Deus Necros

And then Ludwig was gone.

The feeling of being pulled into Necros’s domain was never pleasant, no matter how many times it happened. Space didn’t bend gently around him, nor did it open like the gates of some divine hall. It collapsed inward, swallowing sound, color, and weight all at once until Ludwig felt less like he was moving and more like everything else had been stripped away from him. His body remained intact, technically, but sensation came in delayed fragments. His feet existed first, then his hands, then the cold weight of the lantern at his side, then the deeply irritating realization that divine transportation still felt like being dragged through a keyhole by the soul.

When the world returned, there was no sky.

There was only silence.

Ludwig stood upon a black plain that reflected nothing. Not like polished marble, not like still water, but like the idea of reflection had been murdered and buried beneath the surface. There were no stars overhead, no horizon ahead, no wind brushing against his skin. The place carried no smell, no warmth, no proper direction. It was simply there, endless and indifferent, the same way death itself did not need decoration to make a point.

Far ahead, the lantern at Ludwig’s waist trembled.

Its flame bent toward something unseen.

Ludwig placed one hand over it instinctively, feeling the glass pulse once beneath his palm. The Soul Letting Lantern had carried countless souls by now, some willingly, some not, but this reaction was different. It wasn’t fear exactly. It was recognition. Or maybe obedience. Hard to tell with an artifact that occasionally behaved like a jar full of ghosts with employment obligations.

“Sup…”

The throne of bones appeared first with Necros seated atop it, like always, the river of souls manifested soon afterward and with that the audience had begun.

Ludwig felt the Crown of Pride stir across his forehead.

The invisible thorns tightened.

Not enough to hurt, but enough to remind him that the new trait had noticed authority. Significant authority. The kind that made Pride’s pressure feel like a rich child shouting from a balcony. Ludwig resisted the urge to touch his forehead.

“You carry new defiance,” Necros said.

His voice did not echo. It simply arrived everywhere at once, already finished by the time Ludwig heard it.

Ludwig looked up at the hooded figure. “You gave me a crown made out of a dead egomaniac. What did you expect me to carry? Humility?”

Necros remained still.

If the ancient god found that amusing, he did not show it in any way a mortal mind could comfortably interpret.

“C’mon I know you liked that one. So, what’s this meeting about?” Ludwig asked.

It was faint at first, then brighter, pressing against the lantern’s inner walls like sunrise trapped in a coffin.

“The soul of Pride was not claimed before,” Necros said. “It could not be claimed while the thread you walked remained unsettled.”

“Because I rewound,” Ludwig said.

“Because you had not yet chosen which death would remain true.”

Ludwig frowned. That phrasing sat badly in his head. Divine beings had a habit of making simple things sound like philosophical traps, mostly because simple things became philosophical traps when they spoke. He looked down at the lantern, where the golden soul inside it pulsed with growing intensity.

“So now you’re taking him. Now that this death is satisfying.”

“Yes.”

There was no ceremony in the word, yet the entire black plain seemed to adjust around it. Ludwig felt the lantern unlock without his hands moving. The lid opened by itself, the flame within stretching upward in a thin column of pale light. Then Pride’s soul emerged.

It did not look like the broken man who had died in the palace.

It looked like a crown.

Not the Crown of Pride Ludwig had obtained, but something older and grander, a ring of light and thorns suspended around a human-shaped shadow. Gold bled from it in slow rivers, never touching the ground before dissolving into the surrounding dark. The soul did not scream. It did not beg. It did not thrash against Necros’s presence. It merely hovered there, upright and silent, as if even in capture it refused to collapse.

Ludwig watched it carefully.

“Still standing tall,” he muttered. “Of course you are.”

Necros lifted one hand. The motion was slow, almost gentle, and the golden soul drifted closer to him without resistance. He pointed down, and the crown went under Necros’s foot. Reformed, reshaped into a foot rest.

Ludwig’s lower lip twitched. What an ending…

“Vanitas Fiero,” Necros said.

The name changed the air.

The golden soul pulsed once.

The darkness around them shifted, and the black plain became something else. Not fully. Not with the clarity of a memory shown on a screen. More like the world had turned into an old wound, and Ludwig was being allowed to see the scar tissue beneath.

He saw a man standing in mud.

Not gold. Not marble. Not a palace of mirrors.

Mud.

Vanitas had been thin then, almost painfully so, with torn clothes, hollow cheeks, and eyes that burned too fiercely for someone with nothing to his name. Around him, men laughed. Others stepped over him. The world he had been born into had offered him no inheritance, no noble blood worth naming, no divine blessing, no army, no coin, no ancestral pride. Just a body, a mind, and a refusal to accept that the ground was where he belonged.

“He had nothing,” Necros said. “Not even the dignity of being hated by those above him. Hatred implies acknowledgment. To the world, he was beneath notice.”

The vision shifted.

Vanitas grew.

Not in body first, but in presence. Ludwig watched him speak to laborers, beggars, soldiers with unpaid wages, merchants cheated by nobles, widows of forgotten wars. He did not plead with them. He did not promise kindness. He gave them something simpler and far more dangerous.

He gave them direction.

His clothes improved. His posture changed. Men who once ignored him began stepping aside. Support gathered around him not like worship at first, but like iron filings drawn toward a magnet. He learned war. He learned coin. He learned the words people needed to hear in order to place knives in their own hands and call it justice.

“He obtained power,” Necros said. “Not through birth. Not through inheritance. Through accumulation. Through will. Through the understanding that those denied a place will follow the first man who tells them the world can be made to kneel.”

The images moved faster.

A fortress gate burning. A noble house dragged into the street. Banners rising over cities. Vanitas standing at the head of an army, no longer thin, no longer invisible, his crown not yet on his head but already present in the way people looked at him.

Then a throne. Then a kingdom.

Then a world bending around the gravity of one man who had climbed from filth and decided that being ignored once was a debt reality would repay forever.

“He became king,” Necros continued. “Then lord. Then sovereign. His name was carved into roads, towers, laws, borders, coin, and blood. He gathered wealth until treasuries became monuments to his memory.

He took lovers, wives, concubines, companions, and political trophies. He built a court that existed to watch him exist. He was far older than the Empire of Lufondal, older than the throne that would one day pretend its roots had always been deep.”

Ludwig watched Vanitas seated upon a throne too large for any reasonable man. People knelt in rows before him. Messengers trembled. Generals lowered their heads. Women in silks watched from behind veils. Gold glittered everywhere, excessive enough that even Pride’s later palace seemed less like invention and more like memory sharpened into a weapon.

“He lorded over everything the world had to offer,” Necros said.

“Sounds familiar,” Ludwig muttered.

The vision darkened.

A second man appeared.

At first, he stood beside Vanitas. Similar features, but softer at the edges, with eyes that did not burn outward. They turned inward, always measuring, always comparing, always reflecting another man’s light and hating that it was not his own. He was Vanitas’s brother. Ludwig knew that without Necros saying it. The resemblance was there, but twisted through resentment.

The brother smiled in public.

In private, he watched.

“He who had nothing obtained everything,” Necros said. “And so the one who had stood beside him began to believe theft was the only fair form of inheritance.”

The scene shifted to betrayal.

No grand battlefield. No heroic last stand. No armies clashing beneath thunder.

A chamber. Wine. Familiar faces. A trusted hand.

Vanitas fell not to a stronger king, but to the closeness of blood. His own brother captured him, stripped him, chained him, and sealed him somewhere beneath the very kingdom Vanitas had raised. Ludwig saw him dragged through corridors where the stone had been carved with his victories. He saw servants turn their faces away. He saw guards who had once saluted him refuse to meet his eyes.

Then came the erasure.

Statues were reshaped. Inscriptions carved away. Histories rewritten with careful blades. Victories changed hands in ink. Laws once declared by Vanitas were attributed to his brother. The crown, the throne, the wealth, the armies, the palaces, even the women who had belonged to his court were claimed and redistributed, not because the brother desired all of them equally, but because leaving anything behind would mean admitting Vanitas had owned something that could not be taken.

Ludwig’s jaw tightened.

He hated how familiar the cruelty felt. Not the scale of it, but the intent. To kill someone was simple. To erase them and live inside their achievements like wearing stolen skin, that required a special kind of rot.

Finally, the vision settled inside a prison.

Vanitas knelt there, naked and chained, his body marked by imprisonment but not broken in posture. His brother stood before him wearing Vanitas’s crown, Vanitas’s robes, Vanitas’s signet, Vanitas’s history. In his hand was a crown of thorns.

He placed it on Vanitas’s head.

Blood ran down his brow.

“All of what you earned is now mine.”

The words hung in the darkness long after the vision began to fade.

“That man,” Necros said, “became the first Envious Death.”

Ludwig said nothing for a while.

The black plain returned, but the prison remained in his thoughts. Vanitas had lost everything. Wealth. Rule. Power. Legacy. Women. Name. Even the story of his own life had been stolen and worn by the brother who envied him. All that had been left was a naked body in chains and a crown meant to mock him.

“And he didn’t break?” Ludwig asked.

“No.”

Necros’s hand remained beneath Pride’s suspended soul.

“Vanitas accepted the theft of all things external. Not with peace. Not with forgiveness. With revelation. If all that could be stolen was removed, then none of it had ever been him. Wealth was beneath him. Thrones were beneath him. Women, armies, monuments, histories, kingdoms, even sovereign rule, all beneath him. He had risen from nothing once, and when reduced to nothing again, he found that he still remained.”