Our movements become involuntary, purely instinct. She rides me with increasing desperation while I drive upward with brutal force.
At this moment, the vibrating noise in my skull has subsided completely. The magical chaos, the resonance storm destroying Bellmere outside—all of it fades until all I can hear is her. Her ragged breathing. Her small cries of pleasure. The wet sound of our bodies joining again and again.
"Khaivor—" My name on her lips sounds like salvation.
"I can't—" My voice breaks. An ecstatic rush spirals through my very being, unraveling me from within. Every nerve ending ignites. The magic responds, harmonizing with the building pleasure until I can't separate one from the other.
I can sense the urge to release building impossibly high, but not yet. I need to feel more. I want to feel everything—every clench of her body around mine, every gasp, every tremor.
I shut my eyes and thrust upward harder, feeling her fingers claw even deeper into my skin as she suddenly floods with wetness. The sensation nearly destroys me—slick heat coating my length, dripping down to where our bodies join. The sound of it, the feel of it, harmonizes with my very being until it becomes impossible to hold back.
"I'm going to—" I try to warn her, try to pull out, but she doesn't let me.
She wraps her arms and legs firmly around me, locking me in place as she grinds down. "Inside," she gasps. "I want to feel you—all of you?—"
"Aargh—" The groan tears from my throat as I spill into her with violent force. Release crashes through me in waves, each pulse sending more of my seed deep into her welcoming heat. My magic surges in response—not destructive this time, but pure and harmonious, ringing through the forge like perfectly tuned bells.
She follows moments later, crying out as her climax hits. I feel her tightening rhythmically around me, milking every last drop as her body shudders in my arms.
“Khraivo,” my name escapes her lips as I watch her eyes roll to the back of her head.
"I —" The words have lived behind me all this time.
For longer than that, if I am truthful. Since the first autumn I stood at her stall and watched her hands move over the bells she had made and understood, with the particular clarity that only lonely people know, that something in the world was extraordinary and I was not permitted to be near it.
"I love you. I have loved you far longer than I should have allowed myself to."
She pulls back enough to look at my face.
"I know," she pants. "I've known for a while."
"Then you know I cannot survive losing you."
"You're not going to lose me." Her hands tighten in my shirt. "But I need you present,”
Inside the forge, with her breathing against my neck and her hands flat against my back, the chaos becomes something I can hold the shape of rather than something holding the shape of me.
After a long moment she lifts her head.
Her expression has shifted. I recognize the look. I have seen it when a bell speaks to her — that particular inward focus, like she is listening to something the rest of the world cannot hear.
"It's us," she says.
"What is?" I ask in disarray.
"This. What just happened to the sound in your head." She presses a hand flat to my chest again, then to her own. "When we're close,” She shakes her head slowly. "It's not just comfort. It's frequency. Our voice, our heartbeat, the resonance patterns in how I move when I work — they counter what Orrick's bell produces."
She meets my eyes.
"I need to forge a counter-bell," she says. "I need to build something tuned specifically to collapse the frequencies that bell is producing. And I think — I think I've been hearing the pattern this whole time. Every bell I've ever made has been reaching toward it."
"If you forge it," I say carefully, "I can amplify it. Use what I have left to carry the harmonic across the whole town."
"Will it harm you?"
A fair question. I consider it honestly. "I do not know."
She holds my gaze for a long moment.
