The chalk scraped along the floor in slow, deliberate strokes. Arthur traced the diagram line by line, pausing at each intersection to tilt the vial and let a single drop of orc-troll blood fall onto the crossing. The teal liquid hit the white chalk and sizzled faintly barely audible, but enough to know the reagent was active.
At the edges of the diagram, he placed the remaining components at the cardinal points. Bone dust, dried nightbloom petals, were each placed between them creating something that resembled a pentagram, only if that pentagram had webbings connecting each point in a way that looked almost eye-like. A lidless eye staring up from the floor of a student dormitory.
He stood back and looked it over.
He sat down outside of the diagram, settling into something close to a meditative position. He closed his eyes and turned inward, pulling his focus inside himself scanning, the way you'd press your fingers along a wall searching for a seam.
He found it the core of him. Whether it was his soul or simply the essence of his bloodline, he'd stopped trying to name it.
What mattered were the four threads.
Each jutted off into the distance toward its own flaming ball those he had marked, each radiating a different color. Helena's was icy blue. Amy's was amber. Ryn's was teal and noticeably smaller than the rest, still a strong flame, but burning lower, quieter, like a campfire that hadn't been fed in a while. And Mira's was white. Brilliantly so. Burning larger than all the others, its light steady and unwavering, the oldest thread and the most deeply rooted.
Mentally, he imagined his mana as a hand, and with it he plucked the strings the threads between his soul and the Mark pulling them taut the way a siege engineer tensions a line before the first bolt fires.
That metaphysical hand left his body, carrying the strings with it.
One by one, he attached each thread to the small ornate wooden totem seated at the center of the summoning circle.
He opened his eyes.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small knife no more than a couple inches long. He pressed the edge into his palm and drew it across, opening the skin just enough for blood to well up and run freely.
He held his hand out over the summoning circle.
Mana channeled through his body, down into his hand, and poured out through the blood as it dripped into the diagram below.
"I call upon thee she who walked before the first angels fell." His voice was low and even. "She who taught desire to the formless. She who wore sin before the gods had named it."
The chalk lines nearest his blood darkened. A faint pulse ran through the diagram there and disappeared.
Something was listening.
"I offer the white flame the devoted. The first thread. The one who kneels."
The totem shuddered. Mira's thread pulled taut against it, and the chalk at the nearest point of the pentagram bled from white to a dull, pulsing red.
"I offer the amber flame the watcher. The one who burns to be seen."
A second pulse. Stronger. Amy's thread snapped tight and the next point of the pentagram turned, the red creeping outward along the webbings like veins filling with blood.
"I offer the teal flame the hunter. The one whose instinct is sharper than her pride."
The third point caught. The hum in the room deepened no longer something he heard, but something he felt in his molars, behind his eyes, pressing against the base of his skull.
"I offer the blue flame the caged. The one whose thorns grew inward before they grew out."
The final point ignited.
All four threads now pulled against the totem like guy-wires holding down something that wanted very badly to rise. The entire diagram was red. The webbings between the points throbbed in rhythm slowly, deliberate, like a heartbeat that didn't belong to anything in this room.
Arthur steadied his breathing. The air tasted like iron and something older. Something sweet and rotting underneath.
"Lilith. Mother of all lust. Queen of sinners. I have given blood. I have given bond. Four threads drawn from my soul and laid before your name."
He leaned forward. His blood dripped faster now, pooling at the center of the diagram where the totem hovered.
"Hear me, and answer."
The lights in his room died.
Not flickered. Died.
Then a presence filled the space heavy, ominous, pressing in from every wall at once like something vast had turned its attention toward a very small room.
The summoning circle blazed to life.
Bright red.
The haze lifted itself off the lines of the diagram like heat rising from scorched earth. What light remained bled into a deep red hue, transforming the room from a student's quarters into something closer to a hellscape.
The totem rose higher. The four threads attached to it stretched and vibrated, each one singing a different pitch high and thin for Ryn's, low and resonant for Mira's, the other two somewhere between.
The orc-troll blood spread outward from the totem, bleeding across the chalk lines, staining them a deep teal as though the diagram itself were a wound opening slowly beneath the skin of the floor.
Then as if something had taken a blade to the air itself four fingers appeared at the center.
Ghastly. Skeletal. Their form barely holding the shape of a hand.
They grabbed at nothing, trembling, before slowly dragging to the side pulling, tearing, trying to rip the air apart like fabric stretched too thin.
The temperature didn't drop. It vanished as all warmth pulled out through the crack like water through a drain.
And with it came a sound not a sound, exactly. A hum that sat behind the teeth and pressed against the inside of the skull. The kind of frequency that made you want to open your mouth and scream just to drown it out.
A hole, opening.
For whatever was to come through.
A single foot stepped through the hole.
A gold heel and the skin of the leg dark like rich chocolate.
Clack.
— and the presence that followed drove Arthur to his knees.
Crack.
He hit the ground hard with both kneecaps against the floor. He barely felt it.
The hole behind her grew wider, vibrating violently straining, as if the air itself could barely hold against the weight of her mere presence. More skeletal hands clawed at its edges from the other side, grabbing, pulling, tearing it open further. Then more came, and more after that, swarming, ripping the gap apart until it was wide enough.
Another foot. Stepping onto thin air as though it were solid ground.
Arthur couldn't look at the portal directly. His body wouldn't let him. But he felt it a figure standing tall just beyond the threshold.
Then, as if given a silent command, his head jerked up.
She was seductive in a way that made every part of him want to lunge forward and do nothing else. Long legs encased in a tightly fitted dress, a pencil cut, gold and purple, clinging to hips that were wide and deliberate. Her breasts were large and full, the kind that were made perfect to suck on.
Her face Arthur didn't dare look at. He kept his eyes down, near her collar, instinct warning him that the sight of it fully might be the thing that finally broke him.
"Ah. The fresh air of Luminara, beautiful. Isn't it, child?"
A seductive voice echoed through the room, each word a mirror of itself, layered, as though a second voice trailed just behind the first both of them licking at his ears. His body shuddered.
"That would be correct, ma'am."
"I haven't been called upon in over ten thousand years." A pause, unhurried. "I thought you mortals had forgotten about me. But alas it seems at least one of you still remembers." The smile in her voice was audible. "Tell me, child. To what do I owe the pleasure of meeting you?"
"Lilith, Queen of Sinners I ask of you one thing. A way to increase the potency of my bloodline."
Silence.
"Is that all you want, child?" Her voice curled around the words. "Are you sure you don't want perhaps me?"
Something shifted in the air. The presence in the room tightened not hostile, but focused, the way a predator narrows its gaze before deciding whether something is prey or simply boring.
Arthur's jaw clenched. His body wanted to answer before his mind could. Every nerve ending lit up like she'd run a finger down his spine without touching him.
He didn't move.
"I wouldn't dare waste your time with something so selfish, my queen."
A soft sound. Almost a laugh.
"And what of payment, child?" Her tone didn't change. Smooth. Patient. "These things do not come without a price. Surely you have something to please me."
"That, my queen, is something entertaining to watch."
A soft sound. Almost a laugh.
Her voice dipped lower. "Tell me more, child. Entertain me."
Arthur steadied himself. This was the part he'd rehearsed. The part that required knowing exactly who he was speaking to not just what she was, but what she'd lost.
"Life has not been well for you, my queen. Not since the banishment." He kept his voice measured. Respectful. But deliberate. "Forsaken to the underworld. Cut off from the world above. Ten thousand years in exile and for what?" A pause. "All because of what happened between you and—"
"Do not speak his name."
Lilith's voice cut clean through the air.
Sharp. Final. A blade dressed in silk.
The name died in Arthur's throat before the first syllable could form. Not because he chose to stop. Because something reached into his mouth and strangled it.
"You are not worthy to speak his name." Her voice softened, but the weight behind it didn't. "I do not care what the world believes he did to me. He is still my true love. And I will not allow anyone to so much as breathe his name in my presence."
The room pressed inward. The red light thickened.
Arthur said nothing.
Lilith's gaze turned piercing.
And it forced Arthur's eyes up all the way up to her face.
He hadn't wanted to look. He'd known better than to look.
Her face was something beyond the words he had for it. Not heavenly. Not sinful. Both at once, layered so completely that the mind couldn't settle on which it was seeing and the result was the kind of beauty that brought men to their knees before they understood why.
Arthur was no different.
The pressure in his trousers made that clear enough.
His breath went ragged. His thoughts collapsed into one singular, consuming thing
The woman.
But he held on. He tightened his fist until the cut in his palm screamed, and he kept his mind there in the pain, in the grip, in the diagram beneath his knees.
Steady.
Author Note: Patreon.com/Lord_Cuckles or search TabooQuill on Patreon.com