War Drums

Vizio soon found out – these were not metaphorical drums.

Not poetic allegories. These were real, thundering, cosmic – like the heart of creation itself reaching out its hands. The first strike hit like a falling mountain. The second, like a universe gasping in its last breath. The third echoed through Vizio’s very bones, loud enough to unwrite thought.

They came from nowhere and everywhere, muffled yet overwhelming, primal yet orchestral. Each boom seemed to grab hold of his senses and twist. The sky cracked above him, the earth curled beneath him, and Vizio struggled from Orion’s grip. Not from pain. Not yet. But from the world turning against his understanding.

This lightning didn’t simply destroy.

This was an invasion.

It surged into his mind, threading through the fragile wires of thought, flooding his nerves with fire and noise. This was the sound of war drums, crashing down and conquering the insects beneath. They marched down corridors of memory and identity, blasting open locked doors, scrawling over every page with the mark of a returning god.

Vizio clutched at his head. His scream went silent in his throat, swallowed by the roar that wasn’t real, but somehow echoed into a super state of realism, above what his normal senses could handle. He was the time stopper, but here, The very concept of time stuttered. The snow above seemed to fall sideways. The Wasteland itself groaned, weakened from the Forever to the finite.

And still, Orion stood unmoved. The lightning danced around him like serpents at his feet, flaring brighter with each beat. His eyes were stars that had remembered how to hate. The Starheart pulsed within his chest, no longer dormant, its ancient orchestra synchronizing with the conquest, torturing the frozen rot with eternal cosmic fire.

“Hear my voice, worm. Death would be a mercy now – one I will not grant.”

Vizio collapsed to the grass of the school field, too tired to even scream, and yet the voice of the frozen winter still traveled, stretching impossibly long into the distant horizon, echoing past the confines of sound into something more like a soul unraveling. When it finally died out, the silence felt bruised.

He lay there twitching, and the only words that managed to fall from his lips were choked and fractured:

"How… not possible..."

Orion stood above him, eyes still seething with that impossible lightning, now dimming. Without a word, he raised his hand, and the fire of the Starheart obeyed. A cosmic funnel of flame opened above the field, impossibly deep, its inside layered with stars that moved like gears.

There was a finality to this flame, flickering in and out of its mathematical equations. It sucked Vizio upward without resistance, devouring him whole into the secret universe nested inside the Starheart’s core.

"I’ll let the torture simmer for a while," Orion muttered, like one shelving a burden for another day.

Then, he turned. His eyes softened for the first time in what felt like centuries.

“Maiden.”

She was kneeling, dazed, but not from injury. Orion’s protective barrier had managed to hold up, mostly. But as he approached, he noticed her staring at her arm. Her gaze was locked onto a single, flickering spark.

A sliver of purple lightning. Tiny. Harmless, almost. Barely a scratch on her skin.

But it was enough.

Her pupils dilated. The wind around her stopped, or maybe time itself hiccuped, but she was not sure. She wasn’t seeing the school field anymore, blinking her view out of existence – to be a witness to something else.

First came the image of a colossal being – that eight feet tall god, a walking fortress of living rock. His eyes lit up with judgment as he brought his foot down onto a village like he was stomping a candle.

Then came another. Not the stone beast, but a figure clad in jet-black armor, leaner, faster. He wielded a sword as long as a river, absurd in length, dragging it behind him like a god might drag fate by the side. The black of his armor shimmered like obsidian in twilight, and around his neck – a scarf, soaked in the black.

Her vision switched again.

Now seeing a pale warrior, hair bone white, skin stretched taut over something no longer quite human. Cloaked in shadow. A vampire king, perhaps. He raised his bony hand, pointing a finger at legions that did not dare breathe.

Another. The same white-haired man, older now. A priest. But taller than the stars. He reached up, seized the moon in one hand, a star in the other, and crushed them like glass beads.

And in the end, a final vision. The same figure knelt, surrounded by cosmic fire and ruin. Quiet now. He picked up a red scarf from the ashes, and wrapped it slowly around his neck.

The same scarf.

The same figure.

And yet none of them were the same.

They couldn’t be. They were too different. Contradictions stacked like mirrors.

Brute, swordsman, priest, god, monster. But somehow... she knew. They were all the same person. All at once. All real.

If enough people believe – it will become true.

HEY!

Orion’s voice cut through the chaos in her mind, somehow healing her of the madness produced from the lightning. She could barely feel herself think, with her breath getting shorter by the second before coming back to a soothing state of normalcy. She felt like she had just run a marathon, burning through three days’ worth of calories.

Slowly, she could feel her fingers again, then her knees, her heartbeat.

It was like waking up from drowning.

And out of the water, she saw his face.

“Are you… hurt?” Orion looked down at her arm.

She glanced, as if only now remembering the lightning had grazed her. She responded:

“Yeah… I’m fine… I’m fine…”

The stone-cold look on Orion’s face – for this rare moment, seemingly like he was able to relax, and perhaps even a little relieved.

“That’s good… that’s good… stay close to me, okay?”

Looking up at him once more, Emi did not know what else to do except nod her head.