The Southern Hemisphere kept its own sky.
Where the north had its familiar constellations—Bell's Tooth, Anchor's Chain, the crooked ladle that every child called "Toppled Cup"—the south wore a different firmament entirely. The stars there did not trace hunters or saints; they spelled equations and warnings, circles inside circles, a celestial script that only three people on the continent could truly read.
Those three were sitting in the same room for the first time in seven years.
The chamber was built halfway up a hollow tower whose inner walls were carved with reliefs: gods arguing with beasts, rivers strangling mountains, a child holding out a crystal to an empire. The wind moved through narrow slits in the stone, carrying the smell of sea-salt and charcoal from the city far below.
The first of the three sat on the windowsill itself, boots swinging over an impossible drop like he had never learned to be afraid of height. His hair was pale gold, almost translucent where the sun fingered through it, and the silver embroidery on his black uniform caught the light in patient constellations. He had his eyes closed, as if listening to the pulse of the tower rather than anything happening inside it.
The second stood near the center, weight perfectly balanced, hand resting on the hilt of a long sword whose sheath was far too simple for what it contained. Her black-and-white hair was tied high, a loose plume that fell in sharp streaks over her shoulders; blue eyes, bright as fresh-cut ice, tracked every movement in the room and several that hadn't happened yet.
The third lounged against the opposite wall, hat brim shading most of her face. Her coat was the black of sky before a storm remembers how to rain, lined inside with crimson that flashed when she shifted. A weapon—something between spear and scythe, made of moonlight caught in crystal—floated lazily at her back, orbiting her waist in a loose ellipse as if the room had its own tiny moon.
Below, the city of Cael Aurea crawled and glittered, wrapped around the tower's base like a crown. Above, the southern stars waited, patient and strange.
"Report," the swordswoman said.
Her voice cut the air with the same economy as her blade.
The boy on the sill opened his eyes. They were the color of dawn caught in water—soft, until you realized the reflection hid depth. He tilted his head at her.
"You could start with good morning, Yuzuri," he said.
"Morning will not be good if we waste it, Elai," Yuzuri replied. "The High Synod did not drag the three God Ascents into one room so you could practice being insufferable."
On the wall, the woman in the hat chuckled. "They dragged us because they're scared," she said. "Which, to be fair, is my favorite state for politicians."
She tipped her head back; moon-pale eyes gleamed in the shadow of the brim.
"Go on, life boy," she added. "Tell us what your roots have tasted."
Elai of the Life God Ascent sighed, the put-upon sigh of someone constitutionally incapable of being offended. He swung his legs back onto the stone, straightened his jacket, and reached blindly to the table by his elbow.
A seed lay there. It looked like nothing special—brown, irregular, the sort of thing a farmer might toss aside as flawed. Elai rolled it between finger and thumb, then pressed it to the sill.
Green exploded.
In the space of a heartbeat, vines erupted from stone, coiling around the frame, spreading leaves as wide as shields and as thin as glass. Flowers bloomed the color of fresh bruises, then changed, petals flickering through a dozen hues before settling into a soft, steady white. The entire wall hummed with quiet life.
Yuzuri did not flinch. The woman with the floating weapon—Selvara, bearer of the Moon God Ascent—watched with half-lidded interest.
"News from the roots, then," Elai said. "The north shifted a bell. Again."
Selvara's eyebrows arched. "Again?"
"Three nights ago, the resonance we track along the planetary ley traced a spike," Elai said. "Same signature as the last anomaly—anchor-type interference intertwined with sovereign mana flux. The timing matches the northern reports: Maryville's bell still rings at twelve-oh-three, not twelve."
Yuzuri's hand tightened on her sword. "The Anchor boy."
"Xion Trinity," Elai confirmed, expression going distant. "The one who tied the Bell Warden to his heartbeat and lived."
"Barely," Selvara murmured. "Or so the stories say."
Yuzuri's gaze flicked to her. "You've been listening to northern stories now?"
"I listen to any story that ends with a god complaining of a headache," Selvara said lazily. "The Moon has been muttering in Her sleep. That boy's anchor-thread is loud."
Elai brushed a leaf with his fingertips; the plant shivered, then calmed.
"It's not just the bell," he continued. "The Beast Gate pulse dipped after his interference. Our seers in the southern lattice confirm it. Less panic in the ambient field. But..."
"But?" Yuzuri prompted.
"But the Calendar Court is... re-writing," Elai said quietly. "Their edicts ripple through causality. We feel the corrections down here as... tumors. Strains in timing. And recently, something else layered on top of their work. A smaller loop. Localized."
Selvara straightened. The weapon orbiting her waist sped up, arcs of argent light tracing circles in the air.
"Localized where?" she asked.
"A northern killing field," Elai replied. "A place they call the Maw Verge. Theater of engagement with Destroyer-class Lost Souls, under Church oversight and Midnight Lore observation. Someone there is caught in a cycle. Resetting on death, rewinding to a 'checkpoint' before the battle."
Yuzuri's eyes narrowed. "The Curse of Suffering."
"That old thing?" Selvara laughed, though there was no humor in it. "I thought the Court locked that toy in its box after the last cycle war."
"They did," Elai said. "But someone has it anyway."
"Xion Trinity," Yuzuri said at once.
"Likely," Elai agreed. "The loop signature matches his anchor-thread. He dies, the world rewinds around him... but only within a bounded segment. Time outside the loop continues. He alone keeps the scars."
Selvara whistled low. "That's not a curse. That's a scalpel. Overused, it will cut the world open."
She flicked her fingers; the prismatic lance behind her rotated, tip carving a thin gleam in the air.
"The northern hemisphere is letting him run free with that?"
"The Church claims he's under their directive," Elai said. "Midnight Lore counters that he belongs to no one. Ordo Meridian insists he's the city's hinge, and they won't let anyone relocate a hinge without proper paperwork."
Yuzuri snorted. "Typical north. Give a boy a world-threatening power, then argue about jurisdiction."
Elai's hand stilled on the leaves. "Even so. He's stabilizing them. The Beast Gate's hunger is lower than projections indicate it should be. Destroyer-class Lost Souls are being culled. The Death God fragment they were tracking... has been contained."
"By whom?" Selvara asked.
"By the same boy," Elai said. "And a woman carrying a Chaos Key."
At that, even Yuzuri's composure rippled.
"The Staria girl," Yuzuri said slowly. "Luminous."
Elai nodded. "Midnight Lore's little obsession."
"And your interest," Selvara added, smirking.
"I'm interested in avoiding extinction," Elai said calmly. "Her Chaos Key is keyed to something older than the Court. Older than this cycle. It can touch concepts the rest of us treat as stories."
He glanced between the two women.
"And now," he said, "the High Synod wants us to... 'redress the imbalance.'"
Selvara barked a laugh. It echoed off the carved walls like a flock of bats.
"Of course they do," she said. "The north gets a living Anchor, a Chaos Key, and a Death God child. We get... what? A tower and paperwork. The Synod wants reassurance their side of the world is not the 'junior partner.'"
Yuzuri's jaw set, the line of her throat hard as the blade she carried.
"We are not anyone's junior," she said. "The Moon God Ascent, the Life God Ascent, and the Anti God Ascent all bloom on southern soil. If this world has an spine, it runs through us."
Elai smiled faintly. "You sound like them."
"I don't," Yuzuri said. "They talk about glory. I talk about leverage. The north is stabilizing the Gate's panic, yes. But they are also bending law—time, causality, the roles of divine prototypes. Every 'solution' they enact is a precedent we all pay for later."
"And your answer?" Selvara asked.
"Show them we can match them," Yuzuri said simply. "So they negotiate instead of dictate."
She stepped away from the table, sword whispering as it shifted with her.
"The Synod wants proof," she continued. "Evidence the southern hemisphere can counter the northern's... anomalies, should the balance fracture. They want a demonstration of the three God Ascents. Together."
"Together," Selvara repeated, rolling the word around like wine in her mouth. "You mean: weapons test."
"If you prefer a kinder term, invent one," Yuzuri said. "I wield the Anti God Ascent. Selvara, you bear the Moon. Elai, you breathe Life. Between us, we can erase a continent and grow a forest in its place before the ash cools."
Elai flinched; the flowers at his back trembled with him.
"That is not," he said softly, "my preferred application."
"Nor mine," Yuzuri said. "But capacity matters. The north must know that if their Anchor snaps, if their Curse of Suffering spirals beyond control, if their Death God child tips from containment into catastrophe... we are able to cut, eclipse, and regrow what's left."
Selvara's eyes glinted. "You think we can beat them?"
"I think," Yuzuri said, "that if we can't, we shouldn't sleep."
Silence stretched. The tower wind traced invisible fingers along the room's edges, stirring Selvara's coat, lifting a few strands of Elai's hair, slipping around Yuzuri's stillness like water against rock.
At last, Elai exhaled.
"You have your demonstration in mind," he said. "What does the Synod want destroyed?"
Yuzuri looked past both of them, out through the vine-framed window to where the southern ocean boiled against the horizon.
"There is an island," she said. "Sermon's Fall. Uninhabited now, save for Lost Souls and remnants of old wars. Once, it was a research site for the previous cycle's Ascent scholars. They tried to coax a God Path from a synthetic crystal."
Elai's expression tightened. "And it broke."
"And the sea still remembers," Selvara murmured, eyes half-closed as if hearing distant waves.
"A congregation of Destroyer-class Lost Souls nests there now," Yuzuri said. "Their howling distorts the southern ley, warps tide and wind. The Synod wants them removed. They want to see if our combined Ascent can cleanse an infestation that would otherwise take an army."
She met their eyes in turn.
"They also want footage," she added dryly, "to send north."
Selvara's laugh came out as a sharp, delighted bark. "They want to posture."
"They want to reassure our people," Yuzuri corrected, but some wryness touched her mouth.
Elai slid off the sill, letting his created foliage recede. The vines did not vanish; they simply settled, leaves going still, flowers closing as if listening.
"And you?" he asked. "What do you want, Yuzuri?"
Her fingers brushed the sword hilt. The air around it shivered.
"I want insurance," she said. "Against gods. Against Anchors. Against whatever sits behind the Beast Gate, licking its teeth."
She looked to Selvara.
"The Moon God Ascent wraps light and shadow," she said. "You can bend perception and distance. Our foes will not see the strike coming."
She looked to Elai.
"The Life God Ascent binds growth and continuity," she said. "You can keep us standing when the Lost Souls chew at our souls. And you can bind the island's scar, so it doesn't scream when we're finished."
Lastly, she touched her sword, the gesture almost affectionate.
"And the Anti God Ascent," she concluded, "will erase whatever divine cheat lets the Lost Souls cling to this world. We cut their umbilical cord to the last cycle's rage."
Selvara tilted her head. "And if the north reads it as a threat?"
"Good," Yuzuri said. "They should."
Elai chuckled under his breath. "Do you really intend war between hemispheres, swordswoman?"
"No," Yuzuri said. "I intend to prevent it. People are less likely to start fights they aren't sure they can win."
Selvara rolled her shoulders; the orbiting spear-lance flared, leaving shimmering rings in the air.
"Then let's make someone very unsure," she said. "When do we depart?"
"Dusk," Yuzuri replied. "The Moon high, life thick in the water, gods watching. The Synod loves symbolism."
Selvara's grin sharpened. "So do I."
Elai spread his hands, palms bare.
"Very well," he said. "I'll inform the shoreward sanctums. And the healers. And the archivists. And the gardeners, if we're turning an island's corpse into something worth visiting."
Yuzuri nodded once. "Make sure they understand the risk. Sermon's Fall is soaked in old god-blood and broken Ascent experiments. The Lost Souls there are... layered."
"Layered?" Selvara repeated.
"Not just men's regrets or beasts' hunger," Yuzuri said. "Fragments of failed divinity. Synthetic god-path shards that never quite became. They remember what they almost were, and that is the most dangerous memory."
Selvara's eyes gleamed, fevered curiosity behind the lazy veneer.
"Anti God Ascent versus wannabe gods," she murmured. "This may actually be fun."
Elai sighed again. "You and I have very different definitions of that word."
He reached for the seed on the sill reflexively, then paused. It had cracked; new growth already probed the stone.
"Stay," he told it softly.
The sprout obeyed.
⸻
Dusk came in stripes.
The southern sky did not fall all at once; it peeled, light fading layer by layer, leaving bands of color like a wound healing in reverse. The Moon rose early, full and sharp-edged, its face crisscrossed by visible channels of light—proof that the Moon here was not just rock but mechanism, part of a system older than language.
Selvara felt every tide-twitch in her teeth.
She stood at the prow of the skimmer, hat tied down by a red cord. The vessel wasn't a ship so much as a blade turned sideways—a crescent of metal and spellwork sliding across the ocean without touching it, leaving only a whispered wake of steam.
Around them, the sea seethed. Sermon's Fall was near.
"We're crossing into their nest," Elai murmured, standing bareheaded in the wind, hair tangling. His eyes were half-lidded, attention turned inward. "The Lost Souls here aren't drifting. They're anchored."
"By what?" Selvara asked.
"By a promise someone broke and refused to admit," Elai said. "Hundreds of promises. Thousands. It's messy."
Yuzuri stood at the center of the skimmer, feet set apart, hand on her sword. Her gaze was fixed on the horizon, where a dark mass jutted from the water like a tooth that had grown wrong.
Sermon's Fall.
As they approached, Selvara saw the island was not truly an island. It was a piece of something bigger—a broken ring, maybe, or the top of a structure that sank into depths unseen. The stone was veined with old sigils, half-erased by salt; crystals jutted from the cliffs like glass tumors, pulsing with sick light.
And above it, swarming in the air like a murmuration of starlings made of static, were the Lost Souls.
They did not have bodies, not exactly. They looked like silhouettes where the world forgot to draw details—humanoid, beast-like, hybrid things with too many teeth or no faces at all. Their edges fuzzed, constant, as if reality tried to reject them and couldn't quite finish the job.
As the skimmer crossed an invisible boundary, the swarm turned.
Elai inhaled. "They feel us."
"Good," Yuzuri said.
Selvara smiled, slow. "Let's introduce ourselves."
She lifted her hand; the Moon responded.
Light speared down in a pillar, silver and cold, wreathing her floating weapon. The lance elongated, its prismatic length stretching until it bridged sky and sea. Selvara stepped off the skimmer onto it, balancing as if on solid ground.
"Selvara of the Southern Crown," she called, voice riding the wind. "Bearer of the Moon God Ascent. This is not your sky."
The Lost Souls screamed. It was not a sound meant for ears. It scraped thought, plucked at fear. The world around them darkened—not from lack of light but from too much wrong overlapping.
Beside Selvara, Yuzuri drew her sword.
No sheath, no flourish, no shouting of names. The blade came free with the tiniest kiss of steel, and the ocean flinched.
To most eyes it would have looked simple—a straight katana, clean lines, golden guard. But the world knew better. Where the edge passed, divine resonance died. Prayers cut off. Old enchantments tied to the sea's memory cracked like old paint.
The Anti God Ascent.
Elai stepped forward last, barefoot on the skimmer's edge. He spread his arms and the vines he'd planted in the tower shuddered thousands of miles away, roots clenching. The Life God Ascent tasted the sea.
"Three breaths," Elai said quietly. "After that, the Lost Souls will attempt conceptual inversion. They'll try to replace their absence with us."
"Then we don't give them three breaths," Yuzuri said.
Selvara's lance swung.
She carved a ring in the sky, a luminous circle that expanded over the island. Moonlight condensed into a barrier—not to keep the Lost Souls in or out, but to define the battlefield, to say: here, and nowhere else, this becomes true.
The swarm crashed into it like waves striking glass. Many passed through; some did not, shredded along their unstable edges. For each that died, three more keened, fragments spinning into new formations.
Elai's hands curled. The water rose.
Not in a wall, not in a single tsunami. It came up in columns, slender and tall, forming latticework around Sermon's Fall. Life-thick water, heavy with phytoplankton and old magic, rose in strands, knitting a cage that moved with the Lost Souls, always between them and the wider sea.
"Containment," Elai said through his teeth. "I can't stop them from howling, but I can stop the echoes."
Yuzuri launched herself into the swarm.
She moved like denial.
Where others would have dodged, weaved, sought openings, she simply walked forward and erased anything that objected. Lost Souls lunged; her sword passed through them, and their connection to the scar that birthed them snapped. They didn't die so much as realize they had already died, and then fall out of the present.
The air became snow with their absence.
"Array," Selvara shouted.
"Eighth," Yuzuri answered. "Anti God Array: Severance Field."
Power flared from her blade in a disc, invisible but crushing. Not a shockwave; a subtraction wave. Everything divine in a certain radius—god-fragments in the Lost Souls, old sigil residue, a lingering prayer to a research god long since forgotten—vanished.
The swarm convulsed.
Selvara grinned like a wolf.
"Seventh Array," she chimed. "Moon God Ascent: Eclipse Spiral."
Her lance spun, a cyclone of lunar glass. The ring in the sky contracted, then snapped like a noose. Light twisted, bending paths. To the Lost Souls, directions reversed; up became down, in became out. Their attempts to converge on the skimmer recoiled, sending them crashing into each other.
Elai took the opportunity.
"Life God Ascent," he whispered. "Third Array: Mercy Root."
From the water columns, roots surged—made of seaweed and spell and will. They lashed around Lost Souls that had been stripped of god-fragments, binding them, pulling them down into the water's embrace.
"Not all deserve erasure," Elai said, sweat beading his brow. "Some simply... need to be returned."
Returned to what, he didn't say. The ocean accepted them, swallowing their noise.
Above, the sky dimmed further. The Beast Gate pulsed behind the clouds, interested.
Yuzuri felt it. Her grip on the sword tightened; the world around the blade shimmered.
"They're changing," she called. "Something bigger is pushing through their network."
Selvara looked up, eyes narrowing.
"The Court?" she asked.
"No," Yuzuri said. "Older. Or... sideways."
Elai gasped. "The synthetic shards," he said. "The failed god-path. It's waking."
On the island's surface, the crystal tumors pulsed in unison. Lines of light shot between them, forming a web that bulged, then tore.
Something crawled out.
It was not large. That was somehow worse. Size could be measured, planned around. This was a man-shaped thing of angles and reflections, tall as a temple door, made of intersecting planes that showed not the sky but other possibilities: a south where the three of them had never met; a north already swallowed by the Gate; a world with no Ascents at all.
The shard-god looked up, faceless. Every Lost Soul still in the air tilted with it, like a pack aligning around an alpha.
Selvara's smile vanished. "That's not in the Synod's briefing."
"The Synod doesn't know everything," Yuzuri said calmly. "Ready yourselves."
Elai swallowed. "If I bind it, I risk feeding it. Life is life to hungry experiments."
"Then don't bind it," Yuzuri said. "I'll cut."
She stepped forward, between Selvara's arc and Elai's water.
"Anti God Ascent, Ninth Array," she murmured. "Refusal Crown."
The sword sang.
Power erupted—not outward, but inward, collapsing divine expression in a radius that only she could feel. The shard-god staggered, its planes flickering. Possibilities bled from it like color from cloth.
It pointed at her.
Not with a hand. With a choice.
In an instant, Yuzuri saw a thousand branches: herself as Synod puppet; herself as northern ally; herself as corpse years ago, never awakening the Anti God Ascent. The experiment's nature was clear—it was built to choose a path most favorable to its own survival and drag reality there.
"Anti God," it whispered, without mouth or sound. "You deny gods. I deny... denial."
Selvara cursed under her breath. "It's trying to anti your Anti."
"Of course it is," Yuzuri said. Her knuckles whitened.
The shard-god stepped forward. The Lost Souls around it elongated, becoming panels of potential, windows into worlds where Sermon's Fall had not fallen. It was trying to overwrite the current with an earlier draft.
Elai's vines snapped as entire sections of his containment cage were replaced with what-ifs.
"Yuzuri!" he shouted. "If it decides, we all get rewritten."
"Then we don't let it decide," she said.
She moved.
The Anti God Ascent wasn't just negation. It was hierarchy. It declared: this law over that one, this choice over that. In simpler battles, she used it to erase magic, to cut through blessings. Against a proto-god built to weaponize decision, she had to go deeper.
She had to cut priority.
Her blade traced a line in the air—down, then across, then down again. A sigil formed, then inverted. The world around them lurched. For a split second, no single future had right-of-way; all probabilities were equal. The shard-god faltered, its power suddenly lacking a slope to roll down.
"Elai!" she gasped.
"On it!" he cried.
Life surged.
Not at the shard-god. Around it. Elai poured growth into every other possibility in the vicinity that did not end in catastrophe. A world where Sermon's Fall healed into a reef. A world where the experiments had never been run but the knowledge survived ethically. A world where Lost Souls were compost, not ghosts.
He fed those options, thickening them, making them juicy. In the brief vacuum of priority Yuzuri created, reality lunged for the fattest branch.
The shard-god screamed. Its angles collapsed inward as the universe chose not-it.
Selvara delivered the coup de grâce.
"Moon God Ascent," she intoned, voice low. "Tenth Array: Silver Guillotine."
Her lance flicked. A line of pure lunar decree cut vertically through the shard-god, not severing it like a physical object but slicing its contract with the sky. The thing blinked out—not exploded, not faded. One frame it was there; the next, the story simply did not include it.
Silence fell.
The remaining Lost Souls shuddered. Without their proto-god anchor, they reverted: fragmented grief, beast-echo, old soldiers' fear. Easy prey for Yuzuri's field, gentle harvest for Elai's root.
In minutes, the sky over Sermon's Fall was... not clear, but quiet.
The sea shivered. The Beast Gate, sulking, rolled over in its sleep.
On the skimmer, Selvara blew out a breath.
"Synod will like the numbers," she said.
Yuzuri resheathed her sword. The sound was barely audible, but the world relaxed.
"They'll like the footage more," Elai said, massaging his temples. "God-tier output, minimal collateral, no hemispheric damage. Proof the south can clean its own messes."
"And theirs," Selvara added, looking north across the curve of the world.
She hopped lightly back onto the skimmer; her lance shrank, resuming its lazy orbit.
"Think the Anchor boy felt that?" she asked.
"Undoubtedly," Elai said. "Anyone touching the Beast Gate's fence will have. The Calendar Court certainly did."
Yuzuri's gaze was already distant, as if tracking threads only she could see.
"Good," she said softly.
Elai glanced at her. "You really want his attention?"
"I want his respect," Yuzuri said. "And his caution. When the time comes, I would rather negotiate with someone who knows what we can do, than with a boy who thinks we are just another province."
Selvara chuckled. "And if he decides we're the threat?"
"Then we remind him," Yuzuri said, "that gods die. Anchors break. And that south and north share one mortal realm between them. It's hard to win a war on half a planet when the other half is on fire."
Elai smiled, tired but genuine.
"You talk like a pessimist," he said. "But you're a gardener, like me. You just prefer pruning."
She didn't deny it.
⸻
They returned to Cael Aurea under a sky thick with news.
The Synod applauded, cautiously. The southern populace cheered, loudly. Rumors raced faster than official reports: the three God Ascents had erased an island's curse, cowed the Gate's echo, reminded heaven and hell alike that the south would not play understudy.
In Maryville, a bell rang three minutes late and a boy with red-and-black hair paused mid-step, a shiver running along his spine as if someone had plucked the other end of his anchor.
Far below maps, the Calendar Court added a footnote.
The human has a table, they had written earlier. account for this.
Now another line appeared beneath, scrawled in a different hand.
the humans also have three swords. do not forget
The Beast Gate breathed, tasting new possibilities. On one flavor, it found the south and north tearing each other to pieces. On another, it found them standing back-to-back.
It slavered at both.
On a rooftop in Cael Aurea, Elai sat with his legs dangling, eyes closed, feeling the world's pulse thrum through the stone.
"Balance," he murmured.
In a training hall, Yuzuri ran a cloth down her blade, watching divine residue vanish from the edge like fog. "Leverage," she countered.
In her private observatory, Selvara tilted her head at the Moon, which tonight seemed a fraction brighter.
"Entertainment," she said, and smiled.
South of the Veil, the game had moved its pieces.
North of it, Xion Trinity—hinge, anchor, curse-bearer—would soon feel the board tilt.