Chains of a Succubus

by Lanak F Tanor

  It was the mayor’s nephew who was selected to be the one to cremate the mayor. The cremation was held at the edge of the woods and the spot was to be marked by a statue of the mayor who had served the town so faithfully and for so many years.

  Finally toward the evening, a new question was in the air: Who was to be the next mayor?

  Usually when a mayor passed away, his son or daughter would take over the responsibility. But the mayor’s son was missing as well and people speculated that wizard had killed him and disposed his body without anyone knowing. The relatives of the mayor were considered equal to the rest of the townsfolk hence none of them could be directly made the next mayor.

  Hence, the townsfolk decide to vote on who would be the next mayor. Everyone gathered at the centre of the town. I was however taken with surprise when a single cry began to fill the air.

  “Zurk! Zurk! Zurk!”

  I couldn’t believe it. Me, a mayor? I had never even been capable of imagining myself in such a position. I tried to decline it, but the townsfolk wouldn’t agree to it.

  “Without you, we would have never found the truth about the wizard,” they said, “you are the one truly worthy of being the net mayor.”

  It was surreal, even as everyone kept shouting my name.

  I saw my wife in front of me. She was smiling her usual radiant smile. I nodded at her and the townsfolk.

  “I’ll take up the responsibility,” I said. The cheering that followed was massive.

  ***

  Chapter 27: Lanak Tanor

  “Danor,” I said, “I thought you said you found it hard to impress rude people. How come you fooled the king so easily?”

  We were flying in the Sphere. When the king had fallen from the sky and met his end, the soldiers of the king had done no harm to Danor, Gorain or the dragon who were still in the premises of the royal palace. The soldiers had just watched in silence and disbelief.

  Then once it was confirmed that the king was indeed dead having fallen thousands of feet, the entire capital city had burst into glee. The soldiers had thrown down their swords and joined in the celebration. The curse of the king had broken. What more, even the wives, the children and the relatives of the king had turned into ordinary people like the rest of the citizens of the kingdom.

  Danor and the dragon had left Gorain behind at the royal palace. Danor said that there was a good chance that Gorain might end up as the next king because of the important part he had played in freeing the city from the king.

  Danor flashed his teeth.

  “This was an entirely different matter, I guess,” he said, “this was fun. I had never had so much fun talking with someone filled with so much vice and making a fool out of him.”

  I turned at Lana.

  “One thing,” I said to her rather severely, “don’t start calling me father now, all right?”

  Lana laughed.

  “Of course, I would stick with captain,” she said.

  At that moment a pain flared in all those places where I had been bitten by the succubus. I let out a groan, and for once my vision seemed to fade but I quickly regained it. Lana and Danor rushed to me.

  “Are you all right, sir?” Danor asked me.

  I nodded with a grunt.

  “I am taking over the controls,” Lana said as she rushed to the control board and placed her hand over the imprint of the hand, “the Sphere is falling.”

  I had momentarily lost my control over the Sphere because my concentration had been broken due to the pain. Once Lana had taken over the controls, she and Danor helped me to lie down on the floor of the Sphere. I did not feel like I was in a capable position to sit up as it seemed to increase the pain.

  “I think I am catching a fever,” I said, for I suddenly felt cold, getting goosebumps all over my body. Lana placed a hand over my head.

  “You have got a really bad fever,” she said. She looked very worried.

  “I guess a little sleep would fix things,” I said, though I had a feeling if I closed my eyes now I would only open them again as a demon. Gorain, though ultimately a good man, had taken much of our time. Lana rubbed my head with a caring hand.

  “I am going to get us to the merepeople as fast as I can,” she told me. She looked into my eyes with determination. “You are not turning into a demon.”

  I fell into a deep dreamless sleep. The next time I opened my eyes, I had not turned into a demon yet, but I could feel the pain over the bitten parts only flaring even more. Lana was sitting on the seat, looking ahead at the windshield with deep concentration, a hard frown on her forehead. With some effort I turned my head towards the windshield. The forests down below were sprinting by real fast. I didn’t think I had ever flown the Sphere this fast. Lana was really giving her best. Drowsiness came over me although I had only just awoken. I closed my eyes again. The moment I did so, I fell asleep again. This time however I had many dreams, all riddled with horns and heads of demons. I looked down at my body seeing it was covered in green. I felt like my mind was no more my own, even as I obeyed a strange voice that seemed to speak into my mind. There was something very charming about the voice, which was that of a woman. I couldn’t say ‘no’ to the voice. As for my own conscience it didn’t seem to exist at all. I watched as I went about killing and biting people and turning them into demons like me.

  For how long I was asleep I did not know. Then I felt a strange weightlessness and following this I felt someone shaking me. I opened my eyes. It was Danor. He was visibly shaking with fear, deep lines of worry on his face that was never meant to age.

  “What?” I said. Even speaking seemed to require a ton of energy.

  “We are falling!” Danor said.

  “Falling?” But how could we be falling? I turned my head towards the seat. Lana was sitting in an awkward position on it, her head facing the top of the Sphere. She seemed to be unconscious. Then I realised, she had probably exerted herself so much that she had lost consciousness because her mind couldn’t take the exertion.

  “The dragon?” I asked.

  “He’s flying ahead to lead us,” Danor said, “He doesn’t know we are falling!” Somehow, I turned my head towards the windshield. I saw that we were losing height very fast. I saw that we were over the sea and we were going to crash into it. We were plummeting at a breakneck speed towards it, which explained the weightlessness.

  “Please do something, sir!” Danor said, although he seemed to know I couldn’t do anything and was hoping against hope. I felt strangely cut off from the situation. I didn’t feel like it mattered even if we crashed into the sea. Death was more preferable to turning into a demon.

  Danor saw that I had given up. He rushed over to the control board and he slammed his palm onto the hand print on the control board. But Danor wasn’t a player. He didn’t have the ability to see stats. He was a mere NPC.

  Danor clutched his hair.

  “It doesn’t work for me!” he cried.

  “It’s okay, Danor,” I muttered, feeling a new wave of drowsiness take over me. “It’s okay.”

  Danor came over to me and sat down on the floor, his shoulders drooping. A defeated man.

  I closed my eyes.

  Blackness.

  It was the impact on the surface of the sea that woke me up. I sat bolt upright. I found myself at a different portion of the Sphere than where I had been sleeping. The impact had been the same as hitting a sea of rock. Danor had been thrown away and he had hit his head on the side of the sphere. His head was bleeding and he was squirming on the floor, as though he was struggling to lift himself up.

  The lid of the Sphere had somehow opened on its own due to the impact and water was gushing in fast. I began to panic. At the same time I was glad that all drowsiness had abandoned me even though the severe pain very much remained at all the places where I had been bitten.

  But I had never been more conscious in the last few hours. I realised that if we didn’t get out fast from the Sphere we would all dr
own. Lana had also been thrown from the seat after the impact and she was lying on the floor.

  I rushed to the entry hole. My body ached, but I didn’t cared. I forced my mind to take over my body entirely and not succumb to the fever that was still on me. I tried to close the lid, but the water was rushing in so fast that I found it impossible to do so. No, we had to abandon the Sphere, one-fourth of the inside of the Sphere was already filled with water.

  I grabbed Lana. She was stirring, having been half drenched with water.

  “What happened?” she said, barely opening her eyes.

  “We need to get out of the Sphere,” I told her.

  At that moment, Lana let out a giggle that was totally out of the situation.

  “Did I tell you that I like you, captain?” she said to me. She was still only barely conscious. I reckoned she thought whatever was going on was inside a dream of hers. “It’d be bad if you or I die without me having told you that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But get out of the Sphere first, all right?”

  The moment I took Lana directly under the entry hole and the jet of water pouring in hit her head that she suddenly came to herself, her eyes wide so much that I feared they might pop out of her skull.

  “What happened?” she asked, looking at the water that was rushing inside with a startled expression.

  “We crashed into the sea,” I said, “now get out. I am taking Danor out as well.”

  Lana nodded and with much effort, battling the oncoming water, she was able to go outside the Sphere. I went and helped Danor to get to his feet.

  “Sir, did we crash?” he asked me, clutching his bleeding head.

  “We did,” I said, “but we survived. Now I want you to get out of the Sphere immediately.”

  “You said it’d be okay,” Danor said. I didn’t understand him.

  “You said it would be okay,” he repeated. I remembered what I had been muttering when I was half conscious.

  “It is okay,” I said. “Now get out.”

  “What about you, sir?”

  “I’ll follow you out, now hurry,” I said. Half the Sphere was full with the water. I watched as Lana swam towards the windshield from the outside and attempted to lift the Sphere. But she couldn’t do it. She had drained herself of her energy when she had made the Sphere move too fast. It would be a good while before she would regain her strength. And we didn’t have the time to wait for that. I indicated at her that she should rather give up and not spend any more of her energy trying to lift the Sphere. We were in the sea and to keep afloat we would need to swim and wait for the dragon to realise that we had crashed and come searching for us.

  Danor was able to put his head out through the entry hole, but every time he tried to put his shoulders out, the water would force him back inside. That he was weak from the head injury didn’t help at all.

  “Go on,” I urged him, “be the strong man you are!”

  Danor put one more effort. I aided him by holding him in place, preventing the water to push him inside the Sphere. I let a sigh of relief when he was finally out.

  Three fourths of the Sphere had been filled with water and the craft was sinking even fast now. I grabbed the sides of the entry hole and I tried to push myself out. But the last few minutes I had exerted myself too much, and I felt like I had no more strength even as the water pushed me back inside the Sphere. I just wanted to close my eyes at this point and drift away to the peaceful lands of death.

  Suddenly Danor’s hand shot inside. He grabbed one arm of mine, which happened to be the arm where the succubus had bitten me the most. Danor had his grasp directly over one of the wounds, and as he pulled me out I was both thankful and angry to him.

  The two of us swam up to the surface and joined Lana. All of us just breathed in the air for a while. The shore was a good distance to the north. It was barely visible and was merely a line over the horizon.

  “Look, he’s still flying!” Lana said, as she pointed at a distance dot flying south in the sky. It was the dragon.

  “Can’t he take a look behind?” Danor said. “My head is hurting.”

  My own wounds were making me feel like parts of my body were going to detach. The saline sea water was making my wounds feel worse. I was getting tired of kicking my legs as well.

  I took a peek under the water and saw that our Sphere was sinking fast. It had served us so well over the past few days, now it was a mere shadow under the water that was getting smaller with each second. A giant fish swam by it.

  Wait a minute.

  Had it been a fish?

  I took a breath and then looked under the surface once again. There had been something very feminine about the fish. But the fish was nowhere in sight.

  “What do we do now, sir?” Danor asked me, once I took my head out of the water.

  “Wait, what else?” I said. There was no way we could swim towards the coast.

  “This is my entire fault isn’t it?” Lana said and I saw that her eyes were bloodshot.

  “It isn’t,” I said, “you just wanted to get me to the merepeople fast.”

  “But I only ended up destroying the craft,” Lana said with much regret in her tone.

  “Well, on the positive side, at least we are in the sea,” Danor said. “Maybe the good merepeople will come to us and then everything will be all right?”

  Then it struck me. Could the fish that I had seen had seen be a mermaid? But then I could remember that I had seen something like horns on the head of the fish. Maybe it hadn’t been a mermaid after all.

  Just then I felt a pull on my leg.

  I looked down and was met with a sight that I had never expected considering all the pain I was in at the moment. But seeing the faces of the three beautiful girls under the water surface, right near my feet, I felt all my pains disappearing. There was something about the girls that got me into a blissful trance-like state. Their faces seemed to be glowing.

  They beckoned at me.

  I turned towards my friends, but the beautiful girls shook their fingers. Perhaps it was only me that they wanted to talk to?

  “Come,” one of them said.

  Wait. They could actually speak under the water? No bubbles ensued from their mouths even!

  I dived under the water surface. Their beauty was so stunning that I forgot the need to breathe even as I swam down to them. They received me with outstretched arms and embraced me.

  “Who are you girls?” I asked them and was astonished that I could speak under the water.

  “We live here,” one of them said. It was that moment when a bug bit me in the back of my mind and I felt like I was forgetting something.

  “Would you like to come with us?” one of them said. I looked up. My friends seemed to be so high up at the surface of the sea. They were frantically turning this way and that as though they were searching for something.

  “Can you call my friends as well?” I asked them.

  “We will, but first we would like to have you alone,” they replied.

  It was at that moment that my eyes finally fell on the heads of each of the girls. They had horns. Deep down in my mind an alarm of panic went on. The horns… My eyes went down to the legs of the girls, except they had none. They had a large tail each, like that of a fish.

  “Are you mermaids?” I asked them. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of alarm. Those horns… My mind felt as though it had been stuffed with too many things. I struggled to remember why I was getting the alarm of panic every time I looked at the horns of the girls. Was this because of the bite of the succubus?

  Wait. Succubus.

  I felt like I had just come back to myself.

  “We are more than mermaids,” one of the girls answered.

  I suddenly realised I could breathe no more. I struggled to speak even though I had been able to so easily only moments back. I was out of the trance. I kicked my legs and shot up to the surface.

  “Where did you go?” Danor and Lana asked t
ogether the moment I surfaced, their faces ones of panic.

  “There are water succubi under the surface,” I said, even as I breathed in air hard. “Didn’t you see them when you looked down?”

  “We didn’t,” Lana said. “Not the succubi, not even you.”

  “But one particular spot down below was a bit too dark,” Danor added.

  I looked under the water surface again. I saw no signs of the water succubi. Heck, their charm was so much stronger than the charm of the land succubi. Even after having tamed so many succubi, I could still fall for their charm.

  At that very moment, the head of a girl surfaced mere metres away from me. I let out a cry, for the girl had horns.

  “What happened?” Lana asked me, confused.

  “Can’t you see her?” I said, pointing at the girl who had surfaced. But by then she was gone. I gaped. What was exactly going on?

  “Are you okay, sir?” Danor asked me. I nodded, albeit a bit lost. Had that girl been real or had I been hallucinating?

  “Look, the dragon is coming this way!” Lana said. I looked up at the sky. Why, the dragon finally seemed to have realised that the Sphere was missing and was coming this way. He had also lowered his height and he seemed to be scanning the sea searching for us. Finally he seemed to have spotted us and he rushed towards us.

  “What happened?” he asked, as he hovered just above the water surface, beating his wings hard such that they were creating waves which were making it really had for us to keep ourselves afloat.

  “Can we first get on top of you?” Danor said. “We have been swimming for a while and are really tired.”

  The dragon grabbed us with his claws and he put us over his back. I lay on his back, feeling all spent. But the faces of the girls with the horns remained fresh in my mind’s eye. Lana and Danor told all that had happened to us, while I simply stared at the sky. Even the clouds seemed to take the form of the heads of girls with horns.

  “I am terribly sorry,” the dragon said. “I always seem to be away from you when trouble strikes. I promise this shall not happen again. I was hurrying because I wanted to lead you as fast to the merepeople as possible.”