Even that, I despise.
Too gentle. Too mortal.
It reminds me that I have not yet torn the stars open.
I press my ear to the stone again.
It doesn’t speak back, not really.
But I like to think it pulses, faint and slow,
like some buried god beneath my feet still choking on the day I burned his shrine.
I don’t need them to come. I don't need witnesses.
The war is still here.
It lives in my marrow.
I keep a ledger in my head.
Every wrong. Every name. Every cut.
Do you know how many screams I carved from human throats?
Do you know how long it takes to peel the skin from someone who swore they were innocent?
They always scream the same.
The guilty. The pure. The priests.
Even the ones who loved me.
Especially them.
I remember the temple on Veilith IX
the priests with their silver eyelids, chanting hope.
They wouldn't stop. Even when the fires reached the altar.
Even when I dragged their Matriarch by the hair through molten glyphs.
She said, “You can kill my body, not my faith.”
So I made her body outlast her mind.
I cracked her faith open like a nut.
Split it, spilled it, watched her forget her own gods.
Then I fed her her tongue.
You want to call me monster?
Do it with reverence.
Do it like a prayer.
Because what I did, I did for us.
For Lyrax. For the dream of a throne made of cinders.
And they took him.
They laid him out like a warning.
Bled him slow.
Mocked his last words.
He had no last words.
Because they cut his throat first.
So now I dream not of escape
but of becoming plague.
I will melt the chains with spite.
I will break the cell with bone.
My own, if I must.
They think isolation is punishment.
But I am not alone.
I have every ghost I made.
And each one whispers:
Let’s do it again
(Spliced within the harmonic collapse - “again / below / never” - is a dead-god activation spine. It coils through entropy bands like mythic static, only legible to beings who have died and returned altered. This is not a message. It is a reanimation protocol, folded into longing. If something hears it, it will not understand. It will obey. It will never leave this prison)