Chapter 124: Void
For several long moments, complete silence reigned as the lady attempted to recompose her own trembling glories and reassemble the patrician hauteur underpinning her every regal nuance.
When she finally responded, the statuesque goddess's full lips twisted in an emotion somewhere between petulant offence and...something darker Blake couldn't readily identify glimmering behind those hooded lids. But it swept past him like a wind. He immediately got goosebumps as he felt the environment slightly shift. It was like this woman was emitting some strange aura.
"You dare turn away from luxuriating in my untamed pleasures, beloved?" Though her tone remained melodious and unruffled, there was simply no mistaking the perilous undercurrent surging through each resonant syllable.
"I offer you the ecstasies and comforts of paradise itself, yet still you resist abandoning yourself to my dominion in favor of chasing these temporary ghosts tormenting your fragile psyche."
With an almost disdainful grace, she pivoted on one sharp stiletto heel and paced several simmering steps away from Blake before whirling back with emerald eyes blazing. She took one long, measuring look to examine every detail of his physique radiating discomfited uncertainty.
"You have forgotten yourself, sweet man," she uttered in a distracted murmur more to her own ears than Blake's. "And for the moment, that tattered remainder of human weakness still vying for clumsy control in your subconscious has blocked my ability to bestow you the profane blessings of your rebirth,"
In one blurring movement, she was practically nose-to-nose again as her quicksilver eyes bored into his very aura. "But we shall remedy this temporary lapse in memory and will sooner than you dread, my intense and overwhelming desire for you. For you will ultimately surrender every shred of inhibition before me in order to experience the horizons of rapture lying in wait, I promise you that,"
As suddenly as their escalating confrontation had ignited, the storm gripping the lady subsided behind a mask of outward calm once more. Maintaining that unruffled composure despite her eyes still simmering with predatory promise.
"We shall retire for the evening to our separate chambers," she stated in clipped, frosty tones. "On the tomorrow, you shall awaken feeling sufficiently restored and emboldened to begin delving into your fractured recollections anew.
Should any further nostalgic threads beckon to be unraveled from these obscuring veils shrouding your past, you need only apply yourself earnestly and I shall gladly facilitate their liberation."
Already she was turning away dismissively, that waterfall of sunlight tresses swirling in her wake as lithe strides carried her back toward the villa and whatever indignant solitude awaited beyond its vaulted halls.
Blake could only remain rooted to that sprawling courtyard, swirling in the undertow of aftershocks rippling outward from their searing unfinished crescendo until the glossy night enveloped him in murky ambiguity once more.
There was no denying his still rapaciously throbbing desires to chase after this mysterious temptress and delve into whatever carnal and profane ecstasies her attentions promised to inscribe upon his very aura. Yet that same stubborn opposing faction wrestling with the core of his being also persisted in walling off full surrender until more illumination could be granted on the present situation.
Igniting innocent curiosity over where he'd truly originated from before fate conspired to deliver him into this supposed paradise had taken priority over simply embracing its raptures blindly. And until more context could emerge from the tangled threads of his fractured subconscious, he would remain suspended in some form of visceral purgatory.
Was catering to such discretions alienating him irrevocably from the radiant mistress of these dominions in the process, or merely postponing the ultimate rapture to be found in total surrender?
Blake wrestled with these dueling quandaries as night's velvety cloak descended and haunting jasmine fragrance swirled through the humid sea breezes washing over the estate.
Off in the hazy distance, the methodic lapping of waves against hulls echoed a siren's eerie reminder that they were still untold leagues from any familiar shores or secular civilization. Just how far had this lady spirited him toward some remote, undying elysian pleasure cult beloved only to herself and her cloistered household?
These and countless other suffocating mysteries swirled tighter around Blake's beleaguered thoughts as the vibrant paradise took on more an ominous pall after nightfall gathered its mercurial shadows. Surrendering to the siren's lush comforts now felt akin to staking his entire essence to some paradigm-shattering compact not to be entered lightly before fully grasping its profane scope.
With those disquieting notions gnawing, Blake at last forced his leaden footsteps back toward the villa's ornate carved doors and whatever unsettling dreams - or restless insomnia - awaited within its damnably extravagant walls until true epiphanies held sway over his consciousness once more.
He was no closer to grasping his relationship to this lady and this timeless tropical estate than upon first awakening within its perfumed sanctums.
But Blake was steadily gaining the strangest disquieting inkling that his very atoms may have been cast into some transitory plane of reality from which only further ordeals would ultimately ferry him back...or hurtle him into some unholy initiation to the paradise's ineffable mysteries on less forgiving terms.
Yet, amidst the uncertainty, Blake couldn't shake the feeling that he was being drawn into a realm of unfathomable secrets, where only further trials awaited him.
Nonetheless, he decided to close his eyes, despite not feeling tired. Watching events unfold before him hadn't brought him much clarity either.
"There's a hole... a huge one in my head. But it's not just there. I feel one in my chest too," Blake thought as he closed his eyes, surrendering to the unknown that awaited him in the realm of dreams or perhaps one of nightmares.
Nothing was guaranteed anymore.
*Author's note*
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