This deviation is by =Blondeyetti. Please leave comments & Favs here: [link]

This picture is an illustration from Susan Kay's Phantom. Special thanks to ~katubish who provided the motivation, the book, and the persian images! I can thouroughly reccomend reading this interpretation of POTO. Erik is wonderfully thought out. If anyone wants me to send them a copy of the book in a Word file, (albeit a slightly incomplete one full of little program tags but still perfectly readable) drop me a note on my blondeyetti account and leave your email. Here's the extract the picture is based on...

"The girl was an odalisque, a slave of the royal harem who had completed her
training as a concubine, but not yet been chosen to serve in the royal bed. There was no
greater honor for the shah to bestow upon a favored servant than the gift of a harem virgin
... the gift of a wife.
When I had stammered my rehearsed piece, there was a deathly silence in Erik's
softly lit apartment, a tension that pulled every muscle taut as bow string.
He stared at the girl with a ravening hunger that the mask could not disguise and
his sudden, overwhelming desire was like sheet lightning, shocking in its savage intensity. I
saw his shoulders hunch against the pain, his hands lock on his knees and claw upwards
into his flesh in a desperate attempt to contain the screaming tyranny of his own body.
When he looked up at me it was with bitter hatred, as though he understood the
exact purpose of my presence here tonight.
“Bring her forward,” he said."