guylining | History

Early Life

Nathaniel (Nate) and his twin sister Gwendolyn (Doe) are born on 1 June 2001 to the Hawthorne family of witches.
The Hawthorne family are among the most powerful witches in the world. They are the ruling bloodline in England, meaning other witching families defer to them and the Supreme - the name given to the overall ruler of witching families - is always a Hawthorne woman.
Nate and Doe have an older brother, Theo. Because witching law is matriarchal, Theo cannot inherit the title of Supreme and holds resentment towards Doe and rivalry with Nate, who is close to his sister.
As well as being the topmost witching family, the Hawthornes are British nobility. Nate grows up in wealth and privilege but finds this lifestyle suffocating.
The Hawthornes enforce strict rules around the use of magic, focused partly on secrecy and partly on increasing their power. Certain forms of magic were also forbidden, particularly spells around dealing with the dead and trying to contact spirits. Purity of witching blood was also enforced. Tradition would see marriage arranged between other witching families.
As he grew up, Nate felt increasingly rebellious and reacted against these rules. He was obsessed by magic, eagerly studied what was forbidden, and dreamed of performing magic on stage to the world.

The Beginning (2019)

By the time he's 18, Nate is planning to leave Hawthorne Manor and move to London, where he intends to make his own way in the world. He has an apartment to go to, but delays, knowing that his family will disown him and cut him off from his sister. He has also started to date Xavier, a boy from another witching family, and he's reluctant to end their situationship.
A marriage between Doe, and Harry Thornton, an american witch, has been arranged. Nate has gotten friendly with Harry's empathic friend Anna, who shares his disagreements with witching culture and is the first truly like-minded witch he's ever met.
Nate and his brother Theo get into an altercation that turns violent. This finally prompts Nate to leave home, convinced he can never be happy under his family's thumb.
He asks Doe, Xavier, and Anna to come with him. Doe and Xavier both refuse; Doe wants to become Supreme, and Xavier wants Nate and himself to get married as arranged and stay together in secret. Nate breaks up with Xavier and says goodbye to Doe. Anna chooses to come with him, and they move to London together.
Nate starts performing magic in public, and quickly gains media attention and interest. His family disown him as predicted, insisting that he will only be allowed to return if he rejects his new fame and submits to their rule. He refuses, and cuts off contact with them.

Two years pass (2021)

2021

Nate and Anna live in London together. They begin an open sexual relationship, and live to some excess. Nate is in periodic contact with Doe, who keeps their communication secret from the rest of the family.
Nate's magic shows have made him famous, and he stages regular shows on the West End. He continues to experiment with magic, his spells growing increasingly more dangerous now that he no longer needs to hide them.
Anna's skill as an empath has also grown with her freedom. One night, while probing into the beyond with Nate, she goes further than before and picks up on something new and unusual; an empathic disturbance that frightens and unsettles her.
Nate casts a spell seeking out the disturbance. The spell latches onto the source - a greater demon, who was harvesting and consuming souls. The demon pulls Nate through his own pentagram and into its own realm, a hell dimension into which living souls are not supposed to tread.

Nate's Story

Nate is made prisoner of the demon, who identifies himself as Ineroth the ravenous, the insatiable, the ever-empty, and a whole host of other titles. Nate resists the demon's attempt to consume his soul and fights back. Ineroth, unaccustomed to resistance backed up by magic, becomes determined to wear Nate down and feed on his power. He tortures Nate with shadow magic, which Nate resists and endures until he sees an opportunity to escape. Nate tries to teleport home-
But it would never be that easy. Ineroth reacts quickly, disrupting Nate's spell so that he teleports not to his own world, but into a bubble dimension of Ineroth's creation. So begins a great chase, with Ineroth determined to wear Nate into submission over time, and Nate desperate to get back to his world.
Ineroth weaves a prison intended to tire and frustrate his target. Nate keeps teleporting through multiple different bubble dimensions, but he is unable to escape Ineroth's realm entirely. Each dimension he finds himself in turns out to be another of the demon's tricks, and in each one, he ends up encountering Ineroth himself.
All around Nate are other captive souls, in various states of decay. At first, none of them are able to communicate. Eventually, Nate manages to get far enough away from Ineroth to find souls which are more whole, and able to comprehend enough to talk to him. Through them, he learns what the demon wants; each soul consumed makes Ineroth larger and more powerful. Eventually, Ineroth will gain strength enough to break through into the world of the living, and will consume it all.
Nate realises that escaping from Ineroth isn't enough; the demon has to be stopped.
Nate doesn't know how long he's been trapped. Ineroth's realm is made of Ineroth's shadow, and there is no night or day. As a living soul in a dead realm, Nate never ages, nor feels tired or hungry. He has no true measure of time; it feels like his whole lifetime over again.

Thorn

By the time Nate meets Thorn, he had already encountered hundreds of souls, most of whom could no longer communicate. Some, he'd managed to free from Ineroth's embrace, provoking the demon's fury. Ineroth had brought Nate to the brink of death multiple times in the attempt to consume him, and on one occasion, comes so close that Nate thinks it's over.
Instead, he manages to teleport, and finds himself in the presence of a new soul, far more coherent than the rest. Where the others had all felt like fading ghosts to him, this new one seems conscious and alive - if confused, and uncertain. The new soul can't remember his real name, but he asks Nate to call him Thorn.
With Thorn, Nate finds the most intelligent interaction he's had in years. If there is any soul he has to save, he knows it has to be this one, and he knows it has to be fast, before Ineroth can erode any more of Thorn's identity.
The two become friends, and in short order, lovers as well. Together, they discover that there was a powerful cage around Thorn. Nate takes it as a sign of how much Ineroth wants Thorn's soul, and believes the cage was intended to keep him there while he was eroded, to prevent him from running away as Nate had.
They work together, evading Ineroth. Finally, they put their strength together to try and break away from Ineroth's realm...
And then Ineroth appears, surrounding Thorn, and consuming him in front of Nate. Nate, in horror, watches as Ineroth's strength visibly grows.
In the same moment, an external force catches hold of the spell Nate and Thorn had been trying to cast. It pulls Nate through, finally returning him to his own world.

Anna's Story

Anna can only watch as Nate is pulled into hell. Horrified, she tries to recreate his spell, but can't connect to him. Panicked, she reaches out to Doe for help.
A horrified Doe wants the Hawthorne family to pool their resources to get Nate back. The Hawthornes refuse. As far as they are concerned, Nate is no longer a part of the family. They had always told him that his experiments would get him into trouble. This, they felt, was just reward.
Doe doesn't agree. For the next year, she works with Anna, trying everything they can think of to reach out to Nate. They can never find him.
However, on Doe and Nate's 21st birthday, Doe ascends to Supreme, meaning that among other responsibilities, she is now the head of the Hawthorne family. Her relatives could no longer disobey her wishes, even though they don't agree; by their own rules and traditions, she is in charge. She instructs them to seek out her brother, and to find the disturbance that Anna could still sense.
Meanwhile, Anna is working harder and harder to reach out to Nate with her empathy. She routinely pushes herself beyond her limits, and becomes more and more reliant on her power. On one occasion, she breaks the crystal siphon that Nate had made for her, causing it to be partially absorbed by her body. The accident makes her power even stronger. She begins to believe that she can sense Nate, though in pieces; he keeps moving, making it difficult for her to latch onto him, and there is a very angry, very powerful entity that blocks her attempts.
As time goes on, she gets closer and closer, drawing the entity's attention. She is able to describe it to the Hawthornes, leading them to uncover Ineroth's name in one of their oldest books. Most are dismissive, doing the research only because Doe demanded it. Doe, on the other hand, is afraid. She knows that the presence of a greater demon is a threat to all magic. It couldn't be allowed to come to Earth.

Five Years Later (2026)

Nate returns, with no idea how long he's been gone. Anna is waiting for him, having cast the spell that finally latches on to him. He's confused and upset, stumbling over himself to tell her what happened. Anna does her best to calm him, while calling Doe.
Finally, the twins are reunited. Doe wants to celebrate Nate's return, but Nate is distraught, and desperate to help Thorn. Nate believes that he has only returned because Thorn helped him to do it, and believes Thorn is still alive inside Ineroth. Nate refuses to abandon him and wants to bring Ineroth to Earth. He theorises that Ineroth would be weaker if taken away from his own realm, and if they could capture and bind him, he could find a way to bring Thorn back.
Doe is adamantly opposed; the demon can't come here. What matters is that Nate is away from him.
Nate insists that his escape is not enough, and had never been enough. Unchecked, Ineroth would keep consuming souls, and eventually find his way to the human world anyway. They had to stop him on their terms, and in so doing, they had to save Thorn from him.
Doe refuses. She wants to shore up their world's defences, keep Ineroth away at all costs, and keep him contained in his own realm.
The siblings part, unhappily at odds, and each determined to see through their own plan. Doe has every resource of Hawthorne house behind her. Nate doesn't care; after all he's never felt part of the Hawthorne fold. He'll act alone if he has to.
Of course, he's not alone. Anna, still wracked with guilt over Nate's disappearance in the first place, promises to help him. Just like when he left home, the one he could rely on was always her.

The Struggle (2027)

It was far easier said than done. While Nate and Anna worked on a way to summon and bind Ineroth in their world, Doe and the Hawthornes actively thwarted their attempts.
Anna's empathy grew ever stronger, and ever more connected to Ineroth.
Throughout this time, Nate starts to dream of Thorn. The dreams are vivid, and memorable. They feel like Thorn is reaching out to communicate with Nate, and Nate reaches back for him. Once they connect, Nate feels the familiar, creeping chill of Ineroth. Understanding floods his mind; Thorn had not been consumed by Ineroth - he is Ineroth. The demon had been consuming souls for millennia, using their energy to increase his power. But each of those souls had conscience and morality. Thorn had been the demon's manifestation of their humanity, and the cage that Nate had broken him out of had been a barrier between him and the rest of the demon. By removing the barrier, Nate had inadvertently given Ineroth access to a well of energy from which he'd previously been cut off. As a consequence, Ineroth is now that much stronger.
Nate continues to dream of Thorn. Over the course of a year, he starts to see him more and more often. Eventually he starts to see him even while he's awake. Anna realises that the dreams are a sign of an empathic connection between Nate and Thorn.
Nate starts using the connection to deliberately try and reach Thorn. This bolsters his belief that he could separate Thorn from the demon. In reality, Ineroth is manipulating Nate through the connection, until Nate can no longer tell whether he's conversing with his friend or his enemy.
Anna could see more clearly. She believed that Nate's connection to Thorn could be used as the hook to summon the demon into a binding of their creation. They try the spell, only to be interrupted by Doe and the Hawthornes, who are finally able to break through the wards around Nate's apartment. Nate runs inside the spell circle, trapping himself along with Ineroth so that he won't lose Thorn again. The demon immediately starts to consume him, and for the first time, Nate doesn't fight back - he just wants to find Thorn again.
Panicked, Anna weaponises her own empathy to reach out to Nate, and pull him back outside of the circle. Anna and Doe are able to banish Ineroth, but Nate is left comatose.
Anna reaches into Nate's mind to wake him, and finds him fractured, and still holding on to Thorn. She manages to bring him back to consciousness, where he tells her and Doe that Ineroth and Thorn are intertwined at the core. They cannot be separated.
Anna proposes another option. If Thorn's humanity cannot be separated from the demon, perhaps they could give him control of Ineroth's form. If he were in charge, rather than hidden within, perhaps he would no longer want to invade their world. Nate and Doe agree that the attempt would be worth trying. The twins were finally on the same side.

Saving Thorn (2028)

Working together, Nate and Doe craft an upgraded version of the spell Nate had attempted with Anna. With every Hawthorne contributing their magic on Doe's orders to manage the binding, Nate, Anna and Doe successfully summon Ineroth.
Anna weaponises Nate's empathy link with the demon, creating a channel to let Nate reach inside and talk to Thorn.
Nate is able to connect with the part of the demon who would never hurt anyone, and with the help of the binding spell, Thorn is able to take control of the demon's mind. Ineroth's evil is pushed down and bound tightly with Hawthorne magic, allowing Thorn's goodness to take precedence.
Now in control, Thorn willingly returns to his realm, and releases the remainder of Ineroth's captive souls.
With the demon no longer threatening their realm, Doe had cemented her role as Supreme. She reinstates her brother's place in the family, and Nate makes peace with them.

The Present (2028-29)

Returning to normal life proves difficult for Nate, after years of travelling through unearthly realms. He chooses not to return to performing magic on stage, finding himself detached from the life he used to want. He decides to focus on investigating the demonic realms, and uses his magic to seek out and prevent further threats to his home.
He maintains his empathic connection with Thorn, who crosses the barrier between worlds often to visit him.
Over the next few months, it becomes clear that there is a problem with magic on Earth. The barriers between realms appear weaker; there are more instances of demonic interaction, and an increase in the activities of supernaturals such as vampires, incubi, succubi, genies, even nephilim. There are also increases in occurrences of wild magic, which seem to get worse and worse.
Thorn also reports that the other six high demons, his siblings, have taken an interest in what happened to him and may present a threat.
Ineroth is no longer threatening to consume the human world, but Thorn has gone too far in the other direction - he's not doing his job, and it's throwing magic out of balance.
Meanwhile, Doe discovers that she is pregnant.
Thorn decides to return to hell, hoping that this would stabilise the world of magic. Not wanting to be separated again, Nate chooses to go with him. They are quickly accosted by Thorn's siblings, and realise that the instability is not confined to Earth, but is presenting in every realm. It is also still worsening despite Thorn's return, because Thorn is still not doing is demonic job. Merely being present in Hell is not enough.
Nate and Thorn return to Earth to report what happened, but find that months have passed, and Doe's pregnancy is almost at full term. Doe and Anna confront Nate over leaving, believing that he has stopped engaging with ordinary life. Nate admits that he is struggling to fit back into life on Earth and feels unable to be the person he used to be. He decides to give his London apartment to Anna and comes home to Hawthorne Manor, hoping that a new start will help.
The group theorise that a permanent solution might be to strip Thorn of his demonic energy, and confer it on someone willing - perhaps sharing it between Thorn's siblings. If successful, this would make Thorn human, something that Thorn desperately wants. The means of achieving it remains elusive, particularly since the other demons are more interested in finding their own freedom on Earth.
The demons begin to emerge in the mortal realm, targeting and influencing other witches. Thorn returns to Hell again, this time determined to fulfil his role as the prince of Gluttony despite the toll it will take on his conscience. Once again, Nate chooses to return with him, unwilling for them to be separated and feeling in general more attached to Thorn than to life on Earth.
As 2029 begins, resolving the instability of the magical world is now the major aim of Nate, Doe, and everyone else connected with them. Nate's personal goal is to stay with Thorn, no matter what else happens.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Being trapped in Ineroth's realm very effectively pulled Nate away from drugs and alcohol - they just weren't available to him there. As a result, he will no longer be reliant on them as coping mechanisms, though he will enjoy having access to them again.
He grew accustomed to marking his body with tattoos when there was something he needed to remember. The major example of this is his left arm, which he spelled so that a circular mark would appear every time he enters a new dimension/world/realm. He now has a near-full sleeve tattoo of interlocking circles all down his left arm. There are other tattoos sprinkled across his body serving as reminders of knowledge that he had no other way of writing down.
Nate experienced cumulatively far more than 5 years in Ineroth's realm - in terms of how much he experienced, it was more like 15-20 years. Because the realm was unchanging, Nate did not physically age during that time, and he had no way to measure the passage of time. However, discovering that it was only 5 human years will feel wrong and confusing to him, and it will be difficult to reconcile in his head.

History

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