empress ciri, the swallow and the sparrow, morvran voorhis
via https://ift.tt/3aXfel0
so people have expressed some interest in the Ciri-centric bit I teased a
while back and for the record work is continuing on it! I was enjoying
having Morvran in the background as a sort of bland Decent Fellow ongoing
situation but then I had to pay attention to him for a moment and realized
that this is entirely a self-denying facade, he considers himself a Bland
Decent Fellow and occasionally congratulates himself on how well-adjusted
he is and how well he treats the people he interacts with, and he isn’t
wrong about being nice to people but under a thin veneer the kid is one
giant ball of frantically glued-together coping strategies and it’s going
to messily unravel at some point. So that is going to be incredibly fun
to write and by that I mean possibly beyond my capabilities as a kink
writer, so we all have that to look forward to. (This man, despite his
frankly horrifying face model in W3 about which no more shall be said, is
about 21 and is a general in the Nilfgaardian army and has been being
groomed as Emhyr’s successor ever since Emhyr uncovered the plot [in which
he was not directly involved] to assassinate Emhyr and put Morvran on the
throne as a puppet when the kid was 14, and so he’s spent most of his
adolescence and all of his young adulthood in this kind of specimen box of
overachievement doing double-duty as heir and hostage. Definitely,
definitely a recipe for a genuinely easygoing people-pleaser, for sure.)
Anyway this is a job for Ciri’s new extremely capable personal assistant to
do some research about, later, along with everything else, but as far as
I’ve gotten so far in the actual writing, everyone including Morvran super
believes that it’s all peachy and he’s fine.
Meanwhile, Ciri is proving to be extremely shy and not very good at
actually flirting with this personal assistant she has a crush on. So far
she’s mostly just– given her extravagant gifts of clothing and promoted her
a bunch, and is sort of hoping that’s how courtship works here because she
doesn’t know what she’s doing.
Over the next several weeks, Luliana spent more and more time in the
Princess’s company, and her wardrobe gradually grew to incorporate more
little swallows in it– […] And, most daringly, a pair of long silk
stockings with clocked heels and a knitted pattern of swallows around the
top hems.
It was impossible not to give in to… those kinds of thoughts as she
pulled those up and had the swallows nestled around the soft skin of her
thighs. Normally stockings like this never fit Luliana, but these had been
made large enough, somehow– how had the Princess known the dimensions of
Luliana’s thighs, when Luliana only ever wore the long skirts correctly in
fashion for a person of her station?
And yet. And yet, the Princess made no overt reference to it, never asked
for anything, only invited Luliana a little at a time deeper into her
confidence. Luliana knew she wasn’t imagining that the Princess’s eyes
lingered on her sometimes, finding the little printed or embroidered birds,
and looking pleased with herself.
Please, Luliana thought to herself, cheeks burning as she watched the
Princess standing at a table verbally eviscerating a stuffed-shirt idiot
with a too-important hereditary position without so much as raising her
voice, please, make a move on me, I am not equipped to handle this sort of
suspense.
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