Early Morning
Sun's Day
23rd of Avril, Year 824 of the Silent Age
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PROJO'S QUEST LOG:
+ [COMPLETED] Charting the Teeth: Master Corvus has been protected and the contract is fulfilled.
+ [ONGOING] Understanding the Curse: Work with Falira to uncover the nature of your powers.
+ Repay Bram (Owe 24 Gold)
+ Return to Mira
PROJO'S INVENTORY:
+ Money: 18 Gold, 10 Silver, 47 Copper
- (Previous: 15G 10S 47C + Contract Pay: 3G)
+ Weapons: Iron Longsword, Gideon's Iron Dagger
+ Armor: Crude Leather Cuirass
+ Supplies: Flint & Steel
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Projo awoke to the soft crackle of a well-tended fire and the scent of old parchment. The exhaustion of the previous day sat deep in his bones, a dull and welcome ache. He sat up, and his eyes immediately found Falira. She was in her chair, a thick tome open in her lap, but she wasn't reading. She was simply staring into the flames, a blank but thoughtful expression on her face.
When she noticed him stir, she looked up. For the first time, there was no immediate assessment in her gaze. She met his eyes for a brief, fragile moment, gave the smallest nod, then returned to her book. The charged hostility of the previous night had vanished, leaving a quiet, uncertain calm.
Projo left not long after that, his footsteps echoing in the misty morning. In town, he bought a week's worth of dark bread, hard cheese, thick, smoked sausage, and a handful of vegetables. The food for both of them cost him ten copper pieces, and he spent an additional four copper on some firewood. Then, on a whim, he decided to buy himself the simple luxury of delegation, offering two copper pieces to the boy who sold him firewood so he didn't need to carry it all back to the tower himself.
When he returned, the tower was filled with the sharp, herbal scent of a fresh poultice. Falira moved with slightly more ease, the rigid, pained set of her shoulders softened. He set the food on the table and she gave a quiet "Thank you" without looking up from her work.
The afternoon passed in scholarly silence.
Projo immersed himself in the Compendium of Monstrous Anatomy, finding the detailed drawings of Cliff Drake viscera with a grim sense of irony. Across the room, Falira worked with a precision and focus that caused him to suddenly view her in a different light—not just a stubborn researcher, but a vital, necessary ally.
They ate a simple meal at the table, the quiet no longer a weapon, but a shared space. The storm had passed, leaving a tentative calm in its wake.
Yet the tome in his hands felt cold and lifeless. Its diagrams answered none of the questions that were truly haunting him. The creatures were monsters—defined and predictable. He was something else entirely. He closed the book with a soft thud, loud in the quiet tower.
Falira looked up from her own studies with a neutral expression.
"We haven't spoken much today," he began, voice low. He studied the fortress of knowledge she had built around herself. "You said... before... that you had read about my kind. A long time ago."
He saw her stiffen, the air in the room growing tense. He wasn't asking about the poetry of starlight anymore—he was asking about the monster in the room.
"Do you have any books," he asked, the words feeling heavy and dangerous, "that might tell me what I am?"
Falira set her quill down carefully. The fragile calm between them vanished, replaced by the weight of her research. She didn't answer immediately, rising instead with stiff movements to walk to a tall, darkwood cabinet in the shadowed corner. He heard the faint jingle of a key, the quiet click of a lock.
She returned carrying two books. One was thin, academic, and unassuming. The other was thick, bound in dark, cracked leather, and sealed with a heavy iron clasp. It looked less like a book than a cage. She placed them both on the table.
"This one," she said, tapping the thin volume, "is a primer on planar entities. It contains a single, speculative chapter on half-bloods and cambions, based mostly on priestly conjecture."
Her hand shifted to the heavy, clasped tome, and her expression hardened. "The real information... is in here." She looked him dead in the eye. "This is from Master Eldrin's restricted collection. Liber Daemonum: A Treatise on the Nature of Infernal Lineages. It is not folklore, Projo. It is a field guide. It will not give you comfort. It will not tell you who you are. It will give you classifications, weaknesses, theoretical origins. It will treat you like a specimen."
She rested her hand on the clasp but didn't open it. "I will not force this on you. But if you truly want to know what the old texts say... the answers are in here."
"That word," Projo said. "Cambion, what is that? Before, you referred to me as an incubus, a demon."
The question was simple, but it caused Falira to pull her hand back slowly. "An incubus is a demon," she said quietly. "But the terms are not interchangeable. It is a matter of classification."
She held up a finger, the teacher in her taking over. "Think of 'demon' as a broad, imprecise category used by the uneducated. It is like the word 'beast'. A wolf is a beast, but so is a rabbit. The term tells you nothing of its nature, only its origin from a chaotic or malevolent plane."
Her gaze sharpened. "An incubus is a specific type of demon, like a wolf is a specific type of beast. Incubi are the male equivalent of succubi—parasitic entities that sustain themselves by siphoning the vital essence—the Mana—of mortals. Their primary method of feeding is through acts of seduction and intimacy. That is what the texts describe. That is why it was my initial hypothesis."
She paused, letting that settle. "A cambion," she said, her voice dropping, "is a half-blood. The offspring of an incubus and a mortal."
Projo stared at her, the word hanging in the air between them. Half-blood.
"That," Falira continued, eyes alight with academic fire, "is why your abilities are paradoxical. You do not perfectly match the descriptions. You are not a pure entity from another plane. You have a mortal component. A mortal soul."
She leaned forward, the pieces of her earlier theory clicking into a unified whole. "A pure incubus is a simple drain. It takes. That is all it does. But your mortal half… it changes the nature of the process somehow. You are not a simple parasite. You are a… a crucible. A living forge where two worlds collide. You siphon the fuel, yes, but your body then re-forges it into something new, amplifying it. The healing, the pleasure, the manifest magic—that is the radiant overflow from that impossible process."
A heavy feeling washed over Projo as he absorbed her words. "Even still… If all of that is correct, then that would mean that I am part demon. So Gideon was somewhat justified in his reaction to me—"
"The fool struck first without seeking to understand," Falira spat hotly. The words came so quickly, and her tone was so defensive of him, that Projo found himself speechless.
She looked at him then, not with fear, but with an unsettling awe, like a scholar who had just found the single, unifying key to her entire field of study.
"You are not a demon, Projo," she said in a quiet, chilling whisper. "You are something far more complicated. And, I suspect, far more powerful."
Projo felt a flush creep onto his face, but instead of looking away, a slow grin spread across his face. He leaned back in his chair, taking the thin primer she'd indicated, and crossed one leg over the other with casual confidence. He cracked the book open, letting his eyes fall on the first page as if settling in for a light read.
Then, without looking up, he spoke in a perfect, dry imitation of her own clinical tone. "The subject notes that the researcher does, in fact, know how to flirt. In her own strange, but flattering, way."
The tower, still humming with the weight of revelation, froze.
Falira stared, mouth slightly agape.
The academic fire in her eyes sputtered and died, replaced by disbelief. A crimson blush bloomed up her neck, consuming her face. She looked at him as if he'd just tried to explain the principles of metallurgy by banging two rocks together.
"Flirtation," she finally stammered, voice high and strangled, "is a ritualized social display intended to gauge romantic or sexual interest. My statement was a logical conclusion based on the available data regarding your paradoxical energy transmutation. The two are… categorically dissimilar!"
She snatched the heavy Liber Daemonum from the table and clutched it to her chest like a shield. "Your interpretation is illogical, inappropriate, and a gross mischaracterization of a serious academic discussion!"
She spun on her heel, her back ramrod straight, and marched toward her workbench, the forbidden tome pressed tight to her body. The brilliant scholar had been utterly routed by a single, well-aimed compliment.
A hint of condescension in his tone, he stated loudly, "If you really believed that, you wouldn't have warned me that the book you're holding will treat me like a specimen."
He exaggerated a pout. "You don't want to hurt my feelings."
Her shoulders stiffened like his words were a crossbow bolt that had pierced straight through the academic armor she had thrown up. She spun, and though the furious blush remained, the sputtering indignation vanished, replaced by stunned silence. A counter-argument seemed to form on her lips for a moment—but it died before it was spoken.
He was right. And they both knew it.
With a sharp, frustrated huff that was the closest she could come to admitting defeat, she marched to her high-backed chair and slammed the forbidden tome onto the table. Ignoring it, she snatched her own journal and quill, uncorked her ink pot with a vicious jab, and began writing with furious intensity.
Projo watched, his smirk softening into a small, genuine smile. He had won the argument, yes—but more importantly, he had seen something true. The researcher might not have known how to flirt, but she did know how to worry. He settled back with the primer, the quiet scratching of her quill a far more comfortable companion than the silence that had preceded it.
The hours bled into one another, marked only by the slow crawl of shadows across the stone floor. Projo read with a hunger he hadn't felt since he was a boy. The Primer on Planar Entities was dense, but for the first time, it felt like reading something true. The single, speculative chapter on cambions was a lightning strike—a blurry but terrifying reflection of himself, full of words like siphon, catalyst, and volatile nature. The rest of the book painted a picture of a cosmos teeming with realities beyond his own—elemental planes of pure fire, shadow realms of quiet despair—and it made his small, lonely existence feel both insignificant and terrifyingly important.
The fire in the room burned down to glowing embers.
At some point, he heard the soft rustle of Falira's robes and the quiet groan of her cot as she retreated for the night, but he didn't look up. The book was his entire world, it seemed. And when he reached the final page, a sense of dissatisfaction settled over him. It was a single drop of water for a man dying of thirst.
Without hesitation, he flipped back to the beginning, hunting for new meaning, for hidden connections he might have missed.
The words began to swim; the diagrams blurred. His head grew heavy, and finally, his body surrendered to the strain. His chin dipped to his chest, once… twice…
Just one more page…
He awoke with a jolt, neck stiff from sleeping slumped in the chair. Diffuse grey light filtered through the high windows, illuminating dancing motes of dust. The primer lay open on his torso, rising and falling with his steady breaths.
His first instinct was to check on Falira. He looked toward the curtained alcove. She was still there, a small lump under a thick woolen blanket, her breathing a soft, rhythmic whisper in the quiet of the morning.
She was asleep.
His eyes drifted to his abandoned bedroll. The three milky-white crystals still formed a perfect triangle—but they were dark. Inert. The silvery cage-like light of the proximity ward was gone.
She had gone to bed without resetting it.
She had slept, wounded and exhausted, in a room with a monster, and for whatever reason—conscious choice or oversight—she had left the cage unlocked. He looked from the dark crystals to her sleeping form, and a strange, fragile feeling settled in his chest: neither fear nor anger, but something quiet and deep.
The tower remained steeped in pre-dawn stillness.
Projo sat watching the grey light bleed across the floor, not wanting to break the calm. The only sounds were the soft bubbling of the cauldron and the steady whisper of Falira's breathing.
Until another joined.
A soft, breathy sigh from behind the curtain.
Projo assumed she was stirring, and he remained still. But the blankets rustled again, more insistently this time, and the sound was followed by a low, quiet noise—neither a word nor just a breath—a murmur.
She must be dreaming, Projo thought.
His brow furrowed, and he tilted his head, listening.
Then he heard it clearly. A soft, distinct noise of pleasure that was impossible to interpret.
Falira moaned.