Two hundred million years after the death of God, creation no longer grew—it simply endured.
Heaven floated in perfect stillness. Its towers of silver light reached into a sky that had forgotten what darkness was. Nothing aged. Nothing changed. Nothing dared.
Upon the Throne of the New Dawn sat Asmodeus, the God of Sin—the one whom mortals whispered about in half-remembered prayers.
To them he was myth; to himself, he was inevitability.
He didn't breathe anymore. He didn't need to. Every heartbeat across existence was his own.
Athena rested quietly near him, a symbol of the last war's peace. When she stirred, the air itself bent around her grace, but Asmodeus's eyes never moved from the horizon. There was no horizon, of course—just light folding into itself forever.
> "Still watching what can't reach you?" she asked softly.
He smiled faintly, the way an eternal being smiles at a question too small to matter.
> "If something could reach me, it already would have."
The words weren't arrogance. They were fact.
In two hundred million years, nothing had dared to challenge him. The flames of Hell obeyed, the choirs of Heaven sang when he willed it, and the cosmos balanced on the edge of his thought.
Below him, even Zephyrus, now Lord of Hell, bowed to that equilibrium. Chaos had learned order. Sin had learned silence.
And yet the silence had begun to… hum.
A thin vibration threaded through the fabric of Heaven—too faint for even angels to sense, but not for Asmodeus. It brushed against his awareness like static. A tremor without origin.
He dismissed it.
> "Residual light," he murmured. "The after-echo of a dead god."
Athena looked up. "You sound almost uncertain."
> "Uncertainty is for things that can end," he replied, and the floor beneath them rippled in response—proof of his words. "I cannot."
He stood, stretching his wings, each feather shimmering with every color that existence remembered.
The sight alone bent the air; whole constellations flickered in answer. He walked through the veil separating Heaven from Hell with a thought.
---
Hell had changed since his rule.
What was once chaos now pulsed in structured fire. Pillars of magma coiled into order, and cities of black glass lined the rivers of blood. At their center stood Zephyrus, seated upon a throne carved from the skull of a dead star.
> "I wondered when you'd remember me," Zephyrus said. "Busy pretending peace is power?"
Asmodeus descended through the heat unharmed, the ground hardening to crystal beneath each step.
> "Peace is power. The kind that doesn't need to prove itself."
Zephyrus smirked. "Until someone decides to test it."
> "No one left to test it."
The two stood facing one another—fire and light, the twin rulers of eternity. For a moment, all Hell listened.
Zephyrus's grin faded. "You've felt it, haven't you? The hum. The pause between things."
> "A ripple," Asmodeus said, waving a hand dismissively. "The universe remembers its old master. Memory means nothing."
> "Maybe. Or maybe it means something's looking back."
Asmodeus's eyes glowed—whole galaxies stirring in their depths.
> "Let it look. There is nothing left to see above me."
Hell itself seemed to recoil at the weight of that truth.
Zephyrus chuckled, but there was no humor in it. "You sound just like the last one before you."
> "And yet," Asmodeus replied, "I'm still here."
He turned, wings unfurling, and in an instant, the molten air froze.
Reality parted for him like water before an ancient blade, and Heaven appeared once more beyond the divide.
> "If something dares to crawl out of the dark," he said, his voice echoing through both realms at once, "it will learn what omnipotence truly means."
And with that, he stepped through the rift—untouched, unshaken, unafraid.
But far beneath the lowest circle of Hell, deep within the silence between atoms, the hum grew louder—almost like a whisper trying to pronounce his name.