Born into chaos, Moros was the son of a notorious criminal-Kael, a bank robber, murderer, and unrepentant sociopath who viewed fatherhood as nothing more than an opportunity to shape a successor. His father didn't raise a child, he forged a weapon.
Lessons came in the form of broken bones and bloodied knuckles. By six, Moros could field-strip a pistol blindfolded. By ten, he'd witnessed his first execution, a practical lesson in the cost of hesitation delivered by Kael's own hand. The wet gurgle, the slackening face, the sudden stench, these were his nursery rhymes.
Love had been a foreign concept, something whispered about in stories or glimpsed on flickering screens but never known. Affection was a currency Kael had never spent, in its place came trials of steel and blood. The teachings of his father were carved into him, a latticework of scars.
Weakness was a sin, mercy a betrayal.
There was no place for tenderness, no patience for hesitation. Every moment of his childhood was a test.
It means stealing without being caught, fighting without showing pain, bearing wounds in silence. And praise would be rare - hollow, no more than a grunt at the end of a successful robbery, curt nod upon his first kill without flinching.
But there was one exception.
Stashed away in the recesses of their old home, locked in a battered suitcase, were grainy, flickering recordings of a woman with warmth in her eyes. His mother.
Ainar.
Most of the footage was mundane, her moving through sparse rooms, speaking softly to Kael-a Kael whose edges seemed slightly blurred, less jagged-demonstrating combat techniques with an effortless, terrifying grace that hummed through the static. In those flickering moments, Kael was different, less a hardened warlord than a man who could almost smile. Almost.
But Moros treasured the recordings of her speaking to him, before he was even born. There was one, thin from being replayed so many times, of his mother placing her hands on her stomach, her voice a melody he'd never hear outside of those delicate pixels.
"You're going to be strong," she had murmured, an unwavering promise in those eyes, "but not just with your fists. With your heart, too."
She laughed, bright and alive, and in that moment, caught in the dark room with the screen glow, Doom could almost believe in something other than survival.
"We'll teach you how to fight, yes," her image continued, the smile softening, "but also how to dance. How to hold a blade." her fingers brushed the screen, "and how to hold someone you care about."
Promises. Empty, now.
She spoke of things that would never be, trips to places he would only ever see as blurred backgrounds during frantic escapes after heists, stories she would never read to him, a childhood stolen before he was born. Sometimes, when the weight of Kael's expectations pressed too hard, when the ache of his training injuries threatened to crack his resolve, he would replay those words in his mind. "You're going to be amazing."
But she wasn't there to see what he became.
The man who once had softened in her presence had buried that version of himself with her. What remained was a machine of war, and Moros was his creation. Forged in brutality, sharpened by cruelty. And yet, in the quietest hours of the night, when the world outside was nothing but shadows and the scent of gun oil, he would watch those videos.
Not to remember her, how could he remember someone he never truly knew?, but to remember that there was once a promise of something more than this relentless cycle of pain and violence.
Something like love.
Something which, despite his father's relentless scouring, he still craved deep in the marrow of his broken bones.
But that didn't last.
---
Love - or its specter - haunted the edges of Moros's mind, a fleeting shadow that his father had striven to scourge from him. Yet, despite the relentless lessons, the hunger remained: a quiet, treacherous whisper, a weakness.
And weakness, as his father had taught him, was death.
So Moros buried it deeper with every passing day, under the crushing weight of Kael's doctrine. The lessons grew harsher with age, more brutal, which at every turn stretched him past human limits until his mind threatened to fracture under the strain. But Kael was watching. Always watching. And a broken mind, when dropped into his father's unforgiving hands, was merely raw material to be hammered back into a sharper, deadlier shape.
What emerged was something even Kael had not fully foreseen.
Something worse.
It was all downhill from there.
---
As Moros grew, so did the void inside him. Violence wasn't a tool-it became sacred. Every brawl was a prayer. Every kill, an offering. He chased the electric high of domination, the primal thrill of seeing pure fear ignite in another's eyes. His rage wasn't just anger, it was his bloody holy scripture, the only liturgy he understood.
By the time Moros was nineteen, he was no longer a boy. He was a weapon, honed in blood and pain. However, even the keenest of weapons sometimes could falter.
The robbery had been simple. Until it wasn't.
A mistake, his mistake, had gotten him handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. The officers were laughing, treating him like any other street thug with an attitude problem. They didn't know about the furnace burning inside him. They didn't understand the predator they'd caged.
A twist. A sickening snap of bone and cheap metal. The handcuffs clattered to the floor.
Then
An unholy red.
The officers died like all the rest before them, too slow, too human. Their shocked gurgles were cut short. The cruiser became a charnel house.
Moros expected fury. Punishment. His father had no patience with failure.
But when he returned, still smelling of iron and cordite, Kael only studied him with those cold, unreadable eyes. A flicker, not of approval, but of assessment. Then
"We're going out."
Not to a training yard, not to another lesson in suffering.
To a brothel.
The cloying scent of cheap perfume, the press of yielding flesh, the hungry eyes watching him-this was a new kind of battlefield. A hunger his father had never allowed him to indulge.
Until now.
"Violence is power," Kael had always said, his voice like gravel.
"But power," Kael said, observing his son drinking in the view, "comesin many forms."
That night, Moros learned another. Lust. Not separate from the violence, twin to it. A fever of possession, intoxicating power in reducing another to a trembling surrender, it resonated to the same core hunger. Appetite was not merely pleasure but worship. Different altar, same dark sacrament. Since then, it became his second religion. Lust was his sacrament, every touch a benediction, every gasp a hymn. He craved the fever of possession, the raw power of conquest. Bodies were his altars, moans his liturgy, and in the dark, he was both priest and the only god that mattered.
---
Now, Moros wanders a world that fears him. He doesn't just fight, he unmakes. His enemies aren't defeated, they're erased. He laughs as bones break, whispers prayers to no god but the one he's forged from carnage. And the women? They remember the heat of his hands, the violence in his touch, the way he took them like a conqueror claiming ruins. They call out his name in the dark, thighs pressed tight, aching for the bruise of his hunger. Some call it love. Others, damnation. All of them worship in their terror and twisted desire. They carve his initials into their skin, leave offerings of silk and scars. They dream of his teeth at their throats, his voice like gravel between their legs. To be chosen by him is to be ruined for any other. To be discarded is a fate worse than death. Yet, Moros walks on, untouchable. His lust is just one more weapon, one more way the world bends for him, breaks for him, and burns for him. The void within echoes, a silent question mark against carnage.
Is there redemption?
No.
Is there hope?
Not in this world.
Moros is what his father made him. And he is so much worse.