Andromeda

She turned her head and glared. She scanned the environment, then the skimpy teenager stood so confidently before her, a numerous amount of gashes and scars painting him a dark shade of red. The wind was blowing, littering the ground with ash.

She knew. This was it.

“Are you aware of the circumstances this puts you in, child? Your hero is gone. Your hero is dead. Yet here you stand before me, daring to prove that your determination still lives beyond the burning fire? You are not him. You do not possess his powers, nor his strength, and even with that his ashes litter the ground and scatter in the breeze, lacking a decent urn. You still think a fragile, scrawny child like you are going to contradict my capability? It is not bravery that has transpired in your soul, It is blind ignorance.”

This was the end.

It was hard to keep his eyes open, for the dust of lost souls collected in his eyes. At least he could explain the tears that streamed down his face. The air was

sweltering from the flames that transformed the scenery into morbid shades of black and crimson. This was supposed to be a melancholy moment. A calm before the storm, but the forecast was wrong. His despondency lit up into a rage, as does flashpaper and this sordid panorama of mutilated burning bodies.

The tyrant belted out derogatory words with undeserved audacity. “Your kind are nothing but sheeple! Cowardice brings no mercy, only degradation. These recreant fools just moments ago had knelt before me, praying for another chance to plead for their lives. It’s quite amusing, I expected you to do the same.”

Amusing. The word she had used. He assessed her. She wasn’t human, 9ft tall and black hair that slithered in all directions for a mile radius. She wore a crown, as though she dictated something other than the battlefield, something with a greater purpose than bloodshed and her twisted definition of “honor”. Pale skin that appeared almost gray, and a grimace of sheer egregious delight, like a demon child that had received a decapitated head on a stick. There were plenty of those lying around.

The boy gritted his teeth in wild fury. He was done with these stupid games. He hadn’t said a word, for her long winded remarks without objection from himself had rendered her distracted and without defense. She did not know the powers he possessed. The hero may die, but the protagonist by all literary laws survives the worst moment of the climax. Plus, he had a secret weapon. In the time she had ranted and her character profile had been judged, He had splintered his soul across the dimensions of plot continuum to a specific and crucial point in space: behind his adversary. While the commentary had been carried out, a quick and subtle nod was shared between him and his reconstruction. The clone had summoned his blade from the depths of whatever eldritch dimension weapons that are summoned from air come from, and ran the sword through her abdomen, quite easily for someone so high on a decorated pedestal.Her blood was the strange alien color of sangria pink, pouring itself into a river of treachery.

Soon after the fatality had occurred, the semblance disintegrated into splinters and blew away, mixing with the dust and ash and becoming just as unimportant and dry. The purple-blood dictator spoke with a loathing tone, the kind you would so hastily speak with when your enemy had just stabbed you through the. “You. Misleading me to believe you were a scrawny idiot child. The power to manipulate space,``she scoffed, for her fatality had ripped the grasp of the story from plot like cellophane. It was the pages after the last page, the last act of a play that had already ended. The ticking of a pocket watch after it had been collected by the maker to stow away in his midnight cloak. She would no longer belong here, and travel the depths of the mentioned eldritch dimensions for an extensive period, taking in vast amounts of awareness and ascend to higher knowledge of the multiverse outside of her own. “I haven’t seen one in a while.”

The boy unveiled their true form: an omniscient being ascended far beyond the limits of the infantile mind. They had taken the position of the boy, learning their state of terror and feeling their emotions, taking their unspoken powers of judged immortality to convert the antacio that acted as a tyrant against their morals, trapped in the confines of the story pulled from an old dusty library on the planet of Alpha Centauri named No Lack of the Dead and Doggerel. They had a lack of defining characteristics, as all protagos do. No gender, no matter, nothing to distinguish them from anything. just a glowing galaxial being in a grey cloak, shifting its form into a humanoid figure. They began to walk away from the scene, off to do much more important tasks, before they stopped to hear their last words before leaving, blood already drying out in the sand.

“Qualem potestatem obicere ducere quiescit animus ab errore ad notitiam rerum infinita confusio belloque intacta plena quaestionibus et responsiones imperatorum do not dare significationes quaerere melius intelligentes imbuendos rationem cognoscendi prudentiaque fuerint eques latrunculorum ordine fata.”

The celestial protago turned to see the spirit of the tyrant had transformed into a similar persona as themself, except they were born from the lack of all things, the very void that existed before time had started to tick. The sole purpose of an antacio was to destroy, and they wanted nothing more to fulfill it and live in peace for the rest of it’s almost infinitesimal lifespan, until the clock of all clocks lost its momentum and froze before returning to the pocket of the Watchmaker to simply check the time. The persona only told of in quick whispers and alien theories of philosophy. They bowed in gratitude (or rather, collapsed into the dirt) and vanished into thin air.

The protago muttered “What a long winded phrase that exists for no pleasure to those incapable of reading thick latin.” and vanished as well, leaving the apocalyptic scene to wither.