I beheld the house of the righteous and I beheld men and women coming to and going from that house. I saw them eating platters of rich food and drinking hearty drafts of fine ale, and I saw that they were content. Great was their contentment and greatly were they enjoying the rich meat that they were eating and the fine ale that they drank. As I beheld the surpassing contentment of the righteous, coming and going from their abode, and finding fellowship in it as they did so, the seed of bitterness found its way into my heart and there it grew. My heart grew black and terrible bitter anger pulsed through my veins. I was not amongst the righteous and I could not go there to that dwelling house. I was not allowed. As I brooded over the eons, dark thoughts took shape in my mind and I vowed to fulfil them. Although no word passed my lips, and no movement came about in my body – which was akin to a vast, impossibly heavy stone – deep within me I plotted terrible insurrection. My thoughts became so dark that they took on a life of their own – they flew out of me by their own agency and in time became small, gnarled homunculi, wizened of feature and malicious in attitude. Armies of these loathsome homunculi gathered secretly in the dark places of the earth and their intention was to harm all righteousness wherever they would encounter it. No joy they knew– no understanding of joy or light-heartedness was possible for them. It was not in their constitution. Their faces never cracked into smiles; their faces cracked from time to time for other reasons (one such reason being poor skincare) but never in the cause of mirth. The closest these poor blighted homunculi ever came to joy was when they came across righteousness or innocence and defiled it. They were my children. They were my children although I intended no procreation. They had hatched out during the long ages of my malicious brooding and dispersed furtively here and there, seeking out the hidden places of the earth where they could hide. They were my children but I did not love them as a father should. They were after all unlovable creatures, full of spite and malignant envy. There were my progeny, born out of the darkness of my heart, and they gathered quietly in their masses, growing stronger over the years, eating smaller and weaker creatures when they could and despoiling the fair creatures of the earth, waiting for their chance to challenge and overthrow the forces of righteousness. And thus – under these very circumstances that I have just described – began the First Age Of Man.
