Searching (The Eternal Dungeon)
Title: Searching.
Author: Dusk Peterson.
Where to find me: Website, AO3, DW/IJ/Tumblr/list.
Series: The Eternal Dungeon, an award-winning speculative fiction series set in a nineteenth-century prison where the psychologists wield whips. You don't need to have read the other stories in the series to understand this one.
Series cycle: Turn-of-the-Century Toughs, a cycle of alternate history series about adults and youths on the margins of society, and the people who love them. Set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the novels and stories take place in an alternative version of America that was settled by inhabitants of the Old World in ancient times. As a result, the New World retains certain classical and medieval customs.
Categories: Original fiction: gen and slash. Friendship fiction with a romance subplot.
Length: Novelette (16,000 words).
Feedback: Yes, please.
Rating: PG-13 for violence.
Warnings: Boilerplate warning for all my stories.
Summary:
Walking into a trap may be the only way to create one.
Danger runs high for Vito when he arrives at the Eternal Dungeon, escorted by guards. In this royal dungeon, prisoners are "searched" for their crimes, by torture and by more subtle means.
Vito knows that he will be searched. But he has his own searching to accomplish, and to do so he must undergo the scrutiny of the queendom's most accomplished torturer.
Vito was beginning to wonder whether this dungeon's prisoners were questioned in pitch darkness. That was a matter of some personal concern to him.