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《 Jerrickson Matthews 》

《 Kerberos - Cerberus 》

《 6'4" - 195cm 》

《 Volcanic copper eyes 》

《 Pitch-black, shoulder length hair 》

《 Scarred, burnt caramel skin tone slathered in tattoos 》

❝Alcohol is the least of your problems.❞

Not every story begins with 'once upon a time...'

《 In the beginning... 》

Jerrickson’s story did not begin with power, but with fire. 

In 1523, the German countryside burned. The German Peasants’ War tore through villages like a fever. Fields trampled, homes reduced to blackened skeletons, prayers swallowed by smoke. Armies marched in the name of justice and faith, but what they left behind was ruin. It was in those ruins that a boy learned how to survive. He had no name anyone remembered then. Only hunger. He moved through the wreckage like a ghost, small and sharp-eyed, slipping between corpses and collapsed beams, picking through what little remained: charred bread, dented tools, anything that could be traded or eaten. He learned quickly that hesitation meant death. That kindness was rare. That the world did not notice children who disappeared. So he became something that could not be easily caught. Days bled into nights. Smoke into fog. Survival into instinct. Until the night everything changed. It was the glow that drew him. Not fire, not the wild, consuming blaze he had come to fear, but something… steadier. Controlled. A pulse of light in the distance, deep in the forest where no one sane would go after dark. Jerrickson, though he would not carry that name yet, followed it. The trees grew denser the deeper he went, their branches clawing at the sky like skeletal hands. The air shifted, thicker, heavier, charged with something he couldn’t name but instinctively distrusted. And then he saw it. A clearing. Carved into the earth itself was a circle of symbols, ancient and wrong, glowing faintly beneath a ring of hooded figures. Their voices rose and fell in unison, a language older than anything he had ever heard, sharp and jagged against the stillness of the forest.

Sorcerers. He didn’t know the word then. But he knew danger. He should have run. Every instinct screamed at him to turn back, to disappear into the dark and never think of this place again. But hunger, curiosity, perhaps something deeper, held him there. At the center of the circle, something moved. Not fully formed and not whole. A shape made of shadow and flame, writhing as if reality itself resisted its existence. The air cracked with heat, the ground trembling beneath the force of it. The sorcerers’ voices grew louder, more desperate. They weren’t summoning something. They were trying to bind it. To weaponize it. Later, Jerrickson would understand what they had reached for, a fragment of something ancient and terrible. A sliver of the guardian of the underworld itself. Almighty Cerberus. But that night, all he knew was that it was wrong. Wild. Alive in a way that had nothing to do with flesh. And then it broke. The ritual faltered, one voice stuttered, one sigil cracked, and the balance collapsed in an instant. The circle shattered in a burst of light and heat. Screams tore through the clearing as the thing at its center surged outward, no longer contained, no longer controlled. The sorcerers scattered, some burned where they stood, others dragged into the collapsing energy they had tried to command. The boy didn’t run fast enough. He never would have. The force hit him like a storm. Fire, real fire this time, consumed everything, searing through skin and bone, tearing him apart and remaking him in the same breath. He couldn’t scream. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t exist in any way he understood. And then everything soaked in an impenetrable silence. 

When he woke, the forest was gone. Or rather, it was still there, but changed. Blackened. Hollow. The clearing was reduced to ash and ruin. And him? Miraculously, he was still alive. That was the first impossibility. The second came when he tried to stand. Pain lanced through him, not sharp, but deep, like something vast had been forced into a space too small to hold it. His body felt wrong. Too heavy. Too light. Too… full. Something moved beneath his skin. Something that was not him. He staggered, breath ragged, hands digging into the dirt as the realization clawed its way into his mind. He was not alone in his own body. The fragment of Cerberus, the thing the sorcerers had tried to bind, had not been destroyed. It had chosen. Or perhaps it had simply taken the only vessel left standing. Either way, it had claimed him. The first transformation came without warning. One moment he was human, barely, and the next? Bones snapped, reformed, expanded. Flesh tore and rebuilt itself in a violent, unstoppable surge. His senses exploded outward in sound, scent, and an overwhelming, unbearable heat. He was no longer a boy. He was something else. Something with teeth. With hunger that had nothing to do with starvation. He ran that night through forests, across fields, away from anything that resembled civilization. He didn’t understand what he was becoming, only that if anyone saw him they would kill him. For decades, he wandered. Europe shifted around him. Kingdoms rising and falling, wars igniting and burning out, but Jerrickson remained caught between worlds. Neither human nor fully beast. Something in between, something that didn’t belong anywhere. He learned control the hard way. Through blood. Through mistakes. Through running when control slipped and staying when it mattered.

Witch hunters came for him more than once. So did far worse creatures who recognized what he was before he did and sought to claim or destroy him for it. He survived them all. Time changed him, refined him. By the Age of Exploration, he had learned to blend into the edges of society. He smuggled artifacts that no church would sanction and no king would admit existed. Objects that hummed with power, that whispered in languages he now understood too well. In the Industrial Revolution, he found himself behind bars—not as a prisoner, but as a bartender. It was the first time he felt something close to… purpose. Listening. Watching. Understanding people in a way that didn’t require teeth or claws. It suited him. Even then. Victorian London gave him something else. A mask. Under the gaslight haze of the city, he joined a traveling circus, his act billed as a clever illusion. A “three-headed hellhound,” a trick of smoke and mirrors. The crowds laughed. Applauded. They never knew how close they stood to the truth. For the first time, he wasn’t feared. It almost felt like belonging. But it didn’t last. Purpose didn’t find him until the 20th century.  Or rather it found him. 

Hades did not arrive with spectacle.

No thunder. No fire. Just an unmistakable, unavoidable presence. Jerrickson knew what he was the moment he stepped into the room. A god. The god himself. And he had come with an offer. The underworld, Hades explained, had grown… inefficient. Too many souls. Too many variables. Too much interference from realms that should have known better. He needed something new, something that understood both sides of existence, something that could stand at the threshold and not falter. He needed a guardian. A bartender. A gatekeeper. He needed Jerrickson. The offer was simple. Immortality, true immortality. Not the half-life Jerrickson had been surviving in. Purpose. And in return, an oath. It was simple: Guard the gates. Serve the drinks. Deliver the souls. Jerrickson accepted. He didn’t hesitate. For the first time since that night in the forest, the chaos inside him had direction. A place to anchor. Hell’s Gates became that place. And he became its keeper. The war came later. World War II, Berlin 1945. Hell’s Gates surfaced in a city already drowning in death, the line between worlds thinner than it had ever been. It should have been routine. It wasn’t. A Nazi occultist found the bar. Not by accident. It was never by accident. He came seeking power, seeking to siphon souls, to weaponize death itself. He made it as far as the bar. That was his first mistake. Jerrickson didn’t give him a second. The shift came faster now. Cleaner. More controlled. Where once it had been chaos, it was now precision. Bone and fire and shadow wrapped into one. 

The hellhound did not hesitate. It tore through the man, not just flesh, but essence, devouring what he was at his core. There was no body left to bury. No soul left to bargain. Only silence. When it was over, Jerrickson stood alone behind the bar once more. But something had changed. A mark burned across his chest: deep, jagged, and alive with a faint crimson glow. A scar not of damage, but of recognition. Hades was pleased. From that night on, Jerrickson was no longer just a bartender. No longer just a guardian. He was something else entirely. A constant in a world that refused to stay still. A line no one crossed twice. And the one certainty whispered across realms: If you find Hell’s Gates, you answered to him. 

《 Present Day... 》

Hell’s Gates had chosen Melbourne tonight.

Not the Melbourne mapped in guidebooks or traced by tramlines and tourist routes, but the quieter version, the one that lived in the spaces between. It sat wedged between a shuttered tattoo parlour and a kebab shop whose flickering “OPEN LATE” sign had promised closing soon for the better part of a decade. People passed it without seeing. Their eyes slid over the door, their steps never faltering, as if something in them understood that noticing it would mean crossing a line they couldn’t un-cross. Only the ones meant to find it ever did. Inside, the air was thick with more than smoke. It carried weighted intent, consequence, the residue of deals already made and the quiet tension of those yet to come. Low red light bled across the room, catching on glassware, on polished wood, on the edges of faces that weren’t entirely human. Conversations layered over one another in murmurs and half-laughs, but none of it was careless. Nothing in Hell’s Gates ever was.

Behind the bar, Jerrickson stood as he always did. He didn’t dominate the space by movement. He didn’t need to. The bar curved around him like it had been built to hold him at its center—an anchor in a place that refused to stay still. His hands moved with practiced ease, wiping down the scarred wood, turning a glass, pouring a drink that shimmered faintly before settling into something that looked deceptively ordinary. To anyone watching, he was just a bartender. To anyone who knew better, he was the line everything else was drawn around. His gaze swept the room, not lingering, not in the way that it was obvious, but missing nothing. A demon hunched at the far end of the bar, shoulders tight, fingers tapping too quickly against the counter. Across the room, two figures sat in silence, wings hidden but not entirely. They didn’t look at each other, but the tension between them hummed like a live wire.

Unusual. Not unheard of, but not usual. Jerrickson noted it, filed it away, and reached for a bottle that whispered faintly when his fingers brushed its neck. He ignored the voice. He always did. A drink slid across the bar toward the demon. The moment it touched his hand, the restless tapping slowed. His shoulders dropped a fraction. Not calm, never calm, but quieter. Temporary solutions were still solutions. Jerrickson moved again, already shifting his attention elsewhere. The human near the back booth shouldn’t have been there. That was the first problem. The second was that he looked like he knew it. He sat too comfortably, too aware, his gaze moving with purpose instead of confusion. Most humans who stumbled into Hell’s Gates did so by accident. They drank, they forgot, they left with their memories dulled into something they could dismiss as a strange night.

This one hadn’t stumbled. And when Jerrickson’s eyes passed over him, the man looked up. Met his gaze. And smiled. A small thing. Almost nothing. Except it wasn’t. Jerrickson felt it anyway, that low pull in his chest, instinct coiling tight beneath centuries of control. The same instinct that had kept the balance intact when everything else tried to tip. Something’s wrong. He didn’t react outwardly. He never did. His hand continued its slow, methodical path across the bar, cloth dragging over wood already clean. But his attention shifted, sharpened, narrowing in ways no one else in the room would notice. Around him, Hell’s Gates continued its quiet rhythm. Glasses clinked. Deals were murmured. A laugh broke too sharply before being swallowed again. The music pulsed low, more vibration than sound, threading through the bones of the building, and whatever lay beneath it. But the patterns were off.

Demons had arrived earlier than usual, their tempers closer to the surface. The angels, two of them, within the same hour hadn’t bothered to keep their distance as carefully as they should have. And the mirrors behind the bar… Jerrickson’s gaze flicked to them for half a second. Too quick for anyone else to catch. Their reflections lagged. Just slightly. A fraction of a second too slow, like something was watching from the other side and taking its time catching up. That was new. He didn’t like new things. His hand stilled briefly against the counter before continuing its slow, steady motion. Control. Always control. The rumors hadn’t helped. They moved through Hell’s Gates like smoke, unseen, but impossible to ignore once they settled in your lungs. Something was looking for the bar. Not wandering into it. Not being drawn by chance or desperation or fate. But looking, tracking, and trying to pin it down. That alone would have been enough to shift the balance. Hell’s Gates didn’t stay anywhere long enough to be found. It slipped, moved, existed in the cracks where nothing else could hold it in place.

It wasn’t meant to be hunted. Yet, Jerrickson reached for another glass, his fingers tightening just slightly around its rim. The portals behind the bar had been active. More than usual. He could feel them even now like a pressure at his back, a constant pull just beneath the surface of the world. They were quiet, hidden, unseen by anyone not meant to see them, but they were there. Always there. Hades hadn’t sent word. He rarely did. But the increase in activity was enough: more souls, specific ones. Jerrickson didn’t like being rushed. He liked it even less when he didn’t know why. The glass in his hand filled, the liquid catching the low red light before settling into something darker. He set it down without looking, already knowing where it needed to go. His attention had returned to the door. It hadn’t opened again. No shift in the room. No ripple of awareness passing through the crowd. Something had changed. The human at the back booth hadn’t looked away. He was still watching. Still smiling that eerie, knowing smile. Like he knew exactly where he was. Like he’d been looking for this place, and had finally found it.

Jerrickson leaned his weight subtly against the bar, one hand resting near the glass he hadn’t yet served. His posture didn’t change, not in any way that would draw attention, but something in him had shifted. Muscles tightened, focus strengthened, always waiting. Because Hell’s Gates didn’t make mistakes. It didn’t let the wrong people in. And if something had found it, truly found it, then whatever walked through that door wasn’t here by accident. For the first time in a long time, the balance felt… fragile. Like something was pressing against it from the outside. Testing it. Jerrickson’s gaze didn’t leave the man. Didn’t soften, didn’t waver. If Hell’s Gates was being hunted, then tonight wouldn’t be about drinks, or deals, or the quiet exchange of secrets in shadowed corners. Tonight, he would find out why.