you're too young & eager to love (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impertinences) wrote2022-08-28 11:17 am
impertinences) wrote2022-08-28 11:17 am
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I am back-posting Monday's AWS (which was more of a catch-up/work on a pre-existing piece since I had Internet issues) now.
This is my attempt at world-building, playing with limited POV, and creating dialogue. I give you the Brimgate Islands (a wasteland, warped version of where the Caribbean should be in today's time) and the Outgan Trifecta, which have a completely different view of shifters and culture compared to the Vries. Augusta goes on a diplomatic visit and does her thing.
I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
— Richard Siken
Dignity and control, Augusta reminds herself as her stomach threatens to hurl.
Not for the first time in the past few weeks, Augusta is reminded of how much she hates the ocean. The ship lurches against the push of the waves, making her stomach roll, and she clutches the railing. She’s barely thirty, still young, but all of her sharp beauty has been drained from her–there’s an uncharacteristically ashen quality to her face, and her dark, long hair falls limp down her shoulders. Her mouth is salt-chapped and the skin across her nose and shoulders peels from the weeks spent beneath the ocean’s merciless sun. When she bites the inside of her lip, it’s hard enough to draw blood.
Dignity and control, she thinks again, tasting acrid bile. The waves chop against the side of the boat, and Augusta pictures Harrow at Albtraum, his smug shark grin splitting the lower half of his face, his incompetent hands wielding a glass of whiskey like a weapon. His languid elevation to power infuriates her even now, even thousands of miles away. She grits her teeth. Beside her, Radomir chuckles and grins. It isn’t unkind, more sympathetically amused than mocking, but the noise grates at her, and she scowls at him.
“We are almost there,” he tells her.
“I have eyes,” she reminds him.
The shoreline is near, and soon the galley will lower anchor and load the smaller boats with goods and passengers to carry them to the docks, but soon is a relative term with sea travel; it could be an hour or three. For her, the pace is glacial. Augusta’s stomach heaves again, and her grip on the railing is so tight now that her knuckles are white.
Dignity and control.
Unphased, Radomir turns his back to the waves. It’s an easy posture, the way he leans against the side of the ship with arms folded across his chest as the men beneath their feet labor and sweat, the stroke of the oars and their muscles creating a continuous thrumming rhythm that makes the ship feel almost alive. “Who would have guessed? The sea is your great weakness.”
The eldest Vries presses her lips together, her mouth a thin white slash across her face. “Your amusement is palpable, you know, much like this humidity.”
He grins, shrugging a large shoulder. “It is endearing. You watch the brutality of the fighting pits without a single shudder. You stroll holding cells without a thought of mercy or compassion, and I’ve never seen you flinch at Albtraum, no matter the experiment you’re documenting. Your heart is black and cold and full of worms, Augusta, but sea sickness has you white at the knuckles.”
Despite herself, Augusta gives a wry laugh. “Forgive me for preferring land to water, and you forget yourself–my heart is not so easily understood. Yours must be full of doubts.”
It’s his turn to laugh, and in this sound, too, she hears their likeness. His laugh is short, more of a bark or a growl or a chuff. “I don’t know the meaning of that word, or I forgot it years ago.”
“Well, you have me to credit for that, no doubt.”
The wind picks up, and Augusta can smell the ocean around them; it’s a salt and shit scent, fetid and rotten, and she pictures the decomposition beneath the blue-gray waves around them, the slime and ooze of the primordial creatures slinking over the ocean floor. Down there, she thinks, is where the real worms are—pulsing, wet, hungry. She turns her face away from the breeze, groans, and forces her nausea down.
Dignity and control.
As if for support, her right hand leaves the rail and clutches at Radomir’s arm, her nails clawing into his skin above the elbow.
He glances down at her passively. “Breathe,” he instructs.
She does, slowly, deeply, until the feeling lessens some. She lets go of Radomir’s arm, his skin beneath her nails, and shifts uncomfortably to mimic his more relaxed stance. He touches her elbow, and she shrugs him off. She hates him a little at this moment—his capability, his strength, the easy intimidating set of his shoulders and solid size. The weeks at sea have not seemed to afflict him; he has been sure-footed, steady and stalwart, even when the ship was tossed from wave to wave in the middle of a storm. For every mile they sailed away from land, until there was nothing but horizon surrounding them, he had maintained while she had faltered, made bare in ways that her station and power could not protect her. The sickness for her had been almost immediate, and since laying down in their small cabin below had only worsened the nausea and made her feel claustrophobic, she’d spent most of the days walking the top deck with unsteady steps or sitting near the helm, knees drawn to her chest, miserable. When the crew on deck skim their eyes over them now as a pair, Augusta knows that they bypass her quickly, that she is not the one seen as a threat.
“Do you know what I’m starting to understand?” she asks Radomir as the waves continue their chopping against the side of the haul. “This is a free city, but it’s an old land. It’s tired and crumbling and all those pretty purple trees on the shoreline can’t do anything to help hide the smell of decay. It comes up out of the water and clings to you like sweat. Why would anyone want the Brimgate?”
“Sea sickness hasn’t made you less astute, at any rate.”
“I wanted an answer, not a compliment.”
His smirk is amused when it should be bloody because she thinks there’s still a little madness in that expression, a hint of feral viciousness. “What the islands do have, they are rich in. The merchant-princes make lucrative trade partners.”
“The culture is …” she pauses, glancing at the crew loading the shore boats and their peculiar tattoos, “not analogous to ours.”
Radomir grunts. She knows he’s aware of the differences, but he’s been smartly devoid of opinion on the matter.
To their left, there’s a hustle of commotion as the men begin to lower one of the first shore-boats to the water. The ship’s captain, a continental with beer-smelling breath and greasy hair, climbs the galley pit and walks toward them.
Augusta continues to watch the crew; the idea of moving from one boat to another, a smaller one, turns her stomach more. She closes her eyes, braces herself, searching for some remaining internal piece of fortitude.
Dignity and control.
“Augusta,” Radomir says gently.
“Minister,” she corrects, now that the captain is within earshot, and her gaze is amber steel when she opens her eyes.
She was not wrong from the deck; the island is a flat and colorful land, even from the harbor. Most everything is sun-bleached brick: the curving roads, the deep-dug fighting pits with their rings of descending seats, the fountains, the walls—all of it is a pale bloody color, but most of it is crumbling too, sending fine dust everywhere to mingle with the beach-sands. The shoreline is peppered with cottages sagging under the oppressive humidity, and the nearby fish-market murmurs with lazy midday activity. Besides the layered breathable silks and cottons, worn to ward off the dust-sand and allow for a cooling breeze, the nearby denizens do not seem so different from the continent—they come in shades of coffee and cream and spice, in shapes round or thin or muscular–but the land itself jars her with its brightness. The waters are more blue than gray up close and purple-flowered trees studding the coastline are shocks of color compared to the muted palette of the continental wasteland. Still, a seashore is a seashore, and the briny, foul-smell of fish and scuttling bottom feeders never changes. If she closes her eyes and inhales, she would think she was anywhere on the continent’s East coast with its pebbled beaches and harsh sands. This gives her comfort and, oddly, a small sense of pride.
Shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, she realizes that someone is coming up the docks towards them. She gestures at Radomir. He pauses in signaling to the crew that are unloading the shore-boats, packing cargo and supplies into a nearby oxen-cart, and surveys the new arrival.
“Magister Laurette,” he informs Augusta with immediate recognition. “One of those merchant-princes, part of the Brimgate’s council. An envoy, I bet.”
The Magister Laurette is a tall and slender woman, though not as tall or athletic as Augusta. She has skin the color of burnt cinnamon–warm and dark—with round hips and fleshy thighs below a slim waist. Her arms, too, are sensual with soft skin that promises to dimple when grabbed. Her black hair is swept back away from her square face, and even without the intricate curls nestled amongst many braids (a customary hairstyle for the Brimgate elite), Augusta knows the importance of her status by Laurette’s regal bearing alone.
“How was your voyage, Minister?” Laurette asks upon approach, cheerful in tone. She’s mindful, too, of the retinue wearily spilling from the docks behind the other woman. “Tiresome, I would guess.”
Laurette’s accent is light except on the s’s; at another time, Augusta might have found it charming, but now she simply fights her annoyance. “You guessed correctly. Are our lodgings near?” She glances up the docks pointedly.
The islander woman has an easy face for diplomacy, Augusta thinks; it is mercurial with a mouth capable of both sudden sensuality and polite reservement. Currently, that mouth is smiling at her in hospitably, but Augusta does not smile back. She has no patience, not even for easy pleasantries.
The wind stirs, but the hot air seems stuck, incapable of breaking through the cloying humidity. Augusta feels the sweat trickle down her back. Ten minutes more in this climate and her traveling clothes will be soaked through in sweat. Laurette, accustomed to the heat, seems to radiate from within, her skin catching the light and appearing burnished. Her smile has not wavered, and her teeth are very white against her gold-dusted lips. “Magister Enel has graciously offered to chaperone you and your escorting party while you visit our islands,” she says. “He has a waterfront estate just around the bend. You should be most comfortable. I hear his water gardens are a sight to behold. If I may lead the way?”
For a moment, Augusta considers making the entire retinue wait. She’d like to go on ahead to scout the estate herself, but she silences her own mistrust and turns to Radomir, her shadow. “Are you familiar with this Magister Enel?”
Radomir nods. “A merchant-prince, part of the electing council for the Brimgate monarch, much like your Magister here. There isn’t anything or anyone they wouldn’t sell for the right money, and all the islanders know it’s the council with the real power.”
Laurette does not seem to mind being spoken of so bluntly. She holds her smile, an expression that is starting to appear etched-on, and keeps her hands folded in front of her like a well-disciplined child, waiting.
Augusta lifts an eyebrow, curious, turning back to the other woman. “Are the women of the Magisters merchant-princes or merchant-princesses in title?”
“Are you the Minister or the Ministress of Propaganda now that your husband has passed?”
This time, it is Augusta’s turn to smile. She, too, has a mouth of teeth she can bare, but she softens the expression by gesturing for Laurette to proceed. After a shout of orders from Radomir and a command from the oxen-drivers, the party makes their lumbering progression forward. As they walk, Radomir closes the gap behind Augusta, and Laurette does what most politicians do for visiting diplomats; she pontificates.
“Did you know, Minister, that the Brimgate once consisted of nearly 70 islands, all within the Outgan Sea? The ocean has since swallowed many of the smaller rocks and reefs so that only the largest islands remain now. Drayder, to the north, then Golminster, of course, which you will be staying on for the duration of your visit, and Arboras, to the west. These are the primary three. They’re also the most populated and hospitable. Each specializes in its own unique commodity, but all three follow Brimgate custom.” There is pride in Laurette’s voice. She could be a mother discussing her children. “When people talk of the Outgan trifecta, it is this three they mean.”
While the Magister talks, Augusta glances behind her to Radomir. She glowers. Did this woman really not expect her to be familiar with their traditions and history? If anything, Augusta understands them all too well, understands that they are unafraid and dismissive of the potential threat the Vries pose; they feel too far south, protected by the Outgan Sea and the distance between their lands, to be burdened by fear.
“You have a reputation for courage,” she tells Laurette placatingly, her face smoothing into a neutral expression of placidity, and feels more so than hears Radomir’s rumbling chuckle.
“You’re too kind, Minister. We hardly need such bravery now during our times of peace, but our early ancestors certainly needed courage. The first of the Brimgate stole these lands over three hundred years ago from the native population.”
“Perhaps this is why you have such a blended culture.”
“Blended?”
“You’re a mix of antiquity and the old coastal customs,” Augusta explains, crossing a gated archway from the harbor into the main city street. “It’s why your affluent wear silks in sunset colors and your laborers sweat in sage and spruce greens. Your men shave their heads to their scalps and paint their eyes like tribal warriors, your whores designate their trade by their gold-painted fingertips, and your eligible women expose their stomachs and decorate their midriffs with finely-jeweled chains. All the sea-rats that came from distant lands to populate the Brimgate in the beginning influenced the creation of what you now call tradition.”
Rather than be offended, Laurette seems impressed. She lifts her eyebrows as they turn the bend, amused. “We must get you some of our saffron silks then so that you may dress in our custom, befitting of your status, of course. And your …?” She falters here, looking at Radomir, a hulking menace behind Augusta, so close that the two nearly touch.
Augusta brushes Radomir’s arm, her hand small against his bicep, her fingers elegant. He has a body like a tree trunk, thick and formidable, an effect that’s elevated all the more by his height and her comparable slimness. “We really must decide on an appropriate title for you these days, mustn’t we? What does one call you?”
Laurette can’t tell, she doesn’t know, she’s wearing the vapid expression of polite indifference, but Radomir’s grin is smug and searing. Augusta turns subtly, the length of her body curving momentarily inside the cage of his arms, and even she has to lean up to press her mouth to his ear. “I’m afraid to hear your answer. Whatever title you pick will give away all my secrets.”
“Never,” he murmurs against her temple, and she feels the way he breathes her in before she slips, like the island silks, from his arms.
Enel is more than a little drunk by the time the eldest Vries joins him on the veranda. In truth, he’d temporarily forgotten that the woman was his guest. He much preferred to focus on his smugglers and trade commissions, but the council had found him the least threatening of the Magisters (an undoubtful sleight, he was sure) and thus his lot had been drawn. He had smiled when the Minister of Propaganda had arrived and welcomed her with all the necessary flattery and subservience despite her bedraggled appearance; he’d yielded her his best rooms; he’d gifted her an entire wardrobe of silks for her to flaunt throughout her visit; he’d had his kitchen prepare a four course dinner and given her a tour of the water gardens while they had waited for the meal. Enel had expected Laurette to assist in his diplomatic servility, so he’d been upset when the dark-skinned woman had taken her leave after directing the retinue to the servant’s entrance on the eastern side of the estate. His frustration towards his fellow Magister had quickly paled in comparison, however, to his growing vexation towards the Minister.
The Vries woman had been polite but stern, nearly to the point of aloofness. Any momentary glimpse of charm had been shadowed by her tendency to condescend, and she’d insisted on her brute of a manservant accompanying her the entire evening. Enel had promptly helped himself to a glass of his finest southern wine after she’d retired for the evening, and then the glass had become a bottle or two, so that he was nursing a hangover within minutes of awakening the next morning.
He is on his fourth glass of honeyed elderflower cordial when he hears her approach, her steps deceptively light on the cool marble flooring. He never likes a woman capable of sneaking, which he is about to tell her in his most assertive tone, when the sight of her startles him into forgetfulness.
Augusta wears silk dyed the color of nectarines, the dress pooling from a delicate golden hoop circling her neck and cinching at the waist with a similarly styled belt. She’s barefoot, like a girl, but the slit running up the left side of the silk is distinctly womanly. Enel can see the long length of her legs with her finely muscled thighs and, dragging his eyes upward, the shape of her breasts as well. They’re smaller than he would prefer, hardly a palmful, and she’s taller than he likes, more lean muscle than feminine curves, but there’s a honed sensuality to her all the same. She reminds him of a viper, something fatal in its appeal, but something he’d like wrapped around him all the same.
“Good morning,” she says, her peculiar turmeric-colored eyes glinting. “I fear I may have overslept.”
“That’s quite alright. You’re a guest, and you’re recovering from a long voyage.” He can’t stop looking at her naked arms, at her shoulders, the skin rose-gold and sun-kissed after her steam in his hot spring. Her dark hair, a brown so deep that it’s nearly black, slips down to the small of her back like molasses, thick and rich. When he meets her gaze, she seems unabashed by the frankness of his stare, and she does not look away.
“Braids,” he says, almost stupidly. “We ought to have your hair braided and curled. It is the custom for our wealthy women.”
“Perhaps,” she says with another smile, walking past him to the balcony. She leans her elbows against the railing and crosses one ankle over the other. Enel watches the way the warm coastal wind blows the silk across her calves. “I may have judged your island too quickly. It can be lovely here. I’m grateful for your hospitality.”
“I am happy to oblige, my dear. Happy to.” Enel pours her a glass of cordial, which she takes, her fingers lingering against his at the exchange. He clears his throat, sipping his own drink before coming to stand beside her. Their arms touch this way, and he can smell her perfume, a tart lemon-like scent, medicinal almost but not unpleasant.
“What do you call them again?” she asks, dipping her head towards the men working in the garden below. They’re shirtless, their bodies varying in degrees of fitness and health, but each one possesses one similarity–intricate blue tattoos curving brazenly around their arms, necks, and torsos.
“Those particular tattoos are known as hikani, Minister. They are for the micipna only.”
“A brand? To indicate their station, yes?”
The Magister is a rotund man, and his skin sags when he bows his head, the jowls of flesh around his mouth dimpling as he smiles at her. “An honor so that we mere men may recognize the mystical among us.”
She makes a noncommittal noise and sips at her drink.
“We glorify them, you know.” Slowly, so slowly, the way one approaches a feral animal, he moves his hand towards her elbow. “The micipna, that is. They live free lives. They don’t know iron bars or cages. They have never seen a militarized compound.”
Augusta’s gaze is forward. She’s studying the workers, her elbows pressed into the railing as she holds the cordial in front of her. “And because of that, all I see is unchecked progress.”
Enel skims her forearm with the very tips of his plump fingers. He’s watching her body, not her face, and it takes him a moment to process what she has said. “What’s that, my dear?”
“You’re likely to start worshiping them, genetic aberrations, over the rationality of man. It’s a worship of biological mutation, of divergence. You don’t see the catastrophe in this?”
He’s trailing his fingers up the side of her arm, appreciating the feel of her skin, when he hears her; he barks a laugh, dismissive. The entire islands know of the Vries and their persecution, their self-righteous hold on the continent nearly as rigid as their hypocrisy. “To be marked is to be respected, but respect is not the same as worship. Let’s not put the cart before the horse.”
Augusta’s shoulders are stiff. She does not respond.
“Perhaps your companion here would like the honor of wearing the hikani? It would be no trouble to accrue an artist for the task.”
“Oh no,” she says, and pulls a step away, glancing over her shoulder to where Radomir has been standing near the doorway, as silent and powerful as stone. “His brands are mine.”
Enel laughs. “I do appreciate a woman who understands ownership.”
“And subservience, no doubt.”
He dips his head again in acknowledgement before taking her by the arm to lead her into the coolness of the pillared courtyard below. It is shadowy and overrun with ivy, the garden lush with vividly colored flowers. “I had not expected a Vries to be so accommodating to our culture, I must admit. It’s wonderful to see you in our dress, and the people will appreciate it. A waist chain would be a befitting accessory for tonight’s dinner, I think.”
“Sadly, my dear Magister, I am still in mourning and will be for some time. A chain of such beauty and implication would disrespect my husband’s memory.”
When he pats her hand with his fat fingers, stroking up the length of her arm, he feels her slight stiffness. “You continentals are too serious. You should spend your time loving rather than grieving.”
“I shall take that under advisement. Would you also advise stealing rather than bartering?”
Enel laughs again, squeezing her waist now. “Always, Minister, always.”
The dinner is more bureaucratic talk. Augusta hardly eats her steamed fish although she takes polite bites of the seaweed salad and the stewed onions with green-colored vegetables that accompany it. She favors the spices here, the burst of heat inside her mouth, and the acidity from all the limes.
When the serving staff pour her a chilled glass of honeyed-wine, she asks for whiskey instead. The Magister must open a barrel from the cellar. Radomir is given a tumbler too, and the glass looks small in his hands. He does not drink it. He is uncomfortable sitting at the table, his mountainous body made all the larger when crammed into a thin chair of beechwood, but Enel does not seem to notice. He piles food onto Radomir’s plate himself and serves him directly, but Radomir waits for Augusta’s acknowledgment before he eats and that, too, Enel does not comment upon.
At the end of the meal, the servants clear the table, and Enel brings out a box of imported cigars. Augusta smiles at the sight of them. “My father used to smoke these,” she says.
“A man of good taste then.”
She declines one all the same, but Enel partakes, the sweet smoke smelling of cedar and leather.
Leaning back in her chair, she rifles through a few documents on cultural propagation. “Can you explain your process a bit more to me?”
“We had naively thought, back in the early days, that transformation was created through receiving a bite. Superstitious of us, really. It seems now that evolution and genetics are the simplest way to ensure propagation.”
“You are genetically controlling the DNA?”
The Magister gives an impatient wave of his hand, the smoke from his cigar circling above his head. “Nothing so drastic nor advanced. The easiest solution is often the best answer to science’s hardest questions. We’ve been studying impregnation through willing subjects. Two micipna almost always guarantee a pureborn offspring, although miscarriages seem to happen at an alarming rate. Some human females when paired with a micipna have up to a 32% chance to rear a fully intact child that, upon puberty, will shift. We suspect there is a recessive trait.”
Augusta looks alarmed. “Why would a woman volunteer for this?”
“Well, as I said, Golminster is interested in propagation. We seek to preserve.”
“Have you not tried blood infusions?”
Enel lifts a bushy eyebrow. “Respectfully, we do not believe in such extreme measures. A human subject cannot absorb a micipna’s blood the way the earth absorbs the rain. An experiment such as that would likely only result in pain and illness, if not death.”
“You misunderstand.” Augusta takes a drink of her whiskey, the ice clinking. “What if you were to infuse contaminated, baser blood with pure, uninfected human blood?”
“To what purpose?”
She looks briefly at Radomir before answering with a self-assured grin. “Transcendence.”
His smile is humorless in response. “We have different ideas here of what true transcendence entails, Minister.”
Augusta nods to show her understanding. She is quiet, reviewing the documents again; she makes a sound of curiosity at the writing in the third paragraph on the fourth page. “The subject is bestial when the fertilization occurs with a human?”
“Yes. It seems to impact the success rates. We don’t yet know why.”
She keeps reading. “It also says that these events are observed and recorded.”
“By our scientists and mystics, yes. It is not the most romantic of events for the subjects involved, but there is a semblance of privacy provided and very little intrusions.”
“I would like to see one.”
Enel grins now, fleshy and eager, around the girth of his cigar. “That can be arranged.”
The observation room is lavishly decorated in velvets, crêpes, and damask. To enhance the atmosphere, a plethora of candles ring the raised dias, and sconces burn across the walls every few feet. It’s a beautiful, feverish setting, heady from the sandalwood scent in the air with all but the center platform dark and the sheerest of curtains falling over the open cut-outs of each adjoined viewing chamber.
A full-figured woman is out there on a small bed piled with sumptuous pillows and opulent blankets. Beside the rich fabrics, another woman might have disappeared, but not this one. She has the gold-painted fingers of a prostitute but the composure of royality; her hair is toffee-colored, the warm golden hue catching the firelight, and her skin a pearly, unblemished cream. Augusta is close enough to see the kitten-pink of her lips, her nipples, and the small thatch of brown curls between her thighs. It’s an honorary placement, she knows, befitting her station as a visiting dignitary.
Still, Augusta settles into the black wing chair of their allotted viewing chamber discontentedly, her fawn-colored dress pooling across her legs. It is another one of the outfits gifted to her by the Magister Enel, and it’s lovely in a gauzy, wispy way, but after only a week on the island, she’s tired of the delicate clothing and the lack of protection it provides. She’d given up on the island’s custom and guest-rights the second day, so now every step she takes reveals the leather holster at her thigh and the blades tucked there against her skin. When she smooths her palms across her lap, she’s comforted by the feel of the knives. She brushes her thumb across the closest pointed steel tip before glancing behind her.
“Enel said these activities are viewed for academic inquiry and record, but with this lighting? That curtain? Impossible,” she says to Radomir, who has taken his place near the closed door. “This is just another excuse for men to view a fetish and fondle themselves, all under the veneer of intellectual discovery.”
“And they consider you the uncivilized one.”
“Us,” she corrects. “They consider us savage. You are not exempt.” Augusta taps the nearby chair nestled beside hers. “But sit. I’d rather you not loom behind me for this.”
He looks too large for the chair, as is customary, but he sits comfortably enough. He has an oblong face with a broad forehead, a strong jawline scratched with stubble, and full lips. His mouth has always looked feminine to Augusta and slobbering, like the jowls of a brutish dog, but she likes his intelligent eyes with their fickle blue-green color. In this lighting, they look more cerulean, but they darken like a tangle of vines when the fire-light flares and the circling crowd gives a collective soft murmur.
“What is that?” he asks suddenly, keenly aware of the subtlest of differences in the air.
“Pheromones, I suspect.”
Radomir meets her gaze. It is not a look of true fright or terror or even suspicion; he’s been with her too long to fear that she might test him any worse than she already has, and he trusts implicitly that he has deserved all her trials, but a sliver of anxiety persists all the same. It’s the instinct of his beast, the guttural response to a possible threat, the blood and bone of his being that he cannot deny. It makes the shape of his face shift, flinch together for the quickest of moments as though he’s been hit.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she asks, voice light as the silk she wears. “It’s supposedly meant to help the fertilization.” One of her shoulders lifts in a shrug. “It’s for the … what is that word they use? Micipna. I’m obviously immune.”
On the dias, a man approached the woman with her golden-painted fingers. He is naked and unabashed. His sudden shift also lacks shame. Augusta watches intently; she has always found the process as revolting as she has mesmerizing, the way the bones stretch and seem to break, how they reform in a grotesquely rapid rate until the beast stands where the man had been. The air always feels charged to her after a transformation, like even the particles in the air have been charred by the anomalous event.
Radomir’s nostrils are flared, and he’s breathing too deeply; his entire body is rigid. He’s leant forward, fixated. She expects his eyes to be like a shark’s–dark and deadly–but they’re bright again, focused so intently on the actions occurring in front of him that he startles when her hand grazes the top of his thigh. Her nails are short, blunt, and they scratch pleasantly across his leg, leading him back into focus. He half turns his face towards hers, but she’s already reaching between his legs, grasping him where he’s pained and hard. Her laughter sounds like a snake shedding its skin, and Augusta watches the way his face reddens, like an embarrassed child.
He has always relented to her, simultaneously tortured and brought to bliss by the indiginity she makes him feel. Since the murder of her husband, it has almost been worse, if proximity to her can be worse than the fighting pits and the dank cell he’d been stored in. She has him sleep in her bed; she likes to stretch her long body against his, to feel him against the length of her spine and the backs of her thighs. Sometimes, she will roll towards him, throwing an arm over his powerful shoulders or burying her face into the white fur of his neck, and each time, Radomir thinks, over and over, that this can’t go on; her around him, surrounding him, inside of him—it will come to an end, and maybe then he will feel relief. He is like a dog, she had told him one morning, like one of her father’s hounds who used to guard his bed by sleeping at his feet, only more loyal and more deadly. He had barely hidden his grin then, just like he barely contains the way his groin aches when she squeezes him now.
When she works at the front of his pants and frees the thick length of him, he sucks air in through his teeth, pushing himself back against the chair. His legs are wide-spread now, his hands on the arms of the chair, clutching as though the wood beneath his fingers is a lifeline.
“Who’s white-knuckled now?” she taunts, pressing her warm mouth to the side of his jaw. She can feel the prickly hair there against her lips.
Her wrist rolls over the head of his cock, her fist slipping down and up, so slow that it’s agony. She keeps her face close to him but shifts her gaze to the side to watch what’s happening on the platform. The beast that had once been a man has mounted the woman, and it’s a grotesque display of sensuality and carnality, of fur and flesh. Radomir’s breath hitches, rattling inside of his chest, all dying air.
When he comes, Augusta lifts her hand, sticky with his seed, to his mouth.
“Lick it off,” she says, and he does.
She is not the woman on the dias, she will have him know. She will not take into her that which offends.
This is my attempt at world-building, playing with limited POV, and creating dialogue. I give you the Brimgate Islands (a wasteland, warped version of where the Caribbean should be in today's time) and the Outgan Trifecta, which have a completely different view of shifters and culture compared to the Vries. Augusta goes on a diplomatic visit and does her thing.
I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
— Richard Siken
Dignity and control, Augusta reminds herself as her stomach threatens to hurl.
Not for the first time in the past few weeks, Augusta is reminded of how much she hates the ocean. The ship lurches against the push of the waves, making her stomach roll, and she clutches the railing. She’s barely thirty, still young, but all of her sharp beauty has been drained from her–there’s an uncharacteristically ashen quality to her face, and her dark, long hair falls limp down her shoulders. Her mouth is salt-chapped and the skin across her nose and shoulders peels from the weeks spent beneath the ocean’s merciless sun. When she bites the inside of her lip, it’s hard enough to draw blood.
Dignity and control, she thinks again, tasting acrid bile. The waves chop against the side of the boat, and Augusta pictures Harrow at Albtraum, his smug shark grin splitting the lower half of his face, his incompetent hands wielding a glass of whiskey like a weapon. His languid elevation to power infuriates her even now, even thousands of miles away. She grits her teeth. Beside her, Radomir chuckles and grins. It isn’t unkind, more sympathetically amused than mocking, but the noise grates at her, and she scowls at him.
“We are almost there,” he tells her.
“I have eyes,” she reminds him.
The shoreline is near, and soon the galley will lower anchor and load the smaller boats with goods and passengers to carry them to the docks, but soon is a relative term with sea travel; it could be an hour or three. For her, the pace is glacial. Augusta’s stomach heaves again, and her grip on the railing is so tight now that her knuckles are white.
Dignity and control.
Unphased, Radomir turns his back to the waves. It’s an easy posture, the way he leans against the side of the ship with arms folded across his chest as the men beneath their feet labor and sweat, the stroke of the oars and their muscles creating a continuous thrumming rhythm that makes the ship feel almost alive. “Who would have guessed? The sea is your great weakness.”
The eldest Vries presses her lips together, her mouth a thin white slash across her face. “Your amusement is palpable, you know, much like this humidity.”
He grins, shrugging a large shoulder. “It is endearing. You watch the brutality of the fighting pits without a single shudder. You stroll holding cells without a thought of mercy or compassion, and I’ve never seen you flinch at Albtraum, no matter the experiment you’re documenting. Your heart is black and cold and full of worms, Augusta, but sea sickness has you white at the knuckles.”
Despite herself, Augusta gives a wry laugh. “Forgive me for preferring land to water, and you forget yourself–my heart is not so easily understood. Yours must be full of doubts.”
It’s his turn to laugh, and in this sound, too, she hears their likeness. His laugh is short, more of a bark or a growl or a chuff. “I don’t know the meaning of that word, or I forgot it years ago.”
“Well, you have me to credit for that, no doubt.”
The wind picks up, and Augusta can smell the ocean around them; it’s a salt and shit scent, fetid and rotten, and she pictures the decomposition beneath the blue-gray waves around them, the slime and ooze of the primordial creatures slinking over the ocean floor. Down there, she thinks, is where the real worms are—pulsing, wet, hungry. She turns her face away from the breeze, groans, and forces her nausea down.
Dignity and control.
As if for support, her right hand leaves the rail and clutches at Radomir’s arm, her nails clawing into his skin above the elbow.
He glances down at her passively. “Breathe,” he instructs.
She does, slowly, deeply, until the feeling lessens some. She lets go of Radomir’s arm, his skin beneath her nails, and shifts uncomfortably to mimic his more relaxed stance. He touches her elbow, and she shrugs him off. She hates him a little at this moment—his capability, his strength, the easy intimidating set of his shoulders and solid size. The weeks at sea have not seemed to afflict him; he has been sure-footed, steady and stalwart, even when the ship was tossed from wave to wave in the middle of a storm. For every mile they sailed away from land, until there was nothing but horizon surrounding them, he had maintained while she had faltered, made bare in ways that her station and power could not protect her. The sickness for her had been almost immediate, and since laying down in their small cabin below had only worsened the nausea and made her feel claustrophobic, she’d spent most of the days walking the top deck with unsteady steps or sitting near the helm, knees drawn to her chest, miserable. When the crew on deck skim their eyes over them now as a pair, Augusta knows that they bypass her quickly, that she is not the one seen as a threat.
“Do you know what I’m starting to understand?” she asks Radomir as the waves continue their chopping against the side of the haul. “This is a free city, but it’s an old land. It’s tired and crumbling and all those pretty purple trees on the shoreline can’t do anything to help hide the smell of decay. It comes up out of the water and clings to you like sweat. Why would anyone want the Brimgate?”
“Sea sickness hasn’t made you less astute, at any rate.”
“I wanted an answer, not a compliment.”
His smirk is amused when it should be bloody because she thinks there’s still a little madness in that expression, a hint of feral viciousness. “What the islands do have, they are rich in. The merchant-princes make lucrative trade partners.”
“The culture is …” she pauses, glancing at the crew loading the shore boats and their peculiar tattoos, “not analogous to ours.”
Radomir grunts. She knows he’s aware of the differences, but he’s been smartly devoid of opinion on the matter.
To their left, there’s a hustle of commotion as the men begin to lower one of the first shore-boats to the water. The ship’s captain, a continental with beer-smelling breath and greasy hair, climbs the galley pit and walks toward them.
Augusta continues to watch the crew; the idea of moving from one boat to another, a smaller one, turns her stomach more. She closes her eyes, braces herself, searching for some remaining internal piece of fortitude.
Dignity and control.
“Augusta,” Radomir says gently.
“Minister,” she corrects, now that the captain is within earshot, and her gaze is amber steel when she opens her eyes.
She was not wrong from the deck; the island is a flat and colorful land, even from the harbor. Most everything is sun-bleached brick: the curving roads, the deep-dug fighting pits with their rings of descending seats, the fountains, the walls—all of it is a pale bloody color, but most of it is crumbling too, sending fine dust everywhere to mingle with the beach-sands. The shoreline is peppered with cottages sagging under the oppressive humidity, and the nearby fish-market murmurs with lazy midday activity. Besides the layered breathable silks and cottons, worn to ward off the dust-sand and allow for a cooling breeze, the nearby denizens do not seem so different from the continent—they come in shades of coffee and cream and spice, in shapes round or thin or muscular–but the land itself jars her with its brightness. The waters are more blue than gray up close and purple-flowered trees studding the coastline are shocks of color compared to the muted palette of the continental wasteland. Still, a seashore is a seashore, and the briny, foul-smell of fish and scuttling bottom feeders never changes. If she closes her eyes and inhales, she would think she was anywhere on the continent’s East coast with its pebbled beaches and harsh sands. This gives her comfort and, oddly, a small sense of pride.
Shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, she realizes that someone is coming up the docks towards them. She gestures at Radomir. He pauses in signaling to the crew that are unloading the shore-boats, packing cargo and supplies into a nearby oxen-cart, and surveys the new arrival.
“Magister Laurette,” he informs Augusta with immediate recognition. “One of those merchant-princes, part of the Brimgate’s council. An envoy, I bet.”
The Magister Laurette is a tall and slender woman, though not as tall or athletic as Augusta. She has skin the color of burnt cinnamon–warm and dark—with round hips and fleshy thighs below a slim waist. Her arms, too, are sensual with soft skin that promises to dimple when grabbed. Her black hair is swept back away from her square face, and even without the intricate curls nestled amongst many braids (a customary hairstyle for the Brimgate elite), Augusta knows the importance of her status by Laurette’s regal bearing alone.
“How was your voyage, Minister?” Laurette asks upon approach, cheerful in tone. She’s mindful, too, of the retinue wearily spilling from the docks behind the other woman. “Tiresome, I would guess.”
Laurette’s accent is light except on the s’s; at another time, Augusta might have found it charming, but now she simply fights her annoyance. “You guessed correctly. Are our lodgings near?” She glances up the docks pointedly.
The islander woman has an easy face for diplomacy, Augusta thinks; it is mercurial with a mouth capable of both sudden sensuality and polite reservement. Currently, that mouth is smiling at her in hospitably, but Augusta does not smile back. She has no patience, not even for easy pleasantries.
The wind stirs, but the hot air seems stuck, incapable of breaking through the cloying humidity. Augusta feels the sweat trickle down her back. Ten minutes more in this climate and her traveling clothes will be soaked through in sweat. Laurette, accustomed to the heat, seems to radiate from within, her skin catching the light and appearing burnished. Her smile has not wavered, and her teeth are very white against her gold-dusted lips. “Magister Enel has graciously offered to chaperone you and your escorting party while you visit our islands,” she says. “He has a waterfront estate just around the bend. You should be most comfortable. I hear his water gardens are a sight to behold. If I may lead the way?”
For a moment, Augusta considers making the entire retinue wait. She’d like to go on ahead to scout the estate herself, but she silences her own mistrust and turns to Radomir, her shadow. “Are you familiar with this Magister Enel?”
Radomir nods. “A merchant-prince, part of the electing council for the Brimgate monarch, much like your Magister here. There isn’t anything or anyone they wouldn’t sell for the right money, and all the islanders know it’s the council with the real power.”
Laurette does not seem to mind being spoken of so bluntly. She holds her smile, an expression that is starting to appear etched-on, and keeps her hands folded in front of her like a well-disciplined child, waiting.
Augusta lifts an eyebrow, curious, turning back to the other woman. “Are the women of the Magisters merchant-princes or merchant-princesses in title?”
“Are you the Minister or the Ministress of Propaganda now that your husband has passed?”
This time, it is Augusta’s turn to smile. She, too, has a mouth of teeth she can bare, but she softens the expression by gesturing for Laurette to proceed. After a shout of orders from Radomir and a command from the oxen-drivers, the party makes their lumbering progression forward. As they walk, Radomir closes the gap behind Augusta, and Laurette does what most politicians do for visiting diplomats; she pontificates.
“Did you know, Minister, that the Brimgate once consisted of nearly 70 islands, all within the Outgan Sea? The ocean has since swallowed many of the smaller rocks and reefs so that only the largest islands remain now. Drayder, to the north, then Golminster, of course, which you will be staying on for the duration of your visit, and Arboras, to the west. These are the primary three. They’re also the most populated and hospitable. Each specializes in its own unique commodity, but all three follow Brimgate custom.” There is pride in Laurette’s voice. She could be a mother discussing her children. “When people talk of the Outgan trifecta, it is this three they mean.”
While the Magister talks, Augusta glances behind her to Radomir. She glowers. Did this woman really not expect her to be familiar with their traditions and history? If anything, Augusta understands them all too well, understands that they are unafraid and dismissive of the potential threat the Vries pose; they feel too far south, protected by the Outgan Sea and the distance between their lands, to be burdened by fear.
“You have a reputation for courage,” she tells Laurette placatingly, her face smoothing into a neutral expression of placidity, and feels more so than hears Radomir’s rumbling chuckle.
“You’re too kind, Minister. We hardly need such bravery now during our times of peace, but our early ancestors certainly needed courage. The first of the Brimgate stole these lands over three hundred years ago from the native population.”
“Perhaps this is why you have such a blended culture.”
“Blended?”
“You’re a mix of antiquity and the old coastal customs,” Augusta explains, crossing a gated archway from the harbor into the main city street. “It’s why your affluent wear silks in sunset colors and your laborers sweat in sage and spruce greens. Your men shave their heads to their scalps and paint their eyes like tribal warriors, your whores designate their trade by their gold-painted fingertips, and your eligible women expose their stomachs and decorate their midriffs with finely-jeweled chains. All the sea-rats that came from distant lands to populate the Brimgate in the beginning influenced the creation of what you now call tradition.”
Rather than be offended, Laurette seems impressed. She lifts her eyebrows as they turn the bend, amused. “We must get you some of our saffron silks then so that you may dress in our custom, befitting of your status, of course. And your …?” She falters here, looking at Radomir, a hulking menace behind Augusta, so close that the two nearly touch.
Augusta brushes Radomir’s arm, her hand small against his bicep, her fingers elegant. He has a body like a tree trunk, thick and formidable, an effect that’s elevated all the more by his height and her comparable slimness. “We really must decide on an appropriate title for you these days, mustn’t we? What does one call you?”
Laurette can’t tell, she doesn’t know, she’s wearing the vapid expression of polite indifference, but Radomir’s grin is smug and searing. Augusta turns subtly, the length of her body curving momentarily inside the cage of his arms, and even she has to lean up to press her mouth to his ear. “I’m afraid to hear your answer. Whatever title you pick will give away all my secrets.”
“Never,” he murmurs against her temple, and she feels the way he breathes her in before she slips, like the island silks, from his arms.
Enel is more than a little drunk by the time the eldest Vries joins him on the veranda. In truth, he’d temporarily forgotten that the woman was his guest. He much preferred to focus on his smugglers and trade commissions, but the council had found him the least threatening of the Magisters (an undoubtful sleight, he was sure) and thus his lot had been drawn. He had smiled when the Minister of Propaganda had arrived and welcomed her with all the necessary flattery and subservience despite her bedraggled appearance; he’d yielded her his best rooms; he’d gifted her an entire wardrobe of silks for her to flaunt throughout her visit; he’d had his kitchen prepare a four course dinner and given her a tour of the water gardens while they had waited for the meal. Enel had expected Laurette to assist in his diplomatic servility, so he’d been upset when the dark-skinned woman had taken her leave after directing the retinue to the servant’s entrance on the eastern side of the estate. His frustration towards his fellow Magister had quickly paled in comparison, however, to his growing vexation towards the Minister.
The Vries woman had been polite but stern, nearly to the point of aloofness. Any momentary glimpse of charm had been shadowed by her tendency to condescend, and she’d insisted on her brute of a manservant accompanying her the entire evening. Enel had promptly helped himself to a glass of his finest southern wine after she’d retired for the evening, and then the glass had become a bottle or two, so that he was nursing a hangover within minutes of awakening the next morning.
He is on his fourth glass of honeyed elderflower cordial when he hears her approach, her steps deceptively light on the cool marble flooring. He never likes a woman capable of sneaking, which he is about to tell her in his most assertive tone, when the sight of her startles him into forgetfulness.
Augusta wears silk dyed the color of nectarines, the dress pooling from a delicate golden hoop circling her neck and cinching at the waist with a similarly styled belt. She’s barefoot, like a girl, but the slit running up the left side of the silk is distinctly womanly. Enel can see the long length of her legs with her finely muscled thighs and, dragging his eyes upward, the shape of her breasts as well. They’re smaller than he would prefer, hardly a palmful, and she’s taller than he likes, more lean muscle than feminine curves, but there’s a honed sensuality to her all the same. She reminds him of a viper, something fatal in its appeal, but something he’d like wrapped around him all the same.
“Good morning,” she says, her peculiar turmeric-colored eyes glinting. “I fear I may have overslept.”
“That’s quite alright. You’re a guest, and you’re recovering from a long voyage.” He can’t stop looking at her naked arms, at her shoulders, the skin rose-gold and sun-kissed after her steam in his hot spring. Her dark hair, a brown so deep that it’s nearly black, slips down to the small of her back like molasses, thick and rich. When he meets her gaze, she seems unabashed by the frankness of his stare, and she does not look away.
“Braids,” he says, almost stupidly. “We ought to have your hair braided and curled. It is the custom for our wealthy women.”
“Perhaps,” she says with another smile, walking past him to the balcony. She leans her elbows against the railing and crosses one ankle over the other. Enel watches the way the warm coastal wind blows the silk across her calves. “I may have judged your island too quickly. It can be lovely here. I’m grateful for your hospitality.”
“I am happy to oblige, my dear. Happy to.” Enel pours her a glass of cordial, which she takes, her fingers lingering against his at the exchange. He clears his throat, sipping his own drink before coming to stand beside her. Their arms touch this way, and he can smell her perfume, a tart lemon-like scent, medicinal almost but not unpleasant.
“What do you call them again?” she asks, dipping her head towards the men working in the garden below. They’re shirtless, their bodies varying in degrees of fitness and health, but each one possesses one similarity–intricate blue tattoos curving brazenly around their arms, necks, and torsos.
“Those particular tattoos are known as hikani, Minister. They are for the micipna only.”
“A brand? To indicate their station, yes?”
The Magister is a rotund man, and his skin sags when he bows his head, the jowls of flesh around his mouth dimpling as he smiles at her. “An honor so that we mere men may recognize the mystical among us.”
She makes a noncommittal noise and sips at her drink.
“We glorify them, you know.” Slowly, so slowly, the way one approaches a feral animal, he moves his hand towards her elbow. “The micipna, that is. They live free lives. They don’t know iron bars or cages. They have never seen a militarized compound.”
Augusta’s gaze is forward. She’s studying the workers, her elbows pressed into the railing as she holds the cordial in front of her. “And because of that, all I see is unchecked progress.”
Enel skims her forearm with the very tips of his plump fingers. He’s watching her body, not her face, and it takes him a moment to process what she has said. “What’s that, my dear?”
“You’re likely to start worshiping them, genetic aberrations, over the rationality of man. It’s a worship of biological mutation, of divergence. You don’t see the catastrophe in this?”
He’s trailing his fingers up the side of her arm, appreciating the feel of her skin, when he hears her; he barks a laugh, dismissive. The entire islands know of the Vries and their persecution, their self-righteous hold on the continent nearly as rigid as their hypocrisy. “To be marked is to be respected, but respect is not the same as worship. Let’s not put the cart before the horse.”
Augusta’s shoulders are stiff. She does not respond.
“Perhaps your companion here would like the honor of wearing the hikani? It would be no trouble to accrue an artist for the task.”
“Oh no,” she says, and pulls a step away, glancing over her shoulder to where Radomir has been standing near the doorway, as silent and powerful as stone. “His brands are mine.”
Enel laughs. “I do appreciate a woman who understands ownership.”
“And subservience, no doubt.”
He dips his head again in acknowledgement before taking her by the arm to lead her into the coolness of the pillared courtyard below. It is shadowy and overrun with ivy, the garden lush with vividly colored flowers. “I had not expected a Vries to be so accommodating to our culture, I must admit. It’s wonderful to see you in our dress, and the people will appreciate it. A waist chain would be a befitting accessory for tonight’s dinner, I think.”
“Sadly, my dear Magister, I am still in mourning and will be for some time. A chain of such beauty and implication would disrespect my husband’s memory.”
When he pats her hand with his fat fingers, stroking up the length of her arm, he feels her slight stiffness. “You continentals are too serious. You should spend your time loving rather than grieving.”
“I shall take that under advisement. Would you also advise stealing rather than bartering?”
Enel laughs again, squeezing her waist now. “Always, Minister, always.”
The dinner is more bureaucratic talk. Augusta hardly eats her steamed fish although she takes polite bites of the seaweed salad and the stewed onions with green-colored vegetables that accompany it. She favors the spices here, the burst of heat inside her mouth, and the acidity from all the limes.
When the serving staff pour her a chilled glass of honeyed-wine, she asks for whiskey instead. The Magister must open a barrel from the cellar. Radomir is given a tumbler too, and the glass looks small in his hands. He does not drink it. He is uncomfortable sitting at the table, his mountainous body made all the larger when crammed into a thin chair of beechwood, but Enel does not seem to notice. He piles food onto Radomir’s plate himself and serves him directly, but Radomir waits for Augusta’s acknowledgment before he eats and that, too, Enel does not comment upon.
At the end of the meal, the servants clear the table, and Enel brings out a box of imported cigars. Augusta smiles at the sight of them. “My father used to smoke these,” she says.
“A man of good taste then.”
She declines one all the same, but Enel partakes, the sweet smoke smelling of cedar and leather.
Leaning back in her chair, she rifles through a few documents on cultural propagation. “Can you explain your process a bit more to me?”
“We had naively thought, back in the early days, that transformation was created through receiving a bite. Superstitious of us, really. It seems now that evolution and genetics are the simplest way to ensure propagation.”
“You are genetically controlling the DNA?”
The Magister gives an impatient wave of his hand, the smoke from his cigar circling above his head. “Nothing so drastic nor advanced. The easiest solution is often the best answer to science’s hardest questions. We’ve been studying impregnation through willing subjects. Two micipna almost always guarantee a pureborn offspring, although miscarriages seem to happen at an alarming rate. Some human females when paired with a micipna have up to a 32% chance to rear a fully intact child that, upon puberty, will shift. We suspect there is a recessive trait.”
Augusta looks alarmed. “Why would a woman volunteer for this?”
“Well, as I said, Golminster is interested in propagation. We seek to preserve.”
“Have you not tried blood infusions?”
Enel lifts a bushy eyebrow. “Respectfully, we do not believe in such extreme measures. A human subject cannot absorb a micipna’s blood the way the earth absorbs the rain. An experiment such as that would likely only result in pain and illness, if not death.”
“You misunderstand.” Augusta takes a drink of her whiskey, the ice clinking. “What if you were to infuse contaminated, baser blood with pure, uninfected human blood?”
“To what purpose?”
She looks briefly at Radomir before answering with a self-assured grin. “Transcendence.”
His smile is humorless in response. “We have different ideas here of what true transcendence entails, Minister.”
Augusta nods to show her understanding. She is quiet, reviewing the documents again; she makes a sound of curiosity at the writing in the third paragraph on the fourth page. “The subject is bestial when the fertilization occurs with a human?”
“Yes. It seems to impact the success rates. We don’t yet know why.”
She keeps reading. “It also says that these events are observed and recorded.”
“By our scientists and mystics, yes. It is not the most romantic of events for the subjects involved, but there is a semblance of privacy provided and very little intrusions.”
“I would like to see one.”
Enel grins now, fleshy and eager, around the girth of his cigar. “That can be arranged.”
The observation room is lavishly decorated in velvets, crêpes, and damask. To enhance the atmosphere, a plethora of candles ring the raised dias, and sconces burn across the walls every few feet. It’s a beautiful, feverish setting, heady from the sandalwood scent in the air with all but the center platform dark and the sheerest of curtains falling over the open cut-outs of each adjoined viewing chamber.
A full-figured woman is out there on a small bed piled with sumptuous pillows and opulent blankets. Beside the rich fabrics, another woman might have disappeared, but not this one. She has the gold-painted fingers of a prostitute but the composure of royality; her hair is toffee-colored, the warm golden hue catching the firelight, and her skin a pearly, unblemished cream. Augusta is close enough to see the kitten-pink of her lips, her nipples, and the small thatch of brown curls between her thighs. It’s an honorary placement, she knows, befitting her station as a visiting dignitary.
Still, Augusta settles into the black wing chair of their allotted viewing chamber discontentedly, her fawn-colored dress pooling across her legs. It is another one of the outfits gifted to her by the Magister Enel, and it’s lovely in a gauzy, wispy way, but after only a week on the island, she’s tired of the delicate clothing and the lack of protection it provides. She’d given up on the island’s custom and guest-rights the second day, so now every step she takes reveals the leather holster at her thigh and the blades tucked there against her skin. When she smooths her palms across her lap, she’s comforted by the feel of the knives. She brushes her thumb across the closest pointed steel tip before glancing behind her.
“Enel said these activities are viewed for academic inquiry and record, but with this lighting? That curtain? Impossible,” she says to Radomir, who has taken his place near the closed door. “This is just another excuse for men to view a fetish and fondle themselves, all under the veneer of intellectual discovery.”
“And they consider you the uncivilized one.”
“Us,” she corrects. “They consider us savage. You are not exempt.” Augusta taps the nearby chair nestled beside hers. “But sit. I’d rather you not loom behind me for this.”
He looks too large for the chair, as is customary, but he sits comfortably enough. He has an oblong face with a broad forehead, a strong jawline scratched with stubble, and full lips. His mouth has always looked feminine to Augusta and slobbering, like the jowls of a brutish dog, but she likes his intelligent eyes with their fickle blue-green color. In this lighting, they look more cerulean, but they darken like a tangle of vines when the fire-light flares and the circling crowd gives a collective soft murmur.
“What is that?” he asks suddenly, keenly aware of the subtlest of differences in the air.
“Pheromones, I suspect.”
Radomir meets her gaze. It is not a look of true fright or terror or even suspicion; he’s been with her too long to fear that she might test him any worse than she already has, and he trusts implicitly that he has deserved all her trials, but a sliver of anxiety persists all the same. It’s the instinct of his beast, the guttural response to a possible threat, the blood and bone of his being that he cannot deny. It makes the shape of his face shift, flinch together for the quickest of moments as though he’s been hit.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she asks, voice light as the silk she wears. “It’s supposedly meant to help the fertilization.” One of her shoulders lifts in a shrug. “It’s for the … what is that word they use? Micipna. I’m obviously immune.”
On the dias, a man approached the woman with her golden-painted fingers. He is naked and unabashed. His sudden shift also lacks shame. Augusta watches intently; she has always found the process as revolting as she has mesmerizing, the way the bones stretch and seem to break, how they reform in a grotesquely rapid rate until the beast stands where the man had been. The air always feels charged to her after a transformation, like even the particles in the air have been charred by the anomalous event.
Radomir’s nostrils are flared, and he’s breathing too deeply; his entire body is rigid. He’s leant forward, fixated. She expects his eyes to be like a shark’s–dark and deadly–but they’re bright again, focused so intently on the actions occurring in front of him that he startles when her hand grazes the top of his thigh. Her nails are short, blunt, and they scratch pleasantly across his leg, leading him back into focus. He half turns his face towards hers, but she’s already reaching between his legs, grasping him where he’s pained and hard. Her laughter sounds like a snake shedding its skin, and Augusta watches the way his face reddens, like an embarrassed child.
He has always relented to her, simultaneously tortured and brought to bliss by the indiginity she makes him feel. Since the murder of her husband, it has almost been worse, if proximity to her can be worse than the fighting pits and the dank cell he’d been stored in. She has him sleep in her bed; she likes to stretch her long body against his, to feel him against the length of her spine and the backs of her thighs. Sometimes, she will roll towards him, throwing an arm over his powerful shoulders or burying her face into the white fur of his neck, and each time, Radomir thinks, over and over, that this can’t go on; her around him, surrounding him, inside of him—it will come to an end, and maybe then he will feel relief. He is like a dog, she had told him one morning, like one of her father’s hounds who used to guard his bed by sleeping at his feet, only more loyal and more deadly. He had barely hidden his grin then, just like he barely contains the way his groin aches when she squeezes him now.
When she works at the front of his pants and frees the thick length of him, he sucks air in through his teeth, pushing himself back against the chair. His legs are wide-spread now, his hands on the arms of the chair, clutching as though the wood beneath his fingers is a lifeline.
“Who’s white-knuckled now?” she taunts, pressing her warm mouth to the side of his jaw. She can feel the prickly hair there against her lips.
Her wrist rolls over the head of his cock, her fist slipping down and up, so slow that it’s agony. She keeps her face close to him but shifts her gaze to the side to watch what’s happening on the platform. The beast that had once been a man has mounted the woman, and it’s a grotesque display of sensuality and carnality, of fur and flesh. Radomir’s breath hitches, rattling inside of his chest, all dying air.
When he comes, Augusta lifts her hand, sticky with his seed, to his mouth.
“Lick it off,” she says, and he does.
She is not the woman on the dias, she will have him know. She will not take into her that which offends.