>>5591918You whirl around to face this newcomer… But you see nothing but blood, guts, ruination, and the emptiness of this sad little empire freshly cleansed of life… Until, from the sky descends a single bird. It is a corvid, black-and-white of feather, as one might see make feats of any such slaughter… But as it alights upon the grisly fingerpainting which you have made of the cult’s young, ti does not eat of them. Rather, it regards the scene with curious and unsettling intelligence.
“Baby…”
>20 for enemy probability“I know,” you quickly respond to Irinnile’s unspoken warning. “Thiss iss your ‘Inky’.”
“‘Inky’?” the bird croaks in its queer mimicry of human vocalization. “Really? Well, then again, what else can one expect of a SUCCUBUS, especially of THAT succubus?”
You tune out Irinnile’s furious retort—most unintelligible anyway—and instead take up a battle stance. It feels absurd against such a tiny and outwardly-insignificant adversary, but you know better than to take something at its face value.
“Anyway,” the Incubus continues, “what is in a name? I have dressed myself in so, so many… In names, faces, dreams, identities. So many aspirants, all vying for an ideal self that they only glimpsed in visions… Until I made those dreams real. Until I unleashed their true selves.”
The bird tilts its head, a gesture you find yourself unconsciously mirroring in your own uncertainty of what to do.
“Well,” the corvid caws, “until you turned the dream into QUITE the nightmare. I’d ask why… But the answer seems obvious.”
“You broke your pact with my mother,” you note, perhaps more directly than you normally would in part to the lingering ‘high’ of your uninhibited atrocity. “With the Sserpent Priesssthood, the Massster Race, and the Dark Godsss Beyond and Below. I have come to collect.”
“I did no such thing!” the incubus-within-the-bird protests. “I did not move against your people, didn’t expose them, didn’t EVER attack them. But you… Well, YOU broke with the pact quite brutally here. Did you realize?”
You didn’t, but you suppose it makes sense. Whatever the terms of your mother’s deal with this new demon were, they surely involved mutual nonaggression to make ANY sense of such an alliance.
“It does not matter,” you say.
“Doesn’t it?” the incubus asks. “I say again: I am in the business of granting dreams. And such DREAMS you dream, little dragon! I see it in you: you aspire to TRULY magnificent things. And yet you truck with this treasonous little tart who PRETENDS at being a Greater Demon.”
“I AM a Greater Demon!” Irinnile all but shrieks. “You KNOW it, you catty bird BITCH!”
