The heavens were boiling, black fires raged across the sky. Through the twisting eye of the cataclysmic storm, the angels cast a look down to earth, where humanity toiled, and they thought:

Truly, now they are lost.

It had all begun the day that the man had lost his wife in an accident. Or perhaps, it had begun the day he had met her and fallen in love, for had he not met her and loved her, he couldn't have lost her. Or perhaps it had begun the day he was born. For had he not been born...

Perhaps it was even earlier than that – when another man had watched the fires of his own creation ascend into the sky, like a blazing purple angel on its way back to heaven, and he had remarked: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Perhaps it had really begun on that day, when the world stood still, and they watched as they became Death, and all sons of bitches.

Perhaps it had begun even earlier than that, on the day the first man lit the first fire, not to warm his body or cook his food, but to set the world ablaze, just to watch it be consumed by flame.

Perhaps it all goes back to the first man who lifted the stone above his head, and brought it down onto another. When he killed, not for the hunt, and not for the sport, but for the hate.

It doesn't matter now where it began. From that point on, at any rate, it was a descent: a tumbling, raging, thrashing, screaming, agonizing fall, into the depths of this dark place that we find ourselves in now.

How exactly did we get here, you ask?

Why, we only did what we were always best at, and at the same time, worst: being human.

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This is a "story within a story", it's the prologue to the book "Dark Abyss" which makes an appearance in the 10th circle:

https://www.wattpad.com/story/142239169-the-10th-circle-abyss