Cruelty was never the point.
But it happened anyway.
It was never scripted. Just lived.

Instinctively, asymmetrically.
Unscored by safewords
or symmetry.

Where dominance wasn't roleplay
but a structure the other bled against.
And neither one called it love.

Because love would have demanded
less elegance, more responsibility.

And some part of us needed it to stay
as ritual, not reckoning.

Our dance is trance,
Paint my eyes red,
Lips slightly parted,
wet iron and ash,
I breathe you out,
You hold me in,
One move, one cut,
thousand more,
they fold, mother soaks,
stars behind open eyes,
every drop marks our path.
Hands melt in hours,
body warm, stone of yours
Twin snakes of bones,
dance of souls.
Not mine or yours.

Chameleon daggers,
battle stars,
morning awaits,
dusk to dust cover us.
Witness of the Moon,
child of Bloom,
Legit forged in battle,
Take by two, left as one
Sacred kingdom of sun,
Grey of food, black fruit:
sweetness of soul,
Drip on my chin,
flow free in chant.
Now altar of yours.
I eat your rage, take your blade,
Feed my hunger, tear apart,
clothes torn, ripped wings,
morning sparks.

That's when you rule,
I give my body, will is yours,
till the next night...
When blade of hunger comes.
Gold and red, skins are shred.
Breath the earth as I demand.
Crescent moons, between knees,
ringed sun, crowned path.
I touch ruby and emerald,
Became a prism, to peel the sun.
My voice is river,
your body is the current.
Mountains of will around,
shoulder blades to hold,
tells a story of the old.

Now we curve into one again,
Fed for good, left to loose,
Eyes became mouth, spreads us.
Freedom of day and night,
Felt more sacred,
than one of the eye.
Other is turned to whisper
of trust. Pantheon without us.
How could they bear that was told
Laws became our holds.
Until we meet again:
in echoes, breathes.
Not day and night,
but warmth and light.

I want to know.
How it feels,
when your name
unfolds on my tongue,
chanted,
left in breath,
invoking -
to linger in thought,
not just spoken,
but felt,
when it calls
to just be close,
and present.

Breathing out,
slowly,
in gravity,
let it sink,
deepen,
descend -
to another level,
to another question
is it too much,
or less than enough?
Because what you ask
might reveal more
than you mean,
more than the answer
can ever hold.

I want to know.
How it curls
behind closed lips,
not to hurt,
but left unspoken
in the hollow of my ribs.

How it feels,
when it marks,
grabs your neck,
holds your pulse,
takes your breath
not just with teeth
of hands,
but with freedom
of not holding back.

What it does,
open the mouth.
Silence follows,
shuts the eye to half,
and let it just breathe.
Pulse.
Slowing down.
Freeze -
in the moment
of heat.

And after,
when felt in the gut,
with memory
and weight.
Resonates.
Like an echo
of you, in me.
A midday longing.
Leaves nothing...
to hide,
to prove -
but stays.

When I wake up,
it is void.
Then the room
unfolds around me –
a cold stroke of reality.
It brushes my skin,
crawling up my legs,
slowly warming as it spreads.
A hand, unseen,
caresses reality
into my chest.
It straddles me,
then softly grips my neck.
The pulse in my ears – slow –
becomes the drums of war,
calling a name:

Ishtar.

It’s time.
Breathe for me,
sweat for me.
Let the footsteps
of your fight
feed the ground.
Soak it in my will –
become my altar.
Your sword
bears my truth.
Crescent moons –
my mark –
cover your back.
Eight-pointed stars –
my sign –
won’t leave you in the dark.

The storm washes the syllables away,
crashing against the walls we built,
until only what we carry within remains.
My hands close around the bars.
I cannot be closer.
I cannot be farther.
That is the essence of restraint:
it separates.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asked.
Am I the keeper of your prison? I ask.

Keeper—
a beautiful word.
To keep someone:
is it to watch them through bars,
to toss them a little mercy,
or to ask instead: why bars at all?
If I were the Keeper,
I would tear down your prison,
refuse to accept that you are captive—
even if the whole world were nothing
but a prison.
The role given to me
would not change what I am.
I would ask nothing in return,
not because of you,
but because of me.

It’s something you won’t find
in lexicons or lessons.
It is either there, or it is not.
Where it comes from—
soul, blood, or memory—
I cannot say.
But it feels as if I swallowed a star
I once was,
and now it burns inside me.
Every word I speak
passes through it—
along a starry path, like Nimród.
I do not walk in the light.
The light walks in me.
Every contradiction holds a truth.
I carry them all.

I blindfold myself.
I place you on the scales.
If you weigh more than a feather,
I let you go—
to rise as you will.
I am not your judge,
not your executioner.
I am the Keeper
of truth, of freedom, of myth.
There is a silent verdict.

But you—
you would watch me
through the bars.
You would keep me,
instead of being my Keeper.
You love freedom,
if it’s yours to have.
You love control,
the sweetness of vulnerability.
You would not lift me up
to where you stand.
If I found a little light in my cell,
you would come at once
and claim it as yours.
But what if I carve the walls
with ink—only of you?
If every brick were a fragment of you—
would you tear the walls down then,
just to keep it for yourself?
So I could show you
how it feels
to choose to stay.
And we build the altar of ruin,
again.

When Intuition goes to battle with Reason,
these are usually quick skirmishes—
but this one has broken into war.
The campaign unfolds on the soil of abstraction,
reality, spirituality, and poetry.

Intuition begins with overwhelming superiority—
three of the four fields are hers.
But Reason is insatiable:
guarding the kingdom,
minimizing the losses,
holding the troops’ morale.

Its advisor is Faith—
the Eternal Outsider.
Usually Faith stands by Intuition,
but now he has slipped quietly
to the opposite box,
losing his own faith… one could say.

Intuition without Faith is dangerous.
Her box is always draped in dark lace curtains;
only her voice comes through—
no one has ever seen her face,
except Faith,
who would never stoop so low as to speak of it.

Some claim she is not even human,
others say faceless,
and in the inner circles it is whispered
she wears Janus’ face—
(probably only for Faith,
a mocking trick against hypocrisy).

Yet for the audience outside,
listening from afar,
plain common sense whispers only one thing:
she is a shapeshifter.
Heresy.
Maybe that’s why they are so quiet.

Why is Intuition so dangerous
without her two-faced advisor?
One might suppose the real danger
is the opposite:
that religious fervor seeps into her field
and sprouts the weeds of fanaticism.

For Faith hides not only
fat volumes of sermon under his cassock,
but the stone tablets of morality.
He has, they say,
even used them in close combat.
Effective: the laws of physics themselves
lend the swing its momentum;
at the moment of impact
it already speaks the language of Force.

A cudgel in Faith’s hand,
a drumhead tribunal—
the kind that applies laws literally.

When he sits beside Intuition,
his chair glows in full illumination,
stage-lights blazing,
the glare descending like a halo.
From that light,
behind Intuition’s baroque curtains,
she too takes on form—
not just a whisper,
but an active member of the council.

Without him,
Intuition grows overconfident.
If no one sees her,
perhaps she isn’t even there.
Her influence falters.
In her own words:
she has free rein.

In such moments,
Intuition dons the mask of the prophet—
a mask that grants
a dangerous confidence.
“The prophet does not err—
he is only insufficiently zealous.”

And at the final word, help arrives.
It is Obsession.
She lays her hand lightly
on Intuition’s shoulder
and says nothing but:

“You are right.”