Elizabeth sank into the steaming bath, letting the heat seep into her small limbs. The tension that had wound itself around her for days finally began to loosen, unraveling thread by thread, until all that remained was the quiet, blissful weight of exhaustion.
'Now this… this is heaven.'
She stared down at the rippling surface, where a tiny face stared back. A four-year-old girl gazed up at her from the wobbling reflection, her round cheeks, and eyes too large for her shrunken features. The longer Elizabeth looked, the more her irritation grew.
'So this is what I'm working with now… great.'
Questions about her flaw gnawed at her. Would she always regress exactly twelve years every morning? Or would her flaw roll the dice with her body each dawn, shifting her age at random? When she'd first woken, she looked at least thirty years older than normal. Now she was twelve years younger. The range of the swing was absurd.
"Hopefully I just turn twelve years younger every morning…" she muttered. If that was all, she could probably salvage something out of this mess. Being stuck in a child's body came with a thousand inconveniences, but at least it was predictable. Still, her gut told her flaw was not so merciful. This was a flaw for a divine aspect, after all. It wasn't going to be simple.
She pushed those uneasy thoughts aside and focused. With a mental command, she summoned her runes.
"Let's check the memories I got…"
***
Name: Elizabeth
True Name: Siren of the Last Haven
Rank: Dreamer
Heaven Cores: [2/7]
Fragments of Heaven: [71/2000]
Attributes: [Split Spirit], [Siren of the Sea], [Spirited]
Aspect: [Avatar of Skies]
Aspect Rank: Divine
Memories: [Pinkey of Rethen], [The King's Glory], [Drop of Ichor], [Last Hope]
Echoes: —
***
Her gaze lingered on the aspect rank for a long moment. Divine. Even seeing it spelled out in front of her so many times, she struggled to believe it. A divine aspect was something people theorize to exist and definitely not something that ended up in the hands of an awkward first-time Dreamer like her.
'Heh.'
She dragged her eyes down to the list of memories.
'Drop of Ichor, huh…'
Curiosity pushed aside her excitement. She focused on it.
Memory: [Drop of Ichor]
Memory Rank: Unknown
Memory Type: Unknown
Memory Description: [Her mind was as brilliant as the myriad of stars she ruled over, her tenebrous black eyes held the depths of the ocean she commanded, her voice was so enchanting the storm quieted down to listen and guided many broken souls to safety. She was flawless, and everlasting
But at the end of a war, one that happened at the dawn of time, she was flawless no more. This was new to her, and she was intrigued by her flaw and hated it. She wished to erase it out of existence but could not bring herself to do so. So she learned how to live with a flaw, and soon learned to love her flaw, and because of that, her a once flawless being made a mistake that cost her and the other gods their everlasting life.]
Elizabeth frowned, the more she read the runes of the memory, the more confused she became. An unknown rank. Unknown type. She had never even heard of such a thing. Memories might be rare and hard to get, strange and mighty, or straight up bizarre, but the Spell always had a label for them, especially if she got it from the spell. She had expected this one to be Sacred at least, she had got it straight from Rethen, after all, and anything tied to that goddess should have been terrifyingly high-tier.
What surprised her as well was the description of the memory. She could not understand what she was reading. How exactly had a goddess acquired a flaw if they were flawless before? Was it like how she got hers after her nightmare? She could not even begin to comprehend what had taken place in a war that happened before time itself. She was simply lost.
'A mistake that cost her and the other gods their lives, huh…' When she read that part of the runes, her heart clenched and she felt her blood freeze, yet she could not even understand why she felt that way. Just what kind of mistake could kill beings that where alive before time?
'What is it with me and storm god? I get that my aspect says that i am supposed to be her vessel but come on.'
Her nightmare had revolved around the storm goddess. Her aspect was clearly said she was designed as a vessel for that same deity. Now she had not one, but two memories that mentioned her. Every time she thought she was free of that divine shadow, it slipped right back into her life.
'But this one is weird…'
She lifted her hand summoning the memory. The memory responded instantly.
Golden particle appeared in the air above the bath, dancing lazily before gathering into a dense, gleaming drop of liquid. It hovered on her palm like a tiny sun. The moment Elizabeth laid eyes on it, something inside her reached out, a fierce, aching pull. It was like staring at a fragment of herself she had lost ages ago and suddenly found again.
Before she could decide whether that was comforting or horrifying, the Spell's voice brushed against her mind, warm and almost… pleased.
[You have acquired a drop of ichor. Do you wish to consume it?]
'What?'
Elizabeth blinked, sitting up straighter in the bath, water sloshing against porcelain. 'Consume a memory? Could one even do such a thing? And for what, exactly?' The longer she thought about it, the less sense it made. What would happen if she agreed? Would it change her? Hurt her? Kill her?
'…Would I die?'
She shook her head quickly, and watched the floating scattering droplets on her palm. No. That didn't fit. The Spell was cruel at times, but not arbitrary. It had rewarded her nightmare with a divine aspect and memories beyond her rank. If this drop of ichor had been given as a prize for killing Rethen, then, mysterious or not, it shouldn't be a death sentence.
Elizabeth exhaled, then smiled faintly. "Yes."
[...As you wish.]
The golden droplet lifted from her palm and drifted toward her forehead, stopping just short of her skin. Tiny sparks flickered within it, bright and sharp.
'What!? Wait, I'm in a bath—'
She didn't get to finish the thought.
The ichor shot forward, slipping through her skin and bone like they weren't even there. For one terrible instant, her brain caught fire. Not metaphorical fire, but actual electrifying fire. Her thoughts were burned away into raw, searing pain. She remained fully conscious, trapped in her own body as agony tore through her mind. It was as if someone had clamped her skull to a lightning rod and invited storm after storm to strike down on it.
She couldn't even scream. Her jaw refused to move, locked in place while the white‑hot agony rippled through her. It crawled from her skull into her bones, her flesh, then into something deeper she didn't even have a name for, her soul most likely.
More than once she was sure she'd blacked out, only to be dragged back into consciousness by the sheer, blinding force of it.
Meanwhile, the bath itself began to empty.
The water rushed toward her skin, drawn into her body in visible streams. As it flooded into her, she felt strength trickle back into her limbs. A soothing coolness seeped into her skull, chasing the storm away, knitting whatever had been burned apart just moments before.
[You have acquired a new Attribute.]
The pain vanished as abruptly as it had come. Elizabeth's eyes snapped open. For a moment, they glowed with liquid gold before the light faded. She sucked in a breath and sat up, disoriented.
'…huh?'
She looked around the bathroom, confusion washing over her, then winced and clutched her head, a muffled scream escaping her lips.
'What the hell was that?'
She had never felt pain like this, not even when Koven and Rethen tore at each other inside her, fighting for control. That had been agony, yes, but this… this was something else entirely.
This felt like her very being was being burned apart and hammered back together, over and over, in an endless cycle she couldn't escape. Every time she thought the torment had peaked, it surged again, hotter, deeper, reshaping her from the inside out.
When she opened her eyes again, the world had changed.
Her field of view had widened impossibly. She could see the tiny crack in the cement at the edge of the bathroom, every jagged line and shadow in sharp relief. Her peripheral vision felt just as crisp as what lay directly in front of her. She could feel...No, see everything around her, It was like someone had taken her 180-degree field of view and stretched it toward something close to full circle. Not only could she see the room; she felt it. Every surface, every ripple of air, and every minuscule detail pressed against her awareness.
But the real shock was what was happening inside her mind.
Her mind felt… immense. Before, her two minds had always felt like two people crammed into one workspace, splitting the same limited processing power of a single brain. Now it was as if she had two full brains, each humming along with its own unique rhythm. Her second mind had already dissected the effects of Drop of Ichor by the time her first consciousness caught up.
'The memory boosted my thinking speed and my brain's capacity to supernatural levels… no, divine levels.' The thought echoed with a strange clarity. 'Of course it did. It came from a sacred being, and it's tied to the storm goddess again.'
'This is insane.'
Both minds were firing at once, attention snapping from one stimulus to the next. It wasn't that she couldn't focus; it was that she was focusing on everything. She felt overstimulated, but not crushed beneath it. It was like standing in the heart of a storm and realizing she was both the wind itself and the one being battered by it
If there came a time when she had to split her mind again, she was confident that a single mind could operate at full potential, unlike before, when her thoughts had felt slow and cloudy. Although she still might not have as much control over most of her body.
'This… is going to take some getting used to.'
Still, no matter how she looked at it, this was an incredible boon. She could not find a single downside, at least, not yet.
Forcing herself to ignore the flood of impressions and voices in hear head, Elizabeth focused on the next memory.
Memory: [Last Hope]
Memory Rank: Ascendant
Memory Tier: III
Memory Type: Weapon
Memory Description: [The last heirloom of a long-forgotten civilization, created using the shards of the leftover egg of an abomination that had terrorized them for far too long.]
Memory Enchantments: [Sharp Presence], [Punishment], [Float]
'Finally, a normal memory…'
The thought amused her more than it should have. The fact that an Ascendant weapon was now "normal" to her was absurd. She hadn't even received her first Awakened memory yet, and here she was sitting in a bathtub, in a four years old in body, reading the description of an Ascendant memory like it was a standard-issue knife. Somewhere, some rich brat from a legacy clan was probably grinding their teeth in envy without even knowing why.
She eyed the enchantments. Most of them sounded straightforward enough. [Sharp Presence] and [Float] were self-explanatory, more or less. It was [Punishment] that stuck in her mind.
'I wonder what you do…'
As if in answer, the runes shifted.
Memory Enchantments: [Punishment]
Enchantment Description: [The more cuts this blade makes, the sharper it gets. Foes cut by it shall be slowly weakened.]
Elizabeth stared at the glowing text, blinked once, then let out a startled snort.
'…What in tarnation?'