The King’s Silence
Every ghost answers to him now.
Every scream in the Infinite Realms echoes through his chest.
But the living?
The living never listen.
They keep calling him The Child Killer.
They keep expecting a monster.
So he gives them one.
Each summoning ends the same — ash, silence, and one terrified child wrapped in starlight.
The Justice League files it under Potential Threat.
They never ask what he’s protecting them from.
Because if they did… they’d have to face what lurks beneath their own world.
The thing older than Hell, older than Death.
The thing that eats gods and dreams alike.
It whispers his name when it wakes.
And he answers — not with words, but with war.
Every portal he seals costs him a piece of his voice.
Every child he saves costs him another shard of light.
He’s burning himself down, quietly, deliberately, so the screams stay contained on his side of reality.
The ghosts call him Merciful.
The humans call him Monster.
And somewhere between those words, the boy he used to be vanishes.
Still, when a child cries his name in the dark —
he comes.
Silent. Bright. Terrifying.
And when the League finally gathers the courage to summon him one last time,
the summoning circle cracks beneath his power.
“Why do you keep coming?” Wonder Woman asks, voice trembling.
He looks at her — eyes like broken stars —
and whispers the first words he’s spoken in a hundred years:
“Because you never did.”
Then he turns, crown flickering like dying embers,
and walks back into the dark where the screams still wait.
The King’s silence is not peace.
It’s mercy.
And mercy has teeth.
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