The world sprawled beneath them, a vast mosaic of light and shadow. Seth and Abel stood above it, unseen and unchanging, their presence anchored beyond time. They had watched the march of humanity since the first settlements rose from dust, since the children of Eve and Adam parted ways. Their father's lineage had thrived untouched, sealed from the corruptions that plagued Eve's descendants, and yet it was the flawed mortals that fascinated them most.
Seth's gaze fell upon the lands of Europe, wrapped in its filth and ignorance. He watched as its streets became open sewers, as the people huddled in squalor, their bodies racked with disease. The air was thick with the scent of rot, the stench of unwashed flesh and festering wounds. They shunned the rivers, believing water to be a carrier of sickness, and so they bathed rarely, if at all. Their homes were crumbling hovels, packed with vermin that scuttled across floors coated in human waste. Even the mighty castles of their so-called nobles were no different; their stone halls masked the same stifling putrescence.
And yet, despite their filth, they held themselves above others.
"They call themselves chosen," Seth mused, his voice heavy with quiet amusement. "And yet they sicken and die in their refuse."
Abel stood beside him, his gaze sweeping across the lands of Africa and the East. There, the air was different, the lands vibrant with life and wisdom. The people of Mali walked the clean streets of Timbuktu, their cities rich with scholars and poets. The empires of Songhai and Great Zimbabwe rose with meticulous planning, their rulers fostering trade and governance rather than drowning in bloodshed. Further still, in China, the Song Dynasty flourished with innovation, while the lands of Japan and the Khmer Empire constructed towering monuments of discipline and beauty.
"They understood what the others did not," Abel said. "That to shape the world, one must first master themselves."
"And yet," Seth sighed, "they will suffer for it."
They both turned their attention back to Europe, where greed festered like an open wound. Armies gathered, clad in steel and ignorance, rallying under banners they did not truly understand. They spoke of conquest and salvation, of bringing civilization to the world beyond their shores, yet their lands were crumbling, their people barely more than walking corpses infested with parasites.
They did not cleanse their hands before they ate.
They defecated in the same waters they drank from.
They sneered at the people who understood the value of cleanliness, of order, of harmony with the land.
And so they waged war.
The Crusades, violent and senseless, tore through lands far beyond their understanding. They slaughtered men who washed before prayer, and desecrated cities where knowledge was cherished. They brought nothing but ruin, driven not by faith, but by hunger—hunger for gold, for power, for something greater than themselves. And when they fell to sickness, when their ignorance turned against them, they wailed and called it divine punishment, never once looking to their own filth-stained hands.
The horrors only worsened with time. The Black Death arrived, a plague of their own making, festering in their filth and ignorance. Corpses piled in the streets, the very air thick with the stench of death. They clawed at the heavens for mercy, cursing a fate they had sealed themselves. And yet, as always, their suffering was not confined to their lands.
Europe hungered.
And so they turned their eyes outward.
The Age of Exploration—an age not of discovery, but of theft, of desecration. They boarded their creaking ships, bringing with them the plagues that festered in their lungs. They landed on shores untouched by their filth, where people lived in harmony with the land, where societies thrived in ways they could not comprehend. And rather than learn, rather than humble themselves before the wisdom of others, they burned it all down.
The great civilizations of the Americas fell to their sickness. The Aztecs, the Incas, the great nations of the Mississippian people—all reduced to ash, their people choking on the foreign plagues they had no defense against. The Europeans did not conquer with strength or wisdom; they conquered with disease, with filth, with rot. They watched entire nations wither before their feet and claimed it as divine providence, as proof of their supposed superiority.
Abel's hands curled into fists.
"It is not war," he said. "It is murder."
Seth was silent, his expression unreadable as he watched the flames consume what had once been vibrant and full of life. He had long since abandoned the idea that mortals could be taught, that they could change before the weight of their sins crushed them. It was not within their nature.
He turned his gaze back to Adam's dominion, to the untouched paradise of their father's making. It had not changed. It had not suffered. It stood as it always had, gleaming and whole, the blood of Eve's lineage never once staining its soil.
Abel exhaled. "Do you pity them?"
Seth did not answer immediately. He watched as the people of the world, both conqueror and conquered, moved through the endless cycle of history. The ouroboros burned in the distance, glowing in the hands of the forsaken mother who had begun it all. Eve's line would always hunger, would always destroy, would always spiral into itself.
And yet, as much as he hated to admit it, there was something different in their suffering. Something that did not exist within their own perfect, stagnant dominion.
"Perhaps," he murmured. "Perhaps I do."
The world turned beneath them, heedless of the silent gods who watched, waiting for the next inevitable tragedy to unfold.