Estelle Ana Baca

Tag: Astaroth

  • Orders, Part IV

    Back to Orders, Part III.

    Ninalla’s energy had been diminished by the act of childbirth. Possessing the dead Zhou threatened to sap what little energy she had left, and she was painfully aware that she to find a new host at the soonest to replenish her own lifeforce inside a new body. The only body at hand was that of the midwife, and she leapt into the mortal’s body without any hesitation. Her first impulse was to tear the midwife’s body apart from the inside out with her phenomenal rage, but she set her mind on revenge instead. She knew that Azrael had stolen away the life of her human host and, more importantly, her child, and she was going to do everything in her power to destroy him.

    Her anger gave her an unanticipated strength, and, soiled as her host’s clothes were from the childbirth, she marched from her home and into Duke Xiao’s palace to find Jiang Xuande, tossing aside every guard along the way who tried to stop her as if they were paper dolls. When she found Jiang Xuande, he was in the Duke’s company. The guards attempted to subdue her, but Ninalla repelled all their attempts and incapacitated everyone in the room except for Duke Xiao and Jiang Xuande. The Duke took his own sword, and he issued an uncertain threat to the demon. Ninalla ignored him, and in a low and cold voice that didn’t belong to the midwife, she said, “Zhao is dead. Our child is dead. I must see Astaroth this instant to seek my vengeance for Azrael’s injustice.”

    Ninalla purposefully crushed the midwife’s spine and exited the body, and the mortal woman’s broken body fell stupidly at Duke’s feet.

    Now—the Apokomistis Astaroth has a grisly sense of fun. When Ninalla returned to her mistress with her sad tale, Astaroth temporarily feigned interest and promised scores of demons in assistance, only to revoke it moments later while rebuking Ninalla for her lack of service and loyalty over the previous fourteen years. Ninalla was awestruck, but she soon recovered her fury. She raged at her mistress, reviling Astaroth’s callous treatment after more than seventeen centuries of loyal and obedient service.

    Unfortunately for Ninalla, her anger had obscured her wiser impulses and made her forget that Astaroth is an extremely impatient demon. It only took a few moments, and after they’d passed, Ninalla was no more.

    Back at the court of Duke Xiao, Jiang Xuande publicly mourned his wife and child while secretly waiting for Ninalla’s return. He commandeered a peasant girl for Ninalla to inhabit and made every attempt to summon her, but none of his spells worked very well without Ninalla’s demon blood.

    After more than a week, Jiang Xuande had begun to despair for partner’s return. He slashed into the peasant girl’s arm and summoned the Neku Benelaba to him. He ordered Benelaba to help him summon Ninalla to him, but the Neku had other obligations. The Neku was bound in service to Sitri, an Apokomistis who had been working closely with Astaroth at that time on a rather nasty little project (for another time, perhaps).  Benelaba informed the magician that Ninalla had been killed by Astaroth thirteen days earlier for her defiance. Jiang Xuande continued to appeal to the Neku for help, but Benelaba refused, citing his allegiance to his master.

    However, Benelaba knew that Jiang Xuande’s soul belonged to Astaroth, and he knew that his master’s business partner would want to keep tabs on her investment. Benelaba referred him a Neku in Astaroth’s service who went by the name Makeri, offered an insincere apology, and promptly disappeared.

    Ishtar Gate at the Pergamon Berlin Museum. Photo by Rictor Norton, courtesy of Wikimedia.
    Nebuchadnezzar II’s Ishtar Gate was inspired by Astaroth’s palace in Persepolis. Astaroth’s palace was destroyed  in Alexander the Great’s capture of the city in 330 BC.

    Jiang Xuande considered his next move very carefully, for like his dead partner, he wanted revenge for the death of his child. Over the many years he had spent with Ninalla, she had shared with him countless secrets that mortals are forbidden to know about the world of demons, and she shared with him everything she knew about the angels, as well. He knew that if he had to take on the Angel of Death, he would need an army of demons at his disposal. In fact, he knew exactly what he needed.

    All the best to you until next Tuesday. Dominus tecum.

    On to Orders, Part V.

  • Orders, Part II

    Back to Orders, Part I.

    It all started when the Watchers Sabrathon and Kochabiel informed Michael that a deranged human—a dark magician by the name of Jiang Xuande—had stolen a powerful grimoire from the Apokomistis Astaroth. Allow me to provide some background (per usual) so that you can understand what this means (before we angels got involved).

    Demons are well-versed in black magics, and they also have a healthy understanding of white magics for, like the best of adversaries, they know the tools of their enemy. A few of the ancient ones consolidated their knowledge of black magics into books containing spells and magical secrets called grimoires. Grimoires are plentiful within the demon world and have varying degrees of potency. Every Apokomistis has at least one that he or she relies upon. Grimoires are most often books or scrolls or tablets, but they have been known to exist in other forms. Regardless of shape, they have often been sought by many human magicians for the vast knowledge and power that they hold, but in most cases, they are completely useless to mortals on account that most spells require demon blood to make them work.

    (Incidentally, there is a white magic counterpart to the grimoire known as an ellamadus. As far as I know, the very few ellamadi in existence were either captured or destroyed by a few Apokomistai during the era that humans refer to as World War II. Remind me to tell you about ellamadi after we’ve wrapped up this tale.)

    However, there are exceptions to most every rule, and if we return to the state of Qin, in ancient China, in the year 354 BC, this particular grimoire and this particular magician Jiang Xuande were a recipe for disaster.

    Temple at Hua Shan
    Hua Shan is one of the sacred mountains in China. This was one of Sabrathon’s favorite vantage points for overseeing matters in the state of Qin, as it gave him a nice view.

    Jiang Xuande was born in 421 BC, and he served as an astronomer and alchemist in Duke Xiao’s royal court from 361–354 BC. The Duke and his advisers all held an understanding that Jiang Xuande’s predictions were beyond reliable, and there were whispers that he had an army of spirits at his disposal to do his bidding.

    This wasn’t entirely far from the truth. Jiang Xuande had nurtured a passionate quest for immortality from the time he was a young boy and had witnessed several members of his family succumb to smallpox. He was subsequently raised by his uncle, a doctor and alchemist himself, and he taught the boy the arts of using the elements and herbs to balance the body. However, Jiang was certain that the science of alchemy could be stretched so as to bestow immortality upon anyone who discovered its secret formula. It led him to dabble in black magics by means of a watered-down grimoire that he acquired through great difficulty during a trip to India.

    Not many of the spells worked in the grimoire, but there was just enough information in it for Jiang Xuande to realize that it was useful. He wanted more, and so he used his little grimoire to summon a Nekudaimon by the name of Ninalla in the autumn of 368 BC.

    Ninalla wasn’t pleased to have been summoned to serve a lower creature, but she sensed that Jiang Xuande’s thirst for immortality had the potential for too much fun for her to pass up. She answered Jiang Xuande’s call, possessing his pet cat, and pledged her services and wisdom to him under the condition that he volunteer his wife’s body for the Neku to use as a human vessel.

    Jiang Xuande didn’t think twice about Ninalla’s proposition. He had long fallen out of love with his outspoken and barren wife Zhou, and he had begun to regard her latest failed pregnancy as a sign of an inferior stuff in her family history. He idly wondered if the metaphysical bond between the spirit of a demon and the body of a human might improve what was wrong within Zhou and endow her with the strength to bear him a healthy child when he was finished playing around with demons.

    Ninalla had an agenda in mind as well. Serving a human gave her an excuse to escape the tyranny of serving Astaroth for a while (I’ll let you imagine how demanding a master an Apokomistis can be over hundreds of years). She knew that eventually Jiang Xuande would die and she’d be able to convert his possessions into capital that she could use herself, or rather, until Astaroth pulled rank as an Apokomistis and took them. Astaroth gave her Neku permission to stay with Jiang Xuande, understanding that his demon-dabbling made his soul all too pluckable when the time was right. Furthermore, she sensed that affairs in the state of Qin were nearing a steady boil.

    Moments after Jiang Xuande gave his assent, Ninalla occupied Zhou’s body. Later that night, she taught Jiang Xuande how to make the some of the other, more grisly and powerful spells in the grimoire work through donating decent quantities of his wife’s demon-infused blood.

    More about Jiang Xuande next week. Dominus tecum.

    On to Orders, Part III.

  • Valac the Demon, Part I

    Valac is an ancient demon, and just as the word упир has changed over the centuries of human history, so has his name. He answers to Volac, Valax and Valu, the latter pronounced with a nice French-sounding u at the end. Sometimes he can be even summoned as Moloch whenever Moloch himself is out of reach.

    Valac's Sigil
    Valac’s Sigil as it was not altogether erroneously recorded in the Lemegeton, the Lesser Key of Solomon

    Humans have created their own classification systems for demons over the last few millennia. Byzantine writer and politician Michael Psellos dreamt up one of the most fantastically elaborate systems back in the eleventh century. He wrote (and many others copied) that there were demons of the Empyreal (the atmosphere), the Aerial (the air), the Subterranean (underground), Aqueous (all bodies of water), Terrene (land) and Lucifugi (exclusively nocturnal). Mr. Psellos wasn’t so much wrong as he was overcomplicating something fairly simple, like inventing categories for pencils based upon their length after they’ve been sharpened for the first time.

    There are only two categories of demon as recognized by angels: the older and stronger demons, known as the Apokomistai (Ἀποκομισταί, singular Ἀποκομιστής), and the young and weak demons, known as Nekudaimones (Νεκυδαίμωνες, singular Nεκυδαίμων), commonly shortened to Nekus. Whereas a Neku must possess a human or animal in order to have a corporeal form, an Apokomistis is capable of taking whatever corporeal or non-corporeal form he or she wishes. Of course, if any demon were to choose to inhabit a cloud in the upper atmosphere, he or she could, but as humans have firmly established themselves as ceaseless forms of entertainment to demonkind, most demons opt for human forms.

    Valac is an Apokomistis. He only answers to a handful of other Apokomistai and generally keeps to himself, unlike most of the other most powerful demons, who are typically accompanied by an entourage of Nekus. He is frequently sighted and summoned by humans, and he has a reputation for appearing as a child who uses his seeming innocence to lure willing victims to terrible ends. In fact, you’ve probably heard about some of Valac’s greatest crimes and never knew it. Have you ever heard of the Children’s Crusade? Or the Pied Piper of Hamelin? Those were both Valac, leading children away to certain death. Some of his lesser-known but more ghastly feats took place in France, not long after the Revolution.

    In the months before the Bastille fell on July 14, 1789, a clutch of Apokomistai and supporting Nekus had been irresistibly attracted to the streets of Paris by the kind of turmoil that eventually leads to bloodshed. The demons dug in and transformed the French Revolution into a ruthless affair that would usher in almost eighty years of intermittent unrest, conquest and, at its worst, horrific civil war.

    Valac arrived in France in May of 1789, at the invitation of the Apokomistai Astaroth and Mammon. Over the next fifty years, he showed up wherever he felt he could do the most damage to the French. Valac, Belial and a squadron of Nekus participated in the Reign of Terror from June 1793 to July 1794 that saw the deaths of tens of thousands of humans (although Kimeries himself rightfully claims the responsibility for having caused it).

    On occasion, Valac would find himself bored with the warring factions and preening Nekus, and he would set off on his own to satisfy his need for human flesh and blood. He was on his way to find a battle or even a minor skirmish to occupy his time when he accidentally discovered a whole new opportunity.

    Fontainebleau is a town to the south and east of Paris. It had been a popular retreat for the French monarchy over the prior centuries, and so it was no stranger to the violence of the Revolution. On the 23rd of Fructidor, Year 1, in the newly adopted and quickly discarded French Republican Calendar (more commonly recognized as September 9, 1793), Valac was passing through Fontainebleau disguised as a young boy of about eight years of age, when he came across a group of six idle teenaged boys. The eldest of the boys was fifteen, the youngest was barely eleven, and they were all from peasant families.

    Valac, like most demons, has a sincere appreciation for money and everything its appearance affords them. As he passed the group of boys, they couldn’t help but notice his wealthy-looking attire, even though he was curiously unaccompanied and travelling with purpose in his step. The boys had all heard plenty from their non-landed families about how miserable life had been under the King and before the Revolution, and they couldn’t pass up the chance to take it out on what appeared to be a weak child with money.

    The eldest of the boys initiated the torment with a vile taunt. He was soon joined by the younger boys, and they all took, very unwisely, to throwing stones at the disguised demon.

    (To be continued later. Dominus tecum.)

    On to Valac the Demon, Part II

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