[A/N: Happy quarantine, to those of us in lockdown who are bored, horny, and into DOS:2, here ya go. WARNING that the chronology is all over the place in terms of what the characters know/don't know about the ongoing canonical in-game events, and I'm editing for tense and spelling [chapters complete 9/14] so if you like it, leave a comment or fav and be aware that I'm working on these issues; this whole thing has been borne of cabin fever and spring fever coinciding for me. Without further ado, on with this deeply problematic and smutty fic heavily featuring our favourite vengeful goth elf assassin, and Lucian's suicide bomber who genocided her people and homeland. You have been warned.]
[UPDATE: 25/03/2020: This piece of writing is growing beyond my control. At this stage, I cannot eat more than once per day, and my dreams and the DOS:2 world are merging seamlessly. All I can hold onto is this one goal; I must be able to canonically justify the elements explored within this work within reasonable doubt. Therefore, the next few chapters are going to take a lot longer to plan, research and write up properly than the pre-existing ~23k words I've already got. Expect this smut-show to turn into a pathetically earnest love epic by around chapter 25-30, which you should look forward to in the next couple of weeks, with my current trajectory and potential future research time factored in, during which I''ll be embellishing upon and tidying up bits of the chapters that are already up. The lockdown continues, and so shall we.]

[Reapers Coast]

Their initial impression of the island upon which they'd struck was obscured by the bilious, reeking smog, which suffused the island with piscine putrescence. Smattered along the shoreline, as far as the mist permitted them to behold, were piles upon piles of tainted aquatic corpses, their skin, scales and spines glinting greenly in the sickly threads of sunlight, which slunk through the fog as if reluctant to bear witness to the wretched scene.

Disembarking the small row-boat, three of the team of travelling Godwoken plugged their noses, Sebille retching lightly at the sight of the slimy shoreline and picking her way through the gelatinous tide-line, grimacing. Ifan tried to keep a straight face, but his watering eyes gave him away as he padded after the shadow of the elven woman, heading up the beach with some haste, trying to put distance between himself and the mounds of reeking gore. Lohse followed, her face a picture of disgust, sweeping her thick red hair across her mouth and nose in an attempt to block out the stench.
Only Fane's cowled and robed form, his features indistinguishable beneath the layers of armour and cloth, seemed to be unaffected by the olfactory disadvantages of their environs. He stood tall, scanning the shoreline before he disembarked and walked briskly over to where they'd all assembled, shuffling their feet and awaiting conference.

They huddled in a loose-knit circle, heads bent, their eyes meeting with the question within all of their minds at that moment: 'what next?'

(CHAPTER 1: FIRST NIGHT IN THE UNDERTAVERN)

Whilst the other members of the party were distracted by the gossip and hustle of the tavern, Sebille quietly shadowed Effie the Innkeeper, stepping softly with keen eyes, keeping her distance as she kept in Effie's blind spot.

No-one was paying the slightest attention to her slight form and understated movements amidst the rowdy roar of the packed throng, it being payday in those parts, and therefore the centre of much intoxicated merriment. Somewhere amidst the centre of the fray, Ifan dealt a hand of cards before throwing back the dregs of his drink and quickly casting an eye around in an attempt to ascertain the whereabouts of his compatriots.

He was sure they'd all been together at the bar a moment ago, where he could still vaguely see Fane hunched at a table by the wall several feet away, engrossed in a scroll, but time had perhaps begun to slip away a little. Looking down at his hand of cards, Ifan noticed that the glass he had drained mere seconds ago had ben refilled, as if from nowhere.

'How many times has that happened tonight?' he wondered, deciding to leave the glass where it was rather than continue his session. Betting low and cashing out for a modest sum at the end of the hand, Ifan at last spotted Sebille shadowing Effie; by this point the elf was directly behind the dwarf, who was reaching up for a glass left on the bar. Ifan almost laughed, the image before him seeming almost slapstick. The whippet-thin shadowy elf loomed over the stout hearty dwarvern woman, and he was just in time - or was that just too late? - to see Sebille deftly cut the cord attaching Effie's keys to her robes, swinging them silently into her own pocket.

Sebille quickly checked around to see if anyone had witnessed her theft, and her eyes met Ifan's across the tumultuous mass of rowdy drinkers. One of his eyebrows quirked amusedly, and Sebille blinked once, slow and cat-like, with a languid smirk twisting her elfin features before she seemed to melt into the crowd. When she reappeared a moment later halfway up the stairs, her eyes were still locked on him. He saw her beckon once to him before snapping her fingers and turning to ascend further. Ifan felt the colour rise to his face as he realised, too late, exactly what was going on here.

Hastily downing the entirety of the contents of the glass before him in a sudden change of heart, he stood suddenly, slamming his hands down on the rough wooden tabletop rather harder than he'd meant to, feeling the cumulative force of the cheap liquor in a rush as the room spun madly for a second. No-one batted an eye as he half strode, half lurched away from the card table, another florid-faced man taking his chair almost before he'd vacated it.

Bidding his drinking comrades a gruff farewell, Ifan made a beeline for where he'd last seen Sebille, muttering 'excuse me's' to the lolling patrons as he reeled past them too closely.. He bounded up the stairs in twos, not fast enough to see which of the various suites Sebille had entered, and stood for a moment on the landing, unsure and quite abashed, the plush red carpet - so ubiquitous to mid-range lodging houses - yielding gently beneath his heavy, mud-encrusted boots, and he scuffed at them awkwardly, noticing his own contrastingly tattered state anew.

Hearing a whispery chuckle issuing from behind the door closest to him, Ifan uncertainly moved towards it, his hand slowly reaching for the handle before he felt a light tap on his shoulder. Spinning around in embarrassed alarm, Ifan felt a combination of surprise and relief as he saw Sebille standing before him.

She smirked, neither kindly nor unkindly, and said nothing, just stared unflinchingly into his face, taking in the feral eyes and the shadows beneath them; the crooked scar on his cheek, on the same side as hers yet jagged, imprecise. Her hands found his, eyes still locked onto his face, and she brought them up to her mouth and gently licked the underside of his right-hand wrist, not breaking his gaze but seeming to resolve herself in some indefinable way.

He briefly wondered about the whispery chuckle, but Sebille was already leading him along down the hallway, pushing him into a sumptuously decorated room hung with tapestries and oil paintings depicting various severe looking dwarves and ancient battles. The four-poster bed in the centre of the room, Ifan noted with relief, was definitely human sized. Closing the solid wooden door behind them and quietly using the pilfered keys to lock it behind them, Sebille took a deep breath before leading the way to the bed. She pulled aside the heavy, red velvet curtains which enclosed the bed and sat down, gesturing for Ifan to join her. He assented, before breaking into a smile and asking her, "Sebille, what kind of scheme have you got going on now?"

She winces slightly, seeming to chew on the word she spoke before she uttered it:

"Murderer."

Ifan hadn't expected that to sting as much as it did.
He was a Lone Wolf, a hired mercenary, a killer-for-hire. Aside from that, after the war, it was the thought that echoed through his mind every time he saw his own reflection, though mercifully those events were scarce. It was his job to kill, to track his prey across any distance to complete the contract, and he was good at it. Or at least, he'd felt like he was. Had that all just been the companionship of the pack? Belonging somewhere, no matter what one had to do to remain within the fold. It had been worth it, for a long time. Now?

He shifted his gaze to the bowls of fruit on the sideboard, the expensive-looking damask drapes covering the windows, the exquisite plaster mouldings on the ceiling...anything to escape the unrelenting vice-like hold of Sebille's steely regard. Then, he felt a pressure as her arms slipped around him, a tingle humming in his brain as her honey and blood breath warms his neck and trickles into his ear, murmuring, "I want to taste their end in your flesh."

After meeting his sorrowful eyes and taking her consent from his lack of resistance, she ran one sharp fingernail along his cheekbone. He barely registered the sting of pain as the tip of her finger collected the thin rivulet of blood, running down his face like a tear, and as she put it to her lips she shuddered. Ifan began to curl away into himself before it dawned on him that she seemed to be enjoying it, immensely so.

"I can see it," she whispered, awe-struck, eyes transfixed on a nonexistent point before her, locked upon sights which he himself had worked hard to forget, but would never.

"I can see the destruction you wrought upon my people. I, too, destroyed them from within. My master..." she breaks off, grimacing slightly at her own memories, before snapping back completely to the present, to this bedroom, and to Ifan.
He barely had time to react as her focus retrained exclusively on him. He had been in some strange encounters before this, but Sebille's intensity of purpose was singular in a way that he'd yet to encounter.

She positioned herself atop him, cradling his face in her hands, covering his whiskery face with tiny licks and kisses, urgently intoning in a low, enthralling burr,

"I need this, need you to. Inside, it feels so empty, so cold, since...please, Ifan, I am so lost since the homelands fell, and I think you are the only one who could understand this terrible shame I feel. I cannot go to the elves whom survived for community, for I am the assassin in their midst. Nor could you rely upon the humans to ever truly accept you. We are monsters to them. Please, Ifan, I am so..."

He wraps his thick, strong arms around her lithe, sinewy body, drawing her closer into his warmth, until their bodies pressed together tightly, causing Sebille to gasp out her unspoken thought;
"...hungry."

Despite having grown up around elves, Ifan was unsure as to how literally to take this admission. That was until she drew her needle to his flesh, pricking just below his right ear, this time leaning close and lapping at the flow with the tip of her pointy tongue. Ifan felt warmth begin to pool in his stomach as his ears started to ring and his vision darkened at the edges, consciousness receding from the outside inwards.

Just as he thought that perhaps he would faint and that he'd really better stop the hypnotic elf beside him from draining him to oblivion, Sebille's pale features swam into focus before him. The world rushed back, the distant roar of the tavern and the rich, sumptuous colours of his surroundings so momentarily overwhelming that Ifan reflexively startled.
He leapt to his feet, his hand reaching for the hilt of his blade before he realised what he was doing.
Sebille shifted so that her needle was positioned defensively before her, crouching on the other side of the bed, having sprung back from where Ifan had shoved her a moment ago in his panic. She waited, motionless, anticipating his attack. Instead, what happened next surprised them both very much. Falling back into a seated position on the bed, Ifan buried his head in his hands and wept noisily, his face reddening as his eyes and nose began to stream.

Sebille, appalled at the emotional display before her, reeled back at the sight of the sobbing mercenary. She felt revulsion creep into her heart, cold & cruel. Stepping forward suddenly, she slapped Ifan brusquely across the scarred side of his now-soggy face. He leapt up, hand flying not to his cheek but his knife, gripping the handle and beginning to unsheathe it as their eyes met.

Both froze, Sebille's hand now tensed at her side, legs bending again to a crouch. Ifan, eyes red and still damp, the same eyes with pupils like whirlpools wreathed in flame, sat with his pointed teeth bared in an expression that was, aside from his rush of rage, immeasurable anguish. Time crystallized around them as they breathed, locked in one another's regard, standing motionless for one protracted moment.
Neither thought that they'd made the initial move, but there they were, clumsily yet ardently entwined in an embrace that expressed more than words or tears could convey. Teeth clashed and lips bruised, and they dragged in drunken breaths as their bodies smoothed over any potential remaining awkwardness. With a growl, Ifan rolled Sebille onto her front and semi-playfully pinned her down, grabbing a fistful of her inky hair in his bear-like fist and tugging, not entirely gently.

"So, elf? Is this how you'd like me to...?"

His other hand finds her hip, as she wriggled her legs, struggling beneath him. He grasped one of her thighs and began to stroke it with his warm fingers, tracing runes on them roughly, absent mindedly, as his mouth finds the softest part of Sebille's neck. She shudders, still squirming, looking up at him with feline eyes, before she languidly stretched her willowy arms around his solid shoulders and fully availed herself to the embrace.

She dug her nails into his back, manoeuvring their interlocked bodies until she straddled him, both still fully clothed.
Beneath her, pressed tightly, she can feel his pulse, a radiating heat. She can smell cold earth, damp leaves and pine needles in his sweat. His breath reeks of whiskey and smoke but he tastes like honey jerky. Kissing him was like standing next to lava.
She undressed him like a lion picks meat from a carcass, all teeth and claws. He responded in kind until they were both knelt facing each other wearing not a stitch.
Sebille sat up and leant back, meeting his eyes as she delicately grasped him, Ifan's eyelids fluttering as a low grown escaped him, body involuntarily jerking slightly as the initial wave of pleasure coursed through him. It had been far too long since this aspect of life had been given any time or importance. Somehow, at this moment, the lives they'd been living up until this point seemed absurd. This felt...vital.

Sebille's deft fingers massaged him slowly, pushing him time & again almost to the peak, before working their way across his chest, until he felt himself lifted into another realm. He grasped her rib cage and kissed her deeply, rolling her over so he was on top of her, pressing against her with his whole body. He moved his mouth downwards, kissing a slow trail of light touches along her waist before burying his face in her lap, licking rhythmically with his rough tongue, causing her to gasp and grasp his hair with both hands as her hips bucked against his rugged face. Just as her breathing was mounting and her hands began to grip the bed, he pulled away with a mischievous smile, eyes glinting. "Let's..."

As he moved inside of her he felt a mounting lightness, as if following a predetermined path, guaranteed to end in purest good. His breath caught as the sensation built, as he struggled to hold back from the edge. Sebille pressed closer, grinding wantonly against him, eyes half closed and head back, almost mewling in little cries of pleasure. Suddenly her eyes snapped open, finding his sweaty, ravenous face before she threw back her head and convulsed, losing control. Ifan cried out, pulled to the peak and beyond, holding onto her hips as they saw beyond the veil together, just for a moment. Afterwards, for a long while, they slept, Ifan holding Sebille in the protective circle of his scarred arms until dawn.