I added the "Mature" tag, for those that didn't see it before. For reasons obvious during the second half of the story.

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I love these high temperatures.

As my favourite pastime is either doing nothing, vacantly staring into the distance or sleeping, hot weather helps a lot, making me feel drowsy and forcing me to think “it’s too hot to do anything”.

Although I don’t need the excuse for lazing around, the thought is still nice.

Why this all of a sudden?

Because for the last thirty or so years – it’s hard to count them when you’re sleeping for the majority of it – I’ve been lying comfortably under the dessert sun.

Though the cold nights are a bother, but I sleep through most of them, so I don’t really have to mind them.

The ice and freezing I caused is long gone, of course.

I am not vain enough to think that I can freeze the earth indefinitely. I just froze it for a couple of millennia and then it thawed on its own, simple as that. I didn’t bother refreezing it again, since only the then-living deserved to suffer, so I only had to freeze it for long enough to kill off the living.

To be honest, I really hoped this time, I would die too.

But this was to be expected, as this wasn’t nearly as deathly as my previous tries.

This wasn’t the only time I’ve tried to kill myself before. Counting this, I tried a couple dozen times, ranging from a simple beheading to extensively torturing myself to death, but I simply came back after some time.

Before I met my lovely wife, I had already lived for far too long. Too long to even remember.

Even before I became the Ruler of Sloth, I impassively saw time fly by through the many, many years of my live. I saw the trees rising up from the ground, the creatures crawling out of the sea, the monkeys trying to use tools, the early humans establishing small settlements, large cities and even sprawling empires, afterwards collapsing and separating, to continue evolving further into separate species. Some of which, began following my example, becoming the People of Sloth and even evolving further to become the different Sins with their own respective Rulers and even the Supreme Beings and the Heroes.

A long time, as you could see.

And I merely watched passively, studying them, understanding them, trying to figure out the question of life, only to arrive at one answer:

It’s a bother.

For countless millennia, I saw them being born and dying in the blink of an eye, living without purpose and dying without reason. Even when life developed intelligence, there was no change.

So naturally, I got tired and tried to experience death, but, as you can see, it failed.

Luckily, the People of Sloth came, finding me buried in a cave somewhere and then, over time, beginning to live a similar lazy lifestyle, making them a quickly endangered species. So, I protected them and granted them powers to continue and extend their lifetime with ease and, in time, some split off from the rest, keeping their powers with them.

And, most importantly, from them, my wife was born.

She was extraordinarily powerful and as such, was pushed forward as the bride of their Ruler, namely me, though I only accepted her since it was a bother to refuse. She even took my name, Acedia, and, over time, was seen as my complementing half and was worshipped as such.

Where I was passive and indifferent, she was active and caring, though still keeping in line with the lifestyle of the Sloths. I watched her for a couple thousand years, until I truly accepted her and even slowly began loving her, having children, though they weren’t as long lived.

Can you imagine? After millions of years, I finally started what mortals call ‘have a life’.

Unfortunately, the betrayal happened and that was the end of my ‘life’.

So there I was, lying in the boundless sea of sand, returning to my way of living before I met my wife and even before the People of Sloth came into existence.

And this was the perfect place to do it, seeing as for the past thirty-something years not a single living creature was encountered.

That is, until now.

Naturally, I wasn’t paying attention. Why should I? Nothing lived here anyway.

So, as I lay sleeping comfortably underneath a sand-blanket soaking in the dessert sun, something suddenly shook me.

I ignored it, thinking some vulture was pecking me, until I heard a voice.

It being hoarse is an understatement. The voice sounded as dry as the dessert, longing for water and nearly forcing the longs out of the body with every sound.

“Mister? Are you awake?” the voice said as it shook me awake.

I played possum, hoping whomever it was would go away.

“Mister?” the voice said, once again shaking me.

Again, I did nothing.

Probably thinking I was dead, the person slowly closed in and took a large bite out of my neck, probably trying to both get some food and sucking out some of my remaining blood to finally get some fluid in the body.

A very natural thing to do in a situation such as this, to be fair. And since I’ve tried torturing myself to death a couple of times, I didn’t show the slightest reaction when she took a bite of me.

Unfortunately, my body is still a living thing.

As she took a bite, she naturally opened up the artery, so, along with the beat of my heart, a powerful spurt of blood shot out right into her eye.

The sudden sign of life made her stumble backwards, shrieking loudly and followed by an intense enough coughing fit to nearly kill her.

In between the coughing fits I could hear the voice saying “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” over and over again.

Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, from another’s perspective -, ever since the time with my wife and the People of Sloth, even the near-soulless I was forced to have at least some compassion for the poor thing. So, I slowly stood up, wiping the sand from my naked body sticking to me from the blood and forcing my neck wound to close, and looked at the person begging on her knees for forgiveness.

What I saw there, surprised even the experienced me.

A naked humanoid woman with two large horns sprouting from her forehead, slowly arching upwards, over her black-haired head, and descending at the back only to rise slightly upwards again, like the silhouette of a curving of a hill with the start of the next. On her beck, sprouting from her tail-bone, was a leathery black tail with at the end forming something like an arrows head.

It looked like a classical demon, one told in thousands and thousands of stories and legends throughout the ages of intelligent life, though having never actually – at least, to my knowledge – existed.

But this wasn’t the most surprising thing about her. There was something else, something shocking even to me.

Over her entire body, not a single spot skipped, were signs of torture no living thing – not even the vilest among them –should have experienced, nor survived.

Every part of the face, except for the left eye, was cut off or poked out. Nose, ears, lips, everything was gone. But that wasn’t even close to the worst thing visible on her body.

Covering the entire right half of her face, was a strange, unnaturally charcoal-black skin formed only after a specific and unnatural burning process involving magic. It wasn’t just scorched and then healed, forming a pink or red smooth skin over the burned area, as a normal burn would have.

No, it was a burning so perverse that it left nothing to chance. Carefully using magic, it was burned over and over again and then healed over and over again, forcing the magic inside the victim’s body to take over the healing process, after which a special seal was placed, forcing the skin to forever burn and forever heal. As such, it could never form scars or even skin, making the right half of her face look like a piece of meat having turned into charcoal, still with the glowing embers caused by the seal visible on her cheek.

And that was just her face.

Over her entire body was the signs of it having been carefully flayed until naught but flesh and muscle remained visible. Over this flesh, perpetrator had taken the skins of others and layered them over her, stitching them to gather and, along with healing magic, forcing it to attach to her muscles and flesh, making her look like a horrific living patchwork doll. In their cruelty, they had even cut off her breasts, her fingers, her toes and had closed the entirety of her vagina with a patch of molten skin, leaving only a minuscule hole for her to pee.

And, with my power-enforced eyesight, this was not the end.

The entirety of her innards were either misplaced, punctured or completely missing. Her brain had missing pieces being replaced by enchanted metal. Very precisely, every two centimetres of her intestines had a puncture in them. Her ribs were replaced with heavy metals, without any support magic to lighten the burden. Her womb, one kidney, part of her spleen, part of her pancreas, part of her lungs and a part of her stomach were cut off or entirely taken out.

The only thing of which I can be for certain they did not mess with, are the tail and the horns. They look almost too healthy in comparison to the rest of her body.

In all my life, the only matching cruelty I’ve ever seen was the one I did to myself, and that was my most desperate and final attempt at killing myself.

Outside of this, nothing even comes close to in comparison to this.... monstrosity.

It’s a wonder she’s still alive.

An even bigger wonder she’s still sane, though the enchanted metal in the brain probably had something to do with it.

Most likely, they didn’t like torturing a doll. Cruel bastards. I hope for them they’re dead, or else I will make them experience an even worse pain. I’ll make them a hell just for them. Continuous torment. No death allowed.

Whilst examining her, she stopped coughing and was now kneeling on the floor, begging to be spared while continuously apologizing in a wheezing voice.

I slowly started walking towards her, enveloping her with my aura, trying to sooth her, make her feel warm and somehow at home in this vastly empty dessert.

Slowly but surely, her shivering stopped, her heartbeat slowed, she stopped and her ragged breathing became steady.

“....Sleep.” I said lazily, forcefully cutting off her consciousness.