Hela laughs softly.
Not the sharp laugh she uses when gods scream.
Not the indulgent one she reserves for irony.
This laugh is older.
Dry.
Fond in the way only funerals can be.
"Ah," she purrs, fingers drumming against the arm of her throne, bone clicking against bone. "You felt it, didn't you? The Hellbound shudder. The doors hesitate."
A corpse in the front row nods. Its neck snaps back into place halfway through.
"Yes. Of course you did."
She leans forward, violet light leaking from behind her mask like bruised starlight.
"You do not become an Ascendant of Knowledge without first learning what knowledge costs."
The lanterns dim.
The void listens.
"Before the blood. Before the fragments learned how to laugh." Her voice softens. "Before everything fell apart…"
Hela tilts her head, as if listening to a memory arguing with itself.
"Daviyi didn't begin as a monster in a scholar's robe."
A pause—just long enough to hurt.
"She began as a daughter."
And daughters, unfortunately, are where gods learn weakness.
Miayna was called the Kingdom of Knowledge, and mortals meant it the way worshippers mean prayer:
half hope, half superstition.
Its towers were libraries. Its markets sold paper the way other kingdoms sold steel. Children learned languages before they learned how to throw stones. Even the air felt quiet there—like it didn't want to interrupt anyone thinking.
Too quiet, some scholars whispered. As if the kingdom had learned to hold its breath.
And at the center of it all sat Queen Isika.
Eighteen years old.
Crowned too early.
Sick too long.
A queen who could not give her people what they demanded most.
An heir.
Stillbirth after stillbirth.
Silence after silence.
The consorts came like seasons and left like cowards. They called her failure in voices sweet enough to sound polite.
She smiled until her cheeks ached.
Then she hid.
Isika hid in the library.
Not the royal one—too public, too bright—but the deep archive under Miayna's palace, where the oldest books lived, and the dust smelled like time giving up.
Sometimes she read children's stories to herself. Sometimes she cried herself to sleep between stacks and pretended the lullaby came from ink.
Then, one night, the guards came trembling.
Two visitors had arrived.
A storyteller, and a child.
They claimed they carried knowledge from the Ascendants themselves.
Isika—desperate, curious, starving for something that wasn't pity—ordered them brought in.
The man bowed with the ease of someone who had met kings and never feared them.
"My name," he said, "is Rzius."
Then he introduced the boy.
"A young apprentice," Rzius said gently. "Jrin."
The child looked five.
He did not blink like a child.
He watched like a law.
Rzius told Isika stories for hours. Tales of Ascendants and realms, of cosmic architecture and futures that felt too sharp to be lies. Isika listened like someone hearing a language she'd always known but never been taught.
Then, with a kindness that felt like a knife wrapped in velvet, Rzius asked Jrin to leave the room.
The child obeyed without complaint.
And when they were alone, Rzius finally spoke the true reason he had come.
"I am here," he told her, "to have a child with you."
Isika's breath caught—not from shock, but from the way the words landed like prophecy.
"Our child," he continued, calm as a sentence being written, "will change the cosmos. She will be a scholar like no other."
Isika wanted to refuse.
But she had been refusing grief for years. Refusing shame. Refusing the whisper that she had been born wrong.
And then Rzius looked at her the way no one in Miayna ever had.
Like she mattered.
So Isika said yes.
Not like a queen.
Like a woman begging the universe to stop taking things from her.
Ten years passed.
Ten years of love that began as purpose and became something softer, stranger, real.
Rzius stayed.
He did not treat her like a vessel.
He treated her like his beloved.
He married her.
Miayna bloomed under their reign: scholars arrived from every horizon, peace anchored itself in the streets, and knowledge became less like a weapon and more like a sunrise.
Still no child came.
Isika cried once. Only once. She tried not to let Rzius see it.
He saw anyway.
And he told her the truth.
"Beloveds," he said quietly, "are not just lovers. They are cosmic permission."
Isika frowned, wiping her eyes like she could erase fate by being tidy.
Rzius continued. "If an Ascendant tries to have children with someone who isn't their beloved… the universe rejects it."
"Stillbirth," Isika whispered, horrified.
"Or worse," Rzius replied. "The universe makes a compromise. Something alive. Something wrong."
Isika went still.
Then she understood everything at once.
Her body wasn't broken.
The world hadn't cursed her.
She had simply been trying to build a future with the wrong blueprint.
She had been meant for an Ascendant's love.
And then, as if the universe finally stopped pretending it didn't care—
Isika became pregnant.
Miayna celebrated so loudly the library itself seemed to tremble.
Daviyi was born under a sky full of clear stars, as if the cosmos wanted witnesses.
Rzius delivered her himself.
He held the newborn like he was holding a truth that could shatter worlds.
For two years he stayed.
Two years of laughter in palace halls. Two years of Isika smiling without forcing it. Two years of Daviyi tugging at his sleeve like she was trying to pull him closer to the mortal world.
Then one morning—
Rzius was gone.
No warning.
No fight.
No body.
Only a letter—sealed for Daviyi, heavy with meaning a child couldn't understand yet.
Isika searched. The kingdom searched. The libraries searched.
The cosmos did not answer.
And in the aftermath, Jrin vanished too.
Before leaving, he gave Isika a promise:
"I will return on Daviyi's nineteenth birthday."
He disappeared like a rule being removed from a page.
Isika raised Daviyi alone.
She refused consorts. Refused counsel. Refused politics disguised as "necessity."
"My heir is Daviyi," she told them. "And no government will ever hold power over the partner of my heir. Suggestions are welcome. Control is not."
Miayna learned to fear its own queen in a new way:
Not as a ruler.
As a mother.
Daviyi grew up sharp.
Not the kind of sharp that cuts for fun—sharp like a knife meant to carve a future.
At six, she questioned scholars twice her age and made them sweat through their robes. At ten, she was testing theories from books the way other children tested dares.
She learned early that some men called her mother a failure.
And she learned something even earlier:
It could have been the men's fault.
Not her mother's.
So Daviyi defended Isika with words that made adults go quiet.
And Isika—sick, exhausted, stubborn—watched her daughter like she was proof Rzius had been real.
Not a dream.
Year Nineteen — The First Lie of Celebration
On Daviyi's nineteenth birthday, the palace buzzed with talk of suitors.
A princess with a mind like hers was a political prize.
Men wanted her like kingdoms want borders.
Daviyi despised them for it and smiled anyway, because she had learned from her mother how to do violence politely.
That was the night Jrin returned.
He attended the celebration like he belonged there, despite looking only a little older than he had ten years ago.
Isika pulled him aside.
"When will you tell her?" she asked.
Jrin's gaze flicked toward Daviyi—bright, brilliant, alive.
"She's nineteen," he said flatly. "You want me to walk up and say: Hello, you're mine?"
Isika blinked.
Jrin continued, voice quieter. "I won't force her. I want her happy. Even if—" He cut himself off like the sentence was illegal.
Isika's face softened.
Then fate decided it was bored.
Daviyi was unveiling one of her first air-blimps—an invention that made Miayna's scholars scream with delight—when assassins struck.
Steel flashed. Panic rose.
Daviyi's mind ran faster than fear. She landed the blimp hard. She turned—ready to fight with whatever tool she could grab—
And then Jrin spoke.
Not shouting.
Declaring.
He said four full names—made up, mortal, meaningless.
And then he spoke their crimes like he was reading a sentence already written into the bones of the universe.
"Assault. Murder. Torture. Robbery. Abuse of animals." A pause. A faint, displeased click of the tongue. "Tsk."
Then he moved.
Each law they had broken became subtraction.
An arm vanished.
Then the lower half of a body.
Then the last of them collapsed into nothing that could be called "whole."
He imprisoned their punishment inside an object like a snowglobe—small, harmless-looking, and eternal.
"You will die," Jrin said calmly. "Over and over again. Until the cycle exhausts you."
Daviyi stared at him like he was a nightmare wearing a child's face.
She ran.
Straight to her mother, shaking, breathless, horrified.
And that was when Isika told her.
"That," she whispered, "is your betrothed."
Daviyi said no.
Jrin said, without looking at her, "Now isn't the time."
That night, Isika told Daviyi the truth about Rzius.
About beloveds.
About destiny.
About why Daviyi was not simply a princess—but a future point the cosmos had already selected.
Daviyi didn't accept it easily.
But she agreed to try.
Because she loved her mother enough to bear the weight of answers she didn't want.
Then Isika gave her a gift.
"From your father," she said.
Inside the box:
A quill with no ink.
And a key engraved with words that made Daviyi's skin prickle.
THE LIBRARY OF KNOWLEDGE.
Daviyi opened the letter.
It was Rzius's voice in ink.
He told her he wished he could have watched her grow up. He told her she would one day become a member of the Primarch Ten. He told her the quill would only work with her blood—because the door it created was not made for strangers.
He warned her:
Some of the text in that library was still writing itself.
Some of it could tell the future.
And knowledge should never be taken for granted.
"I am proud of you," the letter ended, as if pride could reach across absence.
Daviyi opened the door in secret.
In her closet, because she was still nineteen and still thought hiding things made them safer.
The quill drew blood from her finger, and ink rose like obedience.
A doorway formed.
And inside it—
Jrin was waiting.
They built together.
Not because they liked each other.
Because they couldn't stop.
Airships.
Engines.
Plumbing.
Light.
Miayna entered an age of peace so bright it almost felt like it could outrun tragedy.
Jrin was harsh. Cold. Noble. Fair.
He was the Ascendant of Law—unyielding structure, the force that decided what consequences looked like.
Daviyi hated him for how rigid he was.
And hated him more for how often he was right.
Then she hated him in a different way when she realized—horribly—that his stubbornness had started to feel like companionship.
The first time they stepped into the Library of Knowledge together, Daviyi realized immediately she could not stand him.
Because he tried to reorganize it.
"You cannot leave these books scattered everywhere," Jrin said, voice controlled enough to sound like he was being polite. "There needs to be a system. A proper order."
The library—the library itself—seemed to stare at him.
Daviyi crossed her arms. "I don't tell you how to run the laws of the universe," she snapped, "so don't tell me how to run my library."
Jrin did not smile. Did not frown.
He picked up a book and placed it—perfectly—on the wrong shelf.
Then he left.
Daviyi's rage was so hot she nearly tore a page in half.
She hated him.
And Jrin—quietly, impossibly—found someone he could not control.
So Daviyi tried to solve the problem like a scholar.
She enchanted the door: it would only appear on the seventh day of every week.
She warded the library: unworthy readers would go mad.
She thought that would keep Jrin away.
It did not.
Because every seventh day, without fail, Jrin returned.
Of course he did.
The Ascendant of Order could not be driven mad by mere knowledge.
He returned, criticized her chaos, and—just to make her furious—rearranged books in ways that felt like personal insult.
Once he sorted them alphabetically by the second letter of each title.
Daviyi discovered The Art of War beside The Anatomy of a Pickle and screamed so loudly the shelves trembled.
"This is the optimal sorting method," Jrin said, perfectly straight-faced, "based on secondary indexing."
Daviyi threw a book at his head.
Jrin caught it.
He told her, "I'll see you in seven days."
For some reason, that made her blush.
Another time, he invented a law that forced Daviyi to use a "word of the day" every time she spoke.
If she refused, he refused to respond.
She once clenched her teeth and hissed, "Jrin, pass me that scroll, you stubborn tin can."
Silence.
Jrin's eyes flicked toward her, patient as stone.
"You forgot the word," he said.
Daviyi screamed until the library's candles flinched.
And still—
They kept coming back to each other.
Six years passed in argument, invention, and stubborn orbit.
Jrin took the titles slowly—knight first, then Chancellor, then the inevitable thing neither of them named out loud until five years later.
They were nothing alike.
And their relationship became something no mortal text could properly describe.
Year Twenty-Five — When the Cosmos Stopped Asking.
Then, on Daviyi's twenty-fifth birthday—
Lady Hex arrived.
Hela's laugh returns—small, unpleasant.
"Ah," she murmurs. "Hex. Always arriving like a dagger in silk."
Hex told Daviyi she had been chosen.
Not invited.
Chosen.
Because she carried the blood of Rzius, the Ascendant of Knowledge.
Daviyi thought—stupidly, beautifully—that she was finally going to meet her father.
She wiped her blood from the closet door so no one could enter the library. She put the quill and key on a chain. She hugged her mother. She promised she would return.
Isika encouraged her through tears.
"You will always be my princess," she said. "Ascendant or not."
Daviyi gave her mother the quill and key.
"Keep Father's library safe," she begged. "Until I come back."
Daviyi hesitated at the closet door that night.
The quill itched against her skin like it wanted to write something without permission.
She pressed the tip to paper anyway—just one line, addressed to her mother.
A warning. A feeling. A plea.
The ink formed—then thinned—then corrected itself into blankness.
The library did not allow messages that changed fate.
It only allowed records of fate after it happened.
Daviyi stared at the empty page until her hands stopped shaking.
Then she went to Majihir and pretended she hadn't tried.
Isika agreed.
Isika hugged Jrin too.
"Protect her," she whispered.
Jrin swore he would.
And Daviyi and Jrin were taken to Majihir—home of the Ascendants in the first dimension.
Daviyi expected reunion.
Instead—
She was invited to Rzius's funeral.
The cosmos did not soften the blow.
Hrolyn summoned her and named her the next Ascendant of Knowledge.
He spoke about awakening as if it were an honor, not an execution.
Daviyi refused.
She begged to go home.
Hex slapped her.
Hard.
Jrin lunged.
Guards stopped him.
Hex grabbed Daviyi by the hair and hissed into her ear:
"If you refuse, I will take the vilest beings alive and turn them into Ascendants. And then I will have them kill everyone you love."
Daviyi spat blood. "You wouldn't dare."
Hex smiled.
"Oh?" she said. "Then watch me make your father's existence disappear. Or give his title to someone worse."
Daviyi caved.
Not because she was weak.
Because she was still someone's daughter.
Hex ripped something from her—an Iyrian cord, an inner tether that activated power.
Daviyi collapsed.
Then she screamed.
Because knowledge poured into her like molten gold.
Not metaphor. Not feeling.
Reality forced everything it had ever known into her mind and expected her to endure it.
Names of stars long dead.
Languages older than breath.
Secrets of gods who never wanted witnesses.
Daviyi clawed the marble floor like it could anchor her.
The knowledge was alive.
And it devoured her.
Then a voice echoed through the pain.
"What have you done, Hex?"
Daviyi jerked her head up, sobbing, furious.
"Who are you?" she screamed.
A tall figure stood in the dim. Shifting—sometimes solid, sometimes an outline made of ink and golden threads.
Familiar.
He spoke gently, and it hurt worse than screaming.
"My sweet girl," he said. "You may call me… Knowledge."
He wasn't Rzius returned. He was memory given instructions and a voice.
He could not choose. He could only remain.
Knowledge didn't love the way mortals did.
It persisted.
He leaned closer, as if ashamed.
"Don't let them know I'm here."
By the time Daviyi understood she was a prisoner, three seasons had already passed in Miayna without her—
and Majihir kept time the way predators do: only in meals.
Hex locked Daviyi inside a library.
Not her library. A prison shaped like one.
By the time she called it "training," four years had passed.
Only Hex and an Ascendant could open it.
Daviyi was now "one of them"—and still not equal.
Except for Jrin.
He volunteered to stay.
Not because the Ascendants were kind.
Because they wanted Daviyi compliant.
Because they knew Jrin was loyal—to Rzius, and to Daviyi.
The prison-library was obscene in its luxury: bedrooms, kitchen, bath, living room, balcony overlooking the universe.
And everywhere—
Hex's purple eyes watched through the windows like a threat that pretended to be decor.
Daviyi closed every curtain. Locked every door. Shook in a bedroom and whispered that she wanted to go home.
Then the pressure came.
Arms around her.
Not visible.
But real.
Knowledge held her like apology.
She cried into something that wasn't fully there.
He asked about her mother.
Daviyi told him Isika's health had improved. That she remained unmarried.
"My mother said she loved my father," Daviyi whispered.
Jrin said nothing.
He knelt down and held her too.
Knowledge—a mechanism that still remembered how—held them, too.
Daviyi became the keeper of the library.
The place that held answers, secrets, futures still being written.
Long enough to believe, she was almost happy:
Books.
Jrin's stubborn presence.
Knowledge's quiet watch.
After that, Hex stopped improvising.
She scheduled cruelty.
Day One: questions. Day Two: answers.
Day Three meant screams—measured, recorded, and compared like test results.
Daviyi learned there were punishments for refusing—and different punishments for answering too quickly.
The library began to anticipate Hex's footsteps: shelves aligning, ink bracing itself, the air tightening like a throat.
Jrin started standing between them before Hex even spoke.
It never helped.
It only made the beating take longer.
Daviyi lied once.
Just once—she miscopied a line, shifted a symbol, tried to make the ritual fail quietly.
Hex didn't catch it.
The library did.
The correction rewrote itself in Daviyi's skin, burning the "true" version into her like punishment for attempting mercy.
When she flexed her fingers afterward, the burned symbol tightened—like truth didn't want to let her move.
Hex adjusted the cuff of her sleeve between commands, annoyed by a wrinkle.
Daviyi noticed.
She hated herself for noticing.
Daviyi would be dragged to the worktable.
Forced to translate cruelty into method.
Forced to write "applications" she couldn't stomach.
Hex would test them on faceless things first—
and when the results disappointed her, she tested them on Daviyi.
The faceless things didn't scream. Daviyi did.
"You think knowledge is light," Hex whispered. "It's a collar."
The runes began appearing every day.
Daviyi wanted to die.
Then one day, the library ignited.
Daviyi banged on the door. Knowledge tried to open it. Daviyi's skin burned like paper.
In panic, she used her power—forced the door open—
—and collapsed.
When she woke, she was in bed.
Jrin was beside her, passed out.
Daviyi sobbed his name until she broke. Jrin woke and held her, and they cried like mortals who had been robbed of mercy.
Knowledge, however—
was fading.
So Daviyi went to see Eon.
She wanted to free him.
But when she arrived, she found Hex on the floor—
ripped apart.
Half eaten.
Eyes removed.
A dark figure was unchaining Eon.
Daviyi hid herself in shadow.
And then she saw him.
Hrolyn.
The space around him felt compressed, like the world had inhaled and forgotten how to exhale.
He stepped from darkness and demanded answers.
Eon's voice lifted, venom and amusement tangled together.
"You made me," he said. "You made the First Evil. Enemy of the Ascendants."
Daviyi ran.
The corridors felt wrong on the way back—too quiet, like the universe had already decided something and was waiting for her to notice.
She returned to Jrin and said nothing.
She didn't know how.
The next day, she told him she wanted to go home.
Jrin agreed instantly.
He wanted it too.
For the first time in years, Daviyi slept without dreaming of fire.
She woke to sunlight and almost believed she still had a kingdom.
Two days later—
Miayna was ash.
Not ruined.
Erased.
The air still smelled like burned paper—and something worse, like ink trying to die.
Daviyi stumbled through silence until she reached the castle.
Chains hung from the stone.
A body hung from the chains.
And around the neck—
a necklace Daviyi had once given her mother.
Daviyi screamed.
Her power spilled out, and the past unfolded like a cruelty preserved in glass.
Miayna burning.
Isika dragged through fire with the quill and key around her neck—just like the day Daviyi left.
Four horses.
Ropes on wrists and ankles.
Faceless soldiers pulling.
Hex's voice, bright and delighted:
"This is punishment for your daughter. She'll believe you are well—won't that be exciting?"
Then the horses ran.
Isika did not die quickly.
They left her chained, still alive, watching her kingdom burn, holding the quill and key until her hands went slack.
Daviyi fell to her knees.
Knowledge—Rzius's leftover mechanism—lost control.
He screamed.
Tears fell like ink.
"She was my beloved," he whispered, breaking. "We didn't complete the bond—yet she was still mine."
Daviyi hugged him like she could hold grief in place.
Then a ghost appeared.
Queen Isika.
Rzius ran to her.
And as he reached her, his shadow peeled away.
Rzius stood whole.
Isika touched his face as if she'd been waiting centuries to confirm he was real.
They kissed.
Daviyi ran to them and embraced her parents' ghosts with shaking hands.
She and Rzius both said the same words over and over:
"I'm sorry."
Isika smiled through death.
"It wasn't your fault," she told them. "I waited. No matter how long it took."
But now it was time for her to go.
Rzius asked if he could go with her.
Isika nodded.
Daviyi sobbed. "I'll be alone."
Rzius shook his head gently.
"No," he said. "You have the best beloved in the world."
Isika placed the same quill and key in her hand the one she left behind.
"A key to everything that burned with Miayna and your father Lagacy," Isika said. "Use it. Keep our memory alive."
Then Rzius turned to Jrin.
"Take care of her," Rzius commanded.
Not a request.
A final order from master to apprentice.
Jrin bowed.
"It will be done."
And from that day forward—
Jrin kept his word.
Even when keeping it meant becoming something that would one day frighten even Daviyi.
But that—
Hela smiles, sharp and delighted—
"is a story for another day."
She leans back on her throne. The dead lean in, hungry for meaning the way they used to be hungry for air.
"And now," Hela murmurs, voice soft as a funeral prayer, "you understand her."
Daviyi didn't become Knowledge because she wanted power.
She became it because the universe needed a successor.
Because a library can't stay ownerless.
Because sometimes the cost of surviving is inheriting the thing that hurt you.
Hela's fingers tap once more—bone on bone.
"And somewhere in the Hellbound," she says lightly, "she bleeds again… and pretends it's only blood."
A pause.
"Next," Hela purrs, delighted, "we return to the arena."
The lanterns dim.
The void listens.
Because Round Three is beginning.
And the rulers of the afterlife are about to remind the fragments what it means to collect a debt.