The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

An extra-special Headless Over Heels day!

“Was today the first time you saw a seraph?” Ofelia asked.

“First time that close,” Seth said. “I saw one in a field once, five or so years back, killing sheep. Pretty small. Like a horse. The hands scared it away with shotguns.”

“A yellowfeather then, maybe,” Ofelia said. “If the guns worked.”

“Maybe. Erheis killed it, I guess.”

“No, he didn’t,” Ofelia said. “We got Erheis’s books. He hadn’t killed a seraph in a decade or more. We call that kind of Verdugo a preacher. His only business is people on their knees.”

“Well, we reported it.” Seth tried to hide his annoyance. “And someone killed it.”

“Mmm.” Ofelia kicked her feet. “That’s good.”

A field cricket churred into the silence that followed.

Afraid of Being Afraid

“You are wondering, I think, about Anna,” Ofelia said.

“Not really,” Seth lied. “Just another head, right? A second head that’s a second asshole.”

Ofelia smiled with patient humor. “You’re wondering why, I mean. You’ve seen how well Annalise fights. Why would she need another skull for seraphs, especially one as misbegotten as Anna?”

He rested a foot on the fence’s lower crossbar. “I guess you have a theory?”

“Annalise uses Anna,” Ofelia says, “because Annalise is afraid.”

“Of seraphs?”

Ofelia nodded. “She’s afraid of seraphs and of being afraid of seraphs.”

Seth watched the cows and didn’t speak.

“A few years ago, we’d cornered one,” Ofelia said, “and she had a… moment. Sort of like the episode you saw, but waking.”

Seth remembered the whimpering and the jerking. “As bad as that?”

“Oh, it was horrible. She froze in the face of this stampeding redfeather. It only happened once, and it hasn’t happened since, but it nearly killed her—it would have killed her.”

“What saved her?”

“A murani seraph hunter named Nik saved her,” Ofelia said. “She worked with us for a season, half a decade ago. You’ve seen her face, but not the rest of her.”

Seth rubbed his face. “She’s Anna?”

“She’s Anna’s donor. That was her last hunt. She saved Annalise, but not herself. Told Mom with her dying breath to take her head and use it—said she wasn’t finished killing seraphs.” Ofelia smiled wanly. “She was an asshole, but she was fun like that, sometimes. I’m glad a part of her is still around. And it really helped Mother, too. Not seeing her friend die, I mean, though we’d all joked about what a relief that’d be, one time or another, the way Nik was.”

Seth laughed humorlessly.

“But having a head to hunt seraphs helps her partition it,” Ofelia said. “Anna is a great tracker with an encyclopedic knowledge of them. She has purpose and drive and knowledge and viciousness. She’s a place Annalise can fill up with the horrible stuff, so the rest of her can be okay.”

The stench of that place revisited Seth’s mind, and he wished he had as separated a place to put it.

“Tiago’s right, you know.” Ofelia stared out into the dark. “She’s gotten a lot better. The first few years after her unlighting were not good. A bit ironic. The more heads she’s managed to get, the more like herself she’s become. But she’s never once worn anything but Annalise to an execution. I wonder why sometimes.”

“If you’re in the mood for sharing secrets,” Seth said. “Who’s the Verdugo she killed?”

Ofelia had no outward reaction to the question. “She mentioned it?”

“In passing,” he said. “I’m the only one still alive who heard it. What’s the story?”

“The story isn’t my place to tell, I’m afraid.” She hopped from the fence. “You’ll have to ask her.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” he said. He knew he wouldn’t, and though he tried to keep the knowing out of his voice, she turned in the night and looked at him closely.

“I know you’re getting ready to leave,” she said.

“I wasn’t—”

“I won’t stop you and I won’t wake anyone up, though I can’t let you take anything from the carriage but your own effects, I’m afraid. I don’t imagine Annalise would chase you, once she found out.”

“I’m not,” he said. “Where would I even go?”

“I lack the energy for a truth tasting, Seth,” Ofelia said. “So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m just reading into you how I might be feeling, if I was you.”

He let out the rest of his breath on a loose raspberry and clammed up.

“It’s a strange life,” she said. “And not an easy one. And Annalise is a strange person, though she tries not to be. But I think you should at least meet Lisa first.”

“Lisa’s another head?”

Ofelia nodded.

“What’s she like?”

“She’s very nice. She’s brassy.” Ofelia tilted her head. “I think you’ll like her. I’m sure she’ll like you.”

“Well.” Seth lowered himself from the fence. “That’ll be a nice change.”

Ofelia breathed a soft laugh. “Thank you for speaking with me, Seth. I think we might be friends one day, which would be nice. I don’t really have any at all, outside the Necropolis. Unless you count family. And what properly teenaged teenager would?” She gave him a brief wave from the hip. “Good night.”

She meandered away from him, back to the carriage where her brother slept. The door opened and shut.

The calf twitched again. The mother shifted; her tail rested across her baby’s.

Seth stayed a few more minutes like that, leaning on the fence, and then he returned to his bedroll and went to sleep.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...ing-afraid

And then, almost immediately after that, he wrote:

Hello, folks!

What is THIS? It is a BONUS CHAPTER is what. I am in the big final push to try and get this story on the front page, and to do that I need your help.

To that effect, I will be releasing bonus chapters if we hit certain thresholds. We just hit our first one (twenty reviews) overnight, before I even had time to get the whole scheme going, hence this. Allow me to share the ways you might receive additional bonus chappies, my friends!

Bonus Chapter Progress

1500 followers

███████▓░░░░░ 910/1500

300 faves

████████▓░░░░ 209/300

200 ratings

████████▒░░░░ 137/200

20 reviews

██████████ Done!

Hounds, Foxes, and Hens

Strictly speaking, his employer hadn’t told him to stop stealing. In fact, she’d encouraged it. Perhaps she wouldn’t appreciate his freelancing, but he hadn’t appreciated the goddamn charnel house she’d thrown him into.

If that bonus was still on the far horizon he wasn’t about to wait. He needed an emergency supply of cash, enough that he could cut and run; the brush with Anna had shown him that. Maybe he was sticking around, but who could blame him for devising an exit strategy?

And if picking pockets was the best way to burn off the twitchy energy he sometimes got, the itching in his hands, well, that was just a happy side effect. Some thieves talked about it like it was a high, like it was sex. The rush, the gratification. Seth couldn’t wrap his head around that.

Seth stole because stealing was when he felt normal.

A silver-plated pocketwatch. A billfold of braces. Everyone wanted lumber, and this far from the iron arteries Laramme was the only good place to get it. They were well-heeled, the people here. Satisfaction curled the corners of his mouth. He was too threadbare himself to limit his lifts to the affluent, but it was his strong preference.

“Verdugo Erheis is dead,” Annalise said. “Fallen in this past Winter War. Condolences, folks, if he was a friend. Unlikely as that is.”

Laramme, unlike Prossimo, could afford at least a pittance of a laugh, and Seth dutifully joined in its low rumble before getting back to work.

The work. The purpose, the calm. The clarity of need, the execution of expertise. Like he was doing what he’d been designed to do. Like a tangle finally being worked out of matted hair. And the risk of getting caught and hurt, yes. But Seth felt a version of that all the time, every minute. Always something over his shoulder. To have an actual reason to feel it was a balm, not a burden. It made life fall into ticking clockwork order. The world was hounds, foxes, and hens. Seth il Gutierre was a fox.

He nudged a well-dressed woman in such a way that she turned to murmur a brief apology to the man next to her, and then her pocketbook was in his sleeve. Beautiful work. The distant echo through time of a hand resting atop his head. Good job, Seth. Good lift. Good boy. That’s everyone’s supper he just earned, kids. Learn from Seth.

He moved away from the square and around the outskirts of the village, as Annalise’s voice rang indistinctly from the scaffold. He stayed out of the sturdy logbuilt interiors. He untied a pouch of tobacco from an ashwood fencepost. He unhooked a roast chicken dangling above a corpselight heating element at an abandoned butcher counter and carefully wrapped it in an unattended roll of paraffin paper. He recalled the sheer size of his boss, and unhooked another. He strolled past a humming hexis dynamo the size of Annalise’s carriage and lifted a canister of popmites and a sachet of feed from the monitor’s hut. It wasn’t quite enough outdoor thievery to warm him up for second-story work, but he knew a fine middle-ground between indoors and outdoors.

A murani hardcamp sat at the edge of the village in a stump-studded clearing. A clutch of cinnabar-colored conical yurts, decorated with beaded mosaics, mushroomed from the earth around a firepit with still-glowing embers. The camp had crept further away from the mostly human heart of Laramme since Seth’s last visit, as the murani rode the rim of the forest’s slow sacrifice.

There were all manner of kindred in the United Territories, but almost everyone Seth had ever met was human or muran. He supposed the al Ydrises didn’t count any longer, and he’d run into a kari-kine once at a taphouse who had flirted with him, but it was hard to get past the independently moving eyes. Turns out a lady gazing at your lips isn’t quite as titillating when she’s looking you in the eye simultaneously.

The murani were a regular presence in this region of the Plainlands, but they preferred to keep to themselves. There was much to admire about the Felix Folk of the Plains, despite their prickliness. Their willingness for rough living, their tight communalism, and—Seth’s favorite—their general disuse of locks.

He strolled to the center of the hardcamp and cast a look around its carpeted yurts. Empty as the streets that had led to it. Seth thanked St. Wycrest of the Scales for the law of witnesses, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He took the tobacco pouch in his palm, invoked his Fox hex, and dropped it in the dry afternoon grass.

He stuck his pinky in his ear and ducked into the flap of the largest and fanciest yurt. He squinted through the dim illumination its circle-cut windows provided and rifled through the tent’s belongings. A fine camp stove, an ornate three-stringed balaphone leaning against a carved instrument rest.

He’d only just found his trophy—a well-balanced stiletto dagger he’d stuck in his boot, safely away from the discovery of his employers—when the crisp crunch of the underbrush filtered from the tobacco pouch, through his pinky, and into his brain. He hurriedly folded and packed the yurt’s contents back into place. The tent flap was just falling shut behind him as he scrambled from the entrance.

A sun-dappled muran woman stalked into visibility from the forest outskirts with a bloody faun draped across her shoulders. She halted by the farthest tent; the tension on her bowstring went taut as she drew it a few lethal inches back.

“Who’s there, then?” she called.

“Who’s there?” He puffed his chest out. “Didn’t you know the Verdugo was on the way?”

The woman’s whiskers twitched. She dropped the faun before the yurt he’d stepped from; it landed with a heavy thud and left a streak of blood down her shoulder. “My travel companion neglected to inform me.”

Her clothes were fine, despite the twigs and the deer blood. Here was the owner of the yurt, and the stiletto he’d put in his boot.

“You’re able-bodied, you should be at the square.” He jerked a thumb in that direction. “Law of witnesses.”

“You should be at the square, too.” She squinted at him. “What are you doing here?”

“Scraping for stragglers like you,” he said. “I’m part of the Verdugo’s retinue.”

She sniffed and looked him up and down. “You work for the Verdugo?”

And here was the best feeling in the world. Someone high and mighty, sneering down their nose at you, with the contents of their coin purse in your back pocket.

“That’s right,” he said. “For your own good, you want to see her before I do.”

“Her?” She tucked her thumbs into her belt loop. “What happened to Erheis?”

“The Verdugo is dead,” he said. “Long live the Verdugo.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...nouncement

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

Rick and Krista are getting the full explanation of the Monteverdes' lifestyle, now that they've been roped into partaking in it. How will this change Rick's perspective on his past with Lily?

Keiko may have just reached the bottom depths of shame as she looks in the mirror and starts to realize how toxic her relationship with Barry has become. Can she find the resolve to finally end it?

And someone else is dropping in too, who also is looking to overcome her shame for the past and her resolve to change things.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/35

Headless Over Heels.

Seth looked askance as Lisa climbed into the wagon after her luggage. The wagon bed creaked under her powerful frame. “Were you always this strong,” he asked, “or was it a Winter War-slash-Verdugo development?”

“I didn’t exactly train in earnest until they gave me a sword to swing. But I was always rather robust.” She made a show of dusting her hands off. “You know what they say about Orwinese girls.”

“What’s that?”

Auntie Liz

“Oooh. You don’t know.” Lisa grinned. “Then I won’t spoil any surprises.” She climbed the wagon’s divider and perched on the box seat. “Hop up, Mr. i’Lynnok.”

“I’Lynnok?”

“Seth i’Lynnok.” She held out her hand. “That’s your pseudonym while we’re traveling incognito.”

Seth took it. Her bicep stood out and slid gracefully under her skin as she helped him into the wagon. “That’s an Orwinese word, right?” he asked, to give himself something to think about besides the Verdugo’s arms.

“Mmhmm. It means fox. Fitting, no?” She scooted over to give him more room, though her generous hips still left him a bit cramped. “Unless you’d like to change Seth too.”

“Seth’s fine. One of the few things about myself I’ve never thought about ditching. Although I have gone by Boris a few times.”

“Boris? You?” She quirked her head. “You wouldn’t be a Boris. Too slim.”

“I was a fat baby,” he said. “What about you?”

“I was fatter.”

“Your pseudonym, I mean.”

“Moi?” She laid a hand on her chest. “I am Elizabeth i’Lynnok.”

“Are we pretending to be married?”

The white marshfires in her eyes glowed as they widened with her surprised laugh. “I’d planned on being your aunt, Seth.”

“Oh.” His cheeks tingled. “Of course.”

“But married could be fun.” She flicked the reins and Demetrius grumbled into motion. “The dashing younger husband and the vamp who stole him away. That could be very fun.”

Annalise’s warning about her sorceress head lurked in the back of Seth’s mind. “Aunt works. Let’s do aunt.”

An amused hum from between her wine-dark lips. “Let’s.”

He cast a skeptical look at his employer’s paperwhite skin. “Though I’m not sure how anyone could see us as related.”

“You let Auntie Liz handle that part,” she said. “Wink.”

“All your heads do that wink thing, huh?”

Lisa stuck her onyx tongue out. “Annalise got that from Lisa, thank you very much.”

Down the cobbled Laramme thoroughfare, a few people cast curious looks at the Verdugo’s oddly lengthened hair, though her sunglasses and her hat covered much of the transformation. Seth looked to the scaffold as they passed. A geezer in overalls was on his knees atop it, industriously scrubbing the arterial blood from its boards.

The woman who’d spilled it hummed melodiously to herself at Seth’s shoulder.

They rolled out of Laramme’s village cluster into the golden waves of its fields. It was a perfect afternoon, the sort you’d want to capture in amber and preserve for the coming dark and cold. A fresh crispness in the air intermingling with the baking emerald warmth of the sun. Seth wondered sometimes whether the Deathspell had influenced the weather at all. Did the kindred of old feel the warmth of their strange yellow sun for longer? Were their winters gentler?

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...auntie-liz

Princess of the Void.

Should Headless Over Heels land in the top 5 of Rising Stars, I will provide two bonus chapters of Princess of the Void, the following Monday and Wednesday.

I will also commission an artist to draw a brief and explicit illustrated account of Sykora getting her wish Granted, If Ya Know What I Mean. This I will not post on Royal Road, because there are rules to uphold, but those of you with a taste for --content omitted-- will be able to seek it out.

I hope these offerings entice you to check the story out, and I hope that when you do you'll fall as in love with those characters as you have with Grant and Sykora, whose adventures now continue!

GLORY TO THE PIKE

I Know You

I am immune.

The pronouncement ripples through his audience like a physical force. The bridge crew do not speak when their superior is addressing them, but the urge is clear in them. Eyes darting and meeting, expressions of galled disbelief.

“Every Maekyonite is,” Grant says. “That was always my strong suspicion, but it has been confirmed aboard the Prelate system research vessel. The men, the women. All of us.” He reaches behind his head and clicks the strap of his anticomps open. “I wore these to disguise myself. But I want to meet your eyes when I tell you this.”

His sweeping attention snags on a woman in the crowd, a researcher whose name escapes him but who always smiles sweetly at him every time she bows. She’s staring at him like he’s confessing to a murder in front of her.

“When Sykora took me from my world and brought me into yours, we resolved to keep this secret until the sector was ready to hear it. it wasn’t compulsion that made me choose her. It wasn’t compulsion that made me choose you.”

He forces his eyes up, away from his stricken audience and into the camera that is broadcasting his words to the legion of crew aboard every level of the Pike.

“You have all come to know me and accept me as one of your own. It’s a natural feeling to second-guess yourself now, and to question who and what I am, and wonder whether there are other deceptions. But I swear this to you, as your Prince.”

He wills his hands out from behind his back and points to the holoprojection of his homeworld.

“Maekyon will be ours,” he says.

Postures shift again. Uncertain hope returns to the warriors of the Black Pike. They don’t understand their Prince anymore, maybe, but they understand their duty.

“My loyalty has always lain with the Black Pike sector and its Princess, and still does. I will stand with her, and with all of you, as this ZKZ annexes my home world. I will—” An unwelcome quiver starts in his throat. He shuts it off before it hits his voice. “I will see Maekyon join the Taiikari Empire. I’ll prove your fears unfounded; I’ll repay the loyalty you have shown me in kind, and I’ll show the sector that my people need no compulsion to be made proud citizens of the Imperial firmament.”

He looks across them all, sees the fear and confusion at war with love and fealty.

“Glory to the Pike,” he says.

His people may be stunned and conflicted and standing in the wreckage of what they thought was an ironclad truth of the firmament. But they are warriors of the Taiikari, and his call breaks through the daze. “Glory to the Pike!”

He keeps his chin up, even as he feigns what he does not feel. “Glory to the Empress.”

“Glory to the Empress!”

And he’s done it. He’s survived. Whatever they say about him now, to his face or his back, he’s made it through. He has that.

“End transmission,” he says, and the camera’s light blinks out. He turns from the humming dark and stoops at the waist down to Sykora and Vora. “Would one of you take over again?” he whispers. “I kinda need to lie down and stare at the ceiling for the rest of the day.”

“You did wonderfully, Grant.” Vora embraces him around the shoulders. “As wonderfully as you could. They’ll acclimate.”

“They totally will,” Waian says. “There’s Void Princesses who take wives, after all. It’s not, like, so odd for a—”

“But I’m a man, chief.” Cortisol spikes in Grant’s mind, tunnels his agitated vision. “I’m male.”

“I—” The color drains from Waian’s face. “I mean, yes, absolutely. Of course you are. All I mean is that, uh… there’s context already for the people who can’t… I’m gonna stop talking, actually, before my foot goes the rest of the way down my esophagus.”

Grant remembers what Brother Tymar told him once, when they were eating fish together on a remote research station. This might be where the implant is complicating things for you. The Taiikari word for someone who can be compelled is male.

He sighs himself out of his cornered-animal tailspin. This isn’t an antagonist; this is Waian. “It’s okay, Chief Engineer,” he says. “I know you.”

“So do they,” Waian says. “It’ll be a weird couple days while they try and get with the system, and then everything will be okay. Y’know?”

“Yeah,” he says, and feigns again: “I’m not worried.”

“Nor should you be,” Sykora says. “Because if any of them place a toe out of line in their fealty to you, I will launch them into a moon hard enough to ding the axial tilt a degree.”

Grant ought to reprove Sykora’s threat of violence, but this one time it makes him feel better. “Will you come with me?”

She kisses his hand. “Anywhere in the firmament you’ll take me.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...apter-news
UPDATE: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2402682/

[Mamorien]

Praise to the Sorcerer-General! Praise to the Deathspell beneath which he shelters us! Praise the Verdugo and make way!

Well, shit! You guys really blew the hell out of the bonus chapter goals! All we have left is the followers one.

You've earned two bonus chapters; I'll be posting the other one around this time tomorrow.

1500 followers

█████████▒░░░ 1100 /1500

300 faves

██████████ Done!

200 ratings

██████████ Done!

20 reviews

██████████ Done!

The Dam

(...)

There was a dam in Seth’s head, a tall concrete edifice. Here, on the dry side, Annalise al Ydris was a friendly-but-intimidating boss. Someone who he hoped to impress, someone he’d like as a friend, yes; but ultimately best to keep his professionalism and his distance. He was a contractor in all but, well, contract. Something he really ought to amend.

The dam was to be watched zealously and studiously maintained. With every crack, every pebble falling out of it, Seth became increasingly aware that the current behind it was deep and monstrously swift; and if it ever broke, it was going to sweep him away completely, and he wasn’t sure how he could put it back together. He’d thought how big and scary the al Ydris matriarch was, how honed her body was for war and intimidation, might aid him in maintaining it. He had seen her kill, seen her coated in blood. To his disconcerted surprise, these remembrances were not helping him. On reflection, they might even be exacerbating the problem.

The dam had found fine reinforcement when Seth met Anna. Lisa was a problem. Lisa smelled like apricots.

Even if she wasn’t a Verdugo, and his employer, and the mother of his new coworkers, she was unlit. You couldn’t have sex with an unlit. Not if you wanted your soul to stay put and your eyes to stay white.

Which would be terrible. Of course it would. Everyone knew how horrible it was to be unlit. Once you went unlit there was no return. You were torn from your home, made a citizen of the Necropolis for the rest of your days, at the threshold of the Deathspell with the Sorcerer General’s Legion all about you, barred from the rest of the world forever, never to bear children or dwell with your people or feel the warmth of a lit lover again.

And yet.

Seth could not help but notice that—contrary to the folklore he’d learned—the Verdugo’s thigh where it pressed against his was quite warm. Warm as a lit human’s. Warm and thick and well-formed. Her breeches were tight enough he could see the line of her muscle along the outer edge. What was that muscle called again?

“Seth?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you spacing out on me?”

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“Hex engine.” She pointed. “One of those fancy open-top ones.”

“Oooh. Yeah.” Seth squinted through the slow-swaying horse traffic at the slick pine-colored vehicle she’d indicated. “Real flashy.”

“Tiago is obsessed with them,” Lisa said. “He’s constantly intimating that we make the switch on the carriage. I have to remind him we need a way to run from a big seraph if we need to. He doesn’t like horses much.”

“Why not?”

“Not sure. I blame whatever fool raised him. And Meaty does too. Don’t you, Meat?” She leaned forward and scratched her horse’s rump. “Yes you do. You are a disappointed horse.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...19-the-dam

[Mamorien]

And the hits just keep on coming.

“This is why you must seek out the fanciest restaurant you can, every time you’re on an iron artery stop,” Lisa said. “They pass through all sorts of places, stocking up as they go. The Plainland meadows, the Tal-Ranic frost markets, the rice terraces of Rinia, the orchards of Sektorbrav. Shame that Orwiny is so far north. I’d love to feed you a good Orwinese coddle. Onions bigger than your fist. Winter savory and pomegranate.”

“Huh.” Seth was half-listening. Surely a place like this wouldn’t notice one measly little fork missing. Surely they were lousy with forks.

“Ever have a pomegranate, Seth?”

“Can’t say I have.” Seth refocused on the conversation, but he didn’t look up. He couldn’t. Past the flimsy barricade of the menu was his employer, in The Dress.

Sektorbrav Red

The moment they had arrived, Lisa had made a beeline for the roadhouse—they called it a hotel here, Seth had to remind himself—to get them room and board. She’d made him stay in the wagon, though she’d taken with her, in one musclebound trip, most of the stuff he was meant to be watching.

He hadn’t been sure why she’d asked him to wait outside until she’d emerged in The Dress.

Seth was reading the menu. He was not thinking about The Dress. Seth had not noticed the way the shimmery fabric clung to Lisa’s midsection, nor how it draped along her broad hips, nor the solid, shapely thigh that elegantly parted the slitted satin when she sat, because he was far too busy reading the menu. He did not perceive the way its deep V cupped Lisa’s full, soft chest and pushed it upward into two plump round perfections because, as he reminded himself, there was this menu he was supposed to be reading. And he especially did not notice the mole dotting the swell of Lisa’s right breast, because of the whatsitcalled. The menu.

Over the sightline edge of said menu, a pair of merlot lips grinned, and a pair of glamored eyes tracked his. “Still pondering, eh?”

He forced his eyes to flick from the page to Lisa’s face. It took discipline and commitment not to linger his attention between the two. “Uh, a lot more options than I’m used to,” he said. “Chalkboards.”

“Would you like me to order for you?” A black-nailed finger landed on the menu and pushed it back down to the table. “I think I can guess what you like by now.”

She leaned forward across the table, neckline full to bursting, and beckoned him to do the same. He met her in the middle, across the vased foxglove sprouting from the center of the table.

“You can look, you know,” she whispered conspiratorially. “I’m not about to wear an outfit like this and then toss my drink at you for looking. I’m rather proud of them.”

“Oh,” he said, and “okay.” Smooth, il Gutierre.

She returned to her menu. “Two bitey little monsters later, and they’re still hanging in there. I don’t know why Annalise is always so reluctant to show them off. One less lace tied on the battle-tunic’s front split wouldn’t kill her. I don’t think so, anyway. The particulars of sword work get a little fuzzy when I’m Lisa, I admit.”

“You’ve got me beat,” Seth said. “I’ve only ever dueled with a broom.”

“Do we have questions, madame and master?” A man clad in evening wear as sleek and shiny as Seth’s new stiletto slid himself into the conversation over Lisa’s shoulder. “Or have we made our choices?”

Before Seth could get out so much as a syllable, Lisa was pointing out options. “We’ll split this fennel citrus salad here to start. I’ll have the dry-aged ribeye, and the gentleman will have the tenderloin with pomegranate glaze. And a bottle of the Sektorbrav red, if you please, with two glasses.”

“Lovely choices.” The waiter’s silvery pen scribbled shorthand across his little leather notebook. “All our livestock are locally sourced and we ensure on slaughter that their hexis is properly harnessed and stored in civic dynamos. And none of our crops come from mite farm adjacent fields.”

Seth didn’t know that mattered.

“Are we celebrating something?” the waiter asked.

Lisa clasped her hands together with feigned avuncular joy. “It’s my nephew’s birthday.”

The man sent a practiced smile across the azure tablecloth to the stunlocked Seth. “Happy birthday, sir.”

“Thank you,” Seth said. “Aunt Lisa’s been so excited to take me to this place. It’s where she proposed to my uncle once upon a time, Saints bless his soul. And where she met the next fiancé, after he left her at the altar.”

“A lot of family history,” the waiter said, gamely.

Lisa chuckled. “What can I say? It’s got a tether on me.”

“He was a busboy here, right?” Seth tapped his chin.

Lisa mirrored him. “Who can be expected to remember what their third husband did?”

The waiter’s ironclad smile flaked only slightly. “I’ll get us started on that salad.”

Lisa gave Seth’s knuckles a light slap as the waiter made his exit. “Cheeky boy.”

“Birthday boy,” Seth corrected.

“Very true.” Lisa topped her water glass back up. “Let’s see if we get a dessert out of that.”

“I never actually said yes to you ordering for me,” Seth said. “Just to put that on the record.”

“You don’t mind.”

“Don’t I?”

Lisa hummed a gentle mm-mm denial. “You enjoyed it, in fact.”

“Your non-Annalise heads assume a lot about me.”

“You enjoyed it,” Lisa said. “Because you’ve always made your own decisions, because you’ve never trusted anyone else enough to make them. But it’s been years of that, and you’re tired of it, and that little fox on your back didn’t fix it. And I don’t imagine he’s got advice on pairings, but I say you’ll enjoy the Sektor red. The pomegranate tenderloin I’m not wholly sure about—have to imagine this far south, this time of year, they’ll use a syrup. But I think you’re hiding a sweet tooth. Eyes up here.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...orbrav-red

Also, if I haven't already updated yesterday's multi-post to reflect Princess of the Void having updated on Scribble Hub by the time you read this, it's because you got there fustest with the mostest.

[Mamorien]

Have a Verdugo, welcome aboard.

EDIT: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...im-and-sad
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...d-old-fool

[Mamorien]

In Headless Over Heels, Seth and Annalise unwind after the dance.

Seth belted the taupe terrycloth robe at his waist and stepped from the bathroom in a cloud of steam. His water-spiked hair pattered errant droplets against the hardwood floor on the way to his bed, which was narrow and creaky in an expensive and antique way, but cozy regardless. The autumn bedspread had been rolled neatly by the baseboard, and he unfurled its fur-trimmed comforter. He was a bundler when he got the opportunity. And this was the nicest bed he’d ever been in for longer than a tipsy tryst and an awkward goodnight.

He’d asked Lisa the difference between a roadhouse and a hotel. She’d laughed and said a few dozen braces a night and some fantastic plumbing.

Across a pair of flickering bedside corpselamps, a darkened ornamental fireplace, and an expanse of plush platinum carpet, the Verdugo sat in her own bed, in the his robe of the his & hers set they’d been provided, trimming her toenails. Her sorcerously suntanned skin had faded back to its unlit pallor, bringing with it her lethal menagerie of tattoos. Long-haired Lisa was gone, reduced to bleached bone and packed away.

“How about that shower, eh?” Annalise asked, back in her melodic Orwinese lilt. “Betcha haven’t had one of those in a while.”

“Sure haven’t,” Seth said, because he wasn’t sure about admitting that had been his first shower ever, in fact. Not a bad gimmick, but certainly not something a place like Prossimo would splurge on when a dip in the river or a warmed-up basin did the job just as well. The doughty men and women of the Low Plainland saved their money for taps that dispensed lager, not water.

“Sorry for switching out on ya. But I don’t, uh… I figured it’d be a bit awkward if it was Lisa.” She shook her hair out and grinned—Annalise’s gappy, crooked grin, not Lisa’s dazzling smile. “Plus the bob is a devil’s shade easier to dry off.”

It hadn’t been awkwardness, with Lisa. Not entirely, at least. “No problem,” he said, and as far as he knew it was true.

“Thanks for bearing with me while I was her,” she said. “That’s the second head who’s been a real dose with you.”

“Dose?”

“Orwinese slang. Means feckin’ annoying.”

It hadn’t been annoyance, either. Now he knew how Annalise intended to address the Lisa situation: she didn’t. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or upset.

Knuckle Nine

“We go to work tomorrow,” Annalise said, “so I don’t mean to mess with your sleep schedule too much. But it so happens I have a deck of cards and a couple of coins. You play much Knuckle Nine down there in Prossimo?

“Not well,” Seth said. “But I’d do a round or two.”

“Brill.” Annalise dropped to the carpet and sat cross-legged, propped on her bedframe, and Seth glanced at where her robe rode up the tattooed softness of her inner thigh, and told himself that this was not the woman who wanted him.

She rummaged in her saddlebag and produced a beaten-up deck of cards and a sable change purse, both of which she opened and dispersed across the floor. Seth took his deck of nine cards and they fell into the rhythm of the game.

It was easy enough, he supposed. With the different head and the different skin. If he just looked at her like a different person, it was easy enough.

But she isn’t. She’s the same. She told you that. The same thoughts in her head even if the head is different. If you’re going to stay sore about what Anna did, you can’t be choosy.

Fine, then. He wouldn’t stay sore.

“I wanted to say that I forgive you,” he said, as Annalise reshuffled the deck. “For the seraph incident. As long as you don’t plan on doing it again.”

“Can’t forgive me yet,” she said. “I need to make it up to you still, don’t I? Told you that.”

“I thought that was just Lisa being Lisa.”

She shook her head. “Sure look, Seth. I do still owe you one. And I would still be happy to hear what you want, if you’ve an inkling. Just wanted to repeat that in a, uh—less drooly way.”

“If you say so.” Seth pointed to a card in his hand. “Got a four of wings right here.”

Annalise hummed in thought. “If you say so. No challenge.”

Seth placed the card face-up. “That was a seven.”

“You little blighter.”

Seth drew a replacement. “When I said stop trying to be my mother, I was angry. But I don’t… it was shitty of me to say. You’ve been very kind to me. Probably…” He paused and rifled through his mind, trying to find something that would speak against what he was thinking. He came up short. “I have to admit, you’ve probably been kinder to me than anyone else has. Saints, isn’t that sad. The renowned kindness of the Verdugo.”

“Can I admit something back?”

“You gonna tell me you’ve got a jack in there?”

She grinned. “Not that, but now that you mention it, I do indeed.”

“Bullshit.” Seth passed her a coin. “Flip.”

“Heads or tails?”

“Heads.”

She flipped her brace. The stern, thin face of Charles il Nekropoli stared upward from the bedspread. “Bugger.” She put a card face down in front of her from the top of the deck. “Not well, he said. You wee liar.”

“I’m lucky tonight.” He drew a pair of cards into his knuckle-hand. “What’re you admitting?”

“Sometimes, Seth, I do wish I’d been your mother. That I’d been there for you earlier. That I could have kept some of the big nasty world from tossing you about. Or that someone had, anyway. Can’t pretend like I managed it with Tiago and Ofelia.”

“As far as I can tell so far, they’re good kids,” he said. “Not that I’m the expert.”

“Good kids.” She chuckled. “You’re not far from their age, you know. That’s what Tiago would say if he was here. A very defensive young man.”

“You’d have been better than what I got, I’m sure,” Seth said. “Mother-wise.”

“You never knew her, did you? Or not for long.” Annalise rolled a coin between her fingers. “What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “My oldest memory is getting kicked under a table by some guy who said I was his nephew, but he had a dozen nephews and two of us were murani.” He laid a face-down card. “That’s nine. Knuckles up.”

Annalise grimaced at the pile in front of her. Six facedown, three up. “I bet this is terrible.” She flipped her cards. “Ah, fuck off.”

Seth scooted a coin from her pile to his. “How’d you know?”

“That my hand was banjaxed?”

“That I didn’t have a mother.”

She shrugged. “You’re searching.”

“Searching for what? A mother?”

“Dunno,” she said. “Just searching.”

They held each other’s gaze for five silent seconds. Her Annalise eyes were wider than Lisa’s, rounder and more expressive. He could see the tenuous sprouting something, growing thin and green from her to him, and the exact moment she slammed the shutter down to conceal it.

“And speaking of searching, we have a head to find tomorrow,” she said. “So I’ll go on and shuffle these back, and then we ought to hit the pit.”

He shook the moment off. “That mean you forfeit?”

“Ah, sure. Smug little so-and-so.” She began to strip off her robe, to the flimsy nightgown beneath, and paused. “Mind if we go lights out?”

He reached to the corpselight by his bed and clicked its bronze-fitted chain. Annalise followed suit with hers, and the woman across from Seth was reduced to a pale, indistinct phantom.

“Thanks, kiddo.” She kicked her legs onto the bed. Her skin was so bright in the dim that he could tell she had tattoos there, too. A dragon on her thigh, its tail curling up past the hem of her nightgown, slid beneath the surface of the linen bedsheets. “Saints gild your dreams.”

“You too.”

He sat in the dark, and wondered why he wasn’t tired, in this plush bed, after a day and night full of travel and motion and drink. He couldn’t just leave it like that with her, he realized. She could pretend, but he couldn’t.

He inhaled courage from the chilly night. The muffled sounds and dim lights of Fontana’s night shifts, reassuring him there was a whole world out there ticking along with amiable disregard for this high drama unfolding in his head, for the thief who was falling for the executioner, and after all, he was nothing but a man, and she a woman.

“Annalise,” he whispered. “Can I ask you something?”

No reply.

“Annalise?”

A snore sawed through the dark. He ought to have been irked, maybe, but he couldn’t help but smile to himself instead. She slept as big and unbothered as she did everything else.

It didn’t bother him, the snoring. He’d slept through far worse. It was the rhythm of Annalise’s breath, like the tide, that lulled Seth’s eyes shut.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...uckle-nine

And Scribble Hub is playing catchup:
Afraid of Being Afraid
Hounds, Foxes, and Hens
Auntie Lisa
The Dam
Sektorbrav Red
Slim and Sad
UPDATE: Fond Old Fool
MORE UPDATE: Knuckle Nine

Also, on a very special, mostly Sykora-less Princess of the Void:

WHOA, A BONUS CHAPTER.

That's right, gang. I said that if Headless Over Heels got into the top 5 of RS, I'd post a bonus on Monday and Wednesday. And hark! It has. Enjoy this bonus, then, and see you on Wed for the other.

Guppy

“Pause sim,” Hyax says. The distant explosions and gunfire, the roaring outback wind, it all stops.

Hyax paces through the building, past shrapnel frozen in mid-air from a secondary detonation in the ammo dump she was raiding. Past the crumpled, bloody corpses. Is Maekyonite blood really that bright red?

She climbs to the second floor. Bodies and pieces of bodies. Nobody moving—well, of course they wouldn’t be, she reminds herself. “Any surviving hostiles?” she asks.

“None in this scenario, Brigadier,” the calm computerized voice responds.

“Cease sim and give me an after-action.”

“Imperial forces: two major injuries, five minor. All Australian Defense Forces neutralized.”

Hyax looks into the frozen face of the dead Maekyonite. He’s simple and untextured. The simulator didn’t bother to animate his face or give him expressions—this isn’t the emotional endurance module. His impassive face stares at the range’s stony ceiling through the hole Hyax’s men blasted in the roof.

“End sim,” she says, and the tranquil corpse disappears.

She pulls her halfcape off and stows her rifle in its harness as she returns to the armory. She steps from her HAK and loads it back into the rack. Down the gleaming armory-level hall she goes, to her dark, cramped office. She sits on her uncomfortable metal stool and switches on her terminal. Her partway-done document stares back at her:

MAEKYON ANNEXATION COLLATERAL INFORTUNITY ADDENDUM: URBAN WARFARE SIMULATION REPORT

She scrolls past the butcher’s bill of obliterated Maekyonite armies. At the bottom of the list, she writes MELBOURNE ANALYSIS, and pauses.

Present this soberly and with no outward emotion. As you did with Eqtora. That is your task; your own emotions are not to be a factor. Grantyde will appreciate your passivity.

No, he won’t. These are his people. Gods of the Firmament. Can you look into his eyes and tell him the tale of how you will slaughter their warriors?

Hyax cups her hands into a visor atop her forehead, leaning down to hide the report’s stark digital characters. Why is she so terrible at this, at the emotional part? Again she feels the gap in her where a normal person could find these answers.

She stalks from her office and doesn’t realize where her feet are taking her until she’s aboard the lift to the hab level’s second ring.

She salutes a patrolling pair of marines as she makes her way to Hab Block Pekao-5. The Dignitary Suite on the third floor has been converted with a high doorway marked at its apex with a pair of crossed harpoons.

The door opens at Hyax’s hail. Ruaq-nai-Taqa, freshly bathed and smelling like tulaberry tart, smiles down at her. Her willowy slate legs are in a set of itty bitty shorts that terminate above her slouchy, chunky-knit sledger’s cardigan, its sleeves dwarfing her nimble little fingers.

“Hey, Guppy,” she says. “What’s up?”

Hyax belatedly remembers to act annoyed at her new nickname and stop wagging her tail. “I wondered if I might come by,” she says. “Finished up early for the day.”

Ruaq steps to one side and nudges her blubbery, finned tail out of the way. “Then you better get your little blue butt in here.”

Hyax strolls into the meq-Taqas’ cabin. “Is Ipqen home yet?”

“She’s on the way.” Ruaq shuts the door behind her and adjusts the prayer box on the other side. The little wooden family-god charms have been joined by a carved relief of the Black Pike. Ipqen and Ruaq insisted on adding it for Hyax, in place of whatever family god she might otherwise have worshipped. “Stayed over at work to help with the, uh—the engineering thing. The MZI. Did I remember that right?”

“You did indeed.”

“What’s that stand for, anyway?”

“Underdeveloped orbit adaptation.” Hyax takes her boots off and places them next to Ruaq’s agro-level mulch waders. “It’s a suite of modifications for operation in systems where there is no Imperial infrastructure. To ensure that there is no reason to depart the system. Failsafes and such.”

“So were we an underdeveloped orbit?”

“I am not going to answer that.”

Ruaq giggles. She giggles at a lot of what Hyax says, even when it isn’t a joke. Hyax told herself it was annoying when this relationship began and she thought she only wanted Ipqen. She considered it a problem to weather. But Ruaq’s affection is as sweet and bubbly as an effervescent ale and, to Hyax’s consternation, just as addictive. “I thought we were invincible and self-sufficient,” she says.

“Well, now we’re invincibler and self-sufficienter. Thanks to your fiancée and the protocol she’s instituting.”

Ruaq goes to the mek-Taqas’ music console and combs through a score of playlists on a minimalist digital display. They brought this from Harok—it’s big and bulky and primitive-looking, but Ruaq swears up and down there’s a warmth that its wooden cab speakers bring which the Pike can’t replicate. “They haven’t made any changes on the agro ring.”

“The agro ring needs none.” Hyax drags the Taiikari-sized adjustable seat over to the cabin’s dining table and winches it into position. “You botany gals are already operating at maximum optimization.”

Another airy giggle. “Flatterer.”

“It’s true,” Hyax protests, hackles raising. “I’m not—”

Ruaq’s thin arms wrap around Hyax’s shoulders from behind. “Hey.” The keeper’s snout brushes Hyax’s crown, sending a shiver through her. “You gonna sleep over tonight?”

Hyax’s belly gets that low-grav feeling in it. “If you would have me.”

“Of course.” Ruaq opens a cabinet and pulls a foil-covered tray from it. “Have some amma crumble. I made way too much for Specialist Mazek’s nameday thing.”

“Shouldn’t you ask Ipqen?”

“I already know what she’ll say.” Ruaq hands her a fork. “Try it and report back. I think I finally know how Taiikari like it.”

Hyax swallows her I shouldn’t and its attending I don’t mean to be a burden, and tucks into Ruaq’s cooking. It’s bold and sweet and decadently flaky, as usual, with an aggressive floral forwardness and a nutrient profile that Quartermaster Kymai would balk at. But Eqt help her, she’s stopped caring.

Ruaq balances on the balls of her feet. “Whatcha think?”

I think I am falling in love with you, Hyax thinks. “It’s good,” she says.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...8/65-guppy
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2407738/

[Mamorien]

As you can see from the edit to my last, Headless Over Heels is caught up across both sites where it posts, and it continues to keep pace today!

Seth squeezed a wedge of lemon into his coffee del tiempe and stirred it with a clatter of ice. Here was a luxury he’d actually tasted, a coffee with ice in it. Rohan had served it to him once. When your fancy stuff had a shelf life, you were more likely to break it out for your lessers, he supposed.

“The artery is lovely, of course.” Marston scraped butter across his coca bread, navigating around the dried apricots. “You can’t say they’ve given us nothing, can you. Not when those trains roar through.”

Seth mirrored his gesture—perhaps the coca would be made less grainy with a hearty smear. “Surely the artery takes away more than it gives.”

Marson shrugged. “In pure tonnage, perhaps, but what you learn as an importer is the things of true value are often quite light. One simply requires a discerning eye and a sense of…”

He paused. His knife froze halfway back down to his plate. His wife rolled her eyes.

“Timing,” he cried, and Lisa jumped, hand on her chest, letting out a perfectly vacant titter.

Vividly Alive

Seth managed one himself as he scanned the drawing room. The conversation pit in which this farce unfolded was cornered into a picture window out to the garden. What light made it through the smothering wall of begonias landed on a hodgepodge of fine wood-carved furnishings and antique decor that screamed old money at a volume only new money would ever reach for.

A pair of crossed black-powder pistols, a portrait of Luka with a stripy felis on her lap, a slug of pitted metal like magma runoff which Marston had smugly introduced as the work of a sarkani artist from Sektorbrav—one of the dragon people, he’d said. Melted it into shape with his breath. Gimcrack displays like this would normally tickle the larcenist-in-residence within Seth’s brainstem. But he wasn’t here for this stuff.

He’d been charged with something beyond the swinging saloon door and up the marble stairs that lay beyond it. And as his vision returned to the beautiful woman who needed his talents, an encouraging bump of her threaded brow told him he’d given these hosts long enough for the lulling.

He scooted his chair out from the sea of lacy tablecloth. “Which way to the bathroom, may I ask?”

Marston pointed past the half-mummified butler in repose by the exit. “Across the vestibule, round the left corner and it’s your first left.”

“Seth, your cravat.” Lisa affected a look of disapproval. “Come, come. Before you go.” She gestured him in. “Try to leave it as you found it,” she whispered, as she undid his peach-colored cravat. “I want them in the dark so they don’t skip town when we roll in again. Saints speed you, my brilliant little thief.”

She tied the knot again and cinched it snug to Seth’s neck. Like she’s putting a collar on you, an unwelcome voice whispered. She eased back and gave him a light tap on the cheek. He climbed from the conversation pit and slipped out of the room. Another fluting Lisa laugh sounded behind him, at whatever inane thing their host was saying. He did not like how real that laugh sounded. He didn’t want to wonder which of the ones she’d gifted him were so poorly earned.

Out from the light and laughter, he excused himself past the il Molacqs’ other servant, a broad-shouldered gentleman’s gentleman with a head as bald and lumpen as a potato and eyes almost as small. Mr. Potato was standing at the base of the steps. Well, that was fine. Seth was a second-story guy.

He headed for the bathroom and—while he was there—took a quick leak to soothe some of the pre-lift tension. Always helped.

His cheek tingled where Lisa had touched it as he washed up. He wondered if that was some sort of side effect, if the soul drawn close to the surface by its proximity to an unlit lent the nerves some sort of frisson. He splashed some water on his face, as if there were some stain on him that needed washing. As if he wasn’t pining to feel that palm again. He looked at himself in the mirror. He leaned in, close enough to see his pores. He’d miss the color in his cheeks, but the eyes. The white on black. He might look handsome with eyes like that.

It was tragedy. Unlit was unclean and undead. But Annalise was so vividly alive. Tiago and Ofelia had chosen it, had snuffed their own lights to stay close to her. Was it so mad to consider? Would he take the fear and hatred of the entire continent for the love and friendship of the al Ydrises? Would he truly miss the touch of the Rumia al Morinas of the world, if every night could be like those few minutes in the hotel room, drowsy and sheltered in the Verdugo’s big warm arms? What would his Darkness be? What miracle would rush in to replace the spot his soul would vacate?

He’d been with them a bare week. He was putting the spooky black carriage before the horse. And he had a job to do. He splashed another bracing handful of water onto his face and got back to work.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...idly-alive
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2409245/