The five images form a dark antiphon to the earlier cycles of dragon-flight and rainbow-throned scripture. Where the crimson scholar carried forbidden knowledge across luminous skies and the vacant throne elevated holy text into covenantal stillness, these new frames plunge the same motif (book, wings, halo) into infernal register. A horned, bat-winged figure, cloaked in priestly black and crowned by occult sigils, presides over open volumes amid flames, skulls, and floating pentagrams. The composition inverts every element of its predecessors: light becomes darkness, ascent becomes descent, promise becomes accusation. Yet the inversion is not mere negation; it is a counter-exegesis, a black mass performed upon the same liturgical objects. The demonic reader is not the opposite of the rainbow’s covenant but its shadow, the covenant’s own possibility of being misread.

The figure itself is the first and most deliberate desecration. In the initial image he stands between two massive open books, hands resting upon them like a priest at the altar, but the altar is a lava field and the books are scorched. His wings are not the dragon’s leathern sails but membranes veined with ember, closer to the fallen angels of Gustave Doré than to any natural creature. The hood obscures his face, granting him the anonymity of archetype; we see only the suggestion of a skull beneath cloth, the negative space where a countenance should be. Horns curl upward in perfect symmetry, echoing the finials of the heavenly thrones but forged from obsidian rather than gold. A reversed cross hangs at his breast (wooden in the first frame, iron in later ones), its downward point a silent rebuttal to every upward aspiration of the earlier cycles. The halo behind his head is no rainbow but a golden circle inscribed with Latin: *Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus* (“Let justice be done though the world perish”), a motto that twists divine mercy into apocalyptic rigor.

The books are the true protagonists of the infernal liturgy. In the first image they flank the figure like twin pulpits, their pages dense with unreadable script that glows faintly orange, as though lit from within by the flames below. By the second frame the books have multiplied; the figure now sits, surrounded by a semicircle of open volumes whose pages curl like burning parchment. The central tome is larger, its text arranged in concentric circles around an embedded pentagram, a visual echo of medieval magical grimoires. The third image reduces the count to a single floating page held aloft by the figure’s claw, the rest of the books reduced to ash that swirls upward in demonic incense. The fourth introduces candles (black wax, red flame) planted directly into the open pages, the fire consuming the text even as it illuminates it. The final frame returns to three books, but now they are attended by lesser demons: one claw emerges from the lava to turn a page, another skeletal scribe takes dictation with a quill of bone. The books are no longer objects but participants, alive with the same malevolence that animates their reader.

Light in these images is weaponized. Where the rainbow-throne sequence progressed from daylight to divine spotlight, here the spectrum is collapsed into a single infernal hue: the red-orange of molten rock and dying suns. Shadows are not absence of light but its corruption; every fold of the cloak, every vein in the wings, every letter on the page is outlined in ember. The halo, though golden, emits no warmth; it is the cold light of a dying star, or perhaps the reflected glow of the lake of fire. In the second and fourth frames, floating symbols (pentagrams, ankhs, alchemical glyphs) catch this light and throw it back as warning flares. The overall effect is claustrophobic despite the vastness of the sky; the viewer is trapped within a furnace where even the clouds are soot-stained.

Symbolically, the sequence stages a trial of the covenant itself. The rainbow promised that destruction would be stayed; these images ask what happens when the promise is kept by the wrong hands. The demonic figure does not reject the book; he canonizes it. His priesthood is meticulous, his gestures reverent. The reversed cross is not blasphemy but precision: if the upright cross signifies sacrifice offered upward, the inverted cross signifies sacrifice demanded downward. The books, far from being destroyed, are multiplied, annotated, illuminated by hellfire. This is scripture not refuted but rewritten, the covenant not broken but fulfilled in a key the original authors never intended. The Latin halo in the first image is the keynote: justice will be done, but the world will perish all the same. The rainbow’s mercy is revealed as conditional, its bow unstrung only for those who read with the correct orientation.

The progression across the five frames traces a narrative of escalating jurisdiction. The first image is proclamation: the figure stands, books open, halo blazing, a new dispensation announced. The second is study: seated, surrounded by texts, he is the scholar of the abyss, annotating the margins of damnation. The third is judgment: a single page floats free, the rest consumed, the verdict reduced to one irrevocable clause. The fourth is ritual: candles burn directly into the pages, the text now fuel for the ceremony it once sought to govern. The fifth is legacy: lesser demons inherit the library, ensuring that the misreading will outlive the misreader. Each stage tightens the noose around the original covenant’s neck. The dragon carried the book to safety; the throne elevated it to sanctity; the demon enshrines it in perpetuity, but at the cost of its soul.

Compositionally, the images maintain a brutal symmetry that parodies the earlier cycles. The demonic figure is always centered, the books always balanced, the halo always perfectly circular. But where the rainbow-throne images used symmetry to suggest harmony, here it suggests tyranny. The frame is a cage. Even when pages float free in the third and fourth images, they do so within the rigid geometry of the pentagram or the candle circle. The low angle of the first and fifth frames forces the viewer to look up at the figure, but the upward gaze is not worshipful; it is the perspective of the damned staring into the face of their accuser. The dragon soared; the throne floated; the demon is rooted in lava, his kingdom literally built upon the ruins of the world the rainbow promised to spare.

Theologically, the sequence is a meditation on the peril of literalism. The covenant was never meant to be a text alone; it was a relationship, a bow set in the sky as reminder, not replacement, of dialogue between creator and creation. By reducing the covenant to pages, by enthroning the book without the reader, the earlier cycles risked the very idolatry these images now enact. The demon is the ultimate literalist: he has the text, he has the ritual, he even has the halo. What he lacks is the one thing the vacant throne still possessed: absence. The empty seat left room for interpretation, for mercy, for the possibility that the promise might still be kept in spirit rather than letter. The demon fills the absence with himself, and in doing so fulfills the covenant’s darkest clause: justice without mercy, law without love.

Artistically, the craftsmanship is as obsessive as its heavenly counterpart but turned to opposite ends. The textures are visceral: the slick sheen of lava, the papery fragility of burning pages, the leathery translucence of bat wings. The color palette is monochromatic in its intensity (every shade of red, orange, and black calibrated to suggest heat without warmth). The sigils are not random; each pentagram, each rune, each inverted cross is rendered with the precision of a medieval manuscript, a mockery of the illuminated Bibles that graced the rainbow thrones. The books, though illegible, are typographically perfect: justified columns, ornamental capitals, red-ink rubrics. This is not chaos but order, the order of the abyss.

Ultimately, the five images are not a sequel but a mirror. The dragon, the throne, and the demon are three aspects of the same covenantal drama: delivery, reception, perversion. The rainbow promised that the world would not be destroyed by water; these images suggest it may yet be consumed by fire (the fire of misinterpretation, of zeal without understanding). The vacant throne was not victory but vulnerability; the book needed a reader, and the wrong reader has arrived. Yet even in the heart of the inferno, the text endures. The pages burn but are not consumed, the letters glow but are not erased. The covenant, for all its misuse, retains its potency. The demon’s greatest triumph is also his confession: the word is still mighty, even when wielded by the prince of darkness. The rainbow may be absent, but its promise (that destruction will have limits) haunts every flame.