No gods drew breath, and he walked in the hall of their bloating corpses.

For when he expected a war to break out, the King found apathy. The angels of the gate had given in to his many humors, the generals of his army of which stood victorious in their rush, and all the King could see was their lack of struggle. It was unexpected, to say the least, and annoying in all the little things that such weakness stood for. Years of war, of waiting and empowering his army, wasted on such meager strength, and he knew they would’ve been dead for some time, the angels who moved with mechanical motions, and the God’s that lay lifeless. It had been a ruse that had held for far too long, and he was the fool that fell for it. His gaze fall to one long table of Gods as he walked.

One bloated corpse, a man the size of an elephant, with tattoo’s encompassing a body once made of rock-like muscle, carved from stones of time immemorial, had soiled himself, and rotted, and the king wrinkled his nose at the indignity. The God of the Sun, of fire and of metal, dead in such a quiet way. The King had been promised war by his father before, and neither could’ve expected this outcome.

The God of Ashes and Glory lay dead beside his table, and with him so many other Gods. The God of Victory and Bloodshed, face down and nearly mummified. The Great Riddler, the shape of a Sphinx larger than his castle was tall, sat as a skeleton in the far distance of the heavenly halls. It had once been shone with golden light, he noted, remembering his great grandfathers texts.

Now the hall rest with the dim glow of blue mana, and each corpse radiated black with the stench of death, still powerful in their rotting.

The King walked with his entourage, the humors, more generals, some of the tribesman from across his domain, and each fell in silent step of awe as they approached the golden throne. Some drug angels by their wings, burned and charred figures, previously dismorphed from starvation and weakness, a feeble defense to the great army that churned outside with roaring applause of a victory they ill deserved. The King found his frown deepening, as he stopped before the stairs that ascended to that lofty throne.

The building was a hall, filled with tables longer than his army was wide. Many gods had once sat at the wood carved from the great world tree. The ground was made of gold, as were the pillars that held up with marble ceilings, carved with the history of magic and man, of demon and god. It was a fortune waiting to be pillaged, one that paled the Kings own treasury.

Already he noted that he would not let it be pillaged. No mortal creature would come in contact with this room, let alone the corpses, and not one other would get to gaze on that throne that he now glared towards, nostrils flaring with the expectation of more, with the want of more.

It was a chair that was ill fit for the small, starved figure that lay across it. She may have once been beautiful, he noted, but he knew not of her. It was a figure that wasn’t written about in texts, certainly not his great other that should have sat in the throne that matched his stature, and dwarfed even the King before it, and the woman who sat there was not him, and not worthy. His chin rose a fraction, then rose inches more, and he glared down at her despite the stairs lending her an advantage of height.

“Mammon, I presume? You’ve come too late I’m afraid.” The woman spoke. Her voice was fragile, small, almost drowned out by the silence of the lofty chambers, the echo offering little to fight against the sound of silent death, the buzz in the ears of the bad King. She called him Mammon, and she was not wrong. It was one of many words he had come to be called, the nameless bad King holding not one of his own. His lips parted at the indignity of such a feeble thing speaking even one of his hundreds of names.

“What has happened here, woman? I came expecting my final confrontation, the battle to end all battles, the end of the reign of gods, and I’ve found that they’ve taken the reigns from themselves. Was it a mass suicide? Were you to blame?” Mammon spoke, and his baritone voice shook the room. Augmented, and blazed with mana, thrust out for all to hear, as if he could stir the many corpses of the God’s to wake, and also so his army could hear with full transparency the disappointment on the edge of his tone. He was fury incarnate, and he had no place to direct that rage, but for the woman who defiantly stared down at him.

“No dear Mammon, they simply…. Expired. As all things want, they found their end, they each fell slowly but surely and I am what’s left. A servant, to impart their last words, and when you leave I will be dead as well. You will find no battle here. In a sense, you have won.” She spoke, and it was with no enthusiasm. He sensed no lies to her words, and noted that she was not the glory of a god, truly mere servant left to impart the will of what remained, in all of her plain vainglory and the natural impertinence of mankind that enabled her to sit upon that throne.

Disappointment was a word that was becoming a part of him in these moments. Yet in his mismanaged anger, the bad King did catch her words, and turned his head to look to the dead gods at one row to his right. The god of great mischief, the god of calamity, the god of rivers and wards, and the god of growth and decay. All lay in various states of decay, and the King wondered why they died in such a fashion, why not anywhere else. He assumed it was meant for him to see, to understand the gravity of what was to come next, yet that didn’t feel quite right, it felt more as if they were mocking him.

“In a sense, I have won? In all senses it seems I have won, the few that aren’t here can’t stand against me any longer. What more can they do? What can you do? Is this a glorious trap? Are you a Necromancer of some renown, that will raise these corpses for one final failure?” His voice hitched, and it was with the edge of preparation, as he found himself lying. He knew it was not the answer. No Necromancer could raise one of the lesser gods, let alone the full pantheon in even a fraction of its actual glory and strength.

She shook her head for not the first or last time today.

“Then what, woman?! What is this charade?!” The King roared, and his escorts flinched. Generals and Humors could all join forces, and still stand little chance to defeat him as he was now. He had prepared, gathered his mana, saved his power, let it grown and fester, and in the way the angels were dismorphed, he too was as well. Silver hair flowed across his form, longer than ever before, like a fine silk, each hair glowing with displaced power. His eyes, black where the woman’s were white, and irises red and without pupils, burned like the embers of the dying torches among the hall, offering more light than the feeble flames did in the blue mist of the mana that flowed through the air. Remnants of power, with no room to escape. He’d grown four feet on top of what he normally was, leaving him a towering eleven, and his muscles had filled out to match, bristling and knotted with a strength to battle armies, or in this case gods, failures that were now dead.

In the moments before war, that mana had also formed his crown, a gnarled branch of horns that wrapped around the entirety of the King’s head, wings that were not unlike that of a bats, folded back to rest around his shoulders and arms like a cloak, accompanied by a large draconic tail that now thrashed angrily on the ground. His body had naturally fitted itself to offer him any edge it could, a constant evolution, against the divine.

Fitted in his finest armors, and at the peak of his possible power, his fury had no target.

“It’s your end.” She spoke, and her mood changed, and his changed to match. The woman rose, weak from sitting for so long on the throne, and gestured into the empty air. “You will invade the Human world now that we cannot stop you. No heroes remain there, as you know…. Any artifact that once held power is now on display for gawking children, gathering dust, buried underground, or destroyed. You will receive your prized planet, and for that you should be grateful. If you can manage.” Her words spoke clear as she descended the steps. The woman was no larger than five feet, he noticed, as malnourished as any angel had been on their approach, and only a step removed from the death that had claimed the God’.

“If I can manage?” He asked. The King knew better. His father had been a man to gloat and to give long speeches. He liked his long speeches as well. Yet he did not fall for the vice of arrogance, and would hear the woman out, as if there was a trap laid he would prevent it, yet could not foresee the trap on his own.

“When you invade, they’ll grow strong.” She gestured, and his frown deepened. For moments he took in the scenery, ignoring the scoffing of his fellow men, and only the humors among them didn’t laugh. “Open your eyes, look closely. You can find the problem, and it’s one you can’t solve.” The footsteps of the servant stopped before him, and he towered above her, his gaze on the blue mist in the air, and the black glow of death.

Then he smiled. The servant flinched at the horrible smile, his lips stretching across too white pointed teeth, with no real joy to be found on his warping features. The King roared in laughter, as he turned back to glower down at her with that smile of too many fangs, bringing her blood to a chill.

“The God’s died, this mist is their magic, that glow is their resignation, and the moment I open the gate between worlds, this mana will flow…. They’re returning power to the people. It’s such a last ditch effort plan that it will never work…. Maybe if they had given this power to you, you could’ve have defeated me, but spreading it onto the masses?” The bad King spoke, and as he did so he raised a hand to grab the head of the woman, able to more than wrap full digits around with the scaled and armored hand. Screams were muffled in that palm, as he squeezed. “They will not know what to do with it.”

Lifting the servant by the head, the King carried her up the stairs. Clawed feet thudded, and crushed the golden steps beneath them with each furious quaking stomp. Thrown to the seat, the woman was spared much to her horror, his creeping smile spreading larger and larger until it seemed ear to ear, each moment destroying the humanoid features that were his mask.

“Flegmat, chain her to her chair, and ensure that she doesn’t die. The gods were so bold, that they postponed our war…. Our battle is now with mankind, and we will eradicate them before they get a foothold. You will make sure she lives, and watches, a final witness to my strength.” The bad King spoke to the humor now, ignoring the presence of the woman.

Flegmat of the dark continent, a scientist of much renown, able to turn an army of demons into a glorious dragon of corpses. He was a mad man, but he was only a threat when he didn’t have work, and he would have his work. First on the servant of God, then on the forces of man. He was an ugly thing, with ears too large that drooped over his shoulders, a nose that was long at the start and far too fat at the tip, and it too drooped. He was skinny, malnourished, a good fit for a Gluttony should the King lose his somehow, and his greasy green hair perpetually covered a face heavy with bags of flesh that caught in occasional breezes.

Disgusting. The King liked that.

“Chain her down, feeding tubes, glue her eyes open, make sure she cannot sleep…. Have fun with this one, in fact, then make chimera’s from the angels to guard her. I want to ensure she see’s what’s to come.” The King turned, and walked past his parted group of generals, each one saluting him as he set forward towards the exit, to speak to his roaring army. They’d heard all he said, and knew a hunt was beginning.

Tomorrow he intended to end a world, and with its end a new one would begin.

----------------------------------------

His breath fogged the air, as he heaved from his perch. The distant golden skies had stopped glowing, their limits tested and taken to their forgone conclusion. No Gods, no Angels, sealed with only one left entombed inside. Flegmat had done his job, the king assumed, as he always did, and would always do. Disastisfaction still rocked him, yet he was waiting for one final showdown. There were more left.

God’s.

Angel’s.

Heroes.

Humans.

The world hadn’t lost such things entirely, even if he tried to remove them. The pantheon was without a few key members, he had noted, yet he doubted they would stage a play. In truth, he doubted anyone ever would again in this world, or the next.

Digits curled around the banister as the ritual below continued.

The center of his castle was large, and round, with towers and strained geometry encircling the entirety of the perimeter, giving it more of an oval shape. It gave the mage’s plenty of room to work. Light projected from towers, ensconced in barriers of magic, and wreathed in mana pulled from their crumbling world. The overhead moon offered it too, providing it succor, but it was crumbling as well, and soon the night sky would be empty as the chunks fell to their planet to burn up. Maybe a cult would form around the moon rock that surevived, retaining some mana.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe nothing would ever happen on this planet again, its due date rushing forward, an inevitable conclusion. Too many people to save. Too many he didn’t care to save.

“The next garden will be more beautiful than the last.” He spoke to no-one, but expected a reply none-the-less. The man turned, and stared to the armor in his chambers. Befitting shawls of silk and fabrics draped across the room, a veritable fort of soft cushion and pillows and luxuries that the king never sought for. His wife enjoyed them. She was like the moon now, too. Dead.

The armor was his only company. Silver and gunmetal clashed on the suit, never quite mixing, with draped golden and white fabrics across many layers of the metal chassis. It wasn’t his armor, too small. It’d never fit. It was his trophy, another thing he won by running out the clock. Only the sword was missing, as was the corpse.

“Old friend, your world will be our new home. Maybe my offspring will destroy it too, maybe it’ll reach this conclusion as well. Maybe all worlds are destined to reach this fate, sooner or later. Human’s destroying themselves, Angels destroying themselves. Demon’s, and God’s, too. Your kind will not take this beating lightly, but they’re so woefully unprepared, and that’s fault.” The King spoke, voice soft and no longer ragged from the strain of maintaining his form.

The clink at his balcony alerted him.

He turned, and banished the fine silks he wore as clothing, donned in armors once more. The God’s weren’t all dead, and neither were the Human’s of this world. One of both halves stood before him. The red hair and blue eyes pierced him to the core, the man of lightly bronzed skin. He didn’t come in armor, a disadvantage, and the king grinned, stretching his features across his face. The only metal he wore was the supporting metal on his boots, and pads on his knee’s.

“Your Matriarch sends you once more. How did she not fall, like the other God’s?” The King spoke, and stepped across the room to his personal bar. He didn’t intend to drink, but would pour the shirtless Knight one better. The scar along the chest of the Knight reminded him of their last encounter. His fingers curled around a glass, the best he had, and poured a drink better.

“She has other ways of renewing herself, as you’d know Mammon.” The Knight spoke, and rose to his full height. Six and a half feet, the King noted. Taller than before. They’d been training, but it didn’t much matter. He let go of the glass, and it floated to the knight, who took it and nodded thanks. Pleasantries before the fight.

“So she does. As long as you fools continue to worship her, she’ll be forever young. She’d see this planet crumble, then?” He spoke, and eyed the Knight as he sipped the liquor. No such cheap tricks as poisons, the King could win this alone.

The Knight shrugged.

“I don’t know her workings, her grace is everlasting, and her knowledge infinite.”

“Graceful enough to send a man to die.”

“Knowledgeable enough to know he won’t.” The Knight shot back.

The King laughed, and then roared as he did so. That alone caused him to change his mind, and to pour a drink for himself, which he sipped more heavily than his combatant, the knight made would-be assassin. “The ritual will be done in a matter of hours. You brought an army?”

“Just myself.” The Knight spoke, and his hand reached into the air. Through invisible matter it seemed to grasp, until it drew one of the few relics that could truly hurt the King. He eyed it with renewed amusement. The flaming sword, a long straight blade that was too thin, too brittle looking, with a simple cheap handle of long since shredded cloth, and a circular cross-guard. It was nothing special, until activated.

And it was activated.

The entirety of the blade turned red hot in an instant, and spewed forth flames that shaped their way into the length of a great-sword, and yet remained light enough to wield in one hand. His father had been struck by that blade once, Mammon recalled. Lost his tail, which the King hadn’t yet donned for this coming battle, and that very tail of his fathers was crafted into a weapon, that was given to his most prized warrior. The sword had been lost, with time, but he remembered the rumors, that it retained the heat of the blade that sliced it.

The demonic sword that absorbed the heat of gods. Shameful that it was lost, the King thought, it would have been wonderful irony to wield it now.

“I see what you’re doing, boy. This suicide mission. You’re buying time for your mistress, and her pitiful followers, to open their own portal.” The King spoke, and began stalking forward, setting down his glass at the Knight did the same. She’d reach Humanity first. He doubted the woman had the means to reach them terribly fast, however, but such a gate would be more accurate, where the one they used was not. To their leaders, then? The King knew of affairs in the other world, thanks to those who managed to slip between the two.

They’d traded bows for explosive powder. Had their technologies caught up to the might of magic?

He assumed not. The Knight stepped forward, and those blazing blue eyes shone in the flames, as his hair too caught fire. The blade was long, and so blisteringly hot, and it was swung at the King with every intention to kill him in one hit. He braced for the explosion, clawed feet ripped through his boots in their transformation, to pierce into the floor.

The explosion destroyed his room, and rocked the castle grounds.

The Knight fled the explosion by dashing off of the balcony and into the sky. Fire, much like the known quantity of his sword, flared from his ankles and shoulder-blades. The wings were more fae-like, insectoid shaped flames, than the wings of an angel, and required no flapping to maintain his flight. The explosion had rocked the castle, and chaos had rapidly bled into the estate, but the mages down below, and in towers surrounding him, continued their work. They couldn’t break focus, as they were on borrowed time.

It would be only months before the planet perished, and the Knight knew that. He could see the distant eruption of blue-lava volcano’s, their flames of mana spewing with chunks of the planet erupting around them. So little time. Yet he didn’t have to worry about perishing with it.

He had to worry about perishing now.

The smoldering heights of the castle, a small bonfire for the size of the sheer cityscape that the castle truly was, flickered down below. In it, he could see the outline of the man.

Mammon.

He stood in angelic flame, wreathed in them, and emerged unharmed. He’d donned his wings, large and bat-like, with shreds in the fabric-like skin, and his tail, which thrashed on the ground, an amalgam.

“Rude.”

Mammon spoke once, and it echoed the halls, his voice too big for anyone to handle. It hurt ears, and nearly disrupted the concentration of the mages down below. The Knight grimaced, and raised his sword, as he watched the King.

It was a losing battle to begin with.

Mammon lurched, his body contorting as he gained height, and muscle, and power. The wreath of his horns burst through flesh, splattering blood around him, and the once short hair flowed to be long and white. It was a simple transformation, but one that changed him from seeming human to being downright menacing. The Knight prepared another attack, his sword raised towards the darkened heavens above, and the King launched.

From zero to a hundred in less than a second, Mammon had flown from his now collapsing balcony, and forced the Knight on the defensive. His claws were fast. Long, blade like digits that had formed across his now armor covered arms, they collided with the blade of flame and began chipping away with bestial swings. Each hit shattered the edge of the flames, and sent embers scattering. The Knight wasn’t able to move in the air to avoid them, simply being pushed back with every swing.

His stamina was being drained without any true hits being landed.

With one more heavy strike from Mammon, the Knight let go of the blade. The flaming sword plummeted several feet down, and the Knight swung forward, hitting the King with a strike that made a cracking noise, and the King staggered back through the air.

The sword itself that dropped like a rock vanished, and reappeared in the Knights hand, and he went on the true offensive. Swinging it in a blur of motion, heavy full tilt sweeps of the blade, he sliced at the King, and began hacking off chunks of meat and armor where he could. Each swing held nearly as much power as the King had previously brought down, and the damage was showing in long scrapes, or flays of meat, that burned with the might of the sword. The King, for his part, was only getting larger as the fight was going on. It wasn’t damage that was sustaining him, but simply time.

If the fight were t last hours, he’d be at full strength. The Knight didn’t want that to happen. His sword blazed as her brought it back, and then speared forward, stabbing the king in the stomach. The wrath of flames that made up the vast majority of the blade surged forward, and then exploded at the end, filling the sky with black smoke and heat.

The smoke settled in the air as the Knight floated back and away, and he waited, catching his breath. When it cleared, his face dropped a fraction, and more as he took in the scene.

“You’ve come at a bad time young Knight. You’d have done well to stay home. I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been. You’ve not changed at all.” Mammon’s voice cut through the air.

He was alive, harmed, but alive. The explosion had ripped off his natural armor, revealing the flesh beneath, and the X shape wound the attack had left. Shallow, smoldering, lacking in substance or any real permanency. Already the Knight could see the flesh reaching out connect, and mend, with burnt chunks falling off to the ground below.

“You would’ve done well against any of my generals and humors, but you’ve reached your ceiling. There’s nothing beyond this for you.”

Mammon’s movement’s were a blur, and the knight could only try to dodge to a side. His arm, exposed as he did so, was lopped off with one of the talon like fingers of the kings hand. It plummeted with his sword, to crash into the accumulating mana below. It was beyond his call now, and the king knew it.

The Knight twisted and screamed at the wound, spinning in place in the air to bring his foot up at the head of the King, which was caught. He was powerful. The King had intended to fight an army of God’s, not the Knight of just one, and it showed. The mana was fading, surely, but the strength remained, his culmination of power with no worthy target.

The King glared, wrapping his tail around his opponent, and with a full rotation threw the Knight down into one of the castle’s archways, which caved in under his weight and force. The fight no longer had real purpose, and he was left woefully disappointed once more.

“Surely that’s not it, boy.” He couldn’t even remember his name anymore. At the start of the fight he may have recalled it, but with his subpar performance the name had been expunged from the mind of the King. Worthless, useless, like every extension of the God’s so called power.

In the rubble, the man’s upper torso and head peeked out, but that was it.

“You’re unhappy.” The Knight coughed, his blue eyes dimmer than before. No amount of magic made blood less any easier, and the fact that he spoke through the pain was enough to make the King chuckle.

“I am.”

“Why?”

The King blinked, and paused. His winged furled down, and wrapped around his torso, as he considered the question truthfully. There was no real answer. He’d always been left without satisfaction.

“You see this? This grand lie we’ve built young Knight? Fantasy, this other world would call it. Children dream of it there, tell stories of it there, bask it in there, and love it. I’ve always found it disgusting. There’s no true joy, there’s no nobility, there’s no dream. Heroes come and go, God’s are arrogant pricks that alter fates of those to their whim, and Humanity is disgusting. None more disgusting than my own kind, even.” The King spoke now. He wasn’t fond of speeches, his father gloated too much for him to find joy in them. Yet he spoke, a farewell to the Knight. It was a simple thing to do, a goodbye.

The King walked to the rubble and sat, groaning as he did so.

“I’ve hated all of it, yet it’s my duty. To kill and pillage, to combat God’s, it is what brings me a modicum of hypocritical joy. Fleeting, small, limited. I’d always thought I would meet my match, that I would be slain. It’s not true. I will never die. I am more eternal than the God you worship, the planet we stand on, the sun we bask in, and the magic that gives us succor. There will not be one here.” Mammon spoke, genuine.

The ruined archway they stood under lead into the courtyard, where the ritual was commencing. Beams of light flowed steadily from the towers around, and the gigantic written seal of magic was glowing in fever pitch. The King had been concerned that the sword falling would have interrupted it, but now it seemed the flaming blade was lost in the intensely blue light. The language written in that light was one not even he spoke, and it took Necromancer’s resurrecting thousands of monk’s and creatures older than them to find the spell formula to begin with. It was a miracle that they had come this far, even if the exit point couldn’t be chosen. It came with caveats too, one’s that the King accepted.

“So you’ll just go to another world huh? Ruin it? If you’re so strong, it’ll be like stepping on ants.” The Knight groaned. He wanted to keep the King talking, and the King knew that. The grand distraction was welcomed. He had no intention on preventing the Knight’s comrade’s from entering their own portal, but he wouldn’t tell the Knight that. Better to die with purpose, than to die knowing it was in vain, the King thought.

“The ritual is incomplete. It requires travelers. When we step through, we’ll be sacrificing large portions of our power to the seal.” The King chuckled, and smiled the way of the Knight.

He seemed taken aback by the news. He silently nodded, and stared to the magic at work. Even a fraction of the Kings power would kill mankind, but it was hope. His vision blurred as he took another sharp breath, and grunted in pain.

The King rose.

“Your Goddess will be pleased at this distraction. I’ve spent too much mana to go after her.” He lied. The King had mana to spare, he could fly across the continent, into the cave she thought she was so hidden in, and kill her. He wouldn’t. It was yet another challenge to overcome, once on the other side, and it would keep him busy.

Though he did have one last thing on his mind. He turned to the Knight, and stepped up the rubble, until he hovered over the man. The Knight went to say something, but it was too late. The King stepped down on his head and crushed it underneath, splattering blood and bone across the ruins of the archway.

“Fantasy lied to you, your Goddess lied to you.” Mammon stared at the gore underfoot, and stepped back to admire the carnage. He turned and left the corpse behind, approaching the seal that now hummed at the halfway point to its apex.

Half a day until the invasion was left, and he’d wait for the minutes to tick down, staring into the blue light even as the courtyard filled with his people.

His army.