Damosh felt the world fall asunder.

  The King woke up in a whirlwind of riches. He saw his face – his golden skin, his lime green ducktail – reflected a hundred times over in a dazzling lightshow. Inklings, jewels, goblets, crowns. All of them surrounded him, tearing apart the delicate threads of his four-poster bed.

  The Godling of the Wealth Clan collapsed to feet, cracking the marble flooring of his bedroom. He put a hand to his chest, as if trying to squeeze his racing heart to a stop. All the while, the shattering of glass could hardly be heard over his raging whirlwind. The temperature of the room suddenly fell, and harsh sunlight was like a knife stabbing into each of Damosh’s eyes. Where great sheets of stained glass once stood, portraying previous leaders of the Greed and now Wealth Clan, only empty air swept against Damosh’s face.

  And the sight that met him beyond that fragile barrier was no more comforting.

  Somehow, and arriving overnight without his noticing, an army laid in wait, at the very precipice of his city.

  The mass of soldiers was a continuous wave, sweeping back further than Damosh could see. The swelling of people was closing in from what felt to him like all possible angles. Effectively, that left no room for the Godling or any of his forces to escape, did they dare flee. And the Talents, as he now recognised them, didn’t seem intent on backing out any time soon either.

  This was one fight that would be waged until the bitter end.

  Despite the all-encompassing nature of the tide, it was at three main directions where the bulk of the army were primed. Damosh gritted his teeth, squirming like a wild animal.

  I knew it! He screamed silently, the words stifled by a mouthful of froth. I knew it I knew it I knew it I knew it I knew it I knew it I knew it IknewitIknewitIknewitIknewitIknewitIknewitIknewit– I just knew it!

  Damosh was no moron. Any old fool knew exactly the kind of things that were said about him when his presence was elsewhere. Though the Wealth Clan were the only people he could safely trust now, even they had their fair share of opinions about him. Most being of the colourful variety. The comments uttered behind closed doors were not as secretive as his men would like to assume. When his back was turned, or when they thought he couldn’t hear their whispered conversations, they would openly . . . doubt the soundness of his mind. Snippets of heresy to be swept under the rug, without so much as an afterthought. Not any serious attempts at upheaval, but ruthless nonetheless.

  Mad King, they called him. Hysteric. Maniac.

  Mentally insane.

  “I’m right!” He screamed with glee, voice thundering over the rooftops of First Rite. The ceiling above him had been blasted apart, unable to withstand his golden assault. With no boundaries to dull the sting of his vocals, his voice resounded across every nook and cranny of the city. The sound seemed to rebound off every building it swept past, amounting in volume with each contact. “You hear me? I’m – Right!”

  He rose into the sky, allowing his mountain of gold to drag him upwards. Damosh was a messiah, a golden river blazing garishly in the rising sunset. From his new viewpoint, he could finally take-in the outer edges of the army. A few hundred thousand soldiers, all in all.

  So many. Some quiet part of his mind calmed down. How did they have time to muster a force this large? I thought squashing Gold’s Bane would have deterred them enough.

  Damosh has presumed every living being was gifted with the sense of self-preservation, but some people were all too eager to perish at his hands

  That same, teeny-tiny piece of his mind considered something. It seemed as impossible as the sky suddenly changing colour – for the moon to switch locations – but, was Damosh in the wrong? In fact, that tiny, almost non-existent voice was growing increasingly suspicious. Why was he so worked up all of the time? Why did he break out in sweat when nothing was the matter, and why on earth did his mind seem to see the potential danger behind everything? Perhaps something was the matter with him. Something terrible indeed.

  Then the wider part of Damosh snuffed that voice out, and he screamed until his lungs teared.

  “Traitors!” The sound that emerged out of his throat was not a voice. It was not the strident assonance of piano keys being played out of tune. The thunderous squeal of a thousand explosives going off hardly captured its intensity. And neither did the howls of the damned, lined up at the chopping block by a stern executioner, quite encapsulate the audible violation Damosh unleashed. A horrid offense to all living creatures with the misfortune of possessing ears. Some horrors couldn’t be described in words with any justice.

  “I’m going to slaughter you all! How dare you intrude upon my Kingdom.” Damosh was breathing heavily, great robes torn by the brilliance of his own gold-storm. “First Rite is hereby property of the Wealth Clan, and its glorious people only! All of you . . .”

  He swept out his coins in a lethal storm. Damosh watched, mutely, as the four other towers of Ruling District came tumbling down. Juniper’s homage to all things natural; Cyrus’ blazing monolith; the Gravity Clan’s reality bending attack on the laws of physics; and, in comparison, the Vitality Sect’s rather boring totem.

  “. . . no longer have your King’s protection."

  It had been a long time since he’d considered whether the positions of the coveted top five required changing. With Juniper no longer Queen of Hybrid, her position should have been taken up by . . . his mind drew a blank. Well, there was that Water God-Graced who had usurped the throne from under her, but – oh yes, he remembered now. Eliane had crushed that woman Passings ago – and with the Silver Throne no less! It was the funniest thing Damosh had ever recalled hearing, his chest aching with the humour of it all. Doubled-over and clutching his stomach, Damosh dedicated a few moments to wiping the tears out of his eyes, before any semblance of order returned.

  The Gravity Clan seemed like a strange pick too for the top five. While they did produce fearsome warriors, the Matter Clan was dominating any other sect coming out of Great Oasis. Damosh’s mind was still boggled trying to understand some of their inventions.

  Though the top five were chosen for how much they contributed to First Rite, as far as Damosh was concerned, no clans had made any meaningful additions to the city for a long time now. First Rite suddenly struck him as being very similar to a burrow of rats. An infestation had stripped Damosh’s city of its grandeur. Now, there was some pest-control in order.

  A wave of dust swept past beneath Damosh’s feet, as the last of the rubble scattered across the ground below. The hearing of a Godling was quite adept, and Damosh tuned in to the agonised screams of his city’s residents. More and more buildings were caught up by the tide of detritus, adding fuel to the proverbial fire as the avalanche quickly picked up speed. Like the earth itself becoming animated and reaching out for a quick snack, the entirety of the surrounding area sank into the ground. All in the time it took to brush your teeth, nothing was left to commemorate the district’s existence but a corona of soot.

  Ruling District was no more.

  And soon, the Leisure and Labour Districts would cease to be too.

  All that remained of the fallen third was the Wealth Clan’s tower. A great precipice, that, to Damosh’s frantic mind, looked eerily like a candle; one sticking out a bulbous cake of human flesh and rubble. A cake celebrating the birth of a new empire.

  “Your Majesty!” A familiar voice called out from behind and below.

  Damosh lowered his gaze, trembling with ire. Who dared to interrupt him now? But like a waterskin with a hole in the bottom, all the emotion seemed to slip away from him when he saw who it was.

  “Edmar, my dear man.” The Godling swept towards his loyal servant. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Your highness, this is madness.” With no walls to impede their passage, Edmar’s metallic body glistened in the sun’s rays. “Forgive my brusqueness, my Lord, but you’ve destroyed our best line of defence. Some of our soldiers were situated down there! Many of them!”

  “Quiet now.”

  “But your Highness-”

  “Quiet!”

  Edmar closed his mouth.

  Damosh took one of the living statue’s hands. It was like holding a gauntlet, bejewelled above the fingers by the purest minerals the King had ever set his eyes on. “You’re all I can trust now Edmar. First Rite – it’s overflowing with rats, with thieves, with scoundrels! Liars liars liars! I need to flatten the entire place, and rebuild. Only the Wealth Clan can be allowed to continue. Everyone else has ulterior motives; everyone else thinks they know better!” He spat at the cracked marble below. “I was right all along! Do you hear me? – I was right! An army may be at my doorstep, but only I have the keys to let them in! No-one can attack on my Divine Ground. No . . .”

  A wicked grin distorted Damosh’s face.

  “Let the Talents sit outside my city: I welcome them! For there is nothing – absolutely nothing! – they can do about it. Let them watch their friends and family die! Let them see the beautiful purging of a city that deserves to rot, and with it, the beginning of my utopia.”

  “Please my Liege!” Edmar screeched. Damosh wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen his servant so worked up. Coming from Edmar, this really was some strange behaviour. That flicker of sanity rekindled into life in the back of Damosh’s brain, and he had to wonder if he was pushing things too far. Then all fires ceased once and for all, leaving only the ashes of cold certainty in their place.

  “Think this through! There’s something you don’t know about-”

  “Quiet now Edmar.” Damosh frowned. “I’ve humoured your complaining long enough. It may not seem like it, my servant, but this is for the best. A better future awaits us past the corpse of this one. But the present will not die lying down. Things are going to get bloody.”

  Edmar moved to say something more, but Damosh hadn’t the time. He swept through the air, flashing past at what felt like the speed of light.

  I'll soon be a god of my own. Damosh laughed. The prospect of godhood had always troubled Damosh. Ascension wasn’t so easy as simply deciding to join the pantheon when you felt like it.

  That was, if you weren’t already as powerful as a Godling.

  Technically, Damosh could ascend at a moment’s whim. He wasn’t sure what the exact process would be, but he certainly met the requirements. Damosh had clansmen to represent him on earth, all fueled by his subject of power; the word inscribed upon his very soul: Wealth. That was what differentiated a God-Graced from a Godling. While God-Graced simply used the word they inscribed upon their soul – gained during the process of advancing from Warlord – as a way to extend their arsenal of abilities, Godlings began to build up their own clans. They spread their Marks in preparation for ascension, where their followers would represent their godly will on earth.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Achieving godhood, however, left one susceptible to the shackles of the Divine Oath. According to that divine legislation, if all of Damosh’s representatives on Descent were to die, the rest of the pantheon would be free to slaughter him. That was the entire point of humanity in the first place: to serve as the gods’ weapons of war, their own hands proving too devastating to wield effectively. If the gods were blunt devices capable of obliterating planets, then humans were precise surgical instruments. Much more effective at getting things done on a small-scale, whilst avoiding making too great a mess.

  Though, inexorably, things on Descent had gotten messy. Messier than Damosh could have ever imagined the gods foreseeing when first writing the divine legislation.

  Case in point, if the Wealth Clan were to be wiped from the earth, he would perish with them. Unless, miraculously, he somehow fought every god alive, all at once, and won.

  See how complicated these things were?

  Not anymore. For some reason, his body refused to stop laughing. His abdominal muscles ached with the continued pressure of it. Now, things are very, very simple.

  Burn First Rite. Rebuild a utopia for the Wealth Clan on top, and in the process, expand his sect to include hundreds, if not thousands of members. Then, and only then, could he securely ascend to godhood. A clan the size of a city would be unkillable. It may take generations to cultivate, but Damosh felt that oncoming invincibility, at the very cusp of his grasp.

  He’d be unstoppable.

  Damosh cackled madly, the rising sun casting twin swords of light across either side of the horizon.

  “Bow down to your god! Bow down to your liberator, your destroy-”

  The King paused.

  There, hovering in mid-air. Too inconspicuous to have noticed any earlier, like a quirk of the light that was only now fading away, revealing what had been hidden underneath.

  A living absence of space. Damosh blinked, and he thought he recognised someone. Yet this was the final nail in the coffin of evidence, the last signpost by reality that not even his overworked mind could afford to ignore. Indisputable proof that he was well beyond the reaches of sanity. For there was no rational reason why the person ahead should, or could be present.

  Her name like a curse in itself: Aisha.

  Goddess of Greed.

  “No . . .” Damosh pulled himself aside, the jerk-reflex pulling back his floating mountain of gold with him. Huge chunks of Inklings fell down to the ruins below. “You’re not real! You can’t fight me, you can’t-”

  Damosh blinked, and what felt like an invisible string, one split and connected to his every cell, suddenly snapped.

  Then he noticed the others.

  Together with Aisha’s empty silhouette – like reality carved out in the shape of a body – there were ten figures floating before Damosh. On the very border of First Rite.

  A blast of spiritual aura swept across Damosh, rustling his clothes, messing his hair. All the oxygen was pulled out of Damosh’s lungs – an utterly foreign sensation. Like being slapped in the face by an old friend you hadn’t seen in decades. It had been a very, very long time indeed since Damosh had last been winded.

  The power of ten God-Graced pressed in against him. His guts seemed to compress, as if spontaneously replaced by a bag of snakes wrestling amongst themselves. His teeth grinded, and every pour of his body dripped with perspiration.

  All of those tiny moments of paranoia he had been cursed with over the last Rebirth came flooding back. The inklings of suspicion that his underlings were plotting against him.

  At first the faintest quirk of an idea, his fear of city revolt had quickly expanded into an all-consuming obsession. The night terrors, the visions of his own demise running rampant in the free castle of his mind.

  All of them put together were next to nothing, compared to the fear that bestruck Damosh now.

  The King felt as if something as essential as an organ, perhaps a heart or lung, had been wretched out of his body. He recoiled backwards, and the feeling of a fever – something alien to the formidable immune system of a Godling – broke out all over.

  For he had lost something just as precious as any piece of anatomy.

  His Divine Ground.

  Edmar stood in the flattened remains of Damosh’s throne room.

  “Well, well, well, what have we here?”

  He didn’t have to turn around to know who that irksome voice belonged to. Edmar’s spiritual senses expanded behind him, and he knew Ash was learning lazily against the remains of a shattered pillar. The only one that hadn’t been completely grinded down into dust by Damosh’s maelstrom of riches.

  “My plans seem to have taken on a will of their own.” Edmar bit his lip, then quickly stopped. Nervous tics were beneath him. “Really now, I knew the poison I was feeding him was strong enough to work on a Godling, but this has been blown way out of proportion. At this rate, I may not be left with a city to rule.”

  Ash began to pace around the open area, the full view of First Rite stretching out below the lone platform. It felt strange to Edmar to feel the wind brush past his metallic skin in a room that had once been so efficiently insulated.

  “It appears that Damosh mistook one of those God-Graced – the Greed Sect Leader Gulliver – for Aisha. The Greed Goddess hasn’t held a very favourable opinion of Damosh since he deserted their people, traitors in tow, to found the Wealth Clan. Your poisons must have drawn that phobia out of him.”

  Edmar merely murmured in reply.

  “My Paladins are at your beck and call, should you need them. All you have to do is ask. Help me take this city, then swear subservience to Enos. Truly, you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.”

  “If I had an Inkling for every time you’ve tried to convince me to join your ranks,” Edmar began slowly. “I could melt down enough metal to make quite the large bullet. Maybe if I shot that into your thick skull and was done with it, you’d finally stop pestering me.”

  Ash grinned, like this was all one big game. “Big talk for a man whose power is only at the benefit of my master’s benevolence. Stop being a contrarian and join me already! In case you haven’t cared to notice, your city is under siege. If you truly wish to serve as emperor for Enos, then you better start defending what’s rightfully yours!”

  A vein bulged in Edmar’s forehead, and a stubborn part of himself felt the need to delay Ash of his service a little longer. Then he took one glance at the landscape below.

  It was like some cosmic being had taken a bite out of the earth. The crater beneath him was the reigning king of all depressions, steadily increasing in size as eroded land seeped down across the ravine edges. Edmar’s neck snapped north, and he observed blankly as a blazing frontier of clansmen burned their way past the city walls like a wildfire eating into a lush forest.

  Labour District did nought as Edmar espied the leader of the force paving the way forward. Remus. In fact, the residents were clapping and cheering as the roguish youth barreled past, his squadron in tow, before the Wealth clansmen on watch had the chance to intervene.

  They were making a mockery of him.

  Already, he could sense barrages with similar levels of power from the south and west. Their fortifications wouldn’t last long, and Edmar knew with dire certainty that they would be fighting on three-fronts very soon. The Wealth Clan may be strong, and they were the ones with a Godling on their side, but one clan against an army wouldn’t last.

  Edmar had always lived his life holding onto grudges, but this time, it appeared, he would have to put them aside. At the very least, he discarded any minor frustrations he harboured, and like knots becoming loose and undone, invisible weights were lifted off his back. Light on his feet, he now possessed the liberty to carry forward the heaviest burden of them all.

  The grudge he had dedicated his life trying to lift.

  Maso.

  He flared his Tainted Mark to full capacity, and like a butterfly emerging out of a cocoon, Edmar’s statesque body only grew heavier; his collection of jewels ever the more expansive.

  All of those taxes Damosh had put on his people, draining them to the very bone. He’d never needed any of the money – hell, he could create as many Inklings as he would ever need at the click of his fingers. It was a miracle the Wealth Clan hadn’t dipped the city into a constant state of hyperinflation. The taxes had never been about profits. They were an instrument to oppress the people. To keep Damosh in power. That was all the Ulan bloodline had ever craved: to rule no matter the cost.

  Edmar opened and closed his palm, the strength needed to crush a Foot-Soldier’s skull at his fingertips.

  Finally, the metamorphosis was complete.

  Our bloodline was never meant to lay down idly at the feet of others. Prostrating while our true purpose lay hiding in their wake. Your blood runs through me Maso, and one thing has never been more clear to me.

  It is the blood of kings.

  “Rally the Paladins Ash.” The sun shone directly over Edmar, making him a rising star in the limelight. “I have an empire to build.”

  The second Edmar had spoken, Ash underwent his own transformation.

  That shimmering darkness swept from up his legs to the thinnest strands of his hair. No features of his face were left visible, the indents of his eyes flattened over. Ash was a living artwork, his skin and tissue a testament to the vastness of space. Edmar glanced at the few planets and stars and foreign objects far far away, and had to wonder how much time would pass, before they too fell into the Unbounded’s grasp.

  It was none of his concern.

  “You’re lucky Damosh doesn’t possess as great control over his sewers as he likes to think.”

  Edmar stared out toward the Labour District. There, rising out of nearly every manhole, was an invasion of Paladins. A new wave of power crashed against the living statue, as what must have been thousands of fighters revealed themselves.

  There were so many of them, their bodies blurred together into one terrifying mass of flesh, guts, and fury. The residents who weren’t already hiding inside their homes, or flattened in the carnage, or otherwise putting up resistance, were soon lost in the flooding mass of people.

  “How long have they been hidden here?” He took a step backwards, then quickly steeled himself at the sign of weakness. “Below us all this time, and all while someone as paranoid as Damosh was ruling over the city . . . impressive.”

  Ash smiled, putting a hand to his ear and leaning over. “Huh? What was that?”

  Edmar rose stiffly into the air, shooting out coins to propel upwards. “Don’t expect any more compliments from me.”

  His neck jerked westward. An entire section of the city’s fortifications had been moved.

  And that was no understatement. A beacon of purple light illuminated the city’s contours, lasting for all of one moment, and the hundred tons of stone that served as the city’s westward entrance reappeared in the vast fields leading up to First Rite. Without so much as a scratch.

  Violet had simply moved the wall.

  Now, in her Unbounded form, with claws crossed and her hairless head leaning into the air, she screeched a battlecry.

  As if timed, Edmar felt his heart skip a beat when the city’s southern wall collapsed in tandem.

  Like the city was some ancient civilization long since abandoned and reclaimed by time and nature, great oak tendrils clung embedded into the wall. Piece by piece, sections of stone were wrenched away as a bombardment of techniques loosened them. Soon, stability was impossible, and Edmar could only observe with gritted, silver teeth as a wave of shattered stone swept into the city.

  Steam rose steadily into the air from all directions, and a cloud of smog clung to First Rite. Yet, through that fog, Edmar didn’t fail to see a certain someone rushing into the fray.

  “Your brother has arrived.” Edmar rose higher into the air. “I’ll handle Remus while you deal with your sibling troubles.”

  “I have no brother Edmar, in that regard you are mistaken.” All humour departed from Ash like ships fleeing from a port on fire. “That part of me is dead. But rest assured, I will take care of him. We’ll leave Damosh alone for now, to stir up some chaos.”

  “And Violet’s squadron?”

  That smile returned to Ash’s lips. “Do not fear Edmar. I have just the person in mind.”

  Edmar wasn’t sure if he liked how that expression rested on Ash’s face.