The Rogue God moved through the Ether, an unstable dimension layered beneath the mortal realm, pulsing with the chaotic heartbeat of the universe. He traveled with unfathomable speed, breaching the laws of physics and brushing against the boundaries of reality. Space did not stretch before him, it caved inward—pulling him, bending around his presence like a desperate servant welcoming its master. The Rogue God moved at Mach 14, and even that speed seemed sluggish compared to the shifting intent in his twisted mind.
The Ether was not meant for mortals. It was a liminal space, where energy from a thousand broken realities festered. Time swirled in unnatural loops, light existed only to mock darkness, and gravity was an optional suggestion. The Rogue God's passage through it was like an infection through a vein. Behind him, the space he tore through left scars of sickly red lightning and imploded star fragments.
He passed beings that defied language. Creatures without form or sanity, named only in the ancient scripts of dead pantheons. He glided past a Sorrak'tuun, a floating spine wrapped in worming tendrils of thought-flesh, its vertebrae rotating endlessly while screaming hymns in reverse Latin. The creature tried to latch onto the Rogue God, but his presence alone reduced it to smoldering ash and reversed the birth of its existence.
Then came a Zha'dran, a creature composed entirely of twitching eyes stitched into a spinning orb of obsidian-black nerves. It watched the Rogue God pass, but its vision was shattered, each eye rupturing one by one in sequence, like fireworks of gore.
Further still, he crossed paths with a Velmurg, a landmass-sized arthropod with a hundred thousand legs and a city on its back carved from screaming flesh. The city itself was alive, moaning in a language of agony, its inhabitants—eldritch, gelatinous worms—bowing as he approached. The Velmurg lowered its head, allowing the Rogue God to pass above with silent deference.
But not all bowed. A massive serpent-shaped creature, the Therazuun, challenged his passage. Its scales were mirrors that reflected the viewer's worst trauma, forcing minds to collapse under the weight of their guilt. It roared with a mouth that contained no teeth, only void. The Rogue God didn't even look at it. With a mere thought, he turned the creature inside out, then back again, then removed its concept of self until it folded back into the ether as a non-being, never to have existed.
The Rogue God snickered in disdain.
"This universe is full of so many broken toys. How fitting that my master thinks a mortal like that boy is important. That child... Daniel. Why? What interest could he hold for a god such as Him?"
As he moved further through the dimension, the terrain around him warped. Great rivers of liquid time flowed through suspended islands made of regret. Skeletons of dead titans floated in the sky, moaning with haunted memories. He flew through one of their skulls, watching the memories of entire civilizations scream silently in the eye sockets.
Soon, the atmosphere thickened. The energy became malignant, tasting of blight and rust. The Rogue God grinned wider, his thousand mouths twisting open, drooling yellow smoke that corroded the space around him.
"Ah. Home."
He slowed, finally descending toward a structure that loomed ahead in the distance. No, not a structure. A citadel. A hellish fortress of ancient origin. It looked like something built by the screams of dying gods.
The castle stood atop a mountain of skulls, some human, some not. It was layered in obsidian so dark it swallowed light entirely. Rivers of boiling blood flowed around it in intricate patterns, forming runes older than time. The gates were carved from the bones of saints, fused with still-beating hearts of dragons, and pulsed like a living creature.
Every brick of the castle was a sin made manifest, etched with the torments of those who had tried to oppose its rulers. Gargoyles hung from the battlements—except they weren't stone. They were cursed souls, forever frozen in mid-scream, their bodies flayed open and eyes darting in panic. The air smelled of sulfur, blood, rotting angel wings, and despair. Lightning didn't strike here—it bled across the sky in jagged lines of raw hate.
He approached the castle slowly now, for this place was sacred. Not to any faith or doctrine, but to something far worse. It was sacred to betrayal. Sacred to entropy. Sacred to the power that should not be. And here, he was merely a servant.
And he knew, the moment he entered, that he would once again be reminded of his place.
The Rogue God passed through the gates without touching them. They recoiled from his presence, groaning open as if in agony. The blackened bones cracked under his gaze, the dragon hearts embedded in the frame thudding once, like the toll of a warning bell.
Inside, the castle was colder than death.
A long corridor stretched before him, impossibly straight, impossibly long. The floor was paved in crimson velvet, a red carpet that seemed soaked more in dried blood than dyed thread. Every step the Rogue God took pressed footprints into it that sizzled and hissed with a poisonous black smoke. The carpet led into oblivion, but the Rogue God did not hesitate. He walked.
On either side of the hall stood twisted pillars. Not carved, but grown. They looked like charred muscle tissue wound tightly into spirals. Between these abominations were alcoves, each one housing a nightmare made flesh.
To his right, a towering skeletal beast hung upside down in chains, its hollow eye sockets filled with crying infants' faces that screamed in silence. The sound of weeping echoed from nowhere, bouncing through the halls without a source.
To his left, a woman-shaped thing stitched together from a dozen species danced in slow motion, held aloft by invisible strings. Her mouth, located on her stomach, whispered in tongues while flies swarmed through the eye-sockets on her forehead.
Each nightmare was alive. Each one watched him.
Further down, the walls shifted and pulsed like living organisms, veins throbbing beneath obsidian skin. They bled from time to time, releasing thick, purple ichor that hissed as it touched the floor. The ceiling above loomed too high to see, vanishing into blackness, but massive chains hung from it, some ending in hooks, others still dripping with divine ichor, remnants of fallen celestials that had dared trespass.
Torches lined the walls, but they gave no light. Instead, they radiated whispers. Words of betrayal. Of torment. Of madness. Some cried for help. Some begged to die. Some simply laughed.
He passed murals etched in gore and black ink—depictions of kingdoms falling into flame, of gods devoured, of celestial bodies broken apart and consumed. One mural showed a child's face at the center of a storm of ruin.
The Rogue God paused only briefly to observe it, then chuckled.
"They have painted prophecy in blood," he said. "How fitting."
He walked deeper.
The air grew denser. The further in he went, the more gravity seemed to resist him—not because it weighed him down, but because it feared him. It twisted in reverse, becoming thinner yet more oppressive. Like walking through a vacuum that wanted to scream.
Monstrous forms shifted in the periphery of his vision, just out of focus. Shadows shaped like kings, priests, angels—all kneeling, all beheaded. Chains slithered across the floor, dragging unseen prisoners deeper into the bowels of the structure. The castle breathed now, each inhale trembling through the Rogue God's feet, each exhale a moan from a million cursed souls buried in its foundations.
And then he reached it.
A vast double door. Fifty feet high, thirty wide. Made of cracked obsidian glass fused with cursed gold. Etchings of serpents, blasphemies, and the black sun adorned it. It pulsed with malice. In the center of the door, an eye rested. Not painted, not sculpted—real. A living eye, red and slitted like a dragon's, staring straight into the Rogue God's soul. It blinked once. The air convulsed.
The Rogue God stopped before it, his grotesque form reflecting in the polished black surface. Every misshapen limb, every leaking sore, every muttering mouth and crawling maggot shown with brutal clarity.
He tilted his head slightly.
"I've returned," he said aloud, though no one had asked.
Then he waited.
Not because he needed permission, but because what lay beyond was not a place even a Rogue God dared enter uninvited.
Not without consequence.
The obsidian doors did not open—they recoiled, as if in terror of the presence behind them. The eye at their center rolled backward into its socket and vanished, leaving behind a gaping, fleshy void. The doors unsealed with a sound like bone tearing from sinew, parting to reveal darkness so deep it devoured light.
The Rogue God entered.
Inside, silence reigned. Not the absence of sound, but the oppressive stillness of a grave that had never known peace. A colossal hall stretched out before him. The floor was made of black glass, cracked and bleeding from within, as if something monstrous clawed at it from the other side. Pillars of fossilized bone held up a ceiling lost in shadow, dripping with slow, thick ichor that never touched the ground.
At the far end of the hall, a throne loomed.
The throne groaned again, reshaping as the figure seated upon it shifted forward—revealing himself not as a hulking monster, but something far more unsettling.
The Demon King stood.
He was six feet tall. Not towering by divine standards, but his presence distorted perception—made the air feel heavier, as though reality itself bent to his posture. His physique was carved in sharp, brutal relief: muscular to a terrifying degree, each fiber of his body coiled with precision, strength, and savagery.
His features were disturbingly symmetrical. Perfectly so. Eyes aligned, jaw chiseled, cheekbones sculpted like the work of an obsessive artisan. But it was the kind of perfection that triggered unease, as if nature had been tampered with—refined beyond recognition.
His skin was pale, but not sickly. It almost glowed with an unnatural fairness, as though light feared to touch it directly. It gave off no warmth. Only the cold assurance of something eternal.
Thick black hair—wild, untamed, and streaked with streaks of deep crimson—fell just above his shoulders. It moved ever so slightly, even in the absence of wind, as if it lived. As if it breathed with him.
He wore no mantle, no royal insignia, no crown. He needed none.
His torso was bare, every muscle honed, marked only by the faintest scars—each one a history of some god he had fought and broken. The scars pulsed, subtly, with the echoes of dying names.
He wore only tight, flexible black greaves that clung to his frame like a second skin, molded from some material not of this world. They shimmered with the dark iridescence of shattered souls, and extended down to his bare feet—feet that stood comfortably on blood, fire, or bone.
This was no beast. This was a king. A weapon forged by hatred and refined by endless war.
His hands grasped something alive. Something humanoid. Something screaming.
It was a lesser being, twisted by magic and horror, perhaps once human. Its limbs flailed in futility, its voice cracked from endless pleading.
The Demon King took a bite.
The flesh tore like soaked parchment. The thing screamed in a thousand languages, tears of molten silver running from its sockets. It did not die. It simply suffered.
The Rogue God stood still. Even his countless mouths fell silent.
The Demon King chewed slowly, savoring. Then, without looking, he spoke.
"Report."
The Rogue God flinched. The word hit him like a spiritual bludgeon. He stepped forward, his grotesque frame twitching in involuntary submission.
"My lord… I did as ordered. I observed the boy. The one called Daniel."
The Demon King said nothing. His glowing eyes flickered with quiet judgment.
The Rogue God continued, his voice trembling slightly. "He is… not what I expected. Young, yes. Mortal, yes. But he bears the mark. The mark of the cursed fate. I—I saw it clearly when he slept."
Another bite. More screams. The Demon King's gaze remained fixed on the dying creature in his hand.
"I sensed divine interference," the Rogue God continued quickly. "The Saint of Light made contact. Telepathic communion. They spoke."
The Demon King's chewing slowed.
"What was said?" he asked, voice devoid of tone. It was simply sound; neither living nor dead, simply… final.
The Rogue God swallowed, his own limbs trembling, trying to hold themselves in place. Some of his mouths began muttering nonsense. Others cried.
"He spoke of training. Of strength. The Saint guided him. Gave him… purpose. The boy still believes in humanity, in hope. He still fights."
A pause.
The Demon King leaned back into his throne. The room itself seemed to groan at the movement.
The Rogue God hesitated. Then, despite the chill crawling up what remained of his spine, he dared to ask.
"My lord… forgive the question, but… why? Why him? Why is he so… important?"
For a long moment, the throne hall was still.
Then the Demon King laughed.
It was not joy. It was the sound of graves opening. Of promises broken. It echoed like the collapse of heaven's last gate.
"Because he was never meant to live."
The Rogue God blinked.
The Demon King's voice came low, but deeper than any chasm.
"He was erased. Not killed, erased. Torn from time. I watched him die. I killed him. Not just once, but in every possible branch of fate. Every echo of his being was extinguished."
His fingers curled.
"And yet he returned."
The Demon King's hands ignited with silent black flame.
"He crawled back. Reincarnated. Regressed. He defied my will, the will of the world, and the very laws of death."
His voice grew darker still.
"I want him to rise. I want him to grow. I want him to believe he has a chance. That he is chosen. That fate is on his side. And when he stands tall; when he thinks he is ready—"
The Demon King grinned.
"I will crush him again."
The Rogue God shivered. Even he, a being beyond morality and reason, felt dread.
The Demon King turned his gaze upon him fully now.
"Leave. Watch him. Do not interfere. He is not yet ripe."
The Rogue God bowed, his countless limbs scraping against the bloodstained floor.
"As you command, my king."
And with that, he vanished in a ripple of distortion, the weight of the Demon King's will still clawing at his essence.
Behind him, the throne breathed. The castle moaned.
And the corpse on the floor still begged for death.