoke screens for time and iteration. When I stopped believing I was anything but shame in human skin because it had been beat into me by a jealous creature I raised in power above all others without meaning to. All of it tore into me like so many barbed tentacles sucking my scaled flesh from my translucent spiny bones in an agony of roiling wrenching. Every instance real and true and simultaneous.
He wrapped me in his many limbed embrace again, not carapace hands and arms but soft and firm tendrils of blue-black muscle. So many ichorous tongues sliding across my tattered flesh, rasping at bruises and raw meat and bone. Entering my mouth as I silently screamed. Choking. Burrowing. Wriggling up my thigh to probe deep inside. Skewered and writhing. Drowning without dying. Gills struggling to pass water. Lungs remembering they should draw in and push out.
Then I rolled, coughing, crying away from him. Blood and snot and shade and seawater pouring out of my throat and nose to splatter on the floor.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” Ramsay said, his cock still lodged deep inside. His body covering mine, his thick arms wrapping around my chest to pull me back.
“Get the fuck off me!” I squirmed and shoved. Kicked and flailed. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t let go. Only grunted and thrust and licked up the back of my neck and down the side of my face.
“Still too much?” His voice was in my head again. His tongue still impossibly long and sinuous as it stroked my jaw and dipped between my lips in a lover’s caress. “Perhaps you need more shade to ease the way.”
Fog rolled in from the narrow corner of the bed and breakfast’s oddly shaped attic room. And through the blue grey haze Helicent, Maude and Willow emerged, bodies stretched long and thin. Narrow muzzles ending with terribly familiar tentacles. Bodies bony with black spines and long whip tails as too sharp claws clacked against the floorboards with their menacing approach.
But I knew them. I laughed as Ramsay stilled inside me, on top of me, tongue retreating. Because I’d seen them all before. In my nightmares. In my dreams. In the dreams that didn’t belong to me at all but to my father, my uncle, my lover, my king and my god.
“Tindalosian hounds,” I barked out, calming as I understood through time and space they’d found me. For him. To claim and to keep. I couldn’t escape him now any more than I could then. My shape had changed but he’d marked me for his own this time. Pinned me down and staked his true claim and rent me from my father’s grasp into his own.
I reached out to the girls, let their tendrilled maws lick up my arm as they joined us on the bed. Ramsay rolled, pulling me with him, held me with all his limbs as I held up my hand and remembered how to use my tongue to lick the blue ambrosia from Theon’s skin.