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Inspired by the 1868 painting The Enchantress by Heinrich Lossow.
Title: The Statue
Rating: Mature
Fandom: Original Work
Characters/Pairings: Heinrich, the Sphinx, Heinrich's mother. Heinrich/Sphinx
Summary: In Regency England, a bereaved and extremely eligible bachelor dreams of escape from society's demands, and takes solace -and perhaps more than that- in the company of a stone monstrosity
Wordcount: 3563
Warnings/Notes: Grief, duty, moping, marriage demands, sexual fantasy
Claimer: Mine. More or less.
Title: The Statue
Rating: Mature
Fandom: Original Work
Characters/Pairings: Heinrich, the Sphinx, Heinrich's mother. Heinrich/Sphinx
Summary: In Regency England, a bereaved and extremely eligible bachelor dreams of escape from society's demands, and takes solace -and perhaps more than that- in the company of a stone monstrosity
Wordcount: 3563
Warnings/Notes: Grief, duty, moping, marriage demands, sexual fantasy
Claimer: Mine. More or less.
The Statue
Down at the bottom of the gardens, in the copse by the meadow gate, there was a statue of a sphinx. It was a strange, fearsome looking thing. The woman's face, rising above the coiled, muscled power of the lion's body, was fixed in an open-mouthed snarl, baring monstrous teeth to the onlooker and belying any attempt at beauty on the sculptor's part. Yet, despite that, it was not purely monstrous either. The stone was clean and fine, almost translucent in its paleness, and the carved, empty eyes and the sweeping rise of a headdress gave the thing an otherworldly luminosity that, despite its horror, still appealed.
Or perhaps it only appealed to Heinrich. He had been told that his eye for beauty was, perhaps, not entirely reliable. He had been somewhat secluded as a child, a wanderer in the woods and a reader of strange books, and consequently his eye was caught more by dewdrops and spiderwebs and phantoms than by the comely curve of a girl's wrist or the softness of her cheek. The marble ferocity of the sphinx had captured him immediately. He had loved it from the moment he'd first laid eyes upon it, eight months previously when his mother and he had toured the grounds as a prelude to purchasing the property, and that love had not waned since. Indeed, it had strengthened. The sphinx, to whatever degree it could be said of a statue, had become all but his boon companion.
He would not tell anyone so, of course. Not even his mother. From others it would invite mockery, from her it would invite more worry, and Heinrich had need of neither. His attachment to the sphinx was neither strange nor worrisome, he was convinced of that much, and if he took every so often to her cold, ferocious silence as a balm against the clamourings of society, what of it? It did him the world of good, and no one else any harm, and even the sphinx herself had yet to complain about it. So then. It was well and good, and leave it so.
... It was not. Of course it was not. He could see it in his mother's eyes when he came back from yet another tour of the gardens, a book of poetry tucked under one arm and stains once again on the seat of his trousers, where he'd sat for hours on damp stone. He could all but see her thoughts, her worry that her only son was retreating further and further from his peers, heading only deeper into melancholy. The comfort of a statue was cold indeed in the face of a mother's worry, in more senses than one, but there was little he could do about it. He was not designed for this new life of theirs, and they both of them knew it. There was simply no help for it now.
They had bought this house and its grounds, in the river valley north and west of the city, to escape the memories that haunted their old home. Memories of his father, of the love and happiness they had known for years, the happiness they would never know again. He was dead two years now, but the wounds had yet to heal, and they had neither of them been strong enough to continue in that place, where the memories held strongest and most plentiful. A change had been necessary, they'd both felt that.
It was simply that the city, which even forty miles away ruled all around them, was so very foreign to them both. Heinrich had grown up in the forested hills of the north, the land of bandits and fairies and highwaymen, and he had been a fey child on top of that, wandering where he pleased with little enough thought for safety and none at all for propriety. The constant scrutiny here, the placid, eagle eyes of society, were slowly but surely suffocating him, and there was only the cold, marble ferocity of a garden sphinx to bring him comfort. It had been a mistake to come, but one it was too late now to go back on.
He was melancholy, yes. He was damn near more than that. But there was nothing to be done.
His mother was not unaffected either. He'd realised that fairly quickly, for all he had yet to mention it. They did not speak of such things between them, not in words. They traded glances instead, mute pain and understanding, and gave small touches to arms or to shoulders to speak of longed for comfort. She had never mentioned the shadows that clouded her own skies, but he had seen them nonetheless, and he knew their cause. All too well.
She was a wealthy widow now, his mother. A substantial jointure had been agreed upon before she ever entered into marriage with his father, and while she had no property of her own she had more than enough money to live on. A fine target indeed for a gentleman wishing to marry into wealth, and that was without adding the rumours of her relationship to Heinrich himself. Because he was fey-touched, wasn't he. He was a strange and addled young man, who looked to his mother in all things. His father's lands may be his and his alone now, but already he had heard it said that it was his mother who truly controlled them, bending her son to her every whim, such that any man who could control the widow would control the son as well. Or any woman who could replace her, either. They were considered a ripe pair of plums to be plucked, his mother and he.
It was nonsense, of course. Oh, he looked to his mother, all right. She was strength and pride to him, had been since his earliest years, and she'd been much the same to his father too. But the same reason he looked to her was the reason she could not and would not be used against him. For all that he was shy and retiring and much happier in the company of cold stone, he had learned his temper and his strength from her, and any attempt to use either one of them against the other would be met with all force and contempt.
The fact remained, however, that they were both of them ripe for marriage, and there were few of age in the vicinity, male or female, who did not clamour to take advantage of it. There was barely a day went by without someone calling on one or other of them, and there was only so much longer it could endure. If either of them were to have any hope for peace, one of them must be wed before the end of the year, and it would be cruelty indeed on his part to ask that it be his mother.
Which left him here, at the bottom of the garden, gathering his courage in the company of stone monstrosity once again, the better to sally forth that evening and cast his net out into the turgid pools of high society.
He should go back soon, he thought, leaning against the sphinx' flank wearily. He should have a bath, get dressed, have Winthrope get the carriage ready. He should speak to his mother, reassure her that he was well and he was ready once again. All these things he should do.
He couldn't bear to do any of them. He had to, and he couldn't. He wanted to run. He wanted to sprint out through the meadow gate this very moment, run and keep running through this damned crowded valley full of houses, over the bluffs to the north until he found again the forests of his childhood, wild and fey and without care for propriety or marriage or wealth. He wanted to escape, to take his mother with him, to say bedamned to all society and be free.
He was an idiot boy, he thought. For all that he was a man full grown, he was a foolish child even still, and right now he didn't think anyone would argue otherwise.
"If only foolishness were enough to disqualify me from marriage," he muttered, amused with himself and getting his feet back under him at last. He stood, and patted lightly at the sphinx' flank in thanks. "Unfortunately, combined with wealth I think it only makes me more attractive. Better a wealthy, idiot husband to have beneath your thumb than a smart one to have to contend with, hmm? Ach. And I wouldn't mind, necessarily, if only I could trust her as well. But how likely is that? Not at all, I fear."
He moved around in front of the sphinx. Well, it seemed only polite. You shouldn't talk to someone while ambling around behind them. She snarled blankly up at him, her claws flexed and powerful on their plinth, about level with his thighs. He stared at her, a rush of absurd fondness flooding through him, for her fury and her terror and the honesty of her monstrousness, and he leaned down to press his forehead to hers with a sigh. He closed his eyes, and leaned into her stone embrace.
"If only I could marry you, my lady," he said softly, smiling foolishly to himself. "You wouldn't care much for wealth, I think. And at least I would know in advance what I was getting into. You wear your fangs on proud display. Every other belle I've met has kept them hidden behind her smile, the better to poison me all unwary. I think I prefer your honesty."
And for all it was more than half in jest, he almost thought he meant it. Were she real, he doubted a creature of such strength and ferocity would be much interested in him, the insipid boy-child who'd bent her ear with his woes for months on end. She was more likely to eat him on the spot than marry him. But she had been his best and most treasured companion since the loss of his old freedom, and if she were to spring to life this moment, he almost thought he would try it regardless. She could not be worse than what awaited him this evening. As ferocious as she was, there was a stark nobility to her, and he was enough his mother's son to value that even if it killed him. He would propose to her, he thought. If by some magic the chance arose, he would at the very least attempt it.
A strange fantasy, to be sure. He could admit that even to himself. But a comforting one, nonetheless.
He stayed there for a long moment, simply standing, eyes closed and forehead pressed to cool, impassive stone. The thoughts and fears of the evening still wrapped around his throat, but in her presence their stranglehold lessened, at least a little, and for that short while he was as close to content as he could be. He stood, calm in her company, and for a while did nothing save breathe and attempt to regain himself.
And then, suddenly and without warning, the world changed.
Something seized about his hips, a shock of cold, sudden strength, while the stone beneath his brow moved and surged. His eyes flew open, his hands flying upwards in confused defensiveness while his heart hammered in alarm, and then something more, a blankness beyond reach of sense, when he realised what it was that he was looking at, what it was that held him.
The sphinx reared back from her crouch in front of him, stone muscles flexing in a silent roar of power. She moved. Incredibly, impossibly, she moved. Her front paws wrapped around his hips, holding him captive with appalling strength, and slowly, inexorably, she pulled him to her, drew him in without care for his struggles. He staggered, helpless. His thigh hit the marble, crumpled, and abruptly he was sprawled across the plinth in front of her, imprisoned in arms of stone, and her face was there before him. Stark and pale and terrible, she was there, right before his eyes.
Heinrich stared at her, his chest heaving against hers, raw terror and bewilderment thundering through him. He couldn't ... There was nothing in his head. Not a single thought. The situation was simply beyond him, far beyond hope of comprehension, and his terror was all he had left. It wasn't even of her. Not really. It was that the world had moved, that the world was not as he had understood it, that staggered him beyond hope of rescue. Caught, unmoored, he could only stare at her in blind incomprehension.
She stared back at him. Not in fear. In curiosity, instead. She studied him, examined the frail thing caught between her paws in curious interest, leaning close to feel the warmth of him. Her mouth had closed across her teeth, as much as it could, and she looked almost human in that moment. Pale and fierce and otherworldly, yes, but not quite the monster promised by her snarl. Oddly, that almost frightened him more. Her snarl had been fixed in his memory, an honesty and a comfort, and the loss of it frightened him, for all that it should have reassured instead. He did not care for physical safety, right now. He cared for sanity, and the shuddering loss of it.
The sphinx was impassive, however. She was unmoved by his terror, though she took care to hold him gently. As gently as stone could manage, at least. She leaned down, ignoring him as he craned his head back, trying to keep her in sight, trying to keep control, and then ... then she touched her lips to his cheek. She kissed him. Light and chaste and only on his cheek, watching him carefully all the while, but she kissed him nonetheless. At the feel of it, at the thought of it, Heinrich froze.
She didn't move for a second. She had drawn back, studying his reaction to the kiss, and for a few moments in its aftermath, she did nothing else. She did not push, she did not release him, she did not move. She only watched him, watched the flicker of stunned thoughts behind his eyes, and waited.
And then, when Heinrich exhaled in raw amazement and went shudderingly limp in her arms, she leaned back, and kissed him very differently.
It was not chaste, this time. It was no curious, testing peck on the cheek. She laid claim to his mouth in one fell swoop, tugged him up and against her to better grant her access, and plundered him before he could so much as think. He found her teeth again, in that kiss. He found the sharpness of them, the chill of the stone, the taste of moss and rainwater and age. He found her snarl, and her ferocity, and her strength. And underneath that, he found something else. A heat, a spice, a strangeness. Nothing he understood. She took his mouth with hers, and he surrendered without blinking, lost in the surge of sensation through him.
The world made no sense. Up was down and right was wrong, and somehow stone came to life and laid claim to him. Nothing made sense. But for an endless moment, none of that mattered.
She ended it, eventually. She mouthed across his lips, testing their softness with her teeth, and moved up across his features, leaving him to heave a shuddering breath behind her. He slumped, clinging to her stone shoulders, and closed his eyes while he scrabbled desperately for his senses. He could feel her arms around him. He could feel the strange, hard strength of them, a lion's paws carved in marble, the prick of her claws in the small of his back. It terrified him. It amazed him. Something spiked and bloomed in his belly, a wild and trembling thing, and the front of his trousers was suddenly and entirely involuntarily under strain. She held him in her power, she charged impossibly into his world, and something long dormant inside him burst into abrupt and definite life.
He was mortified. He was aroused beyond measure, helpless in her arms, and he was mortified. God and devil help him. What on earth had happened?
"... What are you?" he stammered breathlessly against her, leaning into her chest. "What's happening? What are you?"
She did not answer. She curled her claws behind him, dug them carefully into his skin, and his eyes stuttered open. He pulled his head back, the better to actually look at her, and found himself caught again in her eyes. They were blank still, only marble, but there was something in them. He could see it, even if he could not fully understand it. She looked him, still captured within her grasp, and seemed to wait for something. To ask something of him, silently and with decreasing patience.
After a moment, after a blank and thoughtless stretch of pure confusion, he thought he realised what it was. It couldn't be. Surely she could not have heard his thoughts, nor whatever god or spirit had given her life either. Surely not. But still ... still it was all he could think of. It was the only solution he knew.
"Would you ..." he started, and licked at dry lips. He was panting, he realised. Short, sharp breaths that spoke of panic, or confusion, or even hope. He didn't know himself anymore. Something had changed, something impossible and fundamental, and he had no idea what to do about it, save this. Save ask this question, and see if it might be answered. "Would you marry me, my lady? Do you want to be my wife?"
She smiled. There was no other word for it, though the expression itself was made strange and terrifying and exciting by her fangs. His member jumped a little, embarrassing him all over again, but he managed to ignore it. He managed to focus, instead, on the calm, bright happiness that spread across marble features, and the life that seemed to filter suddenly into what had been only stone. He asked to be her husband, and she smiled at him, and the world seemed suddenly very bright.
And then, of course, he woke.
The shock of cold ground, damp around his breeches and up across his spine, all but wrung a cry from him. He startled upright, horrified and dismayed, to find himself lying in the dirt before the statue, blind and bleary and straining in his trousers. The sphinx rested above him, as ferocious and immobile as ever, and with a dull lurch of realisation Heinrich saw that she was only stone. She had never been anything else. Could never have been. He had only fallen asleep. Somehow, he didn't know how when he had never done anything like it before, he had fallen asleep without realising it, and dreamed himself a strange and terrible dream.
Tears sprang to his eyes. He rolled over, uncaring of the mud that rapidly coated him, and pillowed his weeping eyes upon his arm, sobbing wildly into the dirt. Loss rolled through him, a familiar sensation after his father's death, after their move to the valley, and he let it have him, let it take him as savagely as it wanted. He curled up beneath the statue's foot and wept himself dry in new and ancient grief.
His mother found him there, an hour or so later. She had come looking for him, as the afternoon wore on and the evening's festivities drew inexorably closer. She found him, dry-eyed and swollen of face, sitting propped against the marble plinth. He looked up at her, as fierce and honest a woman as he had thought the sphinx, his mother in all her weariness and strength, and for a second he let her see his anguish. He opened his expression to her, leaving bare all his pain and his confusion and his grief, and then he mastered it, moulded it to determination and calm resignation instead, and let her see that too.
She understood it instantly. He'd known she would. Pain and grief sprang to her eyes in turn, and in their wake came pride, came sorrow, came strength. She knelt beside him, tugging him forward to hold him once and briefly, as she had when he was a child. And then, she let him go. She stood up beside him, held out her hand to him, and together, arm in arm, they walked back up the lawns to the house, and to the cage that awaited them there.
He had learned his strength from her. He'd always known that. Perhaps he should not have been surprised, then, that when he dreamed himself a wife, he dreamed of a thing stronger and fiercer than him by far. A thing to match his mother, if not necessarily resemble her.
He would always have the statue, at least. He would always have the fantasy of it. But dreams were dreams and nothing more, and he had a duty now. His mother had honoured hers already, and he would not balk when it was his turn.
Marriage, it seemed, no more than time or tide, waited for no man of means.
A/N: I was going to have the sphinx be real, and appear to him in human form at the evening dance, but for some reason the depressing ending seemed to better suit my mood right now -_-; You can, however, still imagine the other. I expect I will when I cheer up a bit. Heh.
Down at the bottom of the gardens, in the copse by the meadow gate, there was a statue of a sphinx. It was a strange, fearsome looking thing. The woman's face, rising above the coiled, muscled power of the lion's body, was fixed in an open-mouthed snarl, baring monstrous teeth to the onlooker and belying any attempt at beauty on the sculptor's part. Yet, despite that, it was not purely monstrous either. The stone was clean and fine, almost translucent in its paleness, and the carved, empty eyes and the sweeping rise of a headdress gave the thing an otherworldly luminosity that, despite its horror, still appealed.
Or perhaps it only appealed to Heinrich. He had been told that his eye for beauty was, perhaps, not entirely reliable. He had been somewhat secluded as a child, a wanderer in the woods and a reader of strange books, and consequently his eye was caught more by dewdrops and spiderwebs and phantoms than by the comely curve of a girl's wrist or the softness of her cheek. The marble ferocity of the sphinx had captured him immediately. He had loved it from the moment he'd first laid eyes upon it, eight months previously when his mother and he had toured the grounds as a prelude to purchasing the property, and that love had not waned since. Indeed, it had strengthened. The sphinx, to whatever degree it could be said of a statue, had become all but his boon companion.
He would not tell anyone so, of course. Not even his mother. From others it would invite mockery, from her it would invite more worry, and Heinrich had need of neither. His attachment to the sphinx was neither strange nor worrisome, he was convinced of that much, and if he took every so often to her cold, ferocious silence as a balm against the clamourings of society, what of it? It did him the world of good, and no one else any harm, and even the sphinx herself had yet to complain about it. So then. It was well and good, and leave it so.
... It was not. Of course it was not. He could see it in his mother's eyes when he came back from yet another tour of the gardens, a book of poetry tucked under one arm and stains once again on the seat of his trousers, where he'd sat for hours on damp stone. He could all but see her thoughts, her worry that her only son was retreating further and further from his peers, heading only deeper into melancholy. The comfort of a statue was cold indeed in the face of a mother's worry, in more senses than one, but there was little he could do about it. He was not designed for this new life of theirs, and they both of them knew it. There was simply no help for it now.
They had bought this house and its grounds, in the river valley north and west of the city, to escape the memories that haunted their old home. Memories of his father, of the love and happiness they had known for years, the happiness they would never know again. He was dead two years now, but the wounds had yet to heal, and they had neither of them been strong enough to continue in that place, where the memories held strongest and most plentiful. A change had been necessary, they'd both felt that.
It was simply that the city, which even forty miles away ruled all around them, was so very foreign to them both. Heinrich had grown up in the forested hills of the north, the land of bandits and fairies and highwaymen, and he had been a fey child on top of that, wandering where he pleased with little enough thought for safety and none at all for propriety. The constant scrutiny here, the placid, eagle eyes of society, were slowly but surely suffocating him, and there was only the cold, marble ferocity of a garden sphinx to bring him comfort. It had been a mistake to come, but one it was too late now to go back on.
He was melancholy, yes. He was damn near more than that. But there was nothing to be done.
His mother was not unaffected either. He'd realised that fairly quickly, for all he had yet to mention it. They did not speak of such things between them, not in words. They traded glances instead, mute pain and understanding, and gave small touches to arms or to shoulders to speak of longed for comfort. She had never mentioned the shadows that clouded her own skies, but he had seen them nonetheless, and he knew their cause. All too well.
She was a wealthy widow now, his mother. A substantial jointure had been agreed upon before she ever entered into marriage with his father, and while she had no property of her own she had more than enough money to live on. A fine target indeed for a gentleman wishing to marry into wealth, and that was without adding the rumours of her relationship to Heinrich himself. Because he was fey-touched, wasn't he. He was a strange and addled young man, who looked to his mother in all things. His father's lands may be his and his alone now, but already he had heard it said that it was his mother who truly controlled them, bending her son to her every whim, such that any man who could control the widow would control the son as well. Or any woman who could replace her, either. They were considered a ripe pair of plums to be plucked, his mother and he.
It was nonsense, of course. Oh, he looked to his mother, all right. She was strength and pride to him, had been since his earliest years, and she'd been much the same to his father too. But the same reason he looked to her was the reason she could not and would not be used against him. For all that he was shy and retiring and much happier in the company of cold stone, he had learned his temper and his strength from her, and any attempt to use either one of them against the other would be met with all force and contempt.
The fact remained, however, that they were both of them ripe for marriage, and there were few of age in the vicinity, male or female, who did not clamour to take advantage of it. There was barely a day went by without someone calling on one or other of them, and there was only so much longer it could endure. If either of them were to have any hope for peace, one of them must be wed before the end of the year, and it would be cruelty indeed on his part to ask that it be his mother.
Which left him here, at the bottom of the garden, gathering his courage in the company of stone monstrosity once again, the better to sally forth that evening and cast his net out into the turgid pools of high society.
He should go back soon, he thought, leaning against the sphinx' flank wearily. He should have a bath, get dressed, have Winthrope get the carriage ready. He should speak to his mother, reassure her that he was well and he was ready once again. All these things he should do.
He couldn't bear to do any of them. He had to, and he couldn't. He wanted to run. He wanted to sprint out through the meadow gate this very moment, run and keep running through this damned crowded valley full of houses, over the bluffs to the north until he found again the forests of his childhood, wild and fey and without care for propriety or marriage or wealth. He wanted to escape, to take his mother with him, to say bedamned to all society and be free.
He was an idiot boy, he thought. For all that he was a man full grown, he was a foolish child even still, and right now he didn't think anyone would argue otherwise.
"If only foolishness were enough to disqualify me from marriage," he muttered, amused with himself and getting his feet back under him at last. He stood, and patted lightly at the sphinx' flank in thanks. "Unfortunately, combined with wealth I think it only makes me more attractive. Better a wealthy, idiot husband to have beneath your thumb than a smart one to have to contend with, hmm? Ach. And I wouldn't mind, necessarily, if only I could trust her as well. But how likely is that? Not at all, I fear."
He moved around in front of the sphinx. Well, it seemed only polite. You shouldn't talk to someone while ambling around behind them. She snarled blankly up at him, her claws flexed and powerful on their plinth, about level with his thighs. He stared at her, a rush of absurd fondness flooding through him, for her fury and her terror and the honesty of her monstrousness, and he leaned down to press his forehead to hers with a sigh. He closed his eyes, and leaned into her stone embrace.
"If only I could marry you, my lady," he said softly, smiling foolishly to himself. "You wouldn't care much for wealth, I think. And at least I would know in advance what I was getting into. You wear your fangs on proud display. Every other belle I've met has kept them hidden behind her smile, the better to poison me all unwary. I think I prefer your honesty."
And for all it was more than half in jest, he almost thought he meant it. Were she real, he doubted a creature of such strength and ferocity would be much interested in him, the insipid boy-child who'd bent her ear with his woes for months on end. She was more likely to eat him on the spot than marry him. But she had been his best and most treasured companion since the loss of his old freedom, and if she were to spring to life this moment, he almost thought he would try it regardless. She could not be worse than what awaited him this evening. As ferocious as she was, there was a stark nobility to her, and he was enough his mother's son to value that even if it killed him. He would propose to her, he thought. If by some magic the chance arose, he would at the very least attempt it.
A strange fantasy, to be sure. He could admit that even to himself. But a comforting one, nonetheless.
He stayed there for a long moment, simply standing, eyes closed and forehead pressed to cool, impassive stone. The thoughts and fears of the evening still wrapped around his throat, but in her presence their stranglehold lessened, at least a little, and for that short while he was as close to content as he could be. He stood, calm in her company, and for a while did nothing save breathe and attempt to regain himself.
And then, suddenly and without warning, the world changed.
Something seized about his hips, a shock of cold, sudden strength, while the stone beneath his brow moved and surged. His eyes flew open, his hands flying upwards in confused defensiveness while his heart hammered in alarm, and then something more, a blankness beyond reach of sense, when he realised what it was that he was looking at, what it was that held him.
The sphinx reared back from her crouch in front of him, stone muscles flexing in a silent roar of power. She moved. Incredibly, impossibly, she moved. Her front paws wrapped around his hips, holding him captive with appalling strength, and slowly, inexorably, she pulled him to her, drew him in without care for his struggles. He staggered, helpless. His thigh hit the marble, crumpled, and abruptly he was sprawled across the plinth in front of her, imprisoned in arms of stone, and her face was there before him. Stark and pale and terrible, she was there, right before his eyes.
Heinrich stared at her, his chest heaving against hers, raw terror and bewilderment thundering through him. He couldn't ... There was nothing in his head. Not a single thought. The situation was simply beyond him, far beyond hope of comprehension, and his terror was all he had left. It wasn't even of her. Not really. It was that the world had moved, that the world was not as he had understood it, that staggered him beyond hope of rescue. Caught, unmoored, he could only stare at her in blind incomprehension.
She stared back at him. Not in fear. In curiosity, instead. She studied him, examined the frail thing caught between her paws in curious interest, leaning close to feel the warmth of him. Her mouth had closed across her teeth, as much as it could, and she looked almost human in that moment. Pale and fierce and otherworldly, yes, but not quite the monster promised by her snarl. Oddly, that almost frightened him more. Her snarl had been fixed in his memory, an honesty and a comfort, and the loss of it frightened him, for all that it should have reassured instead. He did not care for physical safety, right now. He cared for sanity, and the shuddering loss of it.
The sphinx was impassive, however. She was unmoved by his terror, though she took care to hold him gently. As gently as stone could manage, at least. She leaned down, ignoring him as he craned his head back, trying to keep her in sight, trying to keep control, and then ... then she touched her lips to his cheek. She kissed him. Light and chaste and only on his cheek, watching him carefully all the while, but she kissed him nonetheless. At the feel of it, at the thought of it, Heinrich froze.
She didn't move for a second. She had drawn back, studying his reaction to the kiss, and for a few moments in its aftermath, she did nothing else. She did not push, she did not release him, she did not move. She only watched him, watched the flicker of stunned thoughts behind his eyes, and waited.
And then, when Heinrich exhaled in raw amazement and went shudderingly limp in her arms, she leaned back, and kissed him very differently.
It was not chaste, this time. It was no curious, testing peck on the cheek. She laid claim to his mouth in one fell swoop, tugged him up and against her to better grant her access, and plundered him before he could so much as think. He found her teeth again, in that kiss. He found the sharpness of them, the chill of the stone, the taste of moss and rainwater and age. He found her snarl, and her ferocity, and her strength. And underneath that, he found something else. A heat, a spice, a strangeness. Nothing he understood. She took his mouth with hers, and he surrendered without blinking, lost in the surge of sensation through him.
The world made no sense. Up was down and right was wrong, and somehow stone came to life and laid claim to him. Nothing made sense. But for an endless moment, none of that mattered.
She ended it, eventually. She mouthed across his lips, testing their softness with her teeth, and moved up across his features, leaving him to heave a shuddering breath behind her. He slumped, clinging to her stone shoulders, and closed his eyes while he scrabbled desperately for his senses. He could feel her arms around him. He could feel the strange, hard strength of them, a lion's paws carved in marble, the prick of her claws in the small of his back. It terrified him. It amazed him. Something spiked and bloomed in his belly, a wild and trembling thing, and the front of his trousers was suddenly and entirely involuntarily under strain. She held him in her power, she charged impossibly into his world, and something long dormant inside him burst into abrupt and definite life.
He was mortified. He was aroused beyond measure, helpless in her arms, and he was mortified. God and devil help him. What on earth had happened?
"... What are you?" he stammered breathlessly against her, leaning into her chest. "What's happening? What are you?"
She did not answer. She curled her claws behind him, dug them carefully into his skin, and his eyes stuttered open. He pulled his head back, the better to actually look at her, and found himself caught again in her eyes. They were blank still, only marble, but there was something in them. He could see it, even if he could not fully understand it. She looked him, still captured within her grasp, and seemed to wait for something. To ask something of him, silently and with decreasing patience.
After a moment, after a blank and thoughtless stretch of pure confusion, he thought he realised what it was. It couldn't be. Surely she could not have heard his thoughts, nor whatever god or spirit had given her life either. Surely not. But still ... still it was all he could think of. It was the only solution he knew.
"Would you ..." he started, and licked at dry lips. He was panting, he realised. Short, sharp breaths that spoke of panic, or confusion, or even hope. He didn't know himself anymore. Something had changed, something impossible and fundamental, and he had no idea what to do about it, save this. Save ask this question, and see if it might be answered. "Would you marry me, my lady? Do you want to be my wife?"
She smiled. There was no other word for it, though the expression itself was made strange and terrifying and exciting by her fangs. His member jumped a little, embarrassing him all over again, but he managed to ignore it. He managed to focus, instead, on the calm, bright happiness that spread across marble features, and the life that seemed to filter suddenly into what had been only stone. He asked to be her husband, and she smiled at him, and the world seemed suddenly very bright.
And then, of course, he woke.
The shock of cold ground, damp around his breeches and up across his spine, all but wrung a cry from him. He startled upright, horrified and dismayed, to find himself lying in the dirt before the statue, blind and bleary and straining in his trousers. The sphinx rested above him, as ferocious and immobile as ever, and with a dull lurch of realisation Heinrich saw that she was only stone. She had never been anything else. Could never have been. He had only fallen asleep. Somehow, he didn't know how when he had never done anything like it before, he had fallen asleep without realising it, and dreamed himself a strange and terrible dream.
Tears sprang to his eyes. He rolled over, uncaring of the mud that rapidly coated him, and pillowed his weeping eyes upon his arm, sobbing wildly into the dirt. Loss rolled through him, a familiar sensation after his father's death, after their move to the valley, and he let it have him, let it take him as savagely as it wanted. He curled up beneath the statue's foot and wept himself dry in new and ancient grief.
His mother found him there, an hour or so later. She had come looking for him, as the afternoon wore on and the evening's festivities drew inexorably closer. She found him, dry-eyed and swollen of face, sitting propped against the marble plinth. He looked up at her, as fierce and honest a woman as he had thought the sphinx, his mother in all her weariness and strength, and for a second he let her see his anguish. He opened his expression to her, leaving bare all his pain and his confusion and his grief, and then he mastered it, moulded it to determination and calm resignation instead, and let her see that too.
She understood it instantly. He'd known she would. Pain and grief sprang to her eyes in turn, and in their wake came pride, came sorrow, came strength. She knelt beside him, tugging him forward to hold him once and briefly, as she had when he was a child. And then, she let him go. She stood up beside him, held out her hand to him, and together, arm in arm, they walked back up the lawns to the house, and to the cage that awaited them there.
He had learned his strength from her. He'd always known that. Perhaps he should not have been surprised, then, that when he dreamed himself a wife, he dreamed of a thing stronger and fiercer than him by far. A thing to match his mother, if not necessarily resemble her.
He would always have the statue, at least. He would always have the fantasy of it. But dreams were dreams and nothing more, and he had a duty now. His mother had honoured hers already, and he would not balk when it was his turn.
Marriage, it seemed, no more than time or tide, waited for no man of means.
A/N: I was going to have the sphinx be real, and appear to him in human form at the evening dance, but for some reason the depressing ending seemed to better suit my mood right now -_-; You can, however, still imagine the other. I expect I will when I cheer up a bit. Heh.
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