The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The mortal world never learned his name. This, too, was his own choice, made in the same quiet, exhausted hour as the decision to sleep rather than rule — he asked, of the small number of newly arrived gods who had witnessed enough of the war to know what to call him, that they simply not. He did not want a name that might one day be worshipped, prayed to, built into a religion that mortals below might use to excuse their own cruelties the way the old court had once excused theirs. He wanted, if he was remembered at all, to be remembered as a warning rather than a god — a story told to frighten the powerful into caution rather than a name invoked to grant anyone permission.

What survived him, in the mortal world, was exactly that: a story, worn smooth and strange by however many centuries of retelling separated any single mortal from the actual war it described. A man who danced on the corpses of fallen gods. A destroyer who came from nowhere, ended everything, and vanished. Some tellings called him a demon. Some called him, with a reverence the man himself would very likely have found uncomfortable, a savior. Almost none of them agreed on the details, because almost none of the details had ever been reliably passed down at all — only the shape of the thing, the outline of a single figure standing against thousands and walking away the only one left standing, distorted by each successive telling into whatever shape best served the fears or the hopes of whoever was doing the telling that generation.

No mortal record, in all the centuries since, has ever confirmed whether he still keeps his vigil. Whether he still wakes, every thirty thousand years, to look briefly at what the World of Gods has become in his absence, and decides, each time, whether the holding has lasted or whether the rot has crept back in. Whether he is, even now, asleep somewhere beyond the reach of either world, or whether something — grief, exhaustion, the sheer unbearable weight of having already done this once — finally convinced him, at some point no record survived to mark, to simply stop waking at all.

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What can be said, with rather more confidence than anything about his current state, is this: the eight who tormented a blind man and his wife in a quiet Fragment of that same old mortal world were never, by any honest accounting, gods in the sense the word ought to carry. They were mortals who had crossed an ancient, unjust threshold he had once chosen not to widen, armed with power they had never earned the wisdom to deserve, playing at a cruelty the old corrupted court would have recognized instantly as its own. And when something finally arrived to end them — something that had, itself, never once heard the old myth, never once known it was walking the same worn path a nameless destroyer had walked long before it, carrying the same unbearable grief into the same unbearable violence — it did what he had once done, for reasons close enough to his own that the resemblance, had anyone still living been positioned to notice it, would have been impossible to mistake for coincidence.

Whether that is proof the old god still watches, in whatever fashion his vigil takes, or simply proof that unjust systems produce the same corruption over and over regardless of whether anyone is watching at all, is a question this account does not have the authority to answer.

No one currently walking the gray stone of the Between knows the answer either.

Not yet.

[End of the Interlude.]