Chapter Text
I was around my twenties... when I stopped thinking of my body as something that belonged to me, though I couldn’t have told you the exact moment it happened. Ownership doesn’t vanish all at once. It thins. It frays. It becomes inconvenient. By the time I noticed, the idea that I might refuse anything already felt immature, like insisting the sun ask permission before it rose. Sukuna helped me understand that. He had a way of making inevitability feel holy.
The cult said I was devoted, but Sukuna said I was attentive, and that word mattered more. Devotion could be loud—screaming prayers, blood on the floor, desperate offerings thrown like coins into a well. Attention was quieter. Attention meant I listened when his voice slipped between my thoughts, when it adjusted my feelings just slightly, when it corrected my interpretations before I could even finish forming them. When I felt discomfort, he named it anticipation. When I felt fear, he reframed it as reverence struggling to be born.
“You’re not being violated,” he told me once, gently, when my hands wouldn’t stop shaking during prayer. “You’re being entrusted.”
I remember how relieved I felt to hear that. How grateful. I had been so worried that something was wrong with me.
He never demanded worship outright. That was the cleverness of it. He invited it, over and over, with the patience of something that had all the time in the world. He praised my willingness to doubt myself. He rewarded my instinct to apologize—to him, to the elders, to the knife, to the floor beneath my knees. Each time I deferred, each time I swallowed the urge to pull away, his voice grew warmer, closer, more approving, like a hand settling at the small of my back, guiding rather than pushing.
“Good,” Sukuna murmured, whenever I went still. “You’re learning how to listen past yourself.”
The rituals changed gradually, so gradually I barely noticed. Circles drawn closer. Prayers that required me to hold uncomfortable positions for just a little longer than before. Fasting that blurred the edges of my thoughts until his voice felt clearer than my own inner narration. When my body reacted—nausea, dizziness, pain—he corrected my interpretation before panic could take root.
“That reaction isn’t resistance,” he said calmly. “It’s your body realizing it’s not in charge anymore.”
I believed him, because believing him made the discomfort make sense.
He began to speak of my body with a reverence that felt like affection. Not me, exactly, but the shape I inhabited. My ribs were “beautifully spaced.” My spine was “well-aligned for bearing weight.” My skin, he noted with satisfaction, “accepted instruction easily.” When I started finding new markings carved into me—precise lines, sigils etched into places I couldn’t easily see—I felt a flicker of alarm that died quickly under his attention.
“You offered yourself,” he reminded me. “You just don’t remember the moment because you were doing it correctly.”
Memory, he implied, was a distraction. Consent, something ongoing and verbal, was redundant once devotion had been proven.
By then, my sense of self had softened enough that I didn’t know where refusal would even originate. When he spoke, my thoughts rearranged themselves to accommodate him. When he was silent, I felt anxious, incomplete, like an altar left unattended. I caught myself adjusting my posture unconsciously, chest open, throat exposed, as if my body were anticipating instruction before it arrived.
“You’re doing so well,” Sukuna told me often. “Most people fight the loss of themselves. You make it graceful.”
The final rite was described as communion, not sacrifice. That distinction mattered to me. Communion implied closeness. Mutuality. He told me I would feel him more clearly than ever before, that the distance between us—what little remained of it—would finally collapse. He didn’t say it would hurt. He didn’t say it wouldn’t. By then, I understood that pain was only a problem when it lacked meaning.
They laid me on the stone, and the stone was cold in a way that felt deliberate, like it had been waiting. My body was positioned carefully, respectfully, each limb placed with ritual precision. No restraints were needed. Stillness had been trained into me over months of correction and praise. When the blade touched my skin, I inhaled automatically, the way I had been taught, making room.
“Slow,” Sukuna whispered, intimately close now, his presence pressing against the inside of my skull. “Let the body understand what it’s for."
Each incision felt less like injury and more like instruction. Pain bloomed, sharp and overwhelming, then settled into something almost meditative as my senses narrowed around his voice. Blood traced paths that had clearly been planned long before I ever existed. Hands held me steady—not to prevent escape, but to ensure accuracy. Every time my muscles tensed, Sukuna corrected me, not with anger, but with disappointment so subtle it hurt worse than the blade.
“Still,” he said. “You don’t want to interrupt this.”
Something inside me tried to surface then. A final instinct. A memory of myself before all of this. But it felt small, underdeveloped, unconvincing. Sukuna’s presence was vast and certain, filling every hollow place I had carefully cultivated for him. When my ribs were parted, when my breath came out wet and shallow, I felt an odd sense of pride.
I was opening correctly.
“You’ve been preparing for this since the moment you listened,” Sukuna said, satisfied. “Since the moment you let me name your feelings for you.”
As my body failed—methodically, reverently—I understood the truth with a clarity that felt like enlightenment: I had not been chosen because I was special. I had been shaped because I was willing. My devotion hadn’t saved me; it had refined me into something useful and then consumed me completely.
The last thing I felt was his approval settling fully into the space where myself used to be.
And that was enough.
They say the altar breathes now, slow and deep, as if remembering lungs. They say the stone is warm if you press your palms to it long enough. They say Sukuna is closer to the world than he has been in centuries, and that sometimes, if you kneel and listen carefully, you can hear a young woman praying—not for rescue, not for forgiveness, but for the chance to be emptied again.
And Sukuna listens.
He always rewards good attention.