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 momentbefore 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 thatwatched 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 thatI 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.
You see, when Asmodeus had first come to me, I had not summonedallof it. It was in Hell,boundto Hell, and bound again by the sigil I had drawn to anchor it to the monastery. I had never before been exposed to Asmodeus’ true power, and so being before it now electrified my nerves with delightful fear. When Asmodeus moved, it broke no silence. With impossible quiet, it stepped forward until the length of its body stood directly before mine. It was so close and so broad to me that its form blocked the sight of the chamber entirely; there was nothing now but this presence. I looked up into the face, into the single red eye that studied me.
Returning its hand to my neck, Asmodeus squeezed once, and then slid its palm around to rest on my jaw. The movement was slow, but not cautious. It had no need to hesitate. Its palm fit itself to my face with the precision needed in a volatile ritual, its thumb brushing my cheek in a gesture both intimate and irrevocable. My breath caught. I didn’t look away, and its gaze did not shift.
When it spoke again, its voice had narrowed into something deeper than quiet, a sound that echoed close to the bone.
"You came to be undone."
Its voice interposed between my ribs and struck at myheart sitting pretty in that yawning cavity. I was compelled to nod.
Thumbing my skin, the tip of its claw poking the sensitive flesh near my mouth. "You offered yourself."
"Yes."
Suddenly forceful, its grip tilted my head upward. The reverence in its touch unmoored me. I went slack and found myself trembling. Again, I couldn’t meet that all-seeing eye. I was here, and I was before it, and everything had been about this moment. Overwhelmed, terrified, and on the brink of some blissful ascension, I closed my eyes and leaned forward.
And then it kissed me.
The contact was cold and absolute. Its lips settled on mine with slow, unyielding pressure, and that first moment stretched, filled with stillness and tension, until my skin tightened across my bones and my breath stilled entirely. The kiss did not hurry. It deepened with care, its mouth claiming mine in gradual increments, each motion chosen with precision. The heat came on slowly, a roiling burn, and as my lips parted, its tongue entered with the same calm intent, stroking deep into my mouth. The taste hit the roof of my mouth like salt and iron. My knees weakened, a pulse echoed through my belly and downward, and I felt my body begin to clench in anticipation.
It kissed like it had waited years for this, like it had learned every contour of my mouth in theory and now tested each one in practice. When we had first met–or I had met that simple component of it–it had taken me, in a rough way. All throughout my journey, I had been governed by that rumbling voice full of command. Now, it seemed almost gentle to me, and I did not know how to act. My breath hitched again. My hands trembled at my sides, tightening into fists I didn’t remember forming. I moaned against its lips, low and involuntary.
