The month of April. The air carried the scent of spring — sunlight pouring through half-drawn curtains, birds already too loud for their own good.

  “Arlen!” his mother’s voice cut through the lazy warmth of morning. “If you don’t wake up now, you’ll miss breakfast—and your first day of college!”

  Arlen groaned into his pillow. First day, huh? The thought tugged a smile out of him despite the sleep still clinging to his eyes. He rolled off the bed, feet landing on the cold floor with a dull thud, and squinted at the mirror — brown hair messy, face half-awake, expression halfway between nerves and excitement.

  By the time he reached the kitchen, the table was already full. His father sat at the head, newspaper folded neatly beside a steaming cup of tea. His older brother, Alden, leaned against the counter with a smirk that could’ve belonged to the devil himself.

  “Look who decided to join the living,” Alden teased. “So, little bro, rumour says you’ve got yourself a girlfriend now? Not bad! Bring her home sometime—I’ve gotta meet the girl who managed to survive your awkwardness.”

  “Shut up, Alden,” Arlen muttered, cheeks flushing as he sat down. His mom placed a plate of eggs in front of him and patted his head.

  “Don’t mind him. Eat properly. You’ll need your energy today.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said between bites. The warmth of the food was familiar, grounding—one of those moments you never realize is precious until it’s gone.

  Then, just as he stood to leave, his father spoke up.“Son. Before you go, say a prayer to the gods. They’ll bless your first day.”

  Arlen paused at the doorway, then shook his head slowly.“Sorry, Dad. But I don’t need divine blessings. I’ll stand on my own feet—on my own hard work.”

  His father frowned but said nothing. The silence stretched, and Arlen slipped out before it turned into an argument.

  The streets outside buzzed with spring’s pulse — students in crisp uniforms, laughter, the smell of food carts. He spotted her waiting by the crossing: Chloe, brown hair tied in a neat ponytail, her uniform catching the morning light.

  “Good morning,” she said, voice soft, eyes darting away shyly as he reached her.

  “Morning,” Arlen smiled, slipping his hand into hers. She didn’t pull away. Her blush deepened. For a moment, it was just the two of them walking side by side toward the new chapter of their lives.

  They met someone at the next corner — a tall boy with a lopsided grin and sharp eyes. Darian, Arlen’s childhood friend, and the only person who never sugar-coated life.

  “Arlen!” Darian grinned, nudging him with an elbow. “Early morning date with the girlfriend? Damn, you’re living the dream.”

  “Shut up, man,” Arlen laughed.

  Then Darian added, half-joking, half-serious, “Hey, did you do your morning prayers? I didn’t. Honestly, it’s like those gods just want to chain us with rules. Do this, do that—obey, kneel, repent. Feels less like worship and more like captivity.”

  Chloe frowned, her grip tightening slightly on Arlen’s hand. “You shouldn’t talk like that. The gods deserve our respect. They protect us. Humans were meant to obey them.”

  Her tone had a strange weight to it—devotion bordering on blind faith.

  Darian rolled his eyes. “And that’s exactly the problem—”

  “Stop,” Arlen cut in, his voice calm but firm. “We all have the right to believe whatever we want. There’s no point in arguing over faith.”

  He looked at both of them, then smiled faintly. “Come on. We’ll be late for the entrance ceremony.”

  The lecture drone droned on—polite applause, the principal’s practiced smile, the same safe sentences repeated every freshman year. “Let us give thanks to the gods for granting you this chance to strive toward your education and futures…blah, blah, blah.” The room hummed with the kind of bored reverence that fills auditoriums: heads bowed, pens tapping, phones hiding beneath laps.

  Then someone at a window shouted. “Hey — look! What’s that?”

  Heads turned. Phones rose. A soundless hush swept the hall as a golden light, small at first, ignited in the sky and dropped toward the city like a hot coin.

  The light grew, resolving into shapes—wings, white and flawless, catching the sun. Figures drifted down like living statues. Pale skin, robes that moved without wind, and halos of a soft, blinding gold. They moved with impossible grace. In their centre, descending as if the air itself bent for him, came a man who made the auditorium go very, very still.

  He was enormous in presence without being corpulent—tall, lean, the sort of body that looked carved from bone and storm. His hair hung silver like a curtain of time itself; his eyes were deep and cold, a clockwork stillness behind them. He wore a robe threaded with metallic threads that shimmered like the rings of hours and minutes; a mantle fell from his shoulders like the sweep of a sundial. On his brow a faint circlet pulsed, a tiny gear turning with an unseen rhythm—an unmistakable emblem of authority.

  When he touched the stage outside the school, a dozen white-winged attendants arranged a throne of gold as if it had always been waiting. The light dimmed only around his shape; shadow and glow seemed to orbit him like silent planets.

  He lifted a hand, and his voice rolled through the hall—calm, absolute, the kind of tone that removes choice. “Greetings, humans. I am Chronos—the god of time. Rejoice, for I have come to rule over you fragile beings.”

  A sound went through the crowd that was part awe, part animal noise: cheers, whispering prayers, the rustle of people seeking sanctity in a miracle. Hands folded in unison. Eyes closed. Where just a second before people had been bored and awkward, now they were lit up with a fervour too quick to be natural.

  Chronos surveyed them, expression unreadable. “Good. Very good. The gods of heaven have decided to rule over humans directly. We are pleased with your devotion. This city now falls under my rule. Worship me, the god of time, until your last breath. Those who haven’t worshipped gods till this day will be executed—for mercy’s sake.”

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  Arlen’s insides went cold with the sentences. Executed? Just like that? He tried to swallow his panic. Why was the crowd so elated? Why were they kneeling? This was wrong. This was insane. What can I do?

  Before he could make sense of anything, the floor yawned — or perhaps the air rearranged — and he found himself no longer seated but standing on a bright strip of marbled floor, facing the throne. He was not alone. Around him, a score of other faces swam into focus: Darian among them, pale and blinking, confusion and fear making his jaw rigid.

  Chronos’s voice cut through the red blur of fear. “These twenty-two,” he intoned, eyes landing like knives, “have the audacity not to worship the gods. For years, they haven’t chanted a single prayer. But, I am merciful. So I will end their pitiful lives.”

  The auditorium did not break into horror so much as into ecstatic obedience. The hands that had been folded rose again—now clapping, now praising.

  At Chronos’s command, the winged attendants descended with terrifying efficiency. They moved like clockwork, silent and exact. Ropes and gleaming blades—holy instruments—were uncoiled and set. The room smelled of antiseptic and new metal.

  The first victim was a middle-aged man whose face translated panic into pleading. “No—please! I have to care for my sick parents. I didn’t have money or time to pray. Please don’t kill me. I swear I will pray from tomorrow—” He gasped, voice fraying into the space as the angelic blade fell.

  There was no mercy: steel sang. The man’s cry was cut short; his body split with a clean, terrible finality. Limbs and red snow tumbled to the floor.

  Chronos’s posture did not change. “One pitiful soul has received salvation,” he said, voice measured as if reading a ledger. “Cheer for him, humans.”

  Around Arlen, the cheered worship rose like bile. Darian’s face turned white; he whispered, “This can’t be happening.” Arlen had no answer—only the animal awareness that a new epoch had been thrust at them, and with it a simple, brutal law: obey—or die.

  They died one after another like candles snuffed by a single breath.

  It wasn’t theatrical. There was no thunderous trumpet of judgment, no righteous blaze. The winged angels moved with the clinical calm of surgeons taking lives as if they were trimming dead leaves. A holy blade flashed, a human body crumpled, a murmur of worship swelled—then the blade swept again. The auditorium became a theatre of the ordinary and the monstrous: pews emptied into piles of limbs; the polished floor slicked to a sick shine.

  Arlen’s throat closed around a sound he could not control. He saw fevered faces—neighbours, shopkeepers, the old man who always fed pigeons—turned into collapsed shapes. He pressed against the marble, watching the slaughter with the helpless, animal horror of someone watching his world unmake itself.

  Only two figures remained—himself and Darian. Darian’s eyes were wide, unblinking, the colour of someone who’d swallowed cold water. He tried to move, and an angel stepped in front of him. Arlen saw his family and Chloe in the crowd. He screamed, "mom, dad Alden, Chloe, please save us!" But their faith made them dead to his screams. The angel’s blade was a clean, merciless line. Darian’s mouth opened in a word that would never finish. Then he fell. “No—Darian!” Arlen lurched, hands on his friend’s chest, shaking. “Wake up! Don’t—” But the friend who had mocked gods with him lay still and lifeless, eyes staring at something beyond human sight.

  Chronos watched with the soft, almost bored amusement of a god cataloguing a new specimen. “You called for your family’s help?” he said, voice like a clock that had learned to smile. “How amusing.”

  A motion, a whisper, and the angels obeyed. One of them stepped toward the crowd and—Arlen could not even process how—the blade she carried was passed into the hands of his brother.

  Alden stood like a puppet under the sun, the blade trembling in his grip. Arlen’s chest seized. He recognised the look in his brother’s face from mournful family photos—trying to be brave, trying to be steady—except now it was blank, drowned under a light that was not his own.

  “Kill him,” Chronos intoned, turning the moment into judgment. “Prove your faith. Then your family shall be blessed.”

  “Brother—please!” Arlen screamed, voice raw. “Snap out of it, Alden! Remember me! Remember Mom — Dad — Chloe! Don’t do it!” They didn’t flinch – their eyes devoid of any sense – as if they are in autopilot.

  His parents’ faces were turned skyward, eyes glazed with trance. His mother murmured a prayer without looking. His father’s jaw worked; his hands were folded. Chloe’s fingers clutched rosary beads as if their texture could smother reason. They did not see him. Their sense had already been swallowed by the god’s command. Alden raised the blade as if stepping through choreography.

  “You’re doing this for us,” Alden said in a voice that was not wholly his own—strained with a false tenderness, a rehearsal for salvation. “When you repent, everything will be alright.”

  Chloe smiled, and Arlen felt the smile like glass. “After you’re forgiven,” she whispered, wide-eyed and unseeing, “I’ll love you more.” The words were a prayer; empty of the person Arlen had loved. The faces around him showed not cruelty but thin, obedient joy.

  “No!” Arlen lunged, but two angels slid in, hands like iron. They pinned him, not violently—simply as a force of fate would pin a leaf. Alden’s blade came down.

  Pain detonated up through Arlen’s ribs, a white flash behind the eyes. He fell. Everything became noise and a distant, tunnelled scream. Chronos laughed—a sound that fit the math of the world being rearranged.

  “Yes,” the god breathed. “This is how it must be. Fragile creatures bow and worship without question.”

  The angels gathered themselves like servants at the end of a ceremony. Chronos rose from his golden seat, gestured, and the worshippers drifted to his side. They left the auditorium the way tourists leave a gallery: murmurs of praise and smiles. The slaughtered lay where they'd fallen—blood and ruin washed into the carpet—the price of disobedience.

  But Arlen was not dead. Even a holy blade becomes blunt after slicing through so many livings human. But for the God, his fleeting life was too insignificant to notice. He lay on marble, a hand slick with blood, each heartbeat stuttering like a cracked bell. He dragged himself inch by inch toward Darian’s still form, toward the scattered bodies who had been his city, his life. With a last, trembling breath he saw his family —still praying, still praising—faces pale with devotion, blind to what they had done.

  “My family… my brother… Chloe” he rasped, rage and grief coiling in his chest. The world around him tasted of iron and ash. He pressed his palm to the blood that seeped from his side and felt something colder than the wound: betrayal, drilled into bone by a god who called his killers ‘salvation.’

  “You— You brainwashed them – you made them kill me” he breathed. It came out a promise rather than a question. “You took everything.”

  He forced the words through the pain. “If gods exist, then demons should too. If you are listening—Demon King, if you listen—give me strength. Give me power to tear down these gods. I will sell my soul if I must.”

  For a long second nothing answered—only the slow drip of distant water and the low hum of the city that had become alien.

  Then a presence arrived like a cold embrace. The air around him thickened; shadows pooled and pressed at his wounds. The temperature dropped and the lights dimmed to something like twilight.

  A voice flowed across the space, both beautiful and poisonous—sinuous as silk, layered with amusement. “Welcome to the Underworld.”

  He saw her then: a figure unmoored from human scale, more gorgeous than any dream, more terrible than any nightmare. Her eyes were ink-dark and curious; her hair spilled like a midnight river; horns curled from her brow like living questions. She wore a gown that swallowed light and scattered it like a promise.

  “I am Cornea,” the queen’s voice said, slow and indulgent. “Demon Queen of the Hollow Court. You seek strength, small human. You have called to beasts and bargains. Speak — what do you bargain with? Your soul? Your vengeance? Or perhaps… something else?”

  Arlen tried to gather breath, to find the language of vows and iron. The auditorium, the corpses, the ringing emptiness in his chest—the whole world had narrowed to one, raw need.

  “I—” he whispered. “I want to kill them. Every last one.”

  Cornea’s smile widened, hungry and amused. “Oh,” she purred, “good. Very good. Let us begin.”