On Nocturnal

I was reading through the AMA MK did, since they have it archived on the Imperial Library, and the piece on Meridia spoke to me. I thought I'd try my hand at something similar for Nocturnal.

Nocturnal is the fling you keep at arm’s length because your unattainability is what makes you alluring. You get a thrill from a dim nightclub, pounding bass, and a silver pole, but the lights in your dressing room make you feel ugly. Your mystery is what makes you feel powerful, but when your secrets are laid bare you’re terrified because you just know you’re boring, you’re mundane, you’re human when you want to be the spawn of sequins and carbon black. You want to be James Bond, theme song and all.

So now you string along a series of lovers, none of which know you, but all of whom just know that you are their god, their muse, their everything. You bring them up to your loft apartment, spend six or seven hours in glorious worship, basking in their adulation, and when the morning comes, you give them a coy smile and a shove out the door. You turn back to your loft apartment and start picking up the rose petals and the foil from the neck of the champagne bottle and become acutely aware of how quiet it is. You hate it, but at the same time, talking would be more hateful still.

Still waters don’t run deep. If they were running, they wouldn’t be still. You know this. Swallow the chocolate you keep under your tongue, spit out the pride and stash it in a lockbox under your bed, because mystery will only get you so far. Eventually the night is over. Someone finds the answer key to all your testing, and they realize all the answers are C, and all your tangled mystique was their own mental handiwork, and now you have to change your phone number, move into a new apartment on the other side of town, tick off that nightclub on your list of places that know you too well. It’s so much work, but then it was never easy to be divine.