29 Days of Smut 2016
Dec. 21st, 2015 05:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aftanithA self-imposed challenge of my own creation, running from February 1, 2016 to February 29, 2016. I only plan to start these stories (producing around a thousand words for each), not to finish them within the month.
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Untitled Harem/Parabellum Crossover [1/?]
Date: 2016-02-18 03:31 am (UTC)Everything about this was absurd. Had someone told Sparrow even a word of this a month ago, she would've laughed in their face. The sheer thought of being married at all was absurd, but finding herself struggling to find some way to turn down the King himself as to absurd to be believed even now. And yet here she was, being whisked away in the most extravagant carriage she had ever seen in her life by a group of terribly unfriendly palace guards who clearly weren't going to take no for an answer.
Sparrow's hands moved restlessly in her lap, her fingers fiddling with the hem of her short brown dress while she tried to repress the urge to bolt. Nothing good was going to happen when she made it to the palace. Either what the guards had told her would turn out to be a mistake, in which case she would no doubt find herself abandoned in the heart of the city with no way to get home, or else--or worse, it would prove to be true. She had no idea what she was going to do in that case. How exactly did someone to about trying to deny a king?
The carriage rolled on through the night, the incessant sound of hoof-beats from the horses stationed all around them like a mobile wall of flesh lulling her to sleep in spite of her growling stomach and rising dread. By the time they reached the city itself, the warm morning light slipping through the open window of the carriage had woken her from a dream she couldn't recall now that she was awake and so thoroughly distracted once more, plunged immediately back into her earlier dread. She knew they were in the city now, the unbelievable din and the stench of animals and overcrowding familiar to her by now, though she'd hardly spent any time here at all, and she longed to get back to the relative quiet of the town she left behind.
At best, it would take weeks in this city to earn enough money to travel home; at worst, she would never get out of this city again.
The farther they traveled into the city, the worse it all became. Everything was unbelievably loud and impossibly crowded, and the carriage slowed to a crawl as the guards ushered the peasants from its path. But as they finally neared the palace, it all started to fall away. There were lots people and more guards, a veritable army of them--more uniformed men and women than Sparrow had ever seen... until that night a week ago when she had first stepped foot in this terrible city.
As the guards opened the palace gate to let them in, Sparrow's heart started to race, pounding in her chest with all the frenzied panic of a caged beast facing its doom. This was a mistake. It had to be a mistake.
But as they ushered her out of the carriage and up the palace steps, no one have any sign that they even so much as suspected they might have gotten the wrong girl. If anyone was at all surprised to see a shabbily dressed, embarrassingly dirty peasant woman with wild, terrified eyes walking up the steps while looking for all the world as if she would've much preferred to run and hide, they said nothing. Everyone must kept acting as if somehow everything was normal. As if a bit of this made any kind of sense.
Sparrow was ushered away as soon as she stepped for inside the palace. But instead of being taken to the ballroom she had seen before, a tall, dark-haired man met her in the hall just beyond the foyer, and the smile he gave her was disarmingly pleasant. And yet she didn't doubt she was about to wipe it right off his face.