Effora cries faintly as her village, her home of 63 years, burns. Smoke and screams fill the air as the destruction unfolds. She brushes an aged grey lock of hair from her face as she watches from her hiding place. The Ratholan soldiers rampage through, pillaging supplies, sacking relics and burning homes. At the centre square half a century's worth of painstakingly preserved grain serves as a pyre for the lifeless bodies atop it. The Ratholans spare no mercy as they slaughter Effora’s neighbours, her friends, her children.

Across the continent the Ratholans marched; no peoples were exempt from the slaughter as the soldiers feasted upon the thrill of their conquest.

Deep in the heart of the world a lumbering hand drags a weathered ebony pawn forwards across a chessboard. Two beings sit across from each other, as they have for Aeons. Their ancient, thoughts are slow, but far from stupid. They are as malicious and cruel as they are old, and as patient as they are cunning. Their duel begins and the other figure slowly moves a white pawn to face the black one.

Arthur doesn’t cry as he hugs his daughter. Save the tears for later. His elderly father sits beside him, his normally kind face now weathered and solemn. Arthur tries to take in every detail, her messy silver hair, the crook of her nose, the freckles that dot her face. God she seemed so small, only 12. Had they no shame? Of course no one was spared from conscription. His 12 year old daughter wasn’t spared, his amputee father wasn’t spared, only bloody Arthur wasn't conscripted. The Ratholans had mobilised and that meant a holy war had begun. Entire Hila’u cities had been sent out to join the crusade. Everyone sent to fight except the priests and those few like Arthur, left behind to guard  temples and palaces. His father doesn’t look back as he walks Arthur's daughter out of her home, his one remaining hand tightly clutching hers.

The Hila’u are brutal as they marshal to fight the Ratholans, but where the Ratholans pillage and murder, the Hila’u convert and assimilate. They carefully line up and burn the elderly and religious leaders along with their homes, their books and their artworks. They tear families apart, bringing children to religious buildings where cultures and memories are broken, beaten and indoctrinated into the Hilathan faith. 

Two beings sit in a cave at the centre of the world. Walls made of ancient bones surround them. The creatures are only half in the mortal realm, somewhere between entities and  concepts. The mountains, the stars, the thoughts, passions, lusts and dreams of all things across are their bodies, their power. But they are tethered to this place. The one who plays white is incandescent and painful to look at. Eight feathered wings and four arms decorate its preferred body. It has thousands of unblinking burning eyes covering its body and no mouth. The other is a constantly shifting inky substance. A porcelain mask sits upon its face. Its features continually change, hands, mouths, tentacles and tongues, but they are never quite right, never quite natural. A hole in its chest is exposed, torn open and inside sits a wildly and erratically pulsating heart. 

The old man has taken off his helmet to use as a shovel, gods be damned, he uses his one remaining hand to pile dirt into the hole, trying to avoid thinking about the small body that lies prone in an unmarked grave, freckled face, messy hair. The man turns to look at the brutal and bloody battle. Anything to avoid looking at what lies there. They fight on the ruins of an ancient temple. The killing field is hot and sweaty, previously beautiful grasslands turned to a horrific, bloody nightmare as mud churns under the feet of the soldiers. 

One of the Hila’u knights falls, swarmed by hundreds of unarmoured Ratholans. The waves of bodies are unfaltering and the knight collapses from exhaustion. The unending waves of Ratholans hammer at its armour, hacking the knight’s body to pieces and fighting for the right to adorn themselves in parts of the shredded steel. The body in the grave is fully covered by dirt now, that's good, he doesn't have to look, can't look, can't think, just… survive. There will be time to mourn later. Just survive.

As its knight falls, the many-eyed phantom doesn’t flinch. Hundreds of stoic eyes stay unwavering in their gaze. The other is the opposite, displaying dozens of grotesque expressions; sobbing and screaming and squealing, always furious, always sad, always hungry. They did not always abhor each other so much In fact, once they weren’t separate. They were once a collection, a mosaic of the best and worst parts of humanity. They once guided their people to salvation and destruction, fulfilling both dreams and nightmares. They were not evil, they were not good, they were human, a random mess of emotion, thought, reaction and just sheer randomness.

In the glass fortress, the stronghold of the Hilathan faith, Effora howls with laughter. The sound echoes through the huge glass mountain. She laughs because she cannot cry. For if she cries she will break and she will not break.

The Hilathan faith is built on the belief that they are holy, they believe they are blessed to have silvery white hair and that their blood is bright white incandescence. And thus they claim  they are the chosen ones. They believe that their insides are sacred; not to be seen by anyone, and so they wear full body coverings at all times. Except… in holy places. 

Ironic she thinks bitterly. After the army left, as the few survivors had emerged from their hiding spots they had seen pale armoured figures in the distance. They heralded them as saviours. In response the new army had lined up all the survivors and executed them one by one, the killings were different to the Ratholans, clean and efficient, emotionless. All dead, except for her, no one left no trace of her village. They had looked at her greying hair and assumed she was one of them. They had taken her here to ‘heal her spirit’, saying she was mad.

She could not let them break her, would not let them erase her. And so as the high priest prayed for her healing among a crowd of priests, Effora grabbed his wrist and sliced at it with a fragment of glass concealed in her other hand. Bright red blood spurted out.

Effora is executed immediately, her smiling body hanging from a noose. The riots start the next day.

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The primordial entity was a collage of humanity and was intrinsically just as self conflicting as the mortals it was made of. But as it became more, it began to want more. It wanted to represent humans perfectly, not just to reflect parts of them. The being was severed into two. It seeped into all things, saturating the earth. The other two wanted so deeply to characterise humans, they split into two more entities. Thus, Passion and Law were born; each trying to define humans. The problem was, humans are beautiful complicated creatures that don’t fit into simple crude definitions. They are emotion and thoughts. Both rational and passionate and so, as the beings became sentient they twisted into crude representations of flawed ideas of humanity. 

Passion gleefully knocks over the bishop, exposed heart wildly beating in sync with the heart of every single Ratholan. Law, who has so far been completely engrossed in analysing and strategising, now calmly turns all of its hundreds of eyes away from the board and focuses all of its burning attention on Passion. Passion's hollow masked face continues staring back at Law. Its black viscous limbs and organs continue shifting.

The black knight storms the palace of the empress. He slaughters every single guard in his path. They fall so easily. Some of them scream, some cry and some are silent. Every single one is burned into his eyes, every single one whispering to him. “Your fault we died” “Monster!”. The entire purpose of his childhood, of his life, has been to massacre these people. Every single one he's hurt follows him, but no it can't be his fault it's his destiny. It's their fault he had killed them, their fault they couldn't fight back. Why couldn't the guards have stopped him, beaten him, killed him? Why had they each fallen so easily, why weren't they stronger? It was their fault he had to kill, their fault he was still alive; her fault he was still alive. As the knight faces the empress, he screams and his once elegant strokes turn into furious onslaught of brutal blows. The empress is not unprepared, clad in armour and wielding Ybrisil, an ancient blade destined to slay a great evil. The knight is no longer fighting like the skilled swordsman, instead wildly swinging his blade without even trying to parry. He dashes into, shrugging off slices and cuts. Constantly slashing irrationally furious.  Eventually the empress takes one too many hits, and collapses. The knight begins to sob. 

In later stories it would be told that Arthur bravely challenged the black knight to a duel and with guile and courage managed to win. In reality, while all of Arthur’s comrades were slaughtered by the black knight, he was robbing the very palace he was there to protect. While every single one of the people he had left were dying to protect the palace, Arthur was getting hammered on the wine in the palace's store rooms. When he drunkenly staggers over their bodies to find the knight crying like a child over the empress's body, driven by the alcohol, Arthur careens over to the knight and clumsily slides his side knife into the knight's back. He takes Ybrisil, and promptly collapses into a drunken stupor.

In his alcohol-induced sleep, Arthur dreams of a cave at the centre of the world and of plunging Ybrisil into a writhing, pulsating red heart. When Arthur wakes up he has a goal instilled into his mind. The way to finally end all the suffering, all the death. 

He leaves the palace wearing his guardsman’s armour and wielding Ybrisil. One of the holy white knights waits patiently upon their steed for Arthur. Ashamed, Arthur walks up to the knight. At least there's someone qualified to deal with this mess. The knight looks at Arthur holding Ybrisil quizzically.

Arthur starts “There was an atta-”

The Knight’s blade flashes through the air, cracking against Arthur's hand and smashing the fragile bones within the gauntlet. Arthur gasps, stumbling backward.

“You don’t deserve that weapon. I need it.” the knight says, hunger in its eyes. It charges.

Arthur, while still a guard, had been lax with training, and even with Ybrisil is no match for a fully-trained knight. He is instantly forced onto the back foot, a whirlwind of slashes and strikes coming at him from every direction. The clang of his sword parrying an attack is far less common than the ringing of longsword against armour. A crushing blow to his chest, his face, his arm. Countless small cuts accumulate in-between the chinks of his armour. Arthur gets a lucky hit on the knight's arm but is immediately punished in turn with a powerful strike to his knee. The knight slaps Ybrisil out of Arthur's hands. He stumbles backward and trips. The knight and horse loom over him, blade poised to strike. 

“Wh-why?” Arthur croaks, blood trickling out of his mouth.

“That sword would do no good in a simple guardsman’s hands. I must end one life to save hundreds more” it rasps, voice echoing behind the helmet. It looked so inhuman in the monstrous armour, face hidden to the world. It was no hero.

“The greater good? The greater good be damned. If you wanted the blade then why not ask for it!? You wanted the glory, the fame. The Hila’u have no honour, no mercy. We can pretend to be sophisticated but we’re no better than the damned Ratholans.”

“It might be little consolation but your sacrifice will save countless lives”

Something in Arthur snaps. The Hila’u took his daughter, they took his father, they will not take him. He flicks his side-knife into the horse's eye and it bucks wildly, flinging the knight off its back. The knight is left unconscious or dazed; it doesn't really matter which, Arthur makes sure to finish the job. The end in mind he begins to drag himself, beaten and bloody, towards the centre of the world. 

As focus turns to a single piece, Law remains ever unmoving, ever confident. But Passion’s fluctuation becomes faster and more erratic, more panicked.

The pain is a constant ache in the back of Arthur’s mind, but his goal is a raging fire in his mind. As he crawls towards the ruins of the ancient temple, he sees countless unmarked graves, countless bodies. As Arthur reaches the ruins the fighting ceases. There are no living left here, it is once again dead and still, another generation comes here to die. Bleeding, he lurches himself down a spiral staircase at the base of a spire.

Law’s incandescent glow grows brighter and brighter. Passion’s frantic movement grows ever more frenzied. 

Grisly and raw Arthur reaches the bottom of the stairwell and finds himself in a cave. Two figures sit on either side of a chessboard. One wildly pulsating, the other is solemn and still. The thought of the illustrious act glows and fills Arthurs mind, a heroic slaying and a glorious act, his destiny, his fate. A way to end everything, to end the fighting, to end the war, to end the loss.

But as Arthur gazes at the grotesque figures the glorious white thought corrupts. He’d lost so much, lost his child, his father, his hope and his faith. He was so tired, so sick of everything. Sick of the bloodshed, sick of his failures, sick of the screams. Sick of his friends dying, sick of children dying. Sick of the Goddamn games. Arthur’s glory fades away and fatigue washes over his body. He’d been manipulated enough he wouldn’t be toyed with anymore he was going to goddamn finnish it. On the verge of death he drags himself toward the black writhing figure, and, with his final strength he lifts Ybrisil. 

Arthur bellows as he slams the blade directly into the heart of the chessboard. He crumples to the dirt and through the black haze rapidly engulfing his vision he sees the board begin to crumble, The radiant white figure screams. As it screeches and shrieks the once amorphous black figure becomes completely motionless, even its one constantly beating heart paralysed. The board disintegrates and the tokens fall to the ground around Arthur's lifeless corpse. The former gods gaze powerlessly at their once playthings. Humanity, broken but living, now left to pick up the pieces.