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Crawly blessed as another jagged-edged plant caught him in the heel, stinging against the skin of his corporation… then winced as a drop of water caught him smack in the eye.
The Almighty had been serious about the land sprouting thorns and thistles. Between that and the rain presently pouring from the sky, accompanied by booms and flashes of light (he’d been hoping the storm was a one-time thing after Eden, but judging from the frequency with which it had recurred over the last couple of moon cycles the phenomenon was here to stay), Crawly was not inclined to be impressed with the earth beyond Eden. Hell had sent him up to cause unhappiness to the humans — but he had quickly come to the conclusion that there was no point in bothering, when the planet was doing that just fine on its own.
It was tempting to just give the whole thing up as a lost cause: a world of ugliness and discomfort, with no redeeming factors, simply waiting to cause as much unhappiness as possible to the beings that walked on it.
And to his own annoyance, despite all that, Crawly found he couldn’t help liking the world anyway.
It was all the humans’ fault, really. They were more fragile than his own corporation; doomed to die in the end no matter what they did; cursed with weeds and poor weather and all manner of other miseries, large and small. By all logic, they might as well have just sat down outside the Garden and let that lion eat them.
But they hadn’t given up, the humans, and they hadn’t gotten eaten. They’d fought the lion off, made themselves clothing of its skin, and set off to learn to live in their new environment. And learn they had, finding ways to make food of nettles and tend to their lowercase-g gardens with the same water that tormented them in downpour.
And still, somehow, finding things to laugh about. To dance about. To find joy in, and to share with one another.
It was absurd, Adam and Eve and their stubborn optimism. It was nonsensical. It was also incredibly, infuriatingly, contagious.
Well, at any rate. At least Crawly was a demon, not a human, and could actually do something about his most immediate issues. He glanced downward, focusing until scales rippled out across the flesh: snakeskin shoes, as it were, protecting his toes, the soles of his feet, his ankles.
Next, he straightened again and scowled around at the raindrops, willing threats at them, until they nervously agreed to steer clear and pretend that there was still a wing over his head. It would be much easier for everyone that way, he assured them ominously.
Those things accomplished, Crawly sauntered on in search of the ethereal essence he could sense in the vicinity. If there was one other thing he’d learned from watching the humans, it was that having company made the thorns and the storms alike much more bearable.