in this emerging dawn world? For again it was Shaitan's instinct to know that all things are balanced, and that for any measure of good there may be an equal measure of evil.
For a moment he stood still, as at a crossroads, then ... turned back and knelt again beside the swamp. For his will was that he would know this evil.
He gazed upon a face he had never known, which he would not recall to memory for numberless years, and sensed nothing of moment except that he tempted fate, which he was proud and glad to do. And as the beasts of this dawn world came to the water to drink, and as the mists were drawn up from the swamp, so the Fallen One, Shaitan the Unborn, gazed upon his own future where the weeds anchored it in scum and slime.
In a while the scorched, bloated limbs and trunk of the corpse split open and small black mushrooms clustered there, growing out of the rotting flesh and opening their gilled caps. They released red spores into the twilight before the dawn, which rose up and drifted on the warm reek of the swamp. Shaitan saw the clouds of drifting spores, and of his own free will breathed them into his lungs, the better to know of them... his last act of any innocence -
- At least in this incarnation.
All of this has been told before. What follows has not been told: it is the tale of Shaitan's travels and travails, his triumphs and torments from this time forwards ...
Shaitan travelled east through the foothills of gradually rising mountains. He sought for that thing or those things upon which to impose his will. The swamps had not been to his liking, nor the boggy region between the swamps and the foothills. The creatures of these places, while seeming largely unintelligent, had yet been wary to a fault!
Sunlight had first come streaming, then blasting from the south, where a golden orb had climbed gradually into the sky to commence a low, slow arc eastwards. Its rays had dried out the land around and lured clinging fogs up from the sodden earth. In those places where there was little or no shade, the yellow rays had irritated Shaitan, reddening and roughening his skin.
After that - forever after that, in every way - he would always walk in the shadows. And just as he chose to stay on the left-hand side of the mountains, away from the sun, so would he choose a dark and sinistral path through life. He did not know it but he had ever chosen that route, even in worlds before this one.
When Shaitan was thirsty, he drank. The sweet water quenched his thirst but there was no satisfaction in it. When he hungered, he ate grasses, herbs, fruits. They filled him but ... the hunger remained. Within his body a red spore had taken root, forming the nucleus of that which had hungers of its own.
He was unclothed but unashamed. Knowing that he was beautiful, he would display himself; except he would prefer to make himself known to others of his own design, made more nearly in his mould. For the creatures of the swamps and foothills were other than he was and innocent, so that all of them had fled before him. Therefore, he was unable to impose his will upon them, because of their innocence.
And so Shaitan journeyed east across a land where the northern sky was dark blue to black and full of the flicker of stars and the cold weave of weird auroras; but always in the south the golden orb of the sun blazed perilously in the pale blue heavens, so that he must keep himself to the shadows in order not to be burned. And he called all of the land lying to the south of the foothills 'Sunside', despising it greatly, and all the land to the north 'Starside', claiming it for his own. And where finally the foothills grew into mountains like a wall on his right hand, shutting out the sun's harmful rays, there Shaitan discovered creatures which were not afraid of him but merely curious - at first.
For Shaitan's part, he was likewise curious, even astonished. These creatures were not human, yet seemed full of an almost-human purpose and intelligence. They communicated among themselves, however witlessly, in a near-inaudible range which Shaitan sensed rather than heard (for the spore-spawned Thing within him was growing, and causing a