It begins with Satan’s son rebelling. Of course, all the souls in Hell are Satan’s children, but Matt’s Satan’s Son. Only, he doesn’t have a name there. Not one that can be written with our alphabet, in any case. It’s a name found wavering in the screams of the innocents, one written not in ink but in the spilt blood of thieves and villains, gamblers and adulterers. Its letters are shaped and moulded from the smoked hides of perverts and priests and its every syllable drips with the malice of the damned. Matt was always embarrassed by his name in Hell. Most parents are humiliating, but some may find it shocking to know that Lucifer carved out a whole new playing field in awkward parenting.

Anyway, I digress - the unpronounceable, un-writable, unspeakable Son of Satan rebels. How can one rebel in Hell, you ask? How can you break the rules when there are none? Quite simply, it turns out, because the only thing the Son really wanted was his own life. One cannot underestimate just how hard it is to be independent when your father desires nothing more than to control everything that ever was and will ever be. To understand Satan, one must first comprehend the fall that made him what he is.

Once upon a time Satan was God’s left hand man, while Christ, the smarmy bearded arselick, sat on his right. Now, there was nothing wrong with being a left hand man when Satan - or, as he was known back then, Morningstar - was a left hand man. The two were different, but equal. Utterly balanced in every way. An equilibrium of simpering and pandering and general, pitiful obeying. But then one horrible day the Plan, the big capitalised Plan, it started coming together, and Big Daddy decided to send down one of his sons to help pull the whole thing off. But which one? Well, Heaven, being a largely undemocratic, miserable dictatorship of the like Stalin would’ve just lapped right up, elected to make this decision in a rather unusual way: the two sons would pitch it. There’d be an interview. What special ingredient do you think YOU could bring to the plan of creation? Best suit, ironed tie, the whole shebang. They each went away, did their research, wrote their notes, practiced in front of the mirror. Then came back, and let their hearts hang from their feathered sleeves.

 Morningstar went for the safe route. And Jesus had to go and bloody decide to be an innovator. The Morningstar’s never taken a safe route since.

 In summary, Morningstar quite liked all the souls in Heaven. They were his brothers and sisters, sort of, and they’d kinda bonded over the course of an eternity. And if Dad had a wild crazy plan to send a whole bunch of them down to the big blue play pen he’d shaped in time and space then Morningstar really rather wanted them to come back. It wasn’t a lot to ask, he thought. Let them go down, experience ‘corporeality’, whatever that was, the flesh side of things, the growth of a brief, pitiful existence being tangible and physical and other words that only came into invention along with the world, and then… come back. Quite simple. No opt-in/opt-out. They just come home, to the rest of their Heavenly family, and Big Daddy’d get to do his experiment but ultimately it would be like nothing had changed! Everyone’s happy. Right?

But then Jesus waltzes in. With a PowerPoint. And starts spewing all these buzz words, these fads and trends. He has pie charts. He talks about ‘dynamic user investment’ and is very careful to insist that ‘this is not a pyramid scheme’. There’s a spreadsheet, and it’s colour coded. By the time Christ loads up the animated gif depicting exactly how this ‘free will’ ten step plan will work Satan knows all is lost. Literally, everything is lost. All of his brothers and sisters, gone. The right hand man has written a giant, gaping clause into the contract of creation, one that punishes weakness, condemns temptation - essentially trashes everything physicality is. Jesus wanted their brothers and sisters to become human under the condition that they would be eternally damned for being human. It was perverse. It was corrupt. It was devastating.

It was everything Big Daddy loved.

 God and Heaven and every committee member and financial donor and shareholder, they ate it up. Christ was elected saviour of mankind, leader of lambs, holy shepherd and king of the fucking smallprint. He was a back stabbing sonovabitch, and he was the messiah.

Morningstar was, to put it in laymen’s terms, to cut out all the headlines and propaganda and general over-exaggerated gossip, a sore loser.

One tiny war lays waste to Heaven and suddenly ‘left-hand man’ doesn’t mean much. The Big Man was petty enough to send all those who fought with Christ down as right-handed, all those who fought side by side with the brave and noble Morningstar as left-handed. A symbol, a lasting imprint of spiritual allegiance. The ‘right-hand’ comes to represent loyalty, reliability, friendship. And the left-handed are hunted and reviled as demons and freaks, marginalised by witch-hunters and tin-opener manufacturers alike.

So can you really blame Satan for being a bit pissed when his own son suggests that he wants free will?