Author Games: Dawn of Nameless Desires

CHAMPION OF MIRRYMDYR: Saint Salvius Shiva - @GWVallejo

Name: Saint Salvius Shiva

Age: Seven Thousand Seven Hundred Seventy-Seven

Race: Tiefling

Alignment: Lawful Evil

Personality: Saint is darkness that one can peer into, shadows so clear the silhouettes of them stick out in the night. He stands right at the edge of your vision, sinister in his blurry state, a whisper too low to distinguish the letters. He sulks, dragged downwards as if gravity weighs on him differently. Like it's heavier. Time moves more slowly for him, a lavalike flow instead of a crashing wave. He's nimble, silent on his feet, able to sneak through a crowstorm without a single peck on the cheek. But Saint is not malicious, not ill-intended; he's merely a phantom, a selfish ghost. You are afraid of him because of what he can do, and not what he's already done.

Appearance: Salvius portrays evil in its simplest sense: dark colors, eyes the shade of shimmering blood, hair tied back behind devilish horns standing stoic and lovely. His skin is pale and soft but the edges are sharp, his bones perhaps stronger and sturdier than anyone else he might go up against. He's not tall, but he's lanky, fingers like long tendrils capable of so much, too much. His lips are unkissed, smooth in their color but dry in their texture, and when he speaks the sound is thundering, lungs tripling their size to handle the crescendo. He never shows the skin on his arms or his legs. He never lets anyone touch his neck, his collarbones, his chest. Rather than a look turning one to stone, a single touch turns them into fire.

Briefest Backstory: Once a human, Shiva travelled across the third layer of the Nine Hells, an endless swamp of poison and envy, to meet Mammon, an old, serpentine lord of riches and death. An archdevil swayed by greed, Mammon lost to Shiva in a simple game of cards; in return, Shiva grew horns, he was inundated in rippling monochromatic skin, and he accepted immortality from the decaying miser. That was a very long time ago. Many nights have come and gone. Still, in Shiva's dreams, he's haunted by the endless acid rain, the scent of the bog, the neverending pelt of hail sharpened like knives. Was this worth it? Did forever have too high a cost? Am I living, or am I walking these snowlands undead?

Weapons/Skills: Both a powerful necromancer and wild poisonmaker, Saint has many tools in his belt to predict the future and readily prepare for it. It's said he's a different man depending on the name one calls him. Saint can communicate with the dead, raising them from their buried graves to speak, their echoes burning with hellfire. Salvius blends wheatgrass and sunflower—harmless, beautiful things—into poisons hazardous and raw. Liquid sloshes in his goblets stained with dying colors, the effects of just one sip fatal, a misery. He likes to say his concoctions often taste like caramel, viscous and stinging as it slides down the throat. Shiva is useless. Shiva, though divine, brings nothing, a mere receptor to the power both Saint and Salvius have been able to acquire. He'll wake up someday. Perhaps that'll be the end of the world.

Anything Interesting: He loved once, long ago. He loved like wildfire and ravenous hunger, like rivers that swept the trees, storms that tore ships down. Saint loved like the realm was perishing, a world-ending kind of passion, a fever spread among all the Gods. Salvius loved as one always does—with everything they have, unafraid and bold. Shiva's love was timeless, yet impermanent. It was golden, yet it darkened. It was magic until dead. Saint Salvius Shiva loved with all the brightness of the stars in the sky, but always lingering is that howl of death. The wind came, and he loved no more. 

Task Zero:

     His foot slips off the mud and into the water, fire erupting in his ankle and growing numb. When he pulls it out, all that remains is bone, the skin washed away like the burnt crisps on a frying pan, like snowflakes melted on window panes. He doesn't cry out, the pain overwhelming, and he wonders if it'd be easier to slip off the grass, whisper farewell, and dive headfirst into the greenlakes.

He doesn't.

Saint wipes the sweat from his forehead, hair of golden honey slipping over his eyes until he pulls that back as well. Toxicity in the air swirls around him, putrid and thick, a verdant fog superimposed on the entire earth. A low rumble thrums below him, and elsewhere a rain has started. He picks up the pace. Mammon remains only a few yards away.

A scream erupts a million miles back. It dies a thousand miles ahead. "Approach," Mammon speaks, spit flying between the two syllables. He sits atop a pile of items he'd won in games— rings worn by the highest kings, crowns of gemstones not even known to this world, robes worth entire kingdoms laid out and unworn. Mammon himself holds a spear, greener still than his skin, longer even than the lower half of his body, a serpentine tail stretched out like a cobra. He grins as Saint approaches. He laughs as Salvius sits. He scowls as Shiva shakes his hand.

"And what do I get if I win?" Mammon asks, already swimming the depths of Saint's mind. He shuffles cards in his hands, the kings adorned with the faces of men he'd swindled, the queens with the smiles of women who'd swindled him.

"My life, of course," Saint says. It's the first he's spoken in over a year, since his friend had gone away. His friend. What a poisonous word.

"Not good enough!" Mammon growls, saliva landing on Saint's cheek. He forgets to wipe it away.

The human thinks. The human knows. "His life, then," Shiva whispers. Salvius shivers, frost in his spine. Mammon, inside Saint's head, sees him, still just a flame from Shiva's past life, and the archdevil agrees. It's odd to allow a man to bargain with someone else's life, but pain is all Mammon asks for. And pain will come.

Pain may already be here.

Mammon spreads out the cards in front of them, their edges worn, the art on the back faded and indiscernible. "Whoever finds the first ace picks the game," the miser says, voice underlined by a chorus of weeps, the sound likely heard all across the realm.

"Deal."

And so, it's in the third layer of the Nine Hells, Saint's right foot melted away, Salvius's hair brittle and falling out, Shiva's skin decorated with sores and welts—it's this hellscape where he grins madly, and runs a hand over a card here, a card there.

He flips one over. He laughs. The sound is heard nowhere.