The throne room always smelled of old blood and burnt offerings.
Always.
When you rule a kingdom raised on corpses, that is what you get. The incense the shades burned did nothing. Nothing at all. After ten thousand years you simply stopped noticing it. The same way you stop feeling the weight of the crown once it has rested on your head long enough.
Today I noticed it again.
Funny, the things that catch your eye when you know it is the last time.
The doors at the far end of the hall did not open.
They exploded.
Stone split clean down the middle. Iron hinges tore free and spun across the marble like careless coins tossed by a bored god. Thick clouds of dust rolled in. Behind me one of the attendants made a small, frightened sound — then fell silent.
Smart.
Ares filled the doorway the way a storm fills a valley. Already in his armor — red-black plate that swallowed light instead of reflecting it. Helmet pushed back so I could see his face. That face was always his weakness. He could hide everything else. Not that.
Right now it wore the dangerous expression.
Relaxed.
Calm.
Rage is loud. Calm means he has already done the calculations and likes the result.
He let the silence stretch. Waiting for me to speak. To beg. To explain. That is how these things usually go among gods — much talking before the blood, everyone performing for an audience that is not there.
I picked up the wine cup from the armrest and drank.
The wine was poor. It always is here. Anything that crosses into my kingdom loses something — color, warmth, taste. Those grapes had probably been fine once. Now they tasted like a ash.
I drank anyway.
"You have been busy," Ares said. His voice rolled across the hall without effort. Heavy. Deliberate. Each word placed like a foot upon uncertain ground.
I set the cup down.
"I am always busy," I answered. "Someone has to be."
He moved. Not a charge. Not yet. Just a shift of weight that swallowed half the distance between us before I finished speaking. Men who have never faced him always misunderstand. They think the god of war is all fury and chaos. No. War is precision. Ares is very good at war.
He crossed the rest of the hall in four heartbeats.
The first strike came low from the right, meant to take my legs. I stepped back. Not far enough. The edge of his shield slammed into my side. Something deep cracked. Ribs. Spine. That precise feeling when structure fails.
The floor rushed up.
One knee hit stone. Hand out to steady myself. Cold stone. I knew every crack in it. Ten thousand walks.
Ares stopped in front of me. Not breathing hard. Of course not.
"That is your problem," he said, looking down. "You always believe you are the cleverest one in the room."
I looked up at him.
The pain was loud. Good. Pain is information. It told me the blow had done exactly what I needed. The fracture had opened in the right place.
"Usually I am," I said.
He brought the sword down.
I did not move.
Not because I could not. Because this was the moment. The one I had spent two centuries guiding everything toward. Every choice, every rumor, every careful word whispered through channels I had built over decades — all of it flowing into this exact swing, this exact angle, this exact room.
The blade struck.
And I felt my power move.
Not scatter. Not dissolve. Everyone believes gods simply fade when they die — essence drifting away into cosmic dust. Nothing kept. Nothing saved. Just gone.
That is what I let them believe.
What happened: everything I was — every century of patience and rage and planning — moved exactly as I had taught it. Not outward. Not into emptiness.
Somewhere specific.
Someone specific.
I felt it travel. A thread unspooling across the distance between my kingdom and the mortal world. Finding the soul I had marked three years earlier. The one who had died in the right place, at the right time, with enough emptiness inside to hold what I was sending.
The transfer took less time than the sword falling.
Done.
My cheek pressed against the cold floor. Ares was speaking above me. His boots entered my vision — red-black, a small dent on the left greave from a battle I had no part in.
I was not listening.
I was thinking about the message I had left.
Short. On purpose. No one wants to inherit a lecture.
Ares crouched. Looked at me the way one looks at something already finished. The calm had left his face. Replaced by something flatter. Not triumph. Closer to disappointment. The quiet letdown when everything adds up exactly as expected and still feels empty.
"That is it?" he asked.
I smiled.
Not wide. Just enough.
His eyes narrowed. He had seen that smile before. Never in situations that ended well for those nearby.
"What did you do," he said. Not truly a question. Something colder.
I did not answer.
The warmth of the transfer was already fading. Everything fading. The floor's chill growing distant. The sounds of my throne room going quiet. Ares still crouched over me, hand on my shoulder now, shaking. A strange thought: he had never touched me before. We were not that kind of family.
My last clear thought was of the soul on the other side.
Waking.
Confused.
Finding the message.
Reading it.
I wondered what expression he would make. Fear first? Or the anger striking before understanding — the way it once struck me, standing in a newly divided world, holding the worst third of it while my brothers laughed.
It did not matter.
Whatever look he wore in that first moment was not the one that counted.
The one that counted would come later.
When he felt the weight of what I had left him and recognized it not as a burden — but as the thing he had been missing his entire life without ever knowing it had a name.
I had felt that too.
Once.
Long ago.
Darkness came in from the edges.
I let it.
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