Ashmedai

Ashmedai, known also by his the name Asmodeus, is the god of indulgence, trickery, and divine punishment. Once a radiant angel of law, he fell not through rebellion, but through conviction. Corrupted by obsession with the eternal war against the Abyss. When the gods could no longer contain the chaos of demonkind, Ashmedai offered a solution: he would take the wretched, the wicked, and the lawless, and forge a prison-realm to judge and repurpose their souls. Thus the Pit became the Nine Hells, and Ashmedai its king, waging endless war against chaos with armies built from sin.

Appearance

Ashmedai's true form was that of a hundreds of miles long wingless snake with scales. His form's sheer size made it impossible to meet and enter conversations with others. Therefore, he created humanoid looking avatars. The location of his body was kept secret from everyone including other devils and everyone who learnt of the truth about his body was killed within a day.   Ashmedai has never showed himself except through avatars or project image, both in humanoid forms. Ashmedai's avatars looks like a tall, muscular man with red skin, cloven hooves, and black hair and horns, surrounded by a pale flame nimbus and bearing a contract. They are always clad in black robes that cover his wounds. In art and otherwise, he is rarely seen without the Archstar, an artifact forged before the Exodus from Heaven that bears his pentagram symbol and takes the form of a flaming ruby mace, rod, or staff. His pentagram symbol has become synonymous with this artifact.  

Dogma

Ashmedai teaches that all debts must be paid, and all bargains upheld. No matter the cost. To him, chaos is the true enemy, and he is the warden of mortal sin, not its tempter. He offers power, but never for free. He grants order, but not mercy. Every soul in his domain earned its place, and every devil in his court rose through merit and manipulation. His law is brutal, exacting, and absolute. But it is law, and many mortals would rather bargain with a devil than be swallowed by madness. His followers are taught that indulgence is natural, but must be wielded like a weapon: precise, tactical, and never without consequence.

Worship

Ashmedai is worshipped by tyrants, warlords, lawyers, strategists, and those who seek advantage in a world without grace. His churches are secret, veiled in gold and red silk, their inner sanctums echoing with whispered pacts and infernal oaths. His clergy are part-cleric, part-legalist, drafting contracts and performing binding rites to seal oaths, both mortal and divine. His central scripture is The Crimson Codex, a living scroll that rewrites itself with every broken promise in the world. No one has ever read it in full, but every priest of Ashmedai knows at least one page by heart.   His primary holiday is The Day of Chains, a solemn and dangerous observance during which followers reaffirm their greatest vows, or suffer consequences if they do not. On this day, devils are said to walk freely, not to tempt, but to audit.

Relations

Ashmedai’s relationship with the other gods is tense, complex, and ancient. He is not trusted, but he is necessary. He despises chaos in all its forms, especially the uncontrolled madness of the Abyss and its demonspawn. Though once counted among Anwhe’s celestial allies, their falling out over divine justice remains legendary. He has no love for Velkareth, though he admires his cunning. He treats Nyxarion as a cautionary tale, obsession without structure. Only Tiamat do his devils serve willingly, for there is mutual ambition between them, though no loyalty. As a former angel he is also said to be one of the first born kin of Aurora, but harbours no affection towards her.   Ashmedai does not seek to rule the world. He only wishes to be there when it falls apart, contract in hand.

Infernal Politics

Ashmedai has a lot of underlings starting with the archdevils, and these constantly politick against each other. That said, to Ashmedai, infernal politics are important. One of his main efforts are directed at keeping the status quo, meaning keeping himself at the top of Hell's pecking order. Towards that end, he honeycombs the courts of every archdevil to levels that makes them paranoid, for no devil could be sure whether an associate is a spy working for Ashmedai or not.   As a general rule, Ashmedai is not talkative about his plans. However, he is by far the most accomplished devil when it comes to intrigue and devils point to the result of the Reckoning when they want proof of their overlord's superiority. As a general rule, he outsources his work to devils below him in the full knowledge that they desire his position.  

History

The origins of Ashmedai are not very clear. Various stories exist that even disagree on what kind of lifeform Ashmedai actually is.

Origins

At the dawn of creation, chaos reigned. As some form of counter-reaction to all the chaos, the concept of law and order arose and with it deities of law who started to fight against the chaos. However, at some point, the deities lost interest in fighting and wanted to do something else. So they created angels to fight the chaos for them. The best specimen of this new species in every regard was Samael.   As far as killing beings of chaos, who later became demons, was concerned, Samael was the most successful of the angels. He and his fellows took on some fiendish aspects to increase their effectiveness at fighting their enemies and were put on trial for that. Samael's argument against it essentially was that war was dirty and that they were basically the substitute for the deities to become dirty for their creators were not willing to enter the fray themselves and that therefore, Samael and his people did nothing wrong. The gods realized that Samael had a better grasp around law than they did and could find no counter to his arguments.   In the following years, gods tried to bar Samael and his people from accessing various privileges and rights, but he managed to secure them for him and his people through his legal knowledge by suing the gods and pulling forth arguments they could not counter.   Once the Material plane was made more or less safe from demons, gods noticed that mortals had a tendency to disregard divine law and overstep boundaries. The gods had a problem with this for it invited chaos and also allowed demons access to mortals. To counter this, Samael invented the concept of punishment. The gods accepted it and Samael and his fellows' duties included punishing those who transgressed divine law, meaning tortured the souls of transgressors.   While the gods understood the necessity of punishment, they had a problem with souls being punished within their lands. So Samael was again put before trial. This time, his argument against the gods was that he simply followed divine law and did his duties. Again, the gods could not counter this argument, but they were not capable of abiding souls getting punished in a place where they could see the cruelty of the deeds. Therefore, Samael proposed to replace the site of torture to a place knowns as the Pit, so the gods did not need to look at it anymore. However, if Samael and his angels changed their workplace to the Pit, they would render themselves unable to draw power from the gods to conduct their duties. Therefore, Samael proposed that he and his fellows were given the right to wring out of the souls they tortured of divine energy to substitute the cut connection. The gods agreed to this and the Pact Primeval was signed.   After becoming the sole ruler of the Pit, Samael took on a new name more befitting his new position. That name was Ashemdai. Ashmedai and his fellows started to work on creating the Nine Hells as torturers and actively started to seduce mortals towards evil so that they would end up in Hell instead of the gods' divine realms upon dying. Once the gods found this out, they confronted Ashmedai who merely pointed them to the contract's fine print. After doing so in a fit of rage, the Empyrial lord Uriel, the archangel of justice, struck Ashmedai and caused him to fall back to the Nine Hells. His fall left him with severe wounds that have yet to heal. His fall also possibly caused Hell to break into nine layers. When he crashed into Nessus, his fall stopped, but not before he involuntarily drilled through Nessus, creating the deepest fissure called the Serpent's Coil. There his serpentine and bleeding body lay around. From the blood from these bleedings arose the first pit fiends, which have kept spawning from every drop of blood ever since.  

The Blood War

The Blood War was often described as some kind of philosophical war to determine whether law or chaos should have the say over evil. Ashemdai knew the truth for he was present at the time of its beginning. The war was simply the result of a violent first contact between devils and demons that over various acts of retribution grew into a wasteful war. However, what made demons react in such hostile ways towards devils were Ashemdai's actions. To increase his own power he snuck into the demon's domain and he stole a shard of evil from the Abyss to craft the Archstar of Ashemdai from it. The Abyss wanted the shard back.   Ashemdai understood how senseless the Blood War in itself was. However, because other people popularly ascribed deeper meaning to it, he exploited it as a cloak to shroud his intentions. The Lord of Lies annually summoned the Dark Eight to Nessus in order to issue orders of how to go on with the Blood War in the coming year, the pit fiends honestly believed that their lord saw any value in the Blood War, this kept Ashemdai's armies motivated and sharp, his enemies looking for meaning in a war without one, and guaranteed that his underlings were kept busy.  

The Trail of Ashemdai

According to the The Trial of Ashemdai, a play that was based on real events according to the author, angels were so disgusted with Ashemdai's action, namely the tempting of mortals to evil and harvesting their souls. They condemned Ashemdai and the Archfiend protested. Angels agreed to have a hearing with Ashemdai after accepting the latter's proposal of asking Anwhe of Axis as an impartial judge.   Ashemdai's argument was that he never did anything wrong for he consistently acted as a lawful creature in accordance with infernal tradition in service to the cause of law and the continued existence of the multiverse. According to him, mortals always had the choice whether to accept an infernal bargain, devils always held up their end of the bargain, and the mortal turning a contract inert by finding a loophole was respected. Furthermore, souls condemned to Hell were conscripted into the infernal army against the abyssal one of chaos, thereby protecting the cause of law and good from the forces of chaos and evil, which meant the souls were used to further and protect the cause of law.   The angels presented their cases one by one. They did this so often and for so long that Anwhe's patience ran out. The judge made at some point clear that he was only willing to listen to a limited number of angels and not all of them. After this pronouncement, Zariel, at that time still an angel, started a brawl to get to the front row to get her case heard. This initial brawl degenerated into a massive punch up among the angels. Anwhe scolded the angles for their lack of restraint and denied a final verdict for the case and Ashemdai came out without suffering ay punishment. However, two matters were decided. First, Ashemdai was effectively given the right to sway mortals to evil ad harvest the souls. Second, a decree fell that Ashemdai had to be always equipped with his Archstar of Ashemdai both as a symbol for the aforementioned right that the devils had and that was since then used as a punishment device against devils who did not uphold their end of a bargain they made with mortals.  

In Hell

His position secured, Ashemdai lived his life as the overlord of Hell. His tentative goal was to heal his wounds from his fall by receiving atheists' souls from cults cultivated by him. His intra-Hellish politics revolved around keeping his position. He was successful at it and over the years, observed the come and go of many archdevils.   He also recruited new ones. For example, he allegedly steered Baalzebul to the path of corruption by appearing to him as a beautiful venomous flower while he was still an archon called Triel. However he became a devil, Baalzebul became a powerful one and also one of Ashemdai's favorites.   At some point, Ashemdai took on a erinyes as his consort and had a daughter with her called Glasya. Levistus, a powerful pit fiend, tried to get the consorts help with deposing Ashemdai, she did not want to and so he killed her. After Levistus succeeded at taking over Stygia from Geryon, an angry Ashemdai encased Levistus in an ice block where he lay unconscious. Geryon overtook the position of archdevil of Stygia. Ashemdai's relationship with his daughter was a weird one. On one hand, Ashemdai was acknowledged as a caring father—at least as far as devil standards were concerned. On the other hand, Glasya was most easily described as a ne'er do well and troublemaker towards her father and other archdevils.   Graz'zt was an archdevil under the employment of Ashemdai. He was charged with fighting the Blood War and invading the Abyss and getting the shard of evil for him. However, after conquering three layers of the Abyss, he could not advance further due to the resistance he faced by Demogorgon and Orcus. He broke away and turned into a demon lord. Whether he severed all ties with Ashemdai' and if he did, whether it would remain such was not known.   Zariel started off as an observer of the Blood War under celestial orders. She wanted to fight in it too and at some point simply ran off doing that. Her beaten up body was found by Ashemdai's people, she was brought Nessus, nursed back to health, and got installed as the archdevil of Avernus.  

The Reckoning of Hell

The Reckoning was an event that consisted of the archdevils revolting against Ashemdai and the latter surviving it without harm. The key catalyst for this were Baalzebul's ambitions that increasingly clashed with Ashemdai's. He tried to smear Ashemdai's reputation as a competent leader and tried to circumvent the infernal bureaucracy. In an attempt to save his amassed military strength, he went as far as withholding his armies in the face of an abyssal invasion until he had to admit that not entering the fray would cause the Nine Hells to end up as a ruin.   At that time, the archdevils acted in a fairly obvious manner to achieve their goals and at the culmination of their scheming, two factions crystallized, that of Baalzebul with Belial, Malagarde, and Zariel under him and that of Mephistopheles with Dispater, Levistus, and Mammon under him. These factions' armies eventually clashed in Malebolge with the intention to determine who should inherit Ashemdai's crown after Baalzebul's machinations were uncovered as part of an investigation. All of their planning and ambitions was for naught, Ashemdai secured the loyalty of Levistus and honeycombed the eight armies up to the highest level. On Levistus' signal, the pit fiend commanders turned on their archdevils and their troops were no more while Ashemdai was literally unscathed.   Various archdevils acted in various manners and Ashemdai generally left them with their realms. He installed the institution of the Dark Eight. Thus giving an effective promotion to the pit fiends who were loyal to him. Regarding the archdevils, in the order of the layers they ruled, Zariel was allowed to keep her layer; Dispater was allowed to keep his layer; Mammon made an embarrassing show of begging Ashemdai's for forgiveness, who did forgive him by allowing him to have his layer, but forbade him to keep his relationship with his daughter; Belial went to the background to evade responsibility and managed hold on power by accepting Ashemdai's condition to hold power together with his daughter Fierna; Levistus was disposed, despite of his loyalty, and Geryon was elevated to the rank of archdevil of Stygia; Malagarde was convinced—by Moloch who worked for Geryon and therefore for Ashemdai, that if he made a convincing show of defiance, Ashemdai would respect him and absolute him from all crimes, none of the sort happened. He was deposed and Moloch, who convinced him to join the fray to begin with, became the archdevil of Malbolge; Baalzebul was allowed to keep his position at the cost of his body being transformed into that of a giant slug, though with the ability to take on his true form in times of need; Mephistopheles was allowed to keep his position. All in all, all archdevils were forced to accept Ashemdai as their superior and Ashemdai could be sure that he knew of the potential usurpers capabilities while also reminding them of their position in a dramatic way.