Ashley Beach-Author and Storyteller

“Satan fell because of his beauty. Now his heart for revenge is to assault beauty. He destroys it in the natural world wherever he can. He wreaks destruction on the glory of God in the earth like a psychopath committed to destroying great works of art. But most especially, he hates Eve. Because she is captivating, uniquely glorious, and he cannot be. She is the incarnate of the Beauty of God. More than anything else in all creation, she embodies the glory of God. She allures the world the God. He hates it with a jealousy we can only imagine.” Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge.

I have mentioned “The Sacred Romance” by John Eldredge and Brent Curtis being influential on forming the seed ideas for The Solstice Chronicles and it is very true. Another book by John Eldredge and his wife Stasi, “Captivating,” was also very influential in other aspects of The Solstice Chronicles. Both books really put into perspective the idea of beauty lost and Satan’s vengeance against that beauty. I love both of these books immensely and highly recommend them to everyone to read. I just love how these authors are able to put Biblical ideas into a different form like putting our relationship with Christ into the picture of a sacred romance and portraying it like the classic love stories of the romance movies we all love and swoon over. They pull illustrations of God’s involvement in our lives from different books or plays and put things in a creative aspect that really appeals to me and makes different Biblical points really stand out to me or make them relatable to my fiction/theater brain.

Their descriptions of Satan and his own fall put a lot of things into perspective for me when I started thinking about writing The Solstice Chronicles and shaped a lot of what I did when I was creating Luscian. Luscian is a form of a name that means “Light”, which may seem ironic for the Lord of Darkness, but, if you recall, Satan was called Lucifer at one point in his life. Lucifer means “Light-bearer,” “Shining One,” or “Morning Star.” He is described as the most beautiful angel God created, and it was in his beauty that he fell.

In writing Luscian, I wanted to create or showcase aspects of Satan that maybe we don’t always think about. The statement that Satan fell because of his beauty really stuck out to me when I was reading “Captivating,” by John and Stasi Eldredge and it made me think about Satan’s own beauty being lost. Like many, if not all, of my characters in The Solstice Chronicles, they have all had a certain degree of their original beauty lost. We in the world have varying degrees of our original beauty lost too and that’s what inspired me to write these books and give a picture of our beauty being lost and restored. But, the reminder that Satan fell in his own beauty really impacted how I crafted Luscian in these stories. As the most beautiful creature in the Heavens and Earth, Satan would have been breathtaking to behold in his original form as Lucifer. God wouldn’t have called him “Morning Star,” if he wasn’t. But, Satan’s pride to be even greater than God Himself is what caused him to fall. His beauty was lost. Just think about that for a minute. Satan’s own beauty was lost. He knew more than anyone and anything ever created what it meant to be beautiful, and he lost that beauty because of his pride and his desire to be greater. Lucifer, the bright bearer of light and morning star of creation became Satan, enemy of God. Destined to roam the earth in his fallen beauty for the rest of eternity. Unlike humans, who if you are a believer and have accepted Christ as your personal Savior, will regain their original beauty once they reach Heaven, Satan can NEVER get his beauty back. Let me say that again. Satan can NEVER get his beauty back.

That fact alone could feed his angry vengeance and bent to destroy all things that are beautiful and reflect the beauty of God. Lucifer was the greatest beauty of all time and he lost that beauty and can’t ever regain that beauty that he lost. It’s no wonder he has such a personal vendetta against the beauty of our world. In the same way, Luscian, my Satan character, has a personal vendetta against the beauty of the realms. That’s why beautiful things are destroyed and attacked like Erianna’s beauty in both her beast and human forms. Her beauty was attacked her whole life and she was led to believe that she was the farthest thing from beautiful. Julianna’s beauty was attacked her whole life because she had the potential to be a mighty Queen of Light, and Luscian couldn’t have that, so he filled her mind with darkness and tried to convince her that her ties to darkness made her unworthy to be a ruler in the kingdom of light. He tries to sway her to become his personal Queen of Darkness. Amber’s beauty was attacked by her inability to see the beauty in the world around her and her struggle for power blinds her to the world around her and sends her down a destructive path. The new character in the Fall realm book had her beauty hidden away in a cottage in the deepest darkest woods for a majority of her life and had the beauty of her family ripped away in the clutches of a dark ruler, and she will struggle with making a choice of fulfilling her own selfish desire or protecting the realms in a choice directly reminiscent of the original choice of Adam and Eve in the garden when their original beauty was also lost.

I created an interesting vignette in Luscian as well that shows how he still desires beauty, and I believe it could be potentially true for Satan as well. When you’ve lost something that you used to have, you can find yourself longing for the thing that is lost. The prince in Beauty and the Beast lost his beauty as a handsome prince, and he also lost his beauty in an act of pride and selfishness. And, even though the prince’s heart becomes hard and angry, you still see this longing within him to be loved and to be beautiful again. I think it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say that Satan also longs for that beauty. That desire to be the beautiful Lucifer once again. And, there is something in an exquisite or rare beauty that draws him to it. I think he sees a reflection of what his previous beauty was and is drawn to beauty that is similar to what his former beauty used to look like. In the prologue of Beauty Restored, I portray the main characters in the first three books as different orbs that Archimedes is in charge of. This was my imperfect way of showing how each and every person that was created and known by God by having this globe room in the Mage’s realm where each globe represents a different person and they are known to The Mage and his Son and watched over, and have always been a thought in the Mage’s mind even if that person hasn’t been born yet, etc. The silvery orb Luscian plays with represents Erianna. The orange orb represents Amber. And, in the midst of the prologue, there is a sunrise-colored pink and yellow orb that catches Luscian’s attention. There is something about this orb that speaks to Luscian and he is drawn to the unique beauty of the orb, and I believe (ok, I know, because I wrote it) that there is something in this orb that points Luscian back to his former glory and beauty and calls to him. He almost can’t resist being drawn to it. This orb represents Julianna of the Spring realm. When Luscian leaves, he sees the beautiful orb again and leans down to breath his dark breath into it. A spot of darkness is revealed in the orb. Now, I will say this. Whether Luscian’s dark breath filled the orb with darkness and was the cause for Julianna’s struggle with darkness, or if it just revealed a darkness that was already there, I’ll leave up to your interpretation. Regardless, a darkness is revealed in Julianna’s orb which heightens Luscian’s draw to her kinship to him of dark beauty. In Beauty Redeemed, you see this strange draw to and interest that Luscian has in Julianna and I think it is because he is drawn to the beauty he saw in her when her orb caught his eye years before and you see that desire played out throughout the book which gives Luscian/Satan this interesting characteristic of being unexplainably drawn to beauty.

Like Satan, Luscian preys on the characters desires and fills their minds with the lies of not being beautiful, not being worthy, not being whole. You see elements like the manor house in Beauty Redeemed that is full of light and opulence and things to fill people’s fleshly desires which invites and entices people in, but like sin, it turns on us and once we are in it’s grip, it becomes mean and controlling and manipulates and twists our minds until we aren’t sure if we even want to get out of its grip and return to the kingdom of light.

I believe God gave me this character to put Satan in a different light and maybe show aspects of his character that we may not normally see and I hope my portrayal of him can give you a glimpse into Satan and his character and influence in the world. The presence of Satan and his fallen angels are a very real presence in our world and they rarely look like the forces of darkness that they are. Satan masquerades as an angel of light and comes across as beautiful and something to be desired, but it is a false beauty, put on to lure the beautifully crafted humans of the world into his domain of darkness. His fate is sealed, and he can never get his beauty back, so he’s going to try to destroy whatever beauty he can in the world and take as much of it with him before he loses his power over the earth. Your beauty is under attack. If Satan sees a great beauty within you, he will do whatever it takes within his power to crush that beauty and keep the world from seeing that beauty, but you have to press into God’s presence so that His true beauty may be reflected in you and so the world can see the beauty you were designed to bear. God is ALWAYS greater than Satan and despite Satan’s many attempts to overthrow God and His kingdom, he has never won and never will. Ask God to destroy Satan’s influences and lies in your life and step into the beauty you were designed to be in the world.

Don’t let Satan’s own hate for his own beauty lost destroy your beauty.

Check out my video about Luscian on my YouTube channel