Rough sketches 007: Iblis Bythos (Patreon)

The edgy boy has arrived, nothing like an evil form to make Asher hotter XD.
After Asher sees his party annihilated by adam and seeing as he tortures them through their magh souls(fragments of adam) Asher gives up and accepts to become the last vessel.

Many situations made Asher come to the breaking point, the good deeds he did have come to bite him in the ass, as the places and people that he saved were punished due to his actions, is not an exaggeration to say that due to that a lot of people in Arcadia that were their friends or acquaintances are now either dead or blaming Asher for their misery. As you know, Asher was already disliked and treated badly as a kid for being different as a non-magh user, but when he became the hero, the savior of Leila's prophecy, he found a purpose, he found a worth in himself that he could not see before. He could be useful, he could be needed, he could be liked and loved. And then when he discovers his role of Savior is a fake prophecy made by syzygy to control him, that both of his original parents are psychopaths with genocidal tendencies, and that none of them see asher as he is but just a defective copy of another person, Kyrios... well his world comes down in pieces, this new worth he found on himself, it was just an illusion, he isn't even that strong without the Heaven's key and Ixbal is gone (she leaves asher's party and joins Adonai), he is utterly emotionally destroyed and he doesn't know who he is anymore.

And thus Adam explains to Asher, that the world has done nothing but wrong to him, and it does not deserve to be saved, but the people he does care about, they do deserve his grace. The cycle of rebirth is the natural course of things, trying to fight it, is just escaping from the inevitable and he does promise he and his loved one will meet again in the next universe. Is this promise real? who knows, but Adam knows exactly what Asher needs to hear, and so Asher accepts and makes the most egoistic choice...He sacrifices the world for his own happiness and thus he becomes the devil.

Iblis retains memories from Asher's life and some aspects of his personality but once he uses Asher's soul to open the Alpha Gate, well Asher is officially dead. This form of Iblis is called Fallen, so as you might deduce, he has a second form Called Requiem that I will show you later.

As for the other sketches, you can see how he is starting the ritual of universal reset, combining the 2 lances into the key (ouroboros) to the final gate. What happens next is that the Holy world tree emerges from the crust and reveals its true form, the tree of eternal return, an eldritch entity fabricated by adam to collect the souls and his vessel to traverse universes. obviously, I want to note that these are rough sketches and thus they aren't final but I will show you how these things evolve in the next posts!