“What happened between the two of you?”Moloch asked, faux sympathetically.
Asmodeus thought the better question was, ‘What happened to Baal?’In the past two or so thousand years.What had happened to the amusing, simple-minded demon who’d once hung on Asmodeus’ words?Who was this stranger?
In the tower, the regent in question had just kneeled before Satan, staring up at him with a set jaw as the devil said: “And what if this was goodbye, Baal?Goodbye to life as much as Hell.”
Baal took Satan’s hand, tenderly.“It had to end sometime.You always told me that.You told me that all the centuries of work would mean nothing one day, that God will be victorious, and that we will burn.”Satan scowled, deeply, like he’d been slashed.“I suppose the apocalypse is here now, but I don’t believe it all meant nothing.”The burly demon, tilted his head, then quietly added, “I wish I could make you believe that.But no, I know you’re too logical, too strategic.A king can’t feel, you told me.He must not have mercy.He must scheme and assassinate.”
Satan thought, ‘I often wonder if, all these years, I was building the apocalypse myself; if, through trying to stop the end times, I was nudging the Earth closer to it.I met the most terrible men, the wealthy, the cruel.I sat with those who manufactured greater horrors than even God and Satan could individually create.I sat at their table.I did it to know all the most wicked who walk the Earth, so that I might find the anti-Christ.Every Babylon that ever rose carried my footprints.And for two thousand years, I let the evil of the Earth maintain themselves, to build their riches and power.I did it strategically.I ordered the demons to remain in Hell, to never intervene in humanity’s evil.I thought only of killing the anti-Christ.I thought I could just kill the right person.I didn’t think of the world that reared my child — deteriorating.’
‘Each time that I killed my child, each time the anti-Christ was born again, I hunted them down, but I never looked to the world, my world, the one I bled out from my wounds to see how its rot would end us before the anti-Christ could.’
Anger building in his chest, Satan replied, “I told you mercy was useless, was weakness.”God did not allow for justice.He would not have Satan eventually win the endless cycle of this game.He would have the stars align one day — the fall of Babylon, the false Christ, the rivers of blood — all at once.Satan would make a mistake one day, and the Lord had always known it’d happen like this — the mistakes would come from too many faces, too many lives.How to tend to an Earth so much larger than oneself?How to be everywhere at once?‘You cannot, Lucifer,’ came a mischievous whisper in his head.‘You can never be in every place, at every time, because you are not God.’Almost hissing, Satan grunted, “This is my world, and I’m the lord of it.”He had ruled every Babylon behind its kings.“All of this is mine.”
Baal’s gaze flickered — curious, conflicted.
“I will not surrender,” Satan rasped but still squeezed Baal’s hand.“I will never return to Heaven.The end of days will never come.There will be no lake of fire.”He could still try to kill the anti-Christ.It hadn’t worked to try to appeal to the evil nature that all the other reborn anti-Christs before Tadeo had held.There was something particularly twisted about Tadeo — he did evil sincerely trying to do good, to be righteous.And Dina, Heaven itself, had harnessed him.If Satan had been like Dina, had whispered that he held the key to saving his world, then the devil could have built his trust, could have slaughtered him.None of this, this final apocalypse, would be happening.
“There must be,” Baal began, “a way to kill your child forever.Not have it be born again.”Tightly, he said that phrase — ‘your child’ — like it was a knife he twisted in his mouth.
‘My child.’In the days after Christ’s alleged ascension, Satan had been standing in the garden where the Nazarene man had prayed for his Father to give him the strength to be killed, to be tortured.And Satan had whispered that God killed, God tortured, God fucked a young girl just to know what it was like to do it, then just to have a child that He didn’t have to birth.And He wanted to know now what it felt like to slaughter it afterward.
‘You were,’ thought Baal, ‘shaking in anger, as if it was your own child who’d been crucified.I laughed then, and I asked why this mattered to you.If he were really the Son of God, then he was dead.If the Son of God was God, then God was dead.’
Satan thought: ‘But Judas Iscariot was also dead by then.When I found him, Judas, he told me he followed a Nazarene man who believed in his own miracles, who said he was the Son of God.I said to him, you are young but you are wise, Judas.Who am I?I suppose I’m an angel, who was once too wise, too young.I know that a soul that believes itself to be like God will, one day, demand violence.He will take your flesh and your blood.You looked at me, Judas.You said, but it is the Nazarene man who offers his body to you.I told you, he offers his body to you because you can’t offer your own; he already has it.’
Another time, Iscariot had said: ‘Sometimes, I find myself believing in him.When he came to me in private, I spat at him, and I laughed in his face.Angel, I told him, “Son of God?You are no Son of God!”I took him by his clothes, pinned him against the wall, and I shouted, “You are no Son of God!”He called my name — Judas.Then, I said to him: “God would not become a man.Even if He wanted to, He could not.”And Christ stared at me and let me keep speaking: “God could never be a man.You will never be a man.You willneverbe a man.”I don't know why I said it.’
Satan felt Baal stroke his hand, as if to calm, and they stared at one another.“I have,” said the regent to the king, “nothing that I can hold except faith in you.”Ever since what’d occurred with Nero, Baal had dressed like a Roman of old, part of him lost forever to that time.“Nothing.You will overcome the apocalypse, and you will help us overcome it too.”
‘I ordered Judas to trade his Nazarene man for some gold, and Judas said he’d already made the decision.He’d watched the man of Nazareth walk on water.One by one, the Son of God had shown his followers not to doubt, but Judas doubted.The miracles of God’s son irritated him, and no longer did he bother to sit and explain them away.He hated Christ because he loved to hate him.One day, he’d stopped saying, “He is not God,” and he’d begun to say, “Look at how God mocks man.He does not know what a man really is.I can see it in the way that he moves, in the shape of his face.The more I stare at him, the more I see that God has mutilated himself to become not a man but a mutilated thing, a myth, a myth of a man.”And I listened to him.He must’ve known I was a devil, but who else lends a listening ear to the sinners?’
Baal thought: ‘When I asked you again why the death of a carpenter concerned you, you were quiet.I said that he hadn't returned from the dead.His followers burned his body in the tomb, refused to face the false godhood of their prophet.’
Satan thought: ‘Judas whispered that he’d trade him for thirty pieces of silver after the Passover.I told him to kiss his rabbi one last time.’
Baal thought: ‘You said God had broken a covenant.He had put a child of human blood and His own blood on Earth after punishing the angels for the same vice.I asked you: “Do you really believe he was the Son of God?”You said that the question of divinity in the Nazarene man’s body mattered little.Whether he lived as the Son of God — whether or not he rose from his grave — he died, to his worshipers, as the Son of God.
Satan thought: ‘I watched Judas turn Christ over, and that was the last I saw of him, of Judas.His suddenly-paled face, his wide eyes.It’s written that Judas regretted what he’d done.It’s also written that he never knew remorse.It’s written that Judas killed himself, hanging from a tree.It’s also written that he fell into a field and burst open to paint the ground like the blood of Abel, the first dead man, had.Contradictions.What ever happened to Judas?How did Judas Iscariot die?The devil doesn’t know.What were the last words of Christ as he hung from the cross?Even the Lord must not know.Christ and Judas, both unknown to us in their final moments.’
There were times that Satan had looked into the eyes of the Nazarene man, seen a kind boy.His smile had been bright, and he had counted sprouts outside his humble house.If God was in a carpenter boy, He couldn’t remember.God was learning to be human, to be small and frail and wretched.
Slow, Baal leaned forward, kissed Satan’s parting mouth.‘I asked you what to do now, and you said to lay quiet for some time.To see what becomes of Rome and to speak to an angel.To speak to Azazel.’
Sighing against the regent’s lips, the devil shut his eyes.‘Azazel’s murdered child haunted my dreams and my every waking moment.I had a child too, Azazel.His name was Cain.I loved him after spending so long believing that love was a dead creature in me.’When he’d had Azazel set free from his chains, Satan offered him a degree of freedom, food, cleanliness — in return for Azazel’s guidance.‘How to have a child.What did you do that made you unlike the other Watchers?Why you?’Azazel had said that maybe it was love; he had loved his man more than anything.‘My love had died again with Cain.’But he’d still find use for Azazel.‘You think I’ll let you be worthless to me?Oh no.Paint over my mouth and make it new, reshape my eyes, change the tone of my skin.I’ll be somebody else, and you’ll teach me how to do it, Azazel.Poor Azazel.I mocked him.Sad little Azazel with his little child, who can’t help me get one for myself.’
Baal inched back, and he said, “I always wonder if this is how you prefer me — worn-down, tired, broken.”But both their eyes remained closed.“When the anti-Christ was born, I felt as if I’d died.”‘Not only me, the demon, but Baal the angel of flight.’
Slowly, Satan lifted a hand, brushed Baal’s mouth with a finger.“Alive or dead, you’re wanted by me.”Decades after Christ’s death, his followers now numbering in the thousands — ‘I went to make myself like God.I visited a young man named Nero, an emperor for three or four years already.Incompetent.If anything good came of his early reign, it was due to his advisors’ orders.I met the emperor for the first time in the garden, and he thought me a god.I told him I was the goddess of beauty.’
‘We became lovers, and when his mother disapproved, I told him to kill her.And with my guidance, he had her to be shipwrecked.In lapses of his guilt, I whispered he’d done the right thing.And, in a secret garden of one of his villas, I lent the emperor’s mournful soul my body.I watched him fall after that.Like the women after the Watchers, like the boy Cain after he loved a demon.Mere man — you should have known not to desire a god.You foolish men, drowned in tales of tragedies and hubris — still so eager for a kiss from the divine.’
Baal hadn’t thought much of it when Satan returned and told him that he was fucking Nero, the emperor of Rome; after all, the devil was the tempter, the tempest, of Hell.Even when Satan said that Nero was trying to hide him from the world in a hidden villa, like a captured nymph, Baal the regent didn’t ask much.But when Satan, in a sudden agony, collapsed onto the mosaic floor before him — a spill of darkness broke out of his body.Half-flesh, half-blood, miscarried — ‘something in me creaked, then gave, sinking, sinking.’Baal had fallen to his knees, tried to help the twitching, stone-faced Satan as it occurred.Beneath the flame of torches, Satan had looked like Lucifer again, gaze frightened and unknowing and young.Hurt.
Satan thought: ‘Briefly, I was over a bed of flowers again, staring up at my Father.The petals had reddened beneath me.Time had stopped as all the pain in me had long stopped.There had been something inside me — too heavy to bear, but you had torn it out like weeds from soil.I couldn’t carry it.Lord.It’s fallen out of my hands.My legs.Miscarried.The weight of paradise.Satan and God in the garden.I used to ask: Beauty for what?I know now.Beauty to miscarry.The flowers in Eden must still drip my blood.But God loves me.I prayed for His love when I was a few years old.He loves me more than you.I’m his favorite.He watches me sleep.He touches my hair and traces the lips He molded.And He made Eden for us, Him and I.’
‘Whatever you have done,’ Baal had pleaded, ‘do not do it again.Please, Lucifer.’
‘That’s not my name,’ Satan had whispered, laying in Baal’s arms, tunic soaked in blood.‘Not here.That’s not my name.’‘light bearer?but i was never made to carry so much.the morning would break itself out of this body and the star burns a hole into me for you.did you create me to burn so that you might warm your hands?to bear the fire.over the bed of flowers.from my blood, over the petals, set the flames.sacrifice me, god, to your own god.tell me that one day i will leave eden.tell me one day that you will stop loving me.oh i would do anything to make god stop loving me.’
