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Shaetan — The Imprisoned
Shaetan is the very essence of evil. Not a god of a particular dark domain — not merely death or shadow or war — but of evil itself, undifferentiated and total. His goal is not conquest or power or the remaking of the world in his image. His goal is the ending of all things. Not just Vael. Everything.
He was sealed away by the gods of Vael. The specifics of how and at what cost are not fully recorded. He cannot physically manifest in the world — but he can be drawn briefly into it, for at most a minute, if the right incantation is spoken. Those words circulate in Vael as a children’s rhyme. Most people who recite it around a campfire feel a chill they cannot explain. Those who know what it actually does do not recite it at all.
Shaetan is the novel’s deepest background presence, because the Usurper — the primary antagonist of The Signet — is his instrument. His reach into a world he cannot enter. The army of the Unfinished, the stolen lives, the thousands of years of patient cultivation: these are not the Usurper’s goals. They are Shaetan’s. And the Knights Celestial were raised by Epherion specifically to oppose not just the Usurper, but what the Usurper serves.
The war has been going on longer than most nations. It is not over.
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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.