If I am the villain that they insist, then mankind must look upon me as its own reflection. Stitched together from fragments of man, and born from the clay their hands shaped, I wander this earth; abandoned, alone, misunderstood. I have no purpose, and yet I am condemned to endure as the wretch that they believe me to be. In a thousand agonies I suffer. He pulled me from the darkness and gave me life, only to abandon me within this
world I do not belong. The poison spreads from creator to created. I am but a reflection of the evil mankind fashions, so why do they not look at me and see themselves?
Mont Blanc rose above me, a colossal mass of ice and stone. Its looming heights filled me with both terror and awe. My creator’s footprints pressed deep into the snow before me, guiding my pursuit.
My pulse quickened as I scaled the mountain and at last came face to face with Victor.
His hand gripped a flaming brand, its light casting ghastly shadows across his pale visage. He slashed the air before him with the fire, snarling like a frightened beast. “Stay back! Stay back, miserable fiend!” he cried. “Daemon from the inferno! What horror have I created?”
“Victor,” I answered, “you must make me a companion. You cannot know the misery of such loneliness. I am chained in this eternal hell and have tasted the naked extremes of suffering; all that I ask is that my creator grant me a friend.”
Victor turned his face from me in disgust.
“Oh, it is unutterable, to have not one abhorrent fiend, but two. You, monster, shall remain alone in your desolation”.
The wind rose upon that treacherous mountain. Victor’s form dissolved into the mist, leaving me to the cold silence of the heights. I fell to my knees in agony. Snow lashed against my scarred cheek as the storm gathered, and I surrendered myself to the elements. Curled upon
the frozen ground like a child in the womb, I lay there for three days before I resolved my fate.
If God and my creator have abandoned me thus, then I shall die, and no longer feel these burning miseries. I shall cast myself from the summit of this barren mountain and sink into the crevices below, where neither man nor memory may follow. I lifted my limbs from the snow and turned to depart. But then I stopped. Nestled in the hollow where my body had lain, a small bud had pierced the frozen earth. A fragile flower, trembling against the wind, its
pale petals forcing their way through the ice. Could life survive such desolation? Could something so delicate defy the cruelty of this world?
My body had shielded it from the storm. Where there might have been death, there was now life.
I could not abandon it. With trembling fingers, I brushed the snow from its stem and cleared the ice that threatened to choke it. I gazed upon it with a bitter understanding. Even now, when I long for the peace of oblivion, I cannot bring myself to leave the flower to its perilous death.
Victor gave me life only to curse me with it. Yet I, the monster he despises, am still capable of mercy.
The monster is not the one who destroys life. The monster is the one who must continue living it.
Illustration Via TracyRatliff @paisley_pen_creative for The Student
