I'm back... kind of. Life has been kicking me in the heart as of late. I needed some time to just breath. I love writing, so I won't drop this story. But there will be times I will be going on a short hiatus. Thanks to all my readers who didn't drop this while I was away.
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The World Burned.
Aradia, Queen of Witches and daughter of the Roman goddess Diana, floated high above the carnage, her cloak snapping in the scorched winds. Below, the world was falling apart. The stench of smoke and blood choked the skies, rising in thick, unrelenting waves. Even from this height, she could hear them—screams, pleading, the cracking of stone and bone, the shuddering cries of cities collapsing.
A streak of raw chaos magic tore past her, too close for comfort, and crashed into the remnants of a cathedral tower. A holy structure—likely belonging to the damnable Catholic Church—was reduced to molten ruin in an instant.
She flinched, wide-eyed.
"How… how did it come to this?" she whispered, her voice drowned in the howling winds.
The destruction was absolute. Oceans boiled. Earth cracked. The very air wept with magic.
And it had all started because her mother made a fatal mistake.
Diana. Goddess of the Hunt. Moon-born warrior of Rome.
What in all the planes had made her think it was wise to attack that woman—and in her own home, no less? Not only had Diana slain the black-haired nekomata who had curled at the woman's side like a precious gem, she'd wounded the woman's adopted mother and lover too.
Aradia had warned her.
She had told her mother stories, had heard the whispers in the old spell circles, had felt the storm brewing across the leylines when Hespera Eveningstar's name was spoken.
And yet, eight gods from eight pantheons...Eight of the strongest deities in existence had tried to strike down a single woman.
And now the world was bleeding.
Down below, wrapped in a cocoon of Chaos, Nihility, and Destruction, stood her aunt—still cradling the lifeless body of the slain nekomata in her arms. Power rolled off Hespera in tangible waves, warping the very fabric of reality. The stars had fled the sky. The winds moaned with mourning.
Aradia's skin prickled. This was no longer just Hespera.
This was Pandora Unbound.
Her voice trembled. "Mother… what have you done?"
She turned her eyes back to the epicenter, where the cocoon pulsed with unfathomable energy.
"You shouldn't have angered her," Aradia whispered. "You and the others… you've opened Pandora's Box. And now there's no closing it."
Beneath her, Hespera raised her head. Her face, once beautiful, once kind in its chaos, was blank now. Lips trembling. Tears turning to stardust on her cheeks.
She screamed.
And the world shook.
~☆~
Two Hours Earlier
Diana's pacing had worn a shallow groove into the marble floor of her temple. Her thumb bled from how hard she'd been biting it, nerves frayed to thread.
The gods were talking. The pantheons were stirring. And all because Hespera was awake again.
"She can't be allowed to keep stirring chaos like this," Diana hissed to herself, stopping to glare at the pool of moonlight pouring through the arched windows.
Her secret had been safe for centuries. Her oath of chastity—the pride of her legacy—had been broken long ago in a moment of weakness. With Lucifer Morningstar, no less. And from that union, a child had been born. A child she hid. A child only one other knew about.
Hespera. Lucifer's twin. The only being who still remembered everything.
She had disappeared before the Faction War… and for a while, Diana thought the secret had vanished with her. But now, Hespera was back. And worse—she was collecting power. Spreading disruption.
And now… news had spread.
Zeus and Hera were dead.
The heads of Olympus. Snuffed out in a storm of divine fire.
A silence had fallen over the pantheons.
Diana closed her eyes, chest tightening. They would come for her next.
Unless she acted first.
But oh… how she underestimated just how monstrous Hespera would become.
~☆~
Hespera Eveningstar stood beneath the canopy of the Familiar Forest, the scent of ancient bark and stardust still clinging to her robes. Tiamat's draconic form slumbered behind her, settled in for the first true rest she'd had in centuries. The Virdis Myrr glowed faintly in Hespera's hand—a sacred, living relic necessary to heal the wounded World Tree.
She was about to step through the gate to the World Tree Grove when—
something snapped.
It was not a sound, but a sensation. A thread cut. A bond severed.
Her heart skipped. Her breath caught in her throat.
"…Kuroka."
The link she shared with the nekomata—a bond forged not only of affection and devotion but claimed soul-deep—had been shattered.
Her eyes widened. The stars in them dimmed.
Then, her aura exploded.
Reality bent around her in response. The air turned glass-like, rippling inwards around her body as sheer instinct overtook every other thought.
She didn't hesitate.
A portal tore open, its edges crackling with raw Nihility and chaos fire. The world didn't resist—it recoiled to let her pass. Hespera stepped through it, not like a goddess returning to Earth…
…but like a calamity returning to the stage it was banished from.
~☆~
Eveningstar Estate – Mortal Realm
The portal shrieked open above the great hall of the estate, reality pushed aside like curtains before a storm.
Hespera descended.
Wings of void-flame and chaos light unfurled behind her—twenty-four in total, radiant with the glow of stars long dead. Her arrival was silent, but the wind howled as if trying to warn the world of what had returned.
She saw the aftermath at once.
Shattered glass. Upturned furniture. The scent of smoke… and blood.
Blood she knew. It was Kuroka's, Nyx's, and Ophis's.
Her senses swept the estate like a divine flood. Her hand curled into a trembling fist, lips parting in a whisper that trembled with danger.
"…You touched what was mine."
Then her voice—sharpened by grief, tempered by rage—echoed through the halls:
"SHOW YOURSELF."
The grand halls of the Eveningstar estate had known silence. Sacred silence. Peaceful silence. Even mischievous silence when the Hesperides were playing games in the moonlit courtyards.
But this—this was the silence of aftermath. Of blood cooling on marble. Of screams that had already rung out and been choked off.
Hespera stepped into the main hall, barefoot, the ends of her black silk robes dragging over broken glass and shattered sigils.
She didn't blink. She didn't breathe. The scent hit her first. The unmistakable iron-sweet perfume of Kuroka's blood.
Her eyes, those unnatural twin galaxies marked by Chaos and Nihility, locked onto the crumpled figure near the shattered fountain.
Lying there like a discarded doll, her kimono torn, blood pooling beneath her motionless form.
Hespera moved to her knees in a single motion, time bending around her like rippling glass. She gently gathered the nekomata into her arms, brushing blood-matted hair from her cheek.
"...Kuroka," she whispered. The body was cold. No heartbeat. But it wasn't just grief in her chest. It was violation. Desecration.
The blood on her lover's neck was fresh. They had done this recently. They had waited until Hespera was away.
Her breath left her lungs like a collapsed star. And her power detonated.
The walls of the estate shattered outward in all directions, a shockwave of void and fire tearing through the surrounding forest. The sky itself rippled.
The seal broke. The fragment within her core awakened.
Pandora's Fragment ignited.
For a heartbeat—one single, shattering heartbeat—the whole universe paused as the truth sank in.
Then something inside Hespera shattered.
It wasn't loud. It was quiet—like a whisper of cloth tearing… or a prayer being smothered.
And then…
Pandora opened her eyes.
A second pair—jagged, crystalline, and ancient—burst into existence over Hespera's own. Etchings of spiraling chaos and devouring void glowed like living glyphs across her forehead and arms. Her wings—twenty-four of them—splayed out, each one morphing into a jagged paradox of shadow and fire, black feathers curling into razors of reality.
The gods flinched.
Shiva's flames recoiled.
Ra's sun-eye dimmed.
Even Indra took a step back.
And then…
She screamed.
But it wasn't rage.
It wasn't sorrow.
It was grief—pure, eternal, annihilating grief, wrapped in a cocoon of Chaos and Nihility and everything she had ever locked away.
The Pandora Fragment surged to the surface, fully awakened by the trauma.
[Pandora Fragment: Full Resonance Triggered]
"Final Lock Disengaged. Memory Core Alignment: Pain.
Rewrite Mode Active.
Initiating: Absolute Catharsis Protocol."
The earth cracked in a perfect spiral beneath her.
The sky turned violet-black as dozens of spell circles formed above and below.
Reality began to deconstruct around her.
Everything she saw—Diana, Shiva, Odin, Bahma, Vishnu, Dagda, Kali, Amaterasu, Indra—became nothing more than names on her execution list.
She looked at them through tear-stained fury and said with a hollow voice that broke the laws of speech:
"REPENT.repent.RePEnT!"
~☆~
Back in the celestial heights of New Olympus, where the marble shimmered under an endless twilight sky, the banquet had long since faded into silence. The progenitors—Chaos, Death, Order, and Rebirth—stood at the heart of the starlit courtyard, speaking with the new Olympians when the shift struck them.
A pulse. A rupture. A scream in the fabric of reality itself.
It wasn't heard—but felt. It struck the divine like a tuning fork slammed into the soul. The stars flickered. The constellations recoiled. Even Chronos himself paused in the flow of time.
Death's pale hand clenched around her obsidian scythe, her ageless face tightening.
"We're too late," she whispered, voice cold and clear. "Something must have happened."
Chaos, for once, didn't smile.
Their two-toned hair whipped around as raw essence bled from the cosmos itself, spiraling from a single fixed point far below, on Earth.
"The seal's broken…" Chaos murmured. "Pandora has awakened."
Rebirth staggered slightly, his fiery aura flickering wildly like a dying phoenix caught in a headwind.
"Not like this," he breathed. "Not in grief. Not in that state."
Order's eyes glowed with crystalline light, her voice calm but taut like a blade pulled too tight.
"Cause and effect are collapsing. Possibility branches are folding in on themselves. If we do not intervene now, the Pandora Protocol will overwrite this entire quadrant of creation."
The new Olympians—Astraea, Eirene, Hephaestus, and the others—looked around in mounting alarm. The sky above them rippled like fabric drenched in thunder. Even Aether, the eternal sky itself, had begun to fracture.
Astraea stepped forward, her voice firm. "What does this mean for our Queen?"
Chaos finally turned toward her—expression unreadable.
"It means Hespera Eveningstar is no longer just my Blessed."
They gestured upward—toward the stars, toward the cosmic rift beginning to form.
"She is now Pandora Unbound. Not goddess. Not primordial. Not even anomaly. She is the living contradiction—the flaw in the design. The gift and the curse. The tear in reality's script."
Death's scythe hummed with resonance, her voice barely louder than the breeze.
"We must reach her. Or she will erase the world to stop her pain."
Chaos, slowly smirking again, though it didn't reach their eyes, sighed.
"I did say she'd be interesting."
With that, the four true Primordials opened a gate unlike any before—black flame rimmed with aurora light—and stepped through.
Toward Kuoh. Toward the devastation. Toward their fractured, furious chaos bringer.
Toward Pandora.
~☆~
Mountains split. Oceans recoiled. Reality screamed.
Still cradling Kuroka's broken body in her arms, Hespera Eveningstar knelt amid the ashen wreckage of her once-beautiful estate. Her wings—torn, mangled, shifting between matter and myth—curled around her like the petals of a dying star.
Her lips were still trembling against Kuroka's forehead. Her voice, cracked with agony, had gone hoarse from whispering apologies the wind refused to carry.
She felt it—Ophis and Nyx, both not far… both barely alive.
But the eight gods who had gathered around her—the ones who had done this—stood with blades and spells still glowing with power, as if proud of the ruin they wrought.
Shiva, Odin, Ra, Brahma, Vishnu, The Dagda, Amaterasu, and Indra.
Gods of war. Gods of balance. Gods of judgment.
All dead men and women walking.
A chill swept across the battlefield, one that had nothing to do with wind or weather. The sky warped. The stars bent backward. The fabric of time coiled in confusion.
Hespera rose.
Her wings exploded outward—twenty-four wings, now laced with tendrils of voidfire and starlight, shedding particles that eroded the laws of physics where they fell.
She turned her head.
Her right eye, pulsing with the symbol of Nihility, and her left, burning with the sigil of Chaos, locked onto the gathered gods.
Her voice… no longer mortal. No longer divine. It was the law itself.
"—[Death's Decree]."
And the world obeyed.
[Death's Decree]
Classification: Absolute Authority
Tier: Trans-Cosmic | Origin-Class
Effect: With a single spoken word, the universe is compelled to recognize the absolute death of any chosen target. The soul is unmade. The body disintegrates. Their past is erased. Their name cannot be spoken again without cosmic backlash. This is not a curse. It is not magic. It is reality's correction.
Cannot be dodged.
Cannot be blocked.
Cannot be undone.
Works against Primordials, Outer Gods, Avatars, and even concepts.
Only fails against beings who have no existence to begin with.
The instant the words left her lips—
Shiva's flames collapsed inward, extinguished not by water, but by the denial of continuation.
Odin's spear fell from his grasp, his eye widening not in rage, but in confusion—as if his future had just been erased.
Ra's solar core flickered—then crumbled like ash on a dying hearth.
Amaterasu's divine fire froze, the sun goddess trying to scream before her voice disintegrated into motes of stardust.
The Dagda clutched their harp, only for their arms to vanish mid-note.
Brahma, Vishnu, and Indra fell not as warriors… but as forgotten echoes, erased from even the memories of the stars.
No blood was spilled. There were no bodies. Just absence. Just silence.
The kind of silence only Pandora Unbound could summon.
And as the dust settled, the entire world seemed to hold its breath.