Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Prologue - The End of Dreams
"This is it...this is the END of your dreams!"
The words fell across the battlefield like a death sentence, and thousands of soul believed them.
He watched it happen, watched the moment hope curdled into something else entirely.
It moved through the crowd like a sickness: shoulders caving inward, hands that had gripped weapons now hanging loose and purposeless at their sides.
The living, already moving like the dead.
"Remember this. Remember what happens when you dare to stand against your Betters."
He drew breath to speak again, to deliver the killing blow of words that needed no blade.
"Now. Where is that annoying-"
THWACK-SQUELCH-CRUNCH
’Huh’
Something inside him cracked.
Not the bone, something deeper.
He felt his heart clench like a fist around nothing, felt the warmth drain from his chest like sand through an open hand.
The light began its slow retreat from the edges of his vision, narrowing, narrowing still...
And in that closing dark, he saw Him.
A silhouette, standing above him, perfectly still against the carnage.
Two horns curled from his head like a devil’s crown, and between them, cutting the red air like a wound of pure white light, a halo pulsed, it was calm, patient...Absolute.
The contradiction of it seized his dying heart and squeezed.
What was this thing?
Angel or demon?
Executioner or god?
The halo did not waver.
It was simply indifferent to the question, indifferent to him, indifferent to the mountain of dead beneath his boots.
A scythe rested in his hand like it had always belonged there, like it had been forged from the space between heartbeats he never saw coming.
His eyes...those were the worst of it.
Not cruel, nor triumphant, not even cold.
They were empty...distant, as though the world itself had long since ceased to matter, and all that remained was the clean, quiet work of ending it.
A Reaper.
Not the myth, not the children’s story told to make death feel like a stranger in a hood.
This was what the myth had always been trying to describe and failing.
Standing at the center of endless carnage with the stillness of a man who had run out of reasons to feel anything about it.
The single question his mind could still form surfaced through the wreckage of his thoughts, past the pain, the blood, the fading light, urgent as a last breath:
"H-how...?"
SWHKT
The world tilted.
He saw his own body from above, headless, armor destroyed, crumpling into the red earth like a broken promise.
He saw the battlefield stretching to every horizon, a sea of the fallen.
And standing at the center of it all, the figure with the halo between the horns did not watch him fall.
He was already looking somewhere else.
Somewhere far away.
As if death, even this death, was not enough to pull him fully back into the world.
A Reaper ascending from hell.
Carrying heaven’s light as a wound he no longer felt.
And then there was nothing at all.
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