Eligos

“To the last I grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!”

Appearance

Physical: Eligos currently takes the form of a girl of roughly eighteen with pale, flushed skin and a slender frame. She’s built like a sprinter--fairly muscled but with the intention of speed rather than power. A wild mane of curly black hair shades her face with uneven bangs, the rest reaching her shoulders. She hides a third eye beneath her bangs. It is heavily scarred. Small spikes and spines of bone sprout at her joints and collarbones. Her fangs are jumbled and uneven, a mix of under and overbite. Small and large scars litter Eligos’s skin, and the veins on her forearms are highlighted, resembling an injury caused by a lightning strike.

Clothing: Eligos’s clothing is always rough and simple. She currently dresses in the fashion of a delinquent--long, pleated skirts of black canvas, ill-fitting tank tops in drab colors, and scuffed combat boots. Over this is a long, baggy overcoat that is always slipping off of her shoulders with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Nearly all of her clothing is torn and full of holes around the hems and seams. Eligos can manipulate her body and clothes however she pleases, so her ragged look is a conscious choice.

Personality

By nature, Eligos is reserved and secretive. She feels more comfortable isolating herself and marinating in her own thoughts than confiding in other people, and no amount of coaxing will persuade her to do otherwise unless she wants to. She sees her stoicism and secrets as signs of strength, a reassuring sense of personal security, and won’t sacrifice them for anything. Eligos considers pieces of personal information and memories as bargaining chips, as leverage for blackmail, and so viciously protects her own sensitivities. She finds solace in her distance from others, considering her status as an enigma a source of personal pride.

Eligos, at this point, prefers to be feared than to be welcomed. She has been well-liked in the past and her mercy and personal connection to those who have done her harm has numbed her to the comfort found in friendship. If people fear you, she reasons, then they’ll stay away. They won’t cross you. They won’t betray you. And if they harm you, it won’t hurt half as much. Because fear is often synonymous with respect amongst demons, Eligos is satisfied with either and seeks both. She uses this policy of “substitution” for many of her emotions--rage is easier to deal with than grief, and apathy safer than investment. So many of her feelings and reactions are fabricated that Eligos will often fall apart in private in the form of silent fits of sobbing.

The truest portion of Eligos’s nature is her patient, intricate plotting. She has always been like this, even when she was younger and more idealistic. She has no trouble with waiting years, decades, and even centuries for her plans to fully unravel and take effect. Eligos is very methodical and careful when it comes to planning ahead, often ruminating over a plot for weeks on end in order to ensure that she has not left any loose ends or loopholes. She maintains this coolheaded mindset even during times of crisis, able to beat back any rising anxieties until the threat has passed. Very few things can make Eligos lose her temper and act rashly in the heat of the moment--her anger usually simmers under the surface, more fuel for the fire of her vengeance and bitterness. The dedication she has to her goals is terrifying.

Abilities and Peculiarities

Eligos, 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. Eligos is commonly seen in humanoid guises with the occasional animal one for stealth or travel.

As far as combat magic goes, Eligos appears to have either a preference or affinity for ice and frost. She prefers to freeze things solid so she can easily shatter them, but can also turn her breath into winter fog, fire icicles like arrows, and manipulate her skin and limbs into rough spears of ice.

Like all demons, Eligos 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.

Eligos was most commonly contracted because of her ability to foresee the outcomes of battles and wars through her third eye. Her foresight uses a very liberal definition of “battle,” as she can also predict the victor in individual duels between politically significant figures or soldiers. Most of her abilities focus on people of nobility, royalty, or military status, as Eligos can also attract the favor of these individuals towards her contractor. Her third eye also makes her very sensitive to enchanted objects and anything else with a magical aura. Eligos was commonly utilised by humans as a bloodhound for such items.

Past

Hometown: ancient Sumeria, the heart of the Assyrian Empire

Childhood: Like all demons, Eligos was spawned from Hell and immediately hurled onto the Earth. She grew and matured in a matter of months due to being a demon. Although Eligos was a middle-ranking demon and thus unremarkable in terms of power, her ability to foresee the outcome of battles made her a prized outlier amongst her peers. Her contractors’ abuse of this ability made Eligos incredibly bitter and closed off, something she only began to grow out of when in the service of King Solomon.

Early adulthood: Eligos, while not made into a living war machine like demons more powerful than her, was a very close observer to such events and often the accomplice or backup to bloodthirsty high-rankers. She grew both anxious about the change she saw coming over the high-rankers and bitterly insecure about her own perceived lack of power. All she seemed useful for were her abilities as an oracle of battle, which was a skillset Eligos valued but grew sick of using.

Later adulthood: After a perceived betrayal by one of her oldest friends, Eligos grew fixated on not only seizing vengeance, but also scrubbing away at the aspects of herself she saw as “weak” or “vulnerable.” She sought strength in everything that she did, trying in vain to match the power of the high-ranking demonic royalty that had befouled her. She distanced herself from old friends and contacts, and they from her. The majority of her kind began to see Eligos as a dangerous loose cannon.

Present 

Current location: Sanctum, United States

Currently living with: her contractor, Ashton Fields

Current situation: Eligos thought nothing notable of her current contract or station before coming across Beleth, an old friend and current enemy, by chance. Having the target of her vengeance in such close proximity has stoked the fires of Eligos’s rage anew. She is baffled both by Beleth’s attempts to reconcile and the supposed ignorance the other demon has of her betrayal of Eligos. Swearing to not let this stand, Eligos redoubles her efforts for revenge, determined to shove the evidence of Beleth’s crimes in her face.

Other

• Eligos was immediately captured and put to work by the then-current emperor of Assyria when she was born, an unusual circumstance for most demons as usually they are given a window of a few days to wander and get their bearings before being discovered by humans
  • As such, Eligos grew up far more jaded and bitter than most demons her age
• The injuries to her third eye give her chronic pain which flares and subsides seemingly at random
• She was perhaps most at ease during her time in Solomon’s service
  • This was when she made her first friend(Beleth)and for the first time in her life considered that she was a person worthy of comfort, stability, and individual hopes
• Eligos’s accent is so odd and unidentifiable because it is a blend of several different ones that aren’t even from the same area or time period
  • These include: Semitic, Occitan, Scottish, Aramaic, and Ancient Greek
• Eligos enjoys raw meat. The bloodier the better, and preferably human.
• She despises the nickname “Ellie”
  • Beleth was the one who gave it to her and used it most often
  • When they first met, Eligos was actually flattered that someone thought so fondly of her as to actually give her a nickname
• Eligos speaks with formal and even archaic language--this is something she has always done, regardless of the time period she’s living in or the language she’s speaking
• Her favorite animals are warhorses and hunting dogs
• Her skin is always cold. The palms of her hands are downright frigid.