Surrender Control (Emmylou Kotzé)

Whilst being held in the secure grip of death during a skirmish, the Mage-Gifted mercenary Fish looks back at eighteen years of sexy fun times with his fighting partner and husband Nico.

A series of vignettes with an intro and outro. Yep, I am using a literary framing device for my erotica.

This fic was originally posted on AO3 during October 2025 for a series of Kinktober prompts. This is the epub/PDF version as downloaded from AO3, with a pretty cover I added.

A full list of AO3-style content tags is provided on the first page of the book. This is a romantic story about consenting partners engaging in rough sex and the occasional hardcore kink. Includes public sex, tooth-rotting fluff, kink negotiation, porn with (some) plot, wedding nights and first times.

The characters Nico & Fish are main POV characters from my fantasy series Forest of the Morning. The actual book series does not generally include this much sex, but all the encounters in this fic are canon. Some happen after a fade-to-black in the books, others are just fun ideas I conjured up.

A little about the characters:

Nico is a husky bi guy & a survivor of sexual assault. He fits the "dumb berserker" character archetype... except that he's intelligent, well-read & has a wicked sense of humour. He can sing, dance, and crush his enemies all in the same evening's entertainment.

Fish is a gay mage on the ace spectrum (demisexual). Due to the demands of magic on his body, he has a... complicated relationship with pain and pleasure. Although Fish would not call himself demisexual (as the term doesn't exist in this fantasy setting) I deliberately wrote him as ace-spec following my own experiences of being demi.

This fic explores the romantic dynamic of these two warriors over a period of nearly two decades. Topics such as Nico's past SA and Fish's demisexuality are fundamental parts of this dynamic and will crop up.

Length: 29,000 words.