All of existence was red, and THE Sealed One stood at the center of it, smiling.
He had always liked this part. The moment before. When the crimson first poured out of him and painted everything it touched, every enemy in reach became, for one breath, a thing that belonged to his color. The obsidian foam of a dead home, the drifting snow, the rivers of ink around the woman on the air. All of it red. All of it, in a small and honest way, already his.
He let them look at it!
Across the undefinition, three figures stood in his light.
THE Creature, vast and dark, white and obsidian flames rising off him, the fractured Root of Existence glowing in the crack across his chest.
Anaximander beside him, a scholar in white robes with no authority at all, his hands clasped behind his back. And Calliope, THE Writer of Mythos, sitting on nothing with one leg crossed over the other, script crawling slowly across her skin.
