The Lord of the Flies

Precious little is known of that plane of existence called The Abyss. No Serin god has been able to breach it's defenses. No mortal has ever beared witness to the true horror of what lurks just beyond their reach. But every so often, an escaped devil or demon is coerced into describing the madness within. Each account is drastically different, for it seems the very fabric of reality is but an illusion to the unfortunate souls trapped there. This particular account is an exceptionally interesting one. The demon for whom I scribe this letter has a great many ideas about the inner workings of said realm, and has permitted me to attempt to describe it for mortal men to behold. His belief is that devils and demons are not bred, but molded. Not as one would mold clay, but as one would shred a soul to within a sliver of utter annihilation, and then reforming it over tens of thousands of lives. Such a machination would produce one of two results: A broken, useless pile of goo, or a being of awe-inspiring power with the fiercest determination imaginable. This is a story of the latter, for the former have no stories to tell. He is known to other demons as the Lord of the Flies. To mortals, he is merely called Lourch. He has noted to me that he remembers many of his lives and subsequent deaths. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands. But the Abyss has no true beginning, and no true end. He was always a maggot. Born to writhe amongst the millions of his kind. Born to be eaten by his larger, hungrier brothers. Born to be squashed beneath the weight of the carcasses he longed to feed upon. Born to die. He believes that some of his lives may have been so brief as to not even truly exist. He says that in some of his lives, he may have slid down the ladder of promotion, rather than climbing up. But eventually, he reached the next stage of existence. Evolution. As a fly, he would die just as often as a maggot. Usually eaten by something far larger and more terrifying than before. But there was a freedom to being a fly. The freedom to explore. He tested the limits each new time he was reborn. And each time he died in often more dramatic fashion than before. Smashed by lobbed carcass debris. Decapitated by the mandibles of a Marrow Muncher. Caught by the stretchy tongue of a Taster. Dissolved inside the stomach of a Bile One. And although he has no conception of the time he spent in the Abyss, he knew that he became stronger. Faster. Larger. More cunning. And one day, as fate would have it, he found the quasit. It was dying a slow and incredibly painful death, it's bones broken, rotting away in a crack in the wall of a canyon. Lourch knew what he had to do. He spent what must have been weeks and months torturing the pitiful creature. Burrowing into it's orifices, whispering great evil into it's ears. Until it gave up it's secrets. Knowledge, as they say, is power. And power, in the Abyss, is promotion. Now a fully-fledged quasit himself, Lourch sought out a powerful master. An Abyssal Waylord. Lourch, as his minion, became known for his cruelty and unrelenting evil. He became a master at making deals, and carrying out vengeance upon those who broke them. He sucked his victims dry of everything, but mostly their knowledge, and eventually their souls. Once he knew how, it was just a matter of time. He took his master's, and bartered the greatest deal of all. His freedom.