Zerafina woke up slightly sore and sticky on the bed. She looked up to see her impish familiar Tidget leering at her, his tiny cock still rock hard. She groaned and sat up, peeling herself off of the sheets. On the small table in room was the book she had used to summon the demon lord Nyyphas, and upon seeing it she groaned again. It hadn't been her intention to summon the demon lord of lust, and it was absolutely not her intention to give herself over to him, but that didn't change the fact that she had summoned him or that she had submitted her body to him.
She found her satchel bag and pulled out her second-best dress, her other one having been left in tatters throughout the room. She sat down, gingerly, after righting the chair that Nyyphas had knocked over in his haste to ravish her.
She closed the spell book, refusing to even linger over the now crystal clear spells. Yesterday the mystic formula had swam and danced across the page in an incomprehensible mess. She decided that it must be a benefit of having been "blessed" by the Demon Lord of Lust. She poured herself a glass of water from the decanter in the room, the cool liquid easing her parched throat. Her hand lingered by the book and she flipped it back open at random. That particular spell, one dealing with the control and manipulation of emotions, was clear as well, and she realized she had sudden insight into its working. She pulled a strand of her long dark hair back behind her ear as she considered the implications.
Her master, a warlock of no mean power, had spent countless years delving into the arcane. He had wasted his youth and his eyesight in trying to unlock the mysteries of magic. This tome in front of her was his magnum opus, his entire's life work. By rights, she should only be able to grasp the most basic spells and rituals that it contained.
But... her master had probably had the self-control to not call the Demon Lord of Lust accidentally, and Zerafina had a hard time believing that her former master had ever allowed himself to be as completely violated as Zerafina had been last night. She remembered agreeing to serve the demon lord, but it wasn't as if he had left any instructions on how that was to be done, and she hoped that it didn't involve being regularly fucked. Sure, it wasn't all bad, but it hadn't been entirely comfortable either. Still, the young sorceress was going to need some sort of plan. It wasn't like she could stay at the inn the entire time. What little coin she had was not going to last long, and the demon lord would probably resent his chosen one working as a serving wench, even if she did decide to supplement her income. Zerafina thought briefly of striking a special bargain with the innkeeper, but the thought of his balding head and sagging paunch quickly pushed thoughts of lust out her head. She sighed, closed the book again and placed it carefully in the satchel after carefully wrapping it with a few tattered strips from her destroyed dress.
"Come on Tidget," she called, holding the bag open for him. It would do her no good if the locals saw her familiar. Witches and warlocks were not the most popular of people, as her late master would have attested to if he hadn't been run through with an oversized piece of cutlery.
When she opened the door and got to the top of the stairs, it was to see the innkeeper leering up at her. She shuddered slightly and walked down. He didn't move and she was forced to push past him. She felt a slight hard lump below his belt area and quickly pushed it out of her mind.
"You sleep all right last night, little lady?" the innkeeper asked.
Zerafina nodded curtly and wondered just how much of what happened last night the innkeeper had heard. "I slept fine thank you," she replied.
"Is there going to be anything else that you'll be needing then?" the innkeeper continued, moving behind the bar and wiping the filthy bartop with an equally dirty rag.
"No," Zerafina answered, reaching into her coin purse and producing a few of her dwindling coins. She was going to have to find some way to get some more money, and soon, or she would be reduced to drastic measures.
"Not even to break your fast?" the innkeeper asked.
Zerafina thought with some stomach turning revulsion of the meal that had been served to her last night. "I will be quite fine on my own," she said, gathering herself and exiting the tavern. She squinted against the light, her eyes still more accustomed to long days in poorly lit rooms pouring over ciphered text than it was to the great outdoors. She had been sold at a tender age to the warlock, and it was probably because she had been too young to appease the dark lords her former master served that she had been made an apprentice instead of a sacrifice. She reached into her bag as she walked west, away from her former home and away from the baron who had killed her master, and pulled out a hunk of hard cheese and a bit of stale bread. It was still better than what she would be able to get otherwise by foraging in the woods, and she still had some water to wash it all down with.
What she needed was some form of plan. She thought about finding another warlock to apprentice herself to, but shelved that idea. After all, she had become an apprentice to learn magic. That goal had been accomplished: her understanding of her master's book proved that. She could, perhaps, build her own tower and carve a bit of territory out for herself. That would take money, and she didn't have any. All the resources she had were Tidget, and the book.
Zerafina stopped suddenly, a deliciously malevolent smile curving up her full lips. The book! She still did not know all that it contained. She knew it had the ritual for summoning Nyyphas, and as useful as that had proven, being fucked by the demon lord would not likely get her much in the way of power or wealth. There was the spell that she had seen that morning, the spell to control emotions and loyalty, and she licked her lips at the thought of what such a spell could gain for her. She was sure there were other spells as well, ones that would allow her to obtain no small measure of wealth and power. She might even be able to find a way to free herself from her obligations to Nyyphas. The question though, was where to start? She knew that she would eventually want to strike at the Baron of Gorendale if for no other reason than that she was currently homeless thanks to him. She doubted that the would even be able to get close enough to enchant him. Three hours later, Zerafina was again walking along the road, continuing in the same direction that she had started that morning. It had taken her a while to find a spell that suited her needs and that she felt reasonably sure that she could make work. Too many of the spells required strange and rare reagents that she simply did not possess. She was sure that her master had possessed many of them, storing them in his laboratory, but given that his tower was now a burnt out shell that knowledge gave her small comfort. Others required some form of blood sacrifice, and there she had the same problem that she had faced with the ritual to summon Nyyphas- a complete lack of available sacrifices. However, there was one spell that she had discovered that would help her in the short term. It was so simple and direct that she was surprised that her master had even included it in the tome. He must have added it when he was much younger and only starting on his life's work. The fact that it was the same spell that she had glanced at that very morning almost made her wonder if some greater power was subtly at work.