VII: The Book of Kane I
Chapter 1: The Promised Land
As I mentioned before, acting as the made-up god Baal, I’d charged Kane with leading his people across the flat plane of earth to the faraway continent of North America – where I told them The Promised Land was waiting for them. Along the journey, Kane was instructed to ‘make his descendants as countless as the stars in the sky’ by leaving portions of his ever-growing clans behind along the way to populate the planet. It was a mission that I didn’t expect Kane to complete, and I left him to his own designs to figure it out – my thinking here was if he could accomplish the mission, he’d prove his worth, and if not, then he wasn’t worth my time.
Who could have guessed that the Man with the Mark of Immortality would have been so determined?
As it turned out, nearly 90 years after they started, Kane and his people finally reached TerrVerde!
Unfortunately, Kane was a bit disappointed. [As Baal, I may have told Kane that I would remove his Mark of Immortality when he reached The Promised Land, and I may have failed to fulfill that promise]. As a result, when he discovered that his dreaded scar was there, the forlorn man ripped away his face shroud – to the great horror of his people!
The clan scattered at the sight of their leader’s horrific mark. For his part, Kane let out a vehement cry as he watched the gift of his god Baal flutter to the ground like a discarded rag. The shroud, imbued with potent enchantments, lay abandoned on the ground as Kane ran off to the wilderness.
Yet unbeknownst to all, Baal’s magical shroud did not remain where it was, for an ethereal wind wafted it off the ground and into the nearby trees – out of sight. Little did Kane know that he would come to regret this impulsive act, as the shroud’s magic was now lost to him. What happened to it? Who can say.
Meanwhile, unable to take it any longer, Kane continued wandering, hoping beyond hope that he would die. Unfortunately, Kane apparently forgot that he was immortal and didn’t realize that I wasn’t done with him yet. And so, unable to find death, the decrepit Kane continued wandering – losing his mind in the process and thus his usefulness to me [at least for the time being].
As the years went by, Kane wandered aimlessly through the untamed wilds, his once robust frame becoming a gaunt shadow of its former self – in spite of the life force his curse still provided him with. The forests and mountains soon echoed with his mutterings, a testament to the madness that had taken hold. The weight of his eternal curse bore down on him with every step, a constant reminder of his crime and the mark that would never fade. The days and nights blurred together as Kane continued to stumble through the dense underbrush and rocky terrains of his Promised Land, yet he pressed on, always driven by an unyielding torment that offered no respite.
As he aged, Kane’s mind became a battlefield of memories and regrets. Visions of Abel’s lifeless body haunted his thoughts, mingling with the promises and betrayals of Baal. His solitude became both a curse and a comfort, a place where he could scream his anguish into the void without judgement. His immortality was a relentless prison, each moment of suffering stretching into eternity. Even the beasts of the forest seemed to sense his otherworldly nature, keeping their distance as if wary of the cursed man who roamed their domain.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 