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Which was a will he would impose.
So thinking, Shaitan moved away from the rank waters and went to impose his will upon this world. But behind him the mud boiled and spattered, so that he paused to look back where black bubbles came bursting to the surface. And with the parting of the weeds and the scum, Shaitan saw a figure floating up into view.
In its body it was bloated and burned, but its face was almost whole. And in that face was an i
For a moment he stood still, as at a crossroads, then ... turned back and knelt again beside the swamp. For his will was that he would know this evil.
He gazed upon a face he had never known, which he would not recall to memory for numberless years, and sensed nothing of moment except that he tempted fate, which he was proud and glad to do. And as the beasts of this dawn world came to the water to drink, and as the mists were drawn up from the swamp, so the Fallen One, Shaitan the Unborn, gazed upon his own future where the weeds anchored it in scum and slime.
In a while the scorched, bloated limbs and trunk of the corpse split open and small black mushrooms clustered there, growing out of the rotting flesh and opening their gilled caps. They released red spores into the twilight before the dawn, which rose up and drifted on the warm reek of the swamp. Shaitan saw the clouds of drifting spores, and of his own free will breathed them into his lungs, the better to know of them... his last act of any i
- At least in this incarnation.
All of this has been told before. What follows has not been told: it is the tale of Shaitan's travels and travails, his triumphs and torments from this time forwards ...
Shaitan travelled east through the foothills of gradually rising mountains. He sought for that thing or those things upon which to impose his will. The swamps had not been to his liking, nor the boggy region between the swamps and the foothills. The creatures of these places, while seeming largely unintelligent, had yet been wary to a fault!
Sunlight had first come streaming, then blasting from the south, where a golden orb had climbed gradually into the sky to commence a low, slow arc eastwards. Its rays had dried out the land around and lured clinging fogs up from the sodden earth. In those places where there was little or no shade, the yellow rays had irritated Shaitan, reddening and roughening his skin.
After that - forever after that, in every way - he would always walk in the shadows. And just as he chose to stay on the left-hand side of the mountains, away from the sun, so would he choose a dark and sinistral path through life. He did not know it but he had ever chosen that route, even in worlds before this one.
When Shaitan was thirsty, he drank. The sweet water quenched his thirst but there was no satisfaction in it. When he hungered, he ate grasses, herbs, fruits. They filled him but ... the hunger remained. Within his body a red spore had taken root, forming the nucleus of that which had hungers of its own.
He was unclothed but unashamed. Knowing that he was beautiful, he would display himself; except he would prefer to make himself known to others of his own design, made more nearly in his mould. For the creatures of the swamps and foothills were other than he was and i
And so Shaitan journeyed east across a land where the northern sky was dark blue to black and full of the flicker of stars and the cold weave of weird auroras; but always in the south the golden orb of the sun blazed perilously in the pale blue heavens, so that he must keep himself to the shadows in order not to be burned. And he called all of the land lying to the south of the foothills 'Sunside', despising it greatly, and all the land to the north 'Starside', claiming it for his own. And where finally the foothills grew into mountains like a wall on his right hand, shutting out the sun's harmful rays, there Shaitan discovered creatures which were not afraid of him but merely curious - at first.
For Shaitan's part, he was likewise curious, even astonished. These creatures were not human, yet seemed full of an almost-human purpose and intelligence. They communicated among themselves, however witlessly, in a near-inaudible range which Shaitan sensed rather than heard (for the spore-spawned Thing within him was growing, and causing a strange intensification of his five mundane senses ...). They were small, lowly, weak creatures, which yet commanded aerial flight: a skill far in excess of Shaitan's own meagre, as yet unformed talents.
And when he saw their aerial agility he scowled and was jealous of them; for it seemed to Shaitan that upon a time he too had flown - but with such authority and in such places as to put all the best efforts of these small creatures to shame! Why, if only he could will it, he would fly again, right here and now, and show them how it was done!
... Except, having physical limitations, it was beyond the power of his will. He could not will it. Not yet...
But while Shaitan envied them, in some small part he also admired these children of the twilight, the night, the velvet darkness, and chose them for his familiars. And when he called out to them with his mind, he saw that they heeded him and hastened to his beck; for they knew that they were his. But these were only the small cousins of greater creatures, who likewise 'heard' Shaitan's mind-calls from the shadows of Starside; and when they also came to swerve and dip about him, crying out with their shrill voices, then his pride was great. For he saw that indeed he had imposed his will upon all the bats of this world.
They were his first conquests; he enjoyed his triumph, however small; other victories would follow in short order.
Always heading east, Shaitan ate sparingly of tasteless berries gathered on the border of the swamps and in the foothills. Where streams trickled down from the heights, there he would drink, though the brackish water was never to his taste. And before sleeping, he had learned to gather in unto himself his bat minions great and small, for their warmth; so that he quickly became expert in their habits.
The smaller bats were insectivores; their greater cousins . .. drank blood! Which seemed only right to Shaitan: that small life-forms should sustain themselves by devouring even smaller forms, and greater life-forms by devouring ... why, the very source of life itself! And he believed he now understood his personal dissatisfaction with the common fare of wild animals. Berries, fruits, grasses? What sort of foods were they for one such as him? Water? What was that for a drink? And:
'No, no!' Shaitan now promised himself. 'I'll have no more of them. They are for the hooved beasts and the scuttling foragers of this world. But for me ... the blood is the life!' And within him (however vacuously, instinctively) the as yet embryonic spore-creature exulted, for it was or would be of a like mind and nature.
Beyond the mountains the sun sank down; the last yellow glints vanished even from the highest peaks; the stars shone that much brighter in the north and spread themselves like a sprinkling of jewels all across the domed vault of the sky. A breathless moon raced on high, begging of the wild ones in the mountains their adulation. Eerie wolf voices echoed up into the night of Starside, and Shaitan was impressed by the howling of the hunting packs.