Chapter Text
Karlach, Gale, and the Harpers had scattered to intercept the migrating cultist herd, leaving Thorne to follow the Drider’s tracks, eager to witness the grotesque aberration up close, but what he found wasn’t a monster at all, but something beautiful.
The Drider was obviously in pain, both physically and mentally. But he was gorgeous in his suffering, and it would be so easy to trick him. To say a few false words and slip a dagger into the soft gaps between the Drider's chitinous chest. The Moon Lantern would be his and the cultists would be left alone to fend for themselves on their pilgrimage to Moonrise. Cold and hollow, to die like so many others had before them. Thorne could almost taste the opportunity in the air and yet… the words wouldn’t come.
For the first time in his life, there was no spark of cruelty, no thrill in the deception. The Urge to eviscerate, to manipulate and maim, was silent, except for the growing urge between his thighs.
Desire and compassion was a mix that he was unused to, and it surprised him how strongly it was.
“What a magnificent creature you are,” Thorne murmured, his voice low and almost reverent.
He stood on the cliff just above the Drider, watching as the spider-like being babbled to himself, twitching and muttering nonsense while rifling through the pockets of long-dead Harpers. Fingers trembling. Movements frantic. Pitiful, yes -but there was something captivating about its madness. About the shape of him. The ruin.
The spider hissed the moment Thorne made himself known, the Moon Lantern in his hand casting a pale, ghostly blue light across the rocks and corpses below. “What is it, Majesty?” the Drider hissed to himself, his many eyes glinting as he scuttled up the cliff face with alarming speed, limbs clacking against stone. In seconds, he was beside Thorne at the top, looming and twitching. “Meat for Kar’niss?” he asked, head tilting in a sharp, birdlike motion. Hopeful and hungry.
“Afraid not.” Thorne took a slow step back.
The Drider advanced, limbs clicking against stone as it closed the distance.
“I am…” Thorne hesitated, then steadied himself. “I am a True Soul. Seeking Moonrise Towers." There, not exactly a lie but a partial truth of sorts, Astarion would be proud. "But I fear that my intentions have changed since meeting you.”
“Changed?” The Drider’s voice sharpened to a hiss, baring needle-like teeth. “Blasphemy.”
“Kar'niss, is that your name?" Thorne hummed, loving the way it sounded on his lips. "You'll forgive me, won’t you?” Thorne grinned, eyes glinting with something wicked and soft all at once. “For I have been enchanted by you.”
The Drider went still.
The clacking of his limbs ceased. Only the faint rustle of the wind howling through the dead grass filled the space between them.
“You mock Kar’niss,” the Drider rasped at last, voice low and venom-laced. “Pretty meats do not speak kindly to monsters. They scream. They bleed. They run.”
“Don't threaten me with a good time,” Thorne chuckled, which only seemed to anger the creature even more.
The Drider leaned in, his many eyes blinking out of sync. Up close like this in the lamplight, Thorne could see where his flesh twisted unevenly into hardened carapace. He did not much care for the goddess of these lands, but Lolth surely had a skilled hand to craft such a divine being.
"Worry not, Majesty. I will eviscerate it, in the name of your greatness."
Thorne didn’t flinch, not even as Kar'niss gripped him by the neck. He held the creature’s gaze, eyes searching the Drider’s face. “You think I’m lying," Thorne grit out, feeling the pressure on his throat increase. "That I don’t mean what I said.”
Kar’niss hissed, dragging Thorne up off of his feet, the two of them face-to-face, the toe of his boots barely scraping the ground. “You think my face enchanting?” Spittle flew from his twisted lips. “This wreck of body and mind? You seek to own it, maybe. Wear it like a badge, like a broken pet. But I belong to my Mistress. I will not be taken.”
“No.” Dark spots clouded Thorne's vision. It did nothing at all to stop the desire spreading between his legs. “I want to belong to you.”
That stopped the Drider. Kar'niss' head tilted, jerky and insect-like. For a moment, the madness behind his eyes dulled, replaced by something sad, as if Thorne had intentionally hurt him after all. The spider released his grip, and Thorne fell to his knees in a slump, coughing for air.
“Words,” Kar'niss said. “Pretty, sticky words.”
"Teach me," Thorne wheezed, his lungs filling up with air, but still burning. "Teach me how to be yours."
Kar’niss let out a sound that was a mix between laughter and a sorrowful wail. His pedipalps clicked together, chittering like insect legs. “You wish to be claimed? To be mated? By me?”
Thorne’s grin was slow, sure but reckless. “Oh yes.”
*
Kar’niss wasted no time.
He scooped Thorne up with ease, as though he weighed no more than a sack of potatoes, limbs folding around him in a protective cradle. Then he was moving fast, impossibly so, scuttling through the cursed dark with inhuman grace, skimming over stone and root. They stopped only when the trees broke into clearing where an abandoned house stood at its center, warped and forgotten by time. The roof sagged, the windows were shattered. The air hung thick with rot and silence.
Kar’niss slipped inside without a sound, depositing Thorne with surprising care before retreating to the ceiling, limbs curling around a beam, the lantern set in the empty sconce holder by the door. The pale light cast long, flickering shadows on the peeling walls.
Thorne took in the newly illuminated scene.
Skeletons occupied the room. A family, maybe. One was slumped on the floor, a cracked mug still clutched in its skeletal fingers. Another sat eternally at the dining table, collapsed forward, face buried in dust and cobwebs. The chairs hadn’t moved. The table still stood. But time had taken everything else.
Kar’niss clicked softly above him, watching, waiting, and Thorne began to undress. First his weapons, then his boots, shirt, gloves and trousers, leaving himself pale and naked. It was not lost on him that he was the only living thing in this room. Fleshy, meaty, his cock already swelling with desire, his heart pumping life into every inch of him.
Thorne looked up, locking eyes -so many of them- with the creature above.
“Won’t you come down from there?”
A silence followed, thick and taut.
Then the wood creaked.
Kar’niss descended slowly, limbs curling and uncurling in a deliberate, rhythmic cadence. He whispered softly to himself in a dialect of Undercommon -Drow, but older. Raw. The words were unfamiliar to Thorne, but their cadence had weight, like ritual, like reverence. With a final click of his claw, Kar’niss stood before him. He tilted his head, eyes all blinking in slow, disjointed patterns as if trying to take Thorne in from every angle at once.
Then he reached out, a clawed hand hovering just above Thorne’s bare chest. Not touching. Not yet.
And that’s when Thorne realized that he was praying.
It did not sit right with him, knowing that that the Drider's goddess had abandoned him here, leaving him to rot and ruin. Allowing the Absolute to pick up whatever pieces remained. He did not yet know what the Absolute's motivation was, but gods were seldom altruistic, and he could not foresee a happy ending for the Spider. Thorne frowned at the thought.
Slowly, deliberately, he reached for Kar'niss' hand and brought it flush against his chest. The Drider sucked in a sharp intake of breath, his hand cold and rough against Thorne's skin.
“I wish to be claimed by you. Mated by you. Remember?" Thorne whispered, stepping closer, keeping the Drider's palm on his chest even as it began to shake. "So do it." Kar'niss continued those artful mutterings, eyes twitching every which way. Thorne stepped close until he was flush against the Drider's chitin covered abdomen, his own cock jumping at the touch. "Come on, Kar'niss. Show me.”
"My Queen blesses me," The Drider said, whispering to himself. "Yes. Yes. I have served thee well, haven't I?"
In a blink, Thorne was off his feet, yanked upward with unnatural strength before being slammed to the floor hard enough to rattle the bones of the dead. The impact drove the air from his lungs, a gasp catching sharp in his throat. He barely had time to rise to his elbows before Kar’niss was on him —crowding him, looming, legs stabbing into the rotted floorboards with loud, splintering cracks. One after another, sharp and sure, caging Thorne in beneath his too large body.
Thorne’s heart pounded in his throat.
Kar’niss loomed closer, pedipalps twitching, eyes darting across Thorne’s face with frantic focus. “You chose,” the Drider rasped, almost reverent. “You offered. Now you will be kept. As is her majesty's will.”
Then came the hands. They were curious, frantic, overwhelming.
The Drider’s many limbs moved across Thorne’s bare skin in a feverish scramble, claws dragging thin rivulets of red -searching, trembling, tasting through touch. Every inch was explored: his chest, his ribs, his throat, the curve of his hip, the hollow beneath his jaw. His ears, his knees, the slender curve of his cock. Kar'niss touched everything and made a strange, chittering sound deep in his throat, overwhelmed by the feel of living, uncursed flesh beneath his claws. Supple. Warm. Wrong in all the right ways.
Thorne lay still beneath the cage of limbs, heart thudding against his ribs, his body no longer sure whether it was afraid, aroused, or some terrible mix of both. A bead of pre cum wept, pooling at his lower stomach. And above him, Kar’niss whispered again -not to Thorne, but to someone else entirely.
“See? See what I’ve found for You, my Queen. Your servant brings you soft things. Warm things. The living. The willing.” His breath hitched. One hand trembling at Thorne’s throat before sliding down, gently over his weeping cock to his left thigh, bringing it up alarmingly fast, near folding him in half.
Thorne gasped, half a laugh and half a moan. He reached out for Kar'niss, hands finding his face. His palms pressed gently against the chitinous angles, thumbs brushing the strange, ridged skin just beneath the Drider’s many eyes. “You’re so beautiful,” Thorne whispered, breath catching in his throat. “When I saw you, I just knew that-”
Kar’niss visibly shuddered beneath his touch, eyes closing, frowning. The twitching of his pedipalps slowed, relaxing as the armored mound beneath its legs unfurled, revealing a fleshy, near translucent membrane. A long, low sound escaped him. Not a hiss. Not a growl. A keening.
"Oh," Thorne panted, trying to get a better angle at what was between the Drider's legs. "Is that-"
He flinched as the Drider's fleshy and pointed appendage nudged against his hole, forcing past the tight ring of muscle without hesitation. Once breached he thrust the rest of the way in, the hard edges of his chitinous hips slamming up against the curve of Thorne's ass, sure to bruise.
Thorne's breath caught in his throat. "Ow." He couldn't stop shaking, his hips twitching in half aborted jerks as if attempting to pull away from the feeling of being split open, his tail going rigid before wrapping around one of Kar'niss' many legs for comfort. "F-fuck, Kar."
The Spider was driven by an animalistic want that knew nothing of consideration. It was simply desire in its purest form, which made Thorne salivate, even as the painful stretch of his rim nearly softened his erection all together.
"So pretty." Thorne hiccupped, feeling his eyes well up. His hands trembled as he cupped the Drider's face. "Like art. Like a statue. Like-"
Kar'niss bit at his hand, forcing Thorne to flinch away from his twisted face. "How cruel my mate is, Mistress." The spider hissed to itself. "How vile its tongue."
"N-no." Thorne tried to reach for him again, wishing to trace every angle of the Spider's face. Those beautiful blinking eyes above his brow. The pointed tip of a finely sculpted ear. "I am being earnest. I am- I- fuck!"
Kar'niss pulled out and then thrust in again, his appendage pulsing with a heart beat of its own, spitting out slick that felt tacky and made the walls of Thorne's insides tug with every thrust. The creatures' slick was as sticky as its webbing, but it helped ease the glide somewhat, even if Thorne felt like he might unravel each time the Spider pulled out.
"Lies!" The Drider hissed, his face contorting as if pained. "My Majesty blesses and punishes me with the same hand." He wailed.
"P-please-" Thorne wanted to touch him, to hold him close, to be soft with him. It was a foreign feeling, but it burned just as hot as the urge to maim and sever did. "Please-"
Kar'niss kissed him hard. Their teeth clashing together, his lips and chin pushing against Thorne's in a slide of saliva as if he did not know how to kiss. And perhaps he didn't. But the Drider still desired it. If his splintered mind did not know it, his body in the very least, did. And Thorne wanted nothing more than to give it to him.
He opened his mouth to deepen the kiss, but found that he could not, for the Drider had sealed his lips shut, leaving behind a thin seal of webbing. He moaned a question, his voice muffled.
"There, cruel sting." Kar'niss leaned back with a relieved sigh. He patted Thorne's hair, petting him like a dog, the only bit of tenderness he seemed able to do. Shooshing Thorne's whimpering moans softly. "That is much better."
*
The sounds spilling out of him were a mix of pained, unintelligible grunts, muffled and trapped in his chest as the Spider pistoned in and out of him. Slick and tacky threads of webbing drooled from whey connected, leaking from the tight suction of his hole with every thrust, pooling between Thorne's thighs and seeping into the wood.
He could count on one hand the amount of sexual encounters he'd experience after the Nautiloid ship -the ones that he could remember, at least- and while they'd all been satisfying in their own, unique way, none had ever left him feeling so full. So bred.
Thorn could feel the very architecture of his insides rearranging, fitting snuggly to the length and width of the Drider. Perfect as a knife to its sheath. Thorne shoves a hand between them both, reaching for his belly which throbbed and distended from every one of Kar'niss' thrusts. He could feel the curved head of the spider's cock nudging behind his belly button, and the pressure caused him to moan, deep and guttural -though it had no where to go.
Thorne reared his hips up to meet Kar'niss' thrusts as best he could, his rim burning and stretched beyond measure, toeing the line between pleasure and pain. He would surely be left gaping after this. Ruined and open as a well used cunt. He reached lower to fist his neglected cock, dribbling pre. It only took a few strokes before he was adding his own spend to the mess puddling between his legs.
"A perfect vessel." Kar'niss moaned loudly, ramming himself inside of Thorne. "A healthy one, and strong too. For my Majesty's children."
Thorne would've asked him what he meant if he could speak, but the sudden stretch inside caught him by surprise. His eyes widened as he felt the pressure inside of himself shift. As though the Drider's cock were reforming. Growing larger and larger to the point of bursting.
Just when Thorne began to thrash and truly cry out in fear, he felt the pressure subside. Kar'niss eased out from his hole and Thorne froze with the dawning realization that something had been left inside.