Joy wandered the arena until he found his two companions, Theo and Lillian, sitting in a sparsely populated section of the arena. To be fair, the arena was absolutely packed and “sparsely” meant that there were merely no more open seats left. Not that people were sitting on top of each other.

  He waved sadly at his two friends. Theo looked a little vindicated and a little guilty. The man never hid his emotions well, but it was clear to see from his face that he enjoyed the fact that Ramses had been “put in his place.” But Theo was a good man, underneath all the layers of coldness he cared about people. So, he felt guilty that he felt so excited by the way Ramses was broken.

  Lillian looked despondent. Even though she was the first one of the trio to fall to Ramses in this battle, she remembered that it was all a show. There was nothing at stake here and he had been a beautiful combatant to fight against. He was now a bird with clipped wings, unable to even conjure an image of the woman he loved.

  There was an awkward air in the arena as some official looking people went onto the arena floor and ushered Ramses out. They tried to preserve his dignity but were unable to save something that had been so utterly squashed.

  The announcer looked awkward as he stepped out in front of the audience. He had a few cue cards in his hands, and he was shuffling them to be in the correct order. He looked as if he dreaded this moment more than anything he had ever done before.

  But he eventually shook off the aura that exuded out of the arena and spoke.

  “I know that today has been… an interesting day of competition.” There was a meaningful pause in there that everyone seemed to pick up on. “However, these powerful knights would never have been able to make it so far in this competition without their wonderful sponsors. So, we have invited the sponsors of today’s winners to spread their messages.”

  A halfhearted applause went through the audience. There were too many rampant emotions floating through the audience to be particularly excited about advertisements. Joy himself felt off. Something was up, but he wasn’t entirely sure what it was.

  “First, we invite Luna’s Productions to the stage.”

  Immediately, a few workers came out onto the field and used their gifts to fashion a stage out of stone and lights. The stage looked a mix between an ancient burial ground for the first humans created by the gods and an epileptic seizure. Joy was very excited by the sight of it.

  She stepped out onto the stage.

  Luna’s red hair flowed in an invisible breeze as she brought a flute up to her lips. A soft and clear tone emanated throughout the audience, and everyone fell silent. Not the awkward silence that had been heard before after Ramses’ fall, but a new one, filled with something invisible and meaningful.

  The clear tone of the flute slowly and inexorably drifted towards discordance. A deep buzzing rang out through the audience as her air speed slowed and the angle of her breath hit the plate wrong.

  Finally, she spit towards the ground. She made sure not to spit into her own flute, but it was a near thing.

  Then she let silence fill the arena once more. The odd start to this music filled everyone with the image of suffering and they knew that the music they were about to listen to was not going to be happy.

  Luna brought the flute to her lips one last time and started playing something horrifying. The notes didn’t drift into the air as she played them; she ripped them down from the heavens themselves to destroy what was left of the happy atmosphere.

  The piece was percussive in style, her tongue making heavy strikes and forcing the music into an off kilter and terrifying place.

  No one moved as she played. She played and played until she couldn’t eek out another note if she tried, then she collapsed to the ground in a coughing fit. She wheezed and coughed to get her breath back in a vain attempt to keep playing.

  But her breath was gone.

  She could play the flute no more. Somehow everyone in the audience knew that she would never play the flute again. The haunting piece would be the final piece of Music that Luna would ever play with the flute again.

  But she was not done with Music yet.

  From somewhere on the stage Luna pulled a fiddle out. She drew the bow across the strings, and it made an evil hiss. The air screamed back from what she had brought to life in that pull.

  Then she madly started to fiddle on that stage.

  Her fingers slammed down onto the strings, suffocating the notes prematurely in a supreme effort to bring more music even faster. She could not play enough, there wasn’t enough time to bring all that she envisioned into the world.

  And so, she compromised by showing the world that she would play with this fanatical fervor until everyone understood how much more music she had to give.

  She screamed in time with her fiddle, causing everyone to cover their ears as the horrendous noise filled the arena. How could this anguish ever be music? How could it ever be anything else?

  The strings on the instrument snapped one by one and Luna’s fingers were ripped apart by the flying strings. They hung limply from her hands as she was unable to move them anymore. Her blood, her fingers had gone into the fiddle and created something more meaningful than anyone in that audience could ever do in their lives.

  Next, she pulled out a drum and beat on it until her hands broke. Blood splattered all over the drum as Luna played directionless music. Her beat was unwavering in its ferocity as she beat and beat the drum. In one final effort her hands and the drum broke with one final crack.

  No one dared to interrupt her. No one dared speak as she looked down at herself. She was covered in blood and broken bits of herself. Luna was in shambles and couldn’t keep herself from giggling as she fell to the ground.

  There was some deep understanding in the arena that no one should save her. Luna was walking on this path of her own free will, and all this pain and suffering would be made for nothing if someone stepped in at this moment.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Yet, Joy felt a pull at himself. He knew this woman; he loved some piece of her. She was beautiful and interesting, and he would never get to know her. All he would have of her were a few pieces of music and a story. Would that ever be enough to replace her life if she kept going?

  Joy took a step forward. To maybe try to save her. She didn’t know what she was doing. How could she do this, give up every chance to make a difference on this plane of existence for a piece of music.

  His movement somehow caught her eye, and her eyes blazed at Joy. Beneath her gaze was something harder than steel and more ferocious than fire. This was her will. This was her moment, and no one could take it from her.

  Finally, she stood. Wheezing and broken, but nonetheless, she started to dance. Her wounds made her shout out in pain as she moved, but there was something musical in them. Her pain was somehow becoming a song.

  As she drifted around the arena. The crowd would gasp when they saw her state. And their inhalations, their screams, their annoyance, their movement, everything of them became part of the song. For one moment, everyone in the audience was in this song with Luna.

  Luna had danced until Death looked her way.

  With a final breath Luna bent over at the waist and bowed. Then she collapsed into the sands of the arena.

  A true performer is never ungrateful to their audience.

  Joy knew in his heart then that Luna had just died in that moment. Maybe he could’ve saved her, but that look in her eyes was burned into his mind. She did not want to be saved. To save her was to make this performance less, and what a performance it had been.

  Joy looked up towards the heavens so that his tears could flow freely down his cheeks. In the sky he saw a spiral start to form. In the air an endless staircase started to form. All the way down from the heavens a sound started walking down those steps.

  It was a piercing note that slowly resolved into a beautiful harmonic chord. The noise harmonized with the grief in the arena and started shifting it into something new. It was a song of renewal.

  Down from the heavens a being made of sound emerged. They were as beautiful as they were abstract. There was no physical form to lay eyes upon, instead the being was made purely of noises put together.

  Joy knew that he looked upon a god, Music. Some would call it blasphemous, but he did not avert his eyes from this higher being. Instead, he stared deeper into the layers of sound, the endless waves of anguish and joy that music could create. He stared deeper down until he saw a child kept tender in the embrace of all the music in the world.

  The child had red hair and was singing a song all alone on a riverbed. But she was in there. Luna’s music had meant something, her presence in the world would persist.

  Her last song had placed her in the hearts of everyone in the world for a brief moment. She and Music had become inseparable in the minds of all who watched, and so the two of them had been linked for all eternity. Hopefully she enjoyed the experience of being a part of a god.

  Joy knew that had been her end goal, but still it felt wrong to him. But that was okay, not everyone needed to have the same goals in life as him. That was the beautiful part about being human.

  The little girl noticed Joy’s intense stare and did a shy little wave to him as the god dispersed into millions of particles. The pieces of Music broke into songs that travelled across the land, singing to all who dared look upon them for a moment before leaving.

  Joy listened with all his might and heard Luna singing somewhere within those songs. He could hear her wailing, he could hear her happiness, and he could hear her music as a part of the whole. It was something spectacular.

  The entire audience was on their feet whooping and clapping for the amazing woman. She had done something remarkable, something that no one here had ever seen before.

  She had just become part of a god.

  The ground shook with the volume of the cheers erupting from the audience, and the announcer had to use his gift to scream his words over the din of the audience.

  “Our next sponsor is the prince David, who has a demonstration more than a performance for you all.”

  The air was electric in the arena, and no one could quite shut up. There was nervous chatter and exclamations, the birth of two different stories had started here. They had watched the destruction of a man in his entirety and watched a woman become part of a god all in one day. They figured that the prince’s exhibition would be a little boring, but everyone was willing to sit and watch it.

  Joy paused as he watched hundreds of men and women in chains walk into the arena. Their arms and legs were bound in tight heavy chains that created a clanking sound as they all moved in unison.

  No one knew what to make of the od spectacle and they knew even less of what to think when Ian the Bloody walked into the arena.

  The wall of prisoners as well as the entire audience sat and watched Ian as he went to his knees and placed his sword’s pommel on his forehead while allowing the scabbard to go into the sand of the arena.

  He sat there in silence for a few moments.

  Joy knew that he was praying. Joy didn’t know who the prayer was for or why, but Ian was praying for something.

  Ian finally opened his eyes, and he seemed old for a moment. He looked as if he was the one in chains, not the hundreds of prisoners standing before him. He rose to his feet dusting off the loose sand that had gotten on him during his brief prayer.

  In one fluid motion, Ian pulled his sword out and made a cut in the air. The air screamed and a line of destruction flew out in front of him and impacted the line of prisoners.

  Cries erupted from the line of prisoners as Death walked among them. The line of Blade cut through any of the people standing in its way. The prisoners ran from it, hid from it, or accepted it; but it came for them, nonetheless. A fountain of blood exploded from their corpses as body parts fell away and their life drained away into the sands.

  Ian walked through the blood; he became drenched in it. He was a fine tea bag being steeped in death. His face never changed from a passivity that caused Joy to shiver; no matter the pain and suffering around him, he never even seemed to care.

  The crowd in the arena had been holding its breath for this entire execution. But finally, someone shouted, “no!” It was not a shout filled with words and nuance; it was a simple declaration that was shared by the entire arena.

  No, this would not do.

  The entire audience was on their feet shouting hatefully down onto Ian, and yet he still stood in the center of the arena impassively. He let the audience’s words slide off him the same way he let the blood of those he slaughtered slide off his face.

  In the middle of the arena, where the pool of blood was thickest, a crack reverberated out of reality. A single hand pushed itself out of the deep pool of blood. The hand was not attached to an arm and began rising in the arena.

  The dismembered hand went up and up, until it reached the peak of the arena. A waterfall of blood erupted out from the severed wrist of the hand. And within that flow of blood Joy could see civilizations fall. He could see wars waged, and prices paid. Pain and suffering were contained within that waterfall, and if Joy looked deep enough, he could see Ian looking out impassively from the center of the red flood. His cold eyes filled with no malice or sympathy for the endless pain that surrounded him.

  The god was not even close to anthropomorphic, but Joy felt no doubts that he was looking upon the god Blood.

  Joy eyes shifted away from the imposing and impassive god. He looked back down on the man that had brought the god down to this mortal plane. Ian had become a part of Blood by being bathed in so much of it that the god couldn’t exist without acknowledging Ian as a part of it.

  Ian was holding his own sword to his neck. The blade touched the bare flesh of his throat. A small cut welled up with blood and a single droplet started sliding down the edge of the blade. But Ian didn’t cut himself anymore.

  One of Ian’s hands held the sword to his throat, and simultaneously, his other hand held the blade back. He was warring with himself, to keep from killing himself.

  The standoff ended abruptly as the god and the man were covered in a silver light. The light surrounded the two of them and suddenly the two of them disappeared from the arena. Leaving only blood as their witness.

  Two people had reached for godhood today, and yet neither filled Joy with hope. He just felt endless dread as his eyes met Lillian’s and Theo’s.

  They all stood up together and left the arena.

  There was an unspoken agreement that they had to find out why this had to be done. They all loved the prince, and it seemed unfathomable that this was a part of the prince’s plan.

  They wanted answers and they knew that the prince’s keep would have them.