The Guardian gods

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The flow of time returned with a subtle ripple. "Annoying," the goddess's voice came again, this time without the whisper's closeness yet somehow still inescapable.

Kairos narrowed his eyes. He stopped time himself, his own mastery over its threads taking hold, and stepped forward until he stood within arm's reach of the unmoving goddess. A weapon manifested in his grasp, a blade shaped like the hand of a clock, its edge ticking faintly with a sound only he could hear.

Without hesitation, he struck. The blade connected and instantly, he felt it die.

The spirit of the weapon, the essence that made it his, was snuffed out like a candle. The blade crumbled in his grip, scattering away into nothingness. But something else moved something far worse.

A current of cold, divinity traveled along the disintegrating fragments, slithering into his arm. His skin prickled, his blood seemed to still, and the air itself thickened around him.

It happened in the space of a breath. He rewound time instinctively, pulling himself back to the exact point before he had struck her. The world snapped back into place, and he stood once again in his original position, his arm tingling faintly with the ghost of what had just happened.

"What are you?" Kairos asked at last, his voice low and sharp.

The goddess's lips curled into a slow, deliberate smile. "It seems your encounter with the future me was brief," she said with a strange amusement. Her hand rose again in that same inviting gesture, the shadows shifting to form the throne once more.

"You may call me Lady Keles Goddess of Death and Darkness."

The darkness held. It was more than the absence of light. It was a place without horizon, without breath, without heartbeat. A quiet so absolute that even Kairos's own movements seemed swallowed before they could reach his ears. The throne of bone and shadow still loomed at the center of this void, and upon it, the goddess waited.

She hadn't moved since his last attempt. His blue gaze narrowed beneath the folds of his robe. Fine, he thought, let's see how deep your darkness truly runs.

In the span of a heartbeat, his figure blurred then split.

Another Kairos stepped from his side, then another, each a perfect reflection, each moving with the same sharp intent. They fanned out through the void, their robes whispering in the airless silence, weapons forming in their hands blades of ticking clock-hands, the sound of their edges marking each moment they claimed.

To the untrained eye, this was speed. To Keles, it was something more dangerous: layered time. Each Kairos was not an illusion, but a self from another moment, drawn forward to strike together. The present, the half-second-ahead, the fraction-of-a-second-behind all moving in perfect unity.

They came at her in a rhythm no mortal could read, overlapping timelines converging on her throne.

Keles lifted her head which was covered by her viel slightly. No words. No change in her expression. The shadows at her feet thickened, and with a sound like the slow snap of a closing book, the first Kairos was gone. Not defeated simply ended.

Another struck from the left. The darkness rolled over him like a tide, and he too ceased to exist. Not destroyed in body, not broken in spirit just removed, like a thread cut from a loom.

Kairos didn't flinch. Dozens of strikes followed, each Kairos emerging from a different moment in time, their blades reaching for the goddess from angles that should have been inescapable. Each time, the shadows consumed them not violently, not even cruelly, just… with the quiet finality of something already decided.

Then he made his move.

One strike came slower than the others, just a fraction off-beat. A hesitation, almost imperceptible and yet the goddess's eyes shifted toward it. Shadows moved to meet the slower blade, swallowing it whole.

The real Kairos had never committed to that strike.

In the breath that feint had bought him, he reached not with his blade, but with his senses. Threads of possibility stretched before him, thin and silver, each one a path this moment could take. And there, woven between them, was her power.

He saw it for what it was. Her darkness didn't simply kill. It rewrote.

Every object, every being, every motion it touched it didn't matter if they belonged to past, present, or future, she replaced their ending. No matter the path they were on, no matter the destiny ahead of them, once her shadows reached them, their conclusion was always the same: stillness and death.

A sword, a movement, even a sound, its destined last moment was pulled forward, replacing the present with the inevitable.

Kairos's lips thinned. If her power could do that to a blade… it could do it to time itself.

The thought coiled in his mind like a warning.

From her throne, Keles rested one hand idly on her belly, the other propping her head as though she'd been mildly amused by his attempts.

A slow breath left his lips. "You…" he murmured under his breath, "…you could kill time itself."

From her throne, Keles's lips curved faintly. "You're learning, but you are wrong. I can't kill time, but death is always the last destination. No matter how much you stop time, no matter how much you move it, in the end, I'll be waiting for you."

"Death and Time," he mused, the echo of her words settling in the endless dark. "Two sides of the same coin."

"Indeed," Keles replied, her voice soft but resonating through the void. "You are the keeper of your moments, of beginnings and middles. I am the keeper of endings. You represent change at the moment; mine is finality."

Kairos took a step closer to the throne, no longer with intent to strike, but to understand. "But your power… it doesn't just end things. It seems to steal their last moment and make it their present. You don't destroy them; you simply skip to the final chapter."

Keles tilted her head, a gesture of quiet agreement. "Is that not what all time does? Every second is a future that becomes a present, that becomes a past. I simply remove the parts that are not the end. To a mortal, this is oblivion. To me, it is the most efficient form of progress."

"A progress toward nothingness," Kairos retorted, a flicker of his old fury returning. "You offer no future, no hope of change."

"There is always hope of change," Keles corrected gently. "But it is my truth that all change is temporary. Every journey, no matter how long, ends at my door. Your greatest victory, your proudest moment, your deepest love—all of them will, eventually, cease to be. That is not a failure of your time, but the natural consequence of my purpose."

The darkness surged toward him like a collapsing tide, swallowing distance with impossible speed.

Kairos's eyes flared, their blue glow sharpening into a piercing brilliance. Rewind.

The world snapped back an instant. Shadows retreated like smoke dragged by an unseen wind. He stood once more in the moment just before they had reached him, the air still and undisturbed.

He moved at once not away, but to the side, his steps slipping between seconds. For a heartbeat, it seemed the maneuver worked. The surge passed harmlessly through where he had been.

Then his vision blurred.

The space to his right, the moment he had rewound into, stilled. His body shuddered as he felt it the thread of this very instant being rewritten. Her shadows had not needed to chase him; they had already marked the time he would flee to.

Kairos gritted his teeth, forcing his limbs to move before the stillness could finish settling over him. He pulled himself into another second, another possibility, blinking in and out of the present like a phantom. Each time he landed, he felt her touch at the edge of the moment, ready to claim it.

"Annoying," Keles murmured, her voice carrying without effort through the void. She did not rise from her throne, nor did she rush. She didn't need to. The darkness moved for her, a slow, endless current that simply erased whatever it touched.

Kairos halted his steps, standing several paces from her now, his expression unreadable beneath the shadow of his robe. "You're not chasing me. You're… waiting."

The goddess tilted her head slightly, a thin smile forming. "Why run after prey that always returns to the path already chosen for it?"

The implication sank in like a blade. Keles wasn't just countering his movements, she was countering his future.

His fingers twitched, brushing against the fabric of his sleeve where the faint hum of fate-thread magic stirred. She didn't know it yet, but she had forced his hand. If he stayed within her domain much longer, he would run out of safe futures to step into.

And when that happened, she would end him without ever leaving her throne.

Kairos's hand lifted from his sleeve, the faint shimmer of threads spilling between his fingers like strands of liquid silver. They swayed in the air as though moved by a wind that did not exist in this place.