and lord, I fashion dark gods too;

War cries out to him in a way most things do not.
Gods should be above such petty squabbling, sure. He has risen above them, lets them fight and fuck and die in their small lifetimes while he barely blinks an eye. Even the land he was once pledged to as king holds little for him now, the land has been so oft reshaped and warped, it barely resembles the valley he once ruled, once left burnt.
Yet for all of it, there is a certain base pleasure in this: the bloodshed, the froth-mouthed insults hurled. He’s seen barriers thrown up, phoenixes and dragons flying, fires and sandstorms – more of a showcase than a war, really, though there is a comforting stench of death in the air that reminds him they have not forgotten everything entirely.

Still. They rely on tricks; they forget what wars are truly made of, that Beqanna was forged in chaos and bloodshed.
(His Beqanna, at least. The only one that’s ever mattered.)

He’s felt the war, seen it played out like a movie. Tarnished had spent too much time in Carnage’s sulfurous lair to go unmarked, the dark god had lain within him, watching the war.
He materializes, the god from the machine, slips back into a realm where he is more legend than reality.
Reality is this – he keeps his form plain: a stormcloud gray coat, sleek over the ridges of scars, a face lightly dished from Arabic heritage (back when he’d claimed blood heritage, back when he was mortal).

“Tarnished,” he says. It is not loud, but the word is still encompassing, and he knows the boy will hear.
(The boy’s heard so much from him, after all.)
He does not expect the boy to be a protégé (he has long ago learned that ones raised such are ultimately nothing but disappointments), but Tarnished has been a good toy, a thing to take apart, to tell stories too. A thing to remake.
He looks at no one. He feels the chamber’s earth roiling underneath his hooves. He was this land’s prince, too, long ago before the valley was forged.
(When he was mortal, he was an illicit thing, result of an affair. The valley exists because he exists.)

“You’ve drawn this on too long,” he says. And is he speaking to Tarnished still, or all of them? His eyes find no one. He remains apart.
“Bring them.”
He can already taste the blood.

c a r n a g e