We breathed thoughts into you. Oh, you crawled out of the swamp on your own. We gave you the spark to become… whatever you would. Then we watched, when we cared to, which wasn’t often.
When you finally became amusing, we breathed language. Words were the first forbidden fruit, and you gobbled them up, garbled them, split and spit them and wrestled your brains into growing larger, because you craved more words. Terrible drugs will do that, and ideas are the most potent of all. You burned with need for words and concepts. We drove you mad with them, and you became interesting.
The worst
thing we ever gave you was the concept of Truth. It was an accident. A
dalliance, a tryst, a flirtation with complex vagary you were never meant to
remember. But you did, you blighters, and then you Named us.
Strange
thing about you, which some of you realize and the rest try desperately hard
not to: from simple clan group to vast civilizations, the Names you choose for
us are all the same. Certainly, there are nuances, and our appearance changes
depending on what you need us for, but we are always War and Destruction, Love
and Fertility, Redeemer, Chaos. There are more, of course, so many variations
on a theme. We know them all, because you refuse to stop screaming them.
War is the
most fun, so we take turns, which explains inconsistencies in application and
scale. War breathed fire into the Greeks
with some success, but the Romans were spectacular at it. The guise of bringing
civilization to outlying lands was pure genius.
Love had a decent run
in the ancient world, until we switched up and you got it confused with Redeemer. Then you managed to morph that into War, which is one of the more
impressive things we’ve witnessed. Sick, yet brilliant. We briefly considered
intervening, but the show is mesmerizing.
Redeemer
teamed up with Chaos and had you write a book. While something got lost in
translation, it’s still an epic work. We managed to separate Fertility from
Love, which, as it turns out, wasn’t that smart, since you won’t stop breeding.
The best part – all Chaos’ doing – is how we convinced you to give the book a twisted
ending that invites us to send down extremely creative waves of destruction,
and a whole subset of you will thank us, because you think
you’re going to come live at our place afterward.
I hate to
tell you, but we’re terribly fond of our privacy.
Redeemer
felt bad about how that book turned out, so we commissioned a few other books
in the hope they would catch on and balance things out. Whoops. That was like
asking War to take a vacation to everywhere. You invoke War daily, as if there are
no consequences to that. Then you try to apologize, only to make things worse.
Words are
powerful, important, playful, merciless. You cling to them while at the same
time twisting them. There’s an art to it, but too few pause to appreciate our finest
gift. Instead, you find every possible way to bludgeon each other with it. For
all you go on about your complexity, you remain terribly simple creatures. Eat,
fuck, spawn, kill. If those were the only words we’d given you, you wouldn’t
have turned out much different.
Lately, some
of you have taken to humanizing us. Oh, sure, there was always Redeemer in
human form (pick a Redeemer, any Redeemer), but you’ve gone further. It wasn’t
enough to embrace the monsters we sent to frighten you into behaving – or tempt
you into misbehaving. Even demons (daemons, daimons, diamonds – all paths of
worship lead to blood or sex, and sex is what drove you before we gave you
words) have become pseudo-Redeemers in your fictions. Chaos is over the moon
about this development. We’ve managed to curtail the most insidious plans for
giving you what you appear to desire, but you may want to stop pushing so hard
for it.
Which brings
us to angels. Did you not read that book we made you write? Angels hate your
guts, yet you pray to them for intervention. Angels – and yes, they are as real
as the demons and just as scary, because we don’t create a sub-par product –
are always second in line. Not next, second. They are about as pissed off as a
creation can be, and you idiots keep calling out to them. They would like
nothing more than to answer your prayers. They are, as some of you suspect, super
sexy. They would happily show up in your room. And then they’d kill you.
So stop
flirting with the monsters. Even Love is put out, as you seem to have narrowed
the concept severely.
The only
thing saving you is us, and we’re not all that fond of you these days. For one
thing, you shit all over the place we gave you and then pretend it wasn’t
your fault. Bad form. I could go on, but if you were going to listen, you
wouldn’t keep silencing our prophets. Yes, we still send them. We breathe into
them words of wisdom, and they try in vain to teach you. At least you stopped
killing most of them. That’s progress.
But if you
write one more sugary tale in which some incarnation of us comes down there and
opts to become mortal for the love of a human woman or sacrifice our existence to
save a clump of humanity (again), we are going to open the cages above and below, sip on
nectar, and watch the carnage. Because, despite what religious tomes tell you,
we are not benevolent, we do not think you’re our best creation, and we aren’t
inclined to save you to start the whole party over.
We already know how this story ends, and unless you start respecting our gift, you don’t get happily ever
after. You get angels.
This is in response to the Flash Fiction Challenge "The Fire Of The Gods" over at Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds.
This is in response to the Flash Fiction Challenge "The Fire Of The Gods" over at Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds.
