A thousand bodies watch a thousand daggers slide into a thousand necks. A thousand streams of blood. A thousand annihilations. A thousand souls freed and a thousand more retrieved from the bodies of soldiers now marching through glowing red gates that tower above them. A hundred thousand bodies disappear through collected towers designed for the purpose and find themselves at depos scattered secretly about the frontier created by the processing of a hundred only recently conquered villages. Blood and semen and piss collect below circles that reform and continue the march without footsteps abroad.

Beneath the flower capital ten thousand soldiers march under the banner of a Triumvirate posed to conquer the state in absence of a monarch. Archons pour down from the sky on bat and fairy wings to summon hellfire and reject this imposition of territory in vengeance for the fallen Duke, but the legions of the damned are few, and the armies of Quorus are many. The farmland begins to burn as his soldiers put it to the torch. These frontier towns are easy to conquer but hard to control. It is therefore advisable to process the residents and consolidate the new holdings to a minimum viable territory. Those who flee will be spared as a warning. Those who hide will be found.

Quorus dies in a bronze breastplate but another soldier snaps to attention. The Hidden Emperor dons another flesh puppet and the bat demon that had incinerated his last form finds itself with a spear through the torso. The power of a thousand bodies lends little to the individual form, but with such quantity held in reserve even a tiny fraction of the total is more than enough to lend a mortal weapon the power to impale a god. The next form is incinerated. A flesh-wound is not enough to kill the immortal cultivators who have formed this state from long before Yaldabaoth’s fall. Another body takes the place, unarmored, feminine. Quorus finds herself holding no arms, but there are stones within arms’ reach. Rocks are thrown and the body falls. The demon finds itself with holes through its leather wings, and a hundred soldiers encircling it.

There are others in the scene, but Quorus finds no need to continue directing attention there. The splinter of his soul will find itself another host, and soon shatter into more pieces to form more wholes in his collective self. With nothing to sap him of strength it may well only be a matter of time before the whole legion becomes his string-bound toy. Perhaps there is some other limit at the end of a hundred thousand selves, but only time will tell.

The fields burn and the bodies fall, but Quorus does not need to watch them. Another self rises from bed to deliver the news to an audience far more deserving of his true attention. A small and wormlike man sat cross legged on two bodybuilders the size of fridges who supported his tiny form with outstretched hands, as though he were some package of gold and jewels for presentation and consideration of the other man not wearing a thick purple cloak. Aphelion’s hair blazed like fire. His eyes were like sapphires. His skin was like jade. He appeared more of a doll than a man, built by design to the most opulent of specifications, and without clothing or genitals to match. His torso was smooth and hairless, but changed color from peach to something blue or perhaps black as the eyes progressed downwards to his shoeless, toeless feet. They faded into something tiny and perhaps delicate, but as the feet never found themselves against any floor their lack of substance was irrelevant.

Quorus donned his favorite whore donned in a see-through satin dress with only thin lines beneath, but Xevis was in no such mood for these things. Her footsteps pitter-pattered into a wall of fire, and found themselves no more. When Quorus returned in the body of a legionary whose bronze tower-shield would just barely be capable of withstanding such heat weak enough not to harm the mahogany floorboards, he shouted at the old man not paying him any mind.

“And what did you do that for?”

“You know damn well,” Aphelion shouted back, echoes rising in the room whose three-hundred foot ceiling left so much space it at times felt like it could almost form clouds.

“But I liked that one, you didn’t have to kill it!”

“And you didn’t have to drag us into a thousand quagmires!” Xevis retorted.

“You know we’ll easily win.”

“Do I? We only just consolidated the holdings we took five years ago. We can’t be everywhere, and you can’t handle strength,” Xevis continued coldly in the raspy voice of an old man.

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“But with Yaldabaoth gone—”

“So?” Aphelion interrupted forcefully.

“Yaldabaoth was never the obstacle for us. We have three monarchs but a thousand miles of territory. Even if you can occupy a thousand more vessels, there’s still only two of us.”

“No,” Xevis kindly understood, “I’ll never wash off the stench, but the fruits of our experimental work have born fruit.”

“Yes indeed they ha—”

“So?” Aphelion interrupted once again, refusing to allow Quorus any opportunity to explain himself.

“We can go places faster, but two bodies can only cover so much ground.”

Quorus tried to speak, but fell silent under a second torrent of flames, shield only just protecting him but still allowing the… brown hair once on his head to be burnt to a crisp.

“Stil—” more flames met his attempts to speak.

He threw the shield aside and was consumed.

“Still,” a thousand voices echoed in their heads, “You must understand what I have become without restraint.”

Aphelion cursed. Xevis tore a hole in the ceiling and blew apart the walls. Aphelion cursed Xevis now for blowing up his favorite monastery. It had taken them a hundred years to procure enough gold for their first building of the kind, even if it was without remark with alchemy so perfected in the present. But Quorus did not listen to their feeble rejections of his power.

“You seem not to understand what I have become.”

“And what have you—”

The disembodied voice did not allow for interruption without necessity for its words to be carried by sound. “I have become a god.”

“Haven’t we all?” Xevis mused, unconcerned as Quorus continued through his words.

“Without restriction I have become without end. Without flesh I have become without weakness. Without loss of strength in absence of flesh I have lost the one thing you mock me for. I am no longer bound to this plane.”

He continued despite their increasingly forceful objections.

“You are the toads lusting after the swan; looking to the sky unable to see what lies two inches from your nose. Godhood isn’t something one needs to take in. Immortality isn’t something one can find by building a metal body. You must destroy yourself. Everything you are is physical and you call yourselves gods? How weak. How pathetic.”

The Hand of the Scourge began conjuring his namesake, scarring great holes into the terrain that would never recover without Yaldabaoth’s cleansing essence to stitch them back.

“You would call me weak for splitting myself over a thousand forms, and yet now in absence of the one limitation my forms possessed you cannot understand my strength. But I am a merciful god, and I am still the same Hidden Emperor you once knew as a peer.”

“Oh is he finally going to stop this stupid fucking speech?” Aphelion mused, spitting the words as though the fruits of black bile built up for ten thousand years.

“Surely you’ve felt it, the cause of the end of Yaldabaoth’s tyranny? Help me kill it and things will continue as they are. You will lead this world as I ascend, and we will continue to rule as we always have.”

Xevis bent down and threw the larger of his two footstools at where he perceived Quorus’ voice in the sky. It had no effect, of course, but the other began to tremble as if scared of his master’s rage.

When the other came down it was not as giblets, but as a falling feather. Xevis tried to tear Quorus apart for the insolence of not breaking his chair, but even with Aphelion’s augmentation of his strength the attack was to no effect. It was as though Quorus wasn’t really there, though the flesh of the man had been so real only a moment before.

“Why are you so angry? Things will continue as they always have. Are you scared of my strength? Even with me so far above you I will not retaliate for your outbursts, only direct you where you must go as I always have. Nothing has changed for our alliance, only my place within and outside it.”

Xevis and Aphelion looked to each other and the hulking incorporeal Quorus, then shrugged. So what if they had mocked him? It was all in good nature, and if Quorus was to forgive and forget then what harm was there to be done? If his logistical and strategic end of the bargain was to continue to be upheld, then the personal strength of their Hidden Emperor made no difference. He would continue to need subordinates, not because of his lacking personal strength but because of the necessity of delegation. He had many selves but only so much attention. He would always need loyal and capable subordinates, and there was no loyalty stronger than self-interest. They had gained an empire through this alliance, and so long as it continued to grow there was no pressing need to question the small change in status quo.

Quorus smiled as he stabbed a finger through his temple and killed himself. It was much easier this way.