Tarnished By Sin

My name is Diavol. I am a smoke devil, which is a caste of daemon that resides in the house of Lust within Pandemonium, or, as humans knew it better, Hell. Following the fall of man from the home he once called Earth, I have been tasked to document our glorious victory over this world. Frankly, I love this kind of work, being an amateur archaeologist of all things. We would have documented it at the time, but we daemons were busy laying waste to the world, now that man had wilfully allowed us passage to it.

I wasn’t amongst the first to ascend from Pandemonium, that was the privilege of the slithering hordes of Leviathan’s serpentine envies, and the grasping garrison of Mammon’s avaricious covets. At first, we cared not for what brought our arrival, only that the treaty was ended by man’s hand, and we had won the Earth, or Pandora as we called it, largely due to man’s capacity to conceal his sins and his unbridled curiosity.

Now, I overlook the ravaged wilderness that was once composed of so-called civilised men with one task in mind; to find treasures that hold keys to humanity’s history. We daemons don’t have interest in gold nor jewels, for we thrive on a different currency, one that has driven man since they emerged from their caves, frightful and bewildered; emotions, specifically those tied to what humans called the Seven Deadly Sins. We feed on wrath, lust, envy, pride, greed, gluttony, and sloth. Such was the pact with Paradise, or heaven as humans called it.

Earth was once fought over by the daemon kind and the angelic entities. The self-righteous angels sought dominion over man, for what I can only believe was just recruiting them into their own entourages, but I cannot say we daemons were much better – humans, at the time, were just meat to us, and this was before we had been forced to agree to a pact to no longer feast on their skin, but instead we divided the human psyche and soul between us as tithes to keep us sated and the people of the Earth sovereign. We gladly took on the indulgences, whilst the angels capitalised on other emotions, compassion, hope, resolve, love, all those gooey emotions we found unpalatable.

The pact was written such that no side would be able to advance their cause on the Earth, and that the final decision as to who had ownership of the Earth would be decided by man, and only his consent would be what ended the ceasefire. Now the pact is over, the remaining humans have either been driven insane or rendered docile, and their emotions are so much less substantial to the houses of envy and gluttony, but now reduced to feral animals, it is the time of my house to thrive on this Earth. Our houses draw from the sensations of desire, and Earth had no shortage of that, such a delightful den of sin.

Unfortunately, as the houses of Mammon and Leviathan own this world as they were the first to be called to claim it, they still hold the leash for my kind, the dwellers of the house of Asmodeus, so in order to indulge ourselves, tribute must be offered. Thus, this brings me to the remains of the human world, to dig for discarded relics of the past, hopefully charged with unbridled emotional potential; the more intense the memories tied to them, the better.

The Shattered Valley was named as such as it was the place where daemon kind first arrived, where the initial assault took place, named as the heat boiled sand and human alike and fused them into glass. In the eyes of the humans, they were considered “lucky” having been spared the sight of the precious world coming to an end. In my opinion, humankind has a warped view of beauty – we daemons liberated them of the complexity of their lives, now living as simple cattle.

I took a deep breath and of the putrid air; it was here that I knew the loot would be, something I knew the covets would be fighting over amongst themselves, enough to earn myself unrestricted access to the human cattle for months. I cracked through the ground, the sweat of delight pouring from the glands on my brow as I pinpointed the source of the incredibly aura of human carnality.

I was perplexed to find a heart shaped locket. It wasn’t even that remarkable looking, ugly almost, but then these humans had such a dislike for our dystopic vision, we had no interest in their concepts of beauty, only in how much they drooled over it. Still, this locket had value to a human once, and it was this that the covets would pay dearly for if presented. But there were ways of finding out just how valuable it could be.

Man’s world overlooked that which contained innate magical properties, so there was a surplus of those items needed to incant a ritual that would allow me to see the memories within. The charm was simple enough, as curses of this nature all too often entail fire. It was a great daemon that once said that fire holds an important role in magic, for the greatest and most valuable things are forged from it. Ironic, not because of what he said, but that he, like many daemons who said great things, lacked an actual mouth to say it. Do we take heed of the words of the involuntarily mute because they say so little, or is it because to say it they need to say it through blood and flesh wound from a hole they tear open to make a mouth?

It was shown in the flames that this locket was indeed imbued with emotions, but the first layer was without anything of particular interest. It harkened to an age before our revisitation, to a young human male and his partner. The two indulged in a pastime called “love”, an emotion that teeters on the brink of desire, something we daemons can feast, but can easily just be adoration, fodder for angels and their ilk. The human male offered the trinket as a gift to the woman he chose as a mate; humans, for all their misdeeds and delightful evils have such a detestable capacity of sentiment and saccharine.

Observing the memories imbued onto the cheap token, I watched as the human spent years courting this female, a life without much in the way of indulgences, nothing at first to suggest this was the talisman of sin that I smelt it out to be, bewildering simple and unassuming. That was, until, a fateful day approached. The young human female and male had one of their rituals, a wedding they called it, one of those things the angels like to believe they appropriated and humans considered sacred, but was founded in greed and pride by man’s more influential specimens in days passed. Days following from it, the pendant took in memories of disgust and pain, and it was clear what was taking place. The human female was bearing progeny.

Eager to get to the truly exciting part of the tale, I watched further and had hoped it would devolve into scandal, infidelity, despair, and bargaining, the things that makes life worth living. All I saw was a cheerful mother and a doting husband, and it honestly bored me – it was only that I had to maintain my concentration to prevent melting the locket with the fires that I even watched through the memories at all.

Then finally came the moment I had waited for – the sound of human misery. Wearing the pendant, the human female was driven to one of their chapels where humans in impractical clothing practised their religion of healing, the kind that was marked by serpents crawling up a staff. Something was amiss and she was in exquisite agony. Wrath tore through her body, and though not my specific house, I could tell it was intense. After being confined to a bed, people panicked and gathered around her, the husband, dutiful once, was absent at her time of need. She was filled with wrath at his perceived sloth. Simple nourishment in the right hands.

I anticipated scandal, tragedy, disaster even, but, when it came, it felt so wrong, unnaturally so. Perhaps maintaining the divination of these memories meant I was feeling them second hand, but it was almost as if there was no sustenance to be gained from this, even as a daemon. I could feel a profound emptiness as I gazed into the sorrowful story, weeping acrid and acidic tears across my snout as I watched. The dutiful father very soon arrived, turning to one of the priests of healing, the priest shook their head, as they carried away what I at first thought to be a bloodied pulp of something. It was the human infant, unborn and unbreathing, having failed to make it to the world. There was that pang of loss, and even if a covet could feed on it, I doubt even they would want the nourishment from this unwholesome memory.

The image slipped in and out repeatedly, and I too felt queasy. Soon, the locket took on the perspective of the husband, who cradled a frail hand of the woman, whose life ebbed away as he watched helplessly. Perhaps it has been due to my exposure of humans in a way that most daemons do not appreciate, but I felt his loss, his keen pain. But the memory didn’t end there.

I watched the man torture himself, isolate himself, poison himself with drink, and then see him obsess over his lost wife, unborn child, and the time they would have spent together. More pain, more suffering, but none of it palatable. He lamented and fixated over his loss, until he happened upon something that lit a spark of misplaced hope, a ritual, written in an obscure page of one of his books that he turned to for comfort. His pendant was the key.

I watched as he travelled to the now Shattered Valley and cast a spell, adopting that which man had long since abandoned, hoping to see his wife again one last time from the heavens. But he knew not of the pact our kind signed with Paradise; Heaven would be barred unless summoned by an act of evil tainted with virtue, but Hell would be wrought if offered an act of divinity tarnished by the purest sin. His envy for those who had their lovers, his loss for what he once had, and his desire for her hand again, it corrupted his gesture of love and hope, and that was what ended this world, toppled the scales, and brought my kind through the breach and into his domain. Now aware of his treachery, the man cursed the locket and cast it into the ground below, as his was the first body consumed by the hell fire, the locket sealed in glass for countless centuries until my hooves broke the glass it was sealed in.

As the memory embers withered, I reflected on this moment. I could hand this locket over to the covets, the memory valued far greater than I had imagined, I could be given unlimited access to lustful sustenance for as long as I existed, but it would feel hollow. Perhaps I had become too sentimental towards humans, but I felt a profound misery. This man had brought about what his species deemed the apocalypse, but it mattered not to him; for him, the world ended not when his consent ended the treaty and my kind came through, but in that ghastly hospital ward when his wife handed back the heart shaped locket for the last time.