A Business of Misery

Tip #3 | Different Forms May Help Comfort the Dying

The man stood in front of me, his expression suggesting neither fear nor comfort, neither hatred nor love, neither sadness nor joy. His freshly brewed cup of coffee was splattered on the hard wood floor of the main hall in his home. The lights were off, the switch mounted on the wall next to me, but he dared not move any closer. The light from the kitchen cast a shadow on his front, but the radiant beams emanating from my form provided a dim glow which lit his face.

"Be not afraid," I told him, but he needed no such reassurance.

His face was neutral for the most part, but his darting eyes told me that he knew not what exactly he was witnessing. My many eyes concentrated on him, his two unsure of where to look when I spoke. My wings of fire expanded to consume the walls adjacent to me and blocked his path forward. The front door was behind him and the stairs leading to the second floor were just a few steps away, but he knew better than to try and flee.

I knew of the form I took through stories and art; a truly horrifying figure with no resemblance to a human whatsoever, yet so many found comfort in such a creature. A feeling of overwhelming dread overcame any who encountered one, yet they couldn't help to feel warm and accepted. They were being welcomed to a new life and eternal happiness. This man may have thought the same, but his knowledge of what lay beyond was limited, as is every human's.

"Do not be afraid," I said. "I appear before you as a servant to your God, just as you are."

The man remained silent. He turned to his right and faced a mirror mounted on the wall. A portrait of the man was situated across from the mirror on the opposite wall, but the man's face blocked the portrait from view. He blinked and examined his face in the mirror, then turned back to me as my flames slowly expanded to consume a little more of the hall. He exhaled and thin vapor escaped from his lips. The air was cold, yet my embers kept us warm.

"God, huh?" the man said with a chuckle. "I thought he stopped paying any attention to me a long time ago."

"You are always being watched," I assured him. "You always have been."

"Hmph, well, it certainly didn't feel like it. So, God saw all of it? The suffering? And he didn't do a single thing about it."

"The mortal world is a place of law and order, despite the chaos that may seem to run rampant. It is no single entity's place to do anything.

"You're telling me that God just watched, then, when my family's livelihood turned to shit? Watched as my father became a drunk and ignored His teachings, beating my mother and siblings to pulp and casting me to the streets? Did He just sit back and relax while I and countless others prayed to Him to end our abuse and torment? That's some guy to be worshipped, if you ask me."

The man's voice sounded tired; he acted as though speaking of God made him miserable. Yet, I could see in his eyes that what was displayed before him was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his life and that he thought it was a beautiful sight—something truly worth believing in.

"Do you use your own suffering as an excuse to bring hell upon others?" I asked.

"I never put that much thought into it," he admitted. "Everyone deserves to be happy, right? Well, what I did made me happy, at least for a little while. Nothing else brought me joy in this life, so I did what I did as often as I could just to feel something positive."

"But your victims were not happy. They suffered at your hand—those hard-working people whose riches you took for yourself, those innocents whose lives you ended on a whim, those children whose sacred gift you robbed just to feel any sort of control for once—they were not happy in the end."