Chapter 2: The Crimson Lotus
The heavy oak door of the Crimson Lotus swung inward before Candice could even touch it, spilling warm, amber light and a wave of sound into the cool night air. The noise was a living thing—raucous laughter, the clink of glasses, the low thrum of a lutelike instrument, and beneath it all, a constant, sibilant murmur of conversation. The scent hit her next, overwhelming and complex: stale beer, rich perfume, spiced meat, and underneath, something tangy and metallic, like sweat and something else she couldn’t name.
She stepped inside, the door closing behind her with a soft, definitive thud, sealing her in.
The main tavern area was a haze of pipe smoke and candlelight. Patrons—merchants, off-duty city guards, a few faces she vaguely recognized from the university—filled rough-hewn tables. Serving women in silks that left little to imagination wove through the crowd with trays of drinks. Their smiles were bright, practiced. Candice stood frozen just inside the threshold, a stark, nervous figure in her plain dark clothes, her glasses slightly fogged from the sudden heat.
“You seem lost, little dove.”
The voice was like honey poured over crushed velvet, smooth and rich with an undeniable undercurrent of power. Candice turned.
The woman who approached her moved through the crowded room as if parting water. She was breathtaking, ageless, her beauty so potent it felt like a physical pressure. She wore a gown of deep plum silk that clung to generous, sinful curves, the neckline plunging to a dangerous depth. Her skin was the colour of aged ivory, her hair a cascade of liquid midnight streaked with a single, dramatic silver-white lock. Her eyes were the most startling feature—a luminous, hypnotic violet that seemed to see straight through Candice’s tunic and into the frantic beat of her heart.
“I… I’m looking for Kendra,” Candice stammered, clutching the strap of her bag like a lifeline.
“Of course you are,” the woman smiled, and it was a kind smile, genuinely warm, which made everything more confusing. “I am Lysandra. This is my establishment. Come, she is expecting you. She’s in her suite.”
Madame Lysandra. The consultant. The source of the forbidden magic. Candice had expected a crone, a sinister figure in shadows. Not this radiant, maternal-seeming woman who now placed a gentle, guiding hand on the small of her back. Her touch was cool, but it sent a jolt through Candice, a ripple that felt suspiciously like the faintest echo of that pink lightning.
“Do not be afraid,” Lysandra said as she led Candice past the main room, toward a curtained archway at the back. “The path to power is often unfamiliar. It is the destination that matters.” Her voice was soothing, logical. It disarmingly echoed the pragmatic, ruthless tone Dean Adrian had used.
They moved down a quieter corridor, the sounds of the tavern muffled by thick velvet drapes on the walls. The air here smelled cleaner, of jasmine and beeswax candles. Lysandra stopped before a heavy door of dark wood, ornate with carved lotus flowers.
“She is with a client,” Lysandra said quietly, her violet eyes fixed on Candice. “It is part of the work. Part of the magic. You must see. Understanding begins with observation.”
Before Candice could protest, could say she’d wait elsewhere, Lysandra turned the handle and pushed the door open, ushering her inside.
Kendra’s private suite was an assault on Candice’s senses, a temple to decadence. Velvet, deep red and purple, draped the walls and canopied a massive bed. Dozens of candles flickered in gilded sconces, their light reflecting and multiplying in full-length mirrors positioned around the room. The air hummed, thick with the jasmine scent and that darker, ozone-whiskey aroma that was Kendra’s signature. It was hot, uncomfortably so.
And in the center of the room, on a thick, fur-strewn rug before the fireplace, was Kendra.
She was on her hands and knees, her back arched into a deep, obscene curve. The scandalous school uniform was gone. She wore only a pair of sheer black stockings held up by lacy garters that bit into the plush flesh of her thighs. Her enormous, tanned ass was in the air, jiggling slightly with every violent, rhythmic impact. A man, his back to the door, knelt behind her. He was broad-shouldered, his tunic discarded, sweat gleaming on his back. His hands were like vices on Kendra’s hips, his fingers digging into the soft flesh as he drove into her, again and again, with a raw, grunting force.
The sound was wet, filthy, a relentless slap of skin on skin. Candice’s brain short-circuited.
Kendra’s face was turned toward one of the mirrors, her expression one of rapturous, mindless ecstasy. Her pink-streaked hair was stuck to her glistening neck and shoulders. Her eyes were half-lidded, her massive, glossy lips parted in a continuous, breathy moan that rose and fell with the man’s thrusts.
“Oh fuck… yes, right there… fuck your little slut, fuck me harder!” Kendra chanted, her voice a husky, shattered thing. “Fill me up, you bastard… give it to me…”
Candice made a small, choked sound in her throat. The heat, the smell, the visceral, pounding reality of it—it was a thousand times more brutal than any theoretical description. This was the ‘work’. This was the ‘pathway’. Her stomach lurched. Pride, shame, and a sharp, unwelcome spike of something else—a morbid, horrified fascination—clawed at her. She took a step back, her heel scraping the floor.
She had to get out. Now.
She turned, panic tightening her chest, and found her path blocked. Madame Lysandra stood silently in the doorway, having closed it behind them. She wasn’t watching the scene; she was watching Candice. And as Candice moved to push past her, Lysandra’s hand came up.
It was not a rough gesture. It was frighteningly gentle. One cool, elegant hand settled on Candice’s shoulder, the other on her upper arm. The grip was absolute, unyielding. It was like being held by stone. Candice, who had trained in basic physical wards, who had a flicker of lightning inside her, was utterly immobilized by that casual, firm touch. She could no more break that hold than she could shatter the university’s obsidian floors.
“Observe,” Lysandra whispered into her ear, her breath smelling of star anise. “See the power being exchanged. See the energy.”
Tears of humiliation and terror burned in Candice’s eyes, but she was forced to turn her head back, compelled by that iron grip to watch.
The man’s pace was becoming frantic, his grunts turning into sharp, animal barks. Kendra’s moans scaled higher, losing any semblance of words, becoming a raw, screaming keen.
“I’m gonna… fucking cum!” the man roared.
“Do it! Breed me, pump your fucking seed right into my whore cunt!” Kendra shrieked, her body taut as a bowstring.
With a final, brutal slam of his hips, the man stiffened, a guttural shout torn from him. Candice saw the muscles of his back and ass clench violently, saw the way his entire body shuddered. He held himself deep, pulsing, for what felt like an eternity before collapsing forward over Kendra’s back, spent.
For a moment, there was only the sound of heavy, ragged breathing and the crackle of the fire. Then, a soft, pink glow began to emanate from where their bodies were joined. It was subtle at first, a faint luminescence, then it brightened, tracing the lines of Kendra’s spine, swirling around the man’s shuddering form. Candice felt it—a surge of dense, warm energy that prickled against her own dormant magic, making the hairs on her arms stand up. The man groaned, a sound of profound, helpless pleasure, as the last of the glow seemed to siphon from him and sink into Kendra’s skin.
The pink light faded.
Kendra let out a long, satisfied sigh, like someone who had just finished a superb meal. She reached back and patted the man’s slack thigh. “Good job, big guy. The towel’s by the basin.”
The man, moving slowly, as if drugged, pulled himself off her. He stumbled to his feet, not even glancing at the two women by the door, his eyes glazed and distant. He cleaned himself mechanically with a damp cloth, pulled on his clothes, and shuffled out, leaving a small purse of coins on a side table. Lysandra released Candice’s arm just enough to let the man pass, then resumed her gentle, unbreakable hold.
Kendra slowly pushed herself up. She turned, not a trace of shame or embarrassment on her face. She was gleaming with sweat, her makeup smudged, her body flushed. A trickle of white fluid seeped down the inside of her thigh. She grinned, a bright, real grin, and sashayed toward a vanity, completely naked, utterly comfortable.
“Candi! You’re here! And you met Lys.” She picked up a silken robe and shrugged into it, not bothering to tie it closed. “Sorry about the show, but the best lessons are practical, right? Lys, you can let her go. She’s not gonna bolt. Are you, Candi?”
Lysandra’s hands fell away. Candice’s legs felt like water. She couldn’t speak. She just stared at Kendra, at the satisfied, powerful aura that seemed to radiate from her, at the mundane way she now poured two glasses of dark wine from a decanter.
“Sit,” Lysandra said, gesturing to a low, plush divan. Her voice was still kind, still reasonable. “The shock is normal. It passes.”
Somehow, Candice’s legs carried her to the divan. She sank into it, the velvet clinging to her trousers. Kendra handed her a glass of wine. Candice took it, her fingers numb, and drank it in one go. The alcohol burned a path down her throat, giving her something solid to feel besides the dizzying whirl of disgust and awe.
Kendra sat cross-legged on the fur rug, facing her, her robe gaping open. Lysandra perched gracefully on the arm of a chair, a queen observing her court.
Lysandra perched gracefully on the arm of a chair, a queen observing her court.
The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable, broken only by the pop of the fireplace. Candice finally found her voice, though it was cracked and thin. “That… that was your lesson?” The question dripped with accusation, with a scalding betrayal that went deeper than the shock.
Kendra took a slow sip of wine, her violet-painted nail tapping the crystal. “The first one, yeah. You needed to see the exchange. Raw energy, straight from the source. No incantations, no dusty tomes. Just fuck.” She said the word with a casual finality that made Candice flinch. “That man came in here stressed, knotted-up from his merchant deals, holding a low-grade frustration in his gut. He leaves empty, relaxed, and a little stupid. I take that knotted-up energy, his lust, his release, and I refine it. I make it mine. That’s the fuel.”
“It’s prostitution,” Candice spat, the wine sour in her stomach. “You’re just a… a whore with a fancy explanation.”
Lysandra’s melodic laugh filled the space, devoid of malice. “Oh, my dear girl. You think so small. This ‘fancy explanation’ is the reason your friend’s lightning scarred obsidian. It is the reason she will graduate a legend, while you will be scrubbing alchemy bottles for coppers.” She leaned forward, her violet eyes capturing the candlelight. “The body is an engine. Conventional magic uses the spirit, the will—a fragile, temperamental thing, as you know too well. Succubus magic uses the primal, physical furnace. Desire. Arousal. Orgasm. These are not weaknesses. They are concentrated power events.”
“It’s disgusting,” Candice whispered, but her eyes were on Kendra, on the palpable aura of strength that seemed to vibrate from her skin.
“It was, at first,” Kendra admitted, her flippant tone softening by a fraction. She looked into her glass. “I didn’t come here for a lesson, Candice. I was dragged. By him.”
A cold knot formed in Candice’s chest. “Dean Adrian.”
“Daddy Dean,” Kendra confirmed, a bitter twist to her lush lips. “He found out about Lysandra. About what she really is. He didn’t expose her. He made a deal.” She glanced at Lysandra, a look of complex affection passing between them. “Go on, Lys. She needs to hear it from you.”
Lysandra’s serene expression didn’t change, but the air in the room grew heavier, denser. The candle flames shrank, then flared, burning a sudden, unsettling blue. “I am not human, Candice,” she said, and her voice had lost none of its honey, only gained a depth that seemed to echo from a great distance. “I am a Succubus. Once, I was a Queen of the Sixth Circle of the Demon Realm. My power level was one hundred. I had wings that could shroud a city, a court of thousands, consorts who would bleed themselves dry for a sigh of my favor.”
Candice stared. The words were madness. Demons were myth, bedtime stories to frighten children. This woman was flesh and blood, beautiful, real.
“You’re lying,” she said, but the certainty was weak.
“A rival court conspired with my favorite consort,” Lysandra continued, ignoring her. Her gaze was far away, seeing another world in the flames. “They ambushed me during a ritual confluence. They used bonds I myself had forged, chains of pleasure and trust, to drain me, to strip my core bare. I was left with less than a whisper of power. A human mage could have snuffed me out. I fled through a dying portal, arriving here, in this weak, lovely world, as something less than mortal.”
Kendra reached out and took Lysandra’s hand, a gesture of startling tenderness. “She built this place from nothing. Used the last dregs of her power to charm, to persuade, to survive. But she’s stuck. A succubus can’t regain her true power here. The energy is too thin, too… vanilla.” Kendra managed a shaky smile. “She needs a successor. A human she can transform, who can become strong enough here, and then cross into the Demon Realm. Once there, as a full Succubus, that woman could reclaim Lysandra’s throne. Give her the revenge she can’t get herself.”
“She chose me,” Kendra said, looking back at Candice. “Plain, prude, Magic Level twenty Kendra Buxton. Daddy Dean threatened me with expulsion, with having my family’s loans called in. He brought me here. He and Lys gave me the ultimatum: learn, or be ruined. So yeah, I was forced. I fought it. I cried. I vomited after the first few times.” Her jaw tightened. “But then… the power came. It actually came. Not a trickle. A flood. And with it… the feeling. The confidence. The sheer, fucking pleasure of it all.”
Her eyes gleamed with a fervent, converts zeal. “I’m not a victim anymore, Candi. I’m a student. I’m an apprentice. I’m going to master this magic, I’m going to hit Level 40, then 60, and then I’m going to let Lys send me through. I want to become a Succubus. Because if sex feels this good with a human cock, I can’t even imagine what a demon’s will be like. I want to know. I want to feel it.”
The raw, shameless hunger in her voice was more frightening than anything Candice had witnessed so far.
“You don’t believe me,” Lysandra stated, watching Candice’s face. “The human mind clings to its comfortable reality. A demonstration, then. A glimpse. Do not scream.”
Before Candice could react, Lysandra shifted.
It was not a monstrous transformation. It was a subtle, terrifying unveiling. The air around her shimmered, like heat haze off desert stone. Her beautiful, ivory skin darkened to a profound, lustrous shade of grey-purple, the color of a twilight storm. From the cascade of her hair, two slender, onyx horns curved back elegantly over her scalp. Her violet eyes now glowed from within, pinpricks of brilliant amethyst light in pools of solid obsidian. The room’s temperature spiked, then plunged. For less than three seconds, Candice saw the echo of a majestic, leathery wing folded against the shadowed wall, and felt a pressure in her skull, a whispered promise of infinite, degrading pleasures.
Then it was gone. Lysandra was again the stunning human proprietress, smoothing her plum silk gown. A single wisp of smoke curled from the candelabra beside her.
Candice’s hand had clapped over her own mouth. She was trembling violently. The world had just cracked open, revealing a terrifying abyss underneath the familiar stones of her life. Demons were real. Forbidden magic was real. Her former best friend was willingly marching into that abyss.
“I love her,” Kendra said simply, breaking the stunned silence. “She’s the mother I needed. She saw my potential under all the fear. She taught me that this,” she gestured to her own magnificent body, “isn’t corruption. It’s optimization. Our job here? We’re energy converters. We take the crude, frustrated lust of this city and we refine it into magical power. It’s a service. And we’re the best at it.”
Lysandra picked up the thread, her voice back to its soothing, logical timbre. “Dean Adrian permits it because it creates the most powerful mages his university has ever seen, elevating its status. He gets his spectacle, his weapon. We get our sanctuary, our fuel. Kendra gets her destiny. It is a symbiote.”
“How?” Candice croaked, the word scraping her throat. “How does it work?”
Kendra knelt forward, energized by the question. “Okay. Basics. First, you get the Mark.” She untied her robe and let it fall open, then pushed down the waistband of her sheer panties, revealing the smooth skin of her lower abdomen. Just below her navel, over her womb, was a tattoo. It was a beautifully intricate, stylized heart, but instead of red, it was etched in shimmering, permanent pink ink that seemed to hold its own faint light. “Lys inks this. It’s magic. It attunes your core. It rewires your mana channels to recognize lust energy as a fuel source. Your weak, blue lightning? Gone. Replaced with the good stuff.”
She tapped the tattoo. “This is the anchor. Once you have it, your magic turns pink. You start to… feel things more. The lust in a room, a person’s glance. It becomes a scent, a taste. Your own confidence, your own sexiness, becomes a battery. The more you love how you look, how you feel, the more power you generate on your own. But the big boosts…” She grinned. “The big boosts come from the exchange. From taking someone over the edge and drinking the energy of their climax. You saw the glow.”
Candice nodded numbly, the pink afterimage still seared behind her eyes.
“Now, the transformations. At Level 20, you get a second mark, a tramp stamp, right at the base of your spine. It triggers the first change. Your body adjusts. It becomes more of what you secretly want it to be. For me, that meant the tan, the curves, the hair, the lips. For you?” She looked Candice up and down with a clinical, appraising eye. “You’ve got a killer bone structure under those baggy clothes. You’d be a fucking knockout. Long, black hair with purple hints, I bet. A body made for sin.”
Candice instinctively wrapped her arms around herself.
“At Level 40, a third mark on the chest, between the breasts. The second change. It dials everything up further. Sensitivity, allure, capacity. You become a magnet. And every change makes the sex feel exponentially better, which makes you want it more, which makes you stronger. It’s a beautiful fucking loop.” Kendra’s gaze was intense, missionary. “It’s power, Candice. Real, tangible, growing-every-day power. Not the pathetic sputter you’ve been choking on. I went from twenty to fifty in months. You could hit thirty in weeks. You could graduate. You could be strong.”
The offer hung in the fragrant, charged air. It was a dark gem, glittering with forbidden facets. Candice saw her future split into two stark paths: the grey, shame-filled drudgery of failure, and this lurid, terrifying ascent. Her pride revolted. Her desperation leaned closer, whispering.
“And after?” she asked, her voice barely audible. “After I graduate? If I do this… am I forced to become… like you? To go to the Demon Realm?”
Lysandra shook her head, the silver lock of hair swaying. “No. The Mark binds you to the magic, not to my revenge. The door to the Realm will only open for Kendra, when she is ready. Your journey ends here, in this world, with your degree and the power you’ve accrued. That is my promise. The choice to ascend fully, to become a true Succubus, is Kendra’s. It always was.”
“It’s my dream now,” Kendra said, her voice full of a terrifying wonder. “But it doesn’t have to be yours. You can just get what you need. Get your level. Get your diploma. Get out. You never have to see this room again after that.” She leaned closer, her scent enveloping Candice. “But you’ll be changed. You’ll know what you’re capable of. You’ll have felt it.”
Candice looked from Kendra’s eager, painted face to Lysandra’s ancient, knowing eyes. She thought of the ‘13’ burning in the air. She thought of the empty back rows of the lecture hall, the scent of her own despair. She thought of the pink lightning, chaotic and beautiful and powerful enough to leave a permanent scar.
The stubborn, moral part of her was still screaming. It was a small, shrill voice, drowned out by the roaring, undeniable truth of her failure and the visceral, palpable reality of Kendra’s success.
Her hands were fists in her lap. She unclenched them slowly. The trembling didn’t stop.
“What,” she began, swallowing hard, “what is required of me tonight?”
Kendra’s smile widened, a brilliant, victorious thing. She looked to Lysandra, who gave a slow, approving nod.