Aftermath (A series of ELOD one-shots)

XXXVIII. Undoing (Part 1)

A/N: How a god king comes undone. Or, why the Heavens gave Dijun a Dihou only very late in life.

Another what-if, or kind of.

Disclaimer: This chapter refers heavily to Back to Chaos in a Dream, and thus the events depicted may contradict some events in the Aftermath storyline, though efforts had been made to reconcile the two. May be regarded as a one-shot within a series of one-shots, or an AU within an AU, Inception-style. 

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He had never been someone to regret things, not only because it was a useless exercise, but mostly due to the fact that he never had any reason to. After all, for a deity who could see things coming from ten thousand miles away, what event couldn't be foreseen and prepared for? And if everything had been prepared for, the desired outcome would be achieved with certainty, and so there would be no cause for regret.

Yet regret was the only thing he felt, as he gazed at the one that he had never envisioned himself having -- his wife, his one and only empress -- lying motionless in the midst of the battlefield, the scarlet fur of her nine-tailed form looking so wrong in the red sea that was the blood of his enemies.

She had been cautious and prudent, always staying within the protection of Bihai Cangling, far away from the military camps unless he called for her in between campaigns. She was also sensible and clever, and under his guidance had learned to decipher between friends and enemies, knew how to defend herself and their son if necessity requires it. His Xiaobai had been protected by the fiercest of his methods and the most powerful of his sorceries; there should have been no reason for her to end up like this, a pawn for those who desired power, who dared to stand between him and his Heaven-granted mission to achieve true and everlasting peace.

Yet, there she was -- and the rage and remorse and helplessness that filled his heart at that moment was unlike anything he had ever felt, as was the surge of power that sprung forth from within, destructive and terrifying, driven by emotions that the favored son of Heaven ought to not have, at least not at this early point of his existence.

All around him people were running and screaming, soldiers and generals alike, both those from his side and his opponents', although he barely heard them amid the thundering of the blood in his ears and the battle cry of vengeance that emerged from his own lips. The earth opened its bowels and the heavens parted, thunder and lightning battering the ground without mercy, no longer held back by iron-clad control nor tempered by cold calculation -- just plain fury, driven by heart-wrenching pain, manifested in every lethal stroke from each of Cang'he's seventy-two blades.

For how long it lasted, he didn't really know, and no one lived to tell. Though, history books would record it as the bloodiest war in the history of the realms, the turning point when all clans bowed to the rule of Donghua Dijun, and catapulted him to his exalted place as the emperor of all, ruler of heaven and earth -- the unifier of the realms whose reign was forged in blood, tempered by neither compassion, empathy, nor warmth.

In the hollowed silence that followed, a silver-haired, purple-robed deity knelt alone, cradling a limp, scarlet nine-tailed fox to his bosom, his face ice-cold and those unfathomable eyes beginning a descent to madness that would reverberate across all the realms for generations to come.

Arising from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, it was a monument to a rule heralded by grief and loss, under the mantle of a god who had nothing more to live for.

**aftermath**