Duke of the Beast and the Vicarious Bride - Chapter 60

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※ This work contains depictions of coercive relationships, explicit language, and other graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.

Sensing her presence through all his remaining senses except sight, Caligo clearly perceived the woman.

‘Woman. What was a woman?’

The concept suddenly arising in his mind left him momentarily puzzled. In order to fathom Fiona—this woman who had suddenly appeared claiming to be his wife—his long-dormant brain, which had ceased functioning for so long, breathed once more and laboured to think. Yet perhaps because of the vast time unused, the process moved with excruciating slowness and dullness.

Woman. A gender different from male. A being with a body and reproductive organs entirely unlike his own, capable of conceiving young and creating life.

Yet his newly awakened consciousness could not properly process all this information. All he realised was that she was something different from himself.

By the time he had barely reached this understanding, the woman had already travelled far ahead to places he could not follow.

‘We must consummate the marriage.’

He did not know what this “consummation” she spoke of might be, but a sensation he had not felt since awakening from his long sleep now blazed through his entire body.

Was it because of the liquid the crowd of humans who had come to him earlier had poured into his mouth? Yet though he himself did not know it, his body was entirely unaffected by d***s or drink.

Nevertheless, he suffered from the continuing heat. Wracked by heat as if caught in flames for unknown reasons, he twisted his body instinctively. Even unaware that he had grown e***t, he immersed himself in the sensations the woman gave him.

What followed was an entirely unfamiliar and intense experience. Pleasure such as he had never known in all his existence. It was a ritual that sharpened his dulled consciousness like a blade, and suddenly brilliant light seeped into his hitherto shadowed world.

His palate knew not sweetness, yet learned it from the skin touched by the woman’s hand. Dizzying ecstasy as if his entire body seethed and melted. The shivers running down his spine—she had taught him these as well.

‘We are husband and wife. It is all right.’

He was in a state where he could make no distinction between self and other, no preference or aversion, no moral judgment. In such precarious and unstable selfhood, her words, ceaselessly poured into him, sustained and comforted him like some fixed point of reference.

He suddenly wished to lean upon that solidity. The circumstances of having endured the darkness alone until now struck him as terribly unjust. Only after becoming two did he keenly realise he had been alone. He wanted to entrust his paltry self entirely to her.

The woman before him could be trusted. No, he wanted to trust her. He wanted to rely on her, to possess her. He wanted to touch her more closely. He wanted to obtain her even if he must burn his entire body and soul. He wanted to know her.

At this first intense desire ever born within him, his soul, bound by invisible chains, struggled to rise to the surface.

But a barrier of unknown power blocked it. It was the moment when his self-will, barely born after waiting eons, was about to be buried once more in unconsciousness like pus, drowning.

‘Caligo. From now on, your name is Caligo.’

The moment she named him, one of the bonds constricting him dissolved as if by magic. A new fragment of soul sprang vigorously forth upon the sea of unconsciousness, which had been covered by thick glacial prohibitions.

Fiona.

That single name was engraved like a brand upon his soul, which was little different from a blank slate.

She had given him a name. His bride, his wife. He was no longer a non-existence. He was now a proper being, granted the name Caligo.

Perception crashed upon his consciousness, which had suddenly become a layer clearer. Sensations and stimuli of every kind flooded him, so much that he could not know what to accept first.

Most intense among them was the hellish ecstasy she had brought him. Awakened and swept away by pleasure, Caligo nearly lost consciousness again.

He remembered with his soul, not his flesh, the sensation of the woman’s body entwining with his, the process of his own flesh melting into hers.