Smoke and Mirrors

“‘He should not have been destroyed like that. That was wrong.’

“‘It was His will.’

“Lucifer stood. ‘Then perhaps His will is unjust. Perhaps the voices in the Darkness speak truly, after all. How can this be right?’

“‘It is right. It is His will. I merely performed my function.’

“He wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. ‘No,’ he said flatly.”

This is the kind of thing you wonder about when you make up things for a living.

Even the better protected files corrupt,

and the best protected corrupt absolutely.

And our latest project was Death. It's one of the hard ones—one of the big ones, too, I suspect. Possibly it may even become the attribute that's going to define the Creation for the Created: If not for Death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning—a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross...

It was also, they added, Very Now, which was important in a town in which an hour ago was Ancient History.