Being a god seems like a fantasy that everyone wants to come true, all the sweet stuff, power to create, immortality, power to bend rules of nature, outlasting time itself, being omnipresent. But what happens when you see the darker side of it? What if instead of being a god you become one of its darker versions DEATH. The capital showed me that lesson, sometimes it's too much even if you are immortal, sometimes it's too much to bear.

  The training consumed him.

  Day after day. Night after night. Lucius became a fixture in the shadows of Seris's forge, long after the blacksmith had retired, long after the city had surrendered to sleep. The sound of gunfire echoed from the forest beyond the city walls—distant, almost musical in its regularity. One shot. Then another. Then a third. Each one more precise than the last.

  Seris watched the transformation with growing dread.

  He had seen this before. Not in Lucius specifically, but in the pattern itself. The obsession that burned behind the eyes. The way every moment became preparation. The relentless focus that erased everything else—sleep, sustenance, human connection—until only the singular purpose remained. Seris had lost friends to that same hunger. Had watched good men become hollow instruments of their own vengeance, their eyes reflecting nothing but the distant goal they chased.

  One evening, when Lucius returned from the forest with powder stains on his hands and exhaustion etched into his features, Seris tried.

  "You're not what you said you'd be," the blacksmith said quietly. "You said you wanted a new start. A new direction. But this..." He gestured vaguely at Lucius, at the revolver holstered at his hip, at the empty shell casings scattered across the forge floor like autumn leaves. "This is the same path. Just dressed in different clothes."

  Lucius did not respond immediately. He simply cleaned his hands at the water basin, movements methodical and automatic.

  "I know," he finally said. "But I can't stop. Not until this is finished."

  "That's what they all say," Seris replied, his voice carrying the weight of old losses. "And then they don't come back. Or they come back broken. Or they come back changed into something their friends wouldn't recognize."

  "I'm already broken," Lucius said simply. "I'm already changed into something unrecognizable. This won't make it worse. It might make it better."

  Seris wanted to argue. Wanted to grab Lucius by the shoulders and shake him, force him to see the trap he was walking into. But he had learned long ago that once a wolf caught the scent of sheep, there was no stopping it. The predator would hunt. The obsession would consume. And all the warnings in the world could not alter the course of something so fundamental.

  After a month, Lucius came to him one final time.

  The blacksmith was working late, as he always did, hammer falling in its endless rhythm against heated metal. When Lucius approached, Seris did not look up. He simply continued his work, as if he had been expecting this conversation all along.

  "I'm going," Lucius said simply.

  Seris set down his hammer and turned to face his apprentice. There was no surprise in his expression, no attempt at dissuasion. He had seen this sequence of events before—had watched it play out in the lives of other men, other hunters, other obsessions. He knew the pattern. He knew where it led.

  "I know you advised me against it," Lucius continued, his voice steady. "And for some time, I did deceive myself. I thought I had forgotten my vengeance. I thought I could build something new here, in this forge, in this time. But the moment I heard that name—Gazer—I knew."

  He paused, gathering the weight of what he needed to say.

  "I knew I had to go. I knew I had to act. Because if I don't, then it would all go to waste. Everything that happened. Everyone who fell. It would all mean nothing." Lucius looked at his hands, at the calluses built from weeks of forging and training. "But there's more than vengeance driving me, Seris. I am cursed. A curse I can't tell you about, but he might know how to free me. So I'm going to see him."

  Seris nodded slowly, understanding the weight of unspoken things.

  "Whether I kill him or not, I will decide that when I see him," Lucius said. "But I have to go."

  "I know," Seris replied quietly. "Go."

  Lucius turned and walked toward the door of the forge. Behind him, he heard the hammer fall once more—a single, decisive strike against metal, as if Seris was marking the moment of departure with a final note.

  The forge sat at the outskirts of the town, in a rarely inhabited area where civilization gave way to wilderness. As Lucius made his way away from the forge toward the capital, the smile of Sable kept occupying his mind.

  Not the smile from the execution square—that terrible, defiant grin worn by a man accepting his own death. But a different smile. An older one. From the sunflower field, when Sable had looked at him with absolute certainty and spoken words that had bound him across centuries: Give them hell, Lucius.

  The memory burned.

  Lucius was closer to his goal now than he had been in lifetimes. He could feel it in the way the air seemed to contract around him, in the way his body moved with renewed purpose, in the way the revolver at his hip seemed to pulse with its own dark intention.

  Closer than he had been on that day in the execution square, when he had stood in the shadows and watched his brothers die.

  Closer than he had ever been to understanding what he truly was and what Gazer truly was.

  The capital grew larger with each step, its lights beginning to glow against the darkening sky. And in his mind, Lucius carried the image of Sable's face, of Chyros's white hair, of Lanze's hammer. He carried the weight of promises made and the burden of an immortality that refused to grant him peace.

  The hunt was nearly over.

  And when it ended, one way or another, at least one of them would finally know what lay beyond the void.

  Lucius reached Moonlight Meadows as the sun began its descent toward the horizon.

  The capital of Marrowind sprawled before him like a living thing—a marketplace where everything had a price. Slaves and silk, secrets and crowns, the ears of kings and the favor of gods. If you possessed enough coin, you could purchase almost anything. Almost.

  But Lucius sought something that money could not easily buy: information.

  He made his way toward the taverns. These were the places where stories accumulated like sediment in water, where men loosened their tongues with ale and spoke truths they would never voice in daylight. A keen ear, positioned in the right corner, could hear the patterns beneath the noise—could distinguish valuable intelligence from idle gossip.

  He chose a tavern at the end of the street called the Old Oak.

  The interior was dim, lit by candlelight that cast everything in shades of amber and shadow. The air was thick with the smell of spilled ale, roasted meat, and the accumulated sweat of bodies pressed too close together. Lucius approached the tavernkeeper—a broad-shouldered man with a scarred face—and ordered a steak and mug of ale.

  The order was a disguise. A way to blend into the landscape of ordinary patrons so that his watching would go unnoticed.

  He found a table in a shady corner, positioned to observe without being easily observed. From here, he could see the entire tavern—the tavernmaids moving through the crowd like grass bending in wind, the various conversations happening at different tables, the subtle hierarchies of power and weakness that defined the space.

  After some time, his order arrived.

  Lucius left the steak untouched and began to sip the ale.

  Getting drunk was difficult for a man whose heart beat only once per minute. The alcohol effects would diminish long before they reached the proper place in his system, dissipating into the vast emptiness of his body before intoxication could take hold. So he sipped slowly, using the act of drinking as cover, as a reason to remain seated and watching.

  Then a drunkard entered.

  He was profoundly intoxicated—barely able to maintain vertical balance, his movements sluggish and uncertain. He felt his way along the tavern wall as if the world had become liquid beneath his feet. When he reached the tavernkeeper, his speech was slurred nearly to unintelligibility.

  "A mug of ale," he demanded, throwing coins on the counter with reckless abandon.

  Lucius watched.

  There was something about the man that triggered a memory—something in his bearing, in the way he moved despite his drunkenness, in the strange clarity that seemed to underlie his apparent stupor. It reminded Lucius of the days after great battles, when his comrades would drink to forget what they had seen, when the ale would flow like water and laughter would mask the weight of survival.

  The drunkard received his mug.

  He raised it to his lips and gulped the entire contents in a single breath, his throat working convulsively to consume the liquid. Then, with surprising force, he hurled the empty mug down to the floor, where it shattered against stone.

  "HE KNOWS!" the drunkard shouted, his voice cutting through the tavern's ambient noise like a blade through silk.

  A dagger came through the air.

  It moved with such speed that Lucius barely registered its passage before it had already found its mark. The blade pierced the drunkard's skull with surgical precision, punching through bone and brain matter as if they were nothing. The man fell backward, his body striking the floor with a wet finality that silenced the tavern entirely.

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  Then a figure entered.

  She was hooded, her form obscured by dark fabric, but her physique was unmistakably feminine. Something about her silhouette struck Lucius with a strange resonance—a sense of recognition he could not quite articulate. He had seen her before. He knew her from somewhere. But the memory remained just beyond reach, like trying to grasp smoke.

  The woman moved with absolute confidence, crossing the tavern without hesitation. She retrieved the dagger from the corpse's skull, wiping the blade clean on fabric with the casual efficiency of someone performing a familiar task.

  As she turned to leave, her gaze swept across the tavern.

  It found Lucius.

  Their eyes met.

  Blue eyes. Void of emotion yet paradoxically full of them. The same eyes that had haunted him across the void, that had looked down at him with inhuman beauty and terrible compassion. The same eyes from his dreams and his fever visions.

  Recognition flickered in those blue depths—not surprise, but acknowledgment. She knew him. Had always known him.

  Then she was gone, moving out into the street with the same fluid grace that had brought her in.

  The moment she departed, the spell broke.

  The tavern erupted into chaos. Shouting. The sound of chairs overturning. Men scrambling toward exits or away from the corpse. The tavernkeeper disappeared into a back room, likely to avoid involvement with what was to come.

  Then came the sound of boots.

  Heavy. Rhythmic. Organized. The King's Guard. A battalion of them, moving with military precision through the tavern entrance. Their armor gleamed in the candlelight, their revolvers already drawn. They swept through the space with the efficiency of men trained for exactly this kind of situation—crowd control, evidence collection, the suppression of disorder.

  Lucius remained motionless at his table.

  One of the guards approached the corpse, examining it with professional detachment. Another began to question the gathered patrons, his tone suggesting that cooperation was not optional.

  But Lucius's attention was elsewhere.

  It was fixed on the memory he had finally grasped, the connection his mind had finally made. Those blue eyes. That silhouette. The way she had moved with such absolute confidence.

  He knew her.

  Or rather, he knew her in the way one knows a dream upon waking—partially, incompletely, with the terrible certainty that the memory contained something essential about his own nature.

  The king's guards stormed the place as the woman left.

  A guard approached Lucius, his armor reflecting candlelight in fractured patterns. The King's Guard wore reinforced plating designed to deflect bullets—thick steel at vital points, lighter material elsewhere for mobility. Repeater rifles hung from several of their shoulders, the barrels long and professional. Some carried heavy shields, metal barriers designed to stop projectiles. Others had sniper rifles slung across their backs, weapons that could reach across distances that conventional revolvers could not bridge.

  "You mutt," the guard said, his accent carrying the clipped tones of the capital's military class. "Do you know what happened here?"

  "A woman struck him dead," Lucius replied evenly.

  The guard's face twisted in disbelief. "So you're saying our chief commander was struck by a woman? A man who could beat ten men while drunk was killed by a woman with a dagger in this age? Are you fucking playing with me?"

  Lucius did not waver. "That is what I saw."

  But doubt was already taking root in his own mind. He rose from his table and approached the corpse, examining it more closely.

  It was not a dagger wound.

  The hole in the man's skull was perfectly circular—a bullet hole, unmistakable in its geometry. The wound spoke of a revolver, of projectile velocity, of a weapon far more deadly than any blade. It was impossible. The woman had used a dagger. He had seen it clearly. Yet the evidence before him contradicted everything he had witnessed.

  One of the guards bent down and retrieved something from the floor—a shell casing. He held it up to the light, examining it with the precision of a man trained in forensics. Then his eyes shifted to Lucius, to the revolver at his hip.

  Recognition dawned. Suspicion crystallized into certainty.

  "You," the guard said, pointing. "That revolver. It matches the shell. Arrest him."

  Before Lucius could fully comprehend what was happening, before he could articulate his confusion or mount a defense, the guards seized him. His hands were bound. The revolver was taken from his hip. He was dragged through the streets of Moonlight Meadows toward a destination that pulled at something deep in his memory.

  The execution center.

  As they approached, recognition struck him like a physical blow. This was the same place. The same stone platform. The same architecture of death. Even after two centuries, even after empires had risen and fallen, the execution center remained unchanged—a permanent fixture of the kingdom's justice, or lack thereof.

  The crowd began to gather.

  Word spread quickly through the city that another execution would occur. People emerged from their homes and stalls, drawn by the promise of spectacle. A man would die today. It would be a momentary escape from their ordinary misery, a brief window into drama and violence and the terrible certainty of mortality applied to someone other than themselves.

  Lucius was placed on the platform.

  A man approached him—tall, noble-bearing, with the carriage of someone accustomed to power and authority. His armor was pristine, maintained with obsessive care. At his hip hung a revolver so polished that it seemed to emit light, its shine speaking of constant use and meticulous upkeep. His eyes held the cold clarity of a soldier who had made peace with violence long ago.

  This was Veynar. Head of the King's Guard.

  A speaker took the platform, his voice carrying across the gathered crowd.

  "Today we will be sentencing this ungrateful wildling to death!" the speaker declared. "He was the one who murdered the King's Guard's chief commander, Berger. His sentence will be carried out by the head of the King's Guard, Sir Veynar!"

  Veynar stepped forward onto the platform.

  "This man here has murdered my beloved friend Berger," he said, his voice steady and measured. "A father. A son. A loyal servant to the king and kingdom. A true upholder of our law. Today I will end this man's life to avenge my friend."

  He paused, and in that pause lived something unexpected—a gesture toward fairness, toward honor.

  "But one of my guards told me that during his arrest, this man kept claiming his innocence. He kept saying he didn't kill Berger. So in the light of our god Deidar, the one who judges, I give this man one chance for his life."

  Veynar drew his revolver with fluid grace.

  "I will duel him here on this platform. If he kills me, then he walks free. If I kill him, then justice is served."

  He extended the offer with the confidence of a man who had never lost a duel in his life. Around them, the crowd erupted in anticipation. This was better than a simple execution. This was a spectacle. This was the possibility of surprise.

  Lucius stood on the platform where Chyros had stood centuries ago.

  The irony was not lost on him.

  History repeating itself. The same stage. Different actors. The same script of injustice and predetermined outcomes, dressed up in the language of honor and fairness.

  But Lucius understood something that Veynar did not.

  The woman in the tavern—the one with blue eyes—had not just killed a man. She had orchestrated this. She had set up the circumstances that would place Lucius exactly where she wanted him. On this platform. Facing a duel. With the entire city watching.

  It was not an accident that he had been arrested for a murder he did not commit.

  It was a setup. A trap. A game being played by someone who understood the rules of vengeance and justice better than anyone alive.

  And as Veynar waited for his response, as the crowd held its breath, Lucius finally understood the depth of his enemy's power.

  The Gazer was not hiding in the shadows anymore.

  Gazer was orchestrating the very events that defined the kingdom's justice system. Gazer was weaving fate itself into patterns designed to serve a purpose Lucius had yet to fully comprehend.

  Lucius accepted the duel.

  His revolver was returned to him—a single bullet loaded into the chamber. The weight felt wrong in his hand, insufficient for what was about to occur. His hands were untied. He was escorted to a position twenty yards from Veynar, the distance that would define who lived and who died.

  Before the duel could begin, Veynar approached.

  He leaned close to Lucius's ear, his voice low and calm, stripped of all emotion except absolute certainty. "Today you will die. Your tone calm and calculated, you are just too early in this game. And today I will kill you even if you are a god."

  The word struck Lucius like a blade.

  God. Not metaphor. Not exaggeration. Certainty. The kind of certainty that came from knowledge, from understanding, from seeing beyond the veil that obscured most men's perception of reality.

  Veynar knew.

  Knew what Lucius was. Knew what he had become. Knew the terrible truth that Lucius himself was still struggling to comprehend.

  Veynar returned to his position, twenty yards away, his revolver hanging loosely at his side. The speaker moved to the center of the platform, preparing to give the signal that would begin the duel.

  But Veynar spoke once more.

  His voice carried across the execution platform with the weight of something ancient and terrible. And in it, he spoke a name—a name that Lucius had not heard spoken aloud in centuries, a name he had nearly forgotten himself, a name that belonged to a man who had existed before all of this, before the Brotherhood, before the sword, before the void and the resurrection.

  "Today you die here, Lightbringer."

  The name.

  Lucius Lightbringer. A name only his closest companions had known. A name from another age entirely. A name that carried with it the weight of an identity he had spent two centuries trying to escape.

  Lucius went rigid.

  The speaker, unaware of the significance of what had just been spoken, raised his hand. "When I say fire, you both shoot. Whoever is standing is the one our god would deem worthy."

  "Fire!" the speaker shouted.

  A shot rang out.

  It was impossibly fast. Veynar's hand moved with the precision of someone who had practiced this motion ten thousand times. The revolver rose. The trigger depressed. The projectile traveled the distance between them with absolute inevitability.

  It struck clean.

  Right between Lucius's eyes. The bullet punched through bone and brain matter, exploding out the back of his skull in a spray of blood and tissue. The impact threw him backward. His feet left the ground. His body fell like a cut tree, striking the platform with a wet finality.

  Lucius lay on his back.

  The sky above was gray and cloudy, indifferent to the death occurring beneath it. He could see the clouds moving slowly across his field of vision. Could see the blurred shapes of people surrounding the platform, their faces painted with the satisfaction of witnessing death.

  The light in his eyes faded.

  Not slowly. Instantly. As if a candle had been snuffed out by an invisible hand. His breathing stopped. His heart—that impossible thing that had persisted for so long—ceased its half-rhythm.

  And Lucius, Lightbringer, the man who could not die, died once more.

  The crowd erupted into cheers. Veynar holstered his revolver with casual grace, acknowledging the applause as if he had merely performed a routine task. The speaker proclaimed the verdict of their god Deidar—that justice had been served, that the ungrateful wildling had been punished, that order had been maintained.

  On the execution platform, two centuries after another man had fallen in the same spot, Lucius's corpse lay cooling beneath the cloudy sky.

  The game, it seemed, was only just beginning.

  The best thing happened to me that day was seeing those eyes, even though i saw my death just moments later but those eyes just gave me comfort, it was like finding your long lost toy that you used to play with all the time, it was getting in loving arms after a hard day, like a warm meal in cold blizzard, it was everything to sacrifice for maybe i loved those eyes too much, or maybe they mesmerised me but it was a spell I didn't want to break. But being labelled a god when you know that you are far away from being a god than a common man is like a hammer that breaks that fragile spell, and being killed after being called a god is much more of an after impact. But I think Veynar forgot something. He forgot that he made me remember something that came to haunt the kingdom, that brought the downfall of the kingdom. Lightbringer that wasn't barely my last name, that was a destiny that I defied and he intertwined that destiny with my vengeance that brought the fall of Morrowind.

  Don't label a man as god because he might deny,

  Don't look behind the closed doors that you don't want to open pry.