A succubus arrives in the shape of whatever the sleeper has put off longest, and in most bedrooms that is an unanswered letter. I watched it happen once, in the back room of a chandler's house in Nether Chaldron, where a journeyman lay under two quilts with a reply to his mother nine months overdue. The town handles such visits practically. Every household chalks its postponed task on a slate and props it against the bedpost, and the slate, it is held, makes a better meal than the sleeper.
The window did not open so much as stop being closed. A cold patch crossed the floorboards, and the candle I had left burning leaned toward it. She crouched on the sill with her knees bent the wrong way, wings furled against the frame like wet leather. Ram's horns curved back from a long, pale human face. Her eyes did not match, one amber and one the gray of dishwater, and neither blinked. Unfolded, she stood six feet tall, and the boards did not creak under her hooves. She crossed to the bed, went flat and small, and settled on the pillow as a sheet of cream paper in a slanting hand. Gray vapor rose from the journeyman's mouth, and the paper drew it in by slow pulls. What she feeds on is resolve, the meaning to do a thing, rather than the day itself.
Drafts of the reply lay on the table. When the vapor ran thin she stood up as herself, crossed to them, and with one inky nail corrected two spellings. She is vain about penmanship and cannot leave a comma alone. Then she straightened the sampler hanging crooked over the washstand, which she does in every house whether she has business there or not, and went out the window. The latch dropped behind her.
By morning the journeyman was clear-eyed and could not name one thing he had meant to do. Frost lay on the sill until noon, in July, and the room smelled of cold ink. Locals track her by that ring, and by pictures hung suddenly true down a whole street; Ulnage Row, where the old cloth-measurers' houses stand, has gone a week with every frame level. Jory Maddock, the chandler who owns the house, chalks his slate each night in block capitals, which he claims she takes as an insult and leaves alone. At breakfast he set the slate in front of the journeyman and tapped it twice. "Write your mother."
- Classification
- Fiend, sleep-feeding
- Habitat
- Bedrooms with unlatched windows
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft tall, wings spanning 9 ft
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- The Lower Dusk
- Binomial
- Somnivora scriptrix
- Diet
- Sleepers' resolve and unfinished intentions
- Temperament
- Patient, fussy, quietly vain