Epilogue

An Excerpt from “The Devil’s Game”

By Marti A. Silent

Now and then, I wonder if I belonged down there. The more I think about it—his haunting, blinkless stares, his soliloquies as if we were never there, and his final words to me before the final snap of his fingers… Evelyn, he said,

Should you come upon Eden… do not take the fruit from the tree.

… like a warning: Refrain from coming back here; I refuse to house you in my home—the less I believe I was ever meant to leave.

His warning—to keep from burying my soul six feet beneath the dirt, should I be confronted with temptation—as if a part of me could still belong to Him, tells me that his rulebook never spoke of our souls’ invincibility if we find our way back to our lives. It spoke of second chances, of rewriting the scripture of our fate—yet nothing of our inability to rewrite it back into the dust.

I demanded the players be set free. He only looked at me. His eyes—golden and blinding—blinked twice, spelling out without words how even The Devil Himself could not reverse his own Faustian bargain. If it weren’t for the everlasting, boundless rage bursting through every valve pumping into my heart, I might’ve caught a glimpse of sympathy in the glint of his eyes when he told me that even He could not reach wherever their souls had been banished to. I might even have read something sincere, rather than just his villainous refusal to abide by the winner of his game’s final wishes.

A prisoner of his own tournament, forced to hold contests of morals and clear ruined paths for new sinners to come…

The roads to salvation and damnation must be crowded.

I’ll never know if I spoke to Lilith post mortem. There’s no way to tell if she was ever truly given the chance. Not without asking Him directly. The temptation to ask Him, before the final wave of his hand, almost won me over. But an answer would confirm she was ever down there at all. If she’ll ever know Heaven, I can’t say. If she ever knew Hell, I’ll never know, and He’ll never tell. I have consolation in the fact that I do not hear her cries anymore—neither in my wake nor in my sleep. After taking the trophy, I feel comforted by the fact that she does not call out to me in desperation. Wherever she stands, she stands proudly. And I stand knowing I hold the quill to rewrite my fate. Where I belong is next to her. As I go about my days with the freedom to seek the eternity I please, I find that a peaceful forever without her is not the pull I feel inclined toward.

His refusal to see me again tells me one of two things: He is capable of carrying shame—to house the one who made a mockery of the contest to cleanse is beyond Him, so He ensures my salvation instead—or His fascination with keeping me alive, watching the torture I reveled in, runs far deeper than I thought.

My lesson to carry—my warning to heed—is that victory has not absolved me; it has only returned me to my world with new ways to fall. I never feared the fire… only the cold that waited without it.

In fact,

It was a pleasure to burn.