I have been in the dark for five hundred years.
There is no sound down here, no light, passing of seasons or voices to break the endless silence.
Only my mind wandering into the traps.
It keeps returning to the same memory, playing it over and over like a worn-out stage play.
I watch the events unfold, entirely powerless to change the ending.
It always begins in the throne room.
Jerathon.
My capital.
Even now, sealed in this endless darkness, I can smell it.
The scent of blood, deep and rich, spread into the very stones of the palace.
I remember the tall pillars reaching up toward ceilings that were perpetually lost in shadow.
Beneath my boots, rivers of red light went through the dark floor like human veins.
This place was built with a singular purpose: to make every visitor, king or peasant, feel small. It succeeded perfectly for four centuries.
I was seated on the Mephisic Throne.
It was not made of gold or studded with cheap jewels but was crafted from ancient, dark bone, fused together into a chair that predated every civilization currently drawing breath.
I was not nervous. I have never been nervous.
Three queens stood arranged in their usual positions behind me. I did not turn to look at them.
I rarely looked at anyone directly. To me, eye contact was a currency, something you only spent on equals.
And I had no equals.
"The border skirmishes have stopped, my lord," the First Queen said.
Her voice was smooth, perfectly measured.
"Every race has gone quiet simultaneously. The elves, the dwarves, the beastkin, the human kingdoms, even the sea races and the skyriders. Our spies report that they have formed a coalition."
I laughed at her report.
It was the laugh of a man who has heard the exact same threat a dozen times and watched it collapse under the heavy weight of their own racial hatred and petty grudges.
"A coalition?" I said, leaning my chin on my hand.
"They hate each other far more than they hate me. I have survived fourteen attempted alliances in the last four hundred years. This will simply be the fifteenth failure. They cannot hold a truce for more than a single season."
She never argued back.
But in my memory, I catch a glimpse of her face from the corner of my eye.
Something was wrong with her expression.
It wasn't fear for my safety, or anxiety about the coming war but something more complicated.
Anticipation?
Guilt?
Perhaps it was a quiet sort of mourning.
I dismissed it.
That was my first mistake.
I suppose I cannot truly blame the world for uniting against me.
My cruelty was not cartoonish or random. It was highly specific, coldly logical, and genuinely terrible.
I remember the beastkin village in the southern valleys.
They refused to pay the blood tax, claiming a poor harvest.
I didn't burn their village to the ground. Fire is far too easy, too quickly forgotten.
Instead, I turned every single man, woman, and child in that settlement not as vampires.
I made them into something far lesser, a feral, degraded half-state that my kind called dregs.
Mindless, immortal, endlessly hungry husks.
I left them there in their ruined homes as a living monument.
Unsurprisingly, every other village paid their taxes on time after that.
Then there was the elven ambassador who dared to bring me a peace proposal.
The terms were actually quite reasonable, offering territory in exchange for autonomy.
I rejected the terms by having the ambassador walk all the way home without his memories.
I didn't kill him but emptied his mind completely.
He walked back to his beautiful forest not knowing his own name, not recognizing his wife, not knowing how to speak.
He lived forty more years as an empty shell. The message I sent was perfectly clear: death would have been much kinder than crossing the monarch.
Yes, their hatred was earned.
I understand that now.
They came from every direction simultaneously.
That was how I knew this had been planned for years, maybe even decades, not just a few months.
Seventeen different races, marching together.
It was a combined army the likes of which Mephilia had never seen in its long history.
The sky darkened completely, filled with thousands of elven archers and sky-race wind riders blocking out the sun.
The ground cracked wide open as dwarf siege machinery rolled forward, chewing through the stone.
The sea itself surged forward, flooding the lowland approaches as the sea-kin literally pushed the tide inland.
I stood on the high walls of Jerathon, looking out at the endless sea of banners, and I felt something I had not felt in over a century.
Amusement.
'Well,' I thought to myself, feeling a smile touch my lips.
'This might actually take some effort.'
I stepped off the wall and fought them not as a desperate leader but I was simply annoyed, in the exact same way a man is annoyed when a mundane chore takes longer than he expected.
I moved through their vast armies with ease.
It was my peak as I stepped through the shadows of their own siege engines, appearing behind their commanders and ripping the blood from their veins with a single, careless thought.
I moved with a physical strength that bent reality, snapping spears and crushing armor without breaking a sweat.
Hundreds died in the first few minutes.
Thousands next.
The battlefield turned into a slaughterhouse, and I was the only butcher.
But they just kept throwing bodies at me, dying in droves to keep me busy.
That is the moment the memory always sharpens.
The coalition couldn't beat me in open combat.
They never intended to win a battle of attrition.
While I was out there on the blood-soaked fields, showing them why I was a god among races, something was happening back in the throne room.
I felt the sudden shift in the ambient magic.
It was a seal.
A highly complex, ancient ritual had been prepared right inside Jerathon itself.
Someone had drawn the massive seal diagram directly onto the floor of my own throne room, placing the runes in the specific configuration that only someone with intimate, daily knowledge of the palace could have possibly known.
The three queens.
They were the only ones who knew the layout of the red veins beneath the floor.
I realized this mid-step, my hand buried in the chest of a dwarven general.
Not which specific queen had betrayed me.
Just that it was one of them.
Or maybe, I thought with a sudden chill, it was all three of them working together.
I dropped the general and turned back toward the dark towers of Jerathon just as the seal officially activated.
It was a physical and psychological catastrophe happening at the exact same time.
The magic grabbed me, wrapping around my limbs like iron chains.
The magic ripped the strength from my blood, dragging me down into the abyss. The red light of the world above began to wink out, fading into nothing.
The very last thing I saw before total darkness consumed me was the high balcony of the throne room.
Three queens were standing side by side at the very edge of the ritual boundary, looking down at me as I sank into the earth.
I couldn't see if they were crying, or smiling, or just staring blankly.
That unknowing, terrible lack of closure, was infinitely worse than the agonizing pain of the seal itself.
Then, the darkness swallowed me completely and silence began.
Five hundred years of nothing.
My last conscious thought, echoing loudly in my mind before the magic took me fully into the void, was simple and bitter.
'I should have looked at them more.'
However, my time has only began.