Yaaroghkh liked Caedes. Sure, he was a demonic cultivator - one of the most powerful he’d ever met, based off the revolting miasma that surrounded the man and made him want to retch - but he was steady and honest, if a little cynical, and reminded Yaaroghkh of long ago when he supped with Crates and disputed with Aristippus of Cyrene. Some might think this was too quick a judgement of character on Yaaroghkh’s part, but it is not just Santa who knows how to see into a man’s heart.
Caedes was young, with a lithe body, firm jaw, and light red hair. His appearance was neat and tidy. He wore dark blue khakis and a dark blue sports jacket, with gold trim down the sides. The broad-brimmed fedora on the nearby hatrack was evidently his, as was the duffle bag on the floor (black, in impeccable condition). All this was particularly notable given the state of his surroundings, which had been in disrepair decades ago and had more recently come to be a living space for all manner of garbage and refuse, and then there were his companions. Yaaroghkh had only seen them for a moment, but he was a janitor by inclination as much as by trade, and had noticed immediately how apathetic they were about their persons.
“I suppose you can tell I’m a demonic cultivator,” Caedes said, prompting Yaaroghkh to laugh (or, rather, he juddered horribly, tendrils of gelatinous ooze oscillating with mirth).
“But what you can’t tell is why I’m a demonic cultivator,” Caedes continued, downing another shot of brandy (ah, the joys of cultivation, like drinking truly inhuman amounts of hard liquor). In the absence of any evidence of other people, the two had decided to break out the totality of the alcohol supply. And thus it was a well-lubricated Caedes who delivered his Tragic Villain’s Backstory.
“I did not come to demonic cultivation by choice. I wanted to be a doctor, long long ago. Both my parents had died to the plague - the one thing that unites heroes and villains is a tragic childhood - and, dimly, I wanted to prevent other children from experiencing the same fate. The usual sob story, although possibly I’m reading too much thought into the mind of a six year old. Maybe I just thought the stethoscope looked cool.” He put a slice of cheese on a cracker, crunching it down with a single bite. His eyes were misty as they looked back into the past.
“And then, on my eighth birthday, cultivators came to the orphanage. I had never met, or even heard, of cultivators before, and the sight of half a dozen men walking around in thin silk robes in October confused me. Still, it’s a weird world, full of weirder people, so I ignored them and continued chipping away at my maths homework.”
Yaaroghkh nodded in approval. Cultivators were generally silly and frivolous people, and it was best to ignore them and their equally silly and frivolous antics.
“I have dim memories of them speaking to the matron, telling her they were with one of the orthodox sects - the Dying Tiger Sect - and informing her that they’d be appraising the children to see if they had any spiritual roots. Informing, mind, not asking, and appraising as if we were no more than animals to be used.” Here his voice, which had maintained its equanimity thus far, took on a note of bitterness, and Yaaroghkh patted his knee (or, possibly, licked him) consolingly.
“She protested, of course - matron was a good sort; don’t believe those stereotypes they tell you about orphanage heads - and of course they did what all cultivators do. Cried ‘you dare? You’re courting death,’ and cut her down where she stood.” He nursed his glass for a moment, downing another shot.
“They lined us all up, then, with matron’s body still visible on the floor. Then the leader went down the row, and one by one evaluated our spiritual roots. I’m sad to say we were a sorry lot - ‘poor,’ ‘poor,’ ‘very poor,’ he said as he went, and when he reached me ‘none at all.’ Of the two dozen of us who lived there, only one had a spiritual root above ‘poor,’ although that probably made her the poorest of us all. The unfortunate girl had some heavenly something or other body - the type of body fit for a protagonist - and the delighted orthodox cultivator took her screaming under his arm, and prepared to leave.
“Before he left, however, he gave careful directions to the weakest cultivator, Keith, to dispose of the evidence - which is to say, us. You know how it is. So there we were. Twenty four orphans, alone with Keith. He'd taken us out into a clearing in the woods, and dug a large hole - which was a little impressive, since most of the cultivators I know can't do physical labour worth a darn, though he had a shovel in his spatial ring so he must have done this before. And then, one by one by one, he did the deed he'd been tasked."
He downed another shot. Yaaroghkh, sensing that it was the appropriate time for an interjection, leaned forwards and asked "so how did you escape?"
"Escape? I didn't escape. I survived through sheer good fortune. He decided to save me for last, and that's the only reason I lasted. Moments after tossing my last mate into that pit, we heard a thump, thump, thump, coming through the woods. Something was loping towards us, and whatever it was it was huge and fast. An animal, I assumed, attracted by the smell of blood; I had no ability to sense qi at the time, and couldn't tell why Keith was so afraid. A moment later I found out, for what came into the clearing was no wolf or bear, but a demon - a massive creature, with rubbery blue skin, bulging eyes, and a voluminous pair of bat's wings on his back. It prowled like a gorilla into the clearing, its claws clicking as it roved across the pine needles."
The light of recognition flashed in Yaaroghkh's sixty eyes, and Caedes cracked a mirthless grin.
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"I see you recognise him."
Yaaroghkh nodded. "Guleghareg the Devourer. It's been a millennium since we've met - thankfully. His habits are disgusting."
Caedes smirked. "Indeed. I won't say the battle was fast, because there wasn't one. Keith screamed, and ran, and died. Guleghareg the Devourer lived up to his name. A fate I, too, would have experienced, except I had no spiritual roots and thus there was nothing to devour. A fate well avoided, frankly - I’d rather not spend eternity buried with Keith."
He looked expectantly at Yaaroghkh. Yaaroghkh stared uncomprehendingly back (he also stared incomprehensibly, but that's another matter).
"Well?" Caedes prompted.
"Well what?"
"Aren't you going to ask why my unfortunate encounter with murderous orthodox cultivators, and ensuing lucky salvation, led me to conclude that good is bad and bad is good and thence to demonic cultivation?"
"No? You don't seem silly enough to reach such a ridiculously superficial conclusion about human nature, and anyways nobody who's met Guleghareg the Devourer would conclude that demonic cultivators were good. Besides, I never interrupt a story that's being told: that's bad listening." (Yaaroghkh had always been a pious elf, and as a child had been meticulous in his study of scriptures like Momo.)
Caedes clucked. "Bad listening, to be sure, but some of us plan for them as part of the story’s telling."
Yaaroghkh rolled his eyes, mouths, and ears. "Fine. So those who claimed to stand for the light betrayed you, and this led you to embrace the darkness?”
“No. Close, but no. I stood there for hours in that silent forest, once Guleghareg had left, alone save for the denizens of the pit. I stood there alone, and pondered. I understood, of course, that just because someone calls themselves one thing they can be quite another, and knew that oftener than not what someone is calls themselves is precisely the opposite of what they are. The matron was a good woman, as I said, and had taken care to teach us well early. No, what I pondered is of an entirely different nature.
“You have to remember that until just a few hours prior, I never knew there was true evil in the world. Awful things, sure, but not evil. And yet in the space of that afternoon I’d discovered that evil was, and that it wielded powers on par with my wildest imaginings. All of a sudden my dream of becoming a doctor faded away as the sheer magnitude of the evil to be destroyed swam before my eyes.”
Once more he paused, waiting for the interjection. This time Yaaroghkh was quicker on the update, and burbled the expected question in a horrific and sibilant whisper.
“So it’s not that you walked the path of demonic cultivation, but that you stared too long into the abyss, and the abyss stared back?”
“And why would I just sit there, staring into the abyss?”
Yaaroghkh considered this seriously. “I suppose you could take a break from staring occasionally, but in my view the statement is intended in a more qualitative, rather than quantitative, sense. Keeping in mind the essence of the temporal as applied to the phenomenal, however-”
“No no, why would I ever stare at all? That would be rude.”
“ …rude?”
“Think about it. Say you’re the abyss, and one day you’re just going about your abyssiness [ba dum tsh], you know, cooking a nice dish of nothing, snuggling up with your wife (Hesiod denies the abyss has a wife, but what does he know?), or taking a shower with your rubber ducky, when all of a sudden you look up and see some wannabe vigilante gazing down at you, trying to pry out your darkest secrets. Does that strike you as particularly polite?”
Illumination struck Yaaroghkh. After all, the unwritten clause in that great epic of Claus - ‘he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake’ - was that Santa does not see you using the toilet. (1 ~ see below) This was why the elves kept all the photos they liked to drool over in the bathroom - like their Christmas Cookie Photo Albums. For there, they knew, Santa would never see them.
“So you never intended to walk the path of demonic cultivation at all, then?”
“Correct. What knowledge I sought and where I sought it are stories for another time,” he demurred, for the first of the sun’s rays could be seen shining through the window (and they were out of alcohol), “but I will note that there is nothing done that cannot be undone, and no path that cannot be taken. Eventually, I was able to walk the path of cultivation, and when I did I walked the path of demonic cultivation. ‘The enemy is our shape in the form of a question,’ someone said, and I wanted to understand that question, and see why it had to be asked at all.
“So you see,” he finished, a feverish tint in his eyes and the pitch of voice, “when I said nobody knows evil quite like me, I was exaggerating but not lying. There are none in this city who are as familiar with its wickedness than I, none who know as well the rivers of lifeblood which move corruption through its rotting husk. And there are none who are as intimate with the mechanism whereby such villainy is encouraged to fester in the first place - for there are none here who have sought to understand evil like I have. Hence if you want to find the ones who threaten Christmas, there are none who can help you as well as I.”
Yaaroghkh considered this, and then nodded, holding out one squamous tentacle. Caedes grabbed it with his hand, and there in that decrepit and mouldering edifice was born a friendship that would bring the City of Tombstones to its knees.
(1) “He knows when you’re awake - which implies cognition, but not necessarily perception. Since Santa’s Naughty List is based first and foremost off character, not deeds - see the phrase ‘so be good for goodness’ sake’ - information on one’s activities is purely incidental to his gift-giving mission. In Kantian terms, Santa has analytic a priori knowledge on one’s moral state.” - Elfcrates, in Elfo’s The Yule Republic 500d. Elfistotle, however, disagrees, writing in his Metaphysics of Merriment that Santa’s knowledge is synthetic a priori (without disputing that it’s not tied to sensory perception as such). The consensus view among elves, however, is that the Elfinlander idealist Carl August von Elfenmayer was correct in asserting that Santa’s cognition is extratemporal and extraspatial and hence questions of its relation to sense perception are irrational in the first place. ~ Editor)