Chapter 1
They say that a writer creates a world. When he writes, he’s a god, a creator, holding the fate of his characters in his hands. He can twist and turn them, becoming immortal in a reader’s mind. The soft breeze of my room evoked a sense of dread in me, like what I had been waiting for would come, and it wouldn’t be anything that I actually wanted. So as my fingers type, as maybe my life will come to its bitter end, I want to create, because when everything else is stripped away, words inked into a piece of paper might remain.
I don’t believe in long stories. I’m simple that way. I believe in getting to the essence of things, like—you know—here’s the thing: I made a deal with the devil, and I paid the consequence. I had shamelessly, but with an altered, heavy heart, held my cup of wine up and toasted away my own demise. He asked me what I was willing to sacrifice to gain the utter knowledge that everything did indeed have a price, and I boldly said, “love.” You know, because it was never truly meant for me.
Fast forward to today, and it was a much heavier sacrifice than I ever expected. I had not bargained away love. Because what is love? A vast, faulty, myth-like thing that we dream and think and write so many tragic poems about. I sacrificed my heart the day it started beating again, nonetheless. The joke’s on me. It was quiet before, stilled into the tune of the afterlife, where I was the judge, the jury, the last thing between the dead and whatever fate awaited them.
But this story is not just about me. My story has its characters. And I did not create them. They were—they entered into my life in a flow and a twist of fate, as you may call it, although it has already become a cliché. Fate—it’s a feeble thing, and I should know, because it changes. To believe in it is to strip away all choice. No, these people, they came into my existence as a domino effect—a push, a tiny breath on a butterfly wing, and it flew, and then everything after, it fell in a sequence. Blop, blop, blop, like a steady stream of raindrops.
So before I tell you my story, I want to tell you a short story about a girl I knew.
Her name was Scarlet, and she was a force. She asked questions and persisted to know. She looked to the stars in awe, for them to show the truth of the world and knowledge alike. She searched far and wide for answers unknown. She thought she could take them, because she wanted to dare, she wanted to go, to split the universe to bits and listen to secrets untold. And you should see what big eyes she had—the kind that drove the wolves mad. And a smile that stilled the unease, and a spirit untamed.
She didn’t know one thing, though: the divine had deemed her a little treacherous, innocent thing—God’s favorite angel, and the devil’s favorite sin.
And right before I marched down to hell and knocked on the gates, demanding to speak to its master, Scarlet and I had made a sweet little deal. I would let him out, and she would send his ass right back down.
