"Doo...?" Isis muttered.
Her voice was dangerously small, a fragile thread snapping in the wind. Her eyes darted erratically around the desolate valley, her ruby pupils frantically sweeping the gray horizon as if trying to track an object moving too fast for the naked eye. "No... no, it has to be a tricksy illusion. It's a prank, right? Doo? Doo?"
She babbled his name like a broken incantation, a constant, glowing stream of green tears completely flooding her face.
"Doo... you can't. You literally cannot do this to me!" she suddenly screamed, her legs giving out entirely as she collapsed hard onto her knees in the dirt.
She gathered his severed head into her trembling arms, pulling it tight against her chest, entirely unbothered by the dark crimson blood staining her vibrant blue gown. She rocked back and forth, her fingers clutching his crimson hair. "You promised me! You smiled and you promised me you'd be back next week with a mountain of storybooks! With sweet treats! Where are they, Doo? Where are they?!"
She looked down into his still, glassy eyes, her entire chest heaving with suffocating, violent sobs. "You didn't... you never mentioned any of this could happen! You told me you were a busy man but not that busy! You can't die, Doo!!! You are the Dragon King, you can't die!"
Isis wailed into the empty sky, a sound so raw and agonizing that the clouds above violently churned. "You're a liar! You're all horrible, disgusting liars! You can't just leave me entirely alone in the dark! I hate you! I hate you all!"
She pressed her forehead against his cold cheek, her small frame convulsing as centuries of innocence collapsed into a black hole of absolute despair.
"Just what did I ever do?" she whimpered, her telepathic voice fracturing into a chaotic, weeping static inside the minds of the retreating soldiers. "What did Doo ever do to deserve this? Why am I being treated like a monster when all I did was stay in my tree? I should have followed the Mother Tree's advice when I had the chance... I should have just rubbed against you, I should have held you tight and never let you leave. Now it's all over."
A fresh wave of hot tears spilled over her eyelids, mixing with the dirt on his face.
"I should have told you 'I love you' when I had the chance," she whispered, her voice cracking into nothingness. "Now it's gone. It's all gone. I don't want to live anymore. I don't want to exist. This wretched world just keeps taking and taking from me! First Mother... and now, Doo!!!"
She shook his head gently, begging for a twitch, a spark, a single pulse of his fiery aura. "Please answer me, Doo! What do I do? What can I even do?! Time reversal doesn't work on ancient cosmic beings... I can't bring you back! I can't fix this!"
She covered his head completely with her arms, her green tears suddenly turning into a horrific, burning crimson as blood began to stream directly out of her eyes from the sheer, reality-shattering stress of her grief.
"I hate it all," she growled, her voice dropping an octave, layering into a deep, catastrophic tremor that made the earth beneath Malakor violently split open. "I hate this entire disgusting world. I should just destroy it all. I should pull the stars from the sky and turn everything to ash."
Malakor floated lazily in the upper air currents, his twin blue star eyes flashing with absolute, maniacal triumph as he watched her divine aura warp into a chaotic, apocalyptic purple vortex. He crossed his arms, a cruel, mocking smile splitting his bloody features.
"For someone so incredibly naive..." Malakor purred down at her, his tone dripping with artificial pity. "Those are really, truly dark words. Are you feeling alright... God?"
"Malakor? Why... why did you do this?" Isis asked slowly.
Her voice was entirely devoid of its usual rhythmic melody, hollowed out by an impossible grief. She remained on her knees in the dirt, still tenderly cradling Doo's severed head against her chest, her fingers gently threading through his static, cooling crimson hair.
"What do you mean, why?" Malakor smiled, his tone dripping with an insufferable, casual arrogance as he floated just above her. "I've always been exactly like this. I am entirely certain your precious little hair warned you about my true nature centuries ago... but you were just far too naive to notice."
"But why?" Isis whispered, her bloody green tears dripping onto Doo's pale cheek. "We could have lived so happily... all of us together in the forest."
"Screw that," Malakor interrupted firmly, his twin blue star eyes flaring with a cold, absolute megalomania. "I will live happily when I am the one true god of this universe. Not a moment before."
Isis didn't scream. She didn't rage. Instead, a terrifying, absolute stillness washed over her.
Slowly, seamlessly, she rose to her feet. She held tightly onto the head of the Dragon King, lifting it up with an infinite, heartbreaking tenderness, and pressed a soft, lingering kiss right against his cold forehead.
"What about the running people down there...?" she asked slowly, her voice dropping into a sweet, velvety purr. "Were they a part of your grand plan, too?"
"Every single one of them was intimately involved," Malakor smiled wickedly, gesturing broadly to the sprawling, panicked sea of thousands of soldiers frantically tripping over their iron armor to escape the valley.
Isis raised her head, locking her wide, bleeding eyes directly into his. A beautiful, incredibly radiant smile broke across her lips—a smile so pure and dazzling it felt completely psychotic amidst the ash and blood.
"You massive, terrible liar," she giggled softly, her ruby pupils pulsing inside her emerald irises. "But it's not like I care about your petty reasons anyways. I'll just destroy this entire world... and build a magnificent new civilization in its ashes."
She lowered her gaze back to the severed head in her arms, her expression melting into a sickeningly sweet warmth. "I'm entirely done trying to see things in the light. Isn't that right, Doo? It's much cozier in the dark."
THOOM!
Before Malakor could even blink, her forest-green hair erupted.
It didn't expand into vines this time; it shot out across the horizon like millions of supersonic, iron-hard bullets. The sky violently fractured. Instantly, the distant plains became a chaotic, apocalyptic symphony of blood and iron—echoing with the frantic, horrific screaming and yelling of dying men as the living tendrils hunted them down with mathematical precision.
"Yes! That's it, God!" Malakor yelled in absolute bliss, raising his hands as the ambient energy warped around him. "Kill them! Unleash your catastrophe! Use your powers exactly like you were always meant to!"
"Hey," Isis said, turning her radiant, bloody smile up toward him. "You talk way too much."
SNAP.
In a fraction of a heartbeat, the conceptual blessing she had once given Malakor twisted on itself. Space violently buckled around his face, and Malakor's mouth instantly ceased to exist—his lips and jaw melting into a smooth, seamless wall of pale, unmoving flesh. His muffled, terrified screams vibrated uselessly inside his own skull.
With a sickening, heavy rustle, Isis's hair began to retreat, lifting high into the roiling, purple sky like long, endless strands of a horrific tapestry. Dark crimson blood ran down the green vines like a rushing river, pouring torrents of entrails and shattered iron armor onto the weeping earth below.
Impaled upon the millions of strands of her hair were the entire fleeing army of The Settlement. One hundred thousand soldiers, completely hollowed out, their lifeless corpses hanging loosely in the wind like gruesome fruit.
Isis threw her head back, and her laughter erupted.
It was a sound of pure, unadulterated madness—a cackling, echoey crescendo that reverberated through the vast expanse of the universe. The entire planet began to violently tremble on its axis; the sky itself began to peel away into a black void as the sheer velocity of her divine trauma distorted the very flow of time.
She looked up at the weeping heavens, her eyes burning like toxic stars, her hands still tightly holding the only thing she had left.
"You guys desperately wanted a witch, right?!" she laughed, her voice a synchronized chorus of a thousand vengeful gods echoing through the dying world. "Well... your wish is my absolute command!"
Though she could have done it considerably faster—in less than thirty minutes, to be precise—Isis chose to let the agony breathe.
Out of the three billion living occupants of the Iron Empire, only three tiny souls were left alive. That is, until the Entity arrived.
Isis stood in the absolute, silent ashes of The Settlement, a nomadic mountain of death. Her pitch-black hair extended miles into the dark sky, hanging onto every single corpse she had ruthlessly slaughtered. She had left only three human children untouched in the ruins. It wasn't ever clear why her fractured mind had spared them, but everyone else had been systematically executed on the spot, their mangled bodies draped over her living vines like wet clothes left out to dry.
She continued her apocalyptic march across the continent. She took all life as she went, leaving a sterile, white void in her wake. Animals collapsed into dust, vibrant forests withered into gray powder, and even the microscopic organisms in the air and soil were utterly snuffed out. Nothing was permitted to exist in a world without Doo.
Eventually, her path of absolute destruction collided with the boundaries of the supernatural. The other two ancient rulers of the realm—the brutal Demon King and the absolute King of Hell—intervened to halt the genocide.
The great, historic battle lasted precisely the moment they tried to fight her.
In a fraction of a heartbeat, Isis violently bypassed their conceptual immunities. She wounded both rulers so catastrophically, tearing through their immortal flesh and breaking their divine spirits, that they abandoned their armies and fled in absolute terror back to their respective dark domains.
Her unholy march continued unhindered, threatening to unravel the planet itself, until the high God of the realm—the Entity—finally descended from the stellar heavens to stop her.
But the Entity didn't fight alone.
Despite the permanent, conceptual steel Isis had bound over Malakor's mouth, the immortal king had managed to drag his broken body across the barren earth, tracking her movements with psychotic obsession. Using the fresh, pulsing blood of the billions and billions of lives she had taken, Malakor utilized his absolute fortune to initiate the initial, complex stages of a cosmic seal.
With the foundation laid by Malakor's blood-sacrifice, the Entity completed the spell, unleashing an absolute, unbreakable barrier. The ancient magic violently severed Isis, her mountain of corpses, and the entire obliterated continent away from the rest of the world, plunging them into an isolated, timeless pocket void.
She was entirely forgotten by history. A myth of a tragic, weeping witch sleeping in a cage of black hair.
And there she remained in the silent darkness, cradling her memories... until the fateful day Dan broke the seal.
........
Dan's heavy boots came to a sudden, grinding halt against the jagged obsidian stone.
He didn't look back, but he made a sharp, subtle gesture with his hand for Lilly to stay strictly behind him. The oppressive, scorching wind of the demon realm blew violently across the plains, whipping against his stark white hair. Dan's eyes narrowed into razor-thin slits as he stared directly at the tragic figure of Isis standing just a few yards ahead. In one of her pale hands, she casually held the limp, unmoving body of Croc.
"I take it you've completely regained your memories," Dan said simply, his voice low and steady against the howling gale.
Isis froze. She stared at him for a long, suffocating interval through the void of her dark eyes. Slowly, her fingers loosened, and she let go of Croc, letting the unconscious body fall heavily to the ground. Then, her breath hitched violently. She buried her face into her trembling palms, her shoulders convulsing.
"What do I do, Dan...?" she sobbed, going weak in the knees and collapsing hard onto the dark stone. Her once-terrifying forest-green hair now waved weakly and limply around her like dying vines. "They killed Doo... they completely destroyed the Mother Tree... what else could I have possibly done?!"
She wept bitterly, the raw, bleeding agony of a thousand-year-old trauma bursting through her chest. "I killed so many people, Dan! I killed billions! I'm evil, Dan... I'm a monster!" she shrieked, her childlike voice fracturing into a desperate, agonizing wail that echoed throughout the entirety of the demon realm, making the very lava rivers below them tremble. "But they killed Doo! They took him away from me! I hate them all! I hate them so much!"
Lilly frantically grabbed the hem of Dan's jacket, her eyes wide with terror, silently begging him to stay back from the cosmic entity.
"Yes. You did a lot of incredibly bad things," Dan said simply.
Despite Lilly's desperate tugging, he firmly broke free from her grasp. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't brace for an attack. He just walked slowly and deliberately toward the crying girl. As he approached, the living vines of her hair—the same hair that had impaled a hundred thousand soldiers—parted for him seamlessly, letting him pass without a single ounce of resistance.
Dan reached her, dropped to his knees in the ash, and pulled her fragile, shaking frame into a fierce, protective hug.
The moment he held her, Isis completely broke down. She clutched onto his jacket with a desperate, white-knuckled grip, her green hair wrapping around his torso like a protective cocoon as she buried her face into his shoulder and cried violently.
SHUUUU.
With their physical contact, the floodgates broke. Isis's ancient memories rushed directly into Dan's mind in overwhelming, agonizing waves—he felt the phantom warmth of Doo's hand on her head, saw the pristine beauty of the destroyed Mother Tree, and felt the absolute, world-shattering despair of holding a loved one's severed head in the dirt.
A single, silent tear spilled over Dan's eyelid, tracking down his cheek. As the memory of the genocide burned through his brain, Dan knew the objective truth. He knew it was an unforgivable sin. But as he held the weeping girl, a dark, fierce clarity settled into his soul.
Dan was absolutely sure of one thing: if he had been in her exact shoes, and if Areia had been taken away from him like that... he would have burned the entire universe to ash, too.
"Dan?"
"Yeah?" he responded, his voice thick and muffled against her shoulder.
"Hold me tightly... and please, never let go," she muttered, her small hands clawing into his jacket as if trying to anchor her very existence to his chest.
"You promise?," she whispered, tightening her arms around him.
"No... it's a certainty," he corrected softly, his voice trembling. And then, Dan felt it. Her entire frame began to vibrate violently against him, a high-frequency shudder that felt less like shivering and more like a dying star fracturing at its core.
"I'm sure you feel it too, Dan... but I am constantly, rapidly expending my life energy," she said softly, her breath hitting his neck in shallow, ragged puffs. "The reservoir is entirely empty."
"Yeah... I feel it," Dan affirmed, his chest aching with a heavy, suffocating weight.
"I'm sure you already know... I'm dying," she said, her teeth clenching so hard they audibly clicked.
"Yeah. I do," Dan replied, his vision blurring completely as fresh tears welled in his eyes.
"Dan... I'm scared," she whimpered, the absolute, heartbreaking vulnerability of a child breaking through her divine facade. "What's going to happen to me when I die?"
"I hope... I truly hope you go to a much better place," Dan said, forcing a small, incredibly tender smile through his grief, though his heart was violently breaking.
"That's entirely impossible... not after the horrific things I've done," Isis said, her voice dropping into a terrified, panicked whisper. "The ground... it wants to pull me down, Dan. I'm terrified. Please hold me tightly!"
"I am holding you. And I will never, *ever* let go," he said simply, the tears finally overflowing and streaming down his face in hot, unchecked rivers.
Isis cried silently against his shoulder, her body beginning to physically break apart piece by piece. The magnificent, forest-green vines of her hair were the first to fall away, detaching from her scalp and instantly dissolving into gray ash before they even hit the obsidian ground. Then, slowly, the edges of her pale green skin began turning to dust, flaking off into the scorching wind. Her silent, desperate sobs echoed hollowly throughout the desolate land, her tiny body vibrating so violently against Dan's shoulder that she shook like a frightened child left alone in the dark.
"Dan?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you," she muttered in-between her messy, choked tears. A sudden, beautifully tragic warmth softened her face, and she let out a tiny, fragile gasp. "I hope... in my next life... me, you, Malakor, and Doo... get to be really good friends."
"Yeah," Dan smiled back, his voice completely cracking as he buried his face deeper into her vanishing shoulder. "I'll look forward to it. I promise."
Dan held her with every ounce of physical strength he possessed. He felt his own body vibrating violently against the localized distortion of her fading aura, until eventually, her frame started shrinking in his arms. Her tears grew softer, quieter, and fewer... until eventually, the warmth vanished, the weight dissipated, and she entirely ceased to exist.
Space snapped back to a cruel, silent normal.
Dan remained on his knees in the dirt, his arms still locked in a tight, hollow circle. He held onto nothing but the empty fabric of her tattered black dress for a long, suffocating interval, tears still streaming down his face and dripping onto the dark fabric.
She was gone. Completely gone, and never coming back. And deep within the dark, realistic corners of his soul, Dan knew the objective truth: she was going to the deep, unforgiving abyss where all unredeemed sinners go. And it killed him.
Lilly approached Dan carefully, her boots clicking softly against the obsidian stone. Her beautiful golden hair swayed slightly in the scorching wind, and her face was completely flush, her own eyes streaming with tears after witnessing the god's final moments.
"Say, Lilly... do you feel this world is completely, fundamentally unfair?" Dan asked slowly, his voice dead and hollowed out as he stared blankly at the dress in his hands.
"Yes," she responded, her voice trembling but resolute. "Mightily so."
"Is it a bad thing... that I absolutely hate this world?" he asked, his fists tightening against the cloth.
"No," Lilly said softly, stepping closer and placing a gentle, reassuring hand on his slumped shoulder. "It's a feeling we all get... sooner or later."