Chapter 2
The demon, my Prince of Lust, my King of Hell, stood ahead, utterly unframed. It needed no throne nor fire to utterly command the space it occupied. I had not known what form it would take, and thus I was unprepared.
Asmodeus was not cloaked in glamour or ceremony, and neither did it look how it had in its first summoning: devilishly human and red-skinned.
Now, it appeared to me as something more ancient and less recognisable.
Its skin was the colour of calcified ash.
My eyes smoothed across its chest, ridged with muscle designed not for beauty but function: so much of its body appeared too lean and angular.
There was something wrong with its symmetry.
My eyes kept adjusting to it, searching for balance and not finding it.
Its arms were long, hanging too low, with thick-jointed fingers that curled loosely at its sides, and those fingers ended in thick claws.
Its horns curved wide and upward from its temples, black and rough-edged like ancient ivory, and oddly asymmetrical.
Between them, fire burned—real, pale, and soundless—trickling upward. But it was the face that undid me.
It had no obvious expression, no movement of the mouth I could parse. The lips appeared human, save for two fangs that curled over its lower lip. There were no eyes in the usual places. Instead, set deep into the centre of its forehead, was a single vertical eye: red, lidless and still.
And it was watching me.
I could not fully meet that powerful gaze.
The longer I looked, the more I felt something shift behind my eyes.
I would not have been surprised if Asmodeus could see into every nook and cranny within my soul and body, and from one glance alone, learn all my little secrets.
Why I felt the need to hide them, especially when I was here for immense intimacy, I can’t say, only that I found myself bashful before it.
Flushing, I lowered my gaze—an action that only made my gaze level with its lower form.
Its legs were shaped like those of a stag, ending in hooves blackened and cracked around the edges.
Its member was thick, protruding from a bush of brown hair.
A tail trailed behind its back, ridged and heavy, and it appeared like a length of spine pulled free and given purpose.
Vertebrae ran down it, and viscera still clung to the bone.
Rising wide and high into the haze above us were its wings.
Each wing arched outward like an armature.
The membranes were thin, nearly translucent in places, and threaded with dark rivulets that pulsed faintly, like veins beneath flesh too thin to conceal them.
Indeed, the veins themselves resembled the branching growths of root systems.
I tried to breathe. My lungs obeyed, but reluctantly.
The presence of the thing in front of me—this creature I had called Lord, this thing I had sought across so many thresholds of pain and hunger and longing—was all-consuming.
A weight gathered beneath my sternum. That feeling couldn’t be described as a single sensation, but as many, rising in sequence: tightness in the throat, heat along the back of my neck, a pressure in my stomach like gravity bending off-course.
My legs folded.
I knelt, inevitably.
The floor beneath my knees was smooth and warm, with a faint grain like pressed skin.
My chest heaved once, and I forced it still.
There was no liturgy I could offer here.
No title I could speak of that had not already been stripped from me.
Even though I longed to cry out, O, Lord, deliver me!
Even if I wanted to gesticulate and hope for Asmodeus to lift me up and coo to me.
I was overwhelmed and felt so utterly human.
I knew this was not the moment of reward, but the moment I was measured. Can you imagine if I came all this way, only for Asmodeus to lean down and find me still wanting?
I felt the demon move long before its shadow fell over me, and before the weight of its presence arranged the air around us into something tighter, heavier, almost ritualised in its stillness.
I give you only these fragmentary descriptions and desperate metaphors: I tell you, the space itself must have been waiting for this.
Holding its breath across centuries, waiting for a brazen human to come all this way, and now that I was finally here and, on my knees, it exhaled.
Whether the shift was relief or something else, though, I could not say.
I kept my eyes downcast and tried to keep my flesh from trembling.
You are still so human. Even after your mortality has been stripped from you, fear is still your ruling force.
Terrified that Asmodeus would know my weakness, I clenched my eyes shut. The heat from the stone had settled into my hands and knees. My skin knew the creature was nearby. My neck had already bowed.
Asmodeus crossed the final space between us with no sound, no signal, no warning.
My body tensed the moment before it touched me, every part of me drawn tight beneath the surface, though I did not recoil, for there was nowhere to flee.
I had walked willingly into this sanctum.
I had asked to be seen. I had begged to be taken.
Then the hand came down, one long, cold palm, broad enough to anchor me, placed with such exquisite purpose across the back of my neck that the moment felt less like a touch and more like a rite.
Each finger extended with absolute precision, curving into the slope of my spine, holding me without strain.
It touched me as though I had always been kneeling here.
“You were made for this.”
These were the first words Asmodeus, as its true self, spoke to me, as my true self. The words did not pass into the air. They formed directly inside my chest, beneath the ribs, as though they had always existed and had only now been revealed.
“You sought me knowing what I am.”
The pressure of its voice moved through me like a second pulse.
My body shook beneath the hand from the clarity of the recognition.
The truth of what I had done—of who I had summoned, of how completely I had meant it—unfastened something inside me.
I held myself against the floor as though I might be carried away by my own breath.
“You passed through fire. You gave up your shame, your blood, your name. You brought nothing with you but the truth.”
There was no need left to speak, no identity left to defend, only the raw physical fact of being witnessed and accepted, utterly and without revision, by the thing I had chosen. So, with this certainty in me, I lifted my head.
The effort drew every muscle tight. I felt my breath stutter in my throat, my body caught between exhaustion and revelation.
But I rose to look at it, to meet the red eye that watched from the centre of its brow, unmarred by pity or expectation.
The wings behind it arched in quiet dominion, dark as carved stone beneath candlelight. I gasped again at its infernal beauty.
“I am yours,” I said.
That rumbling chuckle filled the chamber, as it had filled my mind for so long. It slipped its hand away from my flesh. “You always were.”
And when I rose, I did not rise as a man who had given himself, but as something claimed.
Each breath came slowly. My chest throbbed with sensation.
I was aware of everything: the cool sweat gathering at the base of my throat, the subtle tremble in my thighs, the dull heat of the stone leaking out of my skin, the silence so complete it rang in my ears.
Asmodeus’ grandeur and its age, and the enormity of what I had done, struck me violently.
The Church had beaten this kind of defiance out of me, or so I had thought.
But the boy who had been caught thieving must have remained in me, still.
I thought back to that time, when I was taken from my family and given to the Church to tame.
I recalled how I had thanked God for my salvation.
Once, I had believed He had plucked me from the world before I could be further corrupted by it; the bishops once told me I had been destined for Hell, and that thieving so young was a sure sign Lucifer himself had tainted me. God alone could save me.
Perhaps they were right. Or perhaps, I had loved my parents and my six siblings, and did not wish for them to starve.
Perhaps I saw injustice in the way of the world, and perhaps I had been guided by something holy to preserve my life.
Even at ten, I had understood what was necessary to survive.
Why I thought of that now–that boy, who had only wanted to help his family, and whose family had wept tears of joy at his adoption by the monastery–I cannot say.
Only that I felt him wake up, as he had never woken up in three decades.
That defiant, wilful energy that I had buried for so long; it flared to life as Asmodeus approached.
We were already so close, and after so long enduring the diabolical distance of Earth and Hell, and then of being in Hell separated by realms, one might expect the separation of only a few feet to be nothing.
But it was worse than ever before, a burning itch roaring on my skin.
How I wanted to touch it, and yet I dared not move to close the gap.