Good End

Helen looked nervously to the harem as the fruit was placed in her hand. “All this time, I’ve been saying that I’d wish myself ugly, but that seems so small and petty now.”

“Yes.” Satan crossed his arms. “Let’s not wish me an ugly bride, hmm?”

Helen glowered at him, and the turned to Eve. “Then you trusted your children to me, and I want to honor that.”

Eve beamed. “I know you won’t let me down.”

That’s a lot of pressure. Helen used her first place mind to think the question over. “But I still think I was right. If would be better if we didn’t have to worry about people finding us beautiful, but it’s not just that. Agamemnon couldn’t have cared less about how I looked. He wanted Troy and all its riches, food, clothes, money, slaves, it’s these damn bodies.”

Olympias was in esctasty, the audience had been right to give her this trait. Here Helen was on the edge of godhood, contemplating to cure the human condition. It was the same reward Alexander had allowed her to enjoy all those millennium ago.

Helen’s mind has been started now, and had no intention of stopping. “All the things we fight about, land food, money is all for our bodies. Our minds, our spirits get co-opted and commodified in this world. So I wish humans had no bodies! I wish we were pure, will, pure thought inhabiting the realm of forms.”

——-

No one had expected Helen of Troy to bring about the end of man, but it should have been obvious. Had she not been the tool of destruction used by the gods to rid the world of their Demi-god spawn?

To the producers, and to the other beings who observe humans, they seemed to vanish. Here one moments gone the next. Cloths, and cars, and countries thrown to the side like a broken toy. It was like some kind of rapture.

Everyone moved on, sad that this entertainment or that toy was lost, but the multiverse was vast. There would be other races to challenge, more horrors to inflict, and overcome. The humans were gone, they’d found their out.

Decades passed, the earth healed.

The monuments of man which seemed eternal began to crack. Plants grew over these structures and chipped away at them. The world seemed somber and abandoned thanks to these overgrown structures. But the Earth was lush, and alive, and thriving without those well meaning parasites bleeding it dry.

——-

Helen sat atop a hill, giving a curious stare to the vine covered towers of what once was, the modern world. She died long before such things could be imagined and to her they looked as alien and foreign to her as anything in a sci fi movie, these people must have been amazing.

Funny, In its own way. How little they’d changed since her times. They’d done so much, grew so little.

Before the queen of hell walking the earth would have been cause for Armegeddon, but no one much cared these days. What exactly was she going to corrupt with her presence?

“Happy Anniversary.” Satan said, rising up the hill behind her.

“You remembered.” Helen gave a small smile.

“Hard not to, it’s been fifty years since me or God earned a soul. You ruined by favorite game, you’re a very bad wife.” He sat next to her.

She ignored his ribbing. “I always feel like you’re cheating on me with God. He’s all you think about.”

He grinned. “That’s the trouble with dating an Angel, they’ll always love God more that you.”

She stifled a moan. It was so hard to be a cuck when you were all your husband desired, but this talk did get her going. “Maybe I’m just being jealous.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

He put an arm around her. “Why did you come up here. This place isn’t as fun without humans to torment.”

Helen gave a gentle gesture to the world. “I wanted to be near them. I’m getting nostalgic in my old age.”

“Them? You mean the humans?”

“Mhm.” She smiled vigorously. “They’re all around us, living an existence we can barely imagine. No suffering, no war, they’re living in perfection.”

Satan snort. A mean kind of gesture for someone he proclaimed to love. “Imagine it is the only thing you can do. Don’t you see? That’s the trick. You wished them to all be thoughts, and that’s all they are now.”

“You think I killed them too.” Helen scoffed, and crossed her arms. It was a commonly repeated accusation in hell, by the demons and tormentors. Helen stopped the flow of souls and starved them all.

“Not on purpose!”

“How egotistical.” Helen shook her head. “They live in truth now, like gods. It’s nonsensical by nature, but you think that just because we can’t see them they don’t exist.”

Satan shrugged. “Well I’m here to implant doubt, but even you have to admit that winning a wish you don’t see the fruit of is a little anticlimactic.”

To Helen it seemed perfectly natural.

Once man was gone, and their buildings tumbled all that was left of them was their myths and legends. Heaven and hell filled to the brim with past and future.

It was natural that now that the humans inhabited the land of thought that their thoughts now inhabited the world. Their children, their hopes and fears now had a world to inherit.

“People thought Troy was a myth, for centuries. But people knew about me. They knew my story, my struggles, even when the city was erased from the earth. And it was real. Me, a story existed when nothing else did.”

Satan looked out at the abandoned Earth. “When people tell stories, they usually skip dinner, work, and the bathroom…”

“The world never mattered, it was the ideas, that the story was about.”

Curious thought. “And what kind of thoughts are the human race building their new world upon?”

“I can only guess.”

“If you had to guess.”

She grinned. “Good triumphing over evil.”

Satan scoffed. “A society built on tropes, how inspiring.”

“They’re tropes for a reason.”

“And what reason is that?”

There was the face that launched a thousand ships, smiling in triumph. Before her a city was laid to waste. Only this time it was a victim of circumstance, and she wasn’t a pawn in the game of divinity. Helen of Troy, queen of Hell. “It’s because they’re true.”