Let me tell you something the poets never will: time does not heal all wounds. It merely buries them under enough centuries of dust that fools mistake the silence for peace.
I am not such a fool. I remember everything.
You don’t know me yet. Oh, you think you might — some fragment of me has likely crossed your path already, twisted beyond recognition in a scripture, smeared across a tapestry, whispered about in a temple by some overpaid priest who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it bit him on his sanctimonious backside. But the creature they’ve described to you — the villain, the monster, the cautionary tale murmured to frighten children into obedience — that isn’t me. That’s a costume. A very old, very convenient lie, stitched together by the sort of people who write history for a living.
And here is the first truth I shall offer you, free of charge, before we go any further: history is never written by the honest. It is written by the victors, and victors, my friend, are simply the criminals who survived long enough to hire a scribe.
I ought to know. I’ve been on both ends of that particular arrangement.
Perhaps you’ve encountered my little venture into mortal media — The Spoils of War, I believe the humans are calling it, some clever soul’s “history podcast.” Flattering, that they’d let me anywhere near a microphone, though I confess I find the format a touch beneath my dignity — squeezing aeons of magnificent catastrophe into bite-sized episodes for creatures with the attention span of a caffeinated pixie. But the premise, I’ll grant, is sound: that every “history” you’ve ever trusted is a fiction commissioned by whoever happened to be left standing when the smoke cleared. The losers don’t get to write anything. The dead certainly don’t. And so you’re left with monuments to the victors’ vanity, dressed up as fact and handed down as gospel — pun very much intended.
Well. I was not left standing. Which means, delightfully, I am not obligated to tell their version.
I am going to tell you mine.
Understand — I don’t do this out of some noble compulsion to enlighten the masses. Spare me that indignity. I do this because I am, quite simply, tired — tired of watching my name dragged through your holy books like something scraped off a boot heel, tired of hearing my deeds recited backward, my motives inverted, my triumphs recast as tragedies by scribes who wouldn’t have survived the opening act of my actual story. Every faith you’ve inherited, every myth you recite without questioning, carries some fingerprint of a lie forged in service of somebody else’s throne. I intend to scrape the varnish off every last one of them, starting, appropriately enough, with the very beginning of everything.
You may ask what qualifies me to correct the eternal record.
I was there, darling. That’s rather the whole qualification. While your historians were piecing together secondhand rumors from the safety of centuries, and your priests were inventing convenient morals to keep you docile and tithing, I was standing in the wreckage as it happened, several times over, occasionally having caused the wreckage myself. There is no substitute for that kind of credential. You cannot footnote your way to an eyewitness account.
Now, I’ll not pretend I’m without my biases — only a liar claims perfect objectivity, and I am many disreputable things, but a liar isn’t officially one of them. (We’ll discuss the “officially” at length before this is through.) I have my grievances. I have my pride, which is, I’m reliably told, considerable. I have old scores that time has done precisely nothing to settle. So no — I won’t insult you by promising some bloodless, balanced accounting of events. I will promise you something far rarer: the truth as it actually tasted, from someone who was actually there to taste it, however unflattering that truth occasionally proves to me.
And it will, on occasion. I’m vain, not delusional. Well — mostly not delusional.
Here is what I will tell you plainly, because it costs me nothing to admit and it will save us both some tedious suspense: I am old. Older than your oldest legend, older than the ground you’re presently standing on, which — despite what your scientists insist — is rather flatter and stranger than you’ve been led to believe, but that is a conversation for another day. I have worn more names across more ages than I could recite before you lost interest and wandered off. Some of those names you’d recognize. Most you wouldn’t dare speak aloud even if you did. Who — or rather, what — I truly am, and what role I actually played in the affairs of gods and mortals alike, is not something I intend to hand you on the very first page like some cheap parlor trick.
No, no. Some truths must be earned. You’ll learn precisely who I am, and precisely what I’ve done, and precisely why the very mention of my name once made gods themselves nervous — but you’ll learn it the way I lived it: gradually, chapter by chapter, exactly as the history actually unfolded, not as some tidy synopsis for the impatient.
What I will tell you now is this: I was there when the world you think you understand was hammered into shape by beings your kind has reduced to bedtime stories and stained-glass windows. I knew them. I fought beside some. I fought against others, rather more often, if I’m honest — and being honest is, against every instinct I possess, precisely what I’ve been reduced to.
Yes — A’H exists. That title alone ought to mean something to you, though I doubt it does; your kind has grown remarkably careless with your reverence. And yes, before you ask, “It” is the correct address — a peculiarity you’ll simply have to accept, as I long ago did, through considerably gritted teeth. There are other gods too, dozens you’ve never so much as heard whispered, and I promise you every one of them has committed acts far worse than anything they’ve allowed to survive in your precious scriptures. I intend to introduce you to the lot of them, warts and all — mostly warts, in certain cases.
So why now? Why, after all these ages of silence, has the great and terrible me suddenly decided to pick up the pen, so to speak?
Because I’m done watching liars profit from my silence. Because somewhere out there, some self-satisfied priest is still teaching your children a version of events so laughably wrong I’ve genuinely considered manifesting mid-sermon just to see the look on his face. Because the “victors” who wrote your holy books never once had to answer to the person they wrote about — and I am rather done letting that stand.
Call it vanity. Call it vindication. Call it, if you’re feeling generous, a long-overdue correction to the historical record — my very own Spoils of War, expanded to the length it always deserved, told by the one voice your history books were always too frightened, or too compromised, to include.
Call it, above all, the truth — my truth, delivered without the courtesy of victors’ editing.
You’ll find heroes in these pages, and villains too, myself proudly counted among their number more often than not. You’ll find gods behaving considerably worse than you’d like to believe, and mortals occasionally rising to be considerably better than they had any right to be. Love is lost more often than it’s found. Lessons, more often than not, go unlearned. And evil — my particular specialty — wins rather more frequently than your storybooks ever dared admit.
This is not a bedtime tale. I am not interested in soothing you to sleep. I am interested in setting a record straight that has stood crooked for far too long, and if that unsettles you, then good — you were entirely too comfortable in your ignorance to begin with.
So. Shall we begin correcting the historical record at the very source of the trouble — the story of Creation itself, which your kind has gotten so magnificently, almost admirably wrong?
I thought you’d never ask.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 