Why Do you mean when you say I’m supposed to be the devil?!: Chapter 4: Education

You would think eternity would bore you.

Three of us. Only three. In all the infinitude of being. Just Father, Michael, and me.

A strange number, three. Symmetrical in its imbalance, divine in its asymmetry. You’d think it would exhaust novelty by the first week. That we'd loop, begin again, fall into routine, repeat ourselves into madness like people trapped in cycles of clockwork and dust.

But no.

Every moment still tasted new.

Every blink of my eyes—yes, we blinked, why not?—felt like I was being reborn. There was always something else. A color unseen. A thought I hadn’t yet plucked from the orchard of mind. Some scent curling from Father's work, thick with impossible spices, winding into the folds of our being like perfume poured over silence.

It was paradise. I’m not speaking figuratively. It was. No hunger. No decay. No lack.

We didn’t need to eat. We were akin to ideas that wore the mask of form. But Father—he liked to cook. Can you imagine? The Author of reality, the Infinite Who dreamt dimensions into being, leaning down over something absurd and beautiful like a star-warmed skillet, just to hand us roasted meat that had never known death?

It made no sense. Which made it make more than any sense.

I remember sitting on his shoulder—his left, always his left, Michael on the right. And when I say shoulder, I mean a continent of blazing light, galaxies spiraling in his skin like freckles of brilliance, veins of fusion-light pumping starlight into ideas not yet named.

There we were, two tiny angels on a God.

And we ate.

I don’t know what it was that day. Something savory. Soft, and crisp at the edges. Salted with meaning. Sweetened with memory. Impossible. Delicious. Food made by omniscience, for mouths that didn’t need to chew, and yet did.

Father worked while we ate. We always watched him, my brother and I. His hands—if you could call them that—moved with precision that made time blush. He was shaping something, etching laws into the air with fingers made of will and fire.

It shimmered in and out of understanding. A grid of intention. States of matter folding into themselves. Solid. Liquid. Gas. Plasma. Then—other things. Concepts that didn’t yet exist. A fifth state that turned inward. A sixth that blinked between potentialities like a nervous laugh. A seventh I still can’t name.

It was always like that with Father. You never truly understood. You just felt as though you did. As if comprehension brushed your mind like silk across skin, then vanished the moment you reached for it.

But I had learned. I had watched.

And after what felt like… what, months? Maybe a year? An eternity? I’d started to guess what he was doing. I'd started to piece it together.

Time. Yes, time.

I’d never asked. Not really. It didn’t feel urgent. Like asking the temperature of a dream.

But today, something in me stirred.

Father, how long?

I didn’t speak. I didn’t need to.

His voice rang not through space but through being. Through the marrow of existence. Through every atom pretending to be stable.

“It has been three billion years, Helel.”

My jaw froze mid-bite.

Three. Billion?

Billion?

That couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be—

The Earth I’d once known—hadn’t it only been four-point-something billion years old? The universe itself was what? Thirteen? Fourteen? I couldn’t remember anymore. But the number dwarfed me.

The weight of it hit me like gravity suddenly remembered.

Had I truly lived longer than the world that bore me once?

And what had I done?

Laughed. Played. Teased Michael. Eaten joyfully. Listened. Learned.

No wars. No triumphs. No tragedies. Just… peace.

Was this what immortals did? Was this all?

I had read so many stories before. So many shows. So many manga. Immortal elves sighing at the weight of time. Ancient vampires sulking in high towers. Endless beings who longed for death.

I thought it lazy writing.

But now, I couldn’t deny the dizziness.

Billion years.

That made me… old?

I chewed again, almost mechanically, savoring a sweetness I couldn’t name.

Old. I was old.

But I didn’t feel it.

I didn’t feel tired.

I—

“Father,” Michael said suddenly, and I almost dropped my food.

His voice was soft. Measured. But deep.

Older than mine.

You see, Michael was always the calm one. The collected one. The… wise one. But not always in the ways that made sense.

Sometimes talking to him felt like talking to an old philosopher. Other times, it felt like debating a particularly persistent toddler who just wanted to see what happened if he licked the stars.

He looked up now, toward Father’s face—distant as the sky, near as breath.

“I want to know,” he said.

Father didn’t look away from his work.

Michael continued. “You told us… I was to reflect that no one was like you. And that Helel was your light. Your ideal. But you never told us why. You leave, sometimes. You vanish, and we can’t feel you. Not in this place. Not in all of this you made for us.”

He hesitated.

“Are we… alone? Are we not the only ones? Are we meant to… go beyond? To do something? Why did you create us, Father?”

Silence.

Not absence. Not cold.

Just silence.

And then—

Father stopped moving.

Everything stopped.

The cooking. The forging. The shaping.

Even time seemed to hold its breath, as if the question itself had tied its shoelaces together and tripped the universe.

My breath caught.

He questioned Him.

Michael questioned Father.

He wasn’t supposed to. I—I was supposed to. Wasn’t I?

If one of us was to rebel, to ask, to defy, to stand on some cliff and shout "Why?" into the roaring face of the Almighty—wasn’t it meant to be me?

Me, not Michael.

My heart—if you can call it that—tightened. Or maybe it was my thoughts that did.

Was this the moment? The divergence? The fall?

Was this how it started?

Had my contentment condemned him to unrest?

Would Father grow angry?

Would Michael be punished?

Would I let it happen?

Would I stand by, afraid to interfere, afraid to risk the precious ending I yearned for, the one where all was restored, where I could one day walk into the light with the family I’d once lost and say: “Look, I made it home”?

Would I be a coward?

No.

Please no.

I looked up. Terrified.

But Father did not roar.

He did not rage.

He did not burn.

Instead, he sighed.

A sound like gravity exhaling.

“You’re right to want to know, Michael,” he said.

And then he turned to me.

“And Helel—don’t fear. I am not angry. I would never be angry with my children for asking.”

And with his words, the world moved.

It folded.

Bent.

Broke and reassembled.

Around us, reality flickered like pages in a divine book.

Images. Not memory. Not illusion. Something else.

A truth shown, not told.

“Before there was anything,” Father said, “there was nothing. And before there was nothing—there were monsters.”

The air shivered. Existence knelt.

The images around us bent again—no, not images. The very substance of history. We were being shown what no mind should see.

I didn’t blink. I couldn’t. I don’t think I even breathed.

The sight stretched outward, a painting without canvas, a memory too ancient for words. Blackness, not empty but screaming with motion. There were things that moved, but not with grace. They didn’t slither or fly—they twisted. Not just themselves, but the fabric of the nothing that birthed them.

Monsters.

That was too kind.

Shapes that defied logic. Teeth that curved through dimensions. Limbs that bent not at joints, but at concepts. Some of them had eyes—burning, bleeding, blistering—but others didn’t need them. They knew things they should not. They hungered for things that didn’t exist yet, and they fed on principles. On axioms. On the very hope that order could ever rise.

They fed on the idea of light.

Father spoke, and every word pinned a piece of the horror in place, like nails in a coffin so large it had to be carved from eternity.

“They killed each other endlessly. Ate each other. Swallowed and birthed and consumed in endless cycles of wrongness. Immortal, but never still. Eternal, but never growing. They did not create. They only desecrated.”

I watched as one of them, taller than galaxies, opened its mouth and screamed. The scream did not reach my ears—it reached my thoughts, and for a heartbeat, I thought I was unraveling.

“They made pleasure from decay. Purpose from corrosion. There were no names, no laws, no mercy.”

Michael gripped my hand.

He never did that.

I looked at him. His eyes were wide—unsure. Frightened. But not of the monsters.

Of the truth.

“Then,” Father said, “came Nothing. And after Nothing, Anything.”

And with those words, the monsters recoiled.

A new scene—if it could be called that—unfolded. A presence. No, two. One was still. Perfectly still. It made the monsters twitch and tear themselves apart just by existing. That was Nothing.

The other—flickering, shifting, wearing shapes like veils of wind and dream. That was Anything.

And from their convergence—when they touched without touching—came something else.

Desire.

Not carnal. Not cruel.

But the desire to mean something. The desire to be more than rot.

“Dreams,” Father murmured, reverently. “Possibility. Hope. From the war between monsters and the purity of absence, the third was born. That which wanted. That which imagined.”

And this new thing, this dream, stood with the silence and the shapelessness against the monsters.

War came.

It wasn’t a war of blades or fire. It was war in the way that thought wars with silence. That meaning wars with entropy.

The monsters shrieked and howled and tore at the new trinity.

They did not win.

But they could not lose.

Because loss implied finality.

And they had never known the grace of ending.

So instead—they were sealed.

“Chains forged from Nothing. Seals crafted from Anything. And their prison… a battlefield’s carcass. A rift between dimensions. A place where the rules were weakest. The dream chose it. And dream…”

His voice quieted.

“He became the warden.”

And we saw Him then—not Father as we knew Him, the cook, the craftsman, the teacher—but Him in war.

In wrath.

His form towered above the monsters, blazing like the first idea ever thought. He wielded words as weapons. Symbols that could rewrite matter. Logic made blade. He wasn’t angry. He was inevitable.

He cast them down.

The monsters writhed and screamed and laughed even as they were bound.

But they could not escape.

And yet.

“It should have ended there,” Father said. “But it didn’t.”

The vision trembled. Wavered.

And we saw it—the corruption.

Cracks in the seals. Fissures in the logic of existence.

Spots where the monsters had left traces. Lingering taints. Thoughts that bled. Rules that twisted themselves around the whisper of what once was.

“They corrupted the Anything. They corrupted me. Perverted the rules. Poisoned the structure. They lingered like infection beneath the skin of creation.”

I saw things. Worlds. Concepts. Abominations.

A tree whose roots whispered betrayal into the minds of men.

A sun that refused to set, burning its world into madness.

A silence that killed thought itself.

“There are things in my universe that should not be. That I cannot see. Things calling themselves gods. Pockets of untruth where logic bends to madness. Where causality frays like thread.”

Father turned to us then—His body vast, but His gaze suddenly human.

“That is why I made you.”

Michael and I stiffened.

“You are… terminals. Proxies. I poured pieces of myself into you. Not just light, not just power—but freedom. Freedom from the chains even I wear. You are of me, but not bound as I am. You are immune to the same corruption that stains my sight.”

My heart—or whatever serves as its ancestor—beat faster.

“You are my answer to what I cannot cleanse. Not as weapons. As watchers. As choices.”

And then Michael spoke.

Of course he did.

“Then why didn’t you ever use us?”

He wasn’t accusing.

Not quite.

But there was something heavy in his voice. A weight.

“What’s the point of creating us if we never do the thing we were made for?”

Father didn’t speak.

Not immediately.

The wind rose.

Not a metaphor. A real, swirling wind. It lifted us—me and Michael—from his shoulders and set us gently down upon His open palm.

We stood there, barefoot on brilliance, small and flickering in His vast grasp.

He looked down at us with a softness that should not exist in something that could birth galaxies with a breath.

“Oh, Michael,” He said.

And there was so much love in His voice it made my throat tighten.

“I wanted to make weapons. Truly, I did. I wanted to fashion perfect tools to end the corruption. To fix the rot.”

He paused.

“But when I saw you… I couldn’t. You were more than what i thought you would be.”

He touched us—lightly, with the pad of one luminous finger. It was like being brushed by kindness itself.

“I saw children. My children. My sons.”

He crouched, lowering His gaze to meet ours.

“So I made a choice. I would never impose. I would never command.”

His voice trembled—not from weakness, but restraint.

“You may never act. You may never fight. You may never leave this home. And if so, I will still love you. I will care for you. For eternity, if that is what you choose.”

And then it hit me.

It hit me with the force of my old life, the memories I still cradled in some quiet, secret pocket of my soul.

Any angel who rebelled with a Father like this… was a cunt.

I don’t use that word lightly.

I felt tears prick behind my eyes—not from sadness, but from something heavier.

Gratitude. Awe. Shame.

I looked up at Him. At Michael.

And I knew.

He told us we could do anything.

That meant I could choose.

So I did.

“Father,” I said, my voice low but clear, “I want to help. I want to shine your light. I want to destroy what festers. I want to be what you hoped I might be.”

Michael—bless him—nodded immediately.

“Me too, Father.”

Father smiled.

It was a quiet thing. Like a sunrise in the corner of your eye.

“You don’t have to,” He said.

But we did.

We both knew.

And still—we chose.

“We know, Father,” I said.

“But we want to.”

And with a softness that should not have fit in something so divine, He said:

“Then I am truly the luckiest father in all that was, and is, and may yet be.”