I cannot remember my life. Only the pain of knowing I had wasted it in vanity and selfishness. For that, I was barred from paradise. Hell was not a fiery pit, nor a sadistic torture chamber for the damned. Eternal damnation was simply this: the soul rejected from returning to its source. Left to wander beside the living yet stagnant on this earthly plane. Cast out from the great tranquility of the Light, I became demon‑kind.
I am old, and the long centuries of suffering have shaped me into something savage and ominous. A soul spurned from heaven but unable to partake in earthly pleasures grows bitter and hostile to all things.
There are no elite demons. No hierarchy. No throne. Only the First, and those who followed her into darkness by living wickedly in service to themselves. The shadow cannot exist without the Light. A testament to the necessary balance of all things. To live too much in either the Light or the dark closes the way to paradise, for both extremes are inherently selfish.
Souls who cling too tightly to goodness become vain, feeding off the life‑force of the less fortunate. Their damnation is to become leeches. Parasitic demons who gorge on the misery of those they once pretended to help, stripped of their philanthropic masks. Their hunger for despair drives them to create it.
Every misfortune in the world has a leech behind it, stirring the pot.
Those who surrender wholly to the shadow self, who maim, murder, or delight in cruelty, are denied rapture for the inequity of their actions. Their fate is to become shadow demons, possessing the most wretched of the living and forcing them to reenact the horrors they once inflicted, until death or ritual drives them out.
Religious ritual can purge a demon through intention, but it cannot banish us forever. And we do not return to “hell,” for hell does not exist as any religion claims. We are cast back into purgatory, compelled to choose another vessel.
The older a demon, the stronger and more formidable. The ancient ones, like myself, have no love for the living. No remorse. No concept of mercy or pity. We no longer cherish the novelties of life. We only envy and resent the living for their chance to transcend into nirvana.
I, however, am an exception to the dark rule. For I am neither leech nor shadow, but both. An anomaly of demon‑kind. Parasite and possessor. Leaping from body to body, leaving each vessel with a sated smile.
My original name has been lost to the ages. But the name given to me by the earliest of men was never written, only spoken in a language now dead. It translates most closely to the Latin word beatitudinem...Happiness