Random stories

For nearly a century we thought they fed on faith. Atheism swept the world, being followed by over nine out of every ten people. Yet still they thrived. And we died by the hundreds of thousands.

We explored every avenue we could think of to starve them. Perhaps they fed on our fears, so we taught ourselves to be brave. Still they thrived, and we continued to die. Our rebellion itself was a test of whether they fed on our obedience. It wasn't that.

We thought they were unable to be harmed. Bullets and blades seemed to do nothing to them. Only massive, overwhelming firepower ever seemed to work. A direct hit by an anti-ship missile could kill one of them. A backpack nuke could speak for a squad.

But, did we want to kill our world, just to end a handful of their hosts? We didn't. We even tried letting them subjugate us. They used us as cannon fodder in their battles and both sides seemed to love watching us die, but even our deaths did not feed them.

Then it happened. A young soldier died on the operating table. They managed to get her back but she was gone for nearly five minutes. They feared she would come back unable to live on her own. Instead, there was a fury in her eyes and she sat up on the table.

"There is a road to heaven and hell," she said, knuckles turning white as she gripped the edge of the operating table, "and I know where it is." She passed out after that and they finished the surgery, saving her life. Little did anyone know that she was the key to everything.

The soldier was met with doubt and disbelief at first. Surely if there was such a road, it would have been found long ago. Right? There were, however, a few who wanted it to be true. A few of them were willing to bet their lives on it.

The expedition set out before she was even fully recovered. The soldier led us. I was the medic who went to keep her alive. A scientist joined us, the soldier's wife. The last member of our group was a cat who I shared part of a ration with that decided to follow along.

We found the road. We followed it. She was right, it led to both heaven and hell.

When we arrived in heaven, we were certain that the signs had been wrong. Surely the devastated wasteland we overlooked was hell. But no, there were angels there. We avoided them, but they didn't seem to care. We could have marched an army past them.

After a week of careful exploration, pushing ever deeper into heaven all the while, we found it. _Farmland_. They didn't feed on us. They consumed crops just like we did. Heaven was also practically empty save the few angels who seemed bound to work the fields.

To be certain, we went to hell next. It was more of the same. In fact, aside from the signs saying we had arrived and the demons present, it looked identical to heaven. Blasted wasteland in every direction. Nothing standing save the farmland.

A plan began to form and we discussed it quietly each cycle when we camped to rest. We would go back, build an army, and storm both heaven and hell to burn their fields. They could starve, and then we would destroy them.

As we made ready to leave hell, the cat revealed herself to be an angel. She had been sent to spy on us and report back to her masters. Instead, she had found herself won over to humanity's cause. We were kind to her, yet she was nothing more than a servant to the other angels. She had been born on Earth during the war, raised on stories of the beauty of heaven. She had always wanted to see the Homeland she had never known.

After arriving with us, she found that nothing lived or grew in heaven any longer save for the crops maintained by angels who amounted to nothing more than to slaves. She had been fighting for a lie for nearly thirty years, and she wanted it to end. So she would help us. She would turn on her people and help humanity win the war against both sides.

Resolved, the four of us returned home. It took over a month for our story to reach the right ears. Our soldier would lead the attack. We carried only two meaningful weapons: fire and salt, both in enormous quantities. We meant to burn the farmlands and salt the soil. As a joke, we made the army 144,000 strong and marched into the road to heaven and hell to destroy our foes' supply lines.

The campaign was short. There were no angels in heaven or demons in hell with the spirit to fight us. Our angel had been correct, all those left behind were slaves. We freed them as we went. We burnt every field on the way in and salted them all on the way out. We did the same to both heaven and hell and then went home.

The war after that point was very different. It was no less brutal. Lacking their supplies, both of our enemies tried to turn Earth into farmland for themselves, but they were weakened. More importantly, they were vulnerable. We hit both sides hard. Wave upon wave of eager volunteers looking to avenge lost family, friends, or lovers took the fight to both sides.

We started winning. It no longer took a direct hit from a huge missile to kill one of them. Small arms would suffice. Both sides grew frightened. They were losing people in numbers that had never been possible before. Yet they were too arrogant to sue for peace. Their generals were countless millennia old and refused to see us as a true threat. They preferred to, instead, blame the so-called incompetence of their subordinates.

The war might have gone on longer, but the younger angels and demons both mutinied. The eldest were deposed, most of them were killed in the fighting, and the new generals sued for peace.

Yesterday, we celebrated the first anniversary of the armistice. Our peoples are still picking their way through the continuing peace process. Humanity has a lot of anger over how it was treated for over a century of continual warfare. The surviving angels and demons share a lot of that anger and all three species have come together on one point in particular: hunting down the surviving elder angels and demons and destroying them.

To my surprise, people seem to be willing - at least in general - to understand that the three generations of angels and demons who never saw heaven or hell are victims too. There are incidents and things are tense, but we are working through the problems.

Now we are one Earth and three peoples. Genocide was ruled out early. Thankfully we had that much sense. We'll find ways to share. We'll find ways to survive. It's what we always do.

I'm happy to say that our soldier and scientist both survived. Our cat survived too. I married her yesterday. To my knowledge that makes me the first human since prehistory to become an angel's wife. We didn't want to try to make history, but it was decided that we could schedule it for the first anniversary of the armistice and let that be a sign to all of Earth's people that the way really was over and that we are all just citizens of the world now.

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Submitted by AlloyedClavicle on Mon, May 15, 2023 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

During the war between angels and demons, humans are the collateral. They are continuously used by the two forces for their advantage until humanity decides to just kill both.