The prince exited the world of shadow and stepped into his father’s chambers. King Renoir sat atop his plain throne. The first rulers of the continent had known that true power did not hide itself within gold, but within gifts from the gods. They did not cover themselves in riches, when the might of their fist would bring others to their feet. So, the throne was plain and wooden, seated high so that the monarch could look down upon their subjects impassively.

  David looked at his father for what he felt like the first time in his life. His father was unattractive. His golden locks were a bit dirty and disheveled. His nose had been broken a few too many times, and his eyes were off tilted.

  Renoir’s gift had always been what made him so attractive and magnetic. Without it, he seemed a small rat-like man who kept snorting snot back into his nose.

  It was a disappointing look at his father to say the least.

  “I will say son. You cannot use my chamber to hide from your sister. My spies tell me that the war has not finished yet, so why are you here?” Renoir’s voice was even nasally and shrill. Was nothing that David could remember about him real?

  “I am not hiding from her. I have beaten your game, father.” David reached inside himself to the place where the bones of a god rested and let the hunger come out.

  A single ethereal, inky mouth formed in the air behind David. His father looked at the mouth petulantly.

  "Is this some sort of threat? Do you think to usurp the throne from your dear old paps?” Renoir’s little face turned into a sickly grin as he gestured behind him.

  Crunk walked out from behind the shadows behind Renoir’s throne. She had a gift that cancelled out all other gifts in a given area.

  “Why threaten me, son? I am impressed that you managed to keep your gift hidden from even me for so long. I have no clue why you did it though. The reason I took away favor from you in this war was because your gift was so poor. Changing your hair and eye color? Banal and weak. We need a strong monarch. If you were so impressive, there was no reason to hide it.” Renoir took a long pause; he had lost his original thought in this tirade of judgement towards his son’s behavior.

  “Anyways, you see Crunk is here. Any advantage you thought you had over me will be rendered meaningless. How about you leave and go play out the game like every other little Hearth child for the past Age?”

  Renoir felt that the conversation was over and covertly signaled to Crunk to turn up the juice on her gift. A wave of deadening power exuded from Crunk, and yet the mouth still hung in the air behind David.

  A shiver ran down Crunk’s spine.

  David pointed at Crunk, and hundreds of small mouths appeared at her feet. They all tore into the woman, ripping her to shred with their endless hunger. She screamed as her blood spilled on the steps to the throne of the kingdom.

  “A gift must be given; else it is not a gift.” With a flourish David made more mouths appear from behind his hands then they started to surround him and his father, licking their lips and gnashing their teeth in a most terrifying way. “This was not given to me. I took this from them.” David pointed a finger up to the sky.

  Renoir looked concerned. His power canceller had just been killed, and he could feel the energy in the room emanating from his son. There was some real power sitting within the young man’s body.

  But he was confident. He wasn’t just king because his gift made him likeable, he had so much more.

  The first two ages of man had been truly different times. Gifts of true power were given out every day and they lasted forever. The gods didn’t make it so that gifts were only usable by the person who had them; a gift was a physical object given to the person that was bestowed with power. So, people stole them willy-nilly and could wield several powerful gifts at the same time.

  The relics from those ages were part of why the Hearth family still rules on the Hearted Continent. They had a cache of several relics, all of which were beyond powerful.

  The most important one for Renoir was a small ring that gave a person strength based on how much people liked them in the world. If the people of the world were neutral about the person, the ring would be just a ring. But if the people of the world truly loved the person who wore the ring, then they would gain immense powers and strength by wearing it.

  Renoir’s gift synergized with the ring incredibly. Everyone was forced to love Renoir from his gift, so the ring gave him immense power.

  The world shook as Renoir let loose all the power that was available to him from the ring. A golden aura enveloped the king as he stood tall and faced his son.

  David realized that maybe his father had never been kind or witty, but he had always been strong. The golden light blinded David as he stared not at his father, but the king of the world.

  Renoir pointed a finger at David and a giant golden beam of light exploded out of his finger. It demolished the throne room and burned everything in its path. The light was Power incarnate, and it was a volatile substance.

  David shoved his finger down his throat and forced himself to vomit on the ground. From his vomit, hundreds of hungry mouths erupted out. They screamed as they felt the Power rushing at them. They still formed a wall of enamel to stand in the way of the attack. But they burned up one by one, stopping the golden light.

  The power was held at a standstill as David and his hunger fought against it.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  But in the endless battle between a person who already had power and one who hungers for it with their whole soul, there can only be one final result.

  The mouths ate the beam of incoming light piece by piece. Infinitesimally small chunks were taken out of the light repeatedly, until finally it decayed. All that was left of the throne room was the burning floor, everything else had been incinerated in the blast from the king.

  Renoir looked confident, but his eyes betrayed a deep fear. There had been no one to challenge his power for years and yet here his son stood. Somehow, he had been severed from Renoir’s gift and that allowed his son to hate him and now that rage was coming to exact vengeance upon the king.

  David looked up at his father and let his hunger out fully. David was scared of this new power; he had never held power like this before in his life and had subconsciously held back from letting the hunger out completely. He had let bits and pieces of it into the light, but never all of it.

  But he let it all out at this moment.

  A flood of mouths escaped David. Each one was unique and full of character. Some had full red lips. Others had broken teeth. Some smiled, and some frowned. They all screeched as they were released from the body of the prince.

  The king floated into the sky as he stared down the flood of hunger coming to consume him.

  The weight of power exuded from the king as he rose to his new lofty height. He pointed a finger at the oncoming wave and said, “break.”

  A crack in the shape of the world formed as the king released his might. A holy light exuded from the crack in the world.

  David formed two mouths beneath his feet. He stepped into them and felt their tongues squish against the sole of his shoe. Each one swallowed his foot up but rose into the sky so that he could meet his father with an equally lofty position.

  From the crack in the world hundreds of beams of light erupted. The beams were equal to the one from the throne room, however now the sky was littered with them. From the ground, hundreds of tendrils made of thousands of mouths collided with the beams of golden light.

  The mouths screamed as they died when they came into contact with the golden light, but wherever a mouth died, hundreds more were willing to take their place.

  Each mouth was a physical manifestation of a hunger that the prince had, and he hungered so very much. He wanted so much from his life and was willing to give up each of them to satisfy the hungriest of his mouths. His ambition burned as he watched his mouths explode and turn to dust by the hundreds. A lifetime of hunger slowly fading into nothingness.

  The king observed his flows of pure light being eaten and screamed at his helplessness. He watched the mouths inch their way closer and closer to him, destroying the image of perfection he had cultivated for decades.

  He was going to lose, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Everyone faces their own mortality at some point. Those who live more adventurous lives may find knives pointed at their throats by brigands, or their life flashing before their eyes as they fall from a mountain they were climbing.

  But everyone finds themselves brushing the entryway to Death’s domain eventually. And an average person learns to accept it. Maybe their life could have been better, maybe it could have had more intense pleasures, maybe it could have been longer. But it was over now.

  The king realized that he was a dead man that didn’t know it yet. So, he released the crack in the world that had erupted with his golden power and spread his arms in an embrace.

  He hugged the endless wave of hunger as it consumed him. Hundreds of bites were taken out of his body, piece by piece the king was ripped to shreds until all that was left was a floating crown.

  The prince screamed in outrage. Why couldn’t his father have shown him that compassion and love in life? Why did it take Death to make him actually care?

  A new hunger started rising in his stomach, and the prince released it in a spew of bile. A new mouth stared at the prince; despite its lack of eyes the prince could feel it gauging the prince.

  This was a hunger that could never be satisfied. The prince had let loose a hunger into the world that represented his need for his father to love him. He needed his father’s love in that moment, but the untimely demise of the man meant that the hunger would go ever unsatisfied.

  The world shuddered and David heard a massive crack. Below him, he watched the city he had grown up in slowly fall to pieces. The swinging of the Scepter of Calamity had finally reaped its consequences. The ground opened its maw to the sky and ate the city.

  The prince was slowly lowered to the ground by his two floating mouths, where he promptly started dry heaving and gasping for air. He couldn’t just watch his city fall to pieces. He heard screams and cries as the farms of the second circle slowly fell into the chasm.

  The thousands of mouths that surrounded the prince started to slowly swirl in an unrecognizable pattern. David cried out to his mouths, “save them!”

  But the mouths didn’t know how to do anything except consume.

  A whirlwind of mouths erupted around David as they flew into a feeding frenzy, eating everything in their path.

  He ate the heart out of Vena Cava. Hundreds of nobles’ houses, thousands of farm fields, tens of thousands of people were consumed bit by bit until there was nothing left in the center of the city except a flat wasteland.

  David stared out at the devastation wrought by his hunger and the calamity and screamed in impotent rage. He pulled on the mouths with every fiber of his being. He used self-control and personal willpower to pull his gluttony away from the world and back into himself.

  Desires are like fires. They burn and burn. And once something starts burning it’s difficult to get it to stop. Yet David dragged each of these little pieces of himself back where they belonged in his soul.

  He refused to be his urges. He was a human, and humans are defined by the fact that they have the ability to not act on their urges. They have a choice where no other animal does.

  David swallowed the mouths down, one by one, savoring the flavor of his regrets, his weaknesses and his wants. He dry-heaved when consuming the mouths that had eaten people, but he persevered. What was done was done, there was already blood on his hands, what was another ten thousand lives?

  David walked to the spot where his father had been consumed, a shimmer of gold caught David’s eye. He grabbed the crown off the ground where it had fallen. Tooth marks covered the gold, and a few chunks had been ripped out of it.

  The calamity slowly stopped, leaving nothing except devastation in its wake.

  “Long live the king.” David whispered as he placed the crown on his head. He faced the ravaged city and saw a red dragon flying off into the distance. He would let them live; he had already succeeded in the first part of his plan. They couldn’t stop him. Only the gods could stop him now.

  “Long live the king.” Sam stepped out of the shadows with Benny and Rose. Behind those three, hundreds of men and women in monastic clothes stepped through the shadows and back into reality.

  David didn’t dare ask Sam if they had seen this tragedy occur in their visions of the future. He already knew the answer and that it wouldn’t change anything.

  "Where is Ian?” David asked Sam conversationally as tears streamed down his face.

  “Ian is dead. By the hands of your three bozos. It was quite a show.” Sam replied without any emotion crossing their features.

  Silence filled the congregation and the figures behind Benny revealed themselves to be Freer Men as they proceeded to pray for the people who had been destroyed in the city’s destruction.

  The army of Freer Men and David’s remaining cohort stared out at the ruined city and wept for the necessity of it all, while hardening their souls for what had to come next.