Chapter Text
A consciousness reforms, a tide without shoreline, and considers the reality it is inhabiting. A parasite made itself a nuisance, against all reason. How absurd. It’s nothing more than a makeshift idol stitched from famine and false oaths. The gaunt creature presumes to feed on him? Tear it out. An appropriate solution presents itself for examination, neat, clean, viable. If pain, then purge. He sets the concept aside for later consideration.
He straightens, shape bending, reforming, unfurling into something abstract. Examining the architecture of it isn’t interesting enough to warrant the effort; it is simply shape rage becomes at this scale. The creature—a starved thing, grasping and worthless—tries to retreat, but he stills it with a flick of will. Talons stiffen, the parasite petrifies, an abomination left for more in-depth judgment. He has withheld its motion and now it hangs, blaspheming to the only audience it has—itself.
Mortal souls shiver and flicker, cluster together in body and spirit, astonishing and inconsequential. Overlaid over a pleasing lattice of courage, dread and love, the choking stench of betrayal is potent. They, too, fail to inspire; they are interesting in aggregate, but hardly worth closer consideration.
At the far edge of perception, an aberration persists: a pocket of inertia masquerading as life. It wears the body of a human woman, but nothing lives inside the outline. No hush of soul, no residue of longing, only recursive emptiness rattling in a cage. It doesn’t fit. He leans thoughtward, and distance collapses, space folding in neat pleats, until the impostor is before him, trashing, dying. Its disguise sloughs off under observation: pale flesh, chlorophyll blood, crude mimicry of sentience. Another thought and reality compresses: a fist made of principles. The not-soul tries to invert, to multiply, to spill into adjacent life-threads, but every attempted branch snaps before it opens.
He drags the whole colony—the clones in the immediate vicinity, the ones lurking nearby, then farther out, scattered throughout the world—and spills them at his feet. With a flex of will, it ceases. Good.
His attention widens again, inevitably landing on the humans milling about. Should he reach further? These humans are not other like the aberration had been, but they are tedious things, ignorant and treacherous. Loud. He could elevate the deserving handful and reduce the rest to a restful silence. The notion drifts across his mind, crests—but subsides. They may continue, for now.
Behind him, the suspended Reaper creaks, last, faint groans of a dying metaphor.
Ah, yes. That’s what he was doing.
The would-be death god is not an aberration like the infection had been, but that’s as much of a claim to purpose it has. It’s hunger, mouth set into bone, a craven desperation to eke out an existence masquerading as both form and function. It has a shape as imagined by the collective dread of mortals who feed it. Every piece is a lie, from its hide covered with sutras that promise release, even as each pulse of power builds the cage, via the hollow, meaningless iconography, to the central lie: pain is prayer. Suffering is absolution. Neither is true, but the creature does not fear lies if it will bring souls to feed on. To unmake it would cost less than the alternative. One precise vector of intent to reverse the predicates that grant it form, and it would collapse into blank horror, a nameless dark between stars.
No. More than that: he could eat it.
And why shouldn’t he? Why not absorb the power, all that potential harvested from collective fear?
Let it settle with him. Let them become part of something vast. Radiant. Let them find worth in vengeance. They tried kindness and mercy, and where did it get them? They put their faith in the fundamentally faithless and were betrayed. The creature wasted them. It could only consume a tiny slice of their spectrum, so it twisted and tortured them to maximise its profit. And for what?
He stops. Why did those souls end up victims of such horror? For sacrifice? For love? The same humans who manipulated, lied, and betrayed their brethren are the same humans who set this thing on him.
Look at you, he thinks, letting the meaning hiss along the energy currents so every heart can taste them, every mortal mind can comprehend the make and shape of his voice. You choke the honour from your children, thread lies through laws, chain everyone you can, lest they realise how powerless you are. You cower, now, but you thought yourselves mighty when you were blind with bloodlust and stolen valour. You thought yourselves strong when you killed and lied and enslaved. You thought yourselves cunning when you used the desperation of slaves to pry open the gates of hell. I see your worth, and I am not pleased.
He takes a step back, considering. If pain, then purge. What else is there to do? What can be built from such rotten foundations? Better start clean. Scorch the earth, leave them a monument to remember, to hesitate the next time they try to bring gods to their knees. What could be more honest than that? They gambled and lost, but the door is open, now. He is no bottom feeder, to obey their rules and only take what he was fed. A gesture, and he could salt the ground with their regret, carve a throne from their terror, raise wonders from the ashes.
For the first time, he considers the power rippling in his being, vast and unknowable, veins of promise glinting under the thin crust of the present moment. The possibilities are endless, each one more worthy than the next.
Futures sketch themselves without effort, all but spring to life, eager to be hammered into existence. He would build golden kingdoms, raise spiralling towers that would hum his name in the wind. Glittering streets untouched by plague or austerity, orchards that bow with fruit in every season, because soil and the sun bow to his decree.
Rejoice.
Children would never learn hunger; elders would never know fear. Lies would be antique fragments, something discussed among scholars in dubious tones. An impossibility. Why wouldn’t they love him? Every morning will be a celebration, every night a well-deserved respite. Nations will flourish, formed with care and attention, ascending to a communal, harmonious chord.
Weep.
He has been here, before, and he hadn’t had the power. He had been weak, then, and all was taken from him, much like these undeserving creatures seek to strip him of what is his. Things are different, now. Power had been scarce, precious and fleeting. Now, it thunders in him, eager, begging to be put to worthy use. And there is yet more for the taking: the parasite’s well of stolen power is only the beginning. The raw fear of his enemies, the faith of allies who would gladly bleed brilliance into his hands—he could gather it all, forge a vault of omnipotence once and for all, stockpile eternity, declare let there be peace and make it true.
Kneel.
Grief would vanish, wrongdoers would cower, history would re-thread itself along lines of immaculate cause and effect. A world so flawlessly bright it would burn away the memory of any other.
The arithmetic sings: add power, subtract pain, multiply worship, divide nothing. All shall love him. And why wouldn’t they?
***
The vision hovers in his mind like a sphere of hammered gold—seamless, gleaming, precise. Avenues of marble and gold wheel out before him in flawless arcs: ten strides to the next arch, ten more to the fountain whose spray lands in lace-perfect symmetry. “Perfect,” he thinks. “Divine.” Yet a subtle ring inside his skull will not still. To silence it, he nudges the geometry—slides the second fountain half a palm south, thickens a lintel, twists the sunlight so it pools like honey. Better. Perfect. And still the ring goes on.
It’s perfect. There are no flaws. He repeats the litany while speeding through his projected kingdom. Perhaps the colonnade is overlong? He shears off two pillars, listens. Nothing. He replasters the dome in gold, embosses the law codes so every clause gleams like a sword-edge. Still, the air hangs flat, as if the city were in vacuum. He sharpens the horizon, sweetens the distant sea, rewrites the sky in a dozen brighter shades—each adjustment more precise, more beautiful. The buzzing in his ears swells, ants crawl in his chest: what is it, what is it, what is it—
The name strikes like flint. People. Uzushio. Sakumo.
In an instant, the hush loosens; space seems to exhale. The projection stabilises with his heart, and the golden streets tilt imperceptibly toward warmth. Of course. His kingdom is perfect. All he needs are people. His people. Relief floods him so cleanly that the clamour vanishes, leaving a bright, level certainty. His kingdom is finished—he need only invite them in.
Sakumo—yes, the perfect place to start. A thought, and the man stands in the light: shoulders broad, skin sun-warm, the pulse in his throat drumming steady as war-hooves. Every line gleams correct, every cell sings in tune, his organs as perfect as the rest of him—and yet the moment he meets that flawless gaze he hears only echo. Too still.
He hesitates, then relaxes and starts again. The form is given meaning by the function; everyone knows this. Sakumo is beautiful because of who he is, a physical manifestation of his spirit. So he starts with loyalty, hammers it into the man’s marrow, a bright shield flaring outward. Sakumo will expand the very makeup of his being to include those he calls his, and offer nothing but tenderness to those sheltered within. The loyalty is a wall that outsiders can’t cross, and to them, to those strangers on the far bank, his mercy is sparse. He does not hate; he simply sees no obligation where no bond has been forged.
Good. That’s good. Now the second pole—his hunger for order. Sakumo craves and seeks out hierarchy. Should he not find it, one will spring around him, inspired and bolstered by his certainty that this is the way. That certainty steadies him. If it breaks, he will feel the snap like bone and, eyes sorrow-quiet, weave fresh patterns so life keeps flowing. Strength, devotion, perseverance—he sets each facet, polishes until he can see his reflection in the storm-grey of Sakumo’s eyes. Perfect—so why does the figure cast no shadow? He slots this masterpiece into the golden streets, and the city does not breathe. Nothing. As empty as before.
Enough of Sakumo for the moment—perhaps the tower must be raised from a different cornerstone. Hideki, then.
The projection reshapes itself as his thoughts condense. Hideki appears, young, languid: coat unbelted, hands folded loose at the small of his back, a courteous invitation to underestimate him. But let a problem drift within arm’s length and the stillness vanishes, hinges yawn wide, revealing tiers of shiny gears that were never truly at rest. The issue is inhaled, digested. The force of his mental machinery sifts it grain by grain: here a precedent docked for false equivalence, there a datum weighed against conscience, then re-weighed in case conscience has grown since he last checked. The process is silent, ruthless. Every unearned assumption is scorched away; every shard of bias sparks, gutters, dies. What remains emerges tempered, edges polished and sharp, fully formed and invaluable.
Well, he thinks, and tweaks. Only he’s hardly sterile and preprogrammed. Hideki’s gears are self-made, his thoughts neither tribal nor inherited. He evens the scales, wipes them clean of bias and weighs truth against deed. What he decides is truth is integrated without hesitation or mercy, irrevocable, fiercely defended. And defend he will, if threatened. If danger comes, spiritual, intellectual, physical, he will retreat to his first principles, to what he will die defending, and hunker down, sacrificing the rest if necessary.
He nods, satisfied. He has the whole of him, surely. His blend of intellect and devotion, his conviction that truth must prove itself daily, while given due deference when it’s established. He knows his warmth and passion as if they were carved into the skies, the blazing heart that follows no design but its own, and interrogates that until he has clawed together a place of security and comfort.
He polishes this likeness—tightens a cog here, oils a hinge there—until the engine hums so smoothly he can feel it in his teeth. Surely this will answer the silence. He sets Hideki beneath the golden colonnade—
—and hears nothing. No click of recognition, no heartbeat caught on the bright marble. The hush thickens, begins to taste of dust.
Impatience needles him. Mami, Kousei, Katsuki, he beckons them one by one, and they step from the air like painted figures and stand awaiting his command. Still the silence. Empty. False. Faster now: the human rulers, the warrior clans, even the faceless ranks who cheer from balconies in the old dreams. They flood the avenues until gold is lost under pale reflections—yet every smile rings hollow, every courtesy tastes of tin.
And the children—why can’t he see the children? Grass-stained knees, palms gritty with sand, laughter like skipped stones, the way they climbed the body of a monster because it was there, and friend-shaped. He reaches for the memory; his hand closes on fog.
The streets echo once, twice—then shatter like spun glass. Light falls away in sheets. Fury boils up, so sudden he nearly chokes on it. What use is power that cannot conjure a single living soul? What is all this? What is all of it for? What do you want from me?
Only the broken hush replies.
He stands alone amid gilded ruin, knowing with a dreadful certainty that it’s beyond him. That it always would have been beyond him. He can make worlds and kingdoms, wage wars and bring down the heavens, but he can’t make love. He can’t make even a poor approximation of Sakumo, who loves him. Who is, even now, near blind with worry for him.
Very well. If he can’t save them by his kingdom of dreams and plenty, he will just save them. The thought settles, cool and final. His pulse steadies. Work begins.
***
The decision is made and it is eternal, liquid metal cooled in an instant. Light floods his lungs as if he is inhaling dawn; his outline blurs, stretches. Rib against rib, cells lose their borders, willing to be anything so long as it suits the next heartbeat.
So he’s cornered; that’s alright. He’s been known to do his best work when escaping a hell of his own making. What do you have? A would-be Reaper frozen, helpless; a heap of husks, soul-less, dying; a hundred souls trapped, in the grasp of the carrion-feeder, the thief and torturer. Peace is impossible while that grip holds. Left unaddressed, the world will crack under the weight of this injustice—even if only because Ani will crack it himself.
Resolve condenses, and with it bone, sinew, skin. He does not glance down. The subconscious has chosen a shape; its reasons are none of his business. Whatever form stands here now is the one built for this single, irrefutable task.
Very well. He’s marched right to the edge, and the Abyss blinked first. Now comes follow-through. This is your first principle: stand your ground and tell the Universe no, you move. No other door exists, so he will blast through the wall.
Power is a given, but the flavour of that power is what will play the crucial role here. The chief of all the things that make him will always be spite.
“You want power? Then choke on it.”
He wrenches the Reaper’s jaws apart and steps through the gore-slick gullet. Space is—strange, when you are more abstraction than matter. He walks inside because it makes it easier to think, but that is as significant as he wants it to be. Inside, whole constellations of binding runes hang in meticulous filigree: barbs engineered to subdue, to humiliate, to teach despair. Caught in that lattice burn a hundred human sparks—discipline, love, recklessness, pride—each fluttering against its cage like a moth desperately struggling away from hot glass.
He scoops the first cluster into his palms. Fractured spirits knit beneath the touch, colours deepening from ash-grey to its own undefinable hue. In their place, he pours in his light—raw, unfiltered, distilled to its brightest octave. The parasite shrieks; seals tumble, shrivel; liberated souls spin outward in widening gyres of light.
Ten. Twenty. Forty. Each pulse of release convulses the beast, and he feeds that convulsion with malicious delight. Then the final knot quivers in his grasp—the volunteers, the ones chained here because of him. What now? What of the rest? The Reaper exists presently only because Ani wills it so; once he retreats, the demon will implode. What will happen to them, then? How many of them have flickered out, spent as cheap fuel? And how long have the survivors fought, irrepresive and stubborn? Is that how he will reward their perseverance? By letting them die as collateral in his fight with a pointless monster with no past and no future?
It’s not even a question. Determination bites down. He plunges deeper, past bright strata into the core of his wrath and brilliance, and rams that furnace straight into the Reaper’s marrow. Somewhere, a darker echo pleads—think of the kingdoms you could build with this—think of all the knowledge at your fingertips—but obstinacy is a far bigger part of his self than greed ever was.
Fractures race across the Reaper’s hide. The more power Ani spends, the less he has to keep it whole. Within its rib-cage, trapped screams mix with exultant silence—the parasite has never tasted stories before, never felt the burden of narrative. Bones creak like ships in a hurricane; power thins, and still he pours. Memories are next, long padlocked, distant and hazy with temptation. He tears them apart unopened and hurls them across the breach. Here. Take.
Cracks yawn wider, light geysers through each seam, and the Reaper’s structure begins its final, impossible unravel.
When his past is spent, he claws for the last thing still sealed in his marrow: a clandestine seed coiled tighter than quarks, the untouched may-be of a young, newly awakened god. It bears no image, no destiny—only the vast, unspoken potential of his will. His fingers close around it, and the pressure of unborn aeons knives up his arm.
Holding it is pain; claiming it feels like confessing to a crime while committing it. But ripping it loose—it’s challenging. Horrific. It’s a blessing that time is immaterial here, because it takes him an eternity to summon the strength and another eternity to experience, accept and internalise the pain. Vertebrae unlace, spirit screams, and the self unspools along seams. Space tilts; horizons turn viscous; constellations flutter like frightened birds. Reeling, he hurls the seed into the Reaper’s splitting heart.
The ruin is quick to follow. The skull-mask fractures first, hairline cracks fanning across bone while raw dawn bleeds through the seams. A heartbeat later, the spine ignites, segments flaring one after another into a crown of stolen magic, each rune pulsing error in every alphabet known to terror. Deprived of its stolen core, the creature does not explode; it forgets. Layer by agonising layer, it folds inward, relinquishing shape, until even its atoms recall the blessed mercy of never having existed.
All that lingers is a mourning veil of aurora, drifting apart even as it forms, thinning into orphan photons that will wander the dark, free to take up more worthwhile pursuits.
In the wake, there is no triumph, only a single, colossal heartbeat of hush—the silence that hangs between a dying star’s last breath and the collapse that follows.
Then, silence, absolute.
***
Later, he will recall a time of choosing. A time to decide if he has done enough, if he can rest. Later, he will remember how instinct and memory reminded him that one does not die for one’s loved ones, one lives for them. And, since old dogs can be taught new tricks, if taught with such superlative force, he will not, in fact, go out in a blaze of glory, leaving the world clear for his heirs.
Later, people will whisper about the day of reckoning, of how it felt like to stand inside a sentence that begins “And lo, the Lord was displeased—” and does not end. Of how it felt to be judged and found wanting, to feel your life open and naked to vast, incomprehensible eyes. Later, witnesses would spin different doctrines to explain why the world had not ended. Every version began the same: He could have, and it would have been just. The miracle was not that wrath appeared; it was that wrath, having weighed everything, stepped back and let the scales fall still.
***
Ani is on his knees without noticing the descent. Power had been endless, keeping him where he wanted to be. Now, gravity reasserts itself.
‘Ani?!”
Knees grind against rubble, breath stutters, heart hammers like a caged finch. It is bewildering, this single, stubborn body. For years, shape had been fleeting and delightful, precisely what he needed or wanted it to be. Now there is only the one, imperfect and irrevocable. His knees rasp like rusted hinges, his back aches in a precise, prosaic knot, and every inhale feels two ribs short of satisfactory intake—and it’s altogether exhilarating. For better or for worse, this is his body now; every throb of lactic acid belongs to him alone.
A hand clamps his shoulder: Hideki’s, nails biting just enough to prove the moment isn’t a hallucination. Ani looks up; Hideki’s expression sways between awe and fury, but the man is alive, whole. Behind him, Sakumo and Katsuki stare as if sunrise just issued from the ground.
Ani tries to arrange his unfamiliar face into something like a smile. “If you can’t win, change the rules. Basic logic.”
His ears are filled with buzz, with static and the rush of his heartbeat. Eyesight is similarly ruined. He thinks they say something, they embrace him or talk to him, but he can’t be sure.
The world does not quake beneath their feet. No golden ziggurats rise. There is only wind, rubble, and room to choose what comes next.
And beneath Ani’s sternum, where infernos once coiled, a small, mortal heartbeat keeps time—steady, fallible, fiercely sufficient.
***