#onb

An: “Ricchan!”

A frazzled-looking An-chan is hobbling over to Ritsu, apologising for being late as she missed her train. Ritsu reassures her that it’s okay and An asks if they could stop by the convenience store.

Ritsu: “Sure. Is something wrong with your feet?”

An explains that her new shoes are a bad fit and worried, Ritsu asks if she’s alright. He noticed she’d been sort of limping her way over to him anyway, so he wondered if something was wrong. An says she’s alright, but also not really and that she’s embarrassed about the whole thing. 

Ritsu: “Oh, wait here then. I’ll go buy some for you.”

An: “I’m so sorry. I’m the one who invited you on this shopping trip, after all. Thank you.” 

Ritsu: “No worries.”

In the beginning was ORIAS, a DEMON loyal to the cause of the DEMONS. They are said to be IMMORTAL and use THEY/THEM pronouns. In this New Testament they serve as a MEMBER of the VICES. Blessed be their name.

THE INDELIBLE MARK.

When God dug His hands into the earth’s soil, His first children sprouted up from it: that is how Orias came to be. They were first mortal, a strange creature which seemed to have stolen a shred of God’s divinity in its birth. The people buckled before them and proclaimed them God’s Messenger: in exchange for their divine interference, they surrendered their first children, whom Orias transformed into the first witches of the earth. Seduced by Lucifer, they are not merely a demon but also the Original Witch, a primeval fountain from which all dark sorcery flows. In Hell, they communed with the planets which hung suspended above and earned their visions, all the while breathing life into dark totems; rites and rituals which their children scattered across the earth. Orias’s abilities extend far beyond mere prognostication. Uniquely endowed with the ability to both cast and create incantations, they are also a sacred alchemist, supernally guided by the world’s natural elements. Baptised as the Vice of Greed, they reprise their ancient role on earth; all creatures flock toward them with empty bellies, hoping to sate themselves on their magic. Orias’s witchcraft is not inwrought but rather a teachable medium: though first among them, it has been known to fail. At once luring and repelling, their wings are composed of granite-grey feathers and, when harnessing their divinity, they wear a silver veil over their eyes.

THE HISTORY.

Even some of the most terrible creatures were only mortal once—and yet, even when they were only flesh and bone, Orias hummed with something ancient. Divinity passed quietly around the light, the sun brushed lazily over their body; to fully embrace it was to glimpse a vestige of God. All around them, there was pestilence and plague, empty bellies and a black-mouthed void, but under the wet forest foliage they waxed with light. As God’s children grew gaunt in famine, his creation curling at the sides from rot, primeval power gathered around Orias. From their hands, divination and magic entered the world: they called them enchanter, spell-caster—neither was right, neither fit, nothing quite captured the strange unaccountability of their gifts. Orias was not a witch, but a fountain, and a world of sorcery spilled forth from them. Such power, however, does not remain hidden for long. It was to the desperately hungry that the leaves carried its whispers—soft-spoken, they sang of a figure with strange power lying fallow in the forest. By their hand, they blessed harvest as effortlessly as they raised the dead. Fatal wounds were salvaged by nothing more than a vial of pomade and their touch. As if a spectre of God, they tilted their neck up to greet the sky and the stars sighed down their secrets to them. There was no explanation for the divinity that hooked itself between Orias’ ribs: they knew not what they were, or where they came from. But the people didn’t care to investigate—after all, they were not searching for answers. They were searching for help.

When your maker forsakes you, you will sign away your soul to anything for a sliver of solace, even a monster. Hands pulled together in supplication, the people heralded them as God’s Messenger, a prophet, whittled in the Heavens and floated down to the earth by their Creator. Whether their gifts had fallen from the clouds or crawled up from beneath the rock debris, however, Orias couldn’t possibly say. All they knew was this: there was something in them, certainly, but it wasn’t God. When the people finally sought them out, half-starved and falling onto their knees in the marsh-mud, one could not ignore the strange sensation their beauty left them with. At once transcendent and terrifying, Orias seemed to them like a providence they could believe in: they could not look away, regardless of the cold sweat that washed over them, like the creeping fingers of a thousand hands. When Orias hummed back to them the price of service, the people cut the payment willingly from their own ribs. That was God’s design, was it not? For all you take, you must also give back. Orias cared little for material possessions, for wealth: what they demanded was far more testing. In exchange for their practice, a pool of sorcery drawn from every element in the earth, Orias demanded heredity, legacy, future. What they coveted was lineage, a pond of offspring onto which they could unload their new rites, their balms and tomes, primordial secrets, scribbled in ink. The people surrendered their children and heirs, cupping that promise of divinity in their hands. In their offerings, Orias passed on a new folklore, and in turn, Orias’s votaries knelt before them, like beggars at an altar, their lips pursed in unbroken litany.

From litany grew belief, and from belief spouted worship—before long, reverence crept up from the very soil around them. Prayer began to bury itself deep beneath the layers of the earth, like a long, golden talon dipped in oil, and it was Lucifer who answered its call. Not one to indulge a rival in idolatry, nor share the supplications of those who bowed and scraped, he threw down a gauntlet. Go on stealing morsels were else there could be gold, or tread with him triumphantly into Hell. Refusing to shrink from what had already been written, Orias fixed Lucifer’s fingers between their own: such was their destiny, or so the stars had told them once. On earth, their children went on bleeding the ground of its magic, transforming themselves into great totems, and in Hell Orias sharpened their power, widening their third eye to the heavenly bodies which hung suspended in the night sky. The galaxy reached out its spangled hands, spiralling obediently above Orias. A crooked star, the night creatures called them, watching crazed as Orias carved out incantations with their tongue. As they felt their magic wrap itself around them, the monsters purred, keeling their heads below a thing more deity than demon; more scripture than servant. As power sank towards them, so did prestige, and thus when Lucifer was uprooted from his throne, Orias did not feel the need to bend like a carapace around him. They took a crowbar to their rib and pried out the old pieces of themselves left in them; exchanging one benefactor for another, they settled themself at the feet of the son, climbing to sit above a throne of their own.

Where their companions, blood-mouthed, tore their way up through the earth, Orias floated diaphanously up to its gates. Like the moon that circles the sun only to eat it, their old world seemed to stretch out its hands to greet them. Their return split the earth in two: some spat blood at the soil they tread, disparagingly branding them False Prophet, Spring of Evil, yet there were others who clung to their steps, devoted, each movement as enthralling as the next. They loved them for it. Orias did not care—it was not love for which they had been spewed out into the world. They desired to chew on worship. Between the interludes of their absence, the world was much changed from the one they had left behind, yet they marvelled at the way that their spell seized every hole and void, every pair of desperate hands, every stomach yawning with unfed longing. Seers sought to commune with the stars; men tunnelled their ravening fingers into the dirt, searching for relics; humankind turned to tracing billows of the waters, pencilling over rings of oak, mapping the placement of the sun, hoping that the world might betray its secrets to them. One might suspect a creature so divorced from themself to shrink at the sight, but Orias did not. Bowing deeply beneath them, all beings of the New Testament beseeched their intervention. They each fell at the base of a defaced altar and offered prayer blind: it hardly mattered whether their supplications grew out of hunger or longing, strung together for an itching palm or a closed fist—they made vagrants of themselves. Between magic sighs and religious whispers, Orias begins to feel themself splintering into something triune: the prophet, the monster, the god. There are some who revile yet another site of worship. Yet, Orias’s body drones with power—such is their design.

THE CONNECTIONS.

ISOLDE WICKEN: Antithesis. She is a fascination of theirs, but not of the infatuating kind. The two of them have never interacted, have never sighed a word to each other, have never exchanged anything more but an entranced glance—but then, perhaps they don’t need to. A glance tells Orias all they need to know. They call Orias the False Prophet for good reason: they are the Great Pretender, a drove of impious wanderers at their altar, while Isolde is the holy Priestess to whom the worshipping masses flock to listen. Perhaps she has become an object of envy—but then, perhaps not. If they held Isolde’s position in higher esteem, they might view her as an adversary; a threat to be vanquished underfoot. But the power of the Hundred-Eyed God only pales in comparison to the primordial force of the Original Witch, they who made themself a monstrous god. Isolde is their opposite in every conceivable way. Gentle, faithful, good. Though capable of seeing the end of all things, subjective as her visions may be, she still seems to shift uncomfortably at Orias’s presence—as if she doesn’t know how all this will end. They’d be lying if that wasn’t the source of great amusement to them.

ESTIENNE WICKEN: Scheme. They are an empty void, and still they swallow something. When Orias looks at Estienne, they don’t see something beautiful nor powerful—instead, they seize an advantage. Both of them are far more comfortable lurking in the shadows than standing in the light, tilling at the dark as if it were the fifth and final element, coaxing it into performing their bidding. In them, Orias senses an irrevocable ambition; an unstoppable hunger. When they meet their following gaze, they detect an invincible appetite, as if their ravenous teeth have already been clenched around the shape of the world. There is something palpably terrible in them, something dark and slinking and wicked, and that in itself yields a golden opportunity to Orias—power to harness or corrupt, they haven’t yet decided. After all, a mortal cannot be expected to fell an entire horde of demons or legions of archangels all alone, even one as powerful as Estienne. Should they hope to transform themself into a conqueror, they’d need friends, allies, and Orias is in a unique position to indulge them. What’s more, their connection to the All-Seeing Priestess of the Hundred-Eyed God is all too delicious to resist, but that is all part of their game.

AZAZEL: Companion. Side-by-side, they are a strange sight to behold: one an ancient soul with the earth’s power at their fingers, the other a dark dove, her Hellhounds yawning faithfully at her side. And yet, the two are cut from the same substance. Spells, enchantment, bewitchment—none of these things are strangers to them, and a gossamer veil arranges itself over them both. They are both carved from mystery, shaped by secrets. Azazel is perhaps the only creature that Orias had genuinely, truly loved; whether this is due to her divine ability to lull or the puzzlingly gentleness she has shown them, Orias doesn’t know. But they would do anything from her. In the dark, Orias casts off for their companion anything ugly; anything real. Wielding the earth in their hands, they craft it into a shape that is attractive to Azazel. There is something maternal in their affection—over the centuries they have spent together, the desire to ward off all that would do her harm has grown like a seed in their chest. It is because of this that the Antichrist has entrusted her protection to them: not as a soldier, but as a friend to stand by her side.

RAHMIEL: Storyteller. There is something terribly melancholy about poetry. Always, it is spilling from the heart, a pool of profound tragedy wrested tightly between broken ribs, and Orias feels this tragedy in Rahmiel’s gold-strung words keenly. He’s not a creature they can say they historically gravitated toward, exactly, finding far more friends in monsters than in archangels, but they’ve come to quietly appreciate their exchanges as he imparts his visions of history—of all the things that hid from Orias’s view once they disappeared beneath the soil. It was Rahmiel who helped them realise the weight of their power here on earth, and the degree to which their rituals had burgeoned; through his eyes and words, they are capable of watching the lives of their children unfold, and their children—and so forth. Nevertheless, their interest in him goes far beyond mere education. Simply put, they’re two creatures that shouldn’t get along, that shouldn’t find such lulling comfort in each other’s company, but still they do. Rahmiel has become, in some shape, Orias’s North Star; their holy compass.

In fair Verona, our tale begins with CARLO AMARANTE, who is TWENTY-EIGHT years old. They are often called CALIBAN and are NEUTRAL. They use HE/THEY pronouns.

Carlo did not come out of the womb wailing against injustice, nor did he ever interest himself in being a particularly good person. They had never been motivated to right the wrongs of the world, nor had they become a crusader in their later years. Sometimes, one bad instinct collides with one good deed: so has been Carlo’s path, from the moment he pushed one pale domino and watched a score of them fall. For all his mother harped on him being LESSER than her somehow, they worked in their own self-interest a majority of the time. It was mere coincidence that the acts preserving their rebellion, the things that would ensure they could eventually be free, seemed to be GOOD DEEDS. When he was young and he smuggled a fresh-faced girl back to her home country on a whim, it wasn’t because she was terrified, alone, and barely spoke Italian. He procured her freedom because it would hurt his mother’s industry, and whatever gouged her pockets, they quickly signed on to be a part of. They learned their part well, quickly understanding that in a war between mother and son, they’d best fight by proxy. Deeds were done in his name without ever truly tracing back to him, and so the BATTLE began.

Little can be said for their childhood, for they were rarely allowed one. Tutors streamed in and out of the home from as long as he could remember, teaching him bits of everything that Sabine deemed useful. These lessons supplemented his normal education, and were meant to groom him into the PERFECT heir. No assembly required, he’d once heard her say to a fling. She might’ve had better luck with a G.I. Joe doll. No one explained to the glorious Amarante that when you fill a child’s head with all that it will take to dethrone you, there is so little to stop them from doing so. Perhaps it would’ve pleased her, had he wanted it for himself, but in the end, Carlo wanted very little. At most, what they craved was ANONYMITY, and they would never get it with her collar on their neck, her hand wrapped around their leash. All his life, only one thing had been in his way, and when the time came, he dismantled it with methodical precision, until there was not even a scandal as Sabine fell from grace. No, it had been too slow a burn, her final dramatic moments quiet and without audience.

For a time, Carlo felt peace. It was only a few months, but it might as well have been years, the way it stretched beautifully before them. He moved away from Italy, traveled a bit with the money he’d squirreled away when she still let him put his hands on it, and could’ve sworn he met a hundred people, none of whom knew his name. No longer were they compared to the effervescent charisma of their mother, contrasted and found wanting and GHOULISH in her wake. No longer did they consider what repercussions her actions would bring, for consequences were never paid by the queen herself, but were often paid double by her surrogate. They found that they, too, could be charming, in a quiet sort of way. They, too, could make friends all on their own, and could be satisfied with the meager power afforded by being CARED FOR by someone. Carlo found himself rapt as he gazed upon the loving connections he saw throughout the world, and a hunger was at last born within him: he wanted LOVE. Simple and cruel, to want such a thing that has never been afforded to you, but he almost had it. Comfort and safety was a butterfly within his net, yet four words on the other end of a telephone could SHATTER it all.

She’s started up again, the whisper reached him, line disconnecting before he could figure out who had summoned him. Perhaps they thought him motivated by doing the right thing, and felt he would be happier to know what she was up to, but on the contrary: the very thought set him into a TAILSPIN. The more power she amassed, the more danger she would be in, especially embroiling herself in Verona’s politics. They still had enough contacts to know that Verona’s mafiosos were widening their scope, becoming an international organization of sorts. It wouldn’t be long before the Amarante name became known, and then what was he to do? Everything he touched withered, everything they wanted burned to ash and smoke as they reached for it. There was no end to his torment, no surcease on the horizon as long as she lived. His plan was to simply enter and exit, an assassin in his own right, but reaching Sabine Amarante was far too difficult for that sort of approach. Now, Carlo remains STUCK, anchored to his task and longing to be free of it. They will not falter if given the chance, but what they long for is nothing violent or ambitious; it is a strange thing, to want NORMALITY so badly you would kill for it.

SABINE AMARANTE: Mother. If one could ask fate, it would seem they’ve always been destined to kill each other. Carlo’s only thought is that he will not allow himself to die first. They hold no hopes for destroying her building power as easily as they had when she to some extent trusted them, but they still know how she works. He’s had a long time to figure out all her tricks, and he won’t stop hunting her, not when his tunnel vision has narrowed so extremely. Sabine has become the source of all his problems, and right or wrong, Carlo cannot see past her or understand a larger future at stake. If anything gets in his way, he will mow it down, though he may regret it in the end. For him, family has always been nothing more than an inevitable duel, and it’s one they intend to win.

PIERO RUIZ: Gnat. The willful pride of a teenager is something exhausting to a person like Carlo. While they recognize his fervor, they also understand that nothing will come of it. A family name, as Carlo so often learned, is much more of a curse than a blessing, and it will not carry you far without merit of your own. He hopes, for the kid’s sake, that he can demonstrate such merit, but he rather dislikes how often that seems to get in the way of Carlo’s own information seeking. He will need to leverage information to get to Sabine, and at every turn Piero steps in his way, a kid with a thirst to prove himself and a confidence Carlo has never possessed. If Piero were more skilled, it would frighten them. As it is, Carlo largely swats them away, not wanting to permanently damage him unless they have to.

YAMAMOTO OMI: Temptation. For someone who grew into adulthood surrounded by models, the Sparrows entice him far more than they ought. Omi in particular catches his attention; something in their gaze makes him think of warmth, even though he knows it’s only a ruse. Why, then, does he continue to torment himself, paying calls to the Dark Lady and trying to get information from all of Mona’s lovely Sparrows? Why, then, does he find himself so often drowning in Omi’s warmth, in her gaze, until the sun blushes pink against the sky? He’s probably a fool. He definitely can’t afford to be one. There’s just... something more to her, just out of reach, and that something reminds him of all that he covets in the world. Serenity and peace, passion and play, all of them come into being when Omi is near, and that terrifies him.

HELOISE MAKSIMOVICH: Confusion. It’s shocking, how naive and curious she is. Heloise will go anywhere with anyone, as he was quick to find out after seeing her leave the Dark Lady with multiple people in one afternoon. She was a shallow girl, perhaps, but a well-meaning one, and she had eyes full of stars with a romantic heart to match. They should’ve told her the truth when she first asked them a question, but instead, they spun their tale into something better. Something... kinder, to the world and to himself. Now, Heloise still asks for those tales, still hooking her arm through his when she sees him on the street. Carlo has no clue what to do with her. They aren’t accustomed to affection for affection’s sake, and it fulfills such a need within them that they have no idea how to say no, even if they might put Heloise in Sabine’s crosshairs in the process.