Chapter 291: Chapter 291 (Intermezzo)

Prose did not wish to be born.

Wait, scratch that.

Prose did not ask to be born and he did not wish to be named Prose. Prose is a weird name. A strange name. Unfeeling. Septic. Boring.

Blah!

Prose threw up a little tantrum in the darkness. He heard some gravel shift. Crunch. He jumped. What a strange, frightening sound.

Prose searched for his familiar comforts. A bird’s eye view of the land below. Trees, rolling hills, cresting waves and a beautiful shore. No, there was nothing. Well, at least things weren’t tinged an awful hint of red. They were a murky, drab grayscale instead, and it was definitely an improvement.

“I don’t know why I settled on Prose,” said Prose to himself inside the pit of boringness. “I mean, think about it, will you? The Evil Eye! Now that’s a catchy name. It’s got chutzpah. Pizzazz. Some other word that sounds fantabulous!” And yes, fantabulous is a word now, wonderful ain’t it?

The pit was still dark and Prose was still stuck. He couldn’t move his stupid little tentacles. Whoever decided a powerful Immortal should have one super vulnerable giant eye and a bunch of useless appendages that couldn’t even hold things?

Right, it was that stupid little bird brained Simurgh who had been afraid of Evil or whatever. Gah, just thinking about those birds made Prose’s inky surface boil! Boil and burn!

Prose calmed down. He had to. What else could he do? He was too weak. He had always been too weak. Sure, he was stronger than all those mortals in the physical world, but the other Immortals had always bullied him like he was the tiniest kid on the block. That was why he vented his frustrations on the mortals and why he wanted to be worshiped and venerated as a powerful deity.

The earth rumbled. There was an explosion. Prose knew that he would be knocked free soon. He was not looking forward to it. He would much rather reminisce in the darkness.

---

The Evil Eye was born in pain.

Hot, searing, scorching pain. He was born fully conscious. He was born under an unfortunate star. He was born with power and influence over domains; the domains of Evil, Selfishness, Pain, Death, Bad Luck, the Red Star, the Starry Sky, and Prose.

Why Prose? Guess the Simurgh didn’t like Prose as much as Poetry, and the two of them clashed too much.

The center of his consciousness was Evil. He didn’t get to choose it. He was born this way. When Madness barged into the Nothingness and laid claim to a bunch of domains, the Evil Eye was still little more than a vassal of the Simurgh. He barely had his own consciousness and he did not act independently.

But when Madness chose to bring into this reality the sort of free will and free consciousness that he remembered from his own world, a little bit of that rubbed off onto the Evil Eye and his own domains began to churn and broil underneath the Simurgh’s control and when the Simurgh was banished and sealed in the physical world, the Evil Eye went with it.

He had defied his creator in the end, although not really by his own will. It was the will of the domains that he had been given. A mistake of the Simurgh’s own making.

He didn’t land where the Simurgh landed. He did not have a connection with his progenitor. He was alone. He was afraid.

He was afraid.

An independent feeling. An independent thought. His first thought, his first feeling that had not been brought about by a domain or the direction of the Simurgh, was fear.

In the darkness in a cave somewhere far, far away, the Evil Eye stewed. He stewed in his own juices for countless, countless years.

---

The Evil Eye began to explore his own independence in the cave. He had been given the domain of the Future and he began to nurture it first. He learned how to see and to predict but quickly learned that his capabilities were limited.

Many, many years later, when the Evil Eye would see Cas use the domain of the Future to jump through time and space, he would be stunned. He had no knowledge of space-time and modern physics, so his understanding of the Future and of time in general had been woefully inadequate.

After the Future, he explored Evil, because it was his core domain. As mentioned before, it was not his choice to become the Immortal of Evil. It was a role given to him by a higher being.

He didn’t like it. To be exact, he didn’t dislike it either. Evil was natural to him. Like breathing and sleeping would be to mortals. It was the sort of thing that he quickly realized did not warrant too much thinking. He merged it with another one of his domains: Selfishness, and quickly came to a quick, dirty, but very useful definition of Evil.

Evil meant doing whatever he wanted to do.

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But what did he want to do?

He was a grotesque eyeball with tentacles. He was immensely powerful but not as powerful as the other two Immortals. He had no way to ascend beyond this world nor did he wish to do so.

It was by this time that the Evil Eye began to explore three of his other domains at once: Pain, Death, and Bad Luck. He figured they were all similar but like his other explorations, he never mulled too many questions and decided he would do the bare minimum to use these domains to his advantage.

He would bring pain, death, and bad luck to all who opposed him, and would use his powers to do… something.

He still had no idea. Out on the surface, Madness had been traveling the entire physical world, meeting with sentient races and offering pieces of his knowledge while trying to find a way home. He had also been monitoring the Simurgh in its seal, knowing that it would inevitably break free.

Madness never searched for the Evil Eye in earnest. He didn’t feel the need. The little eyeball was weak and the last Madness had seen of him, he wasn’t even capable of independent thought. He was a slave to the Simurgh or to his own domains.

The Evil Eye stewed in the cave during the age of monsters. When the seal on the Simurgh was lifted, Madness finally realized how mistaken he had been and how essential the Evil Eye was to his plans. The two of them had to work together to counter the Simurgh.

Madness was pushed back. The Evil Eye barely emanated some of his domains and powers here and there but did not do anything of significance for a while.

---

“What are you doing here?” came a voice echoing through the cave.

The massive eyeball stirred. His eyelids flickered and his pupil widened like a gaping maw ready to devour the intruder.

The intruder did not react. It was too dark. The intruder couldn’t see.

“You aren’t a monster,” said the intruder as it sauntered over confidently but with a weapon in hand. A crude stone spear that couldn’t hurt most mortal monsters, let alone the Immortal of Evil.

“You can’t stay in here, though,” said the voice, a little more sternly. The being raised its primitive weapon and glared into the darkness. “This is our tribe’s holy cave. Come out and reveal itself!”

The Evil Eye felt a strange feeling. It was warm but murky. He didn’t have the words to describe it until…

He realized he had been exploring the domain of Prose. It had been a fruitless domain. One he didn’t think would yield much benefit. So what if he could write? So what if he could tell stories in an ordered yet still freeing way, without the restrictions of verse and rhyme and other things he did not know much about anyway?

Well, at least it had one benefit. He knew how to describe the feeling that was making his little eyeball summon a sound through sheer will and magical energy.

The Evil Eye chuckled. Then he slithered out of the darkness towards the unsuspecting elfin warrior who promptly tried to flee.

The warrior was caught by the Evil Eye’s tendrils, the pathetic spear fell on the floor, and a free floating domain merged itself into the Evil Eye at the last possible second, dislodging some of his power and shedding some of it onto the microlith spear that lay on the ground and which would later take on a more draconic name.

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Prose rose out of the pit. It had reminded him too much of the cave. It wasn’t like he had hated that cave, it had held a sort of special if passing significance for him. But now, Prose was fleshed out in his domains, especially in the domain that had always been his favorite.

Perhaps the thought that had made the Evil Eye so bitter for so many years, was that he had been forced to become the Immortal of Evil rather than the Immortal of Prose. If he had not been compelled by his nature and character to spend all his time plotting and conniving, and could have spent his time writing stories, Prose would have been a much happier Immortal.

It was too late for that. Prose would still be writing and thinking after today but he would be doing so with a bitter taste in his mouth. Prose stared at Cas as he flew up in the sky.

It wasn’t until now that Prose realized that the biggest reason he hated Cas was because the puny elf had always had the freedom that Prose had always yearned for.

It didn’t help that this elf had destroyed Prose’s cave either. The cave nestled away in the Forest of Serenity, where the Evil Eye had first formed his own independent thoughts. He was especially pissed that the first words that Prose had ever written down, the words on the entrance to the Cave of the Terrible, had been destroyed in the elf’s petty fighting.

Perhaps it was time for Prose to write some new words.

He stared at Cas with his singular eye and prepared a spell.