“His Secret Illuminations” by Scarlett Gale [Femdom Book Review]

The TL;DR for this one is that a physical difference (big streetsmart warrior woman/small booksmart mage) forms our starting premise for an opposites attract dynamic to blossom in some cozy adventuring fantasy. Why it’s good is entirely in the execution, and its runaway popularity for an indie is a good thing to point to whenever anyone says femdom books are not marketable. It deserves the love it gets, and in further emphasis of its merits, if you extracted any of the overt kink or romance elements it would still stand on its own without them.

Although I actually read His Secret Illuminations several years ago, back when it came out, I am using the purchase of the physical books as my excuse to finally get around to gushing about my enjoyment of them, and of course giving it a re-read.

Our protagonist, Lucien, is a monk, from an isolated monastery from the most hardline version of his sect. That sect has hired Glory of the Snow, a massive, blonde and vaguely Viking coded woman, to retrieve some stolen books. She’s worked with the monastery before on smaller quests, giving the couple time to have a meet cute and establish a bit of mutual interest, but the need for retrieving the Macguffin gives a convenient impetus to throw them together. Glory, for all her fighting prowess, lacks the magic Lucien has that will let him track and correctly identify the missing items. This, in turn, throws him well out of his comfort zone, both having to navigate his extreme sexual repression and figuring out how to function in a world where every choice is no longer made in service to the monastery.

As far as the fetishes being indulged here, Gale does a good job with playing with the fantasy of Lucien’s extreme innocence and naivety well for self indulgence purposes, but without tripping into being tedious or making one unduly concerned about his ability to consent. Importantly, for those of you who may hesitate because of the number of strangers who keep calling you Mommy uninvited, at no point does it ever stray into making him full on hobosexual-helpless. The fantasy here isn’t about him being without life coping skills, rather giving a way to gender bend the princess-in-the-tower trope. And to justify a nearly stratospheric amount of yearning on the male lead’s part. 

Inversely, Glory’s endless well of patience still manages to remain a power fantasy for a dominant reader, because a great deal of emphasis is put on making Glory a complete person and giving Lucien lots of opportunities to show his use to her. She is allowed to be appreciated for what she is good at, and the falling in love part on her side is essentially discovering just how rapidly he gets up to speed and is then able to keep up with her. The premise is opposites attract, yes, but the conclusion is competence likes competence, even if this can take many forms. Likewise how the other characters react to the budding romance also makes it clear that Lucien and Glory are each other’s type, but it’s not making any sort of fundamental judgment that only these two could truly love each other, or their ability to appreciate each other is some sort of virtue.

The overt femdom elements likewise flow very naturally, in so much that there’s an almost mirror scenario going on that the more comfortable Lucien gets with the outside world, the more intensely we get to see him yearn to be mauled and pinned by Glory. Thus, while the couple doesn’t actually bang until the very last chapter, by the second half of the book the spice has started to seriously kick in. Using Lucien here as the perspective character seems to mostly be because the reader is assumed to want to focus most closely on all the horny submissive vulnerability he is giving off.  

As far as the sex scenes, I would describe them as a natural continuation of the overall themes of exuberant self discovery. The whole book is an immersive sensory experience with a lot of emphasis on embracing the whole body, just as much through food, bathing, clothes and physical activity. Inversely, the real conflict of the book is largely internal. Though there’s many smaller adventures along the way, from medical emergencies to heists, Lucien’s main struggle is with religious guilt, and its typical over emphasis on discomfort and deprivation. 

The way Glory is constructed and how we are allowed to get to know her is also extremely refreshing. Fetishization is often synonymous with objectification, and the larger culture we live in struggles with the idea of a dominant woman as an anomaly. All too often fictional female dominants can veer into becoming avatars of inspiration more so than human beings. This can be particularly the case when the domme character’s role is as a guide (or an antagonist). Sometimes you counter balance this by giving her a challenge of her own to surmount, but inversely this can lead to these characters being stuck being incomplete until the sub comes along. Glory is fine. She doesn’t need a partner not as an act of bitter rebukement, and she has enough openess to others Lucien can have a reciprocal relationship, but we absolutely avoid any hint of feeling ashamed, freakish or rejected without reducing her down to some sort of inexplicable force of nature.

I don’t mind stories of overcoming the world’s efforts to make women small, submissive and compliant, but while there is one scene where those pressures are explored as a potential hazard the book otherwise goes out if its way to make sure you know that’s more of a minority opinion among the citizens of the world. Sometimes, as a dominant reader you need a break from being told you are a freak, even a virtuous one, you know?

I also think it’s worth talking about how much this intersects between wish fulfillment and the mundane beliefs of the culture that produced it. As much as you could call this a Romantasy, it’s equally on the spectrum of being a LitRPG. That’s not to say that the characters have explicit game style overlays and talk about their abilities in terms of levelling up, but the strongest influence here on the setting and plot is on the norms we accept from fantasy TTRPGs. That’s a world where we accept that “adventurer” is a job, where people doing that job have specialized roles like Fighter or Wizard. Likewise, the story is told through an alternation of giving the character a challenge to solve as a group and a period to rest and improve their skills and gear. Thus, tonally what you are getting here benefits from giving you the vibes of playing a very interesting roleplaying game without but without any of the mechanical elements of the game intruding on the story it’s trying to tell or requiring any familiarity with the hobby.  

This choice of medium is ideal for the sort of story Gale is trying to tell. Most obviously, the premise depends on the fact that the game systems that influenced it decided to move away from default sexism baked into the mechanics of the game (for example avoiding adding gender based penalties or bonuses). The other reason is one that gets less spoken of. The elements that make a game function overlap so much with how modern kinky people get up to their shenanigans that the latest edition of The Dungeon Master’s Guide opens with instructions on how to conduct a consent negotiation one could practically lift unchanged and use in a much more intimate context. This cross pollination is intentional and direct, a symptom of the observation that the Venn Diagram between nerdy and creative hobbies and the people who do BDSM is essentially a circle.

For His Sacred Illuminations, therefore, not making your characters approach the ethos of sex like a kinky person would be weirder than the fact that they do. So, as a result, everything works.

Lasty though, I will flag that Gale has actually split things into two books. His Sacred Incantations finishes the couple’s overall story, but the ending of the first and second parts is much more a matter of the pragmatics of serialization than any real completed story arc in the first volume. You could argue that you have reached the traditional romance part’s conclusion by the end of book 1, and book 2 is more about drawing you deeper into the world, but I believe book 2 is just important for what it is trying to do, which, having set up the dynamic between the characters we now get to see it in action.

I think that’s particularly important, given that their initial dynamic is built on setting based power imbalances, whereas in book two we get to see the dynamic run on a firmer foundation of mutual reliance. If you are willing to take the risk on it, buy both books in one go.

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Where to get your own copy: Author’s website, directly.