NOVEL NEXT Aeternae – Chapter 242: Impending Reunion
Ferio glared at the starry reflection of herself that was Diskrye. "Are you sure you don't know where Earth is? Cause I am pretty sure you do."
The primordial deity of space regarded the only child of the Creator for a moment before it sighed. "I know where it was when I made it, but Her creation is in constant motion and it's been more than a few millennia since then." Diskrye offered a shrug. "You would be better off asking your mother to take you there, if you truly wish to go."
The Goddess of Life and Light pinched the bridge of her nose at the comment. "If I could just ask her to get me there, I wouldn't have come to ask you where it is."
"But why can't you ask her?" Diskrye asked, tilting its head slightly. "The All-Mother is always listening. She may not answer everyone, but I am sure she would talk to her own daughter."
"I think you are vastly misjudging the relationship between Aperio and myself."
Diskrye cocked its head to the other side. "Am I?"
"Yes."
Ferio turned away from the starry copy of herself and let out a long sigh. If Diskrye was not willing to tell her, she would have to go looking for herself, which would probably annoy the primordial space entity as well as the All-Mother. Though Ferio was associated with the Sun on many worlds, she had never really gotten along all that well with space itself. This was especially true once she had to leave the confines of whatever realm she was currently in in order to move elsewhere.
Her mother had tried to explain it countless times, but Aperio — at least at the time — was not good at teaching and had expected a nine year old to pay attention to what was essentially multidimensional maths, complex enough to quite literally kill mortals.
"Well," Diskrye began after it became obvious Ferio herself would not talk, "I am willing to show you where I initially made that world. Even from there, finding out where it is now will be just as annoying for you as it is for me."
"Better than nothing," the Goddess replied. "And no, asking Mother is not an option."
Diskrye regarded Ferio for a moment longer before it vanished, the Goddess of Life and Light easily following the teleport to what she had always assumed to be the home of the primordial space deity.
Much like the being itself, this realm was comprised of shades of black and dark blue and housed countless visible stars within it. The worlds floating in the middle of the not-quite-room were the ones Diskrye was currently working on. Most of the hovering orbs had an unnatural — almost haunting — aura to them, as though they were places that reasonable mortals would want to avoid. So Diskrye is on an Eldritch bend again, Ferio mused. Might be worth claiming one of those for some nice horrors of the beyond.
While most of her followers — and most mortals in general — would not be a fan of those mostly formless and otherwise rather incomprehensible beings, she quite liked them. They knew their place far better than the kind of pesky mortals her mother had grown so fond of.
Diskrye, her stellar twin of worlds, dissolved away. In the same instant, the worlds that were currently being worked on were replaced with a web of mana, one that quite obviously did not like being pushed into the perhaps-room's approximation of physical reality.
"It was there when I created it," the disembodied voice of Diskrye said, a small clump of mana shifting slightly in response before a multitude of lines spread out from it. "And that is where it could be by now. As you can see, there are too many options to count."
"That's only a few million," Ferio replied, her eyes tracking one of the possible 'trajectories' the world she was looking for could have taken. "Perfectly countable."
"You know what I meant." The Goddess of Life and Light was almost certain she could hear Diskrye huff in annoyance. "Besides, these are just the initial possibilities. Each path splits into a myriad others, which subdivide again and again. Such is the complex nature of her creation."
Ferio did not reply, too focused on the probable thread of her mother's creation that Diskrye had highlighted. Something about it told her it was the one it was looking for. A slight sheen that only she could seemingly see. A tiny note of power that resonated with her very Soul in a way only Aperio could accomplish.
"Thank you," she said after a moment longer. Before Diskrye could offer any more words, Ferio disappeared from its probably-dominion and appeared in a stretch of nothing that at one point or another had likely served as the birthplace of the world she was looking for.
A thought caused a pillar of runes to appear around Ferio. She touched a particular sequence of them with her hand, the motions not needed but still feeling necessary. This was how she had always commanded larger quantities of her own mana, even if her mother had tried again and again to make her stop. According to the old Aperio, it was unbecoming of her to resort to physical representations of magic.
At the time she had tried to use magic like the All-Mother, but it had never worked quite as well as simply making an abstracted version of the methods, and then using that abstract as a tool for casting. Now, she no longer cared what her mother thought about it. Not really at least. But then, Aperio also had not commented at all on the way her daughter wielded magic since her return.
Ferio tapped a small cluster of runes in front of her, causing a circle coloured in the same orange and red as her clothes to form beneath her feet. It pulsed with her mana for a moment before dissolving into orange motes which attached themselves to a particular strain of mana. One which felt an awful lot like that of her mother.
It was almost like she had left a trail to be followed.
Aperio hesitated for a moment before she gently ran her fingers through Caethya's hair, eliciting a happy mumble from the Demigoddess. Unlike Adam, her love had had a unique Soul from the outset. Sure, it was because Aperio herself had been careless, but she could not longer find it in herself to dislike the fact, or even hate herself like she had in the past.
Caethya had shown on more than one occasion that what she felt was quite genuine and the notion, foolish in hindsight, that her love had only shown affection because she had been given a rather...liberal amount of the All-Mother's mana should have been mostly dismissed. There were still some small whispers of doubt, but that held true for essentially anything Aperio did so she did not pay them much mind.
She turned her attention to Adam who still sat in her Void. She had noticed that he sometimes looked up from his hands to glance at something behind her. The only thing back there that could be of note was the River of Souls. Maybe he wants to see it up close?
Aperio flicked her free wrist as if throwing away a piece of paper, causing her Void to shiver for a moment before the River of Souls became visible underneath them. "You are free to look," she said, gesturing towards the various spheres with the wing not wrapped around her love. "You will not be able to reach them, however."
The mortal only looked at her confused for a moment before he seemed to realise what he was doing and immediately averted his gaze. Apparently, direct eye contact with her was not something he wished at the moment.. Aperio couldn't quite figure out why that was, but she chalked it up to the fact that she had fixed his Soul without asking for permission first. Under normal circumstances, she would have not acted so rashly, but it was needed for both Adam and the universe at large.
Perhaps I should apologise? Aperio thought to herself as she brushed a few of her love's hairs behind an ear, her finger tracing the jewellery that always adorned them.
It was probably the right thing to do, but the All-Mother was not at all certain how she should go about actually doing that. In addition, Adam did not seem all that receptive at the moment to...anything, really.
Aperio narrowed her eyes slightly. She glanced at the mortal's Soul again and for a moment, she thought that she had done something wrong and damaged it. Further investigation revealed that that was not the case. The mortal was simply not quite taking the happenings as she had hoped he would.
A slight grumble came from her lap. It was followed by Caethya's hand tugging Aperio's own back towards her head, and that was enough for the All-Mother to take her eyes off of Adam and turn her attention towards her love.
The Demigoddess was still asleep, but she quite obviously was aware enough to know that Aperio had stopped playing with her hair and was most displeased. Luckily, that was a simple fix and a moment later, Caethya was back to contently mumbling as she shifted a bit in the embrace of Aperio's wing.
She would have liked to focus entirely on the affection of her love, but another presence tugged at the edges of her mind. One that soured her mood for a moment. Why is Ferio coming here?
Aperio let out a sigh, the annoyance contained in it seemingly enough to wake her love.
Caethya let out a yawn as she stretched herself, blinking a few times before she rubbed her temples. "Looking at the System makes my brain feel like a stampede came through it," she mumbled after a moment, looking up at Aperio. "I hope that goes away."
"It will," Aperio replied with a smile. She ran her fingers through her love's hair again, a touch of her magic making sure that Caethya's pain would quickly leave. "Someone lesser would have died from looking at it."
"That's not unsettling at all," the Demigoddess said before she sat herself up in the All-Mother's lap and gently pulled at her wing so that she would move it with her. "But what makes you so annoyed that I can feel your entire Void resonate with it?"
Aperio obliged and moved her feathered appendage so that Caethya could comfortably remain wrapped inside it. "Ferio is looking for me."
"And that's bad? Why?"
"We have not exactly parted on good terms." Aperio wrapped her arms around Caethya's waist and pulled her closer, her free wing moving protectively in front of her love. "I am also not fond of her attitude towards you, and mortals in general.
""Luckily her opinion on our relationship does not matter," her love replied.
"Perhaps not, but she is still my daughter and I would rather her not run around thinking mortals are nothing more than chattel for the comparative few that ascend past their initial bounds." Aperio shifted her wings slightly, pulling them closer to herself. "And while it is not needed, I would prefer if Ferio was accepting of you and the feelings I have. I am not as she remembers, nor will I ever be again, but neither am I — or will I be — who she apparently wishes me to be."
"That sounds like a problem for her." Caethya looked up at the All-Mother, offering her a smile. "You are allowed to be yourself. If she doesn't like it, that isn't your problem."
Caethya tapped at Aperio's wing, standing up once the feathered appendage had been removed and the arms that held her had gone slack. Her love looked at Adam with a raised brow for a moment before she shrugged and rolled her shoulders.
She held out her hand for the All-Mother to take. "Come on, if Ferio wants to come and make a stink, let her. We have a wondrous new multiverse to observe."
"You realise that she could quite handily end any version of Earth she wishes, right?" Aperio asked, taking Caethya's hand. She smirked as her love pulled but did not manage to move her until she stood up herself. "I will not allow her, of course, but she still could."
The Demigoddess simply waved her off. “Just have her meet us at a café or something of the like. Then we can all have a nice chat and she can tell us why she came to what must be the most backwater of backwater worlds to her.”
“That sounds awfully confrontational.”
“Just enough to get through to her,” her love replied with a mischievous smile. “You can think of it as me making a point to her.”
Aperio thought about it for a moment, then gave a tiny shake of her head. “Just don’t fight, please. I want a nice and quiet life, not one where my love and my daughter hate one another.”
Caethya offered another shrug before she held out her hand. “That’s up to her.”
Aperio took her love’s hand into her own, her eyes wandering towards Adam before she sighed and she disappeared with Caethya in tow. If he was ready to leave, all he had to do was ask. She had a family reunion to attend.
