CHAPTER 1
SUPREME EVIL AND WHAT IT ENTAILS
The discourse surrounding the most superlatively evil being to have ever blighted the realm of Eiren is complex and has already been written about in many thick and pedantic tomes. While the argument has been made for a number of villains to ascend to the coveted spot of Supreme Evil, notably Everild the Necromancer, Scorlisha Baneblade of the Mounted Beasts, The Plague Bringer Norasthmus, and Dave from Next Door Who Insists on Doing Yard Work at Dawn, there are also a number of names which remain unspoken by the populace of Eiren, for merely their utterance alone is said to corrupt. These are the demons, servants of the dark gods who are sealed in the Abyss, and while valiant scholars and the devoutly holy are compelled to study these beings so that their attempts to rise to power may be thwarted, infernal names are only traded in hushed whispers for fear of summoning them.
If only summoning a demon were so easy.
Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne fell into a heap, nearly drained, dagger clattering to the floor at his side. So viscous it was nearly black, blood pooled around him. It crawled slowly away from his worn, muscled body in the shaft of hazy light that cleaved through the chamber’s single window many stories above. He steadied himself, hand slick against the stone floor, breath coming ragged but full. Peering between black strands of sweat-drenched hair, his violet eyes bore into it, the amalgamation of years of study and expedition reduced to a small pile of components atop a single piece of inkarnaught ore no larger than a gold coin. With the last of his infernal arcana, he dragged a finger in his own gore, trailing crimson across the floor as he drew the sigil he had designed, and waited.
Silence blew through the chamber, sweeping over Damien’s pallid skin. The slices across his chest and arms burned with the frigid air but gave up no more blood—there was nothing left to give, unless his thinning patience counted. He grit his teeth, refusing to accept another failure. This attempt included not just his strongest spell and his own noxscura-flooded blood, but sand from the shores of the Everdarque, dew from the ash tree that grew in the middle of the Maroon Sea, and a feather of the last known fire roc. If it did not succeed, nothing would.
The inkarnaught ore sparked to life all at once. Damien’s blood seeped away from him, drawn through the grooves of the cobblestones toward the ore in the chamber’s center. The shaft filled with a sanguine aura as the inkarnaught absorbed what he offered it, and then it rose of its own accord from the ground. Swelling with power, it filled the freezing room with the heat of brimstone and infernal fire, and even in his anemic state, Damien pushed himself to stand in its presence.
With two long strides, he crossed to the chamber’s center, sallow skin bathed in scarlet as he reached bloodied, scarred arms out. The talisman descended to rest in his palms—in itsmaster’spalms—eager and alive as it thumped with the same beat that pounded in his own chest.
“My life’s work,” said Damien, lips curling at the corners and thin, black brows narrowing. “It is finally complete.” He was twenty-seven.
Climbing many stories of railing-less, stone steps out of the depths of a cold and unforgiving earth is difficult enough, and after draining oneself of nearly all of one’s lifeblood, it would be nigh impossible for even an adept mage of most arcane arts, but Damien compelled not fire nor earth nor even the arcana of something as trivial as luck—none of those so-called gifts bestowed by the gods. Damien was a blood mage, not blessed but cursed by his infernal heritage, though he saw no evidence of misfortune provided he did not look too hard, and blood mages were not merely gifted arcana but had it flowing through their very veins. This, and he was spurred on by one fact:he had finally done it.
Many times, he had climbed out of that dark chasm—a pit he had constructed to contain and coalesce his too-often tempestuous powers—with only bitter failure. There was sometimes progress, though more often frustration with how close he came to his own death with little to show for it. But this—he ran his thumb over the newly smooth inkarnaught ore, no longer unrefined earth and a pile of components but now an enchanted talisman—thiswas what success felt like. And it felt…wobbly.
Damien ascended the last step out of the chasm and staggered, reaching out to grip the archway that would lead back into the halls of Bloodthorne Keep, but his fingers slipped. He sucked in a breath, the world falling out from beneath him, vision tunneling, and then darkness.
No, not darkness.Noxscura.
Damien was standing straight again, hand gripping the archway as if he had never missed. He focused on a sconce, a skeletal hand clutching a thick, black candle, to keep the corridor from spinning, and he filled his lungs with the warmer air of the keep. He hadn’t summoned the noxscura, but it came anyway. He didn’t like that, but seeing as he hadn’t plunged a hundred feet downward into the pit at his back, he pushed the unease at his magic working autonomously away, and with it went a second, deeper unease, one he couldn’t quite place.
Damien was rarely, if ever, vulnerable in such a way. Expending so much arcana and leaving himself drained was never an option save for in crafting the talisman, and that weakness must have been the kindling for the sudden disquiet in his gut. He simply needed to heal.
The many cuts he had made along his chest and arms were still fresh, and though they had stopped weeping, remained open. He placed a hand over his ribs where the largest gash sliced through taut skin, and he mustered a pulse of magic. It prickled painfully, worse than when the cuts had been made, sewing itself closed along half of its length. If there had been fewer wounds, and he hadn’t been so arcanely spent, his body’s innate ability as a blood mage to mend itself would have taken care of things on its own, but as it was, this mess needed more skilled attention. It would all be easy enough to heal for someone else, someone who had spent their life studying the curative arts and was blessed by some god, but Damien had little time or use for most medicinal magic. Instead, he had dedicated his life to a different kind of arcana, the kind that enchanted and compelled, and he finally had the talisman to justify his many years of toil.
Damien swept through Bloodthorne Keep to the makeshift temple he had established in one of the castle’s wings that also served as an infirmary. It was useful to have healers on hand when one was so overzealous with a dagger, and the object of devotion didn’t matter. There were plenty of dark gods to choose from, twenty-five to be exact, and since they were all locked in the Abyss, they didn’t much mind which of them got the most attention—or, no one heard their complaints, if they did.
When he arrived in his bloodied state, a lamia priest wordlessly slithered over to tend to his wounds. The lamia, with their serpent lower halves and human torsos, made some of the best healers, and Damien assumed it had something to do with the fact they shed their own skin twice a year. It wasn’t pleasant to find a sloughed-off and slippery chunk of scales in the hall, especially by accident with one’s foot in the middle of the night, but it was a small cost for their services.
Renewed with his flesh fully healed, the only scar remaining the one across his face that no magic would mend, Damien left the temple for his private chambers. There, he stripped, doused himself in frigid water to fully come back into his senses, and washed off the drying rivulets of blood. Donning black, leather armor, he didn’t allow himself a second look in the mirror tucked into the corner of his bedchamber once he confirmed he was acceptable enough for the throne room.
By the time he emerged into the main keep, word had spread—second only to their healing abilities was a lamia’s skill at gossip. The damage he had done to himself coupled with the lack of a sour mood when he arrived in their wing had them buzzing, or rather hissing, and the others who served in the keep, goblins and draekins mostly, were trading guttural whispers as they darted out of his way. As he stalked the main hall, headed for the throne room, the tiny form of Gril appeared from the shadows to fall in with Damien as if he had been walking beside him all along.
Reaching only Damien’s hip, Gril, like most of the draekins who served in the keep, could be easy to miss, especially as nearly all of them insisted on wearing black, hooded cloaks that often made them indistinguishable from the dark stone floors. His tail, however, jutted out from beneath the trailing fabric, mossy green and a dead giveaway. Today, it was wagging.
“Is it true, Master Bloodthorne?” the little figure croaked from his side, turning up his scaled snout, a jagged underbite grinning from beneath his hood.
Damien confirmed only with a smirk, but did not stop—to stop would mean to think, and even with healing and bathing, that odd feeling at his success had not lifted but instead settled more firmly in his chest. It would be better if he simply told his father of his accomplishment before…well, he wasn’t quite sure beforewhat, exactly, but there was something niggling at him, something a bit like the noxscura, that made him want to hesitate. He ignored it.
Gril made a small noise in response, a clicking in the back of his throat unique to draekins. Though he couldn’t reproduce it himself, Damien had learned many years ago that that particular sound translated to either “excellent” or “potatoes.” The tail wagging suggested the former, though Gril was quite enthusiastic about root vegetables as well.
The throne room of Bloodthorne Keep was a monument to superfluousness, but it instilled fear in lesser creatures. Impossibly tall, it was lit only by well-placed windows, filled with blue glass to illuminate infernal sigils carved into the shining obsidian overhead. At the back of the long room, the largest window was set high up on the wall, round with silver webbing and aligned with the static moon, Lo, to cast a twilit haze down over the chamber.
Swathed in this amethyst light, the room was long, and footsteps echoed out into it, announcing anyone who would dare enter. Damien crossed the black marble to the dais in the room’s center, pausing for only a moment to gaze on the orb that hovered there, so like the second moon, Ero, that waxed and waned as it crossed the sky. Untouchable to all in the keep and even the city beyond, the orb was the reason the place could exist at all, protected from forces that would see Bloodthorne Keep and its city of Aszath Koth razed to the ground in some holy crusade by those in the realm to the south. Damien gave it a reverent nod, eyes tracking over the symbol on it, a crescent with the shape of a dove—no, just a bird—in flight atop it, and continued on to the throne itself.
Towering in black marble, the seat would dwarf any but the keep’s true lord, Damien’s father. Damien cast his eyes up its length, admiring how the stone’s veins ran crimson against the black, how it rose up to the tattered banners above, how the peak extended with many tendrils, reaching out to grasp and choke and kill. He never dared consider taking it.
A figure two heads taller than even Damien stepped down from the dais the throne sat upon. It said nothing, heavy robes trailing behind, head bent but horns protruding from under its hood to look down on him. Damien clenched a fist around the talisman, its rhythm thrumming through his body familiarly, as if it had always been a part of him and ready to carry out its fated deed.
Then the thought suddenly struck him: should he have put it in a nice box first, or even an embroidered pouch? Something commissioned to protect it but also venerate the importance of—no, it was too late now, and there was no use in pondering what he had possibly missed, just like there was no use in pondering why his initial discomfort had wormed its way from his gut to his chest to invade his entire being.
The hulking, horned figure stepped aside to allow Damien to pass, and the blood mage alighted the dais to drop to one knee before the throne, the talisman still clenched as he bowed his head. “Father, I come with news.”
