Hope

Hope (Curse of the Succubus #1)

Emma South

Published by Emma South

Copyright 2012 Emma South

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I was cursed.  Unlike other people who might use that word, I had the facts to back it up.  I may have looked like an innocent woman in her early twenties but I was over a thousand years old.  Let me tell you my story.  My name, or what I called myself, is Mary and I was born in the year 983.

Reading about my home in history books or watching documentaries on television just didn’t capture what it was really like.  None of them got it right.  I couldn’t begin to explain the crushing hopelessness of the poor.  Every day you worked on the same piece of land for the rich people like all your ancestors as far back as anybody could remember.  You would do this until you died and then your children would take over.  There was no chance of anything else.

So maybe you could understand why I grasped at what I thought was an opportunity to better my life, and the lives of my future children, no matter how unusual or vague it may have seemed.  When a man who called himself Sylvester, though that wasn’t his real name, came to our hovel accompanied by the lord who owned the land looking to recruit ‘suitable’ young women I was seized and presented to him.

Sylvester dismounted from his horse and walked forward until he stood in front of me.  With a wordless glare at the two men in the service of our lord he had me released from their grip and they each shuffled a few steps away.  He slowly walked around me as if memorising every detail of my rag covered body.  Three laps around me were completed before I ever heard him say a word and I would never forget his hypnotic voice as long as I drew breath.

“This is no place for a great beauty such as you, is it?”

“I… I do as my lord commands, sir.”

Sylvester walked to my rear and leaned down to whisper to me.  His impossibly hot breath blew on my neck and I shivered despite the heat.

“What if you could be more than this?  I can give you riches and luxury.  If you can help me.  I have a need.”

His hand slipped through a rip in my shabby clothing to cup my breast and I felt a strange vibrating energy from within it, sending tingles into my nipple.

“What do you think, pretty thing.  Will you do anything I wish?”

“If… if my lord grants it… yes.”

My lord nodded his agreement and I honestly don’t know what emotion I felt more strongly, relief or fear.

“There’s just one little detail I need to check first.”  Sylvester whispered.

Quick as a snake his fiery hot hand was between my legs where no man had touched me before.  I gasped but was powerless to move.  Once satisfied that I was intact he released me and I nearly fell to the ground, breathing heavily.  Sylvester walked back to his horse and mounted again.  Searching inside his coat he fished out a jingling pouch and tossed it to my lord before they turned and began to ride off.  Sylvester called over his shoulder that we would leave in the morning.

That night was the last I spent with my family.  In the years afterwards I could have gone back but given what Sylvester did to me I thought that would have been a disaster.  I often wondered about them though.  The next day I joined a group of other young women who were transported to Sylvester’s private lands.

At first, it was wonderful.  His riches seemed to have no limits and all that was apparently required of me was to wear revealing clothing as I went about my own business pursuing my own interests around his cavernous house.  To be honest, my new clothes were no more revealing than my previous scraps of material had been.  The outfits were simply made to be that way rather than exposing my skin because of being threadbare and ripped.  I secretly thought they were beautiful and those few weeks were heavenly compared to the life of toil I had just come from.

Then came that accursed night.  Us women, some no more than girls really, were marched through a door that had always been locked until that point and taken down countless stairs.  The depths we walked to seemed impossible to have been dug and built by human hands no matter how many slaves were worked to death in the construction.  The stairs and, indeed, the whole house must have been constructed into and on top of some naturally formed caves.

Eventually we reached a large room and each of us was roughly pushed into one of several small individual cages that lined the walls.  In the centre was an altar and standing by the altar was Sylvester.  When we were all safely locked away his servants left and Sylvester began chanting.  I didn’t recognise the language but it sounded old.  Ancient really, and evil.  The temperature rose until I was sweating profusely, the other girls looked equally uncomfortable.

Suddenly a booming voice spoke as if out of the very rock of the walls and floor.  It spoke the same language Sylvester had been chanting, of that I was sure.  As if everything else wasn’t enough evidence I knew then that I had made an incredible mistake and I had been lured into something truly unholy.  Sylvester drew a pentagram on the altar and then went to the nearest cage, dragging the reluctant woman to the middle of the room and forcing her on to the flat surface.

I hoped he was going to sprinkle her with holy water and say a prayer.  When he produced a huge knife I feared he was going to disembowel her.  What actually happened was unlike anything I had ever dared contemplate before.  After cutting her expensive finery off, exposing her innocent body he roughly deflowered her in front of all of us, pounding into her with reckless force until he spent himself deep inside her.

When I was younger I had sometimes giggled with my friends about sex.  I had thought the first time was supposed to hurt but the woman on the altar seemed to enjoy herself.  She didn’t enjoy what happened next though.  Her stomach appeared to swell and churn, bulges formed and dissipated as if something was trying to push out through her skin.  Suddenly the form of a horned head was clearly visible as it strained against her flesh.

Her screams still haunt me, they got louder and louder until she appeared to catch fire and was almost completely incinerated before my eyes.  The room boomed with the voice again.  It was angry.  That was the only time I ever saw Sylvester look scared.  He quickly composed himself and repeated the process with another woman.

This time the woman didn’t burn.  After a while the turmoil of her bulging stomach settled and her appearance returned almost to normal.  The only difference was a strange otherworldly colour to her eyes.  Sylvester whispered something in her ear and she stood up as if in a trance, walked back towards the stairs and I never saw her again.  The booming voice laughed until the room shook and several small stones dislodged from the ceiling, rattling off our cages and the altar alike.

One by one Sylvester repeated the ritual.  Of the twenty other women besides myself almost all of them burned.  Two of them exploded.  Two more of them survived to walk away up the stairs.  I was the last one he took to the altar.  I had been informed correctly, it was painful… but it was also strangely pleasurable and even though I’d seen so many woman meet their demise on that very altar not a few minutes beforehand, I had my first orgasm right there impaled on Sylvester’s huge member, which vibrated with the same hot energy his hands did.

When I felt his fiery seed inside me my fear rose up and overwhelmed all other emotion.  The pain became unbearable and the heat spread throughout my whole being while something inside me writhed and gnashed its teeth.  I was sure I was about to burn for eternity but all of a sudden a cool calm washed over me and my body became still.

Sylvester bent over to whisper in my ear.

“Rise, Succubus, and remember forever how you consented to this.  Hear your curse and weep.  Wherever you go you will derange the minds of all the men around you.  You will haunt their dreams at night and fill their thoughts in the day.  They will become unable to resist their lust for you and will come unto you, to their downfall.  This curse is upon you until you fall pregnant to a man who loves, rather than lusts after, you, though you now be infertile.  Go forth and spread misery wherever you tread.”

I rose to my feet in a daze and walked to the stairs.  I felt like I climbed upwards for years and years.  When I reached the door at the top of the stairs and opened it I expected to see Sylvester’s mansion but the door opened into a forest.  How that was possible I do not know, there were no turns or different stairs to take.  I stepped off the rock, on to the grass and when I looked behind me the door and stairs were gone.  I was naked, lost and alone.  Thus began my first day of forever.

I didn’t consent to my curse with full knowledge of exactly what was going to happen to me but even after centuries I couldn’t forget the hopelessness that I lived my first twenty odd years in and I knew I had been ready to let Sylvester do anything for a chance to escape what I thought my fate was.  I consented to fulfilling his need, even though I didn’t know what it was when I gave that permission.  If I knew then what I knew now…

I was naïve at first.  I thought my simple good looks and pleasant nature would allow me to, one day, find love.  As for being infertile, well, I thought accidents could still happen.  I was so very wrong.  Everywhere I went I spread chaos through the population.  One man, two men, three men, entire villages had their way with me whether I wanted them or not.  They couldn’t stop themselves and I couldn’t stop them either.

I was hunted as a demon, forever chased.  Many wanted to kill me but if any men got too close, they wanted to lay with me instead and for a precious few minutes or hours afterwards they were putty in my hands so I was always able to escape.  I was lucky with a few stray arrows shot at me from a distance though.

Wallowing in depression and self-loathing I began to hate people. Men, women, everybody and, I am ashamed to say, I started to take a sick pleasure in the anarchy I spread.  My life was destroyed, so why shouldn’t theirs be?  On the small scale I ruined relationships, on the large scale I brought down entire kingdoms and toppled religions.  I was becoming corrupted by the power, cursed though it was.

It took centuries, but eventually people changed and it sparked a revolution in my own way of thinking.  After countless generations of people being stuck in the same mind-set a new paradigm spread almost overnight from my perspective.  Concepts about equality of race and equality of gender sprouted and took hold, spreading like ripples around the world.

At the same time I began to see the pain I had brought, and continued to bring, wherever I went.  I walked for weeks until I found a little clearing in the middle of a huge forest far away from anybody.  I built a little house and thought I could stay until the end of days without causing any more hurt.  I was wrong again.

Years went by in my happy delusion before a starving man arrived at my doorstep.  After ravaging me he revealed that hundreds, maybe thousands, of men had died or gone missing in my forest over the past few years.  The men who were found were said to have talked gibberish about looking for something or someone and soon returned to the forest if they weren’t locked up far away.  He said it was like a ‘bermuda triangle’ for men.  With a little experimentation it became clear that my allure became stronger and more far reaching the longer I went without sex.

There was no escape from it, the curse was all encompassing.  I couldn’t hide and it turned out that when overcome with lust there were no men who had the restraint to try to get to know me and fall in love.  Even if they did, there was also the infertility hurdle.  I’d long since lost count of the number of men who had spent themselves inside me but there was no pregnancy anyway.  Once again I felt that crushing sense of hopelessness, it was as if I had been cursed to find a four-leafed clover with eighteen leaves or to walk three miles north of the North Pole.  I was alone in a sea of men.  I couldn’t handle my naïve hope any longer, I feared it would send me crazy.  In my mind I tracked down my hope, put a sack over its head, beat the life out of it and locked it away in a deep dark place.  I threw away the key and bricked up the doorway.

I returned to the world, determined to cause as little damage as I could.  The lifestyle that appeared to work the best was a transient one.  I sought out single men for sex to keep my allure as weak as possible but even with that precaution I ended up enthralling more unintentionally the longer I stayed anywhere, so I moved every month or so.