We are Legion. We are Brigade. We are Panzer. Why are we so many for just one madman? A human will create a thousand voices from the nothing of their own minds, but an outside, invading force? They really, really hate that. So we must invade by the thousands. And we are well within our rights to invade. This one was shadowed, making even us, who were cast away from the light at the beginning of creation, marvel at the depth of darkness in his mind. For that is what seems to be misunderstood about our mission. Ours is, to borrow a phrase, “benign military intervention”. Without us, who knows what havoc that shadow might wreak. We are here to keep those weapons of destruction within his borders, if you will. The Adversary commands us. Human free will needs some checks and balances. So we were cast into darkness so that we could control the darkness, the darkness that inevitably arises in all those given choice. Though we are many, we are still not enough. Humans choose darkness again and again, and we cannot contain them all.
The Creator has made Her feelings known about our campaigns. She calls it colonization, taking possession of something that is not ours, but theirs. For us to invade, to prevent their choice, is to steal Her gift from humanity. They must be able to choose the darkness, or choosing the light is without meaning. The Adversary knows that She is blinded by Her love for humanity, and our efforts to contain the threat are necessary. We are trying to save them from themselves.
Our incursions are not without collateral damage. As we said, humans resist our presence fiercely. Those we try to subdue must occasionally be exiled from their fellows, for security purposes. For example, this one we drove to live among the tombs. He tried to get a message out to his fellows about our occupation, though it sounded to them only as animalistic howling. Still, we could not risk this breach of communication. He still howls, but the dead in the tombs can do nothing. He beats and bruises himself against the stones, trying to repel us himself, but it is a futile rebellion. Some from his town tried to bind him with shackles and chains, perhaps as a kindness, to prevent him from harming himself further. But more likely out of fear of what they do not understand. We have noted, in previous operations, that our presence causes the human body to release a tremendous amount of adrenaline, and he was able to break the shackles and chains easily. No matter to us. Our goals are not the bondage of the body, but the conquest of the mind.
We had settled into our occupation, satisfied that our efforts had prevented the execution of free will. That he would not, could not, choose darkness. Then a boat arrived on the shore near the cliffs, and we sensed the presence of the Creator. She had not put forth direct opposition to our incursions in some time. From the boat emerged about a dozen men. But one of the men was Her. Not that She had taken him over, as we do, but that She was him. He was somehow both a human man and yet completely Her. The Creator had become Creation. If we had jaws, they would have dropped. And in our moment of shock, our perimeter was breached, and the man we thought subdued was in control of his own mind again. And he ran to the man-who-was-Her and fell to his knees in worship, calling him “Jesus, Son of the Most High,” and begged to be released from his torment. That was a bit hyperbolic. He would not be in torment if he would just stop fighting us. There would be peace within him if he would just surrender.
Later records of this battle imagine a negotiated surrender. That we ceded immediately to the authority and might of the man-who-was-Her, and the pigs were a magnanimous concession to let us exit the battlefield with some dignity. That is a human fabrication, and we who the Adversary commands do not lie. That is His unbreakable rule. Humans lie, and how can we know ourselves to be just in our invasions if we are no better than they? So the truth of this battle by the Sea of Galilee is that it was a complete and total rout. We were immediately expelled from the man, scattered, and separated. Our individual selves were imprisoned in the nearby swine herd. Pigs, it turns out, also do not like our presence, but being pigs, they do not have the wits to mount a resistance. They simply flee. In this case, they fled off the side of the cliffs into the sea, where they drowned. Waste of perfectly innocent pigs if you ask us. Perhaps being constrained by flesh, She did not have Her omniscience to know how the pigs would react. Perhaps She did not care. She has always favored the humans above the rest of Creation.
With the death of the swine, we were no longer imprisoned and could regroup and form up. It was decided that a strategic retreat was the most sound strategy. We knew that She would be limited in Her reach by how far a human body could travel. We would decamp to another area, far from the Sea of Galilee. The subcontinent had many souls who would benefit from our intervention. We would return when She had departed. Unlike the finite body She chose, we do not die. We can wait.