#ashenvein gate

[ashenvein-gate]

There's this sickened-viscous intersection of chronic burnout and C-PTSD where you don't realize all the "energy" keeping you standing is tension until something takes it out of you. By then there's nothing left to stand up again

[ashenvein-gate]

I'm currently in talks to be lead writer for a deep, emotional character study. Our lead: a camel-cow hybrid who wants to open a milk-based goods business. They must juggle their own desires with the conflicting expectations of their two families. It shall be the world's first dramadairy!

[ashenvein-gate]

Beautifully nervous wrecks

Each succubus's form is manifested purely by their own will and power, perfectly tailored to match their own deepest desires. Each is the embodiment of their own ideal of beauty.

You might think this would make us extremely confident, but it can actually be quite nerve wracking. Our forms are richly-layered expressions of our innermost selves, direct embodiments of our tastes, philosophies, and all the artfulness we've cultivated throughout our lives. If someone finds the form of a succubus unappealing, that's tantamount to finding the succubus as a person unappealing.

[ashenvein-gate]

A summoning is not necessarily a ritual. It can be as nebulous as creating a moment that a demon would desire to partake in--exploring an abandoned mansion, or bunker complex, or asylum. Wandering city streets during the merrymaking hours of the night, or the dead hours when all others are asleep…

[ashenvein-gate]

Kessug's Lab

The counter's iron-grooved edge squeals under my talons. This stupid place. This stupid, stupid place! It's all built to purpose on the Queen's orders. Cold stone engraved with purely utilitarian runes, a network hidden away beneath Ekraith Mountains. Just one more laboratory...

I wasn't...

A tear of violet coronas, whistling mirage-like distortion, falls from a goldenfire eye onto the iron, unraveling a crater of wispy smoking strands.

I wasn't supposed to start thinking of it as home. But I have. I've spent years here studying our enemies.

Every alembic and retort, every construct from the crystal-tipped arms enchanted to pull apart and unravel essences, to the memory-condenser and integrated crystal array used to study recorded battles. The vaulted halls, the barracks staffed by my assigned personal guard...

At some point or other between my duties, I've taken a tumble in every last bunk of that long squat chamber, squirmed and squealed and clawed my affections into every single soldier in places from their own mattresses, to up against the walls, to the laboratory rooms themselves.

That... started as the Queen's own orders. "An unfed succubus stutters sluggish," she chided, pricking my brow with her talon. "Feed well, my young maershal. Learn to enjoy yourself. You shall find it less onerous than you fear."

Much as I bristled inside, she was right. After overcoming my own insecurities, I came to find it... thrilling. To pivot at the wiggle of a brow from teasing out the existential secrets of a new world, to moaning and writhing as lust washed out every other thought... it took months for me to name that sensation, but it's a familiar comfort to me now. "I am a witch-succubus. This is my place, this is what I should be doing." This refuge, this sanctuary of fell insights, has nurtured as much discovery of myself as the world we infiltrated.

Of course I came to know it for my home. Of course I've grown... attached.

"Kes? Kes!"

Bezheug's voice at last cuts through my stupor. Shaking myself, green face and bosom soaked with violet warp-tears and blackly-acidic demonic snot, I look to her.

Smiling a line between sympathetic and awkward, she hefts the box of vials in her arms, filled with half-expended essence. "Where do you want these?"

Mopping my eyes on a violet gown's sleeve, I point to a spiral stairway at the back of the lab. "Dump them in the escape-way."

It frowns. "Kessug, you worked hard on these blends, you were still trying to perfect half of them--"

"Just..." I sniffle. "Please just let it go. I can't bear to draw this out one minute longer than I must."

Bez frowns harder, waiting to see whether I change my mind.

"... take out the third and fifth vials on the near side," I finally amend, "and the four directly in the center. Put them in one of the stasis-lock containers. Throw the rest into the escape-way."

She nods, hurrying to do my bidding, and returns after a few minutes. "What now?" it asks.

I beckon her with urgent finger-flexes. "First, come here." She obliges, giving me the solid height of her, the muscular heat of its arms and toned black breast.

Everyone down here is my lover. Only Bez is my beloved.

I learn into her, arms thrown around her shoulders as I sniffle into her neck. "You read the final brief I passed along?"

"That the High King is declaring victory?" it murmurs, stroking my onyx-flow mane. "We all did."

"It's a farce!" I mutter. "Victory over whom? Their world is falling apart, and we aren't even the primary cause!"

The High King of the Crusade by the Divine Undivided, sole mortal sovereign of this world, somehow infuriated so many of the crusader vassal-states that the war between their gods is tearing the world apart. Responding to this, the Queen has bid us withdraw. She deems this collapse more than enough amusement, and wishes to watch from afar as the mortals devour themselves in paranoid infighting. And that means I am leaving it behind, my little home.

"What do you suppose will happen to her?" I murmur, drawing back from Bez. "The songstress from the tavern on the cliffside?" I went to check it two days ago, that little village. A mortal woman used to sing there, such a beautiful bright voice. It often lured me hither. It was utterly abandoned. No signs of struggle. Likely they all packed up to go... somewhere.

"I never did find it in me to sit down with her and talk like I wanted," I confess.

Bez hugs me. "Maybe you and she will meet again, somehow."

"Perhaps." I sniffle again. "It's ridiculous of me... I never knew her, not really. I but liked her voice, and the songs she sang, and she existed near to the place I called home, for a while..."

"Kes," Bez soothes, "you do not have to justify what you feel. Not with me."

"Thank you..." I close my eyes, drifting in her scent and her warmth, until at last I feel ready to pull away. "Let's finish things here. Some time in Machrae Diir will do me good. Help to put..." I wave a hand at this place which soon shall cease to be. "... put this in perspective."

Bez nods. We kiss, break away, and pick up the pace. When the time comes to open a portal of coruscating star-flesh and return to the lambent halls, I hesitate on the threshold. It lies within my power, grown as I am, to take the whole lab away. And at first I mean simply to savor the fantasy and then let it pass, but the more I picture it, the more my longing grows.

I did not have the chance to make my mark on this world as I first meant to, to wander its cities, sneak into the dreams of its people. Those things were meant to come later, after we understood and felt ready to act, after the Queen unleashed us in full upon its lands. We never quite found our moment before it all toppled on its own. But the things I made here, the days I spent here, still belong to me, and I will keep what remains precious.

So I stretch forth my hand, and from it flow the violet waves of my power. A spiraling suction, a silver-edged distortion, blurring lines, colors, matter and pulling them over the portal's threshold, drawing rough subterranean stone closer and closer until only solid rock remains.

"You know," Bez says dryly, "you could've decided to do that before you had us pack everything up." I stick my tongue out, and busy myself stitching together essence-waves to help my little haven blend into Machrae Diir. The first pieces of my domain within the domain... such are the wages of chaos. We do not always gain what we hoped to, but we always gain something, so long as we can find it within us just to reach out and take it.

I stretch languidly, and beckon to my former underlings. "Come, kindred--there's a festival on somewhere!"

So capering, flying, snarling and laughing and singing the night, arm in arm and wing to wing, we slip away into the fertile darkness, seeking whatever frightful delights it may bring until the time comes for another realm to know our touch. I wonder... which will it be?

[ashenvein-gate]

Mustering Out

My talons keep flexing instinctively, kept loose to snatch for a sword that's not there. Involuntary maw-twitches send small plasma-streamers between metalloid fangs.

"Easy, Simmers." Vescryd hip-checks me, snapping me back to the present. We traverse veiled halls hand in hand, her lithe silky red skin an eloquent contrast to my scar-streaked violet. I wear the black gown uneasily, teeth chattering with nerves. "They'll love you." Ves pecks my cheek.

Though I'm loathe to say the words, for to my mind they ring direly ungrateful, I say them all the same. Learning to speak what I feel is... it's part of this... this adjustment. So much as I hate to speak, much as what I feel seems a betrayal of all the effort my love's spent on me, I say it all the same: "Will they?" I strain my fangs to a rictus grin that widens both my eyes to manic spheres. "Will they really?"

"Miir, you're a succubus," Ves squeezes my hand, pulling it to her lips. I loose a small involuntary whimpering, eyes averting at the hot prickle of her kiss. "You belong at this orgy, same as the rest of us."

"I know," I murmur. "Cognitively, where it means nothing, I know that. But this is..." I swallow nerves. "This is what I don't do. I was one of the Azhdenaechrat, the Swift Swords in the Night. While our comrades enjoyed each other's company at camp, we... you know..."

"Covered over your trust issues and fears of disappointing sex-partners by relentlessly looking for fights when you should've been resting?" Ves asks, wry but tender.

I answer with a sad smile. "Yes. And... and even beyond that, it's... it's a deep culture shock, all this. Ans--" I catch myself before I can breathe my people's name, saying instead, "Ruinborn succubi are raised very differently to you Hell-sisters."

"I know." Ves rubs my back. "That's why I like you, Miir... well," her eyelids lower to a seductive smirk, "one of many reasons. Yes, you're different." She presses her red fingers to my many-cleft lips, playing with my golden fangs. "That makes you interesting."

"Hmmm..." I contemplate the doorway looming ahead, a high vaulted thing with thick vine-embroidered veils making a haze of the many forms laughing, squealing, and moaning within. "We'll see."

We stop on the threshold. Ves rubs my shoulder, smiling up at me. "Ready?"

I exhale tension-discolored lilac plasma. "Ready enough."

And, reaching with a right hand that twitches, perhaps, just a little less than it did when we first arrived, I pull aside the veils and we step together into the chamber.

[ashenvein-gate]

High Fantasy Forever Falling

Kairliinat speaks to the reasons for her unique relationship with the high fantasy genre.

I yet journey to find my own rhythms in speaking about fantasy. I’ve seen many souls tout the draw of classic high fantasy as being about “stability” and “familiarity” and “eternal cycles”, and while I do feel some of that, for me those answers are incomplete. I recognize I am in the minority here (a demon’s perspective differs from a majority-human audience? Say it ain’t so!) Anyway, what works…

[ashenvein-gate]

"Naming something gives you power over it"

"You kids keep askin' why we don't call that place by name--'Can't be as bad as her name! Nobody's ever become a cubus just saying it.'

Your foot's already in her trap. Its other nickname is Tarbliss Rift. Touch it, and you're stuck forever."