GORR THE GOD BUTCHER Skins

“Behold, God of Stories,” Gorr said as he stood over the bodies of a fallen pantheon of ancient Egyptian gods. “I have written the Ennead’s final chapter! But my tale is far from over.”
“And yet it is so far from where it began…” his captive companion, Shadrak, responded quietly.
“You think you know me so well?” Gorr said, holding the tip of his living sword, All-Black, to Shadrak’s throat. “Regale me then with one of your grand narratives. Tell me who Gorr is, and perhaps you shall be the one god who lives to see another day…”
Shadrak paused for a moment. Perhaps if he defied Gorr, as he had failed to do when they first met so many centuries ago, he would finally find sweet release at the edge of the Necrosword’s black blade. But as his lidless eyes gazed upon the lifeless gods scattered at his feet, Shadrak’s thoughts of defiance quickly gave way to cowardice. And so he began to speak.
“Of course… Master…” he said. “Of all the stories I know, few are as epic as the legend of Gorr, the God Butcher…”
***
Long ago, a broken man walked across a barren world. His planet had once been a jewel in the cosmos, teeming with abundant life. Though the man’s form was imperfect, his leg twisted and crippled, he had found a different kind of perfection in the family he had built. The gods were good to him. And so, in return, he devoted his life to them.
But his world eventually withered away, as did the family he had built. One by one, they succumbed to the harsh, unforgiving conditions that had ravaged the planet. And yet, the man still clung to the conviction that his wife and children had been carried off to paradise by their gods. It was more than just a belief. It was the last thread holding his sanity together. A thread that would soon be pulled, unraveling all he thought he knew.
While laying his last child’s body to rest within a crumbling temple, the man discovered a mysterious gate. Drawn by curiosity, he passed through it and finally came face-to-face with the gods he had worshipped all his life. But what the man found was far from the salvation he had long been praying for. Instead, he watched as two divine beings used their omnipotent power to beat each other senseless over some trivial matter. The man called out to them for help, but they were deaf to his pleas. In that instance, the man began to realize that, to beings of their magnitude, he was nothing. Just as he had always been…
He watched as the conflict between the two gods escalated, each wounding the other fatally with their final attacks. As they lay dying, one of the gods finally noticed the man and called out to him for help. He demanded that the man pray to him at once, for his life could only be sustained through the faith of his followers. When the man hesitated, the dying god made him an offer. If the man would pray for him, then the god would bring the man’s wife and children back from the dead.
Shocked, the man asked if the god truly possessed such power. The god merely laughed. Of course he did, he replied. The man then asked how the god knew of his family’s fate. The god laughed again. His answer was simple. He was a god. Therefore, he knew everything. Having heard all he needed, the man got down on his knees and began to pray at last, much to the wounded deity’s delight. But the man’s words were not the ones that the dying god had hoped to hear…
Instead, the man prayed for the power to kill every god that had ever existed. For if they truly had such vast power and knowledge, and yet they still chose to leave the prayers of their disciples unanswered, then they were never worthy of such devotion. The man had now seen firsthand how arrogant, selfish, and utterly indifferent to mortal suffering that the gods could be. The man’s faith had collapsed, but in its place was born a conviction that would ignite an unholy crusade!
In that moment, the man called Gorr became the God Butcher… and the universe trembled…
***
“Does my account please you so far…?” Shadrak nervously asked his master.

“Nothing pleases me anymore,” Gorr replied, “save for the culling of unholy assemblies such as these.”
“I see you left no survivors once again,” Shadrak noted, a tinge of jealousy in his voice. “If only I had been so lucky…”
“You still serve a greater purpose in my mission,” Gorr said. “They did not.”
“I am sure one of the countless pantheons you have slain had their own God of Stories,” Shadrak responded. “Perhaps one better suited than I…”
“But you are so much more than a teller of tales,” Gorr said with a sinister grin. “Or have you forgotten the god that you were when first we crossed paths…?”
“I have forgotten nothing,” Shadrak said, lowering his head. “Not a single moment since the Necrosword first carved its way through my brethren.”
“All-Black has always made quite the impression,” Gorr agreed. “From the moment I first grasped her hilt, I knew our bond could never be broken.”
“A moment that changed the course of history forever…” Shadrak said, “…for men and gods alike…”
***
As Gorr prayed for the power to end all gods, the universe listened.
Elsewhere in time and space, the primordial blade known as All-Black the Necrosword had been pried loose from the icy grip of its creator, Knull, upon his defeat by a group of powerful mortals. The sword had since been floating aimlessly through the void of space, drifting ever closer to the edge of creation. Almost as if it were being guided by an unseen hand, All-Black was swallowed by a black hole, emerging in a realm of gods unbound to any timeline — the God Quarry.
It was this same sacred place that Gorr had found himself in the presence of the warring deities. So when he reached out in prayer, it was not the voice of a god that answered, but rather the whisper of a weapon designed to slay them.
Gorr followed the haunting voice as it beckoned him ever closer, eventually finding All-Black’s blade embedded in the quarry’s rocky landscape. At the sword’s behest, Gorr drew it from the stone and instantly realized that he had discovered the means to strike down even the most powerful of gods. And so he did, immediately returning to the site of the battle he had witnessed. As the dying deity begged for Gorr’s mercy, Gorr instead delivered a swift and final judgement. It would be the first of many.
All-Black in hand, Gorr returned to his own timeline and spent thousands of years hunting the gods without hesitation or sympathy. But though the Necrosword was eternally wet with the lifeblood of slaughtered gods, Gorr’s quest had only just begun. The next chapter unfolded when an event known as Timestream Entanglement unleashed chaos across the cosmos and created a rift between dimensions, offering Gorr access to a place he had only heard of in stories and read about in ancient scrolls: Omnipotence City. It was there that gods from all corners of existence gathered to share knowledge. And it was there that Gorr would expand his righteous campaign across the Chronoverse.
When he reached Omnipotence City, Gorr butchered every god within it, sparing only one — a god who had given up his true calling to become a librarian in the Halls of All-Knowing. Gorr would force his new plaything to scour the city’s infinite archives to locate more gods for him to massacre. It was this god who was forced to witness to the unholy horrors Gorr unleashed and record the story. It was this god who prayed every day to any other still living that he too would be struck down and would escape this unending nightmare. But just as Gorr’s prayers had gone unanswered, so would Shadrak’s.
***
“Were you this dramatic before we met?” Gorr snarled.
“You have no idea…” Shadrak muttered under his breath before returning to his tale.
***
Though one god was spared a gruesome fate, he would be a singular exception. Realizing that Omnipotence City existed independently of the Chronoverse, Gorr turned the floating metropolis into his own mobile fortress, using it to travel between timelines to massacre his divine prey. He tracked the Great Beasts across the tundra and stormed the Skrull temples of Kly’bn, Sl’gur’t, and Zorr’kiri. He clipped the wings of Sharra and K’ythri and sacrificed the six-fingered Gibborim. Even the many serpentine mouths of Set could not match the hunger of All-Black and the Black Berserkers. No god, no matter how powerful or feared, was safe from Gorr’s wrath.
On one hunt, Gorr found himself grappling for what seemed like an eternity against the First Storm God, Hadad. As the Black Winter wind howled and the lightning flashed, for the first time he could remember, the God Butcher actually came close to losing the fight. But in the end, he managed to get the upper hand and struck down the ancient thunderer. Gorr took Hadad's corpse, which contained a primordial storm sealed within it, as his greatest trophy.
Yet after such a harrowing battle, Gorr’s lust for godly carnage began to wane. Though his devotion to his cause remained strong, the thrill of the hunt had started to fade. Thus, Gorr decided to seek out a means to slaughter gods more efficiently. Only then could he truly create the world he had always dreamed of. A world free of any divine meddling. One that belonged entirely to mortals.
Which brings us to the present. For some time now, Gorr has felt a shift in the blessed beings he has marked for extinction. They have grown weaker, almost as if the faith that empowers them is being slowly siphoned away. Why this has occurred and what it means remain yet to be discovered… but if I know anything about the God Butcher, it is that he will find a way to use it to his advantage. And when all gods fall by his hand at last, I pray that I will be among their number.
***
“You have done your job well,” Gorr said, commending Shadrak for his version of the story. “Now come. We must return to the God Quarry and prepare for —”
Before Gorr could finish his words, a sudden burst of energy swept through all of Omnipotence City.
“What… was that?” Gorr asked, astonished.
“Faith,” Shadrak replied, as a shudder ran through his tortured frame, a sensation unlike anything he had felt in millennia. “The prayers of thousands. Tainted with bitterness toward all the gods who failed them. But prayers nonetheless.”
“I recall that resentment all too well,” Gorr said. “It still fuels me to this day.”
“And now, Master…” Shadrak exclaimed, “… you can’t make me watch anymore!”
Shadrak, the once-god of bombs whose lids were slit open to witness the endless slaughter, leapt straight toward his cruel master. He poured all the disgrace and wrath accumulated over thousands of years into that single swing, only to find himself immediately impaled upon All-Black’s living blade. Shadrak could not help but smile. His prayer had finally been answered — not by a divine being, but by the butcher who had sworn an oath to destroy them all.
As the spark in his lidless eyes finally vanished, Shadrak’s story came to an end at last. And though Gorr had not wished for his servant’s demise, at least his crusade was one god closer to completion.