Nathan

In his current state, Nathan is a 167cm or 5'6 tall demon and has a weight of 53kg or 116lbs, making him a rather small and underweight person. His eyes are bright blue and he has slightly pointier teeth than your average demon. He has a very pale dull red skin and a slender build. His horns are a yellow-brown in colour and are very long and pointed; they bend back and up again and have a triangular contour. Because of his current situation, he's badly malnourished and skin over bones, but his situation has been improving. He has curly shoulder length fainted brown hair.

His old clothing included a black pair of wristbands, a ripped pair of blue trousers, and a couple of rings on his left hand, as well as a light blue medium sleeved vest fit for Cloxygroven's mild summer temperatures. Nowadays his clothes are a lot more worn and have rips in them everywhere, as well as having lost their colour. He no longer has his shoes and his vest can't be buttoned up completely thanks to lost buttons and ripped button holes.

Colour palette

Nathan used to be a very energetic man before he got lost in his dark dimension. He had a hard time focusing on his task ahead but was always enthusiastic and ready to face the day. He enjoyed using his energy and favoured being around people. Thanks to his parents he made attempts to hide his enthusiasm more, but they never managed to shame his behaviour out of him. He had a healthy amount of curiosity inside of him and wasn't scared of a lot of things.

When Nathan got trapped into his dark dimension, he lost all contact with people and for thousands of years was forced to eat the remains of everyone who died there just to get some nourishment. Over the years he lost his ability to communicate with others and he forgot who he was, degrading to a state where he was more of a mindless beast trying to survive than a person. The recent change he got thanks to the artifact he swallowed made him capable of being who he is again, but until he is socialised again that part of him is permanently gone.

❖ Back at home he hated birds always waking him up early with their hellish tweeting. He started taking their eggs as revenge but actually ended up really loving their taste.

❖ No one remembers his name, not even him. Nathan is just what the guard calls him.

Home at the farm
Nathan was born in the countryside as the son of two fairly strict farmers. Save for the traveller's road that ran by their lands, the area was nearly deserted and Nathan rarely got to meet people outside of his own family. The farm was owned by his father and his uncle, and the only contact with another child he got was with his uncle's son of three years older. Despite his parents' wishes of him and their disapproval, Nathan grew up to be a loud and cheerful kid. Attempts to quell his spirit, he didn't seem to grow out of it but he became more careful about when he'd be himself.

Work at the farm meant long and harsh days, but Nathan's unending well of energy aided him at making the tasks easier and adding a fun factor to anything he did. He even regularly recruited his cousin into mischief when the kid was sure no one was around to witness it. For seventeen years Nathan's parents tolerated his behaviour and lack of discipline, but when even after entering into young adulthood nothing about him changed they sent him to the city to learn some discipline.

The city
A bit disheartened by his parents leaving him on his own like that, Nathan still was glad he got to go live where all the people were. He was given a minimal amount of money, just enough to settle the first few days, so that he got the opportunity to for once work hard for his own survival. Nathan believed that he worked hard enough on the farm already to earn his survival, but he couldn't do a lot to protest their decision. He started working at a mail delivery station as it required him to be up early and allowed him to explore the city on his delivery rounds.

He ended up enjoying his job; it gave him the ability to get rid of all his excess energy and he got to explore the gigantic city on his own terms without anyone yelling at him for being excited about his job. His troubles focusing on finding the place he needed to be did put him at a disadvantage, but he was certain he could work on it now that he was motivated by something else than punishment to improve.

... And its dangers
For the past three months he had been earning himself a steady income sufficient for food and a place to stay at. He kept his parents informed about his positive progress in the hopes that they'd recognise their son was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, and that with an attitude completely opposite to what they demanded of him. He missed being around family but his colleagues at the post office made for good friends and made up for the loneliness.

On one of his deliveries at the end of the day Nathan was invited in for a drink, to which he gladly accepted. He didn't remember anything after entering the place, but when he woke up the next morning he was dehydrated, freezing cold, and his entire body burned in pain as though he had been soaked with acid. Entirely covered in blood but with no seeming wound, he tried to get up and escape from the alleyway he was in but couldn't move his legs. By calling out he got the attention of a passerby, who brought him to the nearest hospital.

Again not remembering a thing after the stranger lended him a shoulder, he woke up patched up in one of the beds of a hospital room. One of the medics there explained to him that the city had a problem with blood sucking people who injected a venom into their victims that prevented the blood from clotting so that they could eat their fill without the wound closing. That night he must've been attacked by one who used a lot of venom, explaining the small wounds he had, but not the fact that he hadn't died from either blood loss or venom side effects yet.

He went home that evening as he couldn't afford a longer stay at the hospital, and he had lost most of the money he earned to the days he was out in the hospital. There wasn't anything he could do against the burning feeling, he was told, and all he could do was hope that the fever didn't suddenly take over and killed him in his sleep. For weeks he was too ill to go to work and he spent the last of his money buying food and water in a last effort to beat his fever. Two weeks after the incident took place, in his rest he felt the last fibre of life leave his body.

It didn't end up killing him. He woke up in his bed again, feeling just fine, the burning in his veins and the fevers completely gone. This was the best he had felt in the last weeks, but he was there and alive. His food had spoiled and he didn't have any money left on him, so he returned to his post office where he had been fired thanks to his long absence. He felt defeated and would prepare to go home, but he wouldn't survive until his parents were there to pick him up long enough without money. He searched around the city for a job and found one as clothes washer in the streets.

His enthusiasm was killed and he couldn't wait to return home again. He noticed that his mouth tasted pretty vile and despite having food after a week he felt an insatiable hunger. He returned to the hospital he was treated at fearing that something was wrong and he hadn't fully recovered, but when the same medic who explained what had happened to him the first time returned with a handful of guards and an arrest warranty he winged it.

He ended up completely exhausted in an alleyway but he seemed successful in getting rid of the guards. He collapsed and fell asleep, only to be woken up by a woman nudging him at the shoulder. She let him know that he was safe and that she wasn't going to hurt him, but that he had to be more careful about visiting medics. He promised he would be and she went on to explain that he had caught a little condition called vampirism, a body-altering illness that forced him to take up blood into his diet. He didn't believe her so she left him with the last remark that if he wanted to poison himself with his own venom, he could go right ahead and live back like a regular person.

He didn't want to believe it, but it wasn't like he had an alternative to stilling his hunger seeing as he ate healthily and still didn't get any results. He got up and noticed he could see a lot better in the dark, but he wanted to be certain that the woman was right. He carefully traveled the streets and stole a chicken out of its pen. He sucked the animal's blood out of the newly created wound and disgusted by the act almost choked on the substance, but when he had swallowed a decent amount his hunger was completely gone and the foul taste in his mouth was gone. It was enough confirmation for him.

The cold dark
The confirmation didn't help him when he was captured by the guard and sentenced to death. Vampires were dealt with in a very specific way; a remnant of the spiritual purge had turned a building into its own separate dimension that could only be accessed during very short windows of time every month. Together with another captive he was sent there, and the place was exactly what it said on the box: a freezing realm that only contained a large, fancy house in ruins and the gate that surrounded it. The inside of the house was lit by moonlight shining through its large windows but when looking outside from the inside, only pitch blackness could be seen.

The two saw the gate was open and tried to escape through there, but no matter which direction they took they always walked through the front gate again. His companion died after a week and eventually hunger compelled Nathan to eat his remains. In the ruins he found some remains of others who had died there, perfectly preserved thanks to the freezing cold temperature. He bridged his hunger surviving off of them, but when years later he ran out of remains, he didn't seem to die. Only the hunger remained.

Countless times other people would join him in that dimension, but every time after weeks they would give in to the cold and die, making for his next meal. Things became a drag for Nathan. Slowly he stopped communicating with these victims to save his energy and he would only approach them when they were rendered immobile by hypothermia, making use of the last bit of warmth they had inside their body before ending their life and using them to still his hunger for just a bit longer.

It became routine for Nathan. Slowly he began to forget what he was there for, how he had gotten there, how to talk, and eventually who he was. When the guard found out about his existence they used him as a fairytale to scare people from committing crime. His corpse got to feed more, but ultimately he was stuck there to starve until he figured out how to leave. 

Warmth
Time was just an illusion. Since a few thousand years he hasn't even been completely aware anymore of everything happening. It surprised him when on one of the victims he was thrown he found a warm faintly glowing stone. In his first reflex, he swallowed the item and for the first time in an eternity felt real warmth erupt from his stomach again. It wasn't much, but when freezing for an eternity even a few degrees are a blessing.

The next few days he regained some of his awareness. His hunger had been dulled and the more time went on, the more the warmth spread all over his body. Weeks passed and the corpse his body had become grew a thicker skin and finally began regenerating the muscle it had almost all lost. In just years, he was back at his original strength, and he felt better than ever. His stomach didn't even cry out in hunger anymore, the amount of bodies he got was just enough to keep him going.

He didn't know what this artifact had done to him, but he would never let go of it again.

Art by Warao