The Death of Gods
"In the end, the most powerful being who ever lived felt nothing at all. That was the tragedy. Not the dying — the emptiness that made him welcome it."
You are dying, and the taste of it is silver.
Not the metaphor. The metal. Your blood has tasted of silver for the last three thousand years, ever since you consumed the Argentum Throne and made its power your own. Before that, it tasted of iron, like any mortal's. You have not been mortal for so long that the memory of iron is itself a kind of death.
The throne room of the Obsidian Citadel stretches around you in all directions, a cathedral of black stone and frozen starlight. You built it ten thousand years ago, when you still built things. When your hands still remembered how to create rather than destroy. The pillars are carved with the names of every world you conquered, every dimension you folded into your empire. There are so many names that the pillars have no blank stone left, and for the last millennium your scribes have been carving into the floor. You stopped reading the names eight thousand years ago. They are just sounds. Just places that used to exist and now exist only as fuel for your throne.
You should care about that. You know this the way you know that stars are hot and the void is cold — as a fact that has no weight. You should care that billions of living beings once inhabited those names, that they had families and languages and songs and small, ordinary griefs. You should care. You remember caring, distantly, the way a man remembers a childhood pet: the shape of the feeling without any of its warmth.
The seven generals stand in a semicircle around you, and their expressions are the most interesting thing you have seen in a century.
Vorath is the closest. He has always been the closest. Your first general, your first follower, the first being in the Abyss who looked at you and chose to kneel. He is not kneeling now. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, and his face is a study in controlled devastation — the face of a man performing surgery on his own heart and refusing anesthesia. You have known Vorath for ten thousand two hundred and forty-seven years. You have never seen him cry. He is crying now. A single line of darkness tracks down his left cheek, and he does not wipe it away.
You consider telling him that crying is inefficient. You consider telling him that sentiment is a vulnerability. You consider these things and feel nothing about them. Not even the satisfaction of cruelty. The machine of your mind produces the thoughts and discards them with the same mechanical indifference.
Azreth stands to Vorath's left. The Desolator. Your war-general, your burning fist. He is grinning, but the grin is wrong — too wide, too bright, the kind of grin that men wear when the alternative is screaming. His hands are shaking. Azreth's hands have not shaken since the Battle of the Seven Suns, when you fought together against things that ate light and he held the line for forty days while you devoured the enemy's dimension. That was six thousand years ago. His hands are shaking now because he is about to kill the only being he has ever served, and some part of him still believes you'll stop this. That you'll wake up. That the emperor they followed will resurface from whatever grave you buried him in.
You will not.
The others are there too — Morrigan with her masks, Vexis with his hungry eyes, Lilthara with her careful smile, Thanatos with his perfect emptiness, Erebus with his pride held like a shield. Seven generals. Seven betrayers. Seven beings who served you for millennia and have gathered in this frozen throne room to end you, and the most honest thing you can think is:
Finally.
• •
The array activates. You feel it before you see it — seven pillars of power converging on the point where your body sits on the throne. They have been planning this for centuries. You know this because you have known for centuries. You watched them whisper in corridors you designed to carry whispers directly to your ears. You observed their secret meetings through the eyes of shadows you planted in their quarters before they were born. You knew the date, the method, the precise configuration of the sealing array they would use.
You did nothing to stop it.
You could have killed them all in their sleep. You could have dismantled the array with a thought. You could have erased their memories of rebellion and replaced them with loyalty so seamless they would have kissed your feet and meant it. You have done all of these things to others, for lesser offenses, without losing a breath.
But you are tired.
Not the tiredness of a body that needs sleep. The tiredness of a mind that has thought every thought, fought every war, built every empire, consumed every world, and found at the bottom of absolute power a truth so simple it should be carved into the throne itself:
There is nothing here.
The array burns. Your power — vast, ancient, world-breaking — drains from you like blood from a wound, and the sensation is so foreign that it takes you a moment to identify it. Pain. You had forgotten pain. It is almost interesting.
Your body begins to dissolve. Not dramatically — there is no explosion, no scream of cosmic energy. You simply come apart, particle by particle, like a statue returning to sand. Your left hand goes first. You watch your fingers unravel with the clinical detachment of a scholar observing an experiment. The silver blood that has replaced your humanity evaporates into mist that tastes of regret, though you cannot feel regret. You cannot feel anything.
Vorath steps forward. His lips are moving. You can still read lips — that is a skill so old it has sunk below memory into the bedrock of your being.
"Forgive me," he is saying. "Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me."
You try to speak. Your jaw is mostly gone, but the magic that constitutes your existence is sufficient to push sound through the dissolving architecture of your throat. You want to say something meaningful. Something that will be remembered. Something worthy of ten thousand years.
What comes out is a single word, and it is not for Vorath, not for any of them. It is for yourself. For the boy you were before the throne, before the power, before the silver blood and the consumed worlds and the names carved into pillars. A boy who once made things with his hands and thought that mattered.
You say: "Finally."
And then you are gone.
• •
Except you are not.
The soul of the Demon Emperor — your soul, that mangled, ancient, silver-stained thing — does not dissipate. It should. Every law of dimensional physics says it should. A soul that has been unmade by a seven-point sealing array should scatter across the void like ash in a hurricane. But your soul is too dense, too scarred, too saturated with the residue of ten millennia of accumulated power. It does not scatter. It collapses inward, like a star that has burned too hot for too long, and in collapsing it tears a hole in the fabric between dimensions.
You fall.
Through layers of reality — the Abyss, the Interstitial, the Grey Veil, the Shattered Corridor — your soul plunges like a stone through water, trailing fragments of memory that peel away like burning skin. You lose centuries. You lose the names of worlds. You lose the taste of silver. You lose the sealing array and Vorath's tears and the throne room and the empire and the war and the loneliness and the power, all of it stripped away by the friction of dimensional transit, and what is left when you reach the bottom is not an emperor.
What is left is a scream.
Small. Raw. Newborn.
• •
A woman is dying.
Lady Elara Ashborne, wife of Duke Aldric Ashborne, lies in a bed soaked with blood that should not be black. The midwives have fled. The healers have backed against the walls, their faces pale, their diagnostic crystals shattered. Something is wrong with this birth. Something that none of their training prepared them for. The baby's mana signature — newborns aren't supposed to have mana signatures — is so cold and so wrong that the monitoring enchantments are screaming, and one of the healers is weeping, and Lady Elara is looking at the ceiling with an expression that is not pain but wonder, as though she can see something the others cannot.
The baby emerges. It does not cry immediately. For four seconds, the room is silent except for the monitoring enchantments and the healer's sobs and the sound of Elara's breathing, which is becoming the sound of Elara's not-breathing.
Then the baby screams.
The sound is wrong. Every person in the room will later agree on this, though none will be able to articulate why. It is a baby's scream — high, thin, desperate for air and warmth and the heartbeat it has just been severed from. But beneath it, like a chord played on a broken instrument, there is a harmonic that does not belong to an infant. Something vast. Something old. Something that is not so much a sound as a weight, pressing against the walls of the room, against the walls of reality, testing them the way a caged thing tests its bars.
Duke Aldric Ashborne stands in the doorway.
He is a tall man, lean and sharp in the way of weapons rather than people. His hair is black. His eyes are black. His mana, which manifests as living shadow, curls around his shoulders like a cloak of dark water. He has killed seventeen people in formal duels, commanded two military campaigns, and expanded the Ashborne holdings by three territories through a combination of strategic marriage and strategic violence. He is not a man who frightens easily.
He looks at his newborn son and feels his survival instincts scream.
Not danger in the way of an enemy. Danger in the way of a predator. Something in the baby's mana signature — that impossible, too-cold, too-dense signature that is even now causing the monitoring enchantments to crack and fail — triggers the part of Aldric's brain that predates civilization. The part that remembers what it was to be small and hunted and very, very afraid.
He does not hold his son. He does not name his son. He looks at the baby and then at his dying wife and then at the baby again, and his face, which has never been warm, becomes something carved from the same obsidian as a throne in a dimension he will never know. He says, to no one in particular: "Find out what's wrong with it."
Elara dies at 3:47 in the morning. The healers will list the cause as postpartum hemorrhage complicated by anomalous mana exposure. The baby survives. It will be three days before anyone thinks to feed it, because everyone who enters the nursery feels the same thing the Duke felt, and none of them want to stay long enough to hold a bottle.
The baby does not cry again after that first scream. It lies in its crib, silent and watchful, its grey eyes tracking movement with an intensity that makes the nursemaids cross themselves and whisper prayers to gods that stopped listening two hundred years ago.
It is three years before the Duke decides what to do with the child. During those three years, every test confirms the same result: the boy's mana circuits are shattered. Thirty-seven fracture points across all circuit types. He will never Awaken. He is, by every metric that matters in this world, worthless.
The Duke sends him to Greymoor.
Greymoor is an Ashborne outpost on the northern edge of nowhere — a stone house on a cliff above a grey sea, staffed by a single elderly servant named Hector who was too old to protest the assignment and too kind to refuse it. The boy is loaded into a carriage alone. No one accompanies him. No one waves. His older brother Dorian, age five, watches from a window and feels something he will spend twenty years pretending was relief.
In the carriage, the three-year-old boy who contains the fractured soul of the Demon Emperor sits perfectly still, perfectly silent, and watches the road unspool behind him like a thread being cut.
He does not cry. He has already learned that crying accomplishes nothing, and he learned it in a life that ended before this one began.