Handbook of Erotic Fantasy: Ghosted (Patreon)

It is the best sort of day in the life of a practitioner. You can never know when it is coming though, because it can be anything at all. A jeweled scarab or a cracked mirror. A moldering ledger or a horned mask. Plucked from the grasp of a graveless corpse… stolen from the altar of a forgotten god… rummaged from the bargain bin at the Ye Olde Plotsville Swap Meet for the low, low price of five copper and a palm reading.

The orb had called to her. Something in its flashing depths had glinted, winking like an eye in a trademarked idol. It had only happened a few times before: spear, cloak, and gloves. The rush of power had followed, and a practitioner never forgets that thrill. It came from the orb as strongly as any of her other implements. .

Hurried footsteps through town and back to her chamber. It was a giddy feeling, there in the private dim. Like a youth with half a bottle of stolen rotgut, or learning to swear in the tongues of devils, or lying down beside a best friend’s love, with fire in your blood and treachery in your heart. Forbidden, yes, but imminently desirable.

Occultist shut the shudders. She savored the wooden thunk of glass upon the table. She performed the trick of focus, and moved that doorway of the mind which holds now apart from then.

“What secrets will you show me?” she breathed. But she did not take those secrets by force. She savored the feeling, the slow erosion of time like a jeweler with her files. “I am entitled, you know,” she breathed to her bauble. “Have I not spent a minute handling you? Have you been so handled lately? Give me one piece of information about your past!”

She could feel herself looking out through other eyes then. The sense of a hand that was not hers, holding this same sphere of crystal on some long ago day. The shapes were dim, but the sense of it was… curiosity? Infatuation? And then she felt the long ago sensations of the old owner. And the correct word came all at once: prurience.

“You scryed?” she breathed, watching through time what that other had watched through space. Figures danced within the sphere. They writhed and they shown with sweat. They clawed furrows down one another’s backs, and cried in ecstasy, and failed to make their Perception checks to notice the invisible sensor.

“You were a dirty little mage, weren’t you?” she asked the empty air. But Occultist could feel the peeping diviner’s partner as well. She had not been alone in voyeurism. That other had watched as well. And he had watched from over the scryer’s shoulder.

“You were both into it?”

And the feeling was emphatic. The psychic impression of lovers past still danced in the crystal. The diviner — for a brief, ecstatic moment — was Occultist. And her partner was finding his tempo.

“I think I am going to enjoy Divination,” she said breathlessly. And then her words were no longer intelligible.