I sat on the throne because that was what I did—sat, judged, tired of sitting. The throne was gold and heavy, not gaudy so much as practical: it held weight, it kept people at a distance. Across from me, Chloe smiled the way someone smiles when they know they have a knife in their sleeve. Her eyes and nose were hidden by cloth; only her mouth showed. Pink mouth. Too cheerful for what she was about to say.
"You're going to die," she told me like it was a party favor.
I let my fingers rest on the arms of the chair. "Is that something you smile at, huh, Chloe?" I asked. My voice didn't shake, but my stomach did. I told myself not to care. I told myself a lot of things.
For as long as I could remember I had been used to people saying impossible things. Gods lie a lot. Gods flatter, gods cajole, gods bargain. They have more mouths than conviction. Chloe's grin never reached whatever eyes she had behind the cloth, but she was a god of birth and fertility—her smiles were supposed to be warm. Not this one.
"Well," she said, folding her hands like a child. "I was told the same thing. I found it amusing that someone called the strongest God in the cosmos would be told the same."
"You sound bored," I said. I kept my tone light because I wanted to keep the moment light, wanted to pretend this was a prank. My black hair fell a little over my forehead. My eyes were the color of dried blood in low light—crimson the old poets liked to call it, which always made me want to laugh at poets. I smiled, but my smile didn't reach my eyes. "Listen, I won't die. Even if I manage to die, I have precautions. Is that all you came to say?"
Chloe shifted, and when she spoke her words were clean and small. "No… I came to tell you your Twelve Zodiacs have been upgraded. Official god rank, under you—if you wish."
A soft warmth went through me at the thought of them—my Zodiacs, the pieces of myself I'd trained, the weapons born of my temper and patience. I smiled wider than I felt. "So they've grown. Wonderful. Upgrade them. And by the way, who told you I'd die?"
Chloe blinked. For a moment she looked like she had been stripped of pleasure. "I promised under the god oath." She tapped her chest. "Divine blood. If broken, you lose rank and power. I could not—"
"You promised?," I echoed. My fingers tightened on the armrests. I let them. I wanted to see who flinched first. "Still, a promise can't hide who told you. You don't have insight into the future—so it was Gabriel, right?"
"But I know Gabriel isnt some future telling angel, so who told Gabriel."
She startled at my name. She hadn't expected me to guess it; I knew Gabriel's pride. He belonged to Heaven—an archangel in the Nine Realms. Gabriel spoke in absolutes. He never whispered. Yet someone had told him. Someone with reach. Someone who could speak into Heaven's ear without fear.
Chloe's cloth trembled. "I can't— I swore."
"You can leave," I said, standing very slowly so I could watch the flicker in her fingers. "Because I will find out."
She rose then, calm and sudden, and she opened a portal like a wound in the air. Before she stepped through she leaned close enough that breath warmed the cloth over her face. "I hope what you have prepared is enough, Arthur. You won't survive what's coming."
The portal closed behind her like a palm over a mouth. I let out a breath and let the hall return to a normal temperature, to people who moved like they were not about to stab me in the back.
I laughed then, loud and short. It came out wrong. "Why would I listen to you, Chloe?" I said to the empty space she left. "You're the one working with Mount Olympus, with my Twelve, with the Outerverse creatures. Agathos, Nyarloth—fragments, all of them. You brought a legion to kill a king. You call that justice?"
The laugh I expected never came. Instead, the hall—Celestial Earth, a place where demigods and gods lived—trembled in a way I knew too well. It felt like a premonition and a warning at once: a thrumm that walked through the stones. The celestials looked up; lesser gods clenched fists. They were mine, or had been. Maybe I still owned them, in the way landlords own tenants: in paper and claim, not in loyalty.
I readied myself without thinking. Old reflex. Old muscle memory. I reached into the air and pulled a katana into my hand like another part of my body. Metal hummed to me—old friend, old language. I didn't shout. I didn't need to. I cut the hall in half.
It was theatrical, and the gods outside—six of them, no more—were visible through the wound I made in the building. I had expected an army, a mountain of gods, a skycloud of petitions and battle cries. Instead there were six. Not very many. They had sent a dozen of their best, and the rest of their army were excuses—donkeys to kill a lion. I smiled. Ridiculous.
They were not ordinary gods. They were from the Nine Realms, and they moved like rulers with the arrogance of absolute power. One of them stepped forward with horns curling from his forehead, skin pale as frost, eyes like polished ice, hair like a sun gone white. He spoke with an accent that was everything that came from the mountain realms: measured, inevitable. "I'm afraid your killing won't be possible."
He stepped, vanished, and reappeared inches from me. He didn't surprise me; I did not flinch. I had been surprised before. Surprise had been a teacher that gave me scars. He said a single phrase—"Shadow Cleave"—and a dark blade split him open from sternum to ribcage like he was paper. He fell apart at my feet in two neat halves.
The hall smelled like iron and old perfume.
I moved to finish it. Pride ran like a river through me. I expected fear, a plea, a retreat—anything but the cold steel of a hidden blade between my ribs.
The blade slid into my back and there was no time to name who had done it. I felt the shock and then the absurdity of it all. A knight. A Pegasus knight—one of Athena's. How pathetic. How typical. They sent knights to stab a god.
I laughed, bleeding and bright. "A knight dares to stab me," I said, tasting bile and iron. My hand went to the wound. The blade had hit something vital, but gods do not die from a single blade, or so I thought. I had precautions. I had wards. I had—something—waiting.
Five shapes walked out of the air as if stepping into a rehearsal they'd already practiced a thousand times: Aquarius, Taurus, Leo, Capricorn, Ares. My Zodiacs. My gods. My children, if you wanted the sentimental version. They stood with weapons held like waiting hands.
"Sorry, master," Aquarius said with the polite cruelty of someone removing a splinter with their teeth. "But we all want you dead."
Betrayal tastes like salt and cold metal. I thought of nights I had trained them, of cold dawns and the way their hands had learned my sword. I had fed them, clothed them, taught them cruelty dressed as discipline. I remember the smallness in their eyes the first time they understood hunger. And now they smiled as they drove blades into my back. Taurus, who had once been the heft of a mountain on my shoulder, drove a spear in, and the pain was a bell that didn't ring properly.
My vision narrowed. Time did the polite thing and stretched out. I thought of names—Gabriel, Chloe, Athena—and I thought of the word leviathan. I had felt it in the air, a taste like old sea salt and sulfur; I felt the toxin working in my veins like someone had built a map of my weaknesses and then walked through it at will.
"Leviathan's poison," I said through a laugh that was close to a cough. "That's why you bested me—poison. Without it, the fight would have been over. You would all be ashes. Pray, then, on the Nine Realms and Celestial Earth that I'm not reborn. If I am—if I ever—I'll shred you to pieces."
They laughed. It was a small, coordinated sound. Chloe reappeared where she had gone, as silent as a rumor. She did not speak for a long moment. When she finally did, her voice was soft, like the arrangement of a prayer. "If you are reborn, grow stronger," she said. "Serve the Absolute Celestial. The new ruler."
I wanted to tell her to choke on her words. Instead I looked at her, at the hand that had been clean when she arrived. Cold silk covered her hand like the rest of her face. I laughed again. "Fuck you all," I said, loud enough for the hall to hear. I wanted my voice to be the last thing they remembered before they counted their spoils. I wanted it to mean something.
Pain made the last of my pride collapse into something useful. The world tilted. The faces of my Zodiacs blurred into one another—young men and women who had once wanted to be better than me, who had wanted the whole world to look at them and see their hands. They had learned betrayal; they had learned how to paper over guilt with duty. I had taught them that duty and they used it.
Chloe put her hand on my chest and pressed. The pressure wasn't the soft hand of someone who wanted to comfort; it was the practiced pressure of an executioner. I felt it like a hammer, and then I felt the hole where my heart should have been, clean and clinical.
"You will be remembered," I said, because the last thing to die is usually ego. It keeps you upright for a little longer than the body allows. "And if I return—"
"You will serve new order," Chloe whispered, and the words were gone like breath.
I laughed. The sound tore something in me that had been used to laughing for an absence of fear. I tasted blood and honey and a pocket of memories I had hoped to tuck away. Faces of battle, warm and wet. I had imagined this death a thousand times, always as a storybook death—noble, dramatic, a single blade, a tear. Reality prefers small things: poison, a knight's blade, a mutiny of your own blood.
The light went in and out like someone flashing a lamp in my eyes. I didn't pray. I had never been good at asking for things I knew I'd get regardless of asking. Instead I thought of practicalities—the wards I had put in place, the contracts and names I'd recorded in the annals of the Nine Realms. I had believed those things would anchor me, that the web of my influence would hold even if my body failed.
It didn't.
Darkness came like the end of a good joke.
Then there was a sound in my head, not a voice but a system of clicks and tones arranged like old keys. I couldn't tell whether I had been dead ten seconds or ten years. The world kept doing what worlds do: it didn't stop for a single god to rethink his life.
When I opened my eyes again it was not the Celestial Earth. The air tasted wrong. It had a faint, electric tang, like rain on hot concrete. The sky was too bright and there were no stars where there should have been; instead there were streetlights and the distant pulse of a city. I was on a mattress that smelled faintly of cigarette ash and detergent. My hands were small and human and they shook.
"Where the hell—" I started, and then my throat closed at the meaning.
Mana. The sensation was new and dull at the same time. It was as if someone had turned a dial in the world and opened a channel that filtered through the modern life like sunlight through blinds. Dungeons, gates, a leveling system—the cliches I had sworn I would tolerate only once in a lifetime were in the air like pollen. It was childish, and awful, and exactly correct.
My fingers grazed something at my bedside. The world responded.
SYSTEM: OPEN.
The letters were not printed anywhere visible; they unfurled in my mind like a flag. A voice—none of the gods' voices I knew—spoke in a tone that was neither kind nor cruel. It was efficient. "System open and the—"
The message cut off. My vision narrowed into focus on the beating thing under my ribs, which was not my heart but a familiar ache. My memories flowed back then, not all at once but in a slow stitch: Chloe's pink mouth, the hidden blade, the smell of the poison, the faces of my Zodiacs, Gabriel's name like a stain on a letter.
I swallowed. My throat worked. The room felt too small for what I had been.
I did not know the rules here yet. I had lived in halls that were carved in stars and laws that bound gods like iron. Modern Earth had new rules—systems, gates, levels like talismans in a child's game. It felt wrong and intoxicating. I sat up, my old instincts waking like muscles after a long sleep. There were things to do, plans to unspool. Revenge is a long work. It begins with breath, with standing, with learning the geography of a smaller world.
My hand curled into a fist. I tasted iron and resolve.
"Good," I said to no one out loud. "Let's see what this system is."
The voice in my head finished at last, the same flat tone: "System open and the user—"
Then everything else went quiet, as if the world itself held its breath, waiting for me to choose the next word.