#valas devir

When he doesn’t respond, Gortash fills the silence. “Surely you must derive pleasure from something. I’d only thought… Well, that look in your eye when you hold a blade. When blood first touches your tongue. When you’re… Yes, that look right there.” (from this)

an early days of durgetash fic (rated E)

Chapter One: When Valas confesses the name of the person he most longs to kill, Gortash has a plan. For what is this new alliance for, if not working together to achieve their great desires?

Chapter Two: But it’s not that simple, for one raised by Bhaal, to admit just who or what he wants.

Chapter Three, Chapter Four: And it’s even less simple to take it.

Chapter Five: Yet take it he will. (The consummation.)

The feeling grows claws when Sceleritas clicks off into the distance, and he finally tears [the letter] open to take in the details of Gortash’s plan. It scratches at his skin, enough to stretch and tear and draw thin lines of blood, the kind of teasing, gentle touch he might begin with when he wants to kill slow. He breathes, and he works, and he spends hours in the intricate detail of running Bhaal’s temple, but still it doesn’t go away. By the time the sun begins its descent, a haze of red in the Lower City’s narrow strips of sky, it’s broken through muscle, and bone, buried itself deep within him. It hangs against his lungs, heavy and thick, holds tight to the flesh of his heart. As he picks his way through darkening alleys toward Gortash’s home, he can think of nothing else.

A pairing of new Valas stories.

Of His Kind (rated M, 1.8k words): Valas’s first impressions of Gortash, as he attends a Banite ritual (and invades the Hall of Wonders)

Gortash leans closer, too, and Valas can feel his breath. He can see his pulse, when his eyes drop to his neck, and he thinks of his heart, beneath his clothes and behind his ribs. “You have a political mind,” he says, and the admiration brings him back to his eyes. “Let me prove to you I have a violent one.”

Persimmon Season (rated M, 3.2k words): Valas and Gortash attend a masquerade at the storied Silvershield Estate: there’s teasing, there’s a mask made from bone, there’s suggestive fruit-eating (debauchery everywhere!)

They stay there for a moment, in the late-Uktar cold, and Valas can no longer hear voices bleeding through the distant granite walls. It’s like there’s no one else alive. His favourite feeling, the frisson of it. Anticipation of their future, their success, when it will be just the two of them, at last just the two of them, when he can have him, and hold him there upon the final altar. Valas turns toward the manor when it becomes too much. “And what, pray tell, is the purpose of this evening?” he asks as they stalk across the green. “Amusement, of course.”

Of His Kind

For durgetash week (@bloodsweatandtyranny) Rating: M | 1.8k words | prompt: First Impressions

Valas realizes somewhere between strikes, his blade fast, his hands red, life spilled warm across his feet—he’s curious. He hasn’t felt curious, not for ages, not like this. He’s killed for others before, of course, so many times. For coin, or for practice. For pleasure. It’s often boring, the reasons one might hire the services of a murder god’s cleric: Removal of a threat. Enacting revenge. Indulging envy, or rage, for those held back by coward’s hands. The first few targets for this man, the one he’s killing for tonight, had fit that first neat category. The next few, though, cried for Bane as they died, and begged forgiveness for their failures. The ones after that, Valas hadn’t been able discern a reason for at all, no matter how much he questioned them, snapped their fingers and drove his blades into their sweet, soft places. He doesn’t understand this Enver Gortash. He’d like to.

thank youuuu! I'm always going to rec my multi-chapter projects, closest to my heart:

Haunted One, Valas's origin story, how the son of Gorion's Ward and Viconia DeVir went on to become the Dark Urge (18k words):

A deep voice comes to him that night, one he’ll hear for years to come, with five daggers as claws that draw blood from his dream-held chest. Use the tools you are given, it says, listen to what is bred in the bone.

The Feeling Grows Claws, the Valas/Gortash origin story (25k words):

“My dear Bhaalspawn,” Gortash says, sitting back down at his side. He crosses one leg over the other, leaning closer than before. “What’s wrong with taking something simply because you want it?”

And then a few other favourites from my works:

Stalk-shifter, an Orin character study (1.4k words):

Orin sees him first on the hill, that twist-turning road fleeing shadows in the east. He looks the same as he squints, scenting the Rivington air: scales like blood-brushed bone, black robe shifting with the breeze. The Dark Urge doesn’t see her.

Something Monstrous: An Empirical Study of the Bhaalspawn Mind, durgetash (1.4k words):

There’s an elegant symmetry to the place, in the lines and shapes of the hallways built to ring the crumbling tower. But it’s the tower itself Valas spends the most time studying when they arrive, the algae and weeds covering once-grand walls gently waving in the water’s blue-green, as Enver studies him, beautiful creature built atop the failures of Bhaalspawn before.

Persimmon Season, durgetash (3k words):