The humming of the bleeding sun

A being taller than any man was walking on the highway to Hell, a smile on his face, his heart full of joy for the first time in ages. It was his duty, as a member of the House of the Raising Sun, to always be the spearhead of Good, whatever his real feelings. The truth was that he was tired of being a role model and always play this same role.

Lead the good fight when needed, die heroically when not necessary anymore, rinse and repeat? That had been well and good for a time, but he had long become numb to it, going through the motions to the point that faking it was all that remained. At what point did being the perfect hypocrite became his definition of goodness?

So he had made a choice. He would reroll the dice of fate, in a way that broke the immemorial frame that always gave him the same definite path. He had searched across multiple lives, whenever he could find free time between his heroic quests to save various places which couldn’t bother to save themselves and found more practical to subcontract the work. A drawn-out quest, with a scope the like of which mortals couldn’t even apprehend.

Seeking the thinnest clues, and finally learning about an artifact so obscure even immortals had forgotten about it. And he had found it. Well, to be more precise, he had found where it was, but that was already something undreamt of. And now, in a time of peace between mortal incarnations, he was on his way to take it.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The guardian of the treasure didn’t even know what he had in his hands. In a way, it was typical of them, keeping the most wonderful tools locked to gather dust, in fear of change, of anything to break the natural order of things that their side had created in the past. After all, that was their specialty, to neutralize the tools they didn’t understand. And to do it, they needed a special kind of ignorance, a willful blindness to their working. That was why he went to the most important fight of his existence with only the clothes on his back and his metaphorical spear of hope – let them try to figure out how to neutralize that.

Whatever the result, he had no regrets. That was his way, always going forwards, that was part of him from the beginning and what made him special. So, was it so surprising if that was also the reason he would put an end to the established order? This day, the sun would bleed with the loss, one way or another, of a prominent meber of its house.

While causing this upheaval, the less he could do was enjoying the fight to the fullest, he thought to himself while kicking open the door to Heaven - or was it Hell ? -  while humming ‘Happy birthday to you’.

Heaven, Hell, wasn’t the only difference one of perspective?