Come to Me, continues, part four

Chapter Three...
Lac Strigoi, Moldavia
The Loinfire Club agrees it is about time we started skimming again. The book is passed to The Anthropologist, who begins...

The Anthropologist: "He wakes up, tries not to wank and instead wangsts about it having been a succubus."

That sexual hunger hadn't been his at all. More likely it had come from her.
(The Chronicler: "There's a lot of displacement of one's own sexual desires onto someone else...")

The Chronicler: "Didn't she wipe his memory?"
Pillywiggin: "So she sucks at that too."
Lady Miriam: "Putting the suck back into succubus."

The Anthropologist: "He feels violated by this."

The succubus pictured in the book had the same wings and long hair as Samira, but the body did not do the reality justice. The creature in the drawing had thin legs and a thick waist. Samira's thighs had been plump, inviting a man's touch, while the curve of her hips rounded into a slender waist. Her breasts were high and full, while her hair… Such hair did not exist on mortal women, nor did eyes of such an intense blue, like the heart of a flame.
The Anthropologist: "He's captivated by the fact that she's Rubenesque and marvels at the fact that the picture's shit. But after all, if you make demons look pretty, people might want them to show up."

The Hierarchy of Demons, and Their Summoning, the book was called. It was a collection of lore and spells, supposedly gathered from many countries over many centuries.
The Chronicler: "Well, if that lore has been around for so long, how the fuck can succubus-bint not know about it?"

The Anthropologist: "He lives next to Lac Strigoi, which means Lake of the Vampires, which is a stupid name. There's a legend about some monks going mad after studying the dark arts. They got poisoned and got raised them all as zombies...

The villagers, although frightened, had responded with admirable practicality. They'd taken their scythes and lopped the heads off the lot of them, monk included, and burned the remains at a crossroads.
Pillywiggin: "First sensible people in the entire book!"

Many would say he was risking eternal damnation by such wicked dabbling; he would counter that he was damned already—to a life that was not a life. He would rather risk everlasting Hell than live the rest of his life powerless and forgotten in this godforsaken swamp of a lake.

The Anthropologist: "He's descended from a prophet woman. And then he reads out the bit about succubi in his book:

Of the lowest order of the demons of the darkness are the succubi. A female with the wings of a bat and a nether channel as cold as ice, this hellish creature drains the seed of sleeping men, leaving them without strength or wit upon waking.
The Chronicler: "I'm presuming this is the brief Samira didn't read."

If a succubus chooses the same man for many nights, he will become pale and weak, lose his appetite, lose his powers of thought, and sink into a melancholy relieved only temporarily by another visit by the succubus. If not freed from her, the man will soon die of exhaustion and loss of vital fluids.
The Anthropologist: "He's just worried about magical STDs."

Different opinions exist on why the succubus should drain a man. Some say that they are her sustenance, as bread is to man. Others say a man's seed, once taken by a succubus, will be passed by her to her male counterpart, the incubus. The incubi then deposit such emissions into sleeping mortal women, impregnating them and causing great mischief when the child is born bearing no resemblance to the woman's rightful husband. Such children are tainted, doomed to a life of sin and depravity.
Pillywiggin: "That's stupidly complicated."
The Balance: "It's a bit like snowballing."

She would be the most useless sort of demon for what he needed to accomplish.
Sordan: "I'm glad he notices she's fail too."
The Anthropologist: "Right, moving on. He feels afraid that she'll rape him. He angsts about his scars."
Pillywiggin: "Maybe he's really a Promethean."

Hair like liquid rubies, sliding over her snowy skin, and over those pink, erect nipples, one of which she had so wickedly rolled between her fingertips, as if offering a newly ripe cherry for his taste...
The Balance: "That sounds like an Eragon-ism."
Azrael: "I'm not sure it's possible to liquidise gemstones.... probably resemble something between liquid glass and lava."
The Balance: "This is assuming it's possible it has a liquid state and sublimate not straight from solid to gas like diamonds."
Azrael: "It depends on what the stupid three-point graph looks like..."

He fought to control his body's reaction and failed, the image of her hand on her breast forcing its way into his vision, each pinch of her fingertips acting like a touch upon his own manhood.
(The Chronicler: "Good to know that was truly hypnotic.")

The Anthropologist: "He thinks it's weird that she's obsessed about her name. But he doubts they have human level intelligence so they can't possibly have horrible neurosis like him."
Pillywiggin: "We know they're not as intelligent."

The Anthropologist: "Right. Next chapter. She's obsessed with him, too."

Impossible, of course. Not only was it forbidden for a succubus to revisit the same man...
(The Chronicler: "The Night World once more baffles me.")

He'd rather converse with a cranky three-year-old than with her.
(The Chronicler: "Ironically. Or not so, she does later become... we'll come to that.")

He'd find a gassy old man with long toenails a preferable bed partner; a hungry cannibal a better guest at his dinner table.
(The Chronicler: "Cardinal sin! Farting in bed!")

The Anthropologist: "Theron is back. It's good that they're so enthusiastic about their work and humans... He reveals his secret plans of wanting to be a mortal and a king."

"Because I won't be like all the others, of course! With my knowledge, after all these centuries of watching them play their war games, I'll be a king among them. No one will have learning that compares to mine. No one will understand how to lead men, how to rule, better than I."
Pillywiggin: "He's a beautiful and unique snowflake."

She shook her head, and then immediately saw herself standing barefoot upon the cold, muddy ground in the weak sunlight, a peasant's homespun clothing covering her wingless body, a kerchief on her head concealing unwashed hair full of lice.
Pillywiggin: "Mmmm... lice"

The Anthropologist: "He asks her if she wants to be one, too: If I were king, you could be my queen."
Lady Miriam: "That's just a bad chat up line."

The Anthropologist: "It's revealed that they're not very functional..."

There was nothing more to want: The incubi and succubi could not feel love, and their only sexual pleasure came from mortals. While she could feel shadows of female desire through Theron's touch, she could not see that as real. The secondhand nature of it bothered her.
(The Chronicler: "So why did it mention the possibility of a lover in the Night World in the beginning chapters?")

The bargain Theron had struck with the mortal—Vlad of Wallachia—had been deceptively simple: Theron would send the dream to Dragosh, and in return Theron would be allowed to inhabit Vlad's body for the space of three days. Vlad's one condition had been that this possession of his body must wait until he had triumphed over his enemies, and his position as ruler of Wallachia was secure.
Pillywiggin: "Is that Vlad the Implaer by any chance?"
The Anthropologist: "That's really too vague to be a decent demon contract. Hasn't he heard of subclauses?"
Sordan: "Until he had triumphed over his enemies could be anytime..."
The Chronicler: "So much for being smarter and being able to lord over all humans."

Possessing a human body was forbidden for the demons. They weren't even capable of it, unless the human gave his permission. Trying to enter a human body against the human's will meant spontaneous death for both the human and the demon.
The Chronicler: "Good to know the limitations of this system."

The Anthropologist: "He wants her to possess Lucia. So he can fuck her as Vlad."

"We won't know until we step into the daylight, will we? And what does it matter if it is different? I'd rather have a chance to live as a mortal man, ruling my own life, than to spend the next ten centuries under the thumb of Sleep. I'm tired of sending dream warriors to lick at the loins of frustrated women."
Pillywiggin: "Not for the women... though it might chafe after a while."
The Balance: "It's a dream. They might have an endless supply of lubricant."

Angry and hurt, Samira spoke without thinking. "You say that because I don't want to be your precious Lucia, and share your bed as a human." [...]She sucked in a breath of pain. "So you loathe me, too. A succubus isn't good enough for anyone."
The Anthropologist: "There's an interesting subtext here of her angsting about not being pretty enough to be raped again."

The Anthropologist: "She's being summoned by Nicolae. And there's another stupid swear-phrase: Goddess of the Night! And then... next chapter begins with Nicolae angsting. He's trying to summon Samira."

"Samira," Nicolae said, as he drew another of the strange symbols on the floor in chalk. He leaned over to where he'd laid the book on the floor, checking that he had the symbol drawn correctly.
The Chronicler: "This whole giving any mortal you see your True Name is turning out to be a really bad idea, isn't it?"

Spoken in Latin apparently:
Creature of darkness,
Come to me.
Circle of light,
Bind thee.
Fly through night,
Into sight,
Speak to me,
Come to me,
Samira.
(The Balance: "Why does it rhyme in English?"
The Chronicler: "More importantly, why is it such shit poetry?")


Her fingertips touched the invisible barrier of the circle and she shrieked in pain, jerking her hand back and then cradling it against her chest, her eyes wide and accusatory. She looked as if she was asking why he would do such a cruel thing to her.
(The Chronicler: "Three thousand years and not know about being summoned? Does she not talk to other succubi? Or is she like Satan with the fifteen second memory?")

The Anthropologist: "He's confused because she's even more stupid than he thought she would be. Despite him telling her about it, she's hurling herself against the invisible barrier repeatedly. Like some sort of fly. We're back to her being a cock mosquito."

The Anthropologist: "He's trapped her in some kind of binding."
Pillywiggin: "Kinky."

The Anthropologist: "We have a whole slew of animal metaphors. She gives the impression that she can't understand him when he talks..."
The Chronicler: "The author really isn't helping the case of her not being bestial and inhuman."

She bared her teeth again in response, saying nothing.
"Do you understand me?" No response, beyond a curl of her lip.
"Can you speak?" he asked.

She looked for all the world as if she was sulking, feeling sorry for herself.
The Anthropologist: "She's pouting."

He felt a flash of annoyance. He found no charm in human females who pouted, and he was damn sure not about to find it fetching in a demoness.
Sordan: "Demoness? Sigh."

Her. He'd graced her with a gender, when it would be more true to call her a thing. An it. A denizen of Hell, without a drop of mortal blood.
The Chronicler: "More angst. Whole new levels of objectification."

The Anthropologist: "And he's feeling sorry for her because she's hot. And he feels as though he can't control her."

Samira stood motionless at its center, her wings folded behind her, her arms down at her sides. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes glowed with a furious blue intensity as she watched him.
Gods above, what had he gotten himself into? He'd thought he could control this thing.
(The Chronicler notes that his inability to control her stems not from her conscious use of her sexuality or her powers to manipulate him but from him finding her aura of attractiveness hawt.)

"I wanted to speak with you," he said. Down, down, for God's sake, down! She is not the ripest, most luscious piece of fruit you've seen your entire life. No!
The Anthropologist: "I think he's talking to his cock."
Pillywiggin: "It's a cockalogue! Like a monologue but with more cock!"
The Balance: "He's obviously imbued it with consciousness."
Big L: "That'd be the Worst Phylactery Ever."
The Balance: "But you'd only ever take subdual damage on it...*knee to groin*"

The discussion turns to D&D Monk characters who, with ability to use any part of their body as a weapon, can literally cock someone to death.

"You have the book. Touching the page would have allowed that easily enough," she said, her tone betraying no hint of the anger that he could see burning in her eyes.
(The Chronicler: "Lies and deceit. There's the retarded rule about no second visits.")

The Anthropologist: "She refuses to talk to him. Every time he tries to talk to her, he has an inner cockalogue... it's all very slow."

"You cannot keep me here past the dawn," she said archly. "You know, of course, that your spells will not hold me in the daylight."
(The Chronicler: "How the fuck does she know that?")
 
Her cool façade slipped a fraction, and her lips parted, fear and disbelief struggling to show themselves on her features. "You would do that to me?"
(The Chronicler: "Lies. She has no cool facade. We know this from the fact that she has anger burning in her eyes.")

He'd spent a good part of his day lying half-awake in bed, trying to imagine what she might want and how he would be able to give it to her. A virgin he might be, but he had a healthy imagination.
(The Chronicler: "That's really rare. A virgin hero... And he has no imagination. In this setting, succubi do it for you.")

"In exchange for your freedom, I want you to make nightly visits to one man," he said to her. "You can do that, can't you?"
The Anthropologist: "Right, he explains that he's summoned her because he wants to outsource her to another guy."
Big L: "He wants to be her pimp."

He frowned. "Isn't it? Don't you live off the energies of men?"
She fluttered her wings in a shrug, eyes shifting to the side, intimidated by his hard glare. "Many men, never just one." She chanced a glance at him. "And we give such a wonderful gift in exchange."
The Chronicler: "Oh! The fluffy misunderstood succubi!"
Azrael: "They're just the anthromorphic embodiment of wet dreams."

The Anthropologist: "He explains the guy’s theory about impregnating other women, and she's shocked and appalled."

"That's very rare," Samira said, appalled. Was that really what he thought she did? "And only done when the husband's seed is dead and the couple are desperate for a child."
The Chronicler: "How the fuck do they do that with our current set of mechanics?!"
Pillywiggin: "Yes, I'm seeing the light. They are Sex Angels."

She twisted a lock of her nether hair around her finger, tugging gently, then let it slide loose while her fingertips drifted lower still.
Pillywiggin: "O-kay..."
The Balance: "When women are described as playing with their hair whilst they talk, they don't mean..."
Lady Miriam: "Just how long and her pubes?"

"Tell me what this gift is," he said, his voice holding a rough edge.
"It is every dream you have ever had in the night where you were touched and delighted in that touch, where you reached your satisfaction," she purred softly, meeting his gaze once again and half lowering her eyelids. "It is every midnight pleasure—every secret, dreamed delight of your body that brought you to your male release. Those are dreams that were given to you by a succubus."

The Anthropologist: "So the source of his angst is that he's been with a different succubus before, and he's damned. It's all a bit Grunt... A succubus burned my soul to the ground and now I hate all succubi!"
Lady Miriam: "Has not heard the proverb in for a penny in for a pound?"

"You know what I say to be true. All powerful dreams are delivered by the beings of the Night World. Your human dreams are paltry things in comparison, made up of details of your mundane days and your petty concerns. It takes a dream demon to give you something with fire and imagination— something you'll feel, and remember, and that might change the course of your life."
(The Chronicler is increasingly intrigued by this mechanic and its implications.)

She put her hand on her hip in a gesture she had learned from watching humans. "I have lived fifty mortal lifetimes, and more. I have seen more than you will ever hope to learn in your paltry span of days."
(Reader, mark these words, for they will be disproven all too soon.)

The Anthropologist: "Right. He doesn't understand the woes of being a succubus, sorry, Sex Angel, and how great what they do is. He explains that he wants her to kill the man by draining him of life and she is appalled and..."

She shook her head, mute. "You cannot ask me to do this." She might as well die with the dawn, rather than promise to murder a human.

The Anthropologist: "He wants to pimp her out to Dragosh!"
Big L: "Noo! Barrel man himself!"

The Anthropologist: "She asks why because she knows right and wrong..."
"We have our sense of right and wrong, however different it may be from your own," she reproached him. "Whatever your book may have told you, we succubi are not murderers, any more than you humans may be."

The Anthropologist: "He takes off his shirt..."
Big L: "Moobs!"

"Goddess of the Night," Samira swore under her breath. The pink webbed scar that started on his cheek and poured down his neck widened farther still over the left half of his body. His arm was encased in the webbing down to his wrist, although his hand was mercifully unblemished. The scars went down his side, disappearing beneath his hose.
Luca: "He's been attacked by spiderman!"
Big L: "The question is whether or not it goes down to his cock."

The Anthropologist: "Turns out he is a son of Bogdan who was about to marry Lucia. And now she's feeling faint because he's implicitly one of the five guys gangraping Lucia in that dream. She feels a bit creeped out by all this to her credit, but more than that, she is angsting about how it's all her fault."

She understood now what the effect had been of the dream she had given to Dragosh. A war had started because of it, and Nicolae himself had suffered untold agonies when instead he should have been married to Lucia, bedding her and making babies, and keeping two principalities at peace.

Big L: "She just shouldn't tell him."

A crushing emptiness weighed upon her. Her one mortal contact was the one man who would have every reason to hate her. She wished she were human and had tears she could shed to drain away the sorrow.
Sordan: "Oh! I wish I had wrists I could slash!"

The Anthropologist: "She feeds him plot. The reason Dragosh changed mind about the marriage is because Vlad is pulling strings. He doesn't not believe her. He gives a big speech about the politics of Eastern Europe. It sounds like she's actually looked this up in Wikipedia..."

"I can't keep them all straight," Samira complained. "Iancu, Elena, Hungary, Turks…"
(The Chronicler: "Oh! I've lived for three thousand years and I know everything. Surely she should be able to make sense of this from the even more complex politics of Hell.")

The Anthropologist: "His ancestor what a female prophet. And there's curse-prophecy: Cats and dogs will snarl and fight, and misery be their sustenance. Not until a whelp and a kit bear young will lands again be one, and peace and prosperity come to the children of Raveca."

The Anthropologist: "And let's not forget the message the book is hammering home. All the demons more moral and more sexually conservative than humans. Dawn comes. She is freed to got back to demon world and she angsts about how he doesn't care about her being an individual."

Intriguing Rivers of Male Lust and Cathed join the gathering. The plot of the book so far is explained to them and they are made to sniff it as an initiation rite.

Amid all this, Sordan complains that Big L doesn't know how to take care of his nails.

The Anthropologist: "The new chapter opens with her cursing. Many silly curses: Midnight sun and Son of a sun. She's been summoned to appear before Nyx, Queen of the Night"

In the beginning there had been Chaos, and out of Chaos had come Nyx. Darkness was her consort; Death and Sleep were her children. Nyx was the source of all existence in the Night World.
(The Chronicler: "Where does the Christian God fit in all this?"
The Chronicler is also realising one of the problems of the narrative. It uses, or abuses, depending on your point of view, Classical Greek mythology in a medieval Christian setting, without making it clear from the outset such that the reader automatically assumes that she's writing within the medieval Christian setting. Either way mythology rape.)

Samira, like Theron, was one of the Oneiroi: one of the One Thousand Dreams, the demons born of Nyx's son, Sleep. There was a complex hierarchy among the Oneiroi, and different branches of their demon family had different talents, but they were all grandchildren of Nyx.
(The Chronicler: "We're back to raping Greek mythology.")

She was like a sculpture carved from deep space...
The Loinfire Club: Fissicks!

The Anthropologist: "Nyx, understandably doesn't like to hear about demonologists running around. So proposes that she send demons over to destroy the book and wipe his mind."

She cleared her throat. "I said, I don't think that would be fair. To Nicolae. You see…" She trailed off, her courage failing her.
Cathed: "Good to know that demons have such uncompromising moral compasses."

"...So it's really my fault that Nicolae is stuck in a tower reading magic books, and I think I should find a way to help him, instead of just making him forget everything."
(The Chronicler notes that Nicolae isn't actually stuck in the tower reading magic books. But we'll come to that.)

"You what?!" Nyx said, her lips barely moving. [...] "You delivered a dream to a ruling prince? [...] You knew that only Morpheus, Ikelos, and Phantasos are allowed to deliver dreams to rulers. You know the reason: It is to avoid such disasters as you have created."
The Anthropologist: "It appears that only head incubi are allowed to give dreams. Thus by extension, all ruling kings are gay."

Intriguing Rivers of Male Lust: "What?!"
Sordan: "She's the suck kind of succubus."

The Anthropologist: "Why did you break this extremely important but undemonlike rule? Asks Nyx. And Samira says she wasn't thinking. Which is a really stupid response. Nyx doesn't buy it."
Sordan: "She's the only character with more than one braincell."

The Anthropologist: "Nyx has figured out that Samira isn't smart enough to plan all this. Samira doesn't want to rat on Theron..."

"You will make things right for Nicolae of Moldavia. You will learn how fragile a thing is a human life, and how easily harmed. You will learn why it is that we of the Night World serve humanity, and do not play with them as toys."
The Anthropologist: "You see, they're actually just Sex Angels..."

"You will have thirty days, Samira, to discover that which sets the mortals above us, and makes them more precious than any creature of the Night. Thirty days to reverse the damage you have done to Nicolae of Moldavia."
"Isn't it their souls that make them special?" Samira asked.
The Chronicler: "Ah, yes, the souls that you eat. You farm humans for their souls, right?"

"Do not speak to me," Nyx said. "You know nothing of souls or humanity. You know nothing of why the mortals are precious, and why the gods of both the Night and the Day seek to serve and protect them.
Sordan: "This is so retarded."
Big L: "These are not the demons you are looking for."

"Thirty days, Samira. Tell me then why the humans are above us; tell me how you have used that knowledge to help Nicolae; and tell me then who else was involved in this dream you sent to Dragosh.
(The Chronicler: "It's all gone a bit The Little Mermaid.")

Samira screamed in pain, and then felt herself falling, falling, falling…