The sound was not a roar, but a crescendo of contempt. Laughter, sharp and echoing off the grand obsidian walls, rose from the assembled observers. It was a dense, suffocating sound, and Solatin, the Sun God himself, found it physically difficult to process a single thought beneath the crushing weight of their collective amusement.
Failure. The word was the only thing on his mind, searing away the practiced serenity He had worn for the last thousand epochs.
The opponent, a deity alive for a mere thousand year, whose name Solatin couldn't be bothered to recall, was openly laughing, doubled over in a fit of cruel delight.
How dare He! How dare He find the Sun God's, MY defeat funny!
A tremor of absolute, unmanaged anger convulsed through Solatin's vast, eternal core. It wasn't the fury of a tyrant, but the wrath of a God. He yearned to erase the sound, to make the opponent regret his birth, to make the entire room grovel.
His face did not merely turn red; the heat He radiated intensified not by "dozens of degrees," but by a million years of suppressed, primal solar energy. It was uncontrolled, raw, and desperate. The golden light that always haloed him flared violently, his essence screaming. A couple of minor angelic attendants near the edge of the viewing platform didn't just faint; they withered, their forms briefly smoking before snapping back to their base, mineral components.
The lady standing upon the observation pillar, the game's Narrator and Judge, did not look at him with concern, but with a weary, practiced neutrality. He saw the shift in her stance, the subtle readiness in the surrounding Angelic intervention squads. They were waiting for him to fail to govern himself.
And He did.
The fragile, nascent reality beneath him, the world He had spent three hundred thousand years nurturing in this competition, couldn't withstand the pressure of his divine grasp. It did not explode in a magnificent cataclysm; it simply gave up. It shivered, buckled, and collapsed inward with a soft, pathetic shhhk sound, like a crumpled piece of ancient silk.
Such clumsy fragility.
"God of Destruction!" A sardonic cheer ripped through the crowd, an acknowledgment not of his power, but of his predictable, childish volatility.
A wisp of light, residual smoke rose from the corner of Solatin's eyes.
The Narrator lady turned back to the crowd, her voice echoing with manufactured enthusiasm. "Ladies and Gentlemen! The Sun God, Solatin, is eliminated from the competition!"
His hand opened, releasing the infinitesimal dust of the ruined cosmos. Solatin didn't bother using his own power to move; He allowed the passive, residual pull of the implosion to yank him violently out of the competitive field. The shame was a physical force.
He reappeared, deposited unceremoniously, sitting upon his golden throne in the central solar chamber.
"..."
The silence was louder than the laughter. He was alone, yet the room felt haunted by the trillion-year-old memory of perfection.
The weight of the inherited title was suffocating. He wasn't even asking his father. He was asking the void, the cold, eternal truth of the First Sun God—a primal entity who had earned this mantle before the concept of time had fully crystallized.
The sun is both a creator and a destroyer, nurturer and tyrant, order and chaos incarnate. His light gives life, but his heat burns; He's adored and worshipped, yet too blinding to ever be truly seen.
The perfect creed. The impossible standard. Solatin was only the heat. He was only the burn. He was the shame. He had been given the title, but not the balance.
A God whose touch shall never bring warmth, only destruction. He shall never be able to be close, only able to love from afar.
He was the flawed echo. The impostor Sun God.
An unfamiliar, sharp feeling spiked in his chest, so rarely felt that his immense, celestial consciousness struggled to classify it. It was a cold, hard knot. It was despair.
When you become untouchable... you become unable to touch.
He relaxed his shoulders slightly. The rigid, perfect posture He maintained was starting to fail.
Knock. Knock.
The sound was shockingly mundane against the colossal, echoing silence of the hall. He knew, instantly, who it was. The one being who had no respect for his façade.
He pondered his response; ignore it, dismiss it, deny his own existence for the next million years; but his will was currently too fractured for decisive action.
With a slight, flicking movement of his fingers, similar to a conductor reluctantly beginning a piece He already knows is doomed, He opened the doors.
"Thou shall enter," He announced, forcing the words into the rich, antiquated dialect reserved for his public persona. His spine straightened, his mask of utmost confidence and pristine, arrogant pride slamming back into place. He made sure his languid pose on the throne conveyed exactly who held the divine authority here.
The visitor was Uqlurius, the God of Theatre. A kind friend, yes, but also a figure who understood performance better than Solatin understood his own power. He saw the seams in every disguise.
"What may be the reason for thy presence, my dear friend?" Solatin drawled, resting his cheek carefully on the back of his hand, trying to appear profoundly bored by the interaction. The way Solatin presented himself, the act, was everything.
Uqlurius didn't bother with a formal reply. He stepped inside, letting the double doors hiss shut behind him, and sighed, a deep, mortal sound that was almost offensive in its intimacy.
"Drop the act, Solatin. I can't believe the Sun God would still be so transparent after three hundred epochs. Are you not furious, not utterly defeated by your own lack of self-control?"
"Ha!" Solatin gave a short, practiced chuckle that felt brittle and hollow even to his own ears. "Do not worry, my friend, 'tis but a mere game after all. I am not so fragile as to grieve over such mundane trifles." He laced the word mundane with contempt, trying to elevate himself above the petty competition.
"Are you certain?" Uqlurius asked, his tone shifting from theatrical impatience to genuine, cutting kindness. "I know how desperately you need this win. I see the cost of the participation fee you keep paying. It's the life-hoarded wealth of half a nascent galaxy, Solatin. This is hardly mundane."
The gentle probe found the fault line. Solatin's magnificent facade fractured, and for a fleeting, desperate instant, a raw, wounded expression, the face of the frightened child, broke through.
Uqlurius caught it instantly. The God of Theatre was too fast, too perceptive.
Solatin quickly plastered a confident, dazzling smile back into place, forcing it to stick. "Thou shall not worry, I just have to win the next one! When is it, if I may ask?"
Uqlurius returned a smile, but his eyes held deep pity. "It seems the next one is scheduled to start tomorrow in the afternoon. A quick turnaround."
"Tomorrow…" The Sun God tapped his armrest, the gold cold beneath his fingers. He had always been fascinated, and slightly intimidated, by the speed with which the Veil organized these cosmic gambits. A single round spanned hundreds of thousands of years of mortal time, yet the setup was always instantaneous.
"'Tis sooner than I expected it. I suppose I will have to prepare my strategy for tomorrow. Thou may leave, my friend." He flicked his fingers upward with a flourish, a deliberate, stylized movement, and the heavy doors slowly began to grind open.
Uqlurius merely nodded, his gaze lingering. "Good luck." He didn't offer advice; He offered a benediction for a lost cause.
"..."
As the doors closed, the pretense collapsed entirely. Solatin slumped, burying his face in his hands, his breath coming in shallow, shuddering intakes.
Today shall be the day my reign officially start. The last day I shall be humiliated. I shall never see myself lose again. I am certain.
These were the words He desperately needed to believe, the lie He needed to internalize to survive the next round. He could not rely on power He could not control. He had to rely on a mind He could still command.
He arrived in the same hall the next day, dressed not in his most cherished, golden robes, but in a simpler, pure, white mantle with golden accents, less showy, more strategic. He sat in his seat, ignoring the subtle, expectant stares of his opponents.
There were twelve competitors, a mix of familiar and unknown celestial faces. He saw the smug face of the deity who had laughed. He ignored him.
He focused on the Narrator lady at the center table. She explained the rules for His 510th game once again: The Gods would inherit worlds at different stages of development. Their goal: endurance. To keep their world stable and alive for the longest possible duration. The last world surviving would be granted immortality, and its creator, a single wish.
"You shall start when the countdown reaches 0."
"10, 9,"
Solatin inhaled, the dry, sterile air of the competition room filling his lungs. This was the 510th time He had done this.
"8, 7,"
He had existed for over 254 million years.
"6, 5,"
He had never won. Not once. This would be the first.
"4, 3,"
To my future victory! The certainty was forced, fragile, but necessary.
"2, 1,"
He blinked, and the golden room vanished.
"0!"
An entirely new world appeared before him. It was not a cosmic egg, freshly formed. It was a sprawling, dense early modern civilization already wrestling with its own political and magical conflicts. He was definitely among the late starters. The clock was already ticking.
He looked down at his new reality, a cruel, beautiful trap of complexity.
"Well," He murmured, his voice now stripped of all pretense, sounding quiet and dangerously focused. "I have only one thing to do right now."
He reached out a careful, perfectly controlled hand to the unknown civilization below.
"The Sun God requires a follower, an anchor. Someone who can feed my powers."
Solatin let out an unmistakable grin.
"Where are you, Prophet?"