Daemon Cinatas smiled without humor as he gazed out the floor-to-ceiling window of his New York City high-rise. Every smile of his had been without humor, lately. It was one of the things he had forsaken during his rise to power, and truth be told, he didn’t miss it much. Daemon had always been a humorless person.

Well, at least, the person Daemon had been before he became Daemon had been a humorless person. That weak little maggot archeologist, Clive Pearson, who never stood up for himself a day in his life until he’d found a book that gave him a little help. Clive jumped into black magic like a fish discovering water for the first time. It was the perfect crutch for someone as weak-willed as he - ‘forbidden’, ‘misunderstood’, and promising power for nothing. Clive was a proud atheist, so the trading of a soul for the ability to get back at everyone who’d wronged him seemed like a bargain. He’d assumed the name Daemon Cinatas during that first binding ceremony, no doubt thinking himself extremely clever for coming up with it.

Daemon snorted at the typical human thought that claiming a first name that sounded like ‘demon’ and a last that was ‘satanic’ backwards would grant any kind of benefit. He felt nothing about the name now.

It had been several years since the ceremony, and the being known as Daemon Cinatas bore little resemblance to the now vanished Clive Pearson. Tall, immaculately dressed in a black suit with red pinstripes, he dominated the penthouse space.  His cufflinks were rubies, and his hair cut in the latest fashion. A black tattoo of a snake peaked out at the hollow of his neck before vanishing beneath the folds of his crimson silk undershirt. Clive had been too afraid of needles to get any tattoos.

Women and men found themselves fascinated with him, gripped by the same feeling that drives you to move ever closer to the edge of a cliff; to peer down even though you know that one small mistake means a fall to your death. Indeed, Daemon’s rise to power had been accompanied by no small number of such ‘falls’ – first those who’d slighted Clive, and then later, after that personality had been suppressed, a number of deaths in key industry positions. A string of ‘accidents’, resignations, and mysterious disappearances had eventually promoted Daemon from bank clerk all the way up to CEO of the largest banking firm in America.

Clive would have been thrilled, if he did anything other than howl against the blackness somewhere deep down inside the inky depths of Daemon. No doubt Clive rues the day he dug up the tablets, and the pitiful ambition that had drove him to translate them in secret. The product of his effort was two books:

Clavicula Salomonis, or the Lesser Key of Solomon, and the Grimoire of Turiel.

The Grimoire told of some kind of being (the Arabic was unclear as to exactly what), locked away behind a set of ancient seals… and the methods to counteract those seals. It had some sort of preachy story involving angels and love – “only man has the power to forgive, and so only man may release this angel from its chains” – but Clive took one look at the religious language and didn’t bother translating it. He completed the rituals, and was shocked when it actually worked – the door he inscribed the seals on opened not into the hallway from his study, but into a different place entirely. Eagerly he entered, and closed the door behind him.

An hour later, the door opened again and he was flung out, screaming and clawing at his head. He was found by his colleagues raving on the floor, didn’t regain lucidity until a week later, and refused to tell anyone what happened.

When the shock of being defeated and rejected by the Grimoire’s guardian wore off, Clive decided to try using the Lesser Key of Solomon. If he couldn’t bind whatever was chained in the Grimoire, he could at least try summoning something minor.

Which lead to the pact.
Which lead to Daemon Cinatas.

The first people to die were Clive’s coworkers, whom he hated down to the last man. A freak cave-in, that’s what the papers said. Clive then began to retrace his life, starting with those who had hurt him most recently and moving backwards through all of his 37 miserable years of life. By the time he’d killed the last of the kids who bullied him during high school, his mind was twisted by his own atrocities and easy to subsume.

In control at last, Daemon had set about gaining influence in the human world. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. Humans practically thew their souls at him if he gave them the chance. Be it money, sex, or power, everyone had their own little cracks where Daemon could wedge in his perfectly manicured nails. His ascent was rapid.

He wasn’t just accumulating power for power’s sake, though, oh no. A grand aim, that’s what he had. Clive hadn’t realized what he’d found in the Grimoire, but Daemon knew that once the puny mortal had cracked the first seal, Turiel’s influence had started oozing out into this world. . It seemed that Turiel had waited too many millennia inside his obsidian prison (waiting, oh waiting endlessly for forgiveness from a race of mortals who had forgotten him entirely) and had decided to take matters into his own hands.  All across the span of worlds, the desperate were finding copies of the Grimoire and the instructions for entering his domain. They still had to get past the avatar of fear that guarded the first door; Daemon couldn’t prevent that. Again he cursed divine will that laid down such an unavoidable test to weed out the weak of heart. The weak are easy to mold, more so than even the desperate.

A groan broke Daemon out of his reverie. He sat down in his giant leather executives chair and spun it around, steepling his fingers and looking reflectively over them at the man nailed to the opposite wall. James, his bonded servant, had found this one begging outside one of the nearby subway stations and had lured him here with promises of a hot meal and some work. He’d lasted a long time for someone so gaunt and sick looking.

Daemon frowned as he noticed some blood that’d managed to spray beyond the plastic laid down on the far side of the floor. Blast. I wish there was a less messy way of keeping Turiel’s seals weakened. He knew why the angel was seeking the desperate, and he wanted it to succeed. After all, Daemon had gone back and translated the entirety of the original tablets. The full Grimoire sat on his desk, resplendently bound in black leather. He knew that the book Turiel was sending out only contained instructions for accessing his domain, not the story of the angel.

Not the reason why it was bound there, nor what it would do when he was freed.

Daemon knew what would happen if Turiel managed to free itself, and he looked forward to that day. He sauntered around the desk and across the room, plastic crinkling under his $600 dress shoes.

Now, he thought as he slit the bum’s throat and caught the blood in a silver chalice, all I have to do is continue to dispose of societies’ dross, to the glory of chaos.