Asthéneia

Act 3

After Viridith’s endless exquisite deaths, Asthéneia and Dara learned caution the way other lovers learn touch: slowly, reverently, and with growing hunger. They moved through the Limbo’s hidden shelves like thieves studying locks, mapping every faint red ring that marked a strand already condemned, every subtle tremor that signaled Chronos’s attention elsewhere. They watched the second pillar walk his cold circuits from a careful distance, timing the intervals between his passages. They listened for the particular hush that fell when Kanna’s gaze turned toward other concerns. In those stolen moments of inattention they worked.

Dara kept a ledger bound in dried skin, its pages soft as old parchment and faintly scented with spores. Every doomed strand they discovered was entered in her careful hand: name, scheduled end, permissible shades of agony, a rating from one to “perfect.” Asthéneia would lean over her shoulder while she wrote, kissing each new entry before adding her own notes in black ichor that never quite dried. The ink left faint, glistening trails across the skin-pages, like veins of rot preserved in amber.

They became surgeons of despair. Never touching a strand that still carried hope. Never altering a fated when. Only painting the how until it bled beauty. Their restraint was its own kind of intimacy. Every shared glance across a newly corrupted world, every quiet comparison of notes, every night (or what passed for night in the Timeless Limbo) spent curled together while Asthéneia dreamed of colors of pain she had not yet invented— these things bound them tighter than any plague.

They ruined a moon of glass singers by making their voices curdle into acid over exactly ten thousand years—no more, no less. The singers continued their eternal harmonies while their own songs slowly dissolved their crystalline throats from within; the final centuries produced the most exquisite, choking chorales either of them had ever heard. They taught an entire species of stone giants that their own petrified tears could be weaponized into slow, grinding grief. The giants carved monuments to their sorrow and then watched those monuments erode their own feet over generations, until whole populations stood ankle-deep in the powdered remains of their mourning.

Each time, the Plan remained untouched. Each time, the despair grew richer, more layered, more intimate. Dara’s laughter sharpened into something almost musical, a sound that made Asthéneia’s rotting heart (or the place where a heart might have been) tighten with unfamiliar pleasure. Asthéneia began to sleep—something Pillars did not do—curled around her mortal muse in the soft dark of their hidden garden. In those dreams she invented new spectra of suffering and woke with the taste of them already on her tongue, eager to share.

Their laboratory occupied a quiet fold of Limbo where the light never changed and the air always carried a faint sweetness of advanced decay. Shelves of carefully labeled samples lined the walls: vials of memory-mold, spheres of concentrated despair, threads of silk harvested from previous canvases. In the center stood a low table of blackened bone where they planned. Dara would spread maps of doomed strands across it; Asthéneia would trail fungal fingers along the glowing lines, selecting, refining, dreaming aloud. Sometimes they worked in silence for what might have been days, the only sounds the soft scratch of Dara’s pen and the occasional wet shift of Asthéneia’s living skin. Sometimes they spoke in the low, private language of collaborators who had become something more.

It was during one such quiet period that the tremor came.

A living strand—Myrrdin—bright, stubborn, and very much not marked for erasure. Its light pulsed with healthy, unpermitted vitality. Thanatos had been sent to prune it. Thanatos was there, but he was not acting. The strand hung ripe, defenseless, its fate suddenly negotiable. The wrongness of it sang through the Limbo like a single off-key note in an otherwise perfect chord.

Dara felt it first. She lifted her head from the ledger, eyes gleaming with that particular hunger Asthéneia had come to cherish. She pressed her rotting lips to Asthéneia’s ear and whispered gently, “Go now, I will watch from here.”

Asthéneia stepped onto Myrrdin at twilight. The Lyrani—soft-furred, silk-weavers, gentle—were already panicking from the first signs of natural death returning. Thanatos was standing on a hillside, hesitant. His hand lowered, heavy with sorrow.

Asthéneia stepped from the shadows, cloaked in gangrenous green, eyes bright with poisonous glee. The time had come.

“Dear brother,” she crooned, “you left a garden unpruned. Allow me.”

She spread her arms. Decay answered, rot responded, souls felt new bindings form within the bodies they inhabited. Asthéneia smiled the widest smile she had ever smiled. The plague was not gentle. It was not careful. It was art without rules. Fresh corpses twitched. Silk cords still tied to living kin dragged screaming families into graves. Ancient dead clawed out of barrows, reassembled from dust and memory, soulless and obedient. Souls stayed trapped inside the rotting flesh of those who had remained alive until now—feeling every bite, every slough, every shambling step.

Thanatos stood frozen, shocked at what he was seeing. He tried to sever the thread of a nearby Lyrani, but it did not respond to his touch. The soul remained locked inside its decaying vessel, eyes wide with helpless awareness. Asthéneia stood on the highest hill and conducted the moaning like a choir, one elegant hand rising and falling while the dead answered in wet, imperfect harmony. Thanatos tried again and again to no avail, his movements growing sharper, more desperate.

At last he fell to his knees in the drying grass. “Chronos!” he cried out, voice cracking across the Limbo. “Brother—come! Rewind this!” he begged.

It was not Chronos who responded, but Kanna. Kanna stood there, disappointed, despondent, absolute, looking over what had been wrought upon this world. Asthéneia bowed low, smiling like a child proud of her drawing.

Thanatos bowed until his forehead touched corpse-dirt. “I failed,” he whispered. “Undo it. Let Chronos undo it.”

Kanna’s voice was soft, terrible. “No.” Thanatos looked up, stunned. “I acknowledged your words, granting the mortals a life after, and your response?” Kanna looked sharply at Thanatos “Refusal. Twice now you have defied me. This strand is severed from the weave. It will remain as it is—a reminder that mercy withheld is cruelty by another name.”

Asthéneia’s smile widened.

Kanna turned to her, a tone of admonishment harder than steel came forth. “This was not your task.” Her smile faltered. Kanna’s gaze returned to Thanatos. “Death is not the only gate, little one. Neglect is another. Remember this world, remember Corpus.” Then he was gone.

The dead continued to rise and walk around the two Pillars as they stood. The air filled with the wet sound of flesh hitting flesh, of silk cords dragging, of soft, endless screams muffled by ruined throats. One Lyrani—probably once an elder, its fur patchy and its silk robes in tatters—dragged a screaming child with cords still bound to each of them. It shambled near, pausing as it passed by Thanatos. A sound escaped the ruin of its throat—not a moan, but a word, cracked and questioning.

“Why?”

Asthéneia stood watching as Thanatos tried one last time to sever the Lyrani’s soul thread, his hand trembling with a grief that had nowhere to go. The thread refused him. She licked gangrene from her fingertips, savoring the taste. “A good plague,” she said, almost tenderly. “The best I’ve brewed yet. There will be more, brother. Oh, so many more.” She kissed his cheek and left the newly reborn world of Corpus to its eternal, screaming art.

Asthéneia returned to their hidden fold of Limbo expecting to find Dara exactly where she had left her: bent over the ledger, or waiting in the garden with that sharp, delighted smile, ready to hear every detail. The laboratory was empty. The bone table held only the open ledger and a half-finished map. The soft, spore-scented air carried no recent trace of her muse’s particular sweetness.

She checked the garden next—the place where black roses grew in soil made from the powdered remains of previous canvases. Empty. The overlook to the Void, where they sometimes sat with their legs dangling over infinity while planning the next perfect ending, held only the usual slow drift of unattached threads. No Dara.

It was unusual for her to leave without a word, but she had done so before. Small absences. Private errands among the strands. Asthéneia told herself this was no different. She had work to do. She could not concern herself with her muse’s minor dalliances.

Still, the silence felt heavier than usual.

She returned to the laboratory and stood for a long moment over the ledger. Dara’s handwriting filled page after page in neat, obsessive lines. Asthéneia’s own black-ichor notes wove between them like dark vines. She turned to a fresh section and wrote with careful pleasure: Myrrdin, OURS – Now Corpus – Rating: Perfect. Global. No other Pillar can touch it.

At the end of the note she added a small tangle of Lyrani silk she had taken from the hillside, still faintly warm, still smelling of fear and spoiled fur. Beneath it she wrote one final line- Note: They will never stop screaming. Forever.

Asthéneia closed the ledger gently, smoothing the dried-skin cover with fingers that left faint new stains. The laboratory felt larger without Dara’s presence. Quieter. She told herself the absence was temporary, that her muse would return soon with some new doomed strand or some clever refinement, eyes bright with shared purpose. She told herself that the perfection of Corpus was enough to sustain her until then.

She did not know that even forever had limits.

She knew only that she had painted despair so complete, so absolute, that even Kanna had chosen to hang it on the wall of reality and walk away—leaving the artist alone for the first time in a very long while, listening to a silence that no longer felt entirely like victory.