Fanfiction

In the temple that was the heart of Aveyond, there lived a woman with no name. She teemed with introductions anyways. She was called anything from an old woman with a bad hip to the Goddess, depending on what the situation called for.

Usually, though, she was the Oracle.

It was the truest of her titles. There was much more to her than her wrinkled smile and aching side, but her history was shorter and her abilities weaker than often assumed. The world of Aia was not born of her, although she was the one to raise it. No matter how much she, or anyone, would like her to, the Oracle could not simply snap her fingers and make things happen. She could only understand what must happen, where the strings of fate were supposed to come together, and do her best to thread them.

Written for RPZineMaker!

She was destined, she learned, to wield a legendary sword, to sing a magical song, to save a world so much wider than the one she grew up in. What she had dismissed as a woman's delirious, half-dead ramblings, was the passing of a torch so fierce it burned to carry.

One night in the Wildwoods Tavern, as she dabbed healing salve on the crow-claw marks slashed across her arm, Rhen finally found the nerve to address it.

“Why is it me and not you?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” When Talia spoke, it was soft, almost apologetic. “I must have done something wrong.”

Rhen couldn't imagine what Talia could have done wrong that she was doing right. Talia was her age when she set out to defeat Zorom, she had told her, but she also had three years of training behind her and a best friend beside her. Rhen had an apprentice's leave from school and the son of her former slaveowner. What she wouldn't give to have the sword singing tattoos on her chest, or Peter at her side, right now.

"How do we know I'll succeed where you failed?"

Bad word choice. Talia winced.

"I'm sorry, I wasn't-"

"I was a mage, not a sword singer," Talia said, firmer than necessary. "I did not - could not - trap Ahriman's soul. The Sword of Shadows is the key."

"And I'm the one to wield it."

Talia sighed. "So it would seem."

Yuletide gift written for DisjunctionJunction.

So here she was, sitting in front of her vanity, finger trailing the cool glass of her cheek, taking stock of every imperfection littering her face. The skin beneath her eyes was just green and dark enough to notice without foundation. Scars from the acne that littered her face before her parents anxiously locked down a nightly regiment to banish it. The red of her cheeks looked more blotchy, warm and scrubbed raw from washing off her makeup, than rosy or attractive. Her green hair, falling loose down to her shoulders, was even too messy to save her.

She didn't look ugly. She knew herself too well for that. But beautiful didn't feel like the word anymore, or pretty, or any of the labels she'd been told to strive for. She just looked... nice. Charming, maybe, if she was feeling charitable.

Lydia wasn't sure how she was feeling. Her hand dropped from the mirror and onto the small table in front of it, grazed against the metal of the handles of the pair of scissors she'd laid in front of her. Sliding her hand into place, she felt both as if she was going to be sick and calmer than she'd ever felt at once. It was like all the tension swarming inside her body, by some law of entropy, managed to even out along the edges and hold her outline.

She knew, in the same way she wanted to know what her face looked like bare, that she wanted to know what she looked like with her hair above her shoulders. She wanted to know if it would solidify charming, or convert it to cute, or perhaps even to handsome-

Gift fic written for Ishti.

His face relaxes, and he steps to the small table beside the sofa to take a match and light the lamp on it before sitting down. It’s completely unnecessary for them both, but he had just gotten back in the habit of needing to, and she knows he would have wanted to regardless. "Her name was Daena. She was a druid, although that word has taken on a different meaning since, if the group we encountered in Naylith is of any indication."

Yes, Daena. Druids. Dameon was the sun druid, she remembers now. "You've taught yourself that with your notes?"

He stiffens for a moment. "Not her. She made an impression. She was the first druid whose soul we rescued, you know, after you had taken mine."

"Oh."

"Indeed. I suppose you could say I was jealous. I wanted nothing more than to slay the demon which held my soul captive, after all, but unfortunately for me she had somehow landed on the right side of things and so I was not allowed."

Te’ijal looks at him, and he makes no effort to glance back at her, so she walks behind him and drums a couple fingers across his pauldron while she does for good measure. "Well, all’s well that ends well, isn’t it?"

He lets her sit in her discomfort for a moment before replying, a gesture which Te’ijal understands logically is fair but finds no less aggravating for it. "This is hardly the ending of anything, serpent spawn. Just more things to remember."

Te'ijal and Galahad learn how to help each other.

Te’ijal attempts to inspect her husband’s injury. The fabric of his padded jacket, while thoroughly sliced, is thick enough around the surrounding skin to prevent her from getting a good enough look at it. She purses her lips, frowning.

“I can’t do anything with this fabric in the way,” she says, and finds her voice is uncharacteristically sheepish. She’s at an impasse; she certainly knows better than to ask him if she can take off his breastplate. She’s not even sure she wants to– there’s something about her mental image of Galahad that belongs in shining metal, like if she stripped off too much armor he would disappear right along with it.

He surprises her by saying, the stiffness in his voice betraying some slight discomfort, “the sleeves on this one unlace. Check the shoulder.”

She nods and gets to work carefully unlacing the sleeve of his gambeson. Slowly, she pulls it down his arm. The teal, heavy fabric gives way to a lightweight white shirt not unlike the ones she’s more inclined to wear.

This one’s an easy fix. She rolls up the sleeve, bunching it around his shoulder, and suddenly, his arm – injury and all – is exposed.

Content warnings: Self-destructive tendencies and descriptions of resultant injuries, including an implied suicide attempt. Off-screen and canon-typical; this fic deals with the aftermath.

Even when the chill had finally leeched from her bones, Te’ijal couldn’t sleep that night. It was hard enough to breathe, her head racing, heart thrumming. She was grateful the inn had offered only twin size beds, because if Galahad had insisted on laying beside her, she knew he would notice something was wrong. 

Her stomach didn’t feel any different. She was almost scared to touch the palm of her hand to it, to slide it down to the space between the curve of her belly and the apex of her thighs. Like the thing growing inside her would come alive and claw her open from within. It was the same fear that struck her when she remembered Galahad’s involvement, when she so much as thought the word womb, when Stella called this thing a baby. It all made it feel real, and if this was real, then she couldn’t be, at least not the version of her that had existed for over eight hundred years, the only version of herself she had ever wanted to be.

Vampires ended life. They did not create it. They did not nurture it.  The idea that her body was capable of such a thing, no matter how unprepared or unwilling her mind, was – 

It was violating. A betrayal of the highest caliber. Her own brother trying to kill her had been easier to accept than this.

Content warnings: Pregnancy, abortion (graphic, fantasy medication induced), misogyny. Brief references to vomit, sex.

“Oh, is that your issue, Te’ijal?” he asked, raising his voice on her name as if out of spite. “I focused on our marriage and lost sight of you separate from it? Because you do not get to judge me for that!” 

“And why don’t I?” Te’ijal asked, barely restraining her voice from yelling, and she found that goading him felt good, the most she’d felt like herself all night, if not the past year. She wanted him to call her a monster, to remind her she ruined his life, as if she had ever been the one who forgot. 

Content warning: graphic sex that everybody consents to but nobody enjoys.