Asthéneia

ACT 1

In the formless dark before even the concept of beginning, Kanna moved.

His countless hands were not hands but filaments of raw possibility, weaving the vast tapestry that mortals would one day mistake as the multiverse. Threads of starlight, threads of bone, threads of screaming hope and silent annihilation—all passed between his fingers without preference. He had already birthed Thanatos to prune, and Chronos to measure. Yet one flavour of entropy still felt thin in the weave: the slow, intimate, exquisite weakening that teaches life what it truly costs to endure.

From the deepest clot of the Void—where discarded futures curdled and dreams went to liquefy—Kanna gathered a fistful of black-green miasma. It writhed like living rot, beautiful in its hunger. He breathed upon it, and it took shape: a woman, tall and terrible, her skin a shifting mosaic of mold, lesions, and glistening necrosis; her hair a cascade of fungal threads that dripped spores with every motion; her smile a crescent of ivory bone through putrescent lips. When she opened her eyes, they were twin pools of golden sepsis.

Asthéneia mind awoke to hunger. She had no memory of before—only the sudden, exquisite awareness that something vast and smiling had exhaled her into being. She knelt in the Timeless Limbo on knees that had never knelt, saw her skin, the color of gangrene under moonlight, her hair a living spill of black mold crossed before her face.

“You are the Third of my Pillars, You are Asthéneia” He said, voice soft as a throat closing forever. “Life will pretend it can be perfect. Stasis will call itself mercy. You will rot the proud, waste the eternal, corrupt the clean. Be necessary, little one. Be beautiful. Paint despair so beautiful they will thank you for it. But remember: entropy serves the tapestry, not your pleasure alone.”

Asthéneia looked up. Her smile was already as perfect as she was—wide, carved, and cracked, missing part of one cheek. She felt every future plague waiting inside her lungs like unborn songs. “I will make them sing,” she whispered, and the words tasted of gangrene and honey.

Kanna placed one finger against her lower lip, stilling the smile for a heartbeat. “They will hate you,” He said. “That is the point.”

“Pleasure is the point, Father. Pain is the pigment. Despair is the glaze. I will paint galaxies with fever dreams.” Asthéneia responded, her voice dripping with anticipation.

Kanna’s warning was a soft rumble of thunder. “Thanatos already walks the edge of mercy. Take care your artistry does not bring you to the same edge.” Then Kanna was gone, his third Pillar released into the weave.

A strand shimmered—cold, pure, singing in a key that hurt to hear. Asthéneia followed the note. She stepped onto Calcyra, a shallow ocean world whose surface was one vast reef of living crystal. The water was liquid diamond; the sky was frozen aurora. Its inhabitants were the Choralith—sentient coral polyps no larger than a child’s fist, linked into continent-sized colonies that rose in spires of rose, sapphire, and void-black crystal.

They had achieved perfect harmonic stasis. Every polyp sang one endless note in a chord that had not changed in a hundred thousand years. The song prevented entropy: no erosion, no death, no silence. Only the chord, pure, eternal – smug.

Asthéneia drifted down through the diamond water like a drop of living ink. She landed on the tallest spire—Harmonis Prime, heart of the endless song. The Choralith greeted her with a pulse of welcoming light. Black-note-in-the-chord, why do you fall?

Asthéneia smiled until her solid cheek threatened to split. She opened her mouth and exhaled. The breath was black snow and slow acid. It drifted through the reef like smoke through glass. Wherever it touched, crystal began to weep. Micro-fractures bloomed into lace. Polyps dimmed from within, their perfect notes warping into minor keys of confusion and pain. Harmonis Prime cracked first—a single, perfect fissure that ran from apex to root.

The chord faltered. For the first time in a hundred thousand years, a note went flat. The despair was immediate, exquisite. Choralith colonies across Calcyra felt the fracture ripple through the shared song. They tried to compensate—sang louder, brighter, desperate. But despair is contagious.

The black snow settled deeper. Crystal turned milky, then opaque, then began to crack from the inside out. Polyps liquefied in their own spires, their light bleeding into the diamond water in slow, screaming spirals. The song became a dirge – slow, processional, and terrifying.

Asthéneia walked the crumbling reef barefoot, trailing fingers along dying crystal. Each touch deepened the rot, stretched the agony. She paused at Harmonis Prime’s heart—a single polyp still singing, voice cracking but unbroken. Its light pulsed a question: Why does perfection hurt? 

Asthéneia knelt. She placed her lips against the polyp’s translucent shell and whispered, “Because perfection is a lie that keeps you from becoming more.” Then she kissed it. The polyp shattered into a thousand screaming shards that sang all the way down.

When it was finished, Calcyra’s reef was a graveyard of clouded crystal and black snow. The diamond water had turned the color of old bruises. New life—soft, hungry, imperfect—was already feeding on the rot: blind worms with teeth of glass, storms of acidic plankton, things that had never known the chord. Old life struggled to continue, learning songs to abate the rot, unable to clear it completely. The endless song was gone. In its place were new notes, ones of caution, of survival… well, that – and the wet sound of eating.

Asthéneia stood alone on the highest ruined spire and inhaled the scent of perfect despair. It was flawless. It was lonely. She pressed a hand to her chest, surprised to feel something like hunger that was not for ruin. For the first time, the Third Pillar wondered what it would be like to have someone watch her paint. Someone who understood that every scream was a brushstroke. Someone who would smile with her when the canvas finally broke. She looked out across the dying reef one final time before she stepped into the dark between worlds, leaving Calcyra to its beautiful, necessary struggle. The taste of solitary triumph already turning bittersweet on her tongue. The first canvas was complete. But the artist had discovered she wanted an audience. And somewhere, on a strand yet untouched, a mortal woman was already dreaming of black snow and learning how to smile when it hurt.

Asthéneia walked amongst the Strands for an age, continuing her art. Some worlds grew stronger from her lessons. On Eldrenna she introduced an invasive bioluminescent moss that would threaten the stones of ancient buildings. It’s people, the Lunari, accustomed to the still, cool moisture when the dim light of their sun didn’t shine, left their old homes to ruin. They praised their moon for bringing color and light to their dim grey world, becoming artists of starlight.

On the fungal moon Mykara, a hive-mind of mycelial beings reproduced by grafting fragments of themselves onto the dead. Asthéneia gifted them a blight that caused the dead to rot too quickly—before the living could harvest memory and identity. The hive began devouring its own infected elders while they still lived, ripping fruiting bodies from screaming stalks to preserve the collective mind.

She walked among them as a pale woman draped in veils of spores, kissing foreheads that liquefied beneath her lips. The hive-mind’s final, unified thought before it achieved true sentience was a scream of gratitude and horror that tasted, to Asthéneia, like the finest wine.

The pastoral world Erythra, golden fields, gentle rivers, villages that swayed gently in the wind aside the wheat in their fields, was her favourite so far. A young woman, old enough to bear child, yet young enough to know innocence, walked the road to a village. From her hand dangled a talisman, an odd relic with a blue fragment of stone inset.

She paused as Asthéneia drifted in like a spore on the wind. At first Asthéneia thought this woman sensed her presence, but then she knelt. The woman picked up a rock and crushed an insect that had wandered into her path.

“An insect?” Asthéneia said. “Now that would be an interesting choice for conveyance.”

The woman carried on, seemingly none the wiser of the inspiration she had granted, nor of the chaos that would ensue because of it.

Asthéneia followed the insect’s trail back to it’s home. There she found others, more than enough to experiment on. At first the insects died from the malaise she granted them, but in time she was able to refine. Soon there was one insect that held the Malaise, but was not harmed by it.

“Go.” She told it, her voice gurgling in excitement, “Spread my touch to those you meet.”

The insect buzzed hungrily, and wandered off into the fields.

Within a few hours, the first was infected. The Malaise spread quickly after that. Puss and boils grew, bones weakened and bodies became too frail too work. An old man breathed weakly as he sat before his home.

Asthéneia approached, stroking his scaled head, shooing off a handful of loose scales that fell at her touch.

“You will be remembered,” she crooned, “because you suffered so prettily.”

            As Asthéneia left the village, she passed by a young man. She only noted him because he wore around his neck the same talisman the woman had carried when she entered. She could hear his pleas as she stepped from the Strand.

Act 2

Some time after leaving Erythra, Asthéneia was taking respite within the Temporal Limbo. She stood on a gray floating island, where she had found a pool of water frozen in timelessness. Thanatos found her there.

He arrived as a shadow that smelled of rain on graves.

“Sister,” he said, voice heavy with centuries of reluctant endings, “your joy is… loud.”

Asthéneia rose, “ah, brother in entropy, how nice of you to visit.” She pressed a rotting fingertip to Thanatos’s cheek; the smoke blanched, then healed almost instantly… his nature rejecting hers.

Thanatos spoke softly. “I come from Erythra. Your… art… there was not meant to happen. Our brother, Chronos has corrected the issue.”

“Thanatos,” she purred, “you end cleanly. I prefer the slow crescendo. Why would you let our brother remove my art that would only bring them strength?”

“Strength bought with torment is still torment. I prune so that life may breathe. You choke it for sport.”

She laughed, kissing the air near his lips. “Sport is Próklisi’s tool not mine. I bring evolution, wearing its finest gown.”

He caught her wrist—careful, always careful.

“Contain your plagues to where and when they are needed. Do not make us oppose you.”

Asthéneia tilted her head, considering. Opposition from Death would be… inconvenient, Opposition from Time would be… annoying, he had already cleaned one canvas, no need for him to clean another.

“Very well, dear brother. One canvas at a time, when needed.” She pouted, the mild frown dripping from her lips. Thanatos nodded, accepting her word, and returned to his own tasks, as another Strand called for his attention.

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. “Erythra 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.

Mira 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 it’s 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. Indifferent to the music of a billion deaths playing in perfect, simultaneous agony, Chronos returned to his current task, tracking the interloper who continued to evade him.

After Lyris’s endless exquisite deaths, Asthéneia and Dara learned caution the way other lovers learn touch: slowly, reverently, and with growing hunger. They studied the Limbo the way thieves study locks. They watched Chronos walk his cold circuits, felt the faint tug whenever a strand was marked for erasure, listened for the hush that meant Kanna’s attention was elsewhere. Dara kept a ledger bound in dried skin: every doomed strand they found, every permissible shade of agony, every scream rated on a scale of one to “perfect.”

Asthéneia kissed each new entry and added her own notes in black ichor. They became surgeons of despair. Never touching a strand that still had hope. Never altering a fated when. Only painting the how until it bled beauty.

They ruined a moon of glass singers by making their voices curdle into acid over exactly 10,000 years—no more, no less. They gifted a race of cloud-beings known as the Nebuli with a rust that felt like falling in love, then let them dissolve on schedule. They taught an entire species of stone giants that their own petrified tears could be weaponized into slow, grinding grief.

Each time, the Plan remained untouched. Each time, the despair grew richer, more layered, more intimate. Dara’s laughter sharpened into something almost musical. Asthéneia began to sleep—something Pillars did not do—curled around her mortal muse, dreaming of new colors of pain.

Then came the tremor. A living strand—Myrrdin—bright, stubborn, and very much not marked for erasure. Thanatos had been sent to prune it. Thanatos was there, but he was not acting. The strand hung ripe, defenseless, its fate suddenly negotiable. Dara felt it first. 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 there shocked at what he was seeing. He tried to sever the thread of a nearby Lyrani, but it did not respond to his touch. Asthéneia stood on the highest hill and conducted the moaning like a choir while Thanatos tried again and again to no avail.

Thanatos fell to his knees in the rotting 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 as they stood. The air filled with the wet sound of flesh hitting flesh. One Lyrani, probably once an elder, dragged a screaming child with silk cords still bound to each. It shambled near, pausing as it passed by Thanatos, a sound escaped the ruin of it’s throat—not a moan, but a word. “Why?”

Asthéneia stood, watching Thanatos try one last time to sever the Lyrani’s soul thread in vain. She licked gangrene from her fingertips. “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.

Asthéneia returned expecting to find Dara where she had been when she left. There was no sign Dara was present. Not in the lab, not in the garden, not even at the overlook to the Void. It was unusual for Dara to leave without a word, but she had done so before. Asthéneia had work to do, she couldn’t concern herself with her muse’s minor dalliances.            In the Lab where she kept her notes, she found Dara’s ledger. She added to it – Myrrdin, OURS – Now Corpus – Rating: Perfect. Global. No other Pillar can touch it. On the end of the note, she added a small tangle of Lyrani silk. Note: They will never stop screaming. Forever.

Asthéneia closed the ledger gently. She did not know that even forever had limits… just that she had painted despair so complete that even Kanna had chosen to hang it on the wall of reality and walk away.

Act 3

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.

ACT 4

She stepped back into Temporal Limbo, in search of her muse. In the dim twilight of Temporal Limbo she found Dara in the garden, before a throne woven from petrified vines. The vines still twitched occasionally, as if remembering the agony of their growth. Asthéneia’s fingers traced lazy patterns on Dara’s arm, watching the flesh yield like overripe fruit under her touch, before sealing whole once more. Dara, her muse, sat patiently, listening.

“We need answers,” Asthéneia murmured, her voice a soft hiss like leaves crumbling in the wind. “The cloaks. The masks. Thanatos and Nyx each wear them. They move with... purpose. Strength. I feel it in the weave, like threads tightening around my throat.”

Dara tilted her head, her eyes gleamed with that childlike curiosity Asthéneia adored. “They look ridiculous. Like deities playing at being mortal. But yes, beloved, they are stronger. Why not ask one directly?”

Asthéneia laughed, the sound bubbling like venom in a cauldron. “Directly? No, my sweet decay. We lure. We tempt. Próklisi—he’s always been the proud one. If we craft a challenge grand enough, he’ll come running. And when he does, we’ll pry the truth from his golden lips.”

Dara clapped her hands, bones clicking beneath thinning flesh. “Yes! A world of strivers, of desperate souls clawing for more time. He won’t resist. And when we’ve beaten him at his own game... we ask about those silly costumes.”

Asthéneia nodded, her skin cracking slightly at the edges with her smile. “Precisely. Let’s find a canvas worthy of his ego.”

They chose Aelthir, a ringed water-world that was half ocean and half beach with floating cities built from coral and pearl. The Virelai dwelled there, bioluminescent crustaceans with shells that glowed like underwater stars, their segmented bodies weaving through currents in intricate dances. They were a young species, ambitious, their science focused on elongating their naturally short lifespans. Laboratories bobbed under the waves, filled with bubbling vats and glowing crystals, as they chased the dream of eternity.

Asthéneia and Mira arrived not with fanfare, but as black snow falling upward from the sea’s depths. No one noticed at first—the Virelai were too busy with their experiments. But soon, the plague began. They called it the Lamentfire.

It was Asthéneia’s most elegant creation yet: a subtle virus that infiltrated the bioluminescent glands, burning most so they’d die before maturity, turning their inner light into searing agony. Memories corroded like rusted metal, dissolving into hallucinatory pain. But not for all.

A few Virelai, those with the strongest wills, found their lifespans inexplicably extended, their glow brighter, their agony a fuel for desperate innovation. The plague shortened most lives to mere months, but for the survivors, it granted decades—enough to spark fierce competition. Remedies were sought not just for cure, but to separate the secret of longevity from the pain that burned their shells. Within a decade, the oceans glowed with dying light and screaming color.

Floating cities dimmed as Virelai clawed at their shells, begging for release. Asthéneia and Mira drifted among them, hand in hand, invisible to all but the dying. They tasted every new shade of despair—the sharp tang of a scientist’s failed equation dissolving in their mind, the bitter wail of a parent watching their young fade.

“It’s beautiful,” Dara whispered, her lips brushing Asthéneia’s ear. “They fight so hard now. Look how they compete.”

Asthéneia nodded, spreading fresh infections as she floated in the wate. “And Próklisi will feel it. He can’t resist such a strong competitive spirit.”

Each year they added another of Aelthir’s strands to those infected. On the thirty-third year of the Lamentfire, he arrived. A golden fire cut through the infected waters, rising from the depths like a submerged sun breaking the surface. Próklisi, the Pillar of Challenge and Competition, cloaked in boiling crimson that radiated the heat of a thousand forges. His mask shone bright golden, rays etched with the scars of battles won, eyes burning with arrogance.     

He stopped dead when he saw Mira. The golden mask tilted, rays catching the dying glow of a nearby Virelai. “Mira?” he breathed, the word landing flat like steel falling into sand. Dara tilted her rotting head, curious, her milky eyes flickering with amusement.

Asthéneia stepped between them, her smile sharpening behind her porcelain mask. “She is Dara. My Dara. You are mistaken.”

Próklisi ignored her. He stared at the mortal woman’s face, carved now into gangrenous bone, the features twisted but unmistakable. “This shouldn’t be,” he muttered. “I watched Mira die on Zorath. I held her as her lifeblood drained. She looked exactly—”

Dara laughed, the sound of bells drowning in tar. “I have had many names, golden boy. None of them yours.”

Próklisi’s mask flared brighter, rays extending like spears. “You defile her.”

Asthéneia’s ichor-tears fell—black droplets that hissed where they touched the water, killing small schools of fleeing Virelai. “You dare,” she said, voice soft and venomous, “You dare suggest you knew my muse before I made her immortal?”

Próklisi turned the full weight of his gaze on Asthéneia. “This plague ends,” he declared. “I challenge it, and once it is gone I will have the truth.”

Asthéneia bowed, smiling her gangrenous smile, “No my dear brother, when I win and our plague survives on even one strand of Aelthir, you will answer my questions in truth.”

The two set about the rules of the challenge. In one hundred seventeen years Aelthir would pass through a plasma nebula, this was a set temporal event for the world. The radiation and storms of the nebula were scheduled to end all life on Aelthir in that year. Próklisi had until then to cleanse every infected strand of the plague, but Asthéneia could not start new plagues on strands she had not yet touched. She could only work with what had already been started.

The War of Inspiration began. Próklisi had never been subtle. He descended into the floating cities and walked among the Virelai as a golden apparition, whispering the concept of challenge into every dying mind. Wherever his light touched, dying Virelai felt a sudden, impossible surge of pride. Scientists who had already lost limbs to Lamentfire dragged themselves to laboratories. Artists painted equations in their own glowing blood. Children too weak to swim dictating hope and dreams to their parents. The single burning thought Próklisi poured into every mind: We will not die screaming. We will die cured. We will be remembered as the ones who beat rot.

Asthéneia felt the shift like a personal insult. She flooded the oceans with new strains, light-eaters that turned cure-attempts into blinding agony. Memory-worms that made researchers forget their own names mid-equation. A variant that caused the body to heal into grotesque, painless tumors, life prolonged, but dignity erased. Plagues that made the cure itself cause agony.

Próklisi countered with inspiration: geniuses who lay upon their deathbeds rose, equations glowing on their skin like holy scripture. Dara watched them war with childlike glee, kissing Asthéneia between volleys. “He thinks he can save them,” she sang. “Let him try.”

For a century the war raged across every timeline of Aelthir. Próklisi’s inspiration against Asthéneia’s corruption. Cities rose and fell in fire and ink. In most timelines the Lamentfire burned bright, oceans of screaming light. But in the central branches, the Virelai began to win. A retrovirus was born: Auroracide. It rewrote Lamentfire into harmless bioluminescence, the pain and damage was removed, but the benefits remained and became constant. The first cured city sang in pure, painless color for the first time in generations. Word spread like dawn. Próklisi appeared before Asthéneia on the highest spire, golden mask radiant.

“I won,” he said simply.

Dara stepped forward, rotting fingers stroking the sunburst mask. “Did you?” she asked sweetly. She kissed the golden cheek. Where her lips touched, gold began to rust. Próklisi recoiled. Asthéneia laughed—a sound like continents cracking. She raised one hand. The cure worked perfectly—on every timeline except one.

In that single, hidden branch, the retrovirus mutated under her touch. It did not cure. It perfected the Lamentfire. Every cured Virelai woke unaging, painless, and utterly empty. Glowing shells with no memory, no desire, no soul. They drifted in clean, silent water, beautiful and vacant. A gallery of living statues. Despair deeper than any scream because there was no one left inside to scream. The other timelines died cured and proud, as Próklisi had bidden. But the hidden timeline, that one Asthéneia kept. A private gallery. Próklisi stared at the empty glowing husks, mask dimming for the first time in eternity.

Próklisi felt the hidden timeline bloom into existence and staggered as though struck. “You… kept them,” he whispered. “You kept the worst death of all. You… twisted my victory.”

Asthéneia stepped close, black tears dripping onto his golden cloak, eating holes like acid. She whispered, “Never, speak my muse’s name again. She was never yours to save.” She paused, her voice shifting from venom to curiosity. “But before you slink away, golden one—tell me of these cloaks and masks. Thanatos, Nyx... they wear them now. What do they signify? Do they grant power?”

Próklisi straightened, his arrogance flickering back like a dying ember. “They mark growth. Each Pillar who wears one has faced an internal challenge and emerged transformed. Stronger. I, as the embodiment of challenge, was forged with mine from the beginning.”

Asthéneia disregarded the boast with a wave of her hand, black droplets scattering like ink. “Then I too have met my challenge. I have twisted victory from your grasp, turned hope into hollow eternity.”

She and Dara walked away, leaving Próklisi alone with the silent, glowing dead. In the Limbo, Asthéneia felt the weave shift around her. She gathered the remnants of her plagues—the gangrene from a thousand rotting worlds, the swamp muck from drowned civilizations—and wove them into a cloak. It draped over her like living rot, black-green and pulsing with faint, sickly light. For her mask, she drew from the Breathing Dead of Lyrani, sewing broken skulls together with flesh-strips and their own ethereal silk. Asthéneia’s mask smiled so wide the corners cracked; black ichor wept from the eyes and never quite reached the chin. She stood before Mira, transformed. The cloak clung like a second skin, the mask a crown of desecration.

Dara traced the edges with rotting fingers. “You look perfect, my love. The Pillar of Decay, cloaked in her own art.”

Asthéneia nodded, feeling power surge through her veins like venomous fire. “It is time to show the other Pillars my greatest exhibit.”

Dara opened the ledger and wrote in luminous ink: Aelthir – Rating: Perfect (private reserve). Golden boy learned a lesson. We kept the prettiest corpses. He will never forget our face.

Asthéneia added beneath it, in letters that bled: If he ever says ‘Mira’ again, I will make him watch every timeline die… twice. Asthéneia closed the book, pressing the ledger to her chest. For the first time since Corpus, she felt something like fear—small, delicious, new. Próklisi now had a reason to hate them, and pride remembers every wound.

But the multiverse was still vast,and they had so many more screams to paint. Hand in rotting hand, goddess and muse stepped into the weave—certain the rules were still theirs to bend, still blind to the shadow gathering behind the next six canvases. The universe trembling as they passed by.

After Aelthir, after Próklisi’s broken pride and rusted mask, they refined their doctrine into three sacred laws, written in luminous pus on the inside of Asthéneia’s cloak:

Touch only the red strands, those already sentenced.

Change only the how, never the when.

Leave one perfect scream echoing in every timeline.

They obeyed these laws with religious fervor, yet every obedience felt like triumph. They ruined a species of living flame by making their own heat feel like love turning to betrayal, exactly 4,000 years, no more, no less.

They taught a race of crystal librarians that knowledge itself could rot, and watched them burn their own memories in despair on the exact day scheduled for extinction.

They turned an entire civilization of gentle cloud-herders into a perpetual thunderstorm of self-loathing that rained acid tears for precisely one century before the final lightning strike.

Each time the Plan remained untouched. Each time Chronos walked past without looking. Each time Kanna’s gaze slid over them like oil on water.

The two moved their home many times over the next age. Partly to keep their lab and experiments secret, but also for Dara’s sake. Dara was getting weaker, it seemed even with her immortality she could not remain in Timeless Limbo for too long. She would oft times travel into a Strand to recover, but though she returned in good health, each trip she was gone longer and longer.

Finally they chose to settle in a Strand rather than Temporal Limbo. They found one that was long dead, but still tied to it’s cosmos. Time still moved here, unseen and unfelt. The sun had gone nova a century or two ago, burning all life from the planets in the system. Asthéneia recalled that the planet that held life was once known as Placuit, though she had never touched it with her art. Geolythic lifeforms were annoyingly resistant to her touch. But they were burnt to cinders now, and their world was nothing more than charred rocks in space.

It was in the hollowed-out heart of this dead star that they now made their home, their private gallery. Dara loved it, here she maintained her strength, and the two could work side by side without pause. In the foyer Dara placed small, moving images showing the many minor plagues they had caused, each a reminder that even the smallest art was worth remembrance.

The foyer led to the Grand Gallery itself, where Dara had hung seven much larger moving images. Six of them moved, one sat blank. The six were of Asthéneia’s greatest feats.

The Black Snow that had shattered the Choralith of Calcyra.

The Pollution that turned the world of Zorath from a world of verdant life to one of ash and Iron.

The Veilblight of Lyris, the first plague to spread to other Strands of it’s world.

The transformation of Myrrdin into Corpus through the creation of the Breathing Dead. Asthéneia’s victory over Thanatos.

The world Erythra, not the first malaise that had been wrought… that one had been erased by Chronos, but the second. The Erythra Ascension.

And, of course, The Lamentfire of Aelthir, a clear reminder of their defeat of Próklisi.

One night, Asthéneia and Dara lay entwined on a bed of softly moaning cloaks, looking at the seventh canvas. The one yet to be filled with images of her art. Asthéneia sighed looking at the blank, unmoving canvas.

Dara traced lazy circles of rust on Asthéneia’s bone bared cheek. “Do you ever think,” she whispered, “that we are better at this than He is?”

Asthéneia’s smile widened until the mask threatened to split with the thought. “Every day,” she answered.

Dara laughed, a gurgle like the sound of cities drowning. “Then why stop at doomed strands?” she asked. “Why not paint one that still has hope? One little stroke. He would never notice. An act worthy of it’s place amongst the other six”

Asthéneia hesitated, she had felt it on Corpus, and again when Proklisi recognized defeat, a heartbeat of something that might have been fear. Dara kissed the hesitation away. “We have earned it,” she crooned. “We are the artists now.”

Asthéneia watched the images of her prior feats, at Corpus still moaning beyond anyone’s reach, at Próklisi’s rusted mask somewhere far away. She looked at Dara, her immortal-mortal beloved, the only creature in all existence who had ever chosen rot and called it love. “We have earned it,” she echoed.

They rose together, cloaks whispering, masks weeping and laughing in perfect unison. They stepped into Temporal Limbo, walked to the edge where the red strands ended and the bright, living ones began. Before they began, Dara opened the public ledger one last time and wrote in glowing rot: We have followed every rule. Now we write new ones.

Asthéneia kissed the page until the words bled. Then goddess and muse stepped hand in hand toward the bright, untouchable strands, certain the multiverse was finally, truly theirs. They believed nothing could stop them.

Not Próklisi.

Not Thanatos.

Not even Kanna Himself.

They were wrong. But for one perfect, breathless moment cloaked in living gangrene, masked in weeping porcelain, they were the most beautiful mistake the multiverse had ever allowed.

And the scream had only just begun.

ACT 5

It took time, but they chose a young Strand called Tau Ceti. Life was still in it’s infancy there, as the star had only recently shifted from a Blue Dwarf to a Yellow Dwarf. This made it a prime target, as it meant Asthéneia could attempt something truly profound… To create life that was a sentient plague in and of itself. They chose a simple retrovirus as their vector, one that would bring Asthéneia’s six greatest works together as one to fuel the evolution of their chosen Strand. To make a Species, not ruled by Kanna’s will, but by Asthéneia’s, and hers alone…

The other Pillars watched on with concern. Asthéneia was to embody an aspect of entropy, of decay… not one of life, of creation. Epignos, ever watchful of what was happening throughout the Strands, was naturally the first to become aware of her acts. He was merely an observer, but he knew this was beyond the bounds of her domain. He informed the other Pillars as to what was being done, seeking their input to decide whether or not to interrupt Kanna’s current work.

Chronos scanned the futures of Asthéneia’s work, noting that while it would not disrupt the flow of time of Tau Ceti’s Strand, there was a risk that even minor contact with other Strands could cause severe damage to the fabric of the universe. His calculations wound down, Kanna must be told.

Nyx watched alongside him, noting that the people of Tau Ceti would become living nightmares. They would be fear and terror given flesh. Even such darkness should hold hope of a dawn, of a bright future, but she saw none. This could not be Kanna’s intent. She too voted to inform Kanna.

Still reeling from his defeat at Aelthir, Próklisi almost voted in favor of telling Kanna as well. But he paused – he felt it. He felt the challenge inherent in the act. He voted against, it was not their place to deliver the challenge, it was Kanna who had to respond.

Eriselpis watched with childlike wonder. “What would they look like? What would their society be like? Would they make art? Spread knowledge? Would they…” Próklisi, placed a hand atop her wild hair, bidding her to be calm, and more importantly to be silent. It was clear her curiosity meant her vote was to let this happen.

With two votes for, two against, and with Epignos abstaining, that only left Thanatos to determine the outcome. The pillars turned to him, awaiting his vote. Thanatos stood, his charcoal and ash robe shifting as he gazed across the Strands of Tau Ceti. The flames of his eyes dimmed within his mask as he considered what was before him. He recalled his own actions that defied Kanna, and the consequences thereof. He considered their domains, their orders… and how he had been able to change his. Finally, he weighed the risks to his own domain before he spoke.

His words came out measured, chosen with great care. “We are both pillars of entropy. Our duty is to the end of life, so that life may continue… Not for it to begin, not to make new life, not to choose the path life will take. Our sister is stepping outside her domain. Regardless of whether her creation would spread her domain, it is still creation. We must contact Kanna… if it is his will that entropy can create as well as destroy then so be it.”

Epignos bowed in acknowledgement, his form fading as he left to inform Kanna.

On the sixth planet of the Tau Ceti Strand, one of two planets in the system that would eventually hold life, Asthéneia and Dara were close to finishing their work. It was still quite early in the Strand’s existence… so early that the primordial ooze, pools of single celled organisms, had just started to combine into the first multicellular organisms.

Dara gently examined the primordial ooze, watching as it dripped between her fingers. “This world’s gravity is strong, it will only make your art stronger.”

Asthéneia nodded. “and when they grow, when their strength spreads my art, all my siblings will know that we are greater than our father. The retrovirus is prepared, you should leave my love. You were once mortal yourself, we cannot risk it changing you as well.”

Though Asthéneia could not see it, Dara smiled, relieved. Dara walked up giving Asthéneia a small kiss on the side of her mask. “I will wait for you my dear. Try not to make me wait too long.”

Once Dara left, Asthéneia knelt to the pool of primordial ooze. “You may not know it little ones, but soon you will become greater than any other. And you will – be – mine.”

The Limbo held its breath. Asthéneia pulled from her cloak a single ampoule vial, ready to break it and spill its contents.

Then Kanna was simply there. No footsteps. No wind. Only absolute, disappointed presence. Asthéneia turned from primordial ooze, looking upon Kanna’s visage. “Father, have you come to watch my greatest art yet?”

Kanna looked at the unbroken ampoule, holding within six plagues, six disasters, six dooms. His voice was winter at the end of time. “This was never about your art. You were meant only to bring decay for life to grow. Not to change life’s course, you have overstepped your bounds. There needs only be one source of Entropy.”

Asthéneia’s mask wept a single black tear that hung, never falling. “I made it beautiful,” she said, defiant.

“You made it rival,” Kanna answered. He raised one hand.

Asthéneia understood what was about to happen, that she was to be punished. “No father, not this time, not ever!” She broke the ampoule, tossing it over the pool of primordial ooze, and in a single fluid motion stepped into Temporal Limbo.

Kanna didn’t waste a second. He didn’t need to. The Strand simply froze, all time within drained. The ampoule held itself in mid-air, not a single drop having escaped before being frozen. Then Kanna was gone, following after Asthéneia, but appearing before her within Limbo.

“No!” Asthéneia screamed, “You can’t stop me! Not when I was so close!”

The Limbo itself folded, timelessness made weapon. Time did not stop—it was stripped away. Asthéneia felt every second she had ever stolen, every century she had twisted, every heartbeat she had turned to rot, wrenched out of her like veins pulled through skin. She opened her mouth to scream, whether in defiance or in pain only Kanna would know. The scream froze on bone lips.

Her cloak of moaning skins hardened into stone. Her mask fused to flesh that was no longer flesh. Black tears crystallized mid-fall, suspended like obsidian jewels. She became as a statue—perfect, terrible, aware. Every plague she had ever birthed still sang inside her.Every scream still echoed in ears that could no longer move.

She felt every plague she had ever placed continue their slow, exquisite work across living strands. She could feel new plagues form, weak… insignificant… lacking her beauty, her artistry. But they were beyond her reach, she could not add a single new brushstroke. Kanna looked upon her for a long, sorrowful moment. Then He turned and walked away.

Timeless Limbo exhaled, able to relax at last.

Epignos recorded and withdrew, as always, but his eyes were not the only ones that saw what happened. A second pair watched, eyes that belonged to no Pillar yet known. They watched from a fold in the dark between moments—ancient, patient, amused. When Kanna vanished and the Limbo emptied, those eyes remained. Only when absolute silence settled did the figure step forward. Feminine, soft… Human.

Barefoot on nothingness. Her cloak was the color night forgets. Her face was hidden behind a mask of living shadow that showed only a gentle smile. She approached the petrified pillar, once a self-proclaimed goddess. She laid one small, warm hand on the cold stone shoulder of Asthéneia’s statue. Beneath the time frozen skin, a rotten heart still beat—slow, defiant, immortal. The figure felt it.

She leaned close, lips brushing the frozen ear beneath porcelain hair. “You did well, sister, but I did warn you not to make me wait.” she whispered. The voice was as soft as the first lie ever told. She pressed a kiss to the place where stone met rot. Then she stepped back into the fold between moments and was gone.

No one saw.

No one heard.

But centuries later—if any Pillar had ever returned to check on the Third’s prison—they might have noticed a single, hairline crack on the statue’s left shoulder. A tiny chip missing, as though something warm had been gently, lovingly taken. Asthéneia remained exactly where Kanna left her—masked, cloaked, weeping tears that would never fall, smiling a smile that would never fade, feeling every scream she had ever painted and waiting for the day the crack widens and rot walks free again.

As they left, if they turned back one final time, they might even notice a single feather, the color of storms, hanging up high.

Kanna would later return to the sixth planet of Tau Ceti. The ampoule still frozen in time, still hanging, awaiting release so it may fall. That release came, but not the fall. Kanna plucked it out of the air, willing the time in the Strand to flow once more.

He considered the ampoule, and it’s contents for a moment. A living plague, a sentient plague, was too dangerous to allow. It would ruin his plan, everything he had set in motion. However, a species that could use viruses to their own end was an intriguing concept. That, he could allow.

And so it was that the people of Tau Ceti evolved to communicate by sending retroviral spores. Sadly, no other species in any cosmos communicated in such a manner, so when they had grown and learned enough to send messages into the darkness of space, nobody understood that they were even trying to talk. No response would ever come. And the people of Tau Ceti would end, believing themselves to have been alone in all the universe.

A missing ACT

Act II: The Garden of Delicious AgonyThe Taste of Zythera LingersAsthéneia and Mira drifted between strands, fingers laced, rot and devotion braided so tightly they were indistinguishable.Zythera’s black sludge still clung to their skin like perfume.Mira licked a drop from Asthéneia’s wrist and sighed.“More,” she whispered. “I want to taste something that thinks it is beautiful.”Asthéneia’s smile widened until it threatened to split her porcelain-perfect face.She inhaled.A strand sang to her—hot, humid, dripping with pride.The Orchid CallThey 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 venom-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.Mira’s eyes glowed brighter.“May I sing first?” she asked, voice trembling with hunger.Asthéneia kissed her rotting mouth.“Sing, my love.”The Rust SongMira 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.To beg.One ancient bloom—Rosara the Ever-Red—tried to close its petals against the song.Mira danced closer, placed her lips against a single crimson petal, and exhaled.Rust raced inward like wildfire.Rosara screamed—a sound like silk ripping in orgasm.Its petals browned, crisped, fell in burning snow.But the scream was pure ecstasy.The Wasting PollenAsthéneia 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.Flesh began to liquefy from within.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.Mira danced among them, kissing the dying, licking nectar that now tasted of rot and rapture.Asthéneia watched her beloved, eyes shining with proud tears.The Last BloomOne Florakyn fought longest.Lylira the Unfading—smallest of the immortals, barely thirty meters tall, petals the color of fresh blood.She had rooted herself at the garden’s heart and refused the rust, refused the pollen.Her petals glowed brighter, trying to burn the corruption away.Mira knelt before her.“Look at me,” she said softly.Lylira’s stamen-eyes opened.She saw a creature half-rotted, half-radiant, smiling with absolute love.Mira placed both hands against the stem.“I was once perfect too,” she whispered. “Then I drank ruin and became immortal.Let me give you the same gift.”She kissed the stem.Rust and wasting poured in together.Lylira convulsed.Her scream was the purest note the garden had ever produced—agony and ecstasy braided so tightly they became one thing.Petals fell like burning snow.When it was over, only a skeleton of crystalline stem remained, beautiful, hollow, perfect.But at its heart, a single bud survived.It opened slowly.The new petal was black shot through with gold—rotting and reblooming in endless cycle.Eternal decay.Eternal rebirth.Mira plucked it gently and wove it into her mold-colored hair like a crown.The Lovers’ WaltzThe garden was silent now.Only wind through crystalline skeletons and the soft sound of perpetual falling.Asthéneia and Mira walked the ruins hand in hand.Mira’s crown dripped black nectar onto her shoulders.Asthéneia licked it away.“Beautiful,” she murmured against rotting skin.Mira turned, pressed her forehead to Asthéneia’s.“More beautiful than Zythera,” she answered. “They screamed for us.”Asthéneia kissed her—slow, deep, tasting rust and honey and devotion.When they parted, Viridith’s red sun was setting behind a cathedral of dead orchids.New seeds—small, hungry, imperfect—were already pushing through the mulch of their ancestors.The cycle had begun again, messier, truer.Asthéneia looked at her immortal mortal beloved.“You are my favorite ruin,” she said.Mira laughed, the sound of petals burning.“And you are mine.”They walked into the dark between worlds,leaving Viridith to its delicious agony,the black-gold bud in Mira’s hair pulsing like a second heart.The Ninth 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 petaland screamedin perfect, exquisitepleasure.