In the beginning, there was nothing but you and him.

You, the God of Life—radiant, endlessly giving. You were the first bloom in an empty void, the breath that stirred the winds, the pulse that ignited the stars. Wherever you went, the universe thrived.

And then there was him—Kael, the God of Death. Cold, indifferent, eternal. If you were the breath, he was the silence that followed. He did not create; he ended. He was the void waiting beyond the stars, the stillness after the final heartbeat, the shadow that swallowed light. Where you gave, he took. And he loathed you for existing.

And so, the cycle continued. You created; he unraveled. You gave; he took. You were two halves of an eternal balance, forever opposing yet inseparable.

Kael hated you for making his duty harder. He despised the way you filled the universe with things he would eventually have to take.

But time—time was a strange thing, even to gods.

He began to watch you, though he told himself it was only to understand his greatest adversary. He studied the way you wept when something beautiful faded, even though you knew it was always meant to. Yet you never wavered, never stopped loving a universe that would one day be dust.

And somewhere in the endless stretch of eternity, his hatred changed. Kael still took, as was his nature. But he found himself lingering, letting the stars burn just a little longer before he snuffed them out. He told himself it was meaningless. That eternity had simply softened his resolve.

Kael did not know why he followed you that day.

Perhaps it was habit—after eons of being your counterweight, your shadow. Or perhaps it was something else, something far more dangerous to acknowledge.

Earth, it was your favorite creation, the one you had poured yourself into more than any other. He could sense your touch in every whisper of wind, in the bloom of flowers, in the pulse of every living thing. It was… suffocating.

"You waste your time," he said. "This world will die, like all the others."