THREE
HELL IS NOTHING. There are no lakes of fire in which sinners writhe and crisp. There are no forests of bodies impaled on pikes of ice to bend in the wind of their own shrieks. No spectral judge pronounces sentence at the end of some oversized salad fork. No monstrous henchmen heap nightmares upon the wicked. The wicked are left alone, and in that lies the truest pain. Hell is darkness.
In that darkness, something rolled over.
It had memories, oceans of intelligence and galaxies of experience, but in the dark nothing is certain and so all was meaningless. Differences blend and distort over time, so that history and fiction flow into one another like tallow. It had memories of the Light, and that was a truth to hold onto in the confusion. If there was all this dark, there must be Light. It had its stories of times in the Light, of profound glories. It remembered strength and it remembered pride. Gone now, but never forgotten.
It did not know its own age, no longer counted in eons what could be felt in the weight of quasars. It knew that the Light was outside of time, and had shone before it had known anything at all. The Light had created it and once even loved it. Oh, how that had felt, to turn its face into the sun and be wanted, praised simply for being. It had been young then, and its time with the Light had been short, perhaps. It could never be certain how long it had been in the dark, only that it was dark. Only that the Light had gone, turned away and left it in the closet with a monster.
Its memory was its own fanged demon, its hope the foulest sting. Hope that once again it might taste something outside of the lonely dark. It could never hope to once again bask in the Light, but even the tiniest hint of recognition or attention for any reason at all would be Shangri-La, something upon which to feed in the great nothing. But how?
Out of the black it had a spark, a flame, an idea.
Not love. Hate.
And so, after a long time in the dark, it reached a decision and became a thing different from what it once had been. The new shape of its intention was recognized, allowed. A crack in the darkness was opened. A way was given. It moved. All voices are heard, all prayers are answered, but not always by the same thing.
Sins of the Fathers Page 4