In the office of the aspiring Archduke, one may find a number of elegantly carved marble busts, figures whom one assumes his Lordship finds to be inspirational in his own march towards power and success
In the very back of his quarters, behind a false wall, one might find another marble statue, one quite a great deal larger and more carefully tended to than the rest of the art in his office
What blasphemy it is, for a Banite to kneel at the feet of another
For the Chosen of Bane to supplicate himself before a demi-god other than his own master
And how pathetic it is, for him to pray to the silence where she once was, wishing she might return from death to claim him as she'd once promised she would...
I had the very distinct joy of commissioning @infernaldaydreams for a piece of Kass and Enver - or rather, the memory of Kass with Enver. My instructions were "please make him look like the saddest, wettest, most unadoptable dog abandoned in the shelter" and she came out absolutely swinging. I cannot get over the warmth and the softness of the candlelight playing over the marble curves, and how easily the shadows seem to cling to him in comparison. Just an utterly gorgeous piece, I'm so so smitten
I got tagged 3 times to post the cheesiest romance scenes from my fanfic! By @rdekarios @archduchessgortash and @optimisticgrey, whom are all lovely and talented supremes. By my reckoning I now have to post three cheesy scenes, is that correct?
Let's start off with Gale and Rhyme...
He lay on his back on the cavern floor, Ryme'dra lying beside him, and he conjured the best impression he could of Ched Nasad, the City of Shimmering Webs. Her city, her home, alight with magic thanks to her tireless efforts. He heard her gasp audibly when she realised what it was he was doing, which he took to mean that he'd managed some degree of authenticity in his recreation.
"Oh my gods," she whispered, after a long, agonising moment of silence.
He took a deep breath. "I can't bring you back the people you've lost," he said quietly. "I can't give you back your home, or the years that have been stolen from you by powers far beyond either of us." He turned his head to the side, to look at her. "But I can give you happiness, for a time. If you'll let me."
She had a hand pressed to her mouth, tears streaming from her eyes once again.
He pressed onwards. "You know I'm in love with you, Ryme'dra Ulutar," he said.
She nodded, the motion jerky. "I know," she whispered, hiccuping over the words.
There were tears burning in his eyes too. "Would you... would you let me make you happy?" he asked hesitantly. "Even if it's only for tonight?"
Then we'll move onto Kass and Enver...
Halsin called on them to exchange rings, and as Kass slid the silver ring onto his hand for the second time, she met his gaze. "I should have married you a long time ago," she said quietly, "and I'm sorry it took both of us dying for me to realise that."
Enver's eyes looked ever so faintly brighter than they had a moment ago, and he laughed softly under his breath. "I, ah..." He picked up her hand, rubbing his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. "I always thought you were the cleverest, most brilliant woman I'd ever met," he said, just as quietly, and when he met her gaze again a single tear escaped from his eye despite the smile on his face. "But it wasn't until recently that I realised that your most ingenious act of cunning was convincing me that I wanted to live for you, rather than die for power."
From behind, she heard several happy sighs, and at least one person miming gagging - it could have been Heron, but it was more likely to be Sceleritas. She ignored all of them. "Oh, Enver," she whispered, the tear on her face mirroring the one on his. His hand was shaking ever so slightly when he put her golden ring back on her finger, and he'd barely pushed it into place before she was throwing her arms around his neck, kissing him fiercely enough to steal the breath from his lungs.
And finish up with Wyll and Karlach
Her finger was aimed directly at a small, faint glow several inches above the horizon. "That's my star, I'm pretty sure," she said. "It ain't fancy or bright or nothing, but... yeah. I think I did the star chart right."
He sat up more carefully, squinting his eyes as he looked towards the horizon. The star in question was a pale, yellowish-orange, the colour slightly more pronounced than some of its' fellows who were far sharper and more pronounced in their brightness. But it was soft, and it was constant, a beautiful soft warmth on the curve of the horizon.
Wyll looked back to Karlach, and his eyes slid down to her chest. To the soft, yellowish-orange glow that resided beneath her skin, sometimes surging like an inferno, sometimes blazing like a star, but always, always a comforting light in the darkness that he could always turn to without fail.
He looked back up to her, smiling. "I think it's perfect," he said quietly, leaning in to kiss her softly. "It suits you just perfectly."
I won't tag anyone else since we're now past Valentine's Day but there you have it. Whilst I do love to write the most angst filled tragedy porn, I do enjoy a heavy dose of sigh inducing cheese as well
A Durgetash Week 2025 Fic: The Bonds of Domesticity
Less than a month ago, she had reached her limit. Her Father's overwhelming presence in her body since his resurrection three years prior had worn her down over time, a malevolence that threatened to sweep away her sense of self and her autonomy with every waking moment. Gods only knew how much ground she lost against him while she slept, consumed by nightmares of bloody hellscapes, but she was exhausted. She had thought she understood her Father's bloodlust, and the gleeful, unending hunger for murder that she had merrily indulged in as a younger woman.
With his rebirth, wrought at the expense of her own life, she had learned how very wrong she was. Bhaal's hunger was an unbearable, unimaginable horror within her, like standing in the path of a hurricane while the winds shredded the flesh from your bones. It was loud enough that she had trouble thinking, trouble sleeping, and every minute of every day was now given over to holding him at bay so that some semblance of self could be salvaged.
Less than a month ago, her strength had finally crumbled. She had defied his hunger for twelve whole days, slowly succumbing to madness, before Father had forced the issue with a little help from Orin.
The Slayer had taken her, and Enver had seen everything.
And now here she was, reliving the same shame all over again, because she could feel herself weakening and the only place in the entire world that she felt some crumb of safety was in the company of Enver Gortash, Chosen of Bane.
It would have been laughable if she'd been in any sort of mood to laugh.
Read Chapter Two here! A rather loose interpretation of both prompts (domestic and bondage) but I do enjoy making things difficult for myself
"Is he dead?"
"What answer would make you angrier?"
Gortash took a step backwards, ostensibly to clear his head and put some space between himself and this appallingly frustrating young woman before he attempted to throttle her again; the corner of her mouth quirked, as if she had suppressed a smile, and he knew he had lost that particular volley. "If I am missing a valuable subordinate, I will expect the Temple of Bhaal to reimburse me post haste-"
"He is alive," she said airily, brushing past him while he ground his teeth in frustration. "You really ought to speak to your men, they really aren't very perceptive when it comes to trusting young women."
"It is apparently a trait I share with them," he ground out. "You are late, Bhaalspawn."
"By whose measure? I arrived in a timely manner-"
"Since you are currently masquerading as a Banite with that ridiculous getup, I shall assume you are to be judged as a Banite," he spat. As she slowly rounded back to face him again, it took all of his willpower to keep his gaze on her face, and not drop down to her poorly contained and ample bosom, which was straining aggressively against the fabric of Arkan's undersized shirt. "You were provided with a time, and I expect punctuality."
A slow and hungry smile bloomed over her deep red lips, as if his words delighted her. "Am I to be your pet assassin then, Master Gortash?" she asked, in a sultry tone that set off any number of alarm bells in his head.
Read Chapter One here! And don't forget to subscribe so as not to miss a chapter!
His words died on his tongue as he saw what awaited him at the foot of the bed.
Kassara was perched at the far end of the mattress, almost like a gargoyle hunched in on herself — for a brief and terrifying moment he had to contend with how similar her body language was to Sceleritas, hunched in to disguise her true height and power. But he knew his darling Kassie, and he knew that this was not her.
Her eyes were black. Not an uncommon occurrence, her eyes often turned black when she lost control of her hungers, ichor weeping down her cheeks like unholy tears. Her hair hung lank across her face in a ragged curtain, and he could see that the skin over her skull was taut and drawn, as if the flesh beneath had melted away until skin sat flush against bone. She wore no clothing that he could see in the shadows, and her usually plump body looked withered and obscene.
Her breathing was slow, and ragged. It was the breathing that gave it away, because he had heard breathing like that on precisely one other occasion, slow and rattling like a creature of the crypt — he had heard it on the day that she had died, almost ten years ago, when Bhaal had been reborn within her flesh and had ripped and ravaged his way clear of her like a ravenous wasp emerging from a discarded cocoon.
"Dread Lord," he said carefully, with no more reverence than was expected of him as the Chosen of Bane, "to what do I owe this pleasure?"
Read Chapter Five here, but please go in carefully: trigger warnings for both off-screen and explicit rape, as well as significant discussions of infertility and the grief and shame related to that. If you're aware of the cut content for the Feral Durge ending of the game, you have an idea of what the subject matter will cover. Theme for the day was religious guilt and monster-fucking, after all.
I was tagged by the ever lovely @carnivaley and the delightful @optimisticgrey for this game, which I've not played before. I love the idea of it!!
Rules: You flip through your work (published or WIP, doesn't matter) and share whatever little section you're genuinely proud of. Something that makes you smile or swoon or that tugs at your heartstrings just the way you want it to. Let's give ourselves a little pat on the back and normalize being proud of our work ❤
I'm going to post something that has not had attention from me in a while - one of the pivotal scenes from Keep Telling Me To Breathe, when Kassara infiltrates Banehold to challenge Bane for ownership of Gortash's soul. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted this scene to look like - in my chapter notes on AO3 I described it as "Labyrinth x Lovecraft x Orpheus and Eurydice, as directed by David Cronenberg" but I'll add in as well, with the set design of the 1984 Dune by David Lynch as well. It has that very specific 1980s fantasy vibe, where it blurs into body horror and gore and cosmic horror. I was very, very proud of it, so here's the start of it:
1492 DR, Year of Three Ships Sailing
Banehold, The Barrens of Doom and Despair
If the Throne of Blood was skin-crawlingly intimate and claustrophobic, then Banehold was the inverse of that. She had witnessed first hand the infinite vastness of the Astral Sea, albeit briefly, but it was nothing compared to the crushing sense of cosmic insignificance she felt as she stepped through the portal and into Banehold. There was a cognisance to it, an almost eldritch sense of infinity that would likely have shattered the minds of lesser beings as they tried to grapple with the enormity of the endlessness and their place within it.
The cragged deserts of granite and black sand stretched off in all directions towards an infinite horizon, broken occasionally by jagged, slate black mountains that pierced towards the blood-red sky like knives. An endless roiling storm seethed in the distance, the booming thunder echoing off the chasms and canyons while the pale pink lighting cast a sickly glow over the bleak landscape. It was cold, and it was dry, and even these few brief seconds were enough for her mouth to grow dry and parched, and her lips to crack as if she'd been denied water for days. The wind, when it blew in unexpected gusts, was cold and sharp, and her new wings snapped out for balance when it threatened to send her tumbling.
The pain had not yet relented, and her heavy breathing hurt far more in this cold and alien place than it did in the warm interior of the Elfsong tavern or the placid serenity of Mercuria. She wasn't sure whether it made it easier to concentrate or harder, because in the soft warmth and rich wood tones in the centre of Baldur's Gate, or the golden glow of the Second Heaven, her pain was all she could think about. Here, with the very realm itself determined to make her miserable, she could latch on to that feeling with defiance, and let it feed back into her rage.
Panting, she turned slowly in a circle, surveying the land around her. She did not know of any citadels or fortresses that Bane had constructed to serve as his capital - but then again, perhaps he simply did not like for the intricacies of his realm to be well-known beyond the borders of Banehold. And more than that, Banehold was excruciatingly infinite, so there could have been impossibly vast citadels scattered throughout for all she knew, but with no guarantee that the portal had landed her anywhere even close to where the Lord of Tyranny might currently dwell. She knew that sometimes in other regions of the world it was referred to as the Black Bastion instead of Banehold, so perhaps there was a dark fortress somewhere in this bleak landscape.
But she was on a desperately short time limit. She needed to find Bane, save Enver, and get his soul back to the Material Plane before Carmela took the fight to the Elder Brain, or her agreement with Torm would be null and void.
She took a deep breath, and tried to ignore the exhausting pain plaguing her body. "I've not got a lot of experience with prayers that would be acceptable to you," she said quietly, her words immediately snatched up by the bitter winds, "but if you want me to uphold our bargain, I'm going to need a little direction here."
She didn't even know if Torm could hear her in the heartland of his greatest enemy; even if he could, she had no guarantee he could answer in any capacity. But another gust of wind surged up over the ridge she stood on, and her wings caught the updraft as if on instinct. Her total flight time so far probably came to less than ten minutes, so she couldn't help the immediate bark of panic that escaped her lips as she rocketed into the sky. She stabilised herself with some effort, trying to use back muscles that until a few hours ago had not been trained for flight, but with gritted teeth she strained until the wings brought her to an upright posture in the sky.
As she struggled to regain her breath, hovering several hundred metres above the black sands, she saw a distant mountain standing as a lone sentinel on the endless dunes.
And then she saw it move.
"Direct," she said grudgingly. "My thanks."
She went to kick off, as if from the side of a pool or a cliff, and was grateful there was no one present to witness her frustration as she flailed in the air. Trying to gain momentum from a standing start in mid-air was fucking hard, and all of her muscle memory wanted her to treat it like swimming. Thankful that she was alone during these crucial first blunders, she set off towards the moving mountain.
It was further away than it had initially looked, and that was due to the incredible size of the edifice. It was not a mountain, as she had first assumed, but an impossibly vast ziggurat, a tiered pyramid structure made of massive slabs of adamantine that seemed both too large to have been manoeuvred into place in the first place and too clean to be a construct of this plane of black sand and red death. The peak was as wide across as most city districts, if not bigger. There were massive wheels affixed along the sides of the base, miles long at least, and there were ten thousand thousand slaves or more dragging it slowly towards an endless horizon. She soared overhead, taking in the seemingly unending lines of souls hauling desperately on ropes while banelars slithered along the lines lashing out at random victims with gleeful malice, and baatezu darted back and forth in the air above with impunity. The wails and screeches of ten million damned souls was a mournful cacophony over the wailing of the eternal storms, and even after a lifetime as Bhaal's weapon, the scale of such suffering horrified her on a deeply primal level.
Maybe it was Torm's influence, already wending its' way through her blood and tissue. Maybe she was just finally human enough to be appalled by the cruelty and malice of it all.
She flew closer to the ziggurat, and while a number of the baatezu hissed and yowled at her as she passed, some reaching out to claw in her direction, they all let her pass unscathed. She knew better than to look for her goal amongst the lines of undying slaves - Bane would not let someone like Gortash sink into the bleak oblivion of those masses. He would have him somewhere close.
The ziggurat loomed above her like the mountain she had first thought it to be, miles tall, and she was so fucking grateful that her wings allowed her to bypass the torturous trek to the peak. As she had seen as she'd approached, the pinnacle of the ziggurat was a large flat surface, alight with lanterns and torches and all manner of magical enchantments. There were a large number of people gathered in a space that would have rivalled the size of the entire Lower City of Baldur's Gate, and as she drew closer it became evident that there was some kind of hedonistic bacchanal in progress, a party in name only. There was shrill shrieking laughter and screams, and open vats of wine and fountains that flowed with blood and others with clear spring water. There was at least one orgy in progress, and there wasn't music so much as there was the unhinged wail of instruments that were clearly being wielded by individuals who had never experienced music in their lives. There were feasting tables piled high with grotesque caricatures of food, and cross-frames across which were stretched bloodied victims being lashed and pelted by the jeering, delighted guests. It was violent and it was bloody and it was sexual and it was cruel.
She probably would have loved it ten years ago.
She flew down and alighted on the final step of the ziggurat, resisting the urge to go slamming down into the centre of the terrace in a rage. The dry cold of the air still hurt so badly in her lungs, and she tried to hide her winded pain by gritting her teeth before marching forward, hoping they would interpret her expression as one of scarcely restrained fury, and not of scarcely contained agony. As she walked into the light, head held high, the guests began to draw back with scandalised whispers, and soon a ripple of gleeful anticipation passed through the party as word of her arrival spread. Good - let Bane think she had no qualms walking directly into his realm, into the heart of his stronghold, without a care for the strength of numbers he had with him. She let her wings, skeletal and ragged as they were, stretch out to her sides, the massive fourteen foot wingspan demanding the guests step further back still to avoid coming into contact with her.
She walked down the centre of the palatial terrace, and it did not take long for her presence to draw the attention of the host himself. The music, such as it was, cut off sharply as the sound of someone slowly clapping echoed across the black marble terrace. The crowds ahead of her parted, and an extraordinarily beautiful human man emerged, clapping at her with exaggerated control. His hair was a pale silken blond, and his eyes were piercing blue. His right hand was clad in a wicked black gauntlet, black smoke trailing from the elbow as he walked forward, and he bore no other armour or obvious weapons on his person, wearing a brilliant blue silk robe that hung open across his bare chest and tight black pants.
"My word," he said, his voice filling the space and echoing to all corners of the terrace as if magically amplified. "Ladies and gentlemen, friends of all genders and species, I believe we are quite honoured today to have a valkyrie of Torm in our midst."
He said valkyrie with the same level of mockery that one would use to describe an idiot or simpleton, and his announcement was met with gales of hooting, shrieking laughter. He was grinning broadly, nodding and winking to the crowd as if he was sharing a sly joke with them all, and she wondered how quickly she could draw her sword, and if she would make it to him in time to slice his pretty nose off of his pretty face before the crowd fell upon her and tore her flesh from her bones.
"What an unprecedented occurrence," he continued, and there was a certain measure of flamboyance in his gestures and his turn of phrase that was so very much the spitting image of Gortash that for a moment it unbalanced her. "To think, the great paladin of righteousness himself, blessing my lowly assembly with one of his own! Truly, I find myself quite at a loss for words."
There was nothing else for it. "Lord Bane," she called, her voice also magically amplified in this space. She crossed her arms across her chest, the same gesture she'd seen Carmela adopt a thousand times or more over the months that they'd travelled together. "I will be succinct - I have come for the soul of Enver Gortash."
If you made it this far, THANK YOU
With thanks to my beloved @flamemittens who made the dividers in 2024 for the Gortash Week
A Durgetash Week 2025 Fic: But the Urge Remains the Same
With a guttural roar, Kassara swung hard, and decapitated the man standing before her in a spray of blood.
"Now, was that truly necessary?"
Gortash's voice cut through the thick of the bloodlust, dragging her bodily back to herself; she spun with a snarl, breathing hard as she dropped into a defensive position, but there was no one on her flank. The remaining Banites had all retreated to the very far wall of the room, their weapons having clattered to the floor from hands they now held up in surrender, looking anxiously from her to their master and back again.
The newly appointed Chosen of Bane looked up from where he was fine-tuning a new crossbow, an indulgent look on his face as he scolded her. "And after I went to all this trouble to invest in a proper gymnasium for you, what with you nagging me for the last few years that you simply could not practice your sparring in your own temple, and now look at it." He gestured to the corpse, and the growing pool of blood. "This is weirwood flooring, you know."
Read Chapter 3 here! Yes we're behind schedule, but we persist regardless. It's time for Heist/Fighting as Foreplay
