by Tim Hawken
“Leave here,” I said to them. “You are not the ones I want. Gideon has sinned. He is no messenger of God. He has sent both you and this poor homeless girl into certain destruction. He has raped and killed an innocent woman, my beautiful wife. Is that the will of a loving Lord? Go back to your families and forget what happened here. Don’t say a word of what you have seen to anyone, or I will come back and bring you down to Hell myself.” I released their bonds and they ran crying, out of the doors and into the empty street. Gideon and I were alone.
twelve
“IT’S YOUR TURN TO DIE NOW,” I sneered at Gideon. He stood unmoving, exactly where he had been during the entire massacre of his followers.
“You don’t even care for them,” I taunted. “You let them die for no reason.”
He broke into his smug grin once more and laughed.
“Yes, I did let them die,” he said. “But they did not die in vain, they showed me something very valuable. That your powers are weak, while mine are strong.”
With inhuman speed he ran at me, catching me off guard. Surging forward he rammed into me at full charge, knocking me backwards onto floor. I crashed down flat on my back, oxygen wheezing out of my lungs. I stumbled to my feet, winded, looking around for him. He was now at the end of the church, arms stretched toward the sky, chanting. I felt the air thicken around my body and tighten. I couldn’t move!
I struggled to free myself, my mind in shock. How did he do that? How could he command the elements like me? I changed my perception to view the elements that held me, looking to see if I could unwrap my bonds. To my horror, I saw that they were not elements of air but of spirit, the elements that I had no power to control! I was helpless. I panicked and convulsed, trying to get free. Gideon’s condescending laugh echoed through the church as he walked towards me. I looked back to him as he cackled, feeling like a helpless infant in his grasp. Even more, I felt the sharp spite that I held for him, the one who killed my Charlotte.
“You think God would not arm me against the likes of you?” he sneered as he circled around me. “He has made me a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. I have watched you wield your pitiful powers against the Brethren and have seen your weakness. You only use the four basest of elements. You have no control over spirit, no control over the mind. You will never beat me, or God. You cannot defeat the boundless power of the one true Elemental! ”
“His power is not endless nor is He the only elemental,” I snapped, trying to throw him off balance. “You know his flaws intimately, you know He isn’t all powerful or all knowing, you who holds his secret.”
He laughed again. “Is that what you think His secret is? Is that what you think I know?” he asked. “I know what you think,” he continued in his boyish voice. “You think that God has created a prison for himself, one He could not escape from if he was to be locked inside.”
“That is what I know already,” I said baiting him.
“You’re right, Michael, he did make the prison.” Gideon smirked. “He made it just after the creation of man and trapped himself inside not long after.”
“So he is helpless,” I taunted. “He is trapped in a cage of his making, unable to get out.”
Gideon threw his head back and roared with mocking laughter.
“You mean he was trapped, Michael. If he was still inside how could He have given me these glorious powers?” Gideon tightened the bonds holding me until I felt I was going to burst.
“He has only in the last century figured out how to escape. In fact, He has only figured out in the last century that He actually was trapped.”
I was suddenly puzzled. What was this monster talking about?
“You speak lies,” I said coolly. “You know nothing of God’s true secret.”
“It is you who knows nothing. You who has been lied to,” he snapped back.“God has told me all. He even told me the name of His prison. He called it Hell, the stifling world that you have lived in until recently.”
My heart leapt to my throat. This could not be!
“He told me how He trapped himself down there and locked Himself out at the same time,” Gideon continued. “God imprisoned half of His mind inside a second body, so He couldn’t figure a way out. He locked out His own knowledge of what he’d done. He didn’t even really know who He was, did not even try to escape.” Gideon walked back to the front of me and shoved his face right up to mine, spraying spittle over me as he talked. “God even gave Himself a purpose down there, a purpose that would help keep him from seeking out the truth, a task that needed to be carried out anyway.”
What was this demon talking about? I didn’t know. He continued to talk.
“After the longest time God realized He was not complete, that there was another side to His being. That the adversary He hated most was in fact himself.”
I was lost in Gideon’s words. I looked to the image of Jesus nailed to the crucifix on the wall behind him, the sign of the devil on his chest glowing red. The meaning of Gideon’s ranting speared through my head like a spike of hot metal. He was saying that God was the Devil, that they were the same being!
I convulsed again, struggling to get free, roaring in anger at the lies Gideon was trying to inject like poison into my brain. He pressed on as I tore against my bonds with my mind.
“God realized that he was Satan and now wants to be whole again. He wants to be the truly complete being he was when he created the universe. However, he needs someone to rehabilitate the souls in Hell so they can still go to Heaven. He dare not leave that place unguarded, lest the Perceptionist and the other demons corrupt every soul entering beyond redemption. God needed a son to take his place, he needed you, Michael, and so He created you; someone who would live the sins of earth and therefore know how to purge them. Someone with His power, but with a human soul, one that would never be clean enough to ever enter Heaven. But that bitch came along and started to mess with His plans, so He sent me to kill her.”
At the mention of Charlotte, a furious rage boiled up inside me the likes of which I had never felt. It destroyed my reason. It became my justification. Red seeped over my vision and then turned to something else. My perspective changed to an angle I had never seen before. I saw clearly the swirling of Gideon’s soul in front of me. The gold, silver and green of his person twisted in a bubbling mass before me, contained within his body. I saw it and I loathed it. I wanted to destroy it. I needed to. Pure hatred drove me as I saw the weakness in its construction. There were tiny breaks between the elements of his essence, where they were fused together. With a defiant growl I threw my anger inside him, forcing black elements of hate between the gaps of his soul. Gideon moved to resist me, throwing a barrage of wind and fire into my body. I didn’t relent. I tore him apart, not just his body but his true being. I ripped up each element that contained his life-force and dispelled them into the air. I ravaged his heart and flayed his spirit. I murdered his soul. I shattered it. I sent Gideon screaming into oblivion for all the pain he had caused me and Charlotte.
thirteen
I COLLAPSED TO THE GROUND panting, spewing the contents of my insides, retching vomit onto the floor as I fell to my knees. I’d just committed murder. Not just murder of the body, but the first ever murder of the soul.
There was nothing more for Gideon. He was nowhere. I had utterly destroyed him. He was gone. His soul was now just scattered elements in the air, with no consciousness, no spirit, nothing. A great sadness overcame me. There was no chance of redemption for me now and I knew it. I had just committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of God. I had splintered one of his creations into a million pieces, never to be resurrected, never to feel pain or joy or sorrow again. The finality of it stunned me.
I knelt there sobbing; spit dripping from my mouth like a baby as I wept on all fours. Grief consumed me: grief for Charlotte, grief for Gideon and grief for myself. I’d become a monster in my quest for revenge, a monster created through circumstance. I was blind to my ine
vitable fate. If only I hadn’t talked to Charlotte on that plane, would this have turned out differently? How could I have stopped this if fate was against me? At least she would have been spared.
Soon my grief turned back to rage. Was this supposed to be the fate that God and The Devil had created for me by manipulating my path? How dare they use me as their puppet and decide my soul’s final destination. Is this what they wanted of me? I refused to believe that this was the end of it.
Another more glaring question hung in my mind. Was Gideon telling me the truth about God, or were they just more of his lies? There was only one way to find out for sure. I pulled myself to my feet. I wobbled as I stumbled past the limp bodies of the Brethren, scattered over the floor of the church. I checked the young homeless girl; she was dead as well, another innocent victim of religion. I walked to the back wall where Jesus hung, the stack of broken wood piled beneath him. Gathering the elements of fire around me, I ignited the pyre, along with the rest of the church.
Flames licked the effigy of Jesus. As his body began to burn, so did mine. The searing heat of fire reaped our bodies as one. I threw myself onto the burning coals beneath Jesus and waited for death to swamp around me. Pain filled every fiber of my body, as my insides bubbled and blistered. I didn’t care. I wanted to be back in Hell. I would find the answers I was looking for, even if I had to tear them from Satan’s throat.
The church began to collapse in on itself, just as I felt blissful death wash over my body. My bones were charred and my body gone, but my purpose still raged inside like the fire that destroyed everything around me.
I’m not finished, I thought, as I died for the second time.
fourteen
I KNEW THE MAN SITTING IN FRONT OF ME. He preferred to be called Asmodeus, but his name was Satan. He was my unwanted father, and right now I hated the sight of him.
I stood bound by immoveable elements wrapped so tight around me that I couldn’t even blink. I was held firm as his eyes bored inside me. I knew by the way he looked at me that Gideon had been telling the truth. This was not only Satan, it was also God. His eyes revealed his true self to me. It was inside him; inside his shadow that hung menacing on the wall, flickering in the firelight. He sat patiently watching me, deciding the best way to explain to me why he had carried out the despicable things he’d done to Charlotte. I didn’t need him to tell me. I had already guessed. He told me anyway.
He stood up and leaned on his chair.
“Michael, when I told you that the first being that I made was Satan, I wasn’t lying. I created him of my own consciousness. I did not know how to create a being from scratch just yet, so I divided myself in two, like a split personality in two bodies. I poured all my hate, envy, fear and contempt into this new side of me, and kept compassion, empathy and love in the other. I named the being Lucifer. At first it was like there was a one-way mirror between us. I could see and feel and know both sides, but Lucifer could only see himself and it interested me how he acted.”
He paused and waited for me to react, but I did not. He started to pace around the room in front of me, becoming more animated as he spoke.
“The connection between Lucifer and me soon began to grow cloudier, as I started to despise the things this side of me did.” he continued. “Lucifer started to act independently from my conscious will. Slowly, we became truly separate beings, and he began calling himself Satan. As this Satan, he had the capacity for cruelty. He would attack the imperfections in my creations, as I engineered the universe. He ridiculed me for what he called my ‘grotesque children’: humans. But aside from this cruelty, he also had the capacity for great intellect and foresight. He invented the absolute necessity of death on earth, so life evolved and changed rather than sailing around in circles. Through his intellect he also developed a twisted system of morality. He believed it was only right that humans be treated equally, no matter what. He believed that they should all come to Heaven after death and enjoy a blissful, pain-free existence. He argued that because they were imperfect they shouldn’t have to be punished. I could not allow that. People have to be made responsible for their actions, even if they made their choices while ignorant of all the facts. However, I didn’t have the stomach to punish them for their wrong-doings. I needed Satan to do it for me. Only he had the ability to do the essential things I could not bring myself to do, the things I could not cope with doing. In my last moment of clarity, I created a prison for this side of me. It is the place you know as Hell. It was not just made to contain this side of myself, but also as a penitentiary for the corrupted souls of earth. Satan could punish and rehabilitate these souls without mercy, cleansing them so they could eventually pass over and enjoy the fruits of Heaven with me. I cast him down to this prison and we were blocked off totally. I shut out all memory of how he’d been originally created. I only knew of what he did if I heard indirectly from the angels or humans, and he knew nothing of me.”
The Devil was wringing his hands and staring into space as he recounted his story. It was as if he was telling the tale to himself, rather than to me.
“The angels didn’t know the truth of Satan’s origins, and I never knew to tell them. We went on thinking we were separate beings for thousands of years. We grew to hate each other. I deplored him for the things he did to my souls as he carried out his brutal work. He cleansed their souls with fire, so that Hell wouldn’t fill up and overflow with despicable beings. Satan’s hate for me seethed over the centuries. It bubbled and festered like a wound that doesn’t heal. Eventually, he began on his quest for Armageddon. He wanted to destroy me and I was happy to destroy him, as I didn’t fully realize the necessity of his work. My hate had blinded me into thinking these souls could be cleansed through the power of love alone. Satan soon figured out how to escape Hell, onto Earth.
“I went down from Heaven to stop him from defiling my wonderful masterpiece creation. We finally met on Earth, and came face to face for the first time since I had cast him into Damnation. At once, we both realized the horrible truth: that we’d been fighting ourselves the whole time. I also immediately realized that as a split being I had relinquished the full capacity to enjoy life and the full capacity of omnipotence. I was a shell, and I wanted my entire-self back. We made peace and planned to make ourselves whole once more. It took a while to figure out how to fuse our souls back together as one. After many failed attempts, I finally succeeded. I destroyed my old body and poured my godly soul into the more resilient form that I had created in Satan. I was now God Asmodeus. I was now ready to return to Heaven, but there was still one major problem. This is where you came in, Michael.”
He looked at me with his dark eyes. I sat silently and listened. I didn’t even think anything, lest my thoughts give me away. Beads of sweat poured down my forehead in the effort it took to control my rage. As I watched Asmodeus before me, I could see two distinct sides of him. While he talked, his countenance changed from a smile to a frown every few seconds. His eyes twitched, he blinked erratically and stared off into space, mid-sentence. It was like his two personalities were not properly joined as a single soul. They were wrestling for dominance inside his body. I got the impression that the evil side was winning.
God brought himself under control; sighing, he continued his story.
“I wanted to be whole and live up in my sanctuary of Heaven,” he said “but I could not leave my beautiful corrupted souls to rot inside Hell for all eternity, I could not bear it. I needed a caretaker. Someone would have to rule Hell for me, a person who could carry out the necessary evils that my former self hadn’t been able to commit to. I considered asking the Perceptionist, but he is too unpredictable. I needed someone who I could trust, so I birthed a son. That son is you, Michael.”
God waited for his news to affect me. When it did not, he looked confused at my patience but pressed on regardless.
“I needed a soul guaranteed to come to Hell once its body had died on earth. So, as Satan, I planted my seed into a
whore. She did as I wanted, and gave you up into a life of despair. This was meant to corrupt the human side of your spirit just as many of the corrupted souls of earth. You were supposed to become one of few creations that would become so distorted and steeped in sin that you would be without redemption. You could rule with an iron fist for eternity and ensure Hell was the place it needed to be.”
God’s face constricted again into a snarl and he turned his back on me, pacing back and forth, mumbling to himself. He quickly brought himself under control and turned to face me again.
“My plans were spoiled by an innocent, Charlotte,” he said, smiling falsely. “She came to you by total luck, through free will. It all happened by coincidence, she changed her plane ticket to come home early from a holiday and ended up sitting next to you. She began to ruin my plans and rehabilitated your soul with the power of her love. It was an unacceptable disaster. You would be lost to Heaven while I was stuck managing the souls in Hell, not the other way around.”
This was definitely Satan talking.
“Luckily, I saw the opportunity in this mistake. I was blind to think that you could manage Hell properly without the capacity to love, so I let your relationship blossom, let it grow to the purest of loves. Then I took it from you.”
I stared blankly at him, hating him with every element inside my soul, but I hid my hate and sat still. He pleaded with me to understand, almost groveling as he went on.