The End Began in the Middle-06

"So everything was coming together to blow it all apart?" he said, and I nodded.

"Yeah, that's it exactly. While it still held together, I took as much as I could from the dead and used it to prepare for this." I said, waiving around the room we sat in, "Not that most of those cultists had any sense to prepare for anything like this, so looting their corpses and then their accounts was a lot easier than I expected. Soon I had all of this land, the buildings, the stores, and so on ready and waiting for the shit to hit the fan. All I had to do was get out of the Cities and make it here, and I knew I had it made."

"How long?"

"Ah, now we're moving from 'How did I destroy a social cancer disguised as a movement?' to 'How did I found a new kingdom out of these ashes?' A good time for that transition, since there's not much else to talk about in terms of how I contributed to the burning to ashes of the Old World- and why it deserved to die screaming for its mother like the pathetic bitch it was."

He chuckled.

"Well, as dramatic as hacking my way through a sea of zeds would be, that's not how it happened. I got a tip from someone I knew who went into the Spook world that something big was due in three days, and I should bug out. I took that warning seriously, cleared out my place in town, and then I fled the Cities and came here. I didn't warn anyone else, because fuck them. Whomever managed to not get eaten and still made it I'd consider letting in."

"And?"

"Twenty got here. I put half of them down because they got bit and lied to me about it; that's where the bone pile started. After that first winter I started going around to the others nearby and gave them the choice, and that's when I began building the kingdom that you have been born into."

"And become king of in time."

Now I chuckled.

"If you live long enough to succeed your predecessors. For all that your father and I made of our killing powers we are still mortal men- we do have limits. Don't be like the dumbasses who thought that words had power by themselves; real power, real ruling, relies on hard men ready and willing to kill and kill and kill to get and keep that power. That means that there is only so much that one hard man can rule; to do more than that you need loyal men, and that means finding men worthy of your loyalty. That, my boy, is the real hard part. Kingdoms rise and fall by the power of the king to find and keep good men at his side."