Written by Momoknight
Hiiiiii~
It’s me! Momo! I’m talking to you now! Isn’t that so cool??
You better think it’s cool! OR ELSE!
…Okay, I can’t actually do anything to you (‘cause you’re reading this from across the cosmic curtain in a dimension that’s locked against demiurgic interference) but I would really appreciate it if you’d pretend that wasn’t true and act really intimidated and impressed in the comments of wherever Lady Nyara shares this story. Please? For me? For a cute girl?
Great thanks awesome super duper amazing YAY!
Where was I? Right! So, I’m here to set the record straight. See, if you’ve been listening to Cat so far, she probably has you thinking that this is going to be a tale of tragedy and struggle and suffering and the slow, grindy climb to the top of the power fantasy heap and blah blah blah WHATEVER! Wrong, nope, not at all, completely incorrect.
This is a romance, got it? This is top shelf romantasy, the good shit, the “turn to page 69 for steamy lesbian BDSM elf sex that’ll get your motor purring” premium fantasy erotica. But more than that, this is a tale of star-crossed lovers reunited by the hand of a goddess that happens to like a bit of spice in her yuri. This is the story of how two soulmates found each other again after unimaginable tragedy pulled them apart. It’s a story about the longing in our hearts and the path we have to take to attain our desires in a world that calls them taboo.
It’s a love story, plain and simple.
I’ve always liked love stories. When I was tiny, I got exposed to the standard complement: all the old fairy tales reimagined as animated Disney movies, from Cinderella and Snow White to Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. But, thinking back on it, most of those weren’t really romance stories. There was always a beautiful princess and her prince in shining hair, sure, but most of those tales were so… schematic. The leading couple are both beautiful, and they fall in love at first sight, and true love’s kiss saves the day. But what does it mean to love someone? Is it really love if all you know of someone is their beauty, or their singing voice, or the fact that they own a castle?
There was something different about Beauty and the Beast. It wasn’t love at first sight but hate at first sight, with the leads struggling just to be around each other until a spark of attraction kindled into an earned true love. Gaston wasn’t as glamorous a villain as Maleficent, but the Beast was leagues more compelling a love interest than Prince Whoever. At certain points in the movie, Belle was actually frightened of the man she would love, and that…
That set a spark in me that would one day become a wildfire.
In my early teens, I fell into a vampire kick; hardly uncommon for the time, what with Twilight sweeping the nation, but I could never bring myself to really care about the vampires in those books. Vampires that don’t eat people? Vampires that don’t enthrall people? Vampires for whom biting isn’t sex? What was even the point?
Dracula was better, with little Momo taking particular note of every scene where Dracula used his vampire mind powers to predate upon Lucy and Mina. Carmilla was electrifying. The passion and intensity of the titular vampire enthralled me. Her desire for the viewpoint character, Laura, was undeniable. It was a lesbian kind of yearning, which was new to me, but more than that it held such deep possessiveness.
“You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”
* * *
Rosekitty: oh wow, I never knew Carmilla was that gay. I mean, I’d heard it was the lesbian vampire story but I kinda figured it was just insanely subtextual
Momoknight: NOPE! 100% textual explicit lesbian vampire
Momoknight: needless to say that did things(tm) to me, tho i consider my actual lesbian awakening to be watching the van helsing movie on a couch with some friends
Rosekitty: never seen it, is it any good?
Momoknight: NOPE! but its really goofy and kate beckinsale is really hot, especially when the vampire brides are flirting with her
Momoknight: we could watch it sometime :3
Rosekitty: sure, that could be fun!
Rosekitty: i didnt expect this to be what ppl talk about after the events but i guess it makes sense, it’s all a social thing to begin with
Momoknight: yeah, some of us only log for the RP itself, but I think most of us want to make some actual connections with the people we play with
Momoknight: and you seemed interesting, so I extra wanted to get to know you~
This was the third or so time we’d spoken in Heroes of Telvaria, and I already knew she was the one. She was just my type: alive and breathing.
Okay, so, I didn’t know she was the one, but I hoped. I’m really, really good at hoping. I couldn’t point to anything specific about her RP profile that told me she shared my exact interests, but it was something about the cluster, and the choice to join <Seekers of Darkness> over any of the other RP guilds active on the server. We advertised ourselves as the mature, moody alternative willing to explore dark, serious, explicit topics.
In practice that meant a lot of us were edgelords who liked to ERP. Our saving grace—the only thing that kept our guild from getting infested with the worst kind of internet chud—was that we also advertised being LGBT-friendly and not tolerating bigotry under the guise of maturity. That’s the part that convinced Rosekitty to give us a chance.
Our chat was happening while our characters were situated in a tavern, each of us occasionally typing a quick emote describing our characters engaged in whispered conversation or bouts of laughter. Rosekitty’s cheshire warlock, Roselia Vogelkatze, and my undead dark knight, Kara Laurnstein, sat across from each other in a private booth.
Earlier in the night, we had both played our parts in a meeting of the guild. Roselia had been recruited to the Seekers and had been attending gatherings in order to find a partner or group she could join in our eternal quest to collect cursed relics and bring them back to the guild’s warded manor. Rosekitty was feeling out her new guild and trying to make friends. As Kara, I commiserated with Roselia’s uncertainty. As Momo, I expressed my interest more boldly.
Rosekitty: I’m flattered, but I’m really not that interesting. I barely know what I’m doing
Oh, you self-loathing little minx.
Momoknight: that’s fine!! we all start somewhere. are you totally new to RP, then? cause you write pretty good if thats true! id totally believe you had experience
Rosekitty: well, im not completely inexperienced. ive spent time on the internet, in forums and places, but mostly play by post
Momoknight: ever do ERP?
Rosekitty: uhhhh
Momoknight: sorry sorry, i can be awkward sometimes
Momoknight: its just we get a lot of that guild so like be prepared if someone starts getting flirty or hinting in that direction, yknow?
Rosekitty: um, yeah. its fine. agh okay, fine, yes, ive done ERP.
Momoknight: another win for momo! but seriously, you dont need to feel weird about it, basically all of us have done it! it’s normal! it’s an adult-only guild
Rosekitty: yeah okay, i guess that makes sense. i dont know, it still feels weird to talk about. it’s like, it’s one of those things you don’t really talk about, y’know? it’s a taboo topic
Momoknight: i mean, it’s all context, for sure!! lots of bad times to blurt it out! buuuuuut there are good times to be really super open about this stuff, y’know? you can’t find your kindred if you never tell anyone what you are
Momoknight: hey, i get a good vibe off you, so can i RAMBLE? please? pretty please?
Rosekitty: …sure, I guess. I can save all questions till the end of the lecture
Momoknight: yay! thanks bestie~
Momoknight: Soooo once upon a time, my mom loaned me a steamy romance novel. Very normal! Basically the only genre she would read. Anyway, it was… interesting! Het, of course, but that’s fine, I’m bi. It was about this gal who falls for some classic fairy tale trickery and ends up ensnared by a dark and brooding faerie prince.
Momoknight: It was the kind of story where the heroine gets spoiled with luxury, but the man spoiling her is kinda mean and scary about it. See, the thing binding them together is this fae contract that says he owns her, body and soul, which he uses to compel her obedience in a few scenes. Bowing her head in court, stopping in the middle of running away, so on.
Momoknight: Hot! Really hot, actually, and maybe more for me than most. You see stuff like that all the time in cheap romance. The audience likes it when the guy gets all alpha and takes what he wants. But, there’s a limit. At the climax of the story, the contract is dissolved, and when they reconcile and get married the story makes this big huff about how equal they’re going to be now.
Momoknight: And I hated it! Disappointing! Boring! Boooo! I liked it better when their relationship wasn’t equal. Except, when I complained to my mom, she got this weird look on her face. Things got… embarrassing, real quick. And I realized, oh, this isn’t a normal thing to want. Not like I wanted it. And that made me a freak.
Momoknight: So, Rosekitty, have you ever felt the same way?~
I was pretty sure I knew the answer. See, I didn’t just decide to dump all this randomly. And, actually, I might have made a teensy lie of omission earlier when I talked about her RP profile and not knowing much about her. After that first time I met her at a guild event, I may or may not have done my best to dig up every trace of her online presence.
That’s normal!! People do that!! Haven’t you ever met someone cool and wanted to know more about them?? Of course you have, so don’t you dare call it “stalking.” I just looked up her AO3 account and searched for any fics she followed, and then went to Twitter and Reddit and a few other sites looking for similar usernames and profile pictures. Lots of people make that really easy, okay? Do you know how many people will happily point you to all their other social media accounts on each one?
Not Rosekitty, though. Her online presence was… reserved. Furtive. Accounts created only in the past couple years, despite indications of experience on the internet preceding that. There was something very deliberate about how she interacted on each account, like she was keenly aware of the possibility of someone digging through her history exactly like I was doing. Had she been burned before? Or was that just the kind of person she was?
She had something to hide—and people with something to hide? They’re the people who love nothing more than to spill their secrets to someone they think they can trust. It’s just human to want to share, so the more you can’t share, the more desperate you’ll be to find someone you can talk to. All it takes is reading the right signal… which I was more than happy to provide.
Rosekitty: huh
Rosekitty: …no offense but the shit I’m into is way harder than that
Momoknight: then spill the tea, sis!!!!
Momoknight: dont leave a girl hangin, god
Rosekitty: hahahah okay, fair’s fair. i can always say the logs were photoshopped
Rosekitty: it was a fantasy book, for me, not a romance. it wasn’t supposed to be hot. dark fantasy, sword & sorcery, that kind of genre where a bit of horror is almost expected
Rosekitty: there’s this part where the heroine gets captured and tortured. whatever, plenty of beats like that in stories. But this was different. It was… anatomical.
Rosekitty: Not a feeling person but a collection of muscles and nerves that could be manipulated with the right tools. An incision here, pressure there, degrees of temperature. A body, a canvas, a performance. A kind of scientific art.
Rosekitty: If that had been all, maybe it wouldn’t have affected me so much. But the villain played a vicious little trick on the heroine. She was kept isolated, cold, and hungry for most of each day, or multiple days at a time. The only time she spoke with someone else, the only time she was given warmth, the only time she could eat…
Rosekitty: …was after she’d endured another session under the knife. She had to ask for it. Made to beg for another round of torture so she could be warm and wouldn’t starve and wouldn’t go insane from solitude. And so little by little she came to crave the tenderness of the knife, her only bloody deliverance. Shivering as it kissed her skin.
Rosekitty: In the book, it was just a single harrowing chapter. I wished it had been a hundred. When they rescued her, she was grateful, and some noise was made of the horrors she endured, but there was a scene missing from the story. A moment I wish had been written.
Rosekitty: I wanted her to still want it, after she’d been saved.
Rosekitty: so yeah, I guess that’s my version of your fairy contract
In the game, our characters cycled through idle animations. In meatspace, I leaned back in my pink gaming chair, biting my lip and looking around my cramped college dorm in a frenzy of excitement. Yes, yes, yes! She was like me. She was like me! My instincts were right. Now there was just one last little detail to verify.
Momoknight: pretty hot~
Momoknight: so which of them did you wanna be?
Rosekitty: That’s not really how I thought about it. I found it interesting from an observer’s perspective. If I were to write about it in a roleplay context, I’d take whatever role would make the scene work.
Momoknight: mmmhmmmmmmmm
Momoknight: i see i see
Momoknight: an intellectual curiosity, of course. but just for fun, let’s say you were playing the more dominant role in the scene. could you get into the headspace? how do you think it would feel to do that to someone? to be in control like that?
Momoknight: your hand by her throat, a knife between your fingers, the heel of your boot pressing between the legs of a woman spread and bound for you
Momoknight: grabbing hold of her wrist and applying pressure, pressure, pressure, the pliable bend of flesh and the frail rigidity of bone. the sweet sound of the first hairline fracture
Momoknight: hearing her whimper your name, begging and moaning. completely under your power and bent to your will
Momoknight: don’t you think that would be fun? ;P
I didn’t know for certain how Rosekitty would react, though of course I hoped. I had my fantasies, my dreams, but it was all guesswork. I couldn’t know that, as I spun my little scenario, a long-buried hunger was waking in the Catherine Bird behind the character. I couldn’t know how her breath caught as I took the concept she’d shared and rendered it anew.
There was a long pause after my last message. I hugged my knees and watched the computer screen, barely blinking, needing her reply. Had I pushed too far? Was I being too blatant in my flirtation? Or was she stuck in some useless lesbian mindset, afraid of admitting that my spur-of-the-moment smut had made her horny? Making her horny was the point, but maybe she was too deep in denial to recognize that.
Cat searched for the right words to frame her response, but she found her brain full of nothing but heat and hunger. She spent those precious, agonizing moments of silence fighting back the urge in her belly to rip and tear and use.
Rosekitty: …damn though, you’re good at this
Momoknight: you like?~
Momoknight: sorry if i went too hard at the end there lol, i have a looooot of practice writing smutty stuff
Rosekitty: it was good. I’d like to read more of what you write, sometime, if that’s okay
Momoknight: ofc! it’s all on my ao3
Momoknight: do you write?
Rosekitty: a little. used to do it more. kinda trying to get back into it, i guess, with joining an RP guild and all that
Momoknight: you should! we can beta read each other’s stuff, it’ll be fun
Momoknight: but hey yknow, you never answered my questions from before
Rosekitty: right. yeah. iiiiiii dont know. its weird to think about. weird to talk about. im not used to talking about any of this with people. it’s gone badly in the past. it makes me feel like im not normal, not right
Momoknight: because you’re not. neither am i. we’re sick, you and i. there’s something wrong with us, yeah. but it makes us more interesting. makes us special. we’re apart from the rest of them, apart from the world and all its boring, normal nobodies. we’re the freaks. but we can be freaks together, and we’ll have way more fun than they could ever dream
Momoknight: be wrong with me
Another pregnant pause. Another agonizing minute of frantic anticipation. I had her. I knew I had her. The bait had been taken, the hook was sinking into the flesh of her mouth. I just had to wait and let her follow.
Rosekitty: …yeah, I want that. fuck it, sure, let’s do it. send me your stuff and i’ll read it, and we can talk again and, idk, figure this stuff out.
Rosekitty: i should log for tonight, i have a stupid essay to finish
Rosekitty: but yeah, I wanna do this again
Momoknight: see you then~
And then I squealed aloud and giggled and kicked my feet. I did it! It worked! I didn’t scare her away! I found my one! And we’d talk and we’d hang out and get to know each other and fall in love and get married and be together forever and ever and she’d collar me and train me and rail me and—
You get the picture. I had a lot of lofty ideals. Some of them would be trickier than others, of course. I knew very little about Rosekitty, so I had no idea what kind of job she was going to get, and it’d be hard to be a stay-at-home housewife to someone who didn’t have a healthy income, but if I got some kind of programming job or whatever that I could do from home then I could at least adopt the aesthetic of the lifestyle domestic partner.
A treasonous, lowly voice in the back of my head attempted to convince me that I was imprinting too quickly and setting myself up for another inevitable disappointment, just like my last girlfriend, and the boyfriend before that, and all the others. A hateful chorus. The voices of therapists and parents and teachers; the voices of every boring, dull, ordinary person incapable of seeing what I could see.
They were wrong, all of them. You have to understand that. I was right about Cat. I knew it from the start, and I was vindicated. My fixation was never misplaced. We were going to be together, and it was going to be perfect, because we were made for each other. Destined.
* * *
And then, a few months later, high on the victory of getting Cat to finally ask me out properly, I died.
I’ll spare you the gory details. You don’t need to know how it happened.
What matters is what happened next. In the cold, in the dark, She found me. She saved me. My patron and goddess. The savior of my dreams; the guarantor of my destiny. Lady Nyara.
I was never really one for religion while I was alive. Fun ground for certain sexual fantasies, sure, but actually believing in any of it? Pointless. Yahweh and Allah had nothing to offer me, nor Odin nor Zeus nor any of the rest. Buddhism? A laughable system to a creature like me; saṃsāra is where I belong.
The Lady, though, has earned my worship. She gave me a second chance. She heard my true nature and she was delighted. She brought my beloved back to me. Remember that, every time that horrible princess tries to convince you that the Lady deserves your contempt.
Thanks to Lady Nyara, my destiny has been promised. Now, the rest is up to me. I love my darling Rosekitty. I’m hopelessly besotted with Catherine Rosemary Bird, and I know she feels the same. She loves me. We’re perfect for each other. I just have to show her that truth.
We’re girlfriends again, but that’s only the first stage. A mere stepping stone to our future as Mistress and devoted slave. Cat’s afraid to embrace her desires—afraid to even admit she has them—but I’ll lure them out of her. I’ll show her that her proper place is above all the rest, as the lord and master of a great and terrible host.
I’ll drag her down the rabbit hole and wake the beast slumbering inside her ironclad heart. I’ll teach her to love the taste of glorious dominion. Every fantasy she’s ever had, I’ll make real. It won’t stop at a bit of play. In the world we came from, we were confined by the laws and morals of society; in this world, we can live by our own laws and morals. With enough power, there’ll be no limit to what pleasures we can pursue.
I have a few hurdles to overcome, of course. I need a body again before I can surrender it to the owner of my heart. It’ll take time to break through Cat’s armored heart. But I have plans.
So please, dearest reader, enjoy the show that we have prepared. Enjoy the violence. Enjoy the sex. Enjoy the action and adventure in a fantastical world. But don’t forget what this story is really about. Don’t forget this promise: sooner than you think, Carmilla’s words will leave my darling Catherine’s lips.
“You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”
Engrave those words into your heart, as sure as they’re engraved in mine.
Well, with that out of the way, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming. You were reading about the pyramid, right? All the little novices running around, unaware of the monsters in their midst. A line of troopers waiting outside, a powerful woman in command, and an idiot goblin-killer stumbling out into the sand.
I mean, what did you think was going to happen next? He opens his mouth and he says something stupid, and the soldiers do what soldiers do best:
They shoot him dead.
On with the show.