Bad Company (Seven Deadly Sins #1) ✅ Completed

Chapter Twenty-Four: Galileo Shows the Way

Galileo Shows the Way

Dante stood inside his room and fought the urge to smash something. The last time he’d lost control was over several hundred years ago, and he’d been the cause of a freak tsunami that wiped out an entire village in the south pacific.

It was more than a little irritating how something like that bothered him now. What were a few thousand human lives to a being like him? What did he care for the suffering of humans? He was once a god among these huddled, barely sentient masses. He was even feared among the creatures who’d ruled the dark before light came in and banished most of them to the far corners of the world – far away from these new animals that spread like a virus.

But even he was a creature subject to the winds of change - given enough time, any being was.

His initial disgust of humanity eventually gave way to a mild form of amusement. Humans it seemed were rather an entertaining lot. Watching them go about their brief, insignificant lives helped to break up the monotony of his dark existence. Dante found himself spending more and more time among their kind. He’d even posed as one, trying to blend into society for a better view of the show.

One day, much to his own surprise, he realized he preferred their company over his own kind. It had been quite an accidental discovery, but one that he could still recall down to the finest detail.

He was living on a large vineyard in a small Italian province just outside of Chianti in the 16th century. He'd discovered he had a fondness for fine Italian wine (the women also rated quite high), so he assumed the identity of a wealthy vintner. It was relatively easy to acquire a large tract of land in the rolling countryside. He spent the next few years learning how to grow, harvest, and sell his own custom wine vintages.  

His farmhouse was rather grand for the time, and with the large grounds required a sizeable staff to maintain. An old friend had come for a visit and found the servants within Dante’s home to be entirely to his palate. He’d feasted on the entire bunch, leaving only a handful of bones to ever show any of them had ever existed. When Dante returned to see the bones and his missing staff, he was more than a little put out.

He was furious.

Dante had killed one of his oldest friends over it. Even now, he could hardly believe he’d gotten so worked up over a bunch of humans. The utter astonishment on Cael’s face probably mirrored Dante’s own. These lowly creatures, with the life span of fruit flies (at least when compared to someone like him) had managed to garner some form of attachment out of him.

Not all of course, but some. Some humans were quite…remarkable. A select few accomplished more in one lifetime than any of his kind ever attempted over hundreds, even thousands of years. One such human was the great astronomer and mathematician, Galileo Galilei. History remembered him as the father of astronomy, or the inventor of the telescope, but he was so much more than that. A man at once depressed and passionately infuriated by those that condemned his findings.

Granted, the great Galileo had a strong sense of his own survival and had no interest in being burned as a heretic, so he didn’t exactly spit in the eye of the Roman Catholic Church as they’d tried him. But even at the last, when he’d been condemned for heresy by his accusers, and been sentenced to formal imprisonment (which was later dropped to house arrest), it was the ban against his Dialogue that galled him the worst. What no one knew but the church and Galileo (and Dante of course) was that the ban also encompassed any works he might wish to publish in the future.

Galileo was forced to recant his theory that the earth moved around the sun, which he did because he valued the fact he’d survived his trial with his head still on his neck. And yet on that day, when his eyes searched for Dante in the crowd and he’d finally spotted him, he whispered: “And yet it moves.”

It was at that moment in time during the early 17th century that Dante had become utterly fascinated with the ingenuity, creativity, and stubbornness of certain humans. Some humans came into the world and just saw it differently. Their ability to create beauty, art, or simply that which made life easier (and improve the existence of even creatures like him) was admirable. Everything from opera concertos and dramatic plays to steam engines and suspension bridges were courtesy of their species.

What had he, or any of his brethren for that matter, done over the course of their existence that could compare? Nothing, that’s what. They hunted. They killed. They ate. That was it. Granted, a lot of humans did the same, and some better than others, but not all of them were satisfied with just existing. Some of them created wonders of modern technology, or created a new form of art, some even discovered ways to prolong their meager life spans. Vaccines, chemotherapy, heart transplants – what were these developments if not attempts to fight for even their limited time on this plane?

And Dante had always liked a good fighter.

It was one of the reasons Eliza was such a threat to his current situation. Over his time with Celeste, humanity had lost its sheen. Each year found him more tired with their existence than impressed. The humans who came through her shop were petty, selfish, self-involved creatures that only sought ways to deepen their own pleasures. Money, love, material objects – that was all that mattered to these insipid, pathetic creatures. They were the poorest excuse of life forms, and what was worse was there were always new ones to replace those that had come before. Not a single person that shopped in the private showroom sought to create, to develop, to contribute something – all they cared about was taking.

And they gave a rat’s ass about who they were actually taking from or what the cost of such desire truly entailed.

Being surrounded by such souls for so long had numbed Dante to their actual plight. These people weren’t worth feeling bad over. They’d sought their fates willingly, buying from Celeste when they knew others would suffer. Asher and Celeste were only providing the means of their hearts’ deepest desires, but the price for such a thing was a high one.

Was a soul worth so little? 

Dante didn’t know. He didn’t have one. But he knew all about hell, and that place sucked. It was boring and monotonous, and the bureaucracy was revolting. Hell didn’t have fun little things like AMC TV, or Xboxes, or even graphic novels. It didn’t even have a Taco Bell, just endless rounds of skin stripping, bone breaking torture.

The people who bought the sins Celeste sold were weak, easily duped. There hadn’t been a real fighter among the hundreds that had come through over the years. Not a single Galileo moment to be had among the hundreds of times he’d watched each sin play out to its violent conclusion. Not a single person to spit in the eye of their fate, or at the very least to get the last word in. He stopped looking for it and figured people had lost that spark that had attracted his attention so long ago.

His own situation wasn't much better from those mortals who found themselves dangling from the end of Celeste's evil hook. But unlike those who came through, he had millennia to figure a way out of his mess. All he needed was patience and the right moment would present itself. It could be decades down the line, it mattered little. He couldn't die anyway.  

Then one day Eliza came in and threatened to shake him out of his ennui.  He’d been so checked out for so long, he didn’t even realize what was happening until he found himself stepping between her and that idiot Crawford.

What should it have mattered to him if Crawford had attacked Eliza inside the shop? But just the thought of watching Chase hurt her, no matter how stupidly annoying she was (and she absolutely was most of the time) had sort of bothered him. He’d grown a little used to her stupid, incessant commentary on everything. And if he were being honest with himself, a part of him was secretly pleased she snuck glances at him when she thought he wasn’t looking. She was abrasive, naïve, and too sarcastic to live, but there was one thing about her that rose above all those other things: Eliza Taylor was a fighter. An underdog for sure, but still a fighter.

Cursing himself for his own idiocy, Dante closed his eyes and searched for Celeste. She was just outside of town. Decision made he went downstairs to her private showroom to wait.

They had some business to discuss.