The house was too quiet.
Leornars stood in the doorway, his young, remarkably sharp features settling into a quiet frown. He was only in his twenties, yet his stark black hair—slightly disheveled—framed a face that carried an unsettling, age-old solemnity.
There was no sound. No laughter floating from the kitchen. No light footsteps scampering across the wooden floorboards. No gentle voice calling out his name to welcome him back.
Only a suffocating, heavy silence.
He lingered at the threshold for several agonizing seconds, his bright, crimson eyes piercing through the ambient dimness of the entryway.
"...I'm home."
Nothing.
He forced a faint, fleeting smile onto his lips, trying to push down the sudden, cold knot forming in his chest. Perhaps they were fast asleep. Perhaps she had taken their daughter to the local market down the road. Perhaps—
*Plop.*
A single drop of thick, warm blood fell from the high ceiling, striking the floorboards right before his boots.
Leornars looked up.
The faint smile vanished entirely. His crimson eyes dilated as they caught the thin, wet trail of deep red smearing across the ceiling and dripping down the far wall.
One step. Then another.
The blood in his veins ran cold as his heartbeat thundered against his ribs. He crossed the corridor and stepped into the main living space, his breath catching in his throat.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
His wife was lying on the floor. Or rather... what was left of her. Her body rested motionless against the dark stain pooling into the wood. Her head was nowhere to be seen.
For several horrifying seconds, Leornars forgot how to breathe. His mind, rational and precise, violently rejected the reality his eyes were forcing upon him.
"No..."
He took a slow, unstable step forward.
"No... no, no..."
His hands began to tremble violently. Then, his sharp crimson eyes caught a second, wider trail of smeared blood leading out toward the back door, dragging through the dirt outside.
He followed it, every step feeling as heavy as lead.
There, bathed in the cruel, indifferent morning light of the open courtyard, lay his nine-year-old daughter.
Her small, fragile body was broken, lying face down in the dirt, surrounded by jagged, blood-stained stones that had been thrown mercilessly at her.
Leornars stared. His knees buckled, giving out entirely as he collapsed into the blood-soaked dirt beside her.
"...No."
His hands hovered inches above her small back, trembling, terrified to touch her—terrified that feeling her cold skin would make this nightmare undeniable.
"Sweetheart?"
Silence.
"Come on..." His voice cracked, breaking into a ragged sob. "Daddy's here. I'm home..."
Nothing.
He reached out with a trembling hand and touched her cheek.
It was ice cold.
His breathing hitched, stopping altogether.
Then, over the courtyard fence, he heard it.
Laughter.
Leornars slowly raised his head, his black hair falling over his face as his crimson eyes locked onto the crowd standing outside the estate gate. Some were still clutching jagged rocks in their fists. Some were smiling with self-righteous satisfaction. Others were pointing.
A man in the front yelled at the top of his lungs: "Devil's spawn!"
"Good riddance!" another voice joined in.
"A curse on their blood!"
Soon, the entire crowd was cheering, patting each other on the back as if they had performed a noble duty for the town.
Leornars stared at them, completely uncomprehending.
His wife had never harmed a soul. She had baked bread for the neighbors, bandaged the sick, and smiled at everyone. His daughter was nine years old. Nine. What crime could a nine-year-old child possibly commit to warrant being stoned to death in her own yard?
He looked down at his daughter's lifeless face, then back at the cheering, monstrous mob outside.
Something deep within Leornars broke.
It wasn't a loud or dramatic breaking. It simply... stopped.
The tears fell silently first, washing clean tracks through the dust on his cheeks. Then came a searing, white-hot rage. And finally, replacing both, came something far more dangerous.
Understanding.
That night, Leornars sat alone in the dark house.
The town guards had come and gone, casually hauling away the bodies without care or remorse. The mob had dispersed. The streets outside had returned to their peaceful, everyday quiet.
A single candle burned on the center table, casting long, dancing shadows across the room.
Leornars stared fixatedly into the flickering flame. His hands were still stained with dried blood; he had scrubbed them until his skin was raw and bleeding, but the red stain remained burned into his mind anyway.
He remembered the gentle tone of his wife's voice when she greeted him. He remembered his daughter's bright, boundless laughter. He remembered how she used to sprint down the hallway and jump into his arms every single time he returned from a journey. He remembered carrying her on his shoulders, looking up at her innocent smile and promising her that as long as he was alive, the world would always be a safe place for her.
His fingers tightened around the heavy oak table until the wood groaned under his grip.
"A safe place..."
He let out a short laugh—a dry, empty, completely lifeless sound.
"What a stupid thing to promise."
He turned his gaze toward the window. Outside, the world went on as if nothing had happened. Merchants casually closed their shops, calling out goodnight to one another. Families gathered around lit dining tables to eat dinner. Children giggled as they played tag in the alleyways.
The world had simply kept turning.
That realization cut deeper than any blade. The world hadn't stopped for his daughter. It hadn't stopped for his wife. It hadn't even blinked.
Leornars lowered his head, staring at his palms.
"Why?"
He waited in the dark, but no answer came.
He looked up at the ceiling rafters. "Why did they do it?"
Silence.
"Why did nobody step in to stop them?"
Silence.
Slowly, the expression on his youthful face began to shift. The pain drained away, replaced by an eerie, mathematical coldness. He stopped crying. The fundamental nature of his questions changed.
Not *why did this happen?*
But rather: *Why was this allowed to be possible?*
Why could thousands of normal, everyday people cheer while a child was murdered in cold blood? Why could corrupt rulers sit comfortably behind high castle walls while ordinary citizens slaughtered one another over petty hatreds? Why did slavery exist? Why were horrific wars declared simply because two greedy monarchs wanted a piece of dirt?
Why did humanity obey cruelty while despising genuine kindness? Why did society punish the broken individual while actively ignoring the rotten conditions that broke them in the first place?
He reached across the table, pulling forward a blank piece of parchment and a quill.
Dipping the nib into black ink, he wrote a single line:
*Humanity cannot govern itself.*
He stared at the wet ink, then aggressively scratched it out.
He wrote again beneath it:
*Humanity believes it can govern itself.*
He paused, his crimson eyes narrowing slightly, and added:
*That is the problem.*
The candle burned lower, hot wax pooling onto the wooden table as the hours bled away.
Leornars remained seated, unmoving.
Sprawled across the entire room were detailed maps of the known world—kingdoms, continents, international trade routes, military deployments, noble houses, religious institutions, grain supplies, and water sources. Everything that held the delicate framework of human civilization together.
He studied them—not as a grieving father, nor as a citizen seeking revenge, but as a grandmaster analyzing an opponent's chessboard.
His fingers traced a major trade line on the parchment.
"If I remove one tyrant..." He drew a red mark over a capital city. "...another merely steps up to take his place."
He moved his hand to a neighboring empire. "If I crush one army... another will eventually be raised."
"If I execute criminals... more will be born from the same broken streets."
"If I burn down a corrupt nation... someone else will rebuild it in their image."
He leaned back, resting his chin on his knuckles.
Violence alone was a crude, temporary tool. Killing bad people was easy; changing the systemic rot that created them was infinitely harder. And if the system itself was inherently incapable of evolving...
Then the system had to be systematically obliterated.
Leornars stared down at the demographic ledgers laid out beside the maps.
"How many?"
He began making precise, cold calculations—factoring in global population density, food shortages, military reserves, political affiliations, and resource distribution. The numbers grew exponentially on the margin of his paper.
Millions. Billions.
His hand stopped as he arrived at the final, terrifying sum.
*Thirty billion.*
His face remained completely devoid of emotion as he muttered the grand total of living souls across the world. "Thirty billion people."
He pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward him and wrote a single figure in the center:
*15,000,000,000.*
He stared at the number. Half. Half of the entire human race.
His hand gave a subtle, microscopic tremble. For the first time that night, a flicker of human hesitation passed through his crimson eyes.
He closed his eyes tight. In the pitch black of his mind, he saw his daughter—nine years old, lying broken in the dirt, surrounded by cruel stones. He saw his wife's motionless body. He heard the roaring mob calling them *devil's spawn*.
His eyes snapped open. The hesitation vanished instantly, replaced by a terrifying, immortal resolve.
"If the world demands a devil to hate..." He slid the parchment directly under the dying candlelight. "...then let it hate me."
He dipped his quill into the dark ink and began to write—not a manifesto, not a suicide note, but an absolute blueprint for global destruction and rebirth. A master plan that would one day be spoken of in terrified whispers as:
*The Dice and the Throne.*
The foundational principle was simple: tear down the old world order from the inside out.
Not through open, reckless rebellion. Not through a single catastrophic war. But through profound, agonizing uncertainty.
He would make kingdoms bleed with paranoia. Make rulers view their closest allies with murderous suspicion. Make nobles fear their own shadow-clad guards. Make soldiers question every order handed down by their generals. He would turn the elite against one another until the structures of power collapsed under their own weight.
He wrote frantically, pausing only to cross out entire paragraphs.
*Too obvious. Too predictable. They will see the pattern.*
He rewrote the sections, adjusting variables.
*Better.*
His youthful mind accelerated at a terrifying speed, mapping out shadow assassinations, fabricated treason, economic destabilization, political puppetry, and manufactured famines. Every incident had to appear entirely unrelated; every tragedy had to look like a terrible twist of fate. No single hand could ever be traced. The world had to believe that destiny itself had turned against them.
Leornars reached into his pocket and placed a single wooden die onto the table.
Six sides. Six possibilities. A pure symbol of randomness.
Yet randomness, he knew, was an illusion that could be thoroughly engineered. A die could be thrown, but it was a person who chose precisely when, where, and how to cast it.
A faint, chilling smile touched his lips. "So that's what you are."
He set the die beside the maps and resumed writing.
The scale of the plan expanded into horrifying perfection. He would not merely overthrow kings; he would shatter the very foundation of civilization. He would eradicate the economic engines that fueled slavery, demolish the political machines that waged endless wars, and slaughter the institutions that sheltered the corrupt.
And when humanity was pushed to the absolute brink of total extinction, begging for a merciful end—
He would step out from the shadows. A grand savior. A supreme ruler. A lone man offering absolute, unyielding order to a world desperate enough to kneel before anyone willing to save them.
Leornars paused at the final page, his pen hovering above the paper.
For a fleeting second, he remembered the young man he had been just yesterday—a loving husband, a devoted father, a naive idealist who truly believed humanity possessed the capacity to become better on its own. His daughter had believed that, too.
He stared into the fading candle flame.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, his voice barely audible in the quiet room. "I tried."
He lowered his gaze to the blood dried beneath his fingernails, his grip tightening around the pen until it nearly cracked.
"But trying... was never going to be enough."
The flame flickered one last time and died, plunging the room into darkness. The shadow of his young frame stretched long and dark across the far wall.
Leornars did not see a victim in the reflection of his mind anymore. He saw a weapon forged in unimaginable grief.
And somewhere deep within his heart, the question settled—the single, unshakeable truth that would guide his hand for decades to come:
*If the world refuses to heal itself... how much of it must be purged before the remnants finally learn?*
Leornars placed the final sheet of parchment at the top of the stack. With a steady hand, he wrote four words across the header:
**THE DICE AND THE THRONE**
Directly beneath it, he added:
*Phase One: The Fall.*
He dipped his quill back into the ink, and began to shape the end of the world.