- Marvel, A King Among Gods:
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|| Unknown Place and Timeline ||
No one truly expects to grow into the perfect version of themselves. Perhaps because such a thing would demand an unbearable weight,— not just the responsibility for our own lives, but for the lives, dreams, and hopes of others.
To carry them,— their desires, their pain, their unfinished stories,— upon our shoulders. That, I think, is what it means to grow.
Not simply aging, but becoming: a vessel not only of one's own will, but of the countless voices left unheard.
And yet... I don't know if many would understand. Maybe they'd laugh, and maybe they'd call it nonsense.
I sat there, beside a pristine lake I hadn't even realized existed until now. Its waters reflected an unfamiliar face,— no, my face.
A creature of myth staring back at me, haloed in sunlight: hair like woven gold, eyes glowing a noble crimson, skin flawless but damp with sweat, shaped in a tragedy I knew very well.
It smiled,— sadly, and yet no words passed between us.
None were needed.
For it was me, and I was him.
The sun rose in a slow, dignified sweep over the horizon, bathing the world in warm, golden light. Around me, silence reigned,— an overwhelming, divine stillness.
Only the slow rhythm of breath, from whatever I had become, filled the air.
Before me stretched endless plains of emerald grass and blooming wildflowers,— vivid and alive. Behind me, in horrifying contrast, sprawled a sea of corpses.
A massacre: charred, pierced, dismembered. The blood painted the soil crimson,— still, cold, and final.
The beauty and the carnage, light and shadow, life and death.
The universe, laid bare in its fullest contradiction.
I knelt by the water and began to remove the golden armor that clung to my body like divine skin. Piece by piece, I laid it down with reverence. My reflection,— this strange, beautiful god I had become,— looked back at me with neither guilt nor pride.
Only calm, only silence.
I didn't remember what had happened.
Only that I had died.
That I had been consumed in flame, somewhere on Earth, in the closing chapters of a world war. And now… now this.
The wind picked up. It carried whispers,— impossible whispers,— of things I'd never seen, but somehow knew. Stories of impossible beings, endless power, and unspeakable pain.
I knew them, I felt them in my bones, though I could not say how.
Here I sat, between the two eternal certainties: the brilliance of life and the stillness of death.
Like the axis of a great balance.
This moment wasn't heaven, or hell. It was transition.
I lay down at last, the scent of blood and grass mingling in the air, and covered my new eyes,— eyes slit like a predator's, yet aching with sorrow.
A sad smile touched my lips.
"I made them pay… for what they did to you." I whispered, though I didn't know who the "you" was.
And yet, it all felt so real.
A single tear slipped free,— crimson, like my eyes,— and fell onto the warm, sunlit earth.
The words I spoke weren't mine.
Not yet, at least.
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|| A Few Moments Before ||
In the beginning, there was the Void.
A place beyond space and time,— devoid of shape, of logic, of life.
Ancient, eternal,— created, perhaps, by something beyond the comprehension of gods and mortals alike.
For eons it slumbered, untouched, unchanging.
Until now.
In that unfathomable darkness, something stirred: a flicker of light, deep and burning, the color of urukum.
It shimmered like a jewel in a sea of emptiness, heralding not a thing, but an event,— an act of cosmic significance.
Within this unnatural brilliance, matter began to take form.
A body, humanoid in shape, coalesced from nothing. Bone knitted itself together, flesh followed. Organs pulsed to life in sequence, guided by laws unknown.
A frame sculpted not by time, but by divine intention.
Golden hair sprouted from the forming skull, while crimson eyes blinked open for the first time, their gaze already ancient.
Around this body danced two amorphous shapes,— souls.
Uneven, distinct, and very separate.
They orbited one another like twin stars,— hesitant, watchful. Then, at last, they converged, not with struggle, but with eerie harmony.
Two essences became one.
And that one entered the body.
A soundless shockwave rippled across the void as a portal bloomed beneath the newly-formed vessel,— swirling with violet and blue, alive with energy beyond understanding.
In an instant, it swallowed the figure whole.
The light vanished, the space stilled once more, and the Void returned to silence, as if nothing had happened.
As if creation itself had merely blinked.
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- Marvel, A King Among Gods.