What you did was right. Different worldline or not, I can say this with a steady heart: Aphelia will stand at your world’s peak, like a lone star above a dark sea. Even if she doesn’t become a world-ruling god like me, she’ll still blaze as a peerless force, sharp as a drawn blade.
The Stellar Goddess shook her head, moonlight cool in her eyes. As one among the many Aphelias, she knew what that name meant, like a river of fate running under stone. It wasn’t bragging; it was iron speaking after the fire. She too had once been Aphelia, tempered in trials no lighter than those the present Aphelia faced, or she’d never have risen to rule a world.
The strong trust themselves the way mountains trust their own roots. The Stellar Goddess was no exception. She had stumbled, rain on black rock, but once she set foot on the road to godhood, she advanced like war drums under storm clouds, sweeping every foe like wind flattening wheat. No matter how mighty they were, she cut through them like lightning through a night sky.
Against absolute strength and a hard-running streak of luck, schemes turned to smoke. Ambushes? Your nets break like spider silk in a gale unless you can erase Aphelia outright. Kidnapping her kin? By then the Stellar Goddess had dropped her bottom line like a blade, and if they dared to lay hands on her family, she went to their planet and made a blood circle of it, exacting a price measured in ash and screams.
Revenge is steel going in clean and coming out red. It doesn’t stop until one side is punched full of holes, then burned to cinders, like weeds torched down to dirt. That style cost Stellar Goddess Aphelia a few comrades, leaves falling from a scorched tree, but in the end it scared the great powers stiff. Her methods were so bloody that any clan or planetary bloc heard her name like a war horn in the dark.
She also learned, as iron learns the forge’s heat, that she could not guard her loved ones every hour. Even if she kept them on her own world, even if she threw up a barrier like crystal around a lamp, cracks would still be there. By this universe’s measure, she was only a Demigod at that time. Several other Demigods contested the sky, all reaching for the same throne.
So Stellar Goddess Aphelia threw away her bottom line without a second thought, like cutting a knot with a sword. Touch her family, and she paid you back with the same poison. She refused to walk into deathtraps; why step into a pit with “no return” carved on the stones? That first friend, once kidnapped, had already been killed by those hostile forces, a candle snuffed before she could even try to save her. They’d set the bait to kill Aphelia; there was never a rescue to be had, only a grave.
After that, Stellar Goddess Aphelia wiped out the clans and the allied planets behind it, like a harvest that leaves only stubble. She left no survivors, no “spared” elders or infants, no soft corners. On this point, she was very much like the Aphelia from Fenrir’s world, a winter wind that leaves no leaf standing.
Better to cut the grass and pull the roots than let weeds seed the whole field. One, it stops wagging tongues and chills the petty-hearted schemers like frost on the marrow. Kill them all, and what leverage is left? Two, it fulfills the true meaning of bloody revenge. She even started with their blood kin, like twisting the knife in the mind, then only at the end took the masterminds who stole her loved ones.
As for Aphelia’s own kin, she’d already laid them to sleep and kept them in her pocket world, a sanctuary held like a jewel in her palm. The most dangerous place can be the safest cave; that old saying held like a lantern in fog. Yes, fighting inside a domain risks stray blades, but Aphelia’s strength usually ended the battle before she ever reached for the domain core.
That left her hunters wasting time, tossing spears at mist. Rumors spread like mold: that Stellar Goddess Aphelia had gone mad and butchered her own kin, then framed every major power. But after each battle, Aphelia’s loved ones stepped out alive, sunlight through storm. And the Stellar Goddess herself “generously” released clips of the truth, cold mirrors for the universe. The great powers that once struck at her family had their names dragged through tar and gravel.
Cruel? Yes. Effective? Like thunder that clears the sky. After long seasons of this, few forces dared provoke Aphelia. Most didn’t even dare approach her. The name she forged in slaughter rang too loud and too cold, a bell in a winter temple that makes your bones ache.
From then on, her path to godhood was almost unchallenged, iron laid straight on the anvil. She broke any force that tried to block her, cut down every Demigod who stood as an enemy, a scythe through tall grass. With two Demigod friends at her side, she finally stepped onto this world’s altar, the godseat shining like dawn. She led civilization into a long season of bloom, fields gold and cities bright.
At the instant she became a god, Stellar Goddess Aphelia entered a strange state, like sinking into the sea of her own mind and rising above a higher stratum of the universe. She looked down on the world as a hawk sees river and field, and she saw that in many-colored worlds there were countless Aphelias, stars across a night.
Some were still growing, tempered in blood and fire, hammer meeting steel. Some had just been born, their first cry already keen as a flute. Some were already enthroned as gods, crowns like cold constellations. They felt the arrival of a “new sister” and sent her gentle glances, firelight shared across a long hall.
She could not tell Fenrir that. This news was wrapped in cause and effect like thorns around a heart. Entangle Fenrir with god-throned Aphelias, even by hearing, and the weight of that karma would crush her like a mountain. She couldn’t bear it yet.
Gods who stand above the world and turn the rules between their fingers are called gods because they embody the world itself, its river and its silt. They also embody its cause and effect, its debts and its harvest. You can’t touch them without drowning in karma unless you stand at the same height, back strong enough to carry a world.
Is it really so? Fenrir’s voice carried a winter hush. If you say so, my lady. But my world’s Aphelia has suffered too much. All her blood kin betrayed her, like knives from the same sheath. Her foster sister tried to use her, marching with Sigdrifa’s banner. Her foster mother was the founder of a civilization, doomed to stand against the new one like old walls against fresh river.
Fenrir laid out her worries, stones clicking on a board. She hadn’t made them up; she’d seen them by walking other worlds, frost on the windowpanes of truth. She’d been confident in Aphelia before; this Aphelia stood bright, eager, spine like a bamboo stalk. It was hard to imagine how she’d reach that dream’s abyss.
If so, why that dream at all? The question hung like smoke.
By now, Fenrir didn’t believe in coincidence; the road had taught her that storms rarely wander. Before she met Aphelia, she hadn’t run into so many bad turns. Crossing worldlines was hard, yes, but not a storm every step. After she met Aphelia, everything shifted like weather. Soon she “dreamed” that strange dream. A will fixed its gaze on her, cold as a lantern in a tomb. She had to flee her world for a while, like a fox leaving a snare.
Say it has nothing to do with Aphelia? Fenrir couldn’t swallow that. She chose to believe someone was warning her, trying to keep her world’s Aphelia from walking a road paved with bones. If there’s a Stellar Goddess Aphelia, maybe other Aphelias reached godhood too, their hands full of stars.
My lady, could it be a warning from another world’s Aphelia, a lantern set in my dream, so mine won’t take that dangerous path?
Fenrir sighed, deep as midnight over snow. She was still too weak; if someone wanted to deliver such news but she couldn’t touch that tier of power, a warning by dream wasn’t impossible. To learn the truth, she had to lean on the Stellar Goddess, as a traveler leans on a staff.
Don’t dig into that. However you frame it, at worst treat it as a warning, a bell at the gate. Let it be mine, from me to you. Do you understand?
Stellar Goddess Aphelia smiled wryly in her heart, like a flute note buried under drums. She’d tried to keep Fenrir away from this layer of things, from the sky where rules turn like wheels. But Fenrir had guessed anyway, sharp as wind. In such a state, anyone would think this way; she had just spoken about other worldlines. Who’s to say a sister from another line wouldn’t send a sign?
She could only be helpless, hands open to falling rain. She pulled as much of the karma onto herself as she could, like taking a cloak of thorns onto her own shoulders. She and Fenrir were already tangled like ivy and wall; a little more wouldn’t matter. But letting Fenrir, blind to the danger, link to other god-throned Aphelias would be like leading her into a storm with no lantern.
Hearing her, Fenrir hesitated, a ripple under still water. Then she caught on and set down her teacup, steam thinning like a ghost. She nodded again and again. Both were clever; no need to spell the blade’s edge in big letters. Even so, the warning left a knot in Fenrir’s heart, a stone under silk.
