The world had gone quiet.
Not the silence of peace. But the kind that came after something irreparable.
In the eye of the storm, cradled within a cradle of collapsing dimensions and bleeding sky, Hespera stood perfectly still. But inside her?
A cosmic scream.
The scent of Kuroka's blood still lingered on her skin, no matter how tightly she held her. The nekomata's form remained limp in her arms, head resting against her chest as though merely asleep. But there was no heartbeat. No rise and fall of breath.
Hespera was unraveling.
And yet…
She was so very tired.
The world, the gods, the broken heavens—all of it could wait. Just for a moment. Just for a breath.
Her body remained upright, wings still flared, presence still crushing and divine. But inside the cocoon of her fractured soul, something shifted.
A warmth enveloped her—a memory, perhaps. A thread of comfort from when Kuroka would sneak into her chambers at night and curl around her, purring softly against her neck, tail twitching like a metronome for the rhythm of love. She could almost feel that again now.
Her eyes fluttered closed.
"Just a moment more... just a few minutes... Please..."
It was not a surrender. Nor an escape.
It was permission. To let go. To rest.
A final whisper crossed her mind, gentle and fragile like falling ash:
"Handle it for me... Pandora."
And Pandora answered.
With a smile carved from oblivion and a voice forged in stardust, she stepped forward, filling the silence where Hespera once stood.
The world would not breathe again until the reckoning was finished.
The stillness shattered—not with sound, but with presence.
Where once knelt Hespera Eveningstar, grieving goddess, now stood Pandora Unbound—the living contradiction, avatar of cosmic grief and the wrath of a universe betrayed.
The last vestiges of Hespera's gentle form dissolved like mist, replaced by a visage both terrifying and divine. Her body shimmered between forms: human, starborn, voidspawn, weapon. Her twenty-four wings reformed in serrated patterns, constantly shifting—part blade, part spellwork, part memory of what wings used to mean.
Her voice rang out—not with volume, but with command.
"Reality."
The air rippled.
"Obey."
And it did.
The fractured battlefield bent around her. Marble ruins reassembled only to be crushed under the weight of her wrath. Time crawled, unsure if it was meant to move forward or backwards. Even gravity itself dared not touch her unless permitted.
Pandora slowly laid Kuroka's body down upon a platform of silver-black energy, one woven from remnants of lost timelines and erased myths. The nekomata's form shimmered under protective stasis—one final mercy before the world bled further.
Then, Pandora turned.
Her eyes now burned with trinary irises—Nihility, Chaos, and something new. Something nameless. The conceptual blueprint of grief made manifest. Each blink rewrote the local laws of magic. Each breath dissolved the sky just a little more.
> "They believed this was the end of a bloodline," she said, stepping forward as the clouds above shattered into glasslike hexagons. "But what they have ended… is mercy."
The gods were gone—erased utterly. But she could still feel their essence scattered through the world, the divine detritus of their existence. And she would not waste it.
With one wave of her hand, eight glowing threads rose from the scorched earth—each representing the conceptual core of the fallen gods: flame, war, sun, judgment, thunder, balance, light, wisdom.
She plucked each like a string.
And rewrote them.
"You destroyed her for power," Pandora whispered. "Then I will show you what true power costs."
A storm began to gather above. But not of water or thunder.
A storm of memory.
It tore open above the battlefield like a bleeding wound in the fabric of heaven. From it fell shards of existence—moments stolen from every living creature connected to the fallen gods. Their pasts. Their sacred rites. Their prayers. Their belief.
Undone.
Temples cracked worldwide. Statues shattered. Holy texts burned from the inside out. And in their place? Silence.
The divine energy of Shiva, Odin, Ra, and the rest began to condense around Pandora, trying to coalesce into something stable—but she refused them structure. Instead, she wove them into a single new core.
A seed.
A black sun, rotating at the center of her chest, fed by everything she had unmade.
"Let all creation know," Pandora said, voice echoing across planes, "that divinity is no shield from consequence."
She raised one hand—and pointed it at the sky.
"From this day forward… I revoke their ascension."
She clenched her fist.
In the Celestial Planes, hundreds of lesser gods began to fall.
They screamed. Not from pain—but from erasure.
Each god tied to Shiva's flames. To Odin's wisdom. To Ra's light. They began to vanish, one by one, collapsing into threads of undone fate. Not killed. Not banished.
But unwritten.
A third of the divine hierarchy trembled.
A tenth of it ceased.
Pandora raised her other hand and spread her fingers wide. Time cracked like porcelain.
"Now…" she murmured. "Let them come. Let the Primordials, the Celestial Thrones, the Outer Choirs—all of them—try."
"Because I no longer carry Hespera's restraint."
She smiled.
And that smile…
...was how apocalypses are born.
~☆~
Above the Earth, on the edge of atmosphere—
Aradia hovered, barely able to breathe.
She had seen Hespera at her most dangerous before—when the Codex had flared in her wake, when she broke the Laws of Death just to resurrect a girl lost to fate, when she held entire legions of Heaven in stasis with nothing but a word.
But this?
This was not Hespera.
This was an all consuming Calamity.
Her aunt's body moved the same, her voice sounded similar, her wings flared just as magnificently—but her soul... it was locked away behind a wall of cold, absolute force. There was no love in her expression. No mourning in her stance. Not even righteous fury.
Just power.
Detached. Precise. Empty.
"I should have left with the others…" Aradia whispered. But she couldn't. Not after what she'd seen. Not after what her mother—Diana—had done. She had to make this right.
Below her, Pandora raised a hand—casually, like brushing hair from her face.
But the heavens screamed in response.
Dozens of divine leylines that connected the Earth to the celestial domains frayed like burned thread. Entire astral highways collapsed into shivering motes of un-being. Pandora's fingers curled slightly—and one of Jupiter's lesser moons shattered, silently, as if reality itself flinched too hard.
Then, slowly…
Pandora turned her head and looked directly at Aradia.
Those trinary eyes locked onto her, and the witch's breath caught in her lungs. No words were spoken. None needed to be.
Aradia felt it in her bones:
You are not exempt.
You carry her blood.
You could have stopped this.
Pandora raised her hand again.
No magic words. No grand spells.
Just intent.
The sky cracked apart. A spear of condensed grief and annihilation surged toward Aradia—blinding, soundless, massive enough to erase her across every plane.
Aradia didn't scream. She just closed her eyes, feeling tears fall in spirals of glowing ink.
"I'm sorry, Auntie…"
And then—
BOOM.
A wall of raw cosmic force slammed into the beam, absorbing it just inches from Aradia's form.
The Four Primordials had arrived.
Death's cloak billowed in absolute stillness, her obsidian scythe humming with defiance. Chaos's arms were open, a paradoxal shield of order and madness swirling before him like a prism of impossible angles. Rebirth flared in gold and violet flame, intercepting secondary pulses with feathers of rebirth-force. Order's gaze alone froze what remained of the destructive arc mid-collapse.
Aradia gasped and fell into Rebirth's arms, chest heaving.
"I… I thought…"
Rebirth gave her a faint, weary smile. "You would have been erased, child. Not just dead. Forgotten."
Below, Pandora did not react.
She simply stared.
The presence of the Primordials did not intimidate her. Not anymore.
Chaos stepped forward, voice devoid of amusement.
"Pandora."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Pandora tilted her head.
Not like a human.
Like a concept observing a bug it hadn't yet decided was worth erasing.
Order's voice followed next. "You've breached over seventy-two universal protocols. The fate weave is collapsing. Time-space entropy is now leaking into baseline mortal planes."
"We understand your pain," Death added, her voice colder than frost. "But this cannot continue."
For a moment…
Just a moment…
Pandora blinked.
A flicker.
Something almost soft passed behind her eyes.
But then it was gone.
"You stand in my way," Pandora said, voice like glass grinding against divine stone. "Then you are next."
She raised both hands.
Reality tensed.
And the next war began.