Only cowards use force.
Her words again echo in my head like a prayer I’m finally learning to understand. She just told me she won’t leave unless I make it impossible for her to stay. And here I am, already planning how to trap her.
Gods, I really am my father’s son.
Thing blocks the doorway of his new rooms as if he can sense my violent impulses, and for the first time in centuries, I’m grateful for his intervention.
“Let her go, brother,” he says quietly.
The beast in me roars at being denied, but beneath that rage, something else stirs—something that might be wisdom. “You speak like a civilized being now?” I bark, not bothering to hide my confusion. “After two centuries of madness?”
Thing’s massive shoulders tense. “You treat me as a beast, you get a beast in return.”
His words hit like a physical blow. How many times did I tell myself I was protecting the world from him, when really I was just perpetuating the same cycle that destroyed us all?
“You are Death! You slaughtered armies,” I grasp for justification. “Entire cities fell to your insatiable hunger.”
“I was aninstrumentof slaughter,” Thing corrects, his voice heavy with old pain. “Weaponized by our father. As were you. As were we all.”
“Oh, this is rich,” Remus chimes in, that familiar sharp grin spreading across his face. “Abaddon, the mighty Pestilence, lecturing anyone about bloodshed? Ha! All fear the Pest who darkens their door, isn’t that right, brother?”
I bare my teeth at him, but the shame keeps growing. “You incited more bloodshed than any of us,War. Father used us to clean up your messes.”
“Ah, but what beautiful messes they were.” Remus’s eyes go distant with nostalgia. “The Battle of Borodino—cannon fire lighting the sky, bodies piled six feet deep. That was a good day for all of us.”
Thing turns away in disgust, and my stomach churns. We were Father’s cavalry, his loyal weapons of mass destruction.
His perfect sons, as long as we delivered death and despair on command.
Until the day we weren’t.
I move to the window, needing air that doesn’t taste of old violence and regret.
Father’s ambition had been limitless—like Napoleon, he wanted the entire world. But my brothers and I were wild cards he could never fully control.
Remus lived for chaos, caring nothing for sides or strategy. Famine fed off the starving masses we created. I swept through their ranks like a plague, and Thing... Thing was pure fury incarnate, carrying the dead to realms beyond counting.
Battle after battle, war after war. Horses rotting beneath their riders as armies chased each other across blood-soaked fields. And through it all, Father’s voice rang in our heads, driving us onwards:More. Always more.
I believed in his mission with the fervor of a zealot. I was his most devoted son, his truest disciple.
Which made my betrayal so much more devastating when it finally came.
If I’d doubted him even a little, if I’d been ninety-nine percent faithful instead of absolutely devoted... maybe things would have ended differently.
Maybe my youngest brother, Layden, would still be alive.
But when I finally saw Father for what he truly was, my faith in him didn’t just break—it shattered completely. And in my rage, I destroyed the Creator that no earthly army had ever managed to defeat.
“That was the last day,” Thing says quietly, following my thoughts.
Remus pops another grape in his mouth from a bowl he must have stolen from the kitchen—mygrapes, meant formyconsort—and grins. “That was just the beginning of the end.”
“The last battle,” I correct.
“But there was still Moscow to burn before we were through,” Remus reminds us with sick pleasure.
“Father was so proud,” Thing murmurs, his voice thick with old disgust.
