I
Jericho was born to the noble Lutumbornes, alongside his twin brother. His parents were not particularly religious but, being ill and weak for the duration of her pregnancy, they believed it was a holy miracle that both twins and their mother survived their birth. To honor this they named their children after holy stories; The mighty walls of Jericho, and the treasonous Apostle, Judas. They lived a comfortable childhood. As siblings often are, they were close with one another and yet polar opposites. Jericho was inclined to reading, followed the rules of his status, hardly cared for other children, and politely attended his parents’ parties to study the adults who fawned over his curly mop of gorgeous red hair and the almost cartoonishly thick and large glasses upon his nose. Judas spent most of his time outside, flirting with any girl who could withstand his obnoxious nature and fickle heart. Jericho was given private tutors for his quickly blossoming and unique mind while Judas did as he pleased. Neither of them really cared for the stuffy study room or the rap of a ruler upon their knuckles, so they avoided their education in equal measure, Jericho instead preferring to study by his lonesome in his family’s vast library. That was where he took to medicine for the first time. He wanted to study the body. He wanted to heal the sick with his own two hands, and study every drop of blood of those who died on his table. Jericho knew he would never be allowed to pursue medicine as the heir to their estate. There was no way his parents would leave it to his rake of a brother. He did not object when they began the arrangements for his future marriage when he was twelve, he watched his life be planned and was silent. His father and mother were close companions of the monarchy and were therefore often at whatever royal function struck their fancy, taking their well-behaved and curious son along to begin learning what his future responsibilities would look like. There he made his first and most unlikely friend in the young prince Stolas Altmara. While Jericho could never quite understand the other boys his age, Stolas was kind and welcoming in his own rough, boyish way. This was where Jericho first developed feelings for another person. He didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but Stolas was his first crush.
II
His second companion would be the woman he was to marry. A princess of a tiny kingdom that often traded with the Altmara kingdom, she was an ideal match for the Lutumbornes’ political goals. Her name was Anastasia, and she was the strangest person Jericho had ever met. A blind tiefling born to human parents, she had lost her mother when the woman fled upon seeing the only child she bore for the king was a demon and didn’t want to lose her head. Anastasia was the only one who could get Jericho outside of his library with her promises of adventure, which he quite hated the idea of but she was always so convincing. She taught him that life was for the living. Together they would listen to the vast ocean and she would plant kisses on his nose and tell him how they would elope and spend the rest of their lives on the sea. Even though Jericho would find himself wondering what it would be like if he could live that same life with the prince. Unfortunately, his first companion would be the first to leave his life. It was discovered that his father had only brought their family so close to the royalty because he was planning a coup. They managed to kill the tyrant queen Altmara, but in turn his father was killed, and his mother was found and hung for treason. For a few years he did run the estate. Until he was fifteen, and his interests began to lie elsewhere- and Anastasia was ready to sweep him away. Together they lived exactly how she had promised him they would. They sailed the seas and embraced the life of pirating, searching for treasure and building somewhat of a crew. Jericho never felt like a pirate. He felt like a stuffy nobleman in the bottom of a massive ship content with nothing but his books and his privacy. The only thing he enjoyed about that part of his life was the newfound freedom to finally, finally practice medicine on living, willing patients. Very few died under his elaborate and clever care. But those that did, he would carve and quarter and study for days, weeks, organs in jars, bones cleaned to assemble skeletons. As their numbers grew and the men on the ship sought his guidance as a doctor he became acquainted with a few in uneasy friendships, but none were quite like the bounty hunter who was almost always at his door. Darrow. Darrow became his greatest friend and sole confidant, the only one who could will Jericho to the bow of the ship to feel the breeze on his face. They would spend hours talking while Jericho pored over research and dissected lungs, or when Darrow sorted through junk for treasure. Their relationship blossomed into a form of intimacy further than simple friendship over the course of those few years, and there were many mornings Jericho awoke to the form of another man in his bed. Jericho knew it was not to be. Darrow’s heart, like Anastasia’s, was filled with the sea. Soon he would have to live on land again, far away from the ocean’s stink. But there were things he had to do first. Before he left, he used an ancient book of dark magic and his own hand-written grimoires to perform a procedure on Anastasia. He tore her useless eyes from her skull and drawing from the power of hell he used his own spell to give her eyes of hell. No physical eyes, of course, but sight nonetheless, sight that allowed her to see everything. Even through the back of her head. That was his first brush with hellish magic. Like it does many men the implication of that power consumed him, made him hunger for more. Finally, in his quarters against the wooden floors he drew the shape of a pentagram in his own blood and offered his soul to satan. He carved pentagrams into his palms, and shaking, placed them upon the star. Needless to say his offering was accepted. Jericho planned his deal carefully. Clause by clause, paragraph by paragraph, he painstakingly detailed his deal, cheating the devil out of enacting a prized case of “be careful what you wish for” with one small and unintentional exception- Jericho would be sick. He would feel the sickness of the sea that so trapped him and black pus would drain from his body. This was a necessary detriment, one that came naturally with being possessed, so they struck their deal and his soul was satan’s.
III
Now, only twenty-two, Jericho was everything he had ever yearned of being. There was no reason to feign the fodder of his wife. He was sure he loved her once. Just not the way she wanted him to. He ended their marriage, leaving his ring on her dresser, Where she saw him for the first and the last time with the freshly piercing gaze of his yellow eyes. She said nothing. They parted for good. He left Darrow with a note of where he was going in case they could meet again, and officially began his practice. He set up his clinic in a town close to but outside the walls of the Altmara kingdom, and began to see patients. Any of the carefree, wild parts of himself he had left with Darrow were long gone in the sails of that ship. He grew stoic. Cold. There was no empathy left in his being. All he cared for was his work, his tools an extension of himself. He took lovers now and again but he never stayed with them. Earthly attachments were simply a human distraction, and he was more than human now. He came to believe there was little in the ways of human affection for him, then, and had very few partners who he truly trusted. an Imp, a Dragonborn... he lost his touch with man in losing them. Not forever, though, but it would take a lawyer rather than an army and seven days to bring his walls crashing back down.
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