Work Text:
***
The bitter evening cold had seeped into his bones by the time he opens his eyes.
The Wind, armed with millions of tiny blades, nips relentlessly at his face and hands, making them tingly and rigid. The dull ache shifts into a hollow emptiness, erupting into a burning, sneering ache whenever he dares breathe warmth into his fingers, drawing warmth from his very core.
The ground, crusted over by Winter’s arctic kiss, glitters with a feather-light veil of frost. Overhead, the Moon leans in closer, her face silver and cruel, chuckling at his misery. He longs to snarl up at Her, fangs bared and claws filed sharp to pierce and tear apart.
His head is aching. Dried blood mats his hair around a swelling just beneath his temple. Sickness crawls up his throat, but with a prickle of frustration, he relents.
He is stuck.
Stuck in this rotten body of a child, stuck on this cursed land of a country he holds little regard for, stuck on a planet he feels nothing but burning hatred for.
Oh, how shameful it is. Bound to the very earth his slaves and loyal subjects once roamed freely on, only to tumble into his claws again when their foolish mortal sins finally overtook them beyond the grave.
Humans, lowly organisms, little more than the dirt he scrapes off the bottom of his boots.
And now those very humans are after him, chasing him, hunting him, armed with pitchforks, torches, bows, and crucifixes. They tip their arrows in vials of holy water, to immobilize him, to capture him, to parade his lifeless body through the streets like some prized beast fallen in a triumphant hunt.
If humiliation were as lethal as he once believed, his soul would have left his body long before the cold had time to settle into his joints.
He is not afraid. Demons are incapable of feeling such a human emotion. But this body – scrawny from malnutrition, torn from battle, and burnt by the holy symbol – knows fear, and the terror of it makes it unreliable.
It remembers the squeeze of hands, the bite of rope, the scorch of red heat. Remembers falling, remembers burning, remembers those eyes on him, hundreds of hateful gazes searing straight through the marrow of his soul, chanting hymns, ancient passages and broken scriptures breathlessly. Latin spilling from their filthy mouths in feverish waves, their accents thick and clumsy, phrases half remembered, half invented, yet every word still slicing into his essence with surgical precision.
They threw salt at his feet as though the earth itself had to be purified from his putrid presence. Oh, how right they were, their delicious fears and superstitions a delightful supper for a demon of his rank.
He is no demon now - stripped of his powers, his title, his rank. What remains of him is the hollow echo of what he once was, little more than a pitiful genie imprisoned in an oil lamp. The pure shame of it scorches his very being more than any holy brand.
When he moves, his muscles shudder in protest. He is so lightheaded he might topple over, the world tilting any and all directions and it feels so wrong.
One by one, he gathers his limbs beneath himself, a leg there, an arm there, and when his chest is no longer pressed firmly against the ground, a high-pitched whine escapes from between his lips, thin, frail and involuntary. It surprises him – not the burn licking into his very core like Holy Fire, but the sheer childishness of the sound itself.
Oh, how low he had fallen. Death may very well take his soul captive, for he does not wish to fight back anymore.
The Wind, an old companion, carries with it the sound of approaching footsteps and the crackling of torches biting into the darkness. The distant toll of a church bell slithers beneath his skin, and the fevered chanting of hymns does nothing but ignite a throbbing, scorching pain through his temple. His brief lap into unconsciousness has only allowed his pursuers to grain ground, a bitter reminder of his rotten luck.
This body is a prison of fragile bones and puny flesh, but it is not completely useless – if it aids him to seek out shelter, he might reward it afterwards.
He lays low, hiding behind freeze-bitten leaves and frost-covered blades of grass. They nip at his skin like the Wind itself, but it is a momentary distraction from the burn on his chest. He peeks under his shirt, but the dreadful sight makes his head throb – a mess of blisters, peeling flesh and strips of skin hanging on by a thread, soaked in the vessel’s precious blood. When he moves, the edges of the cross-shaped scar get caught in the fabric of his shirt, pulling and shifting the tender tissue in all the wrong ways, making the experience nauseating beyond measure. The putrid smell of burnt flesh, once a perfume of power, now clings to him like a second skin, the proof of his failure. The scar, that ugly bastard, seems almost alive, contracting with every heartbeat.
No matter. Aesthetics were hardly cardinal.
Still, the throbbing of the scar persists. He commands it to seize it’s pitiful attempt at distraction, but it persists, and it takes a minute for him to realize; it is not the scar that torments him – it is what lies beneath it, beneath the mess of torn, scorched skin, flesh and muscles, caged by the thin walls of the child’s ribcage – the heart, now his, is beating fast and furious, threatening to leap out from his body in terror. This dreadful feeling, the hypnotic power of adrenaline coursing through his veins, it is… utterly revolting. Bile rises on his tongue from the mere discovery of it.
The bushes, his momentary safe heaven, rustle and crackle. Abaddon, with the naive optimism of a young boy, remains grounded. The doings of forest creatures are none of his concern. He shifts his weight ever so slightly, noting how the golden light of lit torches is still further away, casting long, trembling shadows across the thick foliage.
And then, comes face to face with the snarling, slobbering, growling face of a hunting dog.
His blood, rushing and burning moments ago, an unpleasant throb in his ear, now runs cold like the very night everything that could go wrong already has. The dog’s teeth glint in the pale Moonlight, sharp and eager. They’re filed down into sharp points.
Abaddon, High Prince of the Black Realm, had his first taste of humanity that night. He had discovered fear.
He shrieks, a high-pitched, pathetic sound, and the dog pounces. Its teeth sink into his face, piercing through skin and muscle, tearing through the soft tissue like wet paper. Hot pain explodes behind his eye with every jerk of the beast’s head; flesh tearing and bone crunching. The dog – blinded by rage and the desperate need to please its owner – is gnawing at his face like he is a holy feast, taking out chunks of flesh and scraping his cheekbones with its sharpened teeth, filed down and horrendous.
It hurts, hurts like nothing else before, and he can’t see, can’t see, can’t see, The Seven Rings of Hell be damned, his eye is gone.
Blood gushes over the remaining one, blinding him until the world becomes nothing but red haze. His weak, traitorous limbs thrash uselessly, sometimes pulling, sometimes pushing; taking out fistful after fistful of brown fur from the wicked beast. It pins him down with such force that his head cracks against the frozen ground, his spine bending at an unnatural angle. He feels warmth gathering around his groin, the dampness of the sticky trousers sticking to his skin, and if he was human, the shame alone would eat him alive faster than any wicked beast would.
He screams.
He cries.
He begs.
And it is enough to stun him into compliance. Not once in his ten-thousand years of existence has he even considered begging for mercy before.
He goes limp, not unlike a rabbit in the jaws of the fox, and lets the beast have its feast.
He hears footsteps, the crunch of brown leaves under the weight of boots, but they’re muffled from the blood coating the inside of his ears. It is his one chance to escape. He lets them come close, lets them circle his broken, ruined body, lets them cheer over the mess of him akin to a hunter over his first catch of the season. They think they won.
That’s enough for him.
He can’t see, his right eye gone, the right side of his face torn, his teeth and cheekbone exposed to the Wind and the slobbering beast’s rancid breath. The sensation is torment; the frost of the Arctic blended with the scorching heat of the Sahara. He gulps for air, but swallows thick ropes of blood instead. He’s too tired to even choke on it now.
The weight of the dog’s paw lifts from his throat and shoulder. His breaths, once frantic, now flutter weakly like dying moths in his chest. He thinks – perhaps imagines – that someone expresses sympathy. Others just grumble prophecies and holy passages.
Someone approaches him, a hesitant, uneven step. Meek and gentle.
A woman.
He lays, gasping for air the way a dying deer does, compliant and docile. She approaches her with a crucifix in her hands, her knuckles bone white. She kneels next to him, and when his finger twitches involuntary, the tips of his fingertips brush against the coarse, starchy fabric of her skirt. Her breath tickles his forehead.
Foolish woman.
It is now or never.
With the last dregs of strength crackling through his veins, the remnants of adrenalin and the boy’s pathetic weeps tearing through his core, he launches upward like a rabid dog, and lunges at the woman. His left arm, left mostly intact, curls into his body to wipe the blood from his remaining eye.
It burns into his mind, the image of her under the fluttering veils of moonlight. She has kind brown eyes. Thin, sagging skin hanging from the heights of her prominent cheekbones. Sun spots on her nose. Smile lines so deep they cash shadows over her gaze.
Then, his elbow crashes into her face.
Her nose breaks with soft, wet pops.
It’s ugly.
It’s delicious.
She falls backwards, the weight of her body guiding her towards the ground in an ungraceful collapse, and the gathered villagers are momentarily stunned, frozen between rushing to the woman’s aid and holding him down in shackles.
Abaddon, ever the opportunist, takes off running.
He prays – absurdly – that he is not running back toward that wicked village.
Behind him, the crowd erupts into a vengeful frenzy. The chase isn’t over yet. The woman groans.
And Abaddon, trapped in the body of a child so holy, curses his rotten luck –
born under an unlucky constellation, cursed a thousand times over.
He keeps on running.
***
Abaddon isn’t deaf to the whispers of the village.
Hidden beneath the frost-crushed foliage, licking his wounds akin to a stray starving for comfort, he listens. His ears, now cleansed of blood and dirt, catch every murmur, every quaver of unease, fragments of dread fallen off dead lips. The villager’s horror feeds him plenty to survive the winter.
That wicked dog, the one that had torn his face apart, gnawing and snarling into his essence until it’s snoot had rooted itself into the hollow of his eye, had succumbed to a mysterious rot just days after he took Abaddon’s features as its prized possession. Gone with its once fierce persona, it crawled beneath its master’s table like a whimpering larva and wept, sobbing into the wood as if repentance could ease its agony. There it laid for days on end, whimpering and crying like the pitiful mutt it was.
The stench of decay was agonizing, so torturous that even his master couldn’t stomach it any longer. So out the door the wicked beast went, table in tow. On the streets, it had wiggled and trashed like a fish dying on a riverbank, gasping for air its lungs have long since ceased to accommodate.
At last, it choked on its own blood, and perished. And that was the pitiful end of Abaddon’s tormenter.
He feels a fickle of pride, the sort a human child might feel of their heritage. Even in this pitiful form, his flesh is just as putrid as it once was. In the end, he had the last laugh.
The livestock is dying. He hears it in the whispers of the Wind, the flutter of the leaves, the echoing wails of the farmers. First the poultry, chicks, ducks, geese, then the sheep, the goats, the cows, the horses. One by one, the rot crawls up into their throats, Lady Death doing little to grant them peace. They wiggle, they waddle, they fall unceremoniously, their feet kicking up dust and dirt as the light in their eyes fades out. Their gaze, pleading and lost, turn towards the heavens above, beseeching a gentle hand to ease the pain gnawing at them from within.
They fall like flies, seeking mercy and earning death instead. Deep within, every villager knows; it is his doing, he is to blame.
They are right, those cursed lowly creatures – and their hysteria is sickeningly sweet on his tongue.
Abaddon, weakened and pathetic as he is, doesn’t spill his blood eagerly. This body, riddled with mortal diseases, bleeds plenty on its own. But that wretched mutt, foolish in its trust of a human master, had scattered his precious blood across the village, letting it seep into the soil, the river, the very air that fogged their windows.
They’re leaving, the birds say, they’re leaving fast.
This land is cursed, the humans say, cursed by our failure, forsaken by Christ.
God help you, murmurs Abaddon, grinning.
They don’t get far.
It pursues them, the stench of rot. Always, it pursues, relentless and cruel.
Abaddon isn’t accustomed to the diseases riddling his subjects’ puny body, but he is not blind to the symptoms. This village was already at Death’s doors long before he ascended from the Hells below.
The rot is spreading.
He sees it in his own flesh first; chunks of skin melting off in putrid, blackened chunks, exposing the tired muscles and pearly white bones beneath. Fingers, an ear, his nose. The pain is excruciating, not unlike his face being torn off. The child’s spirit is in hysterics, shrieking into his ears, his high-pitched screams more distasteful than delightful in his current predicament. He wishes he’d cease his wails; Abaddon is quite tired now.
A few decades later, when the weather is a pleasant warm blanket, he’d hear the rumors again, spoken in different accents.
It was the grain, the humans would say, carrying lumber on their shoulders in hopes of progress, building up homes on abandoned land. And Abaddon, stunned by their utter stupidity and the consistency of human ignorance, would laugh so hard tears would well in his eyes. Only he held the truth, cradled to his chest, the tale of how a wicked beast spilling his blood had damned the very village this vessel had once held dear.
But for now, weakened, fragile and pathetic, he sleeps. Hidden under the frost-kissed leaves and blades of grass, he curls up in a ball and lets the rot, famine and shame gnaw at him. His dreams are a delicious mix of wails and hysteria.
When he wakes, the village is gone.
Only the tower of the church remains standing, its bell long since taken by bandits – yet its ring, hollow and echoey, can be heard across the land, nonetheless.
The child weeps uselessly.
***
He gets captured, swallowed by tall white walls and the scent of beeswax and camphor.
In his slumber, those wretched humans, speaking the language of devotion and penitence, have rebuilt atop the site of his old failure, hiding the blood-soaked mud under the foundation of a building born anew.
Humankind, foolish in their ways and gullible by nature, has yet to abandon its faith in a being wearing the title of Righteous God.
Madhouse is what they call it, Dr. Hargreave’s Madhouse, the building with white walls and painted deciphers of seraphs etched onto the ceiling.
It’s beautiful.
It’s horrific.
The kid within him rejoices, drunk on holy stricture and crucifixes, and the repurposed temple of his late Father, now a small chapel tucked into in the heart of the institution. The wooden benches, old and weathered, are brittle to the touch. They splinter under the brush of his fingers, and sway dangerously beneath any weight. Yet they stand, half arrogant, half dutiful, same as they once did. Oh, how Abaddon aches to shatter them with a mere flick of his wrist.
The Madhouse is peaceful, the way a haunted gravesite is peaceful, filled with souls that have long since passed, trapped between the grinding gears of time and the yellowish pages of the past. It feels the same for him – hemmed in by purity, suffocated by prayer, surrounded by the madness of mankind.
Dr. Hargreave, a man frugal with words, takes him in like it’s duty, uncaring and ignorant of his demonic nature. For the first time since his possession of the body, his sleep is guarded by insulated walls, creaking windows, feather-filled pillows and the weight of a heavy duvet draped over his body.
The man looks at him with kind, brown eyes, sagging skin around his face and sun spots on his nose. He reminds him of someone, a face long forgotten to the decades he’d spent slumbering. Phantom pain throbs behind his eye, an ache long forgotten, images of ripped skin and the smell of copper heavy in the air.
Abaddon is dutiful and proud beyond measure. Even at the depths he had fallen into, he never once denied his true nature amongst humans.
At first, they laugh, charmed by his words seemingly humorous. This child’s imagination runs riot beyond all reason, they would say, ruffling his hair in delight akin to brushing a lamb’s fleece. They draw warm baths for him, lather him in soap, scrub his dirty skin raw until it’s pristine and pure. They feed him bread and broth, grains from the soil he once spoiled, clothe him in linen softened by the river’s gentle current.
They adore him, – worship him, – a lost child among the madmen, oh, what a wonderful miracle it is for every servant of Christ eager to shepherd the innocent delivered into their care.
But the truth, wicked and ancient, cannot be contained in the mirage of innocence.
It begins with a man, slow with age. Fevered, muttering, eyes haunted and face contorted.
Abaddon, with the kindness of a saint, leads him towards the correct conclusion, face kind and voice velvety smooth. The next morning, the man is gone, having thrown himself from the window in the dead of night. On his temple, burned deep into the flesh, Abaddon’s sigil, a brand of devotion.
No more of the angelic hush that once clung to the place like incense, now curdled by dread, resentful whispers and hushed secrets traded behind closed doors.
They know it’s him, the cursed boy, and they loathe him with a fervor bordering on holy.
The boy weeps.
Abaddon grumbles.
They strip him of his soft cotton shirt and force him into sackcloth gowns. They’re stiff, starchy and itchy, and suddenly he’s nothing more than part of the madman crowd shackled to the building with binding words etched on paper. The bread and broth, once humble and warm, is reduced a bland sludge of oats and soured milk.
He’d rather starve. They let him.
They think he’s being good.
Maybe he is.
The corridors, once haloed in sunlight, now stand vacant and haunted, bathed only in the fickle glow of tallow candles. Their light paints grotesque shadows on the walls, and the boy’s soul trembles in fear.
The women, once foolishly maternal, now regard him with disappointment. Their gaze is hard and ugly, their judgement, each a tiny blade of glass, a conscious effort at discipline. They strike him with open palms and devoted words. Not enough to hurt, but enough to feel.
They arrive cloaked in smokes of incense, frankincense and myrrh. His room, small and bare, is punishment after sinking his teeth into a woman mid-payer, disturbing her fragile ascent towards God.
They scale his room with ease, grabbing onto him while he snarls and trashes. It is useless, his struggle, his dull fangs, his filed nails, a mockery of what it once was. There was a time he might have gone limp to feign surrender, waiting for the perfect moment to tear himself free. But those days have withered into memory. Humans, – those wretchedly persistent creatures – do learn, albeit slowly. He is a foe too dangerous to underestimate. They have salted the very perimeters of the building for a reason.
He loathes the way they seize him by the wrist, fingers clasped tightly around his arms like living shackles, yet they do it anyway, dragging him down the hallway mercilessly. He screams, trashes, wails, his voice echoing through the empty corridor. But those eyes, once softened by his childish demeanor, now remain cold and uncaring.
He’s absolutely seething.
They drag him to the basement and strip him of his clothes. A basin is already prepared, waiting for his arrival.
They dunk him in holy water.
Abaddon, Hight Prince of the Underworld, Gatekeeper of the Fifth Ring of Hell… might actually perish this time, and he believes this to be true. He craves it even.
This pain, it is absolute, unbearable, maddening, it unravels him so easily he feels lightheaded from the mere concept of it. He’s only felt such a thing once before, when the iron cross had branded his stolen flesh with its obscene shape. But this pain, holy and sweet with devotion, dripping from blind faith, and a false god, it is worse. So much worse. Gone with the branding, the humiliation, this is complete annihilation.
He howls, nothing like the child, nothing like himself, raw and ragged like a dying stray, but they’re holding him still with arms made for devotion and steadied by faith, to purge his demonic essence from the body of the little boy. Their ways are primitive and futile, they don’t know just how he is inseparable from the boy’s body, the boy is equally bound to his very soul for all of eternity.
He’s in hysterics, the boy within him, begging and pleading for the women to cease their cruel treatment. It is far from the values his fathers, both Holy and Earth-bound, had once bestowed upon him. These are cruelties invented by men in His name.
Abaddon tells him off, for if men were created in His image, these are His ways all the same.
The boy does nothing but weep in return.
Abaddon lets him.
The women do not relent. They hoist him up with such force his shoulders pop out from their sockets, for just enough time to let him choke on air, but before the smell of his own burning flesh could hit his nose, they dunk him back in, uncaring if the water crawls down his windpipe to burn his lungs within.
Holy water floods his nose, his mouth, his lungs. It crawls through him like liquid fire, searing his insides cruelly.
The world collapses into scalding light of pain.
He’s drowning.
He’s burning.
He’s dying.
It is the most grueling experience of his life.
He’s good, after that.
Compliant and soft, timid as a newborn lamb offered to slaughter.
The boy within him doesn’t utter a single word. His silence, once craved, now sits in his ribs like the memory of an unsaid apology.
Life, for a while, is a white blur of calm and quiet. The sound of the church bell, the chatter of cutlery, the bustle of the morning service.
New faces come and go, wide-eyed, trembling, seeking heavenly aid from those they hold dear, and Abaddon stays unchanging, a constant fixture the building has grown around.
The face of the man, Dr. Hargreave, is dragged down by the weight of time now, his once brilliant brown hair now whisps of white. He ruffles Abaddon hair akin to brushing the fleece of a newborn lamb, and Abaddon allows it, unflinching, hollow.
Time flows like that for a while.
Quiet, unchanging, unremarkable.
At the dawn of the new century, the world has forgotten he ever burned.
He remembers.
The building does, too.
***
With the death of Dr. Hargreave, the Madhouse falls apart.
The women, once maternal, now haggard and ruined with age, flutter out the building like puppets on a string. Their patients, their disciples, fall like flies on a cold October night. Deprived of their shepherds, they blindly wander into the first blizzard of the year, which claims their lives without mercy.
Abaddon does not grieve.
The boy is silent.
Years pass, and still, he remains alone, haunting the building like the shadow of what was once great. Sometimes he wanders, sometimes he lingers, seeing far lands and old walls. But this cursed, wretched place, it calls his name when he’s absent for too long, and Abaddon, with the compliance of a lamb, obeys.
His body, once a hinder, serves him well in his wandering.
Humans, as Abaddon had come to learn, are terribly, foolishly, laughably stupid. Whether it is an evolutionally flaw that they’re trusting and gullible, or simply their own ignorance to the truth of life, he may never know. But these foolish creatures, against all odds, treat their offsprings well. They take in strays too, strays like him.
He’s had families. More than one. More than a dozen.
Women he called mother. Men he called father.
For them, he was but another follower of Christ. For him, they were disposable means to survive the winters without frostbite gnawing at his bones. A mutually beneficial relationship.
When spring arrives, he is gone. No goodbyes, no letters, no trace of sentiment in his wake. One night he lies curled beneath the duvet, and by morning, only the imprint of his body remains. By the time his absence is noticed, the bedding has gone cold.
The building had changed in his recent absence. The walls, once bone white and cracked with age, now hide behind an unscalable barricade of stone and iron. Armed men patrolling the premises, uniforms crisp and immaculate, their gazes honed to points by authority and suspicion.
A guards spots him shortly after his arrival, accusing him of thievery before he can utter a single word.
Abaddon fights, oh, how he fights.
He knows those walls, those rooms, those rules.
He knows what they’re hiding in the basement.
He injures three of them, his mouth a disgusting mix of blood and saliva. Tears an ear clean off, sinks his teeth into their fingers until they snap beneath the pressure like the greenest of spring twigs. The sound is absolutely delightful. It is a blur of animalistic brutality and something so human he doesn’t wish to decipher. A futile bid for freedom, perhaps, but he’d throw himself into the core of the Earth before surrendering quietly.
More guards come.
They wrench his arms behind his back until the joints scream in protest, drag him down the corridor, and throw him into a cell where the door slams shut with the finality of a coffin lid.
There he lays for days, forgotten.
No one visits.
Humanity, as Abaddon once knew it, is entering a new era.
No longer the trembling, God-fearing bunch, they’ve sold their souls in the name of progress, trading their devotion for man-made success measured in ledgers thick with golden coins and goblets brimming with red wine.
They’ve grown crueler, too.
Their hands, once made to clutch rosaries, now hold guns instead, pointing the mechanical beast at anything trigger worthy. Their bloodthirst, although charming, doesn’t compare to holy scriptures dripping from the foul mouths of devoted servants, righteous ferocity be damned. Compared to holy zealots, these modern creatures are amateurs, toying with the idea of wrath without grasping the sacred heat of it. They spill blood, warm and thick with pain and despair, yet it serves little purpose, for blood spilled for enjoyment is something only his kind is privy to.
The loss of coins, the tarnishing of family name, the cold bite of chains claiming their precious freedom. Earthy joys and mortal suffering.
They fear nothing holy, be it from Heaven or Hell.
No divine retribution, no celestial punishment. The calling of Angels, the lick of Eternal Fire deep withing Hell’s gates.
It’s almost pathetic, Abaddon thinks, how small their fears have become. Mundane. Human. Earth-bound.
Oh, how easy it is for him to see through them all.
They come for him on the fifth day, expecting compliance and getting alliance instead. If they crave Hell on Earth, who is he to deny such a tempting request. They will worship him. They will follow him.
He torments them, because this new era of humanity, although cruel in its ways, had grown too soft and malleable for his liking.
The guards are first to learn. Their spine, once straight from pride and confidence, now curl inwards when the rows of empty cells begin whispering, when shadows lengthen directions that defy lanternlight, when arms reach out for them from the depths of the shadows, begging for vengeance. Then comes the inmates, their only comfort taken as their dreams sour into waking nightmares, images of wraiths and ghost plaguing their vision. Even their visitors, carrying the air of someone superior, only leave the gates of the prison after Abaddon grows tired of the taste of their despair from being left to wander the empty corridors for days at a time,
This new era of humanity is cruel, yes, sharpened by industry and greed.
But in the eyes of demon kind, they are little more than infants seeking what they’re yet to grasp the meaning of. Violence, torture, discipline, nothing but empty promises etched onto paper by someone illiterate.
Abaddon, generous as any tutor, patient like a saint and compliant like a lamb waiting for slaughter, takes it upon himself to show them the art of human suffering bestowed upon him by Hell prior to his glorious ascension to Earth.
Imprisonment is far for ideal, as one had suspected.
His fingers ache and blister from the hard work, his stomach gnawing at his insides from the watered-down excuse of a meal they call broth in this new century, and his skin itches from the filth of his cell.
But compared to the Madhouse, the basin of holy water, the hymns, the chapel, this place is a sanctuary in chains. Their God, once a pillar of light, lies abandoned and forgotten, his holy relics replaced by golden coins and pride. Abaddon reaches up to remove the last crucifix hanging from the wall. The nail squeals like a dying man before leaving the stone. Theres’s no protest, no witnesses. At last, the prison had fallen silent.
His hands burn and blister, but the sheer exhilaration of it all numbs the pain into a pleasant hum.
This world, once so righteous and holy, no longer remembers who it once feared.
The building, made anew, silently agrees.
And the boy within him, numb and mute, sleeps.
***
Decades pass, and the prison, like the one before it, falls silent.
This time, though, the world notices.
Tales of a curse, the flicker of oil lamps, the wails trapped in endless corridors, they spread like wildfire amongst the old and young alike. The state, fearful of the spark of hysteria, doesn’t claim the building as its own, letting it stand and rot under years of neglect.
Abaddon doesn’t wander this time.
He lingers in the forest, hunting squirrels and mice. Seasons come on go, some colder, some warmer. When Winter comes, a once fearful foe, Abaddon slumbers. With spring, his body heals, and the cycle continues.
The years eat away at the excess humanity bestowed upon him by the soul once residing in his body, and something inside him unravels. Whatever little boy remained within him two centuries ago, his wails and cries have long since faded in the form of murmurs and prayers, silence falling on him like the finest of veil. The soul, once so stubborn, finds comfort in his demonic nature. They are one and the same now.
It’s a bitter thing.
It’s beautiful.
It’s awful.
Speech, once a constant companion, his weapon, his lament, becomes impossible to grasp. As his thoughts warp, shorten, compress, strings of words forming sentences turn into rough grunts, then to low growls that vibrate through his whole being, until only commands remain; sleep, hunt, eat.
The Forest does not judge.
It treats him like a son; feeds him berries, tucks him beneath her roots, shields him with her canopy. The soil needs no words to yield new harvest, and the trees don’t demand hushed gratitude before he tears the fruit of their labor from their branches.
In their silence, Abaddon descends into something primal, something ancient, the very being that already existed long before his birth under an unlucky constellation, cursed a thousand times over.
No name, no purpose, just the knowledge to survive and wait.
This is how he is found, a boy shaped under the watchful eyes of the Forest. A feral little thing, not quite demon, not quite human, not quite beast.
He is plucked from the forest, bundled up in blankets, arms and promises of a better life spoken by lips once a believer. Abaddon, forgetting his pride, let’s them. His traitorous heart, wrecked by his apparent humanity, hammers in his chest akin to a caged bird.
Asylum, as they call it now, the building that houses the mad and inconvenient. The building, once a church, once a madhouse, once a prison and now an asylum, stands proudly on the soil that had eagerly drank his spilled blood years and years ago. White walls towering, tall and proud, the smell of the fresh coat of paint foul and suffocating. The stained-glass windows of the church, those holy jeweled eyes, ripped out, replaced by squares of clinical, blinding white. The grime, once a loyal comrade, covers under the watchful gaze of the Director. Abaddon does, too.
Dr. Crowden is a clinical man, carved out of marble and discipline.
A tight-set jaw made to hold secrets, piercing blue eyes and blonde hair combed to the side to reveal the deep trenches time has carved into his forehead. His mustache, coarse, long and wax-stiff, moves with every syllable he says.
He’s not unkind.
His words, measured and level, are said with a softness akin to the wings of a butterfly brushing against the cheeks of a newborn.
He smiles, sometimes. A silly thing on a face so ragged.
It reminds him of someone. A face once kind, once a blur of furry and holy divinity.
He lets it happen.
They treat him well. The director, the nurses, the patients trembling from troubled minds and the need to be good. Tender hands and steaming meals, cotton garments washed in lavender water, sewed with care. They clean his body off grime and fifth with rags instead of basins of holy water. The basement, once a plagued image in his psyche, is now tucked away somewhere in the belly of the building, out of sight, out of mind. They read for him from books like a nighttime ritual, pages decorated by illustrations of knights, dragons and princesses. Where once scriptures flung like knives from sacred tongues, there he lays, content and safe.
It's nice.
It’s unbearable.
The boy within, that slumbering fool, stirs from his century-long doze. He wakes with the ache to live, his wails and pleads piercing and final. Abaddon, worn down by time, is caught off guard by the boy’s eagerness, and succumbs to the lull of sleep. And the vessel, not quite human, not quite demon, not quite beast, becomes little more than a boy, for a while.
They ask for his name, and call him Isaac, for that’s the name he gives them. Not Abaddon, High Prince of the Black Realm, Gatekeeper of the Fifth Ring in Hell, he, who had torn off the limbs of sinners and whispered madness into the ears of prison guards. Just Isaac, son of Father Benedict, a lamb who once knelt before a cross, pure and obedient.
They love him dearly, the boy with bright blue eyes and a hunger for knowledge. And that is enough, for a while. They drown him in affection and mortal comforts; arms that wrap around him tightly, pastries dripping with honey and marmalade, undivided attention reserved just for him. Speech, script, his starved mind drinks them up readily without complaint. The quilt they give him is a strange little thing, what once was little more than feather and ink is now an elegant slope of carved wood and decorative gold. It’s a pen , they correct him gently, Surely this isn’t the first you’ve encountered. The boy, Isaac, laughs, a pitiful little sound.
Abaddon comes to be on a warm Saturday night. Sweat trickles down the nape of his neck as he untangles himself from the duvet, groggy and hollow with disorientation.
Time has passed. Months, years even.
His gaze falls on the desk beside the bed, its surface a battlefield of clutter; stacked papers, leather-bound books, and a peculiar instrument steeped in blue ink. Rows of words sprawled out like grape vines, a tangled mess of intellect and childlike wonder he feels no obligation to decipher. Sketches of strange shapes, some mundane, some not.
Then he sees it. Peeking out from beneath a book with its spine curved with age, a picture lies in wait. A photograph, he thinks, though its clarity is striking and precise, unlike the ones he had encountered before on his travels. Rage blooms in his chest as he studies the scene; nurses in pristine white uniforms, sitting around a stern man with piercing light eyes but an unsettlingly kind gaze. And, the boy.
Foolish, soft, human. Grinning at the camera with that mindless, empty hope in his eyes and the lopsided grin on his face Abaddon had taken such exquisite pleasure in erasing all those years ago.
It enrages him; to see the vessel he had claimed look so… content.
Happy.
Care-free.
To realize that his own negligence had allowed such rot to take root – that while he slept, the boy had burrowed his way into this place, carving out comfort and belonging in a world Abaddon never permitted him to have. A world built atop his absence, thriving on his vulnerability.
Abaddon, with his pride wounded and deep fury simmering beneath his skin, looks for an outlet to let out his anger on. The chickens dozing off in their coop, unaware of his awakening, shall do.
Such pitiful, primitive creatures – fattened on human care and domesticity, lulled by the illusion of safety. They are no worthy prey. No challenge.
His fangs and claws, once mighty, now serve him poorly, dulled and disciplined to fit the façade of Isaac. Still, they find purchase in feathers and flesh.
Their blood, warm and metallic, tastes heavenly, and he is stunned by how starved he has become. Like a drowning man breaking the surface at last, gasping down air he had been denied, Abaddon too, devours.
That’s how they find him come morning, shirt plastered to his skin with sweat, arms caked in dry blood, eyes wild and feral.
They scream. They cry. They beg.
They cease him, bound by rope and despair. When he lunges, teeth bared, they hold him by his face with the gentleness of the Blessed Mother herself.
They don’t care for the chickens. They care for the boy, only.
The director, a man frugal with words and forehead etched with deep gashes from decades of troubled thoughts, calls him son. Abaddon is aware of such a word, he understands it. Yet it doesn’t feel right. Just another fragment from the boy’s past. They ask for the boy back. He spits in the man’s face instead.
They lock him in his room. Three times a day they come, offering bowls of broth, fresh bread with honey and marmalade and a washbin to relive himself. He refuses it all. Demons don’t need such lowly offerings, and he tells them so. He might be powerless against their ropes, but he won’t stoop so low to accept the food, tainted with good intent and blind hope no doubt. On the third day, they start force-feeding him. He is more compliant after.
Days bleed into weeks. What once belonged to the boy, lived in and cherished, becomes a prison for Abaddon. The hallways echo with his cries and wails, his demands to be set free from this mortal cage.
The director visits one day, with a thin notebook, a strange quilt of some sort, and a vial of deep blue ink. He sits down beside him, speaking with the fondness of an immortal being, reminiscing of a time he had taught the boy the art of script and poetry. He leaves soon after, defeated by Abaddon’s silence.
More days pass, though it is little more than a blink of an eye for some. A man arrives draped in the cloak of medicine and the stench of misery. He offers a solution , permanent and safe, the epiphany of modern science locked inside a suitcase smaller than a fox’s den.
They bind him to a chair. His head, his hands, his legs, immobile and useless.
The strange man, foreign and twitchy, never dares meet his eyes. He angles his head in a weird, peculiar way, more for his own convenience than for Abaddon’s comfort. In his fist, a slender instrument, clutched with white knuckles and soaked in sins no priest would confess.
He angles the instrument above his eye. It’s cold, filthy, absolutely repulsive.
Metal kisses bone.
There’s dreadful pressure, the weight of impending doom. Then, the hammer descends. A sharp crack. The tool pierces the fragile vault of his mind.
Abaddon’s fingers twitch, involuntarily.
The pain has yet to draw breath, but his thoughts are wrapped in a cotton haze. The world tilts, the shadow of the director’s miserable face haunting his peripheral vision.
The man cloaked in a white cape and antiseptic, doesn’t utter a single word. No reprimand, no comfort.
The scraping begins, a twisting, jingling sensation, and Abaddon’s memories, his thoughts, his feelings, are little more than a jumbled mess. Thoughts snap and tangle, emotions fray and fade, and he is frozen in that very spot while the world turns, indifferent to his troubles.
He had dreamed, fantasized of tearing the man’s hearth straight through his throat, killing him in the most miserably fashion, for committing the crime of humiliating him in such a way. But now, the rage, the sorrow, the humiliation, emotions that had forged his very being into this world, they fade away like the remnants of a dying star.
He reaches out for them, scared and desperate.
The man leaves, taking his wrath with him.
They like him better this way.
Quiet, compliant, hollow.
It doesn’t last long.
Come next week, the man returns, shrouded in misery and armed with the tool of mercy masquerading as science. Abaddon fights harder this time, nails grabbing skin, fists tangled in hair.
It is futile.
Metal meets skull.
Thoughts are ruptured.
The procedure is finished.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Life is a haze for a while.
Milk-white walls and humming lights. Blurs of drifting shadows and the trickle of humiliation. Blackouts, missing hours. Involuntary twitches. Violent outbursts. Cold rooms.
It’s suffocating.
It’s maddening.
The building thinks so, too.
***
By the time the haze is lifted, he is laid to rest under the soil that knows him by the taste of his blood. He crawls upwards, dragging himself from the shallow grave, arms aching, lungs screaming. He wasn’t worthy of a tombstone.
Above him, the building waits. Once a Madhouse, once a prison, once an Asylum, stands vacant, with its windows boarded and blind, its corridors hollow, the chicken coop little more but a phantom of his former hunt.
Abaddon doesn’t stray far. He doesn’t dare to.
Humans have always found a way to bind him here, to drag him back with this building as their anchor. He lingers, warming numb fingers above a rusted stove, burrowing beneath a mildew plagued duvet for comfort, eating the stale remnants of pastries once dripping with honey and marmalade.
Men come and go.
Abaddon, with the fierce viciousness of a guard dog, drives them off, one by one.
Still, they persist.
They return with priests in tow, holly scriptures hanging from the tongues of the nonbelievers. They don’t banish him, not fully. Instead, they push him deeper into the abandoned wings, spaces they deem unworthy of restoration.
They say he is good for business. Another part of history worthy of showcase.
Time swells. Soon, three centuries of silence wavers, spooling out like cobwebs. The chatter of a new age rises, sharp, relentless, spoken in a language he no longer understands. The noise is terrible, grating against his bones until he flees, driven into the dark corners between breaths.
It’s a ritual, a rhythm; letting him lurk until his presence loses its novelty, then forcing him back into obscurity. Predictable, like turning a key in a lock is.
Men come and go.
Their numbers, once overwhelming, offer little distraction now.
They don’t sense his presence. His gaze smolders from the shadows of the vents. Their eyes meet. Only Abaddon is aware.
They don’t fear ghosts. They don’t fear demons.
They squander material wealth to get spooked by the lull of the building. They stay for one night. Two. It drives him insane.
He finds the hole that once held him captive, the shallow grave with no tombstone. Curled within it, he feels… content.
And so, he waits.
The boy waits with him.
The building does, too.
***