With the Light of a Thousand Suns
About 2000 years ago, there lived a man who tried telling people they should be nice to each other. He was summarily nailed to a tree for his naivety, but He also said something I have always found interesting, glossed over by many of His followers and doubters alike.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega.”
These words, signifying that He is the very first and the very last, took all of two seconds for Him to say, and they aptly summarize not only His sentiment but mine as well. I am a minor power as far as us Old Ones go, but I have existed from before the beginning and I will continue existing after everything else has ended.
You probably wonder where I’m going with this. The simple truth is, after an eternity of merely existing, I have grown bored. Bored, but not apathetic. I wanted to do something. Not something great, mind you, just something to take my mind off the tedium and malaise that goes hand-in-hand with immortality. And that is why I am here, in the bottom of a well located on Alpenview’s outskirts. I took it upon myself to grant people whatever wish they associated with this particular well. I granted a great many wishes, just to observe the outcomes. It isn’t my fault a person’s wish often wrecks chaos on their life, because Humans are innately selfish, and by their nature they desire things which are detrimental to their health.
But the story doesn’t actually begin here. I have been in a similar space, sleeping in the inky black long before Alpenview was founded. In a different part of the world I took up residence in a nomad village’s well, coincidentally around the same time as that man I mentioned was first beginning to gain in followers. The sun was harsh in this land, and many days I would hear the muttered pleas of the villagers, begging for any respite from that infernal sphere of fire in the sky. So, one day, I granted their wish.
I took the sun away from them.
A bitter cold and perpetual night washed over this land. Many people died, and that was before society began to collapse in earnest. And all of a sudden, people started begging and praying to their deities of choice for the sun to come back! Now, I am not a cruel being by nature. I granted this new wish and brought the sun back. In fullest force.
The resulting firestorm of a conflagration incinerated this pitiful nomad village into charred rubble. Really, Humans should learn to be more careful with what they wish for.
