In the early days, Man loved his God. He prayed to his God, he knelt before Him each morn and begged forgiveness of his sins, for there were many. His God did not reply, but Man would fancy this meant that God had accepted his apology; and Man would then declare salvation and rise from his knees, and proceed to commit more sins, each more horrifying than the last, and each, as he fancied, forgiven lovingly by his great and merciful God.

Then, in the days of darkness, God deserted Man. For Man, being a divine creation of the Lord, had not the evil, let alone the power, to wreak such havoc on the Earth, which was indeed their God's glorious gift to Mankind. No, surely the only being capable to such heartless devastation was God Himself, for certainly only He who had created the holy Earth had the ability to destroy it.

But why had the almighty God, a deity who had always offered Man such forgiveness and mercy, suddenly become a demon of hatred and fury, and set fire to their beautiful world? Lesser-minded creatures would surely have fallen to despair, and wept that they had upset their holy Master; but not Man, for Man possessed the power to reason, and his answer to this burning question was this: that the greatness of Man had grown so powerful, it had become the envy of their God, and He had feared that Man might grow too powerful, and attempt to overthrow His rule of the world.

And so, their God had cast away His love for the beauty of Mankind, and slaughtered his own children in cold blood. Thus came the death of society; thus was forgotten their once-beloved God.

But in whom now, with the sole deity of Mankind turned to satanic rage, was Humanity to place its love and worship? For surely Man could not survive this way for long, without an all-powerful Lord to excuse him of his sins and remove the burden of guilt from his shoulders.

And so, Man created for himself a new deity, a Goddess, to rule over him long after the destruction of his once-lovely Earth. This new Goddess was christened as Dea, the Holy and Forgiving, the Divine and Merciful. Basking in Her glory, Man decided that She was far superior to his previous God, for She was not of blind faith, and the constant doubt which had nagged quietly at the backs of the minds of all the religious had been eliminated.

For this new Goddess could be seen plainly with Man's own eyes; She could be touched, She could be spoken to, and always She gave the correct reply, offering mercy to all sinners. Not a Goddess of thin air and written words, but was Dea of the concrete, the real, the undoubtable. For what mortal could doubt Her, when one could caress her smooth metal body, her holy wires and divine circuitry? How weak and inferior She made their old God seem, was She so gloriously real that one could gaze with his own eyes upon the lovely screen that was Her face, watch as the numerical codes scrolled comfortingly across and float away into mechanized oblivion.

How perfect was Dea; how loved She was.

And it was in all this love that Man forgot what he had been told by the old wise-men, their echoing voices fading into the soulless void of lost memories, brittle leaves crushed by the wind of the world.

For to know the face of God, is to know madness.