Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 39 - Reflection

Truth be told, I have no idea how many of you actually read these Reflections. I know some of you do, but I also know they're nowhere near as popular as the actual story. This makes perfect sense, obviously, and I've always intended the Reflections to be fun little extras for those that want them.

However, sometimes I wonder if certain Reflections are more popular than others. Are there certain scenes in the main series that people read and go "Wow, I wonder how she thought of that?" or something similar.

(Patreon does technically show me numbers on things like that, but in my opinion they're vague and unreliable.)

With this chapter, however, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more people than usual coming to the Reflection. If you're here, I have a feeling I know what you're waiting for me to talk about. Yes, I have a fair amount to say about the ending, but there was also an entire chapter before that. So, like I normally do, I'll be going through this chapter chronologically.

Anyways, to start out, we get a scene from Chloé's POV that I thought was crucial to the story being told. We've been following her all book, but there was a very notable absence from her POV after she's rescued by Amara. This was very much intentional—a big emphasis of this book was diving deeper into Chloé as a character. Seeing a little more of her backstory, living her daily life with her, and seeing the normal she's fought so hard to create after coming to college.

Pretty much all of the main cast have had very clear arcs this book.

Vee, having finally accepted that she's willing to coexist with Amara, finally saw the entirety of what Amara has been through since learning about her demonic heritage. Vee's journey was about finally getting all the information, realizing the true scope of how she wronged Amara, and apologizing.

Tessa was struggling with a slowly creeping fear regarding Amara's abilities. This ended up tying together with her larger issues about intimacy and vulnerability. Pairing her with Nick was, in my opinion, a really clever move. He's demi (something that surprises Tessa) and he's possible the one person that can actually encourage her to open up about her feelings. Over the course of the book, we see work through her complicated feelings about Amara's heritage, and I think she's a healthier person overall by the end of the story.

Amara's arc is... a bit more complicated. As the main character of the series, its not always as easy to pinpoint where parts of her character development start and stop. That being said, there are some notable things that happen. In the very first chapter, as well as towards the end when everyone is in the cafeteria, we see a very obvious shift towards a bigger ego. This pairs with an increased aggression that, while not as obvious, is still rather pronounced. Honestly, one of the things I find more interesting about Book Three overall is the way Amara moves through it. In the grand scheme of things, her character development kinda pauses while she's in Purgatory with Vee.

At the start of the book she's grown significantly more full off herself, and that's exactly how she ends the book. For her, the most significant change is that she repairs her friendship with Vee. This is a very important step in her journey, obviously, but in a way, it's a little tangential to her overall character arc. This is definitely something I'll have more to say about in future books as we see more of Amara's journey.

And finally, Chloé. In my head, she always represented the ideal status quo of Aurelius University. She's unaware of any threats, she has no powers, and she's just doing her best to make friends and make a world a better place. I've said this before, but her arc ended up being a very interesting parallel to Vee's from the first book. Vee slowly learned that a demon was on campus, and was surprised to learn it was Amara. Chloé slowly learned that her friends were hiding something from her, and was surprised to learn Amara was a demon. I'm really happy with this dynamic, especially as it highlights just how different Chloé and Vee are.

Spending all this time also teaches us how she might respond to the big discovery about magic. To my knowledge, most of my readers assumed she was going to be mad that her friends lied to her. However, her main issues were never really about trust, they were about self-worth.

I mean, one of the very first things we see happen is that she fails to ask out someone she has a crush on. She can't find the courage to stand up for herself. Over the course of the book, this is highlighted over and over. She refuses to push Tessa and Nick about what's going on, even after she starts suspecting things. When I finally revealed why she was upset, I wanted it to feel earned. Hopefully I pulled this off—I certainly had a few beta readers that said "It caught me by surprise, but in hindsight, it makes perfect sense."

Anyways, with that small tangent over, I return to the scene at hand.

The opening scene is all about Chloé's note-taking app. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if this section seems a little out of place, but that's partially the point. I wanted to start this Chapter with a first emphasis and reestablishment of Chloé's character, especially since we've been absent from her POV for a bit.

This section does many things to help with that. One, it's a great bit of characterization. We see the way she thinks, the things she has to do to keep herself organized. Two, it lets me hint at some of her backstory with the reference to her parents. Three, and most importantly, it gives me a chance to approach the idea of "all my friends have superpowers" from a more grounded perspective. I mean, she's a huge nerd, of course she has a wiki about her own life, and of course she tries to catalog all her friends powers.

However, while I tried not to be too blatant about this, I wanted to show how this knowledge affects her. I think it's pretty clear there's some jealousy brewing, but those feelings only serve to heighten her already existing character flaw; her self-image problems.

Compared to what her friends are capable of, she's looking at her own accomplishments and diminishing them, like she always does. However, it's in that context that she goes to Amara and asks if there's anything she can do to help. Despite her poor opinion of herself, she's clearly made some progress over the years. She doesn't give up entirely, she asks for a chance to prove herself. It's a small step, and she doesn't share the full weight of the question with her friends, but I needed to make it obvious.

That's why I end the scene the way I do, with Chloé swearing that she'll find a way to help.

Those last thoughts of hers are crucial to the impact of this story. Ideally, it adds an undercurrent of tension to the rest of the chapter. What is she planning on doing? If she tries to help, will she mess things up or get in the way? I wouldn't be surprised if most people forget about these words by the time the fight starts, but hopefully her resolve springs to mind when she reappears at the end of the chapter.

Once we wrap up with Chloé, it's time to pop back into Vee's head and start the fight. I've been pretty open in the past that I struggle with fight scenes, and I certainly had some mounting insecurities about this chapter. So far, I've ended every book with a big climactic fight, and I think I felt the least prepared for this one.

In Book One, Amara's fight with Vee is relatively tame. Vee has the upper hand for a bit, then Amara does, then it's time to end the book. The fight is over pretty quickly, and the one thing I tried to stress was that Vee clearly had the weaker hand.

In Book Two, the fight in the Ritual chamber was much more involved. However, I had a crutch that helped me keep everything more dynamic. All three participants had vastly different roles. Vee was fighting humans inside her radiant barrier, while Amara was fighting demons and the boss monster outside. This gave me a clear progression of the action, while also giving me a clear opportunity to make the different parts of the fight feel varied and interesting.

For Book Three, I didn't have anything quite like that. There was no clean separation of responsibilities, it was just "go fight the reapers and stop Brandon." This was, in many ways, intentional. I've been trying very hard to build up the reapers as a threat, but more specifically, one that Amara and Vee could believably take down.

If I've done my job well, my readers go into this last chapter fully believing that Amara and Vee can win this fight.

I tried to start the combat out on a high note. What was really fun, honestly, was that I had a chance to inject a bit of spectacle into the combat, which isn't something I've messed around with much before. However, I wanted to show just how much stronger Vee is while she has her Enochian Texts, and I wanted to stress that it gives her more options and flexibility. She's not just doing the same things but bigger, she has a wider array of abilities. So, for this fight, she's got illusion-adjacent light constructs that distract the reaper, and she spend a chunk of the fight running through the air on Enochian runic platforms.

In addition to just being fun, I also wanted the fight to feel very winnable at the start. Then, with each passing moment, it starts becoming clear that Vee is running out of juice. The longer she tries to hold her own against the reapers, the more she's going to get hurt.

She pushes herself to her limits when she tries to distract two reapers at once, but importantly, this gives a chance for Amara to kill another reaper. This small victory is notable, and gives the fight a sense of momentum, but it's quickly followed by Brandon joining the fight.

I struggled with how to portray his abilities. For one thing, he's not a fighter, but he also doesn't fully understand everything he can do. For the purposes of this fight, I tried to make him feel almost more like a nuisance than an actual threat. Like, it's so much more annoying that he's this hard to kill because he's not even that great with his weird ghost powers. However, my goal was to show that his presence continually slowed Amara down. He puts a timer on the fight, as Amara needs to expend even more energy to try and buck against his restraints. This culminates when she stops defending herself, letting a reaper maul her back while she puts everything she has into hurting Brandon.

Again, I really hope the fight was both exciting and easy to follow. I think my fight choreography improves with each fight I write, but it's still a learning process.

In the end, however, I had one incredibly important thing to stress.

They lose the fight.

A while back, one of my Beta Readers asked me how I planned to address power creep in my stories.

(Power Creep is a term that originated in video gaming, and generally refers to a situation where certain things grow more and more powerful over time. This can sometimes negatively affect the plot in different ways, and it applies differently to narrative works than it does to video games. There's many reasons this can be bad. For one thing, if your main character is always able to get stronger and take out the new big threat, it can lessen the stakes of a narrative. However, it also limits the types of stories you can tell. Maybe there's a new threat, but the readers don't believe that they're truly a force to be reckoned with. Or maybe less powerful characters like Nick or Tessa start showing up less and less because they simply have nothing they can do to help.)

I won't detail literally everything I said, as it's not all relevant. However, the main thing I mentioned was that I think about this problem quite a bit. I put a lot of work into making my threats feel believable, and to inject uncertainty into the plot. If Amara wins every time, no matter what, the story might start to feel generic or uninteresting.

One way to counteract this is to create threats that represents different kinds of problems. Even if Amara is strong enough to punch moons in half, that ability won't be useful if the threat is, say, a lawyer trying to repossess her home.

Another way to counteract power creep is to show the characters lose fights. Not just any fights, though, they have to lose when it matters.

So, for Book Three, I wanted to make it very clear that they lose. They throw everything they have at Brandon, they have a plan, they have a cool knife, and it just doesn't work. On a meta level, this hopefully means that all future fights feel more threatening, because now you know I'm willing to let my characters fail. However, I also think it makes the storytelling more dynamic. I mean, Amara has won the big fight at the end of the book twice now, and if I don't shake things up, the story might not be as interesting.

Of course, not all is lost. Despite Amara's protestations, Chloé found a way to sneak into the quad, grab Tessa's knife, and attack Brandon.

Hopefully this moment feels sufficiently triumphant. It's a huge victory for someone who's been terrified of her own irrelevance all book. However, this win isn't without its threats. Brandon might not have his magic, but he's still bigger and stronger than Chloé. They struggle, and its clear that Chloé can't win, but the reapers and all the bound ghosts eventually decide its time to exact their revenge against Brandon.

Now, I wish there were a nicer way to say this, but Chloé struggle against Brandon and the knife were meant to be a fake out. Most readers have a meta understanding of the way a story comes together, and I wanted there to be a solid reason for people to think that Chloé was now safe. She saved the day, almost got killed, but managed to slip away in the end. Having now threatened her life once, it's theoretically safe to believe that all our heroes are in the clear and the story can end happily.

So, Brandon gets dragged away, and Amara finally pulls together the strength to run to Chloé. her line here is pretty powerful, in my opinion, and I think it serves as the perfect summation of everything she's been through this book.

—

“He ignored me,” Chloé whispered, panting. “I’m used to people ignoring me.”

—

There's a lot of depth to this line. First, I think it provides a great rationale for how Chloé was able to sneak up on Brandon when no one else could. It also speaks volumes about her character, though. Throughout this entire book we've seen people ignoring her, be it roommates, classmates, or even friends. For her to take that irrelevance and turn it into a victory is really exciting. It's also a bittersweet moment, as she's telling this to Amara, who had just told Chloé to stay put and not try to help.

They hug quickly, and then it's time to bounce. The portal is still closing, and possibly unstable, so our girls try to get out of there quickly.

(In my original draft, there was a bit more discussion and stuff here, but it messed with the pacing. Shout out to my Beta Readers!)

But, in the end, catastrophe awaits. They're unable to get away fast enough, and Brandon recovers enough of his magic for one last gasp. He lashes out, grabbing Chloé and trying to pull her into Purgatory, and likely certain death. Amara tries her hardest to pull Chloé free, but it isn't enough, and the portal closes around her.

I will admit, everyone ended up like Chloé a lot more than I was expecting. I've always been a huge fan of hers, and always gave her shout outs whenever she appeared in the prior books, but Book Three seemed to really shake things up. I've lost track of how many people left comments about how much they loved Chloé, and how badly they wanted to see her finally score a win. As I kept nearing Chapter 39, and Chloé's inevitable fate, those comments made me more and more nervous. I knew what was coming, after all, but no one else did.

Recently, fellow writer Otterly Mindblowing held a "Best Girl" poll, and I immediately thought that it would be fun to do something similar. My second thought, however, was that there was a very good chance Chloé would end up winning. I really didn't want to be in a situation where it looked like I held a poll that was secretly about which character would live or die at the end of the book.

No, this has always been the plan, for better or for worse.

This may be a little mean to say, but I actually foreshadowed Chloé's ultimate fate all the way back in Book One.

In Chapter 13, all of our girls wore thematically appropriate costumes to the Halloween party. Amara went as herself, Vee was an angel, and Tessa was a slutty witch. But who did Chloé dress up as? To my knowledge, only one person ever recognized her costume, and it was pretty recent.

Chloé was dressed as Aerith from Final Fantasy 7.

(In case you're not familiar, Aerith is a companion character that has one of the most impactful death scenes in video game history. She was an incredibly kind character with a huge heart that, in the end, was too pure for the horrible world she lived in. Her death was one of the first times that video games had killed off such an important character, especially one that was assumed to be the main love interest of the protagonist.)

It was incredibly heartening as a writer to see everyone fall in love with Chloé. The reception to this series has always blown me away, but Chloé always had a soft spot in my heart. She didn't have any cool lineages, or powers, or anything like that. She was just one girl trying to carve out a space for herself, and getting wrapped up in things beyond her control.

To me, one of the biggest tragedies of this Chapter is that Amara and Chloé were both right in the end. Chloé wanted to help, wanted a chance to prove that she was capable of more, and she was right. She saved all of her friend's lives, and the campus, all by herself. However, Amara desperately wanted to keep her friends safe, and tried to keep Chloé away from danger. In the end, Chloé fell victim to such a threat, just as Amara feared.

I'm not going to lie, as a relatively new author, I'm pretty nervous about the ending of this book. It's always a risk to kill off a character, especially one that so many people seem to love. To everyone that's reading this, I honestly can't thank you enough for sticking with me. I know this story started as a pretty straightforward Succubus Smut book, and I'm thrilled that so many people have fallen in love with the bigger story. I've got a lot of plans for the future of the series, but I can't deny that I feel a certain freedom when it comes to planning out future books. If I only got new patrons by publishing sex-heavy chapters, there's always a chance that would affect my writing. However, because so many people have expressed affection for the story itself, I feel like I'm not beholden to the whims of the horny masses.

I'm sure many of you will miss Chloé. I'm right there with you. But, if nothing else, she got to prove that she was every bit as invaluable as her friends, which now live to fight another day because of her.

And with that, Book Three comes to a close.

Nyx <3