Every creature imagined having absolute dominion over everything.  Except for the Dragonis-jin; the Dragonis-jin had absolute dominion over everything.

    The universe was theirs.  They, squirming in the tedious doldrums of a particularly dreary glob of time, had fancied that dabbling in the intricacies of an infant world would be amusing, and they had thus engaged themselves in it at once, creating a delicate little chunk of space-time with which to tinker.  It was an idle pleasure, one to fritter away the restless calm between their bouts of combat.

    Combat alone alleviated their burden.  The intense physical and psychological exertions smudged the truth away—many other things were also smudged—and for one round longer sedated their yearning to escape.

    To the toy they had built—the universe—they were indeed a hoard of deities.  But to the peculiar realm in which they naturally existed, they were inmates, forever shackled within its fortified, abyssal core, though every few eternities the warden—briefly harassed by his own qualms with living, as it may be—condescended enough to heartily thrash them. 

    Their power was therefore relative.  But so rarely was it proven to be such that they began to discount it as a mad dream ignited by the passionate abhorrence of their own unrivaled authority or a perverted little trick cast upon them by one of the critters meandering about their feet.

    Nothing had nearly enough power to truly engage them in any way.  The only acceptable course of action, to them, was to subjugate all life within their quaint little prison—which was no more than that which they had plopped into the pits of their toy—and they swiftly did prostrate it all.

    Everything was to think itself below them, and everything did think itself below them, because everything was below them.  Disputation of the unfathomable might of the Dragonis-jin never escaped the lips of the bugs fated to suffer them nor from the comatose pits of empty reality that segregated them from the outside worlds—the other prison cells—and, increasingly, the soothing, spectral jubilations afforded by the warden—the void merely eyed them with keen indifference.  The Dragonis-jin thus managed to siphon tads and tatters of purpose and contentment from this snug arrangement with that in which they were.

    As their own atoms—which they had granted the right to continue transpiring, although they could not sway them otherwise—bobbed on the waves and tides of eternal temporality, dawdling eternity, their universe bowed before them to pay homage to such magnificence.  Such was the only satisfaction they could rip from the dismal existence of gods that was their existence.  Having performed a thorough autopsy on their universe while it writhed vigorously in their clutch and discovered nothing capable of invigorating them, they grew ever more violently ill with repugnance for their sordid lives, and they grew so much so that they commenced flinging themselves at the tomb walls that suffocated them and accompanied the whole of their foray with the most cherished activity they ever meddled in, screaming very loudly.

    They became quite aware that, beyond what morsels they had to lob about, there was absolutely no point for them to continue existing.

    They grew painfully weary of the worship and fear, and the absence of challenge burnt hotter and hotter, ravaging them wholly with perpetual neural combustion.  Their power dwindled in meaning as the elation of barbaric rule skipped and cavorted towards extinction.  Nothing could dislodge the hatred from them, even when they encouraged assaults, even when they desperately scrambled to maim themselves, even when they prayed to the curator of their particular writhing to do something, anything—but he was but a phantom haunting their agonies.

    Nothing marvelous could ascend from the calloused soils of their scarred universe because terror had smothered potential and the peons could not erect themselves from the prostration.  For ignorant bliss alone they focused and tried breeding their own cultural magnificence within their petty creation, but the balm sizzled when it approached them because it was so absolutely meaningless when the omnipresent, gigantically potent, strangling dullness that squirmed through their every pore was considered.  Pure violence exploded among these titans, razing them all, but not one of them fell—they could not fall.

    They could not stop existing.

    They had dreaded that for a very long time, but since they had never been so determined to crumple, it had only been a nagging dread before; but now the nightmare bled into every last day—if they had days in their eternities—and it hurt so dearly.

    All they had to live for, as it were, was to die, as it was not.

    They ferociously pursued termination or some unknown but equally appetizing solution to their predicament, but they slouched down, curled up, and whimpered instead of dismembering the most elusive quarry.

    Then, one of them stood up.

    His power was absolute, although such things could not be proven.  His dominion superceded theirs.  They immediately found themselves relegated to invincible beings that just were not quite the best, and he made lucid to them the new dilemma audaciously flaunting itself at their delicately permanent integrity.

    They did not enjoy being the second tier.  They hated it.  More than they had ever hated anything.  Except not being able to die.  Before, they were, at least, unquestionably, supreme.  Now, not only were they still stuck in searing seething, but they were also no longer the best.

    But they now were able to die, at the Monster’s behest.

    The Dragonis-jin were all pitifully below him, wallowing in hopeless doom and certain devastation, but they did not welcome it, as they had always dreamt they might, because the Monster was remorseless.  They would not be presented with death by the only being they could find that was capable of doing such; rather, he darkened the misery and mandated a new degree of torture.

    They seethed, trying to pluck their realm’s heart out and vigorously pounce upon it until their suffering ceased and their desperation vaporized in the blazing heat of whatever form of atrocity would snatch them away to anything but that in which they were.