The needle hurts as it pierces his skin, but it’s just a needle, after all. Nothing like what’s been done to him. What was done to his brother.
He steels himself and pushes the needle deeper, brushing the bone of his pointer finger to forbid himself from chasing that particular thought further. He doesn’t know what’s been done to him yet. Not fully.
He knows the Daystar legacy, of course. Knows the pacts between them and pit Devils stretching back generations upon generations, forming the foundation of their power and the cornerstone of their wealth. He’d distanced himself from that legacy for years until his brother, the Daystar heir, died and left him as the surviving heir.
Opening his eyes, Alois gazes at the room through the mirror before him, washed in flickering candlelight and shadow, the needle still deep in his finger. He has nothing to offer, nothing he wants in return save for answers and to stare his new master in the face.
Slowly, he slides the needle free, and as his blood beads along its slim surface and falls the room holds its breath. For a frozen moment, not a single candle flame stirs. Then, all at once, the room is full and dark, and he is no longer alone.
A powerful clawed hand wraps itself around his slim wrist, and a hot tongue works itself dexterously over the needle’s bite and around his finger over and again.
He cannot move or even speak. In the mirror he swears he can see spectral wires sinking into his head and limbs, pulled taut.
Alois watches it happen out of the corner of his eyes even as other scenes play out across his vision: himself writhing in pain and sorrow as the same tongue curls around his nipple and between his legs; himself laughing ceaselessly as he burns for the creature’s amusement in a place of darkness and torment. The creature wants more of him and so he will burn again and again. He will scream and beg beneath it as it devours him over and over.
He cannot see the rest of the creature in the darkness just behind him, but he continues to stare into it, overcome with the knowledge that the creature, this Devil, is hungry.
Alois, the Devil purrs.
“Asmodeus,” the name rises to his lips without previous knowledge of it.
Asmodeus. He’s so fucked.
R.E. Hellinger 