The Loinfire Library swells...

The Chronicler is delighted (or horrified) to report the latest addition to the Loinfire Library:

Lady of the Upper Kingdom, by Merline Lovelace
Greek Captain, an ignorant warrior, lusts after an Egyptian High Priestess-virgin. The plot decrees that they must marry to unite their two kingdoms!
(Yes, it exists purely to spite you, Anthropologist. The first line of the blurb is "As fast and sleek as a cat.")

Border Bride, by Arnette Lamb
Described by Publisher Weekly as "veering from the ridiculous to the incomprehensible", this book deals with a Scottish Laird and his bride.

The Loinfire Library...

The Sheikh Surgeon's Proposal, by Olivia Gates
How could you possibly resist a handsome boss, playboy surgeon Sheikh Malek Aal Hamdaan, heir to the throne of desert kingdom Damhoor?

Knight of Darkness, by Kinley MacGregor
By the woman who brought you WereHunterWolf: Imagine King Arthur's court in a modern setting, with weredragons and demons serving as knights and the most stupidly overpowered artefacts in the world...

Winter is Past, by Ruth Axtell Morren
Jewish MP hires devout Christian for ailing daughter: conversions and Godgasms ensue.

Virgin Slave, Barbarian King, by Louise Allen
Julia realizes that she's more free as a slave than she ever was as a sheltered Roman virgin.

Warrior or Wife, by Lyn Randal
Lelia the Gladiatrix faces the ultimate choice: independence and the danger of the arena, or an uncertain future with the man she once adored.

The Loinfire Club reads... Come to Me

Come to Me, by Lisa Cach

Samira was the lowliest creature of the Night World: a mere succubus, a winged spirit bringing dreams of passion to sleeping men. She knew every wicked wish that lurked in their hearts, and yet she had never felt the touch of a man's loving hand. Nor had she wanted to… until now.

Shattered by war and banished to a crumbling fortress, Nicolae turned to the dark arts. He planned to use Samira as a tool to find a means to oust the invader from his lands and regain all that he'd lost. When she arrived on his doorstep in human form, his long-sought vengeance was lost.

A creature of the night and a ruined prince: one called and the other came. What happened next would change their worlds forever.


The Loinfire Club is reading “Come to Me,” the book with the virgin succubus. It has been anticipating this for a long time.

The book reeks of gin and tobacco. It came second-hand from the Internet, you see, and the Club could but wonder at its previous owner. Every member is initiated into the Meeting by smelling the book and recoiling the horror. The latter half of that ritual is technically optional.

(The Chronicler could now but apologise that the book really got on her nerves in many ways so there may be more angry asides in brackets than normal.)

The first word Naked had been used to taunt and scare away one of the uninitiated, who remembers that he has a very pressing engagement elsewhere.

The map is mocked for looking like a Stupid Fantasy Map, though it is, in fact, a map of Transylvania. The way the surrounding land is coloured makes it look rather... island-like.

The Balance (who is reading tonight): "Are you all sitting comfortably?"

Maramures, Northern Transylvania, 1423
The Anthropologist: "That sounds familiar. Are there any other novels set in this region?"

Naked and full of mischief, Samira crept onto the bed of the ruling prince of Maramures. She paid no heed to the wench who slept beside him, crawling over the snoring girl as if she did not exist.
(The Chronicler could but note now how in both An Original Sin and in this book, "evil" has been downgraded to "mischief." She ponders at this development.)

The prince, Dragosh, mumbled and twitched in his sleep, as if trying to dislodge a bug from his face.
(Note Dragosh, he's going to be Very Important.)

Samira tilted her head, her long, bloodred hair slithering over her bare shoulders...
The Balance: "Her hair slithers... At least we’ve got a reason. She's a demon, after all. Her hair is allowed to slither."

...her black, leathery wings fluttering once to keep her balanced as she peered into the face of her victim.
The Loinfire Club wonder at the perfect manoeuvrability granted by these wings.

Prince Dragosh had a thick scar across his cheek, and deep creases etched into his square forehead — creases from a lifetime of strife, she guessed.
Pillywiggin: "No one should be etching in one’s forehead. Etching is bad for you."
Luca: "So is being square."
Lady Miriam: "He just looks like Spongebob in my head, now."

Sometimes she thought they cared more about eating than they did about having sex.
(This is a sentence that will later come back to haunt us all. And not in a good way.)

The prince's lips were thin, his skin weather-roughened, his nose a much-broken fist in the center of his broad face.
Sordan: "That has to be a medical complication: his nose being fist."
Pillywiggin: "I'm trying hard to imagine him. A square head, etched and a fist for a nose. You’ll have to draw that, Sordan."

The Anthropologist: "This is going to be quite a world setting, where even professional sex workers, even born sex workers, have an I'm not a Slut complex."
Lady Miriam: "What?"
The Anthropologist: "The heroine is a virgin succubus. We found this out from the blurb."
Lady Miriam: "I thought you don't get to be a succubus until you have sex. Until then, you're just a 'bus."
The Anthropologist: "Well, she mind rapes them, not physically rapes them."

The Anthropologist: "Is she a fluffer? I seem to remember that from the other blurb we read."
Lady Miriam: "What?"
The Anthropologist: "She keeps men busy before the Important Demons can come eat their souls."
The Chronicler: "I'm not sure..."

The Anthropologist: "Are we supposed to find this person [Dragosh] attractive? Or is she having angst that she’s required to mind rape ugly men?"

Drool dribbled from the corner of the wench's parted lips, and a thin film coated her exposed teeth. Samira shuddered and moved her wing away from the girl's gaping maw. If this was the best that Maramures had to offer in the way of nubile young beauties, Dragosh had her sympathy.
Big L: "Maybe he has a thing for ugly women."
The Chronicler: "All beauty is objective, remember?"

Big L: "Are there going to be incubi?"
The Anthropologist: "It could be working on the D&D supplement where there are six different species of succubi but only one mention of incubi in the entire book."

She turned her attention back to the nymph-deprived prince.
The Anthropologist: "Is that like a sort of nutritional problem? Imagine going up to your doctor who says, We've done some tests and we find that you've got an nymph-deficiency..."
Lady Miriam: "It could be a House plot."
Big L: "It's not Lupus... it's Nymph deprivation."

A fanning of lines spread from the corner of each of his eyes, speaking of hours spent squinting into the sunlight, surveying the field of battle and happily counting the bodies of the slain.
The Anthropologist: "You'd think if he'd won the battle he'd know better than not to stand squinting into the sunlight."

Dragosh was a strong ruler, she guessed. Fair. Hard. Which meant a lot of people probably hated him. Such was the perversity of humanity.
(The Chronicler wonders if that is a subtle jibe at those who dislike President Bush and other such unpopular "hard" figures of authority. Also considering the rebellion against God, one of the usual backstories of such night gribblies, it seems a bit odd.)

The Anthropologist: "It sounds like she's really bored, theorising his life with some bizarre branch of physiognomy. As though she's forced to stare at the same corner of the ceiling for a long time and trying really hard to find it interesting."

Samira looked back over her shoulder at her friend Theron, standing by the door to the prince's chamber. He was an incubus, a male dream demon who existed only to give dreams of sex to frustrated mortal women. Samira was a succubus, and gave such dreams to sex-deprived men. They were both demons of the Night World, winged beings who gave sexual fantasies—and sexual nightmares, when warranted—to dreaming mortals.

Pillywiggin: "Isn't there another series of books called Night Word?"
None of the members of the Loinfire Club recall the books, (but the Wikimobile proves it's existence.)

The Anthropologist: "Wait... are all the demons homophobic? Because that would basically make them more conservative than normal humans, which just isn't right."
The Chronicler: "She's just the BFG but with more sex."

The fantasies were fun, and the nightmares even more so. Samira's nightmares were a punishment to men who had behaved badly: men who ogled women's breasts while talking to them; who made rude remarks about the size and lumpiness of their wife's buttocks; who thought foreplay was for sissies; who passed gas in bed. The list of tiresome male failings was endless, and Samira's inventiveness legendary amongst other succubi. She had a natural flare for female vengeance, and enjoyed it if only because she was good at it.

The Anthropologist: "So the demons job is to enforce greater degree of sexual conservativeness, thoughtfulness and decency... that doesn't sound like the way it's meant to work."
Sordan: "Fail!Demons."
The Anthropologist: "It sounds like they were originally meant to be sex angels, policing the world of human sexuality but the editors thought that was a bit too... weird."

The Loinfire Club also notes the angry misandrist undertones to that speech. And the triviality of the crimes. And that rape, the greatest of all sexual sins, isn't listed... which is especially pertinent considering the later actions of the hero and how he is curiously nightmare-free.

Dragosh, however, had done nothing wrong recently. Nothing that called for a sharp slap on his nose—
The Anthropologist: "That's the shittest demon punishment ever. I've come to torment you and..."
Sordan: "Bitchslap!"

...unless Samira counted finishing first when he'd made love to the wench, and then falling asleep on top of her. A crime, yes, but so common among men as to go without remark.
Big L: "Which is clearly a lesser crime than farting in bed."
The Anthropologist: "It's good to know that sex demons are relativist in these things."

The sheer amount of random misandry gives rise to Random Sexism as a new category for The Club to drink for.

No, Theron had asked Samira to deliver this nightmare to Dragosh as a favor to him, to fulfill his end of an outrageous bargain he had made with a human named Vlad.
Some would say that it had been a bargain made with the Devil, but Theron wasn't the Devil.
The distinction between Devils and Demons intrigues the Club, but the author is silent on the subject.

And delivering this nightmare meant breaking half a dozen rules of the Night World.
The Balance: "This sounds like possible future angst."

It was just another nightmare, after all. How much harm could it do? Dragosh had probably done something to deserve it.
The Anthropologist: "Apart from having a fist for a nose."
Big L: "I'm sure there'll be a fisting joke soon."
The Anthropologist: "The fist-nose could be a sort of alarm-system in case people attack him in his sleep. He doesn’t have to wake up; It just punches people. Which would explain why none of the pretty women would sleep with him since they get punched."
Lady Miriam: "Or many he's simply headbutted so many people his head has become a fist."

No man was innocent. She ought to punish them all just as a matter of course.
More drinks to random sexism.
The Anthropologist: "That's quite interesting radical feminism coming from a virgin succubus."
(The Chronicler notes, in retrospect, this looks a lot like the All Men Are Bastards belief many heroines adhere to before the hero appears.)

Samira climbed atop Dragosh's barrel chest, squatting weightless upon his rising and falling rib cage.
Big L: "Dear God, is there anything about this guy who isn't horribly malformed?!"
(The Chronicler points out the author naively not understanding the connotations of the term hagridden, the Balance suggests it's just part of the author's attempt to desexualise the succubus... but we'll come to all that later.)

The prince's latent sexual energy was feeding her powers and rousing an echo of his hungers within her ethereal body. She had no physical desires of her own, and only felt lust when she reflected it back from a man.
Big L: "O rly?"
Sordan: "Not a slut!"
Pillywiggin: "I’m not sure what that’s worth drinking for, but I’m drinking anyway."

The Anthropologist: "Essentially when she does have sexual fantasies they’re transsexual ones... her sexual identity must be really screwed up. She'll either identify as asexual or a man."

A jumble of images and emotions washed through her. Faces of men: worry; anger; distrust. The face of a young girl, tawny-haired: love; protectiveness. The vicious chaos of battle, Turkish armies in their foreign garb, with bloodstained spears and swords: fury; fear; bloodlust; determination. Peasant farmers in their tunics, bent in the fields: approval; paternal concern.
Pillywiggin: "He’s thinking very quickly."

The greatest enemy of Dragosh's family, the black-haired Bogdan of Moldavia: distrust; grudging respect; anxiety.
Big L: "Damn you BOGDAN!"
(The Wikimobile tells us that Bogdan of Maldavia did actually exist...)

These were the echoes of the prince's thoughts, the impressions of his days, the bits and pieces of his history.
Pillywiggin: "Why isn't he dreaming of a giant codpiece chasing him down an endless corridor? People dream of random shit..."

Again, and even more strongly, Samira sensed the tawny-haired girl. She knew already, from Theron, that this was Dragosh's youngest sister, Lucia, [...] Samira sensed Lucia's purity in Dragosh's mind. Innocence.
The Loinfire Club: "Eeeeeew!"
Big L: "I see where this is going. And it's not good."
The Anthropologist: "Is the fist-nose on the Y chromosome? I keep getting mental images of this beautiful supermodel with tawny hair and that face..."

A deep love and pride in Dragosh, that this fragile angel among mortals should be his responsibility to protect and cherish, to keep untouched by the foul, lewd hands of other men.
The Balance: "Dodgy... dodgy... "
Sordan: "No one else can rape my younger sister! Only I can!"

Talk turns to Cao Dai in a bizarre tangent and the matter of Victor Hugo being their saint.

From those inner emotions and images she began to weave the requested nightmare: Dragosh's beloved sister, the innocent, tawny-haired Lucia, was standing on a table in the great hall of the despised Prince Bogdan of Moldavia. She wore only a thin sleeping shift.

Big L (who had briefly left the room): "Are they still describing the sister in loving detail?"
The Anthropologist: "No, we've moved on. Now we're about to have rape."

Bogdan's five sons sat around the table. [...] dressed them in the colors of Moldavia, with the silhouette of a wolf on the shoulder. The wolf—it was the symbol of the ancient Dacian race from which they claimed descent, which had inhabited Moldavian lands for millennia.
The Chronicler: "Gang rape, no less."

Samira made the dream Lucia quiver at being the center of such crude male appraisal. The girl shivered in the cold, her nipples hardening, their points visible through the thin linen of her garment...
Sordan: "Boobs!"
The Anthropologist: "I think we need a subcategory for nipples."

She tried to cover herself with her arms, but the movement caused her shift to fall off her shoulder.
The Anthropologist: "That's a very badly fitting shift."
The Balance: "Well, it is a dream shift."
The Anthropologist: "Well, you shouldn't trust succubus labour. No outsourcing for you!"

Her hair draped against her cheek as she bent her head forward, leaving the back of her neck exposed.
Lady Miriam: "Maybe they’re vampires."
Sordan: "There's not much blood in the back of the neck."
Pillywiggin: "They're spine fluid vampires!"

He tried not to look directly at Lucia, her blatant sexuality touching on a deep taboo within him.
The Anthropologist: "Her blatant sexuality as a rape victim!"
(The Chronicler notes that his association with pure innocence and blatant sexuality comes through in other parts of this narrative, but we'll get to the distressing Lolita problems of this book later.)

She was his sister. His little sister.
The Loinfire Club: "Eeew!"
Pillywiggin: "However, the correct response."

As far as he was concerned, she was a blank doll beneath her clothes.
The Anthropologist: "That's even more freaky!"

She did not have the body parts of a normal woman, and certainly none of the desires.
Pillywiggin: "No, actually she’s a man!"

Samira watched Dragosh's reaction with amusement. He was bothered that it was his Moldavian enemies who surrounded Lucia, but even more disturbed by seeing his innocent sister in a sexual situation.
The Anthropologist: "I'm not getting over the blatant sexuality of a teenage girl about to be raped..."
Luca: "Didn't she get this out of his mind earlier?"
Sordan: "She's seducing him in his mind using his virgin younger sister?!"

A soft cry of distress escaped from deep within Dragosh's throat.
Big L: "I'd be disturbed."

...but Samira was suddenly inspired by Dragosh's reaction to watching his sister...
Big L: "You’d think she as a succubus has lots of experience with gangrape."
The Chronicler: "Not Virgin succubi."

She decided to throw in a little extra torture for him, via Lucia herself. This could be fun.
Lady Miriam: "Still, good sadism."

Samira made the dream Lucia toss back her tawny lioness hair...
The Loinfire Club break off into a discussion of what colour 'tawny' is exactly...

...a salacious glint in her eye, a hungry grin forming on her soft lips.
Sordan: "Now she’s going to be gangraped and enjoy it?"
Pillywiggin: "Pass the gin..." (whimpering in a way that implies something about the previous chain-smoking, gin drinking, previous owner of the book and this section of the chapter)

The Anthropologist: "It’s the level of wrongness that you get during a fumble in a Mary Sue roleplay game, not the first scene of a romance novel. I'm not sure that reflects well on us, though..."

Dragosh gasped, his body going tense. "No, no, no, no!" he scolded, and loudly clapped his hands together, as if startling a cat away from a bowl of cream.
The Anthropologist: "Scolded?"
Sordan: "I'm getting a mental image of the a sort of Bad Kitty scolding... not really extreme enough for this scene, is it?"
The Anthropologist: "No, Lucia. We’ve discussed this already. No more crazy orgies or else you're grounded..."

Lucia gave as much heed as would a hungry feline.
Chimes of μ are heard around the room for the catgirl reference.

At this point Lady Miriam attempted to beat Pillywiggin to death with empty chocolate biscuit packet.

The other Moldavian in front of her offered up his goblet, his eyes lightening to the golden tone of a wolfs.
The Anthropologist: "Is it often for gangrapist's eyes to change colour?"
The Balance: "Well, it is a dream..."
The Anthropologist: "But it’s still a very odd detail."
The Balance: "Probably more hinting to him that they're werewolves."

"Drink! Drink! Drink!" his brothers growled, their sharp teeth shining, the thud of their own goblets on the table a drumbeat that matched the beating of Dragosh's frantic heart.
The Anthropologist: "They have a drinking ritual strongly resembling that of my sixth form college? That just makes it even more disturbing."

She was smiling wickedly, her eyes shining. "They rut like beasts, too! They're animals, and hung like—"
The Balance: "Hung like hyphens, it would seem..."
Sordan: "Now they’re hung like Harry Potter."

Dragosh gave an unmanly shriek.
The Anthropologist: "Also known as a girly scream."

"Hung like bulls. [...]And they have tongues like dogs."
"Tongues?" Dragosh asked, startled, momentarily confused. "What of their tongues?"
The Anthropologist: "Ah, it's because he’s only had mediocre sex. That makes him evil."

"They lick me, lick me, lick—"
Big L: "There are far too many hyphens."
The Anthropologist: "Does she have a fetish for repeating the same word?"
Big L: "But the poor hyphens! Think of the poor hyphens!"

Samira held him helpless, leaving him only the power of his voice. "Lucia! You don't like being touched! You're a virgin!"
Lady Miriam: "How does he know?"
Big L: "Because she doesn't like being touched by him."

then slid his long fingers into the dark, damp place between her thighs.
The Chronicler: "Sounds really unpleasant... dark and damp..."
The Anthropologist: "Like something under a log."
Big L: "I wonder if there are woodlice."

This was his sister—his sister!—engaging in sexual acts...
Lady Miriam: "With someone else!"

"You gave me to them, and now I'm their whore," she said. "Thank you, brother, for I have sinned!"
(The Chronicler: "She's getting paid?")

Another Moldavian prince lifted Lucia, straightening out her legs and then laying her back upon the table, the backs of his hands becoming coated with dark fur, his nails turning into claws.
Sordan: "She's about to be raped by wolves now!"

He shoved her shift up past her hips, exposing the dark golden curls of her sex.
Pillywiggin: "But her hair is tawny!"
The Anthropologist: "So she doesn't match."
Pillywiggin: "Damn artificial tawnies."
The Balance: "Or artificial dark golden. We just don't know."

The hair on his face seemed suddenly heavier, his ears growing pointed, his features transforming into something half canine.
The Anthropologist: "Why does it make it worse that she’s having an orgy with werewolves?"
The Balance: "Well it does."

His body tried to rise...
Sordan: "Dodgy comment!"

but he was paralyzed by the bonds of sleep, and by Samira perched upon his chest, holding him in dream thrall.
The Chronicler: "Like being hagridden..."

Lucia cried out in pleasure, the fur-covered hands of the enemy princes slowly pulling her legs open yet wider...
Sordan: "How far do her legs go?"
The Anthropologist: "She’s a professional gymnast."

The prince between her legs latched his lips tightly to her sex, sucking and licking, shoving his face at her with a force to rock her hips and make her breasts sway with the movement.
The Anthropologist: "Don't her breasts have a werewolf on them? Doesn't that impede them somewhat from?"

Dragosh's entire body stiffened with revulsion
The Balance: "Note: his entire body."
Big L: "Is this one of those bizarrely inexplicit ones, where it just says 'sex' and we might never find out what gender these characters are."

...repulsed as much by seeing his pure-hearted sister in sexual acts...
The Anthropologist: "Sexual acts.... That keeps coming up. It's so very vague..."

She parted her thighs wider, and lifted her hips to meet the mouth and hand of the other prince.
Sordan: "She opens her legs wider... I’m sure they’re going to snap soon."

An impossible, nightmare-sized erection, brilliant red, emerged from the pelt at his loins and stood stiff and ready.
Pillywiggin: "Exactly how large is impossible?"
The Balance: "Bull-sized."
Pillywiggin: "You can make walking sticks out of bull cocks."
The Anthropologist: "Just because you can doesn’t mean you should."
The Balance: "What? Where?"
The Anthropologist: "Tourist shops in this country. It's the logical conclusion to postcards with dirty pictures on them and the like."

"They're wolves," Lucia said to her brother, grinning, her eyes glowing, the pupils turning into vertical slashes like those of a cat.
The Balance: "She’s turning into a catgirl!"
Pillywiggin: "Oh no! My sister is turning into a furry!"

"Dacian wolves. We're cats and dogs, and oh! how we snarl and fight!"
The Anthropologist: "Does it make it more beastiality-ness if they’re different animals? Beastiality squared, you know."
Big L: "And exactly how much cat does there need to be until they're not longer catgirls fucking dogpeople but cats fucking dogs?"
Lady Miriam: "Why do you need to know? Are you desperate for a computer model?"

The wench beside him stirred and opened her eyes, blinking somnolently at the dark room, then with eyes still full of dreams she made out the winged shape of Samira perched atop Dragosh. The wench shrieked as if the gates of Hell had opened before her.
Sordan: "These demons aren't scary enough to merit that sort of reaction."
The Anthropologist: "She's just woken up so she could be imagining she's seeing something interesting."

The dream shattered, all images falling away into the night, their shards leaving deep gouges on Dragosh's soul.
The Balance: "Plotpoint."

...perhaps even see a beat of black wing or a brief glow of blue eyes.
The Chronicler: "That must clash with the blood red hair."
Pillywiggin: "Mary Sue!"

...his bare feet as bony and white as a skeleton's against the stone floor.
The Anthropologist: "He now has skeleton feet. And the barrel chest. And the fist nose...."
Lady Miriam: "He's a better demon than she is!"

He ignored their queries, running naked down the shadowed corridor, his flabby buttocks quivering with each slap of his feet upon the floor.
Big L: "You’ll have to draw them... they look like really bad wings."
Sordan: "Ass wings! I pray he’s not actually going to be the hero. Because we'll have a description of his hyphen. And that can't be a pleasant mental image."

Samira peeked into the doorway over his shoulder, and with her perfect night vision she made out the slumbering form of a young woman...
The Chronicler: "Is he going to rape his sister now?"
The Anthropologist: "That would be hilarious."

...a girl, really, no more perhaps than fourteen human years of age.
Big L: "Hoh yeeaah!"
The Anthropologist: "So it's paedophilic as well!"
Pillywiggin: "Human years? What other sort of years are there?"

The browned-honey tangle of hair on the pillow told her that this was Lucia.
The Chronicler: "It’s honeyed now...
The Anthropologist: "The problem of honey and caramel is that I associate it too much with stickiness so they just have masses of sticky mess..."

He now believed the wickedness of Eve to be a seed within her, awaiting the chance to sprout and grow.
Pillywiggin: "Medical complication! That's a parasite."
(The Chronicler could but wonder at why the wickedness of Eve was promiscuity and what exactly the snake did to the first woman. Admittedly, medieval theology does have all sort of interesting interpretations on this front, but still...)

He was certain that a nymphomaniac lurked inside her, awaiting the chance to break free and rut with beasts and Moldavians.
Pillywiggin: "He's nymph-deprived; she's a nymph. That's a match, right?"
The Balance: "She's not one, it’s in her."
Sordan: "It'll eat it's way out of her, like in Alien."

The Chronicler: "How is she making life better for women? Considering how all the crimes she punishes in her job as being the upholder of sexual decency has a bizarre feminist twist..."
Sordan: "She only saves women from mediocre sex. And having their boobs gawked at. And farting in bed."

The aging prince turned away from the doorway, and with glazed, sightless eyes walked slowly back down the corridor toward his own room.
The Balance: "He's gone blind."
The Anthropologist: "It is possible to gain psychosomatic blindness in the Call of Cthulhu RPG."
The Balance: "He has just taken a massive sanity drain..."

His movements were stiff, as if he were made of wood, and the dry skin of his soles rasped against the stone floor as he shuffled along
The Balance: "Being made of wood is a medical complication, right?"
The Anthropologist: "If I was one of his guards. I’d be serious alarmed... Or maybe their lack of alarm means that he does this every night. At around three in the morning he'll run naked to his sister's room and she lies there pretending to be asleep, hoping he'll go away. At first the guards were a bit concerned, but now it's just a matter of course."

A whisper of human regret pierced Samira where her heart should have been.
The Anthropologist: "No! You're a demon, remember?"

It had been as if Lucia were the chalice that held what remained of his own innocence, his own belief in what was good and right. Now that chalice had been spilled.
Sordan: "I think the complex metaphor is beyond me."
Lady Miriam: "I think it's beyond her."

At this point in time, the Chronicler and the Anthropologist exchange notes about the article about Settling and a recent Feminist Mormon Housewives on being "invisible" and Christlike.

Every time he looked at Lucia now, he would see the wolflike sons of Bogdan lapping at her breasts, pulling at her clothes, and her ecstatic acceptance of their touch.
Pillywiggin: "Damn you! Wolflike sons of Bogdan!"
The Balance: "It's not a bad battlecry... I AM the wolflike son of Bogdan!"
Big L: "Sounds too much like Hammer of Bogardan, the Magic the Gathering card."

Samira wondered what frightful changes might happen in Dragosh himself, now that she had destroyed the one pure place in his heart.
The Balance and Big L: "My purelands have been violated!"

She was surprised by her concern, her own sudden sense of guilt. It wasn't her way to feel such things. It wasn't any succubus's way.
The Anthropologist: "Why does she have a capacity for guilt?"
Sordan: "Because she's a fail!succubus."

Then again, neither was it Samira's way to break the rules of the Night World.
The Chronicler: "What are the rules of Night World?"
Lady Miriam: "First rule of Night World.: You do not talk about Night World. Second rule of the Night World: you do not talk about the Night World. Third rule of the Night World..."
The Anthropologist: "You do not write retarded books about Night World."

She looked up at him, a question burning inside her. Was Theron's bargain worth the price they had just made Dragosh pay?
Pillywiggin: "Yes. You're a demon."

Theron touched her hair, his long, strong fingers combing through a silken red lock, and then he let his hand rest heavily on her bare shoulder. He had never touched her before.
The Chronicler: "I thought she was incorporeal."
Lady Miriam: "She's never touched by an Incubus before?"

She felt his [Theron's] sexual power coursing through his hand, setting off involuntary responses in her body that were echoes of the responses he had roused in thousands of sleeping women throughout the centuries.
The Anthropologist: "It's just a business thing. Nothing personal. Unfortunate side effect of the job."

Samira shivered, aware of what Nyx, the Queen of the Night, might do...
Sordan: "Nyx!"
Lady Miriam: "She's murdering a perfectly decent goddess' reputation."

Samira's shoulder stung where he had touched her, seared by the unexpected power in his hand, even as her sex throbbed in the shadow of stolen mortal desire.
The Anthropologist: "She allergic to Incubi."
Lady Miriam: "Or she's allergic to sex. Must be really unfortunate in that line of work. A bit like discovering you're allergic to latex last minute..."

She was eager to be away from both Theron and the scene of this misdeed, as if by escaping both she could forget it had ever happened; forget that she had spoiled the protective love of a brother for his innocent sister; forget that she had driven him half mad, and seared images into his memory that he would never be able to forget...
Sordan: "Demons aren't allowed to have angst."
Pillywiggin: "So just eat his soul."
The Anthropologist: "This is where she goes up to him and says 'If you give me your soul, I'll make sure it never happens again.'"

Theron stood on the threshold of Lucia's doorway, his glowing eyes gazing intently upon the sleeping, innocent princess of Maramures.
Big L: "Hoh yeeaah!"

And with that, the prologue closes...

Come to Me, continues, part two

Chapter One...
Sordan: "We went through all that pain and it’s not chapter one yet?!"

The picture of Dragosh is passed around. There is much giggling.

Six years later...
Big L: "So the guy’s ass is even more saggy, now..."
This unpleasant mental image elicits more giggling.

Samira flew above the earth, its landscape a shifting panorama of blacks and grays, formed by the minds of dreaming mortal men.
The Loinfire Club commends the author on her conception of the shifting dreamscape. It is quite cool.
The Anthropologist: "Though they people of this kingdom are really well-adjusted if that's all they dream about. Or maybe it's a sign of them being all mundanely insane."

...it was a thrum, a vibration in the night that belonged to a single sleeping man...
Sordan: "He's vibrating in the night."

Her body hummed in response, a faint tingling pleasure vibrating through her, luring her toward this drowsing male who needed release in the form of a sex dream.
The Loinfire Club hums in response.

This was the main work of a succubus: giving sexual release to sleeping men through their dreams.
The Anthropologist: "So, hang on. Does she have different shifts, some of which she’s the punishment and some of which do wet dreams? Or does she do both at the same time? And how does she know if those who are sexually frustrated haven't sinned? This system..."
Big L: "Well, there's a big bag of armbands, some of which are green and some are purple. At the beginning of each night, they each pick..."

She had no existence apart from this work; no solid body on the plane of mortals, no lover in the Night World. She had no home or close family, no talents or skills beyond weaving dreams. Up until six years ago, that had suited her perfectly.
The Anthropologist: " You're a demon!"
Sordan: "Fail!demon! Wangst!"
(The Chronicler observes that this angst is very much like the Independent Working Woman Angst in contemporary romances.)

Lately, though, a bleak and depressive mood would sometimes steal over her.
Lady Miriam: "She hit puberty."

She would wonder— absurdly!—whether she was nothing more than a shadow of the mortals she visited; a poor imitation, making up stories for their entertainment, and pretending to herself that those stories were real. As if, somehow, telling stories could be the equivalent of living a true and mortal life.
Big L: "Wait a minute... She's a larper!"
The Anthropologist: "No, she's a romance novel author."
The Chronicler: "Can you smell self-insertion?"
(The Balance later points out that it's absurd for an incorporeal creature to lament that she doesn't have a corporeal existence. It's much like a corporeal creature thinking they're missing out by not being able to "feel" the Night World, especially as the denizens of the Night World are perfectly capable of interacting with each other. The author is physical-centric.)

As if a mortal life was something worth living! She was not like Theron, who wanted such a thing.
The Anthropologist: "He's even more fail! I was hoping he'd be the sensible actually demonic one."

Humans lived but a fleeting moment, the space between their birth and death no more than the duration of a sigh, and that sigh filled with mud, cold, fleas, disease, and great puddles of bodily fluids that Samira shuddered even to think about.
The Chronicler: "She's as squeamish as Satan from last week."
Sordan: "Fail!demon."

Humans were cruel and greedy and violent, and not half so beautiful as the creatures of Night.
Pillywiggin: "But they're demons!"
Sordan: "Why are these demons so morally superior?"
Big L: "She didn't read her brief properly."
The Anthropologist: "Which is why I suspect they used to be sex angels."

It was foolish of her to feel even a moment of envy for mortal creatures. And she didn't. Not for a moment!
The Anthropologist: "Obviously not, since she's not schizophrenic."

Who would it be this time? [...] An adolescent boy [...] Maybe a long-married man with a brood of children and an exhausted wife. Or perhaps it was a shepherd alone in the hills, far from his maiden fair.
Big L: "With only his sheep..."

Making up stories about sleeping men was about the only thing that still kept her interested in her work.
The Anthropologist: "That must suck. If you’re a sex worker and that’s all you can think about is your work."

Making up stories about sleeping men was about the only thing that still kept her interested in her work. Ever since that night she'd given the nightmare to Dragosh, nothing had been the same for her. She was no longer a virtuoso of vengeance. She'd lost her taste for the delivery of nightmares.
Lady Miriam: "I'm not sure she ever was a virtuoso of vengeance."
Sordan: "To be fair, if you did it every night. Boredom is a possibility."
Pillywiggin: "But she's a demon."

And what could she do about who she was now? She was a succubus. She could be nothing else. There was no escape from the Night World, for either her or for Theron.
Sordan: "Why do I think the rest of the book is going to contradict that paragraph?"

Better to chase intriguing rivers of male lust...
Lady Miriam: "That’s an Exalted name."

Change. A different life. A different world. A different her.
The Anthropologist: "Demon!"

You're just bored, she told herself. You'll snap out of it in a couple hundred years.
Sordan: "She's talking to herself."
Big L: "It's an italics monologue. That's much worse."
The Anthropologist: "It'd be among the first questions psychiatrist in these books would ask: How have you been feeling lately? Your monologues... Have they been in italics?"

She hovered where she was for a long moment, the forest of dream trees beneath her shifting from full leaf to winter bare to autumn yellows and oranges as dreamers dreamt scenes within it. The sky above filled with dark gray clouds, as thick as wool, and then parted again to let through streamers of moonlight and a twinkle of distant stars.
As said, the Loinfire Club does think the Dreamscape is quite cool.

A frown between her reddish brows...
The Anthropologist: "Has she dyed her hair?"
Sordan: "Reddish is such a nasty colour..."

There was a flavor to this sexual thrum...
Lady Miriam: "Sound effect please."
Pillywiggin thrummed the guitar behind her.

After three millennia of exploring the minds of men, all their sexual thoughts, their fantasies, she had seen it all. She hadn't come across anything truly new for at least five hundred years. The hopes were always the same, year after year, culture after culture...
Sordan: "Eeeeww! It's as though her brain contained the entire Internet..."
The Chronicler: "No. It'll just be endless vanilla sex."

Making love to a wife's best friend or her sister, or to the big-breasted woman who once passed in the street. Being ravished by an eager young wench, who could only be satisfied by his impressive manroot.
The Chronicler: "Manroot?!"
Big L: "Hoh yeeaah!"

Two women at once, pleasuring each other and the man with equal passion. Thrashing bare bottoms with a switch. Being thrashed in return, while wearing the wife's favorite chemise.
The Chronicler: "I stand corrected. She's done some research."
Big L: "If she had entire Internet she'd think of worse things."
Lady Miriam: "Well, those things were on paysites and she didn't think she needed to do that much research."

The Balance: "But Culture had not changed for five hundred years. For five hundred years, everything has been the same... all cultures, everywhere, in all times... the same desires..."
The Anthropologist makes many distressed noises.

She was overdue for finding something new.
The Anthropologist: "She was debating to herself if she wants to move into Paedophilia, which is dealt in a different demon department."
Sordan: "But they do. There was that fourteen year old."
The Anthropologist: "But she has breasts. In some cultures they have different values. Except for this time, of course."

She was repeating herself too much, often being so lazy as to simply give a man satisfaction with nothing more than a dream handjob.
Lady Miriam: "She's become the demon of mediocre sex."

The only time she felt her old enthusiasm rising up was when she came across a sleeping man who was deeply in love, and who needed nothing more than a dream of holding his beloved close in his arms and making love to her tenderly.
Lady Miriam: "She wants the girlfriend experience. Instead she wants to do the faking being his girlfriend..."

For that, she still took time and care, and would feel within her a shimmering of emotion that she could not name.
The Anthropologist: "Creepy mind rape."

In truth, she didn't understand love, except when it came as an intense sexual yearning. That she understood and could feel as she reflected it back to a man.
The Anthropologist: "Which as we said should make her gender confused. For all she knows women are functionally asexual."

Something inside her whispered that love might be more than that, though. It might hold treasures of which she was utterly unaware, and which she could never know.
(The Chronicler notes that that's the love not appearing in this book, especially as romance novels have a long history of using sexual desire as shorthand for deep romantic love... but we'll come to that. It's in here too.)

It made her want to weep, if only she was capable of it. Succubi had no tears, though, nor a heart to break.
Sordan: "Oh! The angst!"
Hands are duly stapled to foreheads.
Pillywiggin: "That's definitely a medical complication."
The Balance: "How are her eyeballs are not drying up and falling out?"
The Anthropologist: "That's why she’s so angsty. You would you be that way if your eyeballs are about to fall out constantly."

But maybe, after so many centuries of playing in the minds of mortals, she had become infected by their emotions. Maybe part of her was turning slightly human. Humanity might be contagious, like the plague.
Sordan: "If she were to turn human, it would raise the suck level of humanity."

She wasn't sure if that was an encouraging thought or a repulsive one.
Thankfully, the Loinfire Club are quite sure.
Big L: "We don't want to be the same species as her."

...tantalizing, unique thrum of male desire she was following, should not be passed by for so paltry a reason as fear...
Thrum! goes the guitar.

The thrum of desire from the unknown man was beginning to attract other succubi...
Thrum! goes the guitar again.

One, a blonde, approached too close to the stream of desire, and Samira bared her teeth, hissing, asserting her ownership.
Lady Miriam: "My desperate male! Fuck off!"

The blonde bared her teeth back, hissing in return, but then gave way, flapping off into the darkness, tossing her hair back over her shoulder with a pout and a glare.
The Anthropologist: "There should be a David Attenborough documentary on this... Hunting across the plains. We see the succubi in their native enviroment engaged in territoral combat..."
(She continues to narrate the rest of the scene in a David Attenborough voice.)
Lady Miriam: "Oh the corsets!"

Samira made a face at her, feeling disappointed. The coward. A territorial bat fight would have been fun.
Pillywiggin: "Bat fight?"
Lady Miriam: "They just throw bats at each other."
Big L: "Or they just scream since no one is Immune to Sonic."

The warning sounded yet again in Samira's mind, chasing a shiver down her spine. Something truly wasn't right about this thrum. Something wasn't natural.
Lady Miriam: "It needs tuning."

Three millennia of experience were telling her to slow down, to be cautious.
Pillywiggin: "She's been this stupid for as 3000 years?!"

Curiosity and the deliciously strong desire of the sleeping man lured her forward, regardless. Common sense fled, and she happily waved it good-bye. Boring old common sense. What use had she for it?
Luca: "Common sense twitched and then died."
The Anthropologist: "A demonhunter could just keep a horny teenage boy in a cage covered in fly paper to catch these things, you know, because they're as sophisticated as flies..."

She slipped out of the charcoal landscape of the Night World and emerged into the nighttime landscape of mortal men—the plane of the Waking World, they of the night called it.
This confuses some of the members of the Loinfire Club due to the drink the previous chapter had driven them to.
The Anthropologist: "But it's not the waking world... they're all asleep!"
Lady Miriam: "I want to be in the Drinking World."

Everything was real, everything was solid, and now she herself was the one who was not, and she could not be seen by waking eyes.
The Anthropologist: "Except we just broke that in the prologue."
Sordan: "I think the girl was half asleep..."
Big L: "Or she can only be seen if she's reflected in drool."
Sordan: "Or man-lust."
Big L: "Same thing."

A fragile wooden walkway led from the bank out across the dark water to an island. [...]As she approached the island, she made out the thick walls of a ruined fortified monastery, originally built for protection from invading Tartars and Turks. What was left of the brutal low outer walls was punctuated by two remaining stubby towers...
Big L: "How can you have a brutal low wall?"
The Anthropologist: "If you’re gnome..."

A massive square spire rose from one end, miraculously still standing, tall and strong. The spire dwarfed the outer protecting walls, thrusting upward like a spear, its roof a tall, tapering pyramid covered in red tile...
Pillywiggin: "Like a giant hyphen."
The Balance: "So a cock spire."
Sordan: "Why are these books so full of phallic architecture?"
The Anthropologist: "I'm just trying to imagine what the architect's pitch was like: Our new models are 50% more phallic than our competitors and 25% more phallic than our previous models... "

...the peak stabbing the night sky like a bloody blade that had pierced the belly of the moon.
The Anthropologist: "Is this what God was complaining about with Tower of Babel. Because now I can totally see his side of the issue and why I never want anyone to try that again..."
Pillywiggin: "There's a cock in my floor."
Big L: "Or maybe they're just scarred by what they saw through God's floor..."
Lady Miriam: "When they say we should never speak of this again..."

Samira flew up toward the windows, and then alit on a sill, her hands clinging to the stonework
Sordan: "But she's incorporeal..."
Pillywiggin: "She can touch anything that is actually a penis."

A shiver of anticipation ran through Samira, the last vestiges of rational thought flickering and dying under the pull of the unknown man's desire. [...]When nothing threatening appeared, she folded back her wings and inched through the opening scrabbling along like the demon she was...
Sordan: "The demon she barely was."
Luca: "The demon she wasn't."

She could have passed straight through the wall itself if she had so desired, but such passages through solid matter were painful and tiring for succubi.
Sordan: "AKA I want to have power but I don't want it to fuck up the plot."

A massive table dominated the room...
The Anthropologist: "Table fetish! Do we have a category for that?"
The Balance: "You need to learn to generalise. Sometimes it's all the same thing..."

The dark-haired man slept with his arm sprawled across one of the open books on the table, his face resting on his white sleeve, his black hair concealing all but a pale triangle of forehead from her view.
Pillywiggin: "What?"
The Anthropologist: "It's a freemason thing."

There is some discussion as to what this insight into the hero's appearance means, concluding with:
Sordan: "He looks like a hick, basically."

The Anthropologist: "You should never, ever fall asleep over a demonology book. Only bad things could happen. Especially if you drool on it."

His other arm was drawn up close to his body, resting atop his thighs under the table.
The Balance: "Implied masturbation."
The Chronicler: "That's a first... but if he's been masturbating, why in the world does he still have a miasma of unquenched lust?"
Lady Miriam: "In that case he wasn't doing it right."
The Balance: "The ancient art of masturbation has fallen by the wayside."
The Anthropologist: "Maybe he's being working twenty-two hour days and he fell asleep during."

Samira could feel it entering her as if through the pores of her skin, setting every inch of her alive with tingling, unquenched lust.
The Chronicler: "So she's feeling lust as though she was wanking her own cock, since she’s feeling it reflected from other men."

She stood still, soaking it in, helpless for a moment to do otherwise. She'd never felt anything like this, the man's unsatisfied desires coursing through her body with the sweetness of honey, pooling in her loins with a hungry anticipation of things to come.
Pillywiggin: "Eeew! Honey in loins!"

For the first time in all her thousands of years, she was vaguely aware of the danger of falling captive to the lust of a man. It had always been easy for her to weave her dreams and fly away, never losing control, never being tempted to stay.
Pillywiggin: "Why would that be a problem for a demon?"

Such thoughts of control were far from her now. Almost any thought at all was beyond her.
The Anthropologist: "I think my theory is proven. Sucubbi have the mental capacity of small insects. Like some sort of supernatural daddy long legs. Repeatedly flying into torches and lightbulbs."
Sordan: "Except it's not lightblubs."
Pillywiggin: "Basically she's a cock mosquito."

Her gaze flicked over them, almost wondering what this man had been doing...
Pillywiggin: "The gheys have returned!"
Luca: "We should write a book about that. A secret society of the gheys."
The Anthropologist: "They're like bodyguards. But different."

...her mind was drifting in and out of a welter of caution and sexual excitement, and she could make no sense of the things.
The Chronicler: "How could she not know? Doesn't someone have fantasies about that?"
The Anthropologist: "Because she's not a slut."

She came around behind the sleeping man, noting the strong line of his back beneath his simple white tunic and the broad line of his shoulders.
Pillywiggin: "So he's just made of two lines. He may in fact be two dimensional."

Midnight sun!
The Anthropologist: "That's the stupidest swearword."
Big L: "Not as bad as By the Stones!"

You'd think I'd never done this before...
The Loinfire Club drinks again for I'm not a slut!

She shifted from foot to foot, her bare breasts pressed against her thighs as she squatted beside him...
Luca: "That's not physically possible."
Pillywiggin (demonstrating): "No you just need bigger tits. It can be done."

She wanted to touch him so badly, the desire was making her weak and uncoordinated.
Sordan: "So why doesn't she? She's a bloody succubus!"

She looked at the broad expanse and quivered at the thought. She wanted to lay her breasts against him, to wrap her legs around his waist and to feel the total strength of his yearnings through every inch of her naked body. She wanted to melt into him, wanted to become part of him, wanted—
The Balance: "She wanted his hyphen."
The Anthropologist: "We need a new category for all these hyphens and ellipsis."
The Chronicler: "Surely if she's feeling his lust she'd be wanting to find something female to fuck... unless he's gay..."

Do it! she urged herself. Touch him!
No, there is danger.… a softer voice within her said. Think, Samira, something is not right.
The Balance: "Canon schizophrenia."

Energy crackled through her with the force of lightning, slamming into her and blasting her away from the stranger, her hearing deafened by a thunderclap of power even as her mind and senses reeled with a burst of images and emotions, blinding her to the room all around.
Pillywiggin: "I want to be able to lightning bolt demons that touch me."

She bumped against a spike protruding from a beam, the iron making her yowl in pain and sending her tumbling again through the air.
The Balance: "She has a weakness to iron, just revealed. Plot point!"

When she came up against a wooden rafter she clung tightly to it as the images and emotions from the man washed through her: Fury. Despair. Utter, soul-destroying loneliness.
The Chronicler: "If the soul is destroyed then it can't be worth eating."
The Anthropologist: "I'm not sure that's how it works in this system."
Pillywiggin: "The word system implies something that's consistent and functional..."

"Who's there?" he asked harshly, his deep voice bouncing off the stones of the walls. "I know you're here. Come out!" [...] His brows were dark and devilish, with points at the center of their arches.
Big L: "So, horns..."

...a splash of webbed pink that started below his left eye and then poured down the side of his cheek, broadening to the width of a spread hand along his neck and then disappearing into his tunic.
The Anthropologist: "What?!"

Big L: "Are we getting a picture of this man? A triangular forehead. Devilish eyebrows. V-shaped beard. A scar that spills."

The Balance disappears for a moment and returns, producing a multitude of Maltesers.
Pillywiggin: "I'm thrumming..."

In three millennia of being a succubus, she'd seen everything a human body had to offer, as well as a thousand vividly imagined things it did not.
The Anthropologist: "Except burn scars, it would seem."

"I am Nicolae. Who are you?" he asked the shadows.
Pillywiggin: "Perhaps you shouldn't have given it your name."
The Anthropologist: "Perhaps you should look it up in your demonological texts the blurb says you own."

"Or instead of asking who you are, perhaps I should ask what you are?" he asked, a brow lifting.
"I am not a what," Samira muttered, indignant, and then clamped her lips shut. It was stupid of her to make a sound.
Sordan: "Yes. Yes it was."

She saw that his eyes were a warm, clear brown, flecked with yellow, the iris rimmed by a darker brown that was almost black.
Sordan: "Those are shit eyes."
The Anthropologist: "With corn in them."
The Balance: "Turd eyes."
Lady Miriam: "And the black could be blood in stool."

Something small suddenly broke inside her at the question, for it was as if he were interrogating a loathsome beast he'd found hiding under his bed. She was a thing to him.
The Anthropologist: "She's a hateful thing on top of his bed, thank you very much."

The strange sadness that had plagued her for six years welled up once again, and again she wanted to weep like a human, with tears to relieve the ache inside her. [...] For what was she? The Loinfire Club: "You're a demon!"

A defiler of a brother's love. A soulless creature with no heart, and no future other than to look from her lonely vantage into the loves and lusts of others, doomed always to pretend to live and never to feel or grow or change.
The Anthropologist: "You're a romance author!"

The open pages were covered in dense black writing, and in the middle of one was a drawing: a naked female with spread black wings. Before she could make sense of what that might mean...
Big L: "What the fuck? She can't even recognise a picture of her own species!"

Nicolae touched the page with his fingertips, and suddenly Samira felt a powerful jolt of his sexual desire, the same as had drawn her to him in the first place.
(The Chronicler: "Aha! He was summoning her!")

Samira looked quickly at him, and found her gaze met by his own wide-eyed one...
The Anthropologist: "He has a gheys too! So they can be friends."

"Succubus," he said, the word as much a statement as a question.
The Chronicler: "It's not! There's no question mark! I can see the page!"

"Samira!" she said, throwing out her name in frightened defiance. She would not be a thing. [...]In a desperate bid to use his weakness, to gain control, she reached up and rolled one of her pink nipples between thumb and forefinger. His lips parted, and he stared at her moving fingers as if in a trance.
Sordan: "Hypnotic nipples!"
Luca: "They have little spirals painted on them."
The Anthropologist: "The real question is: Is there a sound effect for this?"

She was an individual, not just another demon.
The Anthropologist: "No you're not! You're a succubus!"

"Samira," she said again, firmly this time.
The Chronicler: "She really shouldn't be telling him her True Name."
Sordan: "Maybe it's not her True Name."

Even as the force of his desire ran through her, bringing every inch of her to involuntary, tingling arousal...
(The Chronicler: "Is it just me or does that imply she has a cock?")

She sucked in a breath, going as motionless as he was, her nipple in mid-roll. He'd heard her.
The Anthropologist: "Inexperienced fail!demon!"
The Anthropologist: "Maybe it's like you’re trying to do a coin trick but failing to remember what the next step is and you're embarrassingly stuck..."

...it was her name on his lips that she wanted most.
"Samira," he echoed, granting her wish as if he'd felt her demand.
(The Chronicler: "This is getting ridiculous.")

"Samira."
She swayed toward his outstretched hand and took one step toward him, drawn by her name spoken so irresistibly in his deep, mortal voice.
The Anthropologist: "It was her True Name. 'Tard."

He saw her. He knew her name. He spoke to her.
Sordan: "You told him your name five seconds ago! You 'tard!"
The Anthropologist: "She just has really low self esteem."

His fingertips were inches from her skin. If she took one more step, he'd be able to reach her. She remembered what had happened last time.
Lady Miriam: "She has g-spots all over her body."
The Anthropologist: "He's just realised he's not stupid enough to be attracted to you... or not..."

Inside herself, she felt a faint beat. It was an echo of his own heartbeat, she realized with wonder.
Sordan: "What the fuck?!"
The Balance: "She's hollow, then?"
The Anthropologist: "Am I the only one who thinks that hearts beating in unison should be a third or fourth date sort of thing or am I just conservative here?"

His heart might not beat much longer if he received another jolt such as that, she realized.
The Anthropologist: "I did biology once..."
Big L: "You don't need to have done biology to know repeated lightning jolts..."

Fear, shame, and an unnamed longing—for what? for his attention?—did battle within her.
Big L: "She's just a fail!person. Regardless of being a succubus."

The least she could do was give him a pleasant memory to take into his waking hours.
Sordan: "And raping him in his sleep is the perfect thing to do."
Lady Miriam: "It's not rape. It's surprise pity sex."
Sordan: "I'm not convinced she's more attractive than him. She has clashing hair and eyes."
Lady Miriam: "But he has a scar and a limp."

He was a handsome man, even when unconscious.
The Chronicler: "How does being awake affective attractiveness levels?"
The Anthropologist: "You know, this is the first instance of female on male rape in these books we've encountered."

She was here to give the man a moment of celestial pleasure.
Pillywiggin: "What?! Surely it's demonic."
The Anthropologist: "It's the flaw of the find-and-replace editing out of the sex angels."

She curled her toes in anticipation, reached out, and touched his brow.
The Loinfire Club descends into debate as to whether not the last sentence was alluding to a foot fetish as the chapter closes.

Come to Me, continues, part three

Samira dove into Nicolae's thoughts and memories, searching for the keys to his fantasies and secret desires.
Sordan: "Mind rape!"

She had to swim past scene after scene of violent battle and angry men, dark village streets and flaming torches.
The Balance: "Maybe he's into angry men..."
The Anthropologist: "Maybe homosexuality does exist. It's just that the conservative demons don't notice it and mistake them for dominance rituals. Like with Primatologists."

He was so dark inside, so lost within horrors.
Sordan: "I see your angst!"
Big L: "This book is just the biggest wangst fest ever."

And besides, there was no man alive who didn't have desire living within him, whether it was desire for women, men, the switch to one's bottom, a woman's dirty chemise, bare feet, farm animals, something.
The Chronicler: "That's an odd list."
The Balance: "Maybe she should add a footnote: See the internet."
(The Chronicler: "So they do acknowledge homosexuality. But the sex demons just don't cater to it.")

It led her to the outer edge of his darkness and then disappeared behind a black wall. Samira felt over the surface of the wall, looking for some small crevice in which she could dig her fingers ...
Sordan: "Eeew!"
Big L: "That's just dodgy..."
Pillywiggin: "She metaphorically fingering her ass."

...but the wall was smooth and impenetrable. She tried to force her way straight through its surface.
Sordan: "That's definitely rape."
Lady Miriam: "So she is fisting him. In his sleep."
The Balance: "Or trying too."

She'd often come across such barriers, in men who for one reason or another didn't want to allow themselves the freedom of their sexuality.
The Anthropologist: "She's not raping him, children. She's freeing his sexuality."
Pillywiggin: "Ass rape sexual repression wall!"

She wrinkled her nose, annoyed with the wall...
The Loinfire Club wrinkles their noses, annoyed at this metaphor.
The Anthropologist: "She is very blond... I'm getting image of the girl in Clueless."

She was here to help the man, and look at the obstacles he put up. The only time a wall like this was worth anything was when the desires of a man were evil.
Sordan: "But she's a demon!"
The Anthropologist: "She's a sex angel. But you can't write about those.... we've been through this."

She chewed her bottom lip. Might Nicolae's wishes be evil?
(The Chronicler: "She's ready to do dreams of a paedophilic incestuous orgy with bestial overtones and questionable consent. What could possibly be more evil?")

She'd just have to go around it, using her own creativity to build a dream for Nicolae, and hoping she hit upon something he liked.
Big L: "What? Kitten heads."

A classic fantasy would be a good, safe place to start. The favorite of most men, of course, was the innocent girl behaving like a sex-starved wench. It rarely failed to please.
The Anthropologist: "Except Dragosh."
Big L: "You never know. He might be good for random chick who isn't his sister."

She created a dream self for Nicolae: the burns were gone, and he stood strong and vibrant at the edge of a meadow [...]As he did so, he noticed that he was not limping. His mind tossed the incongruity back and forth, and his dream self lifted his left hand in front of his face. It was unscarred. He frowned at it, and his mind started to tell him that this was not real, this was a fantasy.
Luca: "I cope with far worse incongruity than that in my dreams!"

Nothing was going to disturb Nicolae, except…
Sordan: "Oh the poor ellipsis!"
The Chronicler: "Ellipsis are female. They regularly get gangraped by the phallic hyphens."
The Balance: "Don't forget the slash."

Nicolae loped across the meadow toward it...
Big L: "Are we getting wolves? I can feel it from the loping..."
...his stride as smooth and strong as a wolfs.
Big L: "Win!"

A dozen yards through the trees, a young girl in kerchief and richly embroidered blouse passed by. Samira gave in to vanity and gave the girl her own face and figure, her own red hair and blue eyes.
Nicolae stalked in quiet pursuit of the dream Samira.
The Anthropologist: "Rape!"

Samira felt a flush of embarrassment at giving in to the impulse to give the girl her own name. But why not? she asked herself.
Sordan: "It's like writing self insertion fanfic in someone else's head."
Lady Miriam: "You could almost spell Mary Sue out of the letters in Samira."

There were no rules against enjoying the fantasy herself.
Lady Miriam: "You're a demon! I thought that was the point."
The Anthropologist: "Unless they are bureaucracy devils who make you fill out a forms before you are allowed to enjoy yourself...
The Balance: Could be a bit problematic if you have to fill in another form to enjoy filling out the first form. You would get some kind of bureaucratic infinity.
The Anthropologist: I'm going to make you dream about filling out forms... and some of them have subclauses."

The girl glanced over her shoulder, in the direction of the voices, and saw Nicolae. She sucked in a breath in surprise, her creamy cheeks flushing a virginal pink.
Sordan: "I'm trying to imagine it as a crayon that colour now."
The Chronicler: "Or even a Games Workshop colour?"

She looked down, lashes falling heavy on her cheeks, and fiddled with the handle of her basket. "I do not wish to answer." She glanced up at him through her lashes, then back down again. "The nuns keep such close watch on me every hour. Time alone is rare, and precious."
Lady Miriam: "She's giving him a bad porn dream."
Sordan: "At least we know this is a parody of this sort of scene, right?"

"And dangerous. Do you not know what lurks in the forest?"
Sordan: "I lurk in the forest!"
Big L: "Me and my huge penis."

Nicolae frowned. "An unusual name."
A smile flashed across her lips, even as she glanced, worried, in the direction of the unseen nuns. "Yes. It means 'She who entertains.'"
"Does it?" he said, and he stepped closer. The frown was still between his brows.
The Balance: "I dream of buttsex! What is this woman doing in my dream?!"

Summer solstice! Samira cursed silently.
The Anthropologist: "And we need a new category for stupid swear words."

Why can he not just enjoy this?
The Anthropologist: "There's something really wrong about this... it's like if a someone's girlfriend who really liked slashfic isn't content with reading it herself, and could somehow force their partner to sit through all the slashfic they've read during the day in their dreams."

Big L: "She can't even get it on in the dream she makes? How sucky is she?"
The Chronicler: "Why does he have free will in his own dream anyway?"

The silent pursuit drew up deep predator/prey urges from within him, his blood heating with the need to possess the girl.
The Anthropologist: "Ah, popular psychology. And that slash..."
The Chronicler: "Are we developing some sort of punctuation fetish?"

The power of speech was quickly abandoning Nicolae's dream self, his animal instincts rising to the fore. His eyes went to the neckline of the girl's blouse and stayed there, his mind torn between wanting to watch her and wanting to pull her to the ground and plant himself between her damp thighs.
Big L: "She looks so innocent! I want to rape her!"

The girl untied her blouse and touched the dewy skin above her breasts. "I wish I could lie down in that water," she said. "It would feel so good, rushing over my skin. So cool. It's tempting, don't you think?"
The Anthropologist: "Is this the opposite of I'm not a Slut?"

"You won't hurt me, though, will you?" she asked, wide eyes looking up at him, full of innocence.
The Chronicler: "Not really. She's seducing him by being innocently seductive. Unaware that her actions may be construed as sexual..."

"I would not mind if you wanted to do that," he managed to say.
The Anthropologist: "You have my permission to be naked."

Samira muttered in frustration. What was this? Nobility? The wench was begging to be taken. What was wrong with him? Samira felt a sting of rejection, as if it was she herself he did not find tempting enough to take advantage of.
Sordan: "I'm so ugly! Why don't men want to rape me?"

Nicolae's desire was doubling and trebling, pushing him down the path toward release, and creating an echo of delight in her own ethereal body.
Big L: "Oh no! Think of all the positive feedback loop situations we can end up with!"

The innocent-girl-gone-wild fantasy never failed to push a man to the brink. Never!
The Balance: "It's one of the universal cultural norms..."
The Anthropologist winces in obvious distress.

"Take me," the girl begged. "I want you to be the first. Take me, quickly, before they find us."
Nicolae's desire froze. It went cold within him, the burning heat of it flaming out.
The Anthropologist: "He only wants rape! She's consenting!"
Pillywiggin: "They don't teach that to you in self defence classes, do they? How to pretend to consent when faced with a rapist.

Talk now meanders through the different ways recommended to discourage rapists, such as talking about their mothers and vomiting.

He stared at the face of the girl—at Samira's face—and suddenly shoved her away from him.
"No!"
The Balance: "He was up for rape, but consensual sex..."

Tremors ran through his body, and a sick, nauseated feeling was uncoiling in his gut.
It was fear, Samira realized. What in night's blazing stars was wrong with him?
The Anthropologist: "He's scared of women who want to have sex at him."

"They won't find us," the girl said, and Samira put all her power behind the words. "It's all right. They won't find us."
The Anthropologist: "They won't find the bodies afterwards either if that's what you're worried about."

Maybe it wasn't the threat of intruders that was scaring him. Samira cursed that black wall that had hidden his innermost desires from her. There was something back there that scared him to death.
Could he be a virgin, terrified of humiliation?
The Anthropologist: "Or maybe he's terrified of consensual sex."

The girl pulled his fear-flaccid member out from under his clothes and licked her lips.
Big L: "It's the Limp Moment!"
Sordan: "I can't believe it! It's page 40."

There is much lamentation over the newly poured drinks (we use pint glasses)...

The Anthropologist: "That's really unusual for it to be with the heroine. But still, it's the same principle. It was prompted by a sexually aggressive female."
The Chronicler: "Women just aren't allowed to be forward."
Pillywiggin: "Maybe she should just produced a gagged woman tied to the table or something. Save time."

She looked up at him with wide eyes and shivered in delight. "You're so big!"
Lady Miriam: "Were your previous lovers hamsters, darling?"
The Balance: "Hamsters are quite well hung if you compare it to body mass."
Lady Miriam: "Gorillas, then."

The grass around them darkened and turned to a stone floor. Walls appeared, and angry, unseen men began shouting, their weapons clanging as they ran by outside, orange torchlight flickering through an uncovered window.
Sordan: "Return of the Angst!"

The doubts were again crowding his mind, the magic acceptance of dreams dissipating. Logic was taking over. He frowned at the girl, and then recognition hit. "You!"
Big L: "Damn Logic."

Samira grimaced, and quickly changed the girl's appearance. Now she had shoulder-length black hair, and was taller and heavier, her breasts full and ripe.
Sordan: "Ewww!"
The Balance: "Ripe for the picking!"
The Chronicler: "Like in the song of solomon"

There was only one thing to do: bring on the harem.
The Chronicler: "Yay! Girl-on-girl!"

Each woman was unique, as if she'd been plucked from a different corner of the globe, and yet each one was equally hungry for the touch of a man.
Sordan: "Each member of my harem is a snowflake."

"Nicolaaeeee," a blonde called, reaching out her arm toward him as she writhed in frustrated desire on the floor. "Please, Nicolaaeeee…" She touched herself between her legs, her eyes closing as she arched her neck in pleasure.
Pillywiggin: "She's really bad at reading people for a three millennia old demon."

Yes! Samira had him now! The stronger his desire grew, the more strength she had to make the dream vivid, and the harder it should be for him to break free.
Big L: "Aha! The positive feedback loop."

Twin girls from India lolled together on a carpet, one licking the other's breasts.
The Balance: "Twincest girl-on-girl!"

A pale, freckled Scot massaged oil over her own body, while an Oriental girl nearby fondled an ivory phallus...
The Anthropologist: "At least it’s not jade."

The imp of vanity came back to life inside Samira as Nicolae moved toward the Nubian. She didn't want to watch him enjoy himself with one of these women; she wanted to watch him make eager, frantic love to someone who looked like her.
Pillywiggin: "This is just really bad self insertion fanfiction."

In the center of the room Samira created a dais, upon which was a tall marble bench: an altar, almost, draped with silks in burgundy and gold. Sitting in the center of the bench was Samira's double, wingless and naked, scarlet hair flowing in waves down her body and marking the entrance to her sex. Samira made the details fade on all the other women in the room and pooled the light around her double.
The Anthropologist: "And a flashing neon sign above her with many more arrows pointing to her cunt."

A feeling of raunchy wickedness flowed through him, a wild urge to invade and possess.
Big L: "Raypes! Invade and Possess..."

He bowed his head down to the garnet curls.
The Anthropologist: "Garnet?! That has to be uncomfortable."
Pillywiggin: "She has very strange hair colour ideas, this author."

His sense of mastery and control made his erection an almost unbearable burden...
The Chronicler: "Again with the dominant male raypes..."

As she made the girl contort in pleasure, though, she wished she knew firsthand what a woman would feel as a man like Nicolae lapped at her sex.
(The Chronicler: "Why? Shouldn't she be wondering what it would feel like lapping at a woman since she's feeling his pleasure at the act?")

The head of his erection pressed against the dream Samira's damp entrance, the muscles of her sex contracting in butterfly kisses against his flesh.
Big L: "Dodgy animal comment, even if it’s only butterflies..."

When Nicolae reached his climax, Samira would get a charge of energy: It was what kept the succubi in existence. The pleasure of men was their food, their sustenance. But as hungry as Samira was for it, there was something else she wanted from Nicolae first.
Sordan: "Oh no! The ego got the better of her again."

Her double on the bench met Nicolae's gaze. "Say my name," she said.
The Balance: "You're a random in my endless harem... pass the form, eunuch. You're Virgin Number 42. I have your shipping number, if you want it?"

"I don't know it," he said, voice hoarse, as against his volition his hips pressed him once again toward her.
Pillywiggin: "And we're back to rape."

Part of Nicolae tried to think, but his body had precedence, locking him inside the animal instinct to mate. Animals had no names, only flesh meeting flesh, need meeting need. "
The Anthropologist: "She's making him think!"

He was not one to force himself upon a wench, but all men had their limits.
The Balance: "I don't normally rape wenches but I'll make an exception for you!"

She arched against him then, her hips angling to draw him inside. As he slid home, he said her name again, "Samira."
Sordan: "You IDIOT Fail!demon."

And stopped, eyes widening. He stared down at the girl in horror: at her eyes, at her hair, at her mouth.
Sordan: "This book has had nothing but graphic sex and emo."

"God damn you, no!" he shouted, and wrenched himself away.
Big L: "DO NOT WANT!"

Samira was too stunned to react for a long moment, and then the hurt and humiliation again set in. Even in the throes of the strongest passion he'd felt in all his life, the thought of her was enough to revolt him.
The Anthropologist: "He's doesn't want to rape me! No!"
Sordan: "Doesn't that count as I am not a slut on Nicolae's part?"

Embarrassed beyond bearing, Samira reached throughout his mind and broke the bonds of memory to the dream she had created for him, so that he would remember nothing of it when he woke.
Sordan: "She can do that?!"

Nicolae had turned his attention to the distant battle, his dream self decked out in armor, a sword in his fist. He was shouting for his men.
The Anthropologist: "She should bring in an incubus if it's men his after."

Never had Samira failed so spectacularly. Never had a man so thoroughly resisted her wiles, rejected her proffered pleasures. It was as plain as the full moon to her that the reason he had done it was because of who and what she was. He'd been enjoying himself in the harem until she'd put her own face there among the humans.
Sordan: "He's probably just really religious and fears for his soul."
The Anthropologist: "He was quite happy wanking to a demonological text."

What a fool she had been, to seek even a moment's attention from a mortal man. He would never see her as anything but a loathsome creature.
Lady Miriam: "Well, if she hadn't been such a twit and brought in her name..."

From outside the tower she looked back in the window.
Big L: "Let's not forget the tower is a giant penis."

She wanted him to say her name and ask her what her deepest fears and wishes were. But that was not the way of the succubi. It went against every premise of their existence.
Sordan: "She's such an emo kid."
The Anthropologist: "I'm putting another tick in the Sex Angels column.... "

Why then did Samira want it so? And why was it so clearly impossible to have?
The Anthropologist: "She's incredibly commitment desperate. It's something like a first date and she wants him to propose."

With a whimper of distress, she pushed off from the outer wall of the tower and slipped away into the Night World. She was going back where she belonged.
And so the chapter ends, amid complaints of "This is so bad!" and "So much retarded sex!"

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…