Young Merodak is looking for the perfect gift for his mercurial uncle. Fortuitously, a mysterious pet shop seems to have just the thing — a succubus and an incubus, tucked into the very back! But his uncle proves to be much more sadistic than Merodak ever dreamed...
Meanwhile, Razanti is an incubus who's dodged the infamous Incubus Registry for years. He's on a mission to rescue any captured incubi and keep them safe.
Family secrets are brought to light in this dark fantasy novella, set in a bizarre Elvish city with shops and disappear and reappear and trees that walk at will!
Kinks/Warnings: noncon, bondage, incest, tragic pasts, MMMF
A stand-alone that features some characters from A Dinner-Party Diversion.
The Temperance Party assumed power in Sylkhan later than in most places on the continent. Sylkhan was the last of the Elven countries, where they had retreated after the last big war. Peacetime sat oddly on the continent, a delicate filament of trauma reinforced by the ever-growing influence and popularity of Temperance. The protests that had sprung up in other countries—protests against the 'mothering' style of governance Temperance favoured, where protestors held up signs proclaiming: 'Even Baby Birds Fly the Nest!'; 'No Mother is Forever!' and 'United, We Can Cut the Apron-Strings' or simply 'Cut the Apron-Strings' which became a very popular graffiti from the north wastes to the southern coasts—these protests were not found much in Sylkhan, not west of the border anyway.
READ MOREThere was no tradition of mothers opposed to drinking alcohol and shutting down brothels, since elves did not favour the marriage enchantments and rituals that humans used; if anything, the Elven version of Temperance was more a political concession than anything else.
This did not stop the grumbling in the western part of the border, where there were no forests at all and a lot of trade along the big river. The residents—not all elves, of course, by this point in the continent's long and tangled racial history—saw the damage Temperance had wrought in its fifty years of existence. Temperance in human countries made divorces even harder to come by; made stricter only two gender roles; and, despite having risen to power on promises of equality to all women, largely favoured married wives (and especially mothers) over any other sort of women, and threw the rest below the carriage wheels. Legal birth control was restricted to married women who had already had at least one child; illegal, and dangerous, substitutions circulated; lucky were those, like the goblins and selkies, who needn't worry. Now the selkies had all retreated to the Far North Sea, and the goblins had all gone underground except for their few well-guarded tented trade cities.
And then were was the Incubus Registry. That was the other reason Temperance was so popular with humans. 'Finally!' they said, 'Someone is doing something about the incubi.' Stripped of their rights as a race, incubi were rounded up and 'put away.' Stories started up, of secret prisons of incubi, and so did tales of mass graves. Generally these tales were told with a smugness and a feeling of safety; in lieu of the Last War, incubi with their lustful energies and their 'marriage-wrecking ways' became the new target of loathing. When the fury and moral panic died down, any remaining incubi were forced to register, be sterilized, and take magic-dampening drugs. It was the only way to keep them and the other races safe, said the Temperance Party.
Entrenched and backed by old money and the corruption that had spawned the Last War, Temperance seemed a plague that was there to stay. And so even old, isolationist Sylkhan—which after a century still struggled with the loss of its old-growth forests and needed trade badly—bowed to the motherly yoke.
COLLAPSE
