Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who is cold like the light of a distant star
You summoned her the first time expecting — well, you don't know. Expecting is a strong word. You were full to squirming with anticipation, with want, for something; and you knew the clichés, knew the dangers of believing pop-culture hearsay. But still, your frame of reference for succubi inevitably included red skin, horns, sleaze—
Maybe other people get something like that? Maybe there's some kind of ineffable matchmaking, something that looked into you and went, aha, this one needs—
You draw the circle. You draw the sigils, light the candles, say the chants.
The room dims like a clumsy early-cinema fade-to-black. Distance does something strange; space telescoping to bring something very far away, tiny with distance, into the centre of the circle, but somehow without eliding any of the space between you; untouchably far, impossibly far away, while still being present here.
The room is dark, and she is—
Bright, but so far away it dims her almost to invisibility. Pearlescent pale, a moony white. A light. A delicate light. Moth-soft, gleaming, a universe away across the void.
She's so impossibly delicate. You've never touched her, will never — can never, even if you'd ever dare, so far away — she's the only star in this dim firmament, melancholy, silent, beautiful. As if the first astronomer looked into the skies to discover that each light in the dark is made of true love, and only near-invisibility protects our hearts from them, and wasted away the rest of his life waiting for the night to turn his lenses upward just to recreate that first glimpse.
You pine. You ache and shake and need, and you know that this is addiction, but what can it matter, what can it matter if your life rots down around you and you wither in self-neglect, if it gets you one. More. Glimpse. One distant, wordless, one-sided, soul-searing glimpse. One more evening of staring through your telescope of salt and black wax, with ice caking on your walls.
Hot-bodied scarlet-skinned demon sex; if only, you think sometimes, wildly. If only. You could choose to say no to that.