The twin moons rose together to mark the end of the Thirty-Sixth Cycle of the Hearthless Era.
Their pallid light washed over the Hollow Mountains, where the murderer of the Absolute Emperor lay upon a windless peak, waiting for death. His body was broken beyond repair — metal armor split and fused with flesh, bones crushed into inhuman shapes, and blood dried into black seams along his skin. Yet his eyes remained clear, reflecting a sky as dark as obsidian diamond, scattered with indifferent stars.
Within them stirred no regret. Only a faint nostalgia, coiled tightly around a quiet satisfaction.
Below the peak stretched the final battle of an age, a vestige forevermore to this lost Era. The battlefield ran endlessly across the land of Vareim, a ruin so vast it erased scale itself.
Corpses lay in heaps that resembled hills, their origins indistinguishable. Smoke rose in thin, wavering lines, like veins torn open in the earth. Here and there, remnants of life clung weakly to existence, soon to be smothered by the creeping undeath that had ruled the continent for nearly a decade.
This was the Death of Days.
Legions of kith and undeath roamed freely beneath the banner of the Absolute Monarchy. War no longer advanced; it persisted. Children were torn from their parents and reformed into soldiers. The dead were denied rest and taught to march again. Saints and sinners alike were crushed beneath the same unfeeling system, their prayers weighed, and most often discarded.
For every miracle granted, ten thousand were ignored.
If this was not hell, then the word had lost all meaning.
The murderer had understood this truth long before he raised his blade. He had watched empires grind humanity into fuel. He had seen hope weaponized, faith conscripted, and memory rewritten until history itself obeyed command. The Absolute Emperor had ruled by unquestionable dominance—by becoming so vast that resistance seemed childish, and suffering inevitable.
Like insects warring beneath the roots of a mountain.
Beside the murderer, two ant colonies clashed, their tiny forms a blur as they fought near the entrance nestled between the rocks. Maybe a home as perfect as this was really hard to find in this bleak place, and the battle grew more brutal, instantly leaving thousands of dead ants behind.
This might have sounded very tragic and bloody, but in reality, all that was left were small black dots on the ground. Eagles shouldn't fear ants since they are just black dots to them.
Ants shouldn't fear eagles either because they aren't even worth a bite. The world of ants had never seen or heard of a creature as powerful as the eagle, so the eagle remained a mystery to them.
Still, over many centuries and millennia, a few very special ants among the crowd would, for unknown reasons, decide to stop looking at rotten leaves and just once, look up at the clear blue sky... and then, the world was never the same to them.
Above them, the world was wide and uncaring. The sky was unreachable. The sun indifferent. An eagle passed overhead, unseen and unfeared, for it existed beyond the ants' capacity to imagine.
And yet, among countless bodies, a few ants had climbed atop their fellows.
Not to conquer—but to see.
The fear is born from seeing.
From the few ants that stood up and glimpse away from their rotten leaves to gaze up of what's above, heroes and villains emerge. They resembled the brightest of the stars across the world, but even they could not help but sense an overwhelming fear as they stood here in the wilderness on this day.
To see beyond the rotten leaves was to realize the sky existed at all. To understand scale was to understand how small one truly was. Most creatures were spared this knowledge. Most lives were mercifully narrow.
Heroes' were not.
A sleepless wind passed over the Hollow Mountains, brushing against the murderer's ruined body with a tenderness that felt almost deliberate. For a fleeting moment, he indulged in the fantasy that this was mercy.
It was not.
Death would be his punishment, and his salvation. He had no comrades left, no lineage worth preserving, no future that belonged to him. Solely by virtue of birth, he had been condemned to this ending: the Emperor's son, dying as his executioner.
Above him, the twin moons watched in silence.
They had watched before.
They had watched sages rise once every millennium, or so the legends claimed. They had watched empires insist on eternity and collapse within a breath of cosmic time. They had watched ants learn to climb, eagles learn to fear, and gods learn—too late—that being seen was not the same as being understood.
The world obeyed no moral axis.Only cycles.
Below the mountain, the battlefield did not mourn its dead. Above it, the sky did not judge the living. Somewhere between them lay the narrow, unbearable space where meaning was forced into existence by those arrogant enough to seek it.
The murderer closed his eyes.
His fate was the fate of all heroes.
Death.