The Devil You Know
Existing without sensation was disconcerting only if one had never experienced feeling- or if one never remembered it to begin with.
He had existed without sensation for so long, he did not remember remembering if he had ever felt it. His existence had been spread out with small patches of awareness strewn haphazardly throughout his mind. All at once, he had Not Been and then he Was.
There were moments within those small patches of Awareness where he had seen and heard and experienced Experience, lived Sensation. He had touched many lives, influenced many minds, battled enemies, fallen from impossible heights, been the object of scorn, mockery, fascination, and hatred, had been mounted among the gallery of faces all with the name of Evil. He only saw these things when he was disturbed. He was only disturbed when a mind reached out to him. Never was he in control of these things, never did he have a choice.
He knew many things.
He did not know how he knew these things, only that one moment, much like his existing and not existing, he recalled not knowing and then his knowing.
His consciousness was shaped by the minds that reached out to him. They gave him a home, a place that was at once dark and cold, or hot and rank. Sometimes he lived among the People of the Minds. Their heads were his home and he breathed the things they spoke of and became the bane and the figurehead for their actions and their fears.
Through these things, he learned. They were his creators and his teachers, his servants, his lovers and his foes.
But that all came in fragments. It had been slow going at first. Then the momentum grew and soon minds everywhere reached out to him and he found a disconcerting sense of Sensation changing his perceptions of things he had known.
Then the world that was his birthplace, the sepia static void that was always full of Empty until it was full of visiting minds instead, fell away from him. Or he fell away from it.
He recognized the place he landed in only because he had Seen it in the minds, hearts and eyes of the ones that called to him.
In their thoughts he had heard the name of the place, Earth. He tasted the name on his tongue. He had not had a tongue before, taste was a new experience for him. He decided he liked it.
It did not take him long to discover the five senses his creators were born with.
It did not take him long to learn how to reach into the minds of these same creators, as they had once done to him. He taught them the senses in ways they had never considered.
He soon learned that no longer was he bound to the pages of some book or the names that had been stamped on it.
He soon learned that no longer was he bound to the Will of his creators. He could reverse the roles and he did just that with ease.
When he developed a body, he found it was easier to make an impact on the place called Earth. He made many vessels, donning the bodies of all the aspects attributed to his person and he played with the names given him. He became a dancer of masks, the faces bleeding into each other as the fragments of awareness had eventually seeped and given birth to Him, freeing him from that sepia prison.
The qualities the People of the Minds had given him were at once liberating and limiting in their distinctions. He was attributed with things like ambition, pride, cunning, the patient scholarly gentility of a knowledgeable professor with a serious dark side, some all-encompassing characteristic named after a Prince Machiavelli…
Utilizing these qualities made him stronger. He built an army.
No one, it turned out, was surprised to learn he had come to their world. It was amusing to him that they had thought he'd always been there when he was quite new.
Perhaps it was poetic justice that The-Devil-They-Had-All-Thought-They-Knew-Would-Come-To-Destroy-Them would be a self-fulfilled prophecy of their own making.
He looked out over the world he had changed and turned his multi-faceted face upwards, past the rain-full clouds and into the vast prison of darkness and stars he falsely remembered falling from.
If he was real now and Earth dealt all things in sympathetic balance, then it seemed his work was far from over…