Efnisien is a victim who has done terrible things, and had terrible things done to him, trying to get his life back on track after spending time in a juvenile facility. Arden is a co-owner of a bookstore, who meets Efnisien one day and goes from thinking he's a homeless addict, to realising there's a lot more to this guy than meets the eye, and eventually a tentative friendship becomes something more. Efnisien explores his new life, abandoned by people he loves, negotiating therapy, the difficulties of making friends, and falling in love when you're asexual and plagued with intrusive thoughts and the belief that you're the most evil person to have ever existed. "Imagine me deciding to feel bad about everything I've ever done, and then imagine what kind of life I'll have. Because I'm not brave enough to live in some fucked up eighteen-hundreds-style purgatory. I'd rather die. There's no one who wants me, and there's no one who will. Which is exactly what someone like me deserves, isn't it?" A story about a broken boy, who is learning how not to break everything else around him. Quick tropes/themes: Trauma recovery / Ace rep / Kink awakening / Found family / HEA (Happily ever after) Content warnings: BDSM, graphic violence, PTSD, child abuse, graphic intrusive thoughts, historical animal cruelty and sexual molestation, revictimisation, disturbing themes. Note: A spinoff to my other story, Spoils of the Spoiled, but you do not need to have read that to read this, and the stories can be read out of order. [[Originally published on AO3 under the username @not_poignant - which is me, lol]]

This is a another prequel short story to The Cloud Roads, the first novel in the Books of the Raksura series, which is available from Night Shade Books in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. This one is about the main character Moon, when he was a young boy and still traveling alone.

This is a prequel short story to The Cloud Roads, the first novel in the Books of the Raksura series, which is available from Night Shade Books in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. It's about the changes Chime went through at the Indigo Cloud colony, before Moon arrived.

Cullen Rutherford, overwhelmed with his duties at Skyhold, wants to manage his anxieties with controlled pain, and decides The Iron Bull is the best person for the job. But The Iron Bull wants to do things like 'aftercare' - which Cullen has no interest in at all. * Once, back in Kirkwall, Cullen had an arrangement with a member of the city guard that satisfied his needs. But time changed all things, and he despaired of ever finding a similar arrangement again - that was, until he met The Iron Bull. Problem being that Bull seemed to care far more about sorting out the nitty-gritty of such an arrangement than Cullen ever has. Kink negotiation? What on earth would there be to talk about? Safewords? Defining what one wants and doesn't? Cullen doesn't understand why The Iron Bull wants all of these things, and slowly, The Iron Bull comes to understand that someone has treated Cullen badly in the past. Content Warnings - Explicit sexual scenes, Graphic violence, Explicit BDSM including pain-play, CBT and flogging (including non-sexual BDSM), PTSD, Past emotional and physical abuse, Disturbing themes (including around religious brainwashing), Drug use, Drug withdrawals, Past torture [[Finished wordcount: 230,000 words]] [[Originally published on AO3 under the username @thespectaclesofthor]]