Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who will not shut the fuck up
Purslane had wanted power, once.
The aptitude to do even as little as light a candle without a flame would have been the crowbar with which to dismantle the foreordained crate of her life, to step outside its confines and walk away, to glory and greatness. She lacked even so much. No innate talent for magic; and no expensive wizardly education to bootstrap to it the hard way, that first step insurmountable without already having worldly means.
And so there was nothing for it but the other way.
Warlocks rarely come to pretty ends, but they do get there in style. But again, she was stymied: all very well to set yourself on being some entity's dedicant, but first you have to make the pact, and without any magical education to know the options—
Bitterly, she set her sights low. No towering patron intelligence of pure caustic light and crystal for her, no roiling extraspatial ocean of infinitely mutating protoplasm, no archon of hell to grant her powers of fire and cruelty. No world-shaking puissance. And — unwanted mercy — correspondingly no inevitable doom so terrible that generations of grown men would whisper of it and weep.
She found a rotting shrine, in the ruins of a long-abandoned, plague-gutted hamlet; coaxed out the village spirit, gone strange and sour from grief and isolation, and offered it the dedicant's bargain: her loyal service, in exchange for its magical empowerment.
Purslane had wanted power. What she got was the spirit of a village, maddened and unmoored by the death of everyone in its little world, climbing onto her back like a squat, grey, pot-bellied, malevolent granny, heavy despite its spiritual intangibility; spindly legs locked around her hips, crumpled face pressed into the crook of her neck.
It sleeps, almost always, snoring into her. But it also never stops talking — the smug, ironclad traditional nonsense of village grannies, in a sleeptalker's mumble. Superstition and gibberish aphorisms and endless judgemental nagging. And it never lets go, never dismounts, invisible to others. Clings, heavy.
She cannot shop in a market without being chided for imprudence with her money. The quality of her purchases sniffed at, her haggling denigrated, the price of everything decried as criminal malfeasance. The cooking of her every meal is criticised, her every bed suspected of verminous blight.
She does not have from it the magics of burning swords or wingless flight or rays of killing malice cast from her hands. But power it shares: the slow, quiet graveborne magics of poison, rot, and spite.
Warlock, she insists to herself, skirting as long as she possibly can around the feeling of a thing she Just Knows she can do now: pull the slain out of their rest to be her retinue. A dead village's dead villagers. Warlock: people like that better than necromancer.
She just wishes her patron would occasionally shut the fuck up.