Dark Kiss

There were a myriad of benefits to being a Kor Priestess of Light; not getting eaten by male Kors was one of them.

It also generally meant having enforced respect for my tasks while at any of the Temples of Starlight.

My soil, my waters, my gardens, that I tended to, were about rebirth.

So why in cosmic hell was I witnessing a murder?

On my sacred ground?

I was walking down through the luminescent garden of violet to find out.

I leap onto a cube of rock, hands on my hips as I watch the predator finish his prey. He's elegant about it, bending over the mortal into the soil, his hips snug against hers as he groans, spilling his seed into her body even as she collapses in his arms.

His skin was a dark butterfly blue, but his hair shines with bright light that I believe is from the rising Star over my garden that I protect on planet Magnetiz.

But no, I mistake that sacred starlight as what’s making this Kor glow around the fringes of his forehead. Almost like a false halo.

As I keep spying, I realize it’s not the starlight in the blonde tendrils of his hair. His hair is literally pulsing fluid sparks of light as he drinks. Not white, but silver, from pure luminescence.

He’s not the usual Kor height of seven feet either. He's dwarfed the prey while she's shrunken and paralyzed by his Venom. His teeth have lodged inside her nape from behind, crushing into her spine until she goes limp.

No more noise.

Only the kiss of silence that comes with death.

This Kor is superior to most. He's simply too big to be anything but ancient.

I watch as he rises up, the female, now only dust, a bright puddle of molten liquid formed below him in the moss and soil.

That puddle?

That's the dead girl.

He just melted that mortal into remnants of light that made the center of her atoms, it went even deeper than her bones.

I pause in my analysis as I realize he might spot me at any second with a swivel of his head. He may even attack. It's odd enough that he has killed a girl on sacred ground, because he should know not to do that!

Alpha Centauri would kill him for the Dishonour.

But before I get caught up in possible solutions for this desecration of my Temple, I will need to stay vigilant until I know exactly who he is.

He must be identified.

I Stealth for now.

When I Stealth, I am unseen, becoming invisible to all levels of the spectrum. I absorbed all the light with my own feminine Kor powers, slipping away into an advanced form of invisibility. I was half within the Old Dark, a universe my dead female Kor ancestors roamed.

In my Garden of Starlight, I was the High Priestess, and I was protected from Kor violence here.

It wasn’t allowed here. In any form whatsoever.

I consider the dimensions of this intruder as he gulps down excess Venom and stares at the puddle and his reflection. He's naked except for a slip of black material over his groin. His thighs are so muscular, even from here I can tell they are wider than my head. My hairline would probably reach his naval, if I was lucky. He was almost double my height.

Hm.

He's much too large.

Maybe he isn’t a Kor?

Maybe it’s another kind of alien born from the endless cosmic dust of our universe.

But I don’t think so.

He is a Kor. Just different. Because only Kors could visit an Elion Hive. And only Kors could melt down a female like that into nothing but pure death.

It was curious to me why he took his newest kill here to my space, to lay with her in my garden, to take her to the Dark, here.

I consider that poor woman's last moments.

A Kor’s Venom entered our bloodstream through their fangs lodged in our flesh, it spread through our veins, and depending on the potency, it dissolved us into nothing.

Deleting us from our universe. Literally.

Kors… they weren’t really alien, when they belonged in the Old Dark before us. Universes that predate our own.

This strange predator steps around the puddle and lowers back down to where the starlight filled a dip in the moss. He wants more? I watch him cup his hand into the pool of light, drinking the soul-essence from his concaved palm.

The risen star over the horizon is at his side, and I can see the contours of his face.

The ravaged light drips off his fangs. I try to count.

Six fangs.

So, he is a Kor.

A nine-foot bloody Kor with butterfly blue skin that was unlike Alpha Centauri, the King of Kors.

Unlike the King of Kors. Damn. How could he be even more scary than my uncle? Even more perfectly sculpted for seducing female prey and fucking them into a brutal Death.

I watched and heard as her sighs turned to terrified squeals as he bit into her spine at her nape. The burst of light was equivalent to the birth of a star. It propelled star dust all over the Garden in a shockwave.

I came down from my high ground to investigate, with the knowledge I could hide away or Jump away into the arms of my mother, Diana, or my father, Wolf-Rayet, or any other Kor father of my dearest siblings.

I was a protected New Age lifeform in the Kor Hives. No one could touch me. I was untouchable. My father, Wolf-Rayet, was the King of Shadow Kors.

His magic made me eternal.

My kiss could bring souls back from the dead.

My mother’s love, encased my spirit. My mother was the Empress of the universe and this being… this rarity before me... I have no cosmic idea what kind of Kor he is.

And I had been educated in all of them.

I see the intruder has finished drinking, and he rises again.

His skin flutters with sparks; he is going teleport!

I speak with the veil of my Stealth protecting me from his eyesight.

“Stop! I demand to know who you are! What you’re doing in my Garden of Starlight!” I ask with the authority I was born into.

He looks up, unphased by a voice interrupting his 'private' moment.

“Priestess?” he drawls back, and his voice can’t be real. It makes my spine race with a dark chill. My nerves feel tickled all over. His tone hits every low frequency at once, and it almost feels like a physical sensation touching every part of me.

I shiver and try my best to ignore the way even his voice is designed to kiss a female's senses.

“Tell me your name, please, you've trespassed into my Temple,” I speak again, finding the strength to talk, but pausing when he steps forward.

His foot makes no noise, none at all. He places it silently, as he lifts his other foot, and brings that one forward.

Silly me, he’s just walking.

No.

Nooo.

I think he's stalking me.

Looking where I’m not.

He’s pretending not to see me.

“What’s your name?” he asks me instead.

His eyes open wider and they show sparkles of blue and green light, that thread through his whole eye. There is no iris, no pupil. And as he moves, the starlight sparkles off the black whorls all over his skin, that ripple and move in time. He's patterned like a butterfly. So pretty.

The moving black whorls across his blue skin are hypnotizing and I can’t look away as they move as slow as he stalks, somehow moving a little bit left, then a little bit right. He's aimless.

P-pretending to be.

I know Kors are dangerous.

“Princess... what kind of Kor are you?” I answer with my name and a repeated question.

I'm too curious.

He stops moving, tilting his head, closing his eyes.

I see his bright eyelashes flicker, they almost vibrate. It looks strange. They shed a spark of dust onto his cheek.

“I am a Pryztium Kor... Princess,” he answers, his voice tickling me all over again, especially when he eats up my name like sweet honey.

He holds up his hand, bending his fingers back, showing me his black claws.

I look down at my own black nails, and they look similar to his.

I’d never heard of a Pryztium.

But I had heard of a – hm...

“Preistiuz?” I try to correct him, but I find my voice fading into an even quieter whisper. He keeps tilting his head and I see his ears even shimmer brighter in the center, and I know he’s honing in on me.

“If you like,” he whispers at the same frequency, looking away.

“If I like?” I ask and he takes another step. I estimate about fifteen more and he’ll be far too close. I watch his toes curl into the black soil and the whorls on his feet spin and dance, the sparkles in the garden lifts up and sinks into him. He’s even feeding off the soil, “Don’t come any closer or this discussion ends here, right now.”

His silver hair turns to a dark shade of black.

Did I offend him?

Even his eyes dim, now black voids.

He looks right at me, finding me in my Stealth.

It didn't help that my disguise wavered as I saw his hair and eye color shift in real time.

“Alright, Princess. I won’t advance. Anymore questions?”

Since there’s no point hiding who I am any longer, I drop my Stealth. And immediately he seems to freeze completely.

I almost Jump right out of here into another Hive, because that look is obsessive, not friendly.

I shuffle one foot back and curl my fist, holding onto the ability to teleport, to Jump – if I have to.

Luckily, female Kors were quicker at teleportation than the males. We were instant.

Kors had to really pull on their power source to do so, it could even make them sick. Motion sick, you could say.

Because he wasn’t infinite Light, he was Darkness.

I was infinite Light. I had some tricks to keep myself alive, just as he had some of his own to trick me into playing his games.

And up until 7 months ago? Female Kors like me weren’t even allowed to exist. For sixty thousand years. We were killed at birth. So, I wonder if that's why he's obsessed with staring at me right now.

Their Codes had changed, so it’s only natural some Kors like him would be curious about me. But Kors were also Honour bound. He had no choice but to keep his distance.

And since we’re both curious, I let him look just a little longer.

Because I do not run, his darkness softens down, until his black hair turns an ash grey. His eyes remain black, with a pinprick of starlight in the center as he attempts to look normal.

His eyes run over my white skirt, bare midriff and white bra encrusted with diamonds from Earth, I liked to look pretty as a pure, voluntarily virginal female Kor.

Which is one of the very reasons I was protected.

I just don't know if he knows that.

“Astron, Princess, that's my name,” he voluntarily tells me, “I am a Priestiuz, I say Pryztium. Elion tongue.”

“You’re alone, aren’t you?” I ask.

“Who said I’m alone?” Astron almost smiles at me, standing his ground and occasionally looking away so I don't get scared by his intensity, “Tell me what you know of Priestiuz.”

“Never met one until now, and I know all the Kor species, including yours,” I think back to the lessons Wolf-Rayet gave me. How did he explain Priestiuz? I’ll tell you one thing, he glossed over their kind quickly.

Prized for pleasure. Thought extinct until recently. The last Empress slaughtered all of them because they were too dangerous. Their venom was the most valuable of the Kors.

He waits, moving his head slightly, waiting for my reply.

I feel too shy to speak of pleasure.

“Your venom is valuable,” I settle on that, “The. Most. Valued. Not long ago, you were extinct. Just like me, I'm guessing you were in hiding?” I raise a brow at this, challenging his thoughts.

Astron starts to turn around, toward the Starlight, smirking to himself.

He steps away from me, his hands searching, his head turning.

He’s looking over the garden?

I slowly kneel on the cube of stone and then cross my legs, still holding one fist closed so I can Jump if I need to. Holding my hand shut helped me concentrate.

I watch Astron walk toward a brush with pink, curved leaves that fill with dew drops every morning.

He picks one and lifts it to his face.

I can’t see, because he’s back is still to me, but I know what he's doing.

He’s draining Venom into the leaf from his fangs.

Astron turns back to me, and the distance between us – obliterates in an instant.

He’s teleported faster than any Kor possibly could.

I’ve leant back, but he doesn’t reach. Even though he could.

He’s standing on one side of the cube I'm sitting upon, as he holds out the leaf with the Venom. He's still towering above me, so he slowly steps backwards and leans down until we're eyelevel.

He...

...doesn’t touch.

He offers.

The leaf.

“Hold it, or it’ll spill,” Astron speaks sensibly, “It’s payment, Princess – for me to trespass onto my world. Magnetiz.”

“Your world?” I whisper.

He murmurs under his breath in his own language as his eyes roam over my face, but they are words I can’t understand. I can barely even hear them, and I think he intends for me to lean closer to him.

Which I do.

But I also feel my Kor instincts have been pushed away by the inherited trait of brat from my mortal mother.

I can't help myself.

I want to know the forbidden.

No one is watching... so...

I uncurl my hand, and I lower my palm below his gift.

Astron smiles without teeth, happy.

As he places it on my hand.

“Taste it, Princess,” he drawls, a false kindness.

“What did you say before in the Elion tongue?” I lift the leaf, looking at the Venom, curious but not dumb. I sniff it. It has no scent.

I’m not drinking this. Or tasting it.

“I said I have been estranged for my brutality, but you and I will always belong together.”

“But I don’t know you,” I say, still leaning forward, when I should be shuffling back.

“Given Venom from a Pryztium Kor is a pledge of allegiance,” Astron says, “Priestess. Let me trespass over your Temple in Magnetiz, in return for my obedience.”

“Honestly, I don’t know if you even understand what you’re saying,” I whisper, “You’re estranged from Kors because of your brutality? But all Kors deal in death. Also, you can’t even hold one shade of color without changing. That tells me you're anti-social from the Hives. You can't decide what you should look like.”

Astron follows each word, and his eyes crinkle. Is he amused by that?

He leans down on one elbow. He rests his chin on his palm and then grips his bicep with his other hand.

He watches me, waiting for me to drink. He doesn't answer anything I said.

“Now I also know, this Venom killed that girl,” I tell him, “So even if this gives me the best high of my life, there’s no way I can taste this without melting out of my own eye sockets. Maybe… I could survive just a tiny lick?” I suggest, “I do wish for you to pay for your intrusion, but I’m worried about the effect. One drop. And is that enough for you to pledge allegiance and obey me? And then I’ll let you ‘be welcome’. There’s no need to trespass any further. You are Honorable, yes?”

Astron nods slightly, but he covers his mouth with his fingers, trying to hide the wicked smile.

He’s very happy I’m listening.

I didn’t hate Kors.

My father was one and I adored him.

And this one is so handsome and rare.

I almost feel like our time is special because it feels forbidden.

I reach out with my other hand. I hover my finger over the venom in the leaf.

I’d touch it, then lick it off my finger.

I'm about to dip it in when Astron growls from the center of his throat and I pause under the sound. My eyes flick back to his.

He's still growling low, while glaring at my hand.

“What,” I whisper.

He suddenly reaches out and he takes my hovering hand, pushing it aside.

He lets me go, so I don’t scramble. I stay.

He now brings his hand over the curved leaf.

His pointer finger is too large to dip in, so he sticks out his pinky and he dips that in, until a drop sticks to his black opaque claw.

It droops down to his skin and spreads out into a light sheen. He shakes his finger and half the drop falls back into the leaf.

The Venom on his finger has the lightest smattering.

I am not scared of that amount, I know it’ll give me a taste of him and even show me his true intentions. For the Venom to be the most valued, it also meant it would taste incredible.

I stare at his finger, leaning forward, but I pause, as my lips part, I purse them back to together when I catch his eyes and blush.

It was invasive, to think about his finger dipping into my mouth.

Astron reads me, and he reaches for my chin, not grasping, just laying his fingers under my soft skin, as his thumb presses over my bottom lip then retreats as I open my mouth for him.

He brings his pinky closer to me, and I find myself moving closer to him as well.

I stick out my tongue, so he doesn’t have to shove his finger into my mouth.

“Silly girl,” he whispers just as he’s a hairs’ breath from gifting it to me.

“You will die for preying on her.”

I hear a snarl above me and then a foot, pressing on the side of my head – is kicking, pushing me off the cube.

I spin and tumble onto the ground, landing in a squat and on my hands before I fall on my ass.

I look up to see Velorum, my father’s second, his wings spread as he bares all fangs at Astron.

The Pryztium Kor teleports, leaving the Garden.

“Princess, are you hurt?” Velorum turns, his snarl gone, his fangs no longer bared as he asks me sweetly. He jumps from the rock, grasping my arm and lifting me to my feet.

“Why is he hunting me when it is forbidden? I thought I was protected in the Hives?” I ask him.

Velorum cups my cheek in his hand, narrowing his eyes, considering what to say.

“It won’t matter why, when he’s dead, will it? Go to your mother,” he winks and turns, walking into the remnants of the leftover teleportation field to follow the intruding Kor.

My eyes dart back to the cube.

The leaf.

On the rock.

It’s tipped, the venom spilled, it's drying on the cube, some of it is dripping down the vertical walls.

Silly girl.

Astron was taunting me micro-seconds before he almost ensnared me.

That Venom was probably full of neurotoxins!

I will go to my mother.

But.

I run forward, and before I teleport, I pick up the leaf with Venom residue.

I wanted to show my sisters.

Maybe we could take a dare on who would be brave enough to lick it. Or kiss it.

I grin at the playful thought.

Not realizing in that obvious, idiotic moment of spontaneity; that I am a silly girl after all.