Succession
[CW: Blood, strangulation, abusive relationships, general violence]
The black glass windows showed apocalypse. Had he wanted to hear the sound of the battle, he could have, but it pleased him to watch it in utter silence. Hosts of black-coated Riders on pale horses crashed around what was left of Creation’s defenders like a rising tide. Those Imperators and Nobles who had not yet fallen fought on valiantly, but their foes had finally broken through the flames of the Weirding Wall in numbers too great to hold. Most would say that it was through no fault of their own that they were losing.
Lord Entropy, King Evil and King of Evil he, Magister of the Dark, preeminent Imperator of Earth, unspoken head of the Council of Four and lord commander of the Valde Bellum, was not one of them. With a burning gaze and a sardonic smile, he watched his forces die like heroes, and quietly damned each one for a failure. From his black glass palace, held above the battle on a flying horror the size of a mountain, he observed the battle as he chose, shifting his windows from perspective to perspective. Among the things he appreciated were the ruination of the good and the great, and a hidden plan working as expected, and here he could watch both.
That it meant his ruination as well was almost beside the point.
He had grown accustomed to smiling past the discomfort by now. Something had cracked within him since he had committed to his course. The world had found a contradiction at his heart. Only a careful balance between his goals and his methods kept him going - one of the reasons he allowed himself the indulgence of gloating over his own allies’ destruction. The balance would not hold much longer, but he decided it would be long enough.
Nevertheless, the King of Evil felt a gaze upon him that pried at the cracks in his heart. Without looking, he knew that behind him, at the far end of the room, sat a quiet child swathed in magistrate’s robes many sizes too large. He did not turn around. He did not acknowledge the boy.
Beside the King of Evil stood a figure so glorious to behold that it was impossible to describe its specifics, so beautiful that it threatened to charm the unbreakable chains binding him into unlocking themselves. He had smiled a few minutes ago, and the reflection of it had cracked the black glass walls. Now he stood in silence, watching the war be lost with an impossibly lovely expression of quiet sorrow. He had not noticed the boy.
Without turning, Entropy spoke into the air. “Destruction, Desecration, Scorn: Come.”
Nothing changed with that word, save that those named were now where he wished, arrayed deferentially behind him. Baalhermon trembled with the pent-up violence he was not allowed to direct at himself. Meon was utterly still, save for the smile that always seemed to anticipate terrible things, which was slowly growing wider. Joktan picked an invisible piece of lint from his immaculate suit, seeming resigned behind his mask of obedience.
By Entropy’s will, they were sheltered from the mind-shattering glory of his prisoner. They did not notice the robed boy.
“You have it?” Entropy asked. It was still possible that this could all go awry, if his vassals had failed him. But he had every confidence in them. He had forged their need to perfectly please him with careful centuries of punishment.
Meon stepped forward, head bowed. At his master’s left hand, he laid a thing that struggled against description like a viper against the hand that grasped it. It was sharp and coiled and hatefully golden, when it was anything that could be named.
Entropy eyed the thing with a complex mix of disgust and appreciation. “They say,” he said, lifting it in one bloody hand, “that on the world of its forging, it was used to strangle those who contended for the throne and failed. Though it is now far more than what it was.”
His prisoner considered his response for a moment. “Am I then already failed?” His voice was as beautiful as he was, a thing to make the stars dance for its mere memory.
“If there is an Age to come after this day, it will not be the Fourth, and it will not be yours. It was a pleasant dream.”
Ananda’s eyes gazed out through the windows, and he nodded with solemn grace. “It would appear to be so. And yet, is that not your doing?”
“Am I not the death of pleasant dreams?” Entropy smiled, a mix of bitterness and self-satisfaction. “I merely hastened what could not be prevented. No better outcome was within my power to create, nor would I allow a better one if it meant suffering another to take the reins of Creation. If my captainship shall cause our vessel to founder, then founder it shall.” The smile gained a hint of amusement. “But I won’t ask you to forgive me.”
Ananda’s perfect arms flexed against the chains, but there was no give to them, and his brief smile drove more cracks into the walls. “Nor would I insult you so.”
Entropy’s smile relaxed into something wearier and more honest. “Ah, Ananda. I would regret going on without the one person who truly understood me. Fortunately, that won’t be necessary.”
The glorious eyes widened with worry. “I had hoped you, at least, might have a way out. I do not wish to bear witness to your downfall.”
Entropy could have faked a comforting smile. Out of respect, he did not. “Don’t worry. You won’t have to watch.”
With a swift, smooth motion, Entropy coiled the vile thing around Ananda’s neck, stepped close behind the glorious figure, and pulled it tight. Its razor edges seethed to cut flesh, but Ananda’s perfect skin remained unmarred, and if there was more blood on Entropy’s hands, it was impossible to tell. Ananda’s struggles had the faintly bewildered quality of one who had never before conceived a need for air. He did not pull away from his murderer.
They stood there, intimately close, for long minutes. It is possible that Entropy spoke to his victim; certainly, his mouth was seen to move, but that might have been mere exertion. Then, finally, there was a soft, indescribable sound, and something beautiful came undone, forever and beyond forever.
The golden thing uncoiled from the beautiful corpse and dangled from Entropy’s hand, as though sated. Entropy himself did not move; blood from his hands stained the floor around him. His servants stayed still, so as not to disturb their master, and stayed well back, so as not to see his face before he was ready. The boy, grown a little into his overlarge robes, looked on, worried but reluctant to move. Finally, he knelt to the floor, and did what he must to the still-glorious body.
In the endless black windows, the gods and anti-gods warred on.
A Rider with a glistening blade of onyx set her sights upon a group of godlings, some power’s vassals, and wiped them from sight with a gout of oblivion. When reality asserted itself again, only three of them remained. With despairing cries, they launched themselves at their attacker in a flurry of divine power. She ran one through; a second later she was rendered into a two-dimensional diagram and pierced through by a dozen cathedral spires. The two remaining godlings ground her remains beneath their feet before turning back to the fray.
Some time later, Entropy spoke. “You three can aid me no further.. Go now, and spend your lives where you will. Spend them fully. Hold nothing back.”
“Our service is... done?” Baalhermon’s voice, so strident when he roared, was soft and gentle when he spoke, which is why he had so rarely been allowed to.
In any other circumstances, Entropy would have punished him for the note of hope it held. Now, feeling the broken shards of his heart grinding within him, he found no desire to do so, only a cold contempt for the question. “Neither I nor Creation has a use for you beyond this hour. Die in our service as you see fit. Go.”
Nothing changed with that word, save that now they were elsewhere.
Only then did Entropy turned to the boy - no, the young man - with his face twisted with emotions he would never reveal in front of another. “It will be up to you, now.” Entropy’s lips curled in a sneer, and the boy leaned away from his expression. “The part about this plan I most despise is that it requires this of me. But our foes have been wise to my ways for too long.”
An angel long since Fallen descended upon a host of Riders with wings of flame and blood, seeking vengeance - for Hell and its denizens had been the first of Creation to be lost to the invaders. Where his furious gaze fell, his foes’ fears turned real, and all around him, every torment imaginable sprung from nothing. One after another, a dozen Riders were swept away by nightmares or seared by the terrible flames of his wings. Then the Riders’ bleak powers caught him up, and snuffed out his wings, and ran him through. When he fell, there was no Hell left to catch him.
“Destruction, desecration, and scorn are my weapons, but so long as the battlefield is Creation, they often serve our enemies better. They need not be cautious in their violence, while the more harshly I wield them, the less we are left with to save. If only we could take the fight to the enemy, it might be otherwise… But that is not the nature of our struggle.”
The young man raised his hands as if to offer some sort of comfort, and Entropy turned away hastily. “So I must do what they do not expect of me. I must be other than that which they know me to be. I must build something; I must make it better; I must find a way to cherish it.”
Scales rose before the window like a sinuous tower, like a river of green armor - one of the few remaining Serpents of Aaron, fighting with its greatest weapon - its own impossible strength. This one saw the bloody-winged devil fall and roared its dismay loud enough to shatter the bones of the Riders that assaulted it. Its tail swept the sky and carved a swath through the enemy’s ranks that could be measured in miles. But victory was within sight of their night-sky eyes. They did not fall back.
Entropy’s lips curled. If the children of the World Ash had roused themselves to this sort of desperate fury earlier, none of this would have been necessary. But the same could be said for all the Imperators; they were each and all too absorbed in their own perspectives. As always, there had been only one who had seen what needed to be done. For all his authority, he could not force his so-called peers to act. The limits of his power never ceased to rankle.
A host of the Excrucians spread to surround a warrior angel who shone in sunlight colors. It should not have been possible for ichor and soot and exhaustion to make someone look lovelier, yet somehow the stains served merely to highlight the defiant nature of her beauty. The Excrucian host drew up before her. One tall warrior trotted his horse out before the others.
“And there she is,” he said, eyes locked on the window, not sparing a backwards glance for the young man. “They think they know me, that they know us all. Are we all not slaves to our natures? They know that I am Evil and King of Evil, and that Evil would never sacrifice itself for others or give over a position of power. But though they have seen my strengths, they have failed to account for my weaknesses.”
The angel and the leader of the host exchanged looks of recognition, perhaps even longing. They spoke, each in turn. They shook their heads, each in turn. The Rider raised his great black bow in a signal, and his troops galloped past him to strike. With a beat of her sun-bright wings, the angel flew to meet them.
For a brief moment, Entropy’s grin flashed like a murderer’s knife, and he raised a bloody hand, a magician about to produce a flower. Instead, he produced Ananda’s gore-covered and impossibly beautiful heart. “Besides, is it not the prerogative of the villain of the piece to have one final and unexpected trick?”
The angel stood against the Excrucian tide. Her sword was a ray through the clouds and her shield was the sun itself, and she had never been more glorious. The tall Rider looked upon her and hesitated, his white horse standing steady upon nothing at all as he held the arrow half-drawn. Others closed in upon the angel’s brilliance with weapons of their own. It was clear they would drag her down in moments.
Entropy looked to the heart in his hand. When he raised his head, his grin was savage with hate and loss. His hand closed into a sudden, red fist, and blood sprayed -
The Rider’s expression hardened with resolve. His black arrow flew, and the angel turned from her battle just in time to meet it. Blood sprayed from her chest as it pierced her through; she stared at it, and then at the Rider, and her sword and shield dimmed like an eclipse.
Through clenched teeth, Entropy hissed, “Even the scorn of our enemies may serve us; even our own destruction may save us; even my own desecration may bring us victory.”
The window filled with the angel’s shining face. Blood was red on her lips, but her eyes were clear as she struggled to stay aloft. Somehow, through the window, she met Entropy’s gaze. He drew himself up and stared back coldly. Her bloody lips moved in a tiny, wry smile.
“Asshole,” she mouthed silently.
Then her eyes closed in death, and her wings furled, and every light in Creation save the glow of her wings dimmed, so that she was illuminated against the World Ash like the only real thing in a faded world. And it seemed that the window showed two things at once:
The angel tumbled endlessly from the sky towards the Void, shedding feathers of light in her wake, as the blue flame of the Weirding Wall surged as if in desperate protest, and then dimmed and guttered; her corpse fell into the blue flames like a spark into a lake, and then the spark was gone but the lake, the lake had begun to glow -
Or, a black-coated arm caught her around the waist, and the tall Rider swept her up onto his void-striding steed and carried her back to the invading host, who grew first sharper and more distinct in her light, then harder to see amid the glare -
And as these things happened, Entropy felt the pain of triumph as the precarious balance within him was lost. He staggered, knees weak, and he set his iron will to keep what passed for his heart functioning. It took all his pride to remain standing through the agony, watching the windows through suddenly blurry eyes.
The light rose, and rose, and rose, until the Weirding Wall vanished in the glare. The distorting light covered the ragged, churning mass where Hell had been, swallowing the scars of neglect and conquest both. It boiled up the trunk of the Ash, and world after shining world fell from view. On the battlefields of the invasion, both the hosts of the invaders and the last defenders of Creation distorted, flowed like water and passed from sight, along with the defenders of Creation. At the top of the Ash, the light met the walls of Heaven, eroded them, made them disjoint, and rendered the eternal, radiant crown of the Ash into mere castles of clouds. Even the distant stars were lessened. And the light reached up, touched the seething bulk of the horror-mountain beneath Entropy’s palace, shone through the black glass walls -
“So the seed is sown,” said Entropy, trying and failing to hold himself straight. Everything seemed a blur, though he could no longer tell whether it was his sight fading or the results of his manipulation. This dissolution was what he had chosen for Creation, to forestall the Riders’ war to unmake it, and hold out hope that what was lost might somehow be restored. He had set himself to preserve hope through the most terrible means, set himself the King of Evil against himself who was Evil.
Now the broken pieces of him were emptying out, the depth and terrible majesty of his wickedness flowing away to nothing. “It’s up to you now,” he said, turning to face the young man, whose robes now fit perfectly. “ You have come to claim what is mine as I expected. As I counted on, in fact.”
Strong young arms caught Entropy’s now-uncertain form as he swayed. Blood from Entropy’s hands dripped onto the young man’s own.
“You are my creation, my replacement, my... better half, if such a thing could possibly exist. I bestow upon you the keys to my kingdom. I bestow upon you my responsibilities. I bestow upon you what is left of my power. But to you I give my curse as well. You are my heir and my usurper both… ” Entropy grasped the boy’s shoulders and stared full and hard into eyes very much like his own. “And know that I loathe you for it.” So he spoke, though his voice was slurred, and it would be easy for a bewildered young man, or even a dark and dying god, to mistake the word ‘loathe’ for one much like it.
The dark and indistinct figure sagged lower in his son’s arms.
“May you bear up under it,” Entropy whispered, his vision all but gone, and marked the young man’s forehead with his bloody fingertips.
“Father?” said the young man, sounding lost and far away.
And there was a darkening, and a lightening, and a passing of burdens, and the fate of Creation was no longer a concern for the King of Evil.
