Divine Blood, Demon Heart

The story of the character known as Venus Rigel begins quite a long time ago, with the rise of a demon known as Tenebrys. Originally a low-ranked demon in an infernal plane, Tenebrys was one of the foot soldiers of an invasion of Earthland, planned by a great demon lord. The invasion ended in failure, and the demon lord was killed, while all his subjects were vanquished. The demon Tenebrys, by maintaining a low profile through the war, managed to survive and go into hiding for hundreds of years. While hidden, Tenebrys sought to improve her status in existence, and began searching for what options lay available to that end. In time, she stumbled across one: ascension from demonhood into godhood.

To do so, she needed three ingredients: a demon, a divine being, and a mortal, the amalgamation of the three beings having the potential to, with the right rituals, ascend from the demonic state and become a dark god. To fulfill her dream, Tenebrys created a cult known as the Ascension. Now it was time to find the ingredients. The demon was readily present, being herself, a human could always be easily acquired, but the divine being was the problem. Eventually, she managed to find one, a tennyo somewhere in Midi. Stories went that the tennyo, known as Shirohime, had been temporarily banished from a celestial plane to study humans and learn compassion, and so had descended to Earthland and was camouflaged as a nurse-nun in a healing temple remote and on the border of the country. Tales were of no relevance to Tenebrys. Gathering the Ascension, she stormed the temple and destroyed it, in search of the tennyo.

Although the Ascension suffered terrible losses, the temple was destroyed, and all the monks and nuns slaughtered, except the tennyo, who managed to escape, albeit heavily wounded. Disguising herself as a traveler, Shirohime found an Encan freelance courier ship at harbor and boarded it, to sail away from Midi. The Ascension attacked the ship, but they were repelled by the ship's crew, who, using their knowledge of the seas, and their captain's shrewd intellect, gave the Ascension a good sounding. Tenebrys was apparently killed in the battle.

The trip to Enca was quite eventful and difficult, owing to the heavily stormy weather on the high seas, but eventually, the voyage was completed. By this time, Shirohime had begun to bond with the captain of the Encan ship, a wily but noble man named Hesperus Rigel, as well as befriend the members of his crew. Afraid that she would be tracked by the remnants of the Ascension yet again, Shirohime asked to join Hesperus' crew, as that would ensure that she was constantly on the move around the world, and therefore, much harder to keep tabs on. Hesperus was glad to oblige her, and the crew of his ship were just as glad, seeing as her powers of healing had been quite useful to them. All went well afterwards, and two years later, Shirohime married Hesperus.

Eager to protect his new wife, Hesperus sold his ship and bought another one, an airship named the Skyhand. With the greater mobility of his new ship, chances that the Ascension would catch them were very slim. Life was good, with the crew of the Skyhand traveling all over the world while doing their job of international cargo deliveries. Soon, Shirohime took in with Hesperus' child. Of course, everyone was delighted. Given the nature of the Skyhand's crew, no one had any qualms about the baby being bron on the ship, as the Skyhand itself had about two other married folk with their families as part of the crew, and their medical personnel were rather proficient. Hesperus himself had been born and raised on a ship, so it was quite natural.

Unfortunately, a shadow was cast on the joy of the Skyhand's crew, with the coming of Shirohime's child. It was a girl, as incredibly beautiful as her mother. But with the birth of the child, Shirohime's health began to wane, and she passed away, but not before naming her child Venus. While greatly saddened by the loss of his dear wife, whose remains were secretly returned to Midi and laid to rest, Hesperus took great joy in his child, and tried as best as he could to be a good father. In all fairness, he was, being able to balance discipline with love and care. Venus, for her part, was not a difficult child, although her eagerness to learn and drive for adventure made her a handful oftentimes. She spent much of her time on the Skyhand learning to fly the ship under Hesperus' tutelage, studying her father's extensive hoard of books, training with the Midian battlemaster of the ship in combat, climbing all over the body of the Skyhand, or tinkering with the workings of the airship, along with the ship's engineers and mechanics, from whom she learnt a lot.

Life proceeded with relative peace, until sometime after Venus' sixteenth birthday, when the fortunes of the Skyhand seemed to plummet, and strangely business wasn't as lucrative as before. Desperately in need of work, Hesperus got a job which involved disposing of a cursed item by returning it to Sin. As was his nature, he checked out the details of the job. They seemed legit enough, and the item itself wasn't dangerous by itself. The mission seemed easy enough with the Skyhand: fly over Sin, jettison the item, return. While Hesperus still had his reservations, the other members of the Skyhand encouraged him to take the mission. Nothing, they said, could go wrong. Everything went wrong. While high over Sin, a strange bolt shot upwards from the ground, skewering the Skyhand. Everyone fought to keep the ship airborne, but to no avail. It crashed onto the surface of Sin, and was immediately set on by infernal monsters. The members of the Skyhand waged a valiant battle against the monsters, but they were overrun. The last thing Venus saw while battling on the Skyhand was the people she had grown up with being torn to pieces, and her father yelling and running in her direction, then she felt a heavy blow on the back of her head, and all went black.

When Venus came to, she found herself hanging in chains, along with a few other members of the Skyhand, in a slaver caravan. From what she could gather, somehow, the surviving members of the Skyhand had been "saved" from the monsters by slavers on the northwestern coast of Sin, which was quite strange, seeing that hardly anyone ventured to the cursed land of Sin. The slavers were taking them across the sea to Desierto, where a duke, a rich relative of one of the sultans would buy the 'cargo'. Venus and her companions was saved from being violated or otherwise physically abused, despite her beauty, as the slavers mentioned the client's expressly stated desire that the goods he was expecting be brought in very good condition, and his great displeasure should this not happen. In any event, the amount of money that seemed to have been promised them was enough to make the slavers relatively cordial in their behavior. On Desierto, the surviving members of the Skyhand were sold to the client, who took them to his residence, and gave Venus as a gift to his nephew, while the rest of the crew were sent to somewhere called the Circle. The client's nephew was a spoiled mistake of a human specimen and a menace to everyone, who had always been used to people obeying his every whim, since he was a relative of one of Desierto's sultans. In any event, he tried to force himself on Venus, and ended up with a hairpin in his throat. Not as displeased about the death of his nephew as he was about the cause of the wastrel's death, the client sent Venus to the Circle.

The Circle was actually an arena owned and run by the duke, in which blood matches were staged, and slaves were executed in said matches. Here, in a surprising turn of events, Venus distinguished herself by not only surviving her execution, but defeating her executioner, although, in a bid to defy the duke, she refused to kill the gladiatrix assigned to end her life. Unexpectedly, this won her a lot of favor from the audience, and the crowds screamed their approval. Two long years were spent in the arena, in which her beauty and inability to scar (owing to her tennyo heritage), as well as her impressive flexibility and grace, and most importantly, her refusal to kill defeated opponents earned her the title "the Angel of Mercy". During those years, Venus witnessed the deaths of all her fellows from the Skyhand who had survived the Sin massacre.

One fateful evening, the Angel of Mercy was pitted against the Amazon, one of the best fighters in the circle. Venus was outclassed and clearly the weaker opponent, but her high intelligence and uncanny balance eventually gave her an advantage which she pursued to victory, forcing the Amazon to surrender, and being declared the winner. However, the moment Venus' back was turned, the Amazon drove her sword through the unsuspecting girl's heart from behind. The world swam, as Venus fell to her knees. Then all was dark.

Venus Rigel awoke in a tent located in a strange settlement in Minstrel. Her death wound was gone, but over her heart was a strange tattoo of a Midian script which, interpreted, signified a map or chart. Great was her surprise and joy when a member of the Skyhand's crew walked into the tent, Loredo by name. Initially, Venus thought this was some sort of afterlife, but was informed by Loredo that they were both very much alive. He had managed to survive the Sin massacre when a body collapsed on him and partially buried him, knocking him out as it did. When he came to, the battle had been long over, but he saw signs that humans had left the site of carnage. Following the tracks, he had managed to discover the slaver ship, and stow away on it, escaping when it docked at Desierto's southern coast. From there he wandered about till he was captured by other slavers, but was ultimately rescued by some holy men, led by a divine being named Tenebrys, whose goal was to fight evil wherever she wandered. He had told Tenebrys about the plight of the Skyhand, and she had decided they would try to save any of the crew that remained. After gathering information, they knew Venus was the only one still alive, but they could not attack the Circle to rescue her, being too few. Fate, however, played a funny hand, and they found her nearly dead after her fateful battle against the Amazon. Tenebrys had managed to bring Venus from the brink of death through some secret arts, and here she was.

Some things didn't add up, though. For starters, Venus had seen the slavers who had captured her with bloodhounds, which would have easily sniffed out Loredo when he stowed away on their ship. How had he avoided them? Secondly, how was it so quickly that Tenebrys and company had found her when she was dying, given that the wound she received was fatal? In any case, Venus showed no sign that she smelt a rat, and just acted like she was glad to be alive. She had been weakened considerably by her brush with death, and after recuperation, was offered the chance to learn to use magic, so that she would have revenge on all those who had made her life a misery. She began learning magic under Tenebrys, who taught her to kill demons using her innate element, light, courtesy of her mother's heritage. For a divine being, Tenebrys was vindictive, brutal, cruel, sadistic and merciless during training, though she was kind at other times, further increasing Venus' suspicions that not all was as it seemed. In any case, Tenebrys filled the girl's mind with poisonous thoughts of revenge as she trained the youngster.

One fateful day, Venus, having quelled all doubts or suspicions about her loyalties, sneaked into Loredo's chambers, and stole his journal, from which she discovered that Tenebrys was the leader of the Ascension, the cult which the Skyhand had been fleeing from, and Loredo had been her subject all along. She also learned of Tenebrys' goal. She realized that the mission to deposit something over Sin was Tenebrys' doing, Loredo had beamed a signal which made firing the Skyhand from Sin's ground surface possible, and the demons which had destroyed the crew of the Skyhand were all subservient to Tenebrys, so they had spared Loredo. The slavers were of Tenebrys' doing as well, else the monsters of Sin would have torn them apart, had they ventured there. The duke himself had ties with the Ascension, and seemed to view Tenebrys as a goddess.

Tenebrys' plan was this: she required a human and a divine being, herself being the third component of her ritual. With Venus, being a hybrid of the two, the girl was what she needed. All Tenebrys needed to do was get a portion of Venus' body, and by esoteric magic, graft it to herself, thus gaining qualities from the previous owner of that amalgamated part. However, Tenebrys hated the fact that her body had been all but rendered useless during the first battle with Hesperus and his crew. Loredo suggested that Tenebrys could graft a part of herself onto Venus, using the ritual, and then perform another ritual involving her transferring her will into Venus, and gaining control of the girl's vibrant body and natural healing powers. There was a catch, though: for the will transfer to work, the vessel had to have an evil soul. Therefore, Tenebrys ordered the duke to ensure that Venus became corrupted, which was why he gave her to his nephew, expecting that her suffering at his nephew's hands would blacken her soul. The idiot's unexpected demise led him to bring Venus to the circle in the hopes that the bloody and cruel environment would corrupt her. It didn't, as her refusal to kill, and the crowd's approval of this, ensured that she didn't get bloodthirsty. Eventually running out of patience, Tenebrys ordered the duke to stage the last battle, in which Venus was run through, and, using the amalgamation ritual, implanted her own heart in Venus' body before the girl died, as a dead body would be useless in the amalgamation ritual. All that was left was to perform the will transfer, when Venus' soul was tainted enough.

To the horror of the young Demon Slayer, she realized that Tenebrys had been filling her thoughts with revenge and hatred, and so she was actually a lot less innocent than she herself had realized. Meanwhile, Loredo, realizing his journal was gone, summoned demonic constructs capable of tracking, called homonculi, to seek his book. They tracked the book to Venus, but she managed to disable them and wound Loredo, before locking him together with the homunculi in her room. Homunculi go rabid at the smell of blood, and these were no exception, turning on their master and ripping him to shreds. Venus, however, went to find Tenebrys, intent on striking the final blow of vengeance. However, when she was about to kill Tenebrys, she realized that she wanted to do it out of revenge, and the fact that Tenebrys suspiciously did not try to fight back made Venus figure that that last act of hatred would be sufficient for the demon Tenebrys to dominate Venus' mind. Frightened and unsettled, she fled the place, stealing a good amount of money and supplies before fleeing the settlement.

Venus' hope was that as Tenebrys now existed without a heart, the demon sustaining herself with an artificial lachryma heart which weakened by the day, she would eventually die, if she could not get her hands on Venus. So the newly fledged Demon Slayer traveled north almost across the expanse of Minstrel, taking care not to draw too much attention to herself. Her goal was Fiore, to the north of Minstrel. Her choice of Fiore was its vibrant guild system and the fact that one could easily keep a low profile there. She would join a legal guild, one that coincided with her ideals, and seek to purge herself of her hatred by performing good and noble deeds. One day, when her heart was purer and her arm stronger, she would return to kill Tenebrys, not as an act of revenge, but to rid the world of a festering horror.

Venus, having successfully arrived in Fiore, did some searching around, and eventually found a guild named Sabertooth, whose ideals and goals of defending Earthland from otherworldly threats appealed to her, especially as she could learn something extra about killing demons. Having approached the guild, while taking care not to reveal too much about herself for fear of being rejected, she was accepted and inducted into the guild, with the desire to get stronger and make lasting bonds, while the shadow of Tenebrys hung always over her.

-Into the Abyss and Back: Venus had begun to settle down to a normal life as a mage, having joined Sabertooth and begun her slow, but steady rise in ranks and power, when unexpectedly, she was kidnapped in Motor City and transported by a strange magic to Desierto, where she came face-to-face with Tenebrys once more, as well as the duke who owned the Circle. She discovered that while the duke was still interested in punishing her for the death of his nephew, Tenebrys intended to corrupt her through torture and dark magic, to enable her become the perfect vessel for the demon. However, an unexpected twist occurred, with Venus being transported mentally to an esoteric dimension called the Abyss, and encountering a strange, ancient being known only as 'the Chronicler', who informed her that it had made a deal with Tenebrys. The Chronicler had loaned the demon power, and given her knowledge on how to ascend to become a Dark Moon Goddess, in exchange for the promise that she would perform a task for it, which involved awakening an ancient Elddritch god, so that it could end the Chronicler's life, who was tired of existing for so long in the Abyss. Tenebrys had used the power loaned her by the Chronicler, but wasn't interested in fulfilling her own part of the bargain, so the Chronicler offered to transfer the power it had loaned Tenebrys to Venus, on the premise that she fulfill what Tenebrys did not intend to. Initially, Venus was skeptical about such a deal, but having haggled the terms down to killing the Elddritch abomination, she was granted a new power, which she used to escape her bonds and her cell. The duke, in an attempt to stop her, was pulled into the Abyss, and was never heard from in Earthland again. Now armed with a new power, yet uncertain of its cost, Venus has a new goal: to fulfill her word to the Chronicler and kill the Abomination of the Abyss, although she hasn't quite forgotten Tenebrys yet.
Venus has currently changed the name of her magic to directly target Tenebrys, as well as attempt to distance herself from the demonic influence of her magic.