Ash fell where the throne had been.
Not literal ash, not the residue of a body, but the fallout of authority collapsing. Light that once behaved like law now drifted like smoke. Darkness that once answered a creator's balance now swelled and thinned without rhythm.
The Monarchs gathered at a distance that would have been tactical in any normal war.
This was not a normal war anymore.
Antares stood at the forefront, his silhouette cutting into the ruined sky like a blade. Dragons circled behind him, restless, confused by the sudden absence of a command they had never consciously obeyed. Their wings beat in uneven cadence.
WHOOOM. WHOOOM.
His eyes tracked the void where the throne had been. The emptiness offended him in a way nothing else could. Not because he mourned the creator, but because the creator's existence had been a constant, a load-bearing enemy. A thing to push against.
Now there was nothing to push against.
Only freefall.
Around Antares, Monarchs emerged from shadow, ice, flame, and rot, drawn by instinct to the new center of gravity.
Baran arrived with a crack of white lightning that ripped open the air.
KRRRAK.
His armor steamed, white flame crawling along his shoulders like living cloth. His smile was sharp and bright, and it did not hide the hunger underneath.
"So it bleeds," Baran said, voice carrying the thrill of a boundary crossed. "So it can die."
Querehsha drifted in next, her presence a perfume of decay. Plague mist curled around her feet like silk. Her eyes lingered on the empty space with a curiosity that felt intimate, almost affectionate, the way a poison might admire a new host.
"How exquisite," she purred. "The world is unsealed."
The Frost Monarch arrived without announcement. The storm arrived first, a rolling wall of cold that made broken stone creak.
CRRRK.
He stood within the eye of it, expression flat, gaze scanning not the battlefield but the laws beneath it, as if counting the ways reality had begun to fail.
Rakan came with laughter, because he did not know how to arrive without it. His claws were wet with recent blood, and his grin was wide.
"Now we hunt without a leash," he said.
From farther back, other Monarch presences flickered at the edges of perception. A lurking hunger that did not show its face. A heavy silence that implied teeth. A gaze that felt like an insect crawling under armor.
They were not all willing to show themselves openly when the board was changing.
Antares did not look at any of them at first.
He stared at the absence.
Then he breathed in.
Heat rolled outward in a slow wave, forcing plague mist to thin, forcing frost to retreat a fraction, forcing even Baran's lightning to settle. The dragons behind him quieted as if the air itself had become command.
Antares spoke, and his voice carried a deeper anger than any roar.
"We have been robbed."
Baran's grin tightened.
"Robbed?" he repeated. "The creator is dead. Is this not what the Rulers wanted?"
Antares' eyes narrowed.
"It is what they wanted," Antares said. "It is not what we were promised."
Querehsha's head tilted slightly, intrigued.
"What were we promised?" she asked, soft.
Antares' claws flexed, gouging the stone underfoot.
SCRRKK.
"A war with shape," Antares said. "A world with rules. An enemy that holds the board steady while we break everything on it."
He lifted his gaze to the sky, where gates tore open and tore wider, where planar seams bled into each other. In the distance, the landscape bent as if trying to decide whether it was land or void.
"This," Antares continued, "is not victory. It is instability."
The Frost Monarch's voice cut in, cold and precise.
"The balance mechanism has failed," he said. "The World Tree is shifting into a corrective state. Pruning. Selecting."
Rakan laughed, careless.
"Let it prune," he said. "We are Monarchs. We take what survives."
Antares finally turned his head and looked at Rakan.
The look alone stripped the laughter from Rakan's face.
Antares' gaze moved from Monarch to Monarch, weighing them.
"You speak like a beast," Antares said. "And beasts drown when the river changes course."
Baran's lightning crackled again, irritated.
KZZZT.
"Then what do you suggest, Dragon King?" Baran asked. "Do we retreat? Do we wait while the Rulers rebuild their order?"
Antares did not answer immediately.
His eyes shifted, tracking something that was not visible to most.
A faint disturbance along the underside of reality.
A pull.
A removal.
He felt it in the same way a predator felt a prey animal stop breathing behind tall grass.
The Shadow Monarch.
Gone.
Not dead.
Extracted.
Antares' jaw tightened. He had watched Ashborn change the stalemate with an army that moved like discipline made of night. He had felt, for the first time in eons, the pressure of another ruler of inevitability.
Now that pressure was missing.
The absence felt like an insult.
Antares spoke again.
"The Rulers killed the creator," he said. "And in doing so, they lost the one thing that kept their army from breaking."
Querehsha smiled, slow and dangerous.
"You mean Ashborn."
Antares' eyes burned brighter.
"Yes," he said. "Ashborn."
Baran scoffed.
"A sentimental corpse-king," Baran said. "He was an obstacle."
Antares' gaze snapped to him.
"He was a lock," Antares corrected. "And now the lock is gone. The door has opened. Do you understand what that means?"
The Frost Monarch answered before Baran could.
"It means we are no longer constrained by a creator's architecture," he said. "But neither are the Rulers. The next framework will be written by whoever stabilizes the system first."
Rakan's grin returned, smaller.
"So we race," he said.
Antares' lips curled, not in humor.
"We conquer," Antares said. "But not as we did before."
He lifted one claw and pointed toward the torn horizon, toward the places where worlds overlapped, where gates leaked, where reality was weak.
"Seize the fracture zones," Antares ordered. "Where law is thin, power becomes definition. Make the new cycle ours."
Dragons behind him roared in response, their confusion collapsing into hunger.
RAAAH.
Querehsha's mist thickened again, eager.
Baran's lightning flared, excited at a war without ceiling.
Even the Frost Monarch's storm tightened, more focused, less wasteful.
At the edge of the gathering, a new presence stirred, one of the Monarchs who rarely revealed itself fully. The air around it felt heavy, like gravity tuned wrong. A voice, deep and strange, spoke from the shadow of that presence.
"The creator is dead," it said. "So who names us now?"
Antares did not hesitate.
"I do," Antares replied.
The declaration was not arrogance.
It was necessity.
He turned back to the void where the throne had been, and for a moment his furnace eyes held something like grief, not for the creator, but for the clean simplicity of an enemy that had defined the war.
Then the grief burned away.
Antares' wings of pressure spread across the battlefield like an invisible banner.
"The old chain is cut," he said. "The old stalemate is gone."
He bared his teeth.
"Now we write the new law with fire."
Dragons surged forward, Monarchs followed, and the first wave of the new cycle began, not as an echo of the old war, but as a scramble to claim the bones of a universe that had lost its throne.