Villain

A Serial About A Religious Cult

Enter with care…

This 18+ serial will include content that may be triggering for some readers. Expect to find adult language, abuse, child abuse, violence, religious abuse, religious rites and ceremonies, indoctrination, labor trafficking, and plenty of other culty stuff.

This serial is in its own Section of The Cortex. If you’re not interested in this story, you can unsubscribe from Villian without unsubscribing from The Cortex.

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This is the beginning of Villain by Nichole M Willden

Prologue

I’m the villain.

Look, it’s not as black and white as fairytales make it out to be: Like, I came into being a fully formed “bad guy” with a desire to hurt people? It’s not that straight forward. There is a reason villains have profound origin stories. You don’t get to be the villain without some serious events winding you back and forth on a road of desensitization to human suffering. And probably mental illness. That second one is still up in the air. But as for the first one—the desensitization—that started for me in a cult.

I didn’t join a cult. Come on! Seriously! Who joins a cult? If its banners said “This is a cult” no one would line up for that. Or … if they did, they wouldn’t be anyone’s kind of people. Besides, I never joined anything—not even the church. That happened because I was raised in it.

Church is a wild dichotomy of preaching one thing and doing another. Over the pulpit we would get the “Give to charity” spiel while the church hoarded its money and bought businesses and real estate. They would say “Love thy neighbor” while hiding abuses and ignoring homelessness. But my personal favorite is that they would look us straight in our faces and say “God will make you answer for all your sins” while confidently certain they would not be made to pay for anything.

Because they knew the truth that there was no God watching them. No God sat overlooking the congregation, taking attendance, glowering importantly at the coffers kept in His name. There was never any deity peeking between our sheets to make sure our hands did not stray south to the forbidden land of relief and glory. There was never any Lord and Savior waiting to collect the dead and judge them for a life not quite good enough for an eternity of praise and worship.

Yet, in the church surrounded by praise and worship is the beginning of my villain origin story. But let me make one thing extremely clear: just because I’m a villain doesn’t mean I’m the villain in my story. That’s the thing about villains: it all depends on perspective.

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Time to subscribe to this villainy craziness. You know what to do.