wip snippet

[dragonlady7]

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. (Your picture was not posted)