Cruelty was bored, as those cheeky mortals who ‘worshipped’ Him often prayed for Him to be.

Because if He was bored, there was surely nothing interesting happening around. Well, unless you counted a few genocides, a couple of the more remarkable serial killers and suchlike, but… Cruelty had seen it all before.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good genocide — but when you can see everything, it sort of gets stale after a while.”

Of course, there was nobody around to hear Him, to worry about the god of pain and suffering that had taken to talking to Himself. He had tortured His angels to death long ago, during a similar spell of boredom. It turned out, even ‘immortal’ beings could die if you broke their will to live — so long as that immortality stemmed from themselves, and not some foreign source.

“Maybe I should try that again… I mean, I’m out of angels, so I’ll have to make do with regular mortals. Bah, they’re so fragile, though!”

With growing dissatisfaction, Cruelty wasted a few millennia making the little beings miserable. Inciting wars, crusades, and similar events that created pointless pain. Sure, it was nice, but it lacked artistry. There was just no soul in it. Eventually, He even took to selecting individual people to torture. Sometimes He’d cripple them for life and surround them with prejudice, others He’d simply make watch as loved ones were violated and slaughtered. Still, nothing helped the boredom. All the suffering He could inflict, all the different ways a person could be broken…

It all boiled down to one thing, didn’t it? The same tragic tale. The same pain.

He needed something new.

So the God of Cruelty sat high on a throne of broken glass, and looked down at the mortal realms. He pushed aside boredom and watched. An unblinking eye in the heavens, scrutinizing reality. The laws of physics. The rules of magic. The myriad worlds floating in the Void, barely kept from its clutches by Creation. The smallest of cells. The tallest trees. So long did He sit and watch with a patience He was known to lack, that some of the other gods noticed and jokingly dubbed Him the God of Blank Stares. Some minor deity appeared and looked vaguely upset, but none of the others could get them to speak. They just gave all the gods present a faraway look and left after a while. Cruelty, for His part, simply continued to watch until His audience grew bored of needling Him and left. He had moved on to watching mortals go about their daily lives, with the intent of simply studying their behaviors.

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But almost immediately, something caught His eye.

Humans — some of the angriest, most fragile monkeys he’d ever seen — milled about on a little ball of rocks they called Earth. Indeed, they dubbed the planet that gave them life ‘dirt.’ The lack of respect for their origins, for their own existence, was remarkable. He knew humans could be bad, but usually the other races kept them in check. On closer inspection, He confirmed it — this was a world where humans were left utterly alone. No magic, no gods, no other people besides them.

It was beautiful!

Cruelty’s stare gained intensity as He centered His entire focus on the polluted, ravaged ball of dirt. They had managed to ruin a truly impressive quantity of their world with nothing but their own mortality. Surprisingly, the rate of genocides and similar atrocities were rather similar to the rest of reality — but that wasn’t the part that interested Him. It was the way that the inglorious little monkeys managed to inflict individual suffering. Their cultures, their economy, their entertainment; exploitation and deception were found at every turn. Some of them realized this, but most didn’t. Others fixated on entirely fictional enemies and problems born of flawed perceptions, and added to the problem by simply existing. He watched them, all their many billions, for generations. To Him, it was like the blink of an eye; adjusting His perception of time to mortal standards was challenging, but He felt respect for the annoyance that it was.

One of the most fascinating things these humans did, was torture themselves. No, not individuals inflicting pain on each other — you could leave a single human alone in a quiet room, and it would often drive itself to insanity. Were they somehow capable of directly attacking their own psyche? Many of them appeared to harm themselves physically as well. Whether with blades, hot brands, blunt objects, or even the weapons given them by evolution — they seemed to share a kindred fascination for pain with Cruelty Himself. Out of curiosity, He selected one such monkey that seemed prone to harming itself, and peered inside its — his — head. What He found was disturbing.

It was a field of nightmares that put Hell itself to shame. His own creation, His beautiful plane of torment, outdone by the mind of a single mortal man. Everything about the disturbance was abstract, utterly irrational. In there was raw fear and anguish that defied reason, and resisted the man’s attempts to purge it like a parasite. It truly acted like a separate entity at times, and yet stemmed wholly from the poor monkey’s own mind. It was beautiful. It was inspired!

Suddenly, the God of Cruelty began to cackle, and many of the more powerful seers down in the mortal planes died of stroke.

He reached down to the forsaken dirt ball on the outskirts of reality, and plucked the monkey He’d been watching from its mundane abode.

He already knew exactly what he wanted to do with this screaming little ball of imperfection.

There was no soul in it, eh? He could fix that.