Those Who Ignore History

"I am not a god," I said, my voice hoarse, trembling with exhaustion and fury, "so why the fuck should I expect to wage war against entropy?"

The severed head of the Viraloid Queen hit the floor with a wet thud. Her mandibles still twitched, spasming in the aftershock of death. Violet-black ichor oozed from the stump of her neck, seeping between the grooves of the sigil-lined stone and hissing as if the floor itself rejected her presence. The smell—burnt sugar and rot—hit like a punch.

Morres barely flinched. The orb in his hand dimmed, a faint hum dying beneath his thumb as he looked down at the corpse. His expression didn't change—but his Miasma did. It pulsed, faintly, like a heartbeat trying to push through iron.

"There." I spat the word more than said it, flicking the gore from my fingers. "Your infestation. Done. Whatever the fuck she was doing—throwing me into her dream, or mine, or some goddamn hybrid between nightmare and fever hallucination—I don't care anymore."

I staggered forward, leaving a trail of starlit footprints in the ichor. My body felt like it was held together by willpower alone, as if one wrong breath would make it all unravel. My skin still shimmered faintly with that paper-starlight glow, veins like molten silver beneath translucent parchment. The light flaked with each step, drifting off me in fragile, luminous ribbons—confetti at my own damn funeral.

"But what I do want," I said through clenched teeth, "is a fucking bath. And a fucking cup of damned tea."

For a long time, the only sound was the slow drip of alien blood onto stone. The air smelled charged, like lightning after a storm.
Then, finally, Morres spoke.

"Do you want to talk about what you did to kill her?" he asked softly. No accusation. No command. Just a quiet invitation. The kind only someone who's seen too much already knows how to make.

I laughed once—a sharp, broken sound—and shook my head. "Not much to say." I rubbed my temple with a trembling hand, feeling the hum of power still crawling under my skin like static. "I have no idea what happened, other than I now know more about myself than I ever thought to imagine."

Morres studied me for a moment longer. His eyes—always too old, too knowing—narrowed slightly, reflecting the faint, fractured light still radiating from me. "You're still leaking energy," he murmured. "That's not your Arte. That's…something older."

"Yeah," I said bitterly, collapsing onto a nearby bench made of cold steel. "Tell me about it."

He gave a ghost of a smile. "I would, if I thought you'd listen."

I didn't respond. I just stared down at my hands—hands that now looked nothing like mine. The skin was cracked, faintly luminous, lines of gold flickering beneath like veins of molten ore. My nails had hardened, sharpened almost imperceptibly, as if paper had learned to cut like a blade.

Morres moved closer, crouching beside me, the reflection of the Viraloid's head glinting in his eyes. "Alexander," he said carefully, "whatever you did down there…it wasn't human."

"Yeah." I exhaled, the word half-laugh, half-admission. "I noticed."

He nodded once, and the silence that followed wasn't awkward—it was heavy. Necessary. The kind of quiet that sits between two people when they both know the world just changed, and neither wants to be the first to admit it.

Finally, I looked back up at him and said, "I meant it, you know. The bath. The tea."

Morres' expression softened a fraction. "You'll have both," he said. "But you should understand—after what I just witnessed, there won't be any hiding what you've become."

I smirked, leaning my head back against the cold metal wall. "Then I guess they'll just have to learn to live with it."

***

Everything around me just felt—slow.
So. Damned. Slow.

The world had been dipped in resin, every motion caught and dragged through syrup. Fractal hung in the air before me, her wings moving in deliberate, mesmerizing arcs that I could count—one, two, three—each beat distinct, precise, crystalline. The shimmer of her feathers left spectral trails that refused to fade, as though light itself had forgotten how to move on.

Sound warped next. The murmurs of those around me turned to a low, viscous hum, drawn-out vowels bleeding together into something alien. Only two voices cut through the sludge of time—the measured resonance of the Domini and Gin's low, grounding timbre.

For a moment, I thought I was still trapped in the Queen's dream, or in some fragmented echo of my own. I searched for proof—anything that might tell me this wasn't another layer of illusion.

But it was real. Sickeningly, beautifully real.

The scent of Cordelia's bouquets reached me first—sweet, full, and deliberate, each petal's perfume spiraling with mana that clung to the air like mist. Her tea blend followed, the floral heat of it coaxing my pulse to slow even more. Beyond that, I heard the faint, rhythmic swish of servants preparing the bath. The soft bleating of the sheep outside. The creak of the wind through the shutters.

I was home. I knew this place, down to the grain of its wood and the weight of its silence.
And yet, I felt like a trespasser within it—like I had been gone for centuries and only now returned to a world that had forgotten how to breathe me in.

My heartbeat thudded slow and deep, each pulse an earthquake in my veins. I could see it. The mana currents flowing through me. The threads of reality, moving in their elegant, invisible mechanics.

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"What… is happening?" I rasped. My tongue felt thick, my words slurred by the sluggishness of my own body.

Gin looked up at me from where he sat, the bells stitched into his robe chiming faintly—each note cutting through the air like a silver blade. His smile was patient, but there was weight behind it. The kind that came with knowing exactly what I'd done wrong.

"I warned Dominus Demeterra you'd succeed at completing her quest," he said, tone half-chiding, half-impressed. "I also told her it wouldn't end well."

He stood, the motion graceful, deliberate. The world seemed to shift to accommodate him. Reality bent politely out of his way.

"What I didn't expect," he continued, gesturing lazily in my direction, "was this." His hand traced my outline, and I realized what he meant—my body shimmered, faintly translucent, paper-light, with currents of energy crawling beneath my skin like threads of liquid glass. The glow pulsed erratically, spilling into the air like vapor.

I tried to speak, but my throat burned with static. My miasma was flaring uncontrollably—an aura too vast and unstable to remain bound.

"Shunt it out," Gin said softly, the authority in his voice cutting through the haze. "Now. Before your realm folds in on itself."

I blinked, dazed. "Shunt—?"

He sighed, bells chiming again as he stepped closer. "Push your miasma out of your body. Not all of it—just enough to clear the saturation. You're drowning in your own spiritual overflow."

The words grounded me. My breathing stuttered, then deepened. I reached inward, toward that infinite brightness I'd carried back from the Queen's dream, and pushed.

The air rippled.

Light poured from my skin in threads—long, paper-thin streams of silvery energy that fluttered like ribbons in a slow wind. They didn't dissipate right away; they hung there, shimmering, before dissolving into dust that smelled faintly of burnt ozone and ink.

"Good," Gin murmured, watching. "Now, cycle your spiritual realm. Breathe in. Draw the clean air through your core. Let it pass through you, not into you."

I did as he said. The motion was instinctive—inhale, exhale, let the energy move like tidewater, flowing through the channels of my body. Slowly, agonizingly, the pressure began to ease. The world began to move again, sound and motion realigning with time. Fractal's wings blurred back into normal speed. My own heartbeat no longer echoed like a god's hammer.

"Better," Gin said, nodding once. "Your miasma was trying to synchronize with the realm itself. A lesser Force would have burned themselves out doing that."

I managed a shaky laugh. "So what does that make me?"

"Lucky," he replied simply. "Or stupid. I haven't decided yet."

I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. My skin still pulsed faintly, flickers of that strange paper-starlight coming and going in waves. "Feels like I'm… leaking."

"In many ways," Gin sighed, his voice edged with exasperation, "you are."

The bells stitched into his sleeves jingled softly as he crossed his arms. The sound was faint, but in the quiet that followed, it felt like a dirge. "My title, as you know, is the Archon of Calamity," he continued, tone settling into something more formal, almost ritualistic. "My role in this cluster is not to prevent disaster, Alexander. It's to announce it. To be the one who walks ahead of ruin and tells the world it's already too late. That's why Sovereign Fin sent me here."

He paused, his gaze steady but tired. "To watch you."

That made me look up sharply. I didn't even need to ask the question—he read it in my eyes before I could speak it.

"Yes," Gin said softly. "You're the reason I'm here. I never volunteered to be your manager as a vacation as I let you, and others, believe."

The words hit harder than I wanted to admit. The room suddenly felt smaller, the air tighter. My pulse echoed in my ears, faintly dissonant against the slow chime of his bells.

He stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Alex, listen carefully. What you did in that dreamspace—what the Viraloid Queen made you do—wasn't supposed to be possible. You didn't just survive it. You absorbed fragments of your other selves. Versions of you that exist outside this cluster's cosmology. That kind of interference breaks more than just boundaries—it rewrites them."

I swallowed hard, the words dragging cold realization behind them. "So what does that make me now?"

"An anomaly," Gin said without hesitation. "Something neither mortal nor god. You've pulled strength from realities that don't belong to you. Power that doesn't obey this cluster's rules. And that means I can't protect you from what's coming."

The bluntness of it stung. He didn't soften his tone; Gin never did when it mattered. His honesty was a blade that cut clean.

"Hells," he muttered, half to himself, "you're going to be told to join the front lines the moment the Council learns about this."

"The front lines?" I repeated, the words catching. "Against who—"

He looked at me then, and for the first time, I saw something flicker behind his usual calm: genuine worry.

"The Fallen," he said. Two words. Heavy enough to make the world tilt.

My breath caught in my throat. "Wait—how much time do I—"

My eyes fell to the calendar nailed to the far wall.
Only one day had passed.

A single fucking day.

That meant I had twenty-nine left. Twenty-nine days until the Fallen arrived—until it came for my mana, my body, my soul, everything.

Gin watched me piece it together, his expression grim but unsurprised.

"Morres slowed time in his realm as much as he could," Gin explained quietly. "He thought it might give you more breathing room. A chance to prepare, maybe even recover. But he didn't expect you'd get trapped inside that artificial pocket. You were meant to train for hours, not drift through a dreamwar that lasted years from your perspective."

I could still feel it—the weight of those memories pressing against the inside of my skull, the echoes of every life I'd just lived. My cultivation self, my scholar self, the countless reflections stitched into me like living scars.

"Time's mercy has a price," Gin went on. "When Morres bent his realm to slow the flow, he couldn't predict what the resonance from your fractured souls would do once you broke free. Your mind may have survived—but your essence is still trying to reconcile which version of you actually won."

I sank into the nearest chair. The floor swayed beneath me, and I could feel the faint hum of my spiritual realm churning in protest, unstable, raw. "So what do I do now?"

"For now?" Gin said, and for a heartbeat, he almost smiled. "You breathe. You eat. You let yourself rest before your own body burns you from the inside out."

He turned toward the window, the faint glow of dusk spilling across his form. The bells on his robes caught the light, shimmering faintly—like distant stars caught in fabric.

"And after that?" I asked.

"After that," he said without looking back, "you prepare. Because in twenty-nine days, the Fallen will find you—and no Dominion, Archon, or Sovereign will be able to intervene. When that day comes, Alexander…"

He finally looked over his shoulder, his expression unreadable, almost kind.

"…you'll either ascend. cease to exist, or be someone else."