Abyss 4: May the Widows Weep

The last letter between out two demon friends. 

Just so it's clear, I agree with a lot of the logic my demon characters use. Except they're demons, and I'm a human. Our existences and desires are antithetical, so while they use their mental pathway to seek annihilation, myself and my mortal friends can use it for creation.  Just think about it for a second and you'll see that I'm right(ish). 

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Transcript

Curse the day my adopted brother spawned you,

I had no idea your foolishness was so vile. Here I thought you were undertaking your plans simply because you were misguided. It’s now clear to me that you hate the dwellers of the Abyss as fervently as you hate the bright eyes above. Maybe you despise us more. It’s hard to tell.

You are ignoring all established literature, you know? Assuming any charitability of the Word towards our cause, even benevolence in oversight… it’s unthinkable. Utterly unthinkable. If the Word found us a nuisance, then why would he allow us to continue existing during the scream? I know you mock the scream for its failure, but you must understand that we learned things from it. With the Scream, we shattered apart continents, brought all sorts of ‘natural’ disasters to bear on the material world. And, yes, near the end when we nearly plunged the planet into another ice age was the first time the bright eyes came to the Abyss. We kept shrieking as they slaughter us, and with the scream alone we kept our brethren from regenerating for many years. And you see now how we return in a couple of weeks. Do not discount the scream. It may have failed in its ultimate goal, but it showed us the paths of creation, the bits of the tapestry we had to pull at to unravel it all. And a big explosion, simply put, was not the answer. We’ve tried. Even the humans noticed. Now, they being the blind rats they are, they wouldn’t have made note of our outburst save for the eruption of Mt. Krakatoa which plunged their world into an ice age, but still.

And you will counter that you were there. I know. I was still tutoring you then. Those were better days indeed, nephew, although no sane spirit would rate them as good. But, even so, you had the eyes to see the radicals’ plan fall into shambles. And yes, it was just the hatcheries. But the demons reformed in the shadows of the Abyss, and the hatcheries brought themselves back to full health via their foul magics. This is established. You were extant at the time of these events. And, yes, you might argue that the Young Samaritans did not go far enough. After all, can there be shadows when there is no matter to hold back the light? It’s compelling in its hopefulness, as delicious as hearing a whip strike a sinner’s bare back. But you must not be so confident in that hope as to cost eons of suffering. If we do not reform in the shadows of the Abyss, what then? Perhaps we come back into bodies in the shadows of some earthly cave, wherein we must stretch our wings out in despair. Or, barring that, perhaps we are forced to reform in the heavens, to have our flesh scoured by so much light as to make our current sufferings seem like joy in comparison. 

No, it is not the world that must eliminated, whether that world be Hell or the material plane. The very spirit must be destroyed. How? I haven’t the faintest clue. I am not imaginative enough to understand such a process, even when I am doused with the sufferings of mankind. And you are not imaginative enough either. I was in favor of the first explosion, mind. I helped in gathering the flat suffering into a pile so deep that you might have built Lucifer another palace out of it. There were cow minded humans back then, too, albeit they were less common. I poured my hopes and dreams into that obliteration, and what did it leave us? Nowhere but here, a good twentieth of our human chattily annihilated with the blast. Another loss. Scope will not change the outcome. 

I guess you might be right in saying my age has rendered me conservative, or that the pain of existence has crippled my judgment. I cannot be so haughty as to ignore that possibility. It’s the sunk cost fallacy, I’m afraid. Myself and my fellow spirits have sunk so much time and effort into unweaving the world by its fundamental principles, that… I can’t bear the possibility of having to start over. Sure, our knowledge might remain. But we’ll come gasping out of the hatcheries to see an Abyss utterly bereft of sinners, their souls being freed from our shackles by the simple fact of the cave walls’ dissolution. That’s how I see this playing out. Yes. There is a possibility you and your surface kindred are right. A possibility. In recognizing the Word as infinite I must also recognize that I do not understand it. One second it might completely different from the thing I supposed it to be in the first. I must acknowledge that, but then I must also bow down to my accumulated pain and wisdom. By what other apperture am I to view the world? These accursed, beady eyes? True, I must, as we all must, acknowledge that my plans will never have guaranteed outcomes, for no matter how and how hard I or any others pluck at the strings of reality, there might just be other strings right behind them. And so on, and so on. But that is not a realization I or any sane spirit can base anything on. And I must base my actions on something. No matter how hard I contemplate the infinite, I cannot transcend the splitting headache that infinite decided I deserved by no further crime than my birth. 

I am in pain. And you’re in pain, too. Neither of us can be fully right. But I will err on the side of caution. I know Lord Ahriman better than most of my compatriots. I know the fly better, too. And I know the sweet clacking of suffering on a dead saint’s lips. We may have strived for thousands of years and gotten nowhere save in our understanding, but… but I will not give up the fruits of our struggle, the fruits of the shriek for a gambit so patently insane. There is a chance for everything, but some chances are larger and some are smaller. The chance you are gambling on is so small even a flea would have trouble spotting it. We will find our abolition one day. This I know. Mother Void whispers the truth into my ears on particularly humid nights. We will return to her. But when? We are burdened with our existence here, and we cannot ignore that. If we sleep with Nothing for all eternity, you might say the time does not matter. And I can agree, whole heartedly. But then we leave our discussion, and I once more have to feel the sting of light on my carapace. Time matters. Chance matters. And I will give my all so that the greater chance might become Hell’s plan. 

So, no. I will not seek you out, nephew, although I still believe that you, like all the thinkers of our kind, might be persuaded to reason. We will find your stockpile (I’m guessing it’s somewhere in Satan’s palace, you know how we abhor that monument to filth), and we will destroy it. It is not because we despise you that we do this, but because we love you. You know it has ever been such. 

Suppose we meet on the field. Each of us thinking the other is so foolish that their triumph will bring damnation fit for a human on all the demons’ heads. And we do seem to fervently believe that, yes. Do we actually take swipes at each other? Are we so deluded that give ourselves, our full entity to nothing more than uncertain plans? I don’t believe so. We might speak fire, we might wrap the sinners about in thorns, but… 

Damn all of this. I have said it a thousand times a day for ten thousand years, but damn this. That I must even consider this barbarism, and speak to you as such. 

May the widows weep not by our hand someday, but exclusively by the hands of our enemy,

Your desperate uncle, Hatoir.