“1,609 days left…” by Duvencrune, Edgar O. Diary of the Long Night, 111th Edition

  The harsh slam of Orlo's door reverberated through the mansion. In a flurry of frustration, he tossed his cane onto the bed and rushed to his desk, shoving it across the floor to barricade the closet. The Little Mouse watched, confused, "What are you doing?"

  "Making sure nobody comes in tonight!" Orlo grumbled as he wrestled another piece of heavy furniture toward the closet.

  "But why?"

  "Because I'm tired! I am so fucking tired of being confused, and nothing fucking makes sense!" Orlo spoke to a near shout.

  "Is this because of Miss Zora? She is nice and makes you happy," the Little Mouse ventured, trying to understand the root of her Master's distress.

  "Do I look happy to you?" Orlo snapped back with an ugly grimace across his face. His injured leg caused a slight limp as he moved other furniture. He gripped the edge of a heavy dresser, his knuckles whitening with the effort. With a deep breath, he pushed, the muscles in his arms and his good leg straining against the weight. The dresser scraped loudly across the floor, its legs dragging against the resistance of the carpet.

  Until a sharp pain shot through his leg, halting his movements and sending him collapsing to the floor with a muffled scream. "I'm so fucking, fucking, fucking tired of being crippled. It's not even fun anymore."

  The little mouse approached him cautiously, "You are having a bad day."

  "A bad day? Do you think I’m having a bad day? My parents died! My best friend was shot in front of my eyes! My Hexe’s girlfriend turned into a Nightmare! I was crippled for life in the process! And my Hexe is gay! She is fucking gay! So, please! Oh, please tell me, how the fuck am I having a bad day? Because I don't get it... I don't fucking get it," Orlo muttered, lying helplessly on the floor.

  The little mouse scurried up to her Master's chest, "Ask away! I will see if I have the answers, although usually, you are the one with all the answers."

  "It doesn't make sense," Orlo murmured, propping himself up on one elbow, "I know she is my Hexe; I feel all the bad symptoms, nausea, tremors, my heart doubles in my chest, the world turns upside down but… I don't feel the good ones, nothing. Even if she hurts herself, I can't feel it. But I can feel other things... I don't understand."

  "I think you need to ask her," the Little Mouse suggested, meeting her Master's troubled gaze with a steadying look.

  "Then she likes girls... I don't get it. How is she my Hexe if she won't ever fall in love with me."

  "You'll need to ask her," the Mouse repeated.

  "Do you have any answer at all?" Orlo sighed, his energy spent, as he collapsed back to the ground.

  The Little Mouse watched him, her eyes full of sympathy but no solutions to offer. Her presence was comforting, and she was right; it was clear that some answers could only come from confronting the source of his confusion directly.

  Orlo rubbed his temples, "I can't make heads or tails of this whole Hexe shenanigan," he said.

  "Oh! This one, I know! I know this: the Hexe was made to bind two creatures through body, mind, and seed. And the hex is to be passed on through generations. If one dies, the other dies too. But at no point does it say they must or will be in love," the Dreamer Mouse explained. After a pause, she added, "But concerning Miss Zora...There are questions that only the one knows how to answer."

  "I wish I never knew about my parents's hex. It would be so simple," Orlo exhaled deeply, the weight of his lineage and whatever came with it pressing down on him. He attempted to stand, but his leg, numb and throbbing with pain, refused to cooperate. "Can you help here?" he asked, looking toward his small Spirit.

  "I could, but you can do this; I believe in you, Master!" the Little Mouse encouraged, giving little jumps.

  "You little son of a..." Orlo grumbled, frustration boiling over. With a last straw of strength, he rolled onto all fours and hauled himself onto the bed. Exhaustion took over as soon as his body hit the mattress, and he fell asleep almost instantly, still clothed, succumbing to the sheer emotional fatigue.

  Orlo's eyelids fluttered open as he felt the disquieting sensation of his pants slipping away, first one leg, then the other. As his vision cleared, he found himself staring into Lolth’s six unblinking eyes.

  "What the..." he started, the abrupt realization that his pants were being pulled off causing him to sit up suddenly. His gaze snapped to Zora, now boldly sitting on his lap, her fingers working deftly at the buttons of his shirt. "What are you doing?"

  "Taking your clothes off!" she murmured as quietly as possible.

  He swatted at her hands, annoyance flaring more than his embarrassment. "Stop with that. I can take my clothes off alone!"

  But Zora was dauntless, her fingers unbuttoning his shirt enough to expose his corset, which she began to unravel with haste.

  "Will you stop?" He tried to reach out, his hands grasping to catch hers and pull them away from him. "Are you listening? Stop!"

  "It’s hurting you!" Zora countered, her fingers deftly continuing to loosen the tight lacing of the girdle. As she freed him from the constraints of his corset, Orlo suddenly felt a wave of pain radiating from his wings, which had been compressed under the garment for an entire day.

  Grasping the reality of his discomfort, Orlo quickly shed his shirt and stretched out his wings fully for the first time in hours. "Oh, fuck that..."

  "Hurts," Zora completed the statement for him.

  Orlo's gaze shifted to the closet, noticing how it was still barricaded with furniture, then back to Zora. "Did you use a shadow portal to come into my room?" he asked, half expecting her to admit to using her magic.

  "No, I used the door."

  "Of course..." Orlo muttered. Her sarcasm made him feel suddenly dumb.

  There they were, Zora cradled in his lap, Orlo half-naked with his translucent wings draping like delicate sheets over his shoulders, settling under their own weight.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "Why are you mad?" she asked.

  "Why am I mad? I told you I was in pain, and you insisted I go up the hill!" Orlo's voice grew louder. It was hard for him at this point to hide his anger and frustration.

  "We did that hike before, and you were able to do it!"

  "Zora, which part of 'I am in pain' do you not understand?" Orlo's voice cracked.

  He could no longer mutter a word, and a heavy silence fell between them. Orlo's gaze was fixed on her, and he was expecting an apology or at least some acknowledgement of his pain. But she remained silent, not responding as he hoped.

  "I know you can't feel things like other creatures, and I can sympathize with that, but you don't have any notion of pain. It's awful—I can't move," he explained, trying to bridge the gap in their understanding.

  "What will happen if someone attacks you and you need to run? You're not tall. You’re not strong. You’re not powerful. You are just smart, book smart! You’re short; you better run fast. But if you can't run, what chances do you have? Your magic is unpredictable; you still can't fully grasp what you can and cannot do. So how?" Zora's questions flew at Orlo with a precise punch in his gut.

  "I run..." Orlo managed to reply, his voice faltering under the intensity of her blue eyes and the vulnerability of his half-dressed state.

  "How?" she asked, not letting him evade the reality of his condition. "How are you going to run when it hurts that much?" She paused, taking a deep breath as if gathering the strength to deliver her next words. "We are not training your leg, nor are we making the pain disappear; we are training your tolerance. Because it's probably going to hurt forever, but at least you'll be able to run."

  "Well, you can't understand, and I don’t blame you," Orlo gently shifted Zora from his lap to the space next to him on the bed. He stood up, his movement careful and measured to minimize the discomfort from his lingering injury. There was a slight limp in his step as he crossed to where his pyjamas were neatly folded on a nearby chair. Picking them up, he began to slip into them, his back to Zora as he spoke over his shoulder. "I can hear your theory, and it's not wrong; I understand your thought about it, but you're missing how pain really affects everything. Some days are okay, and some days are terrible."

  "No."

  "No? How can you tell me no? You have no idea!" Orlo's anger bubbled dangerously, making him struggle to find the words. How could she possibly comprehend his experience, his daily struggle, when she herself was untouched by physical pain? His disbelief was tinged with the sting of being misunderstood by someone who couldn't feel what he felt, someone who was so important to him, and her words meant so much to him.

  "No, the pain is the same. What changes is what distracts you from the pain," Zora explained, slipping under the blankets.

  "What are you talking about?" Orlo, puzzled, walked around to his side of the bed and climbed in, though he remained seated.

  "When you have apple pie, you do more things; the flavour lingers longer in your mouth, and you don’t pay as much attention to your leg. When Muna wears that laced blouse— which I get because you can see her boobs underneath—you also seem to walk faster."

  "I do not notice Muna’s bosom!"

  "I see them too; it’s hard not to notice them," Zora continued nonchalantly.

  "She is your sister!"

  "I’m adopted," Zora replied with a dismissive shrug.

  "And how do you know whether I feel or not?" Orlo asked, but as the question hung in the air, his heart began to race. A realization dawned that there was only one logical answer, and he didn’t know if he was ready to hear it.

  "Because I can feel what you feel. I still can't feel anything unless I'm with you," Zora confessed. "Food is delicious. I love the wind in the morning, even though it stings my skin. I like warmth, but cold is good, too. I don’t like apple pie. But you eat so much... I don't get it. It’s too sweet and tastes too much of cinnamon and lemon."

  "Blasphemy, apple pie is the greatest pie ever!" Orlo interjected, half in jest, his eyebrows raised in mock indignation.

  "I prefer chocolate. I like warm chocolate," she paused, a gentle vulnerability creeping into her voice as she made her next confession. “I like your smell. I like it when your wings cover me when I fall asleep. I like… when you touch me. It's… I don’t know how to explain."

  Despite already knowing Zora was his Hexe, her confession still caught him off guard. He stood frozen for a moment, grappling with emotions that surged through him—surprise, confusion, and a lingering sense of inevitability that the heart wanted what the heart wanted. For a second, he lost grasp of reality.

  Orlo and Zora sat on the bed, wrapped in the cosy embrace of blankets. Orlo's posture was stiff, arms crossed defensively across his chest, while Zora nervously fidgeted with the hem of the blanket, her fingers tracing the fabric's edge.

  "When... when did it start?" Orlo asked hesitantly. He kept his gaze fixed on a distant point, unable to meet her eyes.

  "The day you arrived... I got sick. I thought I was going to die. Darra was really worried about me. And when you stepped into the house, it just disappeared. It happened again at the circus," Zora stole a glance at Orlo, trying to gauge his reaction, but his expression was unreadable.

  ”Inganno tu!”

  “What?”

  "You lied to me," Orlo finally said.

  Zora sat motionless, her eyes, like Orlo’s, fixed on a distant, indeterminate point on the floor, unwilling to meet his gaze. She knew exactly to what he was referring.

  "You said you didn't feel anything, and we... did..." Orlo's words struggled to find their way out.

  "Well, you needed to practice anyway. What difference does it make if I feel it or not?" Zora retorted, yet she still refrained from looking at him.

  "It makes a whole lot of difference! Why didn't you say so? Why... oh, by the Spirits, I see it now! I'm an obnoxious, entitled jerk." Orlo covered his face, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of shame.

  "I don't understand what the big deal is. It was just a couple of kisses... it’s not like we did other things..." Zora felt so small. Her cheeks flushed as she confessed.

  "You said it didn't count."

  "And it didn’t!"

  "Zora..."

  "Don't ask me that..." Zora cut him off. Her heart pounded against her chest, betraying her nervousness. Both were tense, neither wanting to delve into the emotions and secret feelings they had harboured over the moons.

  "I'm so sorry... I didn't want to take advantage of you. I thought I was a good friend, but… I see now I was a... douchebag. I'm really sorry." Orlo turned to face her, catching her in the act of nervously biting her nails.

  "I lied... because... I liked it. So I lied, saying you needed to... practice. Because… you know…" The words tumbled out of Zora, who was hesitant at first but gained a little strength as she finally dared to meet his gaze.

  Orlo's expression shifted unexpectedly, a smirk playing at the corners of his mouth as he tried to suppress a chuckle. "So it was good?"

  "Yeah, it was," she admitted, a soft chuckle escaping her, too.

  As Orlo watched Zora, his hand stealthily moved to his thigh where muscle had been removed. With a discreet pinch, he inflicted a sharp pain upon himself, testing a theory silently. Almost instantly, Zora let out a stifled scream, her hands flying to her mouth to muffle the sound. "What the fuck are you trying to do?"

  "Checking," Orlo replied simply.

  "Oh, so you don't believe me?"

  "I do believe you," Orlo reassured her, his voice softening. “I'm just double-checking.”

  "Happy now?"

  "Let's just sleep. It's late. Can you turn off the light? It's on your side."

  Zora reached out and clicked off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into darkness before she burrowed into the blankets. She lay there, expecting the familiar comfort of Orlo's wings draping over her as they usually did, but tonight, there was nothing. She tapped him lightly on the back with her fingers, "Orlo?"

  "What?" His voice came from above the covers, slightly muffled.

  "Can you do that thing?" she asked.

  "Thing?"

  Orlo smiled and turned to Zora. He removed his shirt and gently pulled her closer, feeling her torso against his. Unfolding his wings, he enveloped them both in a cocoon-like embrace, where veins of gold light illuminated their own little universe beneath.

  "It’s so pretty," Zora murmured.

  Her gaze shifted back to Orlo, who was intently staring into her eyes. His hand tenderly brushed strands of hair from her cheek, drawing her even closer. Their lips met in the most earnest kiss.

  "Don't do this; I don't need practice," he whispered against her lips.

  "I know, but I like it," Zora responded softly, conveying more than mere affection. “I want it…”

  As they deepened their kiss, Zora felt a surge of warmth spreading from her toes to her head, a physical manifestation of the emotions swirling between them. Around them, unnoticed at first in their intimate moment, golden lilies began to sprout, blossoming within the sanctuary of their golden-lit cocoon, echoing the beauty and depth of a cursed love.

  

  "I wished I had told her I loved her back then, and… I still do.” ——The Hexe - Book Two by Professor Edgar O. Duvencrune, First Edition, 555th Summer