Handbook of Erotic Fantasy: Dreams of Love (Patreon)

He could not place the smell. It was heady stuff, and his vision swam. Perhaps that is why the room lacked definite shape, seeming to recede from the periphery of his attention? It was dark and warm, and bodies moved around him, and the taste of fruit was on his tongue.

That smell though… It was sweet, and warm, and woodsy. An incense smell, and one he’d known before. In a temple somewhere? And those undertones! Damp earth and anice, paired with a sense-memory of cold weight in his hand: the brass chains of a thurible swinging from his grip.

“You belong here,” she said. “With us.”

Her hair was white. Her eyes were fire, and the apple flickered like candle flame before him. The witch and the demon were there as well, both with hooded eyes and hungry mouths, and he felt that same hunger building within him.

“Why did you resist this for so long?”

He sank beneath the tide of them. The incense pulled him down. And as a drowning man casts about for some line or rock to grasp, to hold and cling to amidst a killing sea, he forced his gaze from the white flame of her hair and the red flame of the apple. He looked to the dark corners of the room. They appeared at need. And there he saw something black and jagged against the shadows.

He could not remember disrobing. Could not remember unlacing his breeches or throwing his tunic to the corner. But he knew that those were his garments in that shadowed alcove. That was his armor, left in a heap where he’d hurled it in the impatience of his lust. But it was no longer gold. His armor was black iron. It was the uniform of the fallen, and it was his.

The voice of the necromancer was all about him. “My love,” it said. “At last we can be together.”

That is when he finally placed the smell. It was her perfume, yes. But it was also the fumes of the funeral censor. The same one he’d held when he’d buried his mother all those years ago.

“This is a dream,” he said.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“It is so sweet.”

“Yes.”

“But it can never be.”

The room was empty now. There was only smoke and darkness. “No,” came the sound of his true love’s voice. “It can never be. Fate and Patreon polls conspire against us.”

There were tears at the corners of his eyes. The incense, surely?