Before rust crowned his name, he was only a boy.
Little SHALTOKOL—child of creation and art, woven from the golden light of an angel and the vibrant hues of a muse—felt smaller than ever before amid the ruins of what had once been his mother's perfect heaven. He was a cherubic figure with gossamer wings folded against his back like wilting flower petals, his skin luminous as fresh-spun starlight, hair a cascade of silver curls. His tunic, woven from threads of dawnlight by his mother's hands, hung in tatters from frantic flight.
The geometry of heaven was bleeding, coming apart at the seams, splintered like shattered porcelain under a careless heel. The sky was a bruised violet, fracturing violently into shards of null-data and raw, screaming static. The ground beneath his bare feet flickered, textures failing to load, turning lush grass into wireframe abysses and back again. Toys he remembered playing with now floated at wrong angles, their once-cheerful faces cracked into eternal grimaces.
He wandered through crumbling corridors, calling out for his mother and father. "Mother? Father?" His voice was a fragile bell chime in the dead god graveyard.
He found his father first.
Augustus was gone. In his place lay a heap of blackened, charred bones clad in tattered black cloth, a ruin lit from within like a smoldering cathedral made man-shaped. His form lay partially embedded in a fractured plane of reality as if the world had attempted to swallow him and then given up. Where hands had once held and healed, there were now only talons of coal clawing mindlessly at the glitching turf, clutching onto the glitching grass. Smoke curled lazily from the dark hollows of its skull where eyes of starlight once resided, instead now blooming with dim twin points of malevolent violet light, flickering with an agony that had calcified into madness. It rasped with a dry, rattling wheeze that might have been cackling, or sobbing, or perhaps both, like a broken music box wound too far. Bits of char drifted as he moved. He did not reach for the child, for he did not know how.
SHALTOKOL stumbled backward, a choked noise escaping his throat. He ran, his small feet slipping on surfaces that momentarily lost cohesion, before suddenly colliding with an imposing stone column. After recovering from the impact, he found that this was in fact his mother, at the heart of the breaking symmetry.
Gudang had become a statue. Not the vibrant muse of color and song, who painted horizons with her smile, but a figure of cold marble faintly shaded with a pastel hue. She stood in a rigid approximation of her former grace, a greco-roman dream arrested mid-motion. One hand lifted as if to pin a cloak that was no longer there; her hands instead grasping an erratic beam of neon pink light. Her face was frozen and expressionless, devoid of the warmth that used to sing the sun into the sky — but jeweled tears traced permanent paths down her stone cheeks, chiming against her collarbone before vanishing through the polygon seam at her throat. Worst of all was the catatonic emptiness where her mind should have been. SHALTOKOL reached out, his fingers trembling an inch from the marble. He felt only a hollow monument, a chamber where memories had been carved out and discarded. The goddess of color and song had become installation art. She did not turn. She did not see him. The beam of neon pink in her hands buzzed, casting candy gloss across stone that was neither flesh nor alive. She would never look at him again.
"Mother! Father! Wake up, please!" He beat his fists against the statue's base, marble unyielding, freezing to the touch. He then scrambled to his father's side, grasping at bony limbs that crumbled to dust under his touch. The scorching, infernal heat of the flames burned his hand.
This wasn't his mother. This wasn't his father. These were naught but…sick mockeries. Monsters wearing their faces. They were dead. The two beings who had made him, who had loved him, were vacant shells—one a charred husk of bitter rage, the other a beautiful monument to forgotten things. A sob ripped from his chest, hot and painful. It was followed by another, and another. He fell to his knees on the sharp, pixelated ground, his small hands clutching his head as the world broke apart around him. He was truly, utterly alone in the wreckage of paradise. Hours passed, or perhaps days—time meant little in this broken paradise. SHALTOKOL remained curled against a fallen column, having cried until no tears remained.
Such sorrow… for one so small…
The voice was not disembodied, instead emanating from fissures in the floor of reality, bypassing the ears to settle directly in the mind, sounding like hunger given speech. The shadows at the edge of the failing world pooled and coiled near the boy’s feet, drawing substance from the corruption seeping through the cracks in reality, viscous and dark as oil. From the gathering darkness, it rose — twisting and coiling, knitting itself into a form that seemed both present and impossibly distant. It took shape (or lack thereof, like a living hole in the world) as a great serpent with scales of pure, depthless black like polished voids, seeming to absorb the dying light of the realm. Its head lifted, and though it had no discernible features, SHALTOKOL felt its attention like a weight on his soul.
"Such a familiar, wasteful ache. A son losing his parents to a fool’s rage."
The boy looked up, tears of liquid gold streaming down his cheeks. "Go away," he sobbed, curling into himself. "I want them back. I want it to be like before."
The serpent glided closer and circled him, its movement sinuous and inevitable. "They are gone, shattered by the crimson knight whose blade cut the thread of your world. He took their light. He took their minds. And he left you here to rot with them."
"Claudius?" The boy’s lip trembled, confusion warring with the agony. "No… he… he is the protector…"
"He protected nothing…" the serpent hissed, sliding closer, its head level with the boy’s tear-stained face. Its voice was the sound of bedrock cracking. "He broke the world. He slew the Angel. He froze the Muse. Do you feel that crushing stone in your chest? That is despair. It will consume you, just as it did them. It will make you weak. It will make you nothing. It will be the only thing you are.."
The boy looked on at the ruin of his parents. The grief was a physical weight suffocating him, tearing his soul into ribbons. He didn't want to cry anymore. He wanted the hurting to stop.
"Unless…" the serpent continued, "you trade it for something stronger. Something that can fill the hollow they left behind…"
He looked at the chaos around him, the unfairness of it all. The boy's grief shuddered, and in the wet darkness of his despair, something new ignited—a sharp, hot spark. It was anger. It was betrayal. He wanted the one who caused this to hurt instead.
The serpent sensed it immediately. Its void-like eyes, deeper than the abyss between stars, narrowed into slits. "Yes. Let that grow, nurture it. I can take your weak, mortal pain and forge it into divine vengeance. You were born of an artist and a creator. You can remake yourself into their justice. Give to me your sadness, child. I can reach into that small, breaking heart of yours and carve out the grief. I can replace this hollow, aching space with true purpose."
The boy stood up. He wiped the golden tears from his face, smearing them into streaks of grime. He looked at the marble statue of his mother one last time, abandoning the hope of her embrace. He turned to the serpent. "Can you really do it? Can you make me strong?" he whispered. "Strong enough to make him pay?"
"Oh, yessssss…" the serpent hissed with a flicker of its forked tongue. Its jaw unhinged to open its yawning maw, revealing sharp fangs like slivers of twilight. "I can make you the ruin of all things. I can turn your tears to acid and your skin to armor. There is but small price to pay. One bite, and your sadness will transform into righteous fury. Your tears will become a weapon. Your grief will become your armor."
The boy hesitated. "Will it hurt?"
"Indeed," the serpent answered. "But after pain comes power. After suffering comes strength. You must first let the rot in. You must embrace the decay. Allow the rust to harden your heart."
After a moment of consideration, SHALTOKOL outstretched his arm. "Do it."
The serpent reared, hood flaring like void-wings. Its head darted forward, and those points of void-light pressed against SHALTOKOL's wrist. There was a moment of absolute cold, then a spreading numbness. The fangs sank deep, and its venom came not in a quick sting, but a flood which surged through his divine veins. It felt like ice, like deletion. A blackness, darker than the serpent’s own hide, began to spread from the wound, threading its way through his veins like ink in water. It was cold at first, then it began to burn. A painful, searing heat lanced like forge-spit. The boy screamed, but the sound shifted as it left his throat. It deepened, distorted, grinding like metal shearing against stone.
It began within. He felt the flow of his divine ichor begin to slow. It thickened, clogged, and curdled into jagged flakes of rust. The light of creation that dwelled within his chest was snuffed out, strangled by a cold, dark hunger. The sadness evaporated, burned away by a supernova of hatred. He felt the geometry of the world tremble not in sympathy, but in fear of what he was becoming.
The change then rippled outward. His golden skin began to flake away, greying and hardening. Silver hair darkened to charred coils, wings twisted into leathern membranes veined with corrosion. Bones ground audibly, lengthening, sprouting spurs of iron oxide. Silver eyes clouded to molten orange, pupils slitting vertical. The cherub's form swelled, tunic shredding as muscles corded beneath rust-pocked hide. His hands, once capable of shaping clay into life, elongated, the fingers fusing and twisting into terrible claws meant only to tear and rend armor and flesh alike. A crown of jagged metal spikes erupted from his skull, dripping with the last remnants of his childhood—now transmuted into molten rust. His gaze, once bright with curiosity, burned away to be replaced with the abyssal gloom of the Alldark. His mouth shaped itself into a grim, severe line.
The being that finally straightened its spine was jagged and tall, a nightmare of corrosion and shadow. He looked at his hands, watching the rust spread like a living infection, scaling over his flesh, making him impervious, making him cruel. He smiled a smile full of jagged, oxidized teeth. The air around him grew hot and dry, carrying the scent of hot metal and ancient, sun-baked stone. Where his feet pressed against the ground, the very substance of the level blackened and crumbled, as if consumed by a rapid, ferric decay. He was no longer the child of Art and Creation. He was the consequence of their destruction.
He flexed new, powerful hands, watching as flakes of rust-like skin drifted from his fingers. The grief was gone. In its place was a vast, chilling certainty, a furnace of hatred stoked to stellar heat. He was the heir to a ruined legacy, and he would use that ruin to scour creation. "I am not what I was," he spoke, and his voice was no longer a child's. It was a low, grating rumble, like stone grinding against stone, echoing with the promise of collapse. "I am the instrument of catastrophic destruction. The shadow of shadows. The murderer of light. Baron of the Alldark, Inheritor of Rust."
As the serpent vanished completely, the Baron of the Alldark tossed back his head and released a roar that shook the foundations of reality itself. "Claudius," the new demon rasped, his voice the sound of collapsing bridges. "I am coming for you." In that moment, he vowed that his uncle would know suffering beyond measure. He would raise an army, the likes of which Daedos had never before seen. "My warriors will be of rust," he decreed to the crumbling heavens. "My word will boil worlds. And you, Claudius… First of Knights… you will look upon my works, and you will despair."
His champions, his order, all would corrode to nothing. Fangs of inferno bared, the demon flexed talons that dripped molten slag. The dance of vengeance ignited eternal.