The battlefield was silent.
Not the quiet of peace, but the thick, suffocating silence that comes when the air itself is too afraid to stir. The earth had long since stopped trembling. The skies, choked with ash, no longer wept fire. Even the crows dared not land.
Only two figures remained standing in the wasteland.
Kaelos dragged himself forward, his shattered armor scraping against bones of fallen gods. His right arm was gone—torn off by the last spell—but he still clutched his sword in his left, its edge dulled from slaughter. His blood, black as the void between stars, pooled in his footsteps.
Across the field, Eridan limped toward him. The hero's silver-plated helm had been ripped away, revealing a face younger than Kaelos expected. A boy, really. Barely twenty. One eye was swollen shut; the other burned with a hate so pure it almost made Kaelos smile.
"You're still alive?" Eridan spat blood onto the scorched earth. "What does it take to kill you?"
Kaelos laughed. It sounded like a landslide. "You'd need more than stolen divinity, little hero."
He remembered the first time he'd seen Eridan—a peasant child waving a stick at a pack of wolves, too stupid to know fear. Now here he stood, the last flicker of light in a world Kaelos had spent five thousand years sculpting into his masterpiece.
And what a masterpiece it had been.
The cities that melted like wax under his gaze. The scholars who wrote entire libraries about his mercy before he fed them to his hounds. The way the stars themselves had begun to rearrange in his name.
All undone by this boy.
Eridan raised his sword. The blade—Dawn's Ruin, they called it—hummed with the last dregs of holy power. "Your reign ends today."
Kaelos sighed. "They always say that."
The final blow came not as a strike, but an embrace. Eridan plunged the sword into Kaelos' chest, and for the first time in millennia,the Monster King felt pain.
Not from the blade.
From the realization.
As his body crumbled, as the sealing ritual tore his soul from flesh, Kaelos locked eyes with the hero and saw it:
Fear.
Not of him. *For him.*
Eridan's lips moved. "I'm sorry."
Then—
Darkness.