Nyx Nyghtingale
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Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 07 - Reflection
🕑 Added 2024-03-15 15:35:32 +0000 UTCThis whole opening stretch is, surprise surprise, another bit of self indulgence on my part. I really wanted to stress that Amara's wings are impressively large, and introducing them before she figured out shapeshifting was very exciting, narratively.
In my mind, this is really where the frustration she's feeling turns around. In the past, it was mainly about feeling helpless despite her transformation, whereas now she's taken a liking to everything that's happening to her, and just wants the freedom to be herself.
We also finally see Nick pulling the trigger with Vee! I set this up all the way back in chapter 1. Now that we're officially past halfway through the first book, we start to see more and more payoff for things I've planted earlier. Granted, some of the things I'm planting won't pay off for a pretty long time, but still.
Tying Nick's reveal about the date to the discovery of Amara's shapeshifting was something I thought of extremely early. While many aspects of her abilities just sort of appear, there are definitely parts that are tied to her thoughts in ways she might not fully understand yet. I'm sure some of you were excited for Amara, as Vee, to have some sexy fun with Nick, but it just didn't feel right.
Nick is too much of a bleeding heart to cross that line, and Amara's in a pretty similar place. I'm actually very cautious when it comes to matters of consent in my writing, and this isn't the first time that I've avoided certain sexy scenes because of it.
Way back in Chapter 5, when Amara is trapped in the circle, I had the perfect opportunity for something much more non-consensual, or at least semi-con. However, when I realized how perfect that scene would be (Especially as someone who, admittedly, frequents the NonCon/Reluctance category on Lit) I was immediately hit by how much I cared about Amara. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't want to write the version of her that gets magically compelled to do Brandon's bidding.
That scene got reworked to its current form, where the sexy stuff is entirely under her control, and she's using it in creative ways to try and gain the advantage.
Of course, Nick has to be off pretty quick, and we jump into the next scene. Amara is, understandably, very eager to leave the house after a week of being cooped up. Is that a good idea? I'll leave that up to you.
We continue to get more hints that Amara is really happy being a demon, and I finally get to write my first scene with her using shapeshifting to be a duplicitous little trickster. Tessa's has poked her enough that I feel she had it coming.
Speaking of Tessa, I continue to be extremely nervous about dumping lore on my readers. I hope it's interesting, and I promise it's relevant. If not, well, it's a pretty short section. I'm personally quite interested in the magic system I've put together, I think I'll be able to do a lot of fun things with it, and we're finally getting the building blocks of how it works.
One thing that was important to me when writing all these scenes with Tessa was to stress that they're good friends. They've been friends for a while, and discovering supernatural nonsense about each other really didn't change much other than what they're doing. However, in my head, Tessa was a little more crass and standoffish before learning about Amara's demonic nature, and she's been softening up a little since then. That being said, I think this particular element got a little lost since we only had one scene with Tessa before her big witch reveal.
As I've mentioned before, a hypothetical future re-write would probably give the friend group more to do early on. That might even intensify the mystery of who our enigmatic Angel is!
And speak of the Devil (Well, Angel, but you know what I mean) this is where we finally learn who she is. Spoiler alert! It's Vee. I didn't really intend for this to be a huge mystery or an earthshaking reveal, but I have no idea how it reads to my audience. I know some people were surprised, and even if you weren't, I think it's at least a fun reveal that the person hunting Amara is actually a close friend of hers.
Poor Vee. I feel this chapter really shows a turning point for her, in a couple different ways. We see that the lack of sleep is getting to her, but she also jumps to the conclusion that Amara is purposely fucking with her, hence the shapeshifting. The two girls still don't know about each other, and it was very exciting to have Vee literally look right at Amara, but still but clueless about so much.
Lastly, we end Vee's scene with a quick clue of how the chapter ends, which is a detail I'm quite proud of.
Writing the last scene was... tense, at least for me. In my opinion, many stories of this nature (Light hearted supernatural fun, not smut) often depict fantasy violence, rather than realistic violence. I'll probably end up doing that a lot myself later on! But this chapter is not that. Derek is NOT a nice person, he's got a lot of issues, and he's really drunk. We know he has some strange obsession with Vee, and we know he was willing to get physical until Amara stepped in last time.
Things are a lot different now. They're alone, Amara feels vulnerable without her normal body, and Derek is desperate. Their scuffle made me pretty uncomfortable, and it took a lot of time to build the scene in exactly the right way.
The most important turning point is realizing that Derek thinks he's attacking Vee. This flips a switch for Amara, and it's enough to spur her into manifesting fire for the first time. It's a pretty triumphant moment, despite how tense it is.
Amara getting back home was another bit I had to rewrite a few times. Initially, the focus was a lot more about the attack and how it affected her, but I didn't like how that felt. The emphasis, as is, leans more towards overall panic. Yes, partially because of the attack, but she's also on fire. Even if the flames aren't hurting her, it's still a lot to process.
Please drink responsibly!
Nyx <3
