You are the beloved Lich Empress Eternal, head of the venerated court of the Khlonni Empire.

You have served your people dutifully for some time in the range of one thousand years. In your rule, you have spearheaded unprecedented advancement and faced the challenges of the millennium confidently and found compromise in each. You have rightfully earned your endless term.

Owing to your predecessors, the utmost ruling body of the empire is a position held two-fold, and your counterpart and consort has lived for as long as you have, kept soft and lively as you have ever known them by the same magicks that stay the deterioration of your mind and soul.

Unfortunately, you were already aged and frail by the time the process was perfected enough to be trusted to work upon you. As they ever have, your azure bones slump unmoving against the arm rest of your throne, just as you bid them to move some centuries ago before moving out of them. They were mostly a figurehead, now. Something to remind you that you had lived, once, as a human on poor old Earth. Something for your advisors and head researchers and archmages to speak to when they had news.

Now, you simply watched from above. The camera lenses set into the ceilings and walls and the attendants dragging their feet through your capillaries were your eyes, your ears, your every perception. Sensors built to last gave your mind what your body had retired from lifetimes ago.

In every wall there was touch, fields netting membranes and stoic fibers to tell you your love was running their hand along you, feeling the bump of the wainscoting on their slender, carapaced fingertips. You opened your eyes and saw them, looking up into the alcove holding the camera you watched through, smiling softly as they stepped light on four gentle feet. The hall was spanned by windows on your left and by a painting-dense wall opposite. Light streamed in from behind the glass, cast by lamps and magiclights outside the Gilded Palace, illuminating the faces of warriors of eld rendered in oils and carved stone busts. Thin ebon curtains cast wispy shadows over the light, and starry banners rippled gently at the disturbance of the hall's air.

Distantly, you felt an itch, and opened a hangar door for an airship. You felt booted and carapaced feet tap-tap-tapping on your skin and gracefully shut the door.

More immediately, you admired the sapphire tint of your beloved's innards and the yellow glow of their eyes, which made a fine accent for the black of their silken robes, adding a disarming degree of color to the drab uniform of the office of Emperor. Your love, your betrothed, your bond eternal gave a sigh and ground their heel into the carpet a little.

It felt nice, like a squeeze around the hand, and for a moment you were not a thousand-year-old skeleton keeping an enormous palace as a body but a young woman at the peak of health again, giddy just to touch this bug and over the moon at the fact that they were touching you back. You gave a great sigh, too, and watched as the ethereal breeze kicked up the bottoms of their robes.

They came to a stop at the bust of a paladin with long, straight hair and a gentle, generous smile, and touched the placard.

GALLANTUNWAVERING WYNONA

it read in clear and blocky Khlonni script, putting a name to a stark and clean human face in the middle of a line of stalwart, dust-caked insectoid visages. You felt a finger along your collarbone, and focused on the sight of your lover's hands groping at the bust before them. You felt a hand on your cheek and fingers in your hair as they smiled wistfully at the face you once wore, and leaned in to touch their mandible to your forehead adoringly.

You wished you could kiss them back with those lips, again.

They touched a fingertip to your forehead and dragged it down the bridge of your stone-wrought nose, then softly held your marble chin and brushed their thumb over your carved lips. You rejoiced, internally - it felt something like kissing the back of their hand, again.

You wanted more, though. You conjured visions in your mind's eye of them holding your tongue, touching you where nobody else would, feeling your arousal. Of times where you felt so free and determined that you needed them to hogtie you so that you wouldn't fly away before they had the chance to touch you. You groaned internally at the cruelty of having only a few decades to feel the pleasures of the flesh with your love undying before an inevitable eternity of life watching them love your ambulatory memory.

A door at the end of the hall opened, and in strode another four-legged mantis with nothing but milky blue where its innards should be, its exoskeleton intact save for an eye replaced with an old world prosthetic. All metal, no magic. An antique from a time of strife, just like the man.

"Bezgul," he said, and your spouse turned to face him. "Brother," they replied, and gave a soft nod. The two of them were always like this - despite the curt exchange an aura of ease hung in the hall. Bezgul brushed a thumb over your cheek, and their Brother huffed.

"Can you... not do that in front of me? I am your sworn brother, and beside that, I knew her when she was small." Your beloved considered this for a long moment, then gave another soft kiss to the top of your head and a pat to your cheek before pulling their hand away. You dreamt awake that you leaned on their shoulder. "Apologies, Brother. How is your husband?"

He looked relieved. "Apology accepted. I simply don't want a repeat of that time in the Great Hall when--" but he was cut off by an insistent repeat of "How is your husband?!" and he was, miraculously, dissuaded.

"He's no replacement, but his love for the Saint rivals mine, and the Heir Resurrected has so far been a good friend. You know, you're getting to be just like him...," he said, as if Bezgul was still a maturing wiggler and not one of the most elderly of their people. He paused and patted his pockets with all four hands. "Well, I'm not here to talk about Arstus and our mutual love. I have business in the depths. Be well my sworn Sibling, honorable heir to the seat of myself, my love, and my mother, and her father before her, and our ancestors memorial in myriad beyond him." With this, he bowed and started off down the hall, and Bezgul was content with that. They paused, a hand splayed over the top of your polished head, and waited for him to round the corner.

A finger and thumb slid down the side of this coveted facsimile of what you once were and pinched your earthen ear, then separated entirely from you as their owner started down the hall, toward the door their Brother had entered through.

On the other side, your eyes opened again, and they met your watchful gaze with a breathtaking and needful look. Onward they continued, taking careful steps on your dusty, faded green rug and running their hand along the curvature of a cushioned seat by the window as they passed.

You felt every touch, every step, every brush, as if your lover's hand was upon your arm or feeling up your hip. You felt their grasp at your bared thigh as their hand graced a painting of one of the palace's stewards in the court of your predecessors, and you enjoyed their perfect touch at the ridges formed by the oil laying thick on the canvas. That would have given you goosebumps, if you had them.

"O, mine living god, my watchful eye, ghost of my love undying and ego of my dearest unflinching: I ask thee, is there any way I might but pay tribute before your altar?" You would have smiled. You knew it immediately for what it was: A playful way of asking if they could relieve the tensions of your immortal soul. With no verbal means to respond, you opted for a sign: a caress from the wind in Bezgul's robes. They released a shaky sigh, and wasted no time scurrying down the hall.

Corner after corner, hall to hall, past every nook and lounge and reading room and library in the palace, you watched your sweetest love scurry. Even with two more legs, they ran the same as they always had when they were excited, until their excitement brought them to the vaunted Great Hall.

It was a beautiful antechamber. The green rug of the hallway widened and sprouted little golden stars upon the floor of the room, and there were tapestries hung beside concave stained glass windows. Together, the tapestries and stained glass depicted two legends: the Swallowing of the first saints, and the ascension of the Lich Emperors. Your twin and fellow emperor strode down the green carpet with purpose, and circled around a large round table in the middle surrounded by cobweb-netted chairs. In the table's center was a sheath for a sword that stood across the room, held forever tip-down by your skeletal hand clutched around its softly glowing hilt.

Your betrothed grasped the sword just above its guard and ran their fingertip down its glowing vorpal edge, tracing the curvature of the regal blue-metal broadsword before you. The touch sent a shiver down your spine. It felt the same-- no, better than their touch used to feel on your cock, when you had one. You didn't particularly care to think about it most of the time, but Bezgul remembered so well how to make it feel good. Their mandible came in for a kiss to the engraved flat of the blade, and you would have moaned if you had the throat for it. The sensation was electric, multiplied tenfold by the separation of soul and body. For reasons you never understood, the distance made it all-encompassing, like a blanket of pleasure.

You were always amazed that Bezgul used the sword like this. It was one thing to do what they were about to do, but it was so much more to perform this ritual with this sword. Reverently, they drew their palm down the edge and sliced it open with a guttural cry of delight. The sapphire light of their essence bled from the wound in their carapace, and you watched with bated breath as it formed a tendril of drippy blue goo.

You felt it too, and the corona put off by your skeleton flared for a long moment and held a gently flickering glow in the dim multicolor light of the hall. Crackling arcs of energy danced on your bones and skipped around in the surrounding air, even reaching out to kiss Bezgul upon their cheek, leaving a smarting blue streak. You would have apologized, but... well, actually, you wouldn't. It felt too good for it to touch them, and they mewled about it besides. A mouth would have given the apology no chance.

Bezgul rose to their feet and approached your azure bones, and the snaking tendril of ooze lapped hungrily at their hand, dancing into the gaps between their fingers. They took some time and careful maneuvering to put their front legs up onto the armrests of your throne and bring their upper half to sit upon your skeletal lap.

From the perspective of your eye sockets then, you watched as Bezgul took your emerald-crusted crown and placed it upon their head in a show of domination. They said, "You, milady, hath verily been conquered. The House of Sky lays claim to the holy throne of Ni-patha. And as my first decree as rightful Empress, I say that thou shall serve me eternally as my toything." They then brought their hand up to the cave of your upper jaw, grasping as if to remake your fallen mandible, and the long blue tongue opened at the sides in wavy fans of sapphire. It extended slowly and coiled around the glowing vertebrae of your neck.

At the slightest touch, you were euphoric. Just feeling their hands upon your bones made you want to squeal, and you were infinitely glad that you were mute. But then their eldritch sex probed up into your cranium to touch your wiggling little brain stem, and the wave of a mind-scattering orgasm crashed against you.

Somewhere past the white haze, you were aware that Bezgul could hear you, and you felt the elation in their connected brain when you mentally squirmed. There would be no coming down from that first orgasm anytime soon, you realized, as the feverish pleasure of another started to rise in the back of your mind. Bezgul's extension coiled around and around your wriggling brain stem, and you moaned the oldest verbal incantation you knew (Fuck!).

The impact of another body-shaking orgasm hit you, and Bezgul felt it too. You watched - insofar as you could focus at all - as they shivered and quaked, clutching one hand to their temple and another two to your skeletal shoulders.

Khlonni did not regularly cum like this, you remembered. Mating is generally a political affair, and often the pleasures of the flesh were referred to by Khlonni as a sort of necessary sin. Bezgul, however, as the leader of their people and a lover of humans, did not give a shit and thought that was honestly stupid as hell. Orgasms rule, actually, and humans are radical and you should Join with them and feel their orgasms too.

This thought was the first sign that the ritual was going well, as it got past your initial internal filter before you realized it wasn't yours and was instead intruding from Bezgul's psyche.

You let it happen, then, as it has happened a thousand thousand times before. Sinking is easier when you share a brain with your dom, temporarily, and as the current of bliss washing over you grew into a constant barrage of twitch-inducing orgasmic pleasure, you embraced them, and Bezgul embraced you, and you both shook within their body as their ego overtook yours and you danced and danced and danced inside until you weren't sure what belonged to who, and resigned together to just figure it out later, and you slumped in a big pile over your own bones and squirmed delightedly.

The lights in the city of Ni-Patha and the bones of the palace beneath the sprawl flare, shining brightly. The entire empire rejoices in the love of the Emperors, blissfully ignorant of the cause of its swell.

You are Bezona, the One True Lich Archemperor, the Lovers Joined, the Living God, the Ruler Eternal, the Hallowed Saint of Saints.

And you cannot stop kissing your own skull.