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I love you, says the voice in Minthara’s head. I know how hungry you are for love, I know how you have been starved of it – how you have licked love off of daggers and from the bottoms of poisoned cups. It doesn’t have to be like that. It could be so easy. Why won’t you let it be easy?
Her name is Minthara Baenre. She is a Nightwarden, devoted to Lolth. Are you still? She is sitting in a pit of flesh pressed close against the skin of the world (too close). Her soldiers are dead. She is dead, certainly. That would explain— It could be so easy. She is sitting propped vaguely up against some pulse-beating wall; the wall is warm and damp, wet enough to let some fluid lick in through the woven threads of her armor. Her eyes are closed. Her left eye hurts fiercely. Please let me in. Why don’t you want me? She does not want this parasite. Don’t you? She doesn’t. Why are you lying? She isn’t.
A hot bright spark of pain at the skin of her throat. The pain draws upwards, upwards, and then stops; after a moment, more wet flesh replaces it. A tongue, licking. Lapping her up.
“You’re trying so hard,” says Orin the Red. “Fighting ’til the last breath. Oh, I do like it when they squirm. When they struggle.” She knows what's best for you. “Do you even know what you’re fighting against, spiderling?”
Double envelopment. The pincer movement. An amateur’s maneuver. Grant me the screams of their young for song— but she doesn’t love you. Why are you praying to her? Stop it, stop it, stop it. Queen of Spiders, I beseech you—
“How it writhes,” Orin says. She traces the blade of that dagger along Minthara’s forehead, the tight furrows of her brow. “I knew you would. I knew it I knew it. All your little friends broke so easily, but you. Do you know it’s been almost two minutes since I put the worm inside? I’ve counted each second. And still you won’t open your eyes and look at me.”
Her head hurts. It can’t have been two minutes, it must have been more, but it’s only been a moment or two, she knows best. Orin knows best. Orin loves you. This is the sort of idiocy that wouldn’t even work on a child – it’s embarrassing, the way Minthara’s heart lurches and pounds in her throat. All of this for two minutes? No, no, it’s been longer, she’s been fighting for longer, and it hurts, and you don’t want to fight anymore, and she will hold out, and someone will come for her – but you know better than that, my love. They’ll see you for what you are: a traitor to Lolth, a heretic. Who would waste resources on a heretic?
Who would waste resources on a heretic? No one would. Minthara wouldn’t, were she still in Menzoberranzan. If she heard about a Nightwarden vanished on some snarling wrath-mission, she would laugh; she would toast them; she would find their seat of power, she would take it while it was unoccupie—
When Orin stabs the meat of Minthara’s hand, she screams. Embarrassing, embarrassing. She’s had worse she’s given worse be a double envelopment is when an army surrounds an opponent on two sides, needling, and her eyes flare open, and Orin is watching her like she is the first interesting thing to be born into this world. And you love her. It’s impossible not to love her. She looks like the corpses hanging in Minthara’s garden; she looks like the garden. Lily-white, bone-white, dagger fork star. The way a skull collapses under the blow of a weapon, Minthara’s skull collapsing: an explosion of light.
Orin is still talking. Impossible to understand what she’s saying through the howl of the pain. You should pay attention. You should listen. She should listen, she should pay attention. Her hand hurts. She isn’t supposed to be listening to Orin, but why not? Pincer maneuver. When a spider bites you, you need to see its markings, you need to know what sort of poison it has introduced into your blood.
Orin lifts Minthara’s hand to her mouth and inelegantly sticks her tongue right into the wound. She jostles all the tendons in Minthara’s hand: a symphony of pain. Exquisite. Orin is smiling as she introduces her tongue to Minthara’s metacarpal bones. She has a nice mouth. Like a set of pinsirs. You love her. I love her. She loves her. Love swarms through her body, love overwhelms her like a fever. So easy to give in to it. Like falling asleep. Orin’s mouth smears a bloody trail down Minthara’s hand, your hand, following the veins, biting every now and then. When she sees Minthara looking at her, she smiles coquettishly.
“Have I kissed it better?” she says. The smile twitches along her bloody mouth. It’s nice when she smiles. It’s wonderful when she smiles because of you – because you made her smile – and that’s all you want in this world, isn’t it? For a woman like Orin to smile because of you? You want to be loved, don’t you? This is what it looks like. This is what it tastes like.
How does it taste?
“Like this,” Orin says, and she presses her mouth to yours. Minthara’s. Minthara’s blood, that’s what her mouth tastes like. Sick-slick and wanting. Her tongue thrashing wildly in your mouth, frantically trying to impale itself on your teeth. Minthara, Minthara Baenre. Orin’s hand in your hair. Holding your skull in the palm of her hand, weighing and considering it. Feeling, maybe, for the squirm of the parasite–
Orin makes a pouting little noise as Minthara rips herself out of the kiss, goes to push herself backwards – but there’s nowhere to go, she is pressed up against the wall. Minthara Baenre. Nightwarden, Lolth. Lolth. Menzoberranzan. Thirza, Zress, Shynlue, Tress—
“That wasn’t very nice,” Orin says. She grabs Minthara’s face in one hand, digs her nails into the skin of Minthara’s cheek. Tress. Ventrid. Rilna. Dead they’re all dead they’re all dead she has to remember that they’re all—“I can see it,” Orin says—that Orin is the one who—“Behind your eye. The wriggling shadow of it. You’re really still fighting? Hm.”
You’re so tired of fighting. Give in.
And here comes the very worst part of it all: Minthara says “Please.”
“It speaks!” Orin says. “It begs. What are you begging for, little lamb?”
You don’t have to be scared of asking for mercy. This isn’t Menzoberranzan. You won’t be punished here. You’re loved here. She loves you. I love you. We love you.
Your mouth still tastes like her own blood, and underneath that: the bitter poison of self-loathing. Please. Like a child watching her fingernails getting pulled out, imagining that if she asks very nicely they will stop. They never stop, do they? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone listened to you? If someone cared?
“Please,” you say again. It’s easier the second time. Your mouth is slick with blood. (Whose blood?) “Orin.”
Orin: eyes enormous, sparkling. Black and white and red all over, like a bad joke. (Tell her the one about the man who married a drider!) Her mouth. It feels so good to have that mouth smile for you, doesn’t it? Because of you? Don’t you want to make her smile?
“Tell me what you want,” Orin says. Her smile is a different shape, now; your vision is pulsing and hot, and through this new looking-glass you realize, suddenly, that her mouth is tender. Loving. And all she wants is to know what you want. And once she knows what you want, she’ll give it to you.
You’re shaking. That’s alright. It’s only that the idea of it overwhelms: that a god could look at you, and see a need in you, and decide to fill it. Just because they love you. How impossible, to think of a god loving you. You know suddenly (or have you known all along?) that Lolth would never deign to love you. You could have devoted your entire life to her, every breath and every twitching second, and it would all have been for nothing.
It’s hard, realizing that. Isn’t it? But it’s necessary. You have to burn the rot out of your body so you can let the truth in.
“I want,” you say, and you watch Orin’s face twitch. You’re losing her attention, her favor, the particular hot burn of her focus. But you have nothing else to say – your hand hurts – your throat hurts, your whole body hurts. You want her to want you. You want her to give you – something, anything. You want to give her everything.
“You,” you say. This is the right answer: Orin kisses you again. To know that you have satisfied her sets your body alight – a spiritual awakening, an orgasm, a wound with a tongue inside. Your whole body a wound with her tongue inside.
She kisses your mouth; she bites open a new wound on your throat, and kisses that too. She sticks her tongue in your ear. She presses her thumb to your eyelid, shoves it up (your eye trembles fiercely, waters) so she can kiss your eye. Both eyes. You are a meal for her to devour, and it feels so wonderful. No, you aren’t a meal – you’re dessert, a fine wine, something for her to savor. You’re special, Minthara. You’ve been told that you’re special for your entire life, but now you finally know what that word means: Orin, pressing you to the wet warm flesh of the ground, her black mouth drooling with your blood.
“You want me?” she says, her voice thrilled and shivering.
Of course you do. There is nothing else you want. There is nothing – there is nothing – there is nothing – if there was something, you’ve forgotten it. It wasn’t important. All that matters is Orin, and the light above her haloing her like.
“Yes,” you say. “Orin. Yes.”
“You love me?” Orin says.
“Yes.”
She laughs: a knife sawing through meat. “Oh,” she says, “oh, I’m going to take you apart and put you back together again. I’m going to leave my toothmarks in your pretty white bones. Would you like that?”
“Would you?” you say.
Orin laughs again. Her smile is a corpse and a garden and a dagger and a moon and a prayer you’ve forgotten all the words to. “That wasn’t the question, sweetling,” and – quicker than you can blink – she has her dagger through the palm of your hand. It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts she knows what’s best for you! When she turns the blade slowly it lights up each of your nerves, sends your body wailing with agony: this is what’s best for you. This is good. This is—
“Thank you,” you say. Your voice is a charred corpse in the pit of your throat. Both of your hands hurt. You have two wounds. They are both, and they. She. The headache pulsing behind your eye. Orin, Orin, Orin. You need to answer her question, you need to be good for her.
“Yes,” you say, even though you’ve forgotten what she asked. It doesn’t matter, anyways: the answer is yes. Of course it’s yes. You love her.
“I thought so,” Orin says, and she pulls the dagger out of your hand. (You scream; your body arches towards her helplessly.) She holds the blade above your mouth; blood pools sluggishly at the point, begins to drip onto your lips. When you open your mouth, it wets your tongue.
She doesn’t need to say anything. You’re clever, you’re obedient, you don’t need instruction: you lift your head up, and you lick love off the dagger again.