Thanks to being headbutted by myself (sadly one of the less weird things to happen lately) I finally remember it. The beginning.

It took about five seconds real time to recall, it'll takes rather longer to explain, and experiencing it... that was a matter of tens of thousands of years... It's an age-old tale of things working just fine in small scale and then breaking apart when things became too large. Of, and of me going cray-cray, I suppose.

Ahem.

During the long years when mortal races - dwarves, elves, humans, mainly - all lived simple lives as hunter-gatherer tribes, we, the angels, stood as the guardians of this world. Set up during the creation our task was to give guidance to the mortalkind, and protect the world from outside invasions.

All of us had our own virtues, not hard-coded, but still pretty much set in our ways. The tribes of mortal we watched over each in their own ways honored the creation. While there were occasional bad apples courtesy of the free will, the world was as close to utopia you could get with stone age tech. It was a nice and gentle way to govern a perfect world.

Too bad this world wasn't one of those. Not even remotely.

Turning point was when the mortalkind went and invented farming. While they began to breed like rabbits, the angels remained at the same constant number. By the time writing became a thing there were tens of millions of them, and the angels were spread so thin that majority of mortals went without any oversight.

And what did they choose to do with their freedom? To build skull-pyramids and puppy-kickery camps with glee, apparently. Faster than we could explain that 'doing that is bad, please don't do that', they ran rampant. Yes, I'm not exaggerating. That brings us to the second problem.

An angel, a spirit supposedly consisting of pure good, isn't meant to force mortals to obey but instead guide them to right path. That was all well and good when back when all the human, elven and dwarven tribes actually listened, but after the population boom things became unmanageable for such methods. Let's just say that cannibal-rapist-slavers aren't very receptive to mere scolding. ...They handled being ecological pretty well though, 'leave nothing unused' was their motto.

With insufficient staff and the very limited methods allowed to us it just kept going from bad to worse. It wasn't of course case of everyone suddenly everywhere becoming evil, but just enough to permanently ruin the fragile balance of before. I don't think this kind of stuff was particular to just this world, since ancient civilizations could be pretty cruel in the other world too. Stuff like building a giant monument just to boast how they cut off the dicks of their enemies was normal here and there (I'm looking at you, Assyrians).

The other angels were of course saddened by the increasing darkness in the mortal world, but remained hopeful that they would one day arrive back to light, if we were patient with them. Most believed that this was a temporary setback: world had worked for tens of thousands of years, so a dark age lasting a thousand isn't the end of everything. That's the expected answer when you are a spirit of hope or patience, I guess.

But the spirit of purity wasn't going to take that shit.

Excerpt one: enter proto-Ais, the angel of purity and diligence...

"Let me at least strike at the Alvanii [the cuddly cannibal-rapist-slavers] horde! There should be some limit to being vile!"

"That is not our way... Hate only breeds hate."

That was angel of humility or patience stopping me, again. The others weren't going to let me go on the avenging angel mode any time soon. Angels were supposed to work as a group, with each holder of a virtue supporting the other, keeping the balance like a weave. But in practice? Let's say that in response to things not working it all began to unravel, starting with me.

"It's not hate, it's... 'setting limits'."

'Setting limits'. Hah. That was a good one, me.

"She's right in that. Sometimes you need to be firm to show love. We need to instill temperance in mortals!"

That was... spirit of temperance, I think. Some did agree with me in taking a more active role in the mortal world - mostly angels of justice and other hardasses. But we were an out-voted minority. Also, we weren't even in agreement about how exactly to accomplish our hard line.

"But how would you enforce those limits? How? By raining fire on those who transgress?"

And there you go giving the old me ideas. 'YES, PURIFY THE SINNERS!'. That was how I thought. Hey, what did you expect from a spirit if purity?

"If necessary, yes."

"That goes too far! Our role is to guide, not to oppress. We need to have faith the mortalkind will find their way--"

End of excerpt one.

The ever-repeating arguments never got anywhere. The angels were simply so perfectly good that they couldn't even fight to stop evil. A stupid kind of good. Not that my solution was that great either. What I was about to do would go too far into the other direction, basically.

On hindsight, I probably had already set up to fall at that point - a thousand years of being a purity obsessed perfectionist who keeps finding more and more problems everywhere will do that to you. Also, the act of falling was most likely about to mess up with my favored aspect in interesting ways.

Why was I the one favoring the nuclear option to begin with then? Think about virtues of purity and diligence. They may be connected to virtues, but they aren't necessarily 'good'. An archetypal example would be Nazis: they liked purity and diligence too. Abstract concepts like these are simply too, well, abstract - they can be interpreted in wildly different ways. Associating the world's custodians with ideals and leaving them without strict definitions... that was another big flaw.

Excerpt two: the time when proto-Ais finally snapped...

This was generations later. The place was a typical copper age Elven settlement. Idyllic tree houses covered in verdant grapevines, flowers raining down as wind gently shook the trees, and impaled human and dwarven corpses frozen in throes of agony below them. Lovely.

This time I approached them because of their little genocide on Dwarves. They had used plaster to block the airflow on their underground halls and then spread smoke and fire from the one entrance left open. ...What I found when inspecting the event site was likely also the reason for my strong reaction to the empire's strike at Dwarves, in fact. Poor Dwarves.

The more hardened mortals of that time knew angels as infinitely patient and nice spirits who would lecture them not to be naughty and then leave. Thus my appearance didn't inspire much repentance from the elves. As I landed in the middle of the village, a pair of sneering elves approached me, critically failing to note my visage of cold ire or the implications of my already greyed wings.

"Oh, is this about the raid on humans? Or the burning of Dwarven mine?"

"Those were all their fault, I tell you. They practically forced us to it!"

"Yeah, we're the victims here!"

"But we still totally repent it, even though it wasn't our fault at all."

Actors not bothering to even act anymore. I was livid, though I didn't show it outside.

"..."

"What, aren't you going to tell us how hate only breeds hate?"

"Oooh, yes, I'm seeing the light! I'll be nice boy from now on!"

"..."

"Not saying anything? Did you just come to stare at us reproachfully?"

Then the other one had a great idea.

"Hey, angels can't hurt mortals, right? Doesn't that mean we totally could do whatever we want with her?"

"Oh... Oh! You're a genius! She'd just take it, wouldn't she?"

"Huehuehue, I want to see her scream as I--"

I, like others, had collected essence since the beginning of world. As the result I had enormous amount of power which I barely had used. As an angel of purity I could call pillar of bright fire from sky, which was originally meant as a safety-measure against possible extradimensional invasions.

Now I turned it against mortals.

"I've had enough! TIME OF MERCY IS OVER."

"B-but you're not supposed to--"

"PERIIIISH! FOOOLS!"

"IIIeeeeeeeeeh!"

"N-nooooooOOOOOO!"

End excerpt two.

I'm not sure what others would have done. Maybe restrained them (despite their sheepish nature, they held much power) with minimal force and then given a lecture. Me? It wouldn't do it justice to say that I merely burned down the whole village.

It was more like a localized apocalypse. I annihilated the whole area.

Afterwards, knowing that they wouldn't approve, I abandoned contact with the other angels and decided to fix the world all by myself. And for that me 'fix' meant 'burn down everything impure'.

The current me doesn't really even understand the way of thinking back then. I mean, I would definitely have snapped too, but not enough to start a worldwide rampage. Being married to abstract ideals led to some weirdly absolute responses. I suppose thousands of years of gaining stress may have had something to do with that too...

And did it work? In short term I indeed managed to stop the more prominent assholery mortals were up to. But in the long term? Just because they are too afraid to be assholes, doesn't mean they stopped being assholes. Something else would have been needed besides instilling fear of consequences. The result was that the large scale jerkassery merely changed into multitude of smaller ones. And that was way harder for me to respond to - it was like using cruise missiles to break eggs.

I of that time noticed that too, and tried something actually fairly intelligent for once: making the mortals police themselves. I made an effort to teach one tribe of humans how to 'not be lazy impure scum'. Yes yes, lacking in moderation was the word of the day. After few generations of indoctrination I had created the druids, ready to protect the balance of world and fanatically-- Wait, I just realized that I created my biggest nemeses of the current time, the druids. ...Hah.

Anyway, that was met with fairly limited success back then, though apparently it lasted all these years up to nowadays. I had hoped they'd spread the right way to everywhere, but somewhy dogmatic religion wasn't well received by the barely restrained anarchists everyone else in the world was.

My attempt to control the world was eventually interrupted when the other angels decided that I needed to be stopped. My reaction was naturally along lines 'Come on! Now you decide to act!?'. I wasn't going to listen to them. It was far too late for that.

After that it starts getting blurry. I do remember that despite their numbers, they were no match for me. How could they, when I the 'Great Destroyer' that punishes the wicked and they were gentle spirits living on fluffy clouds. Despite that the situation remained stalemated for a long time. Our skirmishes only further contributed to the chaos in mortal world.

Somewhere along the line I began to forget what I was even doing it for. Nothing could save this world. All I did made things just worse, but not doing it would have lost even that little I had gained with my actions. That was when the apathy began to seep in.

And how did it end? I don't know much. There was something that I tried... my last attempt to settle this mess. It was to be the perfect solution, completely genocide-free. But whether I even had a chance to do it or it ended in a failure... that I can't recall. There remains a disconnect between demon Ais and angel Ais. Something, I don't remember what, caused the world to change, something caused the angels to disappear and the demons come in their stead.

I... I sure hope I didn't cause it. Ghhhhh... I'm the most likely candidate though. While this whole business with first incarnation is something like watching someone else's memories, that'd still be quite much to take in. I do think the world of now, while in many aspects still shitty, is at least much better than it was back then though.

But is that because of me or despite of me?

"Why didn't I write a god damned journal!? All this annoying memory exercising could have been avoided if I had!"

Snapping back to here and now I can only guess at the missing parts. Silvana looks at my agitation concerned, but she doesn't say anything. My flashback had taken only a moment, I think. We're still standing on the rooftop under the night sky of Etmi Freeport.

"What was it that caused it? Why is there a blank spot in my memory still? What did I try to do?!"

As response the proto-Ais golem starts moving again. Was that an order? I don't think so, but apparently the golem-me did. ...And didn't we use this plot device already? Whatever. At this point I'll accept anything!

Luckily I didn't say something like 'Fuck everything!'. That would have been awkward. I can definitely see this habit of silently completing orders causing a horrible catastrophe in near future though.

"It'd be great if you said something when accepting an order..."

"Acknowledged."

"?!"

To my surprise she finally responds to me, using same voice I have, except as a perfect monotone. Well, better now than never. I suppose I'll need to program more rules to make the proto-Ais user experience smooth.

"Alright then... Carry on?"

Without stopping she continues with the previous request by starting to draw a spell in the air. This... this is a spell that I had used once before too?

Fiery letters appear into the air. For a moment, I am awed. This some really fancy SFX! Also, it is a message from the creator god. Oh... OH! This is it. That's exactly what I tried to do! And I didn't even need to agonize over this for an extended time to find it out. Thanks, other me! Love you

Yes. I attempted to contact the god to fix the world, and this is what I got instead. With great anxiety I begin reading it, as I did back then...

"Fantasy worl 0.04.27 alpha

Edit: More than 122.753 milion mortals could crash angels. Chagned sexual reproducton to be messy and time consming as a workaround. They won't do it so much if its icky, right? Population overflow prblem solved.

© This world uses Dwarves-Elves-Humans template for non-commercial purposes-- blah blah."

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"Are. You. Fucking. Kidding me?!"