The bathroom waited for her in low, attentive silence; the sunken basin of black marble already brimming with water cold enough to hold its breath, the air above it trembling in soft, anticipatory veils.

She unfastened her robes without ceremony.

The dark silk slid from her shoulders in a single, languid surrender, it gathered for a heartbeat at the swell of her hips as though reluctant to part from such finely-curved terrain, then pooled at her feet in a black puddle of obsolete modesty.

The cool bathroom air met Sienna’s bare skin in a low paradoxical hush; it was cold along the high planes of her shoulders and the soft undersides of her breasts, warm where the feather’s residual aura still simmered in the marrow of her bones.

As the two sensations braided themselves around her in a strange the sensual harmony made Sienna’s nipples tighten before she had even stepped into the water but she didn’t care about any of it if she even took any meanings in what ever made her nipples at at.

Sienna crossed to the basin with unhurried indolence.

Each of her step set a faint ripple of nether-violet light moving along the obsidian veins beneath the floor, the room leaning in toward her without quite admitting it. Her hair fell loose down the long, elegant column of her spine, ink-black against milk-pale flesh, and the incense smoke from the bedroom beyond followed her like some kind of worshipful tendrils.

Sienna stepped down slowly, one foot first, then the other before sinking into the cold water that gasped and clung around her ankles like a lover too eager to wait; the chill climbed her calves in slow, possessive strokes, wrapping around the backs of her knees before daringly slid higher to the soft, sensitive skin of her thighs.

The water felt almost greedy as it rose, caressing the warm flesh between Nether Goddess’s legs like some cold deliberate fingers, making her skin tighten and pebble while a slow, treacherous heat bloomed low in her belly in answer making contrast between the cold water and her warm skin.

By the time the dark gleam of the surface had climbed to the soft underswell of Sienna’s breasts she had already lowered herself fully, lithe, slow and almost sovereign, into the water now lapping at the sensitive undersides of her breasts, the cold making her nipples draw tight and aching against the black surface.

She rested the back of her head slowly against the tub’s cold lip and her lashes drifting shut with her lips parting on the smallest sigh the room would ever be permitted to overhear; a quiet, helpless sound that spoke of her over fatigued and abused skin meeting water and liking it far too much.

Then Sienna lifted the feather:

It hovered above the water at her summons, golden and corrupted and obscenely tall, the air around its spine still bending out of true in ways even her own walls could not fully ignore.

A low, sub-audible screaming threaded from it into the bathroom; but it was not sound exactly, more the idea of sound, the impression of a thing that had been mid-shriek for cosmic ages and had not yet been granted the mercy of stopping.

There were corruptive golden flames now that cringed to it making the obsidian veins beneath the floor pulsed a shade darker.

She turned her wrist in a small, indulgent gesture and she let it fall in the tun where she lay rested but the water did not splash despite the feather’s cosmic weight given the power it held and who it once belonged to.

But while that it happen; the water actually convulsed:

The instant the feather’s tip kissed the surface, the basin shuddered in like a long, structural groan, and the entirety of water started to spasmed and bubbling violently, hissing before climbing the inner walls of the tub in panicked black-gold ripples that splashed the marble lip and steamed where they landed.

The clear water had not gracefully tinted, it felt like it had been infected.

The corruptive-gold bled outward from the feather’s slow-sinking length not as colour but as contaminative veins of divine ichor that started threading through the nether energy and the water like rot through fruit.

The gold ichor deepened into flowing dark gold and then deepening into a heavier more honeyed, more agonised gold until the entire basin held what looked less like bathwater than the bled-out heartblood of a continent-sized corpse back in her realm.

The water seemed to sing corruptively too now.

It was the wrong word, sang, because the sound was not music.

This one was a hairline shriek of dying divinity being held against its will inside a smaller vessel — the same scream her generals had heard pouring out of the heart-crater at the mountain’s peak, the same scream Sienna had heard echoing across her own black lakes for cosmic ages, now compressed into one bathtub’s worth of liquid blasphemy.

The walls flinched too at it while the violet flames guttered and, one by one, went out — surrendering to the golden mist that began climbing the room in slow, opulent fog, drowning the cathedral hush in corrupted radiance.

The scent rose with the mist

Corrupted purity; that was the phrase her tongue kept reaching for and discarding as insufficient.

Holiness gone wrong in the cellar like frankincense in a tomb where the body had once been beautiful.

The sweetness so thick and pristine it bordered on profanity and it slowly threaded through with a low, dark undernote of corpse-bile that whispered to the back of her throat about appetites best not named in lit rooms.

Honeyed rot. Liquid divine poison. Every breath was a small act of swallowing something that did not want to be swallowed — and she swallowed it anyway, slow, deliberate, sovereign, because Sienna had walked the slopes of that mountain in person despite not being powerful enough to and she had desire and nothing would never dare make her flinch in her own bathroom.

The feather, against the persuasion of her nether energy, began to resist.

She felt it; the dead Immortal-god’s essence inside the plume bristle, gather, trying to refuse.