The Maelstrom And The Depths Beyond

Did you want to read about the morning after a weird one night stand? I wrote almost a thousand words about one, so you can if you want. Content warning for the really obvious shit like we're out here discussing sex, so if you aren't about that you've been warned. Nothing explicit though.

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Kavsa is already awake when you open your eyes in the dark of the morning, gazing up at the ceiling of his cell, warm body steeped in the smell of wine and sex. It is unclear whether this was a good idea, or at what point you decided it was for that matter. He's striking, a fact that was supposed to stay inside your head but has slipped out into reality somewhere between whatever lost line of thought led to your unstable head on his arm and your fingers intertwined. Or maybe it was the moment you all but admitted you could feel his erection. That was probably the turning point. It felt very natural at the time. 

Now you lay against him and make small talk until one of you figures out how to broach a discussion of what has transpired. You miss your god. This feels almost like a crime, though you cannot name a victim. He turns to hold you, hand against the small of your back. His hands are warm and strong and gentle except where the metal of his rings brushes cool against your skin. "Do you want to stop?" No, you want to be held. You want the security, the connection, the care those hands show you. If only your bodies fit together right. If only it was Iokhar asking in jest, already knowing the answer.

You are aware this is a common thing amongst soldiers and sailors and votaries all. Sex born of close quarters, isolation, and raw animal needs. What the Adrari will not condone in the household they make no effort to regulate in war camps. Desire does not bow to regulation in a pressure cooker. Except yours. You make choices. (Everyone makes choices, your teachings chide you.) Your needs are governed by discipline, and where they are not special and joyous you can handle them yourself.

Except here is Kavsa, featured in your lonely fantasies primarily for his proximity and handsome Kerweni features. Intense, honorable, always working Kavsa. He is a good man. Kind, steady. Somewhere in your gut you feel he deserves better than this. You lay out your motives and he admires you. "Remarkable woman," he calls you. Disclosure of your curse is met with almost heartbreaking concern in his rough voice. Is this friendship or has intimacy created something new and stranger? You do not love him.

When you are sixteen you needle the quiet thoughtful boy who will someday be your husband with questions you don't quite actually mean. He has arrived later to religious schooling than your local peers, or even many of the ones from more distant communities, but he thinks deeply and is usually right when he speaks at all. He also, to your frustration, refuses to be drawn into argument or debate. He asks sharp questions but will not present his own ideas until they are ironclad. Jean has no issue making friends but has very few. You decide to become one of them and pry him open like a clam to expose the soft world beneath his carefully considered exterior. When you are nineteen you will kiss him, because if Jean has to make the first move you suspect you will still be mutually pining at the unimaginable age of twenty-five. 

New birds begin to join the morning chorus. If Kavsa is also thinking of truer lovers he shows no sign of it. You should know better than to compare your god to a man's dead wife, but you've done it anyway and he understands. If only you had faith prayer would be heard in these circumstances, these words--your questions, your desire--should be for Iokhar. Kavsa does not have Iokhar's broad chest and powerful build, but you trace the features he does have anyway, desire and intimacy intermingling with the dissonance. 

In the early days of your first full season with your godly lover you bask in afterglow and ask him when he knew. "Before you did, I imagine. But it was hardly the strangest of your tells. And not a problem, alone." You are not surprised to learn you are hardly the first colleague to find him attractive. You shouldn't be surprised to learn that he can feel your arousal. You had considered the possibility and found it alluring in the soft unserious way you had considered all of your attraction until the moment it became real. "And how long have you known for yourself?" you ask, smiling. "Longer than responsible," he answers. "But," he turns to hold your gaze. "When it was serious you knew immediately."

You fuck Kavsa again in the frail gray before the dawn, sober and fully responsible for your actions. You want it, and he knows you can feel his wants. It is not serious, but you are both living in the pressure cooker. You play for normalcy, but with the gentle out of the approaching dawn he declines to tell you if he was in love with the friend he last sought this from, and you leave with a deep ambivalence. You do not want Kavsa to love you. This pleasure is not special or joyous. It is raw desire and holding tight to what is warm and present and alive in this broken place. As with many things of late, you wish you could discuss it with Iokhar, but you cannot and if only one prayer of many makes it to his ears it would be wrong for it to be this.

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I live in a cool reality where my DM is not uncomfortable with either my writing about or posting D&D related sexual content involving NPCs. It is still a weird feeling thing to do, so also have a bunch of vague thoughts.

I feel a little weird about this being the first instance of Kaijja writing that's getting posted. It's definitely not the first one I've written. Maybe I'll post the stuff I feel less weird about at some point. I think it's stronger writing. But this is the one that's relevant to this particular piece of art so this is the one you get.

Engaging with sexuality (in the horniness direction as opposed to romance) is new and novel and interesting and also I live between hi I'm ace and fluster at the speed of fucking light and hi this character is extremely comfortable with this topic and I am figuring it out.

Along the lines of contrast between the character and the human person: It's interesting writing a person who naturally trends monogamous coming out of a culture where several person relationships are pretty normative and so there's no cultural taboo against doing this thing. Script flipping and all that. This vaguely vibes relationship violation to Kaijja. It's not. She could full ass get married to Kavsa and as long as Iokhar was properly informed and introduced and all that shit it would be fine. It's certainly fully within Iokhar's rights to get married to someone else and it probably wouldn't even bother her that much (though he's a god and there are limits to the amount of ownership one can reasonably exert over a creature that's twenty times your age with all kinds of divine obligations). But this feels weird for Kaijja and she can't use the structure of monogamy to process that both because that's explicitly not what her relationship is (even though to my knowledge neither she nor Iokhar has other partners at the moment) and because there's a little bit of a cultural superiority thing here, even though she probably wouldn't explicitly think of it as such. Her people's neighbors are much more conservative about sexual behavior and family structure. We're Better than hangups about how people do that stuff. There must be some Other reason this feels weird.

Part of the flesh magic Kaijja is copying from Iokhar is a kind of proprioception for other people's bodies if they're close enough. Mechanically in combat this is the Blind Fighting fighting style. I spend altogether too much time thinking about it as an element of stuff like insight proficiency though. A really big element of this character's concept was a human trying to engage with something fundamentally inhuman on its terms, and the kind of blending of the god's perception of reality into the person's at the edges as a result. I tend to write that kind of stuff reasonably euphemistically when I'm not explicitly going for embracing the body horror of it, but it's very There.