Mirror Demon

"BRING THE CHILD TO ME."

The **Mirror Demon**, also called the **Confession Demon** from Chapter II and III, is a reoccurring enemy that appears throughout the FAITH series (except for Chapter II Prologue).

His background is a mystery but implies to be connected to John and the unethical practices he endured while as a patient at Yale Psychiatric Institution. Ever since he was released, John associates his time at the institution as demonic in nature, so the demon's reappearance acts as a way of bringing up past, traumatic memories and guilt over failing to exorcise Amy.

## Appearance

The demon, compared to John's canonical height of 6'2, is freakishly tall and has a gray, shambling mass. His head is hard to describe; he has a singular black dot and there's red mass stretching out of him to the point it resembles a flower. He's capable of floating around in random speeds, slowly or slightly faster, teleporting when needed be, and can turn into a silhouette of himself. The demon somehow has both elongated red arms and disembodied gray hands that can drag victims into his pocket dimension.

## Personality

Normally, a lot of demon enemies in this series don't have a personality besides being evil. Some small details that are important to point out is that he can speak both Latin and English, which is a rarity since all the other demons primarily use English. During battles, he intentionally garbles his voice and emits unnatural roars, screeches, and wails. However, he's capable of speaking clear and coherent English.

## Biography

Like stated previously, a majority of the Mirror Demon's background is unknown. We're going to cut to when he first appears.

### September 21st, 1987

In the Martin House, after John watches Amy jumping out of the attic window, he rushes downstairs and tries to check on her outside. However, he spots a rifle in the foyer room and the words, "KILL HER" written backwards in blood. He picks up the weapon and remarks that it only has one bullet. Before stepping outside, with a small intent of fatally shooting her, he walks into the master bedroom and checks the mirror. Before he attempted to exorcise Amy, he saw a silhouette of her stalking him in the mirror. But, this time, there's a freakishly tall demon looming right behind him.

John decides to shoot the mirror, and it cracks. Every time he fires the rifle, a new one respawns back in the foyer room. Shooting the mirror for the third time, an elongated red arm emerges from the shattered mirror and drags John within.

Seemingly dragged into some kind of dimension littered with skeletons, the Mirror Demon garbles, "FILIS PAETER PROFANI!", which roughly translates to English as, "MY UNHOLY FATHER!". He floats towards him, and a battle begins. During the fight, he attempts to catch John by surprise by teleporting around the room in sporadic fashion. Every time he gets close, the aberration effect (if the visual effect is turned on, that is) becomes stronger and distorted. Whenever that happens, it generally establishes that the enemy has immense demonic power (for example, this detail is shared with Miriam in Chapter II) since plenty of demons that John will eventually come across do not share this trait. Eventually, John bests the demon with his crucifix. Before he disappears, he garbles, "I WILL SEE YOU AGAIN!" Banished, he leaves behind a note.

Picking it up, the note is actually a letter written by John himself back on October 23rd, 1986. The letter details John requesting Dr. McGlashan, the head runner of Yale Psychiatric Institute, to be released as a patient from Dr. Spinel's care, his assigned psychiatrist. He states that ever since he began his treatment thirty days ago, he's able to come into terms as to what truly happened inside the Martin House on September 21st. Thanks to Dr. Spinel's, he accepts the truth that nothing supernatural occurred within the house. Rather, Amy was pressured and driven to kill her parents due to how controlling they were and Father Allred, his superior, for using old church rituals that were thought to dispel evil. He reports that his nightmares have ceased and generally feels peace of mind ever since he accepted the truth. He ends his letter that he respectfully requests to be released from the institution, hopefully in exchange for future appointments with Dr. Spinel. After reading the letter, John pops back into the real world, and the mirror remains destroyed.

This letter's appearance and the battle against the Mirror Demon is difficult to certify whether it truly happened or not since going against him is completely optional. John doesn't comment or bring up about going against this demon in future chapters. Additionally, it seems unlikely John's letter of getting released from the institution is now under the Mirror Demon's possession. For now, we're going to summarize that this battle is not canonical, and just something a player can do after defeating Amy. From context clues, we could say that the demon's appearance is supposed to represent how John currently feels about Amy. He did not exorcise her, despite completely feeling that he has the means to do so before driving to The Forest, and she very well could have died after jumping from the attic window. Right now, John feels immense guilt and steadily feels tempted to shoot her to stop both her suffering and his own. The Mirror Demon looming behind him in the mirror represents how, despite not possessing him, is attached to him and only shows up when he's emotionally vulnerable. Since he's currently at his lowest, he begins to rethink his time at the institution, in this case, the part where he requested to be released.

Like stated before, we're going to say that the Mirror Demon battle is not canon. He walks outside with the rifle and finds Amy nearly bleeding out from her wounds. John disregards his intention to kill her and returns back to his car, believing that he's done enough with her despite willingly leaving her out to die in the forest without contacting help. Getting to his car, he's ambushed by a "Chupacabra" called Michael. With no other choice, John shoots him in self-defense. Michael swears and staggers to the road while bleeding profusely. Suddenly, a speeding truck barrels through the road and spatters Michael, killing him instantly.

John hops into his silver sedan and heads back home. He recites a Bible verse to calm himself and momentarily pauses to recollect what just happened. He talks to himself that he cannot comprehend what just happened inside the house and can only have faith that he did the right thing, a nod to both unintentionally causing Michael's death and leaving Amy to seemingly bleed out with no help. Although John gets to survive, this choice will affect his psyche for the foreseeable future because he failed her for now the second time. Ever since he (and another priest called Father Garcia) was around the Martin House property, it seems like an unseen, demonic entity attached to them and inflicts them with personal nightmares.

### September 28th, 1987

A week after John's second failed exorcism with Amy, he experiences his worst nightmare yet. John aimlessly wanders throughout various areas that recently occurred within Sterling, including Snake Meadow Hill Church, a building where he used to stay as an orphan and explored in a dream a couple days ago (Chapter II Prologue). Although the exterior looks the same, there's a vast cornfield behind the building and there's a glimpse of a purple child wandering into the fields.

#### confess thy sins

The layout of the building is different compared to his last dream and the confessional booth is accessible. He enters inside and confesses what he thinks are sins to an unknown person. He recounts his failed exorcism with Amy a year ago, shamefully believing that he broke his vows to God and the ministry for not being able to exorcise her demon. He goes on to say that, a year later, Amy reached out to him through a dream to return to the Martin House on the anniversary of the failed exorcism to cleanse her. Unfortunately, he could not exorcise her once again and left her to die in the forest. John asks to be forgiven for his current and past sins. The person in the confession booth gives him a penance: "BRING THE CHILD TO ME", saying that if he does so then he'll receive inner peace. The person ends with, "Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good." None the wiser, John respectfully thanks the person and says that may the Lord's mercy endures forever. After this, John pops behind the confession booth and resumes his aimless wandering.

In reality, this person John was confessing his sins to the Mirror Demon, revealed in the "Initiation" Ending of this chapter. There were early signs that the individual is deceiving him since he has a gravely, sinister voice that's shared with the majority of cult members. "BRING THE CHILD TO ME" refers to both the purple child seen earlier and Amy herself. Lastly, he does not respect the Lord and refers to him as "he" instead of "He". Based off of John's first exorcism where he got tricked to making a deal with what he thought was a holy figure, he's susceptible to any and all trickery or coercion by demons. Canonically, John does not battle against the Mirror Demon at all on this date because there's specific conditions that he has to do to encounter him.

In the end, John pairs up with Father Garcia to take down Miriam in an inner sanctum. After she is seemingly defeated, she screams as her body evaporates into the Red Demon, who in turn transforms into the UNSPEAKABLE. The deity emits dazzling red lights, causing John to wake up from the nightmare in a cold sweat. Reading a departing note left behind by Molly, his now ex-wife, he reads a letter sent by Father Garcia who somehow knows where he lives. Garcia instructs him to find Amy's twin brothers, Nate and Jason, before "they" (the cult called the Eternal Order of the Second Death) use them to summon a great demon called Malphas. The letter ends that he has to wait for further updates as to where the twins are, so John gets into his car to clear his head and prays for the Lord's strength. He expects that what he will encounter next will be worse than his nightmares.

##### "Initiation" Ending

Solely in this ending, the Mirror Demon makes his grand appearance. When the dream begins with John standing in the middle of five pebbles, he picks up a note nearby a tomb in Gallup Cemetery that was written by Gary, the main cult leader. Gary instructs the reader on how to receive the UNSPEAKABLE's blessing. Notably, one of the tasks the reader has to do is to, "serve His [Lucifer's] demon." After banishing all three demons that were possessing the bodies of three dead thralls, John stares at a mirror in the tomb and watches his reflection stabbing himself in the eye. Bleeding, John stumbles back to where his dream begun and creates a pentagram. A demon, called Pentarox in the game files, barrels through the trees and attempts to ambush him, but John wards him away and he disappears in defeat. He drops an initial consultation note Dr. Spinel wrote a year ago when John gets admitted into Yale Psychiatric Institution.

Walking into Snake Meadow Hill Church, confessing his sins in the confessional booth, and banishing the Spindly Lady, John takes the unknown person's penance into consideration and heads outside. Traversing through the cornfields, a purple child staggers towards him and asks, "Will you help ME?" John tricks the child to join him and lures them to the confessional booth, catching a glimpse of a silhouette of Amy in the process. Getting closer, a disembodied gray hand grabs the child and drags them into the booth. He grabs John as well and drags him in. In a pocket dimension once again, the Mirror Demon floats before him and garbles, "FILIS PAETER PROFANI!" A fight ensues.

The battle is mostly the same as before, except this time the arena looks like an open field with demon hands acting as barriers. There are more skeletons littered throughout the area than usual. The purple child is mysteriously missing. At one point, the Mirror Demon turns into a black silhouette that blends in with the skeletons in an attempt to throw John off. In the end, John banishes him, and he garbles, "I WILL SEE YOU AGAIN!" before disappearing. He drops a psychiatric note where Dr. Spinel believes that a medical, in-vivo approach is best for John so that he can come into terms with reality. After reading it, John pops back into the building and proceeds with receiving the UNSPEAKABLE's blessing.

Once again, the Mirror Demon's reappearance is supposed to coincide with John's traumatic experiences of both his failed exorcisms and the time as a patient at Yale Psychiatric Institute. In this ending alone, though, it's signifying how John is submitting into his evil urges and willingly wants to submit into the cult's doing.

After performing all three conditions to receive the blessings, John "wakes up" from the nightmare and stumbles outside from his backdoor. Standing in the middle of a pentagram, the UNSPEAKABLE drifts from the sky while thralls, cultists, and Gary watch from the distance. With hollow eyes and a missing collar, John stares right back at the deity and his eye sockets begin to bleed. The game ends before anything else happens, but with context clues, John submitted to the cult. The UNSPEAKABLE is not summoned on Earth yet, so this section here is still a dream, but it's best to believe that John will do the cult's bidding when he eventually wakes up.

### October 30th, 1987

Flashing a month and two days later, John is tasked by Father Garcia to explore a daycare center on 4th Street since he's getting reports of children exhibiting abnormal behavior. For the past two days, Garcia has been requesting John to explore an abortion clinic Amy used to work at and an apartment complex in New Haven since he believed Malphas would be summoned there. However, there was no explicit sign of any summoning site, so John had to head back home and wait for further instructions. This time, Garcia is stern that if they can find the summoning site then the twins will be there as well. John sneaks past police officers who are stationed outside the building in preparation for an ambush and unlocks a seal leading to a staircase.

#### this is where he lives

The staircase paves way to a makeshift tunnel, called Garyland in the game files, and explores the area. Attempting to solve another puzzle, John suddenly gets pricked in the neck from a syringe by Gary. He staggers and screams as the drug's effects kick-in near instantly. Fortunately, the drug does not last too long, so he slumps over when it wears down. Coming to, John walks past a massacre of thralls he caused himself while drugged and traverses deeper into Garyland.

There's a large statue depicting Moloch in the middle of a room. Etched on the statue is instructions on how to open its naval by retrieving three artifacts. John does so and grabs one after defeating a Plagas Cultist and another by playing Red Light, Green Light with a Blind One. Interestingly, the same demon he could've encountered in the "Initiation" Ending, Pentarox, reappears and slowly staggers towards him to kill. To grab the last artifact, John walks past an effigy of Magog and two caged cultists and enters a room with a large mirror. There's a reflection of the artifact but it's inaccessible. There are vines on the mirror that steadily grows if left unnoticed by the crucifix. Suddenly, the Mirror Demon makes his grand return in the reflection.

He attempts to slowly float towards John, which is notable to point out since he doesn't teleport sporadically like he usually does. He can only be seen in the reflection, so John carefully attempts to exorcise him while the vines slow him down. Every time the Mirror Demon gets too close, fanfare begins to play that signifies the player that John is close to getting killed, the same fanfare played in the "Initiation" Ending. Eventually, John bests the demon. He garbles, "I WILL SEE YOU AGAIN!" and disappears. Interestingly, he does not leave a psychiatric note behind, and the artifact is now accessible. John grabs the artifact and unlocks Moloch's door, heading deeper into Garyland.

This is the only required battle against the Mirror Demon throughout the entire series. There's a running theme of enemies relating to John's trauma during the section where you pick up artifacts. Besides the Mirror Demon, Pentarox reappears, and the Unholy Spirit only appears when looking at a portrait of Miriam three times, an enemy that heavily relates to John's time at Yale Psychiatric Institution and Miriam handling John's care when he was an orphan all those years ago. The meaning behind this is unclear, but their inclusion in this section only implies that they were intentionally placed there, likely Gary's doing.

### October 31st, 1987

Unlocking a door in the Nowhere Forest, John comes face-to-face with Gary. After some questioning, the two engage in battle. During the fight, Gary has a chance of summoning enemies John has dealt with in the past, including the Mirror Demon. However, all of these enemies are red-scaled and cannot kill John at all; merely knocking him down and dropping his crucifix. These red-scaled enemies are apparitions, and they are not truly summoned from wherever they were to aid Gary. These apparitions act as bad memories that mentally affected John. We can tell by seeing two different versions of Tiffany, a woman he encountered back on the 29th. He was shaken from seeing her gigantic demon and her scurrying like a spider towards him after her demon was banished. This gives insight on John's personality since he's mostly quiet and doesn't speak on what he witnesses.

This is the last time we'll ever see the Mirror Demon, and so far, the series has yet to explain why je appears or what he wants to do with John. The demon probably was not truly defeated or killed, simply shuffled away and will come back eventually. Since he's an apparition on the 31st, we're going to say that he "died" on the 30th.

#### Interpretation

This particular demon's reoccurrence throughout the Unholy Trinity is significant in likely symbolizing John's depression over the botched exorcism of Amy Martin, which he had a hand in botching. On the subject of the demon himself and his elements, at a glance, his distorted head likely resembles either cracked glass, or the mirror found within the Save Family Tomb, both of which symbolize having one's view of themselves be distorted. In addition, the presence of triangle symbology in the demon's lair in Chapter I alludes to the third aspect of the Unholy Trinity that describes one's lack of purity - that being the Unholy Spirit. True to his name, the Mirror Demon appears most often during John's moments of reflection, literally and figuratively.

Chapter I: The silhouette of Amy stalking John from the mirror is replaced by this demon, signifying that John's guilt is creeping up on him since it's (partly) his fault for failing to exorcise her for now the second time. And currently he doesn't know about her condition since she jumped from a two-story house, very likely dead or severely wounded.

Chapter II: The sacrifice of the Doomed Child to the demon is likely a stab at Amy's fate - through John's cowardice, he allowed Amy as a spirit, to be fed to the forces of the underworld on a silver platter. The demon's use of confessional responses is also a reminder to John; not even under the wing of Christianity is he free from the pain of the past, for self-reflection is a core practice.

Chapter III: Moloch's navel key is found in a room featuring a giant mirror spanning the room's entire north wall, as well as a growth growing out of the room's top corners that must be exorcised for him to degenerate. The Mirror Demon is only seen in the reflection of the giant mirror and can only be exorcised while he is very nearby to John's reflection, as he slows down whenever he gets close enough, and John's reflection is incapable of exorcising. Several allusions can be gleaned from this encounter:

* The demon's required closeness to John in this sequence is representative of facing oneself and one's actions,
* The demon's connection to the navel key (Moloch's third and most unique key) alludes to the third facet of the Unholy Trinity that pertains to the soul (which is the Unholy Spirit),
* And the growths that infest the room are likely representative of the depressive symptom of hyper fixating on oneself and one's guilt, as the growths will overtake the whole room and ensnare John, slowing down his movement, should he remain too long without exorcising them.

## Quotes

### Chapter I

#### Mirror Demon Appears

* "FILIS PAETER PROFANI!" ("My Unholy Father!")

* (Mirror Demon Teleports)

* "I WILL SEE YOU AGAIN!"

### Chapter II

#### Confession Booth Dialogue

* John: "Pray for me, Father, for I have sinned."
* ???/Mirror Demon: "What sins have you come to confess?"
* John: "I tried to save a girl from evil," "but my fears overcame me."
* "I turned my back on the ministry..." "...and broke my vows to God."
* "A year later the girl reached out to me again."
* "But in the end I couldn't save her."
* "I left her to die."
* "I am sorry for these and my past sins."
* ???: "Thou hast said well."
* "Here is thy penance:"
* "BRING THE CHILD TO ME."
* "Perform this act of contrition..." "...and thou shalt have the peace thou seekest."
* "Give thanks to the Lord for he is good."
* John: "For his mercy endures forever."

## Trivia

* The Deluxe Edition of Chapter I added the Mirror Demon fight in v1.2.
* The arena that the demon drags John into in Chapter I is called "HellZone".
* In some way, the Mirror Demon's face sort of looks similar to the mirror that John's reflection wickedly smiles in Save Family Tomb.

* There are unused audio clips where the garble-y sound effect is removed, making the demon talk relatively clearly. Despite this, he talks a bit faster than most other demons, so translating the "intro audio" it plays was difficult. For now, we're going to say that the intro audio is he saying, "My Unholy Father!" in Latin.
	+ Shoutout goes to "abortion steve" from the FAITH Discord for translating the demon's intro audio.
	+ If he truly was saying, "My Unholy Father!", it would've made more sense to say "Mother" instead since every demon affiliated with the cult was summoned from Miriam's gaping face hole.
* (This is trivia for the wiki page) Shoutout goes to NotGlowyswamps for creating the "Theories" tab. This was integrated into the "Interpretation" section of the "Biography" tab.

## Gallery

### In-Game

The Demon looming over John in a mirror in Chapter I.The Demon's elongated red arm.The Mirror Demon.A disembodied gray hand.A darker silhouette of the Demon during the battle in Chapter II.The Mirror Demon reappearing as an apparition in Chapter III.
### Other

The Mirror Demon stalking on John from a mirror.John and the Mirror Demon face each other.A template of the arena the Mirror Demon drags John into in Chapter I.The arena in Chapter II.The mirror room in Chapter III.An apparition (now with a filter!)