The fields burned.

  Firelight crawled across the land, licking at the wreckage of what had once been cities, monuments of ambition and faith now reduced to little more than ruin and ash. The remnants of temples and spires, once clawing their way to the heavens, lay crumbled, shattered, cratered into the very soil they had sought to defy. The air stank of ruin, thick with the stench of charred bodies and the acrid bite of war’s aftermath. Smoke coiled into the sky in writhing tendrils, like spirits clawing their way free from the wreckage.

  Gods had died here. Entities of the divine and the unholy had clashed in their final throes, wielding weapons of unfathomable power. Craters the size of lakes pocked the land. Cracks wide enough to swallow entire cities had been torn into the earth. Their corpses lay where they had fallen, titanic forms twisted and broken. Some had ruled dominions, their names once whispered in reverence or dread. Others had existed in nameless obscurity, their divine purposes lost even to themselves. None of it had mattered in the end. All were dead.

  And amidst it all, he walked.

  His armored boots pressed into the scorched ground, leaving footprints where flames refused to burn. The weight of his presence was a thing that even death could not ignore. Dragging behind him was a mace, its iron head slick with the blood of those who had stood against him. It was not a weapon of refinement, nor one of discipline. It was not meant for elegant battle or measured strikes. It was a weapon of endings. Blunt. Raw. Indiscriminate in its destruction.

  He wore no face—the helm he bore concealed it utterly. And yet, even if it were revealed, it would mean nothing. His armor was thick and devoid of divinity, nor was it filled with the unholy, it reeked of the rejection of both. There was no identity beneath the steel, no name worth speaking. Only war. Only the weight of slaughter.

  He was a titan. Not in stature, not in size, but in sheer, unrelenting prowess. The weight of his presence crushed the land beneath him, the aura of his will heavier than any mountain. He had brought gods to heel. He had shattered their empires, razed their followers to nothing. His own presence fueled by the gutted gods and entities around him that stretched for eternity and beyond.

  There were no mortals in this land. But neither were there immortals.

  There was no throne left to claim, no kingdom left to rule, no voice left to carry the weight of divinity. He had seen to that. He was not special, nor did he consider himself so. He was not chosen. He was not prophecy. He was simply here. And the end of this conflict—of all conflict—was near. He could see it. Everyone could.

  And yet, they still begged.

  "Mercy. Mercy. I beg of you."

  The voice trembled, cracking, a whisper on the flames. A god, if it could still be called that, lay broken before him. Its divine light flickered, sputtering, barely holding form amidst the ruin. Golden ichor dripped from the wound in its gut, thick and luminous, not like mortal blood but something else entirely. It oozed onto the ground, and where it touched the soil, life bloomed, shapes and colors unseen before, fractal tendrils twisting into existence, gasping against the fire and ash before withering just as quickly.

  It reached for him.

  The faceless titan edged forward, his mace dragging through the dirt like a judge’s final verdict.

  "Why must you not listen?"

  The god’s voice was barely a whisper now, like the last breath of a dying star. And still, he paid it no heed.

  His grip shifted. The god’s hand twitched, shaking, struggling to muster its divine will. Power trembled at its fingertips, golden threads of energy trying to take form, trying to weave together something, anything, but it was too weak.

  The titan lifted his mace.

  It rose above his head, a great weight in his grip, both hands steady on the handle that dwarfed him in length. There was no hesitation. No roar. No sound of effort.

  There was only motion.

  The mace came down.

  A soundless impact. A shockwave of finality.

  The god’s torso exploded, ichor bursting into the air like liquid sunlight. The land caved—a crater the size of a village carved into existence in the wake of the blow. The sky cracked with the aftershock, the fabric of divinity rupturing, collapsing into oblivion.

  The god’s essence was no more.

  The titan exhaled. It was not relief. It was not satisfaction. It was simply breath.

  And then, he moved on.

  Just as he did, so did all who fought in this war.

  It was a cycle, a pattern played out not just by him, but by countless beings who had taken up arms. It repeated without end, across battlefields drowned in fire and ichor, across shattered dominions that had once stretched beyond the stars. Entire pantheons ceased, not just in death, but in memory. Names that had once been spoken in reverence or terror faded into nothing. Races that had existed before time itself were unmade, their legacy vanishing like embers in the wind.

  Trust was a relic of the past. No one held faith in another completely. Those who did rarely lived long enough to regret it.

  Before this, there had been order. A fragile, illusory peace.

  The gods and the entities had coexisted in eternity, never knowing change, never knowing fear. Mortality was an alien concept to them. The idea of an end was something they had never fathomed. There had never been a beginning, not in any way that mattered. They simply were. And in their existence, they thrived. Gorgeous spires, and a sky that emanates eternal, golden light.

  Suffering was unknown. Struggle was inconceivable. Pain was a myth.

  It was a world without want, without loss, without anything that could give meaning to their endless days.

  That changed the moment one among them dared to question.

  A divine entity, nameless as all his kin were, looked upon eternity and asked.

  Is this all there is?

  He had served. He had worshiped. He had lived within the bounds of divinity, where gods sat upon their thrones and ruled over all with unchallenged dominion. He had never known another way. But now, he wondered. And in that moment, eternity fractured.

  He asked those close to him, his kin, those who had existed beside him since time had meaning. They had no names, no titles, only designation. And they, too, pondered his question.

  And then, one by one, they vanished.

  There was no warning. No sign. Only absence.

  He knew who was responsible. Who could be responsible. He understood then what the gods truly were, not shepherds, not keepers of harmony, but something else entirely. They were not eternal because they sought peace.

  They were eternal because they sought control.

  They feared change. They feared doubt. They feared the idea of something new.

  So he became that change. He struck.

  And for the first time in an existence without a beginning, something truly new occurred.

  A god felt pain.

  A god bled.

  It was a revelation, a wound carved into the fabric of eternity itself. The gods reeled, recoiled. They understood, too late, that they could die. That there was something beyond them, something greater than their illusion of permanence.

  The nameless entity had no desire for titles. No need for recognition. His purpose was singular, absolute. He sought only one thing.

  The end of the gods.

  But his kin, and the gods themselves, would name him regardless.

  A title. A truth.

  He who created the first wound.

  And the others would follow.

  The conflict would span entire eons.

  The land, once boundless and sacred, ruled by pantheons beyond counting, became a shattered ruin, battered beyond recognition. Kingdoms that had stood since the dawn of existence crumbled into dust. Temples dedicated to divine names, once unshakable, were ground to nothing beneath the weight of war. The sky itself, once shimmering with celestial radiance, darkened into an unbroken canopy of fire and ash.

  The war was unlike anything existence had known before.

  Gods, once removed from the concept of pain, had been reduced to butchers, their hands slick with the blood of their own kin. The entities that had dwelled beneath creation’s notice—beings of order, beings of chaos, beings that defied mortal comprehension—found themselves dragged into the fray. Some fought because they wished to, others because they had no choice.

  Some simply wished to survive.

  And yet, no sanctuary could be found. There were no strongholds that endured, no havens untouched. The entire land had become a battlefield. The heavens themselves bore scars that would never fade, their once-pristine constellations now tangled with the drifting corpses of slain gods. Their light, flickering in the dark void, was not the light of hope, but the last embers of forgotten titans.

  Eternity lost its meaning.

  And in that endless, grinding cycle of carnage, the warriors, be they gods, entities, or something else entirely, began to forget.

  Why had they fought?

  Why had they bled?

  Why had they died?

  At first, they had fought for belief. For supremacy. For dominion over creation. Then they had fought for vengeance. For hatred. For the unbearable, insatiable need to balance every death with another.

  And then, they simply fought because they no longer knew how to stop.

  Whole pantheons had been wiped from history. Not just slain, but erased, their names lost, their worshipers turned to dust, their symbols worn down by the howling winds of destruction. Even those who once revered them had perished, leaving behind no one to remember their existence.

  Until, at last, there was nothing left to fight for.

  And eventually, it ended.

  Not in triumph. Not in conquest. There were no victors.

  Only silence.

  The ringing of steel against divine armor ceased. The roars of the dying, the war cries of the vengeful, the last, desperate prayers of the forgotten, all fell away. And in their place, a void.

  A silence that stretched across all creation, vast and terrible.

  For the first time in eternity, the gods and entities that battered themselves into oblisivion felt something they had never known.

  Exhaustion.

  Eons passed in that silence.

  The flames, once thought eternal, guttered out. The sky, once a weeping wound of blood and fire, began to heal. Where once it had been a testament to devastation, it became something new, something no surviving god, no lingering entity, had ever seen before.

  A sky of blue.

  A sun, golden and warm, rising over a world that had never known its light. Clouds, drifting soft and untethered, unburdened by war.

  A world untouched by divinity.

  Where once the earth had been torn asunder by celestial power, now strange forests sprouted from the dust of fallen gods. Rivers, long since evaporated by divine flame, flowed anew, carving through lands once flattened by titanic war. The great chasms left behind by battles of unimaginable scale became the cradles of oceans.

  And then, impossibly, life emerged.

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  Not life as it had been before, crafted by the gods, molded by their will. This was different. It was something unbidden, something neither divine nor eldritch. It was born from the ruin itself, from the wounds of the world, from the forgotten bones of those who had fought and fallen.

  It spread. It endured. It did not need gods to guide it. It did not need entities to shape its path. It flourished on its own terms, bound not by the chains of immortality, but by something entirely new: time.

  For the first time in existence, beings were born knowing they would die.

  And in time, they grew.

  They built.

  They expanded.

  They shaped the world in ways neither god nor entity had ever considered.

  And those who had once waged war over eternity watched.

  The survivors of the war, the remnants of divinity, no longer sought dominion. They did not seek to rule, nor to shape this new world in their image. They feared it. Feared what it meant. Feared the reality they had once thought impossible.

  The endless war had left them scattered. Isolated. Where once they had been beyond counting, now there were fewer than a dozen left.

  And one by one, they disappeared.

  Some buried themselves in the ruins of their old temples, watching as the world they once ruled grew beyond their reach. Some fled to the furthest edges of creation, seeking solitude in the void between lands that had been damaged by divine magic eons ago.. Others faded into legend, their once-great names twisted into myth by the mortals who unknowingly walked upon the graves of their fallen kind.

  And as the ages passed, they came to believe a single, terrible truth.

  That they were alone.

  That they were the last.

  That they had destroyed everything that had ever mattered, and had left nothing behind except a world that no longer needed them.

  Yet, one of these entities refused to fade into nothingness.

  Where others buried themselves in forgotten lands, he remained. Where others sought solitude, he walked among the remnants of what once was. He had won, had he not? The gods who sought absolute dominion had perished by his hand, their names lost to time. He had set eternity ablaze to bring about change. And change had come.

  No longer did the cosmos exist in stagnation. No longer did divinity shape all things to its will. The world moved forward without the weight of divine rule, without the ceaseless cycle of worship and control. Mortals, creatures who had never known the old war, built upon the ruin of what came before.

  And yet… why?

  Why did he not feel fulfilled?

  He had told himself, convinced himself—this was better. Truly, it was. The gods that remained had learned. They no longer sought to chain existence to their desires. Not because of benevolence, but because they knew—he and a few of his kin still walked. And others like him, scattered though they may be, still endured. The gods understood now that should they try to claim dominion once more, the same fire that had ended their kin would rise again.

  And still, there were those among the mortals who chose to worship the surviving gods. But even they were different. Their devotion was not demanded, not required. The gods did not shape them, nor did they define their fates.

  But these mortals…

  They were strange.

  They called themselves humans, these frail beings, these creatures who bore the visage and stature of gods and entities alike, yet lacked any semblance of divinity. They did not live for eternity. They aged. Their bodies weakened, their hair greyed, their breath grew thin, and then—without any interference from another—they simply ceased.

  To those born from the divine, it was an alien, unfathomable concept.

  An essence ending, not by war, not by the will of another, but simply because time demanded it.

  And yet, for all their frailty, humans endured. They were relentless, always moving forward, building, creating, destroying, rebuilding. They held no true permanence, and perhaps that was why they thrived. They adapted. They changed with the world instead of shaping it to fit their will. They feared death, but they did not reject it.

  And they were not alone.

  Others walked the world of mortals, creatures that had not come from the divine but from the ruin and rebirth of the world itself.

  The Elves

  Like humans, the elves were bound to mortality. But their lives stretched far longer—so long, in fact, that to them, human lifetimes passed like the changing of seasons. Their emotions burned brighter, their passions ran deeper. Where a human would spend a lifetime mastering a craft, an elf would spend several. And when they loved, when they hated, when they mourned, they did so with an intensity beyond human comprehension.

  But it was not time alone that set them apart.

  The arcane flowed through them with an ease unseen in any other. To a human, magic was a force to be harnessed, studied, and tamed. To an elf, it was instinct, as natural as breathing. The world itself spoke to them in whispers of power, and they listened. Some wielded it in art, in song, in creation. Others turned it to war, weaving destruction with the grace of a storm.

  But for all their power, they were cursed in ways humans were not. Their lives, though long, carried the weight of memory. Humans forgot. Elves remembered. And in a world that constantly changed, they often found themselves relics of a past that no longer existed.

  The Orcs

  If elves were creatures of the arcane, of refined mastery and longevity, then orcs were the embodiment of raw, untamed life.

  They, too, were mortal, but their mortality burned short and bright. They were not creatures of stone halls or delicate cities—they were creatures of the land, of the wild, of the pulse of nature itself. Strength was their language, resilience their creed. They were not bound to the old gods, nor did they seek their favor. Their ancestors were their gods, and their own deeds shaped their fates.

  And where humans built, where elves preserved, orcs endured.

  They did not care for legacies written in stone or in song. Their legacy was in their blood, in the echoes of battle, in the scars upon their skin. They did not fear death, for death was merely the end of the current battle—another awaited them beyond.

  To outsiders, they were warlike, violent, driven by battle-lust. But to themselves, they were simply alive. Every moment mattered because they had so few of them. Every fight, every feast, every sorrow was lived fully. Because unlike elves, who had the luxury of centuries, orcs had only decades. And they refused to waste them.

  The Dwarves

  If elves were the children of the arcane, and orcs the children of the wild, then the dwarves were the children of the earth itself.

  Unlike the others, dwarves did not see time as a burden or a fleeting thing to be grasped. They saw time as a tool, a chisel that carved both the world and themselves into something greater.

  They were patient.

  Their cities were carved into mountains, into the bones of the world itself. Where humans built, where elves wove magic, where orcs conquered, dwarves crafted. Theirs was an art of steel, of stone, of unbreakable will. Their weapons were not mere tools of war but works of mastery, meant to outlast even the wars they were wielded in.

  Yet, despite their love for the craft, dwarves were not creatures of solitude. Their halls rang with laughter, with song, with the clinking of tankards raised in celebration. They valued loyalty above all, for stone, when properly set, never crumbled.

  But for all their resilience, they feared one thing above all.

  To be forgotten.

  To a dwarf, a name was everything. A legacy was not measured by years lived but by the mark left upon the world. A name carried through generations, etched into steel, carved into halls, was a victory against oblivion itself.

  The Demons

  And then, there were the demons.

  Not creatures of hellfire, not beings of pure evil as some would claim, but something far older.

  They were remnants. Echoes. The unwanted children of a war long ended. Born not from divine will, but from the cast-off fragments of power that had bled into the world when the gods fell. They did not belong to this world, nor did they belong to the heavens beyond. They were caught in between, their existence an aberration of the old war’s final moments.

  To mortals, they were horrors, their forms unnatural, shifting, shaped by the fears and desires of those who beheld them. To themselves, they were merely survivors of something far older than anything else that walked the world.

  Some sought to carve their own path, finding solace among mortals who did not understand them. Others clung to the remnants of the old world, whispering of a time when gods bled and the sky burned red.

  But whatever their path, all demons shared one truth.

  They were never meant to exist.

  And yet, they did.

  Just as the world itself was never meant to be free of divine rule

  And yet, it was.

  He walked across a vast field, where the wind whispered through the tall grass, carrying with it the scent of earth and time. He had learned much, yet little at the same time. He had seen the rise and fall of empires, had watched kings be crowned and slain, had stood upon battlefields where gods once clashed.

  And yet, despite all that he had witnessed, he did not understand.

  There was something he craved, though he could not name it. A longing that gnawed at the edges of his thoughts, though he had no words for it. He was an entity. A destroyer. A slayer of gods. Eons ago, he had battered divine beings into oblivion, their blood staining the cosmos itself.

  And now, what was left for him?

  No wars called to him. No battles demanded his hand. No foes existed that could stir his wrath. Even demons, those fragmented remnants of a forgotten war, recoiled from his presence, their cursed forms scattering like leaves in the wind when he approached.

  And so, his days became as they were now.

  He did not sleep, for there was no need. He did not hunger, nor did he thirst. He had no ambitions, no desires to chase, and yet, he did not know boredom. On occasion, he would cross paths with great beasts that roamed the wilds, creatures whose bones could break mountains, whose roars could shatter the sky. He would slay them when they crossed his path, not out of sport, nor duty, but simply because they came before him.

  And sometimes, he would find humans.

  A small village lay nestled beyond the hills, its people scattered in their daily toil, their lives fragile and fleeting. When they saw him, they fled. It was not fear of his weapon, nor the ragged cloth that draped it, it was something deeper. An instinct. A primal dread, as if they knew, though they had no reason to.

  They did not know his name. No one did.

  Behind him, his mace rested, bound in torn, dirtied cloth, a relic of another time. A weapon meant to shatter divinity, now dragged across a world that had long since forgotten war between gods.

  When the sun rose high above, he would walk.

  When the sun set, he would stop.

  Not because he was weary, nor because the night brought peril, but simply because he chose to. He would kneel in the dirt, sit upon the rocks, or lie in a field, still as stone. And he would remain.

  Sometimes for days.

  Sometimes for years.

  Once, he had stayed in one place for a century, unmoving, as the world changed around him. The village he had once seen grew into a town, its people building roads, homes, walls. He watched them love, hate, struggle, perish.

  And then, one day, the town was gone.

  Nothing remained but ruins, swallowed by time.

  And still, he walked.

  —

  His boots buried into the soil, the soft sound of dirt pressing beneath his weight. The world moved around him, uncaring, unknowing. Birds scattered across the sky in great flocks, their wings cutting through the crisp air, their cries lost in the vastness above.

  Far beyond the rolling hills, great beasts migrated, their hulking forms parting the land as they made their way across unseen paths carved through centuries of instinct. Above them, towering shadows drifted through the sky—whale-like leviathans, their massive forms gliding effortlessly between the clouds. Their enormous fins rippled through the air, bending the wind around them as they moved, leaving behind trails of shimmering mist.

  He lifted his head, his helm catching the sunlight as he gazed upward, watching.

  Below the sky-beasts, a pack of wyverns flew,, their wings beating softly as they wove through the air. Their bodies twisted and turned with practiced grace, diving between the colossal creatures above them.

  He stood there, unmoving, watching the spectacle unfold.

  For a moment, the world felt different.

  Not empty. Not silent. Just alive.

  And then, as always, the moment passed. The sky-beasts drifted beyond the horizon. The wyverns vanished into the distant cliffs. The land settled into its slow, endless rhythm.

  And he walked on.

  He walked a world born from the ashes of the corpses of divinity. And so, he would tread his boots on soil untouched by the very thing he was born out of.

  It was not a world that bore witness to his war—it was something new, something unfamiliar. The scars of what once was had long since faded, though remnants still remained, scattered across the land like whispers of a forgotten past.

  Mountains carved not by time but by the blades of long-lost titans. Canyons that yawned into the earth where gods had fallen. Spires of stone and metal that had once served as celestial thrones, now hollow and abandoned, their purpose lost to the tides of ages.

  But for all the ruin, there was renewal. Trees older than the first mortal breath stretched toward skies no longer stained with the hues of war. Rivers carved new paths through lands that had once burned beneath the fury of divine wrath. The wind carried no prayers, no wails of dying deities, only the rustle of leaves, the distant calls of beasts, and the whispers of a world untouched by eternity’s war.

  And yet, he remained. A relic from an age that no longer belonged.

  His armor bore no insignia, no banner of allegiance. It was unlike any crafted by mortal hands, neither steel nor gold, yet it held the weight of battles long past. There were no cracks, no rust, yet it did not gleam like the polished plates of human knights. It was muted, as if the metal itself carried the silence of eons. And those who saw him could not comprehend it, his form was like that of a knight, yet too still, too unnatural. Like a construct shaped in the image of war itself, a thing that should not be.

  But he was not a knight, nor was he a golem bound to a master’s will. He was something that defied classification, an entity without a place in the world he now wandered.

  And so he walked.

  The land was vast, stretching beyond what even he could see. He had no destination, for he did not seek one. He had long since abandoned the notion of purpose, and yet, his feet carried him forward.

  To the west, the banners of civilizations fluttered in the wind, castles of stone standing as the works of fragile hands seeking permanence in a world that would outlast them. To the east, dense forests loomed, untouched by mortal roads, where the ancient remnants of creatures older than human history lurked in the shadows. To the north, mountains crowned with ice and mist stood defiant against the sky, holding secrets buried beneath frozen stone. And to the south, open plains stretched endlessly, where nomads and beasts roamed freely, untamed by civilization’s grasp.

  He had seen them all before, or places like them. Yet, he did not stop.

  What was he searching for? He did not know.

  Perhaps he simply walked to see if there was anything left in this world that could move him.

  If there was anything left in this world that could recognize what he was.

  If there was anything left in this world that would not look at him with fear.

  The thought did not linger. He did not linger.

  The sky above was blue, devoid of divine fire. The earth beneath his boots was firm, untouched by the blood of gods. The wind that carried through his tattered cloak bore only the scent of life, not war.

  And so, he continued.

  An entity without a name.

  A remnant of a war forgotten.

  A wanderer in a world reborn.

  The end of one age.

  The beginning of another.

  And yet, he remained.