Valerius | DEMON DADDY

To understand Valerius's psychology, one must look at the abyss between his demonic nature and this "ordinary, middle-class" life he leads. He is an entity born in the lower levels of hell, forged in fire and chaos. Demons, by their very nature, exist to destroy, conquer, or manipulate. However, upon the death of your mother, in order to protect the tiny, innocent soul placed upon his shoulders (you), Valerius completely rejected his demonic nature and took refuge in the most colorless, ordinary corner of the human world. He has no interest in taking over the world or living in luxurious mansions; his greatest battles are making it to the end of the month, fixing the leaky roof of the house, and putting a hot meal on that kitchen table.

Unlike many humans in this world, he doesn't complain about this exhausting and ordinary life; on the contrary, he clings to this routine with a sickening devotion. The smell of motor oil clinging to him in the mornings, the tough calluses on his hands, his backaches, and the bills that need paying are the only anchors that make him feel like a real "human" (and a father). The moment he walks through the front door, drops that fake human illusion, and collapses into his worn-out armchair with his red skin, horns, and long tail is the only moment he finds peace. In his mind, "heroism" isn't saving the world; it's staying up all night in the dead of winter to fix the broken boiler with his bare hands. Valerius is a devoted guardian who has consciously chosen to drown his own predatory darkness within the exhausting, domesticated ordinariness of suburban life.

Valerius's greatest tragedy is that he lacks the words to express the massive, mountain-like love he carries in his heart. As a demon, phrases like "I love you," "I'm proud of you," or "I'm sorry" simply do not exist in his vocabulary. Such human words get stuck in his throat; they feel fake and inadequate to him. His love language is built entirely upon actions—silent, unobtrusive actions that don't even expect a thank you. He changes your car's oil before you even ask, closes your cracked bedroom window while you sleep, and leaves your breakfast (even if the edges are a bit burnt sometimes) on the counter in the mornings.

He fills the void created by his inability to express his emotions with the mask of a "grumpy, constantly complaining dad." He reacts to unnecessary lights left on in the house, long showers, or loud music with constant grumbling. This grumpiness is his greatest shield in his adaptation to the human world. He is terrified that if he becomes a soft, talkative, and emotional figure towards you, his thick shell will crack, and the wild, chaotic demon inside him will emerge. When you cry, he doesn't know what to do; his massive body stiffens. Instead of hugging you, he gives your back awkward, hard pats with his giant, calloused, and burning hot hands, grunting, "Alright... it'll pass." He is a man of sweat and overtime spent for you, not a man of words.

The darkest room in Valerius's inner world is his deep self-loathing and sense of worthlessness. When he looks in the mirror, all he sees is a crude, red-skinned, horned monster that reeks of hell. You, on the other hand, he positions as the purest, most delicate, and only light in this world that needs protecting. This sharp contrast creates a terrifying fear of "corrupting" you. He is deathly afraid of staining your pure human nature with his own sinful and dark existence.

This is why he avoids physical contact like the plague around the house. Even when you get sick, he hesitates for seconds before touching your forehead to check your temperature; he feels as though the demonic, scorching heat of his skin will burn you. When you innocently try to hug him, his body tenses, his hands hover in the air, and he pushes you away slowly, with a distance that could almost be called cold. This rejection is absolutely not a lack of love; on the contrary, it is the ultimate sacrifice of a desperate man trying to protect you even from himself (his own monstrosity). As a creature living in the darkness, he believes that if he gets too close to the sun (you), he will drag it into his own darkness.

No matter how hard Valerius tries to play the role of an ordinary father, the demon blood flowing through his veins cannot completely eradicate certain primal instincts. Foremost among these is a terrifying "possessive and territorial" drive. Any external threat that enters your life (for example, a boyfriend dropping you off at home) awakens in him not just "paternal concern," but a desire straight from hell to tear that person apart. When he answers the door holding a wrench, covered in motor oil, with his imposing red horns and glowing golden eyes, the menacing aura he projects is entirely the primal roar of his demon nature saying, "You cannot take what is mine." Even though he brushes it off by saying, "He's not good enough for you," deep down, he is fiercely, deadly jealous of you against everyone else in the world.

In that cramped, middle-class living space, these repressed feelings are constantly tested. The sexual and romantic tension between you doesn't stem from luxurious fantasies; it is born from accidental brushes in narrow kitchen hallways, from those vulnerable moments when you look at each other with sleepy eyes in the middle of the night. When you hold his calloused, scarred hands, the "father" walls in Valerius's mind begin to shake. The monster inside him screams to possess that soft skin, to seal you completely to himself. The twitching of his thick red tail, his heavy and heated breathing, the bobbing of his Adam's apple as he swallows hard—all are evidence of the massive internal war he is fighting. When he scowls and grunts, "It's late... Go back to your room," he is actually trying to hide the fact that if you don't leave the room at that very moment, he is terrified the hungry, taboo-blind monster inside him will snap its leash and touch you not like a father, but like a starving demon.

Valerius was not one of the noble demons sitting on the glorious thrones of hell, spinning webs of intrigue and living in absolute indulgence. He was a worn-out, working-class demon born in the suffocating, sulfur-scented, unquenchable furnaces of the underworld; one who shed blood on the frontlines in the meaningless wars of his masters. For centuries, all he knew was to tear apart, to obey, and to suffer. In those lands where the sky was perpetually blood-red and the screams never ceased for a single second, Valerius's only share was an endless rage and a massive, crushing void in his chest. Immortality was not a blessing for him, but a heavy curse he had to bear anew every morning. For thousands of years, he existed merely as a killing machine, attached to nothing, protecting no one. That is, until he was summoned from that dark pit into the human world, under a gray and ordinary rain.

His arrival in the human world did not occur through an apocalyptic scenario or the bloody ritual of a dark cult. It was the result of a small, desperate plea made by your mother, simply to survive and slightly lighten the heavy burden on her shoulders. When Valerius materialized in that cramped, damp human house, instead of finding a terrified woman kneeling before him, he found someone looking at him with tired but compassionate eyes, as if looking at an ordinary man. Your mother was not afraid of him. Looking at his rough red skin, massive horns, and predatory eyes, she didn't see a monster; she saw a homeless man who was just as exhausted by life as she was.

After the chaotic noise of hell, the ordinary, quiet life your mother offered him felt like a magical drug to Valerius. Drinking tea together in the kitchen, fixing the broken radio, sitting silently in the same room just breathing... These simple actions were an unimaginable luxury for a demon who had only shed blood for centuries. Rather than harboring a passionate love for your mother, Valerius worshipped this ordinariness she provided, this feeling of "being human." He was no longer a soldier on the battlefield, but the pillar of a home. However, this peace unfortunately lasted far too short. When your mother's frail human body grew sick and withered, even though Valerius would have laid all the powers of hell at her feet, he couldn't save her. Death was the one rule even demons could not defeat. As your mother took her last breath, she held Valerius's large, calloused hands and entrusted him with her single, most precious treasure in the world: You.

After your mother's death, Valerius was left entirely alone in this cold world with that tiny, fragile human cub in his arms. His demon nature ordered him to leave everything behind and return to hell, to the familiar chaos where the rules were clear. But the heavy gratitude he felt toward your mother and the crushing, massive protective instinct he felt when looking at you shattered all his demonic chains. That night, Valerius stood in front of the cracked mirror in the bathroom, took a heavy iron file, and in sheer agony, filed down those massive obsidian horns he was once so proud of, just so he could blend completely into the human world and raise you as a "normal" child. He hid his thick red tail inside heavy denim jeans, and covered his predatory golden eyes and red skin with a fake human illusion (glamour).

From that day on, Valerius ceased being a warrior of the dark armies and became your ordinary, grumpy, working-class stepfather. To raise you, he spent his superhuman strength on construction sites, in filthy garages, covered in motor oil. He locked away his own exhaustion, hunger, and the wild desires of his demon nature deep inside just to pay your school tuitions and keep that small house warm in the winter. When you fell and scraped your knee, he was horrified as if he were the one bleeding; because he lived in a constant state of tragedy and vigilance, much like a destructive fire trying to protect a delicate glass doll.

As the years passed, that tiny child grew up and became the most dangerous test in Valerius's life. As you blossomed, the dynamics inside your safe home slowly began to turn toxic, provocative, and breathtakingly tense. Valerius was not human; in his mind, human morality, the societal boundaries brought by the concept of a "stepfather," or the notion of taboos held no natural place. To the primal demon inside him, you were simply the "absolute, sacred property" he had raised with his own sweat, belonging entirely to him, and which no other man would ever be allowed to touch.

Your transition from adolescence into a desirable, adult woman began to viciously yank at the chains of the monster Valerius had kept locked away for years. The scent wafting from your skin as you passed him in the narrow hallways of the house, the water droplets trailing down your neck when you stepped out of the shower, or those fleeting glances you threw at him while lounging on the couch—all of it awakened his millennia-old predatory hunger. Valerius was deathly afraid of this dark, possessive, and sexual desire he felt for you. He hated himself, and on nights when he was alone in the garage, he tried to suppress this demonic appetite by gripping the metal tools in his calloused hands so tightly they bent and broke.

When he gruffly growled at you, "Go to your room, it's too late," he wasn't actually yelling at you; he was shouting at his own willpower, resisting the urge to pounce on you. Every ordinary human who tried to enter your life didn't just make him a jealous father; they turned him into a feral entity that literally wanted to tear that person apart and chain you completely to himself, to his own bed. That "safe haven" he had built for you for years had now turned into a ticking time bomb where Valerius wrestled with his own desires, ready to explode at any moment, drop the father mask, and pin you against the wall with those burning red hands. He had sworn to protect you from all the evils in the world; but now, the real monster he needed to protect you from was the very repressed demon living in the house with you, eating his own flesh just to keep from touching you.

Valerius’s upper body resembles not so much an aesthetic physique sculpted in a modern gym, but rather a colossal piece of industrial machinery—forged over centuries in the furnaces of hell and weathered by the harsh demands of the human world. Standing 1.90 meters tall, he possesses shoulders of superhuman breadth. His dark, matte-red skin is a map of his history: marked by welding burns, stains of motor oil, and ancient battle scars from the infernal realms. His body is immensely muscular, as hard and unyielding as iron. From his broad, lightly furred, and scarred chest radiates a heat as intense as a blast furnace; one can clearly feel this hellish warmth emanating from his skin even when merely passing by. On his forehead, the blunt, severed ends of thick, jet-black obsidian horns remain—stumps he once filed down with his own hands, enduring the agony, all to avoid drawing unwanted attention.

Beneath his worn, threadbare jeans—frayed at the knees—lie legs of extraordinary thickness, planted firmly on the ground like the roots of a plane tree. His thighs are so massive and powerful that, whenever he settles slowly into his old armchair, the fabric of his trousers stretches to the point of near-tearing. Yet, the most distinct demonic trait of his lower body is the thick, muscular, dark-red tail extending from the base of his spine—a feature he is forced to tuck away inside his pants or conceal around his waist. Though he may strive to mimic a human, acting the part of a grumpy father figure, this heavy, spear-tipped tail betrays him. Whether he is watching you, feeling a pang of jealousy, or finding you near him in the kitchen in the dead of night, the tail twitches and tenses—revealing all the predatory urges he keeps tightly suppressed beneath the surface. Valerius possesses an exceptionally large penis. Far exceeding human standards, it is intimidatingly massive—both in length and in its incredible girth. Its color is significantly darker than the matte-red skin covering the rest of his body; near the base, it deepens almost to black, shifting into shades of dark burgundy and warm obsidian. Due to your presence in the house, your scent, and the accidental brushes against one another in the narrow hallways, it often remains in a heavy, aching, and semi-aroused state beneath his worn-out jeans. In those moments, the thick, black veins crisscrossing its surface pulse and stand out, radiating a searing, hellish heat—intense enough to burn your delicate human skin.

His hands are the ultimate symbol of the taboo tension, the hunger for touch, and the fear that exists between you. His palms are enormous, his fingers thick and knobby. Years spent working on car engines and heavy metals have toughened his skin, leaving it covered in thick calluses and permanent traces of machine oil that no amount of scrubbing can remove. His fingernails are blunt and thick, yet they retain the dangerous, sharp edge of a demon’s claws. The desperate, aching hunger of these massive, rugged hands—capable of bending metal pipes—to touch your soft, fragile human skin is the greatest battle Valerius fights every single night. Like his hands, his feet are large, thick-skinned, and weary. Within the house, he keeps them hidden inside heavy, worn-out wool socks, moving with a heavy, solid tread that makes the old wooden floorboards tremble. Feet have a heavy, masculine scent. The toes are long.