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[voidwhump]

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Once Iesin makes up his mind, they move quickly. They’ve climbed past the foothills and into the mountains proper, and each day Talvos realizes anew just how big the bones of the world are. The trees they pass now have diameters larger than houses. They camp under the corpse of such a giant one evening, sheltering from a rolling barrage of thunder and driving rain under the sloped roof of a fallen tree braced against its own stump. Thick valleys and ridges of bark at the stump’s base are deep and wide enough that Talvos thinks Serys, if pressed, could squeeze between them.

Sometime in the night, he wakes, unsure what prompted him but suddenly fully aware. The bedroll beside him is empty. Talvos rises silently, careful not to disturb the pile of feathers that marks Serys’ slumber.

The rain has faded to a misty patter. All is quiet, deep and dark under the thick canopy far above. As he steps out from under the shelter of the fallen trunk, a soft crackle whispers from above, and bark flakes downwards to land in his hair. Talvos looks up.

Dappled in narrow motes of starlight filtering through the trees, his mate tilts his head skywards in silent watchfulness. His talons, effortlessly pinned against bark, secure his perch atop the tallest fragment of the massive stump. His wings hang half-unfolded behind him, relaxed but ready to throw him into the air at a moments’ notice.

A shiver traces along the length of Talvos’ spine. He glances towards the canopy again, but though all seems as it was a moment ago, he cannot set aside the feeling that something is happening. Carefully, he steps up onto a massive root and starts climbing up the stump. The bark, ancient and soft, is cool beneath his bare feet, offering a slightly spongy surface which whispers of rot. Despite it, the stump’s sheer size staves off instability. Talvos reaches the top and levers himself to a seat on a patch of wood more free of lichen than others near it, then leans over to knuckle away the complaints his knee offers up at being used. When he sits up again, Iesin has moved closer, crawling along the outside of the stump like a spider. He sits near Talvos, not quite touching, attention already drawn back towards the sky.

“What’s happening?” Talvos whispers after a time.

Iesin’s profile shifts against deeper darkness behind him. He too whispers, perhaps affected by the thrumming something that reverberates somewhere deeper than Talvos can name, perhaps merely matching his mate’s tone. “What feel, you?”

Talvos opens his mouth, then closes it. The words his human tongue can shape are not enough. “I don’t know,” he admits after a moment. “It woke me up, whatever it is.” He glances at Iesin. “What do you feel?”

Bark crackles under Iesin’s talons. “Ielyrsolais,” he whispers. “Aelu ielythsolais.”

“Many star… singers?”

Iesin nods. “Li eulsae iriglir.”

[I long to join them.]

Talvos watches tension shiver across his beloved’s wings. “Faerne,” he offers quietly. “Saeghe lisae. Robrior, Serys oyelir.”

[You can go to them. Serys and I will wait.]

Limned in starlight so faint Talvos is not sure how it pierced through the canopy, Iesin’s lashes seem to glow as they lower to his cheeks. “No,” he whispers. “Is not for me.”

He clambers partially down the side of the stump, pausing when his shoulders are level with Talvos’ chosen seat, then peels talons out of the bark and offers a hand to Talvos. “Come to bed?”

“Soon,” Talvos promises. Starsong thrums against his bones, banishing sleep with hints of something that aches like the deepest chords of joy. He watches as Iesin climbs down the stump and disappears under their shelter. The night seems darker once he is gone. Talvos’ mind turns the observation over in the background of his thoughts as he ponders the capitulation in Iesin’s tones. The last time he heard no fight in his mate’s voice, Iesin was dying on the floor of an iron cage, barely able to shape his teeth and tongue around foreign words as he urged Talvos to choose freedom for himself. He hates the comparison, especially now when at last they are so close to returning to Iesin’s home. His beloved should be bright, as sharp and brilliant as star-shards through glass. To see him–

To see him…

It is darker. No starlight makes its way to the forest floor here. Talvos stares, eyes wide, into black on black on black. No, the light he saw did not belong to the stars. Not directly.

Talvos slips down off the stump, hanging on by his fingers to stretch as far as he can before bracing his toes against soft, wet wood and sliding the rest of the way to the ground. By memory, he turns in the dark towards their camp. And there, in dim silhouette against the deeper black of the fallen tree’s shadow, he sees the two fae. Serys, still sleeping under their wings, each feather limned in dewdrop strands of what Iesin calls song and Talvos perceives as light. Talvos’ heart pounds from the blind exhilaration of his descent from the stump. On their bedroll, Iesin. His mate sits crosslegged, watching Talvos stand in the entrance and stare. In patchy, flickering motes, a hope’s cobweb of light drapes over him.

“I see you,” he breathes.

Iesin tilts his head. “What mean, you?”

“I see you, Iesin. I thought it was starlight out there. But I see you. You have starlight on you, just like Serys does.”

Iesin is still, so still that when, after a neglected moment, his chest hitches across an instinctive breath, both he and Talvos blink.

“What mean, you?” he repeats, a hoarse croak.

Talvos sinks to his knees beside him. “Don’t tell yourself that ielyrsolais is not for you any more. I can see it on you. You are alight with it, Iesin.”

In the shift and flicker from his cheekbones and brow, Iesin’s pupils contract to needletip slits. “Am caill cin.”

“No,” Talvos whispers, fierce and close. “I see you, Iesin.” He takes Iesin’s hand and lifts it between them, showing the contrast of the glimmer edging Iesin’s skin against his own. “Do you see?”

His mate blinks. “See nothing, me. Only hand, mine, and hand, yours.”

Talvos glances from their twined fingers to Iesin’s clear bewilderment. “Maybe it’s a different sense for fae,” he muses softly. “But I know what I see, Iesin. You are not severed. Not fully.”

Iesin still looks at him with a mixture of startled hope and bewildered misunderstanding, but he squeezes Talvos’ hand in his own. “Do thank you, me,” he whispers. “Beloved.”

Talvos smiles. “I had to tell you.” He slips into their bedroll and waits while Iesin joins him. “When we get to your home,” he murmurs into star-dappled hair, “maybe we will find out what it means. But I believe the stars have not left you, beloved.”

[voidwhump]

Whumpril 2024 - Day 20 - Touch Starved

Evritt is @whumpr 's boy!! Thank you for letting me borrow him, you know I love a soft sweet golden boy elf c:< This is VERY early on in their relationship!

TWs: None!! Just some touch starvation and cuddling here

"This is okay? You're sure?"

Evritt's voice drew a laugh from Mariano, midway through tugging his shirt off. "I'm sure. I want you to sleep in my bed with me." His binder followed, then his jeans and he pulled one of Bastian's old tees on to cover his chest and boxers before turning back around to Evritt. "Are you okay with it?"

Evritt sat in the bed, shirtless and antsy, the blankets already pulled up to his hips. "I'm sure. I just don't want to make you feel obligated to do...anything."

"I don't." Mariano punctuated this by crawling into his bed and slipping under the blankets, settling in on his back with a sigh. "We're just sleeping, it's way too late for you to be on the road or in the skies."

"I know, I know. Thank you, by the way." Evritt leaned back into the pile of pillows and turned off the lamp, blanketing them in darkness before he rolled onto his side.

One muscular arm draped over Mariano's waist, and goosebumps ripped up Mariano's arms. He tensed, breath catching. Evritt's body pressed up against his side, and Mariano shuddered.

"...Mariano? Are you okay?" Evritt started to lift his arm up, and before Mariano realized what he was doing, his hand darted to grab Evritt's wrist.

"Yes." Mariano started, voice sounding strangled. "Don't, don't move please." He said, trying to catch his breath. "It's just been a...a very long time since anyone's done...this."

Evritt was quiet. "Since anyone's...held you?" His voice was low.

Mariano couldn't hear his tone past his own thundering heartbeat. It was impossible to breathe. His face heated up as he swallowed. "Yes." He said. "I don't want you to stop."

"Oh." Evritt's arm relaxed over Mariano, before tightening around him and pulling himself closer. One of Evritt's legs hooked over Mariano's, and his head came to rest on Mariano's shoulder. He wrapped himself around Mariano, snug and smelling like hawk feathers and sunlight and fresh air. "Okay."

Mariano felt the aches and stiffness melt from his muscles, slow and steady, melting into his own bed with every passing moment. Evritt's weight was heavenly, the breath on his shoulder and neck was more than Mariano had ever wanted. He was so warm. His hair was soft.

Held so securely in the arms of his favorite knight in the safety of his own room, Mariano wasn't awake for longer than a few more minutes.

@whump-captain @whumpr @whumperofworlds @lektricwhump @cyberwhumper @bxtterflystxtches @inscrutable-shadow @honeybees-125

[voidwhump]

Remember to kidnap your whumpee today, it's a free 24 hours before their friends catch on!

#april fool's whump #I suppose #whump prompt #whump

[voidwhump]

Bluebeard's Pet III

This is the final part of a folk/fairytale retelling of Bluebeard in three parts. It replaces Bluebeard's new wife with a male "pet" (slave/concubine). It takes place in a largely fictional medieval Europe.

Part two

CW: slavery, pet whump, slave auction, stocks, power imbalance, gruesome elements like torture, execution, and draconian policies throughout, whipping, sexually explicit scenes, dubcon because of social status, light knifeplay, alcohol consumption, praise kink

Part Three: The Key

September brought the harvest moon, and only slight reprieve from the uncomfortably warm days that had settled over the castle in late summer. The Baron left again, this time for the lands to the near east. He took a company of men and soldiers with him, and left Luca with the keys. Again, he held the moldered key from the rest and asked him not to use it. Luca was kissed goodbye on the cheek in front of the soldiers, which surprised him even now, when he ought to be used to the difference in customs here.

He did not go to the village again, but instead spent some time at the stables riding a gentle gelding called Sparrow out into the fields and back. He was a decent rider, though he didn’t know anything about combat from horseback. He could keep his seat with or without a saddle, and even experimented with using a bitless bridle on Sparrow, who would turn and stop at the slightest provocation of the reins with or without anything in his mouth.

One such afternoon he ran into a small group of servants on a picnic, up in the meadow by a brook. They startled each other but he apologized warmly, having decided to endeavor to be liked more by the strange, sometimes chilly staff. He let Sparrow graze and sat beside them when they invited him out of strained politeness. He planned only to have a drink if they offered, or a bite of apple and cheese and be on his way. Perhaps the next time they saw him they would not turn away so quickly, like they seemed to do around his master as well.

One of the servants was drunk, he soon realized, and the other two were giving him dirty looks as he chatted openly. “Give you the keys, does he?”

Luca didn’t answer. He tilted his head in a silent bid for why.

“He gives them all the keys. Some look. Some don’t.”

“Look at what?” He still hadn’t gotten an explanation for the giant cauldron, but he was embarrassed to ask now, after the Baron had explained the nature of the rumors. “Where he takes them all,” the drunk boy said. His thin lips curled in a smirk and his face was pink.

“Who?”

“You know,” he replied, dipping his chin to his chest and looking up at Luca through a winedrunk haze, a smirk on his stained lips. “The Baroness. The pets.”

Like that June day in the village, Luca felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. The warmth on his back felt artificial and imaginary, like the sunlight in a painting.

“Mircea,” the other servant hissed crossly. “To your Lord's very companion, you say these vile things?”

“They’re true. Where do they all go?”

“Lady Elanor died,” she insisted.

“Not from having the little Lord Alec.”

“Shut up, you foul thing!”

The third servant smiled demurely. Luca thought she might be simple. “Bluebeard,” she said to him as the other two bickered. “It’s Bluebeard.”

Luca pushed himself to his feet and onto Sparrow’s back, glad for the stirrups and saddle that day.

That night he lay alone in the cavernous bedchamber of the Baron, always so empty when the Baron himself was not filling it with his larger than life presence. Luca turned the keys over in his hands. What harm would it be to look in that one room? Why had the Baron told him not to enter? He had the keys to every safe, jewelry box, and wine cellar in the castle, yet he could not look in this dusty, cobwebbed wing, in one little room?

He convinced himself he was going to look at the stained glass in the old chapel. It was not a biblical depiction, but rather a depiction of Hercules with his sword drawn at the lake that was said to be the mouth of the underworld, facing the Hydra. Luca counted thirteen heads on this beast, and the three on his ring glinted in envy. Dust and loose paper littered the tile floor. He sat on a cobwebbed pew and thought of the time he’d fallen asleep in a similar one, and woken to his angry master unfastening his belt. He never understood why he was so angry. What did God care if he slept in his house? He tried to picture the Baron beating him for a transgression, any transgression, and found he couldn’t. Especially not as he’d been then, a child of ten or eleven. The image wouldn’t form in his mind. It kept breaking. Constantin would not hurt me.

He should go back to his lavish, expensive room and leave the keys on the bedside. He should respect the one command his master had ever given him, which was to leave this room alone.

And yet he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t, and when he turned the key the door slid open like it hadn’t even been locked. Like the girl at the fountain had picked up the golden cup.

He covered his mouth and nose with the crook of his elbow. The smell of mildew was overwhelming. Dark shapes took form in front of him, and when his eyes began to adjust he thrust his torch forward and made them out for what they were — a rack, some kind of sawhorse, and most startlingly, an iron maiden with a carved face like that of a sarcophagus on the heavy outer shell. It was ajar, and the spikes were thicker than he’d ever imagined, sharper and dark with dried blood.

The Baron’s favorite Greek once said, ‘the worst of all deceptions is self deception’. Had Luca deceived himself in believing there was ever anything to fear from a man who had been nothing but gentle and affectionate towards him? Who had saved him from a thousand evil fates at the hands of the slave traders who had ripped him from England’s craggy shores?

Or had he deceived himself in believing there was nothing wrong? That his own needling reservations, the things he had heard, the way people behaved around the Baron Illés were all just strange quirks of the people in this castle, and in the village beyond? Had he wanted to be the beloved pet of a powerful man so badly he’d crawled eagerly into bed with a monster?

Slowly, he approached a rough wooden bench. Instruments he couldn’t name were set out lovingly, at even spaces. They, unlike the rack and iron maiden, were cleaned meticulously of blood. A small jar caught his eye and he lifted it to his light. It was full of teeth. He set it back in its circle of dust perfectly, his hands shaking.

He remembered the lock of hair, the sexual game he had made out of the kiss of that dagger, thinking that’s all it was for the Baron too, a game of taking and relinquishing power willingly. Oh, how cooly it had caressed his neck. How lovingly.

He was as trusting as a lamb to the Baron, and thus far it had never been betrayed. Could he really have been so naive? Had the tastes he thought they shared been nothing but veiled bloodlust on the part of his master?

He left the room feeling dizzy. He fumbled to turn the key in the latch to re-lock the room and his heart sank when he heard a sound like a snapping twig. The moldered old key came out missing a tooth and the door was not locked still. He tried to lock it again but it wouldn’t work now. The mechanisms were not moving together as they should. He shoved the traitorous thing deep into his pocket and, trembling, in the verge of frustrated and betrayed tears, he made his way back to the south wing of the castle, where he lay in that wide sleigh of a feather bed and wondered what it was he was supposed to do.

The Baron and his company of soldiers arrived home a day early. Luca had stopped trying to figure out impossible ways to evade his fate, and he watched the procession come through the gatehouse with little more than an unconsciously clenched jaw.

Playing his kalimba to smooth his nerves, he’d remembered the last stanza of the song about the two sisters. A harp was made of the drowned younger sister’s breastbone and strands of her yellow hair. A minstrel took it to the court, where her love, the Knight, has become King, and her older sister has become his Queen. The harp begins to play alone, with no hands plucking its strings, and tells the court how she was murdered by her jealous older sister, the Queen, as everyone looks on in horror. The greatest horror was likely the Queen’s, for the dead seldom accuse their murderers so eloquently.

He turned the broken key over in his palm, knowing he must either flee or present his sin to the Baron. The lord of this land. His master. What happened to the criminals who tried to flee? Were they not dragged back and nailed to crosses or thrown into boiling pots like sea creatures? Was that not the truth? The Baron had softened it for him, white lies to soothe a silly pet. But he knew. All along, he knew.

Luca joined the Baron in the dining hall for their supper that evening. The table was as long as three men, and a great hearth sat cold and empty on the north wall, big enough to roast a reindeer on a spit inside. The weather was still too pleasant to need a fire, and they ate in what the Baron seemed to think was companionable silence. They were served sweet muscadine wine, roasted pheasant with hazelnuts and shallots, white cheese that spread like soft butter on aromatic wastel bread.

“You hardly eat, Luca.”

The Baron often called him by name, unless they were alone and he was speaking in that low, confidential voice. Only then was it pet, love, angel.

“I didn’t know you’d be home this evening. I ate in the late afternoon.”

“Not like you not to drink your wine, though,” the Baron teased. That was true. Luca took a deep drink for courage and pulled the key from his pocket. He placed it on the great table, thick as a ship’s mast, and pushed it closer to the master of the castle.

The Baron did not look surprised. He knew it immediately, of course, that disfigured little skeleton key that looked like it was decomposing. The second tooth was broken off, and was as noticeable as a hand cleaved clean from a wrist. He set down his utensils, slowly, deliberately, so they hardly made a sound on the fine china they dined on. He rubbed a hand over his black, bristly beard. Luca wondered when he would see Bluebeard the warlord, the brute, the power-drunk sadist that the villagers had seen, that his previous pets and wives had known for their last days, or weeks, or however long he tortured them for before they either died or he killed them.

“I suppose that’s in the nature of man, isn't it? Sons of Eve that we are,” the Baron said as if to himself.

“You sound like my English master, now,” Luca said, and regretted it immediately. That was a weak and passing shadow of a truth.

He took a sip of muscadine wine. “I am saddened, though, Luca. I already know the lock is broken on the door. My servant Remi told me this evening upon our arrival. I had hoped it wasn’t your doing, though.”

“You’re saddened?” Luca asked hotly, his blood pounding in his ears, his stomach hot with fear. “I only finally went inside only because of things the servants said about you. About Lady Elanor.”

At his late wife’s name he blinked, looking from the key into Luca’s eyes. “What do they say about Elanor?”

“That you killed her,” he whispered, trembling and exasperated now. “And your other pets.”

The Baron’s eyebrows raised. “Oh yes, the dozens of them. There were two.” He shook his head. “I don’t wish for Alec to grow up hearing these things about his mother. About me. I won’t ask you which servants, because I’m sure it’s half of them, and you wouldn’t want to tell me anyway.”

Luca realized he’d been taking nothing but shallow breaths for the last minute or so and took a slow, steadying draw of air. “I saw the blood.”

“What do you think you saw?” the Baron asked sharply, for the first time sounding cross and even mean. “Just tell me and be blunt about it.”

“I saw a room full of… of pain and death,” he half-whispered. “There was blood on the spikes of the coffin. A jar full of teeth.… I defied you. I betrayed your request.”

“I know.”

“I thought you’d be very angry.”

“I am angry.”

“Well what are you going to do about it?” he cried impatiently. “How will you punish me? Will my fate be worse than theirs, since I’ve so displeased you?!”

The Baron stood abruptly at his outburst, toppling his chair behind him. Luca flinched but refused to cower. The Baron took his wrist and pulled him up, his grip like an iron vice, like one of the instruments laid out on that table. Luca stumbled along behind him. A servant girl scurried to flatten herself against the wall as they passed, her face white as chalk.

Luca knew where they were going. He could have found it alone, blindfolded. They crossed the bailey and up a wide flight of steps to the long corridor with the chapel on their left, the stained glass Hercules in his eternal fight with the Hydra.

The door opened with a push, since it would not lock now. Luca was pulled inside and the door shut behind them. He instinctively tried to flatten himself against the wall like that servant girl when she saw them, but the Baron dragged him forward and lifted him like a bride, all too easily, and set him on the bloodstained rack. He was loathe to touch it, and wrapped his arms around himself protectively. If the Baron could not get his wrists from him, he could not strap them above his head in the leather ties.

The Baron picked up an instrument from the work bench and turned to him, held it a foot in front of his face. “Was this here when you were here last?”

Reluctantly, he looked at the device. It was rather beautiful, like an intricately decorated corkscrew. He didn’t recognize it, but he’d been so distressed he’d hardly taken an inventory. “I don’t know. No?”

“No. It’s called a pear of anguish. Hence the shape.” He demonstrated by turning the round knob at one end and the thing opened up, like a twirling dancer’s skirts. “I acquired it on the trip I just returned from. Remi, a servant who travels with me, brought it here for the collection, and that’s when I learned something was amiss with the lock on the door. The pear is designed to be placed in its victim's mouth or… other orifices. How widely it is opened depends on the transgression of the victim. Or the whim of the torturer, I suppose. I thought it an interesting piece, belonging perhaps next to this heretic's fork here.”

“You brought it for me?”

The Baron stared at him in disbelief. Luca had never seen him appear wounded. He turned and tossed the pear onto the bench so it clattered and Luca flinched, sitting there with his arms wrapped around him on the rack.

“You ask me this in earnest…” muttered the Baron. “I’ve done nothing but love you.”

The word love from the Baron’s mouth made Luca’s eyes fill with unexpected tears. He had to clench his jaw against them.

“I thought we had an understanding, you and I.”

“We do.”

“Do we? Then why do you mistrust me so? Why do you believe every vicious and fantastical rumor about me that you hear? I admit it’s an unsavory hobby to most, but it is that, a hobby. I collect daggers, too, I could show you the room where I keep those. It’s no different. It doesn’t mean I killed my lady wife or my pets with those daggers.”

“What happened to the other pets before me?”

“There were two, as I said. One ran away. We were not well matched. One I loved. They died. They were never very strong, physically, after they spent a winter in a prison cell in Saxony. This was over the span of a decade, by the way.”

“You never thought I’d run?”

“I don’t want a pet that doesn’t want to be mine.”

“Is that why you choose captives and slaves? It’s an improvement for us?”

“Is it not?”

Luca dropped his eyes. It had been.

“Luca,” the Baron said sadly, like he was mourning someone dead, wishing to taste their name just once more. “I loved you from the moment I saw you. From the moment you lifted your eyes to me in that auction yard.”

He came closer, empty handed, and Luca raised his chin in either defiance or surrender, he wasn’t sure. He had never been so lost, so unsure of his own reality. The Baron placed his hands on either side of Luca’s neck, cupping his jaw. He had never since his first night with him been so acutely aware of his master’s stature, the breadth and height of him, the size of the thumbs that brushed his chin. His traitorous body was often excited by moments like this, though now all he felt was fear, old primordial fear ringing down his spine, like the hare in the field that senses the Timberwolf. The Baron smelled of fine leather and spruce, a forest at night. Luca closed his eyes and tried to calm his wildly beating heart.

The Baron only leaned down to kiss his forehead before he left on soft footfalls, leaving the door ajar behind him.

-

For a week, the Baron did not seek him out. He stayed in his own rooms and rode Sparrow farther than he ever had before, all the way to another village where there was another beautiful fountain, but no golden cup. On his second visit he was robbed. Not of much, only the few coins he had on him, but there was an initial struggle that led to him sporting a purple, swollen bruise under his left eye.

The Baron broke the stalemate between them by cornering him in a brazier-lit corridor to ask about it. “I saw this from across the bailey earlier,” he said. “This time you will tell me a name.”

It felt like a relief to be in his presence again. To be spoken to softly, which he thought he might never be again. “I don’t have a name for you.”

“Who then?”

“Some boys,” he said, shrugging. "Hardly grown. They stole some coins from me is all, but I was startled and fought the one who grabbed me.”

The Baron was looking at him but his mind was elsewhere. “Did you report anything?”

“No.”

“Do you remember what they look like?”

“What does it matter?”

“Will you flinch from me again if I try to touch you?”

Luca shook his head. The Baron reached out and touched just the tip of a strand of Luca’s dark hair, like he had that first night they met in the castle. “You are mine, whether you approve of my policies or not. I would like to behead anyone who dares touch you myself.”

Luca forced himself to meet the Baron’s eyes. “But not put them on your rack? In your iron maiden?”

“Don’t be vulgar. It doesn’t suit you. And if you’d looked closely you’d notice that rack isn’t even operational. There is no rope or chain on that cylinder, and it probably hasn’t been turned in a quarter century.”

Was that true? He hadn’t even looked. Finally, the Baron had taken one of many opportunities to make him feel foolish. They stood in silence for a painful moment.

“...Am I really still yours, then?”

“Of course. I forgive your curiosity, if you’ll forgive me for testing it so cruelly. I have to remember you have been mistreated for a long time. Why should you trust blindly?”

“You never gave me a reason not to trust you,” Luca said. He had been tossing and turning at night thinking over it, feeling more and more wretched as the leaves on the mountainsides began to lose their emerald and turn to blood.

“The burden of proof is still mine,” the Baron said. “I should never have forgotten that.”

“What do I do? How can I be in your good graces again?”

“You never left them,” he said, and touched Luca’s lower lip with his finger. The power in that touch, he thought. The way I am sick with lust for it. That is why I am damned.

“Come to me tonight. I miss the taste of you.”

-

Three springs later, in his twenty-fifth year, Luca made a long journey west and south, accompanied by ten soldiers and three servants. He went to his homeland, where he remembered only white clay walls and lemon trees, and the lilt of the language, if not the words. He looked for relatives but found none, which did not surprise him.

Satisfied to eat the food and drink the wine of his motherland, he stayed in a spacious, airy house he rented for the warm months and prepared to leave for home again when the rains came. Stray cats came into the house he stayed in and perched in corners, near the hearth. He didn’t have the heart to shoo them out. The servants began to batten down the shutter windows against a hot wind that had begun to blow sometime in the night and would not stop. The sea, once so prismatic and calm, was choppy and white.

Even here, he had heard rumors of the warlords to the East, those barbaric and heretic lands with their Orthodoxy and their strange influences. The worst of them was Bluebeard, who had a reputation nearly as famed and dark as that of Vlad the Impaler two centuries earlier. Luca listened aloofly for all the trappings of the stories, the hallmark atrocities and places where rumor had cemented into legend. Always, there were idiosyncrasies.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” once asked his favorite servant, Alea.

“Not anymore,” Luca replied. “Only a third of it is true.”

Alea turned back to making them tea.

Two months after he’d revealed his dishonesty to the Baron about entering the room, the thieves who had robbed and beaten him tried their luck in Hwenn. They were apprehended and the Baron was made aware. He had them brought to the castle on a hunch, which Luca confirmed was correct. These were the three from Kyrr. He knew from the look in the Baron’s eyes— he had just sealed the thieves' fates.

“I suppose you think the cross too heinous?” Constantin asked him in English.

“Please,” he said quietly, so the thieves and the soldiers standing nearby could not hear. “Just the sword, if they must die.”

“The people of Hwenn will want nothing less. That one there tried to kill an innkeep for the coins in his register. And they wronged you, which you may be quick to forget, but I am not. Tell me which one caused that bruise and I’ll put him on a cross. You will not be made to watch. I promise.”

Still Luca shook his head.

The Baron looked at him for a long moment. He sighed. “The sword, then. If only by mercy of Luca Illés.”

That night, Luca lay in the ancestral bed of Baron Illés, under the arm that had swung the sword three times, a contented hare between the paws of the Timberwolf.

~

Note:

Inspiration for this retelling comes from the French folklore/fairytale of Bluebeard, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and folklore concerning Vlad the Impaler (specifically, the golden cup). Luca’s kalimba song is very old and has many versions but the version I drew from is Two Sisters by Emily Portman. My intent for this telling was to leave some ambiguity about how many of the stories and tales surrounding this particular Bluebeard are true. We only know that Luca made his deal with the devil. Thanks so much for reading!

@starfields08000

[voidwhump]

Bluebeard's Pet Part II

part one

This is a whumpy retelling of the folk/fairytale figure of Bluebeard in three parts. It replaces Bluebeard's new wife with a male "pet" (slave/concubine). It takes place in an indeterminate year in a fictional medieval Europe.

cw: slavery, pet whump, slave auction, stocks, power imbalance, language barriers, gruesome elements like torture, execution, and draconian policies throughout, whipping, sexually explicit scenes, dubcon because of social status, light “knifeplay” (non diegetic bdsm), alcohol consumption, slight praise kink

Part Two: The Golden Cup 

Slowly, Luca began to feel safe with the Baron, even alone. Especially alone. He liked sitting at the councils for an hour or two, but almost no one spoke in English at those meetings and some of the people who approached the table glanced at Luca like his presence was an insult to them personally.

Alone, Baron Illés welcomed Luca’s tentative warmth without taking any invitation any further than it was meant. After that first blunt conversation about the role of a “pet”, Luca had been worried he would never be used to that sort of open frankness. Was it true what the priests had always said, that the countries of the east were filled with libertines and impious women? An instinctively cautious part of him feared the Baron would simply take what he wanted and tell him it was custom here. Don’t be prude, he might say, or more in his style; you’re more English than you look, aren’t you? He’d never felt like one of them in that land until he’d been taken away.

But the Baron never touched him more than a brief, nearly reverent touch to his hair or his face, or in returning any physical closeness that Luca initiated. This made him bolder as well as hungrier, and soon he found himself inching closer to the nobleman whenever he could, hoping to be met with one of those swordsman’s arms around his shoulders or about his waist. If it was a deliberate tactic of winning him over, he admitted it was working.

Best of all was the Baron’s praise, which he gave easily whenever Luca came closer on his own or initiated some new form of contact. “There now,” he would say, pleased but never lascivious. “Good. Here you are.”

After his years being largely ignored at Thistledown, unless he was being snapped at to do something differently, and weeks of casual abuse by slavers he couldn’t understand, words of encouragement directed into his ear in the kindest English had a profound effect. He was almost ashamed of it, but he couldn’t stop seeking it— like a drunk being poured another cup of strongwine. Often accompanying this praise was a chaste, dizzying kiss pressed to his hair. 

One evening, the Baron asked for a lock of it. He had to go on a short trip to the north, he said, and it might be a fighting sort of trip, if some intel proved true. He would like to wear a lock of that beautiful dark hair of Luca’a in a silk pouch around his neck, under his kaftan, if he found himself in a battle. It was good luck, after all. Flattered, Luca consented. The Baron pulled a curved dagger from a hilt at his belt, and motioned for him to come closer. The golden hilt shone and flickered like a dragons hoard in the firelight.

Ah. Something alluringly wicked about being asked to come closer to a man holding a drawn blade. He thought the Baron was able to sense this delight in him, this preclusion to a certain kind of sinfulness. He remembered the invitation to bite when he was in those humiliating stocks, and the wink the Baron had given him when he said he wouldn’t. That was their agreement. Good treatment and good behavior, and from that stemmed this strange trust, this courtship. 

He knew a slave once that had been indomitable- feral in his refusal to obey a single request or command. Luca had asked him once, after he’d been beaten to a pulp by the master and a young, zealous priest, why he would not simply pretend to submit— especially when it was a small matter. Why would he not pick his battles as the rest of them did? Was he not exhausted of it? But the slave said he’d rather die than give them any satisfaction. He would rather be beaten to death like a mule than be complicit to anyone who dared say that had enslaved him, be it the master or the priests or the King of England himself. He did not share that conviction. True, he’d never loved the priests or the master, he cared not for the King, and the slavers who had arrived armed on the island in the blue fog of dawn would never have a sliver of his love, or anything but obedience that comes from powerlessness, and fear. 

With the Baron, it was a different sort of dance. The more he learned of who he was dealing with, the more interested he became in submitting to him out of curiosity, and interest. The more curiosity and trust he showed, the more interested the Baron became in him. In that regard, they were made for each other. 

He went and sat where he was beckoned, on a great carved bench by the hearth, turning towards the Baron and tucking his legs up under him so they were facing one another. He was trembling, which he attributed to old treatment and old instincts, days when he was kicked and beaten like a dog until he felt like one. The Baron’s eyes were warm and calm. “Just a lock of hair,” he said, sensing keenly his new pet’s discomfort. “I won’t hurt you.”

His heart pounded wildly, like the hare, as Constantin Illés lifted that arabesque curved blade, dragging it lightly and harmlessly along his loose linen shirt. He could not hide the way his breathing became shallow and more labored, his lips parting at the scrape of the blade against his collarbone. He knew this man would not cut him unless he meant to, and if he meant to he could cleanly cleave out his heart in a matter of moments, like the huntsman in the old fairy tale. 

“Good,” the Baron crooned, praising his stillness. One little word, good, but Luca felt it between his legs and nearly whimpered aloud. 

The Baron’s eyes never left his as the blade made its way lovingly, slowly, up his neck, past his artery, and kissed the unblemished beauty of his face, cool and flat. He was caressing him, Luca realized, holding his face with the dagger like he liked to do with his hands.

“You’re forgiving me this indulgence, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Luca said with eyes low.

“I thought so.”

The Baron reached his free hand and lifted a lock of Luca’s hair up away from the rest to cut it. The blade made a little hiss, so sharp it did not even pull as it separated the lock from his scalp. He stared at the dark, curling softness in the Baron’s palm.

“Now I will take you with me,” he said matter-of-factly. “And we can speak to each other under the full moon.”

The full moon, he realized with a start of dread. The Baron would be away when he was supposed to tell him his final decision. He hoped the offer still stood. As far as he knew, it did. He would have to tell him now, or wait. The high of fear and arousal the blade of the dagger had given him was fading, and left a hollow space in his chest. 

“It’s almost full now,” he said cautiously. “Do you still want me?”

It was coy, girlish. He cringed later to remember it. But the Baron took it correctly as an invitation. “I do,” he answered with a grin, tucking the lock of hair into a green pouch of silk. “You have only to allow me.” 

Standing together in the middle of his ancestral chambers, the Baron stripped Luca slowly of his clothes, as if unwrapping a present, with the utmost patience of a circling wolf. Luca panted and squirmed under the heavy hands that roved over his hot skin, quickening him to the sort of desire he’d only thought of in private, guilty moments when his mind did not lend to images of bare breasted nymphs by the creek or even of a stable boy his own age he’d exchanged clumsy touches with once, but of this— of lying down for the master, the Lord. Of being a possession, and being possessed, not as a slave but as an object of desire. He could imagine it, but the real thing was startling.

Still fully dressed, the Baron kissed him like one would a wife, on the mouth, lowering his rough beard to kiss his chest and his belly, to nuzzle between his legs and kiss his naked inner thighs until he was moaning. When the Baron undressed it was swift and automatic, the way a knight removes a breastplate and helmet. He was just as at ease naked as he was clothed in rich silks and furs, no less a noble in his every blink and breath. He asked Luca if he’d done this particular act before and Luca answered truthfully, no, though he would have had the good sense to lie if he had. 

“I won’t hurt you,” said the Baron, and not for the first time that night. “I promise.”

At this Luca blushed so deeply he felt the heat like a fever on his chest as well as his face. There was oil, and fingers, as he knew there might be if he was lucky, and then the act itself, the consummation he had agreed to under the last full moon.

“May I?”

“Yes.”

No matter the civility the Baron treated him with in the light of day, no matter the emerald Hydras or the anklets or the trays of fruit and honeycomb, this was a feral act— animal and base. It was so illicit, so condemning and yet so privately desired that he soon felt the pleasure that lived just underneath pain; he felt both speared and crushed and wondered how he’d ever live with anything less than that ever again, that overwhelming fulfillment. The Baron did not have to ask if he’d hurt him, for he knew he hadn’t, they both knew it. Luca finished with a whimper and a cry, almost shamefully, from a light but persistent touch. But the Baron was pleased, and praised him low in his ear as Luca came over his hand.

 He slept in the Baron’s bed that night, a mahogany four poster like a great sleigh.

In the morning, a servant came with fresh water in a basin. She saw Luca under the master's covers and froze for a moment before catching herself and setting the basin in its place on the dresser.

He would have expected her to be a little scandalized, maybe. But it wasn’t that. Scandal or plain surprise had not been in her eyes. It was fear. They’d locked with his and he’d felt it as instinctually and purely as he knew it was the light of the sun coming through the thick drawn curtains and not the moon.

Who had she been afraid for, if not herself?

Before he left on his trip on horseback with a sword at his hip, the Baron gave Luca a thick set of skeleton keys. He held them out halfway, almost playfully, making Luca reach close and take them.

Until that moment, Luca had not considered the fact that he, a pet, would be entrusted with anything in this great man’s absence. There were others more credentialed and titled than he, surely, but maybe the Baron didn’t want those people having the keys to all his personal compartments. The status of pet here was more respected than he'd thought, farther from slave than he'd ever imagined.

The heavy and intricate keys were of varying sizes, some small as to open the drawer of a cabinet or some ornate box, and some as large as Lucas' hand from wrist to fingertip. His master told him these were the keys to every room in the castle, every lockbox and secret compartment, from the Baron’s private offices to the few old prison cells in the dark bowels of the castle he said he had converted to wine cellars.

Here was the key to the kitchens and a key to the stables once it was shut up after dark. Luca was uncomfortably aware that any slave or pet planning an escape would envy the keys to the stable after dark. The Barons' knowing eyes seemed to read this very thought from him so he had to turn to the keys and pretend to be mesmerized by the teeth of one in particular. He seemed to possess an uncanny ability to read people, Luca thought, which might be why the servants all scurried from him like frightened mice and hurried about their duties in the day like they couldn’t wait to be out of those chambers.

But Luca had nothing to hide. He had no intention of escaping a home better than any he’d ever had, and very dreamed of having. The Baron loved him, he thought for the first time, and felt a surge of love returned for him. That was a dangerous thought, but he’d had it, hadn’t he? It could not be mistaken for anything else. 

The last key on the ring looked older than the others, as if it were moldering or barnacled from being at the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck for the last sixty years. The Baron hesitated when he came to it, looking like he might say something but deciding against it.

“What is that one?” Luca asked. He’d told him the rest, painstakingly. Why leave out the last key?

“Oh,” said the Baron. “It wouldn’t much interest you, I’m afraid. It’s a little room at the end of the east wing, past the old chapel. There’s the most beautiful stained glass in the chapel, that might please you. But the other... it’s nothing. Cobwebs and the hobbies of rich, eccentric men. In fact… why don’t we agree that you simply won’t go to that room? That would be best. I try to respect your privacy and your wishes, and I know you will respect mine.”

He left the ugly key on the ring.

While the Baron was gone, Luca ventured to the nearby village. He’d been in most of the castle, the Bailey and the stable and the aviary. He wanted to see the people of this strange country, not servants or Lords but the people who owned shops and pulled carts and swept the steps of their homes every evening. He brought some money in a belt against his waist, tucked tightly to deter even the most skilled pickpockets. He doubted there would be as many in the little mountainside village as he’d heard there was in London, but he would hate to lose any of the Baron’s money and have nothing to show for it. He left his ring and his anklet in the castle, and dressed in the most modest linen clothes he could find.

The village center was lively at mid morning. It was a sunny June day and the snow caps on the blue mountains were almost gone entirely. He passed a church and a well, an outdoor market with stalls and booths, a post office with a coop of crooning and fluttering pigeons, and a number of residential apartments as well as a small inn that seemed to serve mostly as a pub for locals, even in the midday. There was no wall surrounding the village like there was the castle and the town within. 

He was eating a soft boiled egg he bought from a booth, it’s yolk as orange as the flowers that dotted the hillsides and still warm, when he noticed a remarkable fountain in the middle of the square. It was white, cool marble, and had the now familiar Hydra carved into the side, one of the serpentine heads jutting out to serve as the fountain.

He approached to look at it more closely. On the lip of the fountain was a large golden cup. Puzzled, he looked around. No one was paying the golden cup any mind. On closer inspection, he noticed it was inlaid with a ruby on either side. He picked it up. It was heavy. Was it solid gold? Truly? Even just coated in gold, it had to be worth half of the town.

A girl came close to wash her hands in the stream of cold mountain water that came from the Hydra head.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Who does this cup belong to?”

The girl looked at him with wide eyes but shook her head. Likely she did not speak English.

“It belongs to all of us,” a woman responded in her place. She had come out from the tavern and looked a bit disheveled, with dark hair slipping slowly out of a kerchief on all sides. Her English was thickly accented, and she smelled of ale. She lifted the cup to fill it and took a demonstrative swig.

“I’ve never been somewhere where someone would not steal a gold cup from a public fountain.”

“Then you’ve never been in Hwenn.”

She was being coy, and he was curious to the point of annoyance with her coyness. “What keeps someone from stealing it? I don’t understand.”

Her playful smile dropped at his impatience. “I was going to get you a drink,” she muttered, gathering her dingey skirts and standing from the edge of the fountain. “Maybe give a pretty dance for a pretty boy. But you are rude.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry.”

“There,” she pointed. “Go around church and see why no one steals golden cup.”

He followed where she had pointed, noticing two carrion birds high in the sky, flying their slow arcs like rangers of dead flesh. He turned the corner of the church and stopped fast.

Blood rushed to his ears leaving his feet rooted and heavy where they stood. The sunny June morning went as cold for him as if a dark shadow had blocked out the sun. He could no longer hear the din of shopkeepers or the chirping of birds, the creaking of the wheels on the cart that passed him. 

Three men and a woman were nailed to crude wooden crosses on the side of the busy street. Dead. Their mouths hung open in echoes of screams, faces badly decomposed and eyes plucked out, likely by vultures or crows. Luca covered his face with his elbow when the warm breeze brought him the smell of death.

An old woman saw him staring at the bodies and shook her gray head, covered partly in a black shawl. She muttered something disapproving in a tongue he did not know. He turned away from the hideous display of corpses and into the inn.

It was cool, and relatively quiet inside. The rough beams of the ceiling were so low he had to duck a little at the entrance, but then it opened up a few more feet above his head.

He paid for an ale and drank it slowly, wishing it was the heady burgundy his master had in endless supply.

“You alright, lad?” asked the barkeep.

“He’s just seen the way they do justice in Hwenn,” laughed a man on the stool next to him. He shared Luca’s own accent. “I know that look. And I’ve never seen you around before. You come from some place were they throw thieves in jail to rot for six weeks, dont you? I come from a place like that. I admire how they do things here.”

“They were thieves?” Luca asked. “The ones on the crosses?”

“That's right. And the next thief that comes along will take one of their foul places. Sometimes they get to be almost skeletons, in the summer, before that happens. But someone always tries their luck. Don’t you think a gold cup out in the middle of town is a bit suspicious? Wouldn’t you think hey now, wait a minute, maybe I ought not to try and nab this here shiny piece of bait?”

“Who sets this bait?”

The barkeep gave the man a lingering look and walked away, tossing a dish rag over his shoulder.

“Do you know where you are, man?”

“Hwenn.”

“And who is the Baron of this fine fief, those in Hwenn are under?”

“Illés.”

“The Bluebeard Baron.” The man spread his hands. “No safer or fairer land than this.”

“Safer?” Luca repeated.

The man gave him a leveling look. “Murderers and rapists are boiled to death in a giant pot. They wheel it out special for that, it’s somewhere in the castle the rest of the time. Go fifty leagues from here. You’ll be robbed blind and left for dead in a ditch if there ain’t a wall around you, and even then. Not here. No. No one even takes the cup.” The man lowered his voice to a mumble for his next half-treasonous sentence. “The King ought to take a page from Bluebeard’s book, if you ask me.”

Luca slipped off the barstool, leaving half a cup of undrunk ale and heading back out into the sunshine. He felt drunk, but not from the weak tavern ale. He left the village and made his way back to the castle, where he climbed the many flights to the Baron’s chambers and fell asleep in his ancestral bed, sunsick and dazed. When he woke it was a dusty pink dusk, and fireflies lit the field below his window.

He took the ring of keys and began a thorough search of everywhere big enough to store a cauldron that was big enough to boil people inside of. He was getting more and more confident the man in the inn had been yanking his chain with every cellar and empty room he searched. There was no man-boiling cauldron. That was a story to scare misbehaving children with. Or naive foreigners like himself. In these days of growing reason and humane law, no one less than a King would be allowed to terrorize a fiefdom under such iron cruelty.

Something drew him on, through the last light of dusk and into full night. He carried a light with him, a torch from the wall that’s light was better than a lantern. He opened the door to what he assumed would be the last wine cellar, full of dusty bottles in their hundreds of slots. It was empty, except for a wooden platform on which sat a massive iron pot, bowl shaped like a witch’s cauldron and big enough to fit three grown men inside, black on the bottom from fire.

—

The Baron returned within the time frame promised. He brought Luca gifts from the northern regions he’d visited: a pale blue cloak lined in softest mink, barrels of the citrus fruits he’d mentioned missing from his long lost home (bought from a southern trader), and a seventeen key kalimba with a stag head painted around the sound hole.

“My pet,” the Baron held him tenderly, kissing his hair now even in front of the servants. “I’ve missed you, Luca.”

That evening, Luca plucked a gentle tune on the kalimba to steady his nerves as he thought of the question that had been burning in his mind for days. The song he remembered was long, and he couldn’t remember all the stanzas. He remembered a maiden growing jealous of a Knights affection for her fair younger sister, and drowning the younger girl in the river. 

And he courted the eldest with diamonds and rings

Oleander yolling

The other he loved above all things,

Down by the waters rolling

“I went into Hwenn,” he said softly, still plucking the tune with his thumbs. 

“Oh?”

“It was very nice.”

“Did you see the fountain?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I’m going to build an amphitheater there this year.”

Music, art, theater. What sort of man cares for these things, brings them to other people, common people, even? The same man who has men and women crucified for petty theft?

“There were four corpses in the street,” he said in a rush, before his tongue became tied again. He ceased his song on the kalimba. “Thieves. Crucified thieves.”

The Baron frowned. He had peeled an orange in his large, deft hands and was pulling the flesh apart into sections to eat. Luca couldn’t help but think of the way the Baron liked to pull him apart thusly, teasing him to the edge of pleasure half a dozen times before letting him finish— a game they both enjoyed. 

“Not likely thieves, then, if they were on the crosses.  Murderers, maybe. Horse thieves, occasionally, but that’s a graver offense. If they were convicted of that they’d have been hanged. Possibly put on the crosses afterwards, that’s up to them.”

“Who?”

“Hwenn. The people. They like to do that to foreigners. They don’t like to do it to their own.”

“So the people put them up there? After they’re dead?”

“Did it bother you? I’m sorry if it did, pet.”

“No,” he said defensively. He wasn’t some naive bride who had never seen death before. “I just… I was told they were thieves. That they tried to steal that gold cup.”

The Baron laughed and ate a piece of fragrant orange. “That cup. They love that thing. One day it’ll get lifted in the night and taken where the winds may blow, but they’ve had it there for nigh on a year now.” He laughed again at the thought.

Luca laughed with him, partly at himself. Emboldened by the Baron’s easy demeanor, he added; “a man told me it was your doing. That you kept such order by crucifying petty thieves and… boiling men alive in the town square.”

The Baron’s face fell. He looked at him closely. “This rattled you a good deal, or you wouldn’t have repeated it to me.”

Luca shrugged. He supposed he deserved the loss of levity the conversation had taken. He had pushed too far. He’d nearly made a flat out accusation

”We are beset on all sides by enemies, Luca. I know you know this.”

He did not, specifically, but the Baron never tried to make him feel stupid.

“We have kept them at bay for two hundred years. Kept their armies and their customs and their God out of our land, battled them from the very steps of our kingdom, kept them from crossing the mountains. And what do we get for support from our Church? Our King?” He sighed. “Skepticism and a demand for more taxes. These enemies use every weapon at their disposal. One such weapon is not artillery or horses, but gossip. They start rumors. Priests, generals, Sultans, gossiping like old women until someone writes something in a book and then it is the truth for time immemorial. Is it the truth? What else did you hear?”

“That was hideous enough. I left.”

“Then you did not hear that I drink the blood of my enemies? That I steal their wives for my concubines and rape them, that I murder their children in front of them with venomous snakes?”

“No.” Luca had foolishly waded out of his depth, heedless to the strong current just past where he could reach. “No.”

“You will. In time, you will hear those stories too.” He raised the back of Luca’s right hand to his lips, his recently trimmed and oiled beard still scratching like bristles as he kissed it. “I hope you don’t dwell on such vicious propaganda. I know you have been through more in your time in England than you like to let on, but I would have you think on pleasant things now.”

Yet he looked into Luca’s eyes with that searing golden gaze that so disoriented unsuspecting envoys and dignitaries. “Hideous, you said. What do you think is the proper response to criminality in a land so precariously eastern as ours?”

Luca didn’t know if he meant ours as in his and his peoples, or ours as in you are a citizen now too. “You ask that of a slave?”

“You’re not a slave.”

Luca tilted his head, beseeching the Lord to leave him of answering anyway.

The Baron narrowed his eyes, not unkindly. “Are you afraid?” he asked, and his tone had gentled.

What could he say? “I don’t know.”

"Well," the Baron said, and offered him the last slice of orange as gently as if he were feeding sugar water to a hummingbird. "You needn't be."

In the Baron's bed, Luca dreamt of the Hydra, its many serpentine mouths dripping green venom that burned the earth like Greek fire where it fell.

-

This retelling initially drew on Angela Carter’s short story The Bloody Chamber (her own Bluebeard retelling) as well as folklore surrounding Vlad Dracula (specifically the golden cup). Luca’s kalimba song is a very old one with many iterations, but the version I’m referencing is Two Sisters by Emily Portman

@starfields08000

[voidwhump]

Bluebeard's Pet - Part I

This is a whumpy retelling of the folk/fairytale figure of Bluebeard in three parts. It replaces Bluebeard's new wife with a male "pet" (slave/concubine). It takes place in an indeterminate year in a fictional medieval Europe.

cw: slavery, pet whump, slave auction, stocks, power imbalance, language barriers, gruesome elements like torture, execution, and draconian policies throughout, whipping, sexually explicit scenes, dubcon because of social status, light knifeplay, alcohol consumption, praise kink

Part One: The Hare Moon

Luca’s wrists and back ached stiffly from the stocks at the slave auction. The back of his neck was burned from the sun, and his throat hurt from the long day's thirst.

At least at night the air was cool and the stars were magnificent, a bowl of eternity tipped upside down over the Roman-built road they traveled endlessly south on, towards constellations that looked like a giant ladle, a crab, a many headed serpent. Under the silver light of a quarter-moon, Luca slept in patches, woken always by a shrill whinny of a horse or a bumpy patch of road washed out along a creek bed from the spring snowmelt. He had not slept soundly in many nights, not eaten a true meal, not stretched his arms over his head for the ropes that always bound his wrists. He had not combed his hair or dared say a single word for fear of being struck in the face again.

His newest captors, the people who raided the seaside village he’d belonged to since he could remember, spoke a language he could not even guess to name. It seemed full of consonants to him, with nowhere his mind could rest on a vowel or hear the distinction between words and sentences. For weeks he’d been going by a man’s tone with him, like a dog. He noticed he’d begun to behave like a dog, which made him feel embarrassed and sullen.

He was the only one in the wagon procession from his home country, the others all spoke in Nordic tongues to one another, eyeing him with appraising blue gazes but not trying to communicate. Luca knew his mother tongue should have been or may have once been Italian, but he knew only English now. He longed for even the gruff voice of the old guard at Thistledown, his grumbling would be like birdsong now. He had dark eyes that were sometimes soft, despite his rough voice and hands, and he had slipped Luca hot tea with honey on more than one cold night. What he wouldn’t give for a cup now, in the chipped old mug the man always gave him, with his hands free to hold it in front of him as he pleased.

At first he thought no one had wanted him at the auction. He stayed bent and aching in the stocks, unable to do anything but blink and twitch like a colt at the flies and gnats that buzzed around his face and hands. His gaze was on the ground, he could lift his neck only about an inch and even that sent a twinge of warning pain down his vertebrae. All morning as the sun rose from the April treetops towards its spring zenith he saw boots, boots of soldiers and of merchants, of paupers and some he deemed were likely the fine leather shoes of nobility. Once or twice someone stopped and spoke to the master, who would answer in an oily, flattering voice. Luca couldn’t understand his words, but noted the change in demeanor he had with his prospective customers compared with how he spoke to them— his captured slaves.

Once or twice the slaver pried his mouth open so someone could inspect his teeth, or pulled up and eyelid to see the color of his eyes— or tugged his matted, curly dark hair as if to test the thickness. He could taste their skin on his tongue for hours after they stuck their fingers in his mouth, but he was too thirsty to waste saliva spitting on the ground. He’d probably get a swift kick in the shin for it, anyway. Only the master slaver could spit without permission, which he did frequently— long brown squirts of chewing tobacco through his likewise brown teeth.

Then a large man— Luca could tell by the height of the very shadow on the packed earth in front of him, stood in front of him. He wore a pair of black leather boots, not in the style he’d seen the rest of the morning but flatter, with a tapered toe and filigree silver buckles at the ankles. Of his own volition, Luca dared lift his head that painful inch to raise his eyes to this new stranger. He was well over six feet, broad shouldered and black haired, with silver at the temples almost as if it had been brushed in at perfect intervals. He had dark eyes like Luca, which stood out to him after traveling with so many pale haired, blue eyed captives for so many weeks. Yet unlike Luca’s near black ones, this impassive man’s eyes were light brown, cognac flecked with citrine, like sunlight in a creekbed reflected through water. He wore no discernible expression, but his eyes met Luca and felt like a static shock from a wool blanket. He hurried to drop his gaze back to the dirt.

The slave in the next stock had just bitten someone, and was being beaten with a birch switch so ruthlessly she shrieked and fought her stocks so they rattled. Luca flushed in second hand embarrassment, not only for the slave girl who was being whipped like a donkey, but, strangely, for her bad behavior in front of this regal and composed man.

The man walked a circle around him. In the stocks, Luca could do nothing but stare ahead at the ground. From his peripheral he could see the man wore a curved and ornamented dagger on his hip. Over his wrists and forearms he wore leather bracers, wide and well worn, and on one finger was a gold ring with a flat black head, and in the black field was some jewel, green as deep forest moss, glinting in the sun as it passed his line of vision and was lost again before he could make it out.

The rest of the great man’s garb seemed to him something like the leather and cotton travel-wear his captors wore in these lands, yet over this practical clothing he wore a cloak that spoke to Luca of the unknown lands to the east, an outer kaftan of royal blue embroidered with canary yellow Ottoman tulips. It had fur like that of Timberwolves at the neck, making his great shoulders appear even larger.

The man exchanged words with his slaver in that slippery, impenetrable language, and Luca found his jaw being worked open for the half dozenth time. No finger was shoved inside his mouth, but the foreign man did look at both his top and bottom rows of teeth, the back of his throat. He asked a question and the slaver answered affirmatively, eagerly. Cool fingertips touched the sides of Luca’s throat, just beneath the jaw. He shivered as they worked down the side of his neck, looking for something under the skin he did not understand that none of the others had known to look for.

The slave beside them shrieked one last time and went limp, held up by her wrists and neck. The man glanced over at her, at her matted yellow hair and her bleeding legs and then back at Luca. He put his finger sidelong in front of his mouth.

“What about you?” he asked in English. His voice was measured and low, perfectly enunciated as if to make up for his slight accent. “Do you bite like these little northern barbarians?”

Such a relief it was to be spoken to in a familiar tongue, no matter the words or by whom, that Luca blinked tears away from his eyes, startled by them. He shook his head slowly, deliberately. No.

The man broke into a smile that went right to his eyes and crinkled the skin at the corners. Still it looked saddened, perhaps by the tears standing in Luca’s. “Neither will I, then,” he winked, as if they were sharing a private joke.

The slaver came close with the switch raised. Though Luca could not understand his words, he understood the question he spoke well enough. Shall I beat this one, too? Perhaps buyers liked to see how prospective slaves react to pain. Perhaps he thought Luca had displeased the man.  The foreign man made eye contact with him again, and that was the first of many understandings they would share. “No,” he said to the slaver, giving a casual frown and shake of the head. He said something further in the tongue he and the slaver shared that Luca did not. 

Luca heard an exchange of coins and felt numb with fear and relief both. But then the man left, without a word of reassurance or a claiming touch to his hair, his hand, anything.

He learned later that he was to be brought by wagon to his new Master’s castle, which sat like a great ancient dragon guarding the hills and woods of a remote countryside, as far south and east as Luca had ever been or imagined.

When he finally arrived he was sick from some travel-fever that had gone through the wagons like a curse, leaving them weak and dehydrated. A few died, and they stopped for just long enough to roll the corpses out and bury them along the roadside in shallow graves. Luca wondered if this was out of some universal respect for the dead, or if they simply didn’t want to be caught tossing corpses along the road and fined by local authorities that might take offense to such careless pollution. He had a feeling, watching the master spit tobacco at his feet impatiently as the slaves who were still well enough dug a hole for one of their own, that it was the latter.

The Baron did not greet him when he arrived, and for that he was grateful. He was filthy, repulsive, and sicker than he’d ever been. A pair of servant women helped him up flight after flight of stone steps, some broad and straight and others curving and narrow, past faded tapestries and beautiful chandeliers that reminded his half delirious mind of the stars he’d watched from the wagon, and finally into a huge beautiful room with a waiting warm bath. The women stripped him naked. He helped them as best he could, without a thought except that his clothes should be burned. They guided him into a wide wooden barrel lined with pounded copper that glowed amber in the hearth light.

He sunk into warm water and they scrubbed him with sure hands, as if they’d bathed a hundred new slaves in this very tub.

“Bad water,” one tsked to the other.

“You speak English?” he asked feverishly. He smiled at them in relief. They looked so different than the servants he was used to, dressed in white or gray with their hair covered for cleanliness and their faces plain. These girls wore dresses of brightly dyed linen, and something was reddening their lips like smeared blood. Their brown hair was long and loose about their shoulders, brushed out and shameless and clean. Maybe they weren’t servants, he wondered. But who else would wash a sick, filthy slave bought at auction?

He was sorry they had to deal with him, but grateful it wasn’t his new Master. The shame of his soiled clothes and wasted body would be too much. He might be disillusioned and disgusted. He might have a bout of buyers remorse and not even want him anymore. Perhaps that was for the best. Perhaps he was being cleaned and prepared for a slaughter. What did he know of these strange lands?

The women didn’t answer him, and spoke in another tongue to each other after that. They dressed him in silk pants and no shirt, led him barefoot to a great bed the size of one of the slavers’ wagons. There he dozed, looking into the dark, vaulted recesses of the ceiling, until light crept through thick burgundy curtains, and more servants brought him food on soft bare feet, and it was dark again.

One late evening, with a foreign, sweet-scented breeze floating in the open window, he felt the side of the bed depressing and opened his eyes. In buttery moonlight he saw the profile of his new master light a candle. His nose was long and straight, with a sharp bridge and eyebrows that made him look like a scowling heathen warlord in one of the illuminated manuscripts he had glimpsed in the church once, treasures passing through for his old master to selectively sift through and send the rest along to London.

His old master never sat on the side of the bed. Luca had only ever seen him a few times a month, and even that was more than he wanted to. He was a pale eyed, shrewd Lord, with skin that seemed translucent gray and a sour outlook on just about everything as far as Luca could tell. He did not inspire the curiosity tinged with fear that this man did, smelling of leather and woodsmoke and the outdoors at night.

“I was told you’ve been very sick,” said the Baron in his soft, perfect English.

“I am much better now, my lord,” Luca answered carefully, sitting up as best he could against thick downy pillows. He didn’t know if he looked better, but the women had washed his hair and fed him and given him clean water to drink, so he hoped he at least resembled whatever the man had liked in him at the auction. He didn’t know what sort of man he was, or why exactly he was here. “Those women were very kind. Especially to a slave.”

“Good,” his new master said, and touched only the very end of a lock of his hair so gently it tickled his scalp and gave him goosebumps up his left side. “You’re not a slave, though.”

Luca tilted his head.

“You’re a pet. My pet. If you’d like.”

Pet. He’d heard the word, but it was always in the context of antiquity. It was elevated from slave, though still a position of social bondage. It was a favored, exclusive position akin to a concubine. His heart thudded in his rib cage. Suddenly the size of the Baron was overwhelming instead of just alluring, and their proximity was alarming.

“Or you can remain a slave, if you prefer,” shrugged the Baron. His cloak tonight was embroidered crimson on a field of black. At first the red looked like fleur de lis, but when he looked closer he could see they were beautifully stitched Hydras, three watersnake heads on top of a dragon's body, with forked tongues lashing from their snoutish mouths.

“I… I don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

“Of course. You are not from here. I understand. As a slave you’ll work in the castle, or on the grounds, or in the village. Wherever you’re needed or you show some aptitude. You’ll answer to Sister Agathar. I don’t deal with slaves directly. Not unless one commits a capitol offense.”

“And as a pet?” he asked, his voice wavering.

“You’ll stay here, in the castle. These are my rooms, where you are welcome, but you’ll have your own. You’ll have access to the library, the baths, the gardens. The stables, if you like to ride.”

“What is a pets… purpose?”

“Only to be my companion. My wife died a few months ago giving birth to my son, Alec. May her soul be at peace. I will remarry, eventually, as I need more children to strengthen my house. But…my tastes can run toward dark-eyed boys I find in the stocks in Saxony, too. But only if you’ll have me. I have no interest in conquering.”

That was very well for him, Luca knew, because it would not be particularly difficult for this man if he did. “Tonight?”

His master laughed. He was so straightforward, so at ease that he made Luca’s fear feel childish and needless. “No. Absolutely, no. There is no rush. Though if I were to suggest a time constraint…” he nodded out the narrow window at the full moon rising over the dark and wild landscape, orange as a cantaloupe. “By the next full moon, I’d like to know your final decision. Remain a slave or become my pet. And ideally to consummate it, if you choose thusly.” 

The foreign Lord’s eyes were dark in the candlelight, his beard thicker and fuller than it had been at the auction, streaked in a few places in silver. The rest of it was so black it appeared blue. Despite his height and Zeuslike stature, he had a gentle and civilized air about him, a manner Luca had observed from afar in nobility ever since coming as a young slave to the foggy island village he would come to think of as home.

All his earlier memories were of a white stucco house and sun faded carpets, a lemon tree, and a bright blue sea crystalized and solidified so they were more like paintings in his mind than memories he could visit. They were stuck behind a midnight raid, a blow to the side of his head, his brothers screaming, a dog barking and barking until it yelped and fell silent.

This strange clime, the opulent and beautiful room he’d been recovering in, and the seemingly boundless civility of his new master was intoxicating. He was being offered a position of wealth and comfort and favor. His only other option was a job in a kitchen or field, sleeping on countless generations of lice in a bed of straw, no doubt eating thin leftover soup and stale bread rinds from the castle.

“You seem fair and wise,” he said cautiously, hoping flattery was something this aristocrat liked as much as most of them did. “I… I think I’d be honored to stay as your pet. Though, I am not trained in the customs of that position, and I do not know where I am.”

The Baron smiled, and it felt to Luca like sympathy without pity, like he was apologizing for the whole thing. “Forgive me. I am Baron Constantin Illés, and this is castle Illés in the region of Corralachia, just east of the great mountains. You came through the only traversable pass for twenty leagues in that wagon. What is your name, my would-be pet?”

“Luca.”

“Luca,” the Baron echoed reverently, and ghosted his fingertips over Luca’s cheek so that his breath caught and he felt himself turning red. “‘Bringer of light’. You are certainly the bringer of moonlight. May is the hare moon, and I’ve never seen it so bright as it is tonight. The wolves hunt the hares by the light of it, but still by summer they have multiplied tenfold. They are the bringer of new beginnings.”

“And the wolves must also eat,” Luca said, meaning that they could not feel bad for one animal just because it had a soft twitchy nose. The Baron laughed good naturedly. “True. The wolves must also eat. Sleep on your decision, and tell me for true on the next moon.”

—

In the following days, Luca threw off the remaining vestiges of his traveling sickness. He felt strong and whole again, and ate voraciously of the creamy soups and soft breads he was brought by servants he seldom saw, piling soft cheese on sweet dates and drinking dry burgundy until the skin over his ribs smoothed back out and his hips were not so sharp.

He wore silk and linen clothes, loose fitting and often embroidered beautifully as was the local custom for finery. He was given a delicate anklet of gold, which he knew was a sensual piece often worn in harems or on dancers, male and female, though there was certainly a feminine look it gave to his ankle, like hinting at a secret. It also reminded him of the fetters he’d worn as a slave, rough ropes that cut his skin for weeks. He still had some scarring on his wrists from it, and the Baron had given him a lavender-scented ointment to rub on the skin. He seemed sympathetic to the way Luca had gotten the rope burn discoloration there, rather than critical of a blemish, but they still made him self conscious. He was a captured slave turned pet-prince here, and he ought to look the part.

He was given a beautiful ring, much like the one the Baron wore on his right forefinger, but silver instead of gold. On a flat field of black was the Hydra, the Greek serpent of many heads destroyed by Hercules. The Hydra on both this and the Barons rings were made of emerald. The silver ring had been his great grandmothers, said the Baron, a gift from Marie of Anjou. It fit his left ring finger, and was too small for any other, too big for his pinkies. He knew the left ring finger was for wedding rings and blushed when the Baron smiled knowingly at the placement.

The Hydra, he said, was his family crest for the last eight generations. His ancestor, also a Constantin, had decapitated the lead collaborator of a group of nobility trying to usurp the King, a group which the king called the Hydra on account of its many deceitful and venomous heads. Having cut the head from the serpent and displayed it on the castle parapets, the King bestowed the castle and the crest of the Hydra on the house Illés. That was the very castle he was in today, the very crest he too now wore on his finger. 

The moon waned and began to wax again, this time reborn as the Rose moon. Early summer was full and lush in the woods and hills about the castle. The creeks and rivers rushed swollen down to the valleys below. The leaves were full and vivid virgin green as the emeralds of the snapping Hydra. The meadows were high, wildflowers of every hue swayed in gentle warm breezes. At night the warmth stayed in the air, keeping it moist and balmy until well after midnight, when the sky was often streaked with falling stars. Memories of the lean months of winters by the sea could not seem to touch him here. He forgot the face of his stern, cold master there, the watery-eyed and pious man who had once beat him with a leather belt for sleeping in a church pew.

Here he was unwatched, trusted, and lavished with the master’s chaste affection. He welcomed it, craved it, waited all day for it. Sometimes the Baron would only come to his chamber to sleep, late at night and exhausted from long hours of executive duties. Other times he was relaxed, engaged, asking questions. They seemed to have all the time in the world. 

The Baron wanted him to see the grounds, the castle, to sit with him sometimes at the council table where he saw the foreign dignitaries and the farmers and the tax collectors that came with their tributes. Luca noticed the way people behaved around the Baron, straight-backed and alert, polite and gracious as they hung on his every occasional word.

Mostly they spoke in their own tongue at these meetings and exchanges, but Luca still began to understand that the Baron was somewhat the warlord he had first imagined when he first saw him. The soldiers and generals had the best rapport with him, and seemed the closest with him. His near constant advisor was a scarred and pockmarked old knight that never so much as made eye contact with Luca, like he was invisible.

One visiting dignitary only shared English with the Baron, making Luca privy to that exchange. Some King Luca did not know wanted tribute, money and young boys for his army. The Baron politely refused. The man stood on the flagstones wearing a look somewhere between anger and shock. Luca dared a glance to his left at the Baron, who wore no expression at all.

“You invite open war,” the visitor accused.

“I do no such thing. I refuse an absurd ransom from a madman. Is there anything else you’d like to demand while you’re here?”

When the man left, the Baron and the old knight exchanged words Luca could not understand. Then the Baron leaned to Luca and said in a confidential hush. “It’s always the ones that speak English that behave like this. Sometimes I regret learning English at all. Except,” his tone grew fond, “it lets me speak with you.”

Luca grinned, feeling all the eyes in the room except for the old knight’s momentarily on him, and drawing pleasure from the fact they knew not what the Baron said to him, they would only see it made him smile.

~

Note: This is one of those things I got in my head and just had to write so it would leave me be. Charles Perrault's version of the tale of Barbebleue (1697), names Bluebeard Bertrand de Montragaux. I have changed that name since this is not a French tale. This particular little story is modeled not from Perrault but from Angela Carter's short story, The Bloody Chamber. I have borrowed from that and from other things, and filled it with my favorite whumpy tropes. The other two parts are complete and will be posted over the next two weekends. Thanks for reading! :))

#!

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Part 3 of 3 in the Illiam-needs-patching-up series! Part 1 and Part 2 are there. Masterpost is here. 

Taglist: @castielamigos-whump-side-blog, @doglover82; @top-hat-aye; @burtlederp;   @thesleepysnapdragon @whump-cravings @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi

“You know,” Helis said, setting the enameled bowl of water down on the table carefully so it didn’t spill. “If you took my cuffs off for a minute, I could warm this up for you.”

Illiam glanced up; he had barely moved since he’d first dropped into the folding chair, finally giving up on the pretense that he wasn’t struggling to stay on his feet. Helis watched him, their face carefully bland. It was too much to hope for that he’d actually take their cuffs off, but maybe if he was distracted he’d glance at where the keys were, or something. Helis thought the comment might have been pushing their luck, but he barely seemed to notice.

“What? Oh, right.” He reached out one hand, and cupped it against the bowl’s side for a few seconds. Steam started to rise from the water’s surface. Helis dropped a stack of clean cloths into it.

“Okay,” they said, taking a deep breath. It’s fine. You took that first aid class, back at the Academy, right? Unfortunately, the only things they remembered were the symptoms of heatstroke and not to yank long pointy things out of wounds if they were stuck. Neither seemed terribly pertinent right now. They hoped, anyway. They looked at the blood on Iliam’s trousers and boots. Some of it was fresh and red. “How much… I mean, where else…”

“It’s just the shoulder,” Illiam said curtly.

Keep reading

#god yeah this is some good shit #gore #like with a capital G

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The Angel of Death, Part 1: Star of the Show

Featuring: vampire whumpee, chains/restraints, blood, captivity

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” Keola frowned at the squat concrete building they’d pulled up in front of. “I’m not sure why a veterinarian would be needed at…‘The Colosseum Club.’”

The driver, a girl with blonde curls and a leather jacket, shrugged, not looking up from her phone. “This is where I was paid to bring you. If you want me to take you back, it’ll be fifteen dollars and twenty-six cents.”

“No, I’ll just…head inside and see if I can figure out what’s going on.” Keola shifted her bag to her other hand and went up to the door, half expecting it to be locked and bolted. But it opened when she pushed it, and she went into the building.

Maybe I’m helping some big-shot wrestler’s pet tiger or something? On the phone, she had been asked about her past experience with large and dangerous animals- which, thanks to an internship at the local zoo, she had. But this place was a lot smaller than the zoo- she wasn’t sure where you would even keep something like a tiger.

The Colosseum Club seemed to be like any other nightlife spot- in the daytime, it was dead. Keola found herself in the middle of a dim, empty bar. The walls were hung with wrestling paraphernalia.

What have I gotten myself into? Keola wondered.

“Oh! I’m so sorry, I was busy downstairs, didn’t hear you come in!” A thin man with a dirty blond ponytail rushed in from a side doorway, shaking her hand enthusiastically. “You’re the doctor? Doctor…Yawnadeez?”

“Ioannidis,” Keola corrected, trying not to grimace at his pronunciation of her last name. “It’s Greek. But you can call me Doctor Keola, if it’s easier.”

“Well, pleased to meet you, Doctor Kayla. I’m Moody, Andrew Moody. I own this little establishment. Charming little spot, isn’t it?”

“It’s nice,” Keola replied politely. The bar really didn’t look like much, but she didn’t want to offend her new client.

Mr. Moody chuckled. “This is just the beginning, Doctor Crayola. You know, I used to wrestle, myself?” He held open the side door he had come out of for her, and they went together down a shabbily-carpeted hallway. “Thought I’d make it a business. Start my own little club. But people aren’t that into contact sports nowadays. It’s all scripted, fake. People want something real, something exciting. I didn’t make it in the entertainment industry until I found that exciting something.” Mr. Moody opened another door. “This is my office, and this is my lawyer, Mr. Sawyer.”

Mr. Sawyer the lawyer was a portly, balding man in a dress shirt and slacks, who shook Keola’s hand with more decorum than Mr. Moody had, but with the same amount of friendliness. “I’m just here to make things official,” he said, smiling. “You’re aware you’ll need to sign a non-disclosure agreement, Dr. Ioannidis?” He pronounced her name perfectly.

“Doctor Keola is fine. And yes, I’m perfectly fine signing an NDA.”

“Perfect. You’ll also be committing to being the on-hand veterinarian at any events Mr. Moody holds that might require your services, as well as prioritizing his patient if Mr. Moody needs another house call such as this.”

“Yes, I’m aware of all of that.”

“And on your end, Mr. Moody, you’re aware that you are agreeing to pay Doctor Keola the rate of a thousand dollars for each vet visit, on top of expenses she might acquire while treating the patient? These include, but are not limited to: transportation to and from the Colosseum Club, specialized equipment, replacement of supplies, and any unforeseen costs that may arise?”

Mr. Moody nodded fervently. “Worth every penny. I need a veterinarian on-call.”

The pay was what had made Keola accept the job. It was dangerous for a half-vampire to take calls like this- today was overcast, but the sun was always a risk. It wouldn’t hurt her nearly as much as it would a full vampire, but it would definitely put her out of commission for awhile. And she couldn’t afford that. Her clinic was just starting to get some traction. A few days’ closure could spell disaster without Mr. Moody’s extra money seeing her through.

Still, it was strange that she’d not been told what kind of animal she would be caring for- and that she was having to sign a non-disclosure agreement about it. Then again, Mr. Moody wasn’t the only one keeping secrets. As she bent to sign the contract and the NDA, Keola ran her tongue over her teeth, feeling the points on her canines that were just a little sharper than what a human’s teeth would be. If anyone knew she was a half-vampire, her clinic closing would be the least of her worries.

“So are we good now?” Mr. Moody asked, signing his copies of the papers.

Mr. Sawyer swept everything into a leather briefcase and snapped it shut. “You’re good, Mr. Moody. Dr. Ioannidis, it was wonderful to meet you. I’d stay, but I can’t stand the sight of blood. Have a good evening! Mr. Moody, I’ll show myself out.”

Keola cleared her throat as the lawyer left the room. “So, Mr. Moody-“

“Call me Andrew.”

“I’d prefer to stay professional for the first visit. Um…what is it I’m going to be doing, exactly?”

Mr. Moody swung the door open. “Now that we’re all settled, let me show you the real business I run. Don’t worry, it’s all legal, I’m not involved in any crime or something like that. And you’ll only be helping me with veterinary stuff.”

They turned down another hallway and down a flight of steps. Keola noticed that the carpet had changed to concrete. “Are we going underground?” she asked.

“Yep. Literally and figuratively. See, I don’t call this place the Colosseum Club for nothing. You’ve got the club upstairs, and then down here…” they went through a set of double doors, and Keola’s mouth dropped open. “You’ve got the Colosseum.”

It wasn’t the literal Colosseum, but it was close. They were standing at the top of at least two dozen rows of bleachers, which circled a concrete amphitheater. The bottom of the massive room was a huge arena, separated from the audience by a tall metal cage.

“What is all this?” Keola asked.

“This is that entertainment I was talking about. I get plenty of business down here, the kind of folks who want something more…exciting than watching men in speedos slam each other into a rubber mat. When I’ve got a big show, you’ll be down here making sure it all goes to plan.”

“Mr. Moody, I’m a veterinarian. If you’re expecting me to provide medical care to wrestlers or boxers, I’ll have to break our contract. I’m not licensed to care for humans.”

“I do have boxing matches and wrestling here sometimes. But that’s just the C-shows. The B-shows, even, I don’t need a vet for those. But the A-shows are getting too wild, and those are the ones I need you on standby. Don’t worry, you won’t be doing medicine on a person.”

Keola relaxed at hearing that. “So was this just to show me the place, or…”

“Oh! No, ma’am, I actually did need your services today. Did you bring your black bag?”

“I did. What, exactly, am I going to be operating on?”

Mr. Moody’s cheerful mood dropped like a ten-pound weight from a ten-foot height. His shoulders slumped. “It’s my Angel, Doctor. The crowds love him, he’s the biggest draw to this place. But- well, he got hurt Monday night, hurt bad. And I can’t have that, I’ve got a huge show here on Saturday and he’s the star. I need you to fix him, fast!”

“Okay. Why don’t you take me to Angel and I’ll see what I can do?”

Mr. Moody nodded and led her down to a tunnel behind the arena. “How much did it cost to build all this?” Keola wondered.

“Well, my shows are unique. You can’t find ‘em anywhere else in the city. You wanna see what I show, you have to come here. So when I started putting them on, it drew attention real quick.” They were going down another concrete tunnel, which smelled faintly of blood. A human wouldn’t notice it. Keola did.

“It was small at first. I had friends who brought me contestants, but none of them ever lasted long. And none of them had that star quality I was looking for. Until I found my Angel.” Mr. Moody sighed. “He’s a specimen, Doctor, just perfect. And rare as hen’s teeth, so even if someone got the idea to copy me, they wouldn’t be able to find another one like my Angel. I need you to fix him, Doctor. Whatever it costs, I’ll pay.”

Keola opened her mouth to assure the man that she would do her best. Instead, she ended up saying, “What’s going on down there?”

The tunnel had branched out into a sort of concrete stable or barracks, the corridor lined with sturdy metal doors. Dim lightbulbs flickered on the ceiling- Keola could see in the dark, but she could see the way the bulbs cast shadows on the walls. The smell of blood was stronger now, and she could hear shouts and cursing and a metallic clanking, almost like…like chains.

Mr. Moody sighed. “That’s Angel. And a couple of my men, probably. Angel’s a wild animal, he isn’t tame. I don’t want him tame. But it does make trying to do anything with him…difficult. I’ve been having the boys try to patch him up, just to hold him over until you got here. He isn’t taking it well.”

A furious cry erupted from a half-open door at the end of the hall. It didn’t sound like a tiger, or a bear. It sounded like nothing Keola had ever heard.

She whirled on Mr. Moody. “Mr. Moody, what is Angel?”

“Well, he’s…” Mr. Moody stepped around her, opening the door into the room and letting her see the scene in front of her.

Keola gasped.

She saw it in zoetrope images, one after the other, moving faster and faster until the whole picture came together. Two humans, one of them with a bloody nose, the other with a gash in his arm, trying desperately to pin down the thrashing star of Mr. Moody’s underground shows. Metal chains that seemed to be doing nothing to help restrain him. Red eyes glittering with hatred and anger. And fangs, fangs very like her own, except longer and sharper and fully exposed, ready to tear someone open. Ready for blood.

“He’s my vampire,” Mr. Moody finished.

——————————————————————————

Taglist: @i-eat-worlds @whumperofworlds

Taglist is open! This will have more parts to it, so if you want to be tagged in any future installments, let me know! I can’t believe I’m actually sharing writing! On Tumblr! Publicly!

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New Apocalypse: Apocalypse either starts on screen or very shortly before.

Old Apocalypse: Apocalypse happened years ago, a new normal has been established.

#morning reblog #I'm enjoying the tags from other people #it's always neat to hear why someone likes something

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New Apocalypse: Apocalypse either starts on screen or very shortly before.

Old Apocalypse: Apocalypse happened years ago, a new normal has been established.

#outta curiosity #I wish there were poll durations in between a day and a week but whatever #I can be patient #(I cannot) #whump scenario #setting

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yea what i was talking about to whither-wander-whump was Dragonlance, like you guessed. Dragonlance Legends specifically (so, in case you're not sure which one that was, the premise is basically that the mage Raistlin wants to become a god, his twin brother Caramon needs to do a bunch of character development and stop being emotionally dependent on Raistlin, and the cleric Crysania wants to redeem Raistlin and Raistlin uses that to manipulate her to help himself). I've just been having brainrot abt it, like Dragonlance isn't even really a main fandom for me - honestly I haven't even really looked into what sort of a fandom exists for it, i've just been. you know. having brainrot abt it and suffering silently on my own, lmao. (I haven't even read that much of the franchise, and I'm further hindered by the fact that my local library mostly only has translated copies which I refuse to touch because the one time I read one of the books translated, the translation quality was awful. So anyway for now all I've read is Chronicles, Legends, and the first book of Destinies.)

Anyway for some reason my brain has decided it's fun to poke at Caramon a little bit (literally this wasn't a choice my brain just went okay we're rotating him now, without asking my opinion, you know how it is sometimes) and i've been toying with some "okay no way in hell he's actually just fine at the end of the story, he's gotta be traumatized as fuck after all that, what if I make him break down a lil bit over everything and then throw in some comfort" kinda thing. Y'know, a good old-fashioned aftermath angst / hurt/comfort fic. And I just feel like a few extra scars and an injury that didn't really heal properly or some lil things like that could be fun to add into the mix. anyway yea idk i'll probably never actually write it anyway cuz my brain is stupid

(also i ended up even reading the books in literally the stupidest weirdest most roundabout "how the fuck did you even manage that" way, it's ridiculous, but that's beside the point)

Cool! Like I said, dragonlance has never been my main focus, but I definitely read at least the first book of chronicles and I remember Raistlin but not his twin for some reason. It might be because I read it somewhere between 8 and 11 years ago lmao.

If you do actually get words on paper, the two routes I primarily see in fanfic in D&D universes to keep cannon injuries around are 1. removing magical healing that happened in cannon or 2. making a unique injury harder to heal/fully recover from than was established in cannon. For injuries invented for the fanfic writers just exclude clerics and include limited healing potions it seems.

I just now thought of a secret third option that could be a vibe: phantom pain from an injury that was healed but for whatever reason that character's brain didn't catch on. Maintains cannon injury -> magical healing status but fits nicely with emotional stress.

Anyway fucking mood on not being able to find copies of these older series, I've been trying to hook myself up with legend of drizzt ebooks for a while but Hoopla straight up removed the prequel trilogy at some point and libby's options from my branch are sporadic at best and always checked out. If I'm buying books I want physical copies and I do NOT have the space for that lol. Or the funds really.

#I would be shocked if there is any active fandom for dragonlance #even legend of drizzt's fandom is pretty quiet and that series just finished recently #or is finishing very soon #I don't recall #anyway best of luck tracking down those books #it is hard in the no longer printed fandom but we make do

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Not to insert myself unwelcomely or anything but D&D setting novels are my thing to an indescribable degree so annon if you wanna come share the brainrot I would be thrilled

I mean yeah D&D magic is technically limited (simply because, well, game mechanics, it wouldn't be fun if there was no limits); technically this particular book trilogy i'm having brainrot over was written back in the mid-80s, in the days of AD&D 1st edition, which I don't understand very well (personally i've only played 5e, and though I know people who used to play back in 1st ed days, I've never really ended up asking them to explain the game to me, and the rules have changed enough that I don't understand the books just at a glance), but fundamentally, yeah, then too, there was limits to how many spells of what level a character could cast per day. The book for some reason seems to be a lot stricter about it when it comes to wizards than clerics, but theoretically yeah, there's only so much magic one person can do in a day

But then there's a couple instances in the story where it's like, okay I want that particular injury to leave scars, which generally it's understood that wounds healed with divine/cleric magic don't do. And the character's definitely with a cleric at the time, and she should definitely have the strength left to heal him, if not that day, then the next day.

Or another instance where, okay, there's a couple days that this one character is walking around on an injured leg in a situation where there's no cleric around to do anything about it. That's all fun and whumpy and stuff. But like, just... for funsies, you know how it is sometimes right, well, I just would like that to never heal quite right. Like just something that would continue to ache a bit from time to time, maybe would be a little weaker than it used to be or would make itself noticed if the character had spent all day on his feet, sort of thing. Nothing dramatic, just those little things, because little things are sometimes fun and it might give good spice for an aftermath angst fic idea I've been playing with.

But then that for example is sort of like, okay he spends a couple days after the injury in a situation where he's gotta just grit his teeth and push through, no cleric around to heal him and situation is such that he can't exactly just let the injury rest. But then after that he's in a city with a major temple, so there's really no reason he couldn't or wouldn't have a cleric heal it. And it's kinda just... I'm not sure I can justify the injury not healing properly when you've got a cleric wielding power granted to them by a god who heals it. And I'm just debating like, should I, should I not, can i figure out a way to justify it, ugh why is this too hard

First of all, the question should rarely, if ever, be “should you, should you not.” In my opinion, writing is always “do you want to?” I mean, there’s limits to that, obviously, but for the most part, just writing whatever you want to is Fun and Cool and Makes You Feel Good About Writing. I recently had a horse and cart scene, except I thought the horse was boring so for no reason at all except I Wanted To I replaced the horse with a pair of giant wolves, and it ended up sparking a whole new plotline.

So if you want injuries to not heal properly or leave scars, I’d say you should do it. You can justify it if you want- I find justifying my self-indulgent weirdness can get you some really fun worldbuilding- but you can also just literally do it because you want to.

So wounds healed by a cleric don’t leave scars. You mentioned that the cleric should be strong enough to heal him “if not that day, then the next day.” What if that’s the difference? Yeah, of course the cleric can heal him the next day- but because she had to wait until the next day, it’s not going to be a perfect healing and there’ll be evidence of the wound left. There’s your scars.

Character walking around on an injured leg- same thing, basically. When he gets to the city with the temple, maybe it’s been too long, the leg has started to heal badly, and all the cleric can do is just finish the healing and leave it not quite right. Maybe the guy can’t afford a good cleric and has to settle for one that maybe isn’t so confident in their power, and that’s why it happens (if that’s a thing in DND.) Maybe the cleric’s god just isn’t strong enough to perfectly reverse the injury, or maybe they just don’t want to and the cleric’s like “Yeah, they don’t really want to heal you all the way, they’re having a bad morning, this is the best I got.” (My lack of DND knowledge is really showing, sorry😂)

But on the whole, if you can’t justify it…don’t justify it. Just do it. Nobody is going to come for you because you didn’t explain why a wound left scars when it was healed. Especially not in the whump community- we’re going to be more interested in the fact that the wound left scars when it was healed and that’s fun and angsty, rather than demanding to know why that happened.

#I can't quite peg which books are being discussed since trilogy written in the 80s describes most D&D novels #the “stricter with wizards than clerics” thing is not something I've caught in any of the drow focused stuff #so I'm guessing this is not a forgotten realms series #maybe dragonlance? #which I've historically focused on less but I do recall some good shit in whatever the one I read was #but yeah I get the setting seems hostile to injuries being permanent problems and I have seen some creative ways of solving them

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Cold, Cold, Cold - VIII

1,744 words. Original work, The Jackal of An-Nadr

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Content Warnings | UNREALITY, fever whump, very vivid hallucinations, nightmares, fear of drowning, hypothermia, anchored to the bottom of a river, used as bait, crying into your captor's arms, gorgeous & incoherent begging

Taglist | @killtheprotagonist @secretwhumplair @ink-and-salt @kixngiggles @brutal-nemesis @thebewilderer @whumpsical @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @whimperwoods @shydragonrider @pizzasthengym @thecyrulik @ceph-the-writing-spook @mylifeisonthebookshelf @ohwhumpydays @redwingedwhump @whump-queen @scoundrelwithboba

The thready, unraveling world had stopped making any sense to Nadeem so very long ago. He didn't know how long he'd been drifting. Only that night had now come, and the cold had, too.

Silt pressed between his toes as he strained toward shore, just barely brushing the tops of the muckweed with every kick. His hair drifted out in a raising and dipping halo around his shoulders, frost crusting the strands everywhere it touched the water.

He could count on one hand the number of times he had ever gone swimming at night, especially alone. No matter how much he had always trusted the river during the day, it was a game with death to be out here after the sun had set. The rivercats that lazed at the glinting heat of the shore would have returned to the river by now. The ones that couldn't even be bothered to roll an eye in a human's direction during the day would be out hunting for cattle that wandered too close to the blackness of the shore—and they were much more difficult targets than him. And even if the alligators didn't kill him, The Purratu's cold northbound waters were enough to. 

The motion of the current had already wicked away any of the heat his body had to offer. Shivering against the steady onslaught of water was useless. He knew with a creeping sense of dread that worsened with every minute; I'm dying.

Still he tread water, trying to keep his chin above the surface. His wrists had been bound behind his back, the anchor tied from them to the depths far too heavy for him to lift. He had spent all of his strength and energy trying to drag it closer to shore, but now his violent shivering was beginning to slow. His body was failing. He didn't know when the stranger was coming back to him, only that he was running out of time.

A sharp, shuddering breath rattled his shoulders, sweat seeping into the pillows as he tried to curl deeper around himself, chasing the warmth that was quickly seeping out through the bottom of the canvas bed. No matter how much he shivered, the draft from below took away all heat faster than he could make it.

Was this his punishment? Were they not coming back?

I can't do this.

He gave a frustrated sob as he tried, one last time, to saw his hands free of the rope. The fibers cut deeper and deeper into his skin, succeeding in doing nothing more than spreading more blood into the water.

He twisted his hands weakly in the leather strips tying them to the head of the bed. His fingertips had long since turned a worrying shade of frigid grey, and it took all his focus to get them to gradually flex to try to keep life in them.

The ladder creaked as one of the creatures came down the steps. He caught the flash of eyes, metallic silver pools of light that glinted in the blackness like those of a hyena. The predator shifted through the small space, the sound of lanterns tinkling against its shoulders. Then a second set of glinting eyes joined it soon after.

"Come back!" he cried in a fog of breath into the empty night. His voice was hoarse from clattering teeth, weak with the only shallow gasps he could still reach from the surface of the water. The lights of windows flickered orange against the purple landscape, glittering like embers in the wind.

He knew this man could outwait him. He could remember nothing of the stranger's face, but a deep well of rot in his chest told him he was facing something worse than freezing to death and drowning. He was bait. Even as the shouts grew closer and he saw the distant silhouettes of his townspeople pass, he bit back his sobs and kept himself silent.

If they come for you, I’ll kill them before you have even a chance to scream.

But now he heard his sister's voices in the distance. He had been a constant for their whole lives. They knew him. They knew him well enough that he knew the river was one of the first places they would look. He could do nothing but cry as he ran out of time.

"Come back and take me," he wept breathlessly, "Pl—please." His leg spasmed with a cramp of pain, and with a gasp of shock his mouth dipped below the surface. It took him a few long, terrifying moments to kick again strongly enough to break the surface. The redoubled cold of the night air washed over his face. He sputtered and coughed from the shock of it, feet sweeping back and forth over and over to try to buy enough air.

He let out a breathless sob as claws brushed slowly, carefully back through his hair. He shuddered, shying away from the touch, and held his breath as he felt it pause. Then a warm hand slid down the curve of his jaw and cradled his face. Please, please. "...please."

Please, warmth. "I'll...do...." anything. I'll do anything. Don't let me spend another night like this.

I'll never make it to the oasis if I don't find warmth.

I have to make it. I don't want to die alone like this.

I don't want to die in this forsaken place.

The hand traced his face, soothing over the sweat-drenched mess of his forehead. His eyes lidded as their warmth slowly seeped into his skin, exhausted sobs slipping through clattering teeth.

"I'll do it," he sobbed into the hum of the locusts.

Please don't let them find me like this. Please, don't let my family be the ones to find me.

Baba, Maaman, his sisters—

"I'll do it!" He yelled, and immediately sank back under the surface. In the moments after he surfaced again he was left coughing so hard he almost couldn't catch his breath. 

More lanterns had been lit, glimmering out beyond the high grass like guttering candles. They were still so far away. The wildlife that sang in the banks of the river gave way to the sound of distant cries for a moment before their orchestra breathed over them again.

The creature pulled the blankets away, unwinding him from the tangle of furs. He whined aloud as the cold night air washed over his skin, barely aware of the "Please...no....no," that streamed from his lips.

Talons pulled him out of the blankets, lifting him like he weighed no more than a doll. Then they moved warm over his sweat-drenched clothes, pulled him close against the creature's chest, and continued combing through his hair as arms wrapped around his back. He almost began weeping with relief when warm, bare skin pressed into the numbness of his cheek.

Something writhed beneath his toes in the muck. He jerked his foot away and instinctively kicked at it to keep it at bay, but it wasn’t something he could sustain if he still wanted to breathe. Moments after he was forced to return to his treading, slimy sandpaper scales brushed along the arch of his foot as it persistently returned. 

He braced himself for the needle-pain of teeth, drawn to the smell of the wound in his foot. He let out a near-hysterical whine as he felt those mucousy scales twist up between his toes and wrap around his ankle. Then its body once again pressed cold against the bottom of his foot, slicking over the burn, and kept him from dislodging it even as he returned to his desperate treading.

Lengths of bandage turned slowly round and round his foot, gentle hands working around the wound. 

His fingers curled against its chest, heat radiating against his cheek as he sunk further into the crook of its arms. The air he breathed was tinged with the incense-burn of smoke, huge hands warming the back of his neck. A wordless murmur echoed by his ear, warm breath ghosting over his skin.

Maybe the creature wouldn't... Maybe...

Wait...

No, he couldn't...it couldn't....

Something rustled in the reeds. Something brushed over his hair.

Which was reality?

"Make it stop," he pleaded breathlessly.

"Nadi!" his sister's voices cried from downriver. "Where are you?"

He coughed on more water, breath blooming in silver clouds around his head. Droplets flicked out around him as he turned his head and desperately searched the dark for any sign of the dark figure from before.

A warm cloth wiped across his forehead, washing over feverish skin. A rumbling voice soothed him as he twisted his face away from the contact.

A man's silhouette shifted, so faintly visible against the reeds that he couldn't even be sure he was there. He kicked desperately to try to raise his head from the water enough to call out, but suddenly found, for the first time, that he couldn't reach the surface.

"Õ̵͜d̸̰̆r̷͈̒ä̸̦i̸̻͋!̷̩̌ ̴̯̌G̷̨̊e̴̙͗t̵͚͂ ̴̼̃m̷̖̆e̶̬͊ ̶̑ͅs̷̠̾ȁ̸̝n̵̪͠d̷̠̽b̷͓̆a̷̳̒g̷̩̽s̸̢̊,̵̤͒ ̶̗̽n̴͓̒o̴̗̚w̴̥̉!”

He cast pleading eyes toward the figure, gasping on a breath that was as much water as air. Please. Please.

That...that was no language he knew. And some resigned sort of dread told him that his mind couldn't have come up with it on his own, not even in the fever of dreams like these.

"Nadi! Where are you?"

He struggled to crack open his eyes, but he could see nothing more than incoherent colors swimming beyond his lashes. They lidded as an ember-warm hand brushed back the small hairs at the edges of his face, relief coursing down his spine with a shudder.

He was either drowning or falling asleep. He could no longer distinguish one from the other any more than he could make sense of either of the realities from dreams.

The man on the shore was going to get what he wanted after all.

The creature at the bottom of the river curled its body slowly up his calf, fins fluttering against his skin. Its body tightened around him. Then it pulled him slowly deeper, and Nadi's vision wavered as the muffled roar of the insects went quieter still. He turned his eyes once again up toward the night sky, empty breath clawing at his lungs.

He had no more strength to fight. His trembling, exhausted muscles finally went lax with one last, burning exhale that blossomed to the surface. Then he was no more.

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#mmm yes #dunno where or when you picked up the unreality skills but gotdamn

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#see I know we're all looking at vanilla extract #but think for a moment about the humor potential of missing body parts

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Steps - VII

2,645 words. Original work, The Jackal of An-Nadr

For new readers, The Jackal is an ongoing whump series set in 1,200 BCE, where pre-Islamic fantasy meets the love of bloody sword fights, worlds that are as vivid and alive as the characters, and the agonizing loss being dragged away from home into a life you never asked for.

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Content Warnings | defiant whumpee, aphrodisiac used as a sedative, sleeping with your captor (non-sexy)(...mostly), an unsuccessful escape attempt turned into a murder attempt, stabbing, a bad fall down some stairs, noncon touch (oh....yep. there's the aphrodisiac), xenophobia, mention of food

Taglist | @killtheprotagonist @secretwhumplair @ink-and-salt @kixngiggles @brutal-nemesis @thebewilderer @whumpsical @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @whimperwoods @shydragonrider @pizzasthengym @thecyrulik @ceph-the-writing-spook @mylifeisonthebookshelf @ohwhumpydays @redwingedwhump @whump-queen @scoundrelwithboba

It had been one long, cold night since Ifyaa had taken the iron to the boy's foot, and Yeezumon had had the mercy not to leave it alone with the dreams that followed. The sobs that prickled with the smell of ozone had long since gone quiet, and the deep pain the curse inflicted in his chest was finally fading out to a bruise-like ache.

The glow of pain behind his ribs would have given him away, had there been anyone to witness it. But it was only him and the Son, and the latter was in no state to judge the extent of Yeezumon's stupidity.

Still, Yeezumon barely slept.

Ifyaa had wanted to be there, but after cauterizing its foot he couldn’t get within five paces of the human without it panicking so badly they feared it would hurt itself all over again. It had taken some convincing, but Ifyaa agreed to sleep in the infirmary nook and leave Yeezumon in their cabin with the boy, under repeated promises that he would come to get him if anything were to happen to it.

The boy spent that night tossing and turning, clothes tangling in the sheets as it plunged from dream to dream. The eadh had kept it calm enough before, but even that couldn't ease the feverish restlessness which came with that much pain. 

It trembled from head to toe in the cold night air, and yet every inch of its bronze-brown skin was flush with sweat. The eadh tinged his breaths in clouds of vapor, a visible trace of just how deeply drugged it was. It mumbled foreign words against his chest, and shuddered with relief every time he pulled it closer to his warmth.

He watched it dream, small sounds occasionally falling from its lips as he traced soothing fingers between its braids. 

He had no doubt it would have fought him if it were awake to witness this. But here? Now? It leaned into his hands like they were the only thing rooting it to reality. It was almost hard to imagine such soft features distorted into that snarl. A splatter of freckles across the bridge of its cheeks and nose where the sun had touched its skin above its litham. The feathered edges of what would one day deepen into smile lines, given the chance. Long, downturned eyelashes that veiled its eyes more than framed them. Calloused hands that curled limply against his own when he worked over them with his thumb. None of it lended itself to the scowl it had worn since the oasis had given it to him.

It didn't feel like a Son of Solomon. It just looked like a boy.

Maybe the others were right. Maybe that did make him a fool. And yet as the dawn was breaking, the human slept atop his chest with heavy limbs, matching each of his slow breaths with its own. And Yeezumon couldn't bring himself to believe them.

The light outside turned from grey to pink, and then the first rays of the new dawn cast themselves upon the near wall in the same perfect circle as the window. Dust motes drifted through the column of light between, dancing slow and golden on unseen eddies of air.

His secondary hands brushed over the human's cheek, explored the stubble along its jaw. Its braids lay loose in a cascade across Yeezumon's shoulder, cheek pressed against his chest. 

The ship had already begun to stir to life outside the silence of their quarters. Familiar shouts echoed back and forth, the occasional thump of wood on wood as cargo was lifted and moved. The Quartermaster's voice rose into the air, calling the dawn to prayer.

Yeezumon glanced down at the human, and then slipped ever-so-carefully out of bed. The morning meal would begin soon, and he knew the boy would be hungry when it finally awoke. He smoothed a hand over its forehead, murmuring reassurance as it leaned into the warmth of his palm. It was still sound asleep when he closed the deck hatch behind him, quietly sliding the bolt shut.

The galley wasn't far, and even though it was only just past sunrise the table had already been nearly cleared by the crew who had come before him. He brushed hands with the people he passed, giving barely more than a tired smile and a few murmured words to those who asked after the human. Others watched him from afar, and found reasons to pick up their own meals and leave when he neared.

He didn't blame them. After all, it was because of him that the dirtblood had ever come aboard—the reason it was still aboard now. The entire crew had received the Quartermaster's orders that no fights were to be tolerated, and most chose to leave rather than be tempted by that risk. Even in the light of the promised gold, some only barely could contain the contemptuous fear of news that another Son had been discovered—let alone have it surviving here under their own roof.

And so he didn't linger. He gathered enough food for himself and the boy, and made his way back to the cabin before the tension had the chance to become anything more than that.

But when he opened the deck hatch, the bed was empty.

Yeezumon paused above the trap door, staring at the empty tangle of sheets for a long moment before he sighed. It must have woken when he left. The eadh would still be clouding its mind, disguising the pain in its foot. Maybe even enough to stand on, briefly, even though it shouldn't. 

If it had torn open its foot again...well, it wouldn’t be a fun morning for either of them. 

Yeezumon muttered a small curse beneath his breath, then called out a gentle, "I'm coming down, little one."

It had probably hidden itself around the corner near his desk and scrolls, or slipped under the cot. He would hopefully calm it down enough to come out again. To still eat. The ship's ladder creaked beneath his feet as he began to descend, still balancing the plate of food in one hand.

He only made it to the third step when something slammed hard into the back of his knee, buckling his leg. His eyes flew wide as his other foot caught nothing but empty air, and all four hundred pounds of his weight stumbled and crashed down to the wooden floor below.

The human was only a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye. It whipped around from its hiding spot behind the ladder. 

It had been clinging to the back side of the steps. In a heartbeat it had found its footing on the right side of the ladder and was scrambling up the last few rungs toward the deck.

It was on instinct more than anything that Yeezumon grabbed it by the very hem of its robes, and yanked it back down into the cabin before it had made it more than halfway out of the hatch. It scrabbled against the wood and fell, bony limbs knocking the air from Yeezumon's lungs as it came crashing down on top of him.

He coughed and wheezed out a string of curses, clutching a hand to his side where he had taken the brunt of the fall. His mind was still reeling and trying to make sense of what had happened.

And then fiery, splitting pain stabbed down into the sinew of one shoulder. It ripped a shout of surprised pain from him before he even saw the glint of a blade, his own blade, from the sword belt he'd left by the bed, driving down a second time straight for his skull.

He caught the boy's wrist only a split second before it met its mark, deflecting the clumsy aim of the dagger and burying the blade in the wooden floor just beside his head. 

It tried again to draw the blade, only for Yeezumon to slam its back into the floorboards as he flipped it and pinned it down beneath his weight.

The human thrashed and twisted in his grip, still trying for a few moments in vain to escape before it sagged back against the floor. It let out a guttural, sputtering explosion of frustrated curses, teeth still bared as both their chests rose and fell with ragged breaths.

Yeezumon stared down at it, his mind absolutely blank with shock.

It had...

The human had...

It had stabbed him with his own blade. He was bleeding. 

He was bleeding. A sluggish path of mercurial, silver blood was circling down the length of his arm, dripping to the floor in a growing tempo of pat pat pat. The muscle beneath it was aglow with pain.

It had been waiting. It had been planning this. How long had the boy been lying awake in his arms, while Yeezumon had thought he was still—? 

He clasped one hand to the gash in his shoulder, still not letting go of the boy's wrists.

"You little shit," he hissed. The human went rigid when he wrenched the knife out of the wood, trapped against the floorboards. "Where did you think you would go if you got out?"

"Yeezumon?" someone called from outside, "Are you still alive down there?"

It huffed out pained breaths, and then reared back and spat at him. Yeezumon's gaze went black. He seized the boy by the back of his hair and wrenched him upward, almost dragging him off the floor. He held up the blade, making the human look uncomfortably close at the length of the dagger it had so desperately tried to end his life with.

"Those men would tear you to shreds in an instant if you'd managed to use this properly. Do you understand me? Limb by limb."

It looked from the blade up to him, dark-eyed and trembling and still trying to muster some semblance of a glare. It hissed out the beginning of a bitter insult, but its words cut off the instant he lifted the blade, screwing its eyes shut. 

The voices from above grew closer. Blood continued to trickle from between his fingers. And Yeezumon just stared down at this reckless, drugged, conniving human that had, by sheer luck, come closer to killing him than any ifrit had in years.

"Yeezumon?" 

"I'm fine," he called up, "I'm fine. Just...." his gaze never left the boy. "...just slipped on the step."

Whomever it was muttered their assent, and left him be. 

The human slowly cracked its eyes open once a long while had passed and still it hadn't been struck, breathing hard and only just daring to meet his eyes. And when it did, Yeezumon let out a sigh.

Under his breath, "...you stupid boy."

Its eyes widened when he lifted it and dropped it unceremoniously back onto the bed, leaving it to flinch away from him as he reached up and slammed the trap door shut. 

He tossed the bloodied dagger aside, and then reached for his sword belt and dropped it on the floor too.

"I," A short dagger from beneath the edge of the table, "am not trusting you," two swords from the ceiling beams on either side of the trap door, "with anything sharp, ever again." His mother's shamshir from the side of his desk, while he muttered more about poor decisions and suicidal strays. Two khanjar sewn into the underside of the canvas of their cot, and a third hidden in a crook in the floorboards. “And you had better hope for your own sake that we don’t encounter any night raids while unarmed because of you.” Then a round of leather strapping that he and Ifyaa kept beside the bed, for good measure. And the last...

...the last was not where it should have been.

His eyes turned back to the human.

"You slippery little..." he growled under his breath.

Its eyes flew wide as he reached out and grabbed its arm. He dragged toward him in spite of its clamoring protests, and he began tugging open the ties at the front of its clothing. 

He could hear the spike in its heartbeat, small hands locking around his wrists and trying frantically to push away. The veneer of anger crumbled. It started speaking in rapid fire Q'aimrani, a stream of sharp words that only rose in pitch when the first of the ties pulled loose.

And then it reached abruptly into its own robes, pulled out Ifyaa's dagger, and shoved it roughly into Yeezumon's hands.

It…

He...

They sat there staring at each other for a long moment. The boy's chest rose and fell in shaky, terrified breaths. One of Yeezumon's hands lingered at the second tie that he had already begun to undo, not moving any further.

Oh. That…

He slowly took the scabbard from the boy's fingers. Two clammy hands pressed as hard as they could against his chest, trying to keep him at bay.

...that was interesting.

His fingertips remained at the edge of its collar, over the ridges of simple embroidery that lined the hemmed linen. Just above his collarbone, close enough that he could feel the gravelly pounding of its heart.

He found himself wanting to run his fingertips down the edge between clothing and skin. And in his temptation, he lifted the clawless, soft fingers of his secondary hand to do exactly that. The human’s skin was soft and cool, that rich bronze-brown a beautiful contrast to his own black. The boy let out a shudder, eyes lidding as the eadh rewarded the touch with a full-body wave of pleasure.

Oh, gods that was a temptation. 

But slowly, so slowly, he let his hand fall away. He sat back upright, and sighed.

His shoulder was still throbbing, the orange glow beneath his skin spreading down his arm and into his chest as the inflammation spread. Blood was getting everywhere.

The human blinked as if dazed, realizing where it was again. Yeezumon rose to his feet, gathering the weapons he had collected. He kept one eye on the boy as he strapped on his sword belt.

"You have a lot of nerve, for such a fragile little thing," he murmured, reaching down to pick up the leather strapping. "I can't decide if I'm offended or impressed."

His shoulder was throbbing, one hand still clasped to his wound, and he was careful as he began to uncoil the bindings loop by loop. The sight brought the anger back to its eyes.

"You can look at me like that all you want, but I'm not blind, little jackal. I know what I saw."

It backed away across the cot as he came closer. Yeezumon leaned down, looming into its space as he leaned against the bed.

"But now isn't the time. And you will not be getting the best of me again."

---

Two minutes later, the human lay there squirming and seething through a makeshift gag, the length of its arms bound and hands tied to one of the hooks that held up the bed. It fixed him with a scathing glare, and Yeezumon gave a little scoff before shutting the door to the cabin behind him.

He turned back to look out over the deck, watching the crew. They were working to tame the rigging, calling back and forth to one another as they pulled the main sail tight against the lull of the wind.

He turned his gaze down to the ivory handle in his hand, light catching over the edges of detailed engravings as he turned Ifyaa's dagger over in the morning sun. A thoughtful look passed over his face. And then he cast a single glance back toward the deck hatch, let out a quiet, “Hm,” and turned away.

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#tags pending

[voidwhump]

Memories from Beneath the Palms

1,339 words. Original work, The Jackal of An-Nadr

For new readers, The Jackal is an ongoing whump series set in 1,200 BCE, where pre-Islamic fantasy meets the love of bloody sword fights, worlds that are as vivid and alive as the characters, and the agonizing loss being dragged away from home into a life you never asked for.

Author's Note | Flashback takes place about five years before Nadeem's capture.

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Content Warning | implied/referenced parental death, grief, fear of losing another parent (another very light one)

Taglist | @killtheprotagonist @secretwhumplair @ink-and-salt @kixngiggles @brutal-nemesis @thebewilderer @whumpsical @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @whimperwoods @shydragonrider @pizzasthengym @thecyrulik @ceph-the-writing-spook @mylifeisonthebookshelf @ohwhumpydays @redwingedwhump @whump-queen @scoundrelwithboba

The clay-rich soil crumbled between his toes as he stepped off the path, making his way up the shallow hillside where the reeds grew thinner and the trees grew thicker. He clung to the shadows as he walked, dappled sunlight falling over his eyelashes as he took the path home. 

“Can we go back to the river tomorrow?” Fahime murmured from somewhere near his ear, chin resting on his shoulder. Thin rivulets of water raced beneath his shirt where they’d soaked through, her feet leaving little droplets of water behind them. 

“You’ll have to convince Maaman,” he replied, readjusting her weight against his back. His basket hit his thigh with every step.

“Hasti says we have to ask you, too.”

“Does she?” he asked, glancing at their sister as she picked her way between patches of scrub ahead. He lowered his voice conspiratorially, “Look who's playing at bazbya.”

“I can hear you, you know!” she called back. “And they’re Maaman’s words, not mine!”

“You still said it!” Fahime snickered.

Hasti huffed, switching her basket of damp clothes to her other hip. As the ground flattened beneath them and the ground grew firmer with each step, Nadeem stooped to let Fahime off his back. She took off almost before her feet had touched the ground, racing past them and down the other side of the crest where their home was waiting. He caught up with Hasti, and offered his help as they carried both baskets the rest of the way into the shade.

From down the path toward the village he caught the sound of voices. Two girls raced around the corner, each playfully pushing and shoving at the other to get there first. “Hasti!” they called out, laughing and breathless. “Hasti! You’ll never believe—”

Both of them slowed their approach when they saw who she was with. The taller of the two opened and closed her mouth for a moment, looking as if she might start blushing at her supposed impropriety. The younger girls always seemed to forget how well he knew that feeling, himself. Then they glanced back at his sister. 

Hasti was already looking up at him with an expression of guarded hope. He gave her a look, then tossed his chin their direction.

“Go on. Just be back before asr,” he said. Her face split into a grin.

“You know, sometimes you’re not the worst.”

He rolled his eyes. She set the basket on the ground and took off toward her friends, only to groan loudly when he called back, “Take your sisters!”

But within moments she had gathered up Kheyri and Nasrin from inside and convinced Fahime that it would be more fun to play in town, and with a cautious smile and flushed cheeks her friends led the way back, chattering excitedly about their younger brother falling into the irrigation well.

He watched them round the corner, and the smile slowly fell from his face. 

He set the laundry outside near the back door, shrugging off the straps and straightening out the ache in his back before ducking inside. 

“Maaman?” he called, eyes adjusting to the light. “I’m home.”

He found her bowed over near one of the windows, and placed a hand on her shoulder before leaning forward to kiss her cheek. She glanced up from her work, the underside of her nails tinged yellow-green from where she’d been prying the green skins off of pistachios.

“Alu, azizam,” she said, eyes crinkling at the edges as he settled on the floor across from her. “You sent your sisters into town?”

“With Bahareh’s girls,” he replied. Finally in the privacy of family, he reached up to unwind the saffron-gold turban from his head and expose his face. He ran his fingers through soft braids of hair where the roots were damp with sweat. He spent a moment tying the strands into a loose bun, and pulled the basket of unshelled pistachios toward himself. “There are new ships in the harbor. I saw them landing at the east end, unloading crates by Nakmun's house."

"That's a good sign," she said, giving him a knowing look. "I'll bet Kaveh is already planning a feast."

The corners of Nadeem's mouth twitched downward, eyes dropping to his work. The movement was practiced, his thumbnail leaving crescents as he pried off the skins.

Her voice softened, "What's wrong?"

He glanced away, then lightly swatted at her wrist when she reached again for the basket. "Ay! No more. You'll hurt your hands."

"They're not that bad today."

"They will be if you don't quit while you're ahead."

She gave him a wry look. "Nadeem…"

"Please, Maaman, let me do this."

She sighed, but pressed the issue no further. She'd been putting up less and less of a fight about it these days, which had only confirmed his suspicion that it was slowly getting worse.

He didn't know what they'd do when she couldn't use them at all, anymore.

"Zizi, I know when something's bothering you. What is it?"

He didn't know how to answer. She watched him, voice turning teasing when he didn't reply.

"Did Kazem try to kiss you again?"

He snorted, the sound coming out as an offended little laugh. He tried to pretend it didn't make him feel worse. "No, he did not."

"Then what is it?"

Her gaze was earnest, searching. He found it hard to meet her gaze, struggling over what he didn't know how to say.

Finally he swallowed, trying to pretend his voice wasn't hoarse.

"Baba promised he'd be home before Sahji," he murmured, turning over a loose shell between his finger and thumb. "It's only four days away, now."

Her expression softened. "I know."

"What will we tell them? The twins have already started asking questions, and I feel I'm running out of excuses."

She took his hand.

"We'll tell them the truth."

He could only look into her eyes for a moment before he had to turn away, biting his lip as his throat tightened. But when he spoke his voice was still steady, if barely. "Maaman...what if he doesn't…?"

"He will."

"But—"

"Nadeem, he will."

His throat closed with the sudden and forceful burn of tears he'd been pushing down for days. The smile he put on for his sisters broke all at once.

"We said the same thing when...when dad didn't—"

Finally he met her eyes, chin beginning to tremble. He felt his shoulders hitch, and his mother's gaze went soft. 

"Oh, zizi..." she held her arms out for him. He quickly pushed aside the basket, nearly scattering pistachios across the floor, and buried himself in her arms. Like he had when he was just a kid, the last time he'd realized his father was never coming home.

As soon as she was holding him, everything hit him all at once. He was already almost blind with tears.

"I miss him so much," he whispered, scarcely able to breathe against the burn in his throat. "Maaman, I...I miss him so, much—"

He wasn't even sure who he meant. The father he had lost so long ago, or the father that had raised him—who might be about to lose, too.

"I k-eep, keep wondering if—if he's gonna—"

"Shh, baby, look at me," she tilted his head up. "He's going to be alright. Kaveh wouldn't—"

"Yes he would! In an instant he would, if he thought—"

"No, azizami," her voice cut him short. Then more gently, "No."

He looked up at her, face crumpling.

"I can't go through this a-again, Maaman."

Her expression softened once more, and she pulled him closer. He sank into her arms, feeling like he was on the verge of falling apart.

"Shh," she murmured. "It'll be okay, just—"

---

"—b̰̏͝r͚̚͝ȩ̬̐a̱̒́t͚͊͡h̡̼̄e̡̠ͣ, l̸͚̽i̟͂̕ṱ͑͠t̍̕ͅḽ̢̍e̛͖ͮ ̠ͤ͡j̓҉̱a̪̔͡c̘ͪ̀k̛͈̒a̩̾́ḽͧ́.̷͎ͮ ̠ͦ̕T͊҉̙h͙ͦ͟ȅ̡͔r̼̈́́e̬͋͜.̷̮ͦ.̖̋͟.̛̯ͤI̮ͬ͡'̢̩́v̵̦̉e̸͔ͥ ̡̱ͦģ̼̄o̖̽͝t͙̜̿̎͘͘y̤̅́o̭̐͜ṳ̴͗." 

Warm hands carded through his hair, holding him close as he clung to its chest. Gone was the sound of birds. Gone was the dappled light beneath the palms. 

He sank into its arms, and wept.

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[voidwhump]

Unrest - VI

1,183 words. Original Work: The Jackal of An-Nadr.

For new readers, The Jackal is an ongoing whump series set in 1,200 BCE, where pre-Islamic fantasy meets the love of bloody sword fights, worlds that are as vivid and alive as the characters, and the agonizing loss being dragged away from home into a life you never asked for.

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Content Warning | multi-character argument, discussion of murder, generational trauma, decision to enslave a captive, xenophobia, world building (this is a very light one)

Taglist | @killtheprotagonist @secretwhumplair @ink-and-salt @kixngiggles @brutal-nemesis @thebewilderer @whumpsical @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @whimperwoods @shydragonrider @pizzasthengym @thecyrulik @ceph-the-writing-spook @mylifeisonthebookshelf @ohwhumpydays @redwingedwhump @whump-queen

“That isn’t what I would call ‘powerless’, Al-Mantaqi,” the Quartermaster interrupted, “Sick or no, hurt or no, there is no mistaking what the dirtblood’s voice means. I have already broken up two fights in the last hour, and tensions are only getting worse. It cannot stay here.”

Ifyaa shifted uncomfortably, irritation written all over his face, “Just what do you propose we do with it? Dump it back into the desert and leave it to die in the wastes?” His eyes narrowed. “Or would you rather an execution so the crew can watch? That would be sure to settle their nerves."

The tip of Adrsiae’s blade ground softly into the wooden table as the twisted the hilt the other direction, so deep in thought that she didn’t seem to realize the damage she was doing to her prized desk.

Hidhialial held Ifyaa’s gaze, and then sighed. He readjusted the swords at his belt and wiped a hand down his face. 

With a small gesture of soreness, he pulled out another chair and settled stiffly into it. For once, he looked tired enough to show his age. “You know that isn’t what I want.”

A long moment of unbroken silence passed around the table.

The Captain spoke for the first time since they had entered her cabin, “Keeping a Son of Solomon aboard ship paints a target on our back that our entire world will turn its eyes to,” she looked up at Hidhialial. “Including some powers that we would rather not have looking.”

"It's too late to keep the news contained. Everyone aboard already knows what we've found." Ifyaa pinched the bridge of his nose, "I wish we'd learned about it before exposing the whole crew. All hope of keeping this quiet just died between our teeth."

"There's nothing to be done for it now," Hidhialial said quietly. "If news gets to the cities, we'll have sentinels breathing down our backs within a fortnight. And if news gets to other ships? Well. The Oryx is fast, but a sparrow can only outrun a hawk for so long."

Adrsiae's voice was hard, "Killing it may be our only real option."

Hid sighed, closing his eyes. "No. I don't think it is. Not unless we want to be drowning in worse nightmares in another few decades."

"What do you mean?"

A look passed behind Hid's eyes that was almost one of pain. He didn't want to speak of this, every one of them could see it on his face. "They're coming faster every century. A millennia ago there were none. Now? There have been three in my lifetime alone, and that's only counting the ones we know about." Quietly, "Kill one, and two more are born. We can't keep on like this. With every death, history grows closer to repeating itself."

For a long while, that suggestion sat heavy over the four of them. That was a silence that was hard to break.

“Then we take it to Bu Mahmata,” Yeezumon said. All eyes, even the Captain’s, turned to him. The marigold-yellow fabric of the human’s turban spun through his hands, idly brushing over the embroidery at the edges. “The slavers would pay half the city to get their hands on it, and from there we can take our leave of the matter.”

“The Holy City is more than five months’ sail from here. If the crew doesn’t turn itself inside out by then, certainly other ships would have their claws in us by the time we see the city walls.”

“Do you really think the crew would so readily betray us?”

For a long moment there was silence. 

Adrsiae closed her eyes. “As much as I see these people as family, fear has a terrible way of leaking through the cracks. We cannot go forward under the assumption that the discovery will stay quiet.”

“Then we’ll offer them a share,” said Yeezumon. 

Ifyaa looked toward his husband, alarmed. But Yeezumon placed a hand over his to quiet his protests, and then continued. 

“One part in sixty to each of the crew members. For a Son? That alone is the same as almost five year’s pay to each of them, and I think you will find even the more contemptuous a lot more likely to hold their tongue for that much gold.”

The room went quiet, considering their offer. All was still, and eventually Hidhialial looked toward his Captain.

“It could work,” he said softly. “It incentivizes each and every one of them to keep their tongues under lock and key, and may even be enough to quell some of the tension.”

“But what is to be done with the human in the meantime?” Ifyaa asked. “We can’t just lock it in the hold. If we do, it will be broken and insane by the time we make it to the Holy City. Even a Son can’t be sold in that kind of condition.”

“For now it is in no condition to go anywhere but the infirmary and our cabin," said Yeezumon. "It may not be possible to keep it entirely out of sight, but at the very least we can keep it contained."

“Do you think that will be enough to satisfy the crew?” the Captain asked Hidhialial.

He let out a soft grunt, settling back into his chair. And then he conceded, “There is only one way to find out.”

She gave him a small nod. Then she turned to Yeezumon, “You do realize that as soon as this is offered to the crew it would become blood-bound. Are you prepared to uphold that promise?”

Yeezumon looked toward Ifyaa. What seemed like worlds passed between them, before Ifyaa gave his hand a small squeeze. Then he let out a breath and turned back toward his Captain.

“I don't see any other way out of this. And if the crew is going to be risking their lives, they deserve a share. I'm sure.”

She held his gaze for another long moment, then gave a small nod.

“So be it. I will leave the negotiation of rules between the two of you. Bring them to me before you share them with the crew. Ifyaa, it will fall to you to keep it alive between here and Bu Mahatma. Whatever resources you need, take them."

He touched his fingers to his temple, "Yes, Captain."

"Good." Adrsiae sank back in her chair, finally pulling the dagger free of her table, "Now get out of here, the lot of you. I need time to think."

They obeyed. Just before Yeezumon followed the others out, the Captain called after him.

"Yeezumon,” she was watching him from her chair. There was an intensity to those copper-grey eyes that he had rarely seen without a sword in her hand. It had never before been directed at him. “The crew will hold you to your promise. But remember, I will be holding you to it as well.”

The weight of those words was not lost on him. He let out a slow breath and touched his fingers to his temple, "Yes, Captain."

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