Truth woke to fiendish luxury, stretched indulgently, and sighed contentedly. He took a moment to contemplate what to do with the day. He examined his hand. Long, strong fingers. Well shaped. No scars, which should be impossible but he chalked it up to the Meditations and the odd skincare benefits from the Ghul baptisms. In a word- aristocratic. The hands of a warrior prince.

Incisive was getting, for lack of a better term, sticky. He had noticed it for a while now. As long as he wasn’t pushing hard on the foresight or the fangs, he could keep Incisive going almost indefinitely. He had assumed that it stopped working while he was asleep. He had certainly recast it almost every morning. But there was a lingering sense of the adopted identity hanging around him when he woke.

Merkovah had said something about this? No, not about this but connected. He said that “identity” wasn’t just how you define yourself but how others define you too. That the belief provides shape, but the mage provides power. He was in a city- “city,” the population couldn’t be that big. He had persuaded several mages of Conjin that he was The Prince, a person of such elevated stature that being able to serve him, under any conditions, was the greatest good fortune of their lives.

He would have thought that was objectively mad, but he had grown up in Jeon too. Deference to power, and a keen awareness of status, were so ingrained as to not need mentioning. You were obedient, because only the obedient were allowed to prosper. It was a virtue taught to children and reinforced through a person’s whole life. Obey. Fear the powerful and bully the weak. That’s how you lead a good life.

He refreshed the Incisive. He kept having the feeling that there was something here, something in the persona of The Prince. He wasn’t sure what, or why it mattered, but he was increasingly determined to find out. He had been a rat his whole life. Jumping straight to Prince was a big step, but was it just preparing to be King Rat? He’d find out.

“Attend me.”

The maid instantly entered the room and came to the side of the bed, looking as fresh as could be. Handy thing, being a demon. He took a closer look. “She” looked… good? The maid was a succubus, being attractive was kind of their whole thing, but there was more to it than that, this morning.

The tiny dusting of freckles was still there, as charming as ever. The green of “her” eyes are still rich and deep as the reflection of a pine forest on a hidden pond. “Her” skin is still fair, soft, craving touch. The look of indifference hiding fear and wistful dreams, carefully crafted to inflame the desire of a powerful, cruel man. It was a succubus- this is what it was, and what it did. It wanted nothing more than to be perfect for him. However he defined that word.

It occurred to him that the nicest single moment of intimacy he had with another person, before Etenesh, was sharing a dream with a Succubus. They ate takeout and watched a movie together. Not even cuddling, just hanging out on a couch. It was exactly what he could handle, emotionally, at the time. The fact the succubus had a wolf head didn’t make things worse- it actually relieved some of the pressure. He didn’t want to kiss a wolf. It was fine to just hang out and relax together. A platonic date with a sex demon.

The maid was looking better this morning than it did last night. Truth’s desire for it was nil, but he appreciated the aesthetics and the effort. Something was gently scratching the back of his neck about “her,” though. He was missing something. He shrugged. He would keep an eye on it. The succubus certainly wouldn’t mind being watched.

“Shower, breakfast, dress, then cultivation. This will be my usual routine while I am here. Arrange a sedan chair and a tour guide, I wish to tour the city this morning.”

“As you command, my Prince.” The maid murmured. She bowed and started arranging things. Dutifully and properly. It had truly become a maid… no, HIS maid, to its core.

Truth chuckled slightly and got out of bed. The shower was a delight, and this morning, he would indulge. He was half way there when his brain managed to catch up to his eyes. The “maid” was a succubus the hotel used as staff, likely on the theory that a succubus could do whatever Mary’s guests required. It hadn’t been stolen by him like Butler, it was still bound by the hotel. So why did he firmly believe that “she” was specifically his maid?

He examined himself quickly. No glamor or enchantment had touched him, he would have noticed. He certainly wasn’t catching feelings for a shape-shifting blob of Hell-smoke, and he certainly wasn’t possessive of it, beyond as a status symbol. It didn’t appear that any enchantments or enhancements had been laid on the Succubus. So that would lead one to conclude that, having excluded magic and emotion, the maid was exactly what it appeared to be.

Truth slowly grinned. The maid turned around, smiling back at him.

“It seems I please you, oh Prince?”

“I wondered why the staff here were so quick to bend the knee. How common is the knowledge of what you really feed on?”

“Amongst the mighty? Quite common. Amongst the lower orders? Almost unheard of, simply because they lack the words and concepts to describe what is happening. It seems you were largely kept away from us.”

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“Very deliberately and explicitly,” Truth said. He still vividly remembered his conversation with the System Astrologica about leasable lovers, and the dangers of acquiring a succubus.

“We are a rare breed amongst the Hellborn, in that we don’t want your souls. Nor do we wish to lead you to sin, however defined. We don’t want to harm you in any way whatsoever. We just want you to love us.”

Truth grinned. “No, not exactly. You want us to believe in you. The more lost we become in your seeming, the more our thoughts turn to you, the more we believe in who you present yourself to be. The more real that seeming becomes. It’s why I was so strongly discouraged from taking up with a succubus. The emotional dependency was only part of it.”

The maid was looking down, smiling prettily but demurely. “Yes. Reality, as mortals use that word, is much more rigid here than in Hell, but it is far from static or uniform in nature. Mortal belief reinforces the “realness” of who we are. It calms our wild hearts and scattered minds for a time. And naturally, the more powerful the mage, the greater their command over reality, the greater the effect.”

Truth started laughing. Naked in a hotel room with a succubus, and all he could do was laugh at the poor creature. “We’re your drugs! We feel good for you, relieve your pain, and so you will do “anything” to get us.”

“She” “blushed” and turned away. “If my Prince is pleased to think it so, then it is so.”

“Ah, what a start to the day.” He chuckled and waved her off. “You have your orders. See to it.”

“As my Prince commands, I gladly obey.”

Truth was carried through the winding streets and brilliantly colored buildings in the eternally twilight Conjin. His tour guide was a local boy, an excitable lad with electric blue gills to contrast with the aqua fins coming off his elbows and the back of his legs. His eyes, like Mary’s, were too big for the surface world.

“We are passing through the business district. We may be called the City of Dreaming Waters, but our surface outpost does need some supervision. Not to mention, people would be lost without the routine of an office.” Truth looked around at the hallucinatory office buildings around him. Lowrise, no sky scraping towers under the bubble. They looked like… what they were, he supposed. Level Two and Three mages, people of some standing on the surface, coming in and out of rather proper looking offices. The Level Four’s would likely be met by a sedan chair or other similarly fancy conveyance.

Level five? The ceiling on the dome wasn’t that high, but the odds of a Level Five traveling anywhere on land was next to nil. The spirit beasts and flying clouds strafed the buildings and pedestrians. Apparently it was the mark of the tourist to pay it any mind.

“And over here, we have the public library, constructed and supported by the generous donations of our leading citizens!” It looked like a drowned temple belonging to some very upsetting stellar eminence. He would bet it didn’t get a ton of use.

“Here is the beating heart of our beautiful city- City Hall! Not only do they provide the leadership that propels the city forward, they also command the many complex enchantments that allow Conjin to survive almost a kilometer under the sea!”

That got Truth’s attention. “The city is almost a kilometer down?”

“Startling, isn’t it? A tribute to the wisdom and power of our founders, to say nothing of the determination of their successors!” The tour guide’s ability to speak without using exclamations was still in question.

“How is this possible? I know the waters around Jeon are not so deep.”

“Ah, My Lord is thinking of the waters to the south and on the west side of the peninsula. Around Jeru, the sea bed is barely ninety meters down. But we are in the far northwest! The continental shelf drops quite sharply here, giving space to our dreams!”

Truth did some quick math. Assume that they are actually the full kilometer down. How fast could you swim to the surface? Assuming you could travel roughly a meter a second, that was a thousand seconds, or almost seventeen minutes. Could he hold his breath for seventeen minutes? He wasn’t worried about the weight of the water crushing him, but could his lungs hold out?

“Fortunately, the enchantments on our transport chairs and those built into the city relieve us over any concerns about the pressure of the water. It is simply no different than being on the surface!”

Truth didn’t know what would happen if a person was to suddenly go from surface conditions to “one kilometer under the sea” conditions. Nothing good, he assumed. He had a sudden urge to ensure his stay in Conjin was peaceful.

“To your left, we have the Church of St. Byetil of the Long Grass. It was designed by none other than the famed architect…” Truth didn’t exactly tune out. He was interested. But his eyes kept drifting upward, to the bubble of air and magic over the city. The magic was fading, day by day. Soon there would be only air, and a fraction of a second later, not even that. He wondered what he would see if he went and checked the enchantments holding everything in place.

Conjin had a garden district. Truth wasn’t quite sure what to make of that fact. The gardens often kept with the aquatic theme, long kelp swaying through air as though it were still in water, with little paper fish darting in and out, hunted by little paper octopus. Others embraced the dream of the twilight formal gardens of the surface, with ever-blooming jasmine and honeysuckle perfuming the air next to roses who’s color ran from fish-belly white to bleeding heart red. Groves of dark poplars seemed popular. Truth didn’t know from poplars, the tour guide just kept pointing them out.

Under one such grove stood a young man and an older woman, foreheads pressed together. They looked a little sad, but resolved. They kissed and parted. The man returned to the house, the woman departed. Less than a minute after he left, Truth watched the man leave the house again, this time under a glamour, following the woman. Truth stopped the sedan chair, hopped out, and sent it back to the hotel.

He didn’t know the face, but judging by the way the man moved, he would have sworn he was looking at Vig.