#heretics and flesh devotees az x reader

[gaysindistress]

Heretics and Flesh Devotees

Based on the poem Anorexic by Eavan Boland

disclaimer: credits to original creator/poster of image/gif. found on google/pinterest and collaged on canva

pairings: azriel x fem!reader

Summary: Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it. And I am burning the man who condemned me to such a fate.

Warnings: mentions of abuse (not detailed), mentions of misogyny (not detailed)

Word count: 2.2k

Gaysindistress masterlist | azriel masterlist

My body has never been mine. It’s been owned, sold, bought, and branded by others time and time again. My body has never been mine to command and control as the authority in my life has. It’s disgusting to think that in the years since my birth, my body, my soul, and my will has been placed into the hands of others.

As a babe it was my parents although they did try to be gentle and kind. Their faults were found in the ones they left to care for me. The awful creatures hated me for a name I did not choose and wished their hearts’ cruelest desires onto me. As one would assume those desires became my reality as I grew older and started to fight back against them. Their words hurt but they bounced off where they once slashed. Their look stung where they once left burn gashes. Their foul intentions felt like flicks on my nose where they once felt like I’d been beaten to a pulp.

My body still wasn’t my own even though when I prayed for it to be returned to me. Boys who felt entitled to looks and touches tried to lay their claim to me. Men who felt like they deserved praise for caring for me tried to demand me in payment for their actions. Too jaded against it all, I turned to a creature that would prove to be far worse than any boy or man I could’ve been gifted to.

The creature I thought I would safety in begged for my eternal devotion and demanded that I give over whatever I could. He made me into a prisoner and my body into a witch that worshipped him.

Every molecule that made up my body, mind, and heart screamed when I began to fight against its urges. The enormity of my own craving made me sick when I wailed at the scorching of my secret ministrations.

At night, I poisoned my mind when it thought of him. I bruised my limbs when they carried me towards him. I broke what I had to when I tried to search for him. I destroyed myself over and over again until the thought of him made my stomach turn and my skin crawl.

The sick version of me tried to bend me and sent fever throughout me. In my delirium, her half truths felt like the sweetest angelic hymns. Whispering into my ear, she tried to coax me into slipping back into my old solutions.

I renounced her honeyed voice and vomited out her milky words. I renounced her hungered tongue and spat out her name along with his. I fused the flames that came when I thought of him with the spite I conjured and burned the bitch alive from the inside out.

Morphed into a starved and twisted soul, I laughed when he began to resent me. It took him months to realize that something had changed within me. I was no longer painted with soft edges and stunning features but carved into a curveless piece of skin and bone that mocked him. At dinners and events thrown in his favor, I sipped at my rotten wine while the women among me gossiped the state of my marriage. They did not utter a single word for how I seemed to be fairing but how the once holy union between him and I seemed to be slipping.

I sipped at the foul liquid until it stained my lips a violent shade of calculated vengeance. I pretended to swallow entire bottles and postured drunkenness so they would think I couldn’t hear the things they confessed to.

My husband’s heavy stare always found me as I slumped further and further into my chair, allowing him to believe that my pain to consumed me. The hungry leery he masked with an adoring gaze had faded into disappointment and disgust, so much so that eventually he stopped looking altogether. No longer did he pull me into his lap, his Herculean arms caging me in falsified comfort and demand to know what was bothering his beautiful wife.

Instead he found younger and more attractive women to watch and eventually fill his time with. Instead a young woman, borderline girl, with flowing locks of auburn hair and gentle curves became his new hobby.

Thin as a rib, my knife slept under my pillow. The feverish bitch within me cried and cried as she watched me plot his demise. It pained the other within me that withered and gasped for air to think I could even contemplate such a scenario.

Could I truly commit murder?

Could I truly force my husband to shuffle off this mortal coil?

The dueling fates were soon quilled when I turned in sleep to find claustrophobia looming over me. His warm body threatened to suffocate me while the haunting sound of his inner thoughts filled the breadth between us. Once I had been pulled into slumbers embrace by his heart beat’s gentle drum and quiet song of his breath but now it closed in on me and pressed.

I could not muster the strength to find my rib like knife nor move it from its hiding place. I promised myself only a few more days of this torture. Only a few more nights of slipping back into his bed before I set myself free.

I hadn’t intended on waiting for another few weeks but an uninvited guest coiled my plan into nothingness.

Azriel the Shadowsinger.

He arrived just as his name implied; as silently as the night and slithered his way in without resistance. He was a man born with charmed words that dripped from his silver tipped tongue and slid between pearly white teeth. A man known for his third eye, the Truth-Teller, that when he showed up on our doorstep, my husband begged him to stay for fear of his wrath. Like a shadow, he was present in every crevice of the house and was not seen. My husband’s ego got his way, tripping him up as he stumbled to accommodate Azriel, the embodiment of shadows with violent hazel eyes.

The woman my husband found to be my replacement took her role before I was revealed. Instead I was whisked away into a room hidden deep within the compound. She played the dutiful host and doted on her guests. She donned the gowns once crafted for me and wore the jewelry I previously did. She laughed at the jokes the men made and smiled sweetly at the husband she desired but would never love. She became the wife and I hated to see another take my place for I knew what awaited her.

I wanted to spare her. I tried to spare her but my efforts were in vain. She cried out when I told her to leave. She screamed when she saw my knife meant my husband. She fell into it when I tried to pull away from her ivory grasp.

As I said, I hadn’t intended on becoming into the personification of destruction but it was inevitable when I was given no other choice.

Blood drips from me and hits the floor beneath me with a deafening loudness as my husband stares at me.

A single question hangs in the air; “What have you done?”

“What have I done?” I calmly ask, arching a brow at the man who stands and dares to judge me. “The better question is what did you make me do.”

It’s a disgusting sight to behold; him pretending that I’m nothing more than a body of mangled bones and broken convictions molded by him. Dark as night and deafening as the ever present silence that fills when you’re dying, his gaze tries to weigh me down and fails.

Azriel smiles when he senses my anger and he becomes a conduit of my emotions as the twin sinister glint to mine flickers in his dark eyes. He reclines against the rotting wood walls like a feline would; regal and untouchable but lethal all the same.

My husband throws a glance to the blood that is pooling around me with disappointment before speaking, “Your actions are your own. Take responsibility for the carnage that you have created for once in your pathetic life. This is all your fault, y/n.”

My eyes narrow at his choice of words.

Take responsibility? My fault?

Fitting that he would choose to say that I need to take the blame for the actions I committed because of him. He had been the one to deem me an object to be bought and sold. He had been the one to make me in his image and create a wife he felt was worthy of him. He had been the one to turn my body into a heretic and I had no other choice but to burn her at the stake.

“Husband,” I start as I take a step forward while he takes one back, “What I have done is only because you forced my hand. Every drop of blood, scream ripped from raw throats, tears shed have been because of you.”

Azriel’s terrifying chuckle rings through the room, causing the remaining members of my husband’s house to drop their heads and hide their fear. The blood of their new lady of the house fills the room with a coppery stench and some have taken to covering their faces with their collars. As Azriel around the room, his chest swells with pride at the terror that he’s caused in them but it stills when he lands on me.

A creature who’s grown angular and unholy in the confines of her husband’s cage.

He smiles as he lets his dagger like eyes to slash across my frame.

“Enough of whatever petty martial bullshit this is about,” he dismisses with boredom thick in his voice. “You took something from me and I want it back.”

My husband attempts to fix the situation but the guest cuts him off.

“I said enough,” he seethes, gritting out the words between clenched teeth. The action tightens and sharpens his already pronounced jaw, giving him the appearance akin to a statue.

Within seconds my coward of a husband is lying on the ground, crying and begging for his lord as the Lord of Bloodshed, Cassian, stands over him with his siphons glow a brilliant red.

“Please I don’t have it. I swear I don’t have it!” he begs while the bigger man growls before landing a swift kick to his stomach. “Take whatever you want, please. Anything and it’s yours.”

Cassian looks to Azriel and awaits his judgment. Azriel has not looked away from me this entire night. He’s still locked in on me as he nods. Cassian bends down and grips my husband by the neck, hauling him up so high his feet dangle helplessly below him.

“That’s a dangerous deal you’ve just made.”

My husband begs and begs for his own life but not for mine or even the wife he replaced me with as she lays on the floor in a pool of blood.

“If only I believed you,” Azriel sighs, “but I don’t and I’m not in the mood to hear any more of your lies.”

“Y/n..” my husband turns his pleading to me but I interrupt him with a roar of anger.

“Enough,” I hiss at him, rage boiling in my veins, “You used and manipulated me for years. I was nothing but a toy to brought out when you grew bored. You’ve shoved me off to the side and pushed me to my breaking point but now that the consequences are coming for you, you turn to me and expect me to help.”

Azriel has taken to prowling towards me now that my calm facade has dropped. He stalks me like an apex predator would their prey.

“Did you hear that, princess?” He poses the question to me and only me. “He’s offering you up like a prized goat when he could just give me what he took. That’s not very nice now is it? Seems a bit selfish doesn’t it?”

I attempt to sneak a glance at my husband but he catches my chin in a tight grip, “Don’t look at them, look at me.”

And I do. I’m met with a torrid stare that calls to that divinely angular and starving creature within me.

“You can have her! Take her, please! Please just don’t kill me,” my husband cries out as if I’ll be his saving grace. The sounds are muffled as the utter chaos that lives within Azriel’s heart soothes me into the fall.

I fall into the forked tongued embrace of this devilish man.

I fall into the need of a python that wraps itself around us both.

I fall into the heaving breaths that lunge my chest up and down as I stare at his lips.

I fall into the visions of heat, sweat, gluttony, and lust that awaits us.

Azriel visibly cringes before me at my husband’s words but waits for me.

“Well princess?”

“I want my freedom,” I demand and he flashes me a disastrously beautiful smile.

“Of course,” he promises me. “Of course, princess.”