Asthéneia

Act 2

Asthéneia walked the Limbo still tasting each plague she had wrought in the back of her tongue. The despair had been perfect. Those who grew stronger from her lessons made her smile, those who failed and led their world to ruin… made her grin widen. Both were beautiful, in their own way. That’s the value of art. But her siblings didn’t seem to view it that way, they could not appreciate her art.

She felt… hollow. She had expected her touch to bring a degree of completion, and yet she felt only the faint, irritating itch of something missing. She exhaled black snow into the void and watched it drift, formless.

“Someone,” she whispered to the emptiness, “should have seen the beauty I created.” 

A strand answered – surprisingly coming from a world she had already visited, just a failed timeline… Mykara. On Mykara’s now corpse-moon, amid a cathedral of rotted fungi and a cloud of long dead spores, Asthéneia again ran into the woman from Erythra. Odd to find the same fiber on two different worlds, mere mortals rarely traveled the strands themselves, but it would not be the last time as it was not the first.

The woman called herself Dara. She walked through plague fields untouched, breathing deep as if the miasma were perfume. She spoke to Asthéneia directly, something Asthéneia had not thought a mortal capable of. She spoke of visiting Calcyra, and her admiration of the black snow. Of the miasma that wasn’t on Erythra, that the puss smelled sweet in the air… but she noted that the puss smelled a bit too sweet, a tinge of sourness could spice things up. Dara had other ideas too, ways to expand the art Asthéneia clearly loved, and having a fan of her work truly touched her rotten heart, well… if she had one.

 “You limit yourself to one timeline, one version of agony. Imagine a plague that blooms in every possible branch of a single world at once. An omni-plague. The same species dying a thousand different deaths, all at the same moment, across every future and past that could ever have been. One world, every timeline—simultaneous, perfect corruption.”

Asthéneia’s golden eyes widened, pupils dilating like infected wounds.

“Exquisite,” she breathed. “A symphony played on every string of reality at once.”

Dara smiled, cryptic and kind. “Lyris would be the perfect canvas. Chronos already marked it for ending. He cares only for the when, never the how.”

Asthéneia felt something new, something perilously close to desire.

“Show me,” she whispered.

Dara leaned close, lips brushing the shell of a rotten ear.

“First, learn your brothers’ rules. Walk the edges, never quite break them. Then we will paint something that makes galaxies weep.”

Asthéneia laughed, and the laugh became a cough that seeded the air with new, patient spores.

Far away in the Void, Thanatos felt a chill he could not name.Chronos’s gears ticked once—almost a warning.

And Kanna, weaving, paused for the length of a single heartbeat. The second test was beginning in earnest.

Asthéneia had found her muse.

Together they walked the Limbo’s hidden shelves, fingers laced, rot and devotion braided. Dara led her to a strand whose glow was ringed with a faint red—the mark of a world already condemned. They came across the strands of a water-moon called Lyris. Every timeline of Lyris ended the same way: total extinction within the next century, as approved by Kanna. No survivors. No future branches. A full cleansing so the Strand could start anew. A perfect test canvas—already sentenced, already dead. Only the how remained unclaimed. Dara kissed Asthéneia’s wrist. “Paint it for me,” she whispered. “Across every possibility. Let every version of Lyris die screaming in a different key. See if our siblings react”

Asthéneia’s smile threatened to split the world. She kissed Dara—slow, deep, tasting pus and promise. “Yes.” In her devotion to her art, to her new muse, she missed the misspoken word.

They returned to Mykara only long enough for Dara to inhale the last of the corrupted spores. She exhaled them into the Limbo as a black-gold cloud. Asthéneia added her own breath—wasting pollen, marrow-rot, memory-mold. Together they shaped it into the Veilblight: a plague that would slip sideways through every timeline of Lyris simultaneously. It would not kill faster. It would only make every death unique, exquisite, unforgettable.

They stepped onto the prime timeline of Lyris and released the Veilblight. It spread like ink in water—across oceans, through cities of seaweed and light, into lungs and dreams. Then it leapt. Timeline after timeline bloomed with the same plague wearing a thousand different faces:

In one, skin sloughed away in perfect spirals. In another, memories rotted while the body stayed young. In a third, children were born already gangrenous, smiling. Every version died on schedule. None died the same.

The despair was infinite, layered, perfect. No Pillar came. Chronos did not rewind, the time was right. Thanatos did not come to cut the thread, it would fall on its own. The Plan remained untouched—only the how had been rewritten into a masterpiece.

When the last strand of Lyris went dark, Asthéneia and Dara stood together in the Limbo, coated in the dust of a billion-billion unique deaths. Dara’s body had stabilized—no longer quite mortal, but not quite immortal either, held forever on the edge of perfect rot. She pressed her rotting mouth to Asthéneia’s. The kiss tasted of a billion screams braided into harmony. When they parted, Asthéneia was trembling—not with loneliness, but with recognition. Dara licked a tear of black ichor from the goddess’s cheek. “Next time,” she said, “we make it louder.”

Asthéneia laughed until the Limbo cracked. She took Dara’s hand. Together they walked into the dark between worlds, leaving Lyris to die a billion-billion beautiful deaths, already planning the next canvas that would span every possible ending and make despair itself immortal. Asthéneia was no longer alone. She had a muse. And the multiverse had just learned what happens when corruption finds a partner who smiles the same way.

At the center of Limbo’s hold, where the primes of the strands swirled, Chronos observed from the still point where all timelines converged.

His gears ticked once, slowly.

The WHEN of Lyris’s extinction remained unchanged: every branch still terminated at the exact pre-ordained instant. Only the HOW had been rewritten in a language of exquisite horror. No paradox had been committed; probability itself had been infected, not causality. The entirety of a world’s Strands, stripped away in a single, multifarious event across each timeline. An anomaly to be sure, but not of his concern.

He filed the anomaly under “acceptable variance.”

Yet a subroutine—almost like curiosity—noted the signature of Asthéneia’s hand and logged it for closer observation. One misstep, one spore that drifted beyond Lyris’s closed set of timelines, and the infection could seed the greater weave. For now, the containment held. Chronos turned his attention to the crack in Limbo for a moment, watching as it slowly drifted towards a Strand called Luminara.

“Ah, so that was the cause.” He said, reminding himself not to interfere in events he had already completed. Thanatos would get his attention when the time was right. He read causality one last time as the crack drifted away. That’s when he saw it. Confirmation. The mark of intent on the temporal fracture… not the mark of accidental creation or incidental generation.

Someone had orchestrated events so that the crack would form.

Chronos now had his first concrete clue that his target was already here, and already active. Indifferent to the music of a billion deaths playing in perfect, simultaneous agony on Lyris, and the keening wail that would be building on Luminara, Chronos turned his attention to why he was now again… tracking the interloper who was testing the Pillars.

Asthéneia and Dara drifted between strands, fingers laced, rot and devotion braided so tightly they were indistinguishable. Dara’s eyes still danced with the memory of the Veilblight. “More,” she whispered. “I want to taste something that thinks it is beautiful.”

Asthéneia’s smile widened until it threatened to split her face in two. She inhaled.

A strand sang to her… hot, humid, dripping with pride.

They stepped onto Viridith, a tidally-locked hothouse world where one face forever baked beneath a swollen red sun and the other froze in starlit dark.

Between the burning dawn and the frozen dusk lay a single, endless garden.

The Florakyn ruled it: sentient flowers taller than redwoods, their petals layered like ball-gowns of scarlet, violet, and green. Each Florakyn was rooted in living soil of devoured predecessors, their roots drinking the blood-rich mulch of their own ancestors. They reproduced by ritual self-consumption: once every thousand years, a Florakyn would devour its own petals in ecstatic agony, screaming pollen into the wind to seed the next generation. But the newest cycle had begun to refuse.

They had discovered how to regrow petals without loss. They sought eternal bloom. The garden was choked with immortal flowers, stems thick as cathedral pillars, petals so bright they cast shadows. No new seeds fell. No screams rose. Only smug, perfect beauty. Asthéneia inhaled the scent, cloying, sickly-sweet, begging to be spoiled.

Dara’s eyes glowed brighter. “May I sing first?” she asked, voice trembling with hunger.

Asthéneia kissed her rotting mouth. “Sing, my muse.”

Dara stepped into the garden barefoot. Her feet left prints of black mold that spread like spilled ink. She opened her arms and began to sing.

The song had no words, only the sound of metal corroding, of petals curling brown at the edges, of sap turning to pus. Rust bloomed from her voice. It crawled up stems, kissed stamens, licked the velvet undersides of petals. Wherever it touched, decay felt like the most exquisite caress.

Florakyn shuddered in sudden, helpless pleasure. Their immortal petals began to itch, to ache. One ancient bloom tried to close its petals against the song. Dara danced closer, placed her lips against a single crimson petal, and exhaled.

Rust raced inward like wildfire. The ancient bloom screamed, a sound like silk ripping in ecstasy. Its petals browned, crisped, fell in burning snow.

Asthéneia followed. She walked the garden paths as black snow again, but slower this time, savoring. Wherever her feet touched soil, wasting pollen drifted upward—golden dust that smelled of honey and graveyards. Florakyn inhaled helplessly. The pollen settled in their vascular hearts. Stems hollowed into delicate crystalline skeletons. Petals thinned to translucent lace, veined with black.

They did not die quickly.

They lingered. Every moment of wasting was stretched into centuries of exquisite torment. The garden filled with the sound of ten thousand flowers screaming in pleasure so intense it sounded like grief.

Dara danced among them, kissing the dying, licking nectar that now tasted sweet of rot. Asthéneia watched her muse, her beloved, eyes shining with proud tears.

The garden was silent now. Only wind through crystalline skeletons and the soft sound of perpetual falling dust on undergrowth. Asthéneia and Dara walked the ruins hand in hand.

Dara’s crown dripped black nectar onto her shoulders. Asthéneia licked it away.

“Beautiful,” she murmured against rotting skin.

Dara turned, pressed her forehead to Asthéneia’s. “More beautiful than Lyris,” she answered. “They screamed for us.”

Asthéneia kissed her, slow, deep, tasting rust and nectar and devotion. When they parted, Viridith’s red sun was setting behind a cathedral of dead orchids. New seeds, small, hungry, imperfect gold blemished with black, were already pushing through the mulch of their ancestors. The cycle had been restored and life began again, messier, truer.

Asthéneia looked at her mortal-made-immortal beloved. “You are my favorite ruin,” she said.

Dara laughed, the sound of petals burning. “And you are mine.” They walked into the dark between worlds, leaving Viridith to its delicious agony.

 The Third Pillar had found her perfect companion. And somewhere, on a world that had just remembered how sweet it is to die, a new flower opened its first rotting petal and screamed in perfect, exquisite pleasure.