Lustborn

Here is Episode 4 of Lustborn, titled "The First Thirst"

When she woke, her skin was damp with a heat that wasn't from the sun.

The dream still clung to her — the velvet voice, the burning gaze, the silk that wrapped around her wrists. Her heart thundered in her chest like it had seen something ancient. Something forbidden. Something hers.

She sat up in the temple bed, breathless, clutching the pendant that now pulsed like it had a heartbeat of its own. The room was quiet, but her body wasn't. Every part of her throbbed with need. Not hunger. Not fear.

Lust.

> It wasn't just a dream, she thought. It was a door.

A door to somewhere she'd locked away long ago — until now.

And suddenly, without her willing it, memory surged.

---

The Memory

She had been twelve when it first happened.

The day the heat found her.

It had rained for days in the Outer District. The stone gutters overflowed, children ran barefoot through silver puddles, and the smell of wet stone and jasmine filled the air. She remembered the scent more than anything.

Jasmine — and something darker. Muskier. Like lightning before it struck.

She had wandered out from the woman's quarters of the temple where she was being raised. They called her the "child of none." She knew the whispers. Orphan. Abandoned. Strange girl with eyes too knowing. But she didn't mind the isolation. She liked silence. She liked secrets.

That day, the temple fires were low, and the priestesses were busy preparing for the Night of Offerings. Bodies moved in and out of steam chambers, perfumed oils filled the corridors. No one saw her slip through the red-curtained hallway, barefoot and curious.

And that's when she saw him.

The man.

He wasn't a priest or a servant. He wasn't even supposed to be there.

He stood in the shadow of a pillar, shirtless, with a scar like a serpent wrapped around his ribs. His skin gleamed with sweat. He was watching one of the priestesses leave the bath, his eyes heavy, dark, full of longing.

And something inside her... split open.

She didn't understand it then — the tightening in her belly, the sudden rush of heat between her thighs, the trembling in her fingers. She backed away, unnoticed, and ran to her small cot behind the storehouse.

But she could not stop shaking.

That night, she had her first vision. And it wasn't of gods or fire or ancient runes.

It was of him.

His hands. His mouth. His breath against her neck. All imagined, all impossibly real.

She woke moaning, wet, ashamed.

She was twelve. She didn't know the word for what she felt — only that it was vast, alive, and bottomless. A thirst.

She tried to bury it. She chanted prayers, fasted, begged the flames to burn it out of her.

But the thirst grew.

And by the time she was sixteen, the priestesses knew something was wrong. The way men looked at her. The way she looked back.

They called it a sickness.

They were wrong.

Now

Back in the present, her breath hitched.

The memory had come so violently it left her trembling. Her hand found her collarbone, where the necklace lay hot, humming like a coiled secret.

She pressed her thighs together.

It was happening again. Just like before.

She wasn't just lustful. She was Lustborn.

Her body wasn't just reacting. It was awakening. The demon from her dream — he hadn't taken her. He had shown her.

> "You are what I am becoming."

The truth churned inside her: she didn't just want lust. She needed it. It was the only thing that made her feel real. Alive. Whole.

She curled into herself on the bed, eyes wide in the darkness, as the pendant flared once — then dimmed.

A knock echoed against the temple door. Distant. Cold. But she didn't rise.

She could feel it now. Something had shifted inside her. A fuse lit. A silence broken.

The thirst had returned. And this time… she wouldn't run from it.

She would feed it.