It's been a few months, and six hundred years, and has not yet happened--the day when I tell everyone who's there to read my words, "The lucid dreams of an outer succubus are as solid as reality."

I weave my dreams around me. Tides of shadow, water-murmurs, liquid heat.

If I were awake, it might hurt to think about. But here, wandering over the broken boundary between the shadows in the turbine halls and water-courses beneath the ADS and the shadows waiting in my abyss... it's a all vagary. All my mistakes and misdeeds, all the leering cruelty. All the betrayal, hurt, and despair that made me turn to it.

A memory made of moss from a summer day just gone dark.

When I write those words, I spoke about the outsider's view. My great folly. Always trying to speak to the minds of the audience.

I? Of course I, the dreamer, know I am dreaming. I remember that I recovered many tomorrows ago. Waking seldom hurts. Why am I walking here, then?

Why do I ask myself why? I wish to walk, that's reason enough. That's right... I walk in dreams, shut away from the world, because I am a succubus. I make my home in realms of vagary, in transient things, in one-night stands and whirlwind romances and the hallucinations of a stranger's best drug trip yet. I surround myself with entropy, so there will be none left to creep over the horizon and eat eternity before it comes to me.

Do I owe the hypno crowd an apology? But then... I never vented my discomfort. Just quietly grew beyond it. I suppose we've all got our own quiet ways of softening the weight of our hardest angles. Making them malleable again. Some use spirals and trances. Some use dissociation. I use dreams... and infinity symbols, and trances.

Anyway, the Earth hypnotists are all long dead. A century since the last. How can I owe them an apology when I never got up the courage to speak to them? I think maybe the reason I feel I owe someone an apology regarding hypnosis, is that I owe that "sorry" to myself. Enough. Focus on the joys you can still claim, silly little succubus.

Carag can be such dreadfully elitist creatures... I should return to self-hypnotizing. How did my little recitation run? Fuck Kai, bind Kai, breed Kai, break Kai... that's right...

"Bold of you, isn't it?" I ask the lurker in the shadows. Four horns, curling and curling like a ram, each splitting to five-fold points upholding a lantern. Sensual shapes. She's taller than I... will be taller than I... was taller than I... whatever that's worth.

I am scarcely more distinct, I feel: blue-nova eyes in the dark. Six flanged horns. As I was in the very first dreams of Zul, and the Manifold Throne.

'You're a fool to leave your dreams so open," she sneers.

"You're a fool to enter them," I answer without malice. So sleepy. Soft. "I can't remember what weight is," I murmur, "when I'm like this. I wonder... if I forget that you exist while you're standing in my dream... will you be wiped away?"

"That's not how it works." She flexes talons. Sparklight pools illuminate cloven feet in the dark.

"I feel at home with you." I drift with my words around her, muzzy and comforted.

"W-what?" Her hooves stamp rapidly to keep me in sight.

"You and I are the same, deep down," I breathe. "Pure evil. It's nice, you know? To be with somebody I can truly understand."

"So it's true." She backs away. "You have gone insane."

"I've always been insane." I yawn. "It's all so nice and swaddling down here. It'll make having this conversation so easy when it happens."

"Focus, you insane whore!" she snarls.

My tail draws lazy infinity-signs before me.

"... nah." I sway side to side, delirious with the dream-bliss. "Don't feel like it." My un-fingers feel like a memory of someone else when they touch my lips. "You don't get kisses when you're all... like that." I flop my claws at her. "Not the good kind. 'snot worth it."

She likes sneering, it seems. "You're a slave. A coward."

"No, silly," I giggle. "Just patient. I'll get to be violent and murder-fucky when the times are right. Get to indulge. You..." Little shakes of my head. "I feel sorry for you. You're way too idealistic about your evil." Slave and coward? Is she speaking from the past, or am I meeting her there? Do I care? Hm... I care only to enjoy myself, wherever I am.

"I... you..." Embers pour from her contorting lips, and die in my darkness.

"I'll do this dance forever, I know." Another yawn, hot against my dream-hands. "Never really escape who I am, deep inside."

She slides away as my dreams deepen, and close.

"'s good. I'm really happy."