Damien Darkblood

Red-skinned and built with a rounded paunch, Darkblood stands at a fairly ordinary height and trails a long tail behind him. His eyes set yellow sclera around pale irises, and his grey hair is broken by a shaved patch cut into a white geometric shape.

A broad nose sits above a heavy chin flanked by two small horn-like points, while his ears taper and jut outward, and each hand carries only four digits. For clothing he keeps a close-fitting two-tone grey shirt marked with an angular design, throws an unbuttoned cream trench coat over it, and tops the look with a reddish-brown fedora ringed in grey. He goes about barefoot.

Darkblood carries himself with cool detachment, speaking in a low, gravelly monotone that rarely betrays feeling. He states facts plainly and without cushioning, a bluntness that reads as rude and standoffish, and he claims the finer points of human conversation escape him. Hardened figures like Cecil and Omni-Man find his flat delivery and grim wit off-putting enough to needle him at every meeting.

Underneath, he sees himself as a demon full of regret, chasing good deeds mainly to keep himself out of Hell, and he loses his composure only twice: cursing Cecil over the banishment, and snarling when Donald Ferguson shrinks from him. His great flaw is a bottomless self-assurance. So fixed on dragging the truth into the open, he shrugs off any fallout from revealing it too soon, and as Cecil observes, he flattens complicated situations into a single view and refuses to bend his moral certainties. That rigidity leaves him nearly impossible to work with and often alone.

He also holds that no afterlife or cosmic scorekeeping exists, urging Mark to build his own heaven on Earth through the choices he makes.

Bound by a debt and hoping to redeem his own soul, Damien built a career solving cases, and his infernal gifts made him formidable at it. A touch could pull final impressions from a corpse, his presence dropped the temperature until onlookers could see their breath, and he could surface almost anywhere unbidden.

Working alongside the Global Defense Agency, he used those instincts to correctly name Omni-Man as the Guardians' murderer long before anyone else, which alarmed Cecil enough to order the inquiry dropped. When Damien refused, a ritual forced him back to Hell. There he rejoined his family and pledged himself to the realm's deposed ruler, Satan. A monstrous threat called Volcanikka soon endangered both Hell and the world above, and neither Damien, his kin, nor Satan could overpower her.

He tried to summon Omni-Man for help, only to learn too late that Nolan had already left Earth, and the ritual pulled in his son Invincible instead. The two brought Volcanikka down and restored Satan to his throne. Judged to have cleared his debt, Damien was allowed back to the surface at Invincible's side, now charged by Satan with uncovering why Volcanikka wanted the world above in the first place.