Lucius shut the door behind him, using it to hold himself up. Every breath sent pain through his broken ribs, blood had soaked through his servant's uniform, and was dropping onto the polished floor below him.
Prince Aurelius sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes the way any normal kid would after being woken up. The golden glow was gone, and all that remained was just a sleepy six-year-old squinting through the evening light.
"Who are you?" The boy asked in a small voice, no weight added behind it.
Lucius pressed his hand against his ribs and tried to breathe steadily. He needed to rest. A minute or maybe two, just enough to gather himself for what came next.
"A visitor," he got out through the pain. His voice came out rough and low.
He dragged himself toward the chair near the window and dropped into it. His leg had stopped holding him, and the internal bleeding was spreading. He could feel it like cold water filling his gut.
[HP: 31/150]
[Status Effect: Internal Bleeding – HP drain 1 per minute]
Aurelius watched him with wide eyes. "You're wounded. Should I call the healers?"
"No." Lucius shook his head, then paid for it when the room was titled sideways. "No healers."
The boy tilted his head slightly, curious. "Are you one of the festival performers? You look like you fell off something."
Even through the pain and the blood gushing out and the sheer stupidity of the situation, Lucius almost laughed. "Something like that."
He needed time, a few minutes to breathe and think. The boy was calm, and there was no divine mana rolling off him. No ancient fury lurking behind those eyes. Maybe he could—
'What? Talk him to death? He's the sun god for crying out loud. The second he figures out who I am and why I'm here…'
But right now, Aurelius just looked worried about him.
The boy climbed out of the bed, bare feet quiet on the carpet. His sleeping robes were white and too big for him, hanging loose off his small shoulders.
"You're losing a lot of blood. That's bad."
"Yeah," Lucius said. "Pretty bad, huh."
"Why won't you see a healer?"
"Because…." he let the pause stretch while he figured out how honest he should be. ".....they wouldn't bother helping someone like me."
The boy frowned, turning that over in his head. Then he crossed to a cabinet, pulled out a white cloth, and walked back. He held it out without a word, pointing it in Lucius's direction.
"For the blood," Aurelius said.
Lucius looked at the cloth, then at the being whose absence had killed thousands during the drought, trying to help him stop the bleeding.
'He doesn't actually remember. This version of him doesn't know any of it..'
Lucius took the cloth and pressed it against the worst of the wounds. "Thanks."
Aurelius settled on the edge of his bed, legs swinging above the floor. "Are you a bad person? Is that why they won't help you?"
"Depends who you ask."
"What does that mean?"
Lucius met the boy's golden gaze evenly. "Some people think anyone who questions the gods is automatically evil. Others think the gods are the ones causing the problems."
Aurelius thought about that with the kind of seriousness only children could pull off. "The priests say the gods are perfect. That they love us and protect us."
"Do you believe them?"
The boy shrugged. "I don't know, actually. I've never met a god before."
"Well, except me, I guess. The priests say I'm the sun god reborn, but I don't feel like a god. I don't remember being one at all. I just remember being…well, me."
Lucius's grip tightened on the cloth. "You don't remember anything from before?"
"Sometimes I dream. Big bright dreams where I'm flying and everything is warm and light. But they're gone by the time I wake up." Aurelius stared down at his hands.
"The priests say the memories will all come back when I'm older. That eventually, I'll know who I really am."
"And then what?"
"Then I help people. Bring warm and light, and make sure everyone stays safe." He smiled, open and genuine and completely without guile.
"That's what gods are supposed to do, right? Take care of people and make them happy?."
Something twisted in Lucius's chest, something that existed in between anger and guilt.
"That's what they're supposed to do," he said quietly.
"But you don't think they actually do?"
"I think…." He paused, picking each word carefully. "....gods forget. They sit in their power long enough, and they stop seeing the people beneath them. They stop feeling what those people are going through."
Aurelius's brown creased. "That's sad. If I was really a god, I wouldn't do that. I'd make sure everyone had food and water and—" he cut himself off, eyes going wide.
"Is that why you're here? Did they forget about you?"
'More like abandoned, and left to rot.'
"Something like that."
The boy went quiet, thinking. Then he got up, went to his wardrobe, and came back with a small pouch. He held it out toward Lucius.
"This is my allowance. It's supposed to be for sweets and toys, but you need it more than I do. Maybe for medicine and treatment."
Gold coins shifted inside the pouch, more money than anyone in Fallen Crest village had likely held in their hands at once.
"I can't take that."
"Why not? You're hurt."
"Because….." the words snagged in his throat. "...I'm not what you think I am."
Aurelius tilted his head again. "Then what are you?"
Before Lucius could answer, the room temperature changed.
The air got heavy all at once, and the temperature changed.
Aurelius's eyes went black, and then golden light bled through them from behind. His small body locked up, head tilting at an angle no child's neck should allow.
[Divine Sense (Passive) – WARNING!]
[MASSIVE divine energy surge detected!]
[Target entering divine memory state!]
When the boy spoke again, his voice had layers to it. Like sounds echoing inside a cathedral made of sunlight.
"You…I know this feeling. This darkness, this…." His golden eyes sharpened, cutting through Lucius like focused light through glass. ".....hostility."
The small frame trembled, divine mana poured off the boy in waves, setting the air itself alight. The toys scattered across the floor began to smoke, the silk curtains caught fire and went up fast.
"You didn't come here to talk, did you?" The god-child said, his voice carrying the weight of a thousand minds. "You came to kill."
He moved.
One moment, Aurelius was standing beside the bed, and the next he was floating directly in front of Lucius, his little body ringed in blinding gold light.
His eyes burned like two miniature suns, staring directly at Lucius.
"Are you really who you say you are?"
Lucius tried to stand, to push himself up and create distance, but his body refused. The pain, the blood loss, and the crushing divine pressure pressing down on him from above opposed him.
Aurelius raised one small hand, and solar energy erupted from his palm. The raw killing heat of a star at close range.
Lucius threw himself sideways. The chair he had been sitting in didn't just burn. It simply ceased to exist, reduced to a small pile of ash in under a second.
[HP: -2]
He slammed into the floor, broken ribs screaming at the impact. The flames had caught his shoulder on the way past, burning clean through fabric and into flesh.
[HP: -5]
[Status Effect: Divine Burn - HP drains 2 per second]
Aurelius rose higher, divine energy coiling around him like a living storm. His blonde hair floated on a wind that wasn't there, and ancient symbols materialised in the air around him, symbols that made Lucius's eyes ache just by looking at it.
"I remember now," the boy said, his voice reverberating off every surface. "I remember the drought. I remember….leaving them." Something shifted in his expression. Horror dawned underneath the divine light.
"They died because I abandoned them.. because I—"
The energy spiked hard, and the whole room went up.
Lucius scrambled backwards through the flames, his body running on fumes. The bed, the wardrobe, the carpets, all of it burning with Holy flames that had nothing to do with heat.
[HP: -4]
The heat was beyond bearing, his heat resistance barely made a dent. This wasn't ordinary. This was divine fury.
Aurelius came down slowly, his small feet touching the burning floor without flinching. Tears ran down his face and evaporated before they could drip from his chin.
"You came to punish me didn't you," the god-child said quietly. "For what I did, for leaving them behind."
He raised both hands.
The flames answered, pulling inward and condensing above his palms into a sphere of concentrated solar energy. The power radiating from it hit Lucius's survival instinct like a hammer.
[Survival Instinct (Passive) – CRITICAL WARNING!]
[LETHAL ATTACK INCOMING!]
[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 3%]
"Then do it," Aurelius said, his voice cracked down the middle. "I deserve it, I abandoned them, I let all those people—"
Lucius moved forward.
He drove himself through the fire, past the pain, past everything his body was screaming at him. His hand found the knife at his belt.
Aurelius went wide eyes. "What are you—"
Lucius aimed the blade at the boys chest and thrust it.
The golden light detonated outward and the force picked Lucius up and threw him backwards. He hit the window and went through it in a burst of glass, pitching out into the open air above a three story drop.
Wind rushed around him and the ground filled his vision.
'This is it. This is how I—"
He hit a fabric awning stretched over a balcony below him. It tore under the impact but eased down enough speed to keep the fall from finishing him.
He tumbled onto the balcony floor and lay there, every bone ringing, his vision going grey at the edges.
[HP: -5]
He couldn't get up, blood was spreading beneath him in a slow dark pool, the world kept tilting.
He looked up through the shattered window, three stories above, Aurelius floated in the burning room, staring down at him. The boy's small face held everything at once, confusion, grief, fury, loss.
Then Aurelius raised his hand again.
This time it wasn't a sphere, it was a lance. Pure solar energy, hammered into a single point, blazing with the light of a violent baby star.
The god-child's voice carried down across the palace grounds, threaded through with divine authority.
"You wanted to kill a god, right? Then stand up and face one."
The lance dropped like a fallen star.
Lucius had nothing left, no energy to move or dodge. He watched it come and could do nothing else.
Then it struck and everything became white.