It was not usual, then, for one to claim an acquaintance with the devil, nor was it with any conviction that a person might speak of his methods, for the presence of such evil was experienced most often only through a provoking of sensation.
Alizeh did not like to be the exception.
Indeed it was with some pain that she acknowledged the circumstances of her birth: that it had been the devil to first offer congratulations at her cradle, his unwelcome ciphers as inescapable as the wet of rain. Alizeh’s parents had tried, desperately, to banish such a beast from their home, but he had returned again and again, forever embroidering the tapestry of her life with ominous forebodings, in what seemed a promise of destruction she could not outmaneuver.
Even now she felt the devil’s voice, felt it like a breath loosed inside her body, an exhale against her bones.
There once was a man, he whispered.
“No,” she nearly shouted, panicking. “Not another riddle—please—”
There once was a man, he whispered, who bore a snake on each shoulder.
Alizeh clapped both hands over her ears and shook her head; she’d never wanted so badly to cry.
“Please,” she said, “please don’t—”
Again:
There once was a man
who bore a snake on each shoulder.
If the snakes were well fed
their master ceased growing older.
Alizeh squeezed her eyes shut, pulled her knees to her chest. He wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t shut him out.
What they ate no one knew, even as the children—
“Please,” she said, begging now. “Please, I don’t want to know—”
What they ate no one knew,
even as the children were found
with brains shucked from their skulls,
bodies splayed on the ground.
She inhaled sharply and he was gone, gone, the devil’s voice torn free from her bones. The room suddenly shuddered around her, shadows lifting and stretching—and in the warped light a strange, hazy face peered back at her. Alizeh bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.
It was a young man staring at her now, one she did not recognize.
That he was human, Alizeh had no doubt—but something about him seemed different from the others. In the dim light the young man seemed carved not from clay, but marble, his face trapped in hard lines, centered by a soft mouth. The longer she stared at him the harder her heart raced. Was this the man with the snakes? Why did it even matter? Why would she ever believe a single word spoken by the devil?
Ah, but she already knew the answer to the latter.
Alizeh was losing her calm. Her mind screamed at her to look away from the conjured face, screamed that this was all madness—and yet.
Heat crept up her neck.
Alizeh was unaccustomed to staring too long at any face, and this one was violently handsome. He had noble features, all straight lines and hollows, easy arrogance at rest. He tilted his head as he took her in, unflinching as he studied her eyes. All his unwavering attention stoked a forgotten flame inside her, startling her tired mind.
And then, a hand.
His hand, conjured from a curl of darkness. He was looking straight into her eyes when he dragged a vanishing finger across her lips.
She screamed.
In the Beginning
THE STORY OF THE DEVIL had worn thin in the retelling, but Iblees, Iblees, his true name like a heartbeat on the tongue, was lost to the catacombs of history. His own people knew best that the beast was wrought not from light, but fire. Not angel, but Jinn, an ancient race who’d once owned the earth, who’d once celebrated this young man’s extraordinary elevation to the heavens. They knew best whence he came, because they were there when he was returned, when his body cracked against the earth and their world was left to rot in the wake of his arrogance.
Birds froze when his body fell out of the sky, their sharp beaks parted, broad wings pinned open in midair. He glistened in his descent, flesh slick with fresh melt, heavy drops of liquid fire rolling off his skin. His drippings, still steaming, would hit the earth before his heft would, disintegrating frogs and trees and the shared dignity of an entire civilization who would be forced forever to scream his name at the stars.
For when Iblees fell, so too did his people.
It was not God, but the occupants of the expanding universe that would soon forsake the Jinn; every celestial body had borne witness to the genesis of the devil, to a creature of darkness heretofore unknown, unnamed—and none wished to be seen as sympathetic to an enemy of the All-Powerful.
The sun was the first to turn its back on them. A single wink and it was done; their planet, Earth, was plunged into perpetual night, armored in ice, flung out of orbit. The moon faded next, knocking the world off its axis, warping its oceans. All was soon flooded, then frozen; the population neatly halved in three days. Thousands of years of history, of art and literature and invention: obliterated.