A Debt of Pleasure

The summons didn't arrive by courier or post. It simply manifested.

One moment, Luna Starweaver’s mahogany desk was covered in the usual controlled chaos of her practice: a stack of precedents regarding vampiric inheritance law, a draft of a pre-nuptial agreement for a werewolf alpha, and a half-empty mug of cold, bitter coffee. The next, a scroll lay dead center on her leather blotter, displacing a pen with an almost insolent silence.

It was made of something that looked like birch bark, so pale it was nearly white, and it glowed with a faint, internal luminescence, casting the stacks of legal briefs around it in an ethereal, blue-tinged light. It was tied not with ribbon, but with what looked like a single, solidified strand of moonlight. The air in her sterile, 27th-floor office suddenly smelled of damp earth, night-blooming jasmine, and something else… something wild and sharp, like ozone before a storm.

Luna’s breath caught. She had dealt with supernatural entities for her entire decade-long career. She’d negotiated with demons over soul clauses and arbitrated territorial disputes for shifter packs. She was the best, the one humans and a surprising number of non-humans called when the arcane and the legal collided. But she had only ever dealt with the Fae twice, and both times she had advised her clients to cut their losses and run. You couldn’t win against them. You could only hope to lose less than everything.

Her fingers, usually so steady as they annotated contracts, trembled slightly as she reached for the scroll. The texture was wrong—too smooth for bark, yet pulsing with a faint, organic warmth. She untied the strand of light, which dissolved into a soft shimmer of dust in the air. The scroll unrolled with a sigh of escaping magic.

The script was an elegant, thorny calligraphy that seemed to shift and writhe at the edge of her vision. It was a language she had studied but never mastered, the tongue of the High Fae.

To the mortal advocate, Luna Starweaver,

Be it known that a debt of promise, tendered by one Elara Starweaver, your blood-kin, is now called to settlement. The boon was granted; the price is now due.

By order of the Moonfire Throne, your presence is required before the Seelie Court. Attend, or the contract shall be forfeit, and the collateral—the very breath and memory of the debtor—shall be collected in full.

Cross the threshold at the next rise of the full moon. We shall be waiting.

The words were a punch to the gut. Elara. Her foolish, impulsive, wonderful little sister. The name on the shimmering bark was a violation, a desecration of the neat, ordered world Luna had built to protect them both. The professional calm she wore like armor cracked down the middle.

The ‘boon’. It could only be one thing. The wasting sickness that had clung to Elara for a year, the one the best doctors in the city had shaken their heads over, calling it aggressive and untreatable. The illness that had, six months ago, vanished overnight. A miracle, Elara had called it, her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy for the first time in what felt like an eternity. Luna had been so relieved she hadn’t questioned it, hadn’t pressed, hadn’t looked for the fine print. And now the bill had come due.

Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. A debt of promise. The most binding and dangerous of fae agreements, given not in writing or blood, but in spoken word and desperate faith. A contract with no clauses to dissect, no loopholes to exploit. It was a raw, elemental bargain, and the Fae never made them unless the odds were stacked impossibly in their favor.

The very breath and memory of the debtor.

The threat was not poetic hyperbole. She knew what they were capable of. They could unmake a person, erasing them from the world and from the minds of everyone who had ever loved them, leaving behind nothing but a hollow ache of forgotten loss.

A cold, sharp fury cut through the fear. They would not have her sister.

Luna stood, the scroll clutched in her fist. The elegant script felt like it was burning her palm. She ignored the mountain of casework on her desk, the world of ordered, logical law she inhabited. It was useless now. This was not a matter for human courts or mortal jurisprudence. This was a debt to be paid in a realm where beauty was a weapon and promises were chains. She grabbed her keys and her coat, her mind already shifting from advocate to warrior. There was only one person who could tell her the exact price of this impossible promise.

Elara’s apartment was on the other side of the city, a third-floor walkup that smelled of turpentine, blooming orchids, and burnt toast. It was a perfect reflection of her sister: vibrant, creative, and perpetually on the edge of chaos. Canvases in various states of completion leaned against every wall, their bold, abstract colors a stark contrast to the muted grays and navies of Luna’s world.

She found Elara in the small sunroom she used as a studio, dabbing at a canvas with a brush. She looked the picture of health, her dark hair pulled back in a messy bun, a smudge of cobalt blue on her cheek. The sight of her, so alive and whole, made the glowing scroll in Luna’s coat pocket feel like a cancerous growth.

“Lu! You’re early for dinner,” Elara said, her smile wide and genuine. It faltered when she saw the look on Luna’s face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Luna didn’t say a word. She pulled the fae summons from her pocket and laid it on a paint-splattered stool. The scroll’s pale light seemed to suck the warmth from the room.

Elara stared at it. The color drained from her face, leaving behind the waxy pallor Luna remembered from the worst days of her illness. The paintbrush slipped from her fingers, clattering onto the floorboards.

“They found me,” she whispered, her voice thin and reedy. It wasn't a question.

“The boon, Elara,” Luna said, her own voice dangerously low, each word a carefully controlled piece of evidence. “The miracle cure. You made a deal.”

Tears welled in Elara’s eyes, spilling over and tracing clean paths through the faint dusting of charcoal on her cheeks. “I was dying, Lu. The doctors… they said there was nothing left to do. I was so scared.”

“So you went to them.” Luna’s anger was a cold, hard knot in her stomach. “After everything I’ve ever told you. You went to them.”

“I didn’t go looking for it!” Elara’s voice cracked, a sob catching in her throat. “I was walking in the park at dusk, just trying to feel something other than sick. And he was just… there. Sitting on a bench by the old stone bridge.”

She described him not as a monster, but as something far more dangerous: beautiful. His voice was like wind chimes, his eyes held the color of a twilight sky. He didn’t offer a deal, not at first. He just talked to her, listened to her fears, and spoke of a world where sickness was a choice, not a sentence.

“He offered me a flower,” Elara continued, her gaze distant, lost in the memory. “A night-phlox. He said if I took it, I would be well by morning. All he asked for in return was a promise.”

“What promise?” Luna’s voice was sharp, a lawyer cross-examining a hostile witness. “Elara, tell me the exact words.”

Elara flinched. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering despite the warmth of the sunroom. “He asked what I would give for my life. And I… I told him I would give anything. He smiled, and he said, ‘Then promise me this: when the time comes, you will give me what I ask for.’ And I did, Lu. I promised.”

Luna closed her eyes. It was worse than she imagined. A blank check. An unbound promise, the most powerful and perilous currency in the Fae realm. She had signed her name to a contract without ever reading the terms.

“And now they have,” Luna stated, her eyes snapping open. “They’ve asked.”

Elara nodded, fresh tears streaming down her face. She stumbled over to a small, cluttered desk and picked up a piece of paper—plain, human paper this time, but the spidery, thorny script was the same as the one on the scroll. It must have arrived at the same time. A statement of services rendered. An invoice from hell.

“They want me to bring them three things,” she choked out, her voice barely audible. “They say it’s the price for the magic they used.”

Luna took the paper. Her blood ran cold as she read the terms.

One tear from a forgotten god.
One song captured from the heart of a star.
One moment of true silence from the mortal world.

It was nonsense. It was poetry. It was a death sentence. They were impossible, metaphysical tasks designed to be failed. The contract was never meant to be fulfilled; it was designed from the start to be broken, allowing them to collect the collateral. Her sister’s very existence.

A primal rage, fiercer than anything she had ever felt, surged through Luna. It was a meticulously crafted legal trap, and her sister had walked right into it out of desperation and fear. They had preyed on a dying girl and dressed it up in flowers and pretty words.

She looked at Elara, who was now openly sobbing, her body shaking with the force of her despair. The cold fury in Luna’s chest solidified into something hard and sharp as obsidian. She was an advocate. She fought monsters cloaked in legal jargon every day. These were just older, more beautiful monsters.

Luna crossed the room and pulled her sister into her arms, holding her tight. “Shhh. It’s okay,” she murmured into Elara’s hair, her voice now steady, imbued with a purpose forged in fire. “They made a mistake. They came after the wrong family.”

She held her sister, letting her cry, while her own mind went to work, clicking through statutes, precedents, and defenses. The fae wanted to play games with contracts? Fine. She would show them what it meant to face a master of the craft.

“I’m going to fix this, Elara,” Luna vowed, the words a new kind of promise, one made not of desperation but of cold, unyielding iron. “I will bring you back from this. No matter the cost.”

For the next two days, Luna didn't sleep. She didn't eat. She existed on a diet of bitter black coffee and cold, mounting dread. Her law office, usually a sanctuary of logic and order, became a war room. She barricaded herself inside, the blinds drawn against the world, the only light coming from the green-shaded lamp on her desk and the glow of her monitor.

This was her battlefield. Her specialty was the murky intersection where mortal law brushed against the preternatural. She’d litigated spectral property disputes, negotiated with djinn over binding clauses, and even drafted prenuptial agreements for werewolves. Her library was a testament to this strange niche, filled with titles that would have seemed like fiction to any other lawyer. Sovereign Immunities of Elder Beings, Cross-Jurisdictional Precedents: Limbo, Purgatory, and the Nine Hells, and her well-worn copy of Faustian Bargains and the Unconscionability Doctrine.

She began with jurisdiction, the most fundamental pillar of law. She scoured international treaties and obscure historical pacts, searching for any leverage, any forgotten agreement that brought the Seelie Court under the purview of a mortal tribunal. She found mentions, whispers in the footnotes of ancient accords—a non-aggression pact signed with Charlemagne, a trade understanding with the Venetian Republic—but all of it was archaic, symbolic. Nothing granted a human court the authority to subpoena a Fae Prince. The Seelie Court was its own law, absolute and untouchable. Attacking on jurisdictional grounds was like suing the ocean for being wet.

Next, she turned to the contract itself. Or the lack of one. A spoken promise. In most human systems, an oral contract could be binding, but it required specificity. The terms had to be clear. Elara’s promise was the opposite; it was a void, a deliberate emptiness designed to be filled later by the creditor with impossible demands. Luna drafted a dozen arguments in her head, her fingers flying across the keyboard. Vagueness of terms. Indefinite consideration. Duress. Elara had been dying; her consent could not have been freely given.

She pulled up the file on Meyers v. The Crossroads Demon, a case where she’d successfully argued that a soul contract was void because her client was clinically depressed at the time of signing, constituting diminished capacity. But a demon was a rogue agent, a predator operating in the shadows. The Seelie Court was a recognized, if unearthly, power. They would argue that Elara’s desperation was not their creation, merely the context in which a valid bargain was struck. The Fae did not cause the wasting sickness; they had merely offered the cure. It was a clean, elegant, and utterly damnable piece of legal maneuvering.

The terms of the price were the true masterstroke of cruelty. A tear from a forgotten god. A song from a star's heart. A moment of true silence. They were poetic, abstract, and legally unassailable because they were impossible to quantify or source. How could a court rule on whether a task had been completed when the task itself was a metaphor? It was designed to be failed. The true price was never the impossible items; it was always the forfeiture clause. It was always Elara.

On the third day, after chasing a dead-end lead about an old iron-law precedent in Celtic Britain, Luna finally stopped. She leaned back in her chair, the leather groaning in the suffocating silence of the room. Her desk was a disaster zone of open books, highlighted case files, and empty coffee mugs. Her eyes burned from lack of sleep and the strain of reading ancient, dense text.

She had thrown the full weight of human law at the problem. She had brought all her knowledge, all her cleverness, all her ruthless, analytical skill to bear. And she had accomplished nothing. Her weapons were useless. Her armor was paper. She was trying to fight a tsunami with a law textbook.

The realization settled not with a crash, but with a quiet, hollow certainty. There was no loophole. There was no appeal. No motion she could file, no injunction she could seek, no judge who could hear her case. The human world, with all its systems and safeguards, was powerless. The law, her god and her shield, had failed her completely.

She stared at the wall, at the framed degrees and certificates that had once seemed like impenetrable shields. They were just paper. Meaningless. The only contract that mattered now was the one written in her sister's desperate words and sealed with a stolen flower. The only court that held jurisdiction was across a threshold she had spent her life warning others never to cross. And the only price they would accept was the one they had offered.

A cold, grim resolve settled over her, pushing aside the panic and despair. If the law could not solve this, then she would have to. If her world had no power over theirs, she would have to enter their world and play by their rules. She would become the negotiation. She would become the price.

She rose from the chair, her body a single, aching muscle. The exhaustion was a physical weight, but the new resolve was a steel rod running up her spine. The war room had served its purpose and failed. It was time to change the theater of operations.

Her movements became deliberate, stripped of the frantic energy that had consumed her for the past three days. She walked from her office into her small, adjoining apartment. She bypassed her bedroom, her closet, the kitchen. She didn't need clothes or food. She needed weapons.

Her gaze fell upon the bookshelf that dominated her living room, a different collection from the one in her office. These were older, stranger volumes, the ones she consulted only when a case truly veered into the abyss. Her fingers, stained with ink and trembling slightly from caffeine, traced the spines. She was packing a legal brief for a court that didn't use paper.

She pulled out a heavy, leather-bound tome: On the Nature of Binding Oaths and Geases, its cover worn smooth by centuries of hands. Its pages were filled with the foundational principles of Fae law, a system built not on logic but on reciprocity, aesthetics, and cruel, unyielding balance. Next came The Sovereignty of Courts Unseen, a treatise on the hierarchies and jurisdictions of supernatural realms. It was mostly theoretical, but it contained a chapter on the Seelie Court's internal legal structure, including the absolute power of the monarch. Finally, she took a slim, dangerous-looking book bound in what looked like dark reptile skin: Loopholes and Lacunae: An Examination of Invalidating Precedents. It was a heretical text, rumored to have been written by a human lawyer who had successfully sued a lesser demon and lived to publish his findings before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. It was her bible and her prayer book.

She laid the three books at the bottom of a sturdy leather satchel, their weight a grim comfort. They were an absurd arsenal to bring against ancient, immortal beings of pure magic, but they were her arsenal. Law was the only language she was fluent in, the only system she trusted. She would force them to speak it with her.

With the books packed, she went to a small wooden box on her mantelpiece. It was a simple thing, carved with intertwining knots, a gift from her grandmother who had always spoken of the 'Good Folk' with a healthy dose of fear. Luna opened it. Inside, nestled on a bed of faded velvet, was a single, ugly piece of iron. It was a cold-forged nail, thick and rustic, bent into a rough circle. It was not jewelry. It was a ward. A tangible piece of the mortal world's fundamental truth, a truth the Fae despised: the truth of rust, of decay, of finality.

She took the iron circle and slipped it into the inner pocket of her jacket, feeling its cold, heavy weight against her ribs. It was a crude, superstitious gesture, the kind of thing she, as a creature of logic and precedent, would normally scorn. But her logic had failed her. Her precedents were worthless. Now, she would cling to the superstitions. She would carry the cold, hard reality of iron into their realm of shimmering illusion.

She caught her reflection in the darkened window of her office as she returned to the room. A pale, haunted-looking woman stared back, her dark hair a tangled mess, deep circles like bruises under her eyes. But her eyes themselves were clear. The panic was gone, replaced by a chilling, absolute focus. She looked like a soldier before a battle she knew she might not survive, but who had stopped being afraid of the outcome.

She slung the heavy satchel over her shoulder. The weight of the books and the cold press of the iron against her side were anchors in the storm of fear and uncertainty that threatened to swamp her. She was no longer just Elara’s sister or a human lawyer. She was an advocate walking into the heart of enemy territory, armed with their own laws and a piece of the world they could not touch. She was going to negotiate. She was going to litigate. And if she had to, she would become the contract herself to tear it apart from the inside.

The last stop was the hardest. She walked down the short hallway to Elara’s bedroom. The door was slightly ajar, a sliver of soft lamplight cutting through the gloom. Luna pushed it open gently.

Her sister was propped up against a mountain of pillows, looking small and fragile in the big bed. The wasting sickness was gone, replaced by a vibrant, healthy glow that was almost painful to look at, knowing its price. Her cheeks were flushed, her breathing even, her eyes clear. The stolen fae flower, the one that had bought this miraculous recovery, sat in a small crystal vase on the nightstand. It was still perfect, its petals an impossible shade of twilight blue, showing no signs of wilting. A sign that the magic held, and that the debt was still very much active.

Elara looked up as Luna entered, her expression shifting from listless worry to sharp alarm when she saw the heavy satchel slung over Luna's shoulder and the grim finality in her eyes.

“Luna? What is that? Where are you going?” Elara’s voice was thin, laced with a dawning horror. She tried to sit up straighter, the blankets pooling around her waist.

Luna walked to the side of the bed and set the satchel down on the floor with a heavy thud. She didn't offer false reassurances. Elara was not a child; she deserved the truth, or at least a version of it she could bear.

“I’m going to fix this,” Luna said, her voice low and steady, a stark contrast to the frantic energy that had defined her for days. “The human courts have no jurisdiction. The human laws don’t apply. So I’m going to their court. I’m going to use their laws.”

Tears instantly welled in Elara’s eyes, spilling down her unnaturally rosy cheeks. “No. Luna, no, you can’t. You’ve told me the stories. You know what they’re like. It’s a trick. They’ll trap you.” She reached out, her hand closing around Luna’s wrist. Her grip was strong, healthy. A testament to the bargain that was destroying them both. “This is my fault. My debt. You can’t pay it for me.”

“It stopped being your debt when they sent a summons to my office,” Luna replied, her voice softening slightly. She covered Elara’s hand with her own. “I’m a contract lawyer, remember? This is what I do. It’s just… a different kind of negotiation. A different venue.” She was lying, of course. It wasn't just another negotiation. It was a surrender. But Elara didn't need to know that. She needed to see a protector, not a sacrifice.

“They’ll hurt you,” Elara whispered, her voice breaking. “Or worse. They’ll change you. You won’t come back the same.”

“I will come back,” Luna said, and the force of her own words surprised her. It wasn't a hope; it was a vow. She squeezed Elara’s hand, her gaze locked on her sister’s, demanding she believe it. “Listen to me, Elara. I have spent my entire life learning how to dismantle contracts. How to find the weakness in the fine print. That’s all this is. A contract. It’s written in a different language, governed by different statutes, but it will have a flaw. They always do.”

She leaned in closer, her face inches from her sister's. “I will go there, I will speak their language, and I will find the clause that sets you free. I promise you.” She took a breath, the cold weight of the iron charm pressing against her ribs. “I will bring you home. No matter what it costs.”

The final words hung between them, heavy and absolute. Elara stared at her, the tears now flowing freely, but a flicker of something else sparked in her eyes: a desperate, terrified hope. She believed her.

Elara lunged forward, throwing her arms around Luna’s neck and burying her face in her shoulder, her body shaking with silent sobs. Luna held her tightly, a fierce, protective embrace that was both a comfort and a farewell. She breathed in the scent of her sister—soap and lavender and the faint, alien perfume of Fae magic—and memorized it. She felt the beat of Elara’s healthy heart against her own chest and branded it into her soul. This was the reason. This was the only thing that mattered.

Finally, with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, Luna gently disentangled herself from the embrace. She cupped Elara’s tear-streaked face in her hands, kissed her forehead, and then stood up, turning away before her own composure could crack.

She picked up the satchel, the weight of the books a familiar burden.

“Luna, wait—” Elara’s voice was a choked plea.

But Luna couldn’t wait. She couldn’t look back. If she looked back, she would see her sister’s terrified face, and she would falter. She would stay, and they would both be lost. She walked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her, shutting out the sound of her sister’s weeping. Every step away from that room was a step into the abyss, the weight of her promise the only thing keeping her upright.