"Every empire, even of the soul, collapses first from within."
— Unknown
The temple smelled of incense and blood.
The worshippers still chanted my name — Aurelius Kael, their messiah of ruin — but the rhythm had changed.
It wasn't worship anymore. It was fear disguised as devotion.
I sat on the throne Lilith and I built — carved from bones, symbols etched in languages neither of us fully understood — and for the first time, she stood against me instead of beside me.
"Do you hear them?" she asked, her voice low, trembling between devotion and doubt.
"They no longer pray to you. They pray for protection from you."
Her eyes, once aflame with power, now carried the soft horror of realization — that she had helped create a god who no longer needed her.
I wanted to reach for her. To remind her that I still remembered the warmth, the nights we crafted madness together, the sins we baptized each other in.
But the space between us was now a kingdom — one I had claimed, and she had birthed.
The cult began to fracture.
Whispers in the corridors spoke of rebellion.
Priests hid knives beneath their robes, ready to offer their god back to the void if it meant silence would return.
Lilith began to wake in the night, gasping, claiming she heard the serpent whispering my name instead of hers.
I began to dream of mirrors — thousands of them — each reflecting a version of me that didn't love her anymore.
Power had consumed love.
Faith had devoured faith.
And the divine — our divine — was beginning to collapse.
When she finally looked at me, her voice was a prayer of despair.
"What are you becoming, Kael?"
I smiled — not cruelly, but as one who had already crossed the line between man and myth.
"The thing you asked me to be."