As I stood in my mother Lilith's study, the forbidden room of forbidden rooms, my heart raced just breathing in the air. It felt heavy – like it weighed something. But I guessed that was to be expected, walking into the study of someone whom only the Demon Kings were her equal.
"In the human realm, the same old tales still circulate about you, darling. They talk of you being able to dismember men with a flick of your wrist, or enslave them at a glance." My father had once said to her at the dinner table.
"Ha! Ha! Humans are so funny," she chuckled.
She was the 'Goddess of the Night', after all – the most powerful succubus to have ever lived; It's no wonder such stories accompanied her name wherever it was uttered. In reality, though, she was just my overbearing mother.
As I stood behind the wooden door that was as thick as a castle gate, I pushed down on the iron handle with force behind both hands to retract the lock, and slammed my eyes shut in fear of a sound.
…
Thud
I slowly opened my eyes, the door now shut, having made nothing more than a soft thud. My pulse gradually began to return to normal. I'd successfully slipped in.
I wondered how she opened this thing so easily, like it was nothing. Anytime I'd seen her come in or out of this room, a simple wave of her hand, and the door would fly open and closed like it was weightless. She truly was a monster.
As the adrenaline coursed through my body, I looked around the study I'd seen only once before. It was far more beautiful than I'd remembered.
On the other side of the room were a pair of large, arched windows that overlooked our family's domain. Just the same as the ones in my room. The clouds had passed, and the blood moon on the horizon had become visible again.
The room was lit up by the single, orange flame of her desk lamp, its light bouncing off the deep red interior walls of the study.
She must've forgotten to put it out when she raced out to see Father. Works for me!
On her almost-empty desk, decorated with nothing other than the lamp and the Gremory Household phone, lay a ridiculously large book: 'The Gremory Tome'. It was sprawled open, covering the majority of the desk's surface area, and its weathered pages showed centuries of use.
I'd yet to have seen it with my own eyes, as my previous break-in was too short-lived. But because she'd been working earlier, I figured it would still be here.
Yes! It's really here! The family's grimoire – my way out of this place is here!
I struggled to contain my excitement as my eyes widened just moving towards it. I quickly approached the edge of her large desk, which sat in front of ceiling-high glass cabinets filled with nameless books and magical items. I stood in awe of The Gremory Tome, tracing the desk's gold trim with my fingers.
So this is it! This is… One of the 'Great Treasures' of the house… Huh? It looks so… Dilapidated…
Dilapidated was an understatement.
The top right corners of each page had almost completely eroded, and in human terms, the paper was 'ancient'. The Great Treasures of each house were known to be special, of course, for the secrets and power they contained within them, but this book was on another level. Father had bragged about it many times when I was a child.
"One day, sweetheart, you'll get to use the most beautiful grimoire of any family. It looks a little shabby, but that's part of its charm. It's even made of this rare paper that my Father brought back from the human realm! It's made of the highest quality paper called 'papyrus'."
"So it's just a book?"
"It's a book that can give you almost anything that our bloodline has to offer. That includes your Mother's, too! Never underestimate magic, Luna. It is almost infinite in what it can do."
But looking at it now, I figured that my Father was just biased. The tome looked as if it would fall apart if I touched it, and I couldn't see the 'charm' that Father had raved about.
Placed neatly next to the tome was her thin dragon-bone quill, which sat in a small crystal bottle of energy ink.
Well, old or not, it's time to see how I can get out of here. Magic is infinite in what it can do? So be it, Father.
I circled the desk to make sense of the words written across both pages. On the left one, numbered vertically from one to fifty, was a list of names. On the right, the same, but from fifty-one to one hundred.
I had overheard Mother talk with the maids earlier in the morning, saying not to disturb her as she contacted the human realm.
These must be the names of humans.Then are these the contracts she was making earlier? Is there anything more?
I carefully flipped forwards and backwards through the pages, hoping to find some sort of answer.
"They're blank? What?" I muttered to myself, furrowing my brow. In fact, every page in the book, except for the two pages that lay open, was blank.
As I flipped back to the lists of names, my heart sank.
What…? This is the legendary, all-powerful 'Gremory Tome'? Is this some kind of joke? Is this not the real thing?
As I slumped down into Mother's dragonbone throne and lay my back against the velvet upholstery, I stared at the names in disbelief. After a few moments, though, I realised I could read some of them, whilst not others.
My eyes caught hold of the one closest to me.
湊大月川
"Sou…ta…Tsuki…gawa…" I whispered, my index finger underlining the characters on the page. My Father, a frequent traveller of Japan and France, had me learn both languages when I was young.
"You'll need these when you're the leader of the house one day," he'd said.
Most demons learned human languages in their youth, as contact with the human realm was necessary, but still, I'd surprised myself.
Oh! I guess I do remember my Japanese, after all! Wow. The surname is similar to mine. 'Moon River', huh? And Souta is a man's name!
The first was 湊 (Sou), which meant 'port', followed by 大 (Ta), which meant 'grand'.
'Grand Port Moon River'. I wonder what it means?
As I stared at Souta's name and wondered what he must look like, the characters that made up his name leapt up from the page one by one, glowing a vibrant violet colour. I'd seen energy ink used countless times before, but I never failed to be surprised by it.
Though I didn't fully understand how the magic of it worked, I knew that energy ink was the primary method used for contracts and agreements in the underworld. It was strong – imbued with the life energy of whoever's name was written, and it served as a way to bind someone's essence to whatever agreement was being made, holding them to more than just their word.
Being magical in origin, only beings of the underworld or Heaven could perceive it as different to regular ink, but supposedly, some humans with potent energy or psychic gifts could sense it, too.
I was hoping this book would have something that could tell me how to get to the human realm in it. What do I do now?
***
After a few minutes of staring at the tome and wondering what to do next, I remembered that there were tall glass cabinets behind me.
If there's any final hope of finding a way out, then it'd have to be there, right?
Whatever I was going to do, I needed to do it soon. The faint echoes of my parents talking in Father's study down the hallway rose and fell.
They had likely started arguing, but I couldn't count on it to last. As hot-headed as both of them could get, they were the heads of the Gremory Family: a family notorious in the underworld for the passion and love for their family members.
I scoffed at the thought, my lips pursed as I scanned the cabinets.
Love, huh? I wonder what that feels like.
Most of the cabinets were filled with no-name, dusty books that I pulled out briefly, before quickly putting them back. I figured I needed to find some kind of key.
While I had been in her study before, even as a child, I'd never made it so far as her desk before being ferried out by a maid, or by her. Sitting in her throne this time, though, I noticed a pair of large, hefty drawers tucked under the desk on the right-hand side.
If there was something that she didn't want anyone to see, it'd have to be in there, right?
As I moved further along the cabinets, covering the entirety of the back wall, it occurred to me that I'd never been able to properly look at all of the things she kept in there. Besides images of her wedding day and images of me with my Father when I was younger, nothing stood out.
"Let's see, something like a key… If I were Mother, where would I hide a key?"
As I continued my search, it quickly dawned on me that I had made a crucial oversight.
Wait– She's a succubus. A literal Demon Queen. Why the hell would she require something as rudimentary as a stupid key when she could just use magic?! A spell that perhaps only she knows, just for these drawers! Agh! I'm such an idiot!
I gripped my hair in my fists and let out a silent scream.
How could I have been so stupid? Maybe they're right. I wouldn't survive a second in the human realm. I don't even know magic, yet, anyway! What the hell was I hoping for?!
I gazed down at the floor, dejected.
On the bottom shelf, just centimetres from where I stood, I caught sight of something that I thought had been completely lost to time. A shattered pot–a mini-ruin, almost, which I had presented to my mother in tears at the age of seven, some fifteen years ago.
It was the week before Mother's Day in the underworld, and coincidentally, was also our first magic development class at the prestigious Underworld Magic Academy, also known as 'UMA'. On the first day of class, our teacher had told us there was going to be a surprise.
"You're all of the age now where your magical pathways should have started to form. So today, we're going to try making some gifts for your mothers!" she'd said in a giddy tone.
I didn't know it at the time, but I later found out that she was Serpahine's mother, so it was no wonder she was excited. Not only was her 'platinum-haired-little-devil' going to make her a gift, but she got to watch her take her first steps discovering magic – something that every parent waited for anxiously.
It was a private magic academy, much different to the plebeian ones that most children in the underworld attended. As the daughter of a Duke of Hell, it was only natural that I was expected to be a prodigy. Being the offspring of Marcus and Lilith, there was no way that I couldn't have been.
I'd tried preparing for that day as much as I could. Even before I first started at the school, I sat up in bed until all hours of the morning, day in and day out, reading books heavy enough that they could break a fortress gate down. I needed to be ready to awaken.
I danced around my room rehearsing spells like they were songs, producing nothing more than sighs of defeat and awkward silences at the end of the incantations.
"Class will be different, though! On the day, you'll know how to do it all. You're just nervous!" I remember my mother comforting me.
On the day of our pottery making class, though, the truth burned me more than a dragon's breath ever could.
I was useless.
I had no magical abilities and no promise at all.
As we sat with wet clay atop our desks, I followed the incantation, one eye open, to check if I was doing it like everyone else.
"I take up this clay,
For my mother, I'll make it,
In the form of a pot,
So with love, she may take it!"
As I finished the incantation and closed my eyes trying to visualise a pot like one of the books had said to, suddenly, a loud BANG! rang out across the room, from the direction of me, its source.
I opened my eyes in fright, but one of them wouldn't open completely. It was wet.
It turned out that I'd made a mess of the clay everywhere. It was in my hair and plastered all over my face, dripping down into my eyes. I'd turned the marble white walls a shade of brown that resembled the inside of a toilet, and all over my desk, sad little lumps of clay lay scattered.
The eyes on me struggled to hold themselves back from laughter, and it was in that class, for the first time, that I became aware of what I truly was.
'Halfbreed!' 'Monster!' 'Stupid!' I remembered, the voices echoing around each other inside my memory.
I was the daughter of two beings that weren't even supposed to be together. Succubi and Vampires kept to their own, and Mother herself was a runaway from another family. What resulted was a demon child who inherited nothing but the monstrous strength of both races. Not magic.
I'd hoped to never see the pot again, but now, I was bending down to pick it up.
"Why would she even keep something like this?" I said aloud, my hands clutching the broken pot. It was only big enough to fit within one palm. To call it a pot, actually, was stretching the definition too far. It was the bottom half of a mug, the top of it, shattered into pieces inside.
That's right. After Serpahine's mother cleaned me up, she told me I could just make it with my hands. She used magic to harden it instantly, so I could still give something to Mother.
But when I took it home, I saw the look she had in her eyes. She cried, and I ran off.
That's right… The failed pot that I'd had to make with my hands hit the kitchen tiles as soon as I saw my mother's tears.
My hands trembled as they cupped the small, handmade pot that I'd long forgotten about. I held it tightly, but carefully enough not to break it.
Behind where the pot sat in the cabinet was a photo of Serpahine and me. We were laughing, our mouths wide open, riding on the shoulders of our fathers like they were our own personal dragons.
I picked up both the photo and the pot, and took them to my mother's desk. I sat back down in her throne, the velvet of which matched the colour of her hair – violet.
I ferried my attention between both the pot and the photo, bringing my knees up to my neck, and resting my chin on them.
"Tch–you took this photo, didn't you, Mother?" I scoffed. "I don't remember ever making a face like that." I placed the photo atop the open Gremory Tome and gazed at the pot.
"And you. You're the most curious thing of all. Why the hell would she have kept you? Is it to remind her that her daughter is a failure?"
Not long after that day, my parents pulled me out of that school and had me privately tutored. It was my biggest shame. I had to be the only succubus or vampire that couldn't use magic.
I gently rattled the contents of the pot and tilted it towards me. The small shards of clay rustled around, but from amongst them came a sound that puzzled me.
Clink! Clink!
…
What?
I lifted my head from my knees and peered into the small clay pot, gently moving aside the debris in the process. My eyes shot wide open as the object of my curiosity was revealed at the very bottom of the pot.
A key. A small, weathered black skeleton key, to be precise. It was inconspicuous enough to appear as if it were nothing, but holding it in my hands, I could tell: when I found what it opened, I'd uncover one of the biggest secrets of The Goddess of the Night.