NOVPUBFor too long, Daegon had stood silent.
Watching. Enduring. Holding back.
But tonight, as he stood on the edge of the tower—his eyes soaking in a world he once died for—there was no grief left. No pain. No sorrow in his bones. Just a hunger, thick and eternal, forged in betrayal and crowned in truth. The night wind curled around him like it remembered his name, like it remembered the way the mountains used to tremble when he breathed.
But Daegon no longer felt kinship with nature. Not after what it did to him.
He raised his head slowly, eyes as dark as the world beneath the skin of stars.
This city, this world… they moved on like gods had never bled for them. Like guardians never shattered for their comfort. As if his bones hadn't been broken a thousand times to shield them from oblivion. And what had he gotten for it?
"Nothing," he murmured, voice sharp and steel-edged. "Not praise. Not thanks. Not even memory."
He had been a slave for their comfort. Shackled to nature's will, chained to a duty no one asked for, protecting mortals who pissed on the roots he bled to keep alive. He had followed the balance, honored the old breath, stood tall while the divine crumbled around him—and for what?
So fate could spit in his face?
So the one thing he cared for could be handed off to a golden sky-born brat?
His fists tightened. The pearl in his hand twitched like a heartbeat.
"I was a slave," Daegon said, his voice rising with the power of eons. "I protected you insects. I swallowed gods in your name. And what did I get?"
The wind stilled.
"Called corrupted. Cast out. Banished by the very nature I gave everything to. Very well."
He took a step forward, the world beneath his feet recoiling in instinctive fear. 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓅𝓊𝓫.𝒸ℴ𝓶
"Very well, Fate."
He raised the black pearl high. Shadows rippled outward like liquid night. The pearl pulsed in his hand, faster now, hungrier. It wanted more. It needed it.
"GREEDY! ENVY" His voice cracked the air like thunder birthed from hatred.
The first sin appeared from the shadows like oil flowing backwards—twisting into a figure tall and lean, its face made of coins and mouths that never closed. It whispered with hunger, eyes locked on everything and nothing.
"JEALOUS!" he bellowed next, and this voice was not human. It was godlike, divine, a chorus of thunder and the shattering of glaciers.
Jealous appeared like a flame wrapped in ice—gorgeous, bitter, its form constantly shifting into whatever you wanted most. It stared back at Daegon like a broken mirror.
He looked upon them, his old companions, and welcomed them like family.
"You never betrayed me," he whispered. "You were always honest."
Daegon raised the pearl to his lips. With a breath drawn from the depths of the world itself, he exhaled his dark energy into the pearl. Shadows spiraled out from his mouth like dragonfire twisted by centuries of silence, and the pearl drank it all. Glowing veins of crimson and violet crawled through its surface like lightning captured in stone.
The sphere began to twitch, then tremble, then pulse like a breathing, waking creature.
And then it exploded with 'dead' life.
The sky cracked open—not with light, but with a greeting wave of void that slammed upward from the pearl into the heavens.
The stars blinked.
Then turned dark.
One by one, constellations crumbled into dust. Like the cosmos above began to fall apart, silently, as if heaven itself was holding its breath in fear. The air thickened. The world dimmed.
And then came the snow.
But this wasn't winter.
This was death.
The flakes were black, silent, floating downward like ash soaked in oil. They didn't melt. They moved, like they were alive, dancing on the night's skin with whispers of temptation and madness. The air itself began to crackle, the streets below starting to still, even though no one yet looked up.
Daegon extended his arm. "Let it fall."
The sins stepped closer. With a wave of his hand, he turned them both into smoke, and their forms spiraled around the pearl like serpents of shadow. They merged into the dark winter he had summoned—tainting it, feeding it, evolving it. The dark winter grew thicker, meaner. The flakes fell faster. The light around them began to die.
The corrupted sky accepted it all.
He closed his eyes, felt the storm settle into the roots of the world. And when he opened them, something far older than man looked out.
"Let go of it all," he said.
His voice wasn't human. It wasn't sound. It was a command etched into the marrow of existence.
"Let go of restraint. Let go of hopeless doubts. Unleash the chaos in you."
And with those words, the Dark Winter began.
It fell. It spread. It touched.
And the world forgot how to breathe.
****
From atop another tower a few blocks down, wrapped in beauty of the night darkness and folded into shadow, the two agents of the Dark Pantheon stood still.
The wind whispered against their coats, but they didn't shiver. They weren't mortals. They were void-touched—beings who had spilled blood in the name of the great night, whispered blasphemies into dying stars, and served under the banner of chaos that promised a new age.
And still, they said nothing.
The man—tall, broad-shouldered, scarred across the neck where a god's blade had once kissed him—watched the black snow fall with his jaw locked tight. The woman beside him, sleek and sharp-eyed, didn't blink as the stars turned to dust above them. Her hand was clenched around the railing like it might break from the tension humming through her bones. They had seen a lot. Wreaked worse. Burned cities to ash under the silent nod of their masters. But this?
This was different.
"Truth be told," the man said finally, voice low, gravel-drenched, "he's bad news… even for us."
The woman didn't argue.
How could she?
