The Night Before Reckoning: Part 2 of 2

It was the warmth that had driven him from the thoughts of religion and reality, the lack of chill alarming him to the presence of the other long before she would've made a sound. Eyes focusing finally on the stylish black leather boots within his perception, Rien found himself making a series of certainly false predictions as his gaze traveled up the female form before him. The premonitions, for once, turned out to be the sort of true that even his eyes did not deny.

Shaen was standing before him, dressed exactly as she did for her press conferences, truly a sight for an awkward late-teen. Despite the snow falling around them, she wore the corset ensemble without a coat. Of course, that might have had something to do with the fact that the snow that was falling around them was only doing that...it did not actually get to land on her pristine shoulders, nearly as pale as the snow falling around them. She wore the sort of smile that chilled his bones despite the heat that she was exuding. It called Rien, even before she spoke, and he did not resist the urges that filled his body.

As the distance between them closed, questions seemed to exit from his mind. The rational being that normally inhabited the ungainly nineteen year olds body vanished without a trace, replaced by the sensation of pure pleasure. Yet it was not even that her presence caused these questions to just leave...she answered them so wholly to his mind that before he understood the response, he had already dismissed them, knowing that she could never lie to him. Finally, there was no distance between them, and her fingers slid against his naked chin.

Time stretched and compressed around them in a way similar to the snow. She had him willingly as far as the Council would be concerned, anyway. He had started walking towards her. All she had done was appear. Rien understood that her intentions for him even then, with her ruby nails sliding against the delicate skin on his throat. It was unnerving. She still hadn't said a damn word, but he knew almost as much about her as she knew about him. The only difference was he simply didn't have the storage capacity to accept the transfer of information she had offered him, and had to take only the most crucial elements to avoid causing a dump of crucial memory functions.

Of course, he had also allowed her to bypass some of the safeguards that would have protected an accidental dump...even as she downloaded his files, she uploaded replacements to some of those locations, giving them the same name to replace them. Strictly speaking, he didn't forget anything. But the files that he possessed now were full of corrupted data that would perpetuate whenever he called upon the old data, affirming itself without appearing corrupted to his person.

By Reckoning morning, he was sitting in the Lair, knowing it was the Lair, and knowing that she had created him again. Rien Thomas Ofphilly would be introduced to the world only as Ritophe now, his heritage erased and replaced with a creation story that had made him a demi-God.