Episode 20: Excessive Consideration (5)
The priests who arrived late moved with perfect coordination, as if they had known this would happen.
Hashana quietly watched them line up the herbs, hot water, towels, and spare clothes they had prepared beside the bed.
She held Iskandel tightly in her arms, patting him as she spoke in a low voice.
“You all knew Rsanda was planning to replenish my divine power in installments, didn’t you?”
“Th-that is…”
The priests exchanged panicked glances, their faces screaming ‘oh no’, and trailed off, hemming and hawing.
Pretending not to notice the reproach in Hashana’s gaze, they busied themselves changing the sheets, laying Iskandel down, stripping off his clothes, and wiping away the blood.
As she watched their every move, Hashana finally voiced the sense of wrongness she had been feeling for some time.
“I kept thinking something was off.
It was strange that Rsanda got so furious when she knew perfectly well who was in the delegation.
She whipped everyone into a frenzy to trick me into bringing the prince to my bedroom.
From Rsanda to all of you, you were all in on it together.”
“We have no excuse.
It’s true that we went along with Rsanda’s plan, but… we absolutely did not do it with malicious intent.
The saintess’s coming-of-age ceremony is an important event, directly tied to Durgtah’s prosperity, and you were making no preparations at all.
We were all very worried.”
The excuse, offered by one clueless young priest, only poured fuel on Hashana’s sense of betrayal.
“So all this uproar was because of my first night of adulthood…?”
“Yes.
That was honestly our only concern.
When Rsanda gets drunk and suddenly worked up like that, she’s so terrifying it’s hard to believe it’s just an act.
We were just as shocked as you were.”
“I am the one who is shocked.
The future of Durgtah I envision lies in your happiness, yet the future you envision lies between my legs.”
“No, that’s not what we meant…”
Only then did the young priest realize his mistake.
He stumbled backward, bowing his head in a panic.
The other priests, who had been watching the mood, sucked in a breath and lowered their heads as well.
While they exchanged helpless glances, the high priest, who had been checking Iskandel’s pulse and temperature, stepped in with a genial smile to smooth things over.
“We are sorry, Lady Hashana.
The boy is not very eloquent and expressed himself poorly, but our true feelings—”
“I don’t want to hear it.
All of you, get out.”
Hashana cut the high priest off, pushing them away.
The priests were so stunned they looked as if they had been struck; they couldn’t even speak.
Rsanda interrupting people, throwing things, and making a drunken scene was an everyday occurrence.
But from the moment she was born from the flames until now, Hashana had never once been cold to the priests.
While the ten strapping men could only trade looks, unsure what to do, their bodies were pushed toward the doorway as if they were sheets of paper caught in a gust of wind.
“Until I give you permission, no one is to enter this room.”
Both the physical force she used to expel them and the icy anger in her tone were more than just unfamiliar; they were shocking.
The door, reinforced with divine power, closed with a dull, heavy sound and sealed the entrance tight.
Following its lead, the wide-open windows swung shut, and the curtains layered over them, blocking out the light.
Shielding herself from the bright midday sun in the dim shadows of the room, Hashana spoke to the unconscious man while trying to anchor herself against the unfamiliar emotions churning within her.
“Without even thinking, I believed this whole rude, chaotic mess was all Rsanda’s fault. But apparently, it was all an act, and it was all because of me. Because I wasn’t interested in practicing for my first night… so she made that scene in front of a precious guest from a faraway land and left him in this state. Ha, it’s not like I skipped that damned practice because I was out having fun.”
If she had been neglecting all her duties as the saintess and slacking off on that practice as well, she wouldn’t even have the right to feel wronged.
As she bit her lip, swallowing the words she couldn’t bring herself to say, blood once again trickled from Iskandel’s nose.
“You must have been doing a lot of things that were bad for your body. You’re still bleeding.”
Even when she picked up a towel the priests had left and pressed it to his nose, the blood showed no sign of stopping.
He had bled so much that the healthy color in his cheeks and lips had turned almost bluish.
Although she knew this purification process posed no threat to his life and would actually make his body more like a god’s than a human’s, Hashana felt endless guilt over his suffering.
“I’m sorry. I meant to protect you, but… I ended up burdening you with something terrible instead.”
As her guilt toward Iskandel overshadowed her hurt feelings toward the priests and Rsanda, the turmoil inside her gradually began to settle.
She looked down in pity at the man whose face had gone pale from blood loss, then set the towel aside and laid her hand on his smooth forehead.
“Once you get used to my divine power, it will be a little less difficult.”
Knowing full well he could neither hear nor answer, she still spoke to him as if he were awake, then leaned over his body and gently poured her power into him.
Already saturated with divine power, Iskandel reacted the instant Hashana’s own power washed over him.
His eyes slid open as if drawn by a magnet.
The blue-gray eyes that had glittered like jewels in the sunlight were now almost pitch-black, his pupils dilated to their limit.
As if bewitched by the eyes revealed beneath his thick, even lashes, Hashana leaned closer.
When their faces were so near that the tips of their noses brushed, Iskandel parted his lips as if craving something.
His cold, blue lips, desperate to be warmed, captured her gaze.
‘I’ve never consecrated someone like this before…’
While Hashana hesitated, blood suddenly welled up from Iskandel’s mouth.
She stared down at the man coughing painfully with empty eyes, then, as if she had no other choice, pressed her lips to his.
The metallic blood turned to pure white light the instant it touched Hashana’s divine power, seeping into their joined mouths.
His lips, cold and slack, began to rub and press against her warm flesh, seeking the heat they had longed for.
Awkwardly touching her lips to his and carefully letting her divine power flow, Hashana drew in a small breath at the unfamiliar stimulation.
Following that breath, his thick tongue invaded her mouth.
As if he couldn’t bear for even a little of the air pouring into him to escape, he licked the inside of her mouth, wrapped around her small tongue as it tried to retreat in confusion, and inexorably drew it toward him.
He caught the tip of her tongue lightly between his teeth, sucking on it with a soft, wet sound.
The motion was half exploration, half plea.
That unfamiliar sensation, riding on a shallow stimulus, scattered the resentment that had been trying to take root in the darkest corner of her heart.
It was as if it whispered that none of that mattered, that she should focus on this pleasant feeling instead.
It felt like a temptation.
‘What am I thinking, doing this to someone who isn’t even conscious?’
Even as she scolded herself, Hashana pressed their lips together more deeply under the pretext of transmitting her divine power properly.
Iskandel gladly drank in every bit of breath she poured into him and twined his tongue around hers as it pushed into him.
For some reason, that pure hunger made her want to let out a sigh of pity, so she pressed their wetly joined flesh together more thickly. New chapters come out on g.com first.
She felt that if she let any strange sound escape, this act would turn from a good deed into a lewd one.
A shameless woman, using the excuse of stopping his bleeding to indulge herself with the lips of an unconscious man.
The moment her actions were realized into that single, damning statement, Hashana flinched and pulled away.
Before she could fully relax and catch her breath, Iskandel, his eyes still clouded and dark, cupped the back of her head and flipped their bodies.
In an instant, he trapped her beneath him and swallowed the breath that was about to escape.
“Mm…!”
Hashana’s vision filled with black.
Black eyes, black hair.
Afraid that if she pushed him too hard she might break his bones or even kill him, she clenched her fists, at a loss.
In that brief moment of hesitation, Iskandel used his weight to press his lean body heavily down on hers and suck on her lips.
His rapidly pounding heartbeat thudded into her through her clumsy fists, pinned beneath his hard chest.
As their saliva mixed, their breaths mingled, and their body heat grew more alike, a small shiver ran through her at the experience of her own heartbeat falling into rhythm with his.
Maybe this was what Karasvati had meant by each person’s unique rhythm.
With that not-at-all-funny thought, Hashana easily slipped her hands free and wrapped them around the neck of the man who was greedily seeking her breath.
A small laugh echoed in her mouth.
Since an unconscious man could not possibly be laughing, it had to be her own.
Before she had time to feel strange about the faint echo of her own laughter, his thirsty, wet flesh filled and swept through her mouth as if claiming what was rightfully his.
As if tracing the afterimage of that laugh, he tickled the insides of both cheeks.
The dense contact of his tongue teasing, pulling, and rubbing against hers was sweet enough to raise goosebumps.
Just as her divine power was healing him, it felt as if his saliva was melting away all her anxiety and dissatisfaction.
Without anyone telling her, she wrapped her legs around his firm waist as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and Iskandel lowered his hips as if he had been waiting for it.
The more he bit and released her lips, continuing his slow thrusting, the more distinctly she felt the hot, hard mass pressing against her lower belly.
That heavy presence, slickening her little by little, twitched insistently as if begging her to notice it.
Whenever Hashana let out a short breath, overwhelmed by the slow grind and the faint, creaking sounds, the greedy man traced and swallowed even that.
Since he had taken the burden from her lips, it was as if his wet sounds were a sweet plea for her to take the burden resting on his hips as well.
The sound and the sensation both persisted, clinging to her.
Hashana tried desperately not to acknowledge either, focusing all her awareness on their lips, soaked through with each other’s saliva.
She could just barely excuse the kiss as checking on him and compensating him for the divine power he was bearing.
But if she touched that heated pillar of flesh below, she knew she would never be able to shake the self-loathing of having committed a truly vile act.
Just then, Iskandel’s body, which had been rocking his hips in a teasing rhythm despite his lack of consciousness, was suddenly wrapped in a soft white light like dandelion fluff, and he collapsed limply on top of her.