Firstborn
Fiction
The battle-seared deserts of the south would never shake the same without his footsteps echoing across their airy expanses; the settlements that dotted the greater wastes would still weep for want, but without his steel-muscled hands to guide them to a greater destiny. He was the first, and in that he always took pride — the first what? The first monster? The first devil? The first victim? He’d forgotten the source of the sobriquet himself, recalling only that cheap sense of personal pride in being first among men.
That pride was all that remained of what had once been a legacy of wonder and terror. He glanced once over his hands — well-used tools, shattered and healed over only to be broken again. These tools had slain a hundred rivals, had raised an empire from the desolation of hubris, had invoked a terrible awe in the people of the land who feared that those hands might one day reach them as well. But who cared for their opinions, as long as they did what needed to be done? Let them call me a tyrant, a slaver, a killer, a fiend; let them call me that now, in this briefest of moments, that they might one day call me great for the wonders I have wrought. The city of lost wonders, and the world that would spring from it — his legacy, his crown, all that would remain once the broken bones had dissolved and the shackles crumbled to rust.
