Asthéneia

Act 4

Dara returned some time later, an excited expression playing across her face as she spoke, “I found another, one like Lyris.”

“Tell me, my muse, show me our next canvas…” Asthéneia moved to draw Dara in, but instead of joining the embrace Dara spiraled, dancing over to a window. Dara waves her hand over the glass and, in a typhoon of petals and storm colored feathers, the view through the glass shifted to a world Asthéneia recognized. Erythra. It’s rivers still lazy, it’s golden fields continued to sway gently in the wind.

Asthéneia clapped at the show, “Marvelous! Where did you learn to do that?”

Dara paused, confused for a moment, then her eyes widened as she realized her mistake. “oh, oops. Uh, I’ve been practicing… it was meant to be a surprise, I didn’t mean to show you my artistic viewings until I had perfected…” She stammered out.

“Nonsense! That flourish was perfect!” Asthéneia declared, Dara sighed in relief. “So, Erythra is it? Thanatos spoke true, looks like my original plague was indeed erased. So much bland healthy life abounds. And it’s strands are nearing their end you say?”

“Yes,” Dara said, happy to be back on topic. “well, close to it. Not every strand like Lyris, but enough. All but one core, set to become it’s new prime, and the subsidiaries of that core. All others are scheduled. I thought it would present a small challenge, a twist on our Veilblight, to have it target only subsects of the Strands”

Asthéneia pondered for a moment, a patch of her moldy hair plopping to the ground as she brushed it out of her view. “Oh, but you missed the glory on Myrrdin… No, not the veilblight. We will try something new…” She told Dara about Myrrdin, how she had reforged it through her Breathing Dead plague into Corpus. Then she whispered conspiratorially, “So this time we will infect the strands themselves, so once they end they can continue to spread amongst those that remain…”

They sat, they talked, they planned. After a time, Asthéneia and Dara were on Erythra. They worked in the hollow beneath an ancient, half-rotted willow whose roots drank from a spring that ran through every possible Erythra at once. Here, time was thin as wet paper. Spores drifted upward and fell sideways into futures that had never happened and never would. Dara knelt in the blue water, palms open, guiding. Asthéneia stood waist-deep in the same water, naked, skin splitting and re-knitting as new strains blossomed across her body like living tattoos, spreading into the once clear waters turning them murky.

“This is the vector,” Dara whispered, voice soft as a lullaby sung to the dying. “Not flesh, not air, not even blood. Probability itself. A prion that infects the idea of being healthy.”

Asthéneia’s breath hitched with pleasure. She lifted a hand; from her palm oozed a single droplet of liquid starlight gone bad—opalescent, then black, then gold again.

“It will ride the echoes Chronos allows. Every timeline where an Erythran draws breath will taste this at the exact same moment. They will cough petals in histories that never were. They will give birth to children already moldering in wombs that exist only in dreams.”

Dara’s smile was almost tender. “And because the when never changes—only the how—Chronos will not lift a finger.”

“And then, once they fall, the fun will begin.” Asthéneia leaned forward and kissed Dara full on the mouth, a kiss that should have dissolved flesh and bone. Dara accepted it untouched, tasting of iron and petrichor.

“Genius,” Asthéneia moaned against her lips. “You are the only creature in all the weave who truly understands my art.”

They named it the Erythra Ascension—because even those who survived would feel the glory of being forged in putrefaction.

The release was silent. On the prime Erythra, a little girl picking daisies sneezed a single black petal. On an Erythra that would never be, a queen in a palace of glass coughed up a lungful of moths with human eyes. On an Erythra that had already ended centuries ago, a forgotten corpse sat up in its grave and began to sing in a voice of rust. All at once.

The plague did not spread—it simply was. A mother rocking her infant felt the child’s skin soften like warm wax, watched tiny capillaries bloom into fern-like bruises beneath translucent flesh, and knew, with the absolute certainty of nightmare, that the same thing was happening to every version of her daughter who had ever lived or ever would.

Villages woke to skies raining soft, black snow that melted into lesions on contact. Rivers reversed, flowing uphill with the bodies of the drowned who had died yesterday and tomorrow simultaneously. The sun dimmed, not from eclipse but from billions of microscopic fruiting bodies released by lungs that no longer needed to breathe.

Asthéneia walked alone on the prime Erythra openly now, revelling. She wore the shape of a beautiful woman draped in veils of living mold, leaving footprints that blossomed into toadstools laced with screaming faces. Wherever she stepped, the infected knelt and thanked her with failing voices, because the plague was also hallucinogenic mercy: in their final hours they saw loved ones long dead, felt the fever as warm embraces, believed they were ascending into something greater.

She collected their gratitudes like pressed flowers. Erythra fell, and the scheduled Strands ended. Not in silence, but in a grand display of artistic expression. Then, as the last of the scheduled strands fell – somewhere in a substrand of the new prime, an elderly man coughing up blood widened his eyes in surprise as from the blood arose a single flower with petals as dark as pitch, and dripping ichor just as thick.

Thanatos found her in a cathedral whose stained-glass saints had begun to weep pus. He dropped to the floor, the white flames that trimmed his new ashen cloak burned brightly as it landed softly on the decaying rubble. He looked at Asthéneia through new eyes hidden behind a porcelain mask.

“Sister,” he said, voice raw, “you have gone too far. You touch worlds not meant to be afflicted. This is not pruning. This is annihilation wearing the mask of art.”

Asthéneia turned, eyes luminous with fever. “Look at them, brother. They are praying to the rot. They have never been more alive than in the moment they liquefy. You end lives. I perfect that end.”

Thanatos stepped forward; where his shadow fell, the infected paused in their dissolution, granted a few heartbeats of clarity. A young man, half his face sloughed away, looked up with sudden terror.

“Please,” he rasped, “make it stop.”

Thanatos knelt, touched the man’s forehead, and granted the clean death he had always offered. The body crumbled to dust that refused to rot further. Thanatos had grown stronger since last they met. He wasn’t able to sever her plague touched on Corpus, but now he was somehow able to affect these plague touched…

Asthéneia watched agape, lips curled in something between sneer and sorrow.

“You rob them of the final movement of the symphony.”

“I rob them of nothing,” Thanatos said. “I give them peace instead of screaming.”

She glided close, trailing fingers across his cloak; fabric blackened and frayed at her touch, then mended itself. “Contain me if you can, sweet brother. But the Ascension is already complete. Every Erythra is singing my name in keys only the dying can hear.”

Thanatos looked out over the cathedral’s nave—rows of kneeling infected, mouths open in rapture or rigor, indistinguishable.

“Then I will carry every soul you break,” he said quietly. “And I will remember the weight.”

He vanished, leaving only the faint scent of rain on graves.

Asthéneia returned to Temporal Limbo, an etch of concern crossing her marred face. The change in Thanatos’s power, could it have to do with his mask? His cloak? Why the sudden shift? She needed answers before she continued to her next canvas.

She checked her siblings one at a time. Thanatos she already knew of his change, so she went in search of Chronos, the Second formed. She saw him from a distance, flitting from strand to strand as if chasing some unseen foe, but no cloak. No mask.

Next, she checked on Nyxial, the Fifth formed. Nyx, as her sister preferred to be called, had been formed with wings of Starlight feathers, shimmering with the light of moons and nebulae. Asthéneia held some respect for Nyx, when her sister had been first formed Nyx had come to her to learn. Nyx’s art hadn’t been as grandiose as her own, but she had painted clouds in the air and Nebulae above… an artist’s touch, but not the skill for true beauty.

She found her sister on one of the Strands of Nocturne, a planet of perpetual twilight and deep night. At first Nyx appeared as she had when formed, but as Asthéneia approached from behind, she caught a glimpse of porcelain upon Nyx’s face. Taking a closer look, she realized that Nyx’s cloak was made of the same starlight feathers that reflected both moon and nebulae, they were no longer the grandiose wings she once flew about on.

“That’s two…” Asthéneia whispered to herself, as she quietly pulled away, hoping she had not been noticed. She considered who to check next. There was still Epignos, Eriselpis, and Próklisi. She doubted she’d be able to find Epignos, he was young, shy, and quite good at staying unseen. He was certainly aware of what Asthéneia wanted, and would show himself only if he chose.

Eriselpis was a problem in and of herself. Asthéneia had met the young pillar only a handful of times, and each time she had been forced to cease her art to watch Eriselpis as the young pillar caused chaos wherever she went, oft times disrupting her carefully planned art long before it was released.

That left Próklisi, but he had always worn both mask and cape. What was the signifigance? Asthéneia sighed, it would be difficult to get anything out of him… Próklisi tended to always be tangled in some competition amongst mortals.