The Night Before the Third Moon of Summer, in the 113th Year Before

Ticker the doorman leaned back against the door, stretched, and let out a truly apocalyptic yawn. Damn it, Crayl.

He wasn’t meant to be here, lingering at a quarter past midnight in the windowless entrance room of an abandoned church. He was supposed to be over in the next room, sleeping comfortably at a quarter past midnight in the windowless hallway of an abandoned church.

Instead, here he was, pulling double shifts. All because Crayl, that idiot, hadn’t made it back tonight with the key. Probably lying drunk in some pretty maid’s arms. That man never seemed to take any task seriously. Not even when it came directly from the Cloistermagi and concerned the fate of the whole town, apparently.

Of course, it was easy to get complacent. It had been long years since the Horny War. Most folk around here had never seen so much as an imp before, let alone something like what they guarded.

“Damn it,” he managed, through another uncontrolled yawn. He held the lantern further away from him. The lantern was of peculiar craft—teardrop-shaped, with a three-paned lens tinted a pale orange. The light it shed made it feel like the golden hours, only worsening his fatigue.

Of course, its effect on him was nothing compared to the effect someone else would have to worry about if they tried—

A screeching cacophony like stone under a sawblade howled against the walls around him, nearly knocking him over with sheer surprise. A muffled shout sounded just beneath the commotion.

Ticker whirled around, raising the lantern. That had come from inside the building!

“Sep!” he shouted. “Jesz, Sep, you alright?”

Silence. One, two, three seconds.

just as Ticker was about to run down to investigate, Jesz’s voice rose, ringing with clear calm. “Sorry! Lost control of my sword, is all. Everything’s fine!”

Ticker stared dubiously into the orange-tinged darkness.

“Alright, just be careful!” he called. “Damn near gave my heart away, lass.”

A sheepish laugh. “Sorry, Ticker.”

Ticker laughed, too.

He reached down and slowly, carefully took off first one boot, then the other. He set both to the side. Now in his stockings, he took the door of the lantern and closed it as quietly as possible.

He padded down the hall, pointing his lens away from him so as to disguise the light.

Jesz and Sep were good people, dedicated to the cause. But they weren’t professionals. They and Crayl were just the town’s summer constables, friendly locals eager to lend a hand. There was a reason Ticker was holding the bedroom lantern tonight.

He leaned around the corner and squinted down the hall. He could make out two shapes cluttering the sightline—perhaps two unconscious or subdued figures. Or dead ones.

There was also what almost looked like a great hole in the wall to the right. But that couldn’t be right, right?

A short, feminine figure stood leaning against the far wall, facing him down.

Ticker’s heart gave a lurch. Mindweaver.

He leaned back behind cover, taking a deep breath to steady himself. He might only get one chance at this. The guard reached down and quietly unshuttered the lantern.

The doorman spun around the corner with a shout. He flashed the lantern’s brilliant sunset light down the hallway, eyes closed tight.

The lantern pulsed with heat in his hands, only a fraction of the mindless, dizzying heat that would be suffusing the minds of every sighted creature in the hall at that moment.

After a moment, the heat ebbed. He didn’t unshutter the lantern, but he did open his eyes. He stared for a moment, slowly registering the scene.

“Damn.”

There was a hole in the wall—a perfect rectangle cut away, as though for a doorway. The cut-out section of wall had hit the ground noiselessly, and that was one of the shadows he’d mistaken for a prone figure.

The other prone shape was Sep, sound asleep.

And the standing figure…

Propped against the wall was Jesz. The goblin maid’s eyes were wide and pulsing with pink circles that fell endlessly into one another, her tongue lolling, as she desperately stroked beneath her skirt. Her sword was, indeed, on the ground, about as far from her control as it could get. Judging by the way her eyelids drooped, the lantern hadn’t much helped.

Instinct took over. Ticker rushed forward, hissing in frustration, and whirled on the hole in the wall. He did a double-take as he realized it led not into the street, but into… damn it, was the old church connected to that little bakery down the road? Someone should have told them that when they were laying the wards!

The bedroom lantern was already pulsing its power into the bakery, and this time Ticker didn’t close his eyes—he couldn’t afford that risk. Some slight dizziness overtook him, but it was only passing; he was trained for it.

What he wasn’t trained for was finding cute pastry chefs tied up and kneeling back against display racks, big, dumb, eager smiles on their faces as they gazed up at him. There was no one else in the bakery. The Monastery guards hadn’t gotten around to that scenario in training.

Not except for the basic concept of a honey trap. He braced to turn back the way he’d come, to run back to the front door.

From behind, from where he’d just come, someone planted a light, delicate kiss on the back of his neck.

Instant dizziness overtook him. His thoughts washed and sloshed in his head, and only barely could he manage the effort of turning around.

A beautiful red-haired woman with cherry-red lips and beautiful stormcloud eyes smirked at him, twirling a familiar key around her finger.

He tried to raise the lantern. Tried to speak, to shout a warning, to…

The woman leaned in—her hand grasping his, taking the lantern from him with no effort, closing its shutter—and plumped her luscious lips out for a kiss.

Damn it, Crayl, was his last thought, as those lips met his.

~ ~ ~ ~

Vivi smirked down at the last guardsman as he fell to the ground. He’d been her biggest concern, but it turned out he was still just as stupid as the rest of the lambs. People liked to believe in their own cleverness. Let someone think they were smarter than you and they would positively volunteer to give themselves away.

“Which way to the cellar?” she asked sweetly over her shoulder.

“I-I’ll…” The goblin maid’s voice was husky, low, soaked with arousal, broken with whimpers. “... n-never… tell…”

Vivi got bored and blew her another kiss.

“A-Aah! D-Down, right, um, f-first on the right!”

Vivi beamed. “Oh my gosh, thanks, babe,” she cooed, and skipped down the hall towards her prize.

Case in point: The idiot of a guardsman who had needed nothing but a few drinks, a kiss on the cheek, and a bounce of her ass in his lap to start bringing up unprompted stories of a captive ancient demon he was helping to bind. He’d been so sure he was in control, so sure he was impressing the dumb bimbo slut passing through town.

She giggled, taking a right. She hadn’t even had to take off her panties to break him. Of course, she didn’t take those off for many people. Why take cock when just a few wriggles of her plush ass in their lap had people so eager to give away everything else? Why take when she had so much to give?

Just as she was turning right, the door directly ahead of her swung open. A young man in dull gray robes stepped out, his shoulder-length pale hair quite striking against those bright green eyes.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, his voice level and low.

Vivi lifted the bedroom lantern—such a handy little toy—and flipped open the lens. “Oh, I disagree~”

Soporific orange light flooded from the device and streamed over the man. Even Vivi had to blink a few times, her vision blurring from the lantern’s backlash. But she managed to remember to blow the man a sweet kiss to seal his fate, giggling to herself.

Only when her vision cleared, the man was still standing there—lines of weariness across his face, but still, standing. And now lightning sparked around his head, crackling into the shape of ancient runes.

Vivi’s smile tightened. “Oh, you Cloistermages.” She rolled her eyes. “So boring.”

The mystic snapped her fingers, and flames danced on her fingertips.

~ ~ ~ ~

The ward cellar was carved to curve outward and then in on itself, to bulge at the walls and come back in at the coving, a vase of pure magic with the ceiling bending towards the floor. It was as if the prison itself contorted and warped under the gravity of its prisoner. Pale runes streamed across the walls like glimmering caustics at the bottom of a shallow pool. At its center hung the prisoner. Before the prisoner sat a woman in gray robes, shrunken in her colorlessness compared to the brilliance of the ancient powers that coiled around her.

Sister Salvia swallowed. She couldn’t hear what was going on above, thanks to the ward cellar’s magic, but she trusted Brother Ankou knew what he was doing. That distant tremor in the ceiling earlier had probably been nothing. Probably.

She was a little distracted at the moment, though.

Sister Salvia had a job to do. Her duty as a nun of the Cloistered Monasteries. She had to keep watch. Even the slightest disruption to the circle could loose the horror within, and as the wards grew weaker, accidents could happen. It was critical to never take eyes off the enemy.

She fidgeted with the stick of chalk in her hand.

It was very important that she watch the demoness swaying rhythmically before her eyes.

Even though she felt so, so tired. Sitting crosslegged on cold, hard stone didn’t even matter. As a Cloistermage, she’d slept on worse in comfort.

For all her training against mental control, weariness had crept up on her like a beast in the jungle, invisible until it wasn’t. Now it pulled her down towards an endless abyss, and she knew how good it would feel to just close her eyes…

But Sister Salvia was a nun of the Cloistered Monasteries. The stronger the temptation, the harsher the denial, the more powerful her magic. And so she stared the demoness down, barely a trace of her weariness on her face.

She just wished Tesseract would stand still.

The ancient succubus’s luscious hips swayed to and fro in a slow, languid rhythm, the kind of perfect beat only an immortal creature could attain. Her beauty was like something vast from below, hard to hold in one glimpse, or even two, or even eight hours straight of staring. It shifted in and out of what Salvia felt able to imagine, sometimes overpowering in its intensity, sometimes almost possible to ignore.

Eight long crooked horns rose like spider’s legs from atop her head. Long scarlet hair cascaded down over her shoulders and pooled around her feet like pouring blood, glittering in the lamplight. Her skin was the hue of brilliant tawny amber, cheeks and shoulders dappled with bright red freckles. And not even darkness could hug her body like that black dress did. Its keyhole neckline drew the eye almost irresistibly, enticed the viewer to notice how her breasts strained against the silks, how they were squeezed together, a perfect pair of blood moons just beginning to emerge from the world’s shadow. Those freckles traveled down to within her cleavage, too, not that Salvia would look.

It was hard not to look and still do her job.

But back and forth those hips swayed, and slowly, Salvia’s gaze drooped back down even lower.

Tesseract’s hips were unspeakably curvy, a decadent swell from that narrow waist into the shape of a perfect, beautiful heart. Here the black dress opened into a faint slip, the smallest flaw between fabric and flesh where Salvia could glimpse smooth skin and soft, promising curves.

No. She scolded herself. She kept doing that. Kept… attaching abstract ideas to objective objects.

‘Promising’ curves.

‘Decadent’ hips.

A ‘beautiful’, ‘heart-shaped’ ass.

It was just so difficult. She wanted to whimper in frustration, but kept her face resolutely blank. Brother Ankou didn’t seem to be struggling at all with this mission. Was he just stronger-willed? A better Cloistermage?

Or was the demoness focusing all its attention on her?

Salvia wasn’t sure when she had started dreaming of Tesseract. It had begun sometime over the last few days. The Cloistermages accepted, of course, that wet dreams were inevitable. The body was what it was. They could practice exercises to reduce the prevalence, but at the end of they day, fluids had to go somewhere.

But these weren’t like that. These weren’t just nocturnal emissions.

She wasn’t… cumming in these dreams.

That was the worst part.

Back and forth the hips swayed. Oh, she was… she was staring again. She forced her gaze back up, all the way up, staring coolly up into those bright eyes. One gold, one red.

Back and forth the hips swayed. Even when she wasn’t looking at them, there they were. Back and forth. Back and forth. Tick. Tock.

Tick. Tock.

Tick. Tock.

Tick. Tock.

There came a thundering from the ceiling, and bits of dust and debris rained down. Loose chips of stone and brick struck the ground in places and shattered, and the noise startling Salvia slightly from her daze

She heard her own heavy breathing, heard the steady clinking of the chains, rattling bells accompanying Tesseract’s lazy sway, music for the dance.

Wait. Salvia blinked blearily. Music. Sound.

Noise.

The wards.

Her eyes opened a little more fully. What was happening above?

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, and she needed help now.

She sprang to her feet and whirled around towards the stairs. “Broth—”

She heard a sound like a cracking whip.

An instant later, something long and sinuous and silk-smooth shot past her ear and flicked back around. It looped around her head, as quick as a lunging viper, and pulled taut to slip between her lips.

The rest of her cry for help came out as a garbled cry. Instinct took over, and she tried to bite down, but the tendril was at once as soft and smooth as a velvet cushion and as tough as tree bark. She reached up to try to pull it away, but the sinuous tendril was already looping around a second time, winding around her head, strengthening the gag.

Salvia was struggling to think of a spell to cast when the tail that had gagged her encircled her a third time, and this time slithered around her neck.

It drew taut.

Salvia gave a gurgle, clutching at it desperately. It wasn’t tight enough to strangle her. It was tight enough to make sure she knew it could.

Then it forced her to turn around.

Her eyes flicked first to the source of her predicament. One of the stones had fallen right on the most critical chalk line and shattered, smudging the chalk. She should have noticed, should have fixed it at once. Foolish. Careless.

As she watched, another tail emerged, plucked the chalk from her hand, and carefully redrew the smudged lines—but crooked, ever-so-slightly wrong, easy to miss but totally ineffective. Salvia could tell instantly, but that was because she was looking for it.

Tesseract, still restrained but with multiple impossibly long tails flicking behind her head, gazed down at Salvia with a smile like stars in the night sky.

“Going so soon?” the succubus purred. “What could be the hurry?”

And her sweet-smoked voice made Salvia think of… of nothing at all.

She stared stupidly up at Tesseract, her mind melting into honey, as out of the corner of her eye she watched a second tail continue to carefully flick away debris, preparing the scene for whoever came down next. Laying the trap. Weaving the web.

“After all,” Tesseract added, her voice thick, gooey quicksilver poisoning everything it flowed upon, “isn’t it so important to keep watch over me?”

Salvia felt a third tail teasing between her thighs. This one was as wet and slippery as a woman’s tongue. Wet and slippery as Tesseract’s perfect, intoxicating, musical liquid voice, and the pleasure that began to flow into Salvia was blazing-hot and cruel, everything she had denied herself for the last ten years.

The nun dimly realized she was drooling.

And that ass kept swaying.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Tick. Tock.

Tick. Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.