What is time to a god?

Rue sat upon his throne, brooding, as the burning stars wheeled overhead. A throne of ancient stone and hourglass sand torn from the wreckage of the Gambler’s arena. The thin blood of the mad god spilled around him like a marsh, and from those stagnant waters rose rusting spears like reeds. A breeze blew upon the water, and the spears whistled.

Rue’s head rested heavy upon his knuckles. His elbow rested heavy upon his knee. His feet rested heavy upon the throne’s dais. His whole being planted there like the weight of a world folded upon itself.

The corpse of the Gambler lay at his feet, shattered, grinning, tarnished gold. Rue sat surrounded by victory, and yet the fight continued.

The wind carried the echo of the Gambler’s snapping fingers and a thousand civilization-ending asteroids changed their course a million years ago. Now they came one after the other, burning white in the atmosphere as they plunged toward Rue’s momentary physicality. Rue glanced up at the bright rain. A blade spun between here and there, between not and real, and decimated the ancient falling stones.

The throne grew solid under Rue’s weight. Golden runes flaked away as the silver of steel asserted itself. The bloody waters thickened.

But victory was not yet in his grasp…

They wrestled, falling from a great height, driving elbows and fists and knees against each other. Stars whipped past them. Worlds rushed up out of the past. The gambler screeched as Rue sunk a blade into his heart and hands, a brutal crucifixion pinning him to the void, but his ragged scream dissolved into rich laughter as his flesh dissolved into coins.

They stood crowded around a circle sloppily drawn in the dust. Three suns glared down at the desert world that birthed the Crimson Armada. Those who have little always want more: axiom of the Gambler.

And the truth made the sand gritty, stinging on the wind like the shattered corpses of crystalline wasps. Made the violet sunlight, blue layered upon gold upon red, burn with a skin-peeling wrath. Rue sweated and shivered with the heat as he bent over the circle in the dust.

He forgot the war for a moment as he gazed at the tiny battle below.

Fear in the dirt. Coins in his sweat-slicked palm. A gamble rose in his heart.

Four beetles crawled in the dust. Fat abdomens, and spiny heads, each painted a different color: red, orange, purple, blue. Antennas whirred against the bright lights as they scurried. The gamblers squatted and screamed and amongst them was the Gambler himself, in his rags and scrawny mortal flesh. His youth and beginnings. Long before he wandered through forgotten stars. Before he attained his power.

Rue sat inside the Gambler’s flesh, in the memory, and the stakes were laid out. Which beetle will exit the circle first? The winner claims their place on the throne. The Gambler bet on the beetle with the dollop of orange paint upon its thorax.

Rue doesn’t know which one to bet upon, but the Gambler remembers which one will win. He remembered the first whisper of ancient power in his ear — the first time he felt fate like a thread he could wrap around his fist and pull. The Gambler in his death, in his echo, extends the opportunity to Rue. Win the game, and take the throne, but such a chance is mutually exclusive.

Lose the game, and lose everything.

Do you take the last step off the mountain if it means you will fall to the bottom?

The shattered corpse of the Gambler lay at the foot of the throne. Grievous wounds in the flesh shifted and blackened like toothless smiles. Starlight in the blood that watches. Fish, shadows, in the deep expansive marsh of blood, circled, and circled, as above so below, for the vultures in the sky beat their wings of iron blades, and the jingling, the jangling, haunted the ripples spread across the ever-widening sea of gore.

Four beetles scurried across the burning sand of grit and quartz. Dry ashen chalky smell of dust. Spiced wood burned in a campfire as meat charred and popped. Cigarettes of foul mushrooms hung from alien lips and leaked pungent smoke the color of fluoride. Pipes full of graveflower dribbled black smoke to the ground. The beetles gnashed mandibles at the irritant and the gamblers screamed about interference, but nobody dared stop the match.

The circle was intact. The game continued.

Rue does not know where to place his bet and is running out of time.

How did he find himself trapped in this memory? Trapped in this weak and itching flesh? Flakes upon his lungs he wanted to cough as a burning pressure built inside as red hot as the sunlight upon his exposed skin.

Trapped, for when he reached his fist down the gullet of the Gambler to scoop out his guts… he found something else. A last-ditch technique.

Take a blow to give a blow, a strategy of bravery, of desperation… he never expected this from the Gambler… and so it is something he should have expected.

His temple grew faint against his knuckles. As uncertainty grew, he faded away. Would he swap places with the corpse at his feet and merely provide the Gambler with a story to tell for the next ten thousand years?

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

What is time to a god?

Some say time is a river, but what is a river to a fish? A world of navigable dimensions. Swim back. Swim forward. The flow is something to use, to resist, and if the current takes you in a direction you do not wish…

Swim to the side.

The desert sun beat down like a gang upon a young slave. Heat formed familiar fists upon the skin of the Gambler, and Rue took the memory for himself. He never grew up on the desert betting over bugs, but he knows of hardship, and he knows of the song in the heart when victory wavers on a knife edge.

He heard that song and he sang along as he moved along the stream.

For the knife glistened in his hand.

Invisible in this time, but as real and flashing bright as any steel he held in his career of war and atrocity.

He gripped the knife and plunged it down into the dust. The tip speared a beetle. Bright green blood sprayed.

The Gambler screamed inside his mind.

[You cannot!]

But Rue continued. He chopped down at the bugs. The other filthy desert gamblers charged him. Screaming and howling like jackals denied their scraps of flesh. Rue swung the blade. The arm he used was weak, trembling, but it is a poor craftsman who blamed his tools…

And Rue was a master.

Blood flowed into the boiling sand. The last bug raised its antennae to sniff at the overwhelming scent.

[No! You must make a Gamble!]

Rue sliced the last bug in half. It twitched inside the circle as its fluorescent juices evaporated under the sun.

[The problem with games, is that they require players. You never saw this weakness, you just thought you could force people to participate. That ends now]

The knife rose with the surety of the sun. A blade, warmed by blood, kissed a throat. Back in his beginnings, so many years ago the number meant nothing, the Gambler died.

And at the end of the tunnel, at the end of his life, at the mouth of the river, a sea opened, where the small fish found the shark, and atop his throne of bladed reef, surrounded by the blood, Rue lifted his head.

A king of his own making.

And he wept.

The sky opened up and rained knives. They sank into the bloody waters like whispers. Rue’s heart ached as he rose from the throne and stepped down. He walked past the corpse of the Gambler and over to a table of polished ruby.

Where Lorrilla lay.

Swaddled in a robe like spilled milk, her face exposed to the sky, but no knives fell around her. Eyes closed, for they would open no more. Rue rested a hand upon the heavy ruby surface.

[Everything I achieved, I achieved for you]

He reached out a finger and hesitated, lest he mar the loveliness of her flesh, and pulled back. There was only one thing he wanted to attempt.

One thing he wanted to do with all his power.

And he knew it was impossible.

Resurrection.

He reached within the overlapping dimensions of himself — into space and time and the depths of war and love — but found nothing. For how could he? How could there be the power to resurrect her, when her death was the only reason he was a god in the first place?

He sank to his knees before the ruby table. The throne of silver glowed behind him, waiting. Knives fell and splashed in the ocean of blood.

Everything he achieved, he achieved for nothing.

He longed for an end… for it all to go away… but he felt the engines of power churning within. The Mountains of knowledge burning away the last traces of Skein and making something new. A new system, self-perpetuating… he didn’t even know what it would look like for a system to kill itself.

Can a river drown itself?

Can time end?

Can a god…

He closed his eyes, and it did nothing, for he saw beyond sight. He. Knew. and the world existed within his knowledge.

But there was hope.

The champions of his experiment.

The warriors of the Crimson Armada.

They would come for him. He knew they would. Someone would try to kill him. That was the fate of the powerful. After all, it was why he was here.

And as though summoned by his thoughts, or perhaps they truly were, he felt a shift in the world as the axis tilted.

Knives twisted as they fell and slapped against the bloody marsh. Red waters flowed away toward the horizon and exposed banks of stone. The ground trembled, and the stone cracked. Blood seeped into the crevices as the stone crumbled in a massive cross — two long lines of crushed gravel extending toward the horizons.

The tilt in the world remained, but the blood stopped flowing.

The knives stopped raining.

The world held its breath, and footsteps, bare, hooved, touched upon the road of wet rock.

Rue didn’t turn, but he felt her there, breathing into his ear. He stayed on his knees.

[How long since I last spoke to you, Witch?]

Her breath was hot, like the lick of a tongue, and she stepped away, but she watched him through the ragged holes in the clouds, through the ripples in the blood, through the light glinting off the ruby table.

[Everyone decides upon what they fear, whether they know it or not, and they run headfirst toward those fangs. The world is round; the world is vast; and in running away, we find our desire and our fear are but part of the same sphere]

Rue’s lips twitched into a smile.

[You came to give me riddles?]

[I came to offer you a role. The Gambler placed a bet, and he lost]

[He wished to usurp his place in your trinity. What else was his plan with the Earth System?]

[My brothers play with their toys, but who knows what their plans truly are. Who cares? The only plans that matter are mine]

Laughter shivered through the skin of the world. Rue refused to turn and see the lips curling with amusement. If he didn’t look, didn’t see with his eyes, he could pretend he didn’t know what stood behind him.

[And what is your plan?]

A hand settled upon his shoulder. He couldn’t tell how many fingers it had.

[Join the Smith and I as rulers of the Crimson Armada. Take the Gambler’s role and do better than him. Join us, join me, and do what my brothers could never do]

[And what is that?]

Her whisper filled his body like the soft embrace of poison.

[Give me children]

Rue, despite his overwhelming power, shivered.

[I refuse]

He expected anger. Hoped for rage. The Witch merely laughed.

[We have all the time in the universe for you to change your mind]

[You will have to kill me]

He felt her fading from the world — from his world — as the stars fade at dawn but remain ever watching.

[Death is too crude a tool for one as valuable as you, but if you do not accept my offer of peace, I will speak to you in the language of war]

She vanished.

Rue stood.

Silences stretched out upon the bloody marsh. Sunlight glowed upon the silver throne. He looked up through the ragged clouds at the floating islands of the incorporated Earth. That planet lay within the center of his power. That world alone was truly his.

It contained his hope.

And as the Crimson Armada turned its attention toward him, like white blood cells against an infection, he reached up toward that shattered planet and prayed that someone up there might be his salvation.