#kavsa

Summer winds its way through the Issanari, the sun tilting south in its journey from Al Anar to the distant western shores. Your band of votaries mend structures, resolve disputes, carry the news and cure the sick. Dawn prayer comes early and sunset prayer late. The child in your belly grows and you administer prayers for safe childbirths and safe sex with special reverence for the stories and scripture. From the way you speak of it Jean would think the petitioner saints invented motherhood. You accuse him of taking you literally, which he is, and he accuses you of attempting poetry, which you are. You imagine leaving your daughter summers of poems, gathering a collection of fleeting moments to remember and show her when she has her first child. This was what it was like. This was you.

You sit together amidst the scattered light beneath the trees, resting your tired body while somewhere across the golden grass Tanvi waters the quards. Jean has looped an arm around your waist, fingers lightly touching your belly as he softly enumerates all the work he looks forward to suffering at your side and things he cannot wait to show the child within. 

"Give me some time to finish growing the little one first, hmm?" You quirk your lips at him and he pulls you to the side until your head rests in his lap. You reposition to lay on your back and look up at him, still holding his hand. "What are we going to name her?"

"Her?" He smiles warmly. "How do you know it's a girl?"

"I was visited by Saint Adja herself, she told me so in a dream." You laugh together at the ridiculousness of presuming to know the future and imagine your daughter laughing with you. 

Jean no longer wants you to hunt for pests or drive off predators, and you easily relinquish tasks that you never had talent at to begin with. A wyvern harasses a community deep in the northern hills and you tell Jean and Tanvi to make preparations while you ride to ask assistance from the folk you know cultivate the forest upriver. You can feel his relief, but he insists on riding you to the edge of the wood before sending you on your way. More contentious are the tasks you will not relinquish. You don't need to investigate rumors of a demon, he says, you met Shiral's band two days ago, send word and let them handle it. It turns out to be a medial, but Jean is furious with you for leading the ride to meet it. Were it actually a demon you doubt he would have been able to convince it to leave himself. That's not the point, he tells you with uncharacteristic tautness in his voice, you could have been killed. The fact that you could also be killed if your quard spooks and you fall seems unconvincing, as much as the reality that you are, in fact, fine. 

When you descend alongside the Second Son, lightning drawing back into the earth, you return a symbol. When in a month people you have never met speak your name, it will be for this moment and they will not bother to undercut its virtue. The entire rest of your life will be predicated on what you have done today. Jean cannot even look at you. 

Autumn brings storms, but not like this. Lightning shouldn't strike upward, so there's no fight as you curve your path into its shadow, but the silence is tense and worried. As you near the center you can feel the air crackle, sharp and angry against your skin. The quards bleat in agitation as you bring them to a stop in the settlement at the base of the hill, a small collection of wooden structures spread across three dirt roads. Your companions dismount quickly. Tanvi helps you down off your own testy animal and you feel a clip of static as your feet touch the earth. People stand close to the buildings, hum of nervous chatter playing against the cracking thrum of lightning arcing off the hill above. You issue orders quickly. 

"Split up, find out if anyone's hurt. Go." 

Jean hesitates. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to find out what happened." His eyes linger on you, not quite trusting you not to do something foolish and extreme, so you don't tell him what you're going to do. Instead you say "It's fine, love. I'll be careful," and he goes. 

Once both are out of sight, you will slowly climb the hill, lightning arcing between streaks of red earth all around you. You are not nimble under the best of circumstances, but you are not afraid. You can see yourself in your mind's eye, the image of motherhood ascending through crackling purple death for these people, and you know this will only ever happen once. You are too you not to become a story. 

For what it's worth, Tanvi thinks going home was probably a good idea anyway. "You'll have a community there. The three of us could raise the kiddo on the road, but it's harder." She would know. 

"I have stood by while you did terrifying deadly things, but it's not just your life you're risking anymore. He could have killed you both and there would have been nothing either of us could do about it." Anyone but Jean would be shouting right now. Instead his voice is hard and rough, deriving emphasis from speed rather than volume. 

"Folk are safe and a man lives and I am fine," you answer in soothing tones. "I knew I was going to be."

"Kaijja, you could not possibly have known that. Fuck the scripture for one moment, I know you know what gods are. That man is more dangerous than any demon. He could kill you in pique and forget you ever existed. Damnit, you're lucky he didn't kill you by accident!" He has bypassed the argument that you did not know it was a god at all and a demon might not have been so conversational.

"He wasn't going to kill us." You smile. "Ishxaar is powerful and careless and an ass, but he is still a person."

Jean looks at you with despair in his eyes. "People kill each other, Kaijja."

He doesn't seem to be getting the point, so you reiterate. "Look, Jean, I knew. I felt it. It was right and I was right. Call it fate or intuition or whatever you want, but--"

"I call it gambling, and you will stop doing it with our child's life." In fifteen years of knowing each other it is the first time Jean has ever snapped at you, so you comply.

Your mother is thrilled. She cheerfully rearranges her home to accommodate the two of you, enlists you in spinning thread, and chats to you about parenting you and your siblings in exchange for stories from your travels. Your siblings and friends (yours, theirs, your parents'--your parents' home has always been a parade of friends) make or bring you things--clothing outgrown by your little brother's kid, food from the market and the herds, dry bone and scrap wood for your own crafts. Your father delights in feeding the procession. Your siblings adopt Jean into their routines when he is not out in the community doing votary work, and he blooms as he always does with your family. 

For your part you try to handle the transition gracefully, moving from care to transcription work when spending your days on your feet becomes a problem. At some point the people around you refuse to let you walk up to the cathedral to do it and bring the paper and scripture to your parents' home. You grill them for news and draw them into discussions of stories and scripture and natural philosophy. In what is going to become a theme, you do not like putting aside your work no matter how necessary it is for the child that you rest. Stillness has never been your forte, but as everyone will not stop reminding you, your body is currently doing quite a lot of work. You're just going to have to figure out how to let it. 

You lodge another strike against your motherly intuition by joyously welcoming a son, tiny and screaming and dark like his father. Your parents coo over the little boy while you and Jean insist on speaking to the infant like a tiny adult. "Saiif," your sister tells the baby, "Your parents want you to grow up to be the most erudite child in all the land. I think you should disappoint them by fucking off to be a shepherd in the mountains," and laughs when your mother tries to chase her out of the room for swearing at a baby. 

Saiif doesn't particularly like to sleep, much to your household's chagrin, and you often spend nights wandering the dark of the city with Jean and the restless baby, telling the stories of the stars. Your little brother's four-year-old asks his fathers absurd questions about the new cousin with the grave sincerity of a child tasked with helping the adults. The parade of friends through your parents’ home doesn't stop, but now it comes with parenting advice. You are regularly shooed out of your own home to work or pray or spend some time together. Often, you talk about Saiif anyway. Increasingly, you return to your work.

And then one day during one of your little exiles Mirjat finds you at the bath house, soaking in the warm waters. She joins you in the water and, after a bit of chat, your old mentor informs you that the Herald to Iokhar is intending to retire next year. Does she have any idea yet who the candidates might be to replace him? With things getting complicated in the North it's going to need to be someone who's not afraid to stand up to a difficult god. Ideally someone with an eye to conflict resolution and the record of deeds to prove it. Inevitably unexpected folk will put their names in the ring, but the Clericy always has a shortlist. Who are they going to ask? Well, the Clericy of the Petitioner Saints was thinking about you.

When you share the news with Jean that evening he is uneasy. You have been so wrapped up in planning how you might run a campaign that you had not considered he might not be equally enthusiastic about the thing. When he finally speaks on the matter it is to ask, "Are you certain this is a good idea?" He is concerned that your ties to Adrar--You don't have any--Your husband and son are visibly Adrari. For all that Jean is a votary of Issanar, for all that his parents will never meet Saiif, Jean is Adrari. He does not want the attention your candidacy would bring. He does not want to parade Saiif about to the communities you must convince, does not want your son to be the subject of strangers' scrutiny before he is old enough to speak for himself. 

You chew on that for a little while. You concede Jean’s trepidation is warranted. Perhaps if it were Kahili things would be different, but you want to be Herald to Iokhar, and Adrar is still very much a live security issue for communities in the North. But this will only ever happen once. While Heralds can be unseated, it is rare, and even with advocates of difficult gods oft serving fewer terms, you will never be a more salient figure than you are now. The Clericy has put your name forward because they expect you would be well suited, and they suspect that in the current environment you would win. This is your opportunity to shape the world, to serve your people, to do great works and be part of a lineage that reaches all the way back to the Petitioner Saints. Jean agrees, but he does not want his traditions to become politics. He will not be forced to prove he is Issanari enough to those who would have kept him out if they could. He will not expose Saiif to the same. Your conversation goes in circles for weeks, but ultimately there is no solution to find. You can do this, but he cannot do it with you. You will have to choose.

Later you will argue through tears of rage that Jean cannot leave Tanrilar, cannot take away the son you have barely seen since he started speaking. You will rail against the consequences of your actions as if you had not made the choices, and Jean will listen. Eventually when you have run out of things to say you will fold your arms and lick salt tears from your lips and the man who was your husband will say his piece with a calm but absolute resolve. "I've known you for a long time, Kaijja. For years I enabled you while you took terrible risks and made wonderful things. Now you can do more of both, and I am happy for you. But Saiif is never going to be your priority. So I am going to do what is best for me and for our son." His voice softens, gentler but no less certain. "I love you Kaijja, but this is stronger than your gravity. I promise you will always know where to find us."

You know even then that he is right, but in that moment you will argue and hurl vicious insults regardless, and he will stand there taking it until you have run yourself ragged and worn your voice to sandpaper. It will be almost another year before you apologize. 

Many years later still, over tea Jean will remark without malice that your relationship with your god is kind of perfect. "All the power and love with none of the inconvenience of daily compromise." 

"I compromise!" you complain, smiling.

"Not when someone doesn't convince you that you'll like the new outcome anyway." 

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.

---

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.

---

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.