[Writing Prompt] How do you wish for world peace? (Patreon)

Turns out trashy pulp isekai stories had it right all along.  Who knew?

Well, me, of course.  I knew a lot of stuff, after reaching the wishmaker.  It took the better part of a lifetime, and the combined efforts of fifty of the best that humanity had to offer to get there, but we finally did it.  Well, I did it.  A lot of us died along the way, and of the five that actually made it to the summit...

Well, I didn't actually think any of them should have the damn thing.

Have you ever met someone who instantly rubbed you the wrong way?  Yeah, that's most heroes.  Normal people don't gain powers like that, you know?  Normal people want to do something useful to their family and neighbors, eat some good food, watch whatever sweet Netflix miniseries is out now, and never get closer to grandeur than their dreams in their comfy-ass bed.

Heroes, though, are by and large monsters.  And I don't say that in the traditional way, I just mean that they strive for greatness, and not much else.  Not a single person who survived this far had humanity's best interests at heart.  Not really.  Not even me, no.  It's why I killed the other four, after all.

Of course, the whole thing was a trap, on a cosmological scale.  The wishmaker was always going to be *it*, you know?  The most powerful of the phenom, the Big Score.  The end of the line.  And as someone who'd laid their hands on a bunch of smaller ones, let me tell you, the experience here was altogether a different beast.

It didn't give me a wish, it gave me the context to fulfill one.  It gave me knowledge, and understanding, and a vision of the world that shook me to my core.  I lived the lives of a million people in a heartbeat, so that I could not only know how to get what I wanted, but understand what I wanted in the first place; what it was to truly *want*.

And I saw.  I saw humankind divided, despite centuries of progress and reform.  I saw things falling apart, as people turned against each other for stupid, petty, ignorant reasons.  The same old story, over and over again.  Not even the heroes could stop the tides of history; after all, they were human too.  They were just part of the greater problem.

I knew I couldn't stop it.  No single person ever could; that's just how humanity is.  But I could stitch the wound closed, for a while at least.  Give the world time to heal.

All it would cost was a lot of lives.

The phenoms I'd taken in my life gave me a wide range of powers.  The wishmaker gave me depth, and scale.  And my new desire for a unified mankind gave me purpose.

And so, I sit now on the throne of black iron, atop the bones of what once was Beijing.  Skeletal structures grasp at the sky around me, as the shattered remains of those fools that have tested me mimic them on the ground around.  The screams of my artificial nightmares echo around my ears as I patiently wait.

Every day, a fresh batch of monsters surges forth from the dead city, born from my mind and my will.  Every day, they push the shattered edge of civilization back, just a little further.  Every day, thousands die.

But every day, people step up to join the firing lines.  Every day, refugees are taken in by countries that had previously locked their boarders.  Every day, aid and comfort are given to the dead and dying, to the lost and hopeless.  Every day sees a million tiny triumphs, of human will over the inexorable despair that is my monstrous act of blasphemy.

And someday, someday soon, there will come a day when my lines on the map cease to expand.  When the scions of the human race say, "no more".  When armies and heroes and engineers and scientists and just common people who have had *enough*, will stand their ground, and win.  When the lines of where the monsters live will start to shrink back inward, to my uncomfortable throne.

I cannot give them lasting peace.  I cannot give them a bright future.  I cannot give a single human a moment of true happiness, or satisfaction, or hope.

But I can let them earn the first step.

And I pray that will be enough.