Chapter 10 The Devil
God and I have a tradition of talking. After all, how can he forget his favorite, most beautiful son?
The only one to challenge him. He’d be nothing without me.
He sends a flood and gets people to call it a miracle to prove that he has their love and loyalty, while I can only corrupt the occasional soul.
He condemned his fucking ‘son’ – since he wanted to make Joseph a cuck – as a reminder that the world is a den and I’m the head of the viper that will poison it. Then he frames it as freeing everyone through sin by his son’s choice.
It wasn’t.
Jesus screamed.
Of course, Jesus turned me down when I offered him freedom and revenge, but not everyone does.
God likes to prove that what people remember and how they contextualize it matters more, but there’s no recontextualizing the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, the medical experiments done by one specific group of soldiers in Japan.
The bombs, the knowledge, the way the world has twisted on itself.
I have a habit of showing him the worst in the creations he is so sure are better and more deserving of free will than angels. He’ll do anything to pretend that he loves them, even when he lets my fingers spread across the planet, sewing discord that makes new atheists and nonbelievers every day.
So, I decide to send him another reminder that his humans can’t become angels, that they can only be condemned rather than saved.
Their only options are climbing up in the world they know with my help, or suffering and crossing their fingers that Heaven is worth it.
The devout will always believe, but voices can be silenced.
With a wave of my fingers, the Notre-Dame Cathedral crumbles. The Sagrada Família burns and caves in. The Vatican floods in response to an earthquake that sets new records. The message is clear.
God’s love is fickle, His followers sitting ducks.
Where they seek God, they’ll find the wrath He created in me.
It’s a message for him and those that consider themselves holy.
God doesn’t protect them. He only starts the fucking Rapture.
I roll my eyes.
“Oh yes, save the clergy that you can while the rest are forced to out their sins. No time for public confession like the end,” I say with a smirk while tugging on the souls I own to encourage them to ‘confess’ to save themselves. Of course, their own shame will end them before my demons can.
Looking away and ignoring problems, accepting bribes, harboring murderers, never paying taxes, only helping when encouraged is very ‘unchristian-like’. Those Mega churches and repressed men who don’t know how to balance their instincts with total abstinence fall hard.
But writing love letters to God isn’t the only thing on my to-do list. Not when that girl who escaped my horsemen – now tortured and released with some new fixes – is evading me.
Her body is beyond my touch, but her mind …
so negative, so rooted in annoyed and focused disbelief, will be my new playground.
God doesn’t love them.
Any of them.
It’s the false love that depends on worship and exchange. If God saw every dark thought in her head, if he saw all those deadly sins swirling in her, he wouldn’t want to save her and neither would her angel.
The end of times can bring out the best in people, or set them free of moderation. Set them free for corruption. Charlie doesn’t want the bible, she doesn’t want answers that are riddles and limit her control.
I focus on her mind. “Take control back. You’re hungry, you’re aching, you’re so full of want. What has repression done for you?”
Lust for life can become lust that doesn’t care about pain or selfishness.
Pride in a job well done can become vain pride that lashes out when wounded.
Envy can switch from a driving force to something that consumes a person and encourages theft and belittling.
Sloth can warp into doing nothing, refusing to raise a finger to stop horrors beyond compare.
All my sins spread in insidious ways, welling up in minds as the horsemen set their feet (or hooves in Pestilence’s case) back on the world.
Charlie’s faith will fail, her wingless angel can’t inspire her properly, and once she leaves him, she’ll be mine. She’ll run from his purity, from his piousness, from his many eyes scouring her soul and declaring her unworthy.
My arms will be open. I’ll welcome her, show her the kind of kindness and affirmation she needs and will never get from a god that always raises the bar higher so no one is enough.
She’s tainted, curious, perfectly prepared to welcome everything I have to offer as long as I properly word the deal and get her to shake my hand at the crossroads before she sees the venom in my smile.
She hates the world, hates what it’s become, and I’ll give her the power to burn it all and remake it in a proper, more … appropriate way. I finally look at the cards in my hand while glancing at the kings of hell and turn over a royal flush.
Stacking the deck means winning every time.