1. The Borderland stretched grey and shivered under a sky that never fully cleared — a scarred no-man's-land between the two warring realms, where nothing grew and no army chose to linger. It was here, cast down from Heaven's Gate for a mercy his own King had called treason, that the exiled commander of the Vanguard had wandered for longer than he could count in seasons; out here, time was kept instead by the slow ruin of the ground itself, and it was against that ruin, not against any army, that he measured how far he'd fallen. It was not the rain that scarred the grey plains of the Borderland — rain, after all, cannot be construed as an agent of ruin. It was what the rain did, day, nay week after week: turned ash to a murky paste that clung, gnawing, to everything it touched. He looked down. His hands — once suffused with a light that had oozed from his very knuckles, a radiance hitherto undreamt of by mortal men — were now caked in a filth he no longer had the vanity to scorn. Vestigial, that light. A codger's memory of a crown he'd once worn commanding the Vanguard at Heaven's Gate, back when obedience was mistaken, by him and by his cohort alike, for virtue.
2. "Mercy," the High King had spoken from a throne so gaudy it seemed to mock the very glass spires it was housed in, "is a flaw in steel." Be that as it may — he had not stooped. Bleeding from a dozen wounds, standing between the golden host and a tribe he'd judged too puny, too frail to matter to a war they hadn't asked for, he had dared: "They were routing already. The mortals did nothing but hide. Why must we strike them down too, as though scant mercy were itself a crime?"
3. "Because," came the reply, haughty and inordinate in its finality, "they fail to measure up. And you, of your own volition, have chosen their weakness over our absolute law." Law, the King might as well have said outright, had never once been synonymous with goodness in Heaven's ledger — only with order, and order answered to no mercy it hadn't itself decreed.
4. There was no trial. Trials, he would later construe, are a courtesy extended only to those whose perfidy might still be forgiven. They simply broke his wings — and here the memory grows hazy, less a single blow than an ensuing collapse he cannot, even now, fully order into sequence: whether the shattering of bone preceded or followed the moment he understood that the light he had served for millennia was itself hollow, gilded rather than gold, he could no longer say with any confidence. It was not that Heaven had ever lacked power; it was that its power had never once deserved to be mistaken for goodness. As he fell, he passed through the black smoke of the underworld, where devils — a disgruntled, verminous lot smitten with the prospect of a fresh trophy — reached for him with rusted chains. He did not dally. He struck them back, his brawl with the pits as fierce as his ensuing exile from the light, refusing, out of some instinct he could not name, to be lumped in with either camp. He hit the mortal earth alone, unmoored from both thrones, belonging, whence that day forward, to neither.
5. Centuries passed — or did they merely seem to, the way a stalemate seems eternal to those beset within it? He became a legend fleshed out less by any single deed than by the murky, convoluted rumors of mercenaries and peasants who had never gawked upon him directly. He wandered desolate scar-lands wherein the ribs of fallen titans, casualties of cosmic wars whose causes no chronicle could any longer construe, formed valleys where nothing grew. He watched humanity — their prayers rising like smoke to dissipate, tepid and unanswered, against a sky that gave no inkling of its indifference being anything but total. He witnessed the perfidy of their kings toward one another, their empires going to the dogs through a slipshod, gratuitous cruelty he'd once have called ignoble had he still believed anyone above reproach. He did not hate them for it. He shrugged off their betrayals the way one shrugs off the weather — not from callous disregard, but from a hard-earned, even-keeled recognition that they, too, were merely pawns, cagey and frightened, dabbling at survival in a game whose rules had been levied upon them from above and below alike.
6. Whenever Heaven's agents descended to badger the living into blind obedience, he thwarted them. Whenever Hell's collectors crept up to dupe some soul into a contract designed to ensnare rather than to serve, he tampered with their scheme and broke the chains himself. He courted neither side, and — be it said plainly, lest the point be missed — he was persona non grata in both: the saints, with disdainful sneers, called him demon; the demons, with derisive scorn of their own, called him fool, a wuss who'd wussed out of the only war that mattered. He was, in the parlance of neither realm, merely a man with a sword, standing on a rock, in the sheer and total loitering purview of his own exile. He had come, slowly and without ever choosing to announce it, to a conviction neither throne would have tolerated hearing spoken aloud: that a world offered only two sides to stand on was, by that very offer, already a rigged one.
7. One night, upon the edge of a fissured cliff, the sky split. To the north, a cold celestial light; to the south, a suffocating crimson. The armies were mustering again. Earth, once more, was to be their battlefield — a plaintiff with no court in which to plead its case, no due diligence ever paid to what it might prefer.
8. He looked up at the silent stars — never once had they come to his aid, not out of any earnest malice but out of the same sheer indifference that had swamped every prayer he'd ever witnessed rise and fail. He looked down at the shivered soil beneath his boots.
9. "No more," he whispered — not in trepidation, though trepidation would have been forgivable, but in something closer to the grim, worrywart's clarity of a man who has finally stopped fiddling with half-measures.
10. He did not look back at the sky with longing, nor at the pits with fear. He drew his blade and buried its tip in the mountain's stone.
11. "You want this world?" he shouted into the wind, catching the ominous attention of both impending storms. "Then you'll have to drown me first. I am building a throne out of these ruins — a throne neither of you bequeathed to me, and neither of you can now divest me of. Your crowns will fall. Your hellfire will languish and burn to nothing. But this ground — this ground — remains."
12. The storm hissed. It paused. Whether that pause was respect, hesitation, or merely the gnawing calculation of an attrition neither army wished to begin, no onlooker — had one existed — could have construed with any certainty. He stood alone beneath the endless sky, a mortal heart beating fast, strapped for time, ready for the strike he knew to be imminent, and, for the first time in centuries, entirely his own.