Okay but like Reader, who got transmigrated into another world and even though it’s filled with Yans and death flags, wants to collect every route even the ones that are *cough* literally incest.
Reader who woke up in a world not like theirs after an incident with truck-kun.
You had one rule when you played otome games: collect. every. route.
Didn’t matter if the love interest was a tsundere assassin, a clingy childhood friend, or a morally bankrupt priest with questionable views on sanctity and possession. If there was a character portrait and at least two CGs? You were getting that bad end, dammit.
So waking up in a real yandere-filled world after the classic “Truck-kun kisses your spine” incident?
Dream come true.
Well—if you ignored the fact that everyone here had a murder kink and a God complex.
You woke up in a soft bed, embroidered curtains fluttering, and the sound of a lullaby being hummed. A warm hand pushed your hair from your face.
“Oh, thank the heavens . . . ” a woman whispered tearfully. “My precious child has finally awakened.”
Ah.
Plot twist. You’re the youngest child of a noble house. And this world? Definitely the beta version of some rejected yandere otome visual novel.
How did you know?
Because your older brother smiled a little too fondly when you called him “nii-san.”
Your father warned the servants not to “touch his little angel’s laundry” or he’d “remove their tongues for the disrespect.”
And your mother? She cried happy tears . . . but muttered something about you never leaving her side again. Ever.
You didn’t even meet a love interest outside your family until Week 3.
By then you’d survived:
A poisoning (brother’s “jealousy test” gone wrong),
An accidental “locked in the cellar with me, sweet sister~” event,
And a “punishment cuddle” from your father that lasted six hours.
But despite all this?
You were thriving.
Every morning you looked in the mirror, grinned at your slightly bloodshot eyes, and whispered:
“New world, new me. Time to raise every flag—especially the red ones.”
The gardener? Shy and sweet—stabbed a bird for you and cried.
The knight commander? Cold and noble—flushed when you praised his sword skills, then killed a stablehand for “looking at you wrong.”
The mysterious boy in your dreams? Woke up beside you one morning with chains around his neck and whispered, “I finally found you, Master.”
You were halfway through the cursed priest’s route (he would often try to drown you in holy water, citing your immoral, sinful seduction of those around) when you unlocked a hidden CG: your twin brother, who was supposed to have died at birth, curled up in your bed whispering, “You belong to me . . . You always have.”
The world was breaking.
And honestly?
It was fantastic.
You had so many endings to collect. So many blood-soaked kisses. So many knives held to your throat in the name of twisted love.
Death flags? You planted them.
Because deep down, you weren’t trying to escape this nightmare.
Girls who seethe about the weakness of their flesh, the imperfections of their meat-form. Girls who dream in technicolor of being bigger, better, stronger, faster. Girls who smuggle textbooks from repositories to study by night the dark science of tissue-machine interfaces, of chemicals with which to quell immune responses, of hijacking nerves and spines and ganglia, of replacing neural pathways with silicon ones. Girls who grit their teeth and teach themselves coding against every odd, while society urges them instead to become good mothers and obedient daughters - girls who rail against everything they have been told to be. Girls who know the blood price of the change and make it anyway, all alone, who carve the cost into their own bodies with scalpels they forge in the fires of their rage. Girls who braid up thick lengths of interfacing cable around their heads instead of hair, who glitter with fiber optics and inlaid circuit threading, whose fissile hearts beat within impervious tantalum cages, who are perfect and cold and beautiful in their fearsome ways. Girls with nails like knives and voices like jet engines, channeled through vocal cords made of piezoelectric polymers and steel. Girls who do not yield. Girls who engineer for themselves the future they want, that they know they can have if they only reach for it. Girls who are machines, too.
I can't stop thinking of knitting Astarion a blanket.
Maybe it's because I'm elbow deep into crocheting baby clothes but who knows
Like, imagine knitting or crocheting Astarion a blanket. Because everyone else managed to bring something along for the journey when the mindflayers kidnapped you, you had a backpack and some coin, same for Laz'el, and Shadowheart and Gale and probably everyone else, but not Astareon.
He has nothing, not a coin to his name. Just a dagger, a bow, and a few arrows. He steals what he needs to make his tent but he's all too aware that none of it is really his.
And then he sees you working on your project by the fire, sipping on a mug of steaming tea or coffee. He sees you wandering around villages and random groups of people, bartering your way to some yarn.
Of course he's curious. But he'd never ask, because, obviously, it would never be any of his business. It could never be for him. And then, after working on it at any moment you could, you come to him one night with the blanket neatly folded in your hands.
"I don't know if you get cold," you say, "But I thought you might want a blanket if you do."
You're so awkward, you know Astarion likes the finer things in life. He likes luxury, and this is hardly luxury. It's a dark blue, but only because you died it. The yarn you bartered never came in the same colour and sometimes it wasn't even the same thickness. You tried to match it as best you could, but it wasn't perfect.
Astarion notices it and for the first time in his very long, miserable life. He doesn't give a shit. Because it's his. Completely, 100%, his own thing. Cazador has never touched this, he has never seen this, he will never lay a finger on his blanket. And the fact that it's his is only overshadowed by the fact that you made it for him. Not because he likes you, he's not even realised that yet, or not properly anyway, but because you looked at him, fangs, sarcasm, blood thirst and all, and decided you were going to take a tenday and make a blanket to gift to him. You decided he was worthy of yarn, time and effort. All so he could be a little warmer at night.
That blanket might not be worth much, if anything, but when you're as used as Asterion is to being worth less than shite, it's like happening upon a vault of precious diamonds.
He doesn't say thank you, he just grabs it from you and tries to act nonchalant. Because if he opens his mouth, he might actually just start crying.
Legend holds that our language was buried fully-formed from the desert sands. Our ancestors sank to their knees, plunged their hands deep into the sand, and found the first word. It sparkled in the sunlight - blinding if you held it at a particular angle. This was the word for 'dig'.
The language wasn't a flat object, nor was it buried too close to the surface. Its veins and tendrils snaked in every direction, forming a cage that contained nothing but tonnes and tonnes of sand.
To uncover it, our ancestors started digging. With their bare hands, they dug into the sand until they could uncover more and more of this language left to them as an inheritance. Wood, metal, shovel, pickaxe, love, camaraderie, curiosity, endeavour, all these words entered the virtual lexicon.
As they uncovered more and more of the language, our ancestors learnt about more and more things. Ideas that existed in a time before they arrived in the desert, tools and implements, and of course, violence and weapons. There was conflict, and collateral damage. Many words were smashed to pieces, lost forever in a jumble of shining syllables or crumbled into dust that became one with the sand.
The hole in the desert grew wide and deep. Our ancestors learnt about things that they had not, could not have conceived of. With the wealth of other words they had uncovered, they began working their way towards making those inconceivable words conceivable. They worked to make the hypothetical real.
Away from the hole where new words were mined, an entirely new occupation coalesced. The words uncovered from the hole were processed, their properties determined and re-arranged, so that our ancestors could do something unprecedented. They created new words.
These words could be purer, bigger, shinier. You could use them in ways heretofore unimagined.
A rift was formed between those who created and used these artificial words, and those who worshipped the words in the desert. After all, if the language was fully-formed, there was no need to create new words. The right words only have to be found. They would occur naturally.
Further problems emerged as artificial words were passed off as natural discoveries. One perpetrator of such fraud was unrepentant about his actions. "This word, when found, will be of the exact same composition as the artificial word. So what difference does it make if we use it now, before it has been uncovered?"
No one knew the true extent of the language. Did it stretch across the entirety of the desert, or perhaps comprise the entire sphere that formed the planet? These thoughts, which could not have been put to words once, were now on the lips of every citizen.
These speculations eventually caused the digging to slow down. Did we really need more words? The sand reclaimed the hole. And now, the language lies buried so deep, that if you were to start digging now, it would take years to find the first new word.
Where the Forest Keeps Her Name (22391 words) by Elesiel_Sai
Chapters: 4/?
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Original Female Character/ Original Male Characters
Characters: Astrid Valden, Kairen, Fafnir, Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), O - Character
Additional Tags: Original Female Character - Freeform, Original Male Characters - Freeform, demon contracts, Matriarchal society, Adventure, Slow Burn, Comedy, Forest Spirit Demon, dragon demon, Oblivious Astrid, Magic, Threesome - F/M/M
Summary:
In a world where every man is born a demon and every woman is born with the power to bind them, power is measured by the strength of the contract.
Noble houses rise and fall depending on the demons their daughters can command. Queens rule. Armies march behind summoned monsters. And the most feared women are those who walk beside the strongest demons in existence.
Astrid wants nothing to do with any of that.
She governs a quiet stretch of forests and mountains far from the capital, dealing with smugglers, harsh winters, and the occasional monster that wanders too close to her villages.
Binding demons was never part of her plans.
Unfortunately, the forest had other ideas.
Summary: It's just anonymous chatting with a good-looking guy. It's harmless... isn't it?
Pairing: Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond, Beyonce Knowles as Candace Bricks.
Warning: This is dark romance. Please avoid it if this theme is triggering. This part is safe, though.
Click to read in dark mode🌙( turn on desktop view if you're reading on mobile).
The alarm clock on Candy's bedside blared, the annoying sound cutting through the silence of dawn.
Candace turned over, her body weighed down as if by lead from staying up late into the wee hours of the morning tidying her kitchen and preparing for the day ahead. She reached out blindly for the alarm, knocking her phone and glasses to the floor before finally silencing the noise.
She lay still for a moment, silently praying her still-sleeping husband might stir and take pity on her, offer to handle the morning routine for their two little boys. After five long minutes of silence, she sighed and swung her legs out of bed. No such luck.
As she shuffled through her morning routine, still half-asleep, she reminded herself that her husband didn’t have it easy either. He was the sole provider, working himself to the bone while she stayed home to manage the house. It wasn’t fair to expect him to wake up early and care for the kids when she stayed home all day.
By the time the boys were ready for school, her husband had finally woken up, gotten dressed, and taken them on his way to work. She let out a sigh of relief; at least she didn’t have to handle the school run this morning.
Crawling back into bed, she pulled the covers over herself, ready to steal another hour of sleep before the day fully began. Just as her eyelids fluttered closed, her phone dinged.
She groaned but reached for it, picking it up from where it had fallen earlier. Her vision blurred as she squinted at the screen, but as she made out the words, her eyes snapped open.
“Good morning, beautiful.”
Her heart skipped a beat as she typed out a reply, any thoughts of sleep forgotten.
She had started chatting with Terry on Twitter about a month ago. Their conversations had begun innocently enough, two strangers sharing random thoughts. She was bored; he was attentive and charming. Over time, the chats had taken on a different tone, becoming more personal, more charged.
She’d begun dropping casual mentions of what she was wearing, testing to see if she still had her teasing skills after all these years of falling into the monotonous routine of marriage. He’d respond with compliments that left her cheeks warm. He never pushed, never demanded a picture, but the way he described her—sight unseen—made her feel noticed and desired in a way she hadn't felt since before her first boy was born.
Then one day, Terry revealed his face.
Candace had already been drawn to his words, his humor, and the kind of attention he gave her. But when she saw his picture, she forgot how to breathe. He was handsome—more than handsome. The kind of man who could stop a room with a single glance. And yet, he’d chosen to spend his time chatting with her.
She hadn’t sent him a picture in return. She wasn’t confident after ten years of marriage and two pregnancies. What if he didn’t like what he saw? Worse, what if he stopped talking to her altogether?
But now, as her fingers hovered over the keyboard, a flutter of excitement stirred in her chest. She knew this was dangerous, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop.
"Good morning, handsome. How did you sleep?"
"Naked."
Candy's breath caught. She bit her lip as she stared at her screen. This was a well trodden path between both of them. She dropped her phone and got out of bed. Digging her fingers into the elastic band of her pajama bottoms, she tugged them down and climbed back under the covers.
"Oh?" she typed, "Was it warm last night?"
"It wasn't, but I kept thinking of you, and it started to feel like I had too many clothes on... so I took them off."
She licked her top lip.
"And now...?"
"And now... what?"
"Are you still naked?"
She held her breath.
Her phone dinged. He sent an image.
She threw her phone away and clutched her pillow to her face. This was new. Still holding the pillow to her face with one hand, she felt around blindly for the phone she had tossed. When she found it, she slowly moved the pillow away from her face as she brought the phone closer to her face.
He was lying in bed, a gold chain around his neck, shirtless, with his shorts pulled low to show his Adonis belt and a peek of his trimmed pubes.
Candy didn't realise she had been holding her breath until her lungs started to burn.
She released her breath in a rush and shifted her gaze to his face. She stopped breathing again. He was looking at her. His piercing green eyes bore through her from the screen. His bottom lip glistened like he had just licked it before taking that picture.
She wanted to lick his spit right off them and then suck his tongue for more.
Letting out a soft whimper, she reached down between her legs to find herself already leaking.
"Candy?"
"I'm sorry... It's kind of difficult... to type with one hand."
"Fuck."
Terry dropped his phone after sending the last text and pulled out his erection. He stroked himself as he moaned her name over and over till his cream sputtered out of him and splashed on his tummy and over his hand.
He let go of his member and sighed deeply. He'd had nastier sexting sessions with other women, facetimed and exchanged nasty videos. Candy wouldn't even show him her face. But somehow, her words drove him to the brink of madness.
Or perhaps, he'd already been pushed over the precipice. He looked at the screens on his desk.
On one screen, multiple pictures of Candy at different moments in her life. On the other screen, a search was loading...
Searching address... Candace Bricks
Address found.
Next
I was going to make this a one-shot, but I guess not. Let me know if you want to be tagged.
Special thanks to @rose-bliss for the inspiration and for helping out with this story in so many ways. Luv yuh, girl.😚😚
Don't forget to read the series on the website. It's on dark mode(easier on your eyes )and you support your girl.
At work plagued by thoughts of a mech bigger than you can imagine.
She starts like most of them do, a Titan excavator rig modestly sized for their line: maybe a house or thereabouts, a big house. (Doesn’t matter why she signed up - perhaps a breadwinner, a lone mother or eldest sister, a daughter of aging parents nobody else will take; doesn’t matter what site they sent her to, Earth or Enceladus or Venus or Europa. She’s there, and she lets them strap her in and adapt her for the piloting interface and pump her full of protein ooze and electrolytes and hyperstimulant cocktails as obediently as the next laborer.)
Upgrades come, from big house to bigger, with shovels like hillsides and treads like highways. Still she remains in the cockpit, out only for one day every six months to say hello to her burgeoning family, who have moved nearby to make it easy on her, to meet the baby nephews and nieces whose names she doesn’t yet know.
War comes. The facility hunkers down. It just makes sense to retrofit their biggest digger with shields, to expand her arsenal a little more, give her a better engine, pour all their leftover resources into making her a great guardian, and she rises to the occasion, shielding them from orbital rays, absorbing the energy and taking the pain of it up into her own engines. When the corporate rats who own the site finally turn tail and run the workers and their families band together and do the needful repairs themselves. Her nieces and nephews grow up learning engineering by the light of oil lamps from stolen Old Era textbooks and jailbroken datapads. She hardly ever now glimpses their faces with her own two eyes from within her steel shell but it is a worthy sacrifice to her, to them, for both parties know she is still there, still with them, embracing them in a great steel hug and watching through a thousand glass-lensed eyes.
Years pass. The brightest of her nieces works out how to modify the nutrition cocktail going into her cockpit so she will never age, never die, never fall sick. Somewhere in there all the metal and ceramic encloses her ever-sleeping body like a lotus flower around the benevolent, immortal form of a bodhisattva.
The outpost survives the war, somehow. Refugees hear of the little town on the colony that could, guarded by a goddess the size of a temple, and flock there. It makes sense to add to her control, among her array of sensors and actuators, the new city’s power generation and delivery system, its wall defenses, its waste management, its communications mains. Nowhere is anything safer than with her.
With all these new additions come techs and custodians to keep her in good care. They build modest crew cabins nestled amongst her treads (now rusty from disuse) so they can be close to her, the better to help her.
Slowly more and more falls under her purview, new cabins, then mezzanines and stairways and platforms between them; each generation has their own superstitions that they add to those of the last before them, so paintings crop up on her metal panels now, in nooks and crannies, often crude symbols that promise good oil changes or swift code updates, or simply depictions of their goddess, of the war she survived. Still she watches.
Her nieces and nephews are all dead now, and their nieces and nephews look on through rheumed eyes as the city attains new heights, heralded everywhere on every planet that still lives as an oasis of peace and prosperity. Still she watches.
A new company comes, enticed by the stories. They want to buy her. Buy her! The people scoff. As if you could just buy a person! - A person? asks the representative from Acher Spaceways, perplexed. - We heard she was your goddess.
She is both, of course, the goddess who lives, the goddess who is one hundred percent flesh and one hundred percent machine.
Acher doesn’t like this. They send machines - zero percent flesh, entirely drones - screaming down from the stars for a more insistent negotiation, one phrased in metal slugs and incendiary fire.
So your goddess rises up to meet them.
It is over in a short day. The drones lie in pieces; Acher, from orbit, licks their wounds, and the goddess rebukes them with a single laser blast, modified from her very first mining waymaker photonic drill.
The blast is precise and surgical. It tears apart the whole platform, spinning central axis to annular habitat space, which supernovas into a blossom of shining proof in the night sky at which the citizens below cheer.
But the pieces are falling, and soon they will pepper the surface below with molten debris, kick up dust into the atmosphere and make it all but unbreathable. The people could leave, the goddess advises them through short-wave radio bursts. They could use her emergency shuttles to escape gravity before it is too late, or they could go underground and salvage her rarest and most precious resources to survive until the surface is safe again.
Here is the thing - every pilot is augmented, and most augments are for the benefit of the plainly physical, for strength and speed and stamina and sharpness of perception. When her people augmented her, they augmented something else entirely. With every new module, every sensor upgrade, every painted symbol and hidden shrine, they gave her a superhuman capacity not for stamina or speed or strength, but for love.
It is her love that saved them, so they must save her back.
For two days they work tirelessly, the whole city, while above them the shattered pieces of Acher Spaceways looms ever closer. When they are done the treads are gone, the cabins dismantled, only the little drawings carefully preserved under coats of abrasion- and heat-resistant paint. And under her, their city, their Haven, lie rockets, ten of them, repurposed from the old all-ore crucibles, fit to move an asteroid.
She’s out there somewhere by Orion now, they say, the fourth jewel in his belt. And she has only grown: from three thousand then to three hundred million. Creatures from all over come to pay her their respects, or to visit lovers, or to live there themselves. There is always room in a body that is ever expanding, like the cosmos itself. Over all of them, she watches, eternal.
Among all the stories they tell of her, they repeat this one the most - how she tore apart a whole space station for the sake of her people, knowing she would die if she failed, for how can a whole city hope to flee? She guards them, and in turn they do not abandon her. They are two halves of the same whole, they say reverently, love manifest - the people and their city; this pilot, this great machine. This Haven.
