A specter comes in among the colorful figures atop the ever-snowy peak they know as Everest. An apparition in a lacy black gown with frilled sleeves clinging tight at her alabaster wrists, and black-painted nails draped atop the sword of black shadow she wears through a black gossamer sash around her trim waist. Bare skin, blushing at the cold thin air as though it’s nothing sharper than a late October wind.

Bless this liminal space where the human mind loses its lie of the rational world, where these mortals I can't help but love step, for the briefest halcyon time, outside the conditioned psychosis. That prison of mundanity that blinds and deafens and numbs them to the eldritch, the tendrils in the bright morning, the inferno from the deep night pooling by our bedsides. Bless the low-oxygen delirium that lets me seed the mountaineering psyches with the truth while sparing them the truth’s full unmaking weight.

We’re in the death zone. People experience all sorts of strange things in the death zone.

That's the key: the explanation. I suppose I should forgive myself for growing so obsessed with its art. The right explanation, that's why these souls can linger the way they do. They're dead, yet refuse to witness their own deaths. More and more gather around the world every day, trying to deny the toll of climate change, of corporate overreach, of a species trapped in lives so miserable that few can muster the will to keep it alive.

A meditation I've contemplated many times: in many ways, dead humans leave their humanity behind. Even as they emulate the faces, forms, and ways of mortal lives, living humans deem them too alien to call anything other than monsters. How can I help but feel kinship for them?

I see now. My answers grew oh so wily, whether in worldbuilding when I wrote fiction for Earthly audience, or as a woken devil trying to tantalize with philosophy and logic to make everything she did seem so very reasonable. But no matter how devious, my answers could never hold a compulsion like this. Souls give an explanation its power the moment they choose it, choose it because it's the only way they can cling to the reality they want.

Even the temptation of a succubus has its limits. Strange impulses, bright dreams, maddening lust: all irrational. All beyond explanation. For all that I can achieve, I will never be able to replicate, to replace, the pull that certain explanations have for certain souls.

Here on this winter pinnacle, with the cold air bringing clarity... I'm at peace with that. And I think I can forgive myself if it takes a while yet to fully overcome the habit. The momentum of a dream will always be difficult for me to let go. It'll be easier, I think, now that I've recognized I had reasons beyond trauma, fear, and self-harm.

I’m the only mind here that knows the true Earth, the Earth outside the half-dream, the cognitive envelope, the hallucination other humans believe is real purely because they know it as reality. The hunting’s better in the deserted streets where humans make themselves unable to see. Prey suffers most against a predator it only knows as emptiness.

“Beautiful view, aren’t they?” I ask, gesturing to the peaks all around us. “The mountains that don’t give back what they take.” Spiking startlement exposes the solitary climber who understands my reference: a prismatic bloom like a mushroom cloud’s mantle. I grace them with a lingering gaze. Inviting. Quirked lips curved into a slight knowing smile.

–Yes,- I send to the one beneath the mask, -You can choose to chase bliss's mystery. One day you can become a version of yourself who’s able to follow me. –

The dark abyssal blue unfolds from the horizon where the star-womb meets the Earth's uplifting crags. It stretches, stretches, stretches outward to meet the summit-snows.

“Only peace today, my doves,” I call out to the baffled beings scattered along the climbing line. “If you wish a duel to make you stand, I'm afraid someone else must oblige. I'll leave this much with you: a sweet dream's teasings, to rest here, to hold you close. Be steadfast!” I step into the solidified space and melt across it. Swirling. Spreading. I melt up through the atmosphere into the star-clad blackness of beyond.

I stand on a midnight-blue bridge to nowhere, one in a hexagon of six, opaque crystal inset with silvery rooms. Its outer lip is a concave spike. Figures walk the offset angles of the other bridges, following the corkscrew paths in defiance of gravity until they pass through six gateways. Somewhere on the other side they weave together, spiraling, until they merge with the first avenue passing into the lambent halls of Machrae Diir.

Peace settles on me, seeping into my heart as I follow my own path through its gateway, through tunnels where crawling things squelch half-seen along the walls. I pass beneath a lust-demon who looks very pleased with herself for encountering the meat-mass that has her pinned to the ceiling. It’s vacuum-sealed around her hips, thighs and mouth so every thrust of the something it’s using to breed her raises a big, bulging crease on the underside of its amorphous body.

I tilt my head back and catch stray droplets dripped by their mating with a lascivious moan of my own. It’s good to be home.

My steps carry me onward, towards the long, angular installations of pale concrete and rusted iron where fragments of old bunkers and disused convention-center hallways meld into Machrae Diir’s primary motifs. I do feel some regret. She looked like she was having so much fun. But I just got back, and…

… and the number one thing I despised about life on Earth was how often I had to put aside my lust in order to get some sort of thrice-accursed project done. Here's a thought, Kai: maybe instead of treating your sex as some great challenge, you embrace it as a joy you just like to go looking for? Seeking it out at your own pace? So, what's that pace right now?

I double back at double-time and vault up to the ceiling. A little manifested gravity aligns me with the demoness and her meaty partner.

“So, is this more of a personal thing with an exhibitionist layer,” I begin, "or do you have room for one mo–” The meat-mass engulfs me with a sudden lunge of hot, muggy flesh that muffles my yelp of surprise. It pushes me breast to breast with the lust devil, expands its upper band from her mouth to lock us lip to lip, and promptly forms a second mutant shaft so it can pound us both senseless.

The moment that shaft plunges in between my legs, I realize how silly I've been. My folds cling and drip and quiver with lightning-lights of pleasure, my kindred's tongue is so sweet and hot against mine, and every hint of performance anxiety melts away. Lust is what I am. This is what I'm for. To be used, bound, bred, broken, over and over again. I treat sex as something I must perfect because I first explored it through my writing, but sex--sex is just what a succubus is.

I fold outward to meet my newest mates, clinging, gasping, riding along until that strange wonderful flesh driving against my sweet-spot raises me to a wonderful orgasm. My ecstasy's contagious, sweeping my partners over the brink with me, and I forget how to think at the sheer joy of being filled...

Sometime later, now wobbling and lust-drunk with occasional splatters of eldritch seed splattering between my feet, my slickened legs exposed between the shredded fabric of my gown–I could mend it with a thought, but why?–I stagger onto the main avenue running through Machrae Diir. My less than straight-line path leads to the distant dark-iron citadel anchoring the bridge across the Rift of Recompense. That's the source of the cobalt rays spilling skyward in a long barrier-band on the far side of all the miles and miles of paranormal suburbs, monuments, parks and even skyscrapers.

When did my home grow so large? How many beings did it take to build all this?

The Rift conceptually separates, though not logistically–it takes more than that to divide a realm of beings who fly, open portals, teleport and more–the public areas of the dimension from the anomalous reaches leading toward Kdalthach Carogdem.

The Galespire. The immense silver tower at the dimension’s heart inside the Maelstrom of Dissolute Worlds where the Lady’s power, my power, melds with the burgeoning power of Machrae Diir itself. Together we disintegrate the cast-off essences of countless universes into their components so they can be recompiled into something new.

The Maelstrom's so far away I can just scarcely make it out as a dim distortion on the night’s dark-ocean blue. Vestals of the Void Aeon, I remember the days when I could throw a stone with barely more than human strength, and hit the spire from the front gates!

The streets are mostly deserted, of course. We want far more space than we have denizens. Plenty of space for strange new adventures to coalesce, for unheralded entities to creep in, for all manner of secret and mysteries and odd little stories to take place as treasures known only to a few.

A demon's home is so much happier when most of it is unknown even to her.

Blood-orange fire belching from the depths, off-angle highrises curving and twisting into mad Escherian angles. Artfully-dilapidated dive-bars, starship hulks stuffing the catwalk-crossed depths. Those depths plunge down ever further from their humble beginnings at the surface level as uncovered manholes, and dizzying portals carved between silver monoliths. Whole undercities, subterranean sanctums for demons who prefer the echoing cavern and the magma-chamber to the eerie sky.

I should go bask in a magma chamber again. It's been too long. Fates, what am I doing with myself? There's so much to love about Machrae Diir, so many nooks and crannies to explore, so many queer new creatures to meet there and make love with!

Lost souls wail in the distance, enormous undulating creatures of pseudopods and gelatinous dark matter squirm up over the lip where the dimension blends through the seams to other realities, my phase-cables whistle and hum as they carry crackling azure lightning through the sky…

“You finished it,” I whisper, speaking to the echoes of other denizens in my heart.

“You told us to.” Handmaiden startles me.

I have many handmaidens and a fair few Handmaidens, but only one handmaiden. She’s the worst one. She looks like all the other handmaidens, though nothing like the Handmaidens: a demon five and a half feet tall in shining azure silks, robes hooded and veiled that hide most of her save her clawed feet, her swishing snow-white tail with its speckling ice-blue scales, and the delicate jaw and chin. “You like it?”

“I love it,” I breathe, unsteady now with wonder rather than exhaustion as I start forward again. “It’s so much more beautiful than I ever dreamed.”

“Now that’s just not true,” handmaiden says. She falls into step beside me. “Your dreams led us to most of this.”

She spreads her hands to the surrounding constructs, turning a slow circle. “Of course, this isn’t the first try. At first we just sort of threw it all together. This sequencing we have now, with the starship graveyards being underneath and poking out a bit at the edges like a deranged space station? The way we've marked the end of the primary residential area with the kaleidoscopic patterns we made out of the desecrated cathedrals and churches, with the corrupted essence of the dead heavens spawning miniature cosmic horrors straight from the ether… it took us a while to actually organize it all in a way that felt real. We needed it to flow with the streets and the tunnels and especially the highways built from primordial star-coral, but we also needed the streets to end or go crazy…”

“Heaven gets very purple when it decays,” I observe.

Distantly, someone screams in ecstasy.

Handmaiden swats my wrist, earning no response save a raised eyebrow. “You know full well we chose for it to be purple. But nice double meaning, you ridiculous woman.”

“It’s spectacular,” I say, spinning to face her head-on.

“Mistress, please do not–” handmaiden begins.

I seize her in a hug and lift her off the ground. That takes considerable back-arching since even in this Fold I'm two inches shorter than she is. She squirms, goes limp, and then finally returns the hug pretend-grudgingly.

“Truly,” I add. I’m overflowing with surreal awe and starry-eyed joy. “It’s… it’s infinity plus one, over and over and over again.”

A glittering tear-track seeps down her cheek. “Kai… you really mean that?”

“I would never lie here,” I whisper, squeezing her again. “Anywhere else in creation, the totality or the omniverse or the all-that-is, I might. But I will never breathe deception into the soul of Machrae Diir.”

Handmaiden stirs. “So, um… do I call you Ashley in this Fold, or…?”

“Ashley was a chronological aberration I entertained in my psychosis.” I set her down. “An anomaly of myself born from time-continuums we long since left behind. Azure eyes and black hair mean Kairliina, whether the rest appears human or demon.”

“Right.” She sniffs at her robes. “Kai, you filthy slut. You reek of sex. You let some kind of monstrosity have its way with you on the way here, didn’t you?”

“Just after I got back, actually.” I favor her with a vicious grin. “You like it.”

“I never said I didn’t.” She doesn’t ask before stepping in, slipping her fingers into the rip at the front of my gown, and swiping along my vaginal folds for a sample. Already sensitive from the earlier railing, I have to cling to her shoulders while I gasp, my eyes rolling back. She brings her moistened fingers to her lips and licks with slow relish.

“Mmph…” I squirm, shivering. “I’ve missed that. Let mortals keep their consent-models, but all the worrying and the strain, it’s exhausting. On Earth nobody tackled me in the street and pinned me down and flooded me with pheromones from their stinger-tail until it felt so good I stopped caring about consent, you know?”

“Trust me, we agree,” handmaiden says. “Machrae Diir is still a refuge for weirdos who think like weirdos, and need different things to have a fulfilling life.”

“Barring the particular sorts of weirdos who are gross about it, right?” I ask.

“Absolutely not.” Handmaiden sticks her tongue out. “Blech. It’s about the vibes. The vibes–“

“Right, yes, exactly!" I bounce with excitement, conscious in the most delicious way of how my breasts heave in my torn gown. "The vibes need to feel erotic!”

Here it is, just as it always was: whatever I look like, I've always had this joyful sexual depravity in me, this zeal for love and dreams made manifest. Earth could clip my wings for a while, and shear my tail, and break my horns away, but a succubus I remain.

A pleasant sigh. It’s so comforting to let my guard down and shrug all Earth’s standards of conduct off. To let go the morals, the ethics, the philosophy I embraced because the alternative was death, and missing out on all the joys I knew would be unique to the era of my flesh. I'm free now. We’re Machrae Diir. And it's time to share everything I carried with the demons of this demon's heart, so we can make it all ten times better.

“How are they, generally? The denizens?” I ask. “How did they take my departure?”

“If you mean how’s the community handling itself without topdown authority…” her lips quirk. Then she laughs and shakes her head. “Never mind that. You just got back and I don’t feel right making a joke out of that.” A smile. “It’s been good, your highness. Surprisingly so. Sure, for a while we were all timid and afraid of messing it up. The pressure did lead to some breakdowns. A few, especially some of the younger succubi, convinced themselves they hated you for a little while. Kept claiming you created responsibilities that only could carry, then dumped it all on them.”

I roll my eyes, pausing to blow a kiss to a passing vampire. She peeps in and explodes into a swarm of bats, fluttering away to hide in the nearest coffee shop. Oh, is that an attached bakery? I'll be sure to indulge in that later! Note to self: more culinary hedonism. My figure does whatever I tell it to now, and I need to exploit that to eat more.

"So," I continue, turning a wry smile to handmaiden, "how many of these supposed responsibilities were self-inflicted?"

"Oh, a hundred percent," handmaiden laughs. "You know how young demons can be. All hyper-motivated and trying too hard to prove themselves, to earn things they already get to have just for existing."

"May sin kiss their tender hearts," I agree, laughing too.

We pause to consider a chamber of self-recombining circuit-boards. Inside, a naked demon sits on a padded couch beside a drone. His forked tongue lulls out in compliment to his vacantly-staring eyes, little strings of pink drool trickling down his cheek. Wires pierce his temple, dangle out, and feed into slots on the side of the drone’s face-plated head. Their bodies twitch and quiver, sometimes in sync, sometimes in counter-time.

“What’s going on there?” I whisper, excitement creeping into my voice.

“I’m not sure, but I suspect you’ll be able to come back and take advantage later,” she says. “You know, if you like.”

“If I like?” I ask, almost incredulous. “In Machrae Diir? What, do you think I’m going to pass two toys who are either unaware of their surroundings or can’t bestir themselves to show awareness, and not have my fun with them?” I note the viscous white gobs around the demon’s mouth. “Actually, hold on.”

I dart over to the demon, clasp his heated cheeks between my fingers, and slide my tongue up under his to gather it into my mouth. Whether instinct or something else, the forked length and soft lips move against mine. I pant, taste him, breathe his musk and the scent of everyone who’s stopped by to play with him, and lick the leftover semen from his face in parting. It unfolds into ticklish, intoxicating burns when I swallow it, like an absolutely spectacular whisky.

I return to handmaiden’s side, wiping my mouth. “Continue,” I say.