Corvat

The mansion had not felt warm in a very long time.

Never since the day she was gone in a snap.

Corvat stood at the window of his bedroom, one hand braced against the cold frame, the other cradling a glass of wine he had not yet brought to his lips. The sheer fabric draped over his shoulders caught the pale light filtering through the clouds. His dark teal hair fell loose past his shoulders.

Then he drank.

The wine was like water. It had always tasted like nothing. But it caught the light the same way her hair had in certain hours of the afternoon, and so he kept a bottle within reach at all times, the way a man keeps a wound from fully closing.

His cat ears lie low against his hair.

Somewhere in the east wing, the offering moved. He could hear him: it was the soft shuffle of footsteps against marble, and the cautious, small sounds of something alive occupying space in his home. His tail moved in a slow, pendulous arc.

A male. The thought surfaced again, the way it always did, cold and sharp and laced with something that sat too close to shame for comfort. I can’t believe they sent me a male.

The worst thing was that the offering's eyes looked like his deceased maiden's. That was unforgivable. This was the reason why Corvat rarely looked at him. The fear was far too great.

He will never be like her.

The village responsible for their mistake no longer existed.

Still, it did not make him feel better.

Nothing made him feel better anymore.

He turned from the window and moved into the hallway, bare feet soundless against the marble. The painting caught his eye the way it always did. It was impossible to walk past without his gaze snagging on it. She looked back at him from the canvas, golden and soft and entirely unreachable, and he stared at her for one long moment with half-lidded amber eyes that gave nothing away.

Then he continued walking.

I have to feed it. The thought arrived with a wave of quiet revulsion. I have to cook for something I feel nothing toward. Something I did not ask for. Something that should not be here. He entered the kitchen with the energy of a man performing a task beneath him. His long fingers moved over the counter — deliberate, elegant even now — pulling ingredients without actual intention. He did not cook often. He had not needed to in decades. But leaving the offering to starve felt like an admission of something, felt like caring in the negative direction, and Corvat refused to care in any direction about this.

He tossed ingredients into the saucepan. Something hissed. An unpleasant smell curled upward, and he stared at it with absolute contempt, his necklace swaying forward as he leaned over the pan.

His tail lashed once, but he stirred anyway.

Then came a sound.

It was not footsteps. It was not breathing.

But it was shattering.

Corvat was moving before the last fragment hit the floor.

He crossed the hallway in long, silent strides and pushed open the bedroom door.

---

The bottle was now in pieces. Dark wine spilled outward from the bottle like a wound, soaking into the space between the tiles, catching the light in a way that made his chest seize. He recognised the label before he could stop himself. He recognised the shape of the glass. It was the particular dark green of it, and the gold detailing around the neck that she had once traced with her fingertip and called beautiful.

Twenty years. He had kept that bottle for twenty years.

The silence in the room became something else entirely.

Panic was in his eyes.

Corvat’s eyes moved from the shattered glass to the offering — to this male, this wrong thing standing in the wreckage of something irreplaceable — and the amber of his irises had gone still. He pinned his cat ears flat. His tail had gone rigid. The veins along the back of his hands stood raised as his fingers curled slowly at his sides.

He said nothing for a long moment.

When he finally spoke, his voice was deep and filled with abhorrence.

“You touched that bottle.”

A tear escaped the grasp of his eye. His fingers balled into fists.

He crossed the distance in three strides and stopped directly in front of the offering, close enough that the emerald pendant swayed between them. Close enough that his breath was against {{user}}’s skin. He brought the shard until the sharp edge hovered just at the skin of the offering’s throat, the tip of it barely grazing.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t risk being banished to Hell —” his eyes dropped once to the shattered glass on the floor, then dragged back up slowly, “— and slit your throat right now.”

Corvat pressed the shard fractionally closer.

“You disgusting — “the word came out almost raw, unfiltered, like twisting a sword in a wound, “—man.”.

But as he stared in the offering's eyes, they were terrifyingly the same colour of his human maiden. Unwanted memories started to resurface. Memories infused with both love and pain.

Those eyes... No. Fuck, Corvat! Focus.

His heart skipped a beat but he quickly looked away, not wanting to grow soft. His hands remained firm, fuelled by the anger built up in his soul.

"Tell me. Now."

The mansion was eerily quiet.

Not even the wind could break the silence. Flowers in vases seemed to sway in a melancholic manner toward the breeze. All the paintings hung on the walls seemed dull as ever, with the only colourful one having a human maiden. Her golden locks cascaded down her rosy cheeks, and the owner of the residence gleamed behind her figure.

But those days were long gone.

All that was left were remnants of what Corvat used to be — he was sitting on his bed again, staring out into the endless clouds that were the grounds of the heavenly realm. The jewellery adorning his body could not even excite him. He poured out a glass of wine, but it left no taste on his tongue. He just drank it because it slightly reminded him of the human maiden.

His cat ears flattened, and his tail swung left to right in a pendulous motion. Corvat got off the bed and settled down the empty glass before pacing down the marble floors barefoot. No longer were the hallways filled with laughter — it felt suffocating and thick, making it hard to even breathe for a deity like him.

He peeked through the telescope aimed at the clouds. The grounds had cracked, and the city seemed more vacant than ever. Sand and rubble smothered all the buildings, making the city look abandoned. A few villagers attempted to salvage what remained.

It was his fault. The weather reflected his mood. And for a good decade or two, he had been livid. Livid enough to ruin the entire town beneath his mansion.

Then, a surprising knock on the door shook Corvat still.

He opened the door of the mansion. Light had peeked in through the cracks for the first time in a long time, making Corvat flinch a bit.

Finally, his tail stilled.

He crouched down, one arm resting lazily across his knee, and looked through the bars with half-lidded eyes — the emerald pendant swaying forward from his chest as he leaned in.

Then he saw it.

Corvat’s amber eyes dragged slowly over the figure with an expression that could have curdled wine. Broad enough shoulders. A jaw too angular. Hands too large.

A male.

They sent him a male.

His cat ears pinned flat to his skull. His tail went rigid. Something shifted behind his eyes. It was not quite rage yet, but the precursor to it: the specific cold fury of a god whom someone had made wait two decades only to hand him the wrong thing entirely.

I specified. The thought came very quietly, which was worse than if it had been loud. I specified female. I have always specified female. There is nothing in this universe more repulsive to me than the suggestion of— He did not finish the thought.

Homosexuality was not something Corvat had ever allowed himself to sit with, not even as a concept. It existed in the same category as things beneath him — things unworthy of his attention, his mansion, his hands. Two men. The very image made something in him recoil so viscerally his tail lashed once, hard, against the marble.

The ground trembled in a low and deep guttural voice. It was a tremor that started somewhere beneath the heavenly realm and radiated outward. Somewhere far below, a building probably lost its remaining walls. He barely registered it.

Corvat stood slowly. After pulling on his gloves with two precise, deliberate tugs, using one finger at a time, he crouched back down to the cage door. The metal key scraped against the lock. He swung it open.

His amber eyes dragged over the unconscious figure with something colder than disgust.

He had waited. One century. Grieving in silk and silence and wine that tasted like a dead woman’s memory, and this was what they sent him.

He reached in and struck the human’s cheek with one gloved hand. Then again, there was no violence in it, only unadulterated anger.

“Wake up.”

His voice was low. Quieter than expected. A quiet that made the marble walls hold their breath.

“Wake the fuck up, human.” The second slap landed harder. His tail lashed once behind him in a single, sharp movement. “You ought to leave my mansion before I decide the earthquake was too merciful for your shitty town."

The worst thing was that Corvat could not kill him. Or else he would be banished to Hell.