That was the last time I found pleasure in my own body.
Scars and aftermath. I imagine this particular type is familiar to all diabolists. To lose our humanity piece by parcel, or to give it away.
This is not a reality diabolists often discuss. The sacrifices that don’t involve the murder of a lamb or a virgin strapped to an altar.
I intend to open with this topic, a reality we all acknowledge and keep secret. It was the start of my own journey, a motivation for me to start looking into matters. I sought a way to fix what had been made Wrong in my own heart and mind.
The push to leave my home and family came about after a late night discussion with my siblings, my brother and the sister I could not look in the eye.
My sister called my father a charlatan. My brother, set to be a templar after my father’s footsteps, did not disagree, but argued for the benefit of symbolism.
The idea of angels with wings was not situated in record or text, my sister argued. Take away the invented things, the cultural aspects and art, stick to the written word alone, and the world was left with a deity who focused all efforts recorded in texts on a relatively small section of the Middle East.
My brother argued for the benefit of symbolism, for the power of ideas. In the heat of battle, ideas and iconography could lend strength to those who needed it.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it hadn’t. It didn’t. Not for me, and not for our father.
In the end, with many beers shared between us, sitting on the roof of our house in that warm springtime, it dawned on me that my siblings had lost their faith. The irony was, I’d retained my own.
I liken my realizations to the evolution of a child in their early adolescence, learning that their parents are indeed not perfect. The subsequent realization is one many don’t make until they are in their twenties. That their parent is still their parent.
Such was my relationship with God. Such was the nature of my faith.
It was with that faith and little else that I gathered my things and struck out on my own a week later.
That was the start of my journey. I would ask, to those who are still reading, to come with me. Start with your eyes open to the most basic scars we wear. We move on to the subject of Balance, to debts, prices, and the question of how one might better manage dealings with creatures who take from everything.
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Chapter two: Tower
I would like to say I moved with direction after I left home, but I did meander. I was hesitant, and I took too long to break some naive promises I had made to myself. Foolish, I expect, to think one can get answers without paying some price.
When I did finally allow myself to look for and converse with diabolists, I found myself making rapid progress. I hated myself for the prior years, telling myself I had wasted time, but I value them in retrospect. I needed to exhaust all other options before I could walk this path and learn what I knew, or my self-loathing and doubt would have been too much to bear.
At the time, I weighed morals. These days I debate questions of Balance. Some call it karma.
I remain a careful man, these days, but it is human nature to make mistakes in youth. I remember classmates racking up credit card bills in the tens of thousands, before reality caught up with them.
For a practitioner without parents to watch over them, it is easy to do the same with one’s Balance.
Frustrated, tired, and well traveled, I was twenty years old before I reached out to other diabolists. I found Lucrezia, who identified herself to me as Lucy. She, in turn, introduced me to her master and teacher, Jeffrey.
I remain unsure as to why I was invited to their home and presence. My agreement to join them was a cautious one. I spent a full night and two days awake, writing and revising the written contract. Jeffrey barely skimmed it before agreeing.
Among those terms were measures meant to protect my Balance in the universe. I’d come from a good home and an honest life, I’d been generous and given back more than I’d taken, and I held to the rules that God gave to mankind. It was in holding to those rules that I bettered my Balance, rather than God himself, but I remain thankful for opportunity He gave me.
I remained free to refuse any task given me, with the caveat that I would have to pay for my own food and shelter any day that I did, or leave. He agreed to never bind me or limit my freedom.
Even with the terms of our deal, I was uncomfortable. For a long time, staying with Lucrezia and our mutual master, I slept with one eye open, convinced I would be sacrificed. Instead, I got room and board, and frequent menial work, including illustrating for Jeffrey’s texts, which he wrote as short volumes, bound in nice embossed leather and sold at premiums.
He played to the shallow narcissism of other diabolists, fanning their fancies and indirectly flattering them. Each volume was written with specific customers in mind, holding the relatively little substance he’d managed to dig up or barter from others.
Such was my existence with him.
I was there, but did not assist, when he summoned Agares. A duke among the seventh choir, one that brought great beings low. A corrupter and agitator. He could compel a king to march to war, or stop that same warhost in its tracks.
Jeffrey’s efforts were not guided at men. This was, I later learned, one step in my new master’s lifelong quest to quash and vanquish the gods of mankind.
Even in times of quiet, the gods are busy, fighting and holding on to their assets. There is a delicate balance. Jeffrey and Agares both sought to disturb it. To start a war that included gods, incarnations and spirits, and make the deaths that resulted true deaths, ones that left the world bereft of those forces and the structure they gave to our reality.
Many of the choirs are focused on tangible things, but the seventh is an abstract one. Not one that we are able to grasp in concrete terms. Many call it the weakest choir. It is one we are liable to underestimate or lose sight of, and thus the one that gets the furthest in its endeavors towards the Wrong.
By way of my contract with Jeffrey, I was forbidden from direct interference, so I turned to compelling my friend and fellow apprentice to stop Jeffrey.
Had Lucrezia and I succeeded, I might have returned home to be a templar, bottled up my passions and faced the horrors with the same grim expression my father wore.
My master and the Duke won. Lucrezia died in the fight I urged her to take part in.
This text isn’t for the stories of battle, for exchanges of blows.
Ultimately, the world kept turning, a little less bright, less spiritually whole.
I was angry, passionate, protective of my sole friendship from the past three years. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer…
I sought revenge and I did it by way of the tools I’d accumulated, studying and watching diabolism.
I failed, and I was lucky enough to avoid the worst of the backlash when my own bindings failed to hurt Jeffrey and came back to me to exact the required prices.
Many diabolists maintain some means of tracking their Balance. I use a wooden ring. For a long time, the changes in that ring and the perpetual reminder that I was in debt bothered me. A lifetime bringing up my Balance, a few moments of outraged stupidity to spend it and subsequently plunge myself into debt.
My first big question, then, is whether we can manage the karmic balance. Is it possible to walk away free and clear?
Most will say yes. There is the slow growth. Regaining an even or positive Balance by fits and starts, small oaths and large ones, through Right, maintaining and keeping to a code. The Universe will periodically seek to re-establish balance, and the practitioner, succeed or fail, will find a portion of the debt spent to bring this about. Bigger oaths and restoring balance to reality can counteract the karmic weight that burdens the practitioner.