My desperate encounter with depravity

—Lucius 

I first learned about pacts during one of the weeks my Mistress allowed me freedom. Wherever she took me, I learned to seek out and take advantage of any nearby exotic places. I learned which types of magics were real and which weren't. I learned some basics from different religions and warlocks, and eventually, that search led me to demonism. 

After my goddamned torment at my Sire's hand, that was something I felt certain had to hold some answers. The tribal bookstore I visited first knew a thing or two about it, too. 

The only couple of problems were that I wasn't entirely sure where to continue that strange search, and even if I did, I didn't know where we were anymore. 

I can take a guess that it was a long-lost tribe's land now long forgotten on maps, but that wasn't helpful knowledge at the time. Fortunately for me, the bookkeeper knew of it, and he knew others who knew more of it.

It was slow work, but whenever we traveled, I started to seek out different, shadier places, learning what to look for. I kept the names of people I met along the way.

We were someplace outside of Nasferatica, called Luskalith, and Mistress was gone for two weeks, when I found a man named Sadra who had the grimoire that would change everything.

To my vampire eyes, the book glittered with a profound evil, one that made me shiver just to look at it. And here, at last, was the symptom of something that would be worse than the b*tch who turned me. That was exactly what I wanted, something worse than her.

Sadra was more than willing to part with the cursed thing. I had expected to have to beg him for such a treasure, but he shook his head violently and thrust it into my arms.

He wouldn't even take payment for it, using the words "pact" and "bad" a lot. So instead, I softly said, "I cannot say how much this means to me. If I can return and repay you, I will."

He nodded at that reluctantly, and I left. I went to the strange home my Mistress had left for me, a windowless tomb of a place, but I did not need light.

And I read. And read.

I was determined that if there was an answer in that book, I would find it as fast as possible. And it turned out that was, indeed, the book.

————

Before I illustrate just how desperate I was with the plan I made, let me first preface it by saying that I had learned a lot about different magic types by then, and I had even learned a few seemingly useless bits of things. 

One of those things actually managed to come in handy, and that was the way to tether myself to the human realm, so that if I left it, then I had a way to return to it. 

It was a basic teleportation spell, plain and simple, something a warlock had once demonstrated for me. I started with that, making my home pullback a rock in the tomb I had been left in.

And then I did something that only a desperate idiot would do. I opened a gateway to hell. And it was a small thing, a narrow entrance that was short-lived. 

As soon as the door in the rock appeared, it started to shrink on a very short existence timer. I ripped it open and sprinted through, just in time to fall to my knees in agony while the doorway disappeared behind me.

I stared down at my hands, where I bowed in what appeared to be a bed of silt and sand, but the painful part was how hot it burned me. 

When I lifted my hands, my flesh was seared, and then there was the stench. It was terrible. Cries and moans and sobs sounded around me. No sense was left free of assault in that place.

Fortunately, I had spent decades making those same sounds that I heard around me, and I knew them well. Even more fortunately, pain and I were old friends by then, thanks to my Mistress. 

I forced my focus through every disorientation and lifted my head to study the place of torment. And I did lay on a bed of sand, as it turned out, beside a river whose image made my eyes go wide with awe.

It was the deepest of reds, and the stench I had suffered came from it, for it was a boiling, viscous pool entirely of blood. 

Strangely, I would have initially described it as angry and not just angry but absolutely enraged. 

That river seethed and churned and bubbled like sludge, and it was so hot that, like lava, sparks of fire hissed off its surface every now and again. But the most horrific punchline? There were people in it, or rather ethereal shades of what had once been, people. 

They stood about neck deep, and they wailed with cries of misery that I knew well. Those were the cries of people who had been in continual pain for a very long time.

A giggle to my side made me turn my head just in time to see the creature I had been searching for. 

As soon as I saw him laying so casually on that river bank, watching me and my pain while he stroked his c*ck, it was obvious who I was looking at. 

His features were like black smoke that formed a shifting mirage of a person. 

The effect was such that he appeared either faceless or like many faces all at once. And his voice was the killer part when he spoke, deep and guttural and strangely arousing. "You shift the sands of the Phlegathon with your weight. How exciting."

"Depravity, I presume?" Honestly, I chose Depravity at random. My book had let me know three things about him that fueled my decision. One, he was one of the demons that was trapped in hell and forced to do his work from afar. 

Two, he wasn't a duke or a commander, so he didn't have armies or some shit. That was important because I didn't want any part of whatever fights hell was into. And three, he wasn't one of the weak demons either. He was in the middle, which was perfect.

He giggled again, a mad little sound. "That's me, vampire. I wonder what would happen to you if I took you for a swim. My flesh is thickened by how often I take a nice, relaxing wade through the river. Maybe I could f*ck you and feel you burn too."

Oh, yeah, this demon had been the perfect choice. I knew exactly what to do with him, how to entice him. 

Astarte had given me the shittiest practice runs ever with how to talk to this one, that b*tch. "It'd be hot as f*ck, I would assume, but I could give you something better."

"I doubt that very much, but I'll let you try for my amusement." Great. It was all the opening I needed.

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