Tortured Souls: Six Destinies
Book One: The Secret Face of Genesis
Encyclopædia 0.1

Characters

Agonistes

definition
"He is a transformer of human flesh; a creator of monsters." "Over the years, over the centuries, he has been the answer to countless prayers for deliverance from powerlessness." By "cutting, infibulating, searing, cauterizing, stretching, twisting, reconfiguring," Agonistes remakes his Supplicants into "the image of their terror." Agonistes is summoned by sincere prayers.

Cardinal Gaillema

Author of the heretical A Trestise on the Madness of God. He argued that on the seventh day of creation, an exhausted Jehovah created "destroyers and demons."

God

See Jehovah.

Iscariot, Judas

A Supplicant of Agonistes. He was the only Supplicant to ever been granted the comfort of death; Agonistes hung him from a tree.

Jehovah

Also: God
According to Cardinal Gaillema, Agonistes' creator. Instead of resting on the seventh day of creation, Jehovah, "driven into a kind of ecstatic fugue state by the labours of His Creation," created "destroyers and demons."

Pilate, Pontius

A Supplicant of Agonistes.

Supplicant

One who seeks Agonistes's services. "They become objects of perverse beauty beneath his hand; their bodies remade in fashions that they have no power to dictate." Agonistes "has transformed potentates and gangsters, failed actors and architects; women who've been cheated by their husbands and come seeking a new form to greet their adulterer in their marriage beds; school mistresses and perfumiers, dog-trainers and charcoal burners. The mighty and the insignificant, the noble and the peasant." Through "cutting, infibulating, searing, cauterizing, stretching, twisting, reconfiguring," Agonistes remakes his Supplicants into "the image of their terror."

Locations

The Burning Places

Where Agonistes can be found. These can be deserts, or within cities in "places where despair has seared away all belief in hope and love."

Objects

First Art

Also: Holy Art
"The art God used to call life into being." Agonistes claims this is what he practices when he transforms the flesh of Supplicants.

Holy Art

See First Art.

A Treatise on the Madness of God

"A heretical volume in the Vatican Library... written by one Cardinal Gaillema in the mid-seventeenth century." In it, Gaillema argued that on the seventh day of creation, an exhausted Jehovah created "destroyers and demons." One of these was Agonistes.

Prayer to Agonistes

'O Agonistes, dark deliverer, make me in the image of my enemies' nightmares. Let my flesh be the stuff from which you carve their terrors; let my skull be a bell which sounds their death-knell. Give me a song to sing, which will be the song of their despair, and let them wake and find me singing it at the bottom of their beds.

'Unmake me, unknit me, transform me.

'And if you cannot do that for me, Agonistes, then let me be excrement; let me be nothing; less than nothing.

'For I want to be the terror of my enemies, or I want oblivion.

'The choice, Lord, is yours.'

Timeline

7th Day of Creation	Agonistes is created by Jehovah.
Early 1st Century	Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot become Supplicants of Agonistes.
Mid 1700s	Cardnial Gaillema writes A Treatise on the Madness of God.

References

Tortured Souls: Six Destinies, Book One: The Secret Face of Genesis by Clive Barker