“About what?” I polish the flames on my blade with a buffing stone from my pocket.“I do not have two snake dicks.” He looks down reluctantly, brow glowing plasma.“That’s the myth you’re hung up over? Not the pillaging, patricide, and murder?”“The cobra cock is the main one, yes.” He’s crying sleet. It smells like ship tar and rain.“You’re making it snow in sorrow. Hush, my sweet. I don’t mind your anatomy.”“Well, if I have a reptile dick, what about Mikhail? A platypus? What a weakling.”“A lion’s, I think. And you won that war through subterfuge alone.”“So what? I’m not a court knave dealing cards. I was father’s pawn… you were lucky to have parents that cared. Not that they didn’t abandon you, just like mine. Titans don’t have nurturing qualities

Malik is in his pea plant garden, the mutant plants growing red and black blossoms. He idly pops a legume open, then looks up mid-scarf to find Alexandria and I dressed in hunting trousers, buckskin boots, blue cloaks, and tunics embroidered with sun sparrow wings. His green eyes, sandstone skin, and curling red-black hair spills onto his leather coat and black harem pants. He spits the peas out, rubies hanging from his ears, gold torc at his throat.“Oh no, a visit from the ladies. What is it, my doves? Excited for Lussi’s ball? Matilda, chocolates!” He claps his hands and calls to his succubus lab assistant, who canters off on fawn hooves with a “Yes master!” to the kitchen to fix us a plate of cocoa tinged sweets. Malik has them imported just for Lexa across the Naiadis Sea from the southern Unktehi, he loves her so.“Excited my ass,” I snort. “You hate Lucia.”“She

I am in the bridal chamber with Lucia, Lussi’s female form. She has platinum hair, soft, ethereal features, small breasts like hills of milk, and is dressed in blue violet robes. She looks at me inquisitively, then gently pets my wrist. Transfixed, the spell of her beauty breaks, and I continue to adorn her, lighting her tallows aflame: candles shine in her hair, white tapers arranged in an ivy Lussinight wreath that I have gently braided into the cornsilk strands of her crown. She sits silently like a queen, a translucent black veil over her albino face. She stares into the mercury of her mirror, and waits bemusedly as I powder her brow. My wife looks like a China doll from the Eastern lands father once brought back to me from one of his far flung mercantile trips to the Oni. All of the humor of Lussinight has left her, her bravado and jokes and tricks, vanquished by a sicksleep wind. She dreads this as much as I do, her Harrowings. Luci

 “You are so beautiful that I break.” Lucia lets out a low wail. She begins to weep, reaching down under the bed to reach a cat o’ nine tails. She scourges herself, praying to dead Eleleth for forgiveness – to break her rosy curse of undeath. “Pray with me, sweet Magdalene,” Lucia cries out in fathomless depths, like a beached whale upon my shores. The sorrow of the elegant Snow Queen frosts my room to Kelvin zero, and I shudder as blue ice forms in snowflakes on my flesh. I shiver violently, biting my teeth as my mouth chatters, and the lights in the candles blow out as Lucia whips herself, crying out in the angelic tonal language to her Fallen Father. Gold seeps from her wounds.Lucia sings, a song of hunger pangs, a melody of the labor of Rahab’s watery womb, with a timbrel of her father Eleleth’s hellfire seed, and there is a great making and unbreaking in my wife as she punishes herself for her fat

The golden hallway of Lussi’s crystal and ice palace is strewn with demonic nobility of all races. There are nymphs, fauns, satyrs, cambions, incubi and succubi, nagas, rakshashas, lamias, huldra, trolls – everything under the sun, all dressed in Lucifuge’s most recent fashions.Mistress Lucifuge Rofocale sits with a pinched face and black shadows clinging to her gaunt form on the matron’s throne, with Malik flanking her. Malik is ignoring everything, madly drawing on draftsman paper new architectural features for the palace and eldritch weapon designs. Biting his lip, he mutters to himself, crosses out a design, then madly scrawls a new one.I watch the freshly sourced hell brides of Lucifuge’s finishing school and their lucky – or perhaps not so lucky – young new demon husbands and sigh. “So, more broodmares for Jahonna for your cambion armies. How pleasant, Lussifart.”Lussi smiles like a razor, d