The gods do not kill their own; they simply erase them. In the High Heavens, execution was considered vulgar, a messy mortal habit. Instead, they practiced "The Silencing." They took your name, your light, and your history, and they cast the remainder into the Silent Well.
The entity now known only as Mr. Fool—once the Star-Wielder, the master architect who had placed the North Star with the precision of a diamond-cutter—lay in the muck. For eons, he had been a whisper of a man. His immortality had been stripped down to a stubborn, painful flicker, like a candle drowning in its own wax. He possessed nothing but a broken iron shackle on his left wrist and the burning memory of a sky he no longer owned.
Above, the sky was a permanent, mocking gold—the stagnant light of the High Heavens. He crawled through the mud of the abyss, his fingers scraping against jagged stones that had fallen from the upper world. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass. The air in the Well was thick with the scent of ozone and forgotten prayers.
"They forgot," he croaked, his voice a dry, rhythmic rattle. "They forgot that stars are not made of soft light. They are born from the violent collapse of everything."
He reached the center of the Well, where the discarded relics of a thousand wars lay rusting. His hand closed around a shard of obsidian, a stone so dark it seemed to pull the dim light out of the air. It was cold enough to bite through his calloused skin. As his blood dripped onto the stone, the ground didn't drink it. It vibrated. The very foundations of the world let out a low, hungry hum.
From the absolute darkness of the pit's center, a voice like grinding tectonic plates answered his heartbeat.
"Do you wish to return, little spark? Or do you wish to finally go out?"
Mr. Fool gripped the shard until his knuckles turned white and the edges drew fresh blood. "I do not wish to return to their world," he whispered, his grey eyes narrowing. "I wish to burn it all down."
The obsidian didn't just glow; it tore a hole in the fabric of reality. A surge of violet lightning arced into Mr. Fool's chest, sewing his broken ribs back together with threads of pure, unadulterated void. His heart, which had slowed to a near-stop, ignited with a terrifying, rhythmic pulse. The shackle on his wrist didn't break; it melted into liquid shadow, fusing with his skin.
He stood up, his spine cracking as he regained his full height. He looked up at the golden ceiling of his prison and smiled. It was the smile of a man who had seen the end of the world and decided it wasn't enough.
But as his feet left the mud and he began to float toward the light, the violet glow flickered, turning a sickly, necrotic green—and the voice in the dark began to laugh with a sound like a thousand dying stars.