At that mont, the air shifted. A huge hand, gripped the Beast King’s claws, halting its movent. The sharp, tallic tang of ash filled the air, accompanied by a presence both calming and commanding. The World Spirit, herald of Keles, the goddess of death, had arrived.
Its gaze fell directly on the soul cradled in the Beast King’s grasp, and a low, resigned sigh escaped its lips.
"Today has been... quite a busy day," Wardenwild said, "So many souls to guide to the underworld..."
A while back before Amina’s soul was pulled out, Wardenwild with his many children were busy guiding the souls that t their end at the hands of the two fightning.
It was then it’s attention sharpened. It had felt a life end but the soul had been supressed from it’s natural destination. It took him a glance to locate the soul. Wardenwild’s eyes flicked to Osita, and recognition passed between them. Osita’s heart skipped, he knew this being. The World Spirit knew him too.
Turning its attention to the Beast King, Wardenwild waved a hand. Instantly, Amina’s soul lifted from the Beast King’s grasp and floated into Wardenwild’s own, luminous and untouched.
"That does not belong to you," Wardenwild said, voice absolute. "It must be guided to its rightful place."
For a heartbeat, Osita allowed himself a flicker of relief but he then realised what that ant. Before the World Spirit could depart, a sudden surge of desperation took over. Chains of energy sprang from his still open domain, wrapping around Wardenwild. He lunged forward, reaching for Amina’s soul, intent on reclaiming it with his own hands.
But Wardenwild was not so easily thwarted. With a flick of his hand, the soul vanished from Osita’s grasp, and in an instant, a deer appeared from nowhere, ethereal and luminous, gently taking the soul into its care.
Osita skidded to a halt, chest heaving, eyes fixed on the fleeting image. The World Spirit, still bound in chains, gave no warning, no hesitation—only the steady, unwavering presence of inevitability. Osita’s desperation burned hotter than ever, yet he was faced with a stark truth: so forces, even gods could not be wrested from their purpose.
The luminous deer cradling Amina’s essence was about to vanish into the Underworld, the final destination ordained by death itself.
Then the Beast King moved.
Sothing had changed. The chaotic uncertainty that had always surrounded the monstrous entity was gone. No longer were multiple dark gods masked within its form, only one remained. The air seed to tighten as the true presence of Keles counterpart took over.
The Beast King teleported directly before the deer. The ethereal creature barely had ti to react before a pulse of dark presence brushed against it. The life within it was snuffed out, Amina’s soul was absorbed back into the Beast King’s possession.
Wardenwild’s authority, absolute in the realms of life and death, faltered before this counterpart. Every power he wielded, every command he could issue, proved insufficient. His authority handed to him by Keles fell short when faced with the shadow of Keles.
Osita and Wardenwild alike were forced to watch, powerless, as a new rupture tore the void open. Across the widening rift, a figure erged. Osita’s chest tightened, recognition and dread colliding. The Queen of Omadi’s Kingdom. A thought, sharp and cold, pierced his mind, and he scread internally: No... no, this can’t be happening...
But it was happening. The Beast King, unmoved by his desperation, pressed Amina’s soul into the clueless body of Nwadiebeube’s wife, rging life and essence with ruthless finality.
A voice, layered with amusent and chilling calm, rang out in the void.
"You know where to find your wife. Go... and get her."
With those words, the last tenuous thread holding the Beast King’s monstrous body together vanished. Its form shattered like fragile glass, scattering into nothingness. The presence that had been so fearso dissolved, leaving only emptiness behind.
Wardenwild exhaled slowly, shaking his head as he looked at Osita. The devastation on Osita’s face, the shock and grief, was plain to see. Wardenwild reached down to the shattered remains of the deer, the ethereal creature that had carried Amina’s soul, one of his own children. With a solemn gesture, he absorbed the child back into his essence, and in an instant, the spirit vanished, leaving no trace behind.
For Osita, the world tilted on its axis, yet the voice’s words lingered, a cruel mocking invitation: Go... and get her.
For the second ti that day, the residents of the planet Nana learned what true fear felt like.
It was not the fear of death, nor of destruction, but sothing far more suffocating, helplessness. Feet that had been moving monts ago froze in place as panic seized hearts all at once, an instinctive understanding spreading faster than thought itself: sothing vast and terrible was unraveling.
Then the voice returned.
It tore through the fabric of realit
y, dragging minds away from whatever small, fragile normalcy they clung to. This ti, it was no longer distant or restrained. The pain carried within it was raw, unfiltered, and overwhelming. Loss thundered through every syllable, and as the voice roared, it forced itself into the souls of all who heard it.
People who did not know why found tears streaming down their faces. Warriors dropped their weapons. Elders clutched their chests as though mourning soone they had never t. The anguish in that roar did not ask for sympathy, it demanded it, infecting every living being with its weight.
Osita roared until his throat shredded, until his voice cracked and finally broke. Blood seeped from his eyes, running like crimson tears down his face, staining the ground beneath him. There was nowhere for the rage to go, nowhere for the grief to settle.
After sches layered upon sches, after being toyed with by dark gods who treated lives like pieces on a board, this was how it ended.
His wife was still beyond his reach.
The realization burned worse than any wound. The injustice of it threatened to tear him apart from within.
But this ti, he did not lose himself.
He did not let his pain lash out blindly, did not allow his domain to swallow innocent lives in a mont of uncontrolled despair. He rembered the devastation of his past mistake and the wrath it could incur. He would not repeat it.
Osita closed his bleeding eyes.
And vanished.
Space folded around him without ceremony. One heartbeat he stood amid fury, the next he was sowhere impossibly quiet.
A bedroom.
Soft moonlight filtered through drawn curtains. The air was warm, untouched by divine wrath or celestial despair. On the bed lay a woman, peacefully asleep, her breathing slow and steady, unaware that the presence of a broken man now stood only steps away.
Osita stared at her, his rage coiling tightly beneath a fragile layer of restraint.
She looked nothing like his wife.
The shape of her face, the way her hair was made, the rhythm of her breathing, none of it matched the woman he had lost. And yet, Osita did not see her with mortal eyes alone. His gaze slipped past flesh and bone, past the fragile illusion of individuality, into the deeper truth that lay beneath.
There she was.
His wife’s soul, woven seamlessly with the Queen’s own, two essences braided together so perfectly that even he had to focus to tell where one ended and the other began. It was not domination, nor possession, but a fusion, deliberate and ticulous. The dark god handiwork was unmistakable. As ti passed, the threads binding them would tighten, mories bleeding into one another, emotions aligning, identities smoothing into a single, indistinguishable whole.
Soon, there would be no clear line left to draw.
Osita stood at the very edge of his domain, the invisible boundary humming faintly against his presence. All it would take was a single step. One reach of his hand, one act of will, and the Queen would be his. No alarm would sound. No mortal would sense his intrusion
But Murmur never did anything without reason.
If Murmur had placed his wife here, as a queen then this was not rcy, nor coincidence. It was a trap shaped like a temptation. If Osita took her now, it would not be a reunion; it would be a declaration. The Queen of a rival kingdom vanishing without explanation, stolen away by a mad man whose na already carried fear.
The narrative would write itself.
Murmur was patient, relentless, and cruelly precise. He wanted Osita to reach out. To claim. To prove every whispered accusation true. To turn him into the villain of the story, draped in righteous outrage and holy condemnation.
And Osita felt the bitterness of it settle deep in his chest.
He sank slowly onto a chair without realizing it, his attention never leaving her. Minutes bled into hours as he watched her sleep, morizing a face that was not his wife’s yet carried her presence in every subtle movent. When the Queen finally stirred, when her eyes opened and she rose from the bed, Osita did not look away.
She moved through the room unaware, unguarded, utterly human.
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