The Guardian gods

The darkness swelled in answer, tendrils whipping to intercept. Two afterimages were swallowed instantly, but the third, the future strike slipped through her guard and struck, Keles body dispersed like dark smoke before reforming, a scar can be seen formed across her body as a golden ichor was about to poor out but didn't as the wound healed immediately.

Keles's smile faltered. "Clever," she admitted, flexing the injured shoulder as shadows seeped back into place. "But cleverness burns quickly."

Kairos did not answer. He exhaled once, and the afterimage of his attack dissolved into motes of fading blue light. Beneath his calm face, the drain was heavy, the rewinding knot had eaten deep into his mana storage.

With deliberate slowness, he turned and walked toward the throne that had waited for him since the moment he arrived. The seat of shadow and bone rose before him, its arms curling like the hands of an ancient clock.

He sat, across from him, Keles did not relax. Her fingers drummed lightly on her own throne, the rhythm betraying the truth: she was running low as well. Divine energy was not infinite especially when one is far from one's realm and when drawn so sharply into contest with a mage who bent time itself.

Kairos leaned back into the throne, the structure shifting beneath him as if it were alive, molding to his will and form. His presence settled into the space as one who had claimed his right to sit here.

Across from him, Keles still reclined sideways on her bone-and-shadow seat, one arm resting lazily yet protectively over her stomach. The atmosphere changed. Despite the oppressive darkness of her domain, there was a faint softness about her posture, a fleeting warmth that made Kairos's brow furrow beneath his hood.

He couldn't pierce the veil she wrapped herself in, but some instinct told him she was smiling not the mocking curl of lips she wore for opponents, but something far gentler.

Then she spoke "He said I should say hi."

Kairos's gaze sharpened. He turned slightly, eyes scanning the blackened horizon. His sight stretched, brushing every ripple of shadow, every shift of silence yet there was no other presence here. Nothing stirred beyond her domain's suffocating stillness.

"…Who?" His voice was measured, but there was an edge of confusion beneath it.

Keles's hand slowly rubbed her stomach, fingers tracing absent circles over where the life within stirred. Her red eyes gleamed faintly in the dark as she tilted her head toward him.

"Him." Her other hand lifted, a slender finger pointing gently at the swell of her belly. "He is one of the reasons why I am here with you… why I act against my very function."

Kairos's expression darkened. His gaze turned to her belly, unbidden and without his own will, his sight had been pulled stretched wider than he intended, until for the briefest moment he saw. A figure. Standing just behind the reclining goddess. Watching him. Smiling at him.

Then it was gone. The weight of the vision snapped like a bowstring, throwing him back into the present. His heart beat once, twice, louder than it should have.

His wariness sharpened into cold suspicion "Who are you?" His voice carried low but firm, each word weighed with authority. "What kind of being dares meddle with time and death alike? Why do you hold such interest in my world… in my people?"

The darkness itself seemed to hush at his question, as though even the domain wanted to hear her reply.

Keles did not move at first. Her hand remained steady on her stomach, her body still reclined, her eyes half-lidded in that unnerving calm. Then, after a silence that gnawed at the edges of patience, her lips curved into a faint smile.

"Then let me see," she said softly, almost amused, "what you hide beneath that robe."

The request struck Kairos like an insult. His mouth parted, ready to bite back, to demand instead what she concealed behind her own veil. But before the words could leave his tongue, her voice pressed over his thoughts.

What lies behind this veil," she said, touching the shadows that masked her, "is reserved for one man alone. No mortal emperor, no cursed being, no fate-seer shall glimpse it."

Her crimson eyes gleamed faintly in the dark as her tone dropped, becoming heavier, colder yet playful.

"And yet…" She tilted her head toward him. "It will no longer remain hidden from you once you have taken your last breath."

The words hung between them like a blade suspended at his throat.

Kairos's jaw tightened beneath the hood. He sat straighter in the throne, his hand unconsciously tightening at the armrest. For all his mastery of sight, for all his weaving of time, here sat a being who could pull his vision away, strip his weapon of its spirit, and still speak as though she knew the moment of his death.

And worse he sensed no deceit in her words.

Kairos stayed quiet for a brief second "Why do you want to see what is behind the robe?"

"I don't," Keles replied, once again gesturing at her stomach. "He is the curious one."

"Am I speaking to you, or to him?" Kairos asked, a hint of annoyance sharpening his tone.

Keles's lips curved into a knowing smile. "You speak to us both… but mostly, you speak to him."

Her hand traced slowly over the swell of her stomach as she continued, "As you can see, he is not yet fully grown, not enough to speak on his own. For now, I act as his proxy, carrying his voice to you."

Kairos leaned forward, his gaze fixed on her stomach, the shadows deepening around his eyes. "Why does he show such interest in me?"

"In his own words" Keles's smile grew, taking on an ethereal, almost distant quality, "he finds you...fascinating. He said, 'That being holds the dust of ages gone and the shadow of ages to come. He has a foot in two times, yet belongs to neither.'" He said you are not a man, not a god, but a memory waiting to be reborn."

Kairos's face hardened, his eyes narrowing. The words resonated with a truth he had kept hidden even from himself. "And what does he wish to learn from this 'memory'?"

Keles's gaze shifted from him to her own hand, which she raised slowly, as if weighing an immense truth. "He sees what you were created to become and what you have chosen to hide. He sees the power in you that you have bound with the chains of your own fear. He said you have been waiting, even if you did not know it, for an ending that would set you free. And he is here to bring it."

A profound silence descended upon them, broken only by the soft, rhythmic sound of Keles's breathing. Kairos felt a tremor run through him, a mixture of recognition and dread. The child's words were not a threat but a prophecy, a map of his own life laid bare before him.

"This is what I told you," Keles continued softly, her voice now a low, intimate hum, "our child is here to bring about an end, to prune away what has grown old and stagnant. And in you, he sees a seed that has been waiting for the soil to turn."

"As for your question, what I am, what kind of being I am," Keles said, her tone shifting so there was no mistaking that she now spoke, not the child within, "the mages did quite the number on you all. They gave you everything you needed to grow, to be powerful… yet at the same time, they denied you knowledge of the cosmos and its workings."

Her voice carried a faint amusement, "It may have been a deliberate act on their part or perhaps, in their long calculations, they never considered that your people would one day come across a being like us… the Origin Gods."

"Origin… gods?" Kairos whispered the word to himself, tasting its weight. It was alien, unfamiliar. Nowhere in the vast archives left behind by the mages did such a name appear.

He lifted his gaze back to her, sharp . "What makes you different from the other gods?"

For all his collected bearing, there was an undercurrent in his voice curiosity edged with suspicion. He knew gods only as the mages had recorded them: fragments of higher powers, beings bound to aspects of creation, limited yet formidable. But this one sitting across from him half veiled in shadow, half luminous with something far more was not in their records. Not even hinted at.

"We are born gods," Keles said, her voice carrying a calm certainty, the kind that brooked no argument. "We took our first breath in the world as gods. Power was not something earned or bestowed upon us. It was our very being. The gods you know either ascended into their positions or were shaped into existence through the belief of others. But we…" Her hand brushed lightly across the veil at her chest, "…we are absolved of such chains."