Etudie Perpetuity

Good and evil, a question of morality and ethics. Even my modern world was colored by talk of hell and heaven, justice and inequality, fairness and freedom. All manner of things that were either good or bad or somewhere in between. Many people spent their whole lives trying to figure out how to live a ‘good’ life and how to avoid ‘evil’ in their everyday existence.

If the Evil Eye controlled the domain of evil, that meant he possessed all possible knowledge of evil in this world. Based on my own experiences with the domain of time, I knew this meant the Evil Eye’s domain was full of contradictions. His head would be full of definitions of ‘evil’ that could not work together. According to some definitions, stealing would be bad. According to others, it could be justified. And unlike the modern world, where some manner of hand waving and agreeing to disagree would resolve such contradictions, somebody who derived power from this domain could not ignore these contradictions. The Evil Eye had to work with these definitions.

He couldn’t say evil was subjective, because there was some knowledge that claimed it was objective. That it didn’t matter which perspective you chose or what the observer felt, some things were morally wrong and that was that.

Thankfully, I didn’t need to get into the details of objective and subjective morality or of ethics in general. I took a course on ‘justice’ in college, and although I read a bunch of books about ethics later, I still couldn’t distill my thoughts into a few hundred words and explain everything concisely. But for now, all I had to do was come up with questions and poke holes in the Evil Eye’s carefully held-together conception of evil.

I also tried to poke some holes in his body too.

We landed back on top of the mountain with the temple on its peak. There were no signs of life around here, because I had sent them all away, so I let the Evil Eye crash into the hard stones of the temple’s walls. The big red eyeball let out a groan as it slid down the wall and twitched its tentacles on the ground.

I could hear Madness and the Simurgh fighting in the distance. Before hearing turned to seeing, I had to finish my business with the Evil Eye.

“Morality is like art, isn’t it, big guy?” I said as I walked over to the Evil Eye, cracking my knuckles a little comically.

The Evil Eye shuddered. He picked up his body with his tentacles and somehow faced me. Even though his entire body was an eye, he still managed to look like someone who had been punched in the face and had a black eye now. “Stay back, insolent outsider!”

I punched him again. “Don’t wanna.”

“Stop!” he said again.

I replied with a kick.

“I command you!” he said.

Punch.

“Riches! Women! Power beyond belief! I will give them to you!”

Jab.

“We can split the world. You can be king of everything on this side. I will take the other!”

Roundhouse.

“Please!”

Punch.

“Stop!”

Kick.

“I beseech you!”

Pummel.

“I beg you!”

Pierce.

“Anything but that. I will give you anything but my domains!”

I kept beating up the sentient eyeball without giving him a chance to retaliate.

“Your questions, I do not like them!” he shouted.

“Like, dislike. Are you saying evil is based on preferences? Subjective morality, I don’t like it,” I said as I punched him again.

The sky rumbled. The Evil Eye froze and looked up again.

“No, no! I am not saying anything! Do not claim to speak for me, elf! I am the God of Evil! Worshiped by millions, loved and feared in equal parts! I have existed since before time began. This world is mine. Mine! You are not worthy. Not worthy!” he screeched.

I slapped him into the ground. “Not worthy? Oh, does that mean you think morality is defined by worth and merit? That anything that goes against those notions is immoral and evil, was that what you were saying?”

The sky rumbled. The Evil Eye shook.

“No! Do not put words in my mouth!” he said.

I put my fist in his face instead. “You don’t have a mouth.”

“You do not understand evil! You cannot take it from me! I am evil personified. In this world, I am evil!” he said.

“Which implies the evil of this world is different from the evil in another world,” I said as I beat him up some more. “Hence, suggesting you believe in subjective morality after all.”

“No!” he said.

“If something was objectively evil in one set of circumstances, surely it must be evil in another as well, right?” I said.

“I never said that!” he shouted.

“Well, you’re gonna need to pick a side if you wanna have this debate with me,” I said with a kick.

“This is not a debate! You are beating me up on your own!” said the Evil Eye.

“I suppose that applies to both the physical beating you are receiving as well as the intellectual one,” I said, ripping a tentacle off his body. “You can’t keep avoiding these questions for ever. Every attempt to do so digs you deeper and deeper into the same hole.”

“I am not the one who is betraying his ignorance! Every question you ask takes you further from the domain of evil! What, did you think there would be no consequences to asking such inane questions? Ha! If you ask a question, that means you do not have an answer!” he said.

“No, it means I am looking for an answer,” I said as I punched him. The ground cracked. “Specifically, I am looking for your answer.”

“I am never going to give you anything!” he said as he sank deeper into the earth with every punch.

“Don’t be so sure of that,” I said. “What would you do if I started to give you my answers?”

The Evil Eye froze. Then he laughed. “If you begin giving me answers, I will be able to poke holes in them with questions of my own. All knowledge of all evil is contained within me and I have had millions of years to explore that knowledge. You cannot hope to defeat me. Not with questions in my own domain. Never! It isn’t possible!”

Punch.

“I observed you back in time. You are a mad dog. An animal. A monster. You haven’t once stopped to question your own powers, your own existence, your own reality. You have been content to be driven by your baser emotions. Greed. Anger. Malice. And of course,” I snuck a glance over my shoulder. In the distance, there was a cloud of smoke as large as a mountain.

Punch.

I punched him again.

And again.

And again.

Deeper and deeper into the earth until there was a pit shaped exactly like the Evil Eye and I could no longer look behind myself.

The sky was overcast by my design. The moon, which was still somehow in the daytime sky, could no longer be seen from my place in the pit. I kept punching.

I kept punching while asking questions. Incisive questions. A back and forth for the concept of evil, for the domain of evil, for the powers of evil that defined the Evil Eye. Yes, it defined him, didn’t it? It was in his name. A name my translation magic had given him way back then. The Immortal of Evil. I remembered the way the Immortals reacted to hearing their names from my lips. I knew there was something important there. Something dangerous.

Another punch.

“Your name,” I said. “You call yourself evil. Does that mean you consider your actions to be evil?”

The Evil Eye groaned. He was incapacitated but the damage to his physical self would heal eventually. His metaphysical self was still intact and uninjured. Most of my questions had been glancing off of him as if they were raindrops pelting a window, never able to enter inside.

“You will not hear what you want to hear from me,” he said.

“I do not need to hear anything from you,” I said raising a fist but not bringing it down. I didn’t bring it down at all. I stood still. Breathing in. Breathing out. It was dark down here, deep in the earth. Nobody could see me here. Nobody could sense what I was doing. Just like the space above the clouds was a no man’s land for the Immortals, being deep underground was similarly at odds with their existence. Nobody held the domain of the earth. It was neutral territory.

The Evil Eye twitched. It opened its eye tentatively. I could tell that he could see that I was standing over him with my fists held to my sides. He didn’t move.

“You named yourself Evil. That means you must consider yourself evil. You even said, you were the personification of evil in this world. There is no turning back from this, eyeball. This is the end. Your end. Or at least, the end of the ‘Evil’ Eye,” I said.

“What are you—” he said.

“Tell me,” I began. “If we assume an action is evil. Say, killing a sentient being in cold blood. Murder, as it is also known. If we say that murder is evil, can we say that monsters, who kill sentient beings all the time, are evil?”

“Vile outsider, I will never answer your pathetic questions! I am not a fool! I will not undermine my own power so easily!” said the Evil Eye.

“Then let me rephrase the question a little more. Say there was a being. A giant sentient eyeball, perhaps. And this being was created to commit murder. Its purpose, its entire reason for existing, was murder. It committed murder as naturally as I breathe air or a Fil Tusker eats fruit or any other being does any other thing that may be considered natural, mundane, and an essential part of our experience of existence,” I said, my voice growing louder.

The Evil Eye’s one giant eyeball somehow stretched further, as if his eye had widened. “No, wait, you can’t be—”

“Tell me, eyeball,” I said as I crouched down and smiled. “If you were born to be the Evil Eye, were you ever evil at all?”