Interlude: The House of Cards
I keep alluding to an overarching plot I don't have any actual plans for.
Gehenna was, without a doubt, sure to devolve into civil war within a few years. Maybe a decade if Mephisto called in every favor owed to him, but no more. Now, he was no fool and knew that the entire realm was always more or less on the brink of some sort of war, so what made this any different? The masses were always discontent with something or another and the only reason the entire world wasn't (more) on fire was, ironically, Satan. The undisputed ruler was more or less the single force keeping Gehenna as a mostly united kingdom instead of splintering into factions like it always seemed to want to. If someone decided to get the bright idea in their head that they'd be a better ruler and the fire of rebellion began to grow, Satan very quickly showed them that his flames were much brighter. So, as much as Mephisto hated to admit it, Satan suddenly vanishing from the world was problematic and quickly hurtling towards catastrophic.
What was truly worrying the King of Time, however, were the circumstances around Satan's disappearance. Satan was well known to disappear for months, sometimes even years, at a time, so few knew what made this time different from the others. But Mephisto did, and it was the fact that it all had something to do with a woman. It seemed like an inconsequential fact to most, but he had latched onto that one detail like it was all that mattered, and was sure he knew the rough circumstances that had led to Satan's disappearance.
It was a little known fact to those outside Gehenna, but Satan rarely took any interest in any sort of female, no matter how threw themselves at him. It was fairly obvious if one simple looked at how few kids the ruler of Gehenna had despite his impressive age, and yet the Exorcists never seemed to realize how lucky they were. Logically, Satan should have had an absurd number of direct descendants, literally hundreds wasn't out of the question considering how most demons didn't die of age, and yet there weren't even a dozen running around. But the azure demon hadn't even so much as glanced at a female beyond a succubus, famous for their infertility, for several hundred years, and hadn't shown any signs of changing.
Being one of the eldest, Mephisto had seen the steady spiral his father's love life had been. And what a concept that was- a demon, the strongest demon at that, seeking love! The degree of interest he'd taken in each of his children's mothers had varied wildly, but it had one specific pattern: down. Some of the last had been, at best, a passing interest he'd totted around for a few weeks before casually discarding, not caring that they were pregnant in a typical demon way. They were effectively immortal, why would they have to care if they had someone to carry on the legacy or not? Children were an afterthought and, sometimes, competition.
But the earliest ones where the most telling, and a part of Satan's history so many demons forgot or thought unimportant. But not Mephisto, for the future was born from the day's long past. Satan had held onto the demonesses for several years in some cases, giving them more attention and care and affection that anyone who wasn't there would have thought possible. Looking back on it, Mephisto had realized that Satan had been searching for…something in those women. Something which he never actually found, and eventually he discarded those 'treasured' women as well, usually when they became pregnant and they sought to isolate themselves to protect their child. Each woman kept his interest for a shorter and shorter time, the gaps between them growing longer and longer, until he'd seemed to grow bored and stopped entirely. None of the Demon Kings had questioned it because it worked in their favor. There was no risk of competition suddenly showing up and once again disrupting the hierarchy they'd established.
And then Yuri Egin had appeared.
A woman, a human one at that, who'd completely and utterly overtake his father's life.
At first he'd simple thought it was because her body could, impossibly, withstand his flames. It would be easy for such an ancient demon to bewitch such a young woman into eventually falling under his thrall, and then he would have had a lasting body. When Mephisto had learned she was carrying not one, but two of Satan's children, he'd realized his father had decided to use her to bear him more children, possibly because he found her immunity interesting. The fact that one of them had blue flames only made the accurately named Blue Night make all the more sense in hindsight: Satan had finally made a true heir, so why wouldn't he protect that child, and, indirectly, the mother?
But when it ended, with Yuri dead and Satan nowhere to be found, Mephisto realized he probably should have paid more attention to what had happened between the human and demon. Whatever it was, it was something he fundamentally couldn't understand, for his black heart simply wasn't capable of feeling that oh-so-human emotion.
Love.
Did Satan love Yuri Egin, or had he loved her ability to bear blue flamed children? Mephisto didn't know, and, while logic and Satan's own behavior would dictate that he saw her as nothing but a way to breed a powerful army, he had a feeling, rotting and hurting his head with the impossibility, that Satan had never been looking for that. No, he'd always been looking for something more, and it was possible that Yuri had shown Satan that very thing.
Mephisto knew the past well, knew why the Blue Night had occurred far better than any Exorcist did (they saw it only as a random act of violence from a demon that needed nothing to justify it, oh how wrong and hypocritical they were as they lit their torches and prayed under a burning woman) and he knew what the results had been. He knew, and yet Satan's future was still hidden from his eyes. Yuri, the woman Satan had finally loved was dead. Even with her children alive, even with one with a heart of blue flames, did that even matter to Satan? Mephisto had studied human love extensively and he'd hear of how all-consuming it could be, and the madness it brought.
So, just what sort of madness had love cursed Satan with?