body mine

Your name is Xunhrae Thaezyr. You are the fourth daughter of House Thaezyr, whose rank in Menzoberranzan’s hierarchy is best left unexamined. You have known, since you were capable of knowing, that there is something wrong with you.

You have three older sisters. One serves in Arach-Tinilith. The others are not worth the names your Matron gave them.

You have two older brothers. One fumbles his way through training at Melee-Magthere. The other still lives at home, with you.

His name is Vizaeth.

You like him more than you like your sisters, though you liked Jhinlara’s stories before she went to Arach-Tinilith. The way she spoke of Lolth’s divine devouring made your heart race and your head pound. Now she’s gone, you make your own stories—though the ones you soothe yourself to sleep with never end quite the same as Jhinlara’s did.

Vizaeth doesn’t talk about Lolth. He’s somewhat blasphemously silent about Her, but he listens politely to everything you have to say on the subject of the Spider Queen’s glory. He lets you sit on his bed whilst he scribbles away at his desk, poring through ancient books, and makes encouraging noises as you describe your visions of the Demonweb Pits and what happens to the souls who are caught there.

You are thirteen the first time you see him naked. Astonishing, really, that it took so long, when you’ve seen every inch and then some of your sisters countless times over the years. He’s changing when you come by to talk, and continues to do so as you stand in the doorway, unconcerned by your presence. You had something to say. It’s gone now. Your mouth is dry. Your heart races and your head pounds—a body can look like that? He’s only two years older than you, will you look like that, in two years’ time?

“Xunhrae?” he says, and you leave. You turn and you run as deep into the house as you can, until you find a place where the spiders are as plentiful as the shadows, and you think about Lolth with your hand between your thighs.

In two years’ time, you do not look like that. Your shape follows that of your sisters before you; small and curved and soft in the deadliest way. Jhinlara visits, and admires you, and gives you license to take whatever you want from her old closet. Minfein and Nauthel are viciously jealous—Jhinlara once lashed Minfein nearly senseless for borrowing a skirt whilst she was away. You are pleased to be raised over your sisters. You are less pleased at how everything in Jhinlara’s closet makes you look.

Maybe in another two years it will fit better.

Vizaeth has grown very little. He’s slight of limb, pretty of feature, with a sharp jaw and bright eyes. He trains just enough—when he can be bothered—to fill out his form with lithe muscle, all stretched over with smooth skin he spends an inordinate amount of time caring for. His bathroom resembles the interior of an apothecary’s shop. He has five separate jars of soaps just for his hair. Three of them are perfumed.

Every time you see his hands, something burns deep in your stomach. The line of his forearms makes your breath catch; the faint veins on the inside of his wrist like sacred webs you dream of strangling yourself with. When he starts tying his hair up, in a fashion that leaves his neck on display, your mouth goes dry and you think about Lolth, you think about Lolth, you think about Lolth.

He still listens to you talk about Her, though the boys who visit him lately are bored by you. There are three of them, or maybe four—you don’t care enough to distinguish one from another, except for the fact that one is a Xolarrin, whose House is worth significantly more than your own. A Baenre would be more useful, but Vizaeth is young still. He has plenty of time to make better alliances.

None of the boys care for you, or your stories of Lolth, or your frequent presence in Vizaeth’s quarters. You don’t care for the way they look at you, at your sisters. There are many ways to ally oneself with another, after all.

They won’t touch you. You’ll have them whipped if they do.

The books Vizaeth reads are full of magic. He and the others are preparing, he tells you, for Sorcere. They won’t be like the rest of their year, they’ll be ahead of them. Miles ahead. You believe him. He knows so much already, and for three years you go silent and let him talk. Evocation, divination, illusion, transmutation—you like the sound of that one. Changing things. Altering forms.

Your form has stuck. You are prettier than Minfein and Nauthel, much to their disgust. They’re older than you, try harder than you, but something about you draws every eye more than their efforts ever have. Jhinlara’s dresses show you to exceptional advantage, and your Matron has you front and centre of every party you attend. There is so much, she says, that you can do when you look like this, my blessed daughter.

You hate it. Lolth gave you this body, you are made in Her image, so why can’t you look at yourself in the mirror?

Why is it, when you do make yourself look, you see your brother?

You fuck the Xolarrin boy in your sister’s bed. He has no idea what he’s doing and neither do you, though you both pretend otherwise. He writhes under you, the handsome son of House Xolarrin, his skin patched with white, sacred as Szarkai. Lolth has touched him, and for that you are willing to let him touch you.

Yet your heart doesn’t race, your head doesn’t pound. It’s just flesh moving in flesh. Skin and sweat and there’s no trace of Lolth in his mouth, just wet muscle and hard teeth, clumsy and hot. When you sit up, mounted like a queen, he reaches up and puts his hands on your chest.

The next thing you know, both his wrists are broken. The only part you feel bad about is that you can’t remember what the snap sounded like.

You fuck another boy, in your own bed this time—not part of Vizaeth’s collection this one, none of them will so much as look at you any more. He’s older than you, slight of limb and pretty of feature, and he likes that you keep your clothes on. He enjoys how you look with your skirts bunched around your hips and your face pressed to the pillow. You know this because he keeps telling you, filling the void of your silence with the breathless litany of his own arousal.

You think about Lolth. It does nothing any more.

Someone knocks on your door, and you’re so busy thinking about Lolth and how much you’d rather be doing anything else, that you call them in. The boy panics, which makes you smile and flip your legs up, quick-sharp, to keep him inside you. This makes him panic more. You like that.

In the doorway, Vizaeth only laughs, and says he’ll come back later. He meets your eyes for a split second before he leaves, and your heart races.

Necromancy, Vizaeth tells you, is as much the art of life as it is of death. The push and pull between those forces, that is where necromancers play.

“The ultimate mastery of it,” he says, one late night when the two of you are hidden away in his room, “is to become a lich. To remain living in death; to free yourself forever from the shackles of mortality.”

You are sat together on the bed, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. His legs stretch out next to yours, your bare ankles hooked one over the other. The book is open over both your laps, its pages yellow with age, the ink dark as dried blood.

“Is that what you’re going to become?” you ask.

“Gods, no,” Vizaeth says. “I like having a real body, thank you very much. I’ll live long enough with what I have to do the things I want.”

“And what do you want to do?”

“Survive Sorcere, first of all.”

“And after that?”

“After that,” he says, “I’m going to make our House worth something.”

You want to see him then. All of him. All that body whose shape makes you ache like you’re sick, like you’re fevered, like you’re actually alive for once. You put your hand on the book next to his. Beneath your fingers are words of darkest magic, a spell of blood and bone and breaking. The gap between your skin and his is a half-inch. A quarter. A breath.

Your fingers slide together, with no way to tell whose slipped between whose first. Your head pounds.

“Xunhrae…” he whispers, the beginning of a question.

“I hate that name,” you say.

After that, neither of you says anything. Not for a long while.

There is a spell in Vizaeth’s book, not of lichdom but of another way to extend life. It is bloody and painful and it changes you, which makes you think it ought to be transmutation, not necromancy. You find it by accident, whilst you’re waiting for him, avoiding the mirror and the knowledge that you haven’t thought about Lolth in months.

Maybe if She looked like Vizaeth, you’d think about Her more.

The spell is a ritual. It doesn’t need much: two bodies, a knife, the right words. It’s a lot simpler than becoming a lich. You trace the thick black lines of the illustration and don’t look at your fingers. An old man crawls into the skin of a young man, whose face is contorted with ecstatic agony. They’re human, so probably the spell is worthless—humans are iblith who know nothing of magic, creatures fit only for enslavement, but…

Two bodies. A knife. The right words. A child could do it.

You could do it.

Vizaeth locks the door when he enters. Not that it matters. Nobody cares, so long as you don’t start bearing any unwanted heirs, and even that can be overlooked if they’re pretty little girls like you. The idea makes you want to carve out every part of you capable of doing so, makes you want to sew yourself shut forever.

“Find anything good in there?” Vizaeth asks, as he strips out of his shirt. You want him. Slim muscle, narrow hips, flat planes and hard angles, and you want it. Him. You want him. That’s what you want.

“Just death,” you say.

“Mine or yours?” he teases, and you don’t have an answer to that, so you fall into his arms like you always do, and he fucks you face down like he always does, and you think about the ritual. About becoming someone else. Changing form.

Later, he lies next to you in the dark, not touching most of you—he doesn’t want his wrists broken, not when he’s going to Sorcere in a year’s time. You press back into his chest and wish it would open up and swallow you whole, the way you used to dream of Lolth doing. You haven’t had that dream in years.

“I hate this body,” you whisper. Vizaeth kisses your shoulder.

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

That’s not what you mean.

Vizaeth is leaving for Sorcere in two months. You can’t go with him, you can’t go anywhere, not until it’s time for you to try and fail to follow Jhinlara—you love Lolth, you do, but there are things priestesses have to be that you just aren’t. You don’t know what you’re going to do when he’s gone. You barely know what to do when you’re not around him as it is. If you’re real, you can’t tell, the only time you have a body is when he’s touching it.

At the tower, someone else will touch him. Maybe those boys he surrounds himself with, maybe even the Xolarrin boy will bed him there. If he does, you’ll break more than his wrists.

Lolth has returned to your dreams at last, and in the depths of your reverie She is a great red mouth, black fangs, white eyes. You fall into Her throat again and again and again, and who you are when you fall out is not who you were when you went in. Pieces of you are missing. Pieces of you are your brother.

Two bodies. A knife. That’s all it needs. The words pound in your head every time he fucks you, you know them better than your own name. Vizaeth finds you reading that same book every time you come to his room.

“Don’t try to make yourself a lich,” he says, taking it from your hands. He never notices you only read the same three pages. “It’s not worth it. What Lolth will give you at Arach-Tinilith is far better, and you don’t have to die for it.”

“I’m already dead,” you tell him. He touches your face, trails his hand down your neck, carefully lays it over your heart. Your skin contracts where his palm rests on your chest.

“You feel alive to me.” He offers a smile and a kiss. “I’ll miss you too, ssin’urn. It’s not forever.”

That night you let him fuck you face to face, and, with your eyes closed, you put yourself in his place. Your hands, touching yourself; your body, fucking itself. Whatever Xunhrae is you don’t want her, not the way her brother does. If you were him, as you are in this moment, you’d want him. You stay in his place until he’s done, and when he puts his mouth on you—as normally you never allow, but right now you need to know something—you are still him.

It feels good. So good that when you open your eyes the whole world is sideways and upside down. You are not in your body, you’re still half in his. Your limbs operate under some far-off puppeteer’s whim, your flesh crawls with venomous desire, a thousand thousand of Lolth’s children running amok through your arteries. You want to peel off your skin. You want Lolth to eat you and spit you out changed, flayed, bloody and raw and something close to right.

“It’s not forever,” Vizaeth keeps telling you, as the days devour themselves. Your want is a thing too large to fit inside your chest, and every time you lie with him, you can’t get close enough.

You can never get close enough.

“Xunhrae, stop, please, just stop!”

It is forever, that’s the thing.

“You don’t have to do this, you know I’ll do whatever you want—”

This is your bed, this is your body, this is you and him like it’s always been.

“—you don’t know how to cast this, you don’t know what you’re doing!” You lay your palm over his heaving chest, his racing heart. He’s a lovely thing bound beneath you, and you can’t help a smile because in all the years you never fucked like this, the normal way. “Xunhrae, please!”

“I told you I hate that name,” you say. You touch his face. He’s beautiful, you realise now. You’re beautiful. That’s why he said it so much; he knew.

“Wh-what do you want me to call you?”

“Vizaeth,” you say.

“Yes?”

“No.” You laugh softly, wipe his tears with your thumb. They keep coming. “I’m Vizaeth.”

Two bodies, a knife, the right words—magic is so simple, isn’t it?

He begs and he screams and he bleeds all over you and your bed. Your head pounds. Your heart races. You peel back the skin your hands know so well, and you take out the parts you don’t need, and his voice goes high and then hoarse and then faint. You have to take a moment, a breath. Your hands inside him like this…it’s something sacred. For the first and only time you hear Lolth—really hear Her—and Her voice ignites you more than Vizaeth ever did.

You can never recall exactly what it was She said, but you dream of that voice for the rest of your life.

Vizaeth’s voice returns as you crack back his ribs, a howling wail louder than anything you’ve ever heard. No-one comes running. You didn’t spend all those years listening to him for nothing, and as a matter of fact, you do know how to cast. You know how to cast a lot of things.

It’s a tight fit at first. You say the words over and over and with every recitation it gets easier. You weave your thanks, your praise, your adoration into the spell, and flesh parts eagerly to make way for you. You used to think you didn’t have a choice, but you do, it’s this, it’s always been this. It’s been waiting for you all this time. He was made for you, and you for him, and now at last you’re close enough.

You close your eyes, half-blinded with blood. Muscle contracts around you, shifting, changing. Your heart slows. Stops.

And starts.

You are a first-year student at Sorcere. You are the second son of House Thaezyr, whose rank in Menzoberranzan’s hierarchy is best left unexamined. You have known, since you were capable of knowing, exactly who you are.

Your name is Vizaeth.