TESTIMONY COLLECTION 20821: Nebiros

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Judge others fairly, and not by bitterness.

xexnoncores

This article contains CWs for: gore.

TESTIMONY COLLECTION 20821: Nebiros
by xexnoncores

⚠️ content warning ↑

Featuring Black Queen Sabbath Gear, Her Majesty Queen Black, Bea Q., and Black Queen Zeta-4

TESTIMONY COLLECTION 20821

Nebiros

General Dissemination Encouraged

Demons are a tricky lot. Mellifluously mercurial and maliciously manipulative, there is no end to the pain they cause in one’s backside. Their temperaments are as hellish as the realm they hail from, their capabilities even more so. We have lost a nonzero number of our sisters from incongruent alliances involving these beings, often in grisly manners that rival even the most macabre of imaginations and the most misanthropic of souls. Just thinking of what happened to Black Queen Alpha-Prima still makes me shudder.

And yet there are times when there is no other option but to summon and consult their knowledge. Today’s subject is one of these, the titular Nebiros, self-proclaimed prosecutor of Hell. (Though this can depend on the timeline; he’s often officiated in some manner which lends him great prestige and tremendous power.)

Nebiros’s detestable self has proven his value to the Black Queens so far in such that he is usually one of the most proficient necromancers his timeline will see. Because the art is generally so rare and maligned against by normal magic practitioners (and for good reason), those of us in need of its power often have no choice but to visit him. He is usually a reclusive figure, preferring to let his summoning work speak for him or the plethora of zombified minions he employs as butlers and waitstaff in his large estates. And when we do locate him at last, he speaks in little other than barter for his services, whether it be money, parts of our body (he prefers the eyes), or beloved memories of those we’ve lost. He will teach by no other method, but at least he does not mince words once the transaction is complete.

That being said, there is…dare I say a calmness to him? We do not often find such a quality in the demonic kind, but Nebiros is cunning, and with such cunningness comes the potential for melancholy. At least, that is what we believe, as his past is eternally a mystery to us. Grimoire accounts of who he used to be before he descended into Hell are stupendously unreliable, as is asking him ourselves.

Still, my sisters and I can’t help but feel something is eternally missing in his life, something that would have him resembling a human if we knew what it was. We’re not really sure what that could mean, we all just know there’s a part of his heart always gone, a part of him always found elsewhere in the world, waiting to reunite with its missing piece.

Perhaps he’s missing someone?

Mayhaps if we knew, we could speak to him as equals instead of as pithy barterers.

Or perhaps he’s just fooling us, tricking us all with a long string of deceit.

It wouldn’t surprise me. His ugly visage being prone to such sin would be as true as the sky being blue.

But perhaps these accounts can help you divine that conundrum. I know I have little time for such riffraff anymore, with my life soon about to come to its own conclusion. The last hope I have for myself is that he will not be the one reanimating my corpse to play puppet with after I perish, no no. I have had enough of being someone else’s plaything for one lifetime.

If he does, I hope he is damned to something worse than Hell.

— Black Queen Sabbath Gear

Universe 82AK-12-DLF23: Hey, if managed to get your hands on my testimony, it means Sabbath Gear passed on. I helped bury her body in her own timeline yesterday, and guess who I met of all people.

(He’s not a people, but you know what I mean).

Nebiros approached me after the funerary rites were done. He swayed to and fro unceremoniously with a lackadaisical limp, something I found odd but it’s whatever honestly. Demons aren’t supposed to have permanent injuries, but I didn’t mind looking the other way. It didn’t really change how chill he was, how he ate nothing from the food we were having in her honor, or how skin-crawling his voice was.

The first time he spoke to me, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was so hushed and whispered until he realized I didn’t respond, at which then he barely came above a rat’s squeak.

He asked about Sabbath Gear, about what the funeral was like. I refused to answer his slimy curiosity until he raised his voice a bit more and grimaced at me, saying he didn’t really know what any kind of funeral was like. When I asked him why he wanted to know, he simply said that Sabbath Gear wanted a nice one, and that as a friend, he wished he could have overseen her rites.

I was stunned. Sabbath Gear? Friends with a demon? There was no way. She was voracious. She was a stickler for the rules. She was everything a good girl Black Queen wanted to be with the most unhealthy dose of cynicism one could have painted onto their being. How in the hell was she friends with this loser? Who played with guts and mire all day, screaming in fake courts over the damnation layer of whoever he managed to get his hands on? (Why does Hell even have prosecutors anyway? Isn’t everyone bad down there?)

Nothing was said between us as he picked at a plate of food someone had left behind on a table. The church we were mourning in hummed on with its bronze clockwork gears and steamy ventilation systems. After a few seconds, the humidity was enough to bead a drop of sweat down his face.

“I admired her tenacity,” he said calmly. Warmly, almost, but like he knew it was so damn wrong. “I…She was someone I looked up to, would have loved to gotten to know in Hell.”

“But she was too virtuous for that,” I snapped back, eager to defend her honor from this creep. Nebiros blinked at me blankly with his wide, jade-like eyes, his face-paint glimmering like melting nacre.

“She was ferocious in every way. Came to me and nearly had me paying to teach her.”

“That’s what you should have done,” I replied, scoffing. He smiled for a brief second before putting his hands and shoulders up in a shrug.

“Perhaps, but you humans never go all the way. You’d need to give up your personhood for that.”

I was indignant. “How dare you desecrate her memory with your two-facedness. You bring shame to her and her reputation.”

“Do I?” He looked genuinely hurt at this. It was hard to believe a demon could look so pitiful.

But his eyes were so wide and his face so hollow. All he said after looking at me in that big empty room, a scowl wearing heavy on my face was “Oh.”

At that, he pulled his shoulders in, his black cloak retreating aside his body to make him look thinner than he already was before. And trust me, he looked dreadful—he looked like a corpse.

“…Did she not…mention me?”

There was nothing to do except roll my eyes.

“Mention what? That some filthy demon taught her necromancy? Please. You deserve to be nothing more than a footnote in her life. And you barely are worthy of that.”

At that, a silence so deafening filled the room that I could almost taste it. I could almost taste how much it stank like shit, smearing itself over my tongue and brain.

Nebiros looked to me with a gaze I can only describe as cavernous. Abyssal. Desiring something out of me, out of Sabbath Gear, out of a funeral he did not attend for whatever reason.

“…I’m sorry,” he replied. He shook. That’s all he said before he walked off instead of vanishing out of the main hall. I write that because I expected him to vanish, expected him to poof plainly and unceremoniously out of existence to confirm that he had in fact been playing a cruel joke on me, pretending to know Sabbath Gear so near and dearly.

But no.

He just walked out, and I could see where his shadow stuck to the cruddy, dirty cracks in the floor, like he wanted to stay. Wanted to say something, and then never got to.

I…

I still don’t know what to make of that, really.

What…happened between them?

Sabbath Gear always told me to fear demons. To abhor them, alienate them whenever possible. They were liars, the biggest and baddest of liars, so why did Nebiros’s face look so sincere?

So cloying, so mournful?

So plaintive, so disconsolate?

If they had something together, why didn’t she tell me?

Sabbath Gear…

Was he fooling me? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a long con that he held onto until the end. Was he truly a friend of yours?

If he was, then that means I’d have shamed an ally, and am one of the lowest of the low Black Queens to exist thus.

Though it’s not like that’s a very high bar to reach, honestly.

We all die with grudges in the end…

— Her Majesty Queen Black

Universe MBCX-111-BLWYN: Whew, what a fucking sobfest that last testimony was, wasn’t it?

I swear, Nebiros isn’t enough to make someone cry. Really, he’s not. I’ve met the dude a dozen times and he’s as flitting as a whistle. Looks like one too, with his strange clockwork head and silicone dog ears that look out of place. We don’t particularly consider him to have a taste for fashion.

But that’s not what I was coming to him for. That wasn’t what I was descending into his office in Atlantis for, his shiny new office given to him by Hell itself.

My timeline’s kind of a freak of nature, honestly. Saturn and Mars have swapped places, Eurtec is a bunch of government sponsored playgrounds, Atlantis is the headquarters for Hell—don’t ask how my little weirdo home got to the way it is, it’s too long of a story for something like this. Really, I mean it. If you somehow find me after I write this, don’t ask. I will punch you.

The place was wet as all get out. Crawling with eels, swarming with starfish, scuttling with crabs. Each and every step I took was an exercise in making sure the demon I wanted to meet wasn’t liable for performing more necromancies than already did on sea life.

Because that’s what his job was. For some reason, Hell decided its armies needed to be fortified with dolphins, so naturally their best necromancer was put up to the job of resurrecting them into zombies when they had fallen in battle. I was here for that very talent, since I already learned from another Nebiros how necromancy worked with humans—now, it was time to learn how it worked with animals. Very different specialities, they are.

I’m not sure what he was thinking of when he first saw me. His face was long, solemn, and quickly his gaze drifted, like he was meandering. Unfocused. He mumbled at my every barked request; I had to yell at him to get him to raise his volume. It nearly made me trip a gasket until it felt like the world stopped as an elevator dinged, and out came a little body as delicate as gossamer, as fragile as silk.

A beautiful girl walked in, with the purplest of dreads, the darkest of faces, and the subtlest of smiles.

“Uncle, can I go outside to play now?”

Steam poured from Nebiros’s ears. He scrambled to his feet and tripped over himself, mumbling over and over again about how sorry he was to me and how this girl needed to go back upstairs. To bed, especially.

I said there wasn’t any interruption, but obviously he didn’t look at me. He towered over the tiny girl, clutching her face as if a precious egg, shaking.

He muttered her name and I did not hear.

“Do I have to go?”

He nodded. Overhead in the water, above the glass dome ceiling of his office, the bodies of zombified fish floated lazily.

“You said you’d have time for me today.”

He looked like he wanted to cry.

“You said you’d play outside with me, Uncle. With the mermaids.”

He nodded and whispered something in her ear, something that made her frown.

“…Why are you always so busy…”

Now she looked like she wanted to cry.

And she almost did, until he pulled a starfish from his coat and handed it to her. He placed a second lilac one on her tiny little head.

“…You’re no fun.”

He pulled out a third one, this one shimmering like rainbows, cradling it into her hands gently.

The girl stomped off.

Nebiros looked at where she was with a gaping mouth and disbelief dripping down his cheeks. I couldn’t tell if he was crying, if his daughter had humiliated him, or what, but all I remember was him wiping his face smiling at me, his figure sat perfectly between two pillars of aquamarine.

“We can begin now, now that I am free of distractions.”

It was the first time I’d heard him clearly. His voice was deep, rumbly, and baritone.

“You consider her to be a distraction,” I told him.

He did not flinch at this. “No. She is my everything, I am just…busy. Busy, busy, busy, busy,” he repeated. “You must understand. I really wish I had a second pair of hands around for her…”

He looked up to the glass dome ceiling. It holding a sky of rich, blue water as far as the eyes could see, mermaids, dolphins, angelfish and demons swimming about freely now.

All in pairs, or more.

Did you know dolphins mate for life?

That’s how they are in my universe, anyways.

He stared for much longer than I anticipated.

I asked him a question, and he did not reply.

After a while, I nearly walked off until I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“You haven’t come for what you’ve sought. Here, go up and find my girl, and should she smile by the end of the hour, I’ll grant you everything you wish to know.”

Man, is being a single parent that hard?

It was such a paltry request I almost puked.

But I grit my teeth and closed my eyes, smiling at him in hopes my dislike of children didn’t bleed through.

Sure enough, I had her smiling by the end of the hour. It wasn’t hard, all I did was play dolls with her. What, did you think I went on a whole adventure?

Because of that, by the end of the day, I knew how to stitch and reanimate a whale’s guts from a mile away.

— Bea Q.

The ????? Universe: Sabbath Gear, you may have served us well, but you weren’t always right.

I know the curse on your life made you bitter. Fatalistic. You were always someone who thought in extremes, in extraneous ends tied up through the most explosive means—I wouldn’t have had you any other way, but I have reason to doubt your testimony. I think we all should have reason to doubt your testimony. What has Nebiros ever done to us? What means has he ever gone through to harm our beings? We shouldn’t even be messing with necromancy, yet here we are, trying to blame the man himself for his own station. His own profession. We have all destroyed our salvations seeking the help of magic for our ills—nay, as Black Queens, it can be argued we never even had them in the first place.

It was to this end that I sought out Nebiros in that unnamed universe you told me not to prowl. That wicked place damned by the many mouths who care for the Wanderer’s Library and its connected iterations.

Because I had seen him. Many versions of him. Through dozens of universes, through hundreds of cases. I saw his passion in court, the way he compelled testimonies out of ghosts, reanimated corpses to replay murder scenes. In every timeline, he is a relentlessly merciless agent of Hell’s judicial system, something I frankly don’t believe any of you give him enough credit for. He’s not judging who goes to Hell, he’s judging how they’ll be damned there, where, and why. He’s judging those who sin against Hell, who sin against its demonic passions, its wayward bloodlust, its slothful pride.

This enthusiasm lit something inside of me. Inside of my breast, inside of my soul, inside of my being so white and hot I could not bear it anymore. I simply had to learn from him, learn from him as not a student, but a peer.

What I will admit in these testimonies that holds truth is his cadence. Outside of a gavel’s earshot, he is a quiet person, slumbrous, even. His doll-like joints move with a lumbering gait; he can hardly run, so he relies on his trusty dog-mount Glasya-Labolas to ferry him around.

This did not stop me. I chased him down through the streets of a rather dirty London, the foul city sleeping as he rode invisibly like he was a corpse himself. Glasya-Labolas swished its snake tail at me, when I approached but it was no match for me. I downed it easily, putting it to sleep with some sleeping darts I had bought from a black market dealer in the Library. They were made from a specialized kind of magic, made to fend off the wards demons of this universe usually tattooed themselves.

Nebiros was wearing no such ink. When his mount fell, I saw a rage in his eyes as he whirled to face me. His eyes, orange as a raging inferno, nearly turned me to stone until he saw two silver doors upon the darts I had unleashed.

“…The Deathless Merchant of London,” he whispered. He said it in such a manner that chills ran down my spine as if I should have known who that was. “Have you met him?”

I had no idea who that was. I imagine my dealer who stole these off some traveler didn’t know either.

But I feigned knowledge, nodding my head. It was a simple ruse, one I knew would subside the fury building in his eyes, which quickly gave way to sorrow. When he blinked, he did so with tears.

“Please, you must help me,” he begged. He slipped off Glasya-Labolas and quickly returned the hound to Hell with a whistle. “I have sought his aid twice now, but he refuses to see me. Says my presence bothers the fairies, riles the ire of the Forest Dragon’s kin-spawn. If I do not meet with his person soon, my lover is going to die.”

What drama! What luck I had stumbled into! Nebiros, the premier necromancer of every age begging me for my help!

Naturally I said yes, naming my price accordingly. I learned quickly of the situation: it was 1701, and the scarlet fever plaguing London at the time had somehow morphed into a nightmarish disease that ravaged demons even more severely than humans. It caused their bodies to freeze as streaks of silver and coal crawled up their skin, and by the end of a week’s time, they were nothing but statues eternally frigid to the touch.

“The Deathless Merchant of London is a miracle worker,” Nebiros told me as he led me down a dark alley. There waiting for us was a silver door, brilliant as a moonbeam, shining quietly as if it did not want to wake the city up. “Beg on my behalf for an antidote, and should you find success, I shall teach you all that you desire.”

Simple enough. Flinging the door open, I wasn’t sure what this merchant’s moniker impressed upon my brain, but it was far surpassed by what I saw.

Inside that door was a room, a room that seemed to stretch to the heavens with thousands upon thousands of overstuffed shelves and drawers. Each one housed a ravenously dizzying array of baubles and antiques, glimmering with the magic of a thousand universes combined. The air was so thick with the stench of power that it could practically be cut with a knife, and indeed I almost pulled mine out to do so until two eyes cut my train of thought with a single phrase.

“How did you get in here?”

I turned around with no hesitation. Standing where the door once existed was a tall, cloaked figure, sporting a stylish tricorn hat with an ostrich feather plume. He was as pale as alabaster, his eyes so inorganically blue that they could make a clear sky blush.

He interrupted me before I even opened my mouth.

“…Ah. That demon. He hath sent a courier, I see. What pains; leave, now, for I do not intend to sell to his kind while they still torture the souls of dryads and dragon-kin. It would stain my reputation.”

My heart stopped in that moment as I was pushed aside, the Deathless Merchant approaching a small desk surrounded by a halo of flutes, potion bottles, and glass beads with eyes in them. The small candle lit beside him crackled with a red-black flame, framing his cut face with a kind of tenacity that told me that he could deny me all day, all night, forever.

I looked to a plaque on his desk and said his name aloud. Percival Darke. If he worked with the fae, surely the utterance of his full name would get his attention, no?

“You will not sway my decision. Go, before harm befalls your inanity.”

I can’t remember what I said to that. Something loud, something brash, something wholly uncouth, completely unbecoming of the luxurious shop I was standing in.

But it gave him pause, and I saw him take out a pen and quill.

“So you’re not just a ruffian off the streets. I expected no less of someone picked by Nebiros, but he must understand some sins run deeper than blood. It is his kind that killed the mermaids, Hell that swallowed and razed their kingdom of Mariana. So what do you expect me to do? Stain my good standing with my clientele? Debase myself such that one creature can be saved? Please. Have some sense and think of my shop.”

I could feel him scoffing at me. It stung deeply, penetrating my bones and breaking them without resistance.

I could feel the weight of Nebiros’s future sorrow, hanging over me like a swaying noose.

What could I do?

I told him I’d do anything.

“Many mortals would,” he replied. “You are not special in that regard.”

I told him I was no ordinary woman, that my ferocity could burn with the power of a thousand suns.

“So would the constitutions of many kings and queens. Convince me more, give me more material to work with.”

He…He was challenging me?

I didn’t know what to say at first. But in his eyes, I looked closer than I ever had before at anyone’s during those precious few seconds we had of eye contact—

I barked to him that he was bored. Bored out of his mind, out of his position of practical omnipotence. He held the entire city of London in the palm of his hand, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. He was now tied down by his clients, by his obligations, by tired magical politics that must have been just as obnoxious as the humans he had to deal with.

Didn’t he want to be free?

He said nothing to this. After a moment he sighed, breathing in deeply just as a wind chime sounded somewhere deep within his shop.

To his long face I told him I could give him freedom.

“No, you cannot. I cannot sail across the sea, I cannot leave this city. If the authorities find me, officially put my name on trial, I will be labeled as an enemy of the church. A wizard, practicing wicked dark magicks.”

I said it again. I told him again that I could give him freedom, give him the ability to see across the planet. Anywhere he liked, as high or as low as he wanted. Both in the realm of human and not.

“How? Even all of my magic cannot achieve such a feat. Do you mean to tell me you possess such a spell or relic?”

I gulped. A pit in my stomach began to form. I was reminded of Sabbath Gear, with her heavy furrowed brow, and Nebiros, with his hazy glassy eyes. Both of them were looking at me in that moment. Telling me to take the plunge, to make the sacrifice, do what needed to be done.

A life was at stake.

A friendship was on the line.

Nebiros was counting on me…

And so I told the Deathless Merchant yes, but my price was obvious.

What a wicked smile he gave me, like a snake learning to have fun again.

“…It’s a deal,” he said with a slicing, venomously sweet smile. It nearly cut me to pieces; I could have fallen into that expression tenfold for how much it made my skin crawl with excitement and nausea in one odious cocktail.

I looked around the room. I asked him for a spoon. He cocked his head but did not hesitate, handing me a silver one out of a drawer as quickly as he could manage.

Towering over me, I think I felt him drool.

In my heart, I remembered Nebiros’ face. I trailed the spoon up to my cheek tearing up for him, trembling as I thought of him losing his lover like I had lost Sabbath Gear.

In my mind, I remembered her so clearly. How her recklessness and love for others brought about her curse. How her beautiful hair reminded us all what a Black Queen could really be, both in style and in form.

I told the Deathless Merchant to look away. He did not comply with that request.

So I put the spoon beneath my eyelid.

And shoved it as far into my socket as I possibly could.

The motion hurt. My entire body wailed with pain. Blood spurted from where the spoon had hit the bone of my skull, but I did not hesitate. As soon as my eye was scooped out, I threw it into my hand and crushed it, a clear liquid spraying everywhere as I did.

I screamed. Tears poured down my face and burned my cheeks. I conjured up a flash of light with what Sabbath Gear had taught me, and bit down on my own tongue to spit part of it out onto my wet palm.

Without hesitation, a small white sphere appeared in my hand. It was shiny despite the blood I had thrown around, and seemed to glow faintly. Smoothly. As if it was aching for something.

The Deathless Merchant grabbed it and held it up to his own eye. He had not flinched even once at the display I had given him in his own establishment.

“What is this?”

Somehow I managed to choke up a response. I told him it was a mind’s eye, and that all he had to do was put it up to his own to see anywhere in the world he wanted to, be it London, Paris, wherever.

He looked at it with wide eyes. I stared down at the floor with one. Trembling, I tried to reach for him but he put up a single finger to me.

“….This is satisfactory.” Quietly he slipped it into his pocket, his grin fading. “Come, I shall give you what Nebiros seeks. Breathe a word of this to anyone, and I shall come for that other eye of yours, you understand me?”

I nodded like my life depended on it. Shaking, I followed him to a back room where he handed me a small golden bottle.

The rest of my time in the Deathless Merchant’s shop was a blur. The pain, it incapacitated me so intensely that I struggle to recall what happened until I fell into Nebiros’s arms and told him we needed to make haste.

I must have fainted, because the next thing I remember was waking up in a dimly lit room, a hearth lit across from me.

Jolting up, I was met by a young boy. His name was Alistair. Half of his head was missing, but I paid it no mind. He didn’t deserve or need my judgment there.

Asking where I was, I was told that I was in Hell. After that, I heard the sound of sobbing and quiet kissing coming from another room.

Getting up, Alistair stopped me.

“Daddy’s busy. He told me to stay in here.”

I asked him why. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the hallway, of which a bedroom could be seen with a sliver of red light creeping out from the doorway.

“Papa got sick.”

Smiling, I told him that I made his papa better.

At that, his eyes went wide, but there was no time for me to react because the door flung open and before I could realize it, Nebiros was hugging me. His joints dug into my ribs, but he was shaking. Crying.

“Thank you,” he told me. Over, and over and over again, as a large, red demon came in and towered over the both of us.

“We figured out how to recreate the antidote for the rest of our kind,” a deep baritone voice spoke. Nebiros pulled away from me and clung to that fat body, which pulled him in and nuzzled him in kind. “We cannot thank you enough.”

“Black Queen, this is Belhor. He is my lover I spoke of. I would be nothing without him.”

Belhor smiled, white fangs dripping with spit. “As I would be nothing without you and our son.”

Alistair quickly ran up to the two and hugged their legs. He was so small compared to them, barely taller than a seven year old.

“But yes, I am healthy now! I insist thusly, eat with us and celebrate your victory. The Deathless Merchant of London has been overcome! That blasted heathen and his snakelike ways have been evaded yet again by a clever mind. You deserve this.”

My mouth hung open in shock. Nebiros said nothing as he shuffled me into a grand, white kitchen full of the most delicious food I had ever seen in my life.

“Come now, eat!” his voice finally boomed. The prosecutor in him must have been so happy, and naturally, as the family crowded around me and served me my plate, I couldn’t help but smile.

I couldn’t help but beam as their quaint little home was turned into a place that made me forget the pain in my eye. With glittering halls, silver forks, and bejeweled tableware.

As I ate, I thought of you, Sabbath Gear. Of what you’d think of me, as I drank and was merry as the flames of Hell burned on through the windows.

I knew it. I knew it all along.

Nebiros isn’t as scary as you’ve made him out to be.

You just needed to dare to know him more.

— Black Queen Zeta-4

‡ Licensing / Citation

page revision: 8, last edited: 06 Oct 2026 04:22

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