and lord, I fashion dark gods too;

Fury is ill-suited on him.
Fury is dangerous, it makes him rash. He is not often furious, for he is a god, and why bother with such simple emotions as fury? He could destroy them with a glance. He knows he is their god, dark and terrible, and they know it too, more often than not. There’s no need for fury when they cringe and kneel prostate before him, or when the few who do try defiance – sample it on their tongues like a delicacy – well, they are made quick work of.
If he has to break their legs to make them kneel, what of it? In the end, they’re still kneeling.

He does not often know fury because he is a hard man to defy, now. He no longer tries to train them in his image. He rules no kingdom. He drifts, their god from the machine, takes amusement where he can, remains absent, more legend than man.
Until.
Until the world trembles as his queen is changed from ghost to flesh, a feat even he could not accomplish. Until he feels her presence one day, sharp and fervent. And he waits, for a moment, for her to come to him, to press her shadow-dark body to his. To ask for more children from him,, to birth sons or daughters made of stars.
He waited. He is eternal, and used to waiting, but the days take on a sort of itchy impatience he is unused to. And she does not show. She does not say his name.

She has always been untouchable to him, unknowable, but he scanned mind after mind in Beqanna until one rung true: the ghost-king. Carnage even remembers his name: Ramiel. He’d been a child when he’d obeyed the dark god’s summons, had been one of the successful ones who had ushered Gail from the end of the world to the afterlife.
And ushered her into other things too, it appears.
He pages through these memories while his vision goes red and fury raises its slumbering, fervid head. He sees them visiting, ghost and dead queen, tender and stupid and insufferable. He sees them made flesh, reveling in each other’s bodies; and when her heat comes, it’s the ghost-king she chooses.
(She’s still pregnant, he realizes, her term extended due to her precarious existence among the living.)
He sees Ramiel dead, torn to shreds, bleeding and broken; although this hasn’t happened yet, but he isn’t often wrong.

He comes into the dale, a natural disaster, fires blazing in his footsteps (small, insignificant, easy to put out – he’ll burn the king before he burns the kingdom). The stormcloud gray of his coat is gone, replaced with nebulae, swirling stars that live restless on his coat, a piece of the sky taken with him. A star on his body implodes, a black hole, and he wishes it were real, wishes he could erase this kingdom into nothingness.
“Ramiel,” he says the name with ice on his lips, a quiet threat, then, “Gail.”
She cannot be summoned – so insufferably immune to his magic – but the king can. Carnage will drag him if he does not come willingly. And he imagines she will be close behind.

c a r n a g e