Oh, you will! the other promised. And: Are you ready?
Harry’s corpse had cartwheeled out of sight into the multi-hued haze of past time. Pure thought, he had no body, no head to nod; but his deadspeak nodded for him. And as his incorporeal mind fragmented in a glorious bomb-burst – a hundred golden splinters, breaking up and speeding into as many worlds – his thoughts and even his deadspeak were at an end.
Except each and every one of those brilliant shards, they were him . . . and they would know.
Starting into awareness, Shaitan cried out.
He cried out as he felt consciousness cloaking an intelligence previously bereft, will without knowledge inhabiting a mind wiped clean. He discovered himself kneeling at the edge of stagnant water and saw his image mirrored in scummy depths. And when he saw that he was naked, he was ashamed; but when he saw that he was beautiful, he was proud. For shame and pride are of the spirit, not of intelligence.
Standing upright, Shaitan saw that he could walk. And in the twilight of a dim, misty dawn he moved by the edge of the dark, rank waters, which were a swamp. And he saw how dismal and lonely was this place where he had fallen, or into which he had been cast! So that he knew himself for a sinner, and the place as his punishment.
Such knowledge defined his nature: that he instinctively understood such concepts as sin and punishment. And he thought his crime must be that he was beautiful, which was his pride working; which was in fact his crime! For Shaitan saw Beauty as Might, and Might as Right, and Right as he willed it to be.
Which was a will he would impose.
So thinking, he moved away from the rank waters and went to impose his will upon this strange world. But in the moment he turned away so the mud bubbled up behind him, and he paused to look back where black bubbles came bursting to the surface.
And with the parting of the weeds, Shaitan saw a figure floating up into view. In its body it was bloated and burned, but its face was whole. He knew it for an omen, but of what? He had will: he could wait and discover what would be, or move on, according to his will. Also, he suspected that this thing in the swamp harboured evil; why else would such an unclean thing be here, in a world which was new? For a moment he stood still, as at a crossroads . . . then turned back, and knelt again beside the swamp. For he had willed it that he would know this evil.
He gazed upon a face he had never known, which he would not recall to memory for numberless years, and sensed nothing of moment except that he tempted fate, which he was proud and glad to do. And as the beasts of this dawn world came to the water to drink, and as the mists were drawn up from the swamp, so the Fallen One gazed upon his own future where the weeds anchored it in scum and slime.
In a while the scorched, bloated limbs of the corpse split open and small black mushrooms clustered there, growing out of the rotting flesh and opening their gilled caps. They released red spores into the twilight before the dawn, which of his own free will Shaitan breathed: his last act of any innocence.
The wheel had turned full circle and the cycle was closed.
And opened . . .