Work Text:
"I think I preferred Lahabrea."
-Thancred, "Into the Dark," ShB MSQ Lv.74
Thancred escorted her back to her room, her arm once again tucked under his. When they arrived at her door, he hugged her, gave her a chaste kiss on her forehead, and thanked her pointedly for “an almost perfect evening.” She pictured him unconscious across Maggie in Praetorium as she raced them both to safety. Avoiding his gaze, she bid him a final goodnight, and opened the door to her room.
She could feel that her hands were trembling as she closed the door behind her. She leaned up against it, giving herself a moment to steady herself and adjust her eyes to her moonlit room.
She saw Emet-Selch’s silhouette before the large open window; he was gazing at the night sky. As he turned slowly in her direction, she easily slid her tie free from her hair, allowing it to tumble onto her shoulders. She knew she wanted his hands in it, the sooner the better, and she let herself wonder, foolishly she thought, if he too was nervous.
She began to walk toward him, and out of the corner of her eye she happened to see a glint of moonlight bounce off of an object on the table.
It was the Exarch’s sandwich basket.
And it was empty.
“You ate my fucking sandwiches?”
She was genuinely angry about this, but continued walking toward him anyway, her body pulling her forward. He did the same, saying nothing, giving no indication that he had heard her outburst. When they reached one another, he took her mouth forcibly into his own, his hands immediately lost in her hair.
At last, they would finish the dance they had begun that afternoon in the courtyard, just steps from the Ocular.
Their kisses reflected the previous hours of tension building – greedy, unselfconscious, hurried, and playfully awkward. Hearing his moans as her tongue swirled around his, feeling his hands move from her hair down to grip her at her lower back, she was pulled further from her mind’s fretting over her decision to pursue this.
He stopped kissing her to grab her shoulders and turn her away from him. With a gentleness that surprised her, he pushed her sweaty hair to the side of her neck so that he could unzip the back of her frontier dress. The gesture was so thoughtful and sincere that she couldn’t help but recall his earlier characterization of the dress as “positively ludicrous.” She smiled as she registered this lesson she had just learned about the true nature of Emet-Selch’s performance of contempt.
As the dress fell to the floor, she kicked her flats off and turned to face him once again.
He began removing his clothing as she removed the rest of her own. He seemed strangely out of practice at it, even annoyed by it. At these thoughts Glori wished to herself that she could stop analyzing everything and just surrender already to the situation.
They were embracing again, kissing as they moved toward her bed. He guided her down onto the mattress, above her, and entered her with ease with a full and forceful thrust. She gasped in pleasure, grateful to have relief from hours of aching need.
His responses to her seemed too intimate, somehow familiar, as he expertly alternated a series of short thrusts while teasing her with occasional long and deep ones. She was soon desperate for more and then for only the latter, and within a few minutes of his hard and long thrusts she came with such force that her contractions around his cock triggered his own in turn.
He rolled off of her onto her side just as her brain resumed its reeling. Over-thinking. Processing. She had had her fair share of these kinds of quick one-night stands, but never had a stranger made her climax like that on a first attempt with no direct attention to her clit, not to mention with such frustratingly smug self-assurance.
She recalled his earlier revelation that the entire evening had been of his own design. She felt…afraid. Something about this was wrong. Hidden.
Lost in these thoughts, she hadn’t noticed that Emet-Selch had already gotten out of her bed. He was standing beside it, looking down into her face, expressionless.
Was he leaving already? She felt her anger rise with no thoughts of concealing it. The cost of this was too steep for that brief encounter to be the end of it, orgasm or no.
“What about that whole ‘the evening has just begun?’ You promised that the job would be done to my satisfaction. Were those not your words, Ascian?”
He stared at her intensely, betraying the tiniest of smirks.
He raised the pitch of his voice, mocking, as he cocked his head to the side: “I meant what I said and I said what I meant.”
At that, he closed his eyes, raised his hand in the air and snapped his fingers.
A number of things happened simultaneously. Glori felt herself rise into the air, suspended, just as the bed beneath her vanished. Emet-Selch had somehow cleaned and dried her hair and body from the hours of dancing; the only remaining evidence of their lovemaking was the ache of desire she still felt pulsing from her clit. And she was suddenly and unpleasantly aware of the cold air coming in from the inn room’s open window.
His snap had also forced her limbs into splayed positions. Her arms and legs were locked, or rather, encased, by some sort of unseen, magical wall. Glori conjured an image of herself in an X-shaped coffin tailor-made to the exact size of her own body. She immediately tried to fight against these walls, only to discover that the harder she pushed against them, the more they met her efforts with burning, searing pain.
With no recourse left to her, she tried to scream. A constricting pain gripped her throat.
For a few seconds, she heard and saw nothing beyond the ceiling above her. To her relief, she discovered that she could turn her head from side to side without pain, but she didn’t know where Emet-Selch was or even, she shuddered at the thought, if he was still in the room.
She tried to calm herself by taking some deep breaths. But she couldn’t stay her nerves; she was in terror.
She heard Emet-Selch speak before she saw him.
“Fighting fit, I see. But as I’m sure you’re now aware, fighting this will only make things worse. And much like my little demonstration downstairs, even if someone were sitting in this room right now they would see and hear naught else but you sleeping soundly in your now-disappeared bed. I suspect that that so-called Exarch of yours keeps a close eye.
“So, if I may, do try to relax…as best you can.” He appeared beside her upper body at these words.
She turned her head toward his voice.
Emet-Selch was wearing Ascian robes, its hood concealing the upper half of his face. He folded his hands across his chest and she could see that he was once again restraining his smile. He waited before he resumed.
Waving his hand dismissively toward the middle of the room where they had first embraced, he began, “Now that we got all of that out of our system, our great work can begin.”
He paused as he leaned closer to her face. “So, Ascian-slayer, 'tis a pity you missed your chance tonight with that pretty boy gunslinger. But which is more painful for you, I wonder. That I thwarted your plans…
…or that Lahabrea got him first?"
Glori couldn’t help herself from fighting and yelling out at this. She felt tears stinging her eyes from the anger and then the pain and then the finality of the situation. She had allowed herself to become utterly powerless in her own quarters with a man whose first private words to her were an open admission of wanting to kill her.
"And how shall I repay you for your role in Lahabrea's demise? What would be fitting, do you think?"
He is going to kill me. He told me as much and I didn’t heed him.
Images raced through her head. Thancred. The Scions. The Exarch. People from across the First. And then the Source.
Emet-Selch was staring at her, all of her, with an intensity suggesting inspection. With a surprising urgency in his voice, he reached out to touch her hair and pleaded, “Ok, ok, take a deep breath.” Glori jerked her head away from him at this, promising herself she would bite him with everything she had should the opportunity present itself.
He walked around her to reposition himself so that he was standing between her legs. Glori thought to herself as he did this that she was at just the perfect height for him to easily reach any part of her he wished. He lowered his hood and then made a point of removing his clawed Ascian gloves, remarking, “Perhaps these won’t be required after all.”
He began by putting his hands around her waist so that they met around her lower back. The sensation of hands emerging from within the magic holding her body brought warmth and comfort. He began to massage his fingers into her back, and doing so activated that magic encasing her, churning it into radiating waves of warmth and caress outward from her back and down her limbs to her fingers and toes. The sensations were so awakening and inviting and warm – and such a surprise – that Glori felt herself exhale and her mind slow down enough to consider that, perhaps…
“That’s better,” Emet-Selch replied. He had been inspecting her body again as though he was searching for something.
The magic on her back kept swirling of its own volition as he released his hands to redirect himself toward her front. He began tracing his fingers from various starting points around her neck and down her body, registering again that her body was relaxing beneath the magical cascades of warmth that he had stirred across her body as he did so. At first, he studiously avoided her breasts as he did this, and then began including them. And then paying them undo attention.
He grabbed one or her nipples and began to tease and flick it. He would alter his pace or his pressure, stop, and then try something else. Eventually he leaned his body over her so that he could take one in his mouth, sucking first and then teasingly biting it. He chuckled as he moved toward the other one to pay it the same attention.
With an abruptness suggesting a kind of smug completion, Emet-Selch lifted himself back to standing and then snapped his fingers again. Her nipples were now clamped by the same magic that was encasing her, teasing her with alternating caresses and tightness and hints and then escalations of pain. Glori realized that he had in fact discerned the precise type of touch and amount of pressure that she enjoyed. And she could feel all of this attention pulling a flow of arousal up from her groin to her breasts.
She was soaked, and her thoughts of imminent doom were increasingly drowned out by her growing longing for him to redirect his research downward.
Instead, he leaned over her face and tsked, “Turned on by danger and a bit of pain. How predictable. Would you like me to continue?”
Glori hesitated, thinking of the pain approaching, and then whispered, “Yes.”
She was relieved; she could again speak without experiencing pain to her throat.
She added in her ordinary voice, “And fuck you, Emet-Selch.”
“In due time, hero. For now, it is plain to see,” looking down toward her sex, “that more pressing matters beg my attention.”
At this, Glori finally understood. He was watching the flow of aether within her body, like some sort of bizarre and, Glori thought, invasive-as-hell arousal meter. No wonder he had made her come so effortlessly before he began this twisted game they were now playing. She again felt herself relax a little more, felt her mind surrendering to deepening hopes for how this would end.
Emet-Selch determined very quickly that she was already sufficiently aroused that her clit wanted firm, insistent strokes. He parted her folds with his hands with nary a thought, and holding her open, he directed his tongue straight to it.
She again heard him chuckle as he took a brief respite to survey his own work, and then he returned his attention to her clit while inserting two fingers firmly into her and then upward in a curling motion of firm teasing and pressure. Much as he had at the beginning of the evening, he discerned that he needed to alter those small and firm movements with longer strokes, all to get her to squirm and then thrust her hips against him to beckon more of them. She was bucking against his hand now, enjoying the searing pain of Emet’s magic that greeted her as she did so.
He stopped again, surveying her body.
“Please don’t stop,” she moaned.
“Hmm. Let’s try this…”
His tongue found its home again, but now he was gently pressing a finger around her ass with his other hand. Gentle circles, then slow and careful insertion. Her need for release was thundering now but her overthinking brain noted that she never, ever, did anything like this with anyone who wasn’t a trusted and established lover. And now she couldn’t bear the thought of him not continuing.
“As I thought,” he laughed.
He snapped his fingers again. The magic encasing her took the place of his finger, generating those cascading waves of warmth from inside her. He could plainly see that his experiments were nearing their end.
He returned his other hand to her and, with three fingers now, fucked her with steady firm and long strokes. She was his, helpless, and gone – she cried out with a series of guttural moans, her head lolling, her body wracking, her mind silent at last.
He allowed her a few moments to recover before he snapped his fingers again. They were back in her bed, and he was lying beside her naked as though this entire interlude had never happened. While registering some disappointment that the swirling magic container that suspended her was gone, she was relieved to have use of her body again. Without hesitation, she reached for him, her legs and arms immediately wrapping themselves around him to pull him against her. He immediately began to kiss her, with as much longing as he had at the outset of their evening but with a gentleness and sensuality that was yet another pleasant surprise.
He entered her again, her body now in that rare state where the distinction between orgasm and body-spanning waves of pleasure was one without a difference. He had readied both of them for this, and they made good on his work. They tumbled on, for hours, in mindless bliss.
Glori was laying against Emet-Selch’s chest, thinking to herself that, well, her brain had started its whirring once again.
He interrupted her thoughts as though he was reading them.
“By the way, I should say that I am sorry that I went to such lengths to get you out of your own head. I hope you’re not too angry with me, hero.”
“I’m more pissed about the sandwiches.”
“Do you have any idea how long it took you to get here? I was bored.” Glori pictured a sullen teenager as he said this. In reply, she reached for the flesh of his arm to pinch and twist with all of her strength.
“Ow! Why in the seven hells did you do that?”
She replied: “It’s called a safe word, Ascian. Use one next time.”
“Next time?”
A final smirk.
He left her through his void shortly after sunrise and, exhausted, she promptly fell asleep. When she woke, she was shocked to discover that it was early evening. She had slept the entire day away and she somehow knew that everyone must have been waiting for her in the Ocular. She showered, geared up, and only then realized that she was ravenous. She looked toward the table for food that she knew wasn’t there.
But to her surprise, there was a simple meal there, thoughtfully arranged. Crackers, apples and pomegranate, some cheese, and a fresh pitcher of water.
And he had left a note. It read, “Better start slowly. -ES.”
She smiled. At that moment she thought that she would happily relive their night together for the rest of her days, no matter what came to pass.
She picked up her pace as she walked from the Pendants to the Dossal Gate, spurred along by the absurd speeches she was giving herself in her own head about how this so totally was a one-time thing…she got swept up in a spell and her own adolescent fantasies…it was just the shock of meeting him…it was her need for respite…he was her sworn enemy…and a monster… fuck Garlemald and the Ascians…and…and…and…
If they think I’m crazy because of Ardbert, imagine if they could see me right now, she thought as she leaped over the final steps to the attendant outside of the Ocular.
Alisaie was the first to speak after Glori arrived. “Ah, there you are. You’re just in time to welcome our guest.”
As she moved further into the room, she saw that he had returned to both hunched posture and Garlean garb.
She had one last thought before he took the spotlight for himself again.
Godsdammit.