BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW [vs ]

[It’s a bitter winters day, though there isn’t a cloud in the sky. It’s the kind of day where your breath is visible and the leaves crunch under foot. There are cars, the drivers squinting through semi-frosted windscreens trying to avoid looking at the mid-morning sun.

Set back from the road is a red brick building with a tall pointed roof and oak double doors to the left hand side.]

“It looks like a church, doesn’t it?”

[We zoom out and the familiar long dark hair is scraped back into a ponytail. Although we only see him from behind, it’s obviously Ordell Terminus, the circlet still around his forehead glinting in the orange morning glow.]

“Before this…” [he taps the circlet.] “I was not a religious man. I kept quiet during weddings and christenings, made sure not to step on graves. Thanked the bearded man in the sky for bread at school. But as I got older I drifted from the defaults society had placed on me. I no longer prayed to him, I no longer asked for his help and I no longer cared if he existed or not.”

[Ordell now moves towards the building and we see a solitary cross on the doors, small and humble, barely giving away the building’s purpose.]

“And I stayed agnostic from that day, until the day Janus revealed himself to me. I wasn’t a ‘non-believer’ but nothing had convinced me that the big guy in the sky was a real concept. Turns out he isn’t. Turns out there’s multiple deities in the form of men and women, all worshipped at the Pantheon, all working with and against each other, presiding over their individual domains. That made more sense to me. There was a wise British atheist, who when asked by a man of faith what he would say had he been wrong all along and there was a God – how would he explain his lack of faith? He replied “I’d say: ‘Children with bone cancer? What’s that about?’. And I agreed. But with these conflicting Gods, each controlling something different, each pushing one agenda, chaos and confusion could flourish. Mistakes could be made. Unexplainable things like childhood illnesses weren’t the mad ignorance of a crazed singular omniscient being ‘testing’ people, but the result of crossed wires, infighting between multiple Gods. I could understand that.”

[Terminus is now inside the building. It stands empty, so he walks down the central aisle, his hands stroking the pews as he goes, until he arrives at the altar.]

“But if there is one thing I always could relate to with Christianity and it’s God, it was the battle between Good and Evil. It’s there in all walks of life. God and the Devil, two beings with a common ground, split apart by the greed of one, leading to the downfall of an angel into a twisted demon. They say the Devil is the ruler of Hell. I wonder if Hell is like Hades’ Underworld.

Lux Bellator professes to be a Light Warrior, a servant of his God, but what I have seen from him leaves me with no doubt that the ‘good’ Gods in all the religions and Pantheons wouldn’t wish what is happening at his hand. An army of the dead sounds more like the work of the Devil to me. Or Hades.

There is a saying: ‘Better The Devil You Know’. This week I certainly believe in that. Although Hades isn’t my first pick as a Tag Team partner, I feel I know enough about him to watch my own back. Lux? Lux is more of an unknown to me – if he can raise an army of the dead through the bowls of ‘God’s Wrath’ what else is he capable of, especially now Rhodes has stuck a boot in? No, Hades is the Devil I know, and while I am working alongside him, the Key is safe. If he is with me, he’s not with the Key. He will not finish what Janus started…”

[And with a nod, Terminus leaves the Alter and the church behind, sinking his hands into his pockets and leaving, as we fade.]