Side Story: Pharaoh, Karmine Narmer (1)
Sacrifice your lives.
And pray.
Send your faith to me, make me greater.
Since I am your death, fear me.
Master of ninety-nine beasts.
Master of death.
Praise me, the 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments'!
We who were born as pharaohs had been slaves to the 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments' for generations.
The lord of all subjects, the pharaoh.
And eternal slaves to the god.
That was the essence of our royal line... no, of all life in this world.
A predetermined fate.
A fate we were born into.
The god, the lord of death who fed on us, had proclaimed as much to us.
That we were created for it to devour, that dying and offering our souls as its sustenance was our sole joy, singing that endless refrain.
We accepted it.
No, we had to accept it.
There was no defying the god's word that it would devour every subject if we failed to offer sacrifices.
And the god, the power of the 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments', could indeed carry out such a threat—we had no choice.
In exchange, those who offered sacrifices willingly could escape such a death.
The lives the 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments' demanded numbered a mere few hundred each year.
For the price of saving the lives of tens of millions of subjects, a few hundred lives seemed... terribly cheap, as my father... as every pharaoh before him had no choice but to accept.
But.
Was it because of that?
"My lord, recipient of my praise, the 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments' demands the next tribute: ten thousand lives. And the one after: a million lives. Furthermore... you, king of slaves, offer your bloodline in the following tribute as well."
One day, suddenly, the number of sacrifices we'd offered until then multiplied exponentially.
When ten thousand subjects were abruptly reaped and led to death, and we were told to offer a million more for the next,
And when I, still just a child, was named among those sacrifices,
My father's face drained of color.
Only then did my father realize.
No, it wasn't realization...
He had been pretending not to know, trying to keep pretending.
Only when his own turn came did he truly feel it.
No matter how we dressed it up with words, no matter how we praised and begged for mercy,
The god dwelling in radiant splendor above saw us as nothing more than livestock penned up to be slaughtered and eaten.
And this wasn't happening to us alone.
It occurred in every kingdom of the Sahā world.
Everywhere in this realm, all at once.
Thus, countless kings rose up.
Those who had been slaves to the gods rebelled.
Whether out of rage at their subjects' deaths or the realization of their own impending doom.
One hundred twenty-five kingdoms of the Sahā world simultaneously revolted against the lords of the world.
Many kings died.
The courageous.
The strongest of all.
Those revered by the masses.
The wise.
Countless heroes fell.
Those who charged forward even with death before them.
Those who walked into the maw of the god's beasts and thrust swords into their throats.
Those who poured out everything in endless magic.
To survive.
The heroes who sacrificed all crumbled away.
To live on.
Even those who slew themselves kept dying.
Only.
Those who raised swords against the gods died in droves.
And we raised them again.
The heroes who defied the god of death died once more.
They rose, and died.
Rose again, and died once more.
The kings, the heroes, pressed on toward the god.
Ten years, twenty years—the war against the god showed no end.
And my father died.
The greatest necromancer of Narmer Kingdom, the most magnificent pharaoh who had first raised the banner of rebellion against the god, sacrificed himself in the fiercest battle, raising heroes and slaying the god's final beast.
Thus, I donned the crown in my father's stead.
As many kings did.
Like the kings and heroes who swore to continue fighting, rejecting death, I too took the crown as one king, as pharaoh, and marched against the god.
"Rise!"
Raising the countless fallen kings and heroes.
"You who reject death! Kings of the Sahā world! Heroes! Rise!"
The dead kings and dead heroes marched alongside the newly crowned king and heroes toward the god.
Clad in resplendent golden armor.
Gripping weapons inscribed with oaths and convictions, vows to slay the god with prayers.
Advancing, advancing.
Ten years.
Another ten.
The more we died, the stronger we ironically became.
It was only natural, with heroes and kings who never tired, never truly died, raising swords and spears and hurling themselves into the fiercest battlefields.
The 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments', unlike us, grew weaker with time, unable to reap death from us any longer.
Deprived of sacrifices, starved of the lives it had fed upon, the god weakened from hunger.
And another ten years.
At last.
"Foolish mortals, you have no idea what you're doing! You cannot comprehend the folly of slaying a god! Begone! Offer tribute! Do so, and I shall forgive this transgression!"
To us who had finally reached the heavens, the 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments' uttered those words.
All kings and heroes rejected the god's plea in unison.
And at last.
We butchered the god.
The god of our world.
Countless kings and heroes of the Sahā world died, but we slew it nonetheless.
"I curse you! Be cursed, foolish mortals! You shall never know! Slaying a god is slaying the world itself—behold the ruin you have summoned, the end you have wrought with your own hands!"
Thinking that its final spasm, we severed the cursing god's head and tore its limbs asunder.
And the kings divided the corpse of that 'Beast of Death that Sings Laments' among themselves.
As proof that we had indeed slain the god.
As an eternal oath of alliance.
We devoured parts of the god we had killed.
To us who believed we had escaped death at last came the apocalypse.
"Pharaoh..."
From my throne, I looked down upon the one pleading as she called to me.
"Pharaoh... please... please, spare this child. This child... this child is the last boy in our land."
"......"
All men died.
Even the heroes who slew gods could not escape death if they were male.
Even the kingdom's greatest warrior, the finest hero, died soon after his child was born.
The god's curse, its dying spite taking root in the world, was excessively vicious.
True to the name of the slain god.
A curse that plunged the entire world into lamentation.
That curse claimed even the kingdom's last baby boy.
Gnashing my teeth,
I spoke to the woman, a subject and mother begging to revive her child.
"...It's impossible. Even if revived, one who has lost life cannot sow seeds. It would be futile."
"Ahh..."
The woman clutched her dead young son and departed weeping.
I could offer her no words of comfort.
I knew how deeply she loved that child, how desperately she had tried to save him.
In the end, I said nothing to her as she walked away, cradling the corpse the curse had stolen.
I learned at dawn the next day that the child's mother had taken her own life.
She had been a hero.
One of the great heroes who survived to witness the god's death amid the countless who fell in slaying it—she hanged herself after tearing out her own entrails upon seeing the death of her beloved's last blood kin.
Her child lay as if asleep at the feet of his mother, who had hanged herself with her own guts.
The catastrophe did not end there.
The world died.
Because the god had died? The lands withered, rivers and seas rotted.
To us, awaiting only the end with all men dead, the calamity gnawed at the living day by day.
Days of accepting refugees from fallen lands, taking in survivors from ruined nations, striving to revive the shrinking earth—yet to no avail, merely burying the dead.
When at last every kingdom save Narmer had crumbled,
I steeled my belated resolve.
"If this world is doomed to perish anyway, then I shall offer myself for respite until then."
The inevitable end could not be averted, but I could halt the world's dying.
If the world perished because there was no god,
Then...
I need only become one.
"Thus, aid me, O kings and heroes."
I raised the resting heroes once more and opened the path to the heavens.