I was free to leave the transformed version of the castle. I took the northeast path through the restored kingdom (which was now called the Kingdom of Altruse, not that I cared). This path would lead me straight to Misery Peak. Driven by my hatred of Vulgra and my desperation to save Mag, I walked through the night and the following day, refusing to rest, and reached the base of Misery Peak as the following night approached.

Before taking my first step onto this black, rocky mountain, I took a long, deep breath, as if it were the last breath I would ever take. Once I reached the top, I knew I could never go back to what I was now. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care what climbing Misery Peak would do to me. I didn’t care that I was cold and exhausted. I didn’t care that I only had one shoe and was a tattered, dirty, bloody, vomit-covered mess. I had to do this for Mag. And so I began my footslog up the rocky slope.

After an hour, I noticed a single wildflower, a firewheel, just off the mountain trail, growing from a small, defiant patch of grass. I held the faint light on my staff up to this flower. Its red and yellow color quickly drained from it. Then the patch of grass became colorless, too, as did everything, except for me, Mag’s fire, and the few stars I could still see beyond the blanket of smoke above me (though even they seemed muted now). I felt like a munchkin who had been transported from Oz to Kansas.

I walked several hours more, and my legs were now burning like all hell. I wished that Vulgra had just given me a lift to the top along with Mag, but I supposed the talismans wouldn’t have allowed it. Besides, it soon became apparent that, like many things that had happened to me since I arrived in this dimension, this wearying climb was yet another part of Vulgra’s intricate plan.

Visions now appeared before me. It was as though Vulgra had set up multiple invisible projectors and screens on which it played videos of various selfish and wicked acts that the humans of Earth had committed. I couldn’t physically interact with these illusions, nor could I ignore them. Wherever I turned my head, the visions followed. I could see them even if I closed my eyes.

At first, the visions were tame: I saw people returning shopping carts in a crooked mess in the ultimate act of rebellion against the young man on minimum wage who would have to straighten them out later. I saw people littering, employees ignoring the sign saying they must wash their hands, drivers not stopping to let pedestrians cross at crosswalks. It was nothing shocking. It was all things that most of us do every now and then, and they usually don’t cause any harm.

Not long after these visions started appearing, I had climbed high enough that I was now walking through the cloud of smoke that surrounded this mountain. The smoke was so thick that I could barely see the fire on the end of my staff, though the illusions around me remained clearly visible.

Now that I was inside Vulgra, it spoke to me. “Thank you for coming, Emerson. I apologize for the long climb ahead of you, but you need to see the images presented by this mountain as the last step of your preparation. You must understand the extent to which your species is evil by observing the deplorable acts they have committed. You must lose that last, despicable shred of hope in humanity that your father and Mag have given you.”

“Your plan won’t work,” I said. “Because I know that anything deplorable that I might see was caused by you. People aren’t evil. You make them evil. And no amount of shopping carts is going to change my mind.”

“I do not make anyone do anything. Remember: I am incapable of forcing anyone to do anything against their will. The visions depict actions that humans would perform regardless of whether the Butterfly Guild or I could influence them. I should warn you that the visions will become increasingly disturbing as you ascend this mountain. What you’ve seen so far is but the tip of the pyramid.”

Vulgra wasn’t lying about that. As I continued climbing, I saw the things that people do when no one’s looking and how they can destroy lives. The first destroyed life I saw was that of a girl whose parents had the same parenting style as my mom: that careless, cold, repeated-blows-to-the-head parenting style. Also, they didn’t like her talking, so she became frightfully shy and didn’t make any friends at school.

After struggling through school, she met this guy who I was really hoping she wouldn’t end up with because he was a selfish jerk and often drank too much. But they did end up getting married, mostly because the girl’s parents scared her into thinking she would die alone if she didn’t marry while she was still young and, as they put it, “not completely ugly.”

They went on their honeymoon. On the second morning, she woke up just knowing she had gotten pregnant the night before. She was happy about this, as she had always wanted to be a mother. She was determined that, if she accomplished nothing else, she would be a decent, loving mom. She’d be nothing like her parents, and she would raise a happy child. She spent the remainder of the honeymoon actually looking forward to the future for once and finally understanding why anyone ever said life was a precious gift.

I thought that was pretty honorable. For a lot of people, a crappy childhood would destroy them. They’d use it as an excuse to not care about anyone or anything, just as I had. But this woman was going to do good by it, dammit. This made my hope in humanity increase, not decrease.

For a moment, I thought Vulgra had made a mistake in showing this woman’s life to me. But Vulgra doesn’t make mistakes.

The wife could barely contain her excitement when a pregnancy test confirmed her suspicion. However, when she broke the news to her husband, he responded by saying, “I thought we agreed we’re not ready for children yet.” (They hadn’t. He had gotten together with himself to agree on that.) And he said some stuff about focusing on his career and how he couldn’t have a crying baby waking him up at all hours of the night if he wanted to make partner. He was emotionless as he listed the reasons against them having a baby, like he was reading a business report.

The way the joy on the wife’s face turned into despair was heartbreaking. Even more heartbreaking was the way she apologized for getting pregnant, like she was the one who had stuck her gross, unwashed penis inside him. She also agreed to hide the pregnancy and have the baby adopted. She did these things because the husband said this is what she must do, “or else” (I’m going to skip over some details here, but “else” meant violence).

I witnessed the birth and watched this woman’s face as the doctor took her baby away. I could see how much she wanted to love that baby. But she had no choice. She had to give it up. She no longer had any contact with her parents, had no friends, had no job to support herself, had nowhere to go. She had to do what her husband said.

After giving up her baby, she stopped caring about anything. She knew her husband was never going to be ready for a child.

The husband also made her get a part-time job at a grocery store. She had never wanted that, but her husband needed the extra money to make the payments on his boat. He also blamed her for this. “If you weren’t so gaht dang annoying, I wouldn’t need a boat to get away from you in the first place,” he said.

So then this woman was the one who had to rearrange all those crooked shopping carts that I mentioned earlier. According to her manager, it was “a good job for a lady because it don’t take much brains.”

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The vision fast-forwarded a few years. On this particular day, the wife was inspired to buy some painting supplies.

The husband was not happy about this. “What do you need all that shit for?” he asked when she came home.

“I was thinking maybe I’d learn how to paint,” the wife said.

“Yeah, I got that from the fucking paint brushes in your hand,” the husband said. “I mean why do you want to waste your time doing that? Why don’t you learn yourself something useful, like how to cook a halfway decent dinner?”

“Sorry,” she said. “You’re right. It was a silly idea. I’ll return these things tomorrow.”

But she didn’t return them. Instead, she hid her painting supplies in the basement and painted during every spare moment she had while her husband was at work or out on his boat. She had a knack for painting animals, including some that didn’t exist but were beautiful nonetheless.

As time went on, she got more supplies and mastered more techniques, and within a few years, she had gotten very good. It was like she could paint onto the canvas the love she’d always wanted to give to the children she never had. Her paintings were her children. They had magic in them, and I reckon she could have sold them for a bundle.

She eventually became confident enough that she decided she would display and sell some of her work. The first obstacle in this endeavor was her husband. She would have to confess that she had disobeyed him and had been painting in secret. But painting was her passion, and she hoped he would be supportive once he saw how good she was. Also, as a clincher, she would say maybe she could make enough money to pay off his boat.

She made her announcement by showing him what was by far her best painting: a piece she called Ballena Gris.

Unsurprisingly, the husband wasn’t supportive at all. When she revealed the painting, he said, “The fuck is that s’posed to be?”

“It’s that whale we saw on our honeymoon. Remember? The one that came right up to our boat and let us pet her?”

“Pfffft! That whale wasn’t that big. You see, this is why I told you paintin’ were a waste o’ time. You got to have some actual talent for that kinda thing,” the husband said, returning to his newspaper as tears rolled down the wife’s cheek. “The fishin’ sure was bitchin’, though. Good times.”

The next day, the wife burned all her artwork. And the day after that, she got hit by a bus and died. It didn’t look like an accident.

I was transported to this woman’s funeral. But I wasn’t merely an observer of this illusion; I was in the illusion. I approached the open casket to pay my respects. I looked down at the body lying in the coffin.

It was me as a baby.

Every scrap of worthlessness this woman had ever felt, every heartbreak she had ever experienced, shot through me. I screamed and leaped away from the casket, right out of the illusion and back onto the mountain trail.

It was now snowing. I was freezing and terrified. The only thing holding me together was the flame glowing on the end of my staff. Mag was still alive, and thinking about her reminded me that not all life is tragic.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked Vulgra, my voice trembling.

“Because to fully understand how people choose to make other people feel, you need to experience such feelings firsthand,” Vulgra responded.

“But that was just one bad man who made that woman feel that way,” I said. “That doesn’t make everyone bad.”

“But it wasn’t just one man. Everyone who entered that woman’s life played a role. Even the customers whose groceries she rang through are guilty. She was visibly unhappy, but not one person asked if she was okay or if they could help her. The most they would do—if they noticed her at all—would be to grumble about how miserable she was as they left the store.

“All she needed was someone to be nice to her. One small random act of kindness from a stranger could have blossomed into a friendship, a source of support and encouragement for her to share her art. She could have made enough money to leave her husband. She was still young enough to raise children. They would have inspired her to create even more beautiful art, and her artwork could have inspired other people and enriched their lives in turn.

“Anyone could have saved her, for all humans have the remarkable abilities to feel empathy, to imagine what things could be like in the future, and to act to make that future a reality. But nobody wanted to use these powers to help this woman. Thus, her life was a tragedy. As are most people’s, as you will soon see.”

“Please, no!” I cried. “I don’t want to see any more! How much further must I climb?”

“It depends.”

“How can it depend? Isn’t distance a fixed thing?”

“No, not on Misery Peak. This mountain path is like the endless stairs in Super Mario 64. Your climb will end once you have done what is needed. But instead of accumulating stars, you need to lose faith in your fellow humans.”

I hated that Vulgra knew precisely what terms to use to make me understand. It was like it was in my head.

As I trekked further up the mountain, the snowfall growing ever heavier, Vulgra showed me the tragic stories of many other people’s lives, each one more depressing than the last. I would share more of them with you in detail, but I’m worried you’d want to kill yourself if I did. Had I not had Mag’s fire to soothe me, I would have killed myself several times. So, I hope it suffices to say that some of the other lives Vulgra showed me were several hundred times worse than the one I have already described. And at the end of all of them, I was forced to feel every drop of pain that each of these tormented souls had felt.

Occasionally, Vulgra juxtaposed the images of evil against images of average people having happy times. For example, on one side of the mountain trail, I would see a mother viciously beating her child; at the same time, I would see a happy group of young people drinking and dancing and making merry on the other side. Or perhaps I would see Nazis ransacking Jewish families’ homes to my left, but then I could look over to my right and see successful, happy adults sharing stories and laughing at dinner parties. At one point, I saw an image of Mag and me greedily scarfing down Hawaiian pizza next to an image of pigs being slaughtered, I assumed to eventually be used as toppings on subsequent pizzas. According to Vulgra, the events that I could see on either side of me had occurred simultaneously in my world at one time or another.

The “good” images were not being shown to me in the interest of fairness, however, and seeing the happy side of the mountain did nothing to pacify my fury or restore my faith in anyone. Seeing these joyous occasions and knowing they had occurred at the same time as the heinous acts made the happy people seem awful. How dare they experience joy in a world full of such misery? How dare they feel comfort when they should have been laboring to save those who needed saving?

At one point, I got so angry at the happy people that I forgot they couldn’t hear me, and I shouted at them. I demanded that they stop dancing and do something about the six-year-old girl who’d been kidnapped, sold to the highest bidder, and was now getting the shit raped out of her. But they couldn’t hear me, and they couldn’t see what was happening. If they could have seen it with their own eyes, if the evil was only a few feet in front of them, at least one or two of them would have helped that child. But people always choose to ignore evil as long as it’s happening far enough away. Because people simply aren’t good.

I had now seen the full extent of the hatred—or, at best, the complete disregard—people had for each other. I could feel the anger frothing inside me. I was furious with everyone, including myself, for letting the world be what it was. My dark thoughts had been spot on. If anything, they hadn’t been dark enough. People weren’t just jerks. They were pure evil.

By the time I reached the summit of Misery Peak, the Destruction Rod was so dark that I wouldn’t have even known it was there if I wasn’t holding on to it (or perhaps it was holding on to me now). The hands that clasped the Destruction Rod had turned gray. Mag’s flame continued to glow red, but it did nothing to quench my rage.

I was no longer the boy I had been at the bottom of this mountain. I had seen too much, and I had lost the part of myself that Mag had begged me to hang on to. I was now a man.