-Grief is the Price, Part 3-

I dreamed.

It was an endless dream of histories long past; of peoples no longer living.

I saw the gods—before they became so.

I witnessed the Goddess.

And what laid beneath a thin veil of harmony. Fear. Uncertainty. Worry. A twisted mass of emotions wormed into the hearts of the Celestials.

The Void had attacked their world, isolating it from the greater Cosmos and pulling it into the infinite plane of in-between, Tartarus.

Terae was helpless to remedy Her attendants' worries.

All She could do was maintain their pocket of existence, creating a system with Her limited power to manage the tasks normally handled by other Gods—whose connections were severed when Her world fell into the Void.

The Celestials' emotions were overbearing, slowly chipping at Terae. It splintered Her. She sealed these broken divine fragments in a hidden sanctum in the hope they'd one day fuse back together.

And then betrayal came.

Three of Her attendants had embraced the Void. Their actions caused a breach in the dimensional space, allowing the essence of Tartarus to influence the world, splintering the divine realm into many.

I saw these events—witnessed them, even.

Because I was a splinter. Just one of many fractured pieces of the Goddess, stowed away to be fixed later.

Terae had realized what we'd become and placed four divine seals on us so that we wouldn't suffer the same as She did from the Celestials' turbulent emotions.

I retreated into myself, watching Atë—or, Ruin, I guess she preferred that name now. I saw it all; Julius' intransigent attitude, Hailey's hesitation, Ikuye's suspicions, Flik's resolve, Akari's unchanged endearment, and Hikita's steadfast support.

The voices of the other egos were finally clear to me, and I could feel their pain and rage over the things Ruin had to deal with. Loss and grief primarily were emotions they didn't understand well enough to process maturely.

Cries of murder overtook all rational ideas.

Especially when those kids showed up…

What luck, or lack of such a thing, we had when Renault reappeared. All their shitty emotions could be vented out on our very own respawning punching bag.

Honestly, I was planning to sit side-seat for a few more days. Until Hailey's frantic call, that is.

I opened the mana circuits in our body and flooded them with divine and chaotic energy while Ruin ran to her. I handled the complex management of magicka to stabilize high level physical enhancements, just as Ruin usually did for me.

Then we saw our mother, and that fine control I had slipped. Ruin was booted from her spot, and I was back in control before I could pull back the magicka flow.

Everyone in the room with low ENDURANCE or WILLPOWER was crushed by the raw power.

Oops.

"Is this something you can dispel?" I asked Hikita, my voice still over-infused with magicka, "Like how you stopped the summoning crystal in the streets above."

She was straining to stand under the pressure, but nodded and offered a simple, "Maybe."

"Try it. If you aren't confident, then don't continue. I can't risk it."

As Hikita approached my mother, I struggled to get a hold of the clashing magicks. Chaos was easily routed toward the intangible font that connected Capricorn and me, but the divine power was more difficult.

It resisted, empowered by my emotional state. It was unruly and protested against being directed toward my Iteria.

Just sit quietly until I need you!

- - - - - -TARGET- - - - - -

[Koharu Vanixi] HEALTH: (42 / 520) STAMINA: (13 / 620) MAGICKA: (3 / 80)

» ACTIVE EFFECT: CRYSTAL STASIS

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

If Hikita could release Mother, she needed healing.

But having some standard priest cast normal spells would tax her already worn-out body.

The divine magick that healed me through BLESSED RECOVERY didn't seem to use up my STAMINA and was way less painful than regular healing. I didn't need to worry about setting bones or clearing wounds either, it just automatically returned the body back to an intended and healthy state.

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If I could harness that energy for Mother—

Somebody grabbed my hands and began squeezing.

Hailey had withstood the crushing pressure and was standing in front of me with red-eyes and tear-streaked cheeks.

There was a lot being said with her expression alone, but she remained quiet.

The divine power finally subsided, retreating to the inner path to my Iteria and forming a bubble-like core of divinity.

Everyone around me eased as the pressure let off. Some had already given out and collapsed, but the officers were taking charge and getting those stragglers pulled away.

"I'm ready." Hikita said, her eyes illuminated a deep blue as magicka churned through her body.

"Do it."

Hikita's void-hued magick coursed through the purple crystal. Tiny cracks formed at the base. They spread upwards, and chunks of crystal started to break away.

Glass-like shards were pulled away by strings of magicka and fell to the ground a safe distance away.

The crystalline prison was carefully chipped away bit by bit until Mother's body was freed.

I pulled her out with Hailey's help; we laid her down on a cleared table.

"Mother?"

I grasped both her hands in my own.

Her status window was sitting in the corner of my vision, and I confirmed the active effect had been dispelled.

She was breathing, but it was labored. If we were partied up, I'm sure I'd have a series of notifications about how she was suffering from multiple levels of exhaustion and a half-dozen injuries.

I couldn't hold back the flood of divine energy any longer, and my fingers glowed silver as motes of iridescent light rained down on my mother.

Her body quivered, and her breathing settled.

"…Mom?"

"Nngh."

Mother's eyes finally stirred. She turned to face me, and my throat caught.

"My baby, is that you?" Her voice cracked dryly.

Her hand shakily reached out to touch my cheek, and I leaned into her hand.

"So many tears, my silly girl."

"Wah! Momma!" I sobbed into my mom's chest.

The open comms channel was abuzz with the news that Mother had been liberated from the dungeons of the Renaultians' palace.

Morale had spiked to an all-time high. How couldn't it, with such a heroic tale of the highest ranking divisional leadership following the Empress herself into the darkest depths to put a stop to evil, only to uncover terrible sacrificial rituals where the enemy planned to murder the Empress' mother.

Karina and her disciples must have been having a field day.

None of that mattered to me, as I had already pulled the communirune from my ears and abandoned my role as Empress for the day.

Hanna and Luke were given orders to consult with Julius and Aisling to make the best plan if something urgent came up.

Hailey and I both delegated our command to them and retreated to the less damp and void-free living quarters of the hidden palace.

The two of us were sitting side-by-side, leaning against each other's shoulders. Akari rested in her lap, and my mother laid her head on mine—She insisted she was fine to sit up, but I refused.

"When did you get a girlfriend?"

"Mother!"

"What? Look at how close you two are, and how you were acting before. A mother knows these things." She insisted.

Hailey's head bobbed, drifting into sleep.

"It's not a secret. A lot happened. It's been half a year."

"That long…? For me, it's only been two days since I heard the news that the Gendarme killed you."

"I wasn't killed."

Not by Renault's soldiers at least.

"Oh?" Mother tugged at my ear with a grin, "That's all you can say?"

"Well, I mean, I wasn't."

"You have your father's humor."

"I wasn't joking, though?" I pouted.

Mother's expression got serious.

"Your sister?"

"Safe," I assured her, "Surrounded by guards and enjoying her time making gadgets for the war effort. Like these thingamajigs."

I held out the dual-magick inscribed runestones Rias made, the communirune.

"Handier than the aethernet stuff we used to communicate before. The artificers we snagged from Aestori really pushed them to the max."

Mother closed her eyes and let out a sigh of relief.

"Sounds like there is a lot to catch up on."

"No need to rush. You're a patient in Hailey's care, and until she discharges you, I forbid you from getting involved with anything too taxing."

She smirked, "Is that an order from the Empress?"

"Haah," I sighed, "No, it's concern from your eldest daughter. But I'm not above assigning you a plethora of bothersome attendants and bogging you down with bureaucracy until you're too busy to mess around."

"How frightening my daughter has become."

"You don't know the half of it…"

I sat in silence for a while, occasionally breaking it to answer a random question Mother would ask.

Eventually, her curiosity reached a boiling-point, and she blurted out the question I had dreaded most.

"What did you do with Jacques Renault and the Renaultian leaders?"

"Killed them, or if they're not dead yet, we're in the process of hunting them down. There's a level of weirdness we can get into later, but some of those deaths were out of our control. Renault was a demon in many ways. I killed him."

"…Your father never believed in retribution."

"Yeah, well, it's too bad that Father and I didn't see eye to eye on that."

Mother's lips twitched as she fought to hide a smile.

"Ahem, I'm being serious."

I rolled my eyes, "So am I. That bastard cursed his own daughter, brainwashed and tried to sacrifice his other kids, rounded our people into concentration camps and used godsforsaken magick to turn them into monsters. Father may have believed in a higher form of restorative justice, but this time we needed to act rather than placate."

"You've grown. My little girl is so confident now." Mother grabbed my hand and squeezed, "You did a great job. Thank you for coming back for our people. Thanks for coming back for me. I'm proud of you, no matter what choices you had to make."

A hot streak dripped down my cheek.

Awh, dammit. Why am I being such a crybaby?

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