“Primordial Flame? I’ve heard that name before…” The phrase glowed like an ember buried under ash.

Aphelia’s brows tightened, ripples closing over a still pond. Memory struck like a sudden thunderclap. Back on that Asgard timeline, Odin and the others had mentioned the so‑called Primordial Flame. But steel rain fell from Sigdrifa’s ambush, and the Three Fates tumbled like broken stars, leaving her no breath to chase a word.

Hearing it again from Heron today, her guard rose like a wall of spears. She wouldn’t let a single grain of detail slip through her fingers like dry sand.

“Odin told you, didn’t he? Or the Three Fates? Forget it. The sight between these worldlines is fog to me now. As for Aphelia—especially your path—it's beyond my scope, like a horizon drowned in night, even if I keep burning my soul like a candle to the wick…”

Heron coughed again, a brittle sound like wind over bone-white stone. This time no blood beaded her lips like crushed berries.

Black lines began to creep across Heron’s skin, ink‑dark vines spreading over pale bark. She strained to hold them back, but they raced, irrevocable, up both arms. Pain flashed across her face like a blade of cold, then she masked it with ice‑still calm.

“Miss Heron!” Ophelius blurted, her voice ringing like a struck bell. The Crimson Fire curled in her palms like a living rose, and she felt what those black lines meant—death, pure as winter’s bite. If Crimson Fire births life like spring water, then these lines were death, unalloyed, a night without stars.

Even on the undead, Ophelius had never tasted death so thick, like salt in a dead sea. Back when she was a Hero, countless Undead Overlords had fallen under her Holy Sword, and her knowledge of death could stand shoulder to shoulder with theirs, iron to iron.

Heron in front of her wasn’t one of those lich‑lords who carve their flesh like rotten wood. How could a living woman carry a death‑scent this dense, like stormclouds packed to bursting? She could see Heron wasn’t undead, yet the black lines crept like frost. Why?

“Don’t worry, Ophelius. This is normal.” Heron steadied herself with a few soft coughs, like leaves shivering in a cold wind. She pointed at the lines crawling her arm, ink on parchment.

“These are death lines. They’re how the Origin writes death into the body, like script cut into stone. You can see them, which means you’ve stepped into true strength, mountain to mountain. No one judges by one scale anymore, but it means the Origin has acknowledged you. That ties to the Primordial Flame in your hand like root to branch.”

Aphelia eyed Heron’s flickering breath, a candle in a draft. Words rose to her lips like a tide, then broke, unsure where to crash. This wasn’t the first time Heron had met death with calm, a lone pine standing in winter squall. Across long years, what storms had this planetary governor weathered, what scars had been ringed into her like a thunder‑struck tree?

“If so, why call it the last ember of human civilization?” Aphelia hesitated, then let the question fall like a stone. “I don’t feel culture in this fire, no temples, no songs—only destruction and slaughter, a blade wrapped in flame. And as you said, I was one of the Root Executors. By all rights, I should stand on the other side of your riverbank, steel against steel, shouldn’t I?”

Her chest held no hunger for ruin, only the quiet of a still lake. Yet the power came from the Root Executors, so the banks felt opposed like night and day. Why would she bear this flame, like a star cupped in both hands?

Back then, the Zerg Maiden Heron took in—herself—was clearly a Root Executor, a storm sent to vent the wrath of gods like lightning on a lone city. Why had Heron kept her, and why unveil any of this now, like lifting a veil at dawn?

“When we returned to our original star system, something terrible happened,” Heron said, her voice low as thunder far off. “A world that should have grown stronger began to wither, like a garden gone black overnight. No expert in any field could read the pattern in the cracks, and blaming human pollution was a joke lost in the wind.”

She breathed out, and Aether painted the past in the air, a mirage over hot sand. The projection wavered—she was near spent, river running to stones—so she chose only the worst places to show. Even so, Aphelia’s heart stuttered like a bird caught in a sudden squall.

Great fissures split the land, black mouths yawning across a once‑whole earth. Quakes rolled like stampeding beasts, driving those on the surface into deeper ground like rabbits to burrows. That wasn’t safety either. Dead volcanoes woke like old gods, ash veiled the sky like funeral cloth, and fire‑tailed meteors fell like burning rain. Aether‑weak bodies brushed magma and became ash, a moth meeting the sun.

The ocean roared back, a beast of salt and iron. The waves grew fangs, tore through Aether shields like paper in a storm, and corroded structures that should have lasted decades, rust racing like plague. Every sea platform sank, black mouths swallowing them whole, and the dead were as countless as pebbles on a shore. Even those with Aether weighed their worth before those eerie, howling waters, scales tipping like fate.

People used to Aether’s shelter fled like villages before a wildfire. Strip tools from humans and throw them into raw wild, and they stand naked before nature, as if hurled back eons, bone and breath under open sky with nowhere to hide.

By the time Heron returned with her legions, this storm had raged almost a full moon’s cycle, waves on waves.

By then everyone knew the sky was wrong. This wasn’t weather; it was a hand on the world’s throat. In less than a month, the motherworld had been dragged back to its molten dawn, order smashed to mud, everything a boiling chaos like the first day of earth.

“This… is the power of the Origin?” Aphelia whispered, a chill down her spine like ice water. In her old world, those half a step from a True God could move mountains and fill seas, and people called them forces of nature, thunder in flesh. In front of this, they were children tossing stones into a river.

“Yes,” Heron said, gazing into a fire only she could see. “This is the Origin’s power—but only its crudest handwriting. A planet’s will is the Origin, earth‑deep and sky‑wide. Turning a world back to zero is like rebooting a system… no—more like swapping the system out entirely.”

Heron’s voice bent around an old metaphor, gears and keys from a bygone age. Later, when she learned the truth, the memory cut deep like a cold blade: to the Origin, all that humans built, all the changes carved into nature, were just viruses in code, noise in a clean song.

When the virus grows bold and common tools can’t cleanse it, you wipe the drive and start fresh, snow over tracks. That’s what the Origin did. The motherworld that meant everything to the Aether Civilization slid back to its first morning like a stone sinking without a ripple.

“And that was only the beginning.” Heron’s sigh drifted like smoke from a burnt wick. “Under me, the Aether Civilization had roamed the stars and seeded Aether like wild grain. To the Origin, we were a stubborn virus spreading from machine to machine. It answered with emergency measures—world‑level cataclysms on every planet we touched, a storm sweeping field after field.”

Heron’s shoulders dipped, mountain under snow. Every colony world of the Aether Civilization buckled the same way. Worlds with enough science fled to orbit like bees to a hive, lights dimmed. But many cultures were still newborn, dawn barely pink on their horizons. We had only sown the seed of Aether, and the storm scythed them down, roots and petals.

Her own motherworld howled, and Heron’s hands were full of her own fire, a captain in a maelstrom. She couldn’t spare more than a glance at distant flames while her deck pitched, and a cold breath hunted her back like a wolf on her heels.

“As we searched for a way to break the storm, every natural disaster stopped at the same heartbeat,” she said, teeth tightening like a trap. “Then something worse arrived. Beings that should be called ‘angels’ descended upon the star systems like white knives.”

At the name of the Root Executors, Heron’s jaw locked, iron on iron. Their strength ran beyond human maps, deep as night.

Heron’s world held, barely, like a fortress under a red moon. Everyone wielded Aether, and the Zerg Queen—one of the Root Executors—stood with them like a mountain in a flood. The winged Executor who came couldn’t butcher freely on the Aether Civilization’s motherworld and was driven out, wings torn by storm.

Other civilizations weren’t so lucky. Their skies broke like glass.

“The Lord of the Blood River. The Lord of the Locust Plague. The Lord of Nature. The Lord of Ruin…” Heron spat the titles like bitter seeds. In less than a day, they erased star systems that carried Aether like torches. Then they moved on, comet to comet, and smashed innocent systems along the way like boots crushing ants, never sparing a look.

Heron couldn’t watch the blaze spread, not out of mercy, but because once those fires finished their feast, they’d turn toward the Aether starfields next, smoke on the wind. Face several Root Executors at once, and the chance of victory drops to frost in summer—gone on the first light.

“That war almost snapped the spine of the Aether Civilization,” Heron said, a sad smile thin as a scar. “We poured out everything like blood from a wound. Before the Root Executors, we were small, dust in a sunbeam, and there was no road back to our peak.”