An hour had passed like a held breath.
The great reception hall of House Rotchy had not changed—its obsidian pillars still drank the light, the carved crescents and runes along their flanks still hummed with patient mana. Yet something in the room had shifted; the air that had felt merely cool before now felt dense, weighted with truths newly born and old secrets finally spoken aloud. They sat in the hush like stones settling after an earthquake: Elizabeth, pale and trembling at the edges of her dignity; Naoko, silver and still as a blade; Tishara, lithe and cynical, eyes bright with a restless fire; and Sion, whose laugh had been silenced and replaced by a thoughtful, distant quiet.
They were grouped on the low sofas in the center of the hall, arranged beneath the vaulted ceiling where chandeliers like frozen constellations hung. The sofas were heavy and dark—soft black velvet that absorbed the spell-light, their backs carved with Rotchy sigils and the subtle crescent halo inlaid with silver. The rugs underfoot were woven with threads that caught the mana in slow, shimmering patterns. Outside, through tall windows of smoked glass, the palace gardens lay empty and exacting, their hedges like ordered rows of teeth. Within, the mana in the pillars breathed: slow, patient, omnipresent.
Naoko had finished telling them everything about Jin. The story had come out measured, almost surgical: the marriage arranged, the mana-assisted conception, two children—Estelle and Jin—Estelle's death at twelve in front of Jin when he was eleven, the divorce that followed, the months that hardened into years. She had said it plainly, without flourish. The facts fell into the room like iron coins.
Elizabeth sat very straight, hands folded in her lap as if holding herself together was a new and difficult task. Her platinum hair caught the chandelier light in a muted silver arc; her grey eyes shone with shock and the wet promise of tears. It took a moment for speech to reassemble itself around the pieces of surprise.
"My daughter," she said at last, voice thin and brittle with too many small things pressed into it. "Do you mean to tell me you are performing a heart graft using the Destruction God's power—Eburneo's destructive core?"
Naoko did not blink. Her hair laid like a blade of moonlight down her back; her eyes remained the same cool metal—reflections without warmth. Her face had the stillness of someone who had practiced silence until it became an instrument.
"Yes," she answered simply, the single word cold and final. There was no denial. No softening of the edges.
Tishara, who had been leaning back with arms crossed and an amused scowl playing at the corner of her mouth, sat forward now. Her golden hair scattered across her shoulder like molten light; her emerald eyes were sharp and clear, bored of spectacle but curious in the way of predators who smell blood and wish to know the scent. She spoke quickly, a torrent of interpretation rather than a question.
"So. For Jin—that is tragic. You and Sion trained him, and Jin married Rina of the Amberhart family as a political bond. Rina loved someone named Shin Blackthorn, but he did not return her feelings. Rina opposed the match, yet her mother Amelia pressed her into it for the sake of alliance. She agreed, begrudgingly. Rina married Jin, and then you gave her a Dragon heart—Drasiroth—because she began loving Jin. But Jin had no feelings; he promised her fidelity because he could not feel after Estelle's death. You stripped his emotions to shape him into a weapon."
Tishara's recounting tumbled forward like water released from a dam—rapid, accusatory, but with the slight tremor of someone trying to make sense of sorrow by naming its causes. She watched Naoko with a mixture of triumph and accusation, as if pushing the facts around could make them stop bleeding.
Naoko's single-syllable answer arrived like winter wind: "Yes."
Sion said nothing. She had listened, fingers clasped around a memory she refused to show. She loved Jin—her tone, the unspoken ownership of that love—because he was, in a way, her son too. She had been his teacher; she had been part of the hands that forged him. Sion's chest tightened when she thought of the ritual, of a god-heart being taken and grafted into a human chest. She was a sea nymph once queen of tidal courts, blessed by Poseidon; she had given up her throne to escape a world of betrayal. She had not expected to be pulled back into such a room, such plans, such cold instruments of power.
Elizabeth's voice came again, softer now, but insistent as a heartbeat. She glanced from Naoko to her two daughters, then to Sion. "Naoko—my child. If this is what you intend, I will help. I possess the Life element and many holy aspects that differ from the green-moon's power. I might be able to develop what you need, as I developed you. Tishara—your rebirth… you stand as Princess of the Underworld now, the first princess. You bear Hades and Persephone blessings. Your elements are Death and darkness and shadow and soil; mine are life and blessing. Between us, perhaps we can stabilize what Eburneo's ruin would attempt to create."
Naoko did not move. For a long, impossible second the room felt as if it had been carved away, leaving only the four of them and the space between their words. Her voice, when she spoke, was a measured coldness that neither welcomed nor rejected Elizabeth's offer.
"The Destruction element and the Void belong to me," she said. "A death-element will not make sense to me, mother. It does not fit in heart Jin. But Jin is a scion of many things. If we are to break him and reforge him, then your life-bonds and Tishara's death and shadow might be necessary. I want him made into something more than he is now: a demi-god. Come with me; let us finish what must be finished. Turning him into that which he needs to be will take a coalition."
Sion's chest tightened. She looked at Naoko with soft fury, the hurt of a woman who both loved and feared the child being spoken of. "What will you do to his heart?" she asked quietly. "You speak of grafts and gods like they are pieces in a cabinet. Jin is not—"
"An instrument?" Tishara supplied, with a brief laugh that shredded the softness of the word. "He will be an instrument. Better than a broken thing."
Sion's eyes burned briefly; she caught herself and swallowed. The hall sat on the edge of something. The argument did not resolve into violence; it swam in the unnerving space between love and ambition.
Tishara's tone shifted, pragmatic as steel. She had not come to this house merely to snarl and provoke. "I will give him my blessings: the Death and Shadow elements," she said. "I brought the Water of the god—an offering I pried out of the Shadow Realm. I can infuse it into him, steep his flesh in it, and the shadow will drink and root. It will grant the element of Death and Darkness."
Sion looked at Tishara with something like incredulity and then with fierce resolve. "I will give him my Poseidon-born blessings," she said. "He will have the sea's pulse within his veins—an anchor. If he stands on land, he will still remember tides. If he falls, the water will not let him drown without a price."
Elizabeth's gaze softened into a memory-hewn kindness, but steel lay beneath it. She was not naïve. "Naoko," she asked, gathering her courage into a mother's steadiness, "tell me this plainly: how many moons does Jin command?"
Naoko considered; the silver of her face moved like a pond under ice. She spoke in levels and numbers as if reading an inventory of weakness and potential.
"The Red Moon—level three. The Blue Moon—level two. The Green Moon—level two. The Purple Moon—he can only fashion a spatial gate with it, no further. The White Moon—level one. The Silver and the Black moons—he cannot yet withstand them. His body could not endure the strain. He was born with a lone mana heart. He was weak at first. Estelle had the god-heart; that is why she was strong. She was born strong. She died."
The words landed like stones. Estelle's presence, brief and bright, became for everyone in the room the axis around which Jin's life had spun. The fact that Estelle had a god-heart—something intrinsic, unforced—made the current plan both desperate and audacious. They intended to graft divinity into what had not been born to it, to force a human vessel beyond its natural capacity.
For a long minute nobody spoke. The only sound was the distant tick of some clock hidden in the palace's bones and the soft whisper of mana against stone. The rotchy runes inlaid in the pillars seemed to hold their breath.
Sion, determined to cut through the heavy air, lifted her chin and offered a small, raw smile. "Then let us go. Let us make him whole—if that is the word you prefer. I will stand beside you." Her voice was steady, but inside it had an ache like a net cast and tearing.
Naoko gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod. "Yes. Come with me. We begin the rite soon. Jin will be taken to the sanctum. We begin the graft and raise him to demi-godhood."
Elizabeth rose then, the motion slow, deliberate—an old queen drawing a cloak around herself. There was grief in her posture, but also the clear, dangerous fire of a woman willing to shape fate by hands that trembled. "I cannot promise to soften what must be done," she warned softly. "But I will lend my life-bonds and holy aspect. We will protect what remains of the human in him, if any remains to protect."
Tishara's grin returned, thin and predatory. "Good. I will give him death, and you will give him life. Sion the sea will give him sea, and Naoko will graft the god-heart of Eburneo. Together, we make a child into a weapon and hope he does not shatter."
Sion's reply was a whisper, fierce and private. "I do not want him to shatter."
Naoko looked at them all—her mother, her sisters, the woman who had been a queen of tides—and for the first time in the evening there was something like an unreadable softness in her silver eyes. It lasted for a beat and was gone, replaced by the same blade-calm as always.
"Then act," she said. "We have preparations to make. There is a sanctum in the lower vaults—ritual circles carved and star-aligned. The graft will require the Root of Eburneo, life-water, shadow-ink, and Poseidon's salt. We will need to bind his moons to new thresholds. Time is not our ally."
They moved then, a small company pulled tight by inevitability. The Rotchy hall watched them pass—its obsidian skin gleaming, the runes quiet. Outside the crescent emblem above the gate gleamed like a single patient eye. Inside, the low chandeliers threw patterns on the rugs, and the sofas where they had sat seemed to sigh as if the weight of decision had been laid upon them and removed.
As they prepared to leave, Elizabeth paused and looked back at the dim alcove where Naoko had set her cup of tea. The porcelain cup trembled faintly on the low table, a small, fragile thing amid the iron logic of their designs. She reached out once, like a woman reluctant to close a book on grief and yet unwilling to leave it open.
"For Estelle," she whispered, although whether she spoke to the dead child, to her daughter, or to herself was unclear.
The echo of that whisper hung in the hall as they passed beneath the carved archway toward the sanctums below. The lights in the chandeliers seemed to dim, as if the palace itself was drawing a curtain for the next act.
Down below, where the sanctum waited and shadows pooled like water in the basins of carved stone, preparations would begin. Names would be invoked. Elements would be called. A heart would be offered to break and be remade. And in the great obsidian hall above, the furniture cooled and the runes resumed their patient humming, as if nothing had altered the world—except, perhaps, the fate of a boy named Jin, and the hearts of those who chose to remake him.
------------------
Heat: Thank you so much for reading
[note: Naoko, Teshara, Sion, and Elizabeth were all gods, and Estel was the child of a god and Jin was a human. That's why he was born with a weak body, except that Jin's soul was the soul of a god, but his body was human, so his soul was consuming his body. It was like a water balloon trying to fill it, but more water, did it fill her mouth? So Jin's body was going to be destroyed because his soul was stronger than his body and he had a mana heart, so he was living in conflict with his body.]