The wind screamed across the wasteland, but Lucian barely heard it anymore.
He sat atop the corpse, one leg draped over a twitching limb that had finally stopped moving. Six arms sprawled in the snow around him like the petals of some grotesque flower. Three heads—or what remained of them. One lay five feet away, its dozen eyes frozen mid-terror, blood pooling black against the white.
Steam rose from the wound. From his breath. From the gap in his armor where claws had found purchase.
Lucian pulled a strand of hair from his face. The tie had come loose during the fight. He didn't bother fixing it.
"Why is the first thing you wanted to do with this power,save the world?"
His voice cut through the howling. He nudged the severed head with his boot, metal scraping against frozen bone.
"What has the world ever done for us that it deserves saving, huh?"
The head stared back. Silent. Judging, maybe. Or empty. Hard to tell with the dead.
Lucian crouched, bracing his forearms against his knees. Blood flaked off his gauntlets. He studied the creature's central eye—the big one, the one that had wept when he'd driven his blade through its second heart.
"The world doesn't need saving, creature." He traced a finger along the monster's frozen snout. "It's beyond saving at this point."
Fog rolled between them, swallowing the horizon. Above, below, in every direction—just white. Just cold. Just the two of them in the space between breaths.
"No, no, no." Lucian stood, his armor groaning with the movement. "What it needs is to be corrected."
The wind shifted. His hair whipped across his face, dark strands stark against pale skin.
"See, I knew you wouldn't understand me." He looked down at the corpse, at all those arms reaching toward a sky they'd never touch. "What needs to happen."
He turned, black armor drinking in what little light filtered through the fog. In the distance, something howled. Another creature, maybe. Another trial. Another step toward whatever he'd decided the world needed to become.
"Perhaps I should just show you what the world could be."
His voice dropped to a whisper that the storm swallowed whole.
"Then you'll finally understand."
Lucian walked into the white, leaving the corpse behind. The fog closed around him like a curtain.
The severed head watched him go.