NOVPUB"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?
Far beyond them, Daegon stood like a god reborn. The corrupted pearl pulsed in his grip, and the sky obeyed it like it owed him everything. The streets had fallen into hush, not panic. Not yet. Just awe. That was worse. That was always worse.
She looked up. The stars were still fading. The dark winter had touched everything. Slowly. Softly. Like the world was being rewritten from the top down, line by line, molecule by molecule.
"Back in the day…" she said, her voice strange with something like reverence, "he uprooted half the gods who now kneel for the Dark Pantheon. That was when he was still the Guardian. Before he fell."
The man nodded, eyes narrowing. "Back then, he didn't just protect. He purged. Any divine that dared drop corruption on his land didn't leave with their soul intact."
"And we thought he was extinct," the woman muttered, more to herself than anyone else. "Or at least… broken."
But the truth was simple—and terrifying.
Even in the Dark Pantheon, there were only four Great Leaders who held absolute authority, whose shadows were thick enough to bend reality. Out of them, only two had ever faced Daegon in his prime. And not as enemies. As survivors. When they had tried to bring chaos to the land he guarded, he didn't argue. He didn't threaten. He wiped them out. Roots, temples, banners—gone.
No mercy.
Nature had made him to be its hand. Its hammer. It had given him power drawn from the core of the planet, breath laced with stormfire, skin carved in mountain stone. But when he was cast out… nature forgot something. It forgot to take all that power back.
And then—he didn't just stay corrupted. He ascended through the sins.
Jealousy. Greed. Wrath. Pride and other human sins. They didn't hollow him out like they did other fallen gods. No, Daegon made them his. Tamed them. Fed on them. Twisted them into weapons the divine had no defense against.
Now?
No one even knew how strong he truly was.
Even the Pantheon's highest circles admitted it in private. If Daegon ever regained the full scale of what he once held—and layered it on top of what he now was—he wouldn't just threaten their power.
He could erase them.
All of them.
Maybe Olympians included too.
"Crazy," the woman whispered, not even blinking now. "He's a Titan, too. That's the worst part. He was already on another level before all this."
The man didn't respond. He didn't have to.
Daegon had just begun. And if this… this dark winter, this gentle apocalypse blooming over the city… was just a fraction of what he could do—
Then the war hadn't even started.
The world was still smiling.
And that was the real horror.
****
The first to see it was a child.
He had been skipping beside his mother, a half-eaten pastry in one hand and sugar dust still on his chin. His other hand clung to hers, swinging between steps. But then his feet froze. His eyes drifted upward. He blinked once. Twice. His voice cut through the hum of the evening like a spark across oil.
"Mom!" he pointed, high-pitched and breathless. "Look! Black snow!"
All around them, the crowd slowed. Conversations thinned. Phones dropped from ears. A million heads tilted skyward at once. And there it was—falling, soft and slow and impossible. Not ash. Not soot. Not any weather the city had ever known. It was snow. True snow. But not white.
It was black. Jet black. Every flake like a sliver of charred silk drifting down from a night sky that no longer looked like it belonged to Earth.
It didn't hiss or spark or burn. It simply fell.
And the people… they watched.
Mouths agape. Eyes wide. Nobody screamed. Nobody moved. They were rooted, looted of motion by awe alone. Frozen not from fear—but from wonder. The streetlights flickered softly, caught in the fall of the dark winter, making every flake shimmer like obsidian stardust.
Some reached out instinctively, stretching palms as if catching a miracle.
And one of them—some middle-aged man in a coat too thin for winter, perhaps just walking home from work—held his hand out, fingers trembling slightly, not in fear but reverence. The flake touched down. It landed on his skin like a kiss from something forgotten.
He stared at it.
The flake didn't melt. It stayed. It writhed.
It crawled.
He leaned in closer, curious. Confused. Eyes widening not in horror—but in fascination.
And high above, Daegon watched.
From the skyscraper's peak, his gaze was endless. The pearl in his hand pulsed slowly, in rhythm with the descent of the corrupted snow. The storm had already claimed the sky, swallowing the stars like sugar dissolved in ink. The wind carried no chill—only stillness.
And yet they marveled.
No panic. No screams.
Only awe.
His smile deepened, slow and cutting like a blade drawn without urgency.
"Where did it go, I wonder…" he said, voice low, ancient, amused. "That old thing humans used to have…"
He watched the man with the snowflake squinting at his palm like he'd been handed a puzzle box by God.
"Fear of the unknown."
Daegon chuckled.
It wasn't cruel. It wasn't even loud.
He watched the man with the snowflake squinting at his palm like he'd been handed a puzzle box by God.
"Fear of the unknown..." Daegon murmured, the words rolling out of his mouth like they tasted foreign now.
It used to be primal. A safeguard. The one instinct that held humanity back from peering too long into shadows, from reaching into holes too deep to scream out of.
Fear of the unknown was the one voice that said, "Don't." Don't enter the cave. Don't drink the glowing water. Don't follow the music in the woods. It was the mother of caution, of ritual, of every fire humanity lit to keep the darkness from licking their skin.
But somewhere along the way, they killed it.
Buried it beneath logic and entertainment.
Painted it as weakness.
Chased it out with documentaries and dopamine and bite-sized explanations.
Now they stared into the abyss not with trembling knees, but with phones held up to record.
Daegon chuckled again—quiet and sharp, like glass grinding against old stone. "They don't even run anymore," he whispered. "They watch. They wonder. They reach out."
He looked at the pearl in his palm, glowing like a slow-beating heart.
"Good. But they will learn to fear!"
It was the sound of a god remembering the first joke he ever heard—the cruel, cosmic humor of creatures who ask for signs and miracles and, when finally given one, ask if it can be filmed.
He turned his eyes back to the city. The pearl pulsed darker.
The snow started falling.
The first flake had landed.
And it would not be the last.
It had began.
The reign of gods and dark forces!
