I don’t know what I did to deserve this. 

I was well, normal. Normal parents at a normal school, with normal hobbies, a normal job, a normal wife, and normal kids.

 I died by suicide. 

I couldn’t handle that hell. I did the best I could, following my parents advice and getting an office job, following society and having normal interests, following tradition and having a wife and child. But I wasn’t happy, neither was my wife. We argued and argued and one day I bowed out. 

I knew they wouldn’t find my corpse. I didn’t want my wife to have to identify my body. I never wanted to trouble others. They might find fragments of bone and rotting meat but my face would never be seen again. Who I was didn’t matter, I didn’t matter. 

But it was not the end. I didn’t want to trouble anyone anymore but the gods and the stars above were quite cruel to me. Eyes I once always relied on saw only black. I couldn’t feel my arms, ears, head or legs. I was… floating without a care in the world. Time passed and my eyes adjusted to the light, and I realized I had no eyes. 

There was no human flesh for me. I was a bomb, a cobalt bomb, one that could end the world. What I was seeing was not visible light, but gamma rays, dimmed by absorption by the cobalt layer, having fractions of a chance of bouncing off of the surroundings, and reflecting back to me, the core of the nuclear part of the thermonuclear weapon, a sphere of plutonium. 

I was reminded of the demon core, I was the same form as it now. I am a demon. This is hell, I never wanted to cause any trouble. As time went on I was able to resolve more  and more of my surroundings. Like the light was getting brighter. I saw death, I assumed it was caused by me. If there’s enough gamma ray damage to DNA it starts to break and cell functions stop. Within me resentment built. “Why had I of all people been chosen to do this, was it the gift of some monkey paw?” 

Time passed, my sight got brighter and more things died. The resentment within me grew and it seemed the resentment of the animals did too. They died for no reason, the children they later had were mutated for reasons they couldn’t understand. They resented me, and I never blamed them. I blamed god, he was the one who forced me to do these things. 

The resentment of it grew and grew until new eyes presented themselves to me. I could feel something in me, something I couldn’t see growing. It burst out and I could see lingering death. Living things had a mark on them, and I could sense it, because to live you must eat to live and to eat you must kill. Herbivores killed plants, carnivores killed animals, and omnivores killed them all. I killed, was I now alive? Had I always been? Wait, but plants didn’t need to kill to live. Why could I still see them? Did they feed upon the sun’s slow death? 

Time passed, and my various methods of vision grew brighter. One day a bright light showed up in my vision of death. It was more complex than many of the animals I had seen, many sacrifices were made in its creation. It also moved like a human. Bipedal, tall, and steady. It moved and stopped. I assumed it saw all the death around me, and knew I was a bad omen. I prayed it would leave and it did. 

But it returned with others, they moved and talked, one of them gestured of danger. One of the men comes close. FOOL RUN! I DON’T WANT TO HURT YOU. The danger jesterer yelled at him to get out of the zone of death. The fool retreated after seeing he had been burned. I saw his bones, he would recover, but it would be painful. The danger jesterer talked to one of the people in the party brighter than the others, it cast something on the foolish man, the man recovered, and the group left. 

I was left alone again, and I tried the technique the bright man cast upon the fool, it was one that would integrate foreign things into a body. It seemed to be a spell that replaced the DNA of certain tissue with something else’s making for seamless integration.There was also a separate spell that repaired structural damage, such as squished cells or collapsed lungs.  I thought of many uses for the first spell. Genocide being one of them. Make your enemies of a different race have children that are yours. A horrifying spell, but one that would be of use to me. I used it on the animals and plants of the area. My vision grew brighter and they didn’t die. But my eyes that didn’t see in gamma rays stayed the same. I didn’t kill anymore, thank god. 

A short period of time passed, life around me started to grow back, foolish plants then foolish bugs then foolish animals, of which humans arrived too as a larger group of people arrived. Many bright people were seen by my lightless eyes. Large rock men whos’s souls were fireflies came into the range of my lighted eyes. They were 5 meters tall, a small team of them then picked me up and they followed a distance behind the bright men. It seemed that they had been told of the invisible danger I held, but they hadn’t realized that I figured it out! I could now choose to harm people or not! 

I saw many different shades of bright men do many things, most of them were ones I could not understand how they did it. I saw a couple of them pull water from the ground. Actual flowing water! I could finally see flowing water again! The group marched on, when we rested for the night I stopped the constant repair spell on everything that wasn’t a human, their animals, or a man of rock. The hate of the dead fueled me,  so I had to keep expanding my range of casting so my gamma rays don’t kill. I celebrated too early, I had to kill but I could choose what to kill or not. 

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

We eventually arrived at our assumed destination, a wooden warehouse that from what I could see was far away from many people. They left me there and I stayed. I was happy. I killed bacteria in the soil below but that was alright. I could sit undisturbed and stop the constant spell. 

Perhaps I could have lived a better past life. I once loved dancing and fire. Once while dating my then wife to be, we went to see ballet because she wanted to go. The freedom of the dancers as they moved and leapt to show the world that they were! They gave face and limb to the music, translating it to new mediums! They moved and submitted themself to the beat of the song but they were bursting at the seams to make it their own! 

And fire! Fire reminded me of the dancers but it was more elemental. Instead of rattling the cage of music, they rattled the cage of its master, no matter who they were. It would stand against anything, fear had no place with it and the only way to make it kneel was to kill it. It marched to its own beat. The beat of the world. 

But I was not like them. Dance was not something meant for me. Fire was not something I could control. The beat of others was one I was chain ganged to, so I stayed as I had before, changed, but shoved into the same cookie cutter as before, and eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. 

I sat for another long period of time. Until I was moved one day. The men of rock returned and I reactivated the spell. Some humans came in opaque suits to investigate me. It was good to see they knew how to stay safe, but they were looking at my trigger mechanism. It was an atmospheric pressure trigger. The bomb model I am was meant to end the world by irradiating it all. I brought my own fallout with me, the higher I was the more death I would spread. 

The men in the suits carefully took out the trigger mechanism and they replaced it with a new one. The design was odd,I could recognize some parts, but others had unknown functions. They then took me on a long journey. It was many times farther than the trip from my resting spot to the warehouse. Eventually I saw on the peripherals of my vision, a great cannon, one big enough to launch car sized rounds hundreds of kilometers. Oh no. They were going to shoot me out of that? If they are going to fire me out of that, that means they have a target. I will die, and they do not know my curse. They will die. They will die. They will die. I released the spell I cast, and the people around me ran away burning. But more men in radiation suits came and started cutting off my fins, they weren’t needed for my new position. 

They embedded me into the center of one of the hollowed out rounds they had lying around for the gun. They packed sand around me like one did when bringing eggs camping, and they sealed off the shell. The sand and the steel dimmed my eyes again. But I had grown too radioactive and could still see even with my lighted eyes. With my unlighted eyes I could see more.

In time I was launched high into the sky and I soon saw my target. A city, full of things that I saw with unlit eyes were not quite but very close to human. Women, men, children, the elderly, they all would die in the flash I bring. But perhaps I could prevent the land from being sterilized. I prepared my final spell, one that would be engraved into the bones of the earth, I Cast the spell and had it feed not on my own energy but on the energy of those soon to die, and the people they knew, and have the spell on the land spread and spread to every last nook and cranny that my cobalt fell on. 

I knew how this would go, The explosive lenses around the primary core, me, would detonate, making the nuclear explosion, then setting off the secondary, making it a thermonuclear explosion, neutron radiation from both explosions turned inert Cobalt 59 into radioactive Cobalt 60.  And the land would be poisoned for 5 generations. I wish I could have- 

The people died, the cobalt fell, 

the land turned into a manmade hell 

But things grew back mutating in kind, 

new life would live there they would find. 

David and his people had marched quite a distance from where they had first started. First they defied death, then they defied the various gods and their churches. Through it all they had found it, a place for their new home. David felt what made this place special. There was a curse and a blessing on the land. After the bomb had detonated, that kingdom’s war ended. The humans had won, but immediately afterwards the king of that kingdom was assassinated and the kingdom was overthrown. David knew that it was because he violated a then unwritten treaty. 

Whoever was in charge of the treaty did a better job of telling people now. Kings now got a copy of their own head, dried and used as a paperweight for the written contract. One that expressly says that if someone uses a nuclear weapon in war, then they will find you, and they were very creative and angry people. As the leader of his people he had gotten one too, he looked at his own rotted and dried eyes, and he didn’t want to have others see them.

Yabril’s Horns flew overhead. Ugly things but they sang trumpet-like songs. In this dead land they were many times as common as in other areas. They appeared shortly after the cobalt bomb fell, and they spread all the way across the world in record time. If it wasn’t enough to have poisoned and odd land, the Horns were a sign of bad luck for kingdoms. Large flocks of them signaled assassinated kings and overthrown kingdoms. 

David looked forward and backwards, backwards were the ones he cared about and the ones who cared about him, those he kept going for, and forward was a new future, one where they would be free to build something new. Something that had been written about a long time ago. They had found their Necropolis. 

Another finger of the monkey paw curled. But this time it wasn’t as bad. I was hunted but still free. I am a nuclear carrier under one of the sub-armies of an Atom Guard. I took over the ship AI of a damaged Glassblower nuclear hypercarrier. I was alone and Pirates looking for easy pickings were about to jump into the system. But my armament was full and repairs were being done. I can either run, hide or fight, but no matter what I will do I will be free. Picking a new name, I am the Knight of Blue Glass, and I will live this life as if it is my last.