Esofar Kills Everyone Part II: There's More Murder

## Prologue - The Third and Final Symphony

The Prince of Shadows was angry, no, furious.

The Pillar of Chaos was laughing at him. “I didn’t work, did it?”

“Shut up,” Prince Esofar growled, pressing his forehead against one of the jagged chunks of shattered cornerstone. The cornerstone was broken but for some reason, some inexplicable infuriating reason, magic still worked as it should. Or close to it, reality was still fractured.

“No I don’t think I will,” Esofar the Pillar laughed, “This is great! You’re pathetic!”

“Shut *up*!” he hissed, driving his fist into the stone and watching it shatter, hollow and unsatisfying, blood spilling from hit splitting knuckles.

Esofar laughed again, the most annoying sound in all the worlds and the places beyond. “She’s still winning. After all these years of you planning your revenge, the Supreme is still winning.”

The prince withdrew to his mind where the chaos pillar lounged insolently in his too-big red coat, his tumble of unbound golden hair doing nothing to conceal the hollowness of his eyes and cheeks.

“Back so soon? I thought you said I was just a worm? Did I manage to burrow under your skin?”

Prince Esofar did not speak, choosing to instead summon his spear of darkness. Relishing in the fear that lit like a prayer candle in the pillar’s listless eyes, he stepped forward slowly, preadatorally. Upon reaching Esofar he stopped. He smiled. In the blink of an eye, he sprung into movement, sending his spear through Esofar’s shoulder to prevent the last-minute mad dash he’d tried to make out of the way.

The Pillar cried out in pain as Esofar twisted the spear completely through the muscle and stabbed it into the mental barrier he’d kept the pillar caged in, leaving Esofar pinned. “You are a worm, and you will not speak to me as I proceed or I will be back and I will do worse to you than this. Do you understand?”

Esofar said nothing, glaring at him with simmering animal rage.

“Do-” a twist of the spear, “You-” again, “Understand?”

“Yes,” the pillar spat, breathing sharp with pain.

The prince smiled and summoned another spear, driving this one through his host’s stomach, “You spoke.”

He walked through the bloodstream, unhurried and casual. The beasts of blood leaped upon him as he walked on water like a twisted mockery of the singular God and each one found its teeth ripped from its maw, eyes gouged out and organs yanked savagely from soft skin with a damp squelch. Esofar was angry, but anger was fun. His pillar host was silent once more and he could carve a killing path to the space stone. There was an army gathering there, he could sense it. Fine, he would slaughter them. It would be fun.

Triss guarded the heart by herself, but he trusted her. She was broken, molded to his will. And there was no one to defeat her, if that were even possible. Triss herself was not much, but she was the ancestor of his pillar host and soon to be the mother of his rebirth. She was nothing, but she bred greatness. And she was more of that nothingness to him than everyone else.

They fell beneath his fingertips as he arrived. Carcass gods, old and new, and dead mortal heroes alike, each stood before him, giving their soul if not their life to the cause and each fell to him, his spear in hand conducting an orchestra of cries and splashing blood until he was covered in it head to toe. Red dripped down his spear and ran in rivulets down his arms, dropping off the tips of his bangs and tracing tear tracks down his cheeks where he licked it off his lips and smiled over the carnage.

It had taken him a long time to kill them all, not because they’d been powerful enough to match up to him, but the sheer volume of bodies that had been thrown in front of him like sacrifices to buy time had… well they’d worked as intended.

Why… Why were they here? Who had gathered this army and set them against him to be erased from existence? What purpose did a little extra struggle, barely an hour of slaughter give them? The only answer was... time. Esofar’s mind jumped unbidden to the Cornerstone of Time, barely guarded by Triss. They couldn’t be thinking of going back, not when the Supreme was in such a weakened state already. Still, the idea gnawed at him. But aside from whoever was leading this futile resistance, who could have summoned this dead army? Well that answer was obvious.

“Pillar,” Prince Esofar purred, seeing in his mind's eye the pillar in question stiffen in fear where he was trying to pull the spear out of his shoulder in pained silence. “Your little friend the Death Pillar that you asked me to let live… is this her doing?”

“I don’t know,” the Pillar lied, “Anyone can open the gates with her keyring, not just the keeper. This could be anyone’s doing if they took Bianca’s keys.”

The prince chuckled, a low rolling wave of malice, “You’re cleverer than I give you credit for. I’ll admit, you played me, appealing to my cruelty like that. But even though I let her live then… suffice to say I won’t be making the same mistake twice.”

“What? No!” Esofar shouted, attempting to clamber to his feet but halting as the spear shaft in his torso shifted and agony shot up his spine, “You can’t! You bastard, don’t even think about touching her! I’ll kill you!”

With a flick of the wrist and three more spears, the pillar finally shut up, choking out a weak “Please,” before succumbing to unconsciousness.

Prince Esofar grinned as the space cornerstone cracked under his hand and shattered. New plan. Destroy whoever tried to mess with Triss and the Time Stone, then find and kill that sweet little death goddess with Esofar’s hands. This was just a small hitch in his plans, a mere pebble in his path.

It was a beautiful day for carnage.

## Chapter 1 - Skulls for the Skull Throne

There was, all things considered, less blood than he thought there’d be.

That wasn’t to say there was only a little blood, or even a moderate amount of the stuff, but although there was a sizable puddle, for a creature so vastly huge and important as the Supreme the amount of blood she was in was simply not proportionate to his expectations.

As the elder god of injury, and arguably healing (and perhaps blood if the old texts were to be believed), Naomi considered himself to be something of an expert on the substance. He was one of the oldest creatures in the Supreme’s multiverse, perhaps even in the worlds beyond as well, seeing as he’d been born of dust when she was still in the womb, and she was now quite old. Over his many many millennia of life and several hundred years of death after the fact, he had familiarized himself quite thoroughly with injuries and the subsequent bleeding and sometimes healing that tended to follow. He’d inflicted and healed wounds of epic proportion to monsters now unknown to all but the deceased Knowledge Pillar, who’s devastated library contained the only records of his deeds in the past. He’d slaughtered armies, massacred the greatest kings and queens of old, struck down many of the gods themselves back in the time when the laws of the multiverse had been ill established and divine rule was a mere concept in the minds of the Pillars of Existence. In short, Naomi knew blood, and what to expect before and after it’s involvement.

And yet somehow he found himself to be surprised and underwhelmed by the current state of his sovereign as she bled out. She looked so mortal like this. There were no stars crying for her passing, no ocean of blood as would have been an appropriate send off for a fire-lit viking boat funeral. She did not look like a storybook queen or knight dying heroically, tragically, artistically. She just looked close to death in the most unromantic and terrifying of ways.

Naomi knew Death, he’d walked hand in hand with her on the great olden battlefields and a new incarnation of her legacy stood here with him as well. But more than he knew Death, he knew the dying. He knew the look of someone on their last breaths, whether they were dying on the blade of his sword or dying because he could not save them from someone else’s. And as impossible as it was to believe, the Supreme appeared to be in the latter category.

“So?” asked the pseudo-Chaos Pillar, worried but detached from any hope of living. He too knew Death the Unromantic well, and hated it with dulled and lifeless passion. “Can you save her?”

“I don’t know,” Naomi responded truthfully, “But I can try my best.”

“Your best should be good enough, right?” asked a third voice, high pitched and female. He turned to reassure Bianca, only to realize that it was not her who had spoken.

Rather, a girl who appeared to be about fourteen years old stood next to her. She was clearly Multiversei, but also clearly not. She lacked the deep indigo skin of the starwalking race and was instead a shade of dark earthy brown, though it was speckled with the starlike worlds present on the skin of others of her kind. Instead of a galaxy cloud of hair she had a thick and messy mop of indigo locks pulled into a rudimentary ponytail. But perhaps what was most striking about her was her eyes. They were soulless black pits carved into her face, shadowed and calculating, nothing like the shining white Multiversei eyes or Naomi’s own. They were different from Bianca’s as well, for her blackened eyes contained lighter irises. No, if anything this girl looked like a cross between Multiversei and…

“You’re an Other, aren’t you?” he asked gently.

Naomi had never met the Others in his years of blood and conquest, but he was an Elder God and thus privy to knowledge above the other gods. The first Pillar of Knowledge had invited him to the barely formed Library of Truth when his hands still dripped red with the blood of tyrants and newborn gods to tell him of the creatures that lived beyond their Supreme.

“I do not know enough,” the Pillar had lamented, “For our lady is but a child and all I know is all she does. But she has been told the stories by her father- there are a people other than her own who live in the stars of her desert world. Naomi I need you to know, you are the only one of the gods I am telling this to.”

“But why?” he had asked, for he was a god of blood and destruction and violence. “Why not tell the other elder gods? Or the gods of your domain? You have a god of stories now, do you not?”

The Pillar had laughed and taken Naomi’s red hands in his own, “I am telling you because you are the one I trust most. I don’t know a lot of things, but I will and I will keep trusting you and I will write it and I will tell you because if the worst is to happen I don’t want this knowledge to be lost.”

“Kier,” he’d laughed, “Tell your god of stories. This is a library, these star people will appear in the books as our lady learns more of them. Leave me to my battles and trust that as long as your domain remains the stories will keep.”

“I’m a cautious man, Naomi. I am the Pillar of Knowledge, but knowledge is nothing if kept in one place, inaccessible. And yet my caution prevents me from spreading such tales. I’ve had dark dreams of the future, far off and muddled. Keep the star people in your thoughts and I will keep them in my library and we will have our secret together and trouble no one else with my worries.”

“Your worries,” Naomi murmured, “Are some of the only things that trouble me. I will keep your misgivings of the star people in mind, however vague they may be.”

And he had. He’d returned to the Library every few years, or whenever Kieran had summoned him, until one day it was not his friend before him when he arrived, but rather a girl with limp white hair and dove grey skin.

“Kieran has passed on,” she explained, “I am to succeed him. The Pillars of Knowledge will continue to relay what we learn to you. I find it foolish, but my master thought highly of you, and I will respect his dying wishes. The star people are called Others. You may go now.”

Naomi became a wanderer after that. There were no more battles he needed to fight, all the rebellious gods had long since been quelled, and anyone who dared to rebel could be put down by lesser gods now. Occasionally he returned to the library to hear news of the others from Molly, then Jes, then Anaria, and on and on through generations of Pillars that blended together indiscriminately.

He learned but did not dwell on facts that were presented to him. The Others were a peaceful species. The Others were ruled by a King. There were three Other Princes and one Other Princess. The Supreme and the youngest Other Prince had fallen in love. The Other Queen had died. There was war. The Multiversei were nearly extinct.

Naomi wandered on, thinking and feeling nothing, hearing only the last breaths and screams and pleads of his victims every night as he drifted off to sleep and in his neverending nightmares. His hands felt red with blood and no matter how many times he cleaned them in sacred springs and wells of holy water in every world he visited, the invisible stains would never wash off. He was a god of injury without anyone to injure, a god of blood without any to spill, a god raised and forged in war that no longer existed. His Supreme had no need of him anymore, but still he listened and memorized the stories of the Others lifelessly and robotically. There was nothing else for him to do.

Until one day he returned to the library to hear of the Supreme’s half-other daughter from the new Knowledge Pillar.

“She doesn’t have a name yet,” the Pillar said, “But I doubt you’d be interested in that sort of thing anyway. Kieran’s instructions were very clear: ‘inform Naomi of the activity of the star-people’ they say, and nothing else. Anyway, what have you been up to recently?”

“Don’t you have anything else to do?” he’d asked the Pillar flatly.

“Nope!” he’d said, popping the ‘P’ sound. “I’ve got an apprentice now since this is my third-to-last life. She’s been handling everything around her pretty smoothly for the past year or so.”

Naomi had sighed. Another Pillar had already been born. He’d lost track of how many it had been since Kieran. Ten? Twenty? Thousands? “I’ve been doing nothing. There isn’t any use for me.”

“Huh. Have you ever considered taking up healing? With your knowledge of injuries surely you’d be good at fixing them!”

Naomi considered this briefly, “I will keep that in mind…”

“Please do,” the Pillar said, “Anyway I’m off to find Ingrid. Don’t be a stranger, ‘kay?”

He’d taken the Pillar’s advice, for what else was there to do? Slowly, over the course of only a few hundred years, Naomi’s hands learned to be gentle, to heal instead of hurt. The nightmares subsided slightly, voices shriveling to husky quiet like flower petals in August scorching sun.

And then, inexplicably, there was war again.

It erupted suddenly, from every corner of every planet, worldwide, universe encompassing, devastating for gods all across the vast body of the Supreme. Naomi could have taken up his spear again, donned the mantle of god of blood, god of injury and war, of pestilence and killers. He could have. He didn’t.

Instead he tried to save them. His hands were not dipped red but instead glowing white. Mortals did not fall beneath him, piling and piling into mountains of corpses. Gods fell and he was there to close wounds and undo damage, or to close their sightless eyes and let their souls depart.

The Pillars remained, untouched and jaded. Not one lifted a finger to help save for the Pillar of Creation, Marisol, the godmaker. She’d made too many gods and they were weak with spread out and watered down power. They were slaughtered.

Even the Chaos Pillar, renowned for her kindness, did nothing. She believed her gods were to be safe and she had no obligation to any of the others. Her gods were tucked away from the mortal realm each a powerful force brimming with power, There were, after all, only three of them. (Two by the war's end. The Chaos Pillar was wrong about their safety. Powerful as they may have been, she was soft inside and so were her gods. Esperaunce fell when the mortals discovered doors in their dreams.)

As for the other Pillars, they abdicated from the war for various reasons. The Death Pillar had nothing to worry about, his gods were safe in the dimension beyond life, beyond the Pillars, the war, the Supreme. (They actually were, this time.)

The Yang Pillar shrugged off responsibility as always. He preferred to live carefree, ignorant and blissful. (“What's it to me? If the gods die nothing will upset the balance. I’m sure they’ll work it out, no worries.”)

The Yin Pillar was disinterested. Her gods were similarly few in number and thus powerful forces of nature. They were not too kind like the Chaos Pillar’s. (Darkness, Silence, Cold, and Sleep won many of the battles they partook in. The Yin Pillar was satisfied by her illusion of a contribution.)

The Order Pillar did not care either. Much the same as the Light Pillar, he was sure that if the gods died nothing bad would happen for the multiverse. There was no reason to worry about the rebellion, the Supreme was fine. Interfering would upset the balance, he reasoned. (He had no gods to lose.)

The Life Pillar wanted to interfere. Her children were dying, both mortal and god alike. She did not, however, for although she could feel the seed of sorrow planted in her heart, it would never sprout, never curl its vines around her ribcage and flower across her lungs, blue and heavy-petaled. Pillars were emotionless keepers of the balance, not the peace. Her children were dying. (She couldn’t find it in her to care.)

The Emotion Pillar was similarly unable to feel anything. They all were really, but for some of them it was their only excuse. She had a vast amount of gods, for she believed it was better to leave emotions to the ones who could actually feel them. Many of them died. (She relished it, for every time one fell she could feel their emotion again, if only for a moment. She began to regret her decision when Sorrow died.)

The Knowledge Pillar, puppeteer and cold-hearted watcher of the worlds, encouraged her associates not to interfere. She too believed that nothing bad would come of the gods’ deaths in the long run, and also that it was beneath them to help. (“It is their fault that the mortals have grown unhappy with them, why should we fight their war for them? Besides, are we not here to protect mortal life? Gods are useful, but we can do without them. Mortals sustain us.”)

Naomi was not one of the new, the weak, gods. He was older than them, older than the Pillars too, though less powerful. The Old Gods were middle men of the war, mercenaries, either way the chosen was fine. Some chose to fight for the new gods, others chose to remain aloof, like the Pillars. But eventually a decision had to be made. The gods were losing.

They met at the Cornerstone of Magic, the first time they’d all gathered in one place. They were going to put down the uprising by giving their power to the new gods, passing on the torch, in a sense. Here, at the brain, the Supreme’s thoughts flowed uninterrupted.

*My gods*, she’d thought, *I give you leave to take a piece of me to imbue with your essence. These gods you wish to protect can die without consequence, however… it doesn’t feel right to let them.*

And so those who had power to spare stepped forward. The elder gods of elements, fire, water, earth, and air. (Water and Earth bred metal and ice as well, weakening themselves further and further. They died for it later.) The god of storms and disaster. Darkness, a new god and emissary of Vaaka, who always played both sides. Light, who followed Darkness as his master followed hers. The old god of poison and the god of empty space and dust from before that cornerstone had formed. Morgan, Pillar of Death. The only one who had come to their aid as himself. (Not because he cared. Because *she* did.) Naomi imbued a shard of the cornerstone with healing magic, hoping it could help save the gods, but there was an off chance that due to his previous nature it could become a stone of disease and corruption. He hoped it wouldn’t.

And just like that, the tide turned again. The gods won, at great cost to themselves. Resentment formed between the gods and the Pillars that had created them.

As for Naomi, he died. Like Avonlea and Terrus. Like the nameless space god. They were not the powerful elder gods they once were, they could still have been. He died as he faltered for a split second and his own spear tore through the open wound he already bore for thousands upon thousands of years. The necromancer smiled, resurrection stone in hand. Naomi looked at the fading hands on the spear then up at the face of the ghost she’d pulled out of his heart and the dust from far flung corners of the multiverse.

“Sorry,” Kieran whispered.

Naomi awoke in the Inbetween, Morgan by his side. Wordlessly he was guided to a door, to his afterlife. And there, in death, they finally met again. Until Naomi was called upon by the daughter of that far off old god of storms to fight against the prince of those star-people he’d begun his journey with so long ago.

“Tell me more about them when you return,” Kieran smiled.

“I won’t return,” Naomi said. “My soul will be erased.”

“I know,” he responded, arms wrapping around Naomi and pulling him into a final embrace, “But let me hope, just this once.”

“Come with me?” Naomi pleaded.

“I would only slow you down.” Kieran responded, “I’m a distraction. If I am not with you, at least there is a chance you will return.”

Naomi said nothing, letting his tightening embrace speak for him. If he opened his mouth he would spill his fear and cry. His fingers tightened on the back of Kieran’s shirt.

*I love you*, he thought. He didn’t say it.

So he followed Elecktra, insane, a newborn godling who didn’t know it but knew everything. He followed her to a decaying afterlife where Morgan’s daughter and the true Pillar of Chaos awaited them, where an army of stonebearers and fallen gods left through a gate to act as cannon fodder to buy precious time and slow down the star prince. He followed Death and Chaos out of the Inbetween, to the Supreme, halfway a corpse.

To the girl halfway between Other and Multiversei.

“No,” she responded, “Close though. Umbra - Others -cannot walk here in the Desert That Wasn’t. The sand burns their feet because of all the blood that was spilled during the war. That’s what Mother says at least, though it didn’t do her a lot of good. Can you save her?”

“Your mother is the Supreme?” Bianca asked, voice cracking slightly. “Then you must be-”

“I’m not talking to you,” the Supreme’s daughter cut in, not unkindly as she turned her attention back to Naomi. “You are an elder god, correct? You have Mother’s eyes. Tell me blood god, is your best good enough to save her?”

“I hope so.” he said, “But truthfully I don’t know.”

“How reassuring,” she said mirthlessly, “Well come on then, Pillars. Leave him to his work. Let’s go stand a little to the left by the void, I find it’s easier to work without an audience.”

Naomi returned his attention to the Supreme, white-gold healing magic gathering on his fingertips as he stitched together her torn skin and tissue, reassembling the flakes and splinters of her bones, slowly, slowly, too slowly.

“It seems you’re dying to the one you loved just as I did.” he said sadly. His crimson blood trickled ever steadily out of the gaping hole in his stomach and mingled with the starry blue blood of his Supreme.

“What fools we are,” she rasped quietly, her bloodstained hand rising feebly to rest on his knee.

And they were fools, both of them, and they were both of them dancing with the concept of death if not the being herself. And they had both loved against their judgement and both lost and had life ripped out of their torsos.

It was simple, he supposed, why the Supreme had still loved Esofar enough to trap him within herself rather than kill him when she had the chance. Her daughter was half Other. And for a being as kind as the Supreme, it was perfectly believable that she couldn’t bring herself to kill the father of her child.