first option is one of the worst timeline alive!iphigenias i think. every beat of her arc with eris is diametrically opposed to how she is with tamlin in renascence. because she’s known (of) eris so long before he intervenes and reveals their bond, his saving her has none of the inherent Goodness that endears her to tamlin. instead, it’s—how could you have known we were mates and let this happen to me for so long? she gets so incredibly bitter and probably more than a little suicidal to know she wasn’t worth saving sooner, which manifests not as those overly careful fear responses to keep her alive but now as intentionally volatile responses to tempt death. her tongue is sharp. her emotions are weaponized. every revelation about what happened to her is shared with intent to hurt eris like he let her be hurt. she takes all her anger with beron out on eris. also ! she knows eris prefers maidens. which she is not. because he let her be made into a whore. which she would throw in his face All The Time

and for eris, who knows love to be pain, who has learned he’s deserving of blame and violence and mistreatment, who is indeed culpable in this situation, who sees echoes of his mother’s face every time iphigenia lashes at him—oof! big oof! real big oof!!! worst part? he’s fuckin HORNY about it all. she is beautiful and vicious and hits such a good masochistic spot for him. one night iphigenia, drunk and wanting to hurt him, the wood of the forest house rotting all around her, lashes out at him. you will never be your father; you pale in comparison to him. eris snatching up her jaw. iphigenia thinking—there he is. finally. (because he hasn’t laid hand to her for pleasure nor punishment, not since he bedded her on their mating night.) but eris is just viscerally lustful because not only is she trying to hurt him but in her attempt to do so she actually ?? comforts him. cue FUCKNASTY TORRID SEX!!!!! which is the only way he subsequently knows how to feel connected to her. which makes her spiral out about being just a whore to him. it’s very not good

second option is better ! he intervenes quickly, so she has more affection for him from the outset. in this scenario, the antagonism is more subtle. she looks like loa; he looks like beron. each of them looks away from the other for what they see of people who mistreated them, and that leads to lots of misunderstandings/small hurts between them. but always, iphigenia is uniquely suited to see eris—she knows all of beron’s cruelty, all of his little tells, all of his expressions and mannerisms, and so anything she sees outside of that in eris is absolutely glaring. some of it is loa that she sees, (who she uhhh does also hate,) but there are other elements to him too. little shards of who eris really is as himself. loyal. fiercely protective. shrewd beyond his years. a man of action, even if that action is hidden behind cutting word. angry, so angry, so quick to lash with his tongue but never violent with her. he’s even sad beneath, if she cares to look.

eris feels immense guilt for what beron did/what he couldn’t prevent beron from doing + assumes she sees only beron in him. i really like the thought of eris trying to make this up to her and do right by her by doing away with the bed slave system in autumn as a whole, thinking it’ll be a sweeping gesture of his care for her—but iphigenia becomes distraught. first time he actually sees her cry. she always felt a cut above the rest, being favored of the high lord, and this means that her mate sees her as any other whore. she doesn’t want justice; she wants revenge. she doesn’t say it outright, but the way she barbs at him is telling. eris is massively offput by this, but only for as long as it takes him to resonate with it—for he was abused by beron, too. he knows her anger. that stuns him. he knows her anger, and so she must know his. he knows what has alleviated it for him in the past, if only for a while: blood, violence, power restored. so he finds the males who brought her to the forest house and presents their slow, methodical torture to her like a bouquet. she’s barely said a word to him since he told her about the abolishment, and he has to coax her into accompanying him.

but when she sees them.,,,,,,.,.iphigenia, even with tamlin, has vast propensity for violence/revenge when she feels it’s deserving. so i mean she is literally bricked up over this gesture it’s the first time erenia have that like . enthusiastic, carnal, lost in the sauce sex. possibly in an empty cell of the dungeons. they’ve had sex of course, but this is Different. iphigenia feels seen and loved and cared for. properly protected. eris feels like he’s done something right between them—and now that he knows how best to do that for her, he can continue doing it. he teaches her not how to be soft and earnest like tamlin does but instead how to use her mistruths as weapon rather than defense. safe in the iron-grip protection of him, she’s free to be the autumn lady she should have been aka Maximum Cunt and Entitlement. she’s lying for fun. she’s got the nobility wrapped around her little finger. she’s saying everything to helion and loa that eris holds back, then she’s getting fucked to the gods because don’t ever, ever speak to my mother like that but also do that again you’re so fucking sexy i love you so bad

they come to complement each other, but beron and loa are always imposed over them in some capacity. eris does look like and talk like and make decisions like beron, and sometimes it freezes iphigenia up; that crushes eris—reactivates that I’m My Father wound. sometimes iphigenia says something harsh or gentle and eris grows distant and it’s because he envisions his mother saying it to him. consistently, iphigenia has complex about not being a good enough lady of autumn, not like his mother, who the commonfolk all saw as their mother—she is no mother; she is just a whore. you will not say that of yourself, he tells her. and why shouldn’t i, when it is the truth? and god bless em when they do have children together they’re each other’s worst parenting nightmares