Aphelia still remembered the code Urd once recited for the RhineFairies. But when the whole timeline turned into a flooded river, even those sworn to non‑interference couldn’t sit high on their dais anymore. Their nature is mist and law, not flesh and deed, so they can’t step in by hand. That’s why the three flames—Uroboros, Odin, and Aphelia—mattered to them more than breath.

The Uroboros here didn’t buy it. Or rather, the Uroboros would never buy a RhineFairy’s pitch. She shook her head with cool disdain, calm settling over her like frost. Even with most of her body fading like ash on the wind, she wouldn’t accept Urd’s terms.

“Urd… that’s what they call you, right? Even if I’m not the main body, you think I’d agree to that? Do you misunderstand what the Ouroboros is?”

Uroboros is Uroboros. Body or avatar, her pride is a spine of iron. She’s a rule distilled from the world’s first dawn—grand words, but they’re true.

Silence hung like snow. Then Urd answered.

“No.”

She’d known that answer, and still she had to try. Because a god who watches the river of time aches more than anyone for that one‑in‑a‑billion ripple. Even as a RhineFairy, she reached like a mortal for a future made of mist.

Now the world stands on the World Tree alone. So every soul across the three tiers is braided to it. Their fates are fixed, cinched tight to the spindle of destiny, a dead knot in time with no way to loosen it.

When Aphelia returned to this era, she felt it too. Her Aether sense spread like dawnlight over water, and the wrongness rose to meet her. In the deep heartwood of the World Tree, she glimpsed power buried like a black spring—something of the Origin—and back then, she wasn’t strong enough to drag it into the light.

Frustration first, then thought—if she’d had that sight then, she wouldn’t have believed a single word from this Urd. Aphelia shook her head, helpless as a leaf in a headwind. She’d been too weak, blundering into snares set in the grass, getting played in the dark without ever knowing.

But another thought cut in, sharp as a hidden blade. If Urd had already sunk this deep with the Origin, why stage that public “glorious sacrifice” at all? One knife from the shadows with Origin at her back, and Aphelia’s journey would’ve ended in Asgard.

Everything before her was fog on a marsh. Aphelia couldn’t even tell why she’d been pulled here. If this was to save Asgard, then cut the reins and let her move. Call the Origin here and now; Aphelia would rip the Origin apart with her own hands.

Even now, even as an avatar, Uroboros belonged to the Reaper—the one who holds the concept of death and walks outside time. As the nymph guarding Niflheim and a goddess of fate, Urd could glimpse that figure in the time‑current like a shadow on water.

So she believed there was still a slim thread here, a chance to alter the loom of the future. Yet her choices ran crosswise to her aim, and that only deepened Aphelia’s doubt.

“Then that’s settled. Look after Aphelia. My life ends here.”

With a last, light laugh, Uroboros unraveled into Niflheim. Under every gaze, she thinned into fine black motes and was gone.

Watching her vanish, Urd let out a long, heavy sigh and turned to go.

“Odin, take Aphelia to the World Tree’s root‑tendrils. The avatar of Uroboros is finished. From here on, we can only rely on Aphelia…”

She didn’t finish. Odin seized Urd’s shoulder and hauled her back.

“Urd. From the start to the end—explain. Now.”

Azure Aether leapt around Odin like cold flame. Unlike Aphelia, she didn’t let lies slide or let anyone hand‑wave a crisis. Her face was set in iron; her gaze pressed with a weight no one could shrug off.

“Release me,” Urd sighed. “If you still want to save your realm—save this world—then take Aphelia there. She’s your last hope.”

Urd looked at Odin’s grip and exhaled again. Before Odin could comply, Urd slapped her hand away herself and strode toward the giant roots.

Skuld kept weaving as if none of it existed. Calm and steady, she flicked her spindle, drew a thousand threads out of the air, bound them into a sheaf, and sent them into the void.

“Odin, tell me—do you actually understand our position?”

At the base of the great trunk, Aphelia already lay on the altar. Souls too many to count were heaped beside it like a bank of coals, ready for her to draw in.

Odin and Urd sat across from the stone. Urd pressed her brow as if a headache were drilling through bone.

“More or less,” Odin said. “Humans paid some price to sway the giants. They damaged the World Tree and headed for the top world…”

A breath, half laugh, half groan, slipped from Urd. She shook her head, grief and exasperation like rain.

“You’re a leader. Can you grow up a little? You’re skimming foam and calling it the sea.”

“Then give me something deeper than foam,” Odin shot back. “I came home from wandering and got hunted the moment my boots hit ground. I’m desperate too.”

She tapped her own chest, voice low as thunder under rock. “If not for Aphelia, I wouldn’t even have had the chance to run. If you plan to keep playing coy, this conversation is over.”

Seeing her dig her heels in like that, Urd couldn’t bring herself to flay her. Odin’s “wandering” had a streak of temper in it, yes—but it was also to broaden her sight. The Aesir’s upper ranks had agreed to “exile” their leader for that very reason.

She came back to a hall of slaughter, ambush on ambush, fleeing the Asgardian Realm with blood still steaming on stone. In someone else’s hands, it might not have gone any better. At the root of it, Odin was simply young for the Aesir’s throne.

“You’re right. I misjudged… Then let’s begin with their invasion. Maybe then you’ll grasp how vital Aphelia is…”

“I’ve always thought she was vital.”

“Can you not quibble with me right now?”

For reasons she hated to admit, Urd’s good temper frayed whenever Odin was near. She felt like dying young, like grabbing an axe and going berserker, splitting Odin clean in two. A vein twitched under the fall of her hair.

Odin shut her mouth at once and said nothing more.

“Honestly, I should’ve left you out there for a few more years…” Urd muttered. She tugged a thread taut and pulled up a mirror of light in front of Odin.

“Humans won the giants with a stranger’s help. Someone who could bestow a Valkyrie legacy, someone who could break the World Tree. They’d been laying this out since before you left a century ago. Compared to the Aesir, soft with long ease, humans are ruthless.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me at the start…”

“And you weren’t the master of hiding, impossible to find?”

That shut Odin up hard. She looked away, awkward as a child with sticky hands.

Finally scoring a point, Urd folded her arms and let out a small, pleased hum. “See? If you hadn’t thrown a tantrum, we could’ve reached you. But you plucked out the second Seed of the World Tree yourself. With that gone, no one in the world could find you.”

Chastened, Odin rubbed the back of her head. Fair enough. If she hadn’t been so stubborn and left her second Seed in the Golden Palace, she wouldn’t have been hunted by giants so miserably.

That extra Seed was why she’d become lord of the realm at all. Hers were purer than any other’s, and there were two. That second Seed gave her power and divinity far beyond ordinary gods.

Back then, in her immaturity, she’d left that second Seed in the palace out of spite when she was “exiled,” cutting every divine line that could reach her.

If she hadn’t done that, could she have saved the Asgardian Realm?

She’d asked herself that. The answer was an unhesitating no.

“But because I was missing that Seed, I found the power we call Aether. If I’d still had the second Seed, the Aether would’ve burned me to cinders by now, right?”

She gave a wry smile, palm over her breastbone.

“That too,” Urd nodded. “Your Aether is a true variable. Even Skuld’s scrying never caught a path this dazzling. But such possibilities are all…”

“Brought by Aphelia. Right?”

Urd inclined her head.

Aphelia was sent to this era by Enkidu, riding the current of time. She isn’t native to this world. To put it plain, she stands outside this cosmos’s tiers, unbound by its elements. A person like that is a wild term in any equation—how could we observe her cleanly?

Even if Aphelia herself hasn’t realized it, her very existence says as much.

“In the human ranks, there’s someone with power like a Valkyrie’s. Even we can’t see her face. She appeared as if from thin air, became humanity’s trump card—and she’s the one holding the World Tree’s passage together.”