As he always did, Leon had spent today in the relentless way he spent every day.
Up before dawn for solo training. A morning visit to the Grand Temple for a ceremony open to lay worshippers. Then the entire afternoon in the Order’s training grounds, directing the drills of junior knights.
The schedule left no room, as usual, for meals.
That was the official reason. In truth, he had been deliberately cutting back on food for weeks.
When he was full and his body had energy to spare, the symptoms came on more frequently.
That curse-ridden desire that made the world look blood-red — that wretched craving that turned him into something with a vampire’s hunger for what it could not have.
At the beginning, when the symptoms first appeared, he hadn’t even understood what he was craving.
He’d thought it was a fever of some kind. Believed his holy power would be more than enough to heal it.
But every time the symptoms came, his holy power was completely useless.
And not only his holy power.
His self-discipline — widely praised. His endurance. His will. Everything capitulated before that craving.
He’d first understood the nature of what he was craving when, weakened to the point of seeking out a temple healer, a novice acolyte had reached over to check his temperature.
Are you all right, Vice-Commander?
Ngh.
The moment the acolyte’s skin made contact with his, he’d swallowed a sound.
From where their body heat met, something shameful had unfurled through him with violent force.
It was a hunger he had never felt before in his life. Like a red beast stirring awake somewhere in his gut — wanting to lick the hand that touched him until there was nothing left of it, and then devour it whole.
The desire was so enormous it was frightening.
Already weakened as he was, Leon — barely in control of himself — had grabbed the acolyte’s wrist before he knew what he was doing. He brought the pulse point to his nose and breathed in deep.
…?! Vice-Commander?
Urgh.
He nearly gagged.
The smell.
From the acolyte, a wave of awful smell had hit him — and he flung the wrist away before he’d consciously decided to.
Ow — Vice-Commander! What on earth — that hurt—
And so it had begun.
Every time the desire rose and he reached for someone without meaning to, they smelled. Terrible, choking things.
Whenever the symptoms were at their worst, every one of his senses sharpened to an unbearable edge, and the faintest traces of human biology and emotion registered as specific scents.
Brother — what’s wrong, why are you—
Fear smelled like iron just pulled from a forge — burning, metallic orange-red.
Oh my goodness, Your Highness. You look a little tired — shall I help you? Ha-ha.
Cheap desire smelled like standing water in a drain.
Ah — Your Highness, your eyes look a little red. Are you feeling all right?
Revulsion smelled like a fish left out too long.
And his own uncontrollable craving — a dark, iron-rust smell, something like being soaked in someone else’s warm blood.
There was no shortage of women who would have offered themselves to him. Satisfying the craving itself was, logically, not difficult.
But each time the temptation reared up — just once, just this once — and he came close enough to smell them, it became impossible to go through with it. The stench hit him in waves and his body refused.
Caught between desperate desire and violent rejection, he had sometimes thought he would go mad before it was over.
If he hadn’t had things worth protecting. If there hadn’t been people depending on him. He might have let it end long ago.
The worst of it was how unstoppable the growth of it was. The curse was getting stronger.
Have I broken some sacred prohibition? Have I committed some sin I don’t even know about, to deserve this punishment from the gods?
The attempts he had made to atone for crimes he couldn’t name numbered in the dozens.
He had locked himself inside a temple storage room for a month. Fasted. Flagellated himself — bare skin, a thousand strikes.
He had liquidated nearly half the inheritance settled on him and donated it to the temples.
He had volunteered for dangerous assignments reserved for convicts, using the work to punish his own body.
He had served in the ward for elderly retired high priests — men with dementia who hurled abuse at him while he tended to their most basic needs, without complaint.
Every form of penance he knew. And the trap around him only tightened.
Through all of it, he had grown steadily more hollow.
Those who didn’t know better praised the Holy Knight Leon’s acts of charity, saying they grew more remarkable with each passing month.
He knew the truth.
Someday the desire would swallow him whole, and that would be the end of him. His humanity was already substantially worn away. He was performing the role of a holy knight by now, nothing more.
He could manage his own destruction — dying alone, going mad alone — he could accept that. But when that happened, everything he had spent his life protecting would collapse along with him.
His family. His younger siblings. All of them would bear the mark of a fallen paladin’s disgrace.
And so he was enduring. With everything he had.
Deceiving the world, though he could not deceive himself. Carrying the weight of what he knew himself to be.
But there was something that cut him even deeper than self-contempt.
One hand. If just one person would let me hold their hand and let this heat die down.
On the nights when the desire drove him past endurance — when he had satisfied himself alone in the dark and curled beneath the moonlight afterward — a devastating loneliness swept in.
A filthy desire he could confess to no one.
This desperate ache to touch someone else’s skin.
Was there anyone in the world who could meet it without fear, without revulsion, without contempt?
No. Never.
If such a person existed, they would certainly not be normal. They would have to be at least as mad as he was.
He had given up on the idea.
I am…
I want you to be happy.
And then she appeared.
An actual woman saying something that unhinged.
“Hah! Hyah!”
He had swung his sword like a man possessed throughout the entire afternoon session, and still could not get the woman out of his head.
The truth was, he hadn’t been able to for days.
I can help you.
Insane woman.
Did you really think no one had noticed?
Suspicious woman. Dangerously suspicious.
Cough. Cough.
A woman with a neck that had fit inside his grip with room to spare.
“Hyah! Hup!”
“I yield! I yield! Have mercy, Vice-Commander, please!”
The five knights who had been sparring against him all crumpled to the ground in various theatrical attitudes of defeat. But the woman would not leave his head.
“Hyaaah—!”
Crack. Bang.
The sparring dummy, unable to withstand any more, splintered to the floor.
Hah. Hah.
Drops of sweat struck the earth of the training ground like rain.
But no matter how hard he pushed. No matter how tightly he set his jaw.
She was still there. Perfectly clear.
The cool, smooth surface of her skin — the one thing in months that had actually quieted the burning.
The ridge of her spine, arching under his fingertips like something made to be found.
Those eyes, the color of some flower pressed into water.
And above all — the scent of her. The only person whose smell was simply clean.
How. Why.
Did she have no human desires? No human feelings?
That can’t be possible.
It wasn’t possible for a human being to have no desires. Where did this spotless creature come from, without a single soiled particle of feeling inside her?
But her breath had been honest in a way he could not explain.
Like someone who had put down every foolish expectation of the world and become free.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, he had been able to breathe near another person without holding his breath.
Focus. If she’s right and this is a curse, I should be thinking about how to break it.
I want you to be happy.
Not dwelling on empty, senseless drivel like that.
“Hyaaaah!”
Leon finally hurled his sword.
It flew between the knights, who scattered in alarm, and buried itself in the stone wall of the training ground.
Hah. Hah.
Sweat poured from his scalp in rivulets down his body.
The arm that had swung past the point of pain trembled where it hung at his side.
He bit down on his own lip.
“You have no idea. Who do you think you are.”
Hah. Hah.
In the blazing afternoon heat, his eyes burned with a light that wasn’t entirely calm.
⁂
And then.
After all of that — after an afternoon that should have been beneath contempt, dragging himself home at last — she was there.
As though she had appeared out of thin air.
Sir Leon.
It’s been a week.
Eight days, to be precise.
The fact that he knew the exact number of days since their last meeting was contemptible even to himself.
And her — that unusually tired look. The pallor. The faint, drowsy scent of her.
All of it was already unsettling his concentration.
Did I invite you here?
He’d said it to push her back. But he already knew. The damned desire had already registered her arrival and begun to respond.
To keep from revealing how quickly he was losing ground, he had turned away sharply.
Show her to the second-floor study. I’m going to wash.
He needed time to put the desire back in its place.
If he was going to face her without losing himself.
If he was not going to be fooled or manipulated.
“The bath has been drawn, sir.”
The servant bowed as Leon walked past him into the washroom. Leon stepped past the steaming bath and tipped a bucket of cold water over his head instead.
Splash.
Hah. Hah.
Even with ice-cold water running down every inch of him, steam rose from the top of his head.
He stared into the mirror across the room.
A drenched, furious idiot stared back.
