Adient Decents | An Ascendants prequel
The surface land knew the end of life in its last breath, how it held the body still in its grasp of mortality. Exhaling the last essence of life from the lungs and stilling blood that once pumped through the heart. They did not know Death. Its sons and daughters, their vengeance and thirst for blood in conquest. They did not know the true ivy that poisoned running waters or the stench of rotting flesh in the air as though spoors.
Soon, they learnt that the wails of mothers clutching still bodies sung in the skies and that limbs coursing with fire tore flesh or twisted obsidian blades held no living flesh. As mortal deaths become decaying armies, they suffered for the god of Brikkarg who was their only purpose. Their lives now meaningless, he would make their deaths a rite of passage. Covered in the blood of his victory and his armies full of the slaughter of enemies, a new reign was ushered from the underbelly of Brikkarg.
Long reign its God and eternal King Dhodar.
Eternal was his reign. One of great monuments built of the ruble of bones of those unmoving. High-walled mausoleums where the bodies of his once loyal soldiers become idols of worship and aspiration. Stories and tales that sang of his triumphant rise, and the showers of death he poured over the desolate lands until their land was all blood dunes and bones. The capture of the dissidents, and their rotting flesh torn by the dead ground they are dragged on by Dhodar's generals and their golems.
They praised him while they ravaged and burned in his name. While their decaying teeth tore through flesh and ate like hoarding pigs, they relished in the spoils of war gained by eternal damnation. How their mouths would froth as those hours after their last breaths were taken to destroy in sovereignty. Watching their realisation that it was not Lucifer of Hades, they stood before but something that held no moral or value—just cruelty and the empire that praised it, and his legacy.
The god who wore Titan's bones as a crown and bore scars of battles with Ares. His insignia of flayed skin flagged on poles in procession and pride before tribes were taken for food, flesh, sex, blood, and conquest. The God of Dead Flesh and Conquest, how the names so easily intertwined with that of his ruling name, and so it would be so for 120 centuries. 12,000 mortal years, the lands only knew of Dhodar, God of Dead Flesh and Conquest, immortal ruler of Brikkarg.
12,000 years of rule and he found himself on a throne built into the tower risen in his name, wondering. What more can an obsidian blade and unquenched thirst conquer?
Legacy had been a dead word in the lands of Brikkarg. There was nothing after this servitude, for they had exhausted their last breath on earth and had fallen through the gaping darkness. The same could not be said for Dhodar. He was not mortal or mundane. Had never been shamed in a human body or shed the tears that they wept in sorrow. He had known no whisper of the mercy or the caress of maternity, for the embodiment of suffering was not to ever know its warmth. Pleasure was to plunder and joy was to conquer. There was nothing ripe in his daunting body, for it had been filled with rot from the beginning.
The kind that came from feeding off pain and misery as though it were ambrosia. An opioid made out of the screams of the tormented had made all in his body, blood and bones, vile and devoid of humanity. Breaking down the light that was a soul whose misfortune had left her virtue to the bargain of a father cheating death and the lust of a wealthy evil.
The god of Dead Flesh and Conquest found his most fruitful of campaigns in the matrimony of him and Madeline Umrena. Born under the guise of holy matrimony, she was shielded by a veil and patriarchal governance until she first bled. It was in her 14 years of mortal life that the veil had been lifted, and who was once a patriarchal governance was now an auctioneer. With mercy from a merciless god offered, the Umrena patriarch would pull a golden locket from his chest. Shaken hands as bloody as they had been before his last breath revealed the wide doe eyes and a petel laid nose, the delicate touch of innocence in her pouted lips and locks of nyx black hair. She would be the consort beside the ruling god a trade from eternal torture.
The lace of innocents she had shivered and cried down the aisle in gave regency to the new Queen. Her walk stumbled, and her breaths gasped as living lungs were tortured by dead air. He had stolen a living being, for she would do more than be a consort, she would bear a legacy. It would be deemed so before a crowd of cheering, the clashing sounds of war swords and shields banging against the bodies of the dead. It would be deemed so by her father's blood, which pooled on the altar and stained the white lace torn off her body after vows under his flayed skin.
The cries of consummation were heard through blood dunes and forests of bones. Rattling the soil of the living and creating typhoons in the lands of the dead, the storms brought alert to kingdoms far and wide from Brikkarg. Heard by the dead and the immortal, her pleas for mercy rang, but so did the all too familiar sound of Dhodars successful conquest. A sound even the mightiest of gods halted in approaching, all but a single goddess.
As Madeline looked at the carvings of the full moon, tears and burning torches of fire filling it with light, she heard her. Lilith whispered a promise between the first woman and a newly made one, that a seed of clay would be what the spawn of Dhodar is made of. That the conquest Dhodar relished in today would be the collapse of his immortality tomorrow.