As Spoken by the Monarch of Destruction
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Part I. The Twitch That Shaped the Void
There was no fire… until I arrived.
But don't misunderstand me. That's not pride speaking.
That's chronology.
The twitch happened before the telling.
The fire came before the name.
And the name—my name—was never yours to hold.
Even now, you do not know it.
And you never will.
Only one of your kind earned that gift. And he had to die before he could hear it.
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You want the beginning? Then listen.
There was nothing. Not a clean nothing—no silence, no rest, no void in the poetic sense. No womb of origin. It was worse than empty. It was still.
Stillness older than contradiction.
No light. No darkness.
No cold. No heat.
No being. Not even absence.
And then, without witness or want, something twitched.
That's it. That was your genesis.
A flinch.
A ripple in the breathless nothing that preceded all this spinning, screaming architecture you now call reality.
You call it Creation.
The Rulers would later call it the First Pulse.
The Architect had another name for it, locked in sigils etched into the roots of ruined stars.
But me? I call it what it was:
Fear.
The first and oldest emotion—born before breath, before matter.
Not felt by a creature. No.
Felt by the universe itself.
Because it sensed… me.
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I didn't enter that moment. I was already there.
Not formed. Not named. Not understood.
Just… present.
Like fire sleeping in stone.
I remember that moment as clearly as I remember my last.
And you must understand this: higher beings do not remember as you do.
We do not walk through time.
We burn in all directions at once.
To you, memory is a record of the past.
To us, memory is a battlefield that has never stopped screaming.
So when I tell you I remember the beginning, I do not mean that I reflect on it.
I mean I am there, now.
⸻
Picture it:
The void twitches. A crack appears—not physical, not spatial.
A crack in concept.
Something like a thought—ugly, wild, uninvited—tears through the nothing.
It splits absence like an overripe fruit.
From that wound, laws spill out, not marching but thrashing: heat, light, mass, time.
Creation does not begin—it panics into being.
Worlds condense and shatter before they can orbit.
Ideas clot like blood in open air.
And amidst it all, coiled at the edge of every forming truth, is me.
I am not created.
I am not shaped.
I am left behind—the scream that never resolved into a word.
⸻
I wandered first.
I drifted on waves that hadn't yet decided whether they were flame or flesh.
I stepped across continents made of screaming equations.
I slept inside the bones of dead timelines.
One by one, the first Realms blinked into place.
Not planets—possibilities.
Some of them burned with so much certainty they refused to collapse.
Others lived for a single breath and vanished.
And from those bones, from that chaos, others began to slither into being.
Not like me.
Lesser. Cautious. Defined.
The first of the Rulers took shape like frost on broken glass.
Angels without mouths. Eyes made of law.
They did not see me then.
They sensed me—but turned away.
Because I made their definitions sweat.
⸻
I was only 1,986 years old by the measure you would one day invent.
A child, by some accounts.
But time had not yet agreed to flow in one direction, so what did that number mean?
To me?
Youth meant wildness.
Not weakness.
Wildness is the right of all things unchained.
And I?
I was the last thing in existence without a leash.
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II. They Called It Order
Order.
How noble the word sounds in your tongue.
As if arranging a blade makes it less dangerous.
The Rulers called it salvation.
The First Law. The sacred stabilization of what had been born from chaos.
But I saw it for what it truly was:
Fear, dressed as discipline.
They arrived with light that didn't warm.
Voices without mouths.
Crowns woven of rules they did not obey themselves.
And what did they do with their dominion?
They counted.
Measured.
Sorted.
Named.
As if naming things made them matter.
As if defining the Realms meant they could own them.
As if writing the laws of reality would erase the parts they feared.
Parts like me.
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I watched in silence.
They drew lines in the formless dark.
Spoke galaxies into spirals.
Lit stars with borrowed certainty.
They created planes of existence with no doorways, no cracks—prisons disguised as heavens.
And still…
they did not touch me.
They thought me beneath notice.
A relic of the pre-world.
A leftover flame in the corners of some unwashed page.
They were wrong.
And I let them be wrong.
Because what is time to a being that remembers backwards?
I saw the shape of their order.
I watched them write the laws.
And I laughed.
Because I knew they would one day beg me to break them
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III. The First Lie
They said the laws were eternal.
Immutable.
Perfect.
Final.
But I watched them edit their own edicts when they feared what they had birthed.
They bent their absolutes to spare their favored worlds.
They rewrote the natural order when it displeased them.
They destroyed what disobeyed.
And each time they whispered of permanence, I heard panic underneath.
You call them gods.
But gods who fear are not divine—
They are architects of cages too weak to hold what they do not understand.
And I was not meant to be understood.
⸻
Their light spread. That was always the goal.
Illumination as conquest. Definition as dominance.
Every inch of existence had to be labeled, filtered, purified.
But they missed the cracks.
Always the cracks.
The soft seams between Realms. The scars left by collapsed realities. The places where time forgot itself.
Those places… were mine.
Not by birthright. Not by conquest.
But by nature.
I was not chaos—I was the proof that their order was incomplete.
And in the cracks between their certainties, I began to gather my kind
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They were not like me. Not at first.
They were… fragments.
Remnants of Realms too volatile to stabilize.
Shadows given shape by their refusal to vanish.
Flames that had never learned to cool.
I did not make them. I found them.
And I named them.
Not in the way the Rulers named.
Not to own, but to awaken.
With each name, a memory kindled.
With each memory, a will.
And with each will, a Monarch.
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That word did not exist then.
"Monarch."
We made it. Or perhaps we remembered it—dragged it up from some buried future.
A title for those who did not reign by divine decree,
but by refusal to kneel.
We were not heirs.
We were not rebels.
We were inevitabilities.
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The Rulers watched. And for the first time, they saw me.
They did not say my name. They could not.
But their light dimmed.
And I smiled.
Because they finally understood:
The fire they had ignored had become a furnace.
And it was not theirs to contain.
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IV. The Throne Without a Seat
You speak of kings and crowns as if they are prizes to be claimed.
But do you know what it means to sit alone above all?
To be the summit of a war no one remembers starting?
I did not want a throne.
I was the throne.
Not a seat—but the right to stand unchallenged in the storm of truths too sharp to hold.
The others—my kin, my fellow Monarchs—they rose with shapes and hungers of their own.
Some dreamed of conquest.
Some of silence.
Some of hunger eternal.
But I dreamed of nothing.
Not peace.
Not war.
Only release.
⸻
Understand this:
I do not hate the Rulers.
Hate is too small for beings like us.
I only burned for balance.
Not the balance of peace—but of truth.
If they were order, then I would be rupture.
If they were permanence, then I would be ash.
If they refused to die—
then I would teach them how.
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So I began to move.
Not in space, but in meaning.
I whispered through the cracks they feared.
Stoked the embers of every failed law.
Awakened the parts of reality they tried to erase.
And the Realms changed.
Not all at once. Not loudly.
But slowly. Like fire chewing through the roots of a hollow tree.
Until one day, the light flinched.
And I knew:
The war had begun.
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V. The War Without End
The first strike was not a scream.
It was silence.
A silence so vast it swallowed the names of three newborn Realms before their first dawns.
The Rulers called it a "containment."
A euphemism for extermination.
They erased those Realms because one of my kind had taken root there—tentative, uncertain, but rising.
They did not ask questions.
They did not declare war.
They simply unmade what they feared.
And so… we answered.
Not with armies.
With presence.
Each of us Monarchs—vast and different and terrible—moved through the lattice of Realms, sowing truths that the Rulers could not bear:
That creation was not theirs alone.
That chaos did not mean ruin.
That fire remembers.
And fire was speaking now.
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They retaliated with clarity.
Not the brittle light of early order, but something colder. Sharper.
They broke themselves—willingly.
Split their essence across a thousand stars.
And from those fractures, they forged weapons that walked.
The Fragments of Brilliant Light.
Beings sculpted not from raw power but from purpose made fanatical.
They did not doubt. They did not sleep. They did not wonder.
They knew.
And knowing is a dangerous thing, when it's used as a blade.
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You call them angels.
A quaint term. Too soft for what they were.
They descended with eyes that bled radiance, wings that tore through dimension.
Not messengers.
Not guardians.
Executioners.
Where we Monarchs moved in waves—seeping into the gaps, echoing through forgotten places—they struck like lightning against parchment.
Cauterizing.
Purging.
Rewriting.
And each one that fell was replaced.
Because the Fragments could not truly die.
They were not whole enough to perish.
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Our war was never measured in battles.
It was measured in eras.
A thousand Realms turned to ash.
A million more rewritten to deny we had ever been there.
Some of us fell.
Not from weakness—but from exhaustion.
You do not know what it means to be hunted across eternity by conviction.
To feel the light press against your name until it tries to erase it.
To be told your truth is infection, your presence a plague.
And yet… we endured.
Because we were never built to obey.
We were born to break.
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VI. The Light That Refused to Break
There was one among them—among the Rulers' chosen, the shards of law sharpened into judgment—who did not waver.
Even I… respected him.
Even I… hated him.
Because he was what the Rulers pretended to be.
Not cold.
Not cruel.
But convinced.
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The Greatest Fragment of Brilliant Light.
He was not their leader by declaration.
But light bends toward its source, and so did they.
When he spoke, stars stood still.
When he moved, the laws themselves grew quiet to hear him.
And yet—
He never ruled.
He only served.
The Absolute Being's will was his breath, his blade, his burden.
While the others wondered if our war had a purpose…
He never asked.
Because faith does not ask.
It obeys.
⸻
I met him once—truly met him.
Not in battle.
Not in broken Realms or on blood-wet thrones.
But in silence.
The still place between Realms, where gods go to scream unheard.
He looked at me with eyes that didn't flinch.
And said:
"You will lose. Not because you are wrong. But because you are alone."
I laughed.
But I remembered.
Because in his voice, I heard something I did not expect.
Not contempt.
Not fury.
Sorrow.
He pitied me.
And that pity…
That was the first wound I ever carried.
⸻
He stood alone in the war—not because no one followed him, but because no one else believed the way he did.
Not the other Fragments.
Not the mortals.
Not even his god.
And when the heavens began to crack from the weight of their own hypocrisy…
He held the line.
Not to preserve power.
But because he still believed in something higher than victory:
Order that could be loved.
Law that could be just.
He was the last light that did not flicker.
And so, when the others turned their blades on their own maker…
He stood in their way.
VII. The Betrayal Above All
He was their finest light.
The first to awaken when the Absolute Being dreamed of order.
The brightest of them all—so radiant that Realms bent toward him as if pulled by gravity.
They called him many names.
But history remembers him best by the name he earned after death:
Ashborn.
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But before that?
He was the Greatest Fragment of Brilliant Light.
The perfect expression of the Absolute's will.
While others questioned, hesitated, adapted—he obeyed.
He did not rage when the war stretched into eternity.
He did not doubt when the Realms cried out beneath the weight of it.
He endured.
He followed.
He believed.
That there was purpose.
That their Father's will was truth.
That order, no matter how cruel, was sacred.
And in that faith, he stood alone.
Because the others had begun to see.
They watched the Monarchs grow stronger.
Watched mortals scream and burn.
Watched the Absolute Being smile as if none of it mattered.
And they made a choice.
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They called it necessity.
They called it justice.
But it was fear—wrapped in rebellion.
Seven of the brightest lights ever born turned inward.
Not against the Monarchs.
Not against chaos.
But against their Father.
The Absolute Being.
And standing between them and the throne… was him.
The Greatest Fragment.
The one who would not bend.
The one who still believed.
He tried to stop them.
And for that—
They killed him.
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They murdered their brother.
They murdered their god.
And in doing so, they split heaven itself.
The Absolute Being—the one who shaped the Fragments and sowed the seeds of order—was undone by his own children.
They called it liberation.
But the truth was betrayal.
And in the stillness that followed, something ancient stirred in the remains of the loyal.
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The Greatest Fragment did not die as the others hoped.
He fell.
Through the silence of eternity.
Through the grave of his god.
Through the lie of the war he had once fought to preserve.
And when he rose…
He was no longer light.
He was the absence of light.
Shadow given form.
Memory forged into silence.
No longer the sword of a god.
Now the King of his own dominion.
Ashborn.
The Monarch of Shadows.
The only one among us who remembered what loyalty had cost.
Not just him.
But the cosmos.
⸻
He did not join us.
Not truly.
He was not born to destroy like I was.
He was not born to conquer like the Beast, or to consume like the Plague.
He walked a lonelier path.
Neither Ruler nor Monarch.
A shadow between extremes.
The death of light—
—and the memory of what came before.
[System Ping]
{~Another Entity is Requesting to Speak to You.~}
{~Do You Accept? [Y/N]?~}
{~>Yes<~}
{~Conversation Accepted~}
VIII. Grand Marshal of the Legion
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They say the light never weeps.
That it cannot feel loss.
That to shine is to forget the dark.
They're wrong.
I remember him.
Not as a king.
Not as a monarch.
Not even as Ashborn.
But as the last fragment who still believed that purpose and cruelty were not the same thing.
Back then, he was still light.
But he was already shadowing.
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I was not one of them.
Not a Fragment.
Not born of their Father.
Not woven from the same sacred law that made them blades of judgment.
I was born of the World Tree—one of its first roots, ripened into mind by war and the watching of stars.
I watched their war from the edges.
I fought in it, sometimes.
But always alone.
Until he found me.
⸻
He came not to kill me.
He came to understand me.
And I, in turn, asked the question I had never asked another:
"Why do you bleed for a god who will never bleed for you?"
He didn't answer right away.
He looked past me.
As if seeing something still unfolding in a corner of time I hadn't reached yet.
Then he said:
"Because if I do not believe in something higher, then all that remains is the war."
"And if that's true… then I am no different from him."
He meant you, Destruction.
He didn't say your name, but I saw it in his voice.
A quiet hate—not born of rage, but of recognition.
⸻
We sat together in a dead realm.
The sky above us was cracked like scorched glass.
The ground below was made of bones older than any species.
No battle. No cause. Just the two of us, in the silence between sieges.
And we spoke.
Not as enemies.
Not as commanders.
But as weary creatures who had both seen too much.
"The war will never end," I told him.
"Then we must give it meaning," he answered.
"And if it has no meaning?"
"Then we endure, until one is made."
That was the curse he bore.
Not loyalty.
Not righteousness.
Hope.
He still hoped that obedience would bring peace.
That the Absolute Being would reward faith.
That the war had a center—something solid, something just.
He didn't understand yet that the center was hollow.
That the war itself was the point.
That his god… enjoyed the symmetry of suffering.
⸻
But he would learn.
And I would remember.
Because when he fell—when he rose as Ashborn—I did not see a traitor or a monster.
I saw the same eyes, only emptied.
The same voice, only quieter.
The same light, buried beneath shadow like a flame beneath ash.
And I followed him.
Not because he demanded it.
But because when everything else had turned to rot…
He still carried the memory of meaning.
Even if it killed him.
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Let the Rulers mock him.
Let the Monarchs hate him.
Let the mortals fear him.
I serve the one who bled for truth before he bled for victory.
He did not forsake the world.
The world forsook him.
And I—
I remember
IX. The Puppet Who Dared Speak
As spoken by the Monarch of Destruction
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Enough.
What is this?
A memory?
A eulogy?
Did I permit this parade of sentiment?
Did I grant voice to the shade-cloaked errand boy of a fallen god?
No?
Then sit down, Interloper.
And remember your place.
You speak of bleeding. Of meaning. Of hope?
You were a sword with a name, nothing more.
He picked you up. You mistook it for purpose.
But I saw the truth of you:
A wandering root in search of soil.
A husk dressing itself in borrowed nobility.
You call yourself Grand Marshal now.
But to me?
You're just the first pawn who mistook proximity for power.
And proximity—to him—was never safety.
⸻
Let me remind you, and anyone else listening:
This is my telling.
Not his.
Not yours.
Mine.
So unless you wish to see what it means to have your essence unmade across a thousand timelines simultaneously…
Hold your tongue.
Because where I left off—
Was not in a grave.
It was in fire.
And I have much more to burn.
⸻
Shall we continue?
The war was no longer a war.
It was evolution.
A grinding of wills that sharpened reality against itself.
Ashborn may have withdrawn into silence.
But the rest of us?
We were not idle.
The Beast sharpened his hunger across a thousand worlds.
The Plague perfected extinction until biology begged for mercy.
The Frost claimed stars as trophies.
And I?
I led.
With fire. With ruin. With truth.
Because if this universe was birthed from fear…
Then it would die screaming in awe.
X. The Day the Dead Fought Back
As spoken by the Monarch of Destruction
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There comes a moment in every war
when memory turns to myth.
Where names begin to crack
beneath the weight of what they've done.
Ashborn had become one such name.
And for the first time since the first twitch of nothingness—
I felt curiosity.
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I do not fear.
Let me say that now and always.
But curiosity?
That I grant.
Not because I doubted my power—no.
But because the battlefield began to whisper.
Not scream. Whisper.
Have you ever heard a whisper make the stars lean closer?
That was his doing.
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The first sign was silence.
Not retreat. Not absence.
Silence.
Ashborn did not charge.
He did not roar.
He did not command from atop a godlike throne of bones.
He simply walked.
Through battlefields drowned in plague.
Through realms choked in frost.
Through skies my dragons had scarred.
He walked where no light remained.
And the dead followed him.
Not like an army.
Like a truth returning to claim its due.
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You don't understand what that means.
Let me explain it this way:
I have broken worlds with a whisper.
I have unmade cities before they could be born.
I have fed suns to the jaws of beasts I crafted in sleep.
But that day—
When I stood across from him on the field of Hollow Earth?
He looked at me.
And I saw not rage.
Not fear.
Not challenge.
I saw recognition.
And worse—
pity.
⸻
Do you know what it means to be pitied by a shadow?
By a memory that refused to die?
It means he had seen something I hadn't.
And for the first time…
I felt the shape of an enemy I could not define.
He did not strike first.
He never did.
He simply raised a hand—
—and the dead stood.
Not monsters. Not beasts.
Knights.
Soldiers.
Kings.
Each one broken once… now bound by purpose.
Not mine.
Not the Rulers'.
His.
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That battle was not won.
Not by either of us.
But something changed.
From that moment onward, the war was no longer two-sided.
Not Monarchs versus Rulers.
Now, there was him.
A kingdom of silence.
A throne with no anthem.
A king with no living subjects, yet more loyal than any I'd ever commanded.
Ashborn did not shout.
He remembered.
And that made him more dangerous than any of us.
⸻
So I burned the field.
I shattered the bones of his champions.
I roared until timelines cracked.
But still—
They stood again.
And again.
And again.
Because death was no longer the end.
Not while he existed.
Not while he remembered .
…let it end in awe.
Not peace.
Not balance.
But awe—raw, blinding, overwhelming.
The kind that silences even gods.
⸻
X. The Fire That Spoke Back
Do you remember the first time a mortal raised their voice to the sky?
When they screamed not in worship, but in defiance?
That sound was mine.
Not because I taught it to them—
But because it matched me.
The mortals, pitiful and brief, were never meant to shape anything.
They were flukes.
Scattered atoms with dreams too large for their frames.
But they believed.
Not in gods.
Not in laws.
In themselves.
⸻
And belief, when it grows teeth, becomes flame.
I saw it.
I felt it.
The way their anger made Realms tremble.
The way their grief lit stars brighter than any edict the Rulers ever carved.
They should have been snuffed out.
Easily.
But the Rulers, in their arrogance, tried to tame them.
Tried to grant them "purpose."
Tried to make disciples out of creatures born for rebellion.
They gave them trials.
Blessings.
Titles.
And that…
was their second greatest mistake.
⸻
Because mortals do not carry gifts with gratitude.
They carry them like weapons.
The first time one of them defied a Ruler, they wept as they bled.
The second time, they smiled.
The third—
They laughed.
And laughter, when aimed at gods, is sacrilege.
But I welcomed it.
⸻
Understand this: I do not love mortals.
I do not weep for them or pretend they are sacred.
But I respect them.
Because in them, I saw something the Rulers forgot and the Monarchs misunderstood:
The will to burn everything rather than kneel.
And in the center of that will—
A boy was born.
Just a boy.
Mortal.
Insignificant.
But the crack he made in the pattern?
It split the whole tapestry.
He did not inherit flame.
He became it.
And from the ashes of everything they tried to make him be…
He chose.
Not destruction.
Not order.
Shadow.
⸻
We'll speak of him soon.
The last player.
The final piece.
But not yet.
Because before him…
Before the collapse…
Before the end even began—
I had to become something more than fire.
I had to become story.
And story, little listener, is the one thing not even gods can kill.