Last story of the series Perpetuality!
Destruction. He perpetually destroyed because he could. Not out of perpetual necessity. Not out of perpetual vengeance. Not even out of cruelty, for cruelty at least acknowledged the other. He destroyed in the same manner a storm passes through a sleeping town. “Why not?” he would often say with laughter. “Why not?”
And truly, why not? Was he so different from those who stole to eat, who killed to defend, who lied to love? Wasn’t he too, in his own twisted calculus, simply perpetually fulfilling a role the world had made for him? Others wore their sins like heavy coats, weighed down with purpose and rationale. But he, he wore his like it didn’t exist at all.
He had met many: a Recycled Man who staggered beneath his own perpetuality and deceit, a Guillotined Man whose paralysis of Perpetual Inertia was carved into his heart, and a Camel Rider who dared to kill in the name of meaning. They passed before him like in a pageant. They screamed, they bled, they bared their teeth in pain and defiance, but to him, they were nothing more than moments and lessons. “You ruined me!” the Recycled Man once roared in a storm of grief. “You recycled me until I broke. Didn’t you?” The Devil had only smiled: not with glee; not with scorn; but with something that felt older and wiser than any emotion known to mankind.
“I didn’t ruin you,” he said softly. “You chose to rot in place.” The Recycled Man cried; the Devil turned.
He called himself the Devil, not because he believed in fire or brimstone, but because people needed names for things they couldn’t grasp; he had many names, depending on the hour and the heart of the one who saw him: whisperer, wrecker, enlightener, God. He was never what people expected, and he came with no pitchfork in hand. He did not destroy buildings, or even people in a sense: he destroyed certainties.
He would walk into a room and ask, “But what if your love was never love?”
He would stand by a mother’s bedside and say, “What if your child becomes all the things you loathed?”
He would whisper to lovers, “Do you adore them, or do you simply fear loneliness?”
He would murmur to the passionate, “Is your passion passion? Or is it relentless stupidity?”
And always, something happened to them.
Sometimes he wondered if he existed at all. Not out of melancholy, but out of curiosity. Was he a person? Or merely a force? A necessary consequence of too much light? A perpetuality?
He once asked a dying man, “Do you believe I’m real?”
The man blinked slowly and said, “You’re more real than anything that tried to save me.”
He took no pleasure in that. But he took note.
He believed himself gold dipped in ink: you could take it and reward yourself, but you’d never do it without staining your hands. He wandered deserts and dunes, cities and citadels, forests and ferries, mountains and mangroves, bayous and bridges, temples and towers, caverns and coasts, lakes and labyrinths, markets and monasteries, fields and fjords, harbors and heaths, graves and gardens, islands and inns, cliffs and cloisters, and no one ever realized that he was gold.
He met a girl who prayed daily to be forgiven for things she had not done. He sat beside her and said, “Would you feel holier if you sinned?” She stopped praying after that.
He met a man who rescued others from fire but let his own house burn each night in dreams. He told him, “Saving is just burning by proxy.” The man went silent for a year.
He met a preacher who loved his God but hated his child. He asked, “Isn’t your God just the parent you wish you were?” The preacher wept. He never preached again.
But the Devil did not count these as victories. To him, a victory would require sides. And he did not play games. He did not keep score. He simply moved, and where he passed, he was nothing but perpetual. Entirely perpetual. He remembered the Camel Rider. The Camel Rider believed himself empty and numbed by betrayal. But the Devil knew better. “You kill,” he said once to the rider, “because your grief won’t sit still. So you ride it like a beast.”
The Camel Rider struck him with a stone, a big one at that. It broke nothing. Though, the Devil didn’t really exist of course, so the stone hit nothing but the air and the ground. Pain didn’t work on him, of course.. Not because he was perpetually immune, but because it meant nothing if it didn’t rearrange him. And nothing rearranged him anymore.
He whispered to children, “Ask the questions your parents won’t.”
He said to soldiers, “You’re not brave. You’re just not scared enough.”
He muttered to lovers, “The closer you hold them, the more you choke.”
He sang lullabies to orphans that ended in screams.
He once stood before a mountain and shouted, “Give me a sign!” The mountain did not do anything, contrary to humans. He laughed until he sobbed.
And when the sobbing stopped, he felt something dangerous—hope. He crushed it underfoot. To be the Devil was not to hate. It was to peel. To expose. To hold someone’s face up to the fire and say, “Look. That is who you are in its light.” And most people ran. But not all. Some stayed. Some even reached out. A hand extended. A look unflinching. Towards the essence of perpetuality.
“Are you lonely?” one woman asked him once. He didn’t answer; he just vanished. Because he was. And that was the one truth he dared not admit. To be him was to be outside the circle. Forever the variable that does not belong. The note that does not harmonize. The actor without a script. And in moments—just moments—he wished he could bleed. But he couldn’t. He wasn’t sure if he had blood. Or a heart. Or if his shadow that trailed behind him meant anything at all.