“
Theirs was a human evil, a product of their own flawed natures. Faulty genetics might have played a part in what they became, or childhood abuse. Tiny blood vessels in the brain corrupting, or little neurons misfiring, could have contributed to their debased natures. But free will also played a part, for I did not doubt that a time came for most of those men and women when they stood over another human being and held a life in the palms of their hands, a fragile thing glowing hesitantly, beating furiously its claim upon the world, and made a decision to snuff it out, to ignore the cries and whimpers and the slow, descending cadence of the final breaths, until at last the blood stopped pumping and instead flowed slowly from the wounds, pooling around them and reflecting their faces in its deep, sticky redness. It was there that the true evil lay, in the moment between thought and action, between intent and commission, when for a fleeting instant there was still the possibility that one might turn away and refuse to appease the dark, gaping desire within. Perhaps it was in this moment that human wretchedness encountered something worse, something deeper and older that was both familiar in the resonance that it found within our souls, yet alien in its nature and its antiquity, an evil that predated our own and dwarfed it with its magnitude. There are as many forms of evil in the world as there are men to commit them, and its gradations are near infinite, but it may be that, in truth, it all draws from the same deep well, and there are beings that have supped from it for far longer than any of us could ever imagine.
”
”