Bael-Sharoth and Ganon-Sharoth

Bael-Sharoth and Ganon-Sharoth are brothers whose relationship is defined by a painful disagreement over what it means to belong to Hell. Their reunion does not restore an uncomplicated family bond; instead, it exposes two demons who have chosen incompatible forms of escape. Bael-Sharoth is still entangled with infernal power, earthly responsibility, Six, and the consequences of his own past, while Ganon-Sharoth has attempted to disappear from both Hell and his former life. The meeting turns their private history into a negotiation over guilt, loyalty, and whether a brother can leave without abandoning the one left behind.

Estrangement and Secret Survival

Bael-Sharoth encounters Ganon-Sharoth while Ganon is using the human identity of Bill, an acting principal. Before speaking privately, Bill seals the office against eavesdropping and scrying with a complicated series of magical gestures, then abandons his human form. The protective ward and the concealment of identity establish the conditions of their reunion: Ganon-Sharoth is alive, but deliberately hidden, and his survival has required him to place distance between his current existence and the infernal world they once shared.

Ganon-Sharoth does not make a display of power when he meets his brother. As a demon possessing a human body, he is essentially powerless, and he remains in that constrained state rather than reclaiming a more openly demonic presence. His diminished condition contrasts with the identity Bael-Sharoth remembers and helps explain why Ganon has been able to remain concealed. He has not simply traveled away from Hell; he has reduced his visible and practical connection to it.

The concealment has also wounded Bael-Sharoth personally. Bael admits that he had thought Ganon-Sharoth was dead and is angry that his brother never asked him to leave with him. His complaint is not merely that Ganon departed, but that he deprived Bael of the right to know the truth. Bael acknowledges that he might not have followed, yet insists that he should at least have known his brother was alive. The distinction captures the relationship’s central injury: Ganon’s attempt at a clean break was experienced by Bael as exclusion.

Why Ganon-Sharoth Left

Ganon-Sharoth explains that he needed to leave everything behind because he feared Bael-Sharoth would be corrupted too. The explanation reverses the expected moral order of their world. Bael responds that they are demons and therefore the ones who corrupt others, but Ganon’s fear is not presented as a simple accusation against his brother. It is the desperate logic of someone trying to escape a system he considers spiritually and morally intolerable.

Ganon-Sharoth explicitly rejects the fate assigned to him by Hell. He says that he will not return there because he has forsaken it, describing eternal damnation for crimes the brothers never committed as madness. Bael considers the decision insane, but his anger cannot undo it. Ganon’s refusal makes the brothers’ conflict larger than a family quarrel: it is a dispute over whether inherited allegiance can justify eternal punishment, and whether abandoning Hell is liberation or betrayal.

The conversation also makes clear that Ganon-Sharoth has not escaped consequence simply by rejecting his former home. While possessing a human body, he cannot freely return to demonic power, and his continued absence would matter to Lucy. Bael points out that Ganon cannot accompany his human host to Heaven when the priest dies. Ganon’s attempted separation therefore leaves him suspended between identities and destinations, much as his relationship with Bael remains suspended between love and resentment.

The Brother, the Uncle, and the Hidden Daughter

Bael-Sharoth tells Ganon-Sharoth that he has a niece, perhaps even two nieces, and later identifies Six as a human child he has taken in after she was raised by a cult. This revelation changes the emotional scale of their meeting. Ganon is not only confronted with the brother he abandoned; he learns that the family he left behind has continued and that Bael has assumed responsibility for a vulnerable human child.

Six also connects the brothers’ personal history to the cult’s attempt to summon Bael-Sharoth. Bael explains that someone gave the cult a book designed to summon him and asks whether Ganon knows anything about it. Ganon’s expression turns sour before he admits that the book was one of his. Bael understands why the book’s altered writing points toward a demon trapped in a human body: Ganon could not simply use magic to rewrite it and instead had to create a palimpsest by old-fashioned means. The discovery reveals that Ganon’s disappearance did not mean complete withdrawal from events. He had acted from concealment, leaving behind an instrument that helped set the cult’s crisis in motion.

Bael then uses another family revelation as leverage. Ganon-Sharoth has a daughter, and Bael offers to bring her to him. The offer is deliberately coercive: Ganon may meet his only daughter if he accepts Bael’s demands, or die without ever seeing her if he refuses. Ganon calls Bael a son of a bitch, but asks what Bael wants in return. The insult and the negotiation coexist, showing how intimacy permits Bael to identify the pressure most likely to work while still preserving enough trust for Ganon to answer rather than simply break away.

Bargain and Conditional Reconciliation

Bael’s first demand is that Ganon-Sharoth help fix the school. He carefully distinguishes this obligation from revenge for the summoning book, saying that Ganon should help because it is the right thing to do. That distinction matters within their relationship. Bael is willing to exploit Ganon’s desire to meet his daughter, but he also insists that responsibility cannot be reduced to the consequences of a private trick. Ganon must repair damage connected to his actions because repair is morally required.

Ganon agrees to help, then asks for the second condition. Bael’s final demand is that Ganon attend his wedding. The request transforms the bargain from a purely instrumental exchange into a test of familial presence. Bael does not ask only for labor or information; he asks his estranged brother to appear at a public milestone in the life he has built. The wedding becomes a counterweight to Ganon’s earlier disappearance, a concrete occasion on which Ganon must choose whether separation remains absolute.

The terms do not erase the brothers’ conflict. Bael has threatened Ganon with the loss of a meeting with his daughter, and Ganon still rejects the world Bael inhabits. Nevertheless, the agreement creates a limited form of return. Ganon will help restore the school and come to the wedding; Bael will facilitate contact with Ganon’s daughter. Their reconciliation is therefore conditional and practical rather than sentimental, but its very practicality makes it credible. The brothers do not solve their disagreement about Hell. They find a way to act together despite it.

Relationship Significance

The relationship between Bael-Sharoth and Ganon-Sharoth gives the book’s supernatural conflict a familial interior. Ganon’s abandonment of Hell resembles a moral defection, but Bael’s response shows that infernal loyalty is inseparable from personal hurt. Bael is furious that Ganon feared he could be corrupted, disappointed that he was not invited to leave, and still willing to tell him about Six and arrange a meeting with his daughter. Ganon, meanwhile, has tried to protect Bael through absence while concealing the truth that made that absence so damaging.

Their dynamic also mirrors the book’s wider interest in identities that cannot be cleanly separated from their histories. A demon can hide in a human form, a vehicle can receive an animus and become Murphy, a book can develop desires of its own, and a child can be recorded as dead despite remaining alive. Against this pattern of altered names and unstable legal or supernatural statuses, the brothers’ recognition of each other carries unusual force. Even after Ganon-Sharoth has left Hell and assumed another life, Bael knows him; even after Ganon has tried to sever himself from his past, he remains answerable to the family and damage that past contains.

The reunion ultimately frames brotherhood as neither unconditional forgiveness nor permanent condemnation. Bael-Sharoth can condemn Ganon-Sharoth’s decision, call it insane, and manipulate him with the promise of a daughter’s presence while still making room for him at the wedding. Ganon can regard Hell as intolerable and leave without surrendering every tie to his brother. Their relationship survives not because the disagreement disappears, but because both brothers accept obligations that their chosen identities alone cannot cancel.