Preamble: Author's Notes
A note before you start:
Covenant Beneath Her Skin is a story I discovered while picking out an ‘overdone’ trope and seeing what interesting story we could tell about it. I started with the ”Corruption/Lust tattoo from a Demon King’s Chosen One" concept and started building out. I asked:
What if the Demon King never pursues the ‘Chosen One’?What if the heroine’s fall doesn’t involve external seduction?What if she is complicit in her own downfall?What if there’s no clean answer to a rescue?
What I got was Seren, and a fall that happens one cold night at a time.
Seren was a priestess of the Dawning Light. She knelt in white before the High Priest who raised her and gave every response of the Great Rite without stumbling once. She thought it was the highest honor her Order could give. It was a sale. But to what, to whom, and for what became the ultimate question.
There is only one hard-and-fast rule: nothing can force her further than she chooses to go. That sounds like it should be empowering, right? Read on and decide for yourself.
This is for you if you want dark fantasy where desire costs something, a heroine who isn’t a victim and isn’t innocent either, and a faith whose kindness is real and paid for by someone. If Kushiel’s Dart left a mark on you, start here.
The entire trilogy is written and posted. Please start on Book I if you are stumbling across Book II or III.
Content note: Adults only. Explicit sexual content, magical compulsion and questionable consent, religious betrayal, some violence, and dark themes throughout.
AI DISCLAIMER: I use a significant amount of AI involved in my narrative writing. This can amount to: Planning, Ideation, Outlining, Continuity Documentation, and even Narrative Prose. I have built a ‘soup-to-nuts’ approach for my AI usage, including multiple agents, stages, and steps. Each individual piece goes through rigorous reading, editing, and evaluation before it sees human eyes, and I am heavily involved in both the creation and assembly of the stories I post.
I do not have any qualms about disclosing this, and I abhor the idea that someone would hide their AI usage just to blatantly use AI-Prose with no editing and pass it off as their own.
