PART I: DEATH MEMORIES
Little brother…how far you fell.
Because of you, sister. Why did you lead me to my death?
I did not, little brother. You led yourself there.
I followed you.
You followed your fascination for the woman and your need to create chaos. What you have always done ever since those beasts sunk their claws into you. Changed you.
I saw you. I heard you. I felt you compel me to kill her…no…to have her join me and take over the galaxy.
You saw yourself. You heard yourself. You compelled yourself.
No…
I wanted you to come home. All you had to do was get on a ship…leave Tython.
You…
I told you what you had to do. You chose to kill. You chose to hunt. You chose to degrade yourself. I called you Devaronian, but…you acted as little more than a quarra.
Sen, I-
You can still save yourself, little brother. But you must atone now in death. Remember your crimes. Remember your lost dreams. Remember your failures. Find your true power once more…and find me in the center of your heart.
Sen!
Remember your evil.
CHAPTER ONE: EVIL
This was the day it all began to end for the man who would become known as Laoth.Little brother…how far you fell.
Because of you, sister. Why did you lead me to my death?
I did not, little brother. You led yourself there.
I followed you.
You followed your fascination for the woman and your need to create chaos. What you have always done ever since those beasts sunk their claws into you. Changed you.
I saw you. I heard you. I felt you compel me to kill her…no…to have her join me and take over the galaxy.
You saw yourself. You heard yourself. You compelled yourself.
No…
I wanted you to come home. All you had to do was get on a ship…leave Tython.
You…
I told you what you had to do. You chose to kill. You chose to hunt. You chose to degrade yourself. I called you Devaronian, but…you acted as little more than a quarra.
Sen, I-
You can still save yourself, little brother. But you must atone now in death. Remember your crimes. Remember your lost dreams. Remember your failures. Find your true power once more…and find me in the center of your heart.
Sen!
Remember your evil.
CHAPTER ONE: EVIL
Jira ne’Jiral was dead. It happened in seconds. Her gorget had been pierced as if it was not even there, and her neck had been struck by a jagged blade made of sharpened Devaronian silver. Her eyes had widened in surprise and both of her hands shot up to grab for the arm holding the weapon killing her. It had come from behind and while she was able to grasp at her assailant, every necessary vein and tendon within that thick stretch of flesh and muscle was severed. She died almost instantly from the sheer shock of it, and almost as quickly when the blade was wrenched out. She tumbled forward, gasping one airless breath, and fell onto her face, crushing her nose against the paneling of the rooftop. She coughed once and remained still.
Her father was also dead. It, too, happened in seconds.
Jira’s death would go on to be an unremembered thing for the greater part of short-term and long-term history, barely talked about by the three people who knew she was no longer among the living. But her father’s death would go on to become the need-to-know news of every country and nation and continent in the world of Devaron. Where Jira’s death was silent and unremarked even by the man who had stuck the blade in her neck, her father’s demise was ushered in by a choice phrase from a pale giant in red and black armor wielding a massive ax steaming with semi-coagulated blood and hateful might.
"Jaolin ne’Jiral is dead. And I killed him."
The proclamation had been met with deafening silence from the gathered throngs. A thousand eyes of every Devaronian color gazed upon the stage, some wet and stinging from the burning sunlight. The stage was handbuilt from cherry oak and mahogany; iron bolts and bearings held it all together. It was older than the town it was stationed at. The people called it a relic of the lost days from before Humanity had dominated the stars their people explored first.
The man who had just been mentioned was also a relic, though not as old or refurbished. But he was still viewed with contemporary hope and reverence. Some would say his gifted respect was on par with the gods of the church themselves. Bishop ne’Jiral was a man of respectable aged countenance and magniloquence. Both developed over the long years of his service. He had led his country - in some ways his entire continent - out of a depression that nearly spread as far as Montellian Serat across the great ocean. These were the reasons so many had come to hear his words in a moderate town of worth not far from Assarda, the capital of this country.
Thus it was no surprise that none could believe that they had heard his supposed killer correctly. It was a joke, surely.
Then the giant repeated it with stronger conviction and worry began to spread throughout the masses. It was calm anxiety at first, like a hush before a yell. Questions drooled from agape mouths beyond count. Had this man - respected as well in spite of his alleged dalliances with the more fanatical splinters of the church deep within the jungles - lost his senses? He said what? He said that he had killed Bishop ne’Jiral? What ludicrous idea was that? One that was certainly born of a nightmare or an overactive imagination. In fact, there was no way that he had actually said what they had heard. Who would want to kill the Bishop?
But then he produced soldiers. Men armored in leathers and chainmail, dragging a large wooden cart, and caked in dried blood. Questions silenced in the place of murmurs and gasps. Worries and hisses.
Then the screams began.
From this cart, they produced something so utterly radiant and magnificent that it was undeniably divine. Dozens of people fell to their knees. Others clawed their eyes to mulch. Some bit their tongues off in their panic. Dozens more turned to flee from the gathering, demanding to be let go so that they could escape what was clearly a demon. Others merely stood there in stunned silence. Unable to process what they were seeing.
The man was of respectable aged countenance and magniloquence, his head decapitated and now held in the grip of the giant. It was angularly chiseled, a young-old face, with dead glassy eyes. They were the color of blue diamonds. His perfect teeth were bared in a rictus grimace. His stump of a neck was charred. The blood that had clearly poured from it had curdled like sour milk and blackish goo.
Jira ne’Jiral, his daughter, would have been able to rally the few dozen stout-hearted who resisted the urges of self-mutilation at the horrific sight of their religious leader’s death. But she couldn’t. Not when she was atop a building - perhaps a tavern or an inn - some ways from the gathered masses. Not when she was dead.
Had she been alive and not a corpse with a cut neck, she would have cursed the giant through clenched teeth. Because he had done it; he had actually done it. It would be almost incomprehensible if Jira had not learned what she had learned over the entire ordeal that she sought to end. If Jira was alive, her hands would have trembled. Fingers tightened around the grip of a black-wood bowcaster. Her palms would have become increasingly sweaty, which would have stung the scratches and punctures across her flesh. Despite this risk of the weapon slipping from her grasp, the weapon would be perfectly aimed at the giant man on the stage.
The giant man smiled at the panicked crowd and slammed the pommel of his ax onto the stage. Iron-tipped wood cracked onto wood with a great clapping sound. Thunder. Belying the possible range of noise from a simple act. The screams fell into aghast shock. Those attempting to flee stopped and turned back. All eyes were once more upon the giant who rested both hands on the head of his cane. Eyes the color of milk glass scanned through the hundreds of thousands of faces before him. Young, middling, old. Man and woman, peasant and noble.
"Yes…I have killed our beloved Bishop!" he proclaimed again to the new shouts of fearful protest from the throngs. His voice was a miasma of snakish confidence; the syllables and vowels dragged out to a painful stretching. "I killed him because of a simple truth burned into my heart that I wish had not been so."
He let the moment settle before continuing with an accusatory raising of the head, "I killed him because he deserved to die. I killed him because he did not deserve our worship, our faith…our love. I killed him because he was a false idol. A man who did what he did only for his gain. A man who used our belief in him as a leader…as a leader who saved us from a dark and terrible time to benefit his own advancement in the world…of mortal and divine.”
"In my studies of our great history," he said with a voice carrying across rows and rows of the gathering. "I learned of a spell. A spell that would open a gateway into the realm of the gods to commune with them. I am not a pious man, but even I could not resist such temptations of the religious heart. Through trial and loss, I succeeded in casting it and I went through that gateway. I went through and what I saw…revealed to me that our Bishop was…evil.”
The crowd collectively screamed in protest, some finally snapping out of their stricken fear and attempting to charge the stage and giant. They were stopped by the soldiers, who kicked and swung at the attempted rioters. The giant man smiled at the violent growing spectacle and callously dropped the head onto the stage. He looked to the north horizon, over the panicked crowd, and saw the tall stoic form of his husband, hand clutching the dagger he adored so much. He had done his part as well, it seemed. The giant looked, briefly then, to the west and affirmed what he already knew. In the shadows, in a place only he could see with his gift of foresight on the woman, was his wife toiling away with sigils and manipulations of her hands to ensure the emotional dread of the crowd remained so fixed in its tempest.
Everything was coming together.
He glanced back down to those attempting to strike at him and bore his fangs in a wider toothier smile, and he repeated his proclamation once more: “Jaolin ne’Jiral was evil and I killed him for it."
