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

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

The music played. Thundering drums the size of oxen hammered by severe soldiers in spiked helms and frogged field coats. Complex curlicued brass instruments poured forth a fusillade of triumphal sound. Ofelia had not been joking about the bassoons. They were the size of fucking cannons and blared their deep-ocean heaviness.

Tiago rode on the carriage’s flank, his shining boot planted on the booth step and his crisp black riding glove looped into an ulnar handhold on its side. “Get ready,” he yelled over the music. “You’re in the splash zone.”

“The what?” Seth asked, and then realized what Tiago meant. He tucked his chin.

Lisa unsheathed her sword.

The brilliant banner of foaming red that it released, in all Seth’s months of bearing witness, had brought forth gasps and yelps and sounds of dismay muffled by coarse-spun sleeves. Never to thunderous applause; never until now. The city was alive and the city was as ravenous for the imported gore as the imported glory.

Vivat a Nekropoli. Vivat a Legia Aeterna.

Seth felt the hot droplets of the preservative blood that pumped through it on the back of his neck. He smeared them away and examined his hand. This smear of red had joined the green Legion sash as the only color on him.

Ahead of them, Rafi held his own gory blade up, to similarly raucous reception. Behind them, Larson a’Lauvey drew his, with an overenthusiastic yank that scythe-bladed the blood outward into the crowd. The crow-clad bachelorette it painted red didn’t seem to mind; she whooped wildly and jumped up and down, her bustier showing through the low cut of her coatee.

Seth remembered what the twins had told him of lit life in the city, how eager the competition was to snuff your wick. Sleeping with an ensouled Verdugo would surely be the grandest prize of them all.

They’d crossed the bridge now, past towering precipices of polished stone decorated with statues of heroes and halberdiers whose carved musculature bulged in confederate determination to hold up the woven threads of galvanized steel suspension that anchored the paved road above its murky moat.

Around their heads and higher up, in windows forty vertiginous floors above the water, flylamps burned, burnishing the gleaming banisters into a pallid caramel wash. The unlit swarmed and cheered and hurled great armfuls of black-and-white confetti. A festival in monochrome.

Flechette festivity came cutting down through the green air in starling drifts. Some the petals of a greenhouse’s worth of flowers; some was paper. Confetti, yes, but between the milled-for-purpose stuff was ledger paper and broadsheet and old bills, whatever the offices had going spare, dumped by the armful into the updraft off the river. It caught the light. It went into Seth’s collar and his hair and the horses’ manes, and Draco tossed his head and did not break stride, because Draco had done this eleven times before.

A crisp, floral taste suddenly dried the center of Seth’s mouth. He coughed to dislodge it from his soft palate and a crumpled flower petal landed in his palm. Ahead of them, Rafi wagged a finger. He cried something over the cacophony that reached Seth in snatches: “I told you, Mr. il Gutierre! Mouth shut!”

The landmarks were coming into view now. The glow of the psychelith cut itself from the sky in jagged facets lit from within by millions—millions, Saints help us—of disembodied souls. With a pair of infuser’s goggles, perhaps you could even see them—the invisible strings that linked the people to the souls that swam within life-preserving crystal goliath like a woven skein laid across the city.

And the Bastion. Their destination. Built in brutalist simplicity centuries ago at the broken rim of a crag over the North Delta, the seed of a black-bricked metropolis that had bloomed upward to meet it and cover it in a megaregurgitation of every fine artist’s magnum opus from across a terrified and grateful continent, like an ancient hull crusted with barnacles or an underwater volcano whose layers of magma had formed a breaching island, until the ugly blocks of the original fort had been buried in an intricate reef of flying buttresses and ribbed vaults and towering traceries and boss stones filigreed with this Saint or that one and reliquary spires and criss-crossing transepts like an asterisk or a star of granite, now steepled with pointed pinnacles whose tympana were so crowded with antique warriors and leering skulls and gargoyles and shrieking grotesques that the eye whirlpooled to behold it, that the shield borne by a bold legionnaire upon a carved relief battlefield had within its compass, as if painted on the wood, another battlefield, with more scenes of heroic bloodshed upon it with details matching the first into unthinkable minutiae, into a fractal infinity whose depth was primordial, whose stone developed a life beyond and before and supplanting the life that had built it and lived in its shadow, eternal and undying and glaring down upon its witnesses as if to say: All you who perish and flow through the Turning Wheel, all flesh fails, all breath fades. But not the Legion. Vivat a Nekropoli. Vivat a Legia Aeterna.

At the very crest of the Necropolis’s peregrine mausoleums, that world-cracking flash of green came again. This close it was not a lightning bolt but a universal blink, inverted from the mind’s murky black to the soul’s brilliant emerald. Its casting strobed the street in brilliant neon, sent every shadow leaping back, and a simian backwater in Seth’s brain froze over in preparation for the thunder, but none came, just a low tuneful thrum in bipart, like the massive slow lub-dub of a metropolis-sized heart fit to keep the world beating.

Which it is, Seth suddenly understood, with fearful veneration. Which it does. The energy of thousands upon thousands of deaths from across the continent, riding the rails to the Necropolis, feeding the Legion who blistered the sky all the way back with the returning obituary pulse. A permanent death-engine within a vault of towering stone-and-steel ribs, pumping countless oblivions across a continent frozen at the threshold of what ought to have been its own oblivion in turn brought by millions of gnashing maws and tearing claws.

It was one thing to know it. To see it turned him impossibly small. A mote of dust blown from the surface of the world by the cosmic wind, swirled in the eddies of the passage of some incomprehensible titanic something. If he hadn’t had one already, he’d have needed to find a seat.

And this is your reason now. Fueling the deathspell. This is what you will spend the rest of your life in service to.

Lisa grinned and nudged him with her knee, as if mistaking his existential dread for excited awe. And perhaps that’s what it was. Not since his own unlighting had he been called upon to contain such an emotion, one too large and unnameable to fit inside him.

No, he decided, daring to look again at the horrible beauty of the bewitched sky. That isn’t what your life is for. That’s not what you serve after all. She is.

On balance, that actually made him feel a lot better.

“You can’t tell because they’re all cheering for us,” Tiago said. “But there is a certain sort of Necropolitan who cheers every time that flash happens, every two hours, and it’s fucking annoying.”

Ofelia picked a petal from the felt trench of her bicorne. “You stop hearing it eventually.”

Seth leaned over his shoulder to the carriage’s front window and gave it a soft knock. “You don’t have to come out,” he said. “But these people are cheering for the saviors of the continent, and that includes you.”

The curtain twitched. Riccana’s drawn face was visible in its dark interior. “That’s nice of you to say.”

“Also,” Seth said. “Tiago’s had his hat on backwards for five minutes and hasn’t noticed.”

A pause. The curtain moved another half-inch. “It is on backwards.”

“It’s shameful. Somebody should tell him.”

“No,” Riccana said. “Let him find out in the papers.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...ia-aeterna
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2619885/

[Mamorien]

Princess of the Void.

Dylan Thorogood awakens on day six of being a possession. There’s a pillow under his head and another between his knees and two more smushed up against his hips. These last two are round, purple, very warm, and attached to Xamika phar Zwinai nai Qena-Qel.

It was day 4 that they started joking about her sharing his bed. He doesn’t remember who initiated it, exactly, but they kept making allusions to sleeping in the same bed that night head-to-foot, and laughing, and the laughing didn’t go away but the joke did. As did the part where they’re head-to-foot.

So they’ve been sleeping together. Not sleeping but sleeping. Both in their clothes, neither touching. Not with intention, anyway, but this is the second morning that he’s woke up to find that they’ve shifted in the night and he’s cuddling her to him.

She’s just too cute. Too touchable. Like a teddy bear with a soft ass and gentle breath and a heartbeat he is only now noticing goes ba-da-dum like an Iron Maiden triplet beat.

Xami says.

His morning hard-on is pressed against her, cradled between the thick purple globes of her butt. It goes up, past where the squish turns into firm symmetrical muscle, past the small of her back, to the curve of her spine where it meets her waist.

God, it’s nearly halfway to her ribcage. He blinks blearily and wonders, not for the first time, if he’d even fit.

“Mmm.” Xamika stretches. Her shoulderblades glide beneath the criss-crossing straps of her top. Its stretchy material bunches above her tail as she arches and presses her butt further into the hollow of Dylan’s hips.

She swivels. “Someone’s awake,” she whispers.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s uh… biology.”

She scoots further against him. “Can I tell you something I’m probably overdue to? The Taiikari don’t use—well, the word in our language is Ganeamak. You might want to practice avoiding it, if you do end up getting chipped.”

“Ganeamak,” he repeats. “It’s a pretty word, for one you’re not supposed to use.”

“Pretty or not, there’s no call for it. It’s biology, right? You’re healthy.” She sighs happily, her toned shoulders loosening. “And you’re warm.”

She’s vibrating. It takes a moment for Dylan to realize what he’s feeling. He chuckles in surprise. “Xam, do Taiikari purr?”

Her tail wags. She bends forward. “They purr even harder when a cute boy rubs their back.”

She didn’t flash him or phrase it as an order, but now her butt is firmly hot-dogging him, and he reflects that there are many ways to get him to obey. His thumbs knead the defined muscles in her shoulders. “Luaz’ti ezzat,” she groans. “That feels good.”

Lower now. To her waist. Her curves are so dramatic that when he extends his hands, his fingers nearly fit all the way around her middle. Lower again, to the root of her tail. Her purr intensifies. The vibration against his hips. His kneading fingers are inches from that big, round butt he’s been staring at all morning.

“Hokay.” Her tail paffs lightly against his cheek. The fur tuft on it smells like lavender. “I don’t want this to stop ever, but we gotta get up.”

He’s mind-swimmingly hard. “Two minutes,” he murmurs.

“I’m gonna stay in bed for two hours if I let you keep going.” She turns over in bed and meets his eyes. Flash. “Xami says let me up.”

Dylan sighs and releases his curvy little lap pillow; she pats his hip and yawns herself to sitting.

They’ve adopted Xami says to get as close as they can to proper compulsion—he tried going off her flashing eyes but it wasn’t obvious enough. He can do whatever he wants before she says it, and he’s pretty sure she gets a kick out of how often he defies her requests. But once those words come out, it’s not optional anymore.

And that’s how it’ll be for the next two days.

At least, he thinks.

“So what’s on my agenda?” he asks. “Breakfast with the girls or with the humans?”

“Humans today.” Xamika squeezes into her uniform breeches. She catches him admiring her, and wiggles her hips more than is strictly required. “You have to show some face or they’ll think I’ve dragged you off to a torture chamber or something.” Two last little hops to get the stretchy fabric over her butt. Bounce, bounce. Dylan turns away before the urge to tackle her back into the bed gets too pressing.

He rummages through his drawers and finds a Bolt Thrower shirt from their Return to Chaos USA tour. It’s been folded neatly, like the rest of his stuff. How they retrieved it and at what materiel cost, he can’t imagine, but it’s a nice touch.

“Why do none of the other humans have this many skulls on their clothes, anyway?” Xamika asks.

“They lack the true power of Metal, I guess,” Dylan says. He pulls on his pants and feels Xamika’s close attention as she takes her turn to ogle. He smiles inwardly. It’s been a long time since he’s felt this drooled-over. It’s moments like this—the lingering looks, the lingering touches—that tell him he’s not misreading this whole thing, and she’s not forbearing out of disinterest.

He departs his cabin with a Xami says-derived promise to meet his temporary mistress after breakfast in the arboretum, and waves good morning to Viaq, who’s sneaking out of Santi’s quarters again.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...-xami-says
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2622204/