The throne room trembled beneath the roar of a thousand voices. Nobles, priests, and generals knelt in unison, their foreheads pressed to the marble floor as the man they worshipped ascended the dais.
King Alaric Kaelthar stood above them, draped in crimson robes stitched with gold thread spun from conquered treasuries. The crown on his brow glittered with stolen jewels, each stone pried from the corpse of another king. His eyes were cold and precise, measuring the crowd like a tactician sizing up a battlefield.
Behind him hung banners of blood-red silk, each embroidered with sigils of nations kneaded into history by his hand. Wolves of the North. Suns of the desert. Dragons of the East. Once-proud emblems now hung as trophies. The marble itself was a map of his victories—mosaics of broken spears and broken kings, pillars carved with scenes of campaigns that smelled faintly of iron and smoke.
Ten years of war had broken empires. Ten years of blood had left his banners planted in every capital.
No rival king remained.
No army dared march beneath another standard.
The world had bent its knee.
And yet, he demanded more.
This ceremony was meant to be the crown upon a lifetime of conquest: a sanctification by priests, anointment before the heavens, the seal that would bind crown to divinity. The High Priest of the Eternal Flame stood at the foot of the dais, staff raised. His hands trembled. He had aged into his robes, decades of worship etched into his face. The staff itself was older than any of the nobles present, inlaid with sigils and silver filaments that promised protection with oath and order.
"Your Majesty," the priest intoned, voice thin with piety and fear, "the rites are prepared. We call upon the gods to witness this hour. We ask their blessing that your rule will bring order and prosperity."
A murmur of prayer rose, a fragile thing that threaded through the bowed heads. Incense smoke curled in ornate spirals, turning the air into a haze of white and grey that softened the edges of marble and gold. Musicians played low notes on horns and strings; the sound was a slow heartbeat under the priest's words.
Alaric descended the last step with deliberate slowness, every movement a lesson in control. He stopped just before the priest, and for an instant the hall held its breath with him. Then his hand moved like a blade: he seized the staff, his fingers closing on ancient wood and silver… he snapped it in half.
The shatter was more than sound; it was a rupture in faith. For a heartbeat the world seemed to lurch.
Gasps spread like wildfire. A woman in the front row clutched her child so hard the child's face reddened. A general's knuckles went white around the haft of his sword. Some faces showed guilt, others awe. A handful of old soldiers who had bled with him from the beginning smiled, as if the snapping were a victorious crack.
Alaric's voice filled the space, precise and cold as winter iron.
"Before the gods? No. There are no gods. Not above me. Not beyond me.
I am king of kings."
His words landed like gavel strikes. He let the sentence hang, then leaned forward, eyes like quarries of flint.
"There is no one and nothing, across eons or heavens, I will ever kneel to."
The High Priest's knees found the floor as if pulled by invisible cords. "Blasphemy—"
Alaric raised a hand and cut the priest's word short, a small, contemptuous motion. "Blasphemy?" he said softly. "Tell me, priest—what is a god to a king?"
He walked the length of the dais, boots whispering on marble, each step a measured echo.
"A whisper in the dark," he said. "A leash for the weak."
He turned, and the hall watched its monarch as if watching a god. "I have crushed nations beneath my heel. I have rewritten borders with blood. Kingdoms fell. Empires broke. The world itself bowed, and I pressed my heel into its throat."
A murmur ran, half prayer, half denial. Some pressed their foreheads harder against stone, as if their faith could hold what he had broken.
"The sun rises not by their will," he continued, voice heavy with scorn, "but because I permit it to rise over lands that are mine. Do you not see? I am divinity made flesh."
He laughed then, a metallic sound that shivered across the mosaics. "What is a god to a king? A phantom hiding behind incense and prayers.
I rule not by whispers, but by blood, by steel, by the fire of men who follow me."
He paced the dais like a predator, letting his words sink. "I have watched priests call for miracles. I have watched mothers beg the heavens for mercy while their children starved. And the heavens—" here his voice dropped, cruel—"the heavens answered with silence."
This provocation changed the tenor of the gathered crowd. Where fear had been stoic before, it turned to something raw. A young noble near the aisle clenched his jaw so hard a vein stood out on his temple. An old captain who had fought wars under Alaric pressed his palm to his scarred face.
"So strike me then, gods," Alaric said, spreading his arms wide as if embracing the dome itself. "If you are real, let your lightning burn me where I stand. Prove yourselves. Or admit what all men must see—nothing stands above my throne."
For a moment there was only his voice and the fluttering of a woman's sob. Then the torches guttered. One by one, the flames winked out, swallowed by an absence that was almost physical. Shadow crept along the marble, thick and greedy like spilled oil.
The silence that followed was absolute, so vast it seemed to crush the breath from ribs. Even the orchestra stopped, strings slackening into an abrupt, painful note.
Then the light came.
It was no sun or torch. It was not thunder. It did not speak; it simply fell, an ocean of cold brilliance poured from a slit that appeared in the dome like a wound opening in the sky.
It hit Alaric first. The light was a thing that knew only how to punish. It did not scorch so much as unmake; it peeled at the edges of flesh and memory. His crown—once a glittering halo of claimed worlds—bloomed and ran like wax. Jewels bled molten, cutting into his face with the slow cruelty of glass. His robes caught and turned into a hungry thing of flame that crept like a living serpent, tasting and burning.
Still he did not bow. His knees buckled, his form hunched and convulsed, but his chin remained lifted.
A sound akin to a roar echoed:
"WHAT'S A GOD TO A NON-BELIEVER?!" he roared, voice torn and iron-true.
"Burn me! Shatter me! Tear me apart!" His words were ragged, each one a strike against the invisible. "Do you think this will silence me? Do you think I will crawl?"
The light thickened until it had weight. Fingers of radiance lanced through his chest, digging into places no blade could reach. Pain became a landscape in which he was both traveler and land. It unraveled something older than memory inside him: bones echoed like struck bells, veins became rivers of ice, thoughts peeled back into raw images—
Visions spilled into him: towers of ivory collapsing into void, armies with banners turned to ash before they could be born, figures in the periphery whose faces were the shapes of storms. He saw the gods as courts of light, not merciful but statistical and cold, measuring and pruning. They did not rage; they executed calculations.
But through the fireworks of annihilation, Alaric found a center: a thin thread of consciousness that was stubborn and full of poison. He threaded his voice through the brightness.
"I will not kneel!" he shouted, the syllables tearing from him like cloth. "Not to you. Not to anyone!"
Laughter—countless, dry as old leaves—answered him in a chorus that could have been triumph or mockery. The light creaked like an arch falling inward. For a pulse, his silhouette changed into something obscene: elongated, jointed wrong, a monstrous suggestion of what might come if man learned to wear divine shapes. The hall convulsed with noise: screams, the crash of chandeliers, the sound of something very old and hungry turning its face.
He screamed back, not in supplication but in rage. "When this curse is done… when your fire fades… I will return. And when I do—"
His voice fractured like a mirror. A piece of him flickered and then was gone. The rest of him coiled as if drawn by a hook and then vanished into the light.
When the brilliance finally ebbed, the throne room lay exposed as if in the eye after the storm. The throne itself stood like a tooth in a jaw. At its foot a black crater smoked, a basin where earth had been burned away.
Silence stretched like the holding of a wound. The High Priest lay curled over the broken staff like a thing that had lost its god and child in the same instant. A captain wept with his face buried in his hands. A frightened child, tightly held onto his drenched mother frozen in fear on the cold marble.
"He—he defied them even as he burned," murmured a general whose voice scraped like dry leather.
"No man should speak so and survive," the High Priest whispered, though none could say what survival would mean now.
Outside, the city waited. Word was a living creature in the streets; peasants would whisper, merchants would drop wares, and mothers would pull children close. Rumors would build like tinder into fires: that the king had ascended, that he had been annihilated, that he had become something else. Some would whisper of a martyr; others of a monster.
But for those in the hall, one sensation lodged deep—an ache of dread that tasted a bit like awe. The gods had answered. They had punished their king with a force that had no grammar in mortal tongues.
And yet, even as the last embers of light smoked away, a sound threaded through the silence—unexpected, impossible, and small:
Laughter. Low at first, as if tunneled through stone, then clearer; the clang of a man's mirth against the void.
As though even heaven's fire had failed to silence him.