#dark lore

So he tried to bind you to him. A union of gods.

"You will suffer. Suffering is learning," he says, his clawed fingers brushing your cheek, tender in the way only your kind can pretend to be. "I am not new to rebuilding the broken." A red string materializes between his fingers, thin, crimson, unsnapped.

"I will be your comfort after the trials. There is no world where will wins against destiny." He declares it like law, like time itself will bend to his voice. The god beyond time.

And you, you were young then. Only a few centuries old. Born with the birth of self-aware thought. The deity of will.

You, the contradiction to everything he was. And he hated you for it.

"Try a thousand lifetimes, a thousand times over, and you still won’t win." You glare at him, fire twisting in your throat. "Your world runs on the tracks of fate, but creation is made out of its will."

You turn your back to him. Your hands tremble. "Never will I be yours. Any pain is amenable."

"You will bring doom to any you seek," he announces from his throne, already writing the fate of your trials to come. "Every pain known to the living shall be yours to bear. But harsher will be the fate of those who dare to love you."

"I accept." You close your eyes, willing to calm the tempest that riles your powers. "Bitter will be the pain of becoming someone's doom. Yet, I will bear it. I choose it over you."

You stare at the core pulsing in your palm, alive, sacred, yours.

And then you shatter it.

"This will never be yours. No matter what."

You crush it into shards and release them into the winds of creation, feeling the parts of you scatter. A fog of fall and forgetting creeps into your skin. Your power begins to unravel.

Soon, your memories will scatter. Your godhood will be stripped. And all that you were will vanish, until the end of trials.

An end that might never come.

In the last moments of your consciousness, he torments you with visions of time to come.

Of the worlds of Linkon, Philos, and so many more.

He shows you the fragments of your soul as they fall; into kingdoms torn by war, into cities where rain never stops, into bodies that bleed and break with each rebirth.

He lets you feel it. Every lifetime waiting to be lived.

He lets you taste every betrayal. Every mistake you’ll make. Every love that will end in ruin because it was built with pieces of you.

And then he smiles.

Not out of cruelty, no, Astra has always believed this is mercy. That suffering brings you home.

"You will return to me," he says. Not as a threat. As prophecy.

And then the fog takes you.

And the visions are gone.

But their ache lingers like the echo of your torment that he keeps alive.

Astra felt the unraveling like a blade pressed under his ribs. The final thread went slack. The loom stilled. And then, nothing.

You were gone.

Not lost. Not scattered. Freed.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

You were supposed to suffer until you crawled. Bleed until you begged. Return to him not out of love, but exhaustion. He had designed your trials meticulously, every loss tailored to weaken you. Every death, every lover, every flicker of peace, calculated failures meant to break your will.

And you had the audacity to overcome all of it.

You had the nerve to choose something other than him.

Astra moved through the remains of his halls, robes dragging through ash. The loom, the machine he had built to thread your lifetimes, was crumbling. Dozens of strands snapped, unraveling entire timelines.

Let them fall.

Let the worlds rot.

He didn’t care about the order of things anymore.

Not if you were no longer bound to it.

He swept a hand over the map of the worlds of his making, watching as the image of your final form flickered, unreachable now. You had remembered everything, endured every curse, and still walked away from him.

You dared to think you were finished.

Foolish.

There were other ways to reach you. Other paths to turn you back into something desperate. And Astra knew all of them.

He wouldn’t beg.

He would ruin.

He would thread nightmares into the lives of your beloveds. Poison their fates. Twist their dreams until they woke screaming your name. He would resurrect old ghosts, bring back lovers you lost and pit them against each other. He would engineer tragedies so precise you’d think destiny itself had turned on you.

And when the world began to rot under the weight of your name, you would come back. You’d have to.

And if you didn’t?

He’d burn every universe you touched until the only place left to stand… was at his side.

You were his creation. His defiance. His obsession.

But they’re over it. Them waking up in the morning and thinking about it while getting dressed is just idle thinking. How their thoughts always wander to what they wish they had done, what they wished they had said, the chances to ask for help, whenever they’re alone.

But they’re over it. When their friends bring the subject up and it immediately starts a discussion of more things you’ve remembered, it’s just ‘gossiping’. Because they can forget about it at any other time with them. They can be normal until their thoughts drift.

They’re past it. Why should it affect them? They deny any mention of ‘needing to process it’. They’re over it, past it, forgotten about it. They don’t even realize how much they dwell on it either. It’s so easy for their thoughts to drift. after all, it was something that left such a lasting impact. Maybe it happened too fast. Maybe it was all a blur, time smudged together as they experienced what ever happened. Maybe it was nothing at all. Just a moment in their life where they were completely alone. Of course they can’t get their mind off of it, it was their whole world at some point.