The chosen lamb always wore white. It was tradition, and the village of Oakhaven clung to tradition like a drowning man to splinters, especially when it offered a convenient solution to an inconvenient problem. Elara's gown was scratchy, cheap linen, too thin for the chill night air that snaked down from the Blackwood, and it made her skin itch. Or maybe that was just the terror, a live wire humming beneath her skin.
"A noble sacrifice," Elder Brom had intoned just hours before, his voice as dry and brittle as old leaves. He stood before her in the torchlight, his aged face a mask of solemn duty that couldn't quite conceal the relief in his eyes. Relief that it was her, and not one of their own. "The beast will be sated. Our harvests will be protected. Your name will be remembered in the annals of Oakhaven's courage."
He'd said the same thing to Lyssandra the year before. Elara remembered Lyssandra—her bright, braying laugh that could startle birds from the trees, the way she could whistle a perfect, piercing note through a blade of grass. She did not remember her as a 'noble sacrifice.' She remembered her as a vibrant, sixteen-year-old girl who'd been pushed into the dark and never returned. The annals of Oakhaven's courage were short, brutal, and written in the blood of outcasts.
The walk to the forest's edge had been a parade of shuffling feet and averted gazes. The other villagers lined the muddy path, their faces pale and drawn in the flickering torchlight. They held their children close, not in shared grief, but as a warning. See what happens to those who are different? All but Old Man Hemlock, who'd broken from the crowd to spit a wad of phlegm at her feet, his eyes burning with superstitious hatred.
"Blight-bringer," he'd hissed, the word meant only for her. "This is all your doing. Finally making yourself useful."
She was the orphan, the strange one with eyes the color of a stormy sea, the one whose touch sometimes made seedlings wither in the garden patch. An easy choice. A convenient offering. Her existence had always been a slight discomfort to them; now, it could be an appeasement.
Two guards she'd known since childhood—Jonas, who'd once secretly given her a stolen sugar-cake on her tenth birthday, and Ralof, who'd patiently taught her how to skip stones across the millpond—marched her to the stone archway that marked the entrance to the beast's domain. Their grips on her arms were firm, impersonal, their jaws set.
"Nothing personal, Elara," Jonas had muttered, staring fixedly at the dark trees ahead, unable to meet her eyes.
"It feels rather personal," she'd replied, her voice surprisingly steady. It was always steady when the fear was greatest. A final, paltry defiance.
They'd shoved her through the moss-covered arch, and a strange, resonant hum had immediately sealed it shut behind her, the ancient magic barring any retreat. No going back. The air inside was thick and heavy, tasting of ozone, deep, wet earth, and something else… something metallic and old. It was not the foul stench of a predator's den. It was the charged silence of a sanctum. Bioluminescent moss cast a sickly, pulsating green glow on crumbling basalt walls covered in faded carvings, and the very stone beneath her bare feet thrummed with a power that made her teeth ache and her head spin.
This was not a beast's lair. This was a prison. And she was the latest piece of fuel for whatever engine kept it running.
She followed the pull of that power, the invisible thread drawing her deeper into the labyrinthine ruin. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs, but her mind, usually so clouded by the village's disdain, was preternaturally clear. The corridor opened abruptly into a vast, circular chamber, and in its center, she saw him.
Not a beast. A god.
He was bound at the heart of an immense, intricate circle carved deep into the floor, chains of solidified moonlight coiled around his powerful form from his torso down to the great, scaled serpentine tail that vanished into the shadows at the chamber's edge. His torso was humanoid, sculpted from lean muscle and pale, perfect skin that seemed to gleam in the eerie light. His face was a monument to arrogant beauty, sharp-featured and severe, with a jaw that could cut stone, framed by hair as black as a starless night. His eyes were open, slitted pupils of molten gold burning with a impotent fury that had been simmering for eons. He was sleep and waking, rage and stillness, all at once. And he was magnificently, utterly trapped.
The binding circle. The old stories, the ones she'd secretly devoured in forbidden books while tending the elder's neglected library, whispered of the Old Ones, the primordial gods who walked the world before man, who were chained by forgotten magic. They never said one was chained here, just a few miles from a village that sacrificed its girls to a 'beast.'
"Another morsel?" His voice was a low vibration that went through the stone and up through the bones of her feet. It was layered, the sound of a distant rockslide and a intimate whisper, echoing not in the chamber but inside her own skull. "Do they think to fatten me with their meager offerings? Or does my jailer send yet another set of eyes to spy upon his captive?"
Elara stood frozen, her mind racing, stitching together frayed threads of half-remembered lore and desperate calculation. A bound god. A sacrificial pact. A circle that could be used… if one knew how. The runes were ancient, their meanings obscure, but one was clearly wrong. A hairline fracture broke a key sigil of containment. A flaw in the prison. A chance.
"I am no morsel," she said, and her voice did not shake. It echoed slightly in the vast space, a tiny defiance against the immense presence before her.
The god's laugh was a harsh, cruel sound that grated against her skin. "You are. You are meat and fear and a brief distraction from the tedium of eternity. Come closer. Let me see the latest trembling victim they've sent to amuse me."
She didn't tremble. She stepped to the very edge of the carved circle, her eyes tracing the ancient runes, memorizing their patterns, looking for the weakness. "They sent me for a beast," she said, more to herself than to him, the pieces clicking into a terrifying, brilliant plan.
"And you have found a god. Disappointed?" He strained against his bonds, the chains of light flaring brighter with his effort, illuminating the sheer scale of his power and his confinement.
"Curious." Her heart hammered against her ribs like a wild bird. She saw it then, not ten paces from the edge of the main circle—a smaller, secondary ring of runes, less ornate but pulsing with a different, quieter energy. A covenant circle. For pacts. For bonds. The words from a crumbling folio, the Canticle of Binding Vows, surfaced in her memory. A marriage pact. The most unbreakable bond. It required consent, but in the oldest, most primal forms, consent could be given under duress… or could be assumed by the magic itself under specific conditions.
The Serpent God strained against his bonds, the chains clinking with a sound like shattering crystal. "Your curiosity will be the death of you, little thing. They all come. They all stare. And then they try to run. They never make it to the archway."
He was the beast. The sacrifices weren't to sate him; they were part of the magic that bound him. A perpetual battery of terror and life force fed into the circle to maintain his prison. Her life force.
The realization was a cold splash of water. There was no mercy here. No bargaining with this entity. There was only power, and who was bold enough to seize it.
She met his burning golden gaze, a strange calm settling over her. "I am not trying to run."
She turned her back on him, a gesture of such profound disrespect that he fell silent in sheer, stupefied shock. She walked to the covenant circle, her mind clearer than it had ever been. She remembered the words, the inflections, the blood-price.
"What are you doing?" he snarled, the chains clinking as he pulled against them, a new, uneasy note in his layered voice.
Elara knelt, ignoring the searing pressure of his glare on her back. She pricked her thumb on a sharp edge of the ancient stone, a single bead of welling crimson. Her blood. Her will. Her life, offered not as sacrifice, but as contract.
"Stop that," the god commanded, his voice losing its bored malice, gaining an edge of genuine alarm. "Cease your prattling!"
She didn't. She recited the vow, her voice growing stronger with each word, each syllable pulling at the air, at the magic in the room, drawing it into the circle. The moss-light flickered violently. She spoke of union, of power shared, of souls bound. She spoke the words of the oldest contract, weaving her fate with his.
"I do not consent!" he roared, and the temple trembled. Dust and small stones rained from the ceiling. The walls groaned.
"You are bound!" Elara called out, her voice ringing with a authority she didn't know she possessed, cutting through his fury. "But your power leaks. Your essence is in this chamber. You have consumed the sacrifices, taken their energy into yourself. That is consent enough! You have accepted every offering they ever gave you!"
It was a loophole. A desperate, insane, brilliant loophole. She was the offering. He would, by the very nature of his prison, consume her life to sustain it. Unless she changed the nature of the consumption. From fuel to partner. From prey to wife.
She finished the vow, the final words hanging in the air like a struck bell, and smeared her blood across the central, waiting rune of the covenant circle.
The world turned white and silent.
Power, vast and oceanic, slammed into her. It was cold and hot, ancient and furious. It was him. She felt his consciousness, a roaring tempest of pride and isolation and millennia of bitter rage, a mind so vast it could encompass worlds. And she felt it being yoked to hers, a tether forming in the very core of her soul, a chain she had forged herself. It was agony and ecstasy, a violation and a coronation.
The light faded as suddenly as it came. She was on her hands and knees, gasping, her lungs burning. The scratchy gown was still there. The stone was still cold. But everything was different. She could feel the immense weight of the power now tied to her, a second, thunderous heartbeat thrumming in her veins. She could feel the coiled, serpentine presence in her mind, stunned into a seething, profound silence.
She looked up, her vision swimming.
The Serpent God was staring at her, his magnificent fury gone, replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated shock. The binding circle still held him, but a new, faint silver thread of light now connected his heart to hers, visible even in the eerie green glow, pulsing with a rhythm that was their own.
"What," he whispered, the word echoing with a depth that promised unimaginable violence, "have you done?"
Elara pushed herself to her feet. She felt dizzy, powerful, and utterly terrified. She looked at the stunned deity she had just irrevocably bound to her.
"I made a choice," she said, the words leaving her lips before she could stop them. "It seems I preferred a husband to a martyr."
A roar, not of beast, but of pure, undiluted godly fury, shook the very stones of the temple. And Elara knew, with a certainty that chilled her soul, that her first battle was won, but her war had just begun.