So yes, I took its hand.
It lifted me with ease. My eyes met its burning flame as it pulled me up. My heart fluttered. But I noticed the temperature of our skin was the same, and since that was the first sign of a change in my body, I stared down at where our hands clasped, expecting something visible to have happened to my flesh. Only my hand remained human in appearance. Sensing my vanity, my curiosity, Asmodeus conjured a sliver of mirrored glass from nothing and held it aloft for me to review my features.
“If you wish to see,” it said, and I did wish to see. Cautiously, I edged closer.
What had I expected? A demon’s visage, with all myfeatures intact? Horns and wings and a tail, in the vein of a stereotypical hellish creature?
Well, I was still myself, and only a little disappointed. My face, my form, my voice—they remained as they had. So, it was an internal change, then, and indeed, beneath my skin I could feel the mark of the demon, and when I turned slightly, my eyes shimmered. My irises burned a faint red. They reminded me of the glare of a lynx’s eyes at night, that predator glow that activates the human body.Flee now or die here. I remember feeling that when, being about as north in the country as I had ever been, I saw a lynx in the flesh.
I had been twelve or thirteen, still a boy and still not wholly broken by the Church. They had taken me to Montecassino Abbey in the north, and I had spotted the lynx watching the roll of our carriage from a high rock. I had felt fear even with the distance and the safety of the doors. I felt it now, looking at myself: I was a predator, now, no longer prey. The rest of my skin followed suit with subtle changes. When I stared, the veins beneath my skin shimmered for a moment, as though touched by molten gold before settling back into flesh. Across my chest, curling faint and fine, was a sigil.
Asmodeus’ sigil.
I fingered the raised scar.
I knew it was a branding. A mark of ownership. I wasn’t naïve. But I had once worn the cross of Christ around my neck, and later the clerical collar—both symbols meant to claim my body and soul. I was used to being marked by otherworldly entities.
Still, when I ran my fingers over the intricate design now etched into my skin, something inside me caught. My heart seized, and a strange sorrow stirred, a grief not for what I had lost by being marked thusly, but for what I had never allowed myself to want. I had a sudden rush of anger at myself. I could have had this feeling, this belonging, long ago! Even in my youth! If only I had sought it out. Had I not listened to my parents, or the bishops and the abbot and my brethren. If I had ignored the whispers and the rumours.
I know it is unjust of me to treat myself so. Yet when one has been exposed to a world such as ours, it is not always the fear of demons that drives one toward chastity or virtue, but the fear of one’s own brethren. Of those we hold dear. I feared the look in their eyes, the one they reserved for devils and outcasts. I saw it, even through the soft murmur of gospel and grace: a flicker of quiet revulsion in the eyes of my fellow worshippers when we passed the meretrices of the towns we preached to.
Christ may have spoken to them, but we faltered. Few dared draw near. The fear of sin clung to us like pestilence, and it was better shunned entirely than risk the taint. Psalm 5:5 says, “You hate all evildoers”, and often I found there was no separation from the sin and its performer, no grace given at all. The Church, ever draped in the language of love, revealed instead the hollowness of that promise. I learned, in time, that such love was not unconditional. It was meted out with caution, portioned according to merit, and I—by my very nature—was undeserving. My desires were unnatural,and thus I was marked, not merely as unloved, but unlovable. Unless, of course, I denied myself completely.
You know as well as I that I tried. And I failed.
But to stand here now, with the knowledge that I might have walked away. . .that I could have turned my back upon the people, and the God, who demanded I contort myself for their affection! It left a bitter taste upon my tongue. The taste of freedom too long denied. To realise I had spent decades gripping the bars of a cage, only to find the door had stood open beside me all the while, made me furious at myself.
My thoughts must have been loud, for Asmodeus laid a steadying hand upon my hip. Though it spoke no word, my heart began to still, the tempest of my body calmed by its mere presence. I pressed my palm flat against the mark it had bestowed upon me and found in it not the weight of possession, but the quiet certainty of belonging.
I belonged to, and with, Asmodeus, Prince of Lust.
I pushed the mirror aside, my heart pounding, and laid my head against the demon’s warm clavicle.
“Would you,” I asked, voice scarcely more than breath, “embrace me?”
Terror flickered in me, sharp and childlike. I feared the silence that followed. I feared rejection more than the flames that had just unmade me, more than the eyes of the demonic kings that stared from every darkened corner of the hall.
Asmodeus did not speak.
Instead, it drew me into its arms. Strong, unyielding, and impossibly warm, its embrace unravelled the tension in me with ease. The world around us seemed to dissolve—the thrones, the judgment, the crushing weight of eternity all faded into nothing. For a moment, I was no longer standing in the Court of Kings. I was merely being held.
And I felt not as a prize, nor as a thing subdued, but assomething fragile, andknown. Asmodeus held the boy within me—the one who had gone unseen and unloved for so long. The child who had been denied tenderness, who had mistaken silence for strength, repression for virtue, and shame for holiness.
And now, at last, that boy was seen.
8
The fire of emotion dulled within me, yet I did not pull away. Asmodeus’ scent wrapped around me, both stirring and soothing—a fragrance sweet and sharp, like a burnt offering, or a charred prayer. It filled my head with feverish want, as thick and cloying as the fog of incense in a sealed chapel. I was dizzy with it, overcome, and without thinking, I opened my mouth and pressed my lips to its flesh.
By then, of course, I had long since abandoned modesty. There was no veil left to draw about myself, no robe to adjust, no collar to tug back into place. The body I had once treated as a battlefield had already been surrendered. Now, it stood bare, unguarded, and waiting. And I took what I wanted.
I traced my tongue over its chest and pressed my lips to the reddened peak of its nipple, my hands wandering reverently across its strange and living stone of a body. Asmodeus sighed—softly, sweetly—a sound I had never heard from it before. My heart pounded, wild with some long-denied ache. From my time with Vassago and Oliviero, I had come to understand how deeply I cherished the act of giving pleasure, not merely receiving it, nor existing as a vessel for another’sdesire. I found joy inthismoment, where I moved with intention, where my touch had purpose. My body, once a source of shame, had become an instrument I could wield, and with it I drew forth sounds like that soft gasp from the parted lips of the Prince of Lust himself.
What a wild and wondrous thing I had become. I twisted one of its nipples as I suckled the other, then dragged my chin slowly through the hollow between its firm pectorals. There, in that tender valley, I let my head rest, cradled against the warm expanse of its chest. Its flesh was like blood-warmed marble; motionless and hardened, yet undeniably alive.
I looked up at it with something like puppyish eagerness, my intention caught between a hunger for innocence, a plea for praise, and the aching desire to be undone beneath the full weight of its lust. It watched me with something like tenderness. I found myself believing I could read emotion in the flicker of its flaming eyes—that the subtle shift of its light bespoke a kind of tenderness as it regarded me. That suspicion was confirmed in the way it stroked my hair, with a reverence so gentle it nearly shattered me. I was learning to read it. We were entering a new intimacy, one that reached beyond the sexual, beyond the sacred offering of my life and soul. This was a quieter understanding, the sort that blossoms only with time, the kind of knowing that comes from loving someone across long, unspoken years.
My heart thudded at the thought. Time in Hell was a strange thing. Perhaps it had been a century since my death. But even so, it felt presumptuous to think this way.Too soon. Too much. Too human.Yet the thought came, unbidden:Do you wish to love this demon? Do you wish for it to love you in return?
