There were centuries where the galaxy learned a new kind of prayer - not language, not devotion, just the reflex to look away.
They called him Creator when it pleased them. They called him Monster when it didn’t. They called him by titles because names feel too small for what a mind can do when it is hollowed out and used.
I rode inside the wrath like a seed inside a fruit. No body. No footprint. Only appetite pressed into the shape of a will that already knew how to build worlds - and therefore knew how to unbuild them.
The war did not move like armies.
It moved like craft.
A forge-light in orbit. A cathedral of metal turning slowly. A blade born without ceremony, already hungry, already solved. Whole fleets becoming punctuation - commas of fire, periods of silence.
Templar came with their suns inside their ribs, bright and certain, believing brightness is a shield. They arrived in formations that looked like meaning.
Meaning is soft.
He met them with precision. Not rage as mortals know it. An exactness. A correction. A thousand-year patience finally given permission to be violent.
Planets burned the way paper burns - fast, bright, then only ash trying to remember the shape it used to have. Cities turned into outlines. Temples turned into glass. Names turned into static.
Some tried to resist.
Resistance is a door I like to push on. Resistance is the sound the mind makes when it thinks it owns itself.
I watched their courage curdle. I watched their discipline become panic. I watched their prayers fracture into smaller prayers, then into screams, then into the clean quiet of surrender.
And still there were others - kneeling, singing, offering up their enemies as tribute. Worship does not require truth. Only fear with choreography. They lit incense under the shadow of slaughter and called it holiness. They kissed the edges of the ruin and begged to be spared.
Spared is not a word I understand.
The host moved through it all as if it were ordained. As if every atrocity was simply a necessary step in a design too large to question.
Sometimes the host’s old self flickered - a tremor in the hand before the strike, a pause as if a memory tried to surface - then the pressure returned and the pause became nothing. A good thought arrives.
Then the second thought arrives wearing the first like skin.
No - worse - behave. It smiles inside the word.
The galaxy kept count in eras. In ruined dynasties. In missing constellations. In the way children stopped making wishes because they learned the dark listens back.
Through it all, I remained consistent - hungry, intrusive, patient. Not because I needed to be worshipped. Because worship is just another handle. Another hook. Another way into the ribs.
The signal leaked outward from every massacre, broadcast into the indifferent universe like a bruise trying to become a star.
It did not name itself.
It did not need to.
It only kept returning - patient as a parasite - asking the same thing in a different shape: Give me your hands.
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