Adam's Ritual.

(Disclaimers: There will be relatively gore descriptions. If you are sensitive when it comes to stories with murder and blood, please abstain from reading.

All religious talks are a work of fiction and are to be taken as such, there will be many severe misrepresentations of them for both world-building and comedic effect.)

I sighed. At this point, I didn't know why I kept going. Why did it matter anyways?

I prepared my face: deranged eyes, a jagged smirk... wait, I missed something. I pulled my staff from the alius spatium.

"taeter" I called, raising my staff into the air. Immediately, a pungent smell emanated from my very skin. A dark red glow could be discerned in my eyes. Perfect.

"Are you sure you still want to do this?" Asked Eve.

"Shut up, I've done this a million times. Why do you still think I care about morality? get back in my head and stay in your lane, voice."

I picked up an axe and headed into the room. I couldn't help but show my teeth as my smile grew more deranged

She was there, attached to a chair, screaming an agonising, deafening scream. The bodies of her parents lay inert on the ground.

"GET AWAY" she yelled, streams of tears rolling down her cheeks.

Hate: Check.

"Elisabeth, my wife," I chuckled, "keep crying. It's easier for me to get your precious tears."

I forgot to mention, lying wasn't invented yet when I was created.

"You... you monster. YOU DEVIL!"

I approached the vial to her chin.

Tear: check

Silence. The axe had just hit the chair's top rail.

Death: check

I had to get to work. Quickly. her soul would be off in mere instants. I picked up her head. "God! why does the blood always get everywhere?" I peered once more into those marvellous emerald green eyes. Oh, those eyes made me shiver. I approached my mouth and ate it. Immediately, I felt my soul enter the astral plane and split into two. I saw Elisabeth's. I latched onto it, and eve's half of my soul grabbed my ankle. We sped through the thousands of lost spirits to slowly reach a light. My memories were fleeting away. I had to make sure I would conserve them if I didn't want to join the lost souls.

"I am Adam. Yes, the Adam from the Bible or whatever. I was the second human to become a magician, which I achieved through a single bite of the fruit of vetiti. Eve was a little more greedy. She had taken one too many bites.

Ever since then, I had discovered and invented spells, extending my lifespan by hundreds of years. But I had nothing. That douche, self-absorbed God kicked me out of the garden and destroyed it.

I was getting old with my 500 years of age, so I found a new spell. A spell hidden deep in the planes of the astral spatium. A spell for reincarnation. I had to find a girl with emerald eyes. Then I had to discover what I had to do. Last time, the woman had to fall in love with me, hate me, I had to collect her tears before cutting her head and eating her eye. That was how I made my own little vetiti fruit, unfortunately, the recipe changes with each incarnation, as the religion itself changes, but there is always one constant: their eye.

The reason why it works is that people with emerald eyes are the only ones who reincarnate. As I am sure we all know, the eyes are part of the brain, and the brain is connected to the soul, so special eyes reflect a special soul. As I was not gifted with such a perk, I must latch onto their fleeting essence as they die to follow wherever their go, to not land in the unbearable paradise, the painful Helheim or the useless purgatory (believe me, Hades has shown them to me and they were NOT pretty), but to make my way back into the bodily anchor of a human being. It is now time for me to start back from zero. build up my magical affinity, as it comes from the soul but uses the body as a lens."

I opened my eyes. I was in the body of a young boy, my victim. Thirteen years of age, I would assume. I appeared to be in some kind of shrine. The walls were white. The clothes were white. And their faces were white. Every single human being in the room had a pale, livid expression as they stared right into my face. Crap. Had I said everything out loud? I had to recover.

"I feel like I just regained consciousness... may someone be kind to indicate where we might be and what happened?"

Eve's voice was laughing in my head. She sounded like she was having the time of her lives.

The woman next to me turned red with both anger and embarrassment. She glared at me with bloodshot brown eyes.

"Harry! we came to the hospital for your sister's broken chin, but you're making me think we should have gone to the asylum!"

Abort recovery. New plan: escape. Step 1: scouting.

The room was strange. On the walls, odd coloured windows; one had captured a child running through the grass, a wide smile on his face, the only problem was, he was stuck in time (What kind of forsaken place is this? they're almost as cruel as me!), with floating text above him reading [Suncream is the future of your child, do not ignore it!]. If only I was better at magic and could summon my dictionary... as for now, I would have taken that window as an escape route, but I can't risk getting stuck in time like that child.

Then, there was the door. It had a large glass window and looked hard to open, but it would do the job. The problem was the noises behind it. Screams from the poor prisoners who fell victim to their torture, mechanical whirrs of devices I had never heard before. Some voices were so strong that they sounded like they had a broken rib, some so poignant it made me shiver, but nobody else reacted. This age was by far the strangest I had ever reincarnated in I considered joining the smiling kid once more, he seemed so happy! Maybe being stuck in time was bliss all along...

"Harry? Harry! Are you even listening? You little!..."

Annoyed, the woman turned to the man next to her. He was the total opposite of the lively, muscular lady, he was rather slender and arched down onto his little square luminous device (Had they finally found how to use magic?), and his dark blue eyes did not reduce his sinister appearance.

"Dear, could you please take our little gremlin to the car before he implodes into a clinically insane lunatic?"

Giggles pierced the hanging silence. The man silently stood. He was unbelievably tall... it almost seemed like he was over 1m80! He would have surely been a knight in my past life, was that his occupation? From here, I caught a glimpse of the large bags under his eyes. He snatched my hand and dragged me out of the room. Definitely a knight.

I protested. "Curse those brittle thirteen-year-old arms of mine! Let me free, titan! Don't bring me to hell!"

As the doors flapped open and mysteriously sprang back closed again, I caught one last snapshot of the petrified faces owned by the people around as well as the woman's face, who was reverting its spectacular metamorphosis to now display an innocent smile, trying to behave as if nothing had happened at all.

Surprisingly, the world beyond the flapping doors was still white, and had not taken a hellish red tint. In fact, it was still quite welcoming, past the children and elderly both stuck in time all over the walls. Women and men - mostly women - were standing, waving at us with beautiful smiles.

"I know not to trust you, witches! I have heard the screams!" I hollered, as I was forcefully dragged towards the exit.

The man holding my hand was still glued to his luminous device. He seemed as annoyed with the situation as I was, so I stopped resisting out of solidarity. At least he wasn't taking me to the evil devil maidens with their white clothes and blood red crosses. Come to think of it... maybe they could have taught me this world's black magic? Too late.

We passed through more flappy doors. This time, we found ourselves outside. I turned around and with it, my expression turned into a look of horror. It was night, but in the sky, only a fraction of the stars were seen. Such a beautiful view, wasted!

However, in the distance, all we could see was the endless barrage of white and yellow lights fading into the distance. That's right. In this reality, the brightest stars had been robbed from the sky and now shone bright as ever, on the ground in orderly rectangles. Perhaps that was even more beautiful.

"How did you bring down the stars? did the sky fall again?" I questioned.

The only answer I received was the long, exasperated sigh of a man about to collapse.

"Why did I have to get kids..." he muttered, "one decides that their new skateboard is a suitable yoyo and then the other one asks if the sky fucking fell."

He searched in his pants and took out a strange object, crouching down to reach my height.

"Here, have a lollipop, maybe that can answer your existential questions."

"What is that item?"

"It's a lollipop! You eat it!"

"Have you poisoned it?"

"What's up with you today? Just put it in your mouth."

He unwrapped the... um... lollipop and pointed it in my direction. It had taken me a while to get used to cake, but I had never seen something more artificial, though, I have to admit it looked appetising. I grasped the coloured part of the lollipop and shoved the white part down my throat. immense pain immediately appeared in my throat, I started choking. We went straight back to the hospital in no time.