The origins of evil 1

Fefnir Era year 2431, Earth - London

"Babe, take a deep breath, it's amazing!"

"I... you're right! The air is so fresh!"

Ecstatic, just like hundreds of thousands of other Londonians, the young couple happily took large inspirations, enjoying the unprecedented purity of the metropolis' air. Something as simple as breathing was now seen entirely differently, it gave people the same feeling they would have had, had they consumed mint pills every five minutes or so.

It could seem like a detail, but it was actually a much, much more significant breakthrough: every bit of pollution in London had been successfully converted into pure air, as pure as it was a thousand years ago. A sight of hope, and of victory against the great plagues than were like grim shadows over the heads of humanity during the entirety of the Indrustrial Revolution Era, pollution and global warming.

It was from this moment on that humans realized the true face of Fefnir techology, this miracle born from the eminent Paradise Company: it was the ultimate hope of humanity, the key to their deliverance, to an eternity of constant evolution, and to the disarition of most if not all of their limitations.

At first, Fefnir technology's effects had only been tested on small unsignificant towns and, when it was verified that its application on the atmosphere didn't show any negative side effect for the inhabitant, it was also applied to multiple small cities, using its amazing properties so as to convert the pollution in the air.

The with this method was that, as long as the process was well-managed, not only the pollution could be rendered harmless... it could also be turned into energy!

Thirty years after its conception, even if Fefnir technology had barely started to be commonized, there wasn't a single significant governement in the world that wasn't aware of its nature as the fate-changer of humanity, and not a single cultured individual that didn't know, and praise its creator, the mysterious genius Feng Chang.

Mass production of Fefnir technology was still in-process, and not likely to happen before several more years at least, several decades more realisitically. But when it would happen, everything would become possible, this sight of the future that Londonians could experience when it was finally their turn to see the miracle of Fefnir technology filled their hearts with hope.

It was a similar feeling that went through the young couple. They had just returned from their honeymoon, and now got to experience such a wonderful surprise at their return!

Sadly, their joy was quickly replaced by anguish as the bride suddenly held her stomach, in pain.

"Honey, are you alright!?" her husband asked in panic.

"I... I think I'm gonna deliver!" she replied in pain.

She had already been pregnant for more than seven month before the wedding, and was now at almost eight months. Still, there had been no prior sign, it was all far too sudden!

The wife was rushed to the hospital, and her husband soon joined her. All exams reached the same conclusion: be it her or the baby, their chance of survival was low, really low.

"It's ok, Jake, it'll be okay, I know it" the wife said, smiling weakly. "All I need is for you to believe in me"

"Yes... you're right... everything will go well, Jerryl" he replied, clenching his teeth hard as he reached for her hand.

Even though his entire body was shaking and contracting, he still made sure that his hand on hers remained firm but soft.

"Everything will be okay"

And like this, a day later, as he was sleeping outside of the pregnancy room, he was suddenly woken up: the pregnancy finally happened, and his wife had ended in a critical state, as the baby was barely maintained alive.

"No... Jerryl..."

It wasn't much he could do for the baby, now. So instead, he went into the room, not making any noise, just putting his hand on hers and sobbing. Praying for her to survive.

But sometimes, prayers don't come true. The baby's health was stabilizing, but Jerryl's just kept getting worse as the days pass. In this world, everybody wished for a miracle to save them, but very few had their wish granted, that was the tragedy of reality.

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Yet, sometimes, even if rarely, miracles happened. And this time was one of them as, against every pronostic, Jerryl's health eventually got better until, finally, her life wasn't threatened anymore. And at the same time, finally, their baby had become sane enough to be exposed to other people, and they finally got to see him.

"He's... beautiful" Jerryl said, tears in her eyes as this child she thought she would never see again was now in front of her, laughing and clapping his hands while looking at her.

"Yes, he is..." Jake said too before adding: "Our little Wises"

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Three years later, in kindergarten, Wises was playing with two other children his age. They were in the middle of a story game, where all of them incarnated an imaginary character, and they teamed up to beat an army of demons.

"I'm laser-god! I'll shoot all their weapons out of functionning!" the first kid said.

"I'm ice king, I'll freeze them on spot, so they can't do anything anymore!" the second said. "Wises, go on, finish the capture!"

Wises mimicked the action of waving a scepter to cast a spell:

"I'm Sage, the great sorcerer on London! Abrakadabra, fire spell!" he shouted. "Fire inflicts twice as much harm after the ice, now they're all dead!"

Wises seemed to be proud of himself, but the two other kids looked slightly upset:

"Wises, we're superheroes!" the first said. "Superheroes don't kill!"

"Yeah! Sage was supposed to capture them!" the second said.

Hearing these protests, Wises shrugged:

"But I'm supposed to be a great sage of magic that lived for hundreds of years, that's in the name" he replied. "And after all these years, I became super-mega-genius! And with my super intelligence, I realized that if we capture the enemy, eventually, they'll escape and come back. If we really go on fighting them, then we have to make sure they can't come back to take revenge, right?"

The two other kids tilted their heads, struggling to understand exactly everything their friend's words but seemingly convinced by them.

"You're really too smart Wises, even Sage isn't a cool enough nickname for you!" the first kid said.

"Haha, thank you, you're super cool too! I can't think of anything better though..." Wises replied.

"But now that all the demons are dead, what game will we play next?"

"Oh, oh! Let's fight supervillains! No, no, let's play tag instead!"

"Actually, I think I have an even funnier game!"

After Wises said that, the two kids turned all their attention towards him, full of expectation. He tried to walk towards the window, but tripped and, when he tried to get back up, he couldn't. Thus, he instructed his friends to do what he had planned instead: placing two chairs in front of the window, climbing on them and opening this same window. As they looked in-below, they saw a small pool, one to two feet deep, where other kids were playing.

"What do we do now?" the two asked.

"Hehe, do you remember how the teacher said we weren't good swimmers?" Wises asked. "If we dive from here in the pool, I'm sure she'll change her mind and tell our parents how great we are, and we'll get ice cream every day for a week!"

"But... we're at the fourth floor..."

"Don't worry about that, I planned it all! My dad is a science teacher, and he teached me about about the resistance of the air! The more place we take when we fall, the more air will slow us down! We'll just land down safely in the water"

"But, what if we land on someone?"

"Hehe, another cool thing with air! By using my secret method, we'll push so much down with us that they be pushed away before we even get close to them! All we have to do is to make sure that we hold hands and jump at the same time!"

The two other kids waited for him to get on the chair and, desite being visibly hurt after tripping, Wises managed to get on the chair, but apparently couldn't even reach the window's frame.

"I'm sorry guys, I don't want to stop you from having ice cream, my leg just doesn't feel right" Wises said. "But I don't want you not to have fun..."

"No, no, if you feel sad about it, we won't jump..."

"Even for these super good advantages"

Wises smiled, seemingly moved:

"Thank you, you really are the best friends ever" he said, before making them hold hands. "You can jump, I won't be jaleous"

Reassured, the two kids climbed in the frame, held hands and, before anyone could intervene, jumped off the fourth floor. At this moment, a curious thing happened: even though he pretended to be hurt and not able to climb, he immediately jumped, and grabbed the frame to pass his head through the window, just in time to see his two friends fall and crash on a little girl, with an horrible noise of broken bones.

Turned out, he never was hurt in the first place! All of this, it had been nothing but an act, all to have this vision.

'These ripples when they crashed... so beautiful' he thought.

He quickly retracted himself from the window, not because hewas afraid of falling or traumatized by what he saw, but because he didn't want people below to see this smile he couldn't contain.

And indeed, as he soon heard screams and cries echoing through the kindergarten, a sincere smile of pure happiness blossomed on his childish face.

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Days later, at the funerals, he couldn't help but feel sad:

"I'm sorry... I couldn't stop them... when they told me about, about this game, I-I, I didn't... didn't think it would be that" he acted with devilish talent. "I'm sorry..."

The parents of the three victims, though devastated, still somehow found the strength to console him, along with his own parents. The videosurveillance had been consulted, and it had been proved that Wises wasn't implicated, thus, they only saw him as another victim, who was promised to be traumatized for life.

As Wises looked at the parents, he couldn't help but cry, like he never cried before. If someone saw him at the moment without context, they'd think he was devastated by his friends and the girl's deaths. But if they knew what he had done, they'd think he was the devil himself, and consequently had devilish acting talents, which wasn't really false.

But the truth was, Wises genuinly felt sad, terribly sad.

He felt sad that his friends died with so little pain. He felt sad that they only crushed one little girl in their fall. He felt sad that no other child died in the panic.

And most of all, he was sad that he couldn't kill their parents too. He had done it: by killing their children, he had successfully ruined their lives. All their dreams, hopes had been crushed and, out of the six parents, he was almost certain that at least one would suicide, or at the very least fall into alcoholism. Their lives were ruined, as he had made sure to choose his two friends amongst unique children, and luckily the girl was one too, so the parents had no other children they could transfer their love too. Eventually, at least one would break, he knew it, simply because they had already started breaking.

That was why it was so frustrating! He had done all these efforts to destroy them, so he could feed on their despair and crumbled aspirations, but he couldn't even finish the deal!

It was something that he had came to understand from the moment he had gained consciousness: in this world, the only thing that could truly make him feel fully happy was to destroy other people's happiness. Their dreams were what fueled his live. And their dreams were nothing but the ideal end of their lives. By turning their lives into nightmares, making them take the opposite end, he could appropriate this end for himself. And by ending their nightmares, he could fully make these dreams his own.

That was his own dream of darkness: he wanted to live forever, and he wanted humans to live forever, so he could destroy and kill people without ever stopping, and feed on their broken dreams for eternity.

'Oh, I can finally think of a cooler name than Sage the mage!'

Despite his regret to be unable to kill the grieving parents even when the perfect opportunity presented itself, he quickly found a source of recomfort in this:

'I'll be Saginus, the mage whose power is to make people's dreams shatter under him!'

Wises smiled at this thought, unaware of what the name Saginus would later become, a secret emblem of rallying for greed, evil and death in a world vaster than what the current him could even conceive.

That was the story of Wises, a child born from loving and caring parent, who lived a life of happiness, circled by friends and family, and yet still chose to take the path opposed to heroism. The story of a man that wasn't born to be evil, wasn't pushed to evil, wasn't influenced to be evil, and yet still chose to be. The story of the one that, despite his inhumainty, truly represented the dark side of humanity, the same that turned the kindest of being into the Devil, the same that even God himself failed to change.

The story of Saginus, the Great Sin of Greed.