Earlier this year I was invited to a fairy-tale themed anthology via my editor at Filthy Figments. Originally planned for October we ended up moving it to next year. Regardless: I wanted to show off the pitch I came up with for this! I like it a lot!! Very excited to work on this next year. Art and summary below the cut.
Title: Our Bodies, In Babylon
Pagecount: 18-20 (can change if need be! A lot of the summary text is ‘worldbuilding’ style stuff that’ll be easier to communicate in a shorter manner on the comic page than it is here.)
Pairing: Trans man (pre op) + trans man (post bottom but not top surgery)
Logline: A sword-servant of the military-state Duvet is tasked with entering an underground maze to finally end his homunculus twin after refusing to do so for 20 years.
Summary:
Iarrow (pronounced like “Yarrow”), a thick man in his early 40s, is a mid-level sword-servant (a mercenary knight, essentially) of purposefully little renown. He’s generally quiet, generally nocturnal, and prefers the company of his horse mount to his peers. He’s brought into the quarters of one of the military’s sorcerers in the middle of the night to be told that they know that he lied about completing one of his final qualifications over 20 years prior: that he had lied about his defeat of his homunculus twin.
During the final year of training, military sorcerers take a hair sample from those in training and grow a clone of them at that period in time, raised separately from their originals in a large maze for 10 months. One of their final tests is the ability to murder their own clone- as a symbolic way of showing that they’re able to remove their individual selves for the sake of the military-state. Iarrow couldn’t bring himself to do it and fled, covering himself with dried blood and mud to fake that he completed the fight. His group was the last to participate in this, as it was deemed by the upper management to be a cost sink. Iarrow’s clone somehow survived all those years in that maze, alone.
The sorcerer claims that he’s made contact with this homunculus and that they’re prepared to tell their superiors about it unless Iarrow makes them some kind of offer within 24 hours. Realizing that part of his reluctance to really connect with any of his fellow mercenaries is related to the guilt he feels over leaving the mimic of himself down in the maze, Iarrow instead prepares a weeks worth of rations and sneaks his way out of camp to head down to the maze. This time he’s determined to end the homunculus so he can finally become ‘normal’.
The area is extremely overgrown and clearly as untouched as the day Iarrow left. He makes camp and begins the arduous task of mapping the maze- it used to shift and change fueled by magic, but being untouched for years it appears to be stable. After several days dedicated searching, he manages to find his mimic. It looks nearly the same as he did as a younger man (18-20), but wilder, scruffier, and with a long, hairless tail.
Iarrow continues tracking The Mimic for another day, observing it- or his, rather- habits. The Mimic spends most of its time eating small wild animals, jacking off, and trying to find its way out of the maze (mostly jacking off in extremely elaborate ways that make Iarrow sweat underneath his full-body hide armor). The Mimic seems unable to ‘see’ the entrance of the maze, but is still confident that he’ll be able to get out eventually. Eventually he does notice that something else appears to be tracking him- living in the eternal maze has given him a very familiar knowledge of every plant and branch.
They soon enter a back-and-forth exchange of chasing and tracking each other, never quite catching up with the other enough to do anything. It’s only after The Mimic becomes sexually frustrated enough from being unable to get off that the chase takes a more charged turn. The Mimic is a filthy pervert, but Iarrow still feels conflicted. He tells himself that fucking The Mimic is the perfect way to get close enough to kill, and starts playing along.
Iarrow and The Mimic take turns chasing each other, grinding and growling like animals when they get close to each other. The Mimic manages to sexually frustrate Iarrow enough for Iarrow to wrestle The Mimic into a mating press. As he’s gotten older, Iarrow has used magic to more accurately confirm his body to what he wants- a set of wide, hairy tits and a cock as thick as his wrist. He roughly breeds The Mimic into the ground.
Just as Iarrow is about to cum a second time, The Mimic grabs his face and pulls him in close. Looking into Iarrow’s eyes and locking his legs around Iarrow’s hips, The Mimic tells him that he always knew why Iarrow was here. Ever since he found (and sucked off) a military sorcerer nosing around for vintage left-behind equipment, he knew Iarrow would be back to finish the job. He tells Iarrow to admit his guilt while forcing him to cum a second time.
After releasing Iarrow, The Mimic admits that he actually isn’t sure what would happen if he leftsince the area has been untouched by artificial magic for some time but he’s stayed the same, it’s possible he’ll live forever. With years of guilt pressing down on him, Iarrow volunteers to switch places. The Mimic refuses, saying that Iarrow would die down here for sure. The Mimic presents a second option- let him become Iarrow, and Iarrow become his mount. The Mimic presses him into this quickly, removing the binding from his horse, and pressing the bit into Iarrow’s mouth instead, which he ‘grows into’. The Mimic then mounts him as one would any horse, but the ending is left vague as to if they head back to camp or if they both turn back into the maze.