I was losing my mind.
Somewhere along the way – I don’t remember where – I pulled a string, and my unraveling began. I began having thoughts – unholy thoughts. Emotions, impure and unwelcome, welled inside me. I was angry. I was bitter. I hated.
Like a pick ax stabbed into a thin sheet of ice, a fatal fissure ominously creaked and groaned its cracking path down the frozen lake of my soul, splitting it into two entirely different parts. One part was the angel I had been, Michaela’s friend, and a holy keeper of Heaven. The other part of my soul was tainted into a smudgy disgrace. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull my soul back together.
I tried to talk about my conflicting feelings with Michaela, but she was always so perfect, so honorable that the words of my soul’s dissolve never came. I was too proud to let the words be spoken. But by then, when I tried to tell her, there were just too many parts of me missing, essential pieces that made me a Holy Angel. It was just too hard to reinvent those lacking parts. Especially when it was so easy to just pick a side – good or bad.
From the center of my inner frozen lake, I heard the two parts of my soul calling to me, each begging me to choose. They rattled against the bars of my bones, pulled at my skin, forcing me to pay attention. That was all I felt – a deafening clatter deep down inside of me.
This went on for ages, this indecision. I barely functioned. I rarely spoke. I hardly made it through the days.
Everyone noticed. But I didn’t hear the worried discussions or see the pressing stares sent in my direction. I stood on the fringes, too preoccupied with my internal conflict to even pretend to partake in my outside life. I felt the other angels’ frosty stares and wintry words on my chilled skin. It all added to my delirium.
I confused the other angels. I was different, even from the beginning. They didn’t want to go so far as to call me a freak, but certainly I was an anomaly.
The worst part of all was that I knew I had been created this way. I was made with a flaw, which had allowed these doubts and hateful thoughts in my mind. It might have been Michaela who was created with this deficiency. By some cruel twist of fate, I was the one chosen to crack.
When the angels felt me pull further within myself, they didn’t think much of it. They sensed my aloofness and wrote it off because I was weird. But then they sensed my emotions, and they began to suspect.
The mistrust between the angels, brewed by the thoughts in my head that I couldn’t keep hidden anymore, caused a severe disconnect. The Holy Angels began to fall apart. Michaela and the others flailed about to salvage their precious order. I sensed the uncertainty and distress they felt. Yet, I did not care, because they did not understand me.
Doubts never filled their minds. Good never had to fight against darkness for prominence in their souls. They never had to choose between two evils that begged for residence in their bodies. Their hearts had never turned to boiling black tar.
I felt things that should never be felt in a place like this, in Heaven.
Standing among my so very devout, devoted, and demure Brothers and Sisters milling around me, frantically searching to re-establish themselves, I felt all these emotions with the strongest surge.
Malevolence.
Fury.
Malice.
Wickedness.
Hatred.
Contempt.
Condescension.
Desperation.
But most of all, I felt a deadening utter and complete sadness.
I was sad because there was never really a choice.
I was made to fall, to become the first Fallen.
I stood in the middle of Heaven amongst the angels as these thoughts swirled through my mind faster and faster. No one paid any attention to the tall, beautiful, quiet angel keeping to himself.
And no one noticed my thin straight lips turn up into the smallest of smiles. Or the glazed eyes devoid of emotion, swimming with nothingness. The light turned off inside me, replaced by something less obvious and subtler, but more sinister. The only animation was the almost unnoticeable twitch of my mouth.
But if someone had been paying attention to me, they would not have been able to place the expression that flickered across my face at that moment as I smiled in response to my dark thoughts.
They would not have been able to place the look on my face, because it was the first look of its kind. One that many would mimic later on, but would never come close to the original true intent and feeling behind that look on my face: a look of pure Evil.
If I was made to be bad, I’d be bad.
I, Lucifer, smiled.