#emp this is not how fucking horse costumes work

[omgeto]

best friends!gojo & geto who convince you to show up to a Halloween party with them in one of these three person horse costumes. with gojo at the front, geto and the back and you in the middle. funnily enough the costume gives them just the right angle for them to rail you… right on the dance floor.

#emp this is not how fucking horse costumes work #ik #but I’m tired and I’m writing satosugu smut that has absolutely nothing to do w this #but I was bored #okay #★ — emptalkshit! #this is a shit post anyways SO JUDGEMENT

[for-peace-war]

art by @idrawbuffgirls​

This is the first part of the Temple of Longing series, which introduces the stage for what the characters will be playing into.  I tried to do some world building in my time period, so I hope it worked out well enough.  Sorry if it’s a little confusing! This one took about an hour and twenty minutes!  Kelzack did a great job, as ever, capturing the idea I offered him!

THE TEMPLE OF LONGING.

Follows: Prologue.

Part I

 FLAVIUS THE FULMINOUS felt his fleeting fascination for the philistine formation fast fading.  Since leaving Akhlat with the Legio XIII Termina, he had shadowed the Satrap Mostafa’s movements with particular care not to be lured free the shadows of the city reconquered.  Legio XI Suprema, that which he pacified the western desert upon receiving his command, and Legio XII Exodia, recently arrived from Nemedia with fresh-faced soldiers, could be entrusted to maintain civil order within the city. But when it came to speed and predictable excellence, he had placed the XIII at the forefront of his command.

The legatus held no lack of trust in the ability of any that fought beneath him, for a soldier of Aquilonian training was worth thrice the swarthy, sand-bred Turanian jackals that pranced about before him.  The satrap’s hounds were many, but Legio XIII was as industrious as it was invincible: small, exacting, and well-blooded.  In a single engagement he had no doubt that they would be able to pierce the enemy’s line and take from their satrap his jeweled crown and the garrulous, blackened head that rested beneath it.

But battle was not just one battle—and war was not merely one war.  Since Emperor Maxentius’ defeat in the valley of Asgard and Vanaheim, had a tradition been born of that very lesson: there was never a single action; there was never a single consequence.

All must be accounted for before the glory of the Empire.

His fascination was not with the quality of the men that were before him, or even the quantity of those that marched about in their hurried steps. Ants, in truth, held the ability to make some formation—and an ant, likely, knew more loyalty to its singular leader than any of the men that served beneath the satrap.  Mostafa was, as far as he understood, as much a governor as he was a warlord—the peace treaty between the reemergent Aquilonian Empire and the Turanian Caliphate had already been tested as a result of his actions. Tested, and quite honestly, found more than wanting.

He had seen his adversary, this Mostafa, the Satrap of Samara, but once on the occasion that he had wrested from his control the singular city of Akhlat, which had proven little more than an outpost and yet positioned him to retake the region from its heart.  Though the Zuagir Desert was thitherto neutral territory, the regions held nominally could be physically secured with enough dedication and determination. There were few in the Empire, Flavius knew, that held either in greater order than he—and in truth, his adversary would not have numbered among that list, either.

Mostafa stood taller than most men but lacked the stocky build and determined nature of a Hyperborean.  Instead, he was slender, and seemed almost emaciated for his height—a Stygian, or at least Keshani heritage might have accounted for his exotic, nigh hermaphroditic build. But the man’s face was a mystery to him, for though he had heard rumor that it was scarred black and rotted from the pox, when they had caught glimpse of each other across fathoms of sand he would he would gladly stained a muddied red, the savage wore a black-iron mask, beneath a crown of gold fitted over samite scarves that draped past his shoulders. It was surely a look meant to inspire fear.

To Flavius, it was merely a sign that the satrap was all show—no action.

He, of course, was something different.  An Aquilonian did not gain the name “The Fulminous” for the simple alliterative effect of it, though he had in truth been ‘the Furious’ before a clever Nemedian courtesan saw fit to so bless him with that sobriquet he then saw visited timely upon that callipygian physique.  

By look, he would hardly have been deserving the title.  In youth he had been gifted with golden curls and a fair disposition, with the slender and spare build of a scholar of Nemedia—or a courtesan of Brythunia, by the claim of his long vanquished rivals—though time had seen his golden curls become silvered and fall with less vibrance upon his lined and worn face.  Savagery had never been his calling, but swordsmanship was a honed talent that he had come to appreciate with each enemy vanquished.

Beneath the command of Imperator Lysander and his Imperial Vanguard he had served loyally and gained great acclaim, basking in the blood of slaughtered foes in the shadows of Asgard.  That had been good fighting—pressed from all sides, and never wanting for a chance to see blood let.  The salient known as Emperor’s Fall should well have been consumed by Pict, Cimmerian, or Nordheimer, and yet those vile beasts had turned upon each other and permitted the garrison to eventually be resupplied and fortified.  It held then—held as a symbol of the Empire that was to be restored.

But those were different times, when the Empire was yet recovering from the Tumult, and generals more than claimants to the throne left vacant by Maxentius’ glorious demise were the power within the realm.  Though he would gladly die for the Empire, as he had shown time and again, Flavius could not claim to be a great supporter of the current emperor—or the system that had seen him to the throne.

It was Imperator Lysander that had told him, “The Imperial Dame names the boy, Rutilus, to the throne.”

There was no part of it that sat well with him.  The Imperial Dame—a half-mad old woman, more a slattern than a sovereign, that had fucked her way through the generalship until she had, by chance more than fate, acquired enough support to bring some semblance of peace to the realm?  And this woman—this whore—was then of enough worth and merit to name a boy—a weak, scrawny, redhaired child who seemed more Cimmerian than Aquilonian—to a throne that, by all accounts, he had struggled to deny and wept furiously over in an attempt to avoid?

That whore? That boy?  That throne? That was the way the Empire was to be run?  By the whims of old women and boys that did not wish to lead?  He had shared little of his views with Lysander, for he was aware that the aged general was as true to the Empire as the purple robes that Marcus Rutilus Maximus wore while sitting in a throne too large for him, under the purple-rimmed gaze of a woman far too old to know sense.

But he liked it little—nay, he hated it, and kept his place despite it.  For if Lysander could do so, then he would as well. It had been Lysander, after all, that was blessed with Maxentius’ gladius and told to ride south—ride south with the bloodied sword and prevent the Empire from falling.  Had any other told him to walk the line, he would have seen them unmanned, but the wizened old general had earned his place—and his loyalty.  The belief that the one that wept over command was also the one most deserving of it was a bitter brew to swallow, but he had managed it and some good did come of it.  The generals stopped fighting one another and resumed reconquering lands that were lost.  He had been moved from the North to the East, promoted to one of the Five Generals that Reclaimed the Throne, and faced against the exotic, sand-hued cretins that then danced with swaying formations before him.

Once more, he was at battle.

Yet by Mitra, how he missed the simplicity of slaughtering those fair-haired barbarians.  They knew to rush forth and die with inane cries to their false gods—however these vulgarians of the East?  But for their fanciful marching orders, the perfumed whores they fucked may as well have been the same soldiers that lined their shamshirite columns.  They were hardly a true challenge—hardly worthy the good, Imperial steel that pierced their faint hearts.

The flap of his tent opened, and a large man entered.  He wore the Flavian insignis, marking him as one of his personal cohort, though his gait and stance would have served well enough.  Of those that he had taken with him, those such as Brutalus were invaluable—he had personally trained them from the time they were cubs, to the moment they stood as tall and noble as the lupine beasts that Emperor Maxentius had crawled from the dying womb of, if legend was to be believed.

“Legatus,” Brutalus said.  “The Hyrkanian auxiliary is returned.”

Flavius grimaced.  “I should hope not the entirety of their number this time.”

“No, my lord.  Just the outriders.”  Brutalus’ tone implied a levity that Flavius did not feel.  His features had reddened slightly from the memory of what vexation he knew when the call for a report had seen the zuun of auxiliaries he had requisitioned arrive.   The Hyrkanians do not understand nuance, he had been told. They respond to orders directly—and efficiently.

He had heard tell of how an order disobeyed by one Hyrkanian meant the entire arban from which they were come was slaughtered. In the face of that, decimation seemed a godsend—but perhaps that explained their dedication to the point.

“What did they report?”

“That it is as you suspected.  Satrap Mostafa is moving his men to obfuscate something more.”

“Obfuscate,” Flavius mused.  “Was that your word or theirs?”

Brutalus paused. “My word, my lord—”

“Do not place civilized words in the mouths of savages,” Flavius said. “If a Hyrkanian uses the word ‘obfuscate,’ then see him, or her—or it, whatever damned thing they choose to be called—flogged and left to the buzzards.”

The discovery of the supposed ‘other’ genders by which Hyrkanians designated themselves had been of little amusement to him.  Their wild, alien culture was as unsatisfying to him as the gaudy costumes that they wore when not astride their horses—but when it came to horsemanship, he knew well that no equites of the Empire could compare.  Pissing standing or sitting, a Hyrkanian with a bow was a force to be reckoned with.

So for the time being he chose to permit them their perversions—and they, in turn, provided him with what he needed.  But he did know how limited their language was and how their grasp on proper dialects proved to be at best comical and at worst unintelligible.  Any that spoke a word such as ‘obfuscate’ was surely a creature to be taken as fed the word by some slithering, simpering Samaran spymaster.  He was of half a mind to question how Brutalus, of all people, had learned the word, but then the young man had always been industrious.

He had probably taken to fucking some kohl-eyed Iranistani whore.  Mirza Hashem, the big-bellied, Iranistani nobleman that had thrown his lot in with the Empire, had provided more than a few of them—and though he found little interest in the meat they shook before his men, he appreciated the discipline they encouraged.  Rapine and assault were disorderly things. It was sorrowfully better to see it paid for than plundered.

“Did this eloquent scout ascertain as to what the satrap was attempting to conceal?”

“They assessed—my word, sir—the situation and came to the conclusion that as several of the cataphractarii were displaced, that perhaps a smaller detachment was sent to escort the satrap’s pleasure palace to a safer location.”

There was nothing one of the dusky and dimwitted barbarians cared for more than the holes he placed his cock into, after all.  Flavius’ frown caused a furrowing of his brows as he looked back to his map.  He used a hand to trace along it a route between Samara and their current position within the Zuagir desert.  “If that is the case, then he is screening for Zuagir—not our men.”

“Exactly so, my lord,” Brutalus said.  He drew closer and looked to where his commander was indicating. His jaw clenched somewhat as he fought to determine what was being expected of him then, realizing it was beyond his grasp, he shook his head.

Flavius favored silence over speech.  He did not understand how any man, raised in Maxentian tradition, could not see the value in that and yet, as his commander—as his teacher, he knew it was for him to guide him, as he had so many times before. “Listen closely, my boy,” he said. “In days to come you will understand the guile of savages—and how they can be bested by their own perfidious machinations.”  He considered the man before him and took a moment to admire all he had crafted.  Brutalus had been a wide-eyed boy when he came to him, and through careful tutelage and intense training he had seen the mountain of brawn and bravery crafted. Though the Flavian cohort could not be considered on parity with the Emperor’s solarii, they nevertheless did inspire courage.  Even the Deathless of the Turanian Caliphate were no easy victors over them.

Perhaps Brutalus was not the sharpest of his men—but a mace did not need sharpened edges, did it?  It merely needed to be wielded well and often by an arm tested and true.

“The satrap’s hubris will be his undoing,” Flavius said. “Truthfully, I can no longer tolerate this heat or the damned prancing about of our would-be adversary.”

“His pleasure palace is the answer to that, sir?”

“Of course it, my boy.  Look.” He motioned for him to draw closer and waited as the behemoth of a man, whose muscles teamed beneath his bronzing skin, tipped about the table.  As he was closer, he caught the faint hint of saffron upon him.  Indeed, he had found some kohl-laced whore to sate himself upon. That was good—women for pleasure kept men from delving into bonds that might have seen more lasting relations jeopardized.

“I admit I see but a map, my lord.”

“Consider what the satrap has assumed of our position.”  He ran his finger along the map once more, triangulating all that was before him.  “They say that when Emperor Maxentius defeated the Picts at Sutagus, it was with a single legion acting with surprise as their command. Savages are semi-human yes, but they understand patterns—as most animals do, and the lull we have entered is one that has shown them a pattern.  Mostafa grows emboldened because by this time he believes we are duped by his fanciful displays.”

“And we are not, my lord.”

“Indeed, Brutalus—we are not.  His display has been, to this point, intended to obfuscate—as you have said so adequately—the weakening of his wing. Naturally, he is expecting to protect these men from an attack by Zuagirs, so they will not be overly numerous.”

For if there was any creature that could claim descent from buzzard, it was the Zuagirs that circled like birds about weakened prey and waited for it to fall. Seven men of any legion could have seen thirty of them to flight—surely, at least twenty Turanians could do the same as well.

“Then your plan, my lord?”

“We gather a small, expert force—a Hyrkanian outrider, that Bossonian lad you spake of yestereve, and three more of the legion.  Dispatch them to head off the pleasure escort, scatter it, and then take the contents hostage.  They should be able to outpace the cataphractarii, and send word back to the legion. Distressed, the satrap will be forced to move and will place to his rear the pretense of a guard while hastening to protect his assets.  Without his wealth, he is nothing more than a brigand.”

Brutalus at last brightened. “I see, my lord.  Brilliantly done.”  The glow of his eyes was no different than when he had taken the young man’s arms into his own and carefully shown him the manner in which Bossonians fired their bows. It was a marvel that so many years later and so much more distance between them, there were some habits that did not fade.

Flavius could hardly suppress his chuckle. “As you say, my boy—brilliantly done. We shatter the rear guard and bring the Turanians to action.  Suprema and Exodia can quickly cover the distance once we have secured our battle. By day’s end, before the satrap can regroup, my cohort will have him—you, will have him, my boy.  It is a great day for the Empire.”

“I would never stake acclaim over yourself, my lord.”  Brutalus said, with practiced humility.  His smile manifested as a vague twitch of his lips.  “But to capture a satrap and his treasures, is that not reason enough for a triumph?”

“If such is something the Empire yet displays, I should think so.”  Flavius recalled the last he had seen—before the boy emperor that then sat the August Throne did so, when Imperator Lysander had captured the Cimmerian warlord Agba and three of his sons in single combat. Could he know that glory?  They were within reach of returning the Empire to Maxentius’ original claim upon the world.  Was that not reason enough to perhaps restore the tradition of triumph to the people? “Ready your men, Brutalus.  If I am to have a triumph, do not think your name will be long from mine own.”

Brutalus’ smile became stronger at that—more charming than ever before. “My lord, I assure you—after today, if your name is to be known across the Empire, then I shall do all I can to see mine placed nearby.”

#conan #temple of longing #writing exercise #flavius the fulminous