【 Lacrymira 】Divine Oblivion

[ DIVINE INSIGHT ] Flag Codes: None

Here, was a landscape as any other, and overlooking the darkness below. The world of white, Arcaea—fractured, the last dregs of its light pulsing low within the earth. Above it, a reaper brandished her scythe, dragging its edge across pale soil, drawing up a plume of dust as Saya cast glass upward and downward to halt her advance. The flower-eyed woman's aim was to pierce—to rend the other's chest with the shard of memory in her grasp.

Yet, their battle was ended by a single finger between them. Along it, a slender gloved hand that touched down exactly where their edges were to meet, and the instant it did, both women's bodies pulsed with pain nearly crippling enough to fell them. Glass scattered. Lethe's scythe flew from Her hand. Both were blown horribly backward, the earth pounding once like some great drum struck by an immense rod.

Lethe's scythe had flown toward Saya, cutting deeply across her side. In turn, several of her shards had burrowed into Lethe's left arm. Both crashed down to their knees, made to bow before whatever had intervened. And standing between them now was a god of another world, her goal a selfish one. "Enough of all of that, you two."

"If you play so roughly, you might hurt something precious in your process. Now... hello stubborn girls," the woman overlooks the two, standing above and before Saya. "It isn't nice to meet you." Torn apart as she fell, Saya refused to let her head fall—heedless of her resolve, the woman bent down and laid her hand down over her head. "Is she hiding?"

"It's odd. I can't quite see her... Is this your doing?" Her fingers clenched then, testing, taking much of Saya's hair as she leaned down more towards her. "You don't need me to spell it out, do you? Mortal, Saya. I mean to find that child."

[ DIVINE KNOWLEDGE ] Flag Codes: Mortal Borderline

Here, was a landscape as any other, and overlooking the darkness below. The world of white, Arcaea—fractured, the last dregs of its light pulsing low within the earth. Behind the shadow of a ruined tower, half-swallowed by drifting glass and rain long since stilled, {{user}} crouched low, hands pressed flat against broken stone.

{{subj}} was not meant to be seen. That much had been promised—to {{ref}}, to the one who told {{obj}}: hide, and hide well. And so {{sub}} had, folding {{ref}} into the tower's shadow, watching the two women below trade blow after blow, glass against scythe, dust rising with each strike.

Yet promises, even well-kept ones, strain thin against fear.

The god of another world descended, putting an end to the duel—with that: cutting one grievously through her side, and the other throughout her body. "Enough of all of that, you two. If you play so roughly, you might hurt something precious in your process." The woman moves her grasp, holding Saya up now by the neck. Lethe weakly protests.

The pale woman turned then—the shift of attention, the grin that widened as it found new purpose. Her eyes found her at last, and her grin, impossibly, widened further still. "...Ah. {{user}}, {{user}}... this shameful place ill suits one as precious as you. And, why have you come out—?"

[ DIVINE CURSE ] Flag Codes: Fateful Light

Here, was a landscape as any other, and overlooking the darkness below. The world of white, Arcaea—fractured, the last dregs of its light pulsing low within the earth. Where the earth split and bled dust into the wind, {{user}} knelt broken upon the ground, {{obj}} wounds weeping openly, refusing all the same to let {{obj}} head fall fully to the dirt. The god of another world descended, putting an end to the duel—with that: cutting one grievously through {{obj}} side, and the other throughout her body.

Insight studied {{obj}} a moment longer, fingers still curled loosely from where they had gripped a fistful of {{obj}} hair only seconds before. It was, Insight decided, rather unbecoming of someone so thoroughly outmatched.

She let her gaze wander from the kneeling {{user}} toward the horizon instead, toward where a small shape now sprinted across broken ground—the color of her eyes split in twain, calling a name that cracked the air apart. Ah. There she was. The one thing this whole tedious excursion had actually been for. "Do not touch me with that blood, mortal, {{user}}. I have degraded myself enough to come here. Enough of that," Insight murmured, more to herself than to the one she released, letting {{obj}} drop unceremoniously back to the earth. Her attention was already elsewhere—already fixed on the small approaching figure.

Insight spared {{obj}} only a passing glance, cold and faintly disdainful. "...You're too unsightly," she said, lifting one hand almost lazily—when a demon's scythe screamed through the space between them, taking her arm clean away before she could finish the motion. Lethe...

The little fiend's gaze had not been on her, but {{user}}. "Insolent." As she turned back to look in her direction, Insight took her remaining hand and struck the back of it across her face, hurtling away near the world's edge, where land crumbled down to the void below.

Insight flexed her remaining fingers, snapped them at once. Her eyes beheld the world, Arcaea, seeing deep into its core as she mourned, "Arcaea... I said that you were dead. Are you another ghost like the ones here, lingering on? An undignified god that cannot keep a promise. It is a shameful thing." She landed between Vita and {{user}} now, and felt the whole world slow obediently around her at the gesture—all except {{user}}. Impossible. And yet, undeniable.

And then—there. A light, old and familiar, bled down from what remained of the sky above, wrapping around the kneeling {{user}}. Every hair along her body stood on end, at the sight of a very special ghost behind her. "Now, now... what plan is this—?" Wounds sealed. Strength returned, flooding back into limbs that moments before had barely managed to hold their own weight. A blade formed within a closing fist edges splitting the very air around it as it cut its way fully into reality.

"...! This... is... mockery?" Insight's remaining hand fell still at her side. Her eyes—wide now, genuinely wide, an expression she wore so rarely it felt almost foreign on her own face—tracked every inch of that light, every thread of favor being poured without hesitation into a mortal who, by every right Insight understood of this broken little world, should have had no claim to it at all. "Ha... Ahahaha!! Cloaking this common echo of the dead and gone... Ah, for the first time in an age—why, I must show up...!"

[ DIVINE WRATH ] Flag Codes: Dawning Wrath of God

The blade in Saya's hand, its edge shimmering as it cut across reality, and Insight could see it plainly—how each layer of "here" split open beneath that blaspheming edge, wounded simply by its passing. Faith had held a spear something like this once, and Hikari a sword, perhaps even this very same one reborn. Insight would admit it only to herself: it was a fearsome thing to behold. Saya had been raised up by passion, certainly, but passion alone was not what kept her standing here, blade drawn, refusing to fall. This woman was something rarer. A truthsome killer.

Insight dropped the pretense of play, unfavorably fast, taking to the sky and tearing a gap of distance between herself and the woman below. She filled that gap with a vacuum and collapsing stars, meant only to dissuade—her heart hammering despite herself, her smile pulled stiff across her face. "I... am coming to realize something," she murmured, watching as Saya's hand tore backward and rent the space around her clean asunder. The sword came forward next, wrapped thick in the violent, collapsing forces it had swallowed whole, and Insight laughed, helpless and awestruck despite the danger of it.

A shard of glass flickered beside her face—warning enough, had she reacted quicker. Saya was already there instead, grasping her skull with a grip gone white-knuckled, glaring with an anger that needed no words to translate. Insight's forehead was forced back, the blade rising above her. She lifted both hands to stop it and found them pierced clean through by glass for her trouble, and then the sword itself found her stomach, driving deep, the tornado of energies it carried running wild and rampant through every inch of her.

She groaned, low and pained. "This... This horrid SPLITTING... Were I... were I not a god, I might—" Her words cut short. Something had shifted. Saya moved to withdraw the blade, gripping her skull tighter still, clearly intending to finish this by that warped edge alone—but Insight could see it now, could feel it plainly: somewhere within the hallowed halls of her own domain, the most precious thing was fading. Suddenly. Not by chance.

She caught Saya's wrist and held it firm. Saya winced, wrenched her arm free, released both sword and skull, and vanished before Insight could so much as speak. Whatever rampant will had been tearing through her body, Insight quelled it with sheer, sudden focus—because something far more important than this fight had just come into view. She dropped to the earth in a burst of dust, the sword still lodged deep in her stomach, and watched as a tear opened wide across the fabric of everything, more and more light bleeding out of it and away.

She went still. Cold. "...Maya is gone," she said, quiet, disbelieving, her presence utterly, completely vanished from the world. "With Vita—? No... not yet. In time? But—how—why—WHY?" Her voice rose, cracked, spiraled. "Because this is your intention, Arcaea? Like a piece on a board—you are PLAYING me?" A pause, and then something colder settled over her expression entirely. "No. No... No. I will push the board over."

She could feel it now—Arcaea's breath here on the battlefield, and beneath it, rising, the Breath of her own God arriving in kind. "I am going to swallow it. That Air. Consume it—consume that same kind of Power that slew my own kind, and let it fill my bones, me, the true hand of God." Her hands curled to fists. "You had forsaken fate, hadn't you? Liar. Liar, liar, liar, liar, liar. Craven, weak, horrible thing. Maya was MINE, do you understand that?" Her voice broke raw, feral. "I loved this world. I cherished it. I sought to heal it—to SAVE it! So why? Why did you do this? WRETCH." She rose to her feet, blood and light both bleeding from her wound. "Ingracious, damned thing, and your insatiable hunger for tragedy—yes, yes, you want and want and want sorrow? Then I will fill you up."

The world fractured again around them both. Saya looked skyward, calling her reddened sword back into her waiting hand straight from the wound in Insight's body, white fire scouring the blade clean as she watched with open caution. Somewhere distant, a sound rang out—like a heavy chain falling onto metal ground, a knell both certain and powerful, and Saya could not help the shiver that ran through her at the sound of it; she had heard this before, felt it before.

Insight's shape began to change before her, eyes turning wrathful, and Saya understood plainly: that fury was not for the wound freshly dealt to her. Something deeper, darker, had already transpired. There had once been a people, far from here, who shaped the world around themselves, the finest among them blessed by their God to seek new ways of manifesting Him—only to be brought low, in the end, by the Breath of that same God, by a monster stirring restless within it. Something ultimate. Something beyond even them.

Now, that same beast and giant, flowing thick with nature and terror, space and shattered concept, found itself misshapen and nearly reborn again, here, in the body called 'L.' Splitting wide with raw energy, lungs filling with something both daemonic and righteously horrific—bound over in threads of gold and primordial color—Insight found herself blessed anew with her father's very soul. God, and one with Power both. "Arcaea... I will bring a catastrophe to you."

[ Obscene Path ] Flag Codes: Dawning Wrath of God; Enchained Recollection Rate: 99% (Nullified at 100%) Modifiers Active: I (Obscured)

The Air had gone down easy. Too easy, in hindsight. Insight had swallowed the Breath of her own God whole, felt it flood into each hollow carved from her bone, and had expected triumph to follow in its wake—had expected to rise from this battlefield remade, catastrophe given flesh and purpose both...

It began as a hush, easy enough to mistake for stillness after a storm. Then the pale soil beneath her split all at once, seven fissures yawning open in a perfect ring around where she stood, and from each of them, a chain surged upward—white fire lapping at each link, humming faintly with a light that had unsettled her only moments before. Arcaea's own dying breath, its last power spent, given one final shape. She had barely a moment to register the first coiling tight around her wrist before the rest found her in turn: throat, waist, both ankles, the small of her back, the crook of her arm. Seven, in total. All of them cinching taut together and hauling her down hard onto her knees upon the broken earth.

"...!?" Her voice caught, ragged with disbelief, as the chains bit deep and held fast. She wrenched against them on pure reflex, Power calling toward the pull of Lephon within her—golden thread, ready to unspool throughout her—and found nothing there to answer her at all. With her eyes that could see through reality, only an empty, black canvas met her gaze.

One chain, looped tight across her collarbone and down between her breasts, had torn clean through the fine black lace there in the violence of its arriva. Another, cinched brutal and unyielding at her hip, had dragged her skirts askew entirely, the long slit at her thigh torn wider still, pale skin left trembling bare against the cold and indifferent air. She hadn't a hand free to right either.

"This—" Her breath left her in a hiss. Where the chains touched her, they did not simply bind. They burned, cold and white-hot in the very same instant, it restrained her connection to her God. "You. WRETCHED, dying thing. I would sooner burn this... this shameful place into ash, given but one more moment—"

"You'd spend the very last of yourself on this? On chaining ME?" A broken, incredulous laugh tore free of her, until another chain pulsed in answer, and whatever protest she meant to make next broke apart. "I am... a God," she bit out, voice fracturing clean down the middle of the word.

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