The gods do not kill their own; they simply erase them.
The entity now known only as Mr. Fool—once the Star-Wielder and architect of the constellations—was now a heap of scarred flesh at the bottom of the Silent Well. For eons, he had been a whisper of a man, his immortality stripped down to a stubborn, painful flicker. He possessed nothing but a broken iron shackle on his left wrist and a memory of the sky.
Above, the sky was a permanent, mocking gold—the light of the High Heavens. He crawled through the mud of the abyss, his fingers scraping against jagged stones. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass.
"They forgot," he croaked, his voice a dry rattle. "They forgot that stars are born from the collapse."
He reached the center of the Well, where the discarded relics of a thousand wars lay rusting. His hand closed around a shard of obsidian, cold enough to bite. As his blood dripped onto the stone, the ground didn't drink it. It vibrated.
From the darkness of the pit, a voice like grinding tectonic plates answered him.
"Do you wish to return, little spark?"
Mr. Fool gripped the shard until his knuckles turned white. "I wish to burn it all down."
The obsidian didn't just glow; it tore a hole in the air. A surge of violet lightning arced into his chest, sewing his broken ribs back together with threads of pure void. His eyes, once dull and gray, ignited with a terrifying, rhythmic pulse.
He stood up, the shackle on his wrist melting into liquid shadow. He looked up at the golden ceiling of his prison and smiled.
But as he began to float, the violet light flickered and turned a sickly, necrotic green—and the voice in the dark began to laugh.