With each footstep, the bones of another god crunched as Kir trudged across the ash-covered wastes. Above him, the roiling grey clouds of the seventh sky churned with the fury of an apocalypse, and little tufts of dust rose from every footfall to coat the tattered tails of a threadbare cloak. A large object wrapped in stained cloth was held carelessly under his arm, and his other hand used an iron-tipped spear as a walking stick.
Kir’s face was dark with sun and ash, and his eyes were cold as he lifted his head to peer into the world above him. Working his jaw, he mustered up enough saliva to swallow his frustration. Casting around him, he made eye contact with every grinning skull staring back at him out of the drifts of ash. They were accusing them. They had lived their immortal lives without ever taking responsibility for their actions.
Kir sneered at them and chuckled to himself. It had been known that every time a god blinked, a human died. The gods had used that power to their amusement. Every time you prayed to a god, you had to gaze upon their likeness and prostrate yourself before them. Hoping in your heart of hearts that even if the god didn’t answer your prayer, they didn’t blink.
The gods were ruled by Uashkhu, the sky-king. He ruled the gods because He had the power to kill gods by blinking his eyes. Uashkhu celebrated this power by hosting a festival of dust once a year. He and the gods cast handfuls of chalk and sand in each other’s faces, laughing as men and deities fell dead at their feet.
Kir stopped in his trek to watch the ash lift and fall in the ghostly breeze. Stooping, he scooped up a handful of ash and tossed it into the grinning skull of whatever dead god lay before him. The ash billowed out around the skull, obscuring its hollow sockets momentarily.
The only creature Uashkhu had feared was Hadrix, the bone-eater. When Hadrix blinked, all things died—even Uashkhu.
“Not that it did them any good,” Kir said, gripping his spear’s haft until his knuckles turned white. Sucking a breath in through his teeth, he relaxed his hand and continued. There was only one god left.
Marching onward, the ground began to shift and change with each passing mile. The terrain to either side of Kir’s path started falling off until he walked along a single ridge rising out of the landscape.
The clouds overhead never changed.
In the distance to either side of Kir’s path, other ridges came into sight, all converging on the same point beyond the horizon, like the spokes of a wheel coming together at an axle. Everything Kir could see was caked in the choking ash of creation. It hurt to breathe, and the edges of his eyes cracked where his tears mixed with the ash on his face.
Pausing for a breath, he shifted his burden from one arm to the other, rolling the tightness out of his shoulder. He grunted. It wouldn’t be long now. His quest, whether he won or lost, was coming to an end.
The center of creation was unassuming. The ridge Kir had traveled along ran into a projection of stone thrusting up from the ground about half again as tall as a man. Counting the path he had taken, thirteen ridges radiate out from the promontory in all directions.
Taking the thing he carried from under his arm, Kir hefted it over his head and onto the outcrop above him. Taking the haft of his spear in his teeth, he began climbing. Leveraging the tips of his fingers into the cracks and grooves of the stone, he pulled himself up briskly.
The top of the rock was a shallow bowl about three feet across. At the base of the depression was a small pile of softly glowing embers flickering in the breeze. Kir pulled himself to his feet and glared down at the coals. It was hard for him to believe this flame, barely more than a candle, was the source of all this ash.
Leaning forward, he spat into the fire of creation. It sizzled and hissed for far longer than it should have, and the breeze that had been blowing ceased. All was silent at the birthplace of the world.
Even the clouds above stilled.
Looking up, Kir waited. As he watched, the clouds parted to reveal what they concealed. The creature that had been watching him since he’d walked through the twelfth gate of the sun and set foot on the wasteland of the seventh sky. The entity didn’t have a face. Only three eyes loomed in beyond the clouds, floating in the void beyond the world. Colorless things they were with pupils deeper than black and whites paler than death. The size of moons, the eyes stared down at Kir with an alien perspective that set his skin to crawling.
“YOU DARE TO BRING YOUR PETTY WAR TO ME MORTAL?” it said in the voice of ages. “I, THASHKHWU, THE ALL-GOD, WHO SIRED CREATION! YOU WOULD NOT EXIST IF NOT FOR ME! I MADE YOU AND CAN UNMAKE YOU AS I SEE FIT!”
“With the blink of an eye?” asked Kir, “My mother told me you made creation by gazing upon it. She said because you looked, it existed. The mere act of you looking caused the world to be. My father told me the world would end when you no longer saw fit to watch over it. When you weary of its colors and lights and close your eyes to sleep, the world would cease and die.”
“YOU SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO YOUR PARENTS WISDOM. I WONDER WHAT YOU THINK YOU CAN DO BEFORE I SLAY YOU FOR YOUR IMPERTINENCE!”
Kir shrugged up at the three eyes and kicked the cloth-bound object at his feet. It rolled to the bottom of the depression he stood in. Knocking coals aside, the severed head inside gazed up at Thashkhwu with empty bloody sockets.
“Hadrix asked me the same question before I slew him,” Kir said, raising his spear and throwing it. The spear was a common example of its kind. A long, smooth handle of ash and a long-bladed iron spearhead affixed to the handle with a socket. It seemed as ordinary as anything could be.
As it flew through the air, the spear flashed with a searing bolt of lightning. The lightning arcked out and forked into uncountable branching points, striking each pupil of Thashkhwu as the bloodless head of Hadrix transfixed the All-God. The All-God screamed as lightning lanced through its eyes. Translucent ooze bubbled down in gelatinous rivulets to scorch the ashen wastes as Thashkhwu’s eyes boiled with thick popping sounds resounding through the clouds like a mockery of thunder.
The cloth wrapped around Hadrix’s head caught on the embers, and a pillar of fire erupted from the god’s head.
Staggering backward, Kir tumbled to land on the ridge he’d taken to get to this place. Gasping for breath, Kir cackled up at the deity of deities above him. The god that had been the maker of the world and the god that would have been its destroyer.
“HOWWWW?” screeched Thashkhwu.
Kir nearly choked on his words as he fought to stop gasping and cackling, “Uashkhu, the sky-king, held lightning in his hand as his weapon. He would cast it against his enemies in battle, and with each cast, it would fork into seven thousand points. Striking down each of his foes as he did so. Blinking his eyes all the way to kill and kill and kill. The flashing light of his weapon blinded his lesser gods so that they shut their eyes against the light. Killing even more. That was the warfare of the gods.”
Catching his breath, Kir calmed himself and continued, “They didn’t stop to see if the number of deaths they inflicted outnumbered their enemies. They didn’t care. They just did it again for fun. For the joy of power. I knew there had to be a way to stop them. I fought them with cunning and trickery. Stealing their precious treasures and weapons… and I made sure they would never blink again. I put out their eyes.”