active feeding
After last time I’ve been more careful. At least, you haven’t had to come rescue me from any dreamworld creatures or demons. But you know I’ve been working.
The first time you told me about astral feeding I almost exploded, veering erratically between cosmic horror, profound excitement, lust, and a kind of stillness that looked like an actual trauma response. Honestly, at the time you didn’t know what to make of it.
So when you teasingly offered to feed upon me you were more than a little surprised to hear me say yes. Not only that, but to offer up a key to my soul. I explained it badly: “I don’t want anywhere to hide from you. Here, it’s an octogram.”
You asked why and I actually blushed and didn’t answer for a long while. I was rubbing your feet at the time. You can always tell when I’m thinking because when I’m meant to be moving I become still and when I’m meant to be still I fidget. I’d stopped massaging.
“I used to fear soul-stealers. With pathological intensity. Even if I didn’t believe in any of that stuff. It made me ill.” I smiled a brittle smile at you, leaving unacknowledged the fact that you can sup at the altar of the soul. “The octogram became a symbol of protection. I realise now I reinforced it as such, without realising that’s what I was doing.”
“And now you gave it away,” you said. Even in the sleepy evening your senses were keen enough to notice goosebumps pepper my forearms. I nodded. “Why?”
“Perfectly natural fear response. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fuck.”
“Which one am I?”
I grinned and threw your feet aside to switch my hips and cover your body with mine. We kissed hot, long and hungry, and then more.
The first time you fed you let me know the week but not the day. It was strange, watching your prey twist itself in agonies of anticipation, second-guessing every sensation. The true feeding was almost gentle. My sleeping spirit hung in space and you enclosed me with your tendrils, constricting, squeezing, feeling a body warm to your touch then blossom open to the kiss of your cutting tendrils. I scarcely stirred as you drank, blood a convenient metaphor for what you were taking. Flesh, too: my eyelashes never fluttered as they graced the back of your tongue. With unconscious prey, eating me was almost an exercise in masturbation. You threaded my being through a corrosive channel in your own like a private hellscape, all for the pleasure and joy of fullness, glutting yourself on my essence.
While you withdrew from that space, groaning with the weight of your partner, did you know you were binding me to you? That the sleeping part of me would forevermore seek to return?
Now, the memory of that time drives me. Or rather the lack of memory. I feel the faint echoes of your hunger and long for more.
As good a reason as any to try to awaken.
It still amuses me when I ask you to feed on me in this way. You will never understand it. But perhaps you will never stop being charmed by my uncharacteristic shyness, the way I lower my eyes then look back, hopeful.
And so you face your mirror once again.
The room is dark enough that your hair blends perfectly into the background. Your eyes stand out obscure red in a pale face that shifts in your staring vision, a phenomenon you are well used to. You are prepared, comfortable, sensual, making free to begin your feed by touching yourself, carefully shepherding an orgasm that will springboard you to where you wish to be but also shape that space to better fit your desires. You tease yourself in ebb and flow so that your astral body is better prepared to enjoy the delights of the feast.
An unexpected pleasure, your stomach growls and squelches its way through a meal as you practise. Its reverberations thrill you, raise sweat on your skin as you massage your clit. You love your body. You take care to build an avatar that you will love just as much.
The time comes and so do you. The mirror becomes a window becomes a door and you step through even as your body rocks with pleasure.
It’s not me hanging in front of you.
The body floats like you’ve seen mine and countless others’ do, scarcely moved by eddies of an intangible wind. But mine has been constructed by an inexperienced practitioner. You can see the hard planes and effort where the hands meet the arms meet the body.
You feel a grin stealing over your face. Your fangs exaggerate themselves. You decide that when you find me you will make me regret playing hard to get.
I’ve played with a mirror of my own. Behind the effigy it stands almost parallel to yours, but rotated just a fraction of a degree so that the reflections in reflections tend to curve, forming an impossibly broad circle of backwards/forwards images of you and my puppet.
There must be millions of me. A clever way of hiding in plain sight. But then, you know I would not wish to be far from you.
You turn around. The effigy reflected there is not a puppet. Its body is a true and natural expression of me, one you have savoured on a number of occasions.
You step into and through my mirror then judge the glass a fraction of a degree. Infinite copies of a trick collapse into we two singular entities.
I am not yet awakened enough to move. I still hang as if suspended in space. The only difference is that my eyes are open. I’m looking at you as you sashay towards me.
Do my eyes betray disappointment that my trick didn’t work? Excitement? Fear, at what is to come? It’s hard to tell in the mostly-sleeping face, and as your mouth waters, you find you don’t altogether care.
You step through a protective circle as easily as walking through rain. No shield I could create will ever bar you.
Your touch raises welts on my skin as you walk around me. Elegant constructed fingernails with irresistible solidity cause blood to well and trickle down my body. You lean in close for a taste. Was that a shiver as your tongue drew a luxurious line through my spilled blood? Perhaps one day I’ll be able properly to struggle inside your spirit body. The thought makes you wet.
The heady flavour and the sexual energy and the excitement of finding your prey come together in impatient hunger. You trace your cutting fingernails across the skin of my neck and the following lick ends with your jaws scissoring together. Your elongated fangs tear brutally through my spirit-flesh.
Ah, you felt me tense. You wonder if my physical body is wracked with a similar pain. Thrilled, you pull from me a great swallow of blood. So great that the tenseness is quelled, as if you almost drank the life from me right there and then. Another mouthful, another dimming of my consciousness, but the feeling and taste is exquisite.
As you empty me down your gullet I shiver. A natural reflex seeks to hold me still. Dark tendrils slip from your back to loop around your prey, again and again, binding me to you. The tips’ steady progress barely alters as they change from moving through the air of the abyss to moving through my flesh. You find deeper vessels in chest and thigh and drink more rapidly. Heat flows in circles out of me, through your tendrils, and into you through your shoulders.
Drinking so violently it is not long before I am almost gone. My open eyes are dim, rimmed with tears. They look upon you as you draw back, pleading for something. An end? You will give it.
A kiss, to the forehead. I ran today, and was punished, but you will be kind. You will put me to sleep, deep, where you are already gorged on my blood.
You taste salt on my cheeks as you jaws widen and press me between. Your hunger ought to be dimmed but your greed knows no bounds and you frenzy as I stretch out your throat. Desiring more you pull with claws and tendrils. Swallowing is an afterthought, a fleshy massage, secondary to the desire to just pull me inside. You are a cup, and I am filling you. The sensation of tightness traces from your jaws down your chest and then disappears as your more capacious stomach gracefully accepts my head; but as my shoulders and chest fill you up, the tightness comes back, builds, keeps building. By the time your stomach claims my calves and the last of me you are practically mewling in ecstatic tautness, your body containing a whole other essence that for the moment is whole and aware and alive.
Your body will change that. Cruel digestion is already ripping into the fabric of me. Even as you sing out an awesome belch signalling my envelopment in your flesh I scream, the first sound I have managed to make. You barely hear it, bubbling as it is through your percolating guts and my own blood that you imbibed.
Sloshing, you feel your way back out my mirror and through your own. There your lean body waits to be filled up by your swollen spirit, replete with captive soul still screaming inside your spiritual digestion. You wonder how much I have consciously felt, and how deep the wounds will run. You wonder how completely you will bind me to you, till eventually one day I give up everything in the name of your hunger.