Wise, and a mutant, or so Clark says, and I'd seen his face in my dreams and in reflections for all my life: twenty-one years of dreaming of him before he saved my life by the bridge that day, and asked my name. He may as well have lifted me onto a high horse and carried me off to his castle - my castle - semantics - my face buried in the dark night of his hair. Clark has always asked for the best of what I had; a king's right, it was.

Clark's eyes green and changing in the morning light, and I knew him, not as the last of his kind, not as a king, for I knew nothing of that then, but as my love. He took all he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me something ten-fold more precious. He returned to me, as a friend, then as a lover, day following day, night following night: his eyes so green, his skin so gold, his hair the color of a deep, winter night.

Lana, his friend, the object of his childhood hopes and desires, was only a child: no more than fifteen years of age when I came to Smallville. A polished green bit of her parent's death hung on her slender white neck. Photographs of her mother, shown over coffee at the ill-advised establishment purchased for her upon the request of my love, revealed a tall woman, hair the color of dark wood, eyes nut-brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.

And, then, one day, Lana would no longer eat with us. She would no longer eat in the presence of anyone.

I did not know where she ate, or if she ate anything at all.

I had my own concerns and did not notice her withering form. Didn't see the white skin paling whiter, the red lips blooming redder, the hazel eyes glowing brighter. I busied myself with my work and left the enigma to those who knew her well.

My love, when he wanted me, would either come to me or send for me. If he asked me to come, I would go to him. If he arrived in my home, I made time for him. Over the years we had learned how to pleasure one another in every way.

One night, several hours after my love had left me at the castle, she came to see me. She was seventeen. I was reading by firelight, squinting in the fitful illumination. When I looked up, she was there. I do not know how she got in.

"Lana?"

She said nothing. Her eyes were glowing like fire coals, her hair was blacker than midnight, her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the firelight.

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm hungry," she said, like an impish child.

It was winter, food not as fresh as in the summer warmth and sunlight; but I had ripe apples, brought that day from Clark's farm, resting in a bowl by the sofa, and I pulled an apple from the top of the pile for her.

"Here."

She took the apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp white teeth.

"Is it good?"

She nodded. I had always been jealous of Clark's childhood love, but at that moment concern swept over me and I warmed to her. I stroked her cheek gently, with my fingers. She looked at me and smiled -- she smiled but rarely by that time -- then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb and she drew blood.

I cried out in pain and surprise; but she looked at me as she gripped my wrist and suckled. I fell silent.

Lana fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and sucked and drank. When she was finished, she left me. Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab and to heal. The next day it was an old scar. Curious, for I do not scar, not since the meteors fell. The only other faded line on my body from where I cut myself with a pocketknife in my childhood.

I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more than the blood she fed on. I am no longer ashamed to admit it. Though, I was ashamed then. I had not fought her off. A girl half my size with none of my training. I did not tell my love.

After that night I locked my doors at dusk, barring them with locks and I had a smith forge iron bars to place over my windows. My love approved of these security measures, all too familiar with the ease of breaking into my home and my predilection for being assaulted or kidnapped. Still I did not tell him of her...and never revealed that the security did not prevent her from coming to me in the dead of night.

Clark, my love, my king, was confused when I sent for him less and less and when he came to me I was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make love to me for I would tremble fiercely; and he could not pleasure me with his mouth: the one time he tried, I started, violently, and began to weep. He pulled his mouth away and held me tightly, until the shaking had stopped, and I slept, like a child.

He told me not long ago that he ran his fingers over me as I slept. I was covered in a multitude of ancient scars. But he could recall no scars from the days before my fear, save one: the pocketknife wound of old.

Soon I was a shadow of the man he had met and loved by the bridge. My bones showed, blue and white, beneath my skin. My hands became cold as stone, my eyes milky-blue, and my skin faded and lusterless. My skin was nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old scars.

I weighed near to nothing. The ground was frozen hard, and had I died then, they could have dug no grave for my body and would have been forced to make a cairn of rocks and stones above me, as a memorial only, for there would have been little enough of me left to protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.

But I was a king, as well. The last of my kind. So I forced myself to live.

I was foolish, and young - twenty-three summers had come and gone since first I saw daylight - and I did not do what I would do, now.

If it were today, I would have her heart cut out, true. But I would also have her head and arms and legs cut off. I would have them disembowel her. And I would watch as the hired henchmen heated a fire to white-heat, watch unblinking as he consigned each part of her to the fire. I would have hired gunmen around the fire, who would shoot any bird or animal who came close to the flames, any raven or dog or hawk or rat. And I would not close my eyes until Lana was ash, and a gentle wind could scatter her like snow.

I did not do these things, and we pay for our mistakes.

Clark says that I was fooled; that it was not her heart. That it was the heart of an animal -- a deer, perhaps, or a cow. Clark says that, and he is wrong.

And some say (but it is her lie, not mine) that I was given the heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is what she tried to make of my life.

There are scars on my body, on my thighs, and on my scrotum, and on my cock. If it were not for these, perhaps she would have succeeded in convincing my love of her lies.

I did not go with the assassins I set upon her. They took her during the day, while she slept, and was at her weakest. They took her to the heart of a forest, and there they opened her blouse, and under my orders, they cut out her heart. They left her for dead, in a gully, for the forest to swallow.

The forest is a dark place, the border to many farms; no one tries to claim any jurisdiction over it. Many mutants live in the forest, recluses and the insane. Native Americans live in the forest, as well, and there are various wild animals roaming there, some claim to have seen wolves. You can ride through the forest and never see a soul; but there are eyes upon you the entire time.

The assassins brought me her heart. I know it was hers -- no sow's heart or doe's would have continued to beat and pulse after it had been cut out, as that one did.

I took it to my room.

I did not eat it: I hung it from the chandelier over my bed, placed it on a length of wire that I strung, superstitiously, with bulbs of garlic and a tarnished cross.

Outside, the snow fell, covering the footprints of the murderers, covering her small body in the forest where it lay.

I had the iron bars removed from my windows, and I would spend some time by a window each afternoon throughout the short winter days, feeling my sense of health return, as I gazed out over the forest, until darkness fell.

There were, as I have already stated, people in the forest. The Native Americans, especially, would come out, for the Autumn Harvest Fair. The others, the greedy, feral, dangerous people of the forest, some of them stunted or with the huge teeth and vacant stare of the idiot, would creep out of the forest each year for the Autumn Harvest Fair, held when the summer had ended and before the first snow fell.

As a young man, Clark had worked at the Fair, and they had scared him then, the strange forest folk. Now, fearless, he sold them apples by the bushel and apple cider by the gallon, not minding when any particularly deformed individual stole an apple and ran away.

I often attended the Fair to spend and spread my wealth - and to watch the glow on my love's cheeks in the crisp autumn air.

I heard the rumblings about the forest folk. I overheard the prejudiced whispers, the handed down fears. But, the forest folk had money to spend and the farmers of Smallville were not in a position to turn down the sale of their harvest to anyone.

The years passed slowly, and many people claimed that I grew my company and the economy of Smallville with wisdom. The heart still hung above my bed, pulsing gently in the night. There were many who mourned Lana's disappearance, including my love, but they did not know that she was a thing of terror and that they were well rid of her.

Autumn Fair followed Autumn Fair: five of them, each sadder, poorer, shoddier than the one before. Fewer of the Native Americans or forest folk came out to buy. Those who did seemed subdued and listless. By the fifth year only a handful of people came from the forest -- a fearful huddle of broken men and no one else.

The Chief of the Tribe came to me when the fair was done. I had known him slightly, from an event involving his granddaughter and my love years before.

"I do not come to you as a Luthor nor as the owner of LexCorp," he said.

I said nothing. I listened.

"I come to you because you can see the truth," he continued. "When you were a child you were marked by the fall of the meteors which have brought this curse upon my people; you have seen the effects of the green rocks on people first hand and have not been afraid. You know secrets and know how to seek out hidden things. Lex," he asked, "what is taking my people and the forest folk? Next year there will be none left to come to the Autumn Fair. Another year like this last and we shall all be dead."

I promised him to discover the cause of the deaths of his people and the forest folk. I hired my best team; I worked in secret and at length.

But it was at night that the answer came to me.

I dreamed that I was looking into a mirror, an old-fashioned looking glass. It was a simple thing, round and edged in silver trim, but the glass glowed like water in the sun. I gazed into it:

She was twenty-two and she was no longer a child. Her skin was still pale, her eyes still glowed like the embers of a fire, her hair fell long down her back, still black as coal, and her lips seemed stained with blood. She wore a ragged dress, probably stolen off of clotheslines in the dark of night. Over them she wore a leather cloak and she had somehow pilfered leather boots for her tiny feet.

She was standing in the forest, beside a tree.

As I watched, in the haze of my dream, I saw her edge and step and flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a wolf. She was following someone.

He was a Native American man, returning from a trip into the city. He wore blue jeans and a checkered shirt. His feet were covered in hardy work boots and his beard was shadowing his cheeks.

She watched him from behind the trees. Eventually he paused for a rest, and began to make a fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a robin's nest as kindling. He had some matches in his pack, and he knocked the wooden sticks against the rough edge of the box until sparks caught the tinder and fire flamed. Then he opened his pack and removed two bars of chocolate and he ate one. It cannot have been much of a meal for so big a man.

He sat there, in the firelight, and she came out from her hiding place. She crouched down on the other side of the fire, and stared at him. He grinned and beckoned her over to him.

She stood up and walked around the fire, and waited, an arms-length away. A short discussion took place and she worked her innocent wiles on his mind. She told him that she was lost and hungry and needed warmth. Suddenly she moved toward him, his hands went into her hair and she began to kiss his lips tenderly. Her hands went to work on the buttons of his shirt and he moaned into her neck, lifting his hips to let her slide his jeans down. His body was nearly hairless and she pushed him back onto the moss-covered ground. One hand crept, spider-like, over his heaving chest, down his taunt skin, until it closed on his cock; the other hand traced a circle on his left nipple. He closed his eyes, thanking God for his luck, and fumbled a huge hand under her skirt. She lowered her mouth to the nipple she had been teasing; he arched up to meet her, her smooth skin white against the bronze body of him.

She sank her teeth into his breast. His eyes opened, then they closed again, and she drank.

She straddled him as she fed. I nearly closed my eyes, knowing what came next, having experienced it so many times myself. She positioned his cock against her cunt and slowly slid down his shaft. The man's head turned and I could see his glazed eyes and hear his whimper as she rode him. I recalled the smooth glide of her sex, the hot clench on my cock as she came again and again, the heady swell of my own orgasm when the sensations would overwhelm me. I trembled in my dream with desire and hate and despair.

She rode him hard, biting him again and again, draining him as she had never drained me. I watched him spasm beneath her in orgasm and then, later, in death. I watched her lick his final wound and ride his dead body to one last climax, smiling like the evil she had become when she climbed off, semen dripping down her white legs.

I woke the next morning and knew what was killing the people of the forest. I went to the Chief and spoke to him in private.

I told him that I would personally take it upon myself to make the forest safe once more.

I had to, although she terrified me. I was the only one whose blood she had tasted and lived. I alone held the power to destroy her.

A foolish man would have gone then into the forest and tried to capture the creature Lana had become; but I had been foolish once before and had no wish to be so a second time.

I spent time with the old Chief. After describing the contents of my dream, the Chief instructed me in a ritual to rid the forest of this pestilence. Had I lived anywhere but Smallville, I would have questioned his sanity and my own.

Instead, I prepared myself, and obtained those things I would need, and when the first snows began to fall, then I was ready.

Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower of the castle, a place open to the sky. The winds chilled my body; goose pimples crept across my arms and thighs and shriveled my sex. I carried a silver basin, and a basket in which I had placed a silver knife, a silver pin, some tongs, a grey robe and three green apples.

I put them down and stood there, unclothed, on the tower, humble before the night sky and the wind. Had Clark seen me standing there, he would have had my head; but there was no one to spy. Clouds scudded across the sky, hiding and uncovering the waning moon.

I took the silver knife, and slashed my left arm -- once, twice, three times. The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet seeming black in the moonlight.

I added the powder from the vial that hung around my neck. It was a dust brown, made of dried herbs and the bark of a particular tree, and from certain other things. It thickened the blood, while preventing it from clotting.

I took the three apples, one by one, and pricked their skins gently with the silver pin. Then I placed the apples in the silver bowl, and let them sit there while the first tiny flakes of snow of the year fell slowly onto my skin, and onto the apples, and onto the blood.

When dawn began to brighten the sky I covered myself with the grey cloak, and took the red apples from the silver bowl, one by one, lifting each into my basket with silver thongs, taking care not to touch it. There was nothing left of my blood or of the brown powder in the silver bowl, save a black residue, like a verdigris, on the inside.

I buried the bowl in the earth as the Chief had instructed me. Then I examined the apples and found that they were, beyond any doubt, the most wonderful apples in the world; and the crimson blush of their skins was the warm color of fresh blood.

I pulled on a wig, sunglasses and an ill-fitting coat before taking up the basket of apples and walking alone into the forest without even saying a word of my plan to my love. I came to her dwelling: a low, dark entrance into the earth, the area around it dirty and littered with bones and other evidence of her deeds. I walked quietly from tree to tree, without disturbing a twig or a fallen leaf. Eventually, I found a place to hide, and I waited, and I watched.

After some hours a dazed man crawled out of the cave, broken, exhausted, pants undone and his still swollen sex peeking out. He was still bleeding from his neck. He would not last an hour. He fainted and did not spy me where I hid.

I waited. No one else came out.

I went to the cave entrance, stepping over the unconscious man, bent down and called a falsetto hello into it. My voice cracked.

The scars all over my body began to throb and pulse as she came towards me, flesh drawn toward its mistress. She walked out into the light, naked and alone. Twenty-three years old, the same age I had been when I ordered her first death, and nothing marred the perfect whiteness of her skin save for the livid scar on her chest, where her heart had been cut from her long ago.

The insides of her thighs ran with the come of the man on the ground.

She peered at me, hidden as I was, in my wig, glasses and coat. She looked at me hungrily. "Apples," I croaked. "Pretty apples for you..."

She smiled and beckoned to me. A tug; the scars on my body were pulling me towards her. I did what I had planned to do, but I did it more readily than I had planned: I dropped my basket and ran.

My grey coat was the color of the winter forest, and I was fast; she did not catch me.

I made my way back to the palace.

I did not see it. Let us imagine it though, Lana returning, frustrated and hungry, to her earthy cave, and finding my fallen basket on the ground.

What did she do?

I like to think she played with the apples first, tossing them in the air, rolling them in her hands, and rubbing them against the flesh of her small breasts. Then, overcome by their red, red skins that smelled of blood, she pressed one to her cheek, and felt the cold smoothness against her skin.

And she opened her mouth and bit deep into it...

By the time I reached my bedroom, the heart that hung from the chandelier, with the garlic and the tarnish cross, had ceased to beat. It hung there, quietly, without motion or life, and I felt that the forest and Smallville were safe once more.

That winter snows were high and deep, and were late melting. I didn't mind. Clark and I spent it together beside warm fires and beneath soft blankets. I never told him about Lana, decided to keep that pain from him.

My father came to live with me, traveling into the forest often and mining several caves for quartz and crystal. I questioned him on his new business venture, but he cut me off with a flick of his wrist and prevented further questioning with a rage and a smashed glass.

A rumor came to me of a shrine my father was building of the quartz. Fear snaked through my heart and I thought about having him killed, but I did not. As long as the heart hung, silent and immobile and cold, from the chandelier in my bedroom, I was safe, and so were the people of Smallville.

My father always kept a retinue of minions: large enough to defend him, small enough that a competitor -- myself, for instance -- would not view him as a potential threat. But then, in my thirtieth year, my father moved a young woman into the castle with us. A woman of thirty-five, of a good family, a potential wife for him to present to the business world. She was tall, very tall, with cold green eyes and swarthy skin.

I was practical: I thought of the alliance of our companies, thought of a 'kingdom' that would surpass any known in the world; I thought of my strange alien love, and I knew that his safety would need to be ensured above all. It was imperative that I remain the last son of my family and it was with the intention of frightening her away from my father that I went to her room that night, but I found that he had done that for me.

She told a strange tale. My father had come to her room, intoxicated and eager. He bade her to remove her clothes, and then made her stand in front of the opened window, far from the fire, until her skin was chilled stone cold. Then he asked her to lie upon her back, with her hands folded across her breasts, her eyes wide open -- but staring only at the ceiling above. He told her not to move, and to breathe as little as possible. He implored her to say nothing. He spread her legs apart.

It was then that he entered her.

As he thrust inside her, she felt herself respond and her hips rise. She moaned. She could not help herself.

He slapped her and his cock slipped out.

"Please," he said, softly. "You must neither move, nor speak. Just lie there on the floor, so cold, so beautiful."

She tried, but he had lost whatever force it was that had made him virile; and, some short while later, he left the young woman's room. I followed his lead and left her there alone, her tears and confusion ringing in my ears.

My father left early the next morning. He took a horse and rode off into the forest.

I imagine his loins, now, as he rode, a knot of frustration at the base of his cock. I imagine his thin lips pressed so tightly together. Then I imagine him finally coming upon the quartz and crystal shrine he had built to that terrible girl who wove her spell of passion even in death. Lana. So pale, so cold, naked beneath glass and dead.

In my mind, I can almost feel the sudden hardness of his cock in his pants, envision the lust that took him then, the prayers he muttered beneath his breath. I do not know these things, however, I was not there. I can only imagine them.

Hands, pulling off the lumps of glass and quartz from her cold body. His hands, gently caressing her cold cheek, moving her cold arm, rejoicing to find her still so pliable.

Did he take her there? On her grave? Did he carry her to a secluded nook before fucking her hard and long?

I cannot say.

Did he shake the apple from her throat? Or did her eyes slowly open as he pounded into her cold body; did her mouth open, those red lips part, those sharp white teeth close on his sweating neck, as the blood, which is the life, trickled down her throat, washing away the lump of ample, my own blood, my poison?

I imagine; I do not know.

This I do know: I was woken in the night by her heart pulsing and beating once more. Salt blood dripped onto my face from above. I sat up. My whole body burned as if being pelted with rocks, the scars screaming for their mistress.

Clark awoke beside me, hands fumbling over my body looking for the source of the blood soaking the bed, before his eyes turned to the heart beating above.

He demanded it from me then, the whole story. When I had finished relating it there came a banging at my bedroom door.

I felt afraid, but I am a Luthor, and I would not show fear. I opened the door.

First my father's minions walked into my chamber, and stood around me, with guns aimed at my head and chest and neck.

Clark moved carefully, positioning himself to fight for me. I raised my hand to hold him off.

Then my father came in and he spat in my face.

Finally, she walked into my room, as carefree as that first night when she bit my hand. She had not changed. Not really.

She stood on the bed to pull down the wire on which her heart was hanging. She pulled off the cross and the garlic bulbs, laughing at me as she did so. Then she took up her own, her pumping heart -- a small thing -- as it brimmed and pumped its blood into her hand.

Her fingernails must have been sharp as glass: she opened her breast with them, running them over the purple scar. Her chest gaped, suddenly, open and bloodless. She licked her heart, once, as the blood ran over her hands, and she pushed the heart deep into her breast.

I saw her do it. Clark saw her do it. We saw her close the flesh of her breast once more. I saw the purple scar begin to fade.

My father looked briefly concerned, but he put his arm around her nonetheless, and they stood, side by side, and they waited.

They told me they would marry, and the companies would indeed be joined. They told me that I would be with them on their wedding day. In an urn.

They tried to tell Clark bad things about me when he moved as though to attack them; a little truth to add savor to the dish, but mixed with many lies.

I didn't care. He didn't believe. He had seen the scars and now noted the fresh ones littering my father's skin.

Betraying his secret to those in the room, he rushed forward and bound them all before they could even take a breath.

He did not know what to do with them. I convinced him to deposit my father and Lana in a tiny stone cell beneath the castle. The others he kissed to clear their minds and let them go.

I do not think that any individual of any strength or wit is wise to threaten my life or health. Clark spent many an hour in tears of frustrated anger before we agreed on what to do with my father and Lana.

Today, my love has taken them out of their cell. My father, covered in scars, still tried to protect his young girl-bride when Clark entered their small, cold room.

The snow was falling as my love transported them, individually, to the inner courtyard, blocked from view from all but above. My father struggled and found himself carried helpless as a child in the frigid winter air. Clark deposited him on the ground before injecting him with a strong narcotic and forcing him into the kiln in the middle of the courtyard.

Then he retrieved Lana. The bitch stood there with my love, staring at me and calling my flesh to her. I struggled and fought, but eventually stumbled forward to the ground, crying out in my desire, hate and pain. She watched me, in my indignity, but she said nothing.

She did not laugh or jeer or talk. She did not sneer at me or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw myself reflected in her eyes.

Clark injected her and thrust her inside. I saw one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without melting.

It is melted now.

My love closed the kiln door behind her.

It must be getting hot in there. Part of me is bitter and wants to cheer and sing and bang on the side of the kiln. But instead I struggle not to weep for my love who is burning a piece of himself and a piece of me in the kiln today.

As the heat grows, the scars on my body burn. I begin to shake with the pain. I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. She may still have some control over my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and they will live with me.

I tremble in pain until it passes. I look at my hand, at the base of my thumb, and find that the scar is gone.

I shall make no sound at all.

I shall think no more on this.

I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.

I shall think of her hair as black as coal, her lips as red as blood, her skin, snow-white.

The End