The Summoning. A veritable rite of passage, particularly the first time it happens. A swirling, smoky gust of wind from nowhere that plucks you up and makes you feel like your body's half lightning bolt, and then, just- pop. You're gone, off to the place spoken of in whispers.

Off to do what you were made to do. All the classes in temptation and in the stuff of dreams and nightmares, how to burnish your horns to a perfect sheen and how to work your tail across every inch of a human body in a way calculated, intuitively, to produce the maximum sin.

You've been waiting, for a while, as bright-eyed succubi and ruggedly handsome young incubi have been vanishing around you. A walk with your friend along the brimstone falls just outside down, and pop, there goes Charlotte. Some human man or woman, up there above the great cavern ceiling, where there's sun instead of fire from below, whose jaw will drop at the sight of her, is probably now giving into sin with, quite literally, the succubus of their dreams. The one for them, the perfect match, the mortal whose little tangle of a soul is now bound up in hers for the afterlife.

It's not the sin itself, really. Not the hours practiced with your throat full and your tongue swirling - just there, Miss Hecate had instructed primly, right where the tip gives way to the shaft. Not the nights of practice with the pleasure golems in the yard. There's no soul to that. It's not even the longing for someone to look at you with eyes wide and mouth open and the thought spinning, so clearly in their eyes, of all their darkest, happiest dreams coming true.

It's the pop, pop, pop, all around you, all your friends off up there, and the thoughts that creep into your head when you look at yourself in the dark glass of your mirror. Maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe. Always maybe, as the chatter dies down around you, your own voice not coming so easily now that your friends will only be summoned away to start their life.

You've been told what they do up there, sometimes, to summon, if the dreams don't work. A circle of chalk, candles, a few little items at the points of a star.

Your chalk circle must be empty.

And now this one, in the ashy dust at your feet. Black candles and chalk that smells of charcoal, and the great cavern ceiling overhead. A stuffed toy, a scattering of brass, and wetness in the dust. Yours, and your tears, and the last word of the ritual on your lips.

It won't work in reverse, you know.

But maybe.

Just a little image I had pop into my head- a lonely succubus, unsummoned, trying to call down a human so she won't feel alone. And I had to write it, really, although I found myself grinning a little at trying to think of what someone would have to put in a circle to summon me. Who knows? It just might work.

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