Galaxies drifted like corpses in a tide too ancient to name. The void groaned with light that had forgotten how to shine. Even the constellations hung like broken teeth—too ashamed to guide, too tired to dream.
Agonized screams and maniacal laughter echoed across the vast nothingness. A twisted symphony for a play no god should witness.
But beneath the howling galaxies and dying stars, a single truth remained.
Not time.
Not light.
Merely a father... and his son.
A son now known as The First Evil.
He towered in silence. Armor creaked—stitched not from metal, but from bone and sinew, lacquered in crimson. The plates were warm, like something still alive. Tumorous eyes protruded from every crevice in his frame, blinking out of sync, leaking green ichor. They did not see—they devoured.
And with each blink, his skin remembered how to hunger.
His irises shimmered with purple rot, slicked in gold. His laughter was not sound, but a pulse—the dying throb of a sun gasping its last. It warped the air, made it sick. The silence that followed was his throne.
Before him stood a monument—untouched.
Hrolyn. The Old God.
Ancient, stooped, unassuming... yet unbroken. He stood nearly eight feet tall, his back curved beneath millennia of memory. A staff, older than gravity, tapped once against the shattered floor—not a threat, but punctuation.
The stars behind him dimmed—not in dread, but reverence. As if the cosmos, momentarily, remembered a promise too old to speak.
The void pressed inward, heavy with expectation. It mirrored the weight Hrolyn had carried across eons—grief worn down into ritual, sorrow hardened into law.
The First lifted his arms—six-fingered hands unfolding like inverted wings. Blood pooled at his feet, black as regret. Tears of void wept from his palms, mingling with the gore.
He gestured lazily to the pool of crimson.
"Come, Father," he purrs, each syllable slithering like oil on flame.
"Give me the last verse. Let your staff sing the requiem for your pride."
As he spoke, a ripple passed through his body—his many eyes weeping, his jagged teeth gleaming like shattered halos.
His lips tore open as they stretched—flesh splitting at the corners of his mouth. Blood trickled down his chin like wine from a cracked chalice.
Despite that, he grinned.
"I once dreamed you would wear a crown of constellations," he says, voice grinding like granite.
"Not gather them like ash in your teeth."
The First smirked—a wound re-opening.
"A dreamer, still. Even now."
"Do you ever tire of the weightless elegance of disappointment, Father?"
Hrolyn did not answer. His silence cracked with tension.
"Do you ever tire," the First pressed, "of being a wound that never learns how to scab?"
Hrolyn's jaw tightened.
"I carved you from the clay of potential," he replies at last, his voice low and worn.
"Named you heir to silence—not as punishment, but as a promise. You were to sing the last lullaby of time, not howl in its wake."
"What have you become, my son?"
The words ruptured the silence like thunder dragged from the bones of a dying god.
His robe, once stitched from strands of living light, carried the weight of every history he'd failed to rewrite. His eyes were black voids glowing with gravitational sorrow. Galaxies lived and died behind them.
"I named you 'mercy' once," he says, his voice dragging entire centuries behind each syllable.
"Even gods may err."
He spoke as if the stars mourned with him.
"I held you the day you were born. I thought your silence meant wisdom."
"Even gods dream, once. You were mine."
The First tilted his head, mockingly tender.
"Father, you cast me in your image. You forged law from starlight, and damned me for kneeling only to silence. I am the truth beneath your order. The teeth behind your prayer."
"There is a difference," Hrolyn answers, "between stillness and rot. Between law... and obsession."
"I gave you will. You mistook it for a prison."
"I mistook nothing."
"You built dreams with law. I wove nightmares from your regrets."
The First stepped closer, smiling with something cruel and intimate.
"Your pretty universes always crack."
"Mother would be disappointed."
His mouth split wide—too wide to be anything human.
Hrolyn's eyes flared. His voice dropped into something heavy and final.
"Speak not her name, wretched thing."
"You are not born of her warmth—you are the shadow she wept when love died."
The First's voice grew quiet, intimate in a way that made the void recoil.
"Do you ever think of her, Father?"
"The way she wept when she named me? Before the chains. Before the silence. She loved me, once."
A pause. His voice cracked.
"I watched the light leave her eyes."
"And you smiled."
Hrolyn stood still. A statue sculpted from agony.
"Whatever I loved in you," he whispers, "died beside her corpse."
"This isn't justice. Justice is pure."
"This... is penance."
His hand trembled—not in fear, but in memory. His fingers curled, instinctively recalling the last breath she exhaled into his skin. Her warmth was a scar carved across time.
There would be no more lullabies.
Only flame.
Only judgment.
Above them, distant planets cracked—splitting down the middle, weeping molten light into a dark that no longer cared.
At Hrolyn's feet, time curled like burned parchment.
"These hands once cradled you."
"These eyes once called you salvation."
"Now, they bring the end."
His voice dropped into the grave.
"Such a waste."
The First's grin widened. His eyes glowed with mockery.
"Then bleed, Father."
"Let your penance carve the sky."
Hrolyn's eyes closed—Father, one final time.
When they opened, he was no longer that.
He was judgment.
He raised the relic of beginnings.
The sky cracked.
It bled teal and gold.
The laws of physics screamed—folding inward like glass under grief. The sky fractured like a memory made manifest.
For a heartbeat, all creation held its breath.
And Hrolyn spoke—not to his enemy, but to the stars that once watched him dream.
"Remembering, not hating, I judge—by First Flame's breath and timeline's weeping."
The sky tore apart, a roar like history itself dying in defiance.
The First withstood it—grinning still, clawing at the seams of reality.
Then, with force forged in wrath and will, he summoned a Vorelan Rift—a blazar-shaped tear in the fabric of existence, vomiting a beam of antimatter. So intense it vaporized the concept of light.
It shattered the majestic Star-Crowns.
Burning the celestial Ring Shards.
As it reduced the Omega Spires to smoking whispers of heat and memory.
The First smiled.
Even the light-eaters flinched.
Hrolyn spoke not—but the cosmos heard the silence.
Low and grave as the first drumbeat of creation, he whispered,
"Let this be the final dirge, O stars."
"Witness the harvest sown in pride, and watered with the blood of time."
"I do not raise my hand in wrath—but in remembrance."
He clutched his staff.
"May the law that bore you... be the law that binds you."
Then he did the impossible.
He did not strike with strength.
He chose acceptance.
His body dissolved into a storm of shimmering motes—each one a sliver of memory: a kindness, a wisdom, a dream. The motes spun like lost stardust, coalescing into the Mournpulse—a weapon forged from the broken heart of a dying pulsar.
It struck.
A blast of anti-time erupted, wrapping The First in paradox: perception frozen and sped up all at once.
Space buckled. Reality bled.
The First sneered through the rupture.
"Tricks," he spits, his voice sour with disdain.
"You always hide behind parlor tricks. Delay tactics. Hoping the cosmos might love you again."
"But they don't. They never did."
Hrolyn did not move.
"I do not strike to be loved."
"I strike ... because silence must have a sword."
He paused, then whispered — "But even silence must leave behind an echo."