Chapter 1: Bound by Fate
Kiss in the Coil, A Dark Romantasy
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Performed by
A shell of his past self, he sought the witch they feared too much to name.
Her magic was no balm—it was deliberate, exacting, and without mercy.
When their magic collides, a Soul-Bind is sealed in venom and vow, constricting their fates.
Now, something old stirs in the dark, and neither of them can walk away.
~+~
He came in the twilight. Priests of Howla named this the hour of warning.
The path he sought to the estate was overgrown—a warning would have sufficed. An opportunity to barter for a better reaping blade. Instead, a path of moss-and-lamiaceae-covered granite stones led him from the woods into what had once been barleyfields, too-long fallow and now reclaimed by wildflower and weed. The squirrels chittered above the quiet man. They thought nothing of the absence of footprints as he emerged from the wet of the wastes. Those boots hadn’t made a meaningful mark in years. The knight hadn’t felt solid ground beneath him, nor the whispered brush of grass against his skin in all that time. Not really.
A witch, they called her…
The villagers hadn’t come with pitchforks for the monster. The utterances dwindled when the clergy reminded the town gossips that the devil withered behind eyes turned away.
“Let the woods have her.”
Only a hush in the village, a true name never spoken, and mothers pulling children tight if the woods grew too still.
“The Fang-Wife,” they whispered. “The one who tames those shadows you hunt.”
Some said she could sink her hands into your chest like wet mud and fish out your ache and want—slick to the wrist, like a haruspex reading ruin between your own treacherous ribs. Others said she had made a pact long ago, and was simply clever enough to live with it.
Or learned to love it.
He didn’t care which was true.
He only knew Ul-Kerath, the Devourer, stirred again—closer now. He could feel it in his bones. The ancient hunger that had hollowed him out years ago and left him to wander was moving leagues away. Distance meant nothing, there was a bond between the knight and his maker. It was stretching again, sharpening its senses to hunt.
They called the Fang-Wife a monster, but between the two he knew which he’d take his chances with. And if the stories were right, she might be the only one who could help him track it.
Or lure it.
He reached the edge of the garden. No gate to be seen. No walls to keep the wilds or intruders at bay, not for some time. Only roses that had learned to bite.
~+~
A hush of cooling crickets lay over Droswold Estate like a linen pall over a corpse. In its hidden garden, the Fang-Wife moved through briar roses and bleeding hearts with old but well-kept shears. Each snip landed with the precision of a priestess.
The garden was ensconced in the ruins of masonry, the remnants of walls all overgrown. Thorned vines sprawled like the cling of groping hands, curling over crumbling stone and otherwise empty rust-chewed arches. She’d pruned the roses that morning, but already they reached for her again. Their pale petals bloomed on the light wind, like mouths whispering her name as she passed.
Her gown brushed slick grass as she walked past the fountain: a cracked cherub whose water spilled like weeping. It gave its evening vespers:
In bloodless dusk the beasts were born,
Of hollow breath and hearts forsworn.
They gather ‘round the witching tree—
To bind, to break, to set souls free.
She paused beneath a twisted pear tree, its shaggy autumn bark like fingers raised in warning. She pressed a palm to it—a mother’s hush. Magic stirred faintly beneath the surface like an old bruise. Like her.
Then: a footstep.
A figure stood at the garden’s empty gate—jagged, stark, foreign against her holy rot. A man, cloaked and watching, as her fingers curled in tighter.
“Get out,” she said, voice cool as stone. The hair at her nape prickled.
He stepped forward.
“Fang-Wife,” his voice rasped, dry and cracked from disuse. “You were not easily found.”
“Then be easily gone.” She let the shears—ash-and-twine wrapped handles—fall from her ruddy fingers to the path.
“I crossed the wastes nine nights to stand before you.” The Fang-Wife noticed his gaunt cheeks, sprouting stubble and crooked nose from beneath the hood.
“I made no summons.”
“Nevertheless.” He stood defiant.
She tilted her head, snake-like.
“Who speaks to a witch with court phrases and empty hands?”
The man loosed his cloak. Beneath, scorched leathers bore the remnants of a crest: a sword wreathed in two snakes. Her breath caught.
“Where did you come by that?”
“It was granted by favor,” he said, stepping further into the dusk. His face bore old lament. His gray eyes carried worse. “Before the curse.”
She studied him like a locked door with a key she dared not turn.
“You lie.” Her fingers slipped to the pocket of her apron.
“Do I?”
“You wear lost heraldry like proof and think I will kneel for it?” Her voice was low with disgust
“No,” he drawled with care, lowering the hood of his cloak. “But desperation might sway you.”
Her frown deepened. “Leave.”
“Not until you help me.”
She laughed—a single, sharp note.
“You know nothing of me.”
“I know what they whisper. Born beneath a black sun. Wields serpentcraft and revels in blood. Mistress of the waneborne. Do I err?”
“Go.” Her voice iced over, threatening an aggressive step forward. “Before the soil remembers you.”
“I won’t,” he stilled. “Because you can call them. And I need one called.”
Her wards surged. The briars hissed awake, closing the path out of the garden with a whispering snarl.
“You trespass on blood-marked ground.”
He reached into his cloak smoothly and flung something black to the ground. A sigil no wider than a coin struck the moss with a hiss. The vines recoiled, keening.
The woman went still.
“Duskblood. How?”
The man swayed, breath ragged from some unseen effort.
“Because I am a Vantel.”
Her head snapped to him and eyes her widened. She saw it now, the telltale absence. Something had been ripped from this man and never replaced. A wound, an emptiness in the body and behind the eyes where a soul should cling.
“You walk unmoored.”
“And you are the last name left to me.”
“I am not a weapon.”
“No,” he said plainly, indicating her hesitancy. “You are afraid. Of the parts of you that remember how to strike.”
Her magic surged in response to the knight’s insolence, thickened air swirling around them. She tore the talisman from her apron—twine, rabbit-hair, thorn-oil, and blood—and flung it true. It struck him square in the chest.
The world cracked open.
Magic collided, soundless, spiraled out from the both of them. A force ruptured between and the vines screamed. The cherub in the fountain shattered in the impact of compressed air. Both bodies fell back.
The Fang-Wife gasped. Pain licked up her arm like the devil’s tongue. She yanked back her sleeve.
There it was. A mark burned on her like a brand, a pact she hadn’t made. A serpent twisted into a circle, trying to swallow itself—but the head had been severed. Ripped clean off. The mouth gaped open, forever hungry. Around it, black glyphs curled like dying veins—still shifting, still writing themselves.
She looked up. The man already watched his own wrist, jaw locked. Same mark.
Their eyes met.
“No,” she whispered.
They tried to move, scrambling to their feet. The witch tried to turn and run. Pain seared in both of their arms and behind their eyes. The magic of the Bind retracted them back to center like a hook through flesh.
“What did you do?” she hissed.
“It wasn’t me!”
“A Soul-Bind. Gods help me.”
“A what? I have no soul.”
“Then you’ve stolen half of mine! If one of us dies—”
“The other follows.” Quiet, sure.
The woman turned, swiping at sudden, stinging tears.
“You fool… You’ve doomed us both.”
“I didn’t know!” The knight widened his eyes, moved for the first time in their encounter. That gave the witch some gratification.
Could it be the armor he wears? She began to pace, breath wild. The edge of the garden burned to approach. Each step away wrenched like a hook beneath her ribs.
He tested the threshold. Same pain. Same coil. They returned to center. Bound.
“This is your doing.”
“I never touched you.”
“You carried waneborne magic, duskbeast blood across an active boundary,” her voice shook, guessing. “It inverted my casting.”
“I didn’t know,” he repeated, flexing the hand above the brand and searching a pouch at his belt.
“Well now you do,” she snarled, head in her hands at the remains of the fountain’s pool. “We need to know exactly what it’s feeding on before I even attempt to unbind this…”
He moved to her elbow.
“So we’re bound together, then?” The witch rose to her feet and they circled each other like snakes around the same spine.
One walks hollow, mouth of need.
One bears fang, and will to feed.
Bound by coil, in blood and breath—
They wake the gate that speaks in death.
She ignored the lullaby from the cherub’s fractured face on the grass, still crying. She pressed her fingers to the brand. It pulsed slow and thick, like a second heart. So did his. One rhythm. A single breath.
She held hers. The mark dimmed.
“Who are you?”
“I am Sir Wytheric.” The wards chimed behind them, urgent.
Below the cliff upon which the garden was perched, villagers called up in fear.
“Lady Sabine,” a woman called. “A duskbeast stalks the village. We beg your aid!”
Sabine’s hand clenched around her wrist again. Wytheric shifted on his feet, examining her.
“This is why I came,” he murmured.
She said nothing. She turned and the grass parted for her like it feared the heat of her pulse. The knight followed her down the hill.
“Where was it last seen?” She called ahead of her to the villagers, her spine straight, jaw set, chin lifted.
“Past the standing stones, milady.”
She nodded once.
“Return to the village,” Sabine’s eyes creased deeply at the corners as she assessed the sky, her dark hair whipping around her. “Lock your doors and keep your kin close. We’ll be there shortly.” The washer woman from the village nodded. With skepticism she eyed the knight up and down, not remembering the heraldry on his breastplate. She said nothing more and peeled off to rejoin her retreating neighbors back to Evenrude.
“Shall we hunt monsters together, Lady Sabine?” Wytheric asked as they marched off-trail into tall grass as the sunlight died. She said nothing. The Bind pulsed.
And beneath their steps, something ancient stirred.
Somewhere ahead, the duskbeast waited.
Next time on Kiss in the Coil:
Bound by fate, hunted by night; As Sabine and Wytheric confront the duskbeast, the price of power begins to unravel—and something far older than either of them stirs in the dark. One does not summon monsters without waking other things.
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🖤 Nico
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That was fun! There's a nice rhythm to the words that matches the spellbinding feel of the whole chapter as well. Like we're being unwittingly hypnotized by a spell by the very story itself!
The imagery of the Soul-Bind mark is haunting, the serpent trying to swallow itself with its head severed. Wytheric being hollow and unmoored makes the bind even more intresting, how can he be bound without a soul? The tension when they both tried to leave the garden and got yanked back was visceral. Can't wait to see how this duskbeast hunt goes when they're literaly tethered together.