Fremd Torturchen - Volume 5 - Chapter Pr

A Tale from Long, Long Ago

There was nothing there.

And yet, at the same time, there was everything.

If one was to describe that place, the most apropos comparison would be to a blank white canvas. Nothing meaningful was painted atop it. In other words, one could paint over it to their heart’s content.

It was empty, and it was free. There was nothing there, yet there was everything.

To one with the privilege of wielding a brush, it was akin to an ideal, perfect paradise. After all, they could create Heaven there, one that aligned exactly with their desires. If they wanted to, they could even create Hell. But such freedoms weren’t afforded to the one who bore the brush this time.

The reason for that lay in the fact that she was a peerless sinner. She bore grave crimes upon her back.

She had no choice but to bear responsibility for the scars she’d carved in the canvas’s predecessor.

Because of that, she had to build the skies, build the earth, and birth the seas.

She had to make vegetation flourish across the land. She had to craft the moon and stars. She had to release fish and birds and beasts and livestock out into the world.

Then, after making humans, beastfolk, and demi-humans, she rested.

That was the fate she imposed upon herself. Fleeing her atonement would have been unforgivable.

She knew. She knew that in the world to come, all would revere her. Unlike the resentful voices of those on the verge of annihilation she’d once heard, she would doubtless be hailed as a “Saint” and be offered up countless commendations. She would be the mother of all who existed, after all. She would probably even be prayed to, hailed as the “Suffering Saint” who sacrificed herself for her children. But for the rest of eternity, nobody would ever consider what she had truly felt.

Without trying to learn what she’d been like before she’d become the Saint and her tale became embellished, they would have no way of even doing so. But she had no intention of condemning them for that fact. That was simply the way the masses were. The same had been true in the world prior. They would hear only what they wanted to hear, see only what they wanted to see.

Flocks of sheep were, fundamentally, stupid. And that was the way things ought to be.

But at the end of the day, was that truly not a sin? The ignorant had no right to cast blame, did they? She remained unforgiven, yet forgiveness was precisely what they would receive. Therein lay an inescapable contradiction.

If that was the case, then, didn’t that make their entire way of life fundamentally wrong?

All alone, she eventually became obsessed with that notion.

After troubling over that fact for quite some time, she created a certain something. It was wholly unlike the land and the sea and the plants and the moon and the stars, wholly unlike the fish and the birds and the beasts and the livestock, and wholly unlike the humans and the beastfolk and the demi-humans. She chose a demi-human as its base, but in order to grant it a long life, she mixed in so many other things that they became wholly unrecognizable.

And that was how she created her hideous, adorable attendant, one who would serve only her.

At present, she was standing before him, cradling a lump swaddled in red cloth in her arms.

She had yet to shed tears of blood, nor had she been hung upside down. She merely looked at the lump in her arms with an affectionate smile on her lips. The rebuilding was still in its initial stages then, and the world was a clean slate. Even the wind had yet to blow. But by some miracle, the lump peeked out from behind the cloth. It lasted only a moment, but its reddish-black alien form was laid bare.

The thing she was cradling was a lump of demon flesh.

Stooping down, she presented the bundle to her attendant. Then she gently passed the seed of evil to him, as though she were entrusting him with her own child. And the attendant obediently took it.

He hugged the repulsive lump of meat tightly, like he was trying to protect it.

“What a good boy you are,” she whispered.

“What a good, good boy you are,” she praised him in her sweet, sweet, madness-tinged voice.

It was a story from long, long ago. A tale too horrible to be called Genesis, too tragic.

But it was also far too twisted to pass off as a fairy tale.