Eve of the Gods--NaNo 2011-12 Prep

October 14: Supporting Character #1 Background Story

Eddying waves lapped playfully over the bone white sands of the beach, teasing the edges of his island in an unending game of cat and mouse. It was marvelous, this place, his own paradise, perfect in its seclusion and its heartrending beauty. There were days, when the sun rose over a blood red sky and the breeze tugged insistently at his hair and clothes like a lover, that he felt his chest constrict in the most glorious feeling of wholeness, as if there were nothing in the universe that could trouble him.

That was a lie, he knew, and so the feeling would disappear and the last two millennia would come crashing in on his memory, demolishing whatever sort of peace his paradise on Earth had brought him.

He missed Heaven. That feeling never left him, no matter how much he'd come to appreciate the beauty and the unmatched glory God's creation had brought him. He missed Heaven with a fierceness that he could not begin to explain, as if something had been torn from him and left his essence wounded and bleeding within him. Actually, he suppose that this was precisely what had happened. A part of himself, a part of his Angelic core, was quite literally missing, rent from him by the misplaced beliefs of human kind.

They believed him to be the Satan, the great evil of their universe, and enemy of God. He, who had served Him with his whole being from the beginning, who had loved Him more than everything in existence, but for one. Eve. Whom he had loved as he slithered about the Garden of Eden on God's business. Whom he'd been charged with damning to an unending cycle of life and death as punishment for Free Will.

He'd been blamed for that act, falsely charged and punished in an attempt for another to escape his own, quite deserved punishment. And he'd fallen, screaming and burning and bleeding from the bosom of his Lord's love to the fires of Hell below. To become the Satan, a position already quite admirably filled by a creature far more hateful and evil than he. Doomed to separation from God, desperate to run from the horrors of Hell, he'd found this island. And he'd been here since.

Lucifer, they called him. The Morning Star. It hadn't always been his name, but the other had been lost for so long he could no longer remember it. He went by Lucien these days, at least around the humans he so rarely interacted with, but Lucifer he remained in truth. Lost and alone on an island that provided the only beauty his wretched soul could ever again possess.

And yet he dreamed of her sometimes. His Eve, his beauty of the Garden, so wonderful and perfect and giving, who'd deserved so much more than she'd gotten. And then he would long for her, and his memories of Heaven would disappear, to be replaced by the bittersweet longing of lost and unrequited love.

She was out there somewhere, he knew, living life after life as part of her punishment from so long ago. His beautiful Eve. The one creature he had ever loved more than God. And he yearned for her, to find her and give her the friend she had wanted back in Eden but never managed to find. Then the call came and he was forced to return to Hell. And Lucifer would remember just why his Eve, his wonderful, beautiful Eve, could never really be his.

And so he lived on his island, staring out at the ocean, living for the brief moments when his breath would catch and a peace would settle over him, as if there were nothing in the universe that could trouble him ever again.