Chapter Text
Abaddon has lived a multitude of lifetimes, has witnessed the rise and fall of nations.
He is the accumulation between two beings: born not of fles hbut of impulse and error, of live twisted into some purpose beyond his comprehension.
From Penemuel, the fall scribe of Heaven, he inherited the ache of memory, the compulsion to remember everything that bleeds. The reverence for words that could cage grief. It was Penemuel who wrote the names of the dying upon the winds. Who inscribed every agony to be found in a desperate need so that the cosmos would not forget its own cruelty. It was both mercy and undoing- something that would lead to a bitter fall.
From Ossuariel, the Keeper of Bones, he inherited silence made holy; the order of decay and the comfort of what remains when the rest is gone. The being was one that worshiped stillness, that believed the dead were purest when stripped down to the bone. He had built cathedrals of ribs and femurs, turned skeletons into prayers, hald convinced that beauty could survive rot, if only it were carved deeply enough.
Abaddon was born where their devotions met, in a seam of world where language turned to marrow and remembrance hardened into bone. The air there was wet and heavy, tasting of iron and smoke; every breath scraped against him like salt dragged across glass. His breath was the first whisper deep within the abyss, his heartbeat the hinge of the door between suffering and release. Neither angel nor demon, neither mercy nor ruin. He was the sum of both parents’ refusals: one who could never forget and the other who could never let go.
Within him, memory transformed into architecture. The walls of the abyss shaped themselves to his every thought, damp and breathing, the stone slick with condensation that smelled faintly of rain and old blood. Each corridor remembered a scream, and when he passed, dust stirred as though exhaling. He was both archivist and jailer- tasked to bear the weight of endings, to choose which torture each individual would receive.
Even so, he endured. Through empires, through silence, through the endless turning of the world. A child forever cast between rituals of preservation and the soft impossibility of rest.
After all, that is what Abaddon is- a child.
Demons- especially those born to a being that had once fallen from the heavens aged differently. Maturing took longer, requiring time that they often did not have. It changed the way they felt the passage of existence, how they understood growth. They were built in fragments- part instinct, part inheritance. Born knowing the language of suffering, of pain, rather than the vocabulary of tenderness. Their childhoods were a myth; their youth measured not in years, but in the number of lifetimes they could endure before breaking.
And so Abaddon grew in reverse. Where mortals learned joy and forgot pain, he learned pain first without every receiving the slightest semblance of joy. His heart was a careful, unused thing, simply a relic of mercy he’d never been able to name. Each century added a new layer to his cage, a new verse to the song of his endurance, to the legacy his parents had left him. The abyss had raised him like a mother made of echoes, teaching him obedience. Patience. The steady art of stillness.
He had watched worlds crumble and rebuild themselves, the air thick with the grit of their ashes. He watched kings die, their crowns carried down to his gates, the metal ringing softly when it struck the stone, a sound he learned to measure centuries by. He listened to prayers sent to a God who did not exist. And through it all, he remained unchanged- small, solemn, and never knowing that there was anything more to be felt.
But even eternity has its seasons. In the infernal order of things, every child of the abyss must eventually descend, to touch the world that forgets it. To taste the ruin they were born to embody, To spread the ashes of damnation, to remind the world of that which they should feel. It is a rite older than language, a pilgrimage through corruption. For some, ending in glory. For others, in silence.
When Abaddon’s time came, the Fifth Ring prepared its ceremonies. The hir had been thick with the secent of ash and iron, the hymns of the condemned rising like incense. The elders had carved his name into obsidian, leaving a permanent record so that the abyss would remember who it had sent away. His brow had been anointed with old from shadows, face painted in the blood of sinners.
They had told him to go. To bring back what he learned of despair.
So he went.
Not in rebellion, but duty.
He fell through the world’s thin places, where air burned like frost and the clouds screamed. When he struck the mortal plane, rain clung to him like oil, and the scent of ozone stung his lungs. A storm raged below, thunder cracking like ribs, and at its edge lay a small body trembling with fever and fear. The boy's name had long since been forgotten, though sometimes, in the spaces between dreams, Abaddon swears he still hears it. The possession was effortless, as it always is when the vessel is already breaking. Flesh took him in like a secret, and the demon who had built cathedrals from bone became a child of breath and heartbeat.
For a time, he did as all young demons did: he learned cruelty. He whispered lies into the ears of villagers, salted the wounds of the frieving, and turned small joys sour to see how quickly mortals would devour one another.
He learned quickly how fragile mortals were, how easily their faith could be cracked like porcelain, how hunger hollowed them faster than fire. Their prayers tasted of smoke and salt; their fear clung to him like damp cloth. There was a kind of artistry in it, a rhythm to the ruin: a word here, a touch there, a silence held too long. He watched fathers curse their sons, lovers abandon each other, and priests question the gods they had once served. Yet even as he carried out his duty, Abaddon felt no triumph. The world burned beautifully, but it burned the same way every time. Their despair did not sing to him as the abyss had promised. It only echoed.
In the beginning, he had believed that to bring despair was to understand it. That if he could trace its shape across enough souls, he might finally see the pattern the Fifth Ring had spoken of—the truth hidden beneath suffering. But the longer he stayed, the more hollow the pattern became.
He began to notice the aftermaths: the quiet rooms where mothers wept into the clothes of dead children, the air sharp with vinegar and candlewax. He lingered in the scent of them; the air humid with salt, milk, and mourning, listening to the prayers whispered not in rage but in love, the kind spoken with cracked lips and shaking hands, meant for ears that would never answer. They clung to the walls like smoke, trembling between despair and devotion. For the first time, the ache in him did not feel like purpose. There was a tenderness in grief that confused him, a defiance that refused to die. Mortals wept, and still they built—hands raw, eyes hollow, their breath misting in the cold. They hurt, and still they reached for one another, as though love itself were a rebellion against the ruin he carried. Their prayers did not end with the dead; they lingered, trembling in the air like embers that refused to fade.
He could not comprehend it. And so, like all things he did not understand, he destroyed it. He set fire to altars, drowned idols, whispered doubt into the throats of prophets until they choked on their own revelation. Each act of desecration was supposed to reaffirm what he had been taught—that despair was the truest form of devotion. Yet each time, something in him recoiled. The ache he carried from Penemuel stirred, the remembrance of all he had recorded in the abyss: the names, the cries, the endless repetition of pain. For the first time, Abaddon wondered if he was not spreading despair but preserving it, ensuring that it would never die.
That was when the whispers began. Not from the condemned, but from the quiet spaces he had once ignored; in the stillborn fields where frost burned the soil silver, the empty homes where curtains stirred though there was no wind, the breath between sobs that smelled faintly of iron and candle smoke. They spoke not of damnation but of mercy, a word he had no language for. It frightened him, that softness. It felt like light within his bones, and he did not know what to do with it. So he fled, running from the very tenderness that might have saved him, until the day he found himself before a dying boy and a desperate father.
His final lesson waiting at the edge of a cliff.