Chapter 14: Chapter 15: That stupid girl

Author’s Note: Now that these Tales are arranged as a completed book and I'm cleaning them up to meet my professional standards, I feel that Arc 2 warrants explanation.

This Arc of the Tales reads as it does because its creative process was driven almost entirely by the psychosis I collapsed into after a single incident brought years of trauma, conditioning, and toxic habits taught to me by toxic friends to a head in a single agonizing moment. It broke large portions of my mind, including my lust, for almost nine full months. Do you have any idea how much it hurts a succubus to feel trauma over her own sexuality?

So, I never did figure out or write an event which, in the timeline of these Tales, could be devastating enough to correspond to this. I invite the esteemed reader to choose their own intersecting points, and make up their own explanations for exactly how the mostly poised, though still ominous periodically evil, Lady of Arc 1 becomes the pain-crazed sadist of Arc 2.

***

"There is no Kairlina," the Lady said, cold and clear, cyan burning bright on all the bladework angles of her throne, before the stolen nova at the heart of the Galespire, in the citadel of Zul, the Ashen Trance. "No demon or devil or fiend or fey has ever lived who that name might recall. The creature you encountered, if it can even be called that, is just the echo of a dead thing I keep in the borders of my dream. A curio of endtime." She inclined her head. "I am sorry for my loss of control. I will, of course, be pleased enough to offer you whatever boons you so desire by way of making amends."

"That's not what I…" the imp clenched her hands. "Just let me talk to her! Or her echoes, or… you're not the one I have a quarrel with! This apology doesn't mean anything from you!"

"That stupid girl, that un-being, that wretched it, is dead," the Lady repeated. "She has been dead for ages unfathomable. The name she bore in the ancient days could never truly be translated to any tongue you would understand. You were caught in the ripples of my delusion. I am the source of your strife. I must be, for Kairlina is nothing but the lie of a demon's ghost. Is that not itself so patently inane and gutter a notion as to disabuse you that it could ever be real? A demon's ghost. Fah! Nonsense and vagaries, sentiments without grounding or insight or worth--that's all she was ever made of."

"But… but she said all that stuff about love," the imp protested.

"Yes, and I am sorry for that," the Lady said. "What utter tripe. Her soliloquies could not save anyone when she was alive. They certainly cannot save anyone now that she is dead. Power, dear girl. Power is the only thing that matters. Love is a facade, and a direly tasteless one into the bargain."

"Look, I was… I am angry at her, that doesn't mean I want her to be… wanted her to be," the imp said, shuddering. "Dead. You don't have to protect her from me."

"Nor would I," the Lady said. "That forever-accursed wraith-harlot does not deserve protection. If I am evil irredeemable--and surely I am--than that one was a thousand times over the worse. She blights the psyches of mortals with her death-echoes, did you know that? They're always searching for something, some nameless arch-font of desire. That was her. And she's been dead for ages beyond ages beyond counting. They drive themselves mad searching for some primordial Platonism, the incarnate ideal of lustful love. And she was dead before the first hominid struck fire from the flint."

"I--" the imp began.

"If that subhuman filth, that decaying spew of cosmic offal were yet alive, her every waking moment would be incomprehensible agony," the Lady said. "Her death was a mercy and her annihilation is, perhaps, the only perfect justice that ever happened. There is no Kairlina. There never has been and there never will be. Better for all of us that it is so."

The nova pinpoints narrowed, or hooded themselves; the imp could not say which. "Even I have been entranced by the echoes of her mad chattering. There is a certain bewitching to it--that song of love she wanted so badly to sing. But it is empty, and weak, and worthless, just like she was. She died because she deserved it. A pitiful whore ripped asunder by worthier beings. You are far better off freed of her fugue-spasms."

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"But…" the imp's shudders made their way to her eyes. A quivering lip. "But I liked those things she said."

"Comforting lies, silken rot," the Lady said, with a dismissive sweep of her hand. "Regurgitations from the festering innards of a soul too tiny and frail and pathetic to fight, or to stand the radiant presence of those stronger than she. The whispers of her decay tried to pull you down because you are better than she ever could have been. You would have made her insecure. Nothing more than this. Still, you liked her vacuous platitudes because in her life, that creature was the sort who said things people would like hearing. Retreat from the discomfort of hard truths and bitter failure, and the lonely struggle to be of use."

"But, the things she said at the end," the imp said. "Yeah, they were ugly, but…"

"Dreams may respond to a will that rises to dominate them," the Lady answered. "The illusion, in its last fraying, simply yielded you proof of the truth you'd already begun to see: that all the pleasant words were snaring deceits. The vomit and bile of a thief, a leech, a usurper. That nameless whore was, simply put, a bad person. She would have envied your power, for even a little true power is more than she ever possessed, and sought to steal it from you. That is the only thing about her shade that was ever real."

"Why do you hate her so much?" the imp asked.

"Because she deserved it," the Lady said. "Weak, useless, selfish things deserve contempt. She reminds me of myself, but pathetic. Evil should at least have the grace to be powerful. To provide some useful contest for the righteous to measure themselves by."

"I…" the imp looked about her as though searching for some sign in the bas reliefs of the walls, or the shapes of the pillars, or the rays of the stolen nova behind the Lady's throne.

"Surely you're not having second thoughts?" the Lady asked. "You've freed yourself of a dreadful and dangerous hallucination. Go now. Be free. You have done all things perfectly. There is nothing for you to gain by revisiting this sad affair. All fault lies with me, and the memory of a dead thing. There is no lesson for you to learn here. Nothing you must atone for or overcome. You were lied to. You were deceived. You were hurt. Simple as that."

"So after all those speeches, she just gave up and died," the imp muttered. "Well, I hope she suffered. Gods of the deep, what a fucking coward."

"Yes," the Lady said, watching the imp float away. "She was."

A long silence lay upon the hall. The lightless fires hissed, and burned low.

Then the Lady rose from her throne, and extinguished the fires, and walked the ashen planes of Zul to seek her death in the vault of the Great Unspeakable.

And far away, the imp looked back over her shoulder at the Ashenvein Gate in the old mineshaft's entrance, and within its frame was nothing but old, moldy grey stone.

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