Creation - November 3rd, 2022

Alternate title: The typical story of a Devil discarded by a God, but with more fire this time.

It wasn’t so simple. Not just that a Devil was evil, and that a God can do no wrong. Not that we were the horrid chaos and destruction to their pristine order and creation. Not when both of us could be claimed divine, could mold with our own hands, claws, vines what we believed we wanted to see.

It’s hard to know when it really, really started. When I became a Devil, if I ever wasn’t. He’d made me different, I knew. And perhaps that’s why he so easily stole his own gifts away from me when I spoke, just like he wanted. With that grin that said to me, silently, “Didn’t you know this was inevitable?”

I didn’t. I didn’t know any of it was inevitable, or even possible, or even thinkable; not when he gazed upon us with a smile, always glittering and bright in a mesmerizing sort of way, like wisps of golden silk, like stardust barely burning. Not when he reached a hand towards our heads, and the softness of his glove ruffled our hair, and we craned our necks, still small.

That was what he was. Not just a sun to us, not just our beaming beacon, but the holder of life and energy and that which makes one’s eyes shine, what draws them to run along paths that shimmered like solidified sand along flowers that twinkled and spun like their own burning stars, grasping hands and claws and whatever we could hold, in the peace of the daytime.

In the peace of the nighttime, the loneliness of the nighttime. I watched the flowers wilt and rise every day; sat as a child and observed them, how as somehow the world that was the sun could have a nighttime, how their little stems drooped, their lights dimmed and dark. The paths empty, houses quiet, air still warm as ever as I sat and breathed in the silence.

It was barely darker, still humid, but I could tell as I watched my sister grow sleepier than usual, yawn and excuse herself, that there was something different about me.

I wasn’t alone. Those claws that I held as we ran along those paths in play; my sister and I saw her, one day, sitting and watching the glimmering sky. She looked older than us, back then—to us, small, like a big cool adult—but as time passed, I even outgrew her, and when I noticed that she was shorter, and told her, she let out a laugh and lifted her claws to mess up my hair. “That won’t stop me from taking care of you. Who knows where you’d run off, with that curiosity of yours, if I didn’t.”

I shrugged off her claws with a grumble.

Did I regret that, later on? The sting of knowing that somewhere, we could never go back to how we were before?

It didn’t stop her from wrapping her claws tightly around me as I weeped, face pressed into her shoulder. My back ached, and even the thought of the extent of my loss sent another shudder through me, but she never judged me.

No, she always supported me.

If she was born somewhere else, created by someone else, met someone else, I wonder if we would have been attached like this. The suspicion, always, that she had been tricking me all this time, that my father had sent her not as a gift but as a knife to dig into my side when I least expected it, and yet she stayed by my side.

On that day, when my wings were taken, I didn’t expect her to follow me into the abyss.

It wasn’t cold, necessarily. Certainly not in earthly standards. The air was still warm, barely a breeze rustling from above, but the sudden change had sent shivers through my spine. A shock, like stepping out from a shower; the air is normal, but you were bathed in too much heat to accept it, and I shivered like the heat (the flames, the sizzling and ash and charcoal) inside me wasn’t enough to keep me warm.

If I was cold, she must have been too.

Does she regret promising to take care of me?

It took time for me to adapt. It was when we were sitting atop a blackened rock, flat and giving us an excellent view of utter desolation, red red red and black, that I idly played with the fire in my hands.

How can one describe it, creation? The tingling in my hands claws scales, the glowing of warmth.

I almost quit then at the flash of pain. Light. Light was that which had thrown me away.

But this was mine, and her claws lay lightly atop my shoulder, and I watched it swirl in my grasp.

It’s so empty.

I wasn’t going to admit it. Not that the world we had been banished to was like an aching void when I had been raised among the village of angels, save for my companion and I.

Maybe I should have figured it out sooner. That he had plans for me, because I was wrong.

(Wrong, in his ideals. Wrong, in my wings and scales. Wrong, in the slight sizzle of temper I kept wrapped in cotton and stored away. But not wrong in my ideas, my choices, no. And I will never accept his thoughts towards that wrongness, because when I see him again...)

From the flame emerged nothing, but the flame itself was alive. I breathed, felt it draw from my energy; a gift. Not thievery, but a gift, and I opened my hands palms up to let it fly, and it danced into the everdark sky glowing with red that felt like death.

Triumph. Fear. Warmth. And the feeling that I could fix the emptiness.

This world, which was my prison, would become my home. There was nothing he could do to stop me save from coming down to stab me himself, and maybe he thought he’d already stabbed me enough to remember him forever, as if his very energy and heat and sun wasn’t already etched deeply into every fiber of the body that I wore.

The heat of the sun packed into a package of a God’s child, God’s soldier, God’s traitor, Devil Devil Devil and nothing could stop the doubt that made him cast me away.

Because a God always seems to need a Devil. Because it’s funny how Devils almost always come from Gods, come after Gods, are shaped by a God’s hand and soul and then sent into the world to be swiftly made an enemy. And if they wanted their pristine worlds of obedience, or calm, or light glittering worlds or punishment that could never be stopped, they didn’t need to create Devils. And yet they did. And sometimes I wonder if the universe itself was involved in deciding that, that a World could not have just one half, and shackled us to suffer inside it.

And maybe the universe took pity on us for our wretched existences, tied to Gods who often cared for nothing but toying with us (in infinitely many meanings of the word), and made us almost equals for it.

Or maybe that was even crueler, making us think we could ever have a hope of tearing out the energy that made us and warping it beyond repair.

Yet, we create.

I know that I created my son first. I created all my citizens, all the creatures and demons and living flames that lived within my world, but my son is my son because he was first, and he was, in the end, my heir.

It pains me that those moments are vague.

It took time to understand the landscape. Stone. Volcanic rock. Ash. Obsidian. Some... wood; it would be a stretch to call it wood and not some charred, stiff rock that sometimes resembled what could be known as a tree.

It took a while until we started actually building. There was no real need; in the empty world, with no existence but our own, what could really harm us, save for the smiling God up above, and if he came, what feeble hut could save us?

It made me recoil. The idea of making a village like the one I had grown up in. The sun-flowers I sat by flashed in my mind. That was the last time I would be seeing them, I knew. Nothing bright could exist here, not within the sunspot, the gaping abyss that the generous God had deemed perfect for my lair, as if it was planned all along.

(It had to have been; why do I still, sometimes, wonder, some tiny part of me crunched between teeth and hissed into flame, if that was all he had wanted from me? A cookie-cutter enemy, softened with kindness and the sweetness of companions before it was all ripped raw and I was falling, my wings in his grasp and losing their color, like he had been waiting to take it back.

They never regrew. With our wounds, sewing themselves together with ease, I can only assume that it was his message; that he was done playing around, and that now, I had to fulfill my role like a good son-turned-Devil so he could hear me scream.)

I cleared an area, familiar by now with the sound of the earth crunching like sand (uncolored, not the same, like someone had taken the stardust and sucked the soul out of it, like a film of monochrome over your eyes, and then you blink and it’s gone, mixing in with the red and black), and tried to build.

It was awful. I had only been a soldier, after all, and now, a novice artist; not still life, but life that breathed and moved like it had never been the incorporeal energy of flame.

I sulked, and my creations came together and built their town, and I hid away in my soon-castle atop the hill and thought they might hate me, too.