I stepped onto the first stair.
At once, something left me; a breath, or a memory. It passed from the base of my spine to my shoulders and vanished. The air around me thickened, growing neither hotter nor colder, but simply heavier, as though I had stepped not into a new place, but into the attention of something vast and old.
The stairs did not move. But the world around me did. I felt the shift behind my eyes first — the quiet distortion that marks the threshold of ritual action. My balance changed. The weight of my limbs adjusted. Like this, I knew I had entered some new, deeper realm; I was ascending into the court of Asmodeus itself, where no human had ventured perhaps for a very long time. Perhaps never before.
The second stair brought with it a tension low in my abdomen, a tightening that was neither pain nor pleasure, but held the shape of both. Unbidden, a memory came: I remembered the first time I had denied myself a kiss. I saw the face of the boy I had wanted, details struck away by time and the fallibility of my memory. But I remembered how my hands had clenched at my sides, as if by force of will, I could make my physical desire holy.
By the fifth step, my breathing had altered, growing slow and laboured, less from the effort of the climb, and more from the air itself. Indeed, it was as if the very air required from me more focus: a deeper intake, a deeper commitment, to allow it into my lungs. I could feel the stone press into the skin of my soles. There was no forgiveness in it, nothing yielding, but I preferred it that way. I put intention into everything, and some part of me laughed that this–this!–might deter anyone who had come as far as I had.
And so it went on, the staircase curving very gently to the left or the right, in arcs so smooth my temple began to throb at the precision of the place. Here was a geometry more perfect than any cathedral, more absolute than scripture. There were no torches or markers, and neither did the stairs themselves give any indication of distance or progress. As time slipped from me, I lost count, and very soon each step might have been the tenth step or the hundredth. The light did not change. A dull, red haze hung in the air, unmoving. But soon, through it, I felt Asmodeus. Not above or ahead, but within me.
As it had been throughout the whole of my time in Hell, Asmodeus was not waiting at the end of the staircase like a prince on a throne. It was already here, in the stone, in the air, and in the faint pressure at the base of my skull. I had known its voice in dream. I had felt its gaze through the mouths of others–for Asmodeus was the concentration of all my unclaimed desire throughout my whole life. But now it was something else. Present. Here! So close to me!
“My soul is consumed with longing for your ordinances at all times.”
— Psalm 119:20
I wondered what Asmodeus thought of the boy I had once been, the one who tried to fast his way into righteousness. Who kissed the altar instead of the mouths helonged for. Who wrote confessions just to feel wanted. I wondered if Asmodeus found that boy pathetic, or if it wanted to kiss him, too. To defile him again and again. If there was anything left in me of the priest I had once been, I believe that climb was intended to strip it from me. With every step came an outpouring of emotion and memory and shame. Things I had long forgotten about or not deigned to linger on flounced through my mind. This was the scaffolding that had held me upright when I still believed I was wrong for existing. Shame bled out of me in slow, deliberate trickles. It was not meant to be cathartic, but necessary. I could not reach Asmodeus carrying rot. And so I came to realise that this climb marked a perfect limbo. Caught between priest and consort, I lingered in this intangible space, and through this climb was meant to perfect myself into the one who would be eternally by Asmodeus’ side.
“Come.”
The voice moved through me like oil, dark and thick and without resistance, sinking into the cracks of my soul.
“Come, little priest.”
The last few steps revealed themselves as I reached them, emerging out of shadow. The climb could have gone on forever if I hadn’t reckoned with the memories rising in me. These steps slid out of nothing, slow and deliberate, each one shallower than the last, as if the staircase expected me to falter now, to crawl the final stretch on my knees. My breath was steady. My body hummed low with heat. I felt stretched thin across the moment, though not weakened, only pulled taut.
The light changed before anything else. The red glow thinned, became something cleaner, colder. A grey-gold shimmer pooled against the ceiling of the space ahead. It flickered, briefly, as if stirred by breath and then the stairs ended, dissolving into smooth, unmarked stone. There was nodirect source of light and no visible ceiling, only the sense of space widening around me–immense, airless, and still—as though I had stepped into the lungs of something that had long ago stopped breathing. The floor had a brittle, fragile quality to it, and in the air hung a sense of expectation. If someone told me I now stepped within the flesh of an ancient Hell creature, I would have accepted this reality without question, for everything felt strange and old, and the architecture wasn’t quitereal.
I walked forward with slow precision, my speed measured not out of fear but because I tried to imbue meaning into every step forward:I come for you. I answer your call.The air was heavy with a strange density. The hall loomed vast and still; the floor was made of dull black stone. Above me, a vaulted dome opened into clouded dark, where smoke shifted, pulsing with veins of reddish amber.
And then, suddenly, there it was.
Asmodeus.
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 mouthI 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 myneck, 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?
