Love as a Form of Binding

***I thought I'd see if I could wind this a little tighter even as it begins to hit the fan.

This moves around a little, mostly in only a handful of places:

A deserted island off the east of Scotland.

Under the island where Kerry lay imprisoned.

In the underhalls where Maezou et al are living and in an Air Traffic Control center.

A little of Lily's distant past comes out and poor Grrta is feeling lost again.

The names: I use the current spelling for Isis, but Egyptologists these days like to remember that a 't' was used as a feminine suffix in names, so it's pronounced 'Ee-set'.

For Ylva, your guess is as good as mine. ~shrug~ I'm betting on 'Yilva'.

You can look up the meaning of 'drude' and 'cambion' at Wikipedia if you need to. One good example of a cambion of legend would be the mage Merlin.

0_o

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Lily lay in Racephet's arms thinking. They'd both come so far from where they'd begun. She knew it would surprise a lot of her kind, but neither of them had come from the dark realms originally. They'd come from Earth and she at least at one time had a family. She was the youngest of seven children and had never known the older four. She knew only that their mother had been bred at times not to her wanting by their selfish father. She sighed.

Now she was so old and had gone so far in her life. And yet ...

And yet here she was in the arms of the one who had first taken her all that time ago. She felt the tiny fire in her belly which told her that his breeding of her had been successful. She couldn't think that she'd ever be bred again after this, but then she smiled softly.

She never had the thought that she'd ever be bred again long before this and yet here she was, wasn't she? About to be made into a mother for the third time, not counting lovely Zele, the foundling who she loved as much as the others.

She was full of Racephet's seed again and a little of it had found her egg. They'd made another life.

She looked up then and watched as Racephet slept. She was as filled with wonder at him now as she'd been when she was just a girl, barely old enough for it, when the young lord had claimed her heart and mounted her for the first time. He slept now, happy and at peace, knowing that he finally had the only one that he'd really ever wanted in her. She knew that he needed her, just as she knew that she needed him.

They were together once more and neither one would ever allow this to come apart again. He slept as though nothing monumental hung in the balance of fate. He always had; and she'd always admired him for it.

Well they now knew one thing, she told herself. They knew that he was a much older and more powerful beast than he had been so long ago, and they knew that he could still make her quiver when they made love. That meant a lot to Lily, and she silently promised him that he could have her whenever he wanted her and for him – and only him – she'd do as she should have done for him long ago and she'd come to him meekly if he wanted her to, throwing off all of her power and pretense.

She'd also bring all of that with her if it was what he wanted then. He liked her both ways – even demanding that she be the haughty queen for him sometimes, because it was what she was as well. She made the promise solemnly because she meant it.

But he surprised her yet again when he opened his eyes to smile at her softly.

Lily almost wanted to laugh. He knew her so well.

She'd made her promises and he'd felt them. It had caused him to wake, and she felt his shaft heating and hardening against her.

Lily knew. She just knew.

So she lifted her leg and situated herself so that he could take her again in the quietest way.

He slid into her once more – where they both knew that he'd always belonged and a few moments later, the most powerful storm demon in all of the dark realms sighed and whimpered for her male as he pleased her. She knew what was happening and she wanted it now where she'd never been one to admit such a thing to herself before.

Racephet was such a powerful lord, but he was the most quiet as well. If there was anything that he needed to prove in his quiet way well, he was proving it now, wasn't he?

The strongest storm bitch lay in his embrace just as awestruck and meek as she had the very first time. Lily would never submit to anyone. She was famous for her laughing scorn and her ability to destroy any lord who demanded that she allow him to mount her as though she had to in the face of their imagined supremacy. She'd shown many of them the error in their thinking during the last second of their existences.

But tonight, she'd given her heart away for the last time and though no one knew of it, Lily trembled in the arms of the only male she would ever submit to from this night forward. They were bound forever now.

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About a mile and a half from Yester Castle, a small and weary group walked and stumbled through the dark night. It was the twenty-seventh of December, still dark, still damp, still cold and it was still snowing as the group shuffled on silently.

Still searching for the one that the adults said they needed to see. They'd been close a few times before, but the one they sought tended to be rather mobile. The children said nothing, they just walked.

They didn't travel along the thoroughfares and roads as a plan. If they found themselves on the shoulder of a road for a time well, that was merely coincidence. Mostly, they just walked through fields and forests.

If it happened that they found themselves walking along the sides of roads, they might be seen as two adults and two children, dressed in the dirty and ill-fitting clothing of the homeless, pushing a pair of shopping carts along in front of them. It kept most of the people who saw them away.

If they encountered a human who felt suddenly that he or she was the more fortunate, they'd stop to smile and nod, offering thanks and blessings over this holiday time as they accepted the pocketful of small change. They'd continue on then, mostly unseen by anyone.

But if one could have stood and watched them unnoticed as they passed – which was not possible – the observer might see a few things. There was a good four inches of snow blanketing everything in sight, while none of it landed on their shoulders and not even a little accumulated on the children's boots. Anyone who has ever attempted to push a shopping cart through snow might attest that it is a thing much easier said than done over any sort of distance – and that is over asphalt. Harder still over snow-covered gravel. Yet the adults had no trouble at all, the carts moving in front of them unerringly and without a struggle.

More than once, a police patrol car slowed to turn onto a road where they walked. To see them; a family with nothing and two children, it was a procedural point to stop them and see about getting the group into at least a shelter for the night.

But that sort of attention wasn't wanted and again, if one were an unnoticed observer, one would see the little procession walk on, fading into transparency for the length of time that they might have been in the constable's view and reappearing once the car was gone.

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Lily opened her eyes.

After a moment, she felt something that she hadn't felt since near to her own beginnings. She'd been spawned and grew up before it had been decided for her that she was to be something for this spinning ball. It had resulted in a second spawning here long ago. That had been the trouble.

She looked up and saw her male looking at her, "I feel it too."

A few minutes later, they walked out through the doors and into the Goblin Ha up above. Their hands just naturally gravitated together so that when they reached the top of the steps to look out at the snowy nightscape, they stood like the pair they'd begun as many millennia before.

Neither one said anything as they waited, seeing the small group as it came slowly nearer to stop before them and look up.

Maezou walked up behind her mother with Toby and Zele. The others drifted there as well, Tisiphone holding Alecto's hand.

But any sort of changes which were not expected were noted by the slayer sentries and one had run to report, so that news brought Kerry and Brinack up only moments later.

None of them needed any light to see clearly here. Lily tried not to stare at faces which she hadn't seen in so long. When it grew difficult even for her, she looked into the faces of the children.

She'd never seen them before, but she knew what they were. Their eyes weren't dead and they held quiet interest and curious expressions, though they tried not to let that part of it show, since they'd been brought up with manners. They were attractive enough for a pair of ten year-olds whose parents were down on their luck and had nothing for them such as a home or regular meals. A closer look might tell that they were only weary and that was the reason for the look. But Lily knew that it wasn't completely so. She looked at the adults once more.

Even for demons, there can be awkward moments.

"Well," she said," I can't find a way around the discomfort of a meeting like this all by myself."

"We beg your pardon," the man said in an extinct Semitic tongue last spoken near where the Tigris river flowed over ten millennia ago, "and we mean nothing untoward, ..."

He seemed to hang there, stuck right at that point.

"We have traveled, seeking you," the woman added in the same tongue, "Hoping that, ... " She looked down, "We are tired and cold."

Racephet was about to say something but he knew that it was not his place in this, so he waited.

The man shifted on his tired feet for a moment and then he looked up, "Lilitu, we – "

Lily didn't want to, but she crossed her arms then, "I wait now as I waited then, ages ago, for you both to say a thing to me, one thing. Over all of the time, I have not heard it yet, and I now find that I have gotten out of a warm bed to face the same thing as before?

Is it such a large thing to have stuck in your throats for this long? How hard can it be to spit out and say?"

She shook her head, angry with herself now, seeing the way that her words had stung them. It was the nature of the curse they were all under – the only one that none of them could dispel. It had gone on for ages, the three bickering angrily in minutes when they met. Now, they hadn't seen each other in thousands of years.

To Lily, they weren't quite what they appeared to be, and yet they were as well. She could see and feel that they had nothing. She'd had her troubles, but they'd obviously borne the brunt of one being's hatred. Perhaps it might be different this time.

"I'm sorry. It just came out of me and I didn't mean it. I forgot the nature of the curse. He is dead?"

The woman nodded, "He was silent to the end, though by then, he could only quake before me. I smashed every wall and defense to reach him. He refused to lift the curse, thinking that the threat of it would keep me from him. His second curse to keep himself protected became mine to bear alone. I didn't care anymore. He had to die for what was done to us. I crossed the line which was drawn to protect him after I covered the walls with the blood of his followers and then I took him at the last. I slew him many centuries ago and had to wander alone until I was found."

"Such a thing," Lily muttered, "A regal scheming necromancing bastard whose words bind us to this night, long after the one is no more. Surely it has weakened. It must have by now. It is all that has ever come between us; such a little thing, and even now it hangs here still?

There was a time when I begged and pleaded but I was scorned as I scorned him when he wanted me. Now you are here, at a moment when I could use your help and still we are bound to this foolishness?" She shrugged helplessly.

"I can do nothing until it is said."

The children looked at her not comprehending, while the adults looked as suddenly torn and every bit as upset as the tall female before them.

The male hung his head and the woman hid her face in her hands as she began to weep.

"Lilitu," the man said as he attempted it one more time, his voice already hoarse as though he'd cried his own silent tears for an age, "Lilitu, you were right, ... and we are sorry. I have searched for so long, first for Ardat and together, we searched for you."

"Yes," the woman sobbed, "So sorry."

Lily began to cry as well.

When she could manage to speak a few words, she said only, "I have held three words in my breast for longer than any nation has existed on this old world, hating what was done and how we were cursed and held apart."

She wiped her eyes and it seemed to do no good, but she still smiled through her tears suddenly, "I forgive you, Brother. My sister, I forgive you. You have paid so much for what I said. I am sorry as well. You cannot know."

The children looked uncomfortable as their parents hugged the aunt they'd never known.

Feeling overlooked and forgotten for the moment, they gravitated toward each other as they'd so often done, holding hands and watching silently.

Racephet came to his senses suddenly; knowing what they risked to stand here like this. He stepped forward and before the young ones could have a thought to feel even more uncomfortable, he scooped them up, one on each arm and brought them inside the old hall. He spoke then and he was glad that the adults still remembered him as he hurried them inside.

Lily's fingers danced in the direction of the outside world and three seconds later, the first of the unsettled winds began to lift some of the snow from the ground to skitter and blow around. It presaged the rest – the howling blizzard, the likes of which this part of the world had never seen before during the time of man.

Lily spoke quickly and earnestly and with their nods of assent, she finally felt absolute confidence and she drew them inside of the doors so that the three could have an hour to talk – as difficult as that was for three siblings who'd been apart for millennia on end. But it was a start and Lily was happy.

The travelers sat down and a little of their weariness fell from them. Platters of food were brought and the eyes of the smaller ones looked ready to leave their heads. Introductions were made and the boy and the girl found themselves smiling shyly as everyone tried to engage them to hear them speak a little.

After a little coaxing – especially from Zele – the worn-out clothes disappeared and the two stood smiling, a pair of children who caused everyone who saw them to love them. With a look between them, they became youngish-looking half-demons who still charmed everyone and flew around the large hall at intervals of three minutes or so only because they were finally safe from human eyes and wanted to stretch their wings.

"Tell me about the young ones," Lily asked, as her eyes followed the pair through the air enthralled with them.

"Well in the first place," her brother said, looking now as demonic as everyone else, "They are not that young. They are only smaller and it was always my hope that they would grow large in a place where they could. The road is not that sort of place."

"I do not think that they will grow at all anymore," Lily's older sister said, "It has been eight hundred years. I count us lucky to have two such as them. They look like us, Irdu, just as we looked then, dark-eyed and sweet. They just stopped growing one day as a choice they planned between them."

"They are very beautiful," Lily smiled genuinely, "Did you breed together to make them?"

"No," Irdu smiled, "though it was our thought to do that if we ever found you and if we could make a home."

He sighed sadly, "But I wasted so much time before I saw my mistake. You were gone and Ardat as well before I set out. The people no longer wanted me for the weather, and feared me as a night demon instead. I heard of a mystic woman who was seeking me.

One night, I went to her and from her sleeping thoughts, I saw that she wanted a child, but she had been wed and cast off a few years before for being barren. We all know that in most cases, it is not the female who is barren but the man. I came to her the next night and we talked. After that, we were lovers until she found herself with my child Aram there.

When she saw that he was a cambion and took no breaths and had no pulse, she was going to kill him. I knew of course that a cambion draws his first deep breath at seven years of age and at that time, his pulse becomes unhidden as well.

She said that he had to die, but I took the babe and raised him myself."

"I found myself in Egypt," Ardat said, "I found work as a weaver, the same as I was where we grew up if I wanted it. But there, no one had seen the sort of things such as I could make, so I grew to be a little popular for it. I met a young man, the son of the shop owner, and he began to romance me.

It was all very nice and after a time, he promised to marry me, so I spread my knees for him. Once it was clear that I carried his child, he told me that he would never marry a foreign girl, though I could work in his shop and after the babe had starved from my having to work a loom from dawn to dusk, he said that he'd be pleased to do it over again to me and keep me chained to the loom until I died."

She smirked a little then, "I have never found out just where these men grow their stupidity. He told me that after he snapped the lock on the chain shut there on my ankle. Well it was the middle of the night and there was no one there, so I broke the chain and filled his mouth with my weaving and tied him tightly over the loom. I fucked him with the spindle until it broke off inside him. Then I flayed him with the chain slowly until he was dead."

She sighed, "You know that I have always had the worst temper of us three.

I flew to Philae and lived in the old temple of Isis there. I spawned my daughter all alone and I named her after the old Egyptian goddess and we became a mother and daughter pair of attendants long after it closed and sat empty. To look at us, one would never think that we were not Egyptians anyway. Isis and I keep our hair in the old royal style and now Aram a little with his topknot, because he is so close to her."

She smiled, "I love to see them together just to watch them. They are no closer than cousins but I have never seen a pair who need each other so, just like us; Irdu and I.

As we were leaving the country, thinking to go to Greece after finally deciding to go, I found Isis asking me one day if she could play with a boy that she'd met. As soon as I saw Aram, I knew and asked him to take us to his father and then two of us were together again and we began to look for you."

"They look like such a set, it is like my first look at you when I was little," Lily smiled, "I cannot take my eyes from them. When they look human they are a pair stuck at what? Nine or ten on the outside and over eight hundred years old on the inside? Yet when they are demonic like this, they still have those bodies, and the horns and everything else. They do not look so innocent and childlike now, but they are still sweet. They look just the same. Even now, there is no muscle to see on either, no hips and yet, now both have the barest swells on their chests – yet I can see that they are both very strong."

"Both are good with a blade, and both can use their minds for many things" Irdu said," We taught them this, because they are half-demons, not only the sort of cambions born from the efforts of weak demons. They needed something."

Ardat laughed a little, "What they need the most, they already have, Brother. They love each other so."