Sneak Peek: 2nd Person Narrative (Patreon)

Hello all!  So, this'll be the final installment of sneak-peeking at the tentatively-titled Game of Silk and Shadows (I switched from "Season" to "Game" for the GoT echo).  It's been great fun to write, but it's time to get back to Constant, which I'll be picking up again on Monday.

In the meantime, I tried my hand at writing in the second person.  It's an intriguing perspective to write in - easy, to create a strong voice with, which is great but potentially problematic if you're not clear in your own head where the voice is actually coming from.  Also, easy to make mistakes with. I kept slipping in and out of present/past tense with it.

Anyway, enjoy the scene below, and let me know what you think!  Response has been pretty--muted--to this fantasy side project, so I'm imagining people are patiently waiting for me to get back to the main show.

As always, early draft so liable to change:

***

Three: You, But Not

How did it feel, Duncan?

Castigan knew what she was doing, didn’t she, that cruel bitch, when she bound you in your first corset and from that point on you always felt its steel grip at your ribs, leaving always just very slightly breathless, on the edge of fainting, contained and that little bit easier to control. Month by month it grew tighter and did you ever notice? As your body moulded itself to its new shape, your flesh flowing to fill its new dimensions?

The corset Edmund had your loyal handmaiden remove that day was not the same as the first corset you wore. Frankly, there aren’t too many born and bred women of the court that could have worn it.

Lady Castigan could have, of course.

So I suppose it’s no wonder you reacted the way you did once all the feminine trappings she’d carefully wrapped you in over the past year were stripped away. It felt—good—didn’t it, to be free once again, even if naked? Naked and free, though with your dick pulled back between your legs and those great big, beautiful breasts hanging off your chest? Naked, in front of your enemy, in front of the very man who stole everything from you, your House, your authority, your might and masculinity.

And you cast her off so easily: threw Aubriella aside the moment you had an axe in your hand and how did it feel—how did it feel?—to do what so few born women ever do? Shuck off—everything—not just the clothes but everything—like a snake slithering free of its old jewelled skin, leaving that fragile, too-tight husk behind—sliding free of every rule and obligation that restrains her, infuriates her, crushes her into subservience to a man, to filth like Edmund?

But you aren’t a woman, are you Duncan? Or there’s definitely some woman in you, now, how could there not be? But you feel the bonds of silk and lace because they’re so new and alien to you. You’ve only felt the ever-tightening grip for the past year; and what’s a year? Most women of the court were born into bondage, grew up in bondage, and live in bondage. They no longer need a man’s voice and a man’s hand guiding them anymore, because that man is always with them. Father, brother, husband or son: always there in their head, watching them; they hear him, always. They don’t feel those bonds of silk and lace as you do because they’ve always worn them, because it’s part of who they are. Perhaps you too will grow comfortable with it someday.

But for now, you feel it, don’t you? You feel the lace at your thighs and the silk at your waist. Wound around feet and legs, wrists and arms, they hold you as tightly as any rope. Tighter in some ways, I suppose. If only you could see yourself right now, Duncan, as you squirm, breasts straining, and moan around the thing between your lips. It truly is a sight.

What else could you expect? This outcome was inevitable. The best possible outcome, considering; what better could you have hoped for, leaving your lord and master Edmund Malveil standing there humiliated in his own shit?

And so: Duncan, you have willing subsumed yourself with Aubriella once more. This time, in the full understanding of what it must entail: your final transformation; your eventual marriage; that inevitable moment in which you must spread your legs and receive a man’s seed—your brother’s seed—in your belly. Motherhood, even; surely you thought that far ahead. As you lie there in torment, which of these inevitabilities does your mind curl around like a wounded animal as you suffer your punishment.

And to think you could have avoided it all, simply by doing what has always come so naturally to you: killing your enemy.

Why didn’t you do it, Duncan, once Earl of the Compass, Axe of the North?

You had your enemy at your mercy and a blade at his throat, at his manhood, ready to carve the fat and filth from his living carcass. The desire for revenge burned. In some inchoate form you felt the past year churn within you, a violent maelstrom of suffered humiliation. The kaleidoscope of indignities forced upon your flesh fuelled your rage, and your rage made you strong, as it always has, made you fast—you revelled, didn’t you, in that moment of manifest power in which weapond and body moved as one and your whirled across the stone floor of Edmund’s halls.

Did you relive the slaughters of the past in that moment? The Battle of Trath Hill, your many campaigns against the barbarians of the North: you rode those memory of blood and carnage like a wave and it brought your enemy to his knees.

Imagine if Edmund had followed Castigan’s instructions and left you tightly corseted! What would have done then, Duncan?

Nothing, of course.

But then, what did your little display of martial prowess actually achieve? Also nothing. And to listen to Edmund, that’s what you’ll receive, soon, as well: your own nothing, a void between your legs.

It’s not a nothing, of course. Such male idiocy. What you still perceive as a nothingness can be a cradle of life—a source of such pleasure as you’ve never known—yet you would dismiss it as a hollowness in need of filling. This is fear, Duncan—and fear makes you stupid.

‘You shat yourself, Eddy.” A good line to be sure. I’m sure it felt good saying it. Witty, maybe. And a pleasure, humiliating Edmund like that, redirecting some of your own shame to him. And seeing the fear in his eyes—yes, the fear; you took pleasure in his fear.  Before, Edmund thought you soft and weak, an utterly defeated foe. Now he knows you remain a threat and the touch of your blade at his neck must stay with him always.

Not so great with a brain, Edmund said. He wasn’t wrong. Being totally at the mercy of an enemy is one thing; being at the mercy of an enemy who fears you—well. At some level you must’ve realised what would follow. That little tantrum, throwing those axes at his seat: were you raging against the inevitability of what was to come, or in protest at the life you were willingly giving up? Both, I suspect.

In some ways you really are as tightly bound as any born woman, aren’t you Duncan, by your own intractable masculine delusion of self-importance, your Northern stubbornness, your honour, your oath. Though now you’re bound in a very different way, a very tangible and physical way, of course. No need to speak in the abstract, in metaphors when you’ve got—well, everything’s Castigan’s done to you following yesterday’s performance.

‘My name is Aubriella,’ you said. A reassertion of the identity they’d forced onto you this past year, indicating your willing submission to Edmund’s plans. But when he stripped you naked, it was Aubriella he took away, because she wasn’t you, not yet, despite everything they’d done and those superficial trappings peeled away so easily. Oh, she’s part of you; how could she not be after a year under Castigan’s delicate tutelage? After a year dressed as her, talking as her, living as her in the shadowed halls of the Crimson Court. The torture of your transformation indelibly branded something female into you, beyond the breasts and curves and long hair; and the training that followed – how could a week in a Petal Street brothel not change the man you were?

Yet all it took was an instant with a weapon in hand and all the old violent instincts returned.

No wonder then that as Edmund stood there, blood welling between fingers clutching at his neck, reeking of his own shit, he was filled with rage. You humiliated him in his own seat of power. His fury threatened to overwhelm his reason. He staggered towards you with fists raised. He knew you remained the same threat as before. Everyone knows the stories steeped in blood that surround the Axe of the North, more than just a title, a weapon incarnate in flesh.

But he saw only Aubriella. He heard only her soft voice, and the rage and anger transferred from you—a man he dared not strike—to her—a woman who ought to know her place—who’d dared humiliate him. Such audacity could not go unpunished.

His meaty fist knocked you to the floor. You tasted blood.  You went to rise; his fist took you again and you fell to the floor once more, nose streaming snot and blood and you breathed out bubbles and breathed in grit and dirt from the stone beneath your palms. You squeezed your eyes shut as pain exploded in your side. His foot took you in the ribs. More than once. Something cracked or popped. You wheezed and wrapped yourself around the pain—but you did not cry out. Then he took you by that luxurious mane of hair and hauled you to your feet and his fingers curled around your neck….

In his rage, Edmund would have strangled Aubriella to death or pummelled her to a bloody pulp. You would not have been the first girl, young and beautiful and dead, carried out of his hall.

But then, you aren’t just any pretty girl, are you? Even for Edmund, guards dragging the battered corpse of his own adopted daughter out of his hall would be scandalous. Especially one under the protection of Lady Castigan! All his pretty plans wrapped up in your marriage balanced against the bile of his anger: pride versus ambition. Fortunately for you, I suppose—though it is a strange sort of fortune to be fair—Edmund has always been a very ambitious man.

You submitted to his fists and kicks. You neither cowered nor begged for mercy; nor did you lash out in self-defence. You could have still killed him, even then, naked and unarmed as you were, unmanned. But you didn’t, believing yourself ready to die, then and there at Edmund’s feet, rather than be the catalyst for the chaos that must follow his death. This was yet another sacrifice, and how very noble of you, Duncan, how honourable of you to take the beating with barely a whimper. You felt—manly—as Edmund’s fingers tightened around your slender neck. Your hazel eyes met his without flinching, for you knew even then you could kill him and in that moment he knew it as well.

You feel somewhat less manly now, tied up and suffering in silent darkness. Now you whimper and wish you’d done differently. Regret undermines the nobility of your sacrifice. You regret the fatalism that made you passive.

It was Maya who saved you, Maya the handmaiden who intervened with the brute clutching you by the throat.

“My lord,” she murmured and somehow her quiet voice cut through the man’s rage.

He hesitated. “Out of my way, girl.”

“She is Castigan’s,” she said. “Hers to train and hers to punish.”

Edmund scowled, but the brief pause was a bright sliver of reason cutting through the anger and humiliation clouding his mind. Like you, he imagined the chaos that must follow the fulfilment of his rage. With your death, the collapse of any possible alliance with the North; without the North, the support of the West fades; and only a fool places their trust in the East. And there was also his vow, of course, sacred and stained with blood, made before the old king himself, an oath made to the oldest Gods in the oldest ways. Not that Edmund cared much for oaths and vows and blood, nor concerned himself much for the old ways and old powers. New Gods walked the Earth now and his faith was with them.

Still, no need to take unnecessary risks.

So Edmund flung you to the floor and retreated. His rage dissipated, replaced almost instantly by a sullen lassitude and the return of the old boredom. He dropped heavily onto the stone steps below his throne.

“Take her,” he grunted, gesturing with one hand. “Get some clothes and get her out of my sight.”

You were half-senseless from the beating and strangling. Exhaustion and pain overtook you. You did not struggle as your humble handmaiden lifted and dressed you. She took a simple shift and pinned it around your slender frame, and wrapped you in a heavy, fur-lined cloak. Supporting your walk, she led you out of Edmund’s hall. You clutched your side where Edmund’s boot took you, fearing a broken rib. One eye had already swelled shut and the dimly lit passages were a blur as you limped along with Maya. The speed of your progress was an irony not entirely lost on you, even then: battered and bruised, you still moved far faster than when healthy and fully ensconced in Aubriella’s skirts and shoes.

The torturous walk to safety that night remains dream-like. The handmaiden took you along unfamiliar ways, dimly-lit halls filled with dust and cobwebs that avoided contact with others. Occasionally she whispered and a door would open, or with a hidden touch of some concealed panel cause a passage to reveal itself. Traveling along these secret and shadowed ways, you glimpsed unfamiliar places deep within the labyrinthian depths of the ancient capitol.

An ornate stone statue depicting a trio of cloaked and veiled women, arms raised high in supplication, water flowing from eyes, hands and mouth into the deep pool at their feet. A vaulting, torch-lined chamber, lined with racks of glittering weapons spaced between cold and empty barrack beds. A small, circular room in which dozens of candles flickered and danced around a twisting metal pedestal holding a singular tome, thick as your hand is long, barred shut and chained to its base. A body-length mirror set in wide decorative wooden frame carved with intricate details: the glass was clouded yet it seemed you glimpsed—yourself? as a man?—within its surface as your handmaiden pulled you hurriedly past.

These sights and more made their impression upon you as you staggered through these silent paths to safety. Then, you stumbled, breath burning in your chest but at your handmaiden’s urging you kept placing one foot before the other. Her whispering voice sustained you, rhythmic, insistent, drawing you along.

(Now, as you squirm in your bondage, that same whispering voice, those half-remembered glimpses of forgotten places, haunt your suffering.)

At last, you emerged into a small, earth-and-stone lined chamber smelling powerfully of damp and hops. A cellar; a second strong pair of hands took you and supported you up some stairs. Darkness took you, briefly; your eyes blinked open and you found yourself sat in a comfortable chair in a warm room lit by a dancing fire.

Two figures stood by the fire, their silhouette casting long, flickering shadows across your slumped form: Lady Castigan and Master Tobrik, the Flesh-Shaper.