The Book of Earth
7. The Plague of Man
When the civilized world was complete the queen of alchemy died, much to the disappointment of the alchemy king, alas he had tried to postpone her dying and avert her death, but he could not and his heart became a vicious torrent of anger against humanity. He began to tempt the Norns which at the point of tranquility had become the only crime even considered by scientific minds. A swath of genocide intrigued the king, for unsuitable he found replacements, their diseases could be cured and again alas they were not his lost love. A terrible envy plagued him of the gods, to quell his anger he created a disease to rid the world of its human life except himself, but the civil scientists only cured and eradicated his plague after plague after plague. His infatuation with death disallowed his uninterested reprieve, so he created a blight to harm the vegetation in waves of horrid affectation one after the next, first botany, then agriculture, then weeds, but once again tho with some trouble they disinfected the staggering blight. His thoughts were still dead set, he thought until his thoughts revealed a damning virus, his mind rolled in succinct jubilant revelation, and he created a poison that would kill the animals of the world and thus infect that which consumed the beasts and remain infectious and untraceable, but the world was cautious and fasted and designed a machine to churn the clouds and draw air away from the continents, and the animals were euthanized, and eradicated. His madness was replaced with deeper madness which was so replaced by chaos, with his anger he attacked the machines and fought the lighting within the storms of the clouds, and there fought to the death the storms and the wind and the reverent skies, losing his life.
The king stood in the afterlife, his body resting before him in the storm swept land of faded glory, where Loki the trickster approached to give condolence and offer a trickster's deal. A life of the undead, to heal slowly and eat the living and even to control others of the afterlife spells of necromancy. The king of course accepted to further his hate that had not died with him. Loki raised his red hand and devils of hell raised from the earth, with a prim sole promise to sew the king to the mortal world Loki took a knife and threw it into the king's head, the king awoke in the world of the living, still with his wounds where lighting had pierced him many times implicitly, but the wounds were healing. The demons looked to the king with the mending scar on his face and he could read their thoughts and by his wishes alone they obeyed the orders of his mind. The after gangers were as puppets his messengers of death, but a different poison ran in the king's blood than of the vitriolic demons, for when they slayed their foes death held the slain, yet when the king of death battled his blood became a disastrous contagion, those infected were not under his control. The zombie contagion infestation obeyed only the demons, he slayed in jest an after ganger and the mist of blood carried in the air infected other life just as he the first. As he found that they were not his puppets he slayed them and ordered the demons to forfeit their ready growing legion of the hungered dead, but the demons denied him and had strayed from him. The king of the dead having lost superiority felt envy again and killed one of the demons, from the battle his wounds healed but as he hunted and killed nine demons hiding on the earth each, his wounds began to heal slower than they had with each he killed, leaving him believe that the demons were the source of his immortality, so he trapped and imprisoned the final demon in a cage made of poison. When the king deserted the prison the final demon was actually the trickster, puppeteer of the demons, deceiver of providence, and walked through the prison walls.
Tho the king’s wit had left humanity it had not abandoned him, when he saw that the dead were only attacking the young, the machines to purify only dragging the virus over the land quicker, he set to destroy every undead creature to liberate all life, but with each slay the disease only spread faster, into the water, into the air, into the darkness, and in the fires into the light, until the world was consumed by death and all life was lost.
The alchemist king wandered an empty world until the gods had enough sport of his insanity and Loki washed the world with holy fire. It was a trick by the trickster to entertain the gods, the sun washed the world with warmth and the waters purged themselves against the mountains of the sea, the plants began to grow powered by the life of the universe. When the world was mended by the Vanir as best they could, paying Loki with some of the deviant souls, the Aesir returned all of the wrongfully fallen to their lives just as they had existed before catalyst mischief.
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