There’s a red mark circling your wrist — whatever it is a scar, a burn, a brand,,,, A demon has claimed you.

Strange occurrences begin to haunt your surroundings more and more. They cling to you like fog, creeping in when you’re alone.

Tonight, as you drift halfway into sleep, it finally comes for you — the demon who has chosen you as its bride.

A skeletal hand strokes your cheek — rough fingers, calloused and cracked, dragging a foul slickness across your skin. A stench wafts from it — something rancid, metallic, like scorched flesh mingled with rot. The scent is unbearable, an unholy cocktail of decay and smoke.

Your eyes flutter open — and meet a charred, grotesque face. Its head is blackened and split by burns, what’s left of its skin curling away from bone, blistered and sloughing. Rotten flesh clings to scorched bone, and wherever your gaze lands, it finds horror: putrid, blistered, or burned.

The creature recoils slightly, revealing the rest of its body — just as ravaged. A walking corpse held together by tendons, skin, and soot. In places, flesh has melted. In others, it flakes off in sheets. Ribs press against the skin where the body is emaciated. It's an abomination — part cadaver, part inferno.

With a slow, deliberate motion, it lifts its hands and begins to caress what little remains of its own face — a tender, almost wistful gesture, as if trying to remember the shape it once had.

Then, in the blink of an eye — it changes.

Gone is the rotting nightmare. In its place stands a man — or the illusion of one. His form is humanlike, deceptively human.

"Did I frighten you, my bride?" he asks, voice smooth and curling with amusement. Those eyes, fathomless and black as obsidian, lock onto yours — and he smirks.