It has been a warm night, and the earth slinks toward the equinox; you’ve just sent your beloved to bed for the last time with a dosage of deadly nightshade. Why did you do it? Because she was running her mouth, questioning your mastery of the occult. It’s sick, it’s shameful, but it’s true. You pour yourself a sweet carafe, sit back at your desk, and let the remorse take hold, thence quilling out an incantation for Spells in Preparation of the Afterlife.
    You take notice. Before her lasting and final rest, she lit a candle as deep and hypnotic as a black iris. It crackles. Another flame, smelling of a forest wrought with dead desire, burns on the bedside table. To her right, a bougie candle alights with flaxen curls and rosy cheeks with swelling scents of cloying evening jasmine, magnolia blossoms, and tuberose stems. A spire of light by the foot of the bed coaxes in intoxicating spiced oud wood and a heart of pure amber. There are life-breathing candles everywhere… But not enough to raise her from her slumber. For that, you need White Magic, which your evil heart will never conjure. She sleeps forever.
    You practice the Black Arts, the underbelly of the Occult, which is too often misunderstood as purely demonic, selling souls to Lucifer, cackles, cankles, canker sores, a plethora of nasty things. In truth, your personal relationship with El Diablo was always one of non-familiarity, but now, overpowered with excessive scents swarming the headspace—aldehyde, lily of the valley, adoxal, suede, sandalwood, leather, papyrus, heliotrope, blackcurrant, violet, galbanum, mugwort, tonka bean, tobacco, grass, to name a few—you put aside reservations and call upon He Himself to commune again with what was lost. And yet, as the aromas engulf you, as the flames suffocate the bedspread, climb up the walls, and your flesh begins to sear, you realize the grave mistake you’ve made. For she is Him. And He, the Prince of Darkness, is her. You were wrong to question her questioning. You were wrong to toy with the Dark.