An erotic gothic fantasy of counterfactual modernity, set in Svet Dmitrin, a thinly-disguised anachronistic synthesis of soon-to-be-Soviet Odessa and Great War era Leningrad, during a protracted stalemate between the revolutionary Red Guard and the increasingly desperate tzarist White Guard.

Our narrator is Lev/Lyubov Morgenshtern, a gay bigender ex-rabbi who’s just returned to the Talons Ghetto sovyet — an autonomous workers-and-peasants commune of the kind that directly preceded the Soviet Union (and indeed the thing that the USSR named itself after) — after a stint on a psych ward … which followed a far longer stint living in the tzarist-held half of Svet Dmitrin with a bougie respectability-obsessed ex-boyfriend. He’s got nowhere to sleep, no assurance his old friends want to see him and the only workable plan he’s got is to find someone hot and soft-hearted to take him home for the night …

R18 for graphic gay sex; the story makes frequent use of reclaimed homophobic slurs and, well, it’s a story about gay soon-to-be-Soviet Jews — transmisogyny and transphobia, homophobia, and antisemitism are quotidian environmental hazards.

[Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0]

Updates are whenever, despite the length between me posting updates, this is still ongoing; this is technically a mirror of the main site, which is a self-hosted thing where I can have fine-grained control over the typography and whatever.

(There's no "gay protagonist" tag, but in case it isn't obvious: this is, among other things, a gay romance.)