we can all learn things(just maybe in different ways.)

in which the world is set on fire

(sorry this took so long to come out, wanted to make sure I got it right! :])

Quiet.

It had been quiet for nearly a millennia inside his chamber. The silky smooth tapestries that adorned the walls, torn to shreds with age and rage, stared at him from their place tacked to smooth blackstone. The same scenery he had observed through empty eyes for year after decade after century. He was etched in obsidian, a permanent page in history books. He would last forever, much alike his kingdom.

Nothing was going to shake his rule. He had everything under control, guarded by his thousands of eyes and ears and tongues. Even now he could feel the knowledge seep through him.

Who was he?

Not even he knew that. He was ancient. He was all-knowing. He was all powerful. He was like a tree older than time, his roots seeping into the earth and intertwining with all around him, interconnected with everything he touched, taking water and sunlight and life. But unlike a tree, he would never be felled, not even by the two strongest warriors on the planet.

He wasn't life itself. No, if anything, he was the opposite. He gave those he touched life and then sucked it away before they could taste joy. But he wasn't death, either. Not fully, at least.

No, he was pain. He was the excruciating splitting inside of one's brain, the earsplitting howls and begs for mercy, the bone-shattering all-encompassing hellfire of the poison he inflicted on those who dared get in his way. He was a thousand times more powerful than his ancestors, though he could barely remember them. Their faces were etched onto his, frozen in screams of agony.

He was an immortal being from the embodiment of hell itself.

And he would never die.

~

This wasn't exactly what Techno had been expecting when he had heard the words 'public execution'.

He stood almost ten meters above the ground, on a shaky, unsturdy wooden platform. It trembled like a leaf in the wind, as if it had been constructed out of twigs and tied together with twine. The setting sun cast a blood-red glow on the crowd below, a mass of almost a hundred citizens, hybrids and humans alike. The tomato-colored sky burned above him as if it was aflame.

In a few minutes, it wouldn't be the only thing burning.

The execution square was one of the biggest centers in the kingdom. It was an enclosed courtyard directly connected to the palace if you used a secret gate behind the platform. The cobbled streets below seemed small but Techno knew if he fell from this height he would be seriously injured, or worse.

Beside him was Dream, flexing his fists, his eyes locked with the other two men tied to the platform with him. Techno could feel the way he was trembling, the way he tensed at the slightest creak of the wood under him. That had to be the people Dream was talking about, the ones he said he would risk anything to keep safe. The ones that were his family.

One was significantly shorter than the other, with short, dark brown hair, a long-sleeved blue shirt and tinted glasses. The taller one had a stubbly beard and a light shirt emblazoned with fire, the loose straps of his white headband whipping in the wind. Techno spared them both a glance but they were both looking at Dream, their eyes weaving a story far too complicated to unravel.

He went back to scouring the crowd, squinting at the haze of faces that stared up at him, some sympathetic, some unfeeling, but most waiting in anticipation, waiting for the moment he would go up in flames, melt into nothingness, his face twisting as smoke replaced any oxygen that had once surrounded him. Eventually the tower would crumble and fall and he would tumble to the ground, his charred unmoving body almost unrecognizable, covered in soot and ash and burns.