Beginning and End

What have you become?

When you first ascended, it was about the people. The Dominion deserved to rule the mountains, for the sake of everyone therein. The other Kingdoms were bumbling fools in comparison to the might of your king, and you fought with fervor on every battlefield because you truly believed in the cause.

You loved to hear the cheering. You were a hero. A shining beacon of virtue, an honorable man. You did everything in your power to minimize casualties, to ensure that every war was as bloodless and swift as it could be. You were a saint in flesh, and then a God among the stars.

A long-suppressed echo of what you once were has surfaced from the waters of your mind like a drowning man. Dragging himself to shore, he looks up and sees himself—twisted, broken, wreathed in shattered steel and blood... smiling.

It stopped being about protection. It stopped being about necessity. It stopped being about what was right. It became about shedding blood.

The people had been taught not to care about being safer, about being happier, about being treated fairly and with empathy. Instead, they had been taught that one thing above all was most important—their enemies. The world and the horrid beasts within were forever out to get them, a thousand hands reaching for their souls, and only the apparatus of the state and its divine patron could punish these vile forces. Their overlords whipped them into a frenzy. They didn’t need food to nourish their bodies or coin to fill their coffers. All they wanted was blood.

Blood. Blood. Blood. Your pretensions to honor and glory became a thin façade, a human face stretched over the gaping razor-lined maw of a monster, slavering for another taste of its foes. Any avarice, any prejudice, any senseless hatred could be dressed up in your trappings and sold to the public as heroism, and they would believe it.

This was not because they were fools, though many were. Not even because they genuinely wanted to believe that the world was a just place. But instead, for many of them, crushing and tormenting the enemies of the Dominion became more important than anything else. To them, the thing you had become WAS a hero—something powerful enough to terrify the foes that they’d come to hate so much.

For many, the Dominion had become a source of pride, for whatever reason. To see it wield its awesome and awful power against their enemies was exhilarating. They didn’t care who those enemies were—to stand against the Dominion was a vile act worthy of death all its own, and to ask questions would be to dampen the joy they felt in watching their Dominion trample those they felt were lesser.

It stopped mattering what you fought for, and only that you fought. Tests of mettle punctuated by bouts of healing magic that left no casualties became vicious exchanges of gunfire and arrows that ended with corpses strung up in trees. Your worshippers ultimately didn’t care what their enemies felt or thought, only that the state had designated them such—it was all bloodsport, an opportunity to seek catharsis in brutalizing the lesser.

And now… you… stare at you.

Everything you had been, from the day you first ascended until the moment you fell, collapses together into two endpoints:

A forgotten hero, and a monument to brutality.