The Warlock

Author's Note: Thanks to Krissta for her wonderful editing talents on this story. This story has elements of NonHuman, Erotic Horror, First Time, Lesbian, Group Sex (m/f/f) and Mind Control. If any of that bothers you then turn back now. If not, then enjoy!

My name's Wilfred Tennamont and I am a warlock. I thought I should probably put that out there, right up front. I'm not a wizard, I'm not a mage, and I'm not your fucking fairy godfather. What I do is painful, ruthless, and often quite mean spirited. I deal with demons on a daily basis, and those are some of my more polite meetings. If you ever meet me, chances are you've hit rock bottom and the only thing you've got left to give is your battered and bruised soul. Well guess what? I'm buying.

I could make all your dreams come true. Come into my office and by the end of the day you could be smoking a joint made from a rolled up hundred dollar bill whilst a supermodel fucks you into next week. Think that sounds pretty sweet for the price of one little soul? If you do, then congratulations, you're an idiot.

See, everyone likes to talk about their soul but no one really has a clue what it is. Well allow me to brush away the cobwebs of ignorance and spill the beans. Your soul is a power plant. What does it power? Creativity, emotion, desire. You name it. Everything that makes you who you are is given light by the energy of your soul. It's the way to more power than you can ever imagine, but most people are only too eager to sign theirs over for a few million bucks and a blowjob from their high school sweetheart.

What do I do with it once it's mine? Well, since I'm a stand up guy, the first thing I do is let you rent back most of it. This is mainly because if I didn't then you'd turn into a completely emotionless husk on the spot, and I don't want your fat ass littering my office. The magic I work tricks your soul into thinking you're more than you are. It puts it through its paces, and when that bad boy starts overproducing its energy for you then I just skim off the excess. Well, that's if I like you. Most of my contracts are made from deals like this, but as you might imagine I tend to come across some bad apples in my line of work.

If I find you to be particularly despicable then you get what I've come to call the VIP treatment. Instead of trimming away that excess power, I'll slowly let all that energy build and build right before I drain it all away at once. It's a week-long process during which you'll inevitably sink into a grim fit of prolonged depression before wrapping your neck up in a noose.

So the blowjob that supermodel gives you in exchange for the core of your anima had better be a pretty damn good one.

Having said that, it's not all doom and gloom. Sure, people might be morons for turning over that one thing which everyone pretty much universally agrees is a bad thing to give away. On the bright side, all that energy I collect makes me ridiculously powerful. I don't want to brag but I'm almost certain that if I really wanted to I could start a pretty huge natural disaster. Wait, sorry, I forgot who I was writing for. You have no idea how hard starting an earthquake is, do you? Maybe one day I'll get to tell you from firsthand experience. Watch this space.

How did I get to know all this I hear you ask? Well I suppose it started for me during high school, shortly after discovering that social skills were not my forte. Physics, math, literature, art, music: all of those things I could get the hang of. Joking around, small talk, and anything involving physical activity did not come quite so easily. As you may have noticed I've since come out of my shell somewhat, even if I still don't understand the appeal of football.

I'd like to tell you that bullying drove me to dark acts to get a little empathy going between us, but the truth is I wasn't really bullied all that much. I was just your average loner who kept his head down and tried not to attract the attention of the larger and more unhinged set of future delinquents in the playground. A lot of my time was spent in libraries since by that age my parents seemed to notice me as much as my teachers.

So it was then, that when I was thirteen, I came across something interesting in the local public library. Apparently some old man had recently died and left no one to inherit his things. As a result, they'd carted off his impressive collection of old books down to the library to be sorted out. By then I was such a familiar sight to the people who worked there that I was practically a part of the furniture. Seriously, one of the chairs was perfectly moulded to the shape of my ass.

I turned up as usual after school to do the day's homework and pick something up in which to bury my nose for a few hours. When I walked in the door and found the enormous stacks of strange books settled over two of the big tables in the study area I was instantly curious. This was mostly due to the fact that I'd read everything in the place that I was interested in twice already and for the previous six months I'd been reading such fascinating offerings as

The Gardener's Guide to Pests

and

Royal Weddings: A Retrospective

.

Seeing the stack of new material drew me over like a moth to the flame. The librarians obviously hadn't paid that much attention to the books themselves when I first got to them because if they had then they sure as hell wouldn't have been left out in the open. I think that they must have believed them to be books about occult practices. Historical accounts of magic and mystery through the ages. I looked around to make sure no one was watching me and then, once I was sure I wasn't about to be interrupted, I reached out and pulled open the thick black leather cover of one of the tomes.

It was obvious from looking at the first page that this was no mere history book or any new age hippy crap. This was an instruction manual on the subject of dark magic. Honestly? I know it sounds corny, but it really was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. The ebon cover was utterly blank and yet, once opened, the book displayed finely shaped words set in jet black ink that weaved their way across luxurious, thick pages that were yellowed with age. An intricate, hand-drawn border lined every page with dark patterns that vaguely resembled long, thorny vines, interlacing together in wicked shapes.

I looked at the words but couldn't make any sense of them. I'd come across many different styles of writing in different languages, even at thirteen. By then I could already speak decent enough French to get by in Paris, and I'd started to learn German and Spanish. As I said, I had a lot of free time back then. So it came as something of an insult to my efforts when the one thing I'd found in months that I wanted to read wasn't in any language I'd ever known.

You know how they say curiosity killed the cat? Well,

meow

.

It was the first time I'd ever broken the law, but looking through those glorious pages made me want to know what those words were saying more than anything. For my first attempt at thievery, things went rather well. Within five seconds the big book was in my bag, and shortly after that my fear of getting seen caught up with me and I ducked out of the library to rush home.

Home, in case you're wondering, was settled in the middle of a terraced row of council houses on an estate so rough that you could turn a wooden square block into a wooden ball just by throwing it through the air. You couldn't turn a corner without seeing a used needle on the ground or a soggy condom draped over the twigs of a dead bush. When I walked inside my house there was usually the immediate sense of slow decay. My parents didn't talk to each other and they sure as hell didn't care about home improvement. The essentials worked and everything else had been slowly falling to pieces ever since they'd moved in.

I heard the usual sound of the TV in the living room and the usual lack of any kind of greeting from either of the two people who brought me into the world. It didn't matter to me since I wanted to be left alone. I rushed up the stairs to my room and closed the door. I pulled my newest acquisition out of my school bag and let it fall open on my desk. I was hoping that I could copy down some of the words and solve the mystery of the language with a quick trip to cyberspace during the next day's dinner break at school.

My plans were soon shattered when I discovered that most of the words had completely vanished except for the two settled in the centre of the page.

Hello, Wilfred.

As you can imagine, this did quite a number on my 13-year-old self. Then the words were joined by several more beneath he originals.

How may I be of service?

Now, I'm no idiot. I'd read

Harry Potter

, and as a result I fully knew the risks of dealing with books that occasionally liked to converse with their reader. Then again, I had a freaking book that could talk! Well it couldn't talk, just write, but that's still a ways above what most of us are used to, right?

So, after about 10 minutes of standing there looking down at my desk I finally managed to eke out a whisper.

"What are you?"

The writing in the centre of the page vanished and new letters began to weave their way across the top of the paper.

I am the Nocturne Compendium. My pages hold the combined writings of over two millennia's worth of arcane lore. I have been modified and updated by hundreds of highly capable practitioners of dark magic. How may I be of service?

Well, wasn't my new book just a little bit full of itself?

"Dark magic?" I forgot to whisper. No one cared.

Instead of the conversational answers I'd been given before, the book's pages began to turn of their own accord with such speed that they sent air rushing across my face. The sensation made me realise that I'd barely been breathing and I let out a quick gasp as the page suddenly fell open toward the end of the book. I'd noticed as those pages had been rushing by that all of them were completely blank, as was the one the book had selected until writing began again.

Glossary:

Dark magic – The branch of magical lore devoted to the study of magical energies aligned with the dark realms.

Well that didn't sound too good, did it? Now that I remember that first interaction with the

Nocturne Compendium

I almost shudder. I can't possibly tell you how amazingly lucky I was that I picked up that book and none of the others. The Compendium is almost unique in that it is one of the few things created by people in my profession that isn't designed to hurt anyone using it who shouldn't be. For example, if you happened to read the first three books on my office bookshelf without my permission then you'd spend the rest of your very short life as a leprous donkey with dysentery.

Since other warlocks are often similarly protective of their stuff, a lot of knowledge gets lost when we die. The

Nocturne Compendium

was an effort to fix that. It won't hurt anyone who reads it that shouldn't. It just makes no sense to them. This is because it's designed to be passed down through the generations, amassing more and more knowledge as more and more warlocks use it for their work. I found out later that the warlock who owned it before it came into my hands had died before he could successfully pass it on. Since we're not too morally uptight about stealing from the dead, the book decided that I was its new owner.

I won't go into the entirety of my first conversation with that book. I didn't know what questions to ask back then and I don't enjoy reminiscing about all the idiotic ideas that came into my head. What I will tell you is that the book turned out to be everything it said it was. It could quite easily reproduce the writings and accompanying notes of long dead warlocks at my command. It even had illustrations; most of which made me feel sick.

I took the next day off school to stay home and read the book. All it took was a quick word to my mother that I didn't feel so well before she gave me an absent grunt of acknowledgement and I hurried back upstairs. I'd found a collection of articles written by a warlock to his apprentice during the 13th century. These articles outlined the basics of using dark magic.

This brings me to my next little fun factoid. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to actually

use

dark magic?

Let me put it this way: you sure as hell don't learn it in a day. The easiest way is to simply summon up a demon and offer your soul in exchange for magical knowledge. The demon will do exactly the kind of thing I do and just slice off the excess power for itself and use you as its little battery for the rest of your life. Of course the problem with that, as the book thankfully outlined several times, is that the energy your soul gives out is the main thing that powers your own magical ability. So you end up knowing the ins and outs intimately but only being able to conduct very minor spells. It's also not a very good idea to make contracts with others if you don't have a firm hold on your own soul, especially not if it belongs to a demon. I'd elaborate but frankly I don't have the stomach for it.

So I had to start from scratch. Self-taught initiation to magic involves a lot of work. Every night I read more of the

Nocturne Compendium

and most of my days in school were spent trying to force pencils across my desk with only my willpower. I didn't flag behind in my classes. To tell you the truth, after spending so much time in the library I knew most of what my teachers were going to say before they said it anyway.

It took me three years before the pencil moved.

I remember it wasn't long after my 16th birthday and I was sat at my desk at home, taking a break from some coursework. I turned to the constantly-stationary pencil on my desk and almost absently thought about moving it when it finally obeyed and rolled a few inches across the wooden surface. At first I thought it was just some other factor. It wouldn't have been the first time I'd gotten my hopes up only to find I was taking the credit from a gust of wind or someone slightly knocking the table. So I tried again and sure enough, nothing happened.

Back to work I went until after 10 minutes or so I did the same thing again and once more the pencil moved a few inches toward the end of my desk. This was cause for excitement. I'd managed to get the mental gymnastics correct for a while but I lacked the necessary focus that the monotony of writing out school coursework had finally given me.

I swear, you have never seen anyone so excited about a pencil in your entire life. It took me only three minutes before the thing finally rolled off of the edge of my desk. By the end of the night I could roll the thing back and forth across the desk and spin it around on the spot.

It had started.

The main reason I'd kept up with the attempt at rolling pencils for three years via telekinesis was the consistently-interesting reading material within the

Nocturne Compendium

. That's right, three years in and I still hadn't read a tenth of its contents. What I knew was that pencil pushing was only the first step on a very long road.

It took me three months before I could levitate a feather an inch off of the ground. Levitation is a hell of a lot harder than pushing since you have to balance the forces involved. Flicking it up into the air was easy but getting it to hover in place? Not so much. After that I started pushing heavier objects. Do you remember me telling you that the power of a soul depends on the person? A very creative, determined, and emotional person has much more of it than someone who isn't all those things.

Using dark magic makes that energy flare up more and more. It's like a muscle. The more you use it, the more powerful it gets.

By the end of the year I could have sent that damn pencil flying across the room and skewered you in the eye with pinpoint accuracy.

My studies continued with fresh interest and more years passed as I advanced to basic alchemy and practicing with the four basic elements. I was lucky I didn't poison, drown, bury, suffocate or immolate myself. So by the time I hit 18 years of age, I decided that I was a man and that it was time to summon my first demon.

Naturally, being an 18 year old male I wanted my first demon to be a succubus. I'll admit that this was largely because the pictures of them in the

Nocturne Compendium

had gotten me through a very lonely adolescence. I didn't exactly ignore the warnings about the nature of succubi, but that isn't to say I was fully prepared for what I was getting into either. Here's some of what the book has to say about them:

Succubus – A creature birthed in the realm of lust and dark desire, the succubus is often sought out for its unnatural allure. It is one of the few demons capable of evolving itself as it ages. Initially the creature resembles a particularly thin and physically weak woman with few traits that would betray her demonic nature. Though the true origins of the succubi are unknown, it is suspected that the creature is born of a broken heart. Initially a relatively weak demon; if the succubus is allowed to flourish within the dark realms it can become incredibly powerful. Whilst in the dark realms, the creatures will often engage in mass orgies in order to feed from the greater power of the realm itself.

Once it has consumed the required amount of energy, it will grow long claws at the fingertips. Upon reaching this stage, the creature can feed on the magical energy of other demons via any sexual act resulting in physical orgasm and often destroys its victim in the process. The succubus also tends to explore the other dark realms as it grows in order to feed from different demons and expand its own powers.

It is possible to discern how powerful these demons are from their physical appearance.

Initially the creature appears as a thin, sickly-pale, middle-aged woman. The only demonic features of note at this stage are the eyes, which are completely black without a trace of either iris or pupil. Whilst in this phase, the demon can be engaged with relative safety, although it can only survive for minutes when taken out of its realm.

The true danger of the succubus begins when it manifests its claws. Although the claws themselves are potentially lethal, they are more importantly a sign of the succubus's maturation and ability to consume energy other than that of the realm of their birth. More than this, the creature will appear younger and healthier with a much greater appeal to the sexual desire of others.

After it has fed upon several new victims, the succubus's eyes will change as the blackness that once dominated the entire orbs will shift to the centre. This results in a slitted pupil surrounded by a newly crimson-hued eye. The change signals that the succubus is capable of minor emotional manipulation and it will often use this power to heighten feelings of lust in potential victims.

By the time the demoness grows horns it is considered highly dangerous and should not be summoned unless fully contained. The ability to manipulate emotions grows to an ability to read thought and sense the deepest desire of its victim. Although naturally appearing as a highly attractive woman in her 30s, the creature may change its shape at will. This makes it extremely difficult to recapture if it manages to escape. It also means that a summoner should be exceptionally wary of all succubi, as the demon may simply be assuming a lesser form of itself in order to lure the warlock into a false sense of security.

The tail is a sign that the creature is adept in the use of magic and, as such, it means that it has successfully consumed a mortal soul. Succubi, like all demons, lack a soul and may only draw their power from the dark realms. However, once it has consumed a mortal soul it may use that energy as we do. Once the energy is spent, however, then the creature cannot regain it by any other means than seducing another mortal. They may steal the power but they lack the capability to naturally renew it within themselves.