This story does not end or begin with happiness. Its beginning being the end itself only strengthens that fact, one that I am loathe yet required to relate to you as your narrator. There are parts in the middle that you might be able to construe as "glad" or "joyful," but this is, for the most part, a story of suffering and the meaningless fight against it with the power of faith. Faith. A weapon used by so many races in the world thinking that it could protect them from the horrors of what truly lay in the darkness of the world.

The greatest example that I can give for both is that it was suffering that drove Jira ne'Jiral to do what she did over the course of twenty years. But it was faith that killed her. It was suffering that made her fight against the current of the world's demise. And it was faith that she used as her shield against it. Perhaps she had hoped it was impenetrable.

You see, because of her faith, Jira ne'Jiral was dead at the end of this tale. It happened in seconds, which you might view as a good thing. Her killer had made sure of that because it was the least they could do for her. All that time they spent together had to, at least, amount to something.

Her gorget had been pierced as if it was not even there, and her neck had been struck by a jagged blade made of sharpened Dreamsteel. Her eyes had widened in surprise and both of her hands shot up to grab for the arm holding the weapon killing her. It had come from behind and while she was able to grasp at her assailant, every necessary vein and tendon within that thick stretch of flesh and muscle was severed. She wept silently as she and her killer locked eyes for but a moment. Then, she died. It was almost instantly how her expression fell from the sheer shock of it into a despaired confusion. Just as quickly, the blade was wrenched out and a fountain of blood erupted from her wound. She tumbled forward, gasping one airless breath, and fell onto her face, crushing her nose against the paneling of the rooftop. She coughed once and remained still.

God Almighty was also dead. Unlike Jira's death, his own happened over an hour that stretched into decades in his realm.

Jira's death was doomed to go on to be an unremembered thing by most for the greater part of short-term and long-term history. The intimate details of her life would be only talked about in specific situations by the three people who most knew her. One because they hated her and viewed her life as an example of what not to do; one because they knew remembering such an important and captivating woman was the right thing to do; one because they could not bear the pain of their guilt to never think of her again. You may begin to guess which one I am.

But God's death, naturally, would go on to become the need-to-know news of every country and nation and continent in the world. It would go on to change the fabric of everything known to mankind. And where Jira's death was silent and unremarked even by the man who had stuck the blade in her neck, God's demise was ushered in by a choice phrase from a man of the cloth.

"God...is...dead. And I killed him."

The proclamation had been met with deafening silence from the gathered throngs. A thousand eyes of every color gazed upon the stage, some teary and stinging from the burning sunlight. The stage was handbuilt from cherry oak and mahogany; bolts and bearings of an unknown make had held it all together for nearly five hundred years. It was older than the town it was stationed at, leading the people to call it an antique of the Long Ago Days.

The red-robed man in the middle of it was also a relic, but less regarded as such. He was viewed with contemporary hope, rather than traditional admiration. Rarely had terrible news spilled from his lips; his favored words were joyous proclamations of his duties to God and how the people of the continent could better serve the Almighty. He had led several masses in the wake of his superiors' absences, earning a greater modicum of respect and - in some cases - reverence. A reverence that would perhaps rival that of the Matriarch Cardinal one day.

Yes, the Bishop was a man of aged countenance matched by an enamoring magniloquence. Both developed over the long years of his service to God. In regard to the former, he was particularly well-kept for a man of the cloth. His pale face was remarkably patrician in its features, being clean-shaven for both hair and beard, and almost naturally demanded fealty from his most loyal congregational members. He was hunched over by his age but was still tall in comparison to many others. In another life, some would say, he would have made a grand king.

Thus, none in attendance could believe that they had heard him correctly.

When he repeated his words with stronger conviction, worry began to spread throughout the masses. It was calm anxiety at first, like a hush before a yell or the receding of the tides before a flood.

Questions beyond count poured from the gathered masses. Had the Bishop lost his senses? He said what? He said that he had killed God? What ludicrous idea was that? One that was certainly born of a nightmare or an overactive imagination. In fact, there was no way that he had actually said what they had heard. But then he produced soldiers. Men of his Lambency. Broad figures, broader than most humans in their sheer bulk of muscles and bone structure. Being armored in steel as thick as a tree trunk only added to the imposing visage these great knights exuded. There was also a tinge of fear alongside that view today. They were dragging a large wooden cart and were caked in dried blood and other dark fluids. Opaque gelatin seeped through the lines of the cart's wood, staining the floor of the stage.

Questions silenced in the place of murmurs and gasps. Worries and hisses coalescing into a crackling hum of sound.

"What's going on?" one brave soul dared to ask above the rest, his eyes narrow with apprehension. "What's in that cart?"

The Bishop smiled almost deviously from beneath his hood and nodded to the soldiers closest to the cart. Then the screams began. Horrific cries and riots that defied any term capable of being produced by a sane mind.

From this cart, the soldiers produced something so massive in scale, so utterly radiant and magnificent that it was undeniably divine. Dozens of people fell to their knees as the terror of it hit them like warhammers. Others gouged and clawed their eyes, their faces bloodied with the resulting mulch. Some bit their tongues off in their panic. Dozens more turned to flee from the gathering, demanding to be let go so that they could escape what was clearly a demon. Others merely stood there in stunned silence. Unable to process what they were seeing.

It was left on the stage next to the Bishop like a trophy. A severed head, gargantuan in proportions and boasting perfect features. Angularly chiseled, a young-old face, with hoary hair and dead glassy eyes. They were the color of blue diamonds. Its immaculate teeth were bared in a rictus grimace that spoke of fear, surprise, pain, and anger. The stump of a neck at the base of the skull was charred, and the blood that had clearly poured from it had curdled like sour milk and blackish goo, producing an awful skunk-like stench.

Was this God? Was this the object of their worship brought mortal and low?

Jira would have been able to tell them all the answers they wanted to be answered. She would have been able to satisfy the questions not even the Bishop could satisfy with his oratory. But she couldn't. Not when she was atop a building - perhaps a tavern or an inn - some ways from the gathered masses. Not when she was dead.

Had she been alive and not a corpse with a sliced open throat, she would have cursed the Bishop through clenched teeth. Because he had done it; he had actually done it. It would be almost incomprehensible if Jira had not learned what she had learned over the entire ordeal that she sought to end. If Jira was alive, her hands would have trembled as her fingers tightened around the grip of a black-wood crossbow. A bolt of silver knocked and drawn. Her palms would have become increasingly sweaty, which would have stung the scratches and punctures across her flesh. Despite this risk of the weapon slipping from her grasp, the tip of the bolt would be perfectly aimed at the robed man on the stage.

The Bishop smiled at the panicked crowd and slammed his cane onto the stage. Iron-tipped wood cracked onto wood with a great clapping sound. Thunder. Belying the possible range of noise from a simple stick. The screams fell into aghast shock. Those attempting to flee stopped and turned back. All eyes were once more upon the Bishop who rested both hands on the head of his cane. Eyes the color of milk glass scanned through the hundreds of thousands of faces before him. Young, middling, old. Man and woman, peasant and noble.

"Yes...I have killed God!" he proclaimed again to the new shouts of fearful protest from the throngs. His voice was a miasma of confidence; the syllables and vowels were painfully stretched. "I killed him because of a simple truth burned into my heart that I wish had not been so."

He let the moment settle before continuing with a flourish of accusatory points to the head, "I killed him because he deserved to die. I killed him because he did not deserve our worship...our love. I killed him because he was a false idol of humanity. A God who did what he did only for his gain. A God who used our belief in him as a leader...as a leader who saved us from dark and terrible times to benefit his own advancement in the world...of mortal and divine."

The Bishop fell silent on choking words and wiped a stream of tears from his eyes. His smile, however, never faded completely even in these moments. Of course, no one saw that. They were far too focused on the decapitated head of their Most Holy, and the words of explanation from a man they trusted. What came next drove that crowd into a murderous frenzy.

"In my studies of the divine and the arcane and the demonic," he began again with a voice carrying across rows and rows of the gathering. "I learned of a spell. A ritual, if you will, that would open a gateway into the realm of the divine. His divine realm. To commune with him. I am a pious man as you all know, and I knew the risks on my soul for using such...witchery. But even I could not resist such temptations. A chance to see God in the flesh was more than my mind could bear for denial. And so, through trial and loss, I succeeded in incanting this ritual. And I went through that shining gateway."

He breathed deeply, forcing another waver to his voice and tears to his eyes, "I went through, and what I saw...revealed to me that our God...our Most Holy...was evil."

A pin drop before the storm.

No words after could quell the rampage of brutality that raged throughout the crowd. Collectively, they screamed in protest, insanity, and fury. Some finally snapped out of their stricken fear and attempted to charge the stage and the Bishop they once adored so greatly. With sword and shield carving through their flesh were they stopped by the Lambency, who held no qualms with cutting down the pilgrims and the peasants. Dozens were killed instantly by the trampling hundreds on top of those slain at the stage, flattened into jellied meat and cracked bones. Hundreds fell into incurable madness as they attempted to imagine what the Bishop had seen beyond that gateway. What horrors could he have seen to so deem God as evil. Hundreds more screamed at the heavens in sorrow, pleading for something to awaken them from this horrific nightmare.

If Jira was alive, her finger would brush delicately across the hungry trigger. In a moment, she would have pulled that trigger. The bolt would fly with purpose. It would skewer the cruel man's heart and end it. The mission, the goal, the curse, the hate. Years of stewing to find her opportunity for vengeance and bring down the man who had caused her so much pain.

But she was dead. She...had failed.