Beleth

“History will remember the suffering I brought, but not my own.”

Appearance

Physical: Beleth has had many appearances over the centuries, but currently manifests in the form of a woman in her early thirties with a defined hourglass figure. Her skin is near alabaster in color, with heavy shadows of fatigue under her eyes and blackish-purple stains on her eyelids. Her hair is a pale blonde, curled and pinned in a style that harkens back to the curls of old Hollywood actresses. A pair of charcoal-black horns curl from her head. From her upper arms down, her skin is heavily burned and scarred, stained deep black and charred nearly to bones at her forearms. Her eyes are slit-pupiled with a pale lilac iris, the one constant in her appearance.

Clothing: Beleth has always been an ostentatious, luxury-fixated demon and dresses to flatter her ego. Currently, she has become enamoured with the aesthetic of classic Hollywood starlets. She’s most often seen in a large, extravagant black fur coat and a sleeveless, floor-length dress of purple silk, a slit running up one side of the skirt. The ensemble is completed by a pair of patent stilettos and a velvet ribbon choker. Beleth is incredibly vain and more often than not strives for beauty and sex appeal rather than intimidation or horror.

Personality

Beleth’s arrogance has been one of her defining traits for as long as she and humanity can remember. She’s a showy and highly ceremonial demon who has titanic pride in herself and her abilities. Having been born at the top of the demonic hierarchy, a superiority complex was practically instilled in her from day one. Beleth lords her power over her peers in showy displays of magic and extravagant boasting. Her ego is titanic, but sensitive. She reacts viciously to any slights against her, desperate to never be seen at a disadvantage. In an attempt to appear unfazed, she most commonly plays this off with cruel humor and airs of nonchalance.

A larger amount of Beleth’s confidence than most know is fabricated. She has built her ego as a shield against the centuries of abuse at the hands of her human masters and other demons both. Beleth fears and despises letting any hint of softness show on the surface, and will be the last to admit that something has hurt her. She has resigned herself to being seen as a monster. At this point in her life, the evidence is far too damning. Her reputation of terror and bloodshed is historic, and most hear of it before meeting the demon herself. Beleth has learned to keep her sorrows hidden. Even if she were to meet someone willing to listen, there’s little chance that she would trust them. She has known more traitors than friends and is extremely jaded.

By nature, Beleth is opportunistic. Her years of experience have taught her that prioritizing others over yourself is a path to swift and humiliating death. Most of the aid she gives to others is unwilling or because she reckons she can gain something from it. There have been a few, over the centuries, that have swayed this belief, but their deaths or betrayals have only cemented Beleth’s values further. At this point, she considers mercy a risk.

On the surface, Beleth is a highly charismatic and bombastic presence. Her work is always done efficiently and with flair. For all her ego, she does admittedly have the skills and power to back herself up, but has a habit of ignoring her own flaws. As she has met few true peers, she can end up blindsided by weaker foes who play her arrogance and bluster against her.

Abilities and Peculiarities

Beleth, as a demon, is a total shapeshifter. She has no “true” form--distilled down to her rawest essence, she is an ever-shifting mass of pitch black flesh and tar colored blood with too many eyes, teeth where they don’t belong, and limbs in all the wrong places. Demons are genderless monstrosities that are completely incomprehensible to the human eye. They can manipulate pieces of their bodies into weapons, regenerate blood and flesh exponentially, and swell and shrink size with few limits. The most mundane use for this ability is choosing whatever appearance matches that demon’s current aesthetic preferences. Beleth seems to prefer humanoid guises.

Her specialties in magic appear to extend mostly to pyromancy. Beleth’s definition of “pyromancy” is extremely broad. She can manipulate anything from a small flame to a roaring inferno to clouds of smoke--anything’s fair game. Flames of her creation are always purple.

Like all demons, Beleth can make and seal a demonic contract with any human who orders one from her. Demonic contracts are magical arrangements that essentially enslave a demon to a human’s service for a set amount of time. That amount of time depends on the human’s commands--which can range from the every day and mundane to building an empire. Only once these orders have been followed can the contract be fulfilled and the demon go free. The demon must obey if they wish to remain alive. The human, in their turn, must summon the demon and create the contract without the slightest of flaws so that they are not slain by their enraged slave.

Beleth’s contracts were historically sought after for her ability to influence love. Most who contract her desire the typical romance, perhaps a perfect soulmate. Beleth isn’t limited to merely romantic love, however, she can manipulate any sort. Adoration, infatuation, platonic--all. She has made kings beloved by their people and granted mobs of obsessed fans to celebrities both ancient and modern. Beleth can also perform the reverse and destroy such feelings of affection if her contractors wish to ruin someone else’s reputation instead of inflating their own. She views most of her contractors as insufferably shallow and short-sighted.

Past

Birthplace: ancient Sumeria, by best estimate

Childhood: Beleth fell from the skies enveloped in an inferno and landed straight in the Euphrates River, staining the waters black with her arrival. Like all demons, her intelligence and abilities matured exponentially. Her career of contracts began when Ham, a son of Noah, enlisted her to help him write a book of mathematics. She went on to serve the first city-states of Sumer, Akkad and Babylon, before eventually ending up in Jerusalem in the court of King Solomon the Wise.

Early Adulthood:The first few centuries of Beleth’s life seemed to determine the rest of it. She continued to serve victorious conquerors or wealthy emperors--civilizations such as old Egypt, Troy, and the Roman and Byzantine empires laid claim to her contract at one time or another. Her reputation became a brutal and fearsome one, marked by a trail of burned villages and slain challengers. Beleth came to take pride in her infamy while she tried to ignore and forget her many brushes with death.

Later Adulthood: Eventually, her thousands of years on Earth made Beleth more jaded and less given to mercy. Her goodwill towards her human contractors had deteriorated over the years, as had her hope for a day when she wouldn’t be chained to another’s will. In vain, she tried to make contracting her more perilous, more inconvenient, and only succeeded in making her reputation more notorious. Her emotions often shifted between apathy and an uncomfortable, cloying melancholy.

Present 

Current Location: Sanctum, United States

Currently living with: no one

Current Circumstances: Beleth has most recently been summoned by Leander Fields in a desperate ploy to solve a murder years gone cold. Her feelings towards the idea of contracts can only be described as exhaustion. She feels adrift in the modern world, feeling at once like a monster and an irrelevant fossil. Leander, Beleth thinks, is just another in a long line of forgettable humans. Her motivation to fulfill her contract primarily comes from a desire to get it over and done with as soon as possible.

Other

• Her earliest days are highly ambiguous and largely unknown due to her being born around the same time as the birth of recorded history. The only one who knows all the details is Beleth herself, and she’s loathe to share any with even the most well-meaning of human historians
• Beleth took up smoking after Belial’s death
  • She started with opium, but added tobacco to the mix during her stint in the British Empire
  • She’s undeniably addicted, but it’s unknown if her health has worsened, as demon and human constitutions are so different
• Her favorite color is purple due to its traditional associations with royalty
• Has burned Troy, Rome, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, large portions of London, and El Dorado
  • Dorado is perhaps the one city she doesn't take pride in burning
• Beleth was on the side of Troy in the Trojan War, but conspired with the Greeks to cause the fire of Troy due to her hatred of Prince Paris
• The last time Beleth was contracted, aside from Leander, was during the mid-40s
  • Her current guise is heavily modeled on Hollywood actresses of the time, and she peppers in much of the era's slang in her speech as a result
• Beleth is “highly flammable.” Her body temperature is normally that of a furnace and it will only increase with rage until the point she lights on fire
• She has a weakness for sugar
  • It’s a very big weakness--she was once left in a room with a sugar sculpture the size of most dining tables and devoured it in two minutes
• Beleth always puts on a fake accent for whatever language she’s speaking in order to sound like a natural speaker
  • Her “real” voice has a Sumerian accent, as that was her first language--she started covering it up after younger demons made fun of her for it