My Taboo Harem!

Phei did not step toward the cloud.

He did not need to.

The thick cloud noticed his noticing, and a single thin tendril detached itself from the bruise-like mass with the languid grace of a predator tasting the air. It drifted across the intervening distance unhurried, almost courteous, and brushed the side of his face before he could lean away.

Phei’s jaw locked.

For one half-second he was somewhere else. He was a woman. He was twenty-six years old. He was begging in a language that had been dead for eleven thousand years, the syllables crumbling like ash on his tongue. He was looking up at something tall and pale that was smiling, and the smile had too many teeth where smiles should never have teeth, and then he was — she was — he was —

The tendril withdrew.

Phei stood very still in the bone-drifts and breathed very carefully through his nose, the air thick and metallic and ancient, and did not say anything for a full four seconds.

Somewhere above him, the red sky rippled, as though the realm itself had just gently reminded him that he was walking through a library whose volumes could, if he lingered too long, read him right back — devour him page by page until nothing remained but another skull in the drifts.

His own body had also been changing while he was occupied.

He looked down.

He was taller. He could tell from the way the bone-field sat further beneath him than it ought to, from the way his own hands, at the ends of his arms, hung in his peripheral vision at a distance that was not his. Broader across the chest. Longer in the limb. Wearing the proportions of a grown man rather than the seventeen-year-old boy he had brought into this portal.

The realm was trying, very gently, to make him fit — to reshape him into something more suitable for its endless appetite.

He reached up and ran his fingers through his hair.

The hair was long. Past his shoulders. Messy, slightly damp, jet black, heavy in a way that spoke of years of uninterrupted growth, falling through his fingers with the weight of the hair he should have had, would have had, could have had, before the last decade had thinned it to nothing.

His hair, he understood with a small, cold interior click, was the hair he would have grown in a life where no one had tried to break him.

Then he looked at his hand.

The hand holding the hair.

His hand.

Except the nails were a fraction too long. A fraction too pointed. The knuckle of his index finger, when he flexed it experimentally, articulated a fraction past the angle a human knuckle was supposed to articulate through — not grotesquely, not visibly to a casual eye, but past the human range, into that belonged to something older, something that had once hunted beneath stranger skies.

The realm was trying, very gently, to make him fit.

Phei closed the hand into a fist.

The nails retreated — reluctantly — back toward his fingertips.

Not all the way.

A chuckle rolled across the bone field.

It came from behind him.

Long. Low. Almost musical. A private, amused chuckle — the sound a patron at the opera might make when a particularly gauche theatre-goer drops their programme mid-aria. Not cruel. Not even dismissive. Simply delighted by the quality of the performance error.

Phei turned.

Slowly.

The realm turned with him — the bone-drifts resettling in small, patient adjustments under his pivot, the red tendrils overhead angling a fraction of a degree to keep him centred in their drifting, ravenous attention.

He saw the throne first.

It just floated there without a platform beneath it or dais.

It hung six feet above the bone-scape, a massive construction of carved red-black stone veined with thin rivers of the same red energy, the back rose into a pointed arch that suggested, without quite being, folded wings of some long-forgotten seraph.

Old chains dangled from the underside of the floating platform — broken clean at the ends, their upper links still intact, their lower lengths gone as though whatever had once been bound there had finally torn itself free.

Hairline cracks veined the red-black stone where — Phei saw, staring — other shapes had once been carved into the throne and then worn away by centuries of use, the old carvings present now only as faint absences beneath the present geometry.

A darker stain ran down the front of the seat that even the red-black stone could not quite hide.

This was not Kyle’s first throne in this realm.

It was, perhaps, not even his tenth.

The armrests were not stone.

The armrests were huge skulls.

Two of them.

Dragon skulls — pristine white, bleached to an almost photographic cleanness against the red-black throne, each one long as a grown man’s torso, jaws closed, horns swept back in elegant, lethal curves. The canines were as long as Phei’s forearm. The empty eye sockets were large enough for him to have put his fist through without touching the bone.

Phei’s vision narrowed.

Something in his chest — something older and more feral than the current version of him — went perfectly, quietly still.

‘Those.’

‘Those do not belong to you.’

‘Those do not belong to anyone.’

Kyle, seated on the throne, watched Phei’s face register the skulls and smiled as if he had been waiting a long time to be appreciated.

He was not the Kyle of the prison.

He was, and he wasn’t.

The face was Kyle’s — the high patrician cheekbones, the sharp jawline, the aquiline nose — scrubbed clean of every teenage trace and replaced with something honed by years Phei had never met. This Kyle was older. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty.

He was beautiful in a way the living Kyle had only flirted with but never quite achieved; a beauty born of centuries of selection, finished to the point where it registered as unsettling before it registered as attractive. Pale. Paler than any living flesh had a right to be — porcelain shading into something that had not seen sunlight in a very long time.

Dark hair swept back from his forehead in heavy waves, longer than Kyle’s in the waking world, gleaming faintly where the red light caught it.

And there were small things wrong with him.