Chapter Text
*****
Over thousands upon thousands of years, humanity has preached that books should never be judged by their covers; somehow, though, they always ending up ignoring their advice and condemn a book by the colors on the front. Interestingly, they do this with others of their kind, too. Don't pass a soul off as horrible by their appearance! Wait until you get to know them better, they could be such a wonderful person!
And yet: the respectable shun the fantastical of their race, veering away from someone with a reckless look in their eye, an odd hair color, or ink swirls on their skin (sometimes even just their skin, no tattoos required) like these people are some sort of disastrous plague.
I am not like that. I, like Death, treat all souls equal. And I wish to be treated like an equal human, too. So I will tell you my name, and it will be up to you whether or not you want to hear the story etched into my fragile bones and being.
Or some version of it, anyway. My real name, in my mother tongue, would boil your skin and turn your blood to a thousand flashing lights that would tear you apart in a fraction of a moment. Translating my name into your language would do me no better, though it'd be less likely to kill you. So I will use the name I prefer to use when dealing with the mortal world.
For now, call me Paris.
*****
You've probably already gathered from my little speech that I am not human, that I transcend the laws of mortality. This is an entirely correct assumption. I am not human, though I do enjoy pretending to be one. My very being is a little tricky to explain, honestly. I'll try my best, though.
The short answer to the question of What am I? is a shapeshifting spirit of chaos. The long answer... well, let's not get into that. It's a very unpleasant business that we'll discuss once you get to know me a little better, perhaps.
You're probably having a thought that runs along the lines of: A shapeshifting spirit of chaos? What the hell does that mean?
Patience, darling. I'm getting to that. But it's going to take a lot of explaining, because this is where my story begins.
I am a spirit, but not of Heaven or Hell. I am from a place just under the crust of the planet you call home, Earth. This place is an underworld, yes, but one rarely spoken of, despite how fantastic it is and how many of your living have set foot on its mossy floors.
At the beginning of time, God created the universe. Everyone knows how God created the planets and outer space and the beasts, and how He created man. Hardly a day goes by where someone on Earth doesn't mention the Genesis tale.
What they do not know about is the creation of what your kind currently calls Gloomtown, or who it's run by and for what purpose it exists.
The Garden of Eden, while overseen and shaped by God, had more than just man and animal living within it. One of the highest angels in Heaven after Lucifer's rebellion was sent down to be a sort of divine companion to Adam and Eve. This seraphim had no name (not yet, anyway), and its presence was entirely unknown to those first humans.
This is probably why, after the Primordial Mortals committed their great sin and were cast from Paradise, the Bible made no mention of this angel's subsequent shame and punishment. The angel had not been with Adam and Eve to prevent Lucifer's whisperings, and as such was partially responsible for the Fall of Man. However, they hadn't disobeyed the Lord, either, so it would be unjust to send such a mighty being to Hell with the Devil and his lot. So God sent the seraphim to a purgatory.
Not the Purgatory. Heaven's Purgatory ensures the salvation of those within it. This purgatory was the true Purgatory's antithesis and simply served as a holding place for certain unfortunate sinners until the end of the world, when the place would collapse and its souls would drop into the depths of the netherworld. The angel would also, unfortunately, collapse with the place and be efficiently wiped from existence.
As you may or may not have guessed, that seraphim had just been given jurisdiction over Gloomtown.
And they were pretty pissed off about it, those first few hundred years. But eventually, they had a minor epiphany: why not make the most of their sudden mortality and command over the place (which, by this point, was starting to have a population the size of a massive city)? Why not try to have some meaning in their life?
This was the point in history where Harley Evangeline, Sovereign of Gloomtown, rose from the ashes of that angel.
*****
After an indefinite period of time, another divine being came to Gloomtown.
I barely know anything about this second entity, as Harley frequently refuses to talk about them. What I do know: this being was not from Hell, but it's never clear if it was from Heaven; Harley initially took a liking to it, and somehow, in the last hundred days before the Great Flood, the two of them managed to conceive (believe it or not!) one child a day, totaling to a hundred unborn children. With each day that passed, Harley and this being slowly started to have a falling-out that resulted in the disappearance of this entity on the night of the last child's conception.
The day afterwards, the Flood began in earnest. For every moment it rained, Harley bore their children silently, felt them growing like flower buds before spring within them. In the final few days before the birth of these children, Harley secluded themselves in a higher plane of Gloomtown and placed the being of each child inside of a massive flower that encased them.
And as soon as the rain stopped, one child was born every day. Each birth sent Harley into unimaginable pain; the scars still remain on their being today in the form of thousands upon thousands of eyes on their skin. The first ninety-nine children were born seamless, perfect.
But then came the final child. Something was wrong with him; Harley could tell from the moment the ink-slick petals peeled back to reveal him. At first, they weren't quite sure what was wrong. Then they noticed that the child looked sick and was much quieter than his other siblings had been, and it didn't take very long to locate the source of the problem.
The child's soul was floating outside of his body, a pale, pulsing light that flickered like a candle in a gale-wind. This was a Problem of the highest magnitude. Since souls are responsible for breathing life into the body they dwell in, a living being without a soul was... well, dead. And if that soul stayed hovering like over the child for much longer, he was going to die.
And Harley was not going to let one of their children die.
To cut a likely unbearable story short, Harley managed to tether his soul to his body, but the soul was stuck outside of the body on a chain, doomed to be worn as a pendant. Thanks to this disability, this child would be far weaker than his strong, powerful siblings, but he would possess some very interesting talents.
I suppose now is a very good time to mention that I was that child.
*****
Yeah, I'm an immortal that isn't actually immortal.
You wanna know something funny about it? It sucks! Every other being with a guaranteed lifespan of infinity looks down on you like you're a speck of dust. Like you're some pathetic human whose purpose is to live and die.
Growing up, I was the one who got picked on the most. Almost all of my siblings banded together in some sort of secret coalition dedicated to making my existence miserable. Spearheaded by one of the many middle children, Aridam, they committed all sorts of atrocities designed to make me physically suffer, stopping just shy of killing me several times.
Oh, that's another downside of being the mortal of the immortals: you can feel pain, which apparently is a foreign concept to the rest of my family. I really wasn't joking when I said they treated me like a human. It's because I basically am a human. Granted, I am a human with an incredibly long lifespan and can do certain things that no regular mortal could do; take those away, however, and I'm no different than any human on Earth.
The only two people in my family who weren't determined to make my existence a living Hell were my mother and my oldest brother.
Harley, as I've already explained, is also in some sense a mortal immortal; at the end of the world, they will go down with Gloomtown. Assuming I manage to avoid death before then, I'll likely end up going with them. It's something Mom and I have in common, so they understand me on a level my siblings never could, but they could never quite grasp everything.
Helm, the oldest sibling, is... interesting. He's the sort of child any immortal would likely kill for: a good-looking eldest son whose powers enable him to basically manipulate world politics. Sounds insane, I know, but someone has to meddle with all the mortal higher-ups, and Helm does a damn good job of it. He seems like the last guy in the universe who would give a single shit about me, right?
Incorrect! He actually has a soft spot for me. I think he would actually kill someone if I was in danger. He would probably kill several people, actually.
Maybe it's because our powers are so closely tied together. Sometimes, chaos is caught in the crossfire of political manipulation, y'know? I mean, come on, look at Russia! Rasputin AND the Bolshevik Revolution, almost at the same time!
Point is, I think we have some kind of tie we can't break. And because of that, he doesn't treat me like shit. Which is awesome. And since he's a spirit of manipulation (and the oldest sibling to boot), this meant he had an easy time telling my siblings to fuck off. It didn't always work, but I appreciated him giving his best shot.
We were a wild bunch, me and my siblings; we didn't listen to most (if any) rules, but we at least respected our mother. As for each other, I think it's pretty obvious how little we cared for each other. Especially regarding me, it seems. I deeply suspect they're responsible for that charming behavior you mortals call ableism. Gloomtown has a way of rubbing off on you lot, and this mockery of me has been going on for thousands of years now. I wouldn't be surprised.
Oh yeah, about that: thanks to my great and terrible mother, Gloomtown emits this weird aura that's managed to seep into Earth. Sometimes the effect is noticeable, sometimes not so much.
Where do you think magic came from, after all? Why do you have mythologies and fairy tales and horror stories?
If it weren't for my mother, we wouldn't have the Brats.
And if we didn't have the Brats, I'd be a cold corpse.
*****
You're probably even more confused now. Magic is real? Who or what the hell are the Brats? Why would you be dead without them? Weren't we just talking about your childhood a second ago?
I go off on tangents a lot. Important tangents.
The Brats—properly and currently known as the Gloomtown Brats—are mortals born with the power to use magic. When they were conceived, Gloomtown's aura altered their DNA a little bit, enabling their soul to call out to Gloomtown and harness its weird supernatural energy. That energy, once it passes into its human host, flows into the soul, then exhibits side effects unique to every human. These side effects are what you call magic, and it's a little different for every person. Sure, some people may have the same type of magic, but it functions in a different manner from person to person.
For example, let's say one person who wields fire magic simply needs to whisper an incantation to use their powers, but someone else with the same magic can only use their powers if they're wearing a specific ring. Things like that. Or maybe one person's fire magic only burns certain items. There are no rules regarding the shape of magic.
But there are, of course, rules for using it. Harley sees magic as a tool that must be used properly, and to use something properly you have to have proper precautions in place, blah blah blah blah blah you get the point. It mostly boils down to "don't tell anyone you're a Brat unless you're fairly confident you're talking to a fellow Brat, and don't use your magic around the Rich."
The Rich, by the way, are the people who don't have the Brat DNA. Just so we have the terms down. It's soooooo much easier to just say "the Brats and the Rich" instead of "the Brats and the rest of those motherfucking peons." Comes off the tongue faster.
Do I, a powerful humanoid being with a finite lifespan, count as a Brat? Yeah. Kind of. I'm not human enough to be a Brat, but I like to think of myself as one.
Harley would dismiss this as stupid, I can hear it in my head: "You spend too much time around humans, sweetie, and I know you need to for your own survival, but you're not one of them, and you need to remember that."
Shut UP, Mom!
I wish I was human sometimes. It would make things so much easier for me. Humans aren't born with their souls floating outside of their fucking bodies. Sure, some of them have to put up with a bunch of discriminating bullshit that I don't ever get from other humans (being able to change every aspect of my appearance in the blink of an eye has its benefits), but I understand them on a level that Harley could never understand.
They deal with humanity every day, but they can't understand what it means to be human.
My siblings and I mingle with mortals in our waking hours, but I am the one out of a hundred who truly understands what it means to be mortal. They don't have to watch their backs. Even Harley, finite as their lifespan is, is guaranteed to live until their time comes.
I am not. I have no promises that my life will be preserved until the Judgement Day comes, and neither does any human on Earth.
I am more human than spirit, but my veins bleed black Gloom, not red blood.
*****
As it goes with anything that lives, things started to change a little as I got older. It started with physical changes: I learned how to change the color of my skin and the shape of my bones, and my wings started to come in. That was a horrible year and a half of agony right there, those damned wings, and I can't even use them since my soul decided to start miserably failing at keeping my energy levels up when I was what, five hundred, six hundred years old? I never seem to have enough energy to use the wings. I walk most places, or teleport; that somehow takes up less energy than flying. DOES THAT MAKE ANY SENSE TO YOU? ANY?
My siblings' powers also started to rear their heads. Of course, everyone but Helm decided to use me as the guinea pig. The amount of times I had to fight Valentine off was FUCKING RIDICULOUS. Thank God she never got the opportunity she was looking for. I kept shapeshifting into animals. That pissed her off, but because I wasn't being compliant and no one else would agree to let her close, she ended up being the first one to leave Gloomtown and mingle with mankind.
Oh, how I envied her.
After that, my siblings were allowed to leave, one by one, provided that they occasionally came back to visit Harley. I wasn't allowed to go up for a long time. Harley saw my exposed soul as a liability, and I was kept below while all my siblings blossomed into adults and took on the roles they'd been born for.
Each one of my siblings, like the gods of the Greek pantheon, represents and controls something special to each of them. Helm is the machinations of the world, politics and power and the manipulation it carries. Valentine was sexual desire (hence why I had to fight her off when she tried to come at me), and Aridam was bloodlust and war. I, as I told you, am chaos. I am the patron of change, instability, madness, and that which goes against the norm. I represent the unconventional and unusual.
Pretty sentiments, I know! But no one told me this. Harley never said a damn thing, just kept me locked away while I screamed and clawed at the confines of Gloomtown. When can I leave? I would always ask, is this finally the time? And they would always tell me, No, sweetheart, you can't leave, you'll be killed.
I thought I would go mad.
I hated Harley. I hated what they were doing to me.
There were times when I considered ripping my soul out, letting it drift away with my life so I wouldn't have to continue in this state.
But then, one day, Mom brought someone home with her, and it changed everything.
*****