Chapter Text
Kindness, Imrena has found, often pays for itself. It is a hard-earned lesson, one that has not seen her hands free of the blood that her matron mother would have had her spill anyway. But more often than not a good turn gets her done another here, or at least a reputation enough to fight the initial aversion surfacers have to red-eyed drow walking around in their precious sunlight.
Kindness also comes with certain hard truths. Such as when it is best to put down a dying animal beyond hope of surviving without pain. A bird with a broken wing can be mended by her limited healing spells, a man half-eaten by the shadow curse that had once taken the lands around Reithwin cannot.
Kar’niss fell somewhere in between those considerations. She had seen enough twisted creatures from failures of Lolth’s trials over the long, slow years until Imrena could be smuggled out of Menzoberranzan. They are sometimes fierce, always deeply-injured individuals facing punishment from a sad*stic goddess—not taking into account the hatred and fear they inspire on the surface and on other planes.
Which is what makes them so terribly eager to bend, even break should she take a firm enough grip.
It was easy, in the end, to convince the others to give Kar’niss a chance. She has half of her companions wrapped around her fingers already, just from small kindnesses here and there. The right combination of words that she can slide in their ears comes sweet as drizzled honey to her tongue, smoothed by the time she’s spent getting to know them and the insight the tadpoles give her.
Perhaps it should scare her, how good Imrena is at getting what she wants—to put feeling behind the words where there is none, to play the part of a compassionate person with just enough action behind it to make them believe in her, believe that she will do what she says she will. A hard century as a traveling bard has had her honing her talent to a fine razor’s edge.
And, occasionally, she will indulge in that belief, that trust, to get one of her more selfish desires met.
It is an art, suspending someone whose total weight rivals some bears, and with no one to spot them should something go awry. Imrena bites her lip in concentration as she twines the last length of spidersilk around eight heavy, just barely quivering legs. The web is sticky, but does not adhere to her skin or robe thanks to the power of the black Nightwalker boots she wears. The sensation is fascinating even though her bondage is, all truths told, some of the sloppiest tie work she’s ever done, especially on a drider. But she’s also never worked with drider silk from their own spinneret before, and it has an artful messiness to the drape, especially between his pedipalps. Kar’niss had assured her it would be more than enough to hold the bulk of his body, when she inquired. He had not asked her why she wanted to know, simply provided the answer without hesitation.
The unquestioning obedience had made her toes curl in her dusty boots, anticipation surging when she beckoned him nearer and he came, head bowing low to bring his ear close to her mouth. Imrena smiled then, and detailed a few of the more creative thoughts on her mind.
Now they’re here, in an abandoned barn just far enough into the former Shadowlands that she could guarantee their privacy. Karlach and Wyll had both protested, citing safety in numbers, but Imrena was quick to rip that notion out at the root with a straightforward:
“I’m taking Kar’niss away to f*ck somewhere we can have a little privacy. Anyone wanting to listen in is welcome to, but I shall not let you into the room if that’s what you’re after.”
She took a simple pleasure in watching Astarion theatrically gag at the mental image.
Rain pounds the roof above, but her early inspection and plugging of several holes has left them cool and dry so far, with only their own supplies and a fairy-free lantern lit off to the side. She could, technically, move through this moment using only the night vision she has in the darkness, but she had wanted the clarity that light brings to expressions, to see every detail of the masterpiece she’s made.
Returning to the present moment, Imrena leaves off her inspection of the bondage she’s webbed Kar’niss up in and steps back to take in the entire picture. He looks a treat, spider legs all bound together and folded below him while she used further webs to tie his wrists to each other and anchor them behind his head. The rest of his body is suspended from several webs attached to the barn’s rafters, holding his abdomen and sternum far above the ground, quiescent for now. Even his uncertain expression is sweet, as trusting as the shattered remains of the man can possibly achieve.
The image is only missing one aspect to her preference.
Prestidigitation washes from her hands as she starts to circle him, the barn bathed in light. Gentle, delicately woven magic seeps into the joints where chitinous legs meet Kar’niss’ body, over the bulb of his lower abdomen and spinnerets, and around again to his front. Purposefully, she skips over cleaning his pedipalps, the two short appendages where his spider half meets his drow half, both bound together in front of him by webbing. The limbs are too sensitive to stimulate right away, and having them bound is already making Kar’niss twitch with restlessness. Male spiders often use their palps to communicate with females as a signal that they are not prey, in addition to acting as their primary sex organ. In some Underdark circles she would hear tying palps compared to penis bondage and full-body immobilization all at once, instilling a sense of danger to the play that driders rarely get to experience, even under an expert hand.
Kar’niss’ eyes follow Imrena, calm but watchful, seeming nonplussed at her bothering to remove road dust from his person even after she’d bade him bathe just the night before.
When she climbs back onto the crate she’s been using to bring herself up to his height, it’s to wash another spell over his hair, leaving it a clean and pristine white, if dry at the ends from neglect. Kar’niss bows his head when she strokes the fingers of both hands over his scalp, her nails dragging through his hair from just behind his eyes and down to the back of his neck.
The drider issues a series of contented clicks before catching himself, mouth closing in a flat line. She hums in response, a thrill running through her at the evidence of his submission, the leeway he grants her even as she slowly closes her web around him.
“You look delicious, my dear,” she murmurs. As she does, Imrena allows her hands to drift over the plane of his chest, tracing delicate circles where his carapace meets softer skin in jagged edges along his pectorals.
“You are going to eat us, majesty?” he asks, voice a rasp barely heard over the rain. His many eyes blink rapidly at the threat, but like most other driders, fear is a far off prospect. Imrena hums, standing on tiptoe atop the crate so she can press an open-mouthed kiss to where collarbone meets neck. It's with relish that she observes the shiver that wracks his body, the way his many limbs jerk and click against the webs as he fights to remain quiescent.
"Maybe later,” she teases. Imrena mouths along the ridges over his neck, dragging her omnivore’s teeth over gray skin and reveling in every twitch the drider can’t suppress. Kar’niss leans into the touch, straining against the webs but not yet breaking the fibers.
“When’s the last time someone touched you?” she asks, the command in her voice leaving no room for the drider to disobey.
“Not since the change took us, majesty. Years without number,” he answers, barely a whisper. She doesn’t scold him or tell him to speak up. That can come at a later occasion, one not requiring so many delicate maneuvers and coaxing.
“A long time. You must have been someone’s favorite, before then,” she hums, and, not letting the words sink in, she follows up. “And still so handsome, too.”
Her hands trail down, over his stomach with the blunts of her fingertips until they dip between the vee of his hips, massaging the space where his genitals would have been, before his forced transformation. It may no longer stimulate him directly, but his palps jerk in close as if to protect himself before twitching in place with an imposed stillness that makes her grin.
“You’re allowed to feel good, you know. Just relax a little bit. Let your Mistress take care of you, pet.” Her use of both a title for herself and the diminutive is purposeful, an assurance and a claim all at once. “What do you say?”
“We hear and obey, Mistress,” he answers immediately, the low reverberation of his vocal chords emphasizing the way he has to catch his breath at the end. She smiles when his pedipalps uncurl, as he leans as far into the touch as possible while still hanging in place.
Moving her touch from the vee of his hips, she parts her hands and draws slowly from the base of each of his palps down. Imrena ghosts over the webs binding them, then circles her hands around. She teases along the ends where they curl into sharp stings, her fingers just barely grazing the undersides and pressing in lightly where they're not protected by hardened carapace. Kar’niss clicks and whines—while Imrena is rewarded by twin drops of wetness smeared across her fingertips.
“Good, good, you’re doing so well,” she praises, buoyed by evidence of the drider’s arousal. Her hands alone seem enough to send him over the edge very easily, but a simple org*sm is one thing anyone with enough knowledge can pull out of someone so deprived.
No, she means to wring something far more profound than a night of pleasure from him. She pulls back, gratified when he hisses as her hands leave him.
“Have patience, pet.”
Burning Hands is meant to shoot a cone of fire, but when she brings her thumbs together with a certain twist, her hands are merely wreathed in flame. She lets the fire warm her to near unbearable levels before snuffing it out again, and immediately uses her too-hot hands to hook into his palps again.
Kar’niss shudders, legs clacking together before he goes silent and still. Imrena darts a glance up into his face and pauses. His limited irises are swallowed by his arousal, blown so thin they look like the tiniest of ripples in a pool of ink, but she can tell his gaze is fixed far away from her, up into the rafters where he hangs.
“Are you close to your peak?” she questions, instead of jerking his head down so he can fix his attention back where it belongs.
“Y-yes, Mistress,” he stutters, body suddenly wracked by a light tremor. “Please- may we- we are not allowed-”
“You are allowed,” she immediately soothes. “I promised to protect you, didn’t I? And I’m saying you’re allowed to take pleasure from my hand. Come for me.”
She emphasizes the last with a heavier squeeze to the underside of his palps, massaging them rhythmically until Kar’niss finally gives in.
Wet spurts of come fill both her palms, but Imrena doesn’t so much as pause as the drider jerks against his bonds once, twice. The cry he gives out is long and inhuman, impossible for a drow throat to replicate. Imrena feels herself warming to the sound as it reverberates through her chest, speeding her now-wet strokes and working Kar’niss through it until his voice peters off due to lack of air. Only then does she gentle her touches, running her fingers whisper-soft and smearing come in her wake until it drips down her wrists. She flicks it away with another curl of Prestidigitation that leaves her palms clean and dry again, then places them still-warm at the joins where Kar’niss’ palps meet his sternum.
“There you go, you’re very sweet, aren’t you?”
This is kindness offered in the most vulnerable of moments to get her way, the softness of a velvet glove cloaking an iron fist as she slowly tightens her grip.
Kar’niss predictably melts at the praise. Imrena lets him, finally pulling her hands away again.
The mirrored Mage Hand is a tricky spell, and only years of finding new ways to twist spells to her whims allows her to manipulate it with fine dexterity. She uses it to mirror her left hand, both of them back to ghosting over and playing with his palps, though the left is warmer than the Mage Hand can be made, offering dual temperatures with which to play. She allows her right hand to drift lower, past his legs drawn tight and tied to hang below him. There’s just enough space to slip her hand through, and she finds what she’s looking for easily—his opening already leaking more slick that his palps are too tied to gather.
Clicking, Kar’niss draws up tight in his bonds, his full body writhing as the triple stimulation drives him both to get away and to push down against her hand. Webbing creaks but still remains strong enough to hold her lover fast.
“We-we can’t!” Kar’niss protests for the first time, every muscle jumping in his chest and looking delectable enough to bite. Imrena holds herself back with a promise of next time, determined not to interrupt her current plan.
“You can. Come again for me, pet,” she coaxes, gently beginning to massage the opening until slick coats her hand, wet and noisy enough to be heard above the rain. The Mage Hand follows her direction to squeeze once again, gradually pressing with more force against delicate tips of his palps.
The crest she coaxes him over is not gentle, but it is more drawn out than the aftermath of the first—a long minute where Kar’niss pulls taut and empties the last of his palps into her palm.
It’s only when she starts to work his slit again that Kar’niss cries out, “Please, have mercy on us!” and she finally does, letting her hands drift smoothly away from his sensitive regions to rest gently on his hips, the Mage Hand dismissed with a thought.
The barn falls silent, but for Kar’niss’ panting breaths and the susurrus of rain outside. Kar’niss hangs, his head bowed and eyes closed for a long moment as he tries to recover from his ordeal. She doesn’t stop touching him, smoothing her hands from his hips up to his shoulders, over his arms to his elbows and down again.
When he finally regains his breath and looks down at her, his eyes blaze with a light she is all too pleased to recognize—devotion and arousal in equal measures.
Finally stepping back, Imrena pulls the ties to her robe open, letting the fabric part around her breasts and reveal the lack of any smallclothes beneath. With her high black boots and the robe the only things adorning her, Imrena feels that heady sense of power churning, molten in her gut as his head snaps to the side, seeming torn between turning away in submission or basking in the beauty she’s allowing him to behold.
The cool draft in the room from the rain flows between her legs, making her far too aware of the way wetness is just beginning to seep down the inside of one of her thighs.
“Now it’s your turn to pleasure me, pet. It’s hard to do that without looking.”
“Y-yes,” Kar’niss’ many eyes turn to fix back on her, the open awe in his voice intensified by the way it reverberates. “Please allow us to service you, my- Mistress.”
Imrena pauses, the hesitation a glaring flaw in her so-far smooth plan. She takes in the way he’s shaking in his bonds again, his pedipalps curling and uncurling in nerves.
“Tell me what you were going to call me,” she orders. “And then you may come down from there.”
“We-we…” Kar’niss trails off, eyes darting around restlessly, an animal cornered and tied. She leans in, keeping her bare body from touching his but close enough he will be able to feel the heat radiating off her skin, winding her hand back through his hair. She makes him turn his head until he has no choice but to look her in the eye.
“You can say it. I promise I won’t be upset,” she says, tone soothing as honey balm to a wound. He shudders, gasps:
“My Queen, please, my valsharess -” he hisses out the last in the language of the drow, a title usually reserved for Lolth herself or the highest of the matron mothers. It’s not a term he even used to refer to the Absolute. Imrena’s chest tightens, her shoulders drawing back. Heat flares along her cheeks, in her belly and groin, stirring from the embers she’s been stoking into the full flame of desire.
More words of devotion fall from his lips, but her head is still ringing with that title.
Perfect. She could not have asked for anything better.
“What a sweet mouth you have, pet.”
She rewards him, of course, using the grip she has in his hair to tilt his head down into her sudden kiss against his lips—the first of the night. Kar’niss gasps into her mouth, easily yielding to her demanding tongue as she licks inside and along his needle-like, venomous teeth. If she had not grown up in Menzoberranzan and been regularly poisoned by her own mother as a matter of course, drider venom might have given her pause—with her past and her own proclivities, the venom is only poisonous enough to her to cause a mild warmth and tingling. Imrena hums and only pulls away when she nicks her tongue on one of his teeth, their lips parting with a few ruby drops spilling over and onto her breast. She pays them no mind, her only thought for the way Kar’niss tries to chase her kiss with his mouth until the hand in his hair brings him up short, and the next words to come out of her end as a snarl.
“Come down, I want your sweet mouth on my c*nt.”
The order takes a moment for him to parse, his various eyes blinking out of sync before it seems to dawn on him.
The next Kar’niss bursts the bonds of the web easily, as she knew he would, legs splaying wide and barely catching himself before his chitinous abdomen slams into the ground. The hands kept bound behind his head come free, reaching for Imrena as he sinks entirely to the ground. He pauses just short of touching her, strong hands visibly trembling.
Imrena takes the pause to hop off her crate and backs away even as she beckons him closer, until the bed she made of two half-rotten hay bales and her bedroll meets the backs of her knees. She sinks onto the edge, flicking the robe aside and spreading her legs. Kar’niss scuttles after her, never raising his head above the level of hers in silent subservience.
She doesn’t need to repeat herself or clarify any orders like she thinks she might be required to—Kar’niss sinks entirely to the floor of the barn and brings his hands hesitantly to the insides of her knees where her boots end, his breath ghosting over her pubic mound for only a moment before his tongue begins lapping at her folds.
He starts with quick, inquisitive licks, clearly tasting her and liking what he finds, for the next moment his hands have slid around from her knees to cup the back of her thighs, claws just barely dragging along her tender skin. She permits this trespass with the patience granted to her by long, hard days on the road, his touch leaving lines of fire wherever his claws trail.
With a luxuriant sigh, Imrena runs her one hand through Kar’niss’ hair again, pleased when he whimpers and presses into her further until his forehead meets her stomach. His cool tongue licking into her plays sharp contrast to the heat beginning to build at her core, and Imrena lets her grip tighten as he finally licks her cl*t to full attention. Then his venom hits, the tingling and swelling she anticipated only adds to the cacophony of sensation assaulting her.
“Right there, on my cl*t!” she exclaims, gratified when he alternates his efforts between swirling and laving at it with the flat of his tongue. When she looks down at him, multiple eyes blink back up at her in pure concentration. “There’s a good pet, yes, keep doing that.” She has no doubt he would continue doing so anyway, her satisfaction obvious when she moans out loud and enough to keep him obediently licking.
Imrena allows herself to fall back to the bedroll, delighted when it seems to give Kar’niss more room to maneuver. Her grip in his hair never falters, the drider humming subvocally as she attempts to pull him in impossibly closer. His mouth rides her faithfully even as she tries to buck up into it, and with each pass of his tongue across her wet slit he trails a line of venomous fire—fire that seems to build at an exponential pace.
Before Imrena knows it, her boot heels are digging into his back as she slings her legs over his shoulders, and even if it wasn’t armored by his very nature she’s sure he would wear the bruises with pride. Kar’niss’ moan into her c*nt is drowned out by Imrena’s own.
“Don’t stop, don’t stop, good pet, I’m so-” With her free hand she reaches up to pinch her left nipple, then her right, then reaches down to bury both her hands in his locks in order to yank him even closer. She babbles a few phrases of mindless praise before Imrena’s final words are lost to the burning, the final build into the white heat of org*sm washing through her.
She cries out her pleasure, long and loud. Kar’niss seems to need no direction to keep his mouth working, so she is allowed to ride her crest without further thought until it at last releases her.
With a final curl of her toes in her boots, Imrena pulls back on Kar’niss’ hair to signal her completion and allows her legs to slide from his shoulders. Kar’niss separates from her sex with a wet pop, leaning his face into the side of her thigh and not bothering to clean the slick that shines across his chin.
“Did we please you, valsharess?” the drider asks quietly, once he gets his breath back.
“Yes, very much.” Imrena sits up again to look him in the eye.
“Then could we ask a boon of you?”
“What boon would you ask of me after this?”
“Keep us, please.”
Later, the lyre, laid out earlier but not forgotten, comes to hand easily.
For as much work as she’s done today, her fingers aren’t fatigued enough to mess up a simple tune, such as the lullaby she picks to soothe Kar’niss into Trance. She follows him soon after, a satisfied smile drifting across her lips.
