The ground squished and splatted as he positioned himself on the bench, fidgeting as he did, anxious to engage his mind on anything but the lingering scold of his sisters gaze. He shifted his feet over the soggy dirt, made eternally sodden due to its proximity to the well only a few feet away. The mud dried in a steam as it settled over the warmth of his inhuman temperature, clumping into dry blotches over his naked feet. He positioned himself on the bench as he normally did during various portions of daylight. His feet, unable to find solace, rotated from crossing over the ankles, to crossing over the knee, to resting flat on the bench as he laid his head back to rest on it.
Quinn Vandoras sat staring out, both bewildered and amused, by how fragile flesh and mind can both be.
It’s not easy being the king of all things.
His uniquely built frame, constructed both by humanoid-like anatomy and the despair of an eternal power, humped over his hands as his elbows braced against his knees. There is always a distinct feeling of being unable to sleep, unable to put ones mind at rest for eternity. Quinn’s dubious stint as a mortal, albeit disgusting and deplorable and filled with anguish, had somehow awakened him to his higher responsibility.
The natural order of things had betrayed humankind, not the other way around, as he originally believed. His crimson eyes delved into the humans around him, and although he felt a particular abjection to their existence and inane ignorance of even the most basic of wisdom, he was able to experience them for the first time… only as they are.
They were born, and then they grew up, mostly in the gutters of nature. They worked at young ages, around eleven or twelve years old, and had a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire. For the most part, humans married around twenty, became middle-aged and formed distasteful wrinkles around thirty, and then died in large part around the age of sixty.
And even knowing how abjectly stupid they existed, wrapped and coddled by the chaos of themselves, Quinn had begun to feel some urgency for their species. Human being were somehow painted, and depended on a canvas prescribed for them, by their own natures. The species was constructed solely on the foundation of a higher utilization, and if they were in fact, as Quinn observed, a bane to the perfect hands of nature then they must also possess qualities that made them endearing.
If nothing else, they had earned a spot among the chaos and among the destruction and among the random caprice of their own existence.
It was a heavy physical labor, the care of home and children and loved ones, and the petty quarrels with one another over politics and alcohol and adultery that filled them up over the horizon of their minds. The humans maintained a primitive sense of morality and justice, often convoluting or mistaking complicated ideas with simple ones. Their discontent for themselves, and even for Quinn himself, led nowhere. They suffered the disposition of their nature. They could only ever focus on petty grievances, and larger evils invariably escaped their notice. Essentially, mortals were all corpses, waiting to be sent back to the grave.
The soggy footsteps of another approached Quinn, uttering a string of mistaken words. The dark-skinned lady mistook him for his sister, which was hardly surprising. Scarlet and he were, after all, identical twins—save for the plumbing. His body sat leaning over his knees, head drooping, letting the braided blood red pony-tail fall carelessly from the front of his veil. His ivory horns peaked out, analyzing the Spider Queen, studying her to determine any threat.
She really was none, and her stupidity proved it.
She may have mistook Quinn for his anatomy, but far worse, she took Scarlet for this harmless creature. Quinn knew better… much better.
Quinn’s great body sat upon the bench, sagging and bulging and protruding from every direction. His muscle frame, his clear and indomitable power, was on full display physically. Not even the blind, within close enough range, could deny the enviable strength that animated from his limbs—a fact well learned by a lady that evening who, blind as she was, managed to bump into his molten and immovable stature.
However, this Spider Queen, a counterpart to Quinn’s eternal dominion that he well recognized as the embodiment of wrath, set next time him. Some part of Quinn, in the infinite expanse of his perception and clarity, recognized that she thought she may be of some threat. A grave mistake, for Quinn was no more vulnerable to immortals than he was mortals.
The king of all is untouchable, invulnerable, and perfectly without any fear of being anything but himself…
…the king of all things is eternal.
Not long after Quinn met the company of wrath, the embodiment of Greed would become company, and nothing is worse than stupidy than stupidity that fails to realize how stupid it is. The sort of ignorance that greed displayed was like an outspread hand in the wind, grasping at the gusts as if they could be contained within the palm.
They meandered, they were insulted time and time again. They faltered and proved they were among the likeness of their inferiors, the mortals that gazed the confrontation.
Quinn plucked at the underside of his fingernails with his dagger, half-expecting one of the two idiots to attempt and draw first-blood. The power of fear, although deniable, is still compelling… and they departed as quickly as they arrived. However, one assurance and iota of clarity lingered still in Quinn’s mind…
Although the mortals were inane, and wretched… they had somehow deserved a place among their own chaos. His eternal kindred had no place in the natural order. Quinn was deserving to rule it all, by his very nature. The king of all never needs to announce himself as his nature, it simply is. It is eternal, and always has been.
A proper king has patience for his subjects.
A propoer king dispatches those who threaten his subjects.
Greed and Wrath had to die, and die soon.
…and die they shall.
That’s being the king.
