wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2019-04-15 06:32 pm
wintersday) wrote2019-04-15 06:32 pm
Entry tags:
- character: fbg: sky-captain,
- character: fbg: the repentant devil,
- fandom: fbg: sunless skies,
- fanfic,
- fanfic: length: 1-5k,
- fanfic: rating: mature,
- fanfic: type: f/m,
- format: ficlet collection,
- kink: bondage,
- kink: xeno,
- pairing: fbg: skycaptain/repentant devil,
- trope: eldritch horrors,
- trope: judgment in a sky-captain suit,
- trope: smut as character study
Fic: Where There Is Light
Title: Where There Is Light
Fandom: Sunless Skies
Major Characters/Pairings: Sky-Captain/The Repentant Devil
Wordcount: 10 ficlets of varying lengths, ~3,300 words total
Rating: Mature/Light Explicit
POV: Third person
Summary: Drabbles and ficlets written for 100 Words of… prompts on FFA, primarily featuring (vague, allusive) xeno-tinged smut interspersed with a bit of character study. Also included: generalized rebelliousness against the Judgments, probably more fluff than any ship involving a Devil should have.
Notes: Originally posted at![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
ScriveSpinster. Female Sky-Captain with an Urchin background, Judgement-in-a-Captain-suit
The Captain kneels – head bowed, hands on thighs, breathing slow. No ropes hold her, only the still-smoldering echo of a single command: be still.
There’s a furnace heat behind her, and if she looked back – if she could look back – she doubts she’d see anything resembling human. Then she feels his palm against her back, fever-hot, a reminder that he too is bound by his own word and his own will.
His lips brush her ear: “Relax, Captain. We fly through safe skies.”
Untrue. No safe skies exist, nor any safety in trusting devils.
But she is still, and unafraid.
There was a time when the Captain used to dream of burning: fountains of sparks, rivers ablaze. Sometimes it hurt, reaching for those flames. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes she was the fire, consumed and consuming.
Now, with the Repentant Devil’s claws pressing points of heat into her back, it’s those dreams she thinks of. His eyes are faceted mirrors above her. His wings, unfurled, span the cabin from wall to wall, and it shouldn’t be possible, this wild consummation. Her skin should sear and blacken; the hull should be compromised, void rushing in.
There should be pain, beyond this exquisite ache, but there is no pain. She clasps her legs around a form that shifts like fire, feeling only the tremble in her thighs as he drives into her, the brand of his lips against her throat and the certainty that stars are born like this – in heat, and light.
The Repentant Devil lies curled atop her sheets, head resting on her bare thigh, one of her hands in his hair. The other, he examines with a scientist’s curiosity, searching for something unknown as his thumb traces the raised line of a scar along her knuckles.
“Knife fight,” she confesses, with a short, sharp laugh, and amusement glitters in his eyes. In moments like this, he could very nearly be human; she’s never more aware than in moments like this that he isn’t. He brings her hand to his mouth and kisses it, trailing down from that scar to the very tips of her fingers; his breath brushes her skin, and the air of her cabin is suddenly cold in comparison.
Perhaps he feels her shiver, hears the sound she tries to stifle, or perhaps it’s only that he knows her well, but he turns her hand, presses his lips to her wrist, her palm – and no, she thinks, not human. His teeth are a shade too sharp for that, his tongue too smooth, and the heat when he takes her fingers in his mouth lingers just this side of pain.
“Insatiable,” she says, and his laughter vibrates through her.
“I?” he asks, in mock disbelief. For a moment, beneath the layers of distance, there’s something almost wistful in his voice when he says, “I can remember being so young.”
Then he bends to his task again, merciless in his attentions, and every stray moment collapses into this, here, now.
After Albion, all that industry and emptiness, the lush verdancy of the Nature Reserve seems half-real, unlikely as a dream. It isn’t a safe place to wander alone, but traversing the skies is no safer, and the Captain needs the solitude enough to make her way out into denser growth, through hanging vines and thickets, until even the memory of factory smoke is gone from her lungs. When she turns back, it’s with mud on her boots and the petals of unfamiliar blossoms caught in her hair, easy again in her own skin.
The Repentant Devil, she finds in a clearing along the way, as unafraid of nature’s perils as she. He’s seated amid bronzewood roots with a book in his hands, but he rises when he sees her, and goes still as she takes a step towards him.
“You’ve been stopping to smell the roses,” he says, with a curious tilt of his head. He speaks lightly, but there’s a quality to him that she’s never seen before, a tension in his voice and a darkness in his eyes that seems more akin to appetite than appraisal.
“More thorns than roses here,” she says. “More fungus than either.” And she might, she thinks, simply step back and leave it at that, and he would be aloof and controlled again, even the traces of what she’d glimpsed packed impeccably away. But she’s been too long in desolation, and here in this wilderness, thick with drifting spores and dappled with golden light, she doesn’t feel like stepping back from anything. So she grins, holds out a hand – and he’s there in front of her, reaching up to touch her face as she falls back against the trunk of a great tree and drags him with her. She can feel the heat of his body through her clothes, and the weight of his hips pressed against hers as he leans down to smell the pollen dusted in her hair.
And oh, she realizes, as he breathes deep and a slow shiver runs through him. Of course. She has learned something of devils in her travels – enough that the understanding doesn’t quite surprise her.
“The Garden of Heaven,” he says, “is a place of myriad delights. And it has been too long – ”
He goes to his knees, his hands sliding down to frame her hips, shadows playing across his face as he looks up at her with a hunger that leaves her aching.
“Then lay me down in a field of flowers,” she tells him. “Have your wicked way with me.”
“As my Captain commands,” he says, as his hands find the buckle on her belt and her hands find his hair – and then he’s easing her trousers down over her hips, bending forward to kiss the inside of her thigh, and neither one of them speaks for a very long time. Be it garden or wilderness, home or exile, the air here is sweet-scented, and everything is green and full of light.
When she goes to him that night – after the salvage gone wrong, cracked glass and blood and void – she thinks it’s pain she means to ask for.
She feels too small for her skin, too cold to be alive; when she closes her eyes, light blooms behind them. She’s sane enough still to bring her crew home, but if anyone can pare the touch of starlight from her soul, it will be him, and worth it.
Instead, he bids her kneel before brazier and basin: water to cleanse, smoke to sting and purify, chorister nectar to anoint her lips. The sigil he traces in burning wax between her shoulderblades is one of peace and soothing dark. In the low, droning hum of his voice, she hears hymns of night’s liberation.
In the end, when he lays her down, clad only in clean sweat, the chill of the Wilderness is all forgotten. When he bends above her, wings flared, claws closing on her shoulders and cradling her hips, it isn’t Judgment light she thinks of – and when she reaches back, arching up to take in all that iridescent strangeness, what he whispers in words of flame is, “You are not theirs.”
Peace is a rarity, far as they are from port, but they’re clear of danger, not safe but free, and the Captain feels justified in allowing herself an hour or two for indulgence. What that means – now that her breathing is steady again, her mind free of even the remnants of fear – is a chance to lie with her eyes half closed, just listening to the rattle of pipes and plating and, somewhere far off, a crew member whistling a faint, familiar tune.
At the sound of that song, the Repentant Devil goes still beneath her – his fingers threaded through her hair, one hand curled low and hot around her hip – and lifts his head, alert when he had been languid.
“That’s an old one,” he says, with some surprise. “By your standards, at least.”
“The song?” she asks, listening closer, and yes, she can place it. “That’s an Urchin ditty. A storm-song. Though I also heard it from a zailor once, and even you might not believe the words he put to it.”
He makes a contemplative sound – a sort of resonance, oddly hollow and not altogether human. It’s never easy to say quite what might be on his mind, but she doesn’t think it’s the inventiveness of zailors.
“Storm-song?” he muses. “Maybe so. It’s changed, of course, but the bones of the melody are there. First City, I think you’d call it.”
And she hadn’t thought herself so easily impressed, but she feels the breath catch in her lungs at the sound of those words, First City, and their careless implication. She’d known well enough that this being she’d taken up with was one who mentioned centuries as casually as she mentioned years, but now it strikes her anew, and she has to wonder.
She shifts in place, nestled comfortably against the crook of his shoulder, and asks, “How old are you, anyway?”
Older than Earth, no doubt, wherever Earth might be. Older perhaps than some stars. He tilts his head back, looking up at the roof above and seeming to stare a ways beyond it.
“England’s Church,” he says, “underestimates the age of the universe to a considerable degree. I was among the firstborn.”
And that –
At that, she finds herself stunned into silence. It’s like stepping into a puddle and finding a lake, dark and drowning and so much farther over her head than she ever could have guessed by looking down. Mortal understanding falters against the span of all those years, and the only thing she can think to say, when she manages to say anything at all, is, “And you’ve not gotten bored yet?”
“I have,” he says. “Entirely too often for my taste.” His voice is light, but there’s a moment when the mask slips, and it seems to her that what she sees beneath is not boredom but the weariness of something old and terrible, too great for any peaceful ending. Then it’s gone, replaced with a distant sort of amusement and a smile that would make a courtesan blush – but though she might let him believe she’s forgotten, she doesn’t think she ever will.
“But the universe is full of new things,” he whispers. “And there’s always a diversion to be found.”
His hand tightens on her hip, claw-points pricking her skin, and she twists in his arms, rises to straddle him. Her hands close on his shoulders, over the scars that mark his skin and the fire beneath it; his face is shadowed, but his eyes burn, lambent in the half-dark. That ought to scare her, maybe. It doesn’t. She moves against him, feeling the way his body responds – and then he pulls her close, fierce now, unfurling from the illusion of mortal flesh into the truth it hides. And as he does, she thinks of years and cities fallen, history tangled up in the sweetness of the moment and all the unfathomable ages yet to be.
Afterwards – after she falls back, sated, still trembling – it takes some work to remember that she’s mortal. She feels filled with light, and though she knows this body is hers, this sweat-soaked skin and the sweet ache of pleasure that hasn’t faded, it’s hard to believe she could be anything so small.
He kneels beside her, as close to human now as he ever was, holding a cup to her lips. She drinks, suddenly desperately thirsty: cool water, clear as starshine.
“I’m out of practice,” he mutters, with a dissatisfied shake of his head. She throws a pillow at him.
She doesn’t ask, when they make port in Pan, what it’s like for the Repentant Devil to walk again so close to so many of his kind, or to hear the song of a vanquished Saint marking every hour. She doesn’t ask what drives him out into Eleutherian dark, past beacon fires and revels to a cypress-scented hillside – and he in turn does not object when she follows. There’s something to be said for company in solitude, and both of them are far from home.
This place is strange to her still, but the eternal night holds no terrors; there’s a precarious peace to it, in the wildness of the groves and the playing of the Piper Saint. All stories are forbidden here, but music is a kind of tale, the kind that slips past defenses and roots itself deep. If the Judgment that rules this place has forgotten that, she sees no reason to remind it. Better to sit back, with long grass brushing her arms and tickling her elbows, and listen to the high, mournful tune carried on the wind past Just In Time and Far Too Late. They have a poetry to their naming, Pan’s Brazen knights; she wonders if somewhere, hidden from human eyes, they keep a grove or temple or ruin of May Yet Be.
In the dark, branches rustle and shadows move. Above her, glowing insects trace paths across the sky, the arc of their flight like some script she almost knows enough to decipher. At her side, the Repentant Devil watches her watching them, his head tilted with an empiricist’s curiosity.
“They interest you,” he says.
“They’re odd little things,” she says. “I thought at first they must be scarabs, like we had in the Neath, but...”
He nods. “The small souls here have adapted to make their own light, or do without.”
His smile is wry as he stands, reaching into his satchel for something. He waits for a moment, then moves rapidly, clapping his hands together. When he turns back, he’s holding a little glass bottle, tightly stoppered and glowing from within.
He holds it out, and she takes it – cool in her palms, less fragile than it looks. Back in her childhood, she’d seen such jars used to capture songs and souls, and she wonders whether, if she’s quick enough, she might catch a few notes of the Piper’s tune to carry with her when she goes. But now, when she looks closer, what it holds is not a beetle but a bee – tiny cousin to the Choristers, buzzing against the glass.
“The hive will not miss one,” the Devil says. There’s a question in his voice, but what precisely he’s asking is more difficult to ascertain. It hardly matters. She knows her answer anyway. She unstoppers the jar and holds it up; the bee, no longer captive, wheels once about her head and vanishes into the dusk, trailing light.
“I rather think,” she says, “that one might miss the hive.”
What the Wilderness has taught her – what every captain learns, if they only live long enough – is that there are things it’s best not to look at directly.
Starlight is dangerous; too close, it burns and blinds, and at a distance, it etches itself into your mind, leaves you changed from the inside out. Dark is safer, usually, softer, but she’s felt the ragged well-winds cut deep beneath her skin, looked unflinching into the pit of an Extinguishment, and she’s seen what emptiness can hide. There are eyes in the night, cloaked in splendor, and those eyes stare back.
And what the Wilderness has taught her is that set against some types of beauty, what should be terror instead is respite.
It’s cold, out beyond the thin steel shell she calls a home, but here she is wrapped in heat, caught and anchored by it – and by the Repentant Devil’s arms around her, his burnished claws encircling her belly, his mouth pressed to the place where her shoulder meets her throat. Her eyes are closed, but not in fear, and what she knows, she knows by touch and memory: that his breath is slow and deep, his skin as smooth against her back as an insect’s carapace, that he is many-limbed and geometry does not constrain him. That he is capable, when he chooses, of gentleness.
Her heart beats with human rapidity; her own breath comes quick and shallow. Her thighs ache as she rocks back, her legs spread wide, letting him fill her from behind. She trembles on the verge of something that is almost release, and when she thinks at all, what she thinks of is chains and their breaking.
Let them see, she thinks. The ones who watch and judge. Let them know that I don’t care.
The Captain stands in the silent heart of the Sun-Shattered Dome, surrounded by ruin and vitrified statues. She wears no suit. There’s no need for that anymore – no dim, slow light seeps through the cracks in the ceiling, and she isn’t cold, even here, with void-winds whistling through the walls. She carries no lamp, and none of those is needed, either. She exists in a circle of radiance within the vault of darkness that had been the Clockwork Sun, and before that the Dawn Machine, and now is nothing but dead metal. When she lifts her hand, it is veined with light.
All but one of her crew is gone, sent to safety by the fastest route, and that one stands at her side, watching her with head tilted and no expression in his yellow eyes. Perhaps it’s some regard for her that has him wanting to remain, or perhaps it’s only curiosity, the desire to witness a marvel even he hasn’t seen before. Whatever his motives, she’s glad she’s not alone here.
“I won’t be myself anymore, will I?” she asks quietly, knowing the answer and needing to say it all the same. Words make things real – her native tongue most of all.
“Your soul will remain,” he says, and in the flat calm of his voice, she hears everything he isn’t saying. Her soul would remain. The rest of her would be consumed in the apotheosis, and in its place, there would be power and glory, light and law eternal – or close enough, though both of them know too well that even stars die in the end. Or she could will the burning thing in her chest to quiescence, and walk away. She would be human, and herself, and she would live – and London’s fleet would spill across the Reach in their bid for survival, while those left behind on workworlds would succumb in time to cold and endless night.
She feels his hand on her arm, and turns to face him, her decision already made. There’s a terrible sort of compassion in the way he brushes her hair back from her face, and no pity whatsoever.
“There are worse ends,” he says, “than to perish in the creation of something new.”
She nods. Of course. She can’t deny it.
“Something better,” she says, and laughs abruptly. “That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? For what comes next to be better than what came before? I’ll give you your revolution, Devil.”
Let that be true, she thinks. Let me be different from what I once was, before I became myself.”
And he too must know that nothing is certain – that power alters those who wield it, and law, and light – but what he says, at long last, is, “Our revolution.”
One last kiss, then – open-mouthed and hungry, fire flickering in the space between them – before he steps back, leaving her alone.
It’s simple, what she does next – like unlocking a chain that she’s carried her whole life and only noticed now, letting its weight fall from her shoulders. She tilts her head back toward the roof of the dome and lets her hands fall open at her sides, exhales, remembers. And then she breathes a word that burns, and skin and bone and machinery all flash to ash as she rises, shedding the shell of herself like snakeskin.
And as she does, something rises with her, small and winged and bright against the void. A soul she knows, a memory – exultant, defiant, spiraling upwards in challenge and greeting to call the name of Albion’s new star of the morning.
Fandom: Sunless Skies
Major Characters/Pairings: Sky-Captain/The Repentant Devil
Wordcount: 10 ficlets of varying lengths, ~3,300 words total
Rating: Mature/Light Explicit
POV: Third person
Summary: Drabbles and ficlets written for 100 Words of… prompts on FFA, primarily featuring (vague, allusive) xeno-tinged smut interspersed with a bit of character study. Also included: generalized rebelliousness against the Judgments, probably more fluff than any ship involving a Devil should have.
Notes: Originally posted at
Bondage
The Captain kneels – head bowed, hands on thighs, breathing slow. No ropes hold her, only the still-smoldering echo of a single command: be still.
There’s a furnace heat behind her, and if she looked back – if she could look back – she doubts she’d see anything resembling human. Then she feels his palm against her back, fever-hot, a reminder that he too is bound by his own word and his own will.
His lips brush her ear: “Relax, Captain. We fly through safe skies.”
Untrue. No safe skies exist, nor any safety in trusting devils.
But she is still, and unafraid.
Unrealistic Monsterfucking
There was a time when the Captain used to dream of burning: fountains of sparks, rivers ablaze. Sometimes it hurt, reaching for those flames. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes she was the fire, consumed and consuming.
Now, with the Repentant Devil’s claws pressing points of heat into her back, it’s those dreams she thinks of. His eyes are faceted mirrors above her. His wings, unfurled, span the cabin from wall to wall, and it shouldn’t be possible, this wild consummation. Her skin should sear and blacken; the hull should be compromised, void rushing in.
There should be pain, beyond this exquisite ache, but there is no pain. She clasps her legs around a form that shifts like fire, feeling only the tremble in her thighs as he drives into her, the brand of his lips against her throat and the certainty that stars are born like this – in heat, and light.
Hand Kink
The Repentant Devil lies curled atop her sheets, head resting on her bare thigh, one of her hands in his hair. The other, he examines with a scientist’s curiosity, searching for something unknown as his thumb traces the raised line of a scar along her knuckles.
“Knife fight,” she confesses, with a short, sharp laugh, and amusement glitters in his eyes. In moments like this, he could very nearly be human; she’s never more aware than in moments like this that he isn’t. He brings her hand to his mouth and kisses it, trailing down from that scar to the very tips of her fingers; his breath brushes her skin, and the air of her cabin is suddenly cold in comparison.
Perhaps he feels her shiver, hears the sound she tries to stifle, or perhaps it’s only that he knows her well, but he turns her hand, presses his lips to her wrist, her palm – and no, she thinks, not human. His teeth are a shade too sharp for that, his tongue too smooth, and the heat when he takes her fingers in his mouth lingers just this side of pain.
“Insatiable,” she says, and his laughter vibrates through her.
“I?” he asks, in mock disbelief. For a moment, beneath the layers of distance, there’s something almost wistful in his voice when he says, “I can remember being so young.”
Then he bends to his task again, merciless in his attentions, and every stray moment collapses into this, here, now.
Wanting Someone Desperately
After Albion, all that industry and emptiness, the lush verdancy of the Nature Reserve seems half-real, unlikely as a dream. It isn’t a safe place to wander alone, but traversing the skies is no safer, and the Captain needs the solitude enough to make her way out into denser growth, through hanging vines and thickets, until even the memory of factory smoke is gone from her lungs. When she turns back, it’s with mud on her boots and the petals of unfamiliar blossoms caught in her hair, easy again in her own skin.
The Repentant Devil, she finds in a clearing along the way, as unafraid of nature’s perils as she. He’s seated amid bronzewood roots with a book in his hands, but he rises when he sees her, and goes still as she takes a step towards him.
“You’ve been stopping to smell the roses,” he says, with a curious tilt of his head. He speaks lightly, but there’s a quality to him that she’s never seen before, a tension in his voice and a darkness in his eyes that seems more akin to appetite than appraisal.
“More thorns than roses here,” she says. “More fungus than either.” And she might, she thinks, simply step back and leave it at that, and he would be aloof and controlled again, even the traces of what she’d glimpsed packed impeccably away. But she’s been too long in desolation, and here in this wilderness, thick with drifting spores and dappled with golden light, she doesn’t feel like stepping back from anything. So she grins, holds out a hand – and he’s there in front of her, reaching up to touch her face as she falls back against the trunk of a great tree and drags him with her. She can feel the heat of his body through her clothes, and the weight of his hips pressed against hers as he leans down to smell the pollen dusted in her hair.
And oh, she realizes, as he breathes deep and a slow shiver runs through him. Of course. She has learned something of devils in her travels – enough that the understanding doesn’t quite surprise her.
“The Garden of Heaven,” he says, “is a place of myriad delights. And it has been too long – ”
He goes to his knees, his hands sliding down to frame her hips, shadows playing across his face as he looks up at her with a hunger that leaves her aching.
“Then lay me down in a field of flowers,” she tells him. “Have your wicked way with me.”
“As my Captain commands,” he says, as his hands find the buckle on her belt and her hands find his hair – and then he’s easing her trousers down over her hips, bending forward to kiss the inside of her thigh, and neither one of them speaks for a very long time. Be it garden or wilderness, home or exile, the air here is sweet-scented, and everything is green and full of light.
Cleansing Ritual Sex
When she goes to him that night – after the salvage gone wrong, cracked glass and blood and void – she thinks it’s pain she means to ask for.
She feels too small for her skin, too cold to be alive; when she closes her eyes, light blooms behind them. She’s sane enough still to bring her crew home, but if anyone can pare the touch of starlight from her soul, it will be him, and worth it.
Instead, he bids her kneel before brazier and basin: water to cleanse, smoke to sting and purify, chorister nectar to anoint her lips. The sigil he traces in burning wax between her shoulderblades is one of peace and soothing dark. In the low, droning hum of his voice, she hears hymns of night’s liberation.
In the end, when he lays her down, clad only in clean sweat, the chill of the Wilderness is all forgotten. When he bends above her, wings flared, claws closing on her shoulders and cradling her hips, it isn’t Judgment light she thinks of – and when she reaches back, arching up to take in all that iridescent strangeness, what he whispers in words of flame is, “You are not theirs.”
Age Gaps
Peace is a rarity, far as they are from port, but they’re clear of danger, not safe but free, and the Captain feels justified in allowing herself an hour or two for indulgence. What that means – now that her breathing is steady again, her mind free of even the remnants of fear – is a chance to lie with her eyes half closed, just listening to the rattle of pipes and plating and, somewhere far off, a crew member whistling a faint, familiar tune.
At the sound of that song, the Repentant Devil goes still beneath her – his fingers threaded through her hair, one hand curled low and hot around her hip – and lifts his head, alert when he had been languid.
“That’s an old one,” he says, with some surprise. “By your standards, at least.”
“The song?” she asks, listening closer, and yes, she can place it. “That’s an Urchin ditty. A storm-song. Though I also heard it from a zailor once, and even you might not believe the words he put to it.”
He makes a contemplative sound – a sort of resonance, oddly hollow and not altogether human. It’s never easy to say quite what might be on his mind, but she doesn’t think it’s the inventiveness of zailors.
“Storm-song?” he muses. “Maybe so. It’s changed, of course, but the bones of the melody are there. First City, I think you’d call it.”
And she hadn’t thought herself so easily impressed, but she feels the breath catch in her lungs at the sound of those words, First City, and their careless implication. She’d known well enough that this being she’d taken up with was one who mentioned centuries as casually as she mentioned years, but now it strikes her anew, and she has to wonder.
She shifts in place, nestled comfortably against the crook of his shoulder, and asks, “How old are you, anyway?”
Older than Earth, no doubt, wherever Earth might be. Older perhaps than some stars. He tilts his head back, looking up at the roof above and seeming to stare a ways beyond it.
“England’s Church,” he says, “underestimates the age of the universe to a considerable degree. I was among the firstborn.”
And that –
At that, she finds herself stunned into silence. It’s like stepping into a puddle and finding a lake, dark and drowning and so much farther over her head than she ever could have guessed by looking down. Mortal understanding falters against the span of all those years, and the only thing she can think to say, when she manages to say anything at all, is, “And you’ve not gotten bored yet?”
“I have,” he says. “Entirely too often for my taste.” His voice is light, but there’s a moment when the mask slips, and it seems to her that what she sees beneath is not boredom but the weariness of something old and terrible, too great for any peaceful ending. Then it’s gone, replaced with a distant sort of amusement and a smile that would make a courtesan blush – but though she might let him believe she’s forgotten, she doesn’t think she ever will.
“But the universe is full of new things,” he whispers. “And there’s always a diversion to be found.”
His hand tightens on her hip, claw-points pricking her skin, and she twists in his arms, rises to straddle him. Her hands close on his shoulders, over the scars that mark his skin and the fire beneath it; his face is shadowed, but his eyes burn, lambent in the half-dark. That ought to scare her, maybe. It doesn’t. She moves against him, feeling the way his body responds – and then he pulls her close, fierce now, unfurling from the illusion of mortal flesh into the truth it hides. And as he does, she thinks of years and cities fallen, history tangled up in the sweetness of the moment and all the unfathomable ages yet to be.
Aftercare
Afterwards – after she falls back, sated, still trembling – it takes some work to remember that she’s mortal. She feels filled with light, and though she knows this body is hers, this sweat-soaked skin and the sweet ache of pleasure that hasn’t faded, it’s hard to believe she could be anything so small.
He kneels beside her, as close to human now as he ever was, holding a cup to her lips. She drinks, suddenly desperately thirsty: cool water, clear as starshine.
“I’m out of practice,” he mutters, with a dissatisfied shake of his head. She throws a pillow at him.
Bees
She doesn’t ask, when they make port in Pan, what it’s like for the Repentant Devil to walk again so close to so many of his kind, or to hear the song of a vanquished Saint marking every hour. She doesn’t ask what drives him out into Eleutherian dark, past beacon fires and revels to a cypress-scented hillside – and he in turn does not object when she follows. There’s something to be said for company in solitude, and both of them are far from home.
This place is strange to her still, but the eternal night holds no terrors; there’s a precarious peace to it, in the wildness of the groves and the playing of the Piper Saint. All stories are forbidden here, but music is a kind of tale, the kind that slips past defenses and roots itself deep. If the Judgment that rules this place has forgotten that, she sees no reason to remind it. Better to sit back, with long grass brushing her arms and tickling her elbows, and listen to the high, mournful tune carried on the wind past Just In Time and Far Too Late. They have a poetry to their naming, Pan’s Brazen knights; she wonders if somewhere, hidden from human eyes, they keep a grove or temple or ruin of May Yet Be.
In the dark, branches rustle and shadows move. Above her, glowing insects trace paths across the sky, the arc of their flight like some script she almost knows enough to decipher. At her side, the Repentant Devil watches her watching them, his head tilted with an empiricist’s curiosity.
“They interest you,” he says.
“They’re odd little things,” she says. “I thought at first they must be scarabs, like we had in the Neath, but...”
He nods. “The small souls here have adapted to make their own light, or do without.”
His smile is wry as he stands, reaching into his satchel for something. He waits for a moment, then moves rapidly, clapping his hands together. When he turns back, he’s holding a little glass bottle, tightly stoppered and glowing from within.
He holds it out, and she takes it – cool in her palms, less fragile than it looks. Back in her childhood, she’d seen such jars used to capture songs and souls, and she wonders whether, if she’s quick enough, she might catch a few notes of the Piper’s tune to carry with her when she goes. But now, when she looks closer, what it holds is not a beetle but a bee – tiny cousin to the Choristers, buzzing against the glass.
“The hive will not miss one,” the Devil says. There’s a question in his voice, but what precisely he’s asking is more difficult to ascertain. It hardly matters. She knows her answer anyway. She unstoppers the jar and holds it up; the bee, no longer captive, wheels once about her head and vanishes into the dusk, trailing light.
“I rather think,” she says, “that one might miss the hive.”
Eldritch Abominations
What the Wilderness has taught her – what every captain learns, if they only live long enough – is that there are things it’s best not to look at directly.
Starlight is dangerous; too close, it burns and blinds, and at a distance, it etches itself into your mind, leaves you changed from the inside out. Dark is safer, usually, softer, but she’s felt the ragged well-winds cut deep beneath her skin, looked unflinching into the pit of an Extinguishment, and she’s seen what emptiness can hide. There are eyes in the night, cloaked in splendor, and those eyes stare back.
And what the Wilderness has taught her is that set against some types of beauty, what should be terror instead is respite.
It’s cold, out beyond the thin steel shell she calls a home, but here she is wrapped in heat, caught and anchored by it – and by the Repentant Devil’s arms around her, his burnished claws encircling her belly, his mouth pressed to the place where her shoulder meets her throat. Her eyes are closed, but not in fear, and what she knows, she knows by touch and memory: that his breath is slow and deep, his skin as smooth against her back as an insect’s carapace, that he is many-limbed and geometry does not constrain him. That he is capable, when he chooses, of gentleness.
Her heart beats with human rapidity; her own breath comes quick and shallow. Her thighs ache as she rocks back, her legs spread wide, letting him fill her from behind. She trembles on the verge of something that is almost release, and when she thinks at all, what she thinks of is chains and their breaking.
Let them see, she thinks. The ones who watch and judge. Let them know that I don’t care.
Last Days (Note: There is a thing implied/confirmed at high levels of one Nightmares path. This snippet relies on it)
The Captain stands in the silent heart of the Sun-Shattered Dome, surrounded by ruin and vitrified statues. She wears no suit. There’s no need for that anymore – no dim, slow light seeps through the cracks in the ceiling, and she isn’t cold, even here, with void-winds whistling through the walls. She carries no lamp, and none of those is needed, either. She exists in a circle of radiance within the vault of darkness that had been the Clockwork Sun, and before that the Dawn Machine, and now is nothing but dead metal. When she lifts her hand, it is veined with light.
All but one of her crew is gone, sent to safety by the fastest route, and that one stands at her side, watching her with head tilted and no expression in his yellow eyes. Perhaps it’s some regard for her that has him wanting to remain, or perhaps it’s only curiosity, the desire to witness a marvel even he hasn’t seen before. Whatever his motives, she’s glad she’s not alone here.
“I won’t be myself anymore, will I?” she asks quietly, knowing the answer and needing to say it all the same. Words make things real – her native tongue most of all.
“Your soul will remain,” he says, and in the flat calm of his voice, she hears everything he isn’t saying. Her soul would remain. The rest of her would be consumed in the apotheosis, and in its place, there would be power and glory, light and law eternal – or close enough, though both of them know too well that even stars die in the end. Or she could will the burning thing in her chest to quiescence, and walk away. She would be human, and herself, and she would live – and London’s fleet would spill across the Reach in their bid for survival, while those left behind on workworlds would succumb in time to cold and endless night.
She feels his hand on her arm, and turns to face him, her decision already made. There’s a terrible sort of compassion in the way he brushes her hair back from her face, and no pity whatsoever.
“There are worse ends,” he says, “than to perish in the creation of something new.”
She nods. Of course. She can’t deny it.
“Something better,” she says, and laughs abruptly. “That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? For what comes next to be better than what came before? I’ll give you your revolution, Devil.”
Let that be true, she thinks. Let me be different from what I once was, before I became myself.”
And he too must know that nothing is certain – that power alters those who wield it, and law, and light – but what he says, at long last, is, “Our revolution.”
One last kiss, then – open-mouthed and hungry, fire flickering in the space between them – before he steps back, leaving her alone.
It’s simple, what she does next – like unlocking a chain that she’s carried her whole life and only noticed now, letting its weight fall from her shoulders. She tilts her head back toward the roof of the dome and lets her hands fall open at her sides, exhales, remembers. And then she breathes a word that burns, and skin and bone and machinery all flash to ash as she rises, shedding the shell of herself like snakeskin.
And as she does, something rises with her, small and winged and bright against the void. A soul she knows, a memory – exultant, defiant, spiraling upwards in challenge and greeting to call the name of Albion’s new star of the morning.