The door opened over a scream.
Black and gold split the sky like someone had dragged a blade through it, and I stepped out into the air above a world that was busy tearing itself apart.
Below me, the plains burned.
Mud churned under boots and claws. Banners snapped in a poisoned wind. Lines of armor crashed against waves of teeth and bone. Human throats cried out hoarse prayers to distant, indifferent heavens; monstrous voices answered with roars that sounded like broken mountains.
I stood barefoot on nothing, my galaxy hair drifting lazily in a breeze that didn't touch me. The air tasted of iron and smoke, of fear sharp enough to cut. Blood sprayed in red arcs that caught the pale sun and glittered briefly before falling.
"Loud," I murmured, tilting my head. "Good."
I snapped my fingers.
Time broke.
⸻
— A Painted Battlefield —
Everything stopped.
Arrows hung mid-flight, their wooden shafts humming with frozen tension. Soldiers were caught mid-swing, faces twisted in rage or terror or something in between. A monstrous jaw filled with hooked teeth hovered a finger's breadth from a man's throat, drool suspended in long, trembling strands.
Sound died.
What remained was a painting—violent, intricate, and very, very still.
I walked.
My bare feet left no print in the ash. I moved between armies, past impaled bodies and shattered siege engines, past standards embroidered with symbols that meant home and victory and never again to people who were already forgetting why they'd sewn them.
On one side: men and women in layered iron, cloaks bearing the sigil of a sun pierced by a sword. Their armor was dented and stained but well-kept. Faith etched into every plate. Talismans around their necks—small disks engraved with the stylized face of a god who did not answer.
On the other: not mindless beasts, but creatures shaped like someone's nightmares had been given too much detail. Horns, extra joints, overlapping plates of bone. Some walked on two legs, some on six, some on none. Among them stalked taller figures, spines crowned with spurs, eyes gleaming with a cruel, shared intelligence.
Two sides of the same addiction.
War.
"You've been at this for a while," I said. "I didn't even build you and you still found the same old game."
Between a pair of frozen swords, I slipped, examining their wielders.
The human soldier's lips were cracked, his eyes bloodshot but steady. He looked older than he was, lines carved by exhaustion rather than years. Around his neck, the talisman of his sun-god burned faintly, as if it still believed it mattered.
The creature in front of him had four arms, each ending in a different kind of killing tool—claw, blade, mace, hook. Its skin was a map of raised scars, each one carved deliberately. Rituals of belonging.
Both of them were beautiful in their own pathetic way.
I placed a hand lightly on each of their frozen helmets.
"Let's pick pieces," I decided. "One from each side."
Not yet. First, I wanted to see the whole board.
⸻
— Generals and Ghost-Gods —
On a rise above the slaughter, the human general watched his army like a man counting slow failures.
His armor was immaculate despite the dirt, his cloak long enough to drag behind him like a shadow. Gray streaks ran through his hair, and his eyes were hard, not from cruelty but from the habit of making decisions that broke his own stomach.
A circle of officers stood frozen around him, mouths half-open in mid-report. One pointed toward the monsters' flank. Another gripped a message scroll.
On the opposite hill, the monstrous war-leader loomed.
He stood twice the height of any human, a crown of bone spines jutting from his skull. Around his neck hung trophies: helmets, jawbones, a child's cloth doll stained dark. His four eyes glittered with more thought than his followers suspected.
I stepped first to the general.
Up close, his Name whispered against my skin.
Not the noise his soldiers called him—High Marshal, Lord-Commander, Savior of the Sun—but the truth the world used when it needed to find him.
Refusal to Surrender.
Stubbornness shaped into a man.
He held a small token in his left hand, half-hidden by his gauntlet. A ring, dented, sized for smaller fingers. When I brushed his thoughts, I saw her—someone who'd died on a different field, a long time ago. He wore the ring like guilt.
"You're interesting," I said. "You'd die before you admit you can't win."
I left him and crossed the air to the war-leader.
His Name tasted of Necessary Violence.
He had not chosen this shape. He was born from a lab, from a ritual, from a story—I couldn't be bothered to trace every detail. Humans had made something to kill for them. It had learned to think. It had asked why, and no one had answered in time.
His thoughts were not kind. They were not kind or unkind. They moved in practical lines.
Win, survive, protect the pack, break the enemy's will.
He hated the humans' god-sun, not because he believed in it, but because they used it as an excuse.
"You might have been good friends," I told the frozen general from across the field. "In a different story."
But this was mine now.
I rose higher, until I floated above both hills, above both armies, at the midpoint between banners and bone.
I spread my arms.
"Wake up," I said.
⸻
— The Child in the Sky —
Time dragged itself forward again.
Arrows slammed into shields. Swords met flesh. War cries burst from a thousand throats—and then faltered as every head turned upward at once.
I did not make myself louder. I did not need to. Mortals are very good at sensing when something is wrong with the sky.
A child stood in it.
Barefoot, dressed in nothing but night. Hair that moved like a nebula, strands of blue and violet and gold flexing as if they remembered stars. Eyes—two, but each with twin rings of color rotating slowly, reflecting the entire battlefield in twin mirrored irises.
No wings. No halo. No armor.
Just me.
"What—" the High Marshal's voice broke. "What is that?"
His soldiers muttered: angel, omen, monster, curse.
Below, the war-leader snarled a command that came out as a roar. His creatures shifted uneasily, their instincts warring between fight and worship.
I smiled.
"Continue," I said, my voice falling gently over both armies. "I'm only watching."
No one did.
Silence spread over the lines like spilled ink.
Behind me, the tear in the sky—the door I'd used—faded to a faint scar, black-gold stitches in the blue. There was nowhere for them to run that did not involve looking past me.
"Which side are you with?" one soldier shouted, his voice cracking. "The Sun? The Old Gods?"
"I am with the boredom," I replied. "And you were curing it until you stopped swinging."
I let annoyance bleed into my tone like a soft bruise.
"Fight," I said. "Or I'll kill you all and find a louder world."
That worked.
Fear is better than faith at moving people.
The clash resumed, shakier now, every blow thrown under the weight of my gaze. Human soldiers gritted their teeth and charged. Creatures roared and lunged. Blood flew again.
But now, they kept glancing up.
I walked down from the air, each step lowering me until my feet touched the churned earth between the first broken lines.
An arrow flew straight toward my head.
I watched it come. It stopped a hair's breadth from my eye, shivering in place, wood creaking as if remembering momentum.
The archer who'd loosed it blinked. His bow slipped from numb fingers.
I plucked the arrow out of the air and snapped it in half.
"Rude," I told him.
He dropped to his knees so fast his joints cracked. "Forgive me—my lord—my—"
"Don't kneel," I said absently, stepping past him. "You'll die more slowly that way."
⸻
— A Dying Prayer —
Near the center of the field, pinned beneath a fallen horse, a soldier was dying.
He knew it.
His armor was split open along his side, blood pumping in wet, reluctant spurts between his fingers. His left leg was bent in a direction it had never been designed to bend. His breath came in ragged pulls. The world around him blurred at the edges, sounds dimming, like someone turning existence down.
He stared up at the sky, lips moving.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just… habit.
"Please," he whispered to the sun caught behind smoke. "One time. Just… once. Let it be for something."
His talisman glinted weakly against his chest.
I knelt beside him.
His gaze didn't find me at first. Mortals rarely expect their prayers to be answered by barefoot children.
"For what?" I asked.
He jerked, eyes snapping sideways. "Wh—"
He choked. Tried to push himself up. Failed.
"You're… you're a hallucination," he decided, voice thick. "Blood loss."
"Possibly," I agreed. "Answer the question."
He stared.
"Who—"
"Wrong question," I said. "You begged for it to 'be for something.' For what?"
His throat worked.
"To… keep them back," he managed. "So the ones behind… can get home." He swallowed, grimaced. "So my son doesn't have to—" his voice cracked— "wear this armor."
It was almost funny, how predictable they were. Die so others don't have to. Lay your body down for the next generation. Stack bones into a wall and call it love.
"I have worlds where peace was built without this," I mused. "They're dull."
He blinked slowly. "So it really… is just… nothing?"
He wasn't asking about philosophy. Not really. He was asking if his particular death mattered to anyone who could do anything about it.
Interesting distinction.
I put a hand over his talisman. The thin metal was warm, sticky with his blood.
"You're not interesting enough to save," I said honestly. "But your question is."
His eyes slipped shut, then opened again, stubborn.
"Then… remember it. At least. Please."
He didn't know who he was asking. It didn't matter.
"Fine," I said. "You can be my example."
I pressed down lightly.
The pain vanished from his face.
His body remained broken, bleeding, pinned—but his nerves no longer screamed. He sucked in a breath, shocked by the absence of agony.
"What did you—"
"I turned your suffering off," I said. "So you'd have enough clarity to see what comes next."
"What… comes next?" he whispered.
"A game," I smiled. "And you're one of the prizes."
⸻
— Rules for One War —
I rose from the soldier's side and walked back toward the middle, to the invisible line where human steel met monstrous bone.
The clash slowed as I moved, not because I commanded it, but because everyone near me couldn't help it. They felt me the way dying men feel the last drop of water they'll never reach.
I lifted my voice—not louder, just more precise, threading it through every ear, every skull, every twitching nerve.
"Listen," I said. "I'm bored. You're dying. Let's make both of those things mean something."
Swords faltered. Claws lowered a fraction.
The High Marshal, still atop his hill, stared down at me with a face that looked like it had forgotten how to be anything but stern. The war-leader narrowed all four eyes.
"Each side," I continued, "will receive a single advantage. A rule that applies only to you. A gift from a god you did not ask for."
I smiled up at the human hill.
"You, stubborn one," I called. "General of the sun. You get words."
His jaw clenched.
"Words?" he echoed. His voice carried farther than mortal lungs should have allowed.
"Any command you give from this moment," I said, "will be obeyed. Not just by your soldiers. By the world."
A murmur rolled through his ranks.
"Say 'the ground holds,'" I went on, "and it will not crack beneath you. Say 'the arrows fly true,' and they will ignore the wind. Say 'my men will not break,' and their legs will keep moving even after their hearts disagree."
His eyes widened with a hunger he quickly tried to swallow.
"But," I added, and the word fell like a stone into a still pond, "you may only use this power once in a way that truly matters."
Confusion flickered.
"You won't know when," I said. "You'll speak a thousand orders. One of them will latch onto the bones of reality and become law. The others will be normal noise."
He paled.
Not because he feared the power, but because he feared wasting it.
I turned to the monster hill.
"You," I said to the war-leader. "Violence given thought. You get change."
He tilted his head, heavy jaw moving slowly. "Change… how?"
"Any wound your kind takes," I said, "any limb lost, any scar carved—your bodies can learn from it. Adapt. Shift. Grow new weapons, new armor, new forms."
A ripple of excitement passed through his horde.
"But you will not control how," I added. "Your nature will decide. Every pain will tilt you further into what you already are."
One of his smaller creatures, listening, imagined itself with more claws.
Bones clicked along its arm.
A new joint budded beneath the skin, pale and unfinished.
It jerked back with a startled hiss.
"There," I said, pleased. "You see? War as evolution. You cut each other apart, and whatever survives will be more honest."
The war-leader's eyes narrowed.
He understood the gift as well as the price.
⸻
— Letting Them Move —
I dropped my hands to my sides.
"Continue," I said quietly. "Make it worth watching."
The world exhaled.
This time, when blades met, there was a third thing on the field besides fear and duty:
Expectation.
The High Marshal's voice cracked across his lines, issuing orders as he had for years—but now every word trembled with the weight of possibility.
"Shields up! Hold the left! Reform ranks! No retreat!"
Each command, ordinary in itself, might have been the one that rewrote the world. His officers snapped to obey, their eyes white around the edges. Some moved with renewed confidence, others with twitchy anxiety.
The monsters surged forward, emboldened.
The first one to fall under a spear didn't die cleanly.
As its heart stuttered, its flesh boiled. Blades shattered inside its chest as bone rearranged, turning inward. The creature convulsed, then rose again—shorter now, but plated with jagged armor, its former wound sealed into a ridged shield.
The soldier who had killed it stumbled back, breathless.
"It… changed," he muttered. "They're changing!"
Another creature lost an arm. The stump split, blooming into three thinner limbs tipped with barbed hooks. It screeched, swung wildly, and tore through three men at once.
Pain as design. Death as drafting.
They carved new shapes into each other.
⸻
— The Weight of a Single Sentence —
On his hill, the High Marshal watched his line buckle.
He could see it—everywhere at once. Where the left flank sagged under a heavier wave of adapted beasts. Where a small unit held surprisingly well near a fallen banner. Where the dying soldier under the horse lay, eyes open now, watching the sky with a strange calm.
The Marshal's hand tightened around the dented ring.
One command, his mind whispered, over and over. One chance. One word that matters.
"Lord-Commander!" an officer shouted, panting. "The beasts on the right have grown… shells. Our arrows can't pierce them."
Another skidded to a stop. "Sir, the center's breaking—we need to pull back or we'll be surrounded!"
Retreat. Hold. Advance.
Every choice a noose.
He could say: "We do not fall." He could say: "Their blades will dull." He could say a hundred things, and any one might be the one the strange child in the sky had tied to fate.
Behind his helmet, his eyes burned.
"What do we fight for?" he asked, quietly enough that only those closest heard.
They stiffened.
"The Sun," one muttered.
"Home," said another.
He shook his head.
"We fight," he said slowly, "so they don't have to."
His thumb brushed the ring.
He looked down at his own hands, at the blood on them. At the men and women below, killing and dying with his face in their minds.
"What if," he said under his breath, so soft even I had to lean in to hear, "we were never meant to win?"
He closed his eyes.
Then opened them, hard.
"Signal the horns," he said.
"Sir?"
His voice cut through the clamor like a blade.
"Every unit. Every division. Every last soldier who can still hear me." He drew himself to full height, cloak whipping in the wind.
His next words rolled out across the entire battlefield.
"No child shall die in this war."
It wasn't a strategy.
It was a wish.
He realized it when it left his mouth. His officers stared at him, stunned, because it wasn't a battlefield order. It was a promise he had no right to make.
Most of the soldiers didn't even hear it clearly.
I did.
The world did.
The sentence struck the bones of reality like a hammer on old stone.
Something clicked.
⸻
— The Law of Children —
I felt it.
The rule hooked into the fabric of the war.
You could almost see it—faint, gold, a wave spreading outward from the general's hill in expanding concentric circles.
I laughed, delighted.
"That's it," I said. "That's your law."
From that moment, the battlefield changed in small, invisible ways.
A monster's blade swung toward a boy barely old enough to grow stubble. The steel fractured mid-arc, shattering into harmless shards.
A girl who'd lied to enlist—armor hanging loose on her thin frame—tripped in front of a charging beast. Its clawed foot landed inches from her head, bones locking suddenly as if seized by cramp. The creature toppled sideways, eyes wide with confusion, and was impaled by three spears meant for her.
An officer dragging a wounded teen toward relative cover found his own legs carrying him faster when he realized the soldier on his shoulder couldn't be more than fifteen. The mud seemed to thin under their boots.
The monsters felt it too.
Their adaptive bodies twisted every time they struck someone young. Joints locked, eyes blurred, senses skipped. The law didn't spare them from pain—quite the opposite. Every attempt to harm a child taught their forms that such actions were… costly.
"Something is wrong," the war-leader growled, watching from his hill as several of his more savage troops faltered against the smallest humans.
He bared his teeth.
"Then kill the older ones," he snarled. "Hurt them enough, and the young will break anyway."
He was not entirely wrong.
But the game had been set.
The law could not be undone.
⸻
— Evolution Losing Its Shape —
The monsters kept changing.
The more they were wounded, the more specialized their bodies became.
Some grew thicker plates to resist spears. Others sprouted longer limbs to leap over shield walls. A few developed new organs altogether—sacks of hot liquid behind their ribs that exploded into flame when pierced.
Yet every adaptation leaned toward the same center: more killing power, more efficient violence.
They had been given the gift of change without the gift of reflection.
I watched one creature—small, hunched, with too many eyes—charge the line only to hesitate, claws inches from a terrified boy's face. Its body spasmed, struggling against an invisible rule.
It turned instead and ripped out the throat of the sergeant behind him.
The sergeant had a wedding band he'd never seen fit to remove.
His blood steamed in the cold air.
"Interesting," I said. "He learned. Just not what you would have liked."
The dying soldier under the horse—my chosen example—watched all of this from his pinned vantage point. Pain still off, senses clear, he saw grown men and women fall around him while anyone young enough to still call themselves kid stumbled miraculously between death's teeth.
His eyes found the High Marshal on the hill.
He understood, dimly.
"Idiot," he whispered, admiration and fury mixed. "You wasted it on us."
Maybe.
But that was why it was interesting.
⸻
— A Monster Who Hesitated —
On the other hill, the war-leader felt the shift in his bones.
He had taken wounds now. Long gashes along his arms, a spear-tip lodged between two ribs, where it had been forced out, leaving the bone thicker. One eye was clouded. In compensation, his hearing had sharpened.
He heard something he had not expected:
Children laughing.
Not many. Just two or three, voices thin and high, huddled behind the third line where supplies were stacked. Someone's sons. Someone's daughters. They'd followed the army. The rule covered them too.
The war-leader's hands flexed.
He could command his horde to charge there, to break the humans' law by proxy, to force their god-child to make a choice…
His mind moved down that path.
His body did not.
When he stepped forward, something in his leg locked. Muscles seized, tendons resisting his own will. He grimaced, teeth grinding.
"You see it," I said, appearing beside him on the hill, as easily as a thought.
He jerked, snarling, then caught himself.
"You," he growled.
"Me," I agreed. "Every adaptation answers to a pattern. Yours is clear. You survive by being brutal, but you hold your pack above all."
He glared down at the children.
"They are not my pack."
"But your nature doesn't understand human lines," I said. "It sees small, fragile things and adds them."
His jaw worked.
"You did this."
"You asked for a world where you could become more of what you are," I said. "I just took you seriously."
He stared at his hands.
When he looked back at the field, I saw it—a flicker of something like… weariness.
"They will not stop," he said. "Not while they think their dead buy peace for the living."
"No," I agreed. "They won't."
"You could stop them."
"I could."
We watched a group of men and women push forward, screaming a battle-hymn, eyes wild. They were too old for the law's mercy. They died messily, feeding the ground with meat.
The war-leader spoke again, low.
"What happens if I stop first?"
That was new.
Most monsters do not ask how to lay a weapon down.
"Then they would claim victory," I said. "Build statues. Tell stories. Rewrite you into something uglier so they can feel clean."
He grunted.
"Then there is no point."
"There is curiosity," I countered. "That's enough."
I turned away from him and began to walk.
He followed.
⸻
— Ending the Noise —
I stepped back into the center of the field, into the mud where so much had died already that the ground refused to absorb another drop.
The talismaned soldier under the horse still lay where I'd left him. His breathing was shallow now, but his eyes remained open, fixed on the sky.
He saw me return and did not look surprised.
Above, arrows still flew. Swords still flashed. Monsters still adapted. Children still did not die.
"Enough," I said.
This time, I didn't freeze time.
I turned the sound off.
Voices cut mid-cry. The clang of steel vanished. The roar of beasts snuffed out like candles. Mouths still moved, bodies still lunged, but all of it was silent, like a dream seen through glass.
The sudden quiet was violent.
Everyone felt it.
Heads snapped up, throats working soundlessly.
I stood alone in the still center, and the war bent around me.
"This was amusing," I said. "But the outcome is obvious."
The High Marshal's head whipped toward me, eyes blazing.
He shouted something, or tried to. No sound.
The war-leader's lips pulled back from his teeth. He roared. Silence.
I flicked a finger.
Every soldier over a certain age froze in place.
They did not fall. They simply stopped, locked midway through whatever they had been doing—mid-swing, mid-run, mid-sob. The monsters above a certain mass did the same, jaws open, claws extended.
Only the young moved, staggering, stumbling, looking around in panic and wonder.
And—in the midst of the monsters—a single figure.
A creature barely taller than a child, its body half-formed, armor-plates still growing. It had taken a dozen wounds and survived, its form twisted into something wiry and strange. One arm ended in a single, precise blade instead of a hand. Its eyes, too large for its skull, shone with something like awareness.
It was not supposed to still be alive.
It was.
I walked to it.
It flinched back, blade-arm lifting, then lowering when it realized I wasn't attacking.
Its Name flickered against my vision.
Unfinished Mercy.
"You hesitated," I told it. "Back there."
It didn't understand speech the same way humans did, but it understood tone. Images. I layered my words with memory.
A boy's face, streaked with mud and tears. Clawed hand raised. The instinct to strike. The sudden, unexplainable pause.
Somewhere in its newly rewired nervous system, the moment replayed.
Its blade-arm trembled.
I smiled.
"Good," I said. "You'll do."
I turned to the pinned soldier.
He couldn't move his body. He could move his eyes. When I approached, they brightened, just a little.
"You stopped it," he said—or mouthed, rather. No sound came out. His words were for me alone.
"I paused it," I corrected. "Stopping is different."
His gaze slid to the children still moving among the frozen adults, dragging siblings away from danger, staring wide-eyed at monsters that could no longer reach them.
"You… kept your promise," he managed.
"No," I said. "Your general did that. I just made it inconvenient to break."
He laughed silently, shoulders shaking.
"Who… are you?"
I considered the question seriously for a moment.
"I'm the part of the universe that refuses to answer that," I said. "Get up."
His brows furrowed.
"Get up," I repeated.
The broken leg straightened.
The crushed bones knit. Metal shifted, moving through him without cutting. Flesh wove itself whole. The horse above him turned to shadow and blew away like ash on a wind none of them could feel.
He sucked in a sharp breath and rolled onto his side, then pushed himself, stunned, to his knees.
Pain didn't return.
He looked down at himself, at his intact armor, then up at me.
"I…"
"You're not healed," I said. "You're repurposed."
He blinked.
"I don't—"
"Of all the stupid things you could have used that law for," I said, glancing up toward the hill where the High Marshal stood frozen, "he chose to protect children."
I looked back at the soldier.
"I want to see what that kind of stupidity becomes when I give it more room."
⸻
— New Pieces —
I stood between the soldier and the unfinished creature.
Both stared at me—one with human fear that had not yet decided if it wanted to become awe, the other with animal confusion just beginning to grow thoughts around its instinct.
"You," I said to the soldier, "asked if your death could mean something."
He swallowed.
"You," I said to the creature, "paused before making another orphan."
It tilted its head, blade-arm lowering.
"This war is almost over," I said. "They just haven't fallen down yet."
I let them see it.
The future rolled out behind my eyes and into theirs: a few more charges, a few more bloody victories on both sides, disease in the camps, famine in the cities, slow grinding exhaustion until one banner finally tore and the other claimed itself righteous over corpses.
Same as a thousand other wars.
"I'm bored of that story," I said. "So you're going to tell me a new one."
I lifted my hands.
Above the soldier's head, a word shimmered faintly, half-formed. Above the creature, another.
Not full Names. Not yet. Not like Dominion or Mercy. These were seeds.
"You," I told the soldier, "will remember this field when everyone else lies about it."
The word above him solidified.
REMNANT.
He flinched as it burned into place. Not painful—just… heavy. As if someone had draped the weight of a story across his shoulders.
"You," I told the creature, "will learn what your kind can be when you evolve for something other than killing."
The word above it snapped into form.
AWAKENING.
Its body shuddered. New pathways flickered alive in its mind. Circuitry of thought grew where only reflex had been before.
I stepped back.
"You're mine now," I said casually. "Not as pets. As questions."
The soldier—Remnant—struggled to his feet.
"What… do you want us to do?" he asked.
His voice didn't carry to anyone else. The field remained eerily silent, frozen figures locked in their final poses.
"That's the fun part," I said. "I don't know yet."
I snapped my fingers.
Sound crashed back in.
Men screamed. Monsters roared. Steel rang. The world lurched forward, momentum reclaiming its due.
But it was already different.
The law of children still held. The monsters still adapted. The general still stood on his hill, unaware his one true command had been spent.
Only two beings felt the shift:
Remnant, whose heart now beat in sync with a war he would outlive.
Awakening, whose every wound from this point would teach it not just how to kill, but how to choose.
⸻
— Leaving the Board —
I rose back into the sky.
From above, the chaos looked almost beautiful again. I could have stayed and watched the details, traced each new adaptation, weighed each desperate prayer.
But I had my pieces.
That was enough.
"Kill your gods," I whispered, too low for any but the Void to hear. "Or outgrow them. Either way, keep me entertained."
The tear of black and gold reopened around me.
I took one last look at the field—a single glance that folded every death, every spared child, every new scar into my memory.
Then I stepped back through the door.
The war kept going.
It would end. They always did. But somewhere, a soldier who should have died and a creature that should have stayed dumb would survive, carrying Names I'd half-forged and destinies I hadn't bothered to plan.
Behind me, the battlefield shrank to a pinprick of color among my worlds.
Ahead, the Void welcomed me home.
My throne hummed, pleased. The Hollow Garden glowed softly in the distance, Requiem tending flowers of broken faith. Dominion and Mercy carved their names deeper into their own world.
And I…
I sat.
"Next," I said.
The Void's little king smiled, and the screens shifted, and another world rolled into view.