Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users

Everything did not simply calm down. It paused like a breath held too long. The page hung above the band.

The orchards kept their apples in the air at the same angle. A drop of light that had leapt from a river to a leaf hung there and waited without falling.

Roots that had been charging forward stopped mid-surge, the veins in them glowing but unmoving.

Illusions froze where they had been cutting, broken mirrors suspended without a sound. The arena stood like a picture, as if someone had stopped between frames.

The pressure that had pulled the seal tight did not vanish. It changed shape, turning from a push into a presence.

They arrived without footsteps. The space did not crack to let them through. It made room the way water makes room for a ship that belongs on it.

The succubus Matron stepped out of the still air first. Her hair ran down her back like a river of night with stars caught in it.

The horns at her temples gleamed faintly, not menacing but old. Her tail flicked once behind her, the gem-bright tip burning a quiet color.

A robe that would have been scandalous in any court looked natural on her here. The cut of it said ease, and the way she wore it said authority.

She smiled as if the arena were a room in her house.

Beside her walked the Elven Ancestress. Her green hair held the same soft light as leaves at dawn.

The long points of her ears caught every stray shimmer in the sky and returned it to the air around her. Her robe looked like a thing grown rather than woven.

The pattern on its hem shifted when she breathed, tiny flowers blooming and vanishing without fuss. Her hands were empty.

She did not need a staff to look like someone the world would listen to.

They did not raise their auras to be seen. The arena bent to them even when they did nothing, and that told enough.

Space mended itself around their steps. Cracks settled. The worst bends in the platform softened. Time found a steady pace again.

The mirrors dimmed to a bearable glow. The rivers lengthened their lines and lay down like tired serpents on hooks of air.

They stopped between Lilith and Elowen, not exactly at the center but at the place that felt like the center.

The pause that followed was not awkward. It was the silence of a room that knew a conversation mattered and did not want to interrupt.

"Children should not break the toys they still need," the Matron said gently. Her voice held laughter in it, but the warmth carried iron.

"Even if the toys are very large and very pretty, and you both look lovely when you try."

The Ancestress's eyes went over the torn mirrors, the split roots, the bent rivers. Her tone stayed kind.

"If you keep going, you will pull open more than this seal. You will unravel threads that our hands do not want to tie again."

Lilith did not bow her head. She inclined it the way she had in the pressure a moment ago, an old habit that meant respect, not surrender. "We stopped," she said. "When asked."

Elowen's hands were open at her sides. Her hair's glow had eased to a steady line. "We heard you," she said, voice calm. "And we are here."

The Matron's gaze slid over Lilith's veil and Elowen's rings. She took in the page still floating above the band, the clear patch where two domains had touched without tricks.

She smiled in a way that folded mischief and praise together and made both feel honest.

"You insisted on reminding the seal you still fit inside it," she said. "That is good. It would be worse if your hands had forgotten their weight."

The Ancestress looked toward the far dark where the mountain-thick roots went down and the rivers threaded back into the void. "But not here," she added softly. "Not now."

Their words did not scold. They landed like hands on a shoulder, steadying, not pushing.

Lilith's eyes narrowed a fraction, then softened. "We were honest," she said. "We did not lie about what we are."

"Honesty is why we came," the Matron said. She took one small step, and the air near her smelled faintly of good wine and the kind of ink that stains a writer's finger because they work too late.

"We have questions. You will answer them because you know why we ask."

Elowen inclined her head. "Ask."

The Ancestress tipped her face toward the fractured ceiling. "When the pressure spoke to you," she asked, "what did you hear beneath our words?"

"Save your height," Lilith said without thinking, voice low. "Not for each other. For what comes."

"And do not make the borrowed ground pay for the measure," Elowen added. "We heard that, too."

"Good," the Ancestress said, and in that one word sat old approval. "You heard what we meant. Not just what we said."

The Matron flicked her tail once, more amused than stern. "Next," she said. "If your fight had continued two exchanges more without us, how would you have kept the seal from failing?"

Lilith did not bother to pretend she would have softened. "By pulling the corners of the page wide enough to make a roof the size of the arena," she said.

"A lid that closes without cutting. It would have held for one strike."

Elowen spoke in the same breath. "By making the band a knotted ring," she said, "and tying the knot to the deep root below the platform.

It would have held for two, and then it would have broken something I did not want to break."

The Matron lifted a brow. "And you still would have done it," she said.

Elowen's answer was simple. "Yes."

"Then we arrived on time," the Matron said, and her smile this time had no mischief at all, only relief.

The Ancestress's gaze went to the still orchard and the last thin mirrors of the army. "Lilith," she asked, "the visions you used.

The boy. The girls. Would you have sharpened them further if she had faltered?"