Page 474 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

His face crumpled in a twisted combination of terror and disbelief as he croaked, “She’s gone.”

EPILOGUE

Approximately 15 minutes prior...

The Rightful King of Bellpost found himself suspended in a void. Not shadow, nor darkness, nor light to shatter the endless vacancy of an infinite nothing.

Simply… him.

Ancient yet infant, alone but surrounded, the presence of countless others just out of grasp, like smoke through fingers or water through a net—an untenable awareness that what he sought existed, just not here. Within the void lay the open maw of desire, of dreams once cast and long forgotten, of all the possibilities he sought that never came to be.

Charred is the taste of regret, the ache of grief, the hollow where love should be and yet…

Nothing. For in all things, love requires but one constant; hope.

Without it, the flower wilts, its petals bowed beneath the weight of darkness, or suffocated in the smoke of corruption. Without it…

The darkness wins by surrender.

In the face of insurmountable evil, few things are a more effective rebellion than unwavering acts of hope.

But the rightful King watched love and light and all things righteous crush and shatter beneath the boot of hatred, and he’d forgotten what it tasted like—hope. The glimmering droplet of water as it caught the last of summer’s light, casting color across petals softer than a whisper. The tingle of honey across the tongue, cool condensation sliding down a glass beside a good friend’s laughter. Rain in the gentle hands of spring as they peeled away winter’s cruel cage. Joy unburdened by the weight of awareness.

To the King, all things had become a burden. The air in his lungs, a sentence passed.

And so the void offered him rest. A cocoon of silence in a cacophony of screaming. Within the void, time and space collapsed, leaving him eternally suspended in his solitude.

So, the King thought. He’d always been particularly fond of thinking. Of making sense of the unpredictability of mortality, organizing shattered pieces by color and shape, rearranging them until again they formed a distinguishable picture.

Only… as existence stretched on, he couldn’t remember what pictures he’d been painting.

Even the image of death incarnate, finally knocking at his door to free him from his chains, eventually faded into nothingness. Like ash on the wind, the last semblance of attachment drifted away, simply vanishing as though absorbed into the blackness.

Which left him with… what, exactly?

Himself?

The only thing he ever thought was essential—his own mind, now vacant as the air surrounding him.

The King spent the first stretch of time—what must’ve been years—pondering simply the concept of existence, of creation, of where energy went if it could not vanish. But even the mysteries of the quantum realm grew monotonous as he grappled with the niggling awareness that this solitude was not all he’d prayed it would be. Freedom, yes, but contentment evaded him as it always had.

At last, his existence was quiet, his knowing peaceful, and yet… he longed for the feel of sunlight, for the twinkle of laughter and a smile brighter than golden hair. He longed for the decadence of touch, for the bittersweet glide of chocolate across his tongue, for the surety of a body.

Something akin to grief began to corrupt the void—growing as it spread, reaching for edges that didn’t exist, stretching, expanding, devouring until the rightful King remembered fear.

Fear was a visceral thing to mortals—nearly as all-consuming as love.

Love…

Had he known it? That world-altering sensation that drove the mortals to madness.

Finding his memories more distant than he’d like, the King searched for bright smiles and blue eyes, and found a flash of tan skin and vulgar gestures. A boy so much like him that it had always made his teeth ache, and a girl more fire than solid matter. Just as quickly as he found them, the images vanished.

He was left grappling with the infinite nothingness. Quickly, he realized he didn’t much care for it.

The familiar ache of despair became an all-consuming thing, filling all of his awareness until at last, he cried out for release, for mercy⁠—

—and found himself sucked through time and space, through worlds far and near, through a dimension of glowing water, and an orb composed entirely of ice crystals, through sun so radiant it left spots in his mind, through dense forests so vibrant they ached, until the blur of shape and color ceased and he found himself yet again inside a rather familiar vessel.