Hallowed Be Thy Ashes
Once, there was light. Once, there were men who believed in gods, who built their kingdoms atop the bones of the fallen and drank deep from the veins of the earth, thinking themselves mighty. But the light is gone now, and the gods have drowned in the black tide of their own deceit. The world is a vast and seething thing, its skies thick with smoke that does not rise from fire but from something deeper, older—something that has been watching, waiting, hungering.
The cities stand like mausoleums, their spires reaching desperately for heavens that no longer listen. In the great courts of the nobles, the masked and the damned play at civility, waltzing on floors slick with centuries of betrayal. They are not men anymore, not truly—they are echoes, puppets pulled by unseen strings, twisting their knives in games of power that no longer matter. The kings of death, their crowns rusted and their flesh long decayed, whisper prophecies of endings even they cannot fathom.
Beneath the streets, beneath the stone, beneath the very skin of the world, something writhes. The dead do not sleep here, they do not rest—they plot. They whisper in voices like cracking bone, singing hymns of ruin to deities who no longer speak, who have forgotten even their own names. And yet, their will remains, etched into the marrow of creation itself.
And then there is him. He has no past, no name worth carving into the annals of history. He is not a hero, nor a villain, nor even a man—he is a force, a wound torn through the fabric of a dying world. He does not rage because he chooses to. He rages because it is all there is left. He has seen the suffering, the endless cycles of deception, of power shifting from one wretched hand to another. He has seen the gods rise and fall, has watched kings build their empires only to drown in their own excess. He does not seek to rule, nor to save—he seeks only to end.
But the world is not so kind as to simply burn and be done with it. No, it fights. It writhes. It plots.
There are things older than kings, older than gods—things that do not want salvation, do not want balance, but only to exist, to keep the cycle turning, to let the suffering continue because it must. They whisper in the ears of the desperate, promising power, promising escape, promising meaning where there is none. They have no faces, no forms, only presence, seeping into the hearts of men, into the bones of reality itself.
And so, the game continues. The nobles lie. The kings rot. The gods stir. The dead plot. And he—he burns. But even fire is not enough to cleanse this world, for the embers do not die. They scatter, carried by winds that have no master, to be caught in the hands of the next fool who thinks they are strong enough to wield them.
There is no hope. No salvation. No final mercy. Only the great unraveling, the long decay, the inevitable ruin. And the jester? The jester does not laugh. For what laughter could exist in a world that has already lost?
****
Will be posted on Royal Road under the alias Truthbetold.
