DAMIEN WARD

you will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish.

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THE INDELIBLE MARK

Damien Ward’s advent had been wrought long before he had entered the world. A slice of carnage, the Antichrist would be spat out into the earth, falsely draping himself over God’s ethereal throne; though he would never quite fulfil this prevision, he is a force feared nonetheless. The Son of Lucifer was tucked away in Hell’s mouth when he was only a child—there, his providence burgeoned beneath Judas’s watchful gaze. Since razing his father, Damien has served as the self-anointed Vice of Wrath and Leader of the Vices, positions counterpoised not merely by his birthright but also the throes of fidelity he is capable of stirring. Woven by sublime beauty and lurid horror, he is able to enchant most to his wicked will, a sense of torment and unease washing over all those who dare venture close, and as he moves, a hollow cold moves with him. One seems to understand him as a creature cut from calamity. His touch causes things to rot by subjecting it to an expeditious ageing process: anything his fingers brush over is reduced to ash. Just as God had forged the world, pulling his Creation from his rib, Damien is its ruination, the ability to rend apart God’s cosmos his own. Angels are immune to his touch, fashioned as they are from divinity, though this does not diminish his power. The prodigiousness of his abilities often wander beyond his command, and thus he has resolved to wearing protective gloves, forged from crushed angel’s wings collected in the first wars on earth, to maintain control of his skill. Unlike his hordes of beasts, Damien wears no wings, but instead has the red mark of Ouroboros branded into his neck: a symbol of rebirth and death, marking out what might once have been his world to come.

THE HISTORY

Monstrosity is a necessary ingredient in beauty. So the woman who would be his mother had always believed. Everything beautiful was also dreadful, because it was twisted and full of fear. Wild from violence, it demanded your horror; it needed you to be afraid. This was what had brought her before the dais of the Morning Star: though there was something crooked in the angel, there was also sublimity, that filial breath of God still curled timelessly around his rib. She mouthed a prayer, not for the beast entombed in Hell, but the changeling, half-angelic, his ancient wings spread so wide that they swallowed up the sun. The worship of Lucifer was hardly extraordinary, dipping hands into black rivers and coming up with gold, but falling onto your knees for the Light Bearer was a marvel. As if by some numinous draw, God’s dwindled torch tore his way up through the earth, she was that much of a wonder to him. The woman understood him; when she gawped into his eyes, she appeared to seize something masked in him; she seemed to know precisely who and what he was, far before that secret had betrayed itself to him. His ambition hooked itself around her worship, and though she hoped he would stay with her, he refused. Instead, he parted from her with a gift. From their courtship grew something entirely unexpected: a child. Lucifer cradled the boy in his arms, a creature that should not exist, but nevertheless did. Such was Lucifer’s power. Yet, a prophecy girdled itself around him. The portent held him captive. The Son of Lucifer will eat the world, the soothsayer foresaw. He will put his mouth to the earth, skies, and ravines deep below. He will chew up and spit out all things, even the Morning Star. Though he could not bring himself to kill the child, a seed of strife spread like sickness in Lucifer’s chest. He fled uneasily back to his caves, leaving mother and child behind. He hoped never to see them again.

Though Damien seemed to be an enchantment of his own, his mother conceded she found him, at times, quite strange—yet that, she supposed, also made him beautiful. That was what she had come to love in the Morning Star, no? Beauty, like a breath of winter that climbs your spine. But when she held Damien in her arms, tickling his feet or cupping his cheek, he would not laugh, he would not blink, and the feeling dug deeper. When they walked together in the forest, his cold hand in hers, savage beasts and ferocious animals seemed not merely allayed by his presence but, by some odd providence, drawn to him. Slowly, the woman began to imagine the rot that spread from the centre of her child’s heart. She saw how he had inherited his father’s blasphemy, which before she had refused to see, and she watched as the final morsel of divinity ebbed, wave-like, away from him. She winced as it buried itself beneath the soil. She could not escape his unblinking gaze, the muscles in his face refusing to jerk upwards, even when the child had cause to smile. Damien Ward looked always like a cold creature who never changed. His parentage hung above his mother like a dark blanket, and after eight years of contrite motherhood she finally found herself at the end of her thread, the yarn red as blood. Fog wound itself around the trees, and when the mist had cleared a scene of terror washed over her: there lay a body lying limply in the moss; she watched as the wolves walked meekly to join Damien at his side, their bloodied mouths licking gently at his fingers. Something evil had revealed itself to her that day and, unable to bear the plague she’d wrought, she stepped into the river and felt its waves wash over her.

Her death seemed to stir something powerful below the ground and, its summon extending a dark, claw-like hand beneath the soil, Judas answered its call. Something primal began to knot itself together then: if Damien could run with wolves and bend them to his will, emerging high above them, then perhaps he could also do the same in Hell. Lucifer’s progeny was a source of wicked admiration to him, but he was also, he remembered, his ruin, and thus the impassible ravine grew between them. Damien let his father drape his dark divinity over him, all while his stare burned through bone to reach the throne. After all, Lucifer hadn’t carved his crown to create a legacy. He’d carved it to rule. Damien wouldn’t find a father in the Morning Star, but he found the mite of one in his Right Hand, Judas. He guided him like a beast untethered through the orbit of Hell, ingratiating themselves with all the spectres they might one day cup in their palms. Judas taught Damien how to whittle a lie with his tongue and when to loosen the knot; how to inspire conjoined loyalty and how to galvanise a legacy of fear. Ruinous, the demons flocked to him and, mantled from Lucifer beneath their shadowy veil, the Antichrist began to steal carvings of his father’s kingdom. After an epoch of collusion, the soothsayer’s words attached themselves to Damien like marionette strings and, feeling their strange movement, he felt compelled to follow them. Razing his father from his throne, Judas’s cadaverous hand behind him, hordes of beasts gnawed hungrily at his split kingdom—chewing his father up in his maw, he spat him out, an umbral crown resting on his brow. At Judas’s own encouragement, the Antichrist shaped his infernal army and, curse-spun, a score of ghosts turned their teeth to earth.

Their scourge lasted what must have felt like a millennia: Damien took the world in his teeth and shook it violently, chewing until he reached bone, while Judas built. Always, as he was tearing and grinding, spoiling and shattering slices of the world, there was Judas lingering, wraith-like, behind him—sculpting the wreckage. The Son of Lucifer stood vanward at the front of a legion of terrible monsters, turning their blades and claws on those who had once been God’s heavenly servants; loss or victory, Damien made relics of them, towed by his coven of beasts. He ate away at cities, pulled down what remained of civilisations, making ruins of things that once held fast—before long, the torrid Southern Lands were firmly clamped within his grip. When the demons were done carving their kingdom from the ground, the threat of the Heretics was stiffly dissolved, and Damien Ward settled himself in an invisible throne, a mass of angelic vestiges displayed deliberately around him. As his father had done once. At last pleased with the empire, which was his in all but name, he sighed; the Antichrist yawned out a new age. And yet, the shadows around him have begun to stir. Black-mouthed, they threaten to gorge themselves on pieces of him. After all, what are you to do when your divine purpose is stolen from you, when your reason for existence is, at last, fulfilled? Are teeth not made to chew? What remains for the howling stomach to sate itself on except a dull sliver? Though Damien continues to be feared as much as he is revered, the needle-prick of his claw begins to lose its hold. Stomachs churning with something dark and vicious, a listless hum starts to burn through his kingdom—and at its centre, something new begins to sprout.