The Succubeloved of Catacomb Gardens

Some beauty is earned. Some is taken. Hers was neither — it was fed.

They say that in the lowest reaches of the Cemetaerie, where marble lilies bloom from fractured crypts and bone dust glimmers like frost, lies a grove that never stills. The Catacomb Gardens breathe, faintly, like something dreaming. There, the air is heavy with sweetness and ruin — perfume and decay entwined until they’re impossible to tell apart.

In that place, long ago, a lady once danced. Not a queen, nor a saint, nor a spirit bound by sorrow, though she was called all three. She was beautiful, yes — but the kind of beauty that forgets to blink. Her name, if it ever was one, is lost now. The Faewilde remembers her only as Succubeloved.

They say she moved like flame over the tombstones — slow, deliberate, the kind of grace that made even the shadows hesitate. Her laughter, when it came, was low and silver, like coins dropped into a deep well. And always, the sound was followed by silence.

Those who came to her grove never intended to stay. They entered with their hearts still beating, eyes still bright. Lovers, poets, wanderers — each certain they could love her without being devoured by her light. And at first, they were right. She welcomed them with warmth, with a gaze so full of understanding that even the most wounded spirit felt seen. She kissed like absolution, she touched like worship.

But devotion, once given, never left her side.

The skull-faced blooms that line her garden? Some say they were the first to fall for her — souls pulled from their bodies, faces stretched in longing as they clung to what warmth they could. Each one trapped at the instant of surrender, carved by their own adoration into perfect, hollow devotion. The red stones scattered at her feet glowed faintly, the color of blood held too long in the light. And when the moon shone through the branches, the bones of her lovers shone with it, pale and soft, like pearls forgotten in velvet.

No one knows how long Succubeloved danced there. Some say she never stopped. Some say she became the heart of the Garden itself — a magnetic pulse that draws love even now, centuries after the last heartbeat faded. Her presence hums through the vines, pulling anything tender toward her. Even metal remembers her gravity; even silence bends in her direction.

If you stand in that grove and listen closely, you might hear her still — the sound of a sigh that never belonged to her, or a heartbeat that once did. The air trembles faintly with every pulse, as though the world itself still longs for her approval.

Those who swear they’ve seen her say she looks unchanged: a lady in red, skeletal and sublime, her hollow eyes glimmering with reflected devotion. Her beauty is eternal, they say, because there’s nothing living left in it to fade.

She doesn’t just steal hearts — she keeps them.

Her legend lingers still. Explore Succubeloved in the Cameo Court and Spooklight Sparkles Collections, or join the mailing list to uncover the next tale from the Faewilde Chronicles.