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Sartael flees Hell. He walks among the humans. He puts on a disguise.
They are so easy to fool.
He chooses a form that pleases him, young and lean; he cannot quite manage handsome. He supposes it is too far from his true form. He has an underbite that slurs his speech, and a wide brow, and a broad nose.
The people accept him as he presents himself, without question.
The first man he meets takes Sartael on his wagon far, far away from the town where he was locked in a cage for eight years. Of course, time is a mortal conceit, and demons do not mark the passing of time. But still — eight years!
The man with the cart asks nothing for payment but a story. Sartael obliges, and only lies a little bit. When he finishes the human laughs, as if Sartael has told him a very good joke. When they reach the man’s home village he asks Sartael if he would like a job. For want of anything better to do, Sartael says yes.
So he is introduced to a farmer, who, to Sartael’s amusement, gives him a pitchfork. For some time Sartael pitches hay, and lives in an attic, and insinuates himself perfectly into the lives of the humans.
It is strange to have no greater purpose. He can tempt them, if he wants, but he does not particularly want. He slips into old habits sometimes, arguing for the sake of arguing, convincing people they want things they don’t want; but mostly he just observes.
People are strange. He has seen human beings at their worst. He supposes that he has also seen human beings at their best: walking willingly into Hell to save a little girl, sending her home, and then staying behind to find the woman he loves, willing to take on Satan himself — how could anyone be braver, more selfless?
But Sartael did not feel particularly awed or impressed by the blacksmith’s sacrifice. He’d mostly been worried about saving his own skin and satisfying his debt.
Human beings do impress him, sometimes. It’s always in small things that are utterly insignificant in the vastness of Creation, fleeting moments that are there and gone so quickly that no angel in Heaven or demon in Hell would ever see it.
The farmer’s wife gives birth one night, and within the hour she loses the child. Sartael immediately wants to taunt her for it; the baby will go to Limbo. She has lost it forever, and she cannot even be comforted by knowing it sits at God’s side.
But the woman does not need to be taunted. She knows already. She cries for it. It is a tiny little thing, and ugly — almost demonic in appearance, its skin so red and head so bulbous. She cries for it, and then she prays for it. Others come to pray for it. Others come to cry for it. It is a night for praying and crying.
And then the next day she gets out of bed and makes breakfast for the living members of her family. They bury the child in the church cemetery, and life continues.
How strange and terrible it is to be mortal, Sartael thinks. How pointless. They suffer endlessly, and spend all their lives searching for a reason for their suffering. No wonder so many throw themselves willingly into the pit. The greater their suffering, the more they believe they deserve it.
Sometimes he thinks of telling them: there is no reason. Bad things happen, and good things happen, and nothing they do changes this either way. They might do a good deed for a neighbour to try and increase the aggregate good in the world; but that good deed will immediately be canceled out by a bad deed done by someone else.
It is much harder to be good than bad. Sartael discovers this quickly. He observes it in others, and he experiences it himself. He tries to be neutral, but mortal life is not so simple. His inaction often causes harm. Then he finds himself attempting to balance it by doing something good for someone in return, but one good deed turns into another. One night he finds himself dragged into the bar by a group of men after a hard day of shoring up the banks of the river to prevent the village flooding. It has been raining for two weeks. If the town was submerged in a few inches of water, it would not affect him. He sleeps in an attic. The water could not reach him. He does not need food to live. The ruined harvest would not kill him.
But he went with the men of the village, and they sang as they worked, and they told jokes as they dug trenches, each one more bawdy than the last. And at the end of the day they take Sartael with them to the pub. They won’t take no for an answer. They slap him on the back and treat him as one of them.
It is that night, in that bar, that Sartael realizes that he is loved. The whole village treats him as if he were some prodigal son, returned to them after a long time, instead of the vagrant he is. They have adopted him. They speak of him to one another with fondness.
As if he were their kin, they love him.
The idea of it makes him sick. Really, physically sick. He burns with fever and sweats through the night. He thinks he might die. Maybe that’s what happens to a demon who is loved by men.
He has gathered a collection of coins for himself through his work for the farmer and other odd jobs around the village. He packs them into a bag and walks out into the dawn, following the road and not stopping.
It’s best to move, he thinks. It took eight years for the minions of Hell to find him before, and that was when he was staying still. If he moves from place to place, who knows. Maybe he can avoid them for sixteen years. Maybe thirty-two.
They will find him eventually. He will die in agony. He pretends to believe that he can wriggle his way out of it somehow, but he is a liar, and he too easily sees through the lies he tells himself.
It does not make him special, that they love him. Humans will love anything. They will love their ugly babies, and they will love the demons among them. He suspects that is the spark of the divine in them. They are echoes of God on Earth. They are doomed to love and to be betrayed.
After he leaves the village he walks for a long time. He sleeps in ditches. He speaks to no one. By the time he reaches a new town he is filthy and wild.
And yet — it happens again, just like the first time. They scrub the dirt away from him. They offer him a home.
He doesn’t stay long enough for them to love him. He remembers the terrible prickling in his skin, as if he was being boiled from the inside. He has learned from his mistake.
When he gets to the third village he is angry. He descends on them like a curse. He repays their hospitality with cruelty. He incites violence. He tempts mercilessly. He turns friends against each other. He tears families apart. In the end he looks upon the ruin he has wrought and feels none of the glee that would once have filled him.
He thinks to himself, They would have loved me. If I’d let them.
To know is a terrible thing. You cannot unknow things. And Sartael has known what it is to be loved.
He thinks, perhaps, that he knew it long ago. He thinks of Usue unexpectedly sometimes. He remembers her pity, her sorrow for him. Human children love recklessly. It comes in sudden fits. The farmer’s children used to experience it in spontaneous bursts, and throw their arms around his waist at the sight of him.
Usue kept her promise to him, and freed him. The more time he spends on Earth, the more he suspects that that was an act of love.
And he begins to wonder about himself; how easily he was convinced to defy the powers of Hell for her. How brave he was in the face of selfish fear.
It wasn’t love, because I do not love, he thinks to himself. But he is not so sure of himself anymore.
He was an angel once. He thinks of this often in the fourth village, where he decides he will always be good. It is very, very hard to always be good. He finds that people are crueler to him here. They see him as weak, maybe.
Or perhaps it is simply the way of the universe. He suffers because that is the way of things, and his kindness changes nothing.
He was an angel once. He tries to remember what it was like.
He was nobody. He was a servant of God, but not an important one. When he reaches back into his memories, he understands that he felt powerless and ignored. He felt weak and pathetic.
When he fell, he was supposed to be joining a glorious cause. He was supposed to matter. He made the ultimate sacrifice for Lucifer, and his loyalty was supposed to be rewarded. He was supposed to live in glory in a new republic.
Poor little Sartael, Alastor had said.
He was as weak and powerless as ever. He’d been ignored and discarded. He’d been sentenced to a life of torturing the souls of disgusting humans, a cog in the machine of Lucifer’s ultimate plan for revenge against God. Sartael had known it was pathetic before, but now he sees it even more clearly. It is a punishment that injures the demons as much as it does the humans. He wonders if God even cares — if he pays any attention to this sad act of rebellion.
But of course he does. God weeps for them, full of sorrow and pity, and loves every one of them, human and demon and Devil alike.
Sartael wonders, now, if God would free them. Maybe all he has to do is ask.
But Sartael does not ask, because he is a coward, and he is afraid.
He is kind to the villagers, and it hardly changes anything, except that one of the young girls comes to him, convinced that she is in love with him. It is an accident. He didn’t mean to seduce her. It frightens him, and he turns her away, and he is tempted to run. He stays; and not two days later one of the village boys comes to him confesses his love.
He could twist them. He could talk them into any number of sins. He could give them the rope with which to hang themselves. At a mere suggestion from him, they could damn themselves.
How easily they are tempted! How easily they are led astray! How easily they fall!
But so did he. So did he.
He turns the boy away, as well, and then he leaves.
In one village a woman tells him that he is not handsome, and Sartael’s face twists into a snarl of rage that betrays his wounded pride. She laughs, and says: he is not handsome, but he moves with the grace of a dancer.
It is a strange thing to be told. Dancing is what humans do. Demons do not dance. Angels do not dance, either. Angels sing; humans dance; demons laugh.
Humans sing and laugh as well. But angels do not laugh and demons do not sing. And humans weep, and humans love, and humans mourn, and humans endure.
Sartael has never done any of those things. He thinks that the angels used to pretend to mourn, but it was only a facsimile of the real thing. God was the wellspring of sorrow of the universe, and He felt all things deeply. Humans were made in His image, but even they could only wade in the shallows of His deep compassion and immense grief.
Not one sparrow falls without the Father knowing it. It is a terrible thing to know.
He wanders and wanders and wanders. He sees God’s Earth, His greatest Creation, in all its glory. It is more beautiful than he could ever have imagined. It reminds him of Lucifer’s rage, when it all began. That God had created this work and that it was not meant for them. That they could walk upon it, that they could talk to the humans, but they would always know that this was not theirs to inherit.
Sartael lies in golden fields and stares into blue skies and thinks that it was not fair. He helps to clear away the blackened rubble and charred bones of a row of houses, devoured by a sudden fire, and thinks that it is not fair. There is joy and there is sorrow, and neither one can be bridled, and it will never be fair.
Time is a mortal conceit, and Sartael is no mortal. He does not count the passing years. But one day, sixteen years after he fled, or perhaps thirty-two, he gets down on his knees.
He prays.