#Slave LED Ceiling Light

[ruesol]

ex-convict!sukuna tries to talk to burnt out!reader about her feelings but she dismisses him. not proofread, sorry :(

prompt for more context

Anxiety lathered your back in cold sweat as you received your exam sheet from your TA, not bothering to look twice at your haphazard state before moving on to the next person.

You knew there was a reason why your paper was given to you faced down while your friend received hers with bright red numbers beaming up at her. You knew it was just your insecurity speaking to you, but it really did feel like the entire classroom of seventy-five people were staring at you. Even if your seat was all the way in the corner and Sukuna’s faded brown leather jacket basically cloaked you into invisibility.

You weren’t sure how you accidentally snagged it in the first place, all you remember was that you had slept with him the night before an important exam and rushed out with his jacket instead of your oversized hoodie that you sported for the Walk of Shame. It was the only thing comforting you at the moment. The familiar smell of nicotine and wet grass clouded your senses as you imagined him holding you close with his fingers stuffed in your cunt and his lips on your neck after yet another failure.

Just how many times were you going to go to him to comfort yourself? It was starting to become a habit that shaved you to your bones.

Your chest tightened as the ceiling got lower and lower to the point where you could feel the bright fluorescent lights burning the brittle hair on your scalp. The brick walls engulfed you till yours bones crunched and your muscles tightened.

Without thinking twice, you grabbed your worn denim satchel as you silently raced out the lecture hall, trembling like a fawn. Your boots splashed against the wet ground as you walked towards the back of the building and slid down on the wall while hugging yourself.

Your closed palm held your failure. Your crushed and creased exam sheet. A part of you wanted to grind it to nothing under your boots, but a part of you still had a sense of accountability so you shoved it in Sukuna’s jacket.

While fishing around in his pockets, you found two very interesting things—a leaf of acetaminophen tablets, and a pack of cigarettes. You knew he smoked with the way his jacket smelled but you’d never seen him do it. The leaf of tablets led you to believe that he must’ve been trying to quit.

You’d never been a smoker, always worried that you’d get addicted once you started, becoming a slave to the little white cylinder, but today was different. It was your last chance at passing the class. The last quiz you could get good grade on before failing the entire class even after giving the final.

You assumed he could always quit faster with one less cigarette in the box so you decided to look for a lighter and found one in his inner pocket.

“What the fuck are you doing?” A large, tattooed hand snatched the cigarette and lighter from your grasp. Sukuna stared at you like you’d betrayed him. You groaned to yourself as you rubbed a hand down your face. You’d forgotten you had texted him to pick you up after class.

This confrontation was of your own design.

“Smoking, what do you think? Give that back,” you got up and tried to snatch it away, but he had managed to grab the box from you as well and thrown it down on the ground, immediately crushing it with his boots.

“I can’t believe you’d destroy pricey cigarettes like that,” you quipped as you shrugged off his jacket, but he grabbed on to your shoulders, preventing you from doing so. “It’s cold.”

Of course, a man of few words when it finally came to talking about something than yourself. “Come on, I’ll drop you home,” his large hand grabbed yours as he briskly walked to his jeep that was parked nearby.

Like clockwork, you pulled him into a rough kiss as he got into the driver’s seat, but he pulled away, a string of saliva thinning into air as held you in place by your shoulders. “What’s wrong?” Your usual routine with him was very predictable—you’d call him to let out some stress, make out a little in his car once he’d come and get you, then go to his place.

Not once had he complained, except for a few instances where he’d insist on fucking you after making you come, not even bothering to ask you to return the favor; a strange occurrence for a ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement. Especially with someone as rugged as him.

Usually jail would harden a man up, turn him into an insensitive boor, but it felt the opposite when he’d treat you rather gently: a hand on the small of your back as you’d try to get into his monstrous jeep, or checking in with you after you’d pass out as soon as he pulls out.

It was unexpected yet strangely welcoming.

“You look terrible,” he grimaces. Your cold sweat begins to dry up with the heat of your rage. “Wow. I know I’m not the hottest girl out there, but you really didn’t need to rub it in. I’m out.” He grabs your satchel before you can leave with it. It hangs between you both much like your relationship.

“Don’t get out. I didn’t mean it like that. You just… look really tired.”

You stare at him for a long time before you place your bag back in your lap. You stare ahead at the expanse of fir trees and grass as you lean back in your seat. “Since when did you care about any of that? Let’s just go to your place.”

“When was the last time you had a full night’s rest?” he asked as he started his car. He snatched your satchel and threw it in the backseat. A usual practice for him, although, it was you in the back with him while your bag sat in the front.

“Why are we even talking about this? You’re being weird.” Sukuna’s knuckles turn white at your comment, gripping the steering wheel harder. Your mind races about all the possible ways he could kill you right now. You never really argued with him because you were too afraid to see what he’d be like with his patience on its final thread.

However, you pushed that line today. He was over the edge. You could tell with the way his brows furrowed and his lips flattened ever so slightly. The jeep hadn’t picked up speed. Thank goodness for that.

“You’re in college. You need to take care of yourself,” he flatly said as he made a turn towards his apartment complex.

“Why do you care? You’re not my bo—“

There it was. The taboo word. He sure as hell wasn’t your boyfriend, but he didn’t like the reminder of it either. Only replying to you in grunts and hums when you’d say it. And it wasn’t like you both were that talkative with each other in the first place.

“I’m just worried about you.”

Now he was crossing the line. A boundary you built with ever so shaky hands, so thin that you’d topple over to him if he’d show the least bit affection. You knew he wanted in. You could tell with the way he’d hold your face when his lips would slot themselves on yours. When you’d taste yourself on his tongue.

But you couldn’t let him. It wasn’t right. You’re both fucked up, albeit, in different degrees, but still very messed up with the things going on in your lives.

You did not want him to know what really went on in your mind. Never open the door for a stranger. Even if he knows all about how your body sings for him when he caresses your core.

“Stop the car.”

“What the fuck? We’re about to reach.”

“I said, stop the car. I’m gonna walk home.”

“It’s raining, at least let me drop you off.”

“Stop the car or I’ll jump out.”

You didn’t look back at Sukuna’s face as you walked away. Nor did you tell him that you’d see him later. You both knew he would. Your texts would always come in when you’d be feeling even lower than you presently were.

And then from Sukuna’s jacket (that you were still wearing), you took out a singular, slightly bent cigarette.

—

more ex-convict!sukuna fics

[drjae69]

INPATIENT CARE

When your Dominatrix said she had something in mind you didn’t have this in mind particularly . The moment she picked you up at your apartment lobby, and once you got in her car, your fate was sealed . Once your seatbelt was buckled, she hit you with the chloroform and you were out fast . Between bouts of consciousness she put you on a stretcher and brought you into her clinic lair and that was about the last time you saw the outside. By the time you woke she had already set you up . Restrained and on oxygen and nitrous she had you just right and helpless . All you could do was lifelessly stare at her ceiling and accept it . She confessed that she lied to you to lure you here on false pretenses as you fit all her criteria for a permanent medical slave as her last one was no longer up the task and was her toilet now. The first thing she was going to do was going to be permanent . Already had prepped you she cleaned your scrotum already freshly shaved by you . She coded it with local anesthetic and waited until it was numb . She then introduced a muscle relaxer into your IV trip. Once she was ready and gloved she operated . She slowly methodically cut open your scrotum and extracting one testicle at a time before slicing it off the vas . Holding them in your hands she showed you her work before putting them in the biohazard bin before stitching you up. Enough trauma for one day she let you rest putting you back to sleep as tomorrow was going to be the first day of your new life as an medical slave .

She woke you the LED light always on she cleaned you before putting your mask back on and feeding you, IVs . You tried, but only could mumble at her as she had injected your vocal cords with solution . All you could do was groan and moan at her . After breakfast should be returned at attaching electrodes to you and slowly proceeded to increasing the voltage of every shock flinching with the hit . With every incremental jump, she got a bigger reaction from you . It reached a point where only she heard was agonizing moans where she stopped for a time  before returning to it . Still raw from surgery the shocks were unbearable but tightly bound restraints kept you stationary as she climbed . She then sounded you as she did it three reactions be becoming more visible and pained . That was just your first day. The next she gave you moops (man boobs) with saline and added needles to your nipples. Then the next she tenderize you on the freshly cut scrotum. Other times she humiliated you as your penis, shriveled, and atrophied due to hormonal starvation . At some times she brought other more broken and abused slave than you had been most docility following her commands to the letter . They sucked on your toes like royalty and suck you off when commanded all the wild expressionless .

With enough time passing, you realized that hell was real and you were in it . Eventually, she would see to it that you wouldn’t realize it after all the times tenderizing and abusing she had finally wanted to test a new procedure on you . Bringing an old-fashioned kit with a ice pic and ball pen hammer you know exactly what she was planning . She then again gave you muscle relaxers and local anesthetic before placing the pig through your eye socket and up against your gray matter before gently tapping it a few times . From that point on you were just like the other traumatized things in her charge, barely even a person anymore you could only lay in your bed as she played with you, your cock never erected again and only flaccid . You forgot your old name sometimes you were a sissy other times a pet and worse, a toilet . But you are always at the end of the day a slave. 



[mika-no-sekai-blog]

Tear of salt

Azriel x Mermaid OC

Word count: +6300

Summary: He sneaks into enemy territory to spy/assassinate someone and while sneaking through that person's manor he finds a large tank holding a sad mermaid.

Warnings: Azriel doing his job - killing; mentions of blood, wounds, torturing, starvation

Based on this prompt by @ghostedgrim @azrielappreciationweek Day 7: Free Dividers by @tsunami-of-tears

Azriel crossed his room, attaching last daggers he had prepared, to his gear. He got a mission, a very easy one. There was nothing that could go wrong and he even didn't feel sorry for what he was about to do. Sneaking into manor of some bastard who was kidnapping lesser faeries and human children all around Prythian and selling them as slaves on continent, was way too easy for him. Azriel could have sent some of his spies to handle this, but after witnessing what was left of one of the victims, he wanted to do it personally. He wanted to see that bastard suffering as much as those children suffered before he would allow him to die.

The shadows swirled around his arms and wings, gathering at his ear. "It's time," they whispered in their silent soothing voices.

Azriel closed his honeyed hazel eyes, releasing a deep sigh through nose while shadows swallowed him. When he again opened them, he stood on a hill at the edge of the forest.

It was night, a valley bellow was plunged in impenetrable darkness as heavy dark clouds swimming across the firmament, hid all the stars and moon. Air was filled with a smell of rain and static energy of coming storm. Azriel didn't mind it though. He was used to the darkness and saw his destination almost as clearly as during the day.

At the bottom of the shallow valley stood a manor surrounded by garden and high fence. Only certain people knew about its existence or how to get there. It took him just a few hours to find the right people and follow them to this place and next several days he spent spying around, counting coming and leaving wagons. That bastard was so arrogant that he kept only a small unit of guards to secure such big estate. Killing him couldn't be more easier. Even from afar Azriel could say that whoever cast the wards around the estate, did a very poor job. He cracked through them the second he came without any problem and not a single soul noticed it.

Azriel waited for an hour after the last of the lights turned off in the manor. The wind was getting stronger, playing with his dark hair as he stretched out his wings. The guards were so negligent that they rather hid from the coming storm than guarded the place. This really couldn't be easier.

Azriel quietly slid on the wind down to the garden close to the servants entrance, but then he changed his mind and with smirk he landed on a driveway. There was no need to hide in the shadows, the darkness of the night covered his tall figure dressed in black perfectly fine. Rhys would certainly call him a show-off for this later. His noiseless steps led him up the staircase straight to the main entrance, hand casually resting on a hilt of his favourite dagger on his hip.

The shadows swam out from beneath the massive doors, climbing up his body to whisper into his ear. Azriel huffed when they told him that nobody was keeping an eye in the main hall nor anywhere nearby. How convenient. His blue siphons gleamed in the darkness as he reached for handle. It wasn't even locked. How could such amateurs manage to kidnap so many people and even had an audacity to think that nobody would notice and come for them?

Tugging his wings closer, Azriel stepped in and closed the doors behind. The main hall was literary made of white marble that covered not only floor but also walls and ceiling. Great portals on the both sides of the doors led deeper into the house. However, Azriel's attention was trained on the two staircases winding around an enormous tank. The bedroom he was looking for, was certainly up on the second floor. Though that didn't bother him so much at the moment.

A soft greenish light was coming out of the tank full of dirty water, the only source of light here. As far as he could say, Azriel didn't see any fish swimming in it. He couldn't explain it, but something was drawing him to that tank. With hammering heart he stalked closer, trying to get a better look of what was within the glass walls covered with slime. It took him awhile to recognize the shape of a great rock in its middle. At first he thought that the tank was empty except of the rock and kelps swaying in the dirt. He was about to return back to the purpose of his visit when he noticed a faint gleam of something metallic. Not metallic, he realized. A fish scale. Now when he knew where to look, he could see it. A long fish tail attached to a human-looking torso. He hadn't seen any of this creatures with his own eyes, yet he immediately recognized it.

A mermaid.

The only known mermaids lived in the ocean near the shores of Summer court, occasionally ranging water lines of Spring. They lived in well guarded communities, but once every few centuries there was a curious mermaid who came out from the water looking for an adventure on land. Their rare offspring with fae or human, however, were excluded from their community and had to stay on land. They usually had just little if anything of their mermaid ancestors anyway and they could be easily mistaken for high fae.

The mermaid was lying on her side, limp. Her eyes were closed, dark shadows loomed under sharp bones of her cheeks. Her skin had a sickly greyish tone, by the state of her starved body, she could be already dead.

Azriel clenched teeth and pressed his palm to the thick glass, its surface cold like ice. No wonder this room was so cold compared to the stuffy night air of late summer outside. His stomach hollowed, the pain wrapped around his heart like hand around tiny bird and squeezed. He felt sorrow for the poor creature who ended up imprisoned in this tank, starved to the death. That wasn't fate he would wish even for his worst enemy.

As leather of gear on his hand touched the tank, it caused the small thud echoed through the water. Mermaid's long eyelashes flickered and she so slowly opened eyes. Her gaze was empty, dulled with suffer and tiredness, sliding down the glass to the place he stood at.

When their gazes collided, Azriel gasped and took a half-step back. The jade like eyes struk him straight to the heart, sending waves of the sweetest pain to his veins. His heart expanded to create space for a golden thread that bounded him to the female in front of him.

Her lips parted, soft moan slipped from between them. She felt it, too.

However, the thread was weak, disappearing as the life gradually drained from her. It took some time until it fully formed and he got a straight link to her. Enormous hunger and pain flooded his system and he needed a moment to separate her feelings from his own. He couldn't do anything right now to help her, except of sending his strength and assurance to her.

Her hand, bones and tendons wrapped in skin, slightly moved toward him.

Azriel's jaw tightened as his gaze flickered to the second floor for a brief moment.

"I'll return for you, I swear. Just give me a second to finish that bastard. I'll make him suffer on your behalf." He only whispered the words, but water carried them to her and she weakly nodded.

Not wasting another second, Azriel ran up the steps, taking three at time. The game was over. There was no need to hide in the shadows, sneaking around. The rage was tearing through him, seeping from his pores like a toxic cloud. He was the Death and the Death was him. Nothing could stop him now. Every person who took part of enslaving and torturing of his mate deserved nothing better that slow death. Those who saw her and decided to do nothing weren't any better.

As if they felt it, several residents of the manor appeared in the hallway, blocking his way. Azriel didn't even as much as blink when his scarred fingers closed around hilts of daggers. He moved smoothly as a dancer, cutting a path through bodies. Once he got them, he didn't glance their way anymore. There was no need. He was trained killer, with every blow he delivered fatal injury. Some died immediately, some shrieked on the floor, blood flowing from the cuts like unstoppable river, others were drowning in it.

Azriel swiftly followed the lead of his shadows showing him the shortest way to the bed chambers of the head of this group. He didn't count the number of bodies he left behind. Spattered with dark crimson liquid, he smashed the door open - the real demon looking for his next victim.

The bastard was hidden behind his bed, trembling like a little girl with small knife in hand. Azriel wrinkled his nose as an odour of urine hit him. He snorted. That bastard pissed himself. If Azriel had time, he'd love to play with him to make him pay for all ruined lives, but his mate was weakening with every second he spent here. He needed to hurry up. He moved toward the hiding male who shrieking threw the knife at his head and tried to run away. A big mistake! No one could outran the Death.

Azriel caught the flying knife mid air and tossed it aside. The tendril of shadows wrapped around males neck, yanking him back. Careful not to break his neck, they lifted him into the air. The male was making choking noises, kicking feet around in attempt to find something, anything to stand on. Shadows squeezed his neck more firmly until his eyes rolled back in his head.

Azriel waited. The shadows loosened their hold before the male could die. It was their master's turn to strike the final blow. Azriel promised that he would make him suffer and so he did. He made a tiny cut to the artery on male's arms and watched as his life dripped out of him, drop after drop. When male in agony shuddered for the last time, shadows tossed him into the puddle of his own blood and swam to their master.

Spymaster turned on heel and ran back down to the entrance hall. He searched whole tank on his way down the stairs, but there was no hole, no opening. It was built only for one purpose and that enraged him even more.

Azriel put both palms on the thick glass, gathered all the power from his siphons and released it at once. The glass turned into fine dust, the mass of dirty and stinky water spilled on Azriel and all around the room. He shook himself dry like a dog, wiping the disgusting slime from his face and climbed inside. He waded in knee-deep dirty water to the rock in its middle, slippery algae binding his legs and making the progress harder. The mermaid just lay there helplessly, her chest heaved with difficulty, gasping for air.

Without hesitation, Azriel opened the upper part of leathers and stripped the T-shirt beneath it. He jumped up on the rock and started carefully wiping off the dirt from her face and especially from her nose, mouth and gills on her neck.

As soon as he was done, she took a deep breath, savouring fresh air. She tried to lift her head, but she was too weak.

"It's over now," he spoke lowly to her, his voice soft. "I know that you felt it, too. I won't let anything bad ever happen to you again."

He brushed her long wet hair from her face. Even with a thick layer of dirt on, she was the most beautiful female he'd ever seen. As the wild creature of depths of the ocean she was, she undoubtedly wanted to return home, but Azriel already knew he wouldn't be able to let her go. He would gladly follow her even to the bottom of the ocean. She was his mate after all, the missing half of his soul. They were made for each other. That had to mean something.

"Let's get you out of here."

He so carefully scooped her in his arms, but her tail was so long that it dragged behind. Shadows wrapped around the scales and lifted it up, helping to their master. Her head with still closed eyes fell on his naked chest. His body shivered in answer and he groaned. Only thanks to the years of discipline and restrains he didn't crush her in his arms. Right now she needed healer, food, care and love. He had to wait until she would be healthy and then they would talk about the bond.

Azriel released a deep breath and called in the shadows that obediently swallowed them. When Azriel opened eyes again, he was standing in the middle of Madja's office at healers center, the dirty water was dripping from their bodies on perfectly clean floor. Old healer was leaning over the table, her hands swiftly taking one pouch after another, mixing medicine with precision of many years of practice.

The shadows immediately flew to greet her. The healer didn't even as much as sigh in surprise when they touched her hands, helping with the pouches.

"Good evening, Azriel," she spoke in a tired voice. "I hope that you know what time it is and that the injury you have, is really serious."

She slowly turned to him, her moves sluggish after a long, hard day. She gasped when she noticed mermaid in his arms.

"I know it's late and believe me, if it wasn't a matter of life and death, I wouldn't bother you. But.. she needs immediate help and you are the only one I can entrust her to."

"At last you found the one," she smiled at him knowingly, her hands already picking up everything she would need. "Put her on the bed."

Azriel did as she asked and carefully set the mermaid down on simple bed for patients. When he made sure she is comfortable, he moved to the tail that hung from bed and gently scooped it into his arms, holding it off of the cold floor. Looking closely at it, he noticed quite big areas with only reddish skin without scales and his heart clenched. Even now he felt unbearable pain and hunger seeping from her end of the bond and he wished he could kill that bastard again.

Madja got to work, swiftly looking the pacient over. Azriel watched her while his shadows assisted to her. When Madja was done, she sighed and wiped her hands clean.

"She is heavily malnourished. That's the cause of the other issues like loosing the scales and tiredness. Looking at you two, I assume that the numerous inflammations are caused by too long stay in stagnant dirty water. The very first thing she needs, is a bath. I think it's something you can deal with. Just treat her carefully. Right now she is very sensitive, more sensitive to touch than your wings."

Azriel nodded. "Got it."

Madja put together all the medicines and ointments while explaining him how and when to apply them and what to expect in the following days. At last she told him to call for her, if her state worsened.

Azriel listened carefully, thanked to the old healer and winnowed with the mermaid to his apartment in the center of the city that he kept secret from his family. It was his place to retreat to when things started to be too much and he needed silence, peace and time to recharge.

The apartment was enough big to accommodate him and his wings, equipped only with a necessary basics like bed, closet with some spare clothes, bathroom, sofa near the hearth, small kitchen area where he could prepare a simple meal, and few shelves with books. It wasn't much, but it suited his needs. The whole building was located next to the park, with Sidra flowing behind it. That was the main reason why he decided for this apartment. None of the windows was directed to the street so it was a very quiet place, exactly what he was looking for.

His steps immediately led to the bathroom with bathtub enough big for giant Illyrian warrior. Some of his shadows return as soon as they heard about the bath to prepare it. Bathtub was full of warm water, the steam was rising from its surface.

Azriel hesitated for a moment unsure whether mermaids were fine with warm baths. He sat down on the edge of the tub, placing his mate on his lap. He gently took her hand and let it slowly inch after inch slip into the water. Mermaid groaned softly, but she didn't seem to be in pain. He lifted small hand up, inspecting it closely. The colour of her skin seemed to be normal, there were no blisters or redness, so he assumed it should be fine and carefully dipped her whole body. After that he took off his dirty leathers and shadows took care of them. It was so dirty that it was better to throw it away than to try to clean it. Shadowsinger dipped to the water, sighing with relief as warm liquid worked its wonders on his tired body. He made sure to wash himself properly before touching female opposite him. Then he moved to her, gently washing off the dirt from her body and hair.

The water turned muddy after the first wash, so he refilled the tub again and again until it stayed clear. Then it was finally a time for the most hardest and delicate work - to wash her tail. Shadows brought him a new soft toothbrush from cabinet under the sink and he started to gently brush one scale after the other. It took him hours to get from the top to the bottom, but he didn't mind it at slightest. For his mate he would do it even thousand times and gladly. When he looked at her clean tail from afar, it had a light sea green colour with metallic accent. However, looking closely at the scales, each one had a pearly iridescent colour. It was fascinating.

Mermaid was whole time unconscious, but the bond between them was growing stronger and steadier which was a good sign. Azriel checked on her every now and then to make sure he wasn't hurting her.

She was calm, her expression relaxed as he pulled her out of the tub, wrapped her in towel and carried her to the bed. Her hair was so tangled that he decided to just wrap it in another towel and deal with it later. Gently wiping her body he moved to her tail. As soon as the towel touched it, it started to melt beneath his hands like ice. Azriel's eyes widened in shock, panic gripping his heart. That wasn't suppose to happen, was it?

He quickly ran back to the bathroom to run another bath. When he returned, he stiffened on threshold. Instead of mermaid, a Fae-like female was lying on the bed, her long pale legs riddled with red wounds.

Azriel dropped to his knees, wiping tears away as he drew hands down his face. He stayed like that, watching her chest rise with every steady breath until he calmed down. She was fine. He cursed under his breath. Madja certainly knew this would happen, she should have warned him.

Sitting on the edge of mattress, he took out the ointments the healer gave him. Mermaid, now female, was completely naked in this form and it took everything in him to ignore the fact. He quickly finished this tormenting activity, bandaged the wounds and dressed her in one of his spare T-shirts. Once she was safely tucked under the blanket, all tempting parts covered, he released the breath he held entire time.

He needed a minute to cool down, so he dressed and went to clean the mess they made in the apartment. When he was done, he took comb, climbed on the bed and began untangling her long hair. Free from dirt and slime it was the deep shade of auburn, slightly wavy and soft to touch. By the time he braided her hair, gave her medicine from the healer and exhausted fell asleep next to her, it was already a lunch time.

The next few days he hadn't left his apartment. As Madja warned him, mermaid got a fever caused by infection in numerous wounds. Even the most shallow ones took twice the time to heal than it normally would. Azriel patiently replaced the bandages several times a day, applying the ointments on wounded skin of legs. He was worried, yet he couldn't but appreciate this opportunity. It gave him enough time to think everything over.

She was still unconscious, so she wasn't able to eat solid food, which left Azriel with only one option - soups.

When he tried to feed her the very first meal, he hit an obstacle. He tried every possible method of getting liquid into unconscious person he knew of, failing terribly. The soup simply spilled from her mouth or she started choking on it.

He was sitting helplessly on the edge of mattress, watching her. According to all the stories and little information his kind had, it was well known that mermaids were beautiful. Their physical appearance was hard to resist to and where their beauty failed, their voice managed to break even the strongest individual. Singing of mermaids was legendary. Depending on what the mermaid wanted, the effect of their song could differ. Azriel hadn't heard her voice yet he was already lost. Whether she wanted or not, she had him wrapped around her finger. Sleeping peacefully her features were soft, she looked quite young and like a good person. He assumed that she liked to smile a lot because corners of her mouth were permanently turned upward. He really hoped to see her smile someday.

However, her sunken cheeks were causing him a pain. When he was changing her bandages after waking up, he noticed a lot of details that early in the morning he missed out in agitation. Every time he touched her and felt no muscles, only bones and thin tissue under the skin, it hurt him like a stab straight into the heart. Desperately wanting to get the food to her belly, he was just sitting there, gazing at her, his eyes clouded with sorrow. There had to be some way how to do this.

Brooding over it, he didn't hear his shadows when they spoke to him at first. The darkness swirled around him, gathering near his ear, whispering. When he didn't answer, they tried to get his attention by cool gentle touches. It didn't work either, so they moved to master's mate, creating wall between them.

"What is it?" Azriel frowned, pushing them away.

"We are trying to talk to you. Why don't you listen to us?"

"She needs food," he stirred the cooling soup with spoon. "I'm trying to come up with some way to feed her."

"We might know about something you haven't tried yet."

"I tried everything," he shook head. "Maybe I need to ask Madja. I should write her a message. Will you deliver it?"

"Nope," they collectively dismissed. "First, try our method."

"Are you sure that it will work?" he raised a brow at them.

"For 100%! But if not, we will deliver the message."

"Fine, so what do I need to do?"

The shadows explained him their idea in detail. Azriel's eyes grew wider with every their word and he blushed fiercely.

"I can't do that!" He covered his mouth with hand, stuttering. "It's.. it's disrespectful to her.. I need her permission to do something so.. naughty."

"In this state, she will hardly give you permission. It's your only chance, boy. She doesn't have to know about it. Think about it!"

He hated to admit it, but they were once again right.

"It's going to be just feeding.. Only feeding.. nothing else," he grunted giving up and shoved spoonful of soup into his mouth.

His cheeks burnt with bright red colour as he leaned over sleeping mermaid. He gently opened her mouth and sealed his lips over hers. The jolt of energy surged through his body at that simple touch and he groaned, closing his eyes. He needed a moment, unable to move. He wanted to taste her, but thankfully his mouth were full of soup.

Come to your senses! It's feeding.. It isn't a real kiss, he scolded himself, taking a deep, steadying breath.

"That's it, boy! And now slooooowly," shadows were encouraging him, floating so close they were almost touching them. A growl rumbled in his chest and they recoiled.

"Fine!" If they had eyes, they would roll them now. "Just don't drown her." They flew back behind his shoulders and observed the situation from there.

Azriel sighed through nose. He let a few drops of soup slip from between his lips into her mouth and waited. Nothing happened at first and he was about to call it off when her throat worked under his tender touch and she swallowed. Female moaned and her brows knitted together as her lips moved slightly, looking for more. Happy, Azriel caressed her hair and let another small amount flow into her mouth.

Gradually, he fed her half of the soup in the bowl. It was quite a slow process, but how could he mind? Being so close to his mate, the bond between them awoke, pulsing in unison with their heartbeats. It came in handy in this situation. As her belly filled, the bond shone with satisfaction and Azriel knew it was time to stop. She had to start carefully to keep the food in. He put the bowl aside and pulled warm blanket higher, tucking her in. Mermaid frowned, her lips looking for more food.

"Soon. I'll give you more very soon," he murmured, caressing her cheek lovingly. "You are safe here. I'll give you as much food as you need. I'll give you anything you want, just.. give me a chance."

He hoped his prayer would somehow reach her and she wouldn't refuse the bond as soon as she opened eyes.

Azriel decided to feed her with small amount of soup every two hours and see how her body would react to that. And in between he gave her tea from herbs Madja gave him. It took him only a half day to turn this into a routine. His body got used to the repeating motions. Cleaning of wounds and applying ointments, changing bandages, little bit of tea with medicine, few mouthfuls of soup.

All of that required a lot of time and the short breaks between the individual actions, he spent gazing at his mate, committing details of her face to his memory or cooking some food for himself and soup for his patient.

At beginning, he always tried to feed her with spoon, but when it failed, he gladly pressed his lips to hers. It was like a remedy and while he was balancing between keeping it professional, detached, and giving in to his needs, he hardly noticed anything else. Two days later he didn't even bother with trying spoon anymore. The fever was finally gone and she seemed to be getting better, her starved body was healing, too. Yet she didn't awoke even once. As his mouth sealed over hers, he closed eyes, fighting his usual battle and imagining what could be.

Azriel didn't notice the startled move of hand nor felt the body under him tensed. He let small amount of soup slip into mermaids mouth and she swallowed. Suddenly pair of hands pushed him away. It surprised him and he started choking on the soup, coughing violently.

"W-what are you doing?" Her voice was still weak and full of fear, but she was definitely awake.

Azriel finally stopped coughing and took a deep breath, wiping away tears. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do anything bad," he put his hands up. "While you were unconscious, you couldn't eat and this was the only way how to get food into you.. I swear I tried everything else before.. you know.." The blush climbed up his neck, burning his cheeks. He watched her with plea.

"I-.. You are that male, the one who saved me.."

"Yes, it's me," Azriel nodded eagerly, biting on his bottom lip and waiting whether she would mention the bond.

"I have to thank you for saving my life. I was sure that I will die there and I really would die, if it wasn't for you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart."

Her voice was the sweetest melody Azriel ever heard. He was trying to stay focussed, but with every word that left her lips it was harder and harder.

The bond in his chest stirred and flexed with expectation. He knew that she felt it, it snapped for both of them at the same time after all, yet he wanted to wait until she mentioned it. While he was waiting, they introduced to each other, sharing some basic information. She even told him about how they captured her and confined her in that gigant tank.

Several days later, Mer was enough strong to stand up on her own. She didn't need Azriel to help her anymore. Her wounds healed without leaving any marks and she was able to eat solid food. Not even once she mentioned the bond and Azriel had a bad feeling about it.

With each passing day she was getting restless. She often watched Sidra flowing under the window of sitting room, her gaze vacant.

"Where does the river flow?" she asked him for the third time that day.

"It flows into the sea beyond the city," he answered her patiently, his voice sad. "Why?"

"I want to go home," she murmured under her breath, but he heard it. It was the first time she mentioned it and his heart clenched in pain.

Azriel swallowed hard, preparing to hear something that would break him into pieces. "Do you want to return home, Mer?"

"Yes," she replied simply and finally looked at him. "When will you let me go?"

That hurt more than he expected. Balling hands into fists, he turned his back to her.

"I can't.."

He was hardly keeping it together. Shadows swirled around his shoulders as if trying to comfort him. His wings rustled as he abruptly marched to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of bed, putting head into his hands. Mother had a very strange sense of humour, punishing him by giving him a mate who didn't want him. The only person who was supposed to love him and stay by his side, wanted to leave him.

He felt unwanted his entire life, first by his own father, then in the camp by his own people and later even by the first love of his life. He was scared to love because people who really mattered to him, didn't want him in their lives. Five centuries later, it was still hard for him to comprehend that Cassian and Rhysand liked him, that they called him their brother and he dreaded the day they would stop.

Mer quietly followed him, watching him with puzzled expression.

"Did you save me only to imprison me again?" Her voice was calm, there was no trace of hatred or accusation in it.

He took a shaky breath and shook his head. He hadn't seriously cried since he was thrown into dungeons as a small boy. He didn't cry even when his hands were burnt and it hurt badly, but now he felt like doing so.

"I can't possibly let my mate leave me just like that.."

She sighed and walked over to him, crouching in front of him and pulled his hands away from his face. He looked at her in surprise. It was the first time she touched him. Ever since she woke up, she was refusing his toich. Now she was searching his face, her expression unreadable, her small but strong hands holding his.

"You know that we belong to different worlds. I can't stay on land for too long and you can't survive under the water. That's just how things are. We can't change it."

She was so calm that it was killing him. Was he really so unworthy? Was he really not good enough even for his mate, the one he was made for? Azriel was never pushy with people he cared for. He was always putting others, their wishes and needs before himself. He could count on fingers of one hands the times when he revolted and stood his ground. In this case, he didn't want to give up easily. He wanted to give it a try and fight with everything he had to change her mind, to prove her that this could work.

He closed fingers around her hands, holding them firmly and looked straight into her eyes with determination. Small sparkles whirled in them as he opened his mouth to speak.

"I always believed that the real love can overcome anything. That once I find my mate, she could love me despite of looking like this," he nodded to his scarred hands. "That she will see me, the real me under all the darkness and blood staining my hands and yet choose to stay by my side.." He searched her eyes, looking for a hint of agreement, a hint of longing, anything. "There's nothing I wouldn't be willing to do for you. Nothing. I would even try to learn to live under the water, if you asked me for that. Please, don't shove me away.. Don't refuse the bond.. Give me at least one chance to prove myself as worthy of you.. I believe that this relationship can work and I will do anything for that.. Please.. Just one chance.."

She listened closely. When he stayed quiet, waiting for her respond, she narrowed eyes on him, thinking about it. It felt like forever until she gave him an answer, his heart treating to explode with emotions that were wrestling with him.

"Fine," she sighed and nodded, squeezing his hands back. "Let's try it. But what if it won't work? What then?"

"I'm sure it will work, but if not, we will talk about it then. I won't give up though."

She smiled at him gently. "I think that you are good male. So don't take it personally, but I really need to go home. I mean to the water. The time I can spend on land is still quite limited because I am young. The longer mermaids live, the longer they can stay without water."

Azriel's brows raised. "Oh.. I didn't know that. I'm so sorry. Your kind lives in depths of ocean, secluded and we have a little to nothing information about mermaids. You are more like a legend from fairytale. I don't like to admit it, but my knowledge is limited. However, I will learn it all, I swear. Just give me time and guidance, please."

He helped her to sit on the bed and headed to the bathroom to prepare bath. When they visited Madja last day, the healer said that she should be okay from now on, but she needed to take it slowly and especially to avoid dirty water because infection could still return. She also had to keep taking the medication healer gave them.

When bath was ready he returned to bedroom and scooped her in his arms.

"I can walk," she protested weakly.

"And I know it, but as I told you before, I want to prove myself. Carrying my mate when she is sick and needs to take it easy, is my responsibility that I'll gladly do," he smiled at her. "I want to be a good mate. And not just now, it's forever."

She didn't protest at slightest when he offered to help her strip from his T-shirt that looked like dress on her and carefully lowered her into the bath. As soon as her skin touched the surface of water, the tail reappeared and she sighed in relief, diving in. Azriel watched her to swim in small circle, glad his bathtub was enough big, but he was already thinking about getting a bigger one. She emerged and watching him, she swam closer.

"Azriel?" she called at him and his attention immediately was fully on her. "Uhm, you know I'm not water spirit, right?"

He blinked, confused. "Sure. I couldn't possibly mistake you for one."

"I see," she pouted her lips, playing with water. "So you remember when I told you about my home. In ocean."

"Of course, I remember everything you told me," he laughed and then tensed as the realisation hit him.

"Salt water," he breathed out, blushing fiercely. How could it not occur to him sooner? "You need salt water."

Her head tilted to the side as she observed his embarrassed form. Azriel dashed from the bathroom and returned within seconds with small container of kitchen salt.

"Would this do?" he hesitated.

Mer burst in genuine laugher and the thread connecting them sang. Soon Azriel joined her, sitting down next to the bathtub. She swam to the edge and he took her hand, placing kiss on its back. When they calmed down, he locked his gaze with hers, serious.

"I'll learn it, I swear. I meant it when I said that I want this to work and I'll do everything I can for that. Please, trust me. Can you forgive me for the mistakes I'll do at start? I promise that I will get better."

Mer bit on her bottom lip and leaned closer. Her lips gently brushed over the corner of his lips in lovingly kiss. Flushed, she smiled.

"I want this to work too. Let's try it! Together."

[belit0]

Crawl for us, (Y/N)

This is how I push through my creative blocks, don't judge me Izuna / (Y/N) / Madara

Izuna has a severe addiction, and it's not drugs or alcohol.

TW: dub-con / non-con

The house reeked of weed and perfume. 

A thick fog of smoke curled under the ceilings while red LED strips bled into the dark corners. Bass pumped like a heartbeat on the verge of flatlining. Bodies moved like they didn’t belong to anyone anymore, just skin and friction and the taste of cheap liquor on desperate tongues.

Izuna leaned against the kitchen counter, cigarette burning low between his fingers, the filter soggy from his teeth. His eyes were locked across the room, where she stood under the dim hallway light, sipping on something pink, something innocent. 

(Y/N), the tight little cunt every bastard in that school had been talking about.

Puffy. Soft. Tight as fuck. Unused. Or at least that’s what the rumors said. 

He didn’t give a shit about rumors, but the second he saw her in that lace skirt and those glossy lips, something feral snapped loose inside his chest.

Madara had told him the week before, -She’s not for you. That one’ll fuck your head up.- Which was exactly the problem. 

Izuna didn’t want to fuck her. 

He wanted to taste her. Needed to.

He tossed the cigarette into someone’s beer and moved.

Didn’t ask. Didn’t wait. 

Just walked straight through the crowd like gravity had changed for him. She turned her head just slightly when he got close, eyes slow and drugged with whatever she’d been drinking. 

Her gaze dragged up his body like she knew she was being watched, like she wanted to be seen. He didn’t say shit. Just cornered her against the hallway wall, one hand pressing beside her head, the other slipping into the back pocket of her skirt like he’d already claimed her.

Her breath caught.

He grinned.

-Lemme guess. They told you not to talk to me.

She tilted her head lazily, lips parting.

-They told me you'd ruin me.

His grin cracked wider. His mouth was dry. Tongue hot.

-They’re late. I already did, in my head. About four times.

He leaned in, nose brushing hers. He could smell it now. Under the perfume. That sweetness. That heat. His fingers twitched with restraint.

-You smell like I need to get on my knees for you.

She blinked slowly, like she wasn’t sure if he was joking.

And Izuna wasn’t.

He slid down. Just dropped to his knees like a fucking dog, right there in the hallway while drunk kids passed by, too wasted to care. He didn’t even ask. Just pressed his face against her thigh, inhaled so deep it looked like he’d lost control. 

She gasped. But she didn’t stop him. Her hand tangled in his hair, not to push him away, but to pull him closer.

-C’mere. I wanna see what that tastes like.

He was gone after that.

Didn’t care who saw. Didn’t care who talked. 

All he needed was that first taste of her on his tongue, and he was done. Obsessed. A slave to it. The tight little heat between her thighs owned him now. He mouthed at her through her panties like a man dying of thirst, lips messy, breathing through his nose, desperate. Growling against the fabric, mouthing hungrily as she whimpered above him.

Her moans hit his ears and made his cock throb against his jeans. 

But he didn’t touch himself.

Not yet. Not until he earned it.

Not until her thighs were shaking and her pussy soaked through the lace and her fingers were tugging his hair like it hurt her not to have him deeper.

Izuna wasn’t addicted to girls. 

He was addicted to this.

To it.

To that.

He stood up, no warnings, and didn’t let go of her hand as he dragged her up the stairs, not even looking back. 

(Y/N) followed, half-drunk on the way he moved, the way he didn’t speak unless it was filth, and even then it was whispered like a threat between clenched teeth. The second the door to the upstairs bedroom slammed shut, the noise of the party vanished, sealed behind wood. 

It could’ve burned down and neither of them would’ve known. Or cared.

She barely had time to breathe before Izuna had her flat on the bed, skirt shoved up to her waist, panties already hanging off one ankle like a white flag he wasn’t accepting. His hair fell forward, shadowing his face, but she could see it. 

That look. Mouth parted. Chest rising. 

Eyes glued to the soft folds between her legs like they were holy.

-Fuck, that’s perfect,- he muttered, more to himself than her. -Puffy and soft. Just like they said. Tight like a goddamn vice. Fuck me.-

He dropped to his knees again at the foot of the bed, arms hooked under her thighs as he yanked her ass to the edge. 

No hesitation. No teasing. 

He just dove in, burying his face between her legs like she was the last thing on Earth worth living for. His tongue licked flat and wide, from her entrance to her clit, again and again until she whimpered. Until her thighs trembled and tried to squeeze shut around his head.

But Izuna growled, growled, and shoved them open again.

-You think I’m letting go of this? You’re fucking dreaming.

He lapped at her with the kind of hunger that should’ve been illegal. Mouth soaked, chin wet, nose buried in her folds as he sucked on her clit like it gave him oxygen. Her hands clawed into his hair, trying to ground herself, maybe trying to stop him, maybe not. She came quickly, hips bucking against his mouth, moaning so loud the walls caught the sound and held it like a secret. 

Her pussy clenched, twitching around nothing, but Izuna didn’t give her a break.

He just kept going.

Growled against her again, licking harder, more frantic now, tongue stabbing inside her, then flattening against her folds like he was trying to drown in her.

-Come again,- he breathed, words muffled, desperate. -Come on my mouth. I need it. Come, come again, right fucking now.-

She writhed, half-laughing, half-crying, fingers tugging at his hair, still thinking this was just some oral at a party and not the beginning of something terrible.

-Izuna, I can’t—fuck—I can’t—too much, please—

But he didn’t move. 

Didn’t budge.

Not even when her legs kicked, not when she tried to pull back. He just grabbed her thighs harder, left fingerprints in her flesh, keeping her pinned open like a man possessed. Like a dog at the throat of a kill.

One of his hands left her thigh and slid under her ass, lifting her harder into his mouth as he angled deeper, tongue fucking her, then sucking on her clit with that obscene wet sound that echoed off the room’s silence. His other hand snuck up between them and slid two fingers into her, fast and rough, curling up just right.

She screamed.

And then she broke.

Came again, hips convulsing against his face, legs shaking, trying to close but failing, pussy pulsing around his tongue and fingers. 

But still; Izuna wouldn’t stop. 

Didn’t even slow down. 

He licked every drop, swallowed every twitch, licked through her orgasm like he could live in it forever. Like he had to.

-I’m not letting you go,- he gasped when he finally came up for air, voice low, ruined, his chin glistening, lips swollen and red. He looked deranged. High. Not from drugs, but from her. From that pussy.

-You’re mine now. You hear me? You ruined me. This little cunt ruined me.

His hand slipped back between her thighs, spreading her open with his fingers, eyes dragging over the swollen, slick folds like he was studying scripture.

-I’m never gonna stop needing this. I’ll fucking die without it.

And with no warning, he ducked back down, mouth latching onto her clit again, tongue flicking harder now, unforgiving. She tried to squirm, breathless, overstimulated, crying out as her legs spasmed and her hands tried to push him off. 

But he was locked in. Starving.

And he didn’t stop.

Her body stopped responding. The overstimulation became too much. She was twitching. Boneless. Gutted. Like Izuna had licked the soul out of her and was still starving for the rest. Her throat was raw from moaning. Her chest slick with sweat. Her pussy swollen, hypersensitive, wet to the point of dripping off the edge of the bed. 

And still, Izuna didn’t fucking stop.

His face was soaked. Lips red. Eyes half-lidded like he was high off her taste, and maybe he was. The way he clung to her thighs, the way he mouthed at her folds like it hurt to stop. He didn’t even speak anymore. Just breathed heavy through his nose, grunting into her, tongue relentless. 

Flicking. Sucking. Stroking. Devouring.

She couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t move. Could barely form a word.

And then the door opened.

She didn’t hear it at first, too lost in the sounds of her own ruin. But the click of it shutting again made her flinch, legs trying once again to close. They didn’t.

Izuna growled low in his throat and pinned her harder, grinding his face deeper into her pussy like punishment.

She turned her head toward the noise, chest heaving, only to find him.

Madara.

Leaning against the wall just inside the room, eyes black and unreadable, jaw tight.

He was staring.

Right at her.

At the mess she was.

At the way Izuna was face-deep in her cunt like an animal who’d just found god.

Her lips trembled. Her hand reached out weakly.

-Please—make him stop—I can’t—I—

Her voice broke when Izuna sucked hard again, dragging another broken sound from her chest. Her thighs kicked, useless. Her hands pushed weakly at his head, and failed again. Her mind scrambled for logic, for help, for something to make sense of the overstimulation frying every nerve in her body.

But Madara didn’t move toward Izuna.

He moved toward her.

His boots thudded slowly across the wooden floor until he reached the bed, standing there, looking at her face turned sideways on the sheets, tears leaking from her lashes, lips parted and shining with spit.

He sat down.

Right beside her head.

-You opened your legs for a dog in heat, princess. You thought someone was gonna save you from the bite?

She tried to ask for help, but no sounds were coming from her mouth.

His fingers tapped her cheek. Then slipped between her lips. Two of them.

-Suck.

Her eyes widened, but his stare didn’t change. Cold. Icy. Unforgiving.

His fingers tapped her tongue again.

-I said suck, baby girl. You wanted help. This is how you earn it.

She opened her mouth and took his fingers, letting him slide them in slow, letting him curl them against her tongue until they hit the back of her throat and she choked a little. Madara didn’t pull back. He just watched. Face unreadable. One hand in her hair now, holding her head still.

Below, Izuna was still going.

Tongue working her like a rhythm he couldn’t break out of. One hand had her ass pulled flush to the edge of the bed, the other gripping her inner thigh so hard she’d bruise. He licked her like she was still fresh. Like all the last orgasms hadn’t existed. Like he’d never get tired of the way she tasted.

Madara’s fingers curled in her mouth again, slow.

She sobbed around them.

Her pussy spasmed again, so oversensitive it hurt, but Izuna didn’t slow down. Didn’t blink. His eyes were glazed over, lost. Feral. 

If Madara had told him to stop, he wouldn’t have even heard it.

And Madara didn’t say shit.

He just leaned in a little closer to (Y/N)’s ear and whispered, -You’re gonna give him another one, aren’t you? That’s what that pretty little pussy’s made for. You’re not done. Not even close.-

She moaned around his fingers. Her thighs shook again. Izuna licked faster.

And just like that.

She broke.

Again.

Worse this time. Sloppier. Her body convulsed, tears leaking, tongue twitching around Madara’s fingers as she sobbed into his palm. Her pussy clamped up so tight Izuna groaned against it, tongue still lapping through the aftershocks, refusing to stop.

Madara finally pulled his fingers from her mouth with a wet sound. Dragged them down her jaw. Down her throat.

-Good slut,- he muttered. -Now breathe. You’ll need it. My brother’s not even close to done.-

Her chest rose too fast, air catching on the sobs wrecking her throat. Every inch of her body was raw; burning, shaking, twitching like livewire under skin. Her legs tried again to close, to kick, to do something, but Izuna didn’t budge.

Didn’t even fucking blink.

His mouth was still glued to her cunt, tongue relentless, chin soaked, spit and slick dripping down to his jaw like it was the only thing keeping him alive.

She was crying now. Truly crying. Face wet, head shaking, voice cracking.

-Please—please, I c-can’t—Izuna, please—let me go-

But he didn’t answer her.

Didn’t even look up.

Just moaned low against her folds, voice muffled into her pussy like he lived inside it. He pulled back just a little, lips still brushing her clit, tongue flicking it slow as he whispered. -This thing’s fucking possessed, Madara. Keeps sucking me back in like she wants to choke me on it.-

His voice wasn’t lusty. 

It was mad. 

A rasp. 

Desperate and uneven. 

He licked her again, slow this time, eyes locked on the mess between her thighs like she was nothing more than a cunt made for his mouth.

Madara chuckled, still seated at his spot, one hand stroking her temple idly like she was a pet.

-Yeah? That little peach giving you trouble?

Izuna sucked on her clit again, hard. (Y/N) cried out, body arching, shaking her head—no no no—and yet it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

-Never seen anythin’ like it,- Izuna mumbled against her folds, breath hot. -Tight little folds, always twitching. Bitch says stop, this pussy says more. You hear that, Dara? She fuckin’ lyin’ with her mouth. But this—this little cunt’s honest. Can’t fake the way she keeps suckin’ me in.-

He tongued her slit again, slow and wet, eyes glazed over.

Madara’s fingers found her jaw again, gripping gently to turn her face toward him. He watched her for a second; tears, ruined makeup, lips swollen from sucking him. She looked like she’d been cracked in half.

But his tone didn’t change.

-Women lie all the time. Mouth says “no more.” Pussy says “please don’t stop.” Izuna’s just listenin’ to the right voice.

She tried to turn her head away, but Madara gripped her jaw harder.

-Nah. Don’t act shy now. You knew what this was when you let him put his face down there. You heard the rumors. Wanted to be the pussy that made Izuna lose his mind.? Congratulations. You did it.

She sobbed.

But Izuna just groaned again, licking harder now, the rhythm sharp and brutal.

-S’little hole’s ruined me,- he muttered like it hurt to say. -Can’t stop. I fuckin’ need to make it come again.

She wailed, tried to push his head back again with trembling fingers, but he slapped her hand away, not even hard, just firm. 

Final.

-No. Don’t you dare. You owe me this. You don’t get to walk around with a pussy like this and not let me drown in it. Fuck. Look at it. Shakin’. Clenchin’ just from my tongue. Loves it. You hearing this, Madara? She leakin’.

Madara hummed, amused.

-Bet she’ll come again in under a minute. You gonna make her cry for real this time?

Izuna didn’t answer.

His tongue did.

And her body gave out again.

Another orgasm slammed through her so violently she screamed hoarsely, voice gone, legs spasming, eyes rolling back. Her pussy convulsed against his face, leaking down his jaw, her hands grabbing at the sheets, the air, anything.

But there was no mercy.

Not from him.

Not from Madara.

Not even from her own body.

Izuna just kept at it. Like a dog gone rabid. Like a man being dragged under the current of his own obsession and clawing for one last taste before he drowned.

Her cries turned to broken gasps. -H-Hel-lp.- Sobs. Pleading that didn’t make sense anymore.

And still, Izuna whispered into her folds like she was sacred.

-One more. Just one more. One more for the road, baby. Gimme everything. Squeeze my face. Come for me again. Ruin me. Fucking ruin me.

His grip was bruising. His tongue never left her. He licked through her climax like he was trying to memorize the shape of it. Still greedy. Still obsessed. Still down there like nothing had happened.

Like it wasn’t enough.

And maybe it wasn’t.

Madara tilted his head. Studied her. He stood slowly, cracked his neck, and moved behind Izuna without urgency.

-You askin’ me to help you, or help him?- he questioned slowly, one hand already reaching for her inner thigh.

His palm slid against her skin—bigger, rougher, firmer than Izuna’s—and without waiting, he gripped her leg and spread it wider. Then the other. Holding her so open it almost hurt.

She cried out, head tossing.

Izuna moaned into her.

-Fuckin’ perfect like this,- Izuna muttered hoarsely, lips brushing her soaked folds. -Look at that. Look at how puffy she is. She gripping air, Madara. Fuck, can see her fluttering. She wants me to stay down here.

Madara didn’t answer right away. Just held her open like it was a job. He watched her reactions. Watched the way her stomach clenched, the way her hands dug into Izuna’s hair, trying to do something.

Then:

-You gonna fuck her, or just eat pussy all night like a bitch?- he asked, tone flat, casual.

Izuna just dragged his tongue up her slit again, slow. Then circled her clit with the tip of his tongue and kissed it like it was something sacred.

-Nah. Not yet. She not ready. Not down here she’s not. She’s still holdin’ back. Still pretendin’ she can breathe without my mouth on her.

(Y/N) whimpered.

Madara exhaled through his nose.

-He ain't stopping, love. You invited a monster in, and now he’s starved. You think beggin’ gonna snap him out of it? You’re talking to a guy who jerks off to the idea of pussy like yours. He’s not thinkin’ anymore, just feasting.

She sobbed again, helplessness, grief, fear, frustration. 

Madara just held her legs open wider.

And Izuna grinned into her heat.

He slapped her clit with his tongue, again. Again. Again.

She broke into a sobbing moan.

Madara looked down at her from above, hands still keeping her thighs stretched wide like it was his only purpose.

-Might as well come again. Only way out, slut.

But then they flipped her.

It happened in a second. Like gravity. Her thighs were trembling, knees bent awkwardly on the edge of the bed, and her arms collapsed beneath her as they moved her—Madara’s hands gripping her hips, Izuna’s mouth never leaving her for long enough to let her breathe.

Her chest hit the mattress, flushed and heaving. Her cheek sank into the sheets, and her mouth parted on a sharp gasp as Izuna buried himself between her thighs again from behind.

Madara adjusted her like she was furniture. No hesitation. No softness. Just spread her legs further, palms sinking into the meat of her ass, thumbs pulling her apart with a slow, surgical grip.

-That’s better,- he muttered, more to Izuna than to her. -Now she really open. Don’t waste it.-

Izuna didn’t even acknowledge the words.

He was somewhere else.

Not in the room. Not in his mind. 

Just in her. 

His mouth latched to her like he was starving, face tilted up so his nose bumped against her while his tongue worked with slow, violent devotion. Every sound he made was filthy; slurping, groaning, gasping like she was the air he’d been denied for years.

She pushed up on trembling elbows, eyes wet, voice nothing more than a broken plea.

-ss-top—please, I-I can’t—

He didn’t.

Madara leaned forward, still holding her cheeks wide apart, and said into her ear:

-You really want him to stop? When he worshipping you like a fucking altar? Ungrateful little slut, aren’t you.-

She whimpered, hips twitching.

-Feels like she askin’ for more without saying it. Pussy drippin’ like she’s about to beg again. You gonna fuck her now, or still high on her taste, freak?- he asked lazily.

Izuna answered, finally.

But not to Madara.

To her.

-I told you. Not done with you yet. Not even close. You think those little climaxes earlier were enough? You think this is about you? Nah. This—this is about me and your pussy. This pretty little peach. Mine now. You? You’re just the body it came with.-

She gasped, whether from the words or the way he dragged his tongue again over her slick folds, she didn’t know.

Madara huffed a dry laugh and let his thumb dip lower, resting just beneath where she pulsed and clenched with every flick of Izuna’s tongue.

-He talkin’ like you're furniture. Don’t take it personally, tho. Not your fault you were born with the prettiest pussy we’ve seen. Izuna been dreamin’ about it since he heard the rumor. Now he’s inside that fantasy. You think he’s giving it up? You think he can? You’re fucked, sweetheart. He’s addicted.-

Izuna's voice came again, muffled, low, ruined.

-I’m never letting this go.

[exostark]

Dragon Age: Oathkeeper

II: Sebastian Vael

Incense lingered heavily in the air. Streams of flickering candlelight passed through the smoke, casting down upon the statue of Andraste and illuminating the whole chantry with a soft golden light. Curtains cut from deep red cloth and trimmed with brilliant gold hung from the ceiling and framed Andraste perfectly, like the flames of her pyre.

Not a single pew was empty, full to the brim with the Maker’s devoted flock. Some were far in the back, kneeling on the stone floor in deep prayer. Some knelt outside the open doorway without regard for the gentle rain that fell upon them. All listened with reverence as Revered Mother Neilina gave her sermon, though none listened with as much devotion as the prince himself.

Sebastian Vael knelt before the Revered Mother in solemn prayer, one knee resting upon the red carpet below while his head remained bowed. Just a few years ago this place might have seen only a dozen or so people at a time. Now, the reign of Prince Sebastian saw the chantry swell with the faithful. Guided by the Maker’s hand, he led his people through their most difficult times, even when all the world was being strangled by the hands of a heretical faction. Through his fervent devotion, he inspired the faithful to Starkhaven in droves from all over Thedas. 

As the sermon came to an end, the prince stood and prayed with the Revered Mother, her hands clutching his. “All men are the work of our Maker’s hands. From the lowest of slaves to the highest kings. You walk with the Maker at your side, Prince Sebastian.”

“Thank you, Revered Mother,” he said. He turned to face the rest of the people, many still on their knees. They looked at him with rapt attention. “My hearth is yours, my bread is yours, my life is yours, for all who walk in the sight of the Maker are one. As was declared by Eileen, so I declare to you as well. What is mine, is also yours.”

The crowds parted for the dozens of servants entering the chantry, soaked to the bone from the waiting they did outside. Carried in each of their arms were massive baskets filled to the brim with fruits, vegetables, wheat, and barley – things many in the city desperately needed. But the most prized of all were the six hunters who trailed the end of the line; upon their backs were the freshly hunted corpses of halla, their fur soaked pink and brown where the arrows pierced their hearts. Tears of joyful gratitude filled the chantry, overwhelmed with loving praises to the Maker and Andraste both.

Read more at AO3.

[sashi-ya]

𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐓𝐎𝐁𝐄𝐑 𝟐𝟑 DAY 16: PEGGING Eustass Kidd 𝘹 F! 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳

Requested by: @thegrandlinesimp ➡ I am jumping and leaping forward for the kinktober list! Can we please get a bratty, demanding sub!Kid for day 16. Pegging 😍 tw: pegging. sub! kidd. dom! reader (kinda cruel). masturbation. orgasm denial. wc: 912 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

When you look at Kid, you simply know he is not a sub. His imponent frame and his violent demeanour are far from ever imagining for him to be under someone

However, when you came into his life things definitely changed… One of them, positions -quite literally-

Such a big man on all fours has to be an interesting  view. His spread buttocks, his lifted hips and curled back. Around his neck, what could be considered a dog collar. And, attached to it, a metallic leash.

His hair, crimson like blood, like hell, rains on his face and over his shoulders. He is not allowed to wear his goggles while you are in charge.

Red lipstick, smeared; Eyes a little watery that have turned his eyeliner into black drops falling through his cheeks. His whines, far from the usual beasty grunts.

“Should I peg you and let you come this time, Kidd? Or should I leave you on the verge of it?” you ask, drizzling a sweet slippery solution on your fake dick.

“Let me come, please…” he begs, with thighs trembling and toes curling. Kidd looks at you from the mirror of that low budget motel, the crimson lights of cheap LED lights on the ceiling bathe both of you.

You smirk, coating the dildo attached to your strap on very well with enough lubricant. And enjoy how desperate he is for you to fill his hole.

“Wiggle your tail for me if you want it. Be a good boy for your mistress”  you chime, looking at his delightful submissive reflection. There is something about dominating such big boys that makes you extremely pleased.

Kidd looks at you and begins to move his hips side to side; as if he had an invisible tail, he acts like a dog in heat.

“Such a good puppy boy! Come on, let me give you your special treat” you purr, coming closer to his pathetically attractive body and kneel right behind him. With your hand, you begin pumping his dick that hangs in between his legs. It has already made a little puddle of precum over that green -already sticky- carpet. A puddle you hope it becomes bigger the more he comes during the night.

Kidd’s head hangs down and his back arches more and more. His shoulder blades protrude, his fake arm carves on what’s left of his arm… and he doesn’t care, Kidd is now a slave of your hands… his body belongs to you, as well as all of his free will.

When he begins to tremble as you pump harder, and your index stretches his back entrance, you stop. Right, and exactly a second before he reaches climax. It is painful for him, as he quivers and moves his hips searching for more stimulation… being orgasm denied is quite a torture for him.

“My mistress… why?! Please, more… more” he begs. “Because I don’t want you coming just from my hand, puppy! I want to penetrate that man pussy of yours!” you scoff, spanking his left ass cheek. -Already pretty red and hot as you kept giving him sudden and rough slaps on it-

Eustass accepts the deal. If it’s you fucking him, he can stand not coming for once. You are amazed at how well behaved he can be when he wants his ass pounded; it’s glorious.

“Spread wide for me, ok? I don’t want you to hurt” you command, requesting for him to open his legs enough for his hole to be stretched really good.

He immediately obeys, because Kidd can’t wait a single second more for your belligerent hip thrusts.

You squeeze the lube bottle right over the small of his back, allowing for the silicone-based compound to slide down and in between his buttocks. It drizzles, coldly on his entrance, and then it keeps squirting until his perineum, causing him to almost mewl.

“Such a bitch you are, Kidd. You love being fucked in the ass, don’t you?” “It’s you, mistress. It’s just because it is you who is doing it”

You smile, pleased. His words are just more fuel to the flames. Violently, you pull from his leash, causing him to gag and choke and with a strong grip the jelly dick slides with little to non-difficulty into his insides.

He grunts at the first intrusive thrust, and the more he gets used to the pounding the more his eyes turn white.

“You like it, puppy?” you ask, fastening and deepening the rams. “Ye…. Yeah… I- do… more… please” he moans, throwing his hips back for more. Insatiable, desperate, eager to be destroyed, wanting to cum with no hands but a feral insides wrecking session.

And soon, you can tell that his hardness becomes even harder. Twitching, growing the puddle of precum, trembling, quivering, with his teeth chattering… should you stop again? Should you keep going? What do you prefer?

Maybe both… cry, Kidd… plead for your climax… beg for me to give you the right to finally release yourself.

“I’m coming, Mistress!!” “Are you puppy boy? How much you want it? How much you are willing to do for me to let you cum? Hm?” you ask, scoffing at his pathetic wiggles, at the way he is unable to touch himself. How cruel can you be, to take advantage of such poor man.

“Please, please don’t stop… please! I will do anything!” “Well, you’ve been a very good boy… so now, go ahead… cum!”

yes... my mistress... thank you ~

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[echo-goes-mmm]

Silas and Wren 2.0 #2

Masterpost

Previous

Next

Warnings: none

Master quickly paid, and soon he was unlocked from his chain. The other slaves eyed him with pity, and it didn’t help the worry growing leaden in his stomach.

The streetlamps were already lit when they left, casting their warm glow on the road. 

The fresh air was a welcome change from the warehouse, but it was rapidly cooling, and he shivered as Master led him through the streets. 

“What’s your name?” asked Master, startling him.

“W-whatever you want it to be, Master.”

People kept looking their way, and he kept his eyes lowered and head down.

“Well, what did your mother call you?”

“W-wren,” he said, teeth chattering. His worn clothing wasn’t enough for the chilly air, and the cobblestone roads were freezing on his bare feet.

“Then that’s your name,” said Master, looking at him from the corner of his eye.

“Thank you, Master.”

Wren tucked his fingers under his arms as Master stopped to browse at a stall selling street corn.

It smelled delicious, but he couldn’t understand why they stopped.

Master paid for a cob of the grilled corn, and handed the tinfoil package to him.

“You look cold,” he said, “and you should eat.”

Wren took it gratefully, and the hot corn kept his hands warm until it was cool enough to unwrap. It was nice to know his new Master was a generous type.

He nibbled slowly to make it last. His feet were still freezing, but he’d had worse.

When the crowds had thinned, he took a better look at his Master.

He was handsome: tall, with dark hair and gray eyes.

Many of his old masters weren’t nearly so beautiful, and maybe that would make bed service more bearable.

But he was also a vampire, and there was no way to tell how that was going to go. He half expected to be hypnotized already.

Master walked in long strides, seemingly in a hurry to get home, and Wren had to work to keep up.

He was surprised when a half hour into the walk, Master stopped in front of a narrow townhouse.

He pulled a key from his jacket pocket, and unlocked the door, ushering Wren in.

It was dark inside, the windows covered in thick blackout curtains to presumably block out the sun, and Master opened them to let in the light from the streetlamps.

The house was nice, certainly, but it wasn’t the infamous nest in the upper city he had heard about.

Was Master a lone vampire?

He didn’t voice his thoughts, instead keeping quiet as Master pulled candles from a shelf in the living room.

Wren waited for Master’s first orders, but Master didn’t seem interested in bedding him yet.

“Are you hungry?” asked Master, searching for matches. “I bought food, but I, uh, forgot to make something.”

“I’m alright, Master,” he said politely, confused.

Master turned, matches in hand. “Oh good,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “I don’t think I can cook anyway.”

Master lit one of the candles, the dim glow casting his face in warm yellow. “I’ll show you to your room.”

Master had prepared a room for him? His heart sank as he thought of chains and cages.

Wren chewed the inside of his cheek in worry as he followed Master upstairs to the second floor, and then up another, smaller staircase.

There was a short, narrow hallway, and then a door that led to the attic.

“I know it’s not much,” said Master, putting the candles and matches on a table off to the side of the door. “But it’s something.”

Wren stood stunned for a minute, taking it in. 

“It’s beautiful,” he said truthfully.

The room was small, with a low cozy ceiling, and Wren loved it immediately.

There was a circular window across from the door, with parted blackout curtains that let in moonbeams.

A bed sat below it, with a nightstand. A rug was under that, with a blue and cream design.

There was even a small, low bookshelf against the right wall with books, and a plush chair to sit in.

He couldn’t read, but it was a nice thought.

“I’m glad you like it,” Master said. “I- um- I’ll let you rest. I know you sleep at night, but...”

“I’ll work on it, Master,” he promised.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be downstairs, if you need anything.”

Master closed the door behind him, and Wren was left alone.

___________________

He woke up late in the morning, sunlight streaming through the attic window.

Wren tried to go back to sleep, to prepare for the night ahead, but he didn’t have much success.

Soon he was too hungry to stay in bed, and he went downstairs to look around.

A closed door on the second floor was probably Master’s room, and he peeked into a couple cracked open doors to get his bearings.

A full bathroom, claw tub and everything, was on the right, along with a linen closet and a guest room.

Downstairs held a kitchen, living room, and dining room. There was a backyard, with a high fence and a small patio, and Wren briefly smiled at the idea of Master mowing a lawn.

His stomach grumbled, and he cut the exploring short to cook a quick meal.

The kitchen had brand-new pots and pans, a tea kettle, and an untouched stove and oven.

The cabinets were stocked with food, and there was fresh meat and vegetables in the ice box. The most surprising item was a spice rack that was stocked with more than he knew existed.

There was no way he could eat all of it, even within a week.

He would have to ask Master not to buy so much.

Wren started on a pot of rice, and pulled out some broccoli and chicken from the icebox.

He looked for some olive oil, and found it in a cupboard above the stove.

It was nice to work without someone looking over his shoulder. He had served in kitchens before, a long time ago, and had watched the cooks as he washed his Master's dishes. Now he could do the cooking, which had always seemed more interesting.

Wren pulled out spices at random, sniffing them to figure out what to put on the chicken.

He was having fun, really, but cooking wasn’t the quietest chore.

He glanced up at the ceiling, and hoped Master couldn’t hear him as he chopped the broccoli.

Over the years, and after many masters, he had learned that a beating on the first day was bad luck.

The rice came out a bit undercooked, but it was his first time and no one else was eating it.

He ate slowly, wondering what his new Master was like. He seemed nice enough, but a bit… odd.

Was that the vampirism, or was he just unused to giving orders?

And why didn’t he have a nest?

taglist: @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @secretwhumplair @freefallingup13 @mylovelyme @whumpzone @paintedpigeon1 @haro-whumps @whumpthisway @fanastyfinder @extemporary-whump @susiequaz12 @keepingwhumpwiththekardashians @the-cyrulik @morning-star-whump @writereleaserepeat @annablogsposts @tobiaslut

[koko-mochi]

Hoo boy... CW: captivity, implied slavery, violence, blood, coercion, loss of voice

Strange things happened to perception in the hold of a ship, without light and air and hope. How many days had passed since she boarded this ship? Or the one before? She knew they had made several stops, each time loading more captives, most of them women. The air in the hold was thick with moans of despair and pain, choked with the stench of unwashed bodies, vomit, and excrement. Koko, however, gazed straight ahead into the darkness, and resolved to fight it. If she was going to die in this place, she would die a Xaela.

Several of the captives had been moved to their own cage. There was a Raen woman, numb with despair, who leaned her forehead against the bars and muttered to herself. There was a Midlander woman who couldn’t understand Koko’s accent and who said “I’m sorry” too much. And there was Koko, the only Xaela in the hold, surely an exotic oddity for—she wasn’t sure. Possibly she was to be enslaved. Some Xaela tribes kept slaves, as the spoils of battle, usually. But the efficiency and brutality of whatever this was far outstripped any Xaela practice.

It didn’t take long before Koko realized her cage was directly beneath the captain’s personal quarters. Captain Doesmaga was loud and cruel, and his shoes thumped on the planks above her day after day. One night, she waited until she heard him slump into bed, and she began yelling at the ceiling of her cage, with all her might. She shouted in her language, the Xaela language, threats and insults and curses. I am going to tear off all of your limbs and feed them to Yol while you watch. You are without honor and you will die like a dog. I hope your flesh festers on your bones. I hope you die alone, far from the glory of battle. I pray the sea swallows you.

Eventually, she would hear him wake up, and she would stop, wait until he went back to bed, and start again.

This went on for night after night, nearly a week. When the weekly washing happened—an act that involved the captives being stripped of their clothes, lined up on deck, and doused with sea water—Koko stared at the bags under Doesmaga’s eyes, the strained lines in his face, the slight sway in his stance. And she sneered at him.

She realized almost immediately that his was a mistake. His eye went wide and he marched over to her, removing her ankle from its shackle and wrapping an enormous hand around her neck. The Roegadyn was so large that his hand engulfed much of her shoulders and chest as well. He picked her up off the ground, her feet kicking helplessly and her hands tried to loosen his grip. He slammed her back against the mast.

“So y’er the Hells-spawned whore ‘s been keepin’ me up at night,” Doesmaga snarled, leaning down towards her.

“May everything you love be taken away,” Koko spat in Xaela, while struggling against the pain of his grip and the panic of being lifted off the ground. He wore a large, brass ring on his index finger that scraped against her horn, and she struggled to keep her expression steady.

“Again with tha’ feral dog tongue o’ yers.” He seemed to consider, and then his eye went wide with a frightening gleam. “Boatswain! Bring me a knife.”

As the boatswain approached with a dagger, Koko had precious few moments to contemplate her death. The journey that had led her here had not been what she had wanted or expected. She had barely seen the world she had set out to explore, locked as she was in the hold of a ship. Father had been right after all. But even here, in the absence of weapons and armor, in the absence of freedom and glory, she did what she could to die a warrior’s death. In her own way, she fought. And she had made Doesmaga respect her enough to kill her.

“Any last words, bitch?” Doesmaga said, taking the dagger in hand.

She spit, and in her best attempt at the common Hyuran tongue, said, “The dead will always remember what you are.”

The cruelty of his smile shattered her as he said, “Who said anything about dying?”

Her eyes went wide as the blade crept into view, and her gaze darted from his eyes to the iron dagger. She opened her mouth to speak, but—

The blade flashed.

Blood.

A jagged pain in her mouth.

Onlookers averting their eyes.

A garbled, strangled scream. Her scream, she realized belatedly.

Doesmaga threw her tongue overboard, almost an afterthought.

She was on the deck now, reeling from the pain, trying to catch her breath from his hand on her throat, but choking down great mouthfuls of blood, coughing it back up. Doesmaga leaned down to whisper to the boatswain, “Give ‘er ‘alf a potion. Wouldn’ wan’ ‘er chokin’ on ‘er own blood.” And, his work done, the captain stomped off to his cabin.

In silence, the boatswain fed her half a potion.

In silence, she was locked once more into her shackles.

In silence, she returned to her cell.

In silence, she cried.

[number1-hera-defender]

Alectryon: Embrace of War, prologue

(Sorry to delete the Alectryon poll, I finally settled on one, it was a mixture of B and A)

Alectryon rolled over in bed, staring at the ceiling before the noticing the man was fully dressed, he quickly sat up, smiling at the man. “Thanks for your patronage, I hope I’ll see you again... hopefully sooner than later.” He called in a flirty tone, winking at him, the man smiled, looking over his body before leaving. Alectryon sighed, sitting up in bed and getting dressed again. Tears burned his eyes, he hated it here and he hoped the man would be nice enough to use spit, oil if he was lucky, but he couldn’t choose or even try to beg. He reached into the dresser, grabbing out the familiar ointment. “Tannis!” The madame yelled from downstairs, he almost didn’t respond, he forgot the Madame called him by another name, Tannis. It wasn’t like he liked his birth name, but he felt like he had to keep it, it was the only thing his mother could give him, being a slave and all. He headed downstairs when she shouted again, he threw an exomis on before jogging down the stairs to see what she needed. “Sorry, cleaning up after a cli-” He went to speak but she cut him off, her voice sharp. “Silence! I didn’t ask for an excuse!” She snapped, grabbing him by one of his curls, making him hiss slightly, he tried to pull back, but she didn’t let him. “You are the only one that can walk and form a sentence. I need you to go out and buy some supplies.” She shoved a list and a pouch of gold into his hands, he took a step back before heading to the door, not wanting to speak with her more than necessary. The list was short but in terrible handwriting, he could figure out a few things, oil, meat, bread… he was fairly sure that said goats milk. “Gods… get better handwriting.” He muttered under his breath; he was sure he got everything, the butchers, stopping by the farms and more. He walked around, buying things and getting them delivered to the brothel. He brought himself a treat from the bakery while getting bread, he sat down on the steps of some random temple for some random god he could care less about. He had been out for so long, it was almost dusk now. As he stood up, cold and potent water was thrown on his back, he stumbled and turned around, standing there was a priest, most likely for the god. Alectryon gritted his teeth, clenching his fists. “What the hell man? I was just sitting here!” He yelled, the priest look taken aback, like he didn’t expect Alectryon to snap back, but he straightened up, looking at him like he was just some speck of dirt. “Slaves are not welcome on the steps of the house of Ares.” He said simply, the way he said it, with his smug grin, like he was oh so proud of himself. It made Alectryon made, he swung his fist, and it connected with the man’s face. The man stumbled, falling up the stairs, his hand on his cheek as he stared at Alectryon in shock, he didn’t want to hang around, knowing Ares was probably hanging around. He turned and quickly walked away, the priest yelling after him, but he ignored him, pretending not to hear. He got to the brothel just as night fell, the lanterns already lighting his way back. He slipped through the back door, the madam was busy chatting with some older men, he quickly ran up the stairs and into his room. He bathed, changed into more pretty clothes with sparkling gems. He dabbed some perfume around his neck and thighs, hoping to mask the smell. After that, he wandered downstairs, slipping the gold back into the Madam’s room. She saw him come downstairs, her face a scowl before it shifted in a cruel grin, she grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him over to the old pervert, who smiled, grabbing his waist. Alectryon put on an act and led the man upstairs, trying to ignore the disgust that twisted in his gut.

[fangbangerghoul]

Slim Pickins

Fandom: Veilguard Rated: M Chapter One: Reflection Summary: Ghoul 'Rook' Mercar: Shadow Dragon, Rogue, destiny with danger and desire.

There were enough members at the Lighthouse that were asleep where the light inside the Fade crept to a sunset illusion. Ghoul was sitting inside of her room peering out the window to look over the courtyard and the growing shadows. Her tiny hideaway room was far enough from everyone that it was the only place she could truly ‘let her hair down’, as Harding would say.

Originally her stuff was placed into the meditation room that had a large aquarium and a lovely green couch, but Ghoul couldn’t shake the irrational fear of the glass breaking and the water drowning her in her sleep. This led her to wander around the premises of the Lighthouse until she found refuge in an attic in the northeast tower of the Lighthouse. It was the perfect size for her, now scattered with her favorite knives, half way burnt candles and a collection of dust and spare wood she inherited with the space. Over the time they had stayed she managed to clean up bits and pieces and made it more comfortable to spend long hours in. Like adding a floor mattress for when her body forced itself to recharge or the metal bars that hung from the ceiling so she could exercise.  

Ghoul looked over at the small makeshift desk where she was reading a pile of letters. Most of them were unsent from Ashur that he had recently handed off to her now (through Neve mind you) and only a few were old intel she could have used forever ago. It was not until she returned from retrieving The Demon of Vyrantium where she finally sat and read through all of them. Some of the letters were laced with scented perfumes, some more poetic, but all signed and never officially sent. It had been a year. A year since she received the actual letter he sent. An abrupt ending to a blooming entanglement. But there was one among them that she had read repeatedly:

Ghoul,

I have heard through the channels your travels have fared well. My last letter was not sufficient with details. The reason I hope to one day explain in person, if you chose to lend an ear.

Your safety, along with the safety of anyone in Minrathous, will always be my priority.

Forgive me,

Ashur

 

Her mind and heart felt torn on what to do. She was never good at this.

“Fuck.” She cursed out loud, hating herself for considering hearing him out. He had plenty of time to send one of these out beforehand.

“The Chantry boy is just feeling guilty.” She tried to convince herself as it became harder not to want to reach out to him. Ghoul knew she was going to have to work with him again at some point. That point was encroaching very soon as the groups eyes were on intel from the Shadow Dragons, the faction she was temporarily banned from. For being the one to free countless of slaves and slaying more Venatori in one sitting than most did.

When she left with Varric, Ashur's original letter was clear cut, no more mingling but now it would seem he regretted that decision. She could not lie to herself and deny she did not feel the same. There were silent moments with herself where she missed the exciting rendezvous they used to do whenever they crossed paths. His large hands always gently caressing or treading to parts of her he would tell her he yearned to consume. Her lips always eager to lavish the dip of his neck and anywhere that brought out that primal side out of him, like they were caged animals.

It was over a year ago and there was a hint of underlying desperation when she thought of it. She loathed the position she was in now. Being a leader. Having the responsibility of planning ahead. Taking on two Gods. She just wanted a drink and a rough handling that ended in a sloppy making out session or an orgasm that could bring a five-century old corpse back to life.

Her fingers tapped the side of her face as she still sat perched by the window, her legs crossed over the other, her green curls softly moving with the breeze, and her citrine eyes staring at absolutely everything yet nothing. Ghoul needed to act upon her desires soon or else there would explode from her and she’d be fraternizing with the companions that rested below. She knew she shouldn’t do that.

She leapt from her sitting position with a decision made, quickly gathering her favorite daggers and a few necessities before rushing out for the evening.

[miarenmert]

Crystal Dream Throne of Olkyon – part 10

Olkyon wasn't ready to die. When she saw her head slip from the hands of the Death Goddess, she caught it in mid-air and returned it to its place. Her world was shattered, but she saw another world behind it, and she made glasses from the shards so that she could always see only that world.

Olkyon saw two moons in the sky, the light moon always shining in the sky, and the dark moon appearing and disappearing. When the dark moon appeared in the sky, chaos reigned, but one day the moons aligned, and that night a statuette with an infinitely black shadow appeared. It attracted evil to the places where it appeared, even under the moon of order, and could move on its own when no one was looking.

Olkyon walked through the temple of knowledge to solve puzzles and receive gifts from the god of madness, whom she hated, made from those she felt sorry for. But now a wise girl came to her who knew all the ways. With her, Olkyon easily reached the room where the deity sat decrepit and powerless. Olkyon took nothing this time, but the deity was not helpless after all. Olkyon didn’t find the way back and found herself in an unstable space.

An old man led her out of the unpredictably changing corridors, into a desert where he could drink sand. He promised Olkyon eternal power if she didn’t let her sister kill her mother. The sister came at different ages, she always reached for the clock that shouldn’t be broken. The old man ordered to cut off her hands in order to gain power over time. But looking at the aged wizard, Olkyon realized that eternity was a lie, since he couldn’t get it for himself. She regretfully turned back time and gave power to her sister.

She wanted to get far away, to a suffering kingdom ruled by a sickly prince who had an unhealthy relationship with his mother. He brought a prosperous kingdom to the brink of extinction, but he himself was barely hanging on to the brink of demise. When he saw the cursed statue, he threw himself from the tower.

The empress who took his place was obsessed with beauty, secretly suffering from her own imperfections and hiding them behind the most extreme beauty practices. Just beneath her throne was an abyss of flesh, all the vile things that the empress tried to oppose herself to, and there Olkyon learned that court attire is armor.

Behind the stations of the amusement park train was an invisible industrial system that everything worked on. Unlucky visitors to the rides fell into traps, from which, if they didn’t escape, they became fuel. However, the slaves of the internal mechanisms worked to improve themselves and turn the system to their advantage. There Olkyon turned a souvenir pendant into a sword.

In the temple of ancient technology, there was a puzzle made of stone blocks that moved out in sections, so explorers could climb up to the very top. However, each part of the puzzle summoned demons, and Olkyon wanted to fight them all. One adventurer went the other way. He climbed onto the ceiling and jumped straight to the central part of the puzzle, opening a portal to a paradise island. Olkyon followed him to watch him meet the main demon that lived there.

But the paradise island was an illusion, and there only a desert awaited her, with visions so abysmal that Olkyon's crystal glasses were not enough to protect her from them. She turned them into a shield.

After walking through the desert, she found the last temple, where she recognized all the deities she had met along the way. They were a painful hope, but hope nonetheless. So Olkyon accepted the mission to free them.

[memurfevur-archive]

Hide and Seek Part 3: A Promise

Character(s): Athena Uyilst, The Hidelord (@mageofspacemultiverse), NPC

About: The Hidelord worms himself into Athena's mind, playing on her weaknesses and strengths while they skin a traitor alive.

CW: blood, light graphic depictions of torture, human zoo

Words: 3,736

Plot Page

Song and Dance (part 1)

The Bronze Girl (part 2)

==================================

 Hidelord sniffed the air, glancing to the left in the direction of a long tapering stack of smog climbing the night sky. I stood beside him in a half-cower, knowing what lies ahead and undecided whether or not I could brave it. The Zoo was not like any other place in Hidelord’s domain, and what he had planned beyond here I would not know would break or save me.

"When we're alone with the bastard, then we'll talk about accountability. We can spin our turning knife, see who it lands on. Now, hunch forward a bit, and move."

He led the way through the field of reedy grass that flicked at our forearms and jostled noisily across our legs. It took us less than ten minutes to walk the full length and for the wide metal shed to come into sight: the Zoo had everything, not just holding cells for all of Hidelord's prizes, but a surgeon's bay, a kitchen, some bathrooms, and even a trading post inside for the exchange of skins and the occasional auction.

A guard was poised outside one of the rear doors. He leaned in to whisper something in the Hidelord's ear, and after a moment the Hidelord whispered back. The code words were not audible to the ear in case a slave tried to remember one as a means to escape, but it didn’t stop me from angling my ears listening for a shred of hope. For a brief moment I questioned whether this was what I truly wanted-- an escape; with rainbow drinker senses as sharp as a knife, I could easily hear soft murmurs and whispers as loud as a crowd’s roar. And yet, I heard nothing, and reminded myself that I am too weak to leave on my own volition. With a quick key jingle, the door was unlocked and the Hidelord grabbed me with a convincing tug and pulled me inside.

I had learned to be a good actor, playing my part to give people what they want. Looking sad and pathetic was too easy, though really the depression was the true star. I followed Hidelord with my head down and ears closed, but I didn’t need to act. The dread I felt was real.

Leading the way into the makeshift warehouse, the formerly tranquil air was instantly aplomb with screams, pleads, moans, weeping, and the noise of metal being shaken and scratched. Stacked in aisles at least twenty feet high and a hundred feet long were industrial cages, partially covered with numbered tarps. Empty or broken boxes were stacked against the wall for future use. Plastic tubes for dispensing water fed from each cage up toward the ceiling where one great cooler sat, like rodent sipper bottles, collecting from pipes buried in the ground outside. Flayed skins of past pets hung on the wall, a fatal reminder that despair was all anyone here had in store.

The place smelled of bile and sweat and dirt, but most of all, misery.

We passed the barrage of noise and doomed souls to the rear end, making it to an entryway made of thin plastic curtains. "Wanna wait here?" Hidelord put forth with a rhetoric chime to his voice, then stalked through the entryway to speak with his other minions. There were the faint sounds of beeping machinery through the cooler entrance, but it was mostly drowned out by the wails of the creatures behind me.

I was sure to keep my head down, though this time more for my health than out of obedience. I couldn't quite remember the path there, everything had been a blur, and I had been outside of my body for most of the journey through the Zoo, past the twists and turns filled with hollowed faces caked in blood and dirt and worse. I tried to keep myself together, gritting my teeth just to have that pressure as an anchor. The vile scene was almost too familiar to me. Underground slaver rings were only the scratches of the surface compared to this, though.

I wondered briefly if I was meant to be here, if this was my punishment for last night’s foolery. Or had he grown bored of me after all and decided to lock me away in the Zoo? I'd die, I decided; I'd rather die than go through this again. Hidelord had plenty of knives on his person. I could easily take one when he isn’t prepared, and slit my own throat right in front of him....

I began to hum to myself softly to try to drown out the screaming and crying, a short lullaby my brother would sing to me as kids. The memory of my brother brought forth its own guilt and regrets, but it was better to feel those than face the smothering atmosphere around me.

It was, to the relief of the surrounding universe, that Hidelord’s abandonment wouldn't come just yet. He soon returned as the squeaks of rubber against metal began to fade from the other room. He did not speak, only urgently waved to join him within the suite.

Beyond was much of the same, though some fabric curtains were fastened to the ceiling, and the room only held one or two cages, currently empty. All was covered in caked blood, none having bothered to clean the proof of their gruesome activity. Violet, blue, and brown alike were splattered across the room, as well as two of the otherwise shining metal tables that lay dormant before them. The room was cooler here, and the sound of the beeping grew closer.

Hidelord slunk past one of the curtains, gesturing to one table that was, in stark contrast, very much occupied. The traitorous warlord from before, Jembra, was a mass of tubes and cables hooked up to odd, archaic contraptions. A jar of leeches was set on the ground next to him, bright gold and swollen in their putrid swill. An accordion-like object sank up and down to the rhythm of his breathing, and bags of olive-hue blood surrounded his tired, unconscious face.

"The blood'll poison him before too long." Hidelord remarked, snorting. "He's no drinker, so if you want to bask in this for a second, don't fuck around. Let me know when we should get started, and how we'll decide this."

I looked at him, eyes wide. What more could this man go through? What were… we...going to put him through? I glanced back at the barely-conscious corpse on the table. Try as I might, I could not hold much sympathy for him. He knew the rules of the land better than I, and he had been willing to throw away what kept him safe for greed and power. He had been willing to betray what kept me safe. I can’t afford this man any sympathy, so my response was short and dry, “Anytime.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” my master grinned wickedly, reaching under the table and grabbing a small satchel, then sticking it under the lord’s nose.

It took a few moments to kick in, but the corpse lurched forward slightly with a sharp inhale, eyes pulsing from the aftermath of shock.

“Wakey wakey…” Hidelord’s smile faded into a mask of concentration, as he went to the far side of the room and took hold of one knife and a worn whetstone. A long, tapering sound of metal meeting plastic began to repeat through the small bay, and Jembra’s head swung back and forth weakly between the two of us, the reality quickly sinking in. With every haunting shing, his pupils looked smaller and smaller, and his breathing hitched and hiccuped with dread.

I could smell it, his fear, a sweet acidic taste on my tongue and fragrance to my nose. It made my fangs ache and the shudder that ran through my body could clue anyone in that the promise of what was to come seemed... enjoyable. Exciting. Much to my shame and guilt, I felt excited.

No… no it must be because I’m hungry, my blood thirst waking the undead monster within me. But even with this reasoning, I knew I wasn’t strong enough to help myself.

I approached Jembra, wanting him to see me, wanting more of that fear scent. Did he recognize me? Did he recognize me as the reaper who brought him to his knees? If there was recognition, it seemed Jembra’s mind was too far gone to rationalize or vocalize it. He didn’t scream or writhe about, but the puffs of his breath came out desperate, as though his lungs had holes he was desperate to fill.

It did not take long for the knife to be sharpened, and for Hidelord’s heavy boots to lumbar back. He held the blade between his thumb and two fingers. “I don’t think we need to decide. I can see the urge practically erupting from your skin. Shall the knife turn once more, Athena?” It felt like an oddly intimate moment.

Jembra’s legs started to shake pathetically against the gurney, tearing a bit at the medieval stitching that kept his dissected carcass together. He must’ve been on painkillers to even stay conscious with the damage…not that it would matter soon.

Despite the shame and guilt that I could feel building up, it was much easier to fall into these temptations. There was a part of me that missed being the hunter instead of the prey, a part of me that yearned for the days of blood lust and money. I could go back, step into the past, relive the days when I felt most powerful....

Jembra's struggle really sold it. As he moved and tore at his stitching, I could smell the blood welling in his wounds. Hidelord's offer danced in my mind; what would Jembra look like without his skin? With the smell of blood covering his whole body? I shuddered at the thought, and the words of an old story about a fur trader came to my head; one who had been so greedy that he had killed all the animals, and had begun to feel sorrow only then for the victims as he found himself alone. I hummed a bit giddily as words broke past a ghosting smile, "So long it has felt since I have brushed with the soft fur of a pelt."

My mind somehow made up, I looked to the Hidelord then, "If you could guide me…"

The hunter hummed, leaving the knife on the table by the troll's foot, then coming to the side of the table to press the recoiling cadaver's arm tight to the steel, gesturing over with his eyebrows. "I'd normally soak the skin in some salt water to help loosen it from the muscle, but...you get the point. Bastard's weak but he's still gonna shake so I'll hold him for you."

Jembra's moans, barely audible, became weak pleads that warbled through the streaks of tears that bubbled along his eyelids and nose.

"We'll start here." He dug the tip of his elbow against the wrist to keep it secured, then gestured to the secured area of skin just below said wrist. "I'd normally flip him onto his stomach and start from the back, but with his injuries that'd just kill him. Don't expect to be perfect on your first time skinning, it took me a few tries to get the right method." Ugh, dreadful to think about. Almost as dreadful as the excitement that was bouncing in his voice. It irritated me how much we mirrored each other. "You've peeled fruit with a paring knife, right? Same idea. Stick just the tip under, then angle upwards so you're only getting under his skin, then press on a slight angle. The knife isn't a tool, it's a friend; let it do the work."

I readied myself just as Hidelord instructed. My breath became shaky not from nervousness but from the sight of the knife entering Jembra's body and how smooth the movement was. I angled the knife once it was in, and began to peel down. "Is there a pattern you do this in?" I tossed him a glance and ignored Jembra's cries. "Patches? Strips? Is any of this salvageable to you? Or should I have fun with this blood orange?"

The biting remark caused a shift in Jembra's face; the smallest hint of prideful fury at the demeaning tease. Apparently the only thing stronger than fear to the Lords was their pride. But it wouldn't last, and the machines began to beep louder as a deep, dark goo ebbed along the edge of the knife. Groans rose in pitch and the man fought to free his arm with what little fight remained in his form.

"To flay and filet a troll is an art form. Part of the appeal is the different styles. This product is just for a trophy, not for a special sale, but do try to make it recognizable." He pointed along the lines of veins bulging with each dig and pull of the blade. "Try to keep the veins intact if you can, don't slice and dice them for the sake of our turf war. Pyritebloods have thin, mutant veins, but they're almost as much of a trademark as how much of swindlers they are. Never met one that wasn't itching to try and fuck you over for advancement, isn't that right Jembra?" Hidelord chuckled. "Keep doing what you're doing. Maybe cut that first side of the forearm off, and then we'll give him a break so the shock doesn't take him. He's gonna have to keep from croaking too quick for his fucking stupidity, hmm?"

Listening to Hidelord's advice I worked the seconds away. I was careful and attentive as I could be, admiring the way the blood pooled around the knife and the texture of peeled skin. A part of me hated it. It felt as if a lost memory was threatening to play in my mind, something I pushed so far back so long ago. I feared I would uncover it again if I continued. But I wanted to keep going out of spite of my master. And yet there’s a part of me that was hungry and eager to please. I’m a complete mess with torn wills.

I stopped peeling when this half of the forearm was exposed. I held the patch of skin in my hands, my eyes wide. I had once been renowned as the Huntress, playing with my prey before eating it, before shedding their heads from their bodies. These weren’t forbidden thoughts or memories, no more as they were reflections.

I held the patch up for the Hidelord to see, seeking his approval and showing off the catch. I both hated myself and yet was impressed at the same time. I wanted to scream and cry at the Hidelord, fearful of the memory that threatened to come. There was a reason why I’m not up close and personal with my kills, usually. This is up close. This is personal. This is...

I glared at him, burning hatred onto his face. Look what you made of me! This isn’t punishment, but entertainment, and I feel I have become a jester. Yet, this might as well become of me: the very same monster I revere. Despite it all I couldn’t help but wish this to end, and for him to hold me and praise me; did I put on a good show? The proof is in my hands.

Wading in the stench and promise of blood, the night swam into morning in the vigorous agony of the broken man and Hidelord's uncontainable satisfaction. It was early during the start of his chest being worked that the shock and pain finally took hold and Jembra lost consciousness. As long as he was dead, I could numb myself.

"Weak man," the Hidelord huffed, wiping his palms with a dirty cloth. "There was a lot more fun in store if he wasn't such a pansy-fuck. At best, it makes carving him easier, especially for hands and feet, and when we remove the eyes." His index finger went under my chin and pointed my gaze towards him. "Tell me, what do you feel, Athena? A rush? A pride? Honor?"

There was an uncomfortable silence between us as he waited for my answer. I glanced back and forth between the cadaver and Hidelord, studying my handiwork while battling with emotions I couldn’t fathom.

My lip curled slightly as I relented, “Satisfaction.” My voice had cracked, and I could not maintain it. My words grew breathless and soundless, almost like a sob. "Eagerness. Regret. But pride, yes, there's certainly pride." There was a growl rising in my throat, barely audible. He pressed me to him and we rested our foreheads against the other’s. "I hate the person I am when I’m with you.”

His fingers coaxed between strands of my matted hair. "You're lucky to have the luxury to hate what you're doing,” he hummed, "in the Safari, everyone surrenders to me; it's best to surrender with the part of you that's truest. Uncaged, untamed...an exotic nemesis to all that would disrespect you, and disrespect me. “A knife is made to cut, Athena. You may want to keep it sheathed, use it to pin your letters to the wall, make it something it isn't, but it'll never be as good or as happy as when it's cuttin'. You're a knife-" He pointed down at his pants. "You're on my belt, heh. You're sharp, dangerous, beautiful. I'll keep you clean, polished - as a prized possession deserves." His lips brushed across my blood-stained knuckles, his other hand encircling the middle of my neck with two fingers. His breath was warm, rank with the smell of alcohol and spittle. "Now...I've paid you two more favors than I'd pay any other troll in this fucking madhouse of mine. Is that enough to trade for a prophecy, my little bird?"

He was making a promise to me. My chest and throat tightened as tears stung the back of my eyes. This. This was the best my life was going to get. Someone who would protect me, cherish me, want me. I meant something to him, even though I was just a slave-- no. If I had been just a slave, I would have been treated like everyone else. I wouldn’t have the privilege of his protection or praise, of his bed or his knife. He knew me. He knows what’s best for me, can see me for what I am, for what I can’t fight.

And in that moment, I found myself content for the first time in three sweeps. Why should I fight something that seemed too good? I could be here, by his side, on his lap or on the floor, and he would protect me. Clean. Polished. He wouldn't let anyone else have me. I wouldn't move from place to place, hand to hand, whip to whip. I’m his. I have a place. A purpose. His. This was the best I was going to get, and so I’ll have it as long as he'll have me.

Well, there was a problem with that, though. I hesitated. I’ve seen this coming for a long time now, and had always accepted that it would just be Fate. To move around and shift from hand to hand forever. But something was coming. While before I had refused to tell Hidelord this, now that I was convinced of how close Hidelord would hold his knife to his belt I reconsidered. "There will be a hound of metal," I said softly. "Fiercer than your knives. You will lose one of them." The Hidelord’s a smart and clever man, and though sometimes he struggled with figuring out my cryptic words –as per our song and dance-- he knew instantly that this was about me. "How long?" He queried, blinking slowly. "How near is this hound to its scent?"

I reached up and cupped his cheek, running the side of my thumb along his cheek bone and part of the scar that ran over his eye. "You're the most cunning trapper I've had the displeasure to meet," I brought my lips to his skin and traced his uneven stubble on his jaw, then did the same to his throat. I felt him stiffen and radiate with confusion, but soon his shoulders relaxed. I let my fangs graze lightly, then looked up at him. The hesitance was still there, but now I allowed my voice to be distant. Reserved. As always, I knew more than he did, and I knew Fate cannot be fought with. I accepted that a long time ago, after the death of my matesprit. So what am I to do now? And him? "You figure it out."

Predictably, flattering the great lord earned enough favor to distract. The smirk that sprouted was torn between grabbing me by one shoulder blade and pressing me deep into the space between his pectorals and letting me lead, just as he had a moment ago. In the end though, the moment was fleeting, and as we stood at the window, he put the cool metal of his rings against the trail that my teeth had left. “If I ever killed a troll for every time you talked smart to me, the mountain would be higher than the one we took to get here,” he jested dangerously, the words ringing in their usual dynamic.

I nodded, falling silent, but not for him. A small glimpse of time rolled behind my eyes, showing a glimmer of metal and splashes of blood. How topical; I knew the hound was coming, but I hadn’t thought it would be today. Which meant we didn’t have time to stand around. If I don’t distract him, he’ll be dead like the rest of them. What a cruel irony, when I had just chosen to believe in his promise.

"If you do not mind, Aktaio, I would like to confess."

With the use of his real name, the coy game stopped. A vein bulged in the side of his neck as he tried to figure out what that meant. Heat rushed to his face. His jaw set, a suspicion ghosting his expression, though I knew he didn’t want to believe it. “…What have you done? Talk. Now.”

[dark-sirenparis]

@handsonluc

Fuck.

They’d really stepped in it this time. 

How was it that they always managed to stumble into something absolutely fucked? For a moment, Luc allowed their mind to wander back to the trailer park, and sort of smiled. Deacon would say it was because they ran their mouth off too damn much. Which was fair enough, they wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t applied for the vacant Head of Maintenance position.

They laid there for a long moment, staring up at the spotless white ceiling, not a yellow-ish water-mark in sight, and pondered on their new situation. So what? They got a fancy new phone, some nice digs, a relatively cushy job on a tropical island? It wasn't prison. At least not for them. And Luc wasn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination. He’d hurt people, sometimes just to hurt them, other times because he was told. How was this place any different? Luc shot up, sitting up straight like they’d just risen from the dead, and tugged at their long curly locks.

It wasn’t. They had a place to sleep at night and a bit of pocket change, and all they had to do was their fucking job.

Fishing around in their coat pocket, Luc pulled out a sealed pack of cigarettes and slapped it against their palm before pulling the cellophane off, ‘waking up the cancer’ as Deacon used to call it. Luc was supposed to quit, but then again, Deacon wasn’t supposed to lose his goddamn mind and fuck off into the Oregon wilderness, so what difference did it make? Promises were bullshit and these weren’t actually going to kill them anyway.

With an unlit cigarette in their mouth, Luc meandered aimlessly through the halls until they stumbled upon an exit door that led out into the humid island air, it was sweet and warm, and smelled nothing like home. 'Thank fuck,’ they thought, feeling around their pockets for a lighter, the searching growing more and more frantic the closer they came to the realization that they didn’t have one on ‘em. “Fuck.” A trek back to their suite might as well have been a herculean trial without a smoke first. “‘Scuse me, uh –” Luc waved a hand to get their attention. “You got a lighter on you?” The cigarette bounced up and down as they spoke. “I promise not to fuck off with it, scout’s honor.”

Paris was just dropping a slave in the morning. Typically, he'd force them to walk back on their own, sometimes 'forgetting' to alert a guard that they'd been out for the evening with him - the siren didn't like to sleep alone. But he also believed that others were a bit too soft on these slaves, so throwing them a curveball was the most responsible thing he could think to do.

Back into the light of the late morning, with some time to spare before class, Paris took his time up the stairs and out of the building. Walking along the path, he was keen to ignore the person waving him down until it was a little too obvious they were waving to him specifically - no one else was around to assume it was for them. The siren exhaled through his nose before procuring a lighter from his pocket, extending it by his fingertips to the others. "I know you won't," he said, but it was more of a thinly veiled threat hidden behind a winning smile, than an assumption of innocence. "You're new."

[xtruss]

Pompeii Still Has Buried Secrets

The first major excavations in decades shed light on how ordinary citizens shopped and snacked—and where slaves slept.

— By Rebecca Mead | Published November 22, 2021 | Friday June 30, 2023

The ancient city was two miles in circumference. A third of it is still unexcavated. Illustration By Daniele Castellano

The journey from Naples to the ruins of Pompeii takes about half an hour on the Circumvesuviana, a train that rattles through a ribbon of land between the base of Mt. Vesuvius, on one side, and the Gulf of Naples, on the other. The area is built up, but when I travelled the route earlier this fall I could catch glimpses of the glittering sea behind apartment buildings. Occasionally, the mountainous coast across the bay came into sight, in the direction of the old Roman port of Misenum—where, in 79 A.D., the naval commander and prolific author Pliny the Elder watched Vesuvius erupt. Pliny, who led a rescue effort by sea, was killed by one of the volcano’s surges of gas and rock; his nephew, Pliny the Younger, provided the only surviving eyewitness account of the disaster. My view sometimes opened up in the opposite direction, toward the volcano, to reveal farmland or a stand of umbrella pines, their tall trunks giving way to billowing needle-covered branches. Pliny the Younger compared the shape of these trees to the volcanic eruption, with its column of smoke rising to a puffy cloud of ash that hovered, and then collapsed, burying a good part of what is now the Circumvesuviana’s route.

I got off at the stop called Pompeii Scavi—“the ruins of Pompeii”—and headed toward the modern gates that surround the ancient city. Before Pompeii was drowned in ash, it had a circumference of about two miles, enclosing an area of some hundred and seventy acres—a fifth the size of Central Park. Its population is estimated to have been about eleven thousand, roughly the same number as live in Battery Park City. After the ruins were rediscovered, in the mid-eighteenth century, formal excavations continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, with successive directors of the site exposing mansions, temples, baths, and, eventually, entire streets paved with volcanic rock. About a third of the ancient city has yet to be excavated, however; the consensus among scholars is that this remainder should be left for future archeologists, and their presumably more sophisticated technologies.

At some ancient Roman sites, such as nearby Herculaneum, unexcavated areas have been topped with contemporary buildings. But at Pompeii, once you walk inside the gates, you can almost block out the modern world: the ancient city is full of spectacular vistas, with the straight lines of its gridded streets leading to Vesuvius in the distance. And, every so often, a visitor comes across a street or an alleyway that dead-ends at a twenty-foot-high escarpment covered with scrubby grass. This is the boundary between Pompeii’s revealed past and its still buried one.

I had come to Pompeii to explore one such boundary, at the abrupt terminus of the Vicolo delle Nozze d’Argento—the Street of the Silver Wedding—in a corner of what archeologists have designated as Regio V, the city’s fifth region. For many years, the formal excavations stopped here, just past one of Pompeii’s grandest mansions: the House of the Silver Wedding, which was uncovered in the late nineteenth century and named, in 1893, in honor of the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of the Italian monarch, Umberto I, and his wife, Margherita of Savoy. The spacious house, which is believed to have belonged to a Pompeiian bigwig named Lucius Albucius Celsus, included a salon fitted with a barrel-vaulted ceiling supported by columns of trompe-l’oeil porphyry, and an atrium, decorated with frescoes, that scholars regard as the finest of its kind in the city.

In the ruins of Pompeii, discovery has often gone hand in hand with destruction. Photograph by Michele Amoruso/Getty

I discovered that the mansion was closed for renovations: the clattering of workmen emanated from behind its high brick walls. But I wasn’t too disappointed—my interest was in what lay just beyond it, at a newly exposed crossroads. This is the site of the first significant excavations in decades of ruins embalmed by the 79 A.D. eruption. Since 2018, restoration work has been under way in Regio V to reshape and shore up the escarpment. Made up of impacted ash and lapilli, or pebbles of pumice, it had become increasingly vulnerable to collapse, especially after heavy rain. (When chunks of the escarpment broke off, artifacts and structures buried inside it were often obliterated.) Collapses aside, the weight of the unexcavated land in Regio V put the adjacent excavated area at risk by exerting immense pressure on exposed walls, some of which date to the first or second century B.C. The fragile escarpment threatened to make a ruin of the ruins.

Through a careful combination of archeology and engineering, the escarpment has been reshaped into a more gradual slope, with an exposed surface of rocky fragments secured by sturdy mesh. In order to lessen the gradient, it has been necessary to unearth a small area of previously buried streets and structures. In recent decades, most archeological excavations at Pompeii have been of layers that predated the first-century city—digging down to reveal, for example, that several of the town’s temples were built on structures that dated to the sixth century B.C. The new excavations in Regio V—conducted with the latest archeological methods, and an up-to-the-minute scholarly focus on such issues as class and gender—have yielded powerful insights into how Pompeii’s final residents lived and died. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, a professor emeritus at Cambridge University and an authority on the city, told me, “You only have to excavate a tiny amount in Pompeii to come up with dramatic discoveries. It’s always spectacular.”

My guide to the restorations of Regio V was Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who this past February was appointed the director of the Archeological Park of Pompeii. Forty years old, the German-born Zuchtriegel was formerly the director of the archeological site at Paestum, forty-odd miles south of Pompeii. As we walked around Regio V, he deftly navigated the uneven roads and talked about ongoing work: “We are not going to excavate just for the sake of excavating. It would be very problematic, and somehow irresponsible.” However, in the course of stabilizing this stretch of the boundary, in 2019, archeologists realized that they had come upon a structure worthy of a full excavation: a thermopolium, or snack bar, which was situated just across the street from the House of the Silver Wedding, as if the Frick mansion were cheek by jowl with a Gray’s Papaya.

The thermopolium, which opened to visitors in August, is a delight. A masonry counter is decorated with expertly rendered and still vivid images: a fanciful depiction of a sea nymph perched on the back of a seahorse; a trompe-l’oeil painting of two strangled ducks on a countertop, ready for the butcher’s knife; a fierce-looking dog on a leash. The unfaded colors—coral red for the webbed feet of the pitiful ducks, shades of copper and russet for the feathers of a buoyant cockerel that has yet to meet the ducks’ fate—are as eye-catching now as they would have been for passersby two millennia ago. (Today, they are protected from the elements and the sunlight by glass.) Another panel, bordered in black, is among Pompeii’s most self-referential art works: a representation of a snack bar, with the earthenware vessels known as amphorae stacked against a counter laden with pots of food. A figure—perhaps the snack bar’s proprietor—bustles in the background. The effect is similar to that of a diner owner who displays a blown-up selfie on the wall behind his cash register.

It turns out that few of Pompeii’s more straitened residents had a place at home to cook. “Rich people had kitchens in their houses, and banquet rooms and gardens,” Zuchtriegel told me, as we walked around the thermopolium. “But most inhabitants didn’t live in such places—they had small apartments, or even one-room flats. During the daytime, their place was a shop or a workshop, and at night the family would just close up the front and sleep there. And, when they could afford it, they would come here and have a warm meal, and take their plate and eat it on the street.”

Several tourists were peering through the glass into the thermopolium, as if they were hungry Pompeiians surveying the fare on offer. Zuchtriegel took a step back, toward a fountain; it would have provided fresh water for drinking, bathing, or cooling down. “It was life on the street, as today we can still see in Naples,” he said.

In 2018, a fresco of Cupid was discovered inside a sumptuous, newly excavated villa that has been named the House of the Garden. Photograph by Carlo Hermann/Getty

The thermopolium on the Vicolo delle Nozze d’Argento is far from unique—through the centuries, about eighty such establishments have been identified in Pompeii. But archeological science is now more evolved, Zuchtriegel told me, and at the new site scholars “can use modern technologies and methodologies to analyze what was inside the pots.” Fragments of duck bone were discovered in one of the containers, which are known as dolia, suggesting that the paintings of ducks served not just as decoration but as advertising. In other dolia, scholars found traces of cooked pig; what appears to be a stew of sheep, fish, and land snails; and crushed fava beans. A book of recipes attributed to Apicius, a celebrated Roman gourmet from the first century A.D., explains that “bean meal” can be used to clarify the color and flavor of wine.

These near-invisible remains of foodstuffs do not just provide information about the diet of Pompeii’s working classes. According to Sophie Hay, a British archeologist who has worked extensively at Pompeii, they also shed new light on the rhythms of civic life. “Up until this bar was excavated, people who study these things have gone around believing that the dolia contained only dry foodstuffs,” she told me. “There are Roman laws that said bars shouldn’t serve this kind of warm food, like hot meat, so we’ve been guided by the classical sources. Then, suddenly, there is this one bar that is definitely serving hot food. And is it the only bar in the Roman world to have done this? Unlikely. So that is huge.” A new story appears to be emerging from the lapilli: of a cunning bar owner who reckons that an authority from distant Rome isn’t likely to shut down his operation, or who is confident that the local authorities—the kind of Pompeiians who live in grand houses—will turn a blind eye to an illegal takeout business that keeps their less affluent neighbors fed with cheap but tasty fish-and-snail soup.

A decade or so ago, a different story about the walls of Pompeii prevailed—that they were crumbling from neglect and from the ineptitude of the site’s custodians. In late 2010, a stone building known as the House of the Gladiators imploded after heavy rains, severely damaging valuable frescoes inside. That disaster was followed by the collapse elsewhere in the city of several other walls. The media responded with a wave of alarmed stories; a typical headline, from National Geographic, asked, “pompeii is crumbling—can it be saved?” Italy’s President at the time, Giorgio Napolitano, declared the condition of Pompeii “a shame for Italy.” Pompeii was also afflicted with human corruption, with the Camorra—the Neapolitan Mafia—exerting influence over its custodial ranks and on the local businesses that catered to the 2.3 million tourists who visited annually. In 2012, the European Union intervened, underwriting the Great Pompeii Project, which offered a hundred and forty million dollars to Pompeii for conservation and restoration.

Despite this narrative of decline—much of which presumed that Italy was unwilling, or unable, to take care of its greatest asset, its cultural patrimony—the deterioration at Pompeii was inevitable. In some instances, what had given way and caused walls to crumble were not bricks laid by ancient Romans but concrete restorations carried out after the Second World War, during which Pompeii was assaulted by Allied forces who mistook corrugated-metal roofs covering excavation sites for Nazi barracks. Mary Beard, a professor at Cambridge University who is among the Anglophone world’s best-known interpreters of Roman history, told me, “The fate of Pompeii is quite mythologized, and has become a shorthand symbol for lots of other issues in heritage management. The P.R. used to be ‘Well, we can’t even keep Pompeii up, the place is falling down, it’s a terrible disgrace.’ Of course the place is falling down—it’s a ruin. There are totally unreasonable expectations of what Pompeii can be, and how it can be preserved.”

In 2014, the archeologist Massimo Osanna was appointed director of Pompeii, and he immediately launched an effort to restore confidence in the future of the ancient past. Sophie Hay told me, “I went to Pompeii shortly after Osanna got the job, and after five minutes on the site with him I got the idea of where he was going. He walked down the main street, the Via dell’Abbondanza, and there was all this horrible plastic netting in the doorways of buildings, the sort used on building sites to keep people out.” The site looked bandaged and bruised. “He was absolutely horrified—he called people over who were working there and said, ‘Can’t we just remove all of this?’ ” Osanna made Pompeii more inviting to visitors, and by 2019 their numbers had swollen to four million annually. That year, the House of the Gladiators reopened to the public after a reconstruction of its damaged frescoes, becoming a symbol not of Pompeii’s decline but of its renewed vitality.

Meanwhile, the charismatic Osanna won over the press by trumpeting discoveries resulting from the restoration work in Regio V. “He was absolutely brilliant at it,” Beard told me. “Without actually doing any major excavation, he gave a series of carefully timed bits of good news.” A headless male skeleton was discovered at a crossroads next to the House of the Silver Wedding, as was a huge block of stone, which lay, almost cartoonishly, right where the skull should have been. (The gruesome suggestion that the man had been decapitated was overturned by later analysis, which suggested that he had been suffocated by the pyroclastic flow—superheated rock, ash, and gases that rushed down Vesuvius’s flank.) In a house that had been buried beneath a swath of rough land, a fresco depicting the god Priapus weighing his oversized member on a scale was uncovered. The press hailed the new discoveries, and in 2020 Osanna was named director general of Italy’s state-run museums.

One day during my visit to Pompeii, I was wandering alone when I came upon the house with the Priapus, which is around the corner from the House of the Silver Wedding, on the Via del Vesuvio. The fresco of the erect god was in the entrance hall. Phallic imagery was common in Pompeii, and according to scholars such images were usually seen as symbols of good luck, rather than of ostentatious lewdness. It would have been interesting to know whether Priapus’ facial expression was one of pride or discomfort, but the fresco was missing the disk-shaped area where his head had once been. In a nearby room, a better-preserved painting depicted the mythical story of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus assumes the form of a bird and copulates with a Spartan queen. After archeologists discovered the painting, in late 2018, and peeled back its curtain of gray, crumbly lapilli with scalpels, Osanna unveiled it to the public by describing the “pronounced sensuality” of Leda, who, he declared, was “welcoming the swan into her lap.” Examining the painting, I decided that Leda could just as easily be said to have an expression of trepidation, even panic.

Archeologists have since excavated the room to which the painting belonged: a small, richly decorated chamber featuring wall panels festooned with floral motifs. The lower half of the walls were painted in the rich red color indelibly associated with Pompeii. This look is consistent with what historians have classified as the city’s Fourth Style, which was prevalent in the years immediately before the cataclysm. The décor—now nearly two thousand years old—had been freshly installed when the volcano exploded.

In 2019, archeologists realized that they had come upon a structure worthy of a full excavation: a thermopolium, or snack bar, replete with still vivid paintings and amphorae. Photograph by Patrick Zachmann/Magnum

Since the remains of Pompeii and the other ancient Roman settlements inundated by Vesuvius first came to light, some three hundred years ago, discovery has often gone hand in hand with destruction. An eighteenth-century visitor to the site of Herculaneum described the methods used by the workmen under the command of Roque Joachim Alcubierre, the artillery engineer who had been appointed to oversee the excavation by the Bourbon monarchy then ruling the Kingdom of Naples. Unlike Pompeii, Herculaneum was not blanketed with ash and pumice; it was buried only by a series of pyroclastic flows, which hardened into a layer of deep rock, through which workmen could dig narrow tunnels only with great difficulty.

The workmen of that era, upon finding a mansion or other building, would extract any objects of obvious value, such as marble statues, bronze lamps, and decorative mosaics, without taking note of their location or of the architectural context. Because of the treacherous conditions—among them, inadequate light and air—workmen did not trouble to excavate doors. They broke through walls to get from one room to another, regardless of what decorations in the adjoining room they might be destroying. At Pompeii, it is not uncommon to see a wall with a hole smashed through it, including the wall perpendicular to the Leda and the Swan, where another painting has been partially destroyed—the handiwork of heedless laborers in centuries past, who dug down and rooted around through the ash and lapilli, which is shallower and easier to penetrate than the rock of Herculaneum.

Alcubierre operated with barbaric efficiency, especially when it came to wall paintings that his workers hacked off from their brick underpinnings. When a painting was deemed insufficiently different from those already unearthed, workmen pulverized it underground. These excavations were focussed on finding masterpieces to augment royal or aristocratic collections, rather than on discovering the mundane objects of everyday life—or material evidence of the complexities of Roman social structures. Today’s archeologists are happy to retrieve beautiful objects, but they are also intent on finding clues that will help them better understand how slavery functioned in the Roman world, or how women could acquire power.

Even the best-intentioned archeologists are only as good as their methodologies, and the primitive approaches of eighteenth-century pioneers are sometimes enough to make a modern observer shudder. In the seventeen-fifties, a large villa near Herculaneum was discovered, and archeologists were so transfixed by its handsome courtyards and garden that they barely registered the lumps of blackened charcoal that workmen were tossing aside. Many had crumbled before the lumps were belatedly identified as charred scrolls of papyrus. Did they record any lost works of antiquity? The first efforts to render the scrolls legible—by soaking them in mercury, or dunking them in boiling water—resulted in the scrolls turning to dust or mush. In a potent example of the advantage of waiting a few hundred years for technological advances to occur, scientists are now hoping to develop techniques for reading carbonized scrolls virtually, using microscopic-imaging tools devised for use in the drug and chemical industries.

Archeological techniques became more sophisticated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and at Pompeii there was a breathtaking innovation. Preserved in the compacted ash were numerous oddly shaped holes, and artisans made plaster casts of these cavities, thereby creating vivid representations of the city’s residents in their final moments: writhing helplessly on the ground, seeking to protect a loved one from the rain of ash. But Pompeii’s rising popularity as a tourist destination paradoxically contributed to the site’s erasure. Charles Dickens, who visited in 1844, writes, in “Little Dorrit,” about a family of tourists who made off with pocketed fragments—“morsels of tessellated pavement . . . like petrified minced veal.”

Less than a century after Dickens’s visit, much of the buried city had been unearthed, largely under the watch of Amedeo Maiuri, Pompeii’s director from 1924 to 1961. At the bidding of Mussolini, who sought to connect the grandeur of ancient Rome with the triumphs of contemporary Italy, Maiuri significantly accelerated the pace of excavation, exhuming residential areas of the city, and also the buildings that lined the Via dell’Abbondanza. The scale of activity made it hard to protect the site from weeds and looters. But experts praise Maiuri for having a scholarly interest not only in grand houses but also in the simpler structures—workshops, brothels, public latrines—that have increasingly become a focus of Pompeii scholars.

About a third of Pompeii has yet to be excavated; the consensus among scholars is that this remainder should be left for future archeologists, and their presumably more sophisticated technologies. Photograph by Patrick Zachmann/Magnum

Astonishingly, the new excavations in Regio V have prompted historians to reconsider one of the fundamental facts they thought they knew about Pompeii: the date of the eruption. In Pliny the Younger’s first-person account, he writes that the disaster occurred on August 24th. But, in a house down the street from the newly discovered thermopolium, archeologists have found a wall bearing the charcoal inscription of a date: the Roman equivalent of October 17th. Though the inscription doesn’t include a year, many scholars suspect that it dates from 79 A.D. Paul Roberts, a Pompeii scholar at the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford University, told me, “Charcoal doesn’t tend to hang around too long. I am quite convinced that this was put on the wall not long before it was buried.” The inscription backs up a theory that another former director of Pompeii, Grete Stefani, proposed in 2006: that the correct eruption date was late October. Stefani based her argument on an array of archeological evidence, including the discovery of fruit that would have been out of season in August.

The charcoal marking is in a newly excavated residence that has been named the House of the Garden, because it once featured a lovely, verdant courtyard surrounded by a low wall decorated with images of plants. I visited it not long before the site closed for the day, when the declining sun was casting slanted light over Pompeii’s largely emptied streets, tinting the clouds beyond Vesuvius a gorgeous gold-pink. The inscription, at eye level on a wall, had a makeshift shield propped in front of it, protecting it from light damage. When a custodian removed the shield to show me the writing, I found it both indecipherable and disconcertingly familiar—it was the jotting of someone keeping track of housekeeping, just as I might use a whiteboard calendar to note a forthcoming appointment with the dentist.

The other rooms of the mansion were sumptuous, especially one in which a round fresco of a woman’s face—handsome, with deep-set eyes and a long, straight nose—looked out from a wall. Perhaps it was a portrait of the lady of the house. During the excavation of the mansion, a horrifying scene had been found: the skeletons of men, women, and children who had sought refuge in an inner room of the house, trying to shield themselves from the ash, the heat, and the gases spewed by the volcano. In the same building, archeologists discovered a box filled with amulets: figurines, phalluses, and engraved beads. In announcing the find, Massimo Osanna, ever the showman, had called it a “sorcerers’ treasure trove,” noting that the items contained no gold and therefore might have belonged to a servant or an enslaved person. Such items were commonly associated with women, Osanna had noted, and might have been worn as charms against bad luck.

Other scholars have warned that the suggestion of a sorcerer, or sorceress, verges on embellishment, given the paucity of material evidence. The contents of the box are now displayed in the Pompeii museum, with no mention of a sorcerer in the accompanying text. Yet, as the daylight dwindled in Pompeii, it was tempting to follow Osanna’s lead and imagine the scene: terrified members of the household clutching one another, their social differences levelled by disaster, as a Pompeiian who believed in dark magic made unavailing imprecations against unrelenting gods. My mystical vision evaporated, however, after the mansion’s custodian showed me another inscription, which had been scratched into the lintel of the house’s external doorway. It read “Leporis fellas”: “Leporis sucks dick.”

When Zuchtriegel, the current Pompeii director, was overseeing the site at Paestum, where three Greek temples have stood since the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., he made a number of innovations. Visitors were invited to watch ongoing excavations, and the storerooms inside the site’s museum were opened for public perusal.

Zuchtriegel told me that, in his leadership role at Pompeii, he intends to continue embracing new approaches. As we walked along the Via Stabiana, with its narrow, elevated sidewalks that helped Pompeii’s residents skirt the muck of its streets, he emphasized that archeology “is a field that is very much evolving, thanks to new discoveries and methodologies, but also thanks to new questions.” He went on, “Today, we have a much broader view of ancient society. Archeology started as a field dominated by male, upper-class, European, white scholars, and noblemen and connoisseurs, and this very much conditioned archeological research, and what people were interested in. Now, thanks to new perspectives—post-colonial studies, and gender studies, and feminism—we have a really different perspective on antiquity.”

Among the discoveries being examined through these new interpretative lenses was the first significant find announced under Zuchtriegel’s tenure: the remains of a man identified as Marcus Venerius Secundio. The tomb was found not in Regio V but east of Pompeii, where a necropolis had been unearthed close to one of the city gates. Unusually for an adult burial, the deceased had been embalmed rather than cremated, and the body was so well preserved that hair and even part of an ear were intact.

Secundio, Zuchtriegel explained, was a freedman, having formerly been a public slave—essentially, a municipal worker owned by the city. “Of course, nobody wanted to be a slave—it was very humiliating to be the property of someone,” Zuchtriegel said. “On the other hand, if you were a very poor freedman you were less well off than a household slave, some of whom were educators of the children of rich people, or secretaries who were part of the team that carried on the business of the owner.” It is unknown how Secundio gained his freedom, but historical records indicate that a public slave could raise funds to buy himself out of servitude. Evidently, Secundio ascended within Pompeiian society, becoming an augustalis, or a priest in the imperial cult—one of the few high-ranking positions open to men who were not freeborn. According to the funerary inscription on his tomb, Secundio was a patron of the arts, paying for ludi—musical or theatrical events that were performed in Latin and, significantly, in Greek. “This is the first time we have this direct evidence of Greek plays in Pompeii,” Zuchtriegel told me. Scholars had hypothesized, based on evidence in wall paintings and graffiti, that such events took place, but the inscription provides exciting confirmation.

In the decades before the eruption of Vesuvius, Zuchtriegel went on, there was a fashion in the Roman Empire for Greek-language performance, which was established by the emperor Nero, who ruled from 54 to 68 A.D., and who fancied himself not just an aficionado of Greek drama and song but also a performer. (According to the historian Suetonius, Nero “made his début” as a singer in Naples, so enjoying himself onstage that he ignored the rumblings of an earthquake in order to finish his performance.) Nero’s reputation as a tyrant has lately been reconsidered by scholars, and the evidence of Greek-language ludi in Pompeii buttresses the revised image of the Emperor as a popular leader; it also underscores the extent to which even a provincial city like Pompeii was influenced by the cultural fashions of the capital. “Pompeii and Campania had this really multicultural environment,” Zuchtriegel said. “People came from the Eastern Mediterranean, and there were the old Greek colonies at Naples and Paestum. We have evidence of Jewish people here at Pompeii.” (Graffiti found in the city cite individuals with the names Sarah, Martha, and Ephraim.)

Zuchtriegel told me that, as director, he intended to build on Osanna’s work, a decade after the rescue operation of the Great Pompeii Project was initiated. Other damaged fringes of Regio V are to be shored up, and new, limited excavations are to take place in another district, Regio IX. Similarly, work is continuing to protect areas outside the gates of Pompeii which have remained vulnerable to the incursion of illegal diggers. Scholars have made various new discoveries in these outlying areas, such as the remains of a horse that died during the eruption; the cavity formed in the rubble by the horse’s body has now been cast in plaster. Earlier this month, Zuchtriegel announced the discovery of slave quarters: a humble room, equipped with three wooden beds and amphorae stacked in a corner. “It is certainly one of the most exciting discoveries during my life as an archeologist, even without the presence of great ‘treasures,’ ” Zuchtriegel said. “The true treasure here is the human experience, in this case of the most vulnerable members of ancient society.”

But Zuchtriegel is likely to be less hyperbolic in his promotion than Osanna sometimes sought to be. I asked him how he could make preservation as exciting as discovery. He paused, then said, “Well, it doesn’t have to be so exciting. But we have to do it, anyway. I think what Massimo showed in these years is that excavation, research, and preservation are not opposites. As we see with the thermopolium, this was an excavation that had as a primary goal to preserve the conservation of the site.” He went on, “It’s very important to explain that archeology is very complex—from the excavation to the restoration to the exhibition, analysis, publication, and study. It’s important to make this transparent, and share it with the public, so that people understand that archeology is not about treasures and precious objects—that’s only a small part. It’s really about reconstructing the life of people in the distant past.”

Zuchtriegel and I wandered over to a section of the city that was closed to visitors. A custodian holding a bunch of keys seemed on the verge of warning us off when he recognized his relatively new boss. We then entered another of Pompeii’s grand mansions, the house of Maximus Obellius Firmus, one of the city’s most prominent citizens in the period before the eruption. This mansion also demonstrated the Pompeiian fascination with Greek culture, Zuchtriegel explained. An interior garden was surrounded by a peristyle—a rectangular perimeter of covered columns—which was popular in classical Greece. “There is an attempt to transform a traditional Roman house into a Greek space,” Zuchtriegel said. “You could be here in the middle of Pompeii, and feel like you were in a different space.”

He encouraged me to look upward. A restored rafter was serving as a perch for a few pigeons, whose droppings are especially damaging to wall paintings and stucco. Zuchtriegel had introduced a program whereby trained hawks sweep the ruins, frightening off the pigeons. “I did the same in Paestum,” he said. “You can reduce the pigeon population by eighty-five to ninety per cent!”

One of the challenges facing any director of Pompeii is coping with the tourists who flock, like pigeons, to explore the ruins. As Italy reopens for both domestic and international tourism, crowds are again lining up to enter Pompeii’s more celebrated locations, including the street-corner brothel in which partitioned chambers equipped with masonry beds are decorated with obscene wall paintings—an X-rated version of the dead ducks painted on the counter of the thermopolium in Regio V. A feminist interpretation of the practice of sex work, and its role in Pompeiian society, has not yet been incorporated at the site. An official guide who showed me around the city one day regaled me uncritically with the anecdote, found in the satires of the poet Juvenal, that Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius, liked to moonlight in a brothel—a story that Mary Beard and other contemporary critics view with a witheringly skeptical eye.

Counterintuitively, one of Zuchtriegel’s goals as director of Pompeii is to persuade visitors to go elsewhere—to the ruins of Herculaneum and to other, smaller sites that lie in the shadow of Vesuvius. One day, I got off the Circumvesuviana at Torre Annunziata Oplonti, and walked from the station for ten minutes through the town’s steep, scruffy streets to reach a site known as the Villa Poppaea—once a luxurious suburban domicile with views of the islands of Ischia and Capri. The villa gets its name from Nero’s second wife, Poppaea Sabina, whose family is believed to have come from Pompeii; it is thought to have been her country residence.

The site had just opened for the day, and I had it to myself as I descended to the 79 A.D. level and walked through a garden, where what looked like carbonized tree stumps remained in the ground. The villa, a sprawling complex of reception rooms and gardens and walkways which dates to the first century B.C., was stunning. First rediscovered at the end of the fifteenth century, when engineers were digging a canal, it was partially excavated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then more fully exposed in the late twentieth century. Archeologists cleared away pumice and ash, and in rooms edging a garden they uncovered magnificent frescoes of the birds and plants that appear to have once flourished there. A large, decorated peristyle surrounded another garden: Greek-style living at its finest.

For all the interest offered by the new discoveries of the modes of everyday living at Pompeii—with its snail stews and its Greek theatrics—an empty, unfamiliar, luxurious villa retains an irresistible allure. The grandeur of the Villa Poppaea brought to mind images of an élite class of individuals who thought themselves safely removed from the grubbing hardships endured by the poor, but whose vast wealth provided them with no protection from a titanic natural disaster. At the eastern perimeter of the site, there was a feature to stir the envy of a Silicon Valley plutocrat: a swimming pool more than sixty metres in length. It was filled with weeds and gravel now, but in 79 A.D. it would have been edged by lavishly decorated salons and gardens—and it was easy to imagine Roman aristocrats lounging around a glittering pool, gazing across the sea with the dormant mountain at their backs, confident that the world was—and always would be—theirs to enjoy. ♦

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[thorntonkrell-blog-blog]

RECAP 5

Yeah, it's me Krell again. I'm here with another rivulet recap in case ya missed it when Riv returned with Savannah on his mind in the wake, a quest ostensibly set upon the spectral trail which culminated in the discovery of a more enduring apparition: charm.

Oh Savannah.

Savannah, a city steeped in the echoes of history, where the specter of Sherman's forbearance casts its long shadow, evoking a time when the allure of the city stayed the hand of destruction. Yes, Ice sought ghosts, but what he unearthed was a charm as ancient as the cobblestone streets and as timeless as the whispering Spanish moss.

His sojourn, ostensibly to honor Mary's birthday and perhaps glimpse the ethereal, led him to the famed Pirate House, where the spirits of kidnapped buccaneers and smuggled slaves past still roam. Yet it was not the phantasms that captivated Ice. It was the living residents of Savannah themselves their charm so ingrained, it seemed almost mechanical, as if programmed by some unseen hand.

Strolling through the squares, under the canopy of Spanish moss, Ice found himself drawn to St. Joseph's Cathedral, its vaulted ceilings and sublime symmetry a balm for the soul. In its hallowed halls, he felt the weight of history mingling with the promise of redemption, a testament to the enduring power of faith and community.

Yet, Savannah's charm is not without its shadows, for carved into the cobblestones of its history lies the stain of slavery, a legacy that still echoes through the streets and squares. But even in the face of such darkness, there is light to be found, for in acknowledging the sins of the past, we pave the way for a more enlightened future as we ask for forgiveness from those upon whom we have trespassed

And so, as the Savannah River flows inexorably towards the sea, we are reminded that time, like charm, is a fluid thing, measured not in seconds or minutes, but in moments. Moments of love, of pain, of gratitude, humility, and forgiveness. It is in these moments that we find the true essence of charm, for it is not simply a product of circumstance, but a choice—a choice to embrace the past, to learn from it, and to strive towards a more gracious future.

In Savannah, Ice found not just a city, but a crucible of charm, where the forces of history and humanity converge in a dance as old as time itself. And as he bid farewell to its storied streets, we at Riversend carry with us not just his memories, but a newfound appreciation for the power of charm to heal, to inspire, and to transform as we ponder the following questions:

What is the significance of moments in our lives, and how do they shape our understanding of the world around us? How do moments of realization and introspection contribute to personal growth and transformation? In what ways do moments of love, pain, and revelation intersect with the broader narrative of Savannah's history and community? How does momentum, both physical and metaphorical, influence our perception of time and motion? What role do moments of gratitude, humility, guilt, and forgiveness play in propelling us forward on our spiritual journey?

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