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Lysithea shifts from foot to foot, teetering in the ridiculous shoes locked to her ankles with thick cuffs. She rests her hand delicately on the heavy wooden rail before her and, when no-one complains, she shuffles closer to use it to take her weight. She eyes the guard behind her, but he keeps his eyes dutifully ahead.
He’s there if she runs in the wrong direction, then.
The air is cold despite being so far to the east. Lysithea wishes for a blanket, a cloak, anything—even her usual long sleeves and stockings would be insufficient for the brisk breeze coming from further up the mountains. She’s been placed here on her platform, with every eye in Almyra to see her on display, a hair's-breadth away from nude.
The silky kaftan is a poor imitation of a chemise; sheer enough to show the rosy blush down her neck and chest at her own exposure. She’s been given nothing to wear beneath it except the chastity belt she’s been locked into since Almyra conquered the Leicester Alliance. The most substantial garment is the jewelled veil, embroidered in the colours of the conquering emperor, that hangs down her back.
And, of course, the goddess-damned shoes. Lysithea is used to wearing heels but these are ridiculous: the heel is so tall and thin she keeps getting stuck between the wooden planks of the walkways, and her entire weight is tipped forward onto the balls of her feet. She can barely walk.
Which she suspects is the point.
A hunting horn sounds in the distance, and Lysithea clenches her fists. She’s to run on the third horn. The Almyran handmaids responsible for adorning her in this mockery of a dress told her so.
A second horn. In theory, if Lysithea makes it through the Throat and into Almyra, they’ll let her go. In practice, they’ve locked her cumbersome shoes in place so she can’t throw them away and take her chances barefoot.
A third horn. Lysithea makes eye contact with the guard and casts Miasma.
Strong enough to keep him out of this fight, but not so gruesome that he’ll never recover. She can’t risk running out of energy this early on, when she’s expecting an onslaught of guards.
She can’t see anyone before her, on any of the well-worn wooden bridges connecting jutting pieces of land, so turns around to the gate that separates Fodlan’s Throat from the Goneril watchtower.
A line of guards stare impassively back at her, but they make no move toward her.
“If you try anything, I can and will blast right through you!” Lysithea declares with a bravery she doesn’t feel.
Sorry, mother. Sorry, father.
She allowed herself to be brought here so that her parents’ pledges to serve the conquering king wouldn’t be undermined—but now she’s here, and they’re back in Ordelia. She hopes they’ll have enough time to escape before the army can reach them.
“Khalid!” Lysithea shouts, taking great care to speak with as much disrespect as possible. “I will not be toyed with! I’ll give you no satisfaction in running!”
The guards remain still.
And then, slowly, they part.
Out of the mist strolls the first man to lead an army across Fodlan’s Throat and topple the Alliance.
He wears his riding leathers: heavy boots and gloves, protection from the elements that Lysithea has not been afforded. His sash is adorned with foreign medals, and he walks with an easy grace that Lysithea could never hope to match.
She spreads her arms and waits for the tingling of a building Hades to work its way down to her fingertips.
“You’re supposed to run, you know.”
Lysithea glares, and the king laughs. It’s an open, easy thing that even the surrounding guards lean into, and she trembles with a mixture of fury, cold, and fear.
“Hm.” The king reaches into a pocket, and Lysithea raises her arms to fight, but he withdraws only a stoppered vial. He raises his other hand high in the air in a mock salute. “Easy there!” As if he speaks to a wyvern. Lysithea will tear his head from his shoulders. “A gift, just for you.”
“His Majesty can keep his gifts. If I could return these—these borrowed garments, I would.”
The king cocks his head, casually.
“Oh, no—I’m just His Royal Highness, actually. His Majesty is my father. Is the etiquette different over here? I had a Fodlani tutor, but frankly he was a bit…” He trails off and mimes drinking from the vial. “You can call me Prince Khalid, though.”
She doesn’t have time for this. She just knows that she has to wait for the king, prince, whoever to approach her, if she doesn’t want to fight his entire armed guard at once.
“Or Claude, if Khalid is too difficult for your delicate Fodlan sensibilities,” he says with a smirk meant to mock her.
“If Prince Khalid wishes to strike me through the heart, he’s not going to do it from behind while I run.” Come on, step closer, see her small frame and underestimate her.
Khalid tips his head to the side and, to his closest guard, says: “Nader, if she doesn’t start running in ten seconds, shoot her in the foot.” The guard notches an arrow.
Lysithea doesn’t dignify this with a response, but takes a step backward, closer to the edge of the wooden platform. If she can drag Khalid out onto the bridge then it will be less space for his guards to intervene.
“I’m not bluffing,” he says, and—
Lysithea meant to stand her ground here. She really did. It would be the most dignified death afforded to her: holding her head high while she faces the final enemy she can’t defeat. She’s always suspected her timeline is short and thrown herself into each fight accordingly. Death is her ever-present companion, not knowing how badly her crests are affecting her.
And yet.
Lysithea doesn’t want to die here.
She spins in her ridiculously high heels and flees. She doesn’t have time to think about how she’s going to run in them; she just has to do it.
Lysithea makes it across the main bridge that connects the watchtower with Fodlan’s Throat proper, avoiding the heel-eating dips and cracks by sheer luck and determination. Khalid laughs behind her, bright and joyous and not moving any closer, so he’s at least giving her a head start—enough of one that he can tell himself she’s got a chance and probably believe it.
It’s not much, but it’s something. Lysithea is very good at grabbing her scant resources and making magic.
She’ll never be able to outrun Khalid—not now, in her ridiculous outfit, and probably not on a good day. He’s got the advantage in height, physical strength, and he probably knows the area better too, seeing as how this is the path he took to invade barely a month ago. If she calms down and uses as much as she can to her advantage, she can only hope to outthink him.
Khalid will regret giving her a head start.
Lysithea has a rough idea of the geography of the Throat. She’s been here once only, with the rest of the Golden Deer to assist Duke Goneril, and her travelling consisted of pre-arranged warps based on a map.
According to the map, if she takes a sharp right turn here, she can circle back around to what used to be a ballista. Regardless of whether it survived the storming of the Locket, Khalid’s expecting her to attempt freedom by running toward the Almyran border.
She waits until she’s sure she’s been swallowed up by the heavy mountain mist before she detours. It’s rough terrain, often steep enough that she needs to continue on her knees, and uneven enough that she’s always aware of how inappropriately dressed she is. Bracing to run in her high heels brings the discomfort of her chastity belt to the forefront, reminding her that she’s here after he identified her as an omega.
Khalid has organised everything specifically to fuck with her. She’s going to enjoy blasting through him with her best Dark Spikes. See what he thinks of omegas then.
Lysithea’s body, even when not adorned with implements of torture, isn’t meant tor endurance. She must be close to the bridge she needs, if only because she can’t run for much longer, and there it is, materialising from the mist—
And upon it stands Khalid.
“Hi,” he says, and gives her a cheeky wave. “I win.”
The frustration, the despair, the disappointment—it leaves Lysithea along with the last reserves of her strength, and she falls to her knees on the rocky, hard-packed earth. It probably scratches her bloody. She doesn’t care.
“Could I have made it,” Lysithea starts, and swallows to wet her dry throat, and continues, “If I had gone straight ahead?”
Khalid spins an arrow idly, but his bow remains holstered.
“Sorry, but no.” He clicks his tongue and spreads his arms wide in a ‘what can you do?’ pose.
“So you didn’t win anything. This was an unjust match from the start.”
“Guilty as charged. C’mon, let’s at least get you up from the ground.”
Lysithea thinks about what it would be like to face her death with dignity. She likes the idea, but her body has decided there’s nothing left, and she wouldn’t be able to stand if she wanted to.
Here it is, then.
“You can pierce me through the heart from there. I’m not standing for this,” she says instead, to make it seem like she has any power over the situation. She stares at the end of Khalid’s colourful sash, where multiple bright bobbles hang. In another life, she might have thought it fun.
“The heart? Gods no, what kind of monster do you think I am?”
Lysithea freezes so that her thoughts won’t be made obvious by her body language. “Then what?”
“Why do you think—”
Lysithea doesn’t care for Khalid’s words. She waits until he gestures wildly with his arrow and raises a wave of Dark Spikes to plummet toward the ground.
She throws herself to the side in case Khalid thinks to get one last hit in—but he’s more dexterous than he looks under his loose-fitting clothing, and rolls, and the spell only gouges a crater out of the rock below.
She can’t cast another again so quickly, but she flings herself backward and readies a Miasma—
An arm wraps around her throat; fingers pry at her jaw, and the pinpoint pain is enough to force a gasp. A thin liquid is dribbled into her mouth and she tries to shake free to spit it out, but Khalid clamps a hand over her mouth and she’s left with no choice but to swallow. He only lets her go when she claws at his arms in a desperate need for air.
“What was in there?” Lysithea leans forward, intending to retch it back up, but Khalid’s hands pin her own hands away from her face.
“A little something I’ve been cooking up. It’ll trigger your heat,” Khalid says, casually, and brushes her veil aside. He ghosts his lips down the flesh of her exposed neck, leaving gooseflesh in his wake. Is it working already? Would it start that quickly?
“My heat,” Lysithea repeats, and shakes her hands free to clutch at the chastity belt locked around her waist. It makes sense, suddenly—why Khalid ordered her placed in it for the past several days, why she’s been kept separate from everyone but her Almyran handmaids, why she’s been sleeping on sheets clearly scented by Khalid. Her assumption was that it was a power play—it never occurred to her that it may have been for her only.
“Mm.” Khalid strokes his nose over her shoulder. “You tore a chunk right out of my arm when I marched on Ordelia.”
Lysithea remembers fighting against her parents’ wishes, believing she could muster the strength to defend the territory from an entire army. She remembers calculating their supply lines and rations and thinking she stood a chance.
“No-one else has ever gotten close before. And I have a couple dozen half-siblings!” Khalid laughs. Lysithea doesn’t get the joke, but her grip on the belt tightens.
Something’s building inside her. Something hot and prickly that radiates. Khalid trails a hand down her chest, over the sheer excuse of a dress adorning her, and she’s wet.
“I haven’t—I won’t—” Lysithea’s breath catches as the pads of Khalid’s fingers ghost over a nipple. They’re rough and calloused: archer’s hands. She thinks that he’ll surely get bored and move on when there’s so little there to hold his interest, but he doubles down, flicking the tip until it hardens beneath him and the sensations are amplified tenfold. Khalid’s other hand winds around her to cup her other breast, hot and insistent in comparison to the icy ground beneath her. “I haven’t done this before!”
Khalid pauses, his breath hitching. Lysithea can feel it where his chest presses against her back.
“I have,” he says, low and breathy in her ear. “I can take care of you.”
Lysithea assumes it’s the influence of her forced heat, but she believes him.
Khalid’s clever fingers leave her nipple and drift lower, down her stomach, softly enough to gently tickle and make her flex and flinch underneath him.
“Really? There’s been no-one else?”
“No-one,” Lysithea confirms, wishing she had something to compare this to so she wouldn’t be left in the dark. This is uncharted territory.
Khalid unlocks her chastity belt. When he pulls it away from her body, a string of slick connects them.
Mortified, she lets go of the belt and grips onto Khalid’s arm instead, but he’s already moving. The warmth of his body at her back vanishes as he crawls around in front, between her legs, and looks down at Lysithea as though she’s a five-course meal.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs, and slides two fingers through the soaked mess of her. She burns as his fingertips pet at her flesh, and the burning, prickling heat inside her grows. She’s never taken such pleasure even alone, she had no idea it could be like this—
“Marry me,” Khalid says, earnestly looking into her eyes. “You’re everything I’ve been dreaming of and more. Be my wife, Lysithea.”
It’s got to be part of his messed up plan. He’s adorned her in beautiful sheer fabrics, hunted her down, and now he’s making requests? She’d be a fool to agree. She’d spend her life waiting for the punchline, for the other shoe to drop, never truly able to relax.
But—
His scent is so beautiful. Earthy but a little sweet in a way that alphas tend not to be. Alpha scents repulse her, making it impossible for her to even go near any of them, but Khalid—
If she makes it out of this alive, that’s a win for her, right? He’s shown her how he plays, which leaves her one step closer to beating him.
And, goddess, she so desperately wants his touch again.
Can she have this one nice thing, just for her?
“Yes,” she says, digging her nails into his arm, through his heavy riding jacket. “Yes, please, yes—”
“I’ll be so—well, I can’t promise to be good to you. But you’ll never want for anything,” Khalid says, and tugs at the chastity belt again. Lysithea lifts her hips in an attempt to help, past the mortification of it all.
A lock clicks.
The chastity belt settles back into place.
“Wha—”
“I can’t wait to take you for the first time during our wedding ceremony,” Khalid says, sitting back on his heels, a beatific smile on his face. “You’ll hate me now, but it’ll be worth it, I swear.”
Lysithea looks down at the belt.
“You, but the heat inducer—”
Khalid stands, scooping her up in his arms in one swift motion. Lysithea’s hands go to her chastity belt, but find no purchase. She goes hot, then cold, then hot again. She’s going to combust from the inside. She’s going to take Khalid out with her.
“That one might just be me having a little fun,” he says, and sets off walking with Lysithea in his arms.