I had a dream that there was no God, and that it was the devil who had created the earth and the sky.

He had created the earth to be hard and unyielding, and he had created the sky to be cold and indifferent. But by far his favorite – his most prized – creation was mankind: a race of creatures so stubborn and resilient (or perhaps just so stupid) that he could torture and torment them to the brink of death and despair, and yet have them bounce back to their former state, ready to take his punishment all over again.

In that dream, the devil had a disciple. And after years of learning from the devil and living under his rule, that lone disciple rose up against him and challenged him, arguing that mankind had had enough. He took it upon himself to champion the cause of mankind and do everything within his power to protect them from the cruel games that the devil had so enjoyed to play.

But having an adversary only made the devil’s playtime all the more fun and challenging. It was because of his disciple’s actions that he learned what would eventually become his most cruel weapon: subtlety.

And to make matters worse, those unnumbered years spent studying under the devil’s watchful eye had only served to make his former disciple as hard and indifferent as the earth and the sky. His morality had been so corroded by his years of apprenticeship that he was at best a poor fit for champion. And while he had an inkling that this might be the case, he rationalized that it was better for humanity to have a poor fit than none at all.

To be fair, he was not wrong.

In my dream the devil came to me and offered to end it all – to give up on this realm and let it pass entirely into his disciple’s hands. And all I had to do in order to make this offer a reality was not turn back from the path ahead of me; to complete the job that I had already been tasked with no matter how much I came to desire for it to end.

And so I did. I did exactly what the devil had asked of me. I saw horrors that I could not unsee and felt crashing waves of emotion that I could not unfeel. And in the end, when I asked the devil to uphold his part of the bargain…

…That was when I discovered that the devil lies.

It was not the first time that I had had this dream.