Penelope ran her fingers gently through Ivan's hair. She banished his dreams and nightmares while pushing him deeper into sleep. It would be an easy way to kill him. Sleep withdrew the soul from the body, and along with other various important biological functions, it regulated the flow of magic within the body. In this state it gave Penelope enough control to move the Shroud as she liked too. If her young master was ever severely wounded and unable to move himself through the shadows she could move him very easily. But his control came first when he was awake. That was all part and parcel to being a summoned entity.
Her current mortal body did not contain the essence of true life. Though her heart beat and her flesh was real for most intents and purposes it was still only a puppet. The summoning was the first contract that bound her body. Each summons was different that way and had different requirements. Hers had always been the body of a holy woman born with or gifted the Divine Spark, or more simply that of a virgin maiden. It was a costly material for most purposes and she had only been summoned a handful of times throughout her long existence.
Many simple minded warlocks on other magical worlds could not manage to gather the materials without first getting into a great deal of trouble and those who were not hapless always had demands that she would never meet. Always it was 'creature'. Always it was 'demon'. Always 'come and do my bidding'. Or some other pretentious and overblown way of saying 'Come here bitch. Serve me in bed and give me power'.
Ivan hadn't been like that at all. Of course his wasn't an unannounced raw summon, which were sometimes interesting and sometimes very annoying to be pulled into, but that was only to his credit. Had he been desperate and stupid like so many other first time conjurers he might have summoned a lesser demon to gain power and been killed. Instead he had summoned and approached the Shade of Samiel with some level of respect and courtesy. That on its own would be enough for Penelope to at least humor a mortal for what she might gain, but his desperate plea for help and call for vengeance was something all of demon kind knew.
All demons were spirits. Some were so old that all mortal and immortal beings had forgotten the rudest names of the soul bearing species they had once been, but all were dead in one manner or another. Some were simply banished; yes, their will strong enough to remain without a body but still stripped of flesh and bound away; that was a very tiny minority. Demons all knew loss, and betrayal; if not betrayal then they at least knew some kind of regret. What might they have become if the gray twilight memories of their former lives had continued on? Penelope had once often wondered that for herself. She had been angry as well. But she had grown. Perhaps only as much as a demon or spirit could on its own in the eternal realms of Hell, but she had matured in at least some ways.
And now...now…
She ran her fingers over Ivan's face to wipe away his tears before casting the Shroud over him. She had moved him as he fell asleep and her thighs replaced the pillow that had been at the head of the bed. Had he been awake he likely would have gone mad with lust, but for now the powerful effects of her scent and aura only helped keep him asleep.
“Mama...” Ivan whispered, the words barely discernible among the pained mutterings of some dream or memory that had slipped through the cracks. His face was a pained rictus. The sound was something strange and weak. Ivan was certainly a grown man, but that sound had come from the memory and mind of a child. The scent and feel of the memory was fresh and new however, it made Penelope think of fruit or veggies sealed away in jars.
Penelope cast her fingers gently over Ivan's temples and cast her current weakened arcane senses over his mind. A fragmented memory lay there. It was magically bound and those bindings were definitely damaged by time, but something else had been torn away too leaving only a mockery of sealing magic behind in their place, like paper cast over a hole in a wall. Likely she never would have found signs of it without the damage, but therein lay her answer. She felt her face cast a deep and angry frown as the glands of her conjured body produced an angry chemical response, but as Ivan grew stronger she was more and more able to control her borrowed flesh. When she was first summoned she likely never would have been able to sense this memory, but the need to summon so much of her focus to do so little was frustrating.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Ivan was in pain. His mind was in the first steps of collecting the information of the day and passing it into soul and memory. This time was key to forming dreams. Often the content sifted through here determined what lay inside the dream and it was a good time for a Succubus to strike. But she would not feed on her Master so directly. Not because she had been ordered to. In fact Ivan had never so much as ordered her not to harm him. She was within the rights given to her by her contract to feed upon him, even if she had no need now that she could simply slip into the Shroud on her own if she was ever feeling drained.
But no. She would not feed on him. Not on this memory or the dreams that came of it. Instead against the instincts of her conjured body she leaned her senses into the memory. The levers of his mind came easily to the hands of her magic in his sleep. One twitch here, another there, and the transfer of a few mental images would be all it would take now to hijack his dreams.
Instead she worked carefully alongside his mind focusing his subconscious efforts to remember that which had been locked away. She kept his focus dimmed, guiding him like a deaf and blind dog, and dosed him in sleep when his thoughts began to grow too alert. It was a precarious balance, but even though she had never helped this way before she found that she was a deft hand at it. Her mother might have been proud to see this talent, but that thought only angered and hurt Penelope. So many things here in her rightful home world hurt her like that. Thousands and thousands of years old she might be, but she wouldn't pretend that being here didn't hurt her. She just wasn't that vain. She never had been.
Ivan's mind worked through the memory until it finally came together in a dream. It hit Penelope in flashes that startled her, and yet came too fast for her to pull away from. She found that after moments she was crying, and gently cradling Ivan's resting face in her hands as the last of his own tears streamed down his cheeks.
She had known from the beginning that he was something more than strictly mortal. Human, yes, but also something a little more. She thought it was a latent spark of some kind. And oh it was that, but she hadn't expected this. This world had just shown her more of its secrets in the form of answers she needed for herself and for Ivan too.
Still the truth would be too much for Ivan just yet so she pushed the memories down in his mind. She softened the pain of his memories with visions of the future. She teased him with images of her body, and of acts that would be unspeakable to his innocent mind. Even in his dreams he resisted, but only for a little time. Eventually he gave into lust and his mind took part in the images she conjured and thrust into his dreams. However he still twisted and turned in his sleep, and his conscious mind fought to be free of the dream it had inevitably realized it had been forced into. He might remember this and grow angry with her upon waking, but that could be dealt with easily.
She kept on a little while to make sure that his memory of the unsealed dream would be muddled and buried. She enjoyed teasing him. He resisted so well for a human male of his age. It was part of why she liked him, and part of the larger more selfish reason of why she hadn't killed him yet. If she kept him a little while longer he would change. It was happening more readily than she had expected, but his dreams and memories had just provided answers for that too. She began to laugh softly though still tears fell from her eyes.
She let them fall onto Ivan's face as he entered a peaceful and rest-filled deep sleep, his mind and body too exhausted to battle against her magic any longer.
Penelope tilted back her head and projected as much of herself through the link of blood as she could manage to better control the flesh and mind of her avatar here. Once already her hidden motives had made her impatient and she had almost ruined everything by teasing Ivan too much.
She had been excited. In truth she still was excited. For how many years had she looked for a mortal like him? Or at least one that she could stomach and would qualify for what she needed? How many demons had she spoken to who had hosts in corrupt and dark worlds looking for a suitor, but to find the best match kept under her mothers gaze of all places? It was for that question that she cried and laughed. She petted her new, young, foolish, and innocent young master.
She would raise him to be a terror that would make her mother weep. And to seal it off she would seal Ivan's vengeance by becoming exactly what her mother had feared Penelope might have become in life. Perhaps not exactly in reality. Penelope hadn't been a demon then, but who would have known that Istania herself had made something like Theadus's current mistake thousands of years before?
It would be a secret despair that Penelope would very much enjoy, and that just might settle some little of the anger she still held for Theadus. Theadus, who had killed her mother before she even had realistic odds to try the deed for herself.