They told stories about how gods die.
That was the first lie.
Gods did not die screaming, or begging, or weeping into the indifferent void. They did not claw at the dirt or curse the heavens that had abandoned them. When gods died, they did so quietly—not because they had accepted it, but because sound no longer had permission to exist around them.
Delta knew this because he had watched them try.
He sat alone at the edge of a broken realm, boots resting on stone that no longer remembered being a mountain. The sky above was a wound that refused to clot—dark light bleeding through fractured layers of reality. Wind passed through him without warmth, without direction, like the sigh of something that had already mourned everything worth losing.
He was unmasked.
That, more than the devastation, unsettled the world.
Delta leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees, fingers flexing slowly as if to remind himself they were still there. His hands were scarred—not superficially, but conceptually. These were not wounds inflicted by blades or spells, but by names, titles, expectations etched into him over centuries of violence.
The God Killer.
Guardian of Hell.
Right Hand of Hades.
Broken King.
Funny how none of those were his.
He exhaled. The sound echoed farther than it should have.
Somewhere behind him, a god finished preventing its own existence.
Delta didn't turn to look.
There was no satisfaction left in it.
A long time ago—before Hell had a throne, before Heaven learned to fear silence—someone had placed a mask into his hands.
Not a gift. Never that.
A decision.
The mask had been forged wrong. Not incorrectly, but deliberately. It was smooth and pale, carved with no expression at all. No mouth. No eyes. Just absence, shaped to fit his face. When he wore it, the world stopped seeing Delta.
It only saw an ending.
Put this on, Lyrieth had told him, long ago, her voice calm in the way only masters could afford to be. And you will never be forgiven again.
He hadn't asked why.
He had put it on anyway.
Now it was gone.
Lost—taken—misplaced by fate or cruelty or something worse than either. Delta didn't know. He only knew that without it, the universe had started remembering he was a person.
And it hated that.
"You're quieter without it."
Delta didn't flinch. He didn't look back.
Nyxara emerged from the distortion like a shadow deciding to become real. Her armor drank the dim light, her long black hair drifting as if submerged in something unseen. The air bent around her presence, acknowledging an apex it did not understand.
She stopped a few paces behind him.
"Was that meant to be comforting?" Delta asked.
"No," Nyx replied pleasantly. "Observational."
He snorted—a short, dry sound. "Try harder next time."
She smiled. He could hear it.
"Still alive," she continued. "Still sarcastic. Still pretending you don't care."
"Still stalking me," Delta said. "Some things survive every apocalypse."
Nyx stepped closer, her boots never quite touching the stone. "You didn't collect your arm cannons."
"I noticed."
"You didn't call Hell back into alignment."
"Also noticed."
She tilted her head. "You didn't even take the throne."
That got him.
Delta finally turned, meeting those dark-blue eyes that had watched stars collapse and found the experience amusing.
"I sat on that chair once," he said evenly. "And the universe decided that meant I agreed with it."
Nyx laughed softly. "You killed Odin last week."
"He tried to explain why," Delta replied. "That was his mistake."
For a moment, they simply existed. Two impossibilities standing on the corpse of an idea that used to call itself a realm.
Nyx crossed her arms. "They're whispering again."
"Who?"
"The story," she said.
Delta's expression tightened.
Ah.
That.
He looked past her—not at the ruins, not at the bleeding sky, but at something thinner. Something closer. A pressure just behind the eyes.
You're still here, he thought.
Good.
"You know," he said casually, staring straight at where you were, "they always think I don't notice."
Nyx frowned. "Notice what?"
"Nothing," Delta said. Then, quietly, to the space between words: "Yet."
The void listened.
Once, Delta had believed strength was something you carried.
Then he believed it was something you endured.
Eventually, he learned the truth.
Strength was what remained when everything else had been taken—and you kept walking anyway.
Lyrieth had vanished during a battle that shouldn't have been possible. No body. No echo. Just absence sharp enough to carve through time. The chains she had worn—chains forged to bind a being who wanted limits—had fallen where she stood.
Delta had picked them up with shaking hands.
He remembered thinking: So this is what it feels like to be left behind.
That was when the mask cracked for the first time.
"You can't stay like this forever," Nyx said.
"I can stay like this longer than forever," Delta replied.
She studied him. "They're rebuilding Asgard."
He barked a laugh. "Then they didn't learn."
"They rarely do."
Delta stood.
The motion alone sent ripples through reality, fractures stitching themselves closed out of fear or habit. He rolled his shoulders, feeling phantom weight where his arm cannons should have been. Somewhere, weapons waited for him—sleeping, dormant, remembering the shape of his soul.
He just hadn't called them yet.
Not because he couldn't.
Because once he did, the story would accelerate.
"And you?" he asked Nyx. "Here to stop me?"
She smiled wider. "To see which way you break."
Delta paused.
Then he nodded slowly. "Fair."
He took a step forward—and the ground remembered how to kneel.
"Tell them this," he said, voice carrying far beyond Nyx, beyond gods, beyond readers pretending they weren't holding their breath.
"The God Killer isn't gone."
He turned, walking into the void.
"I just stopped wearing my face."