"I saw the Goddess of Fate Svetlana, sitting hand-in-hand with you in a courtyard. I saw the two of you fighting side by side in the Divine War. I saw other images beyond those, all of them pointing in the same direction. The threads between you were close, that too across many futures."
Haru held her gaze for a moment, then reached into her mind directly and read the memories himself. The images she'd pulled from the river of fate were there. Multiple scenes, different contexts, the same consistent shape to all of them, and one word from Caelith's summary was sitting in the front of his thoughts with particular weight.
'Hand in hand.' The literal kind.
He withdrew from her mind and stood quietly for a moment, working through the implications. Svetlana had said the future had infinite variables. She'd also spent considerable effort not answering his question about their future relationship. She looked at him with those silver eyes that were a little too bright.
Furthermore, she could see these threads. She'd seen what Caelith had just seen. Possibly long before today, and she'd kept coming back anyway, kept helping, kept showing up, kept steering things in a direction she could see from a thousand miles away.
'So she's helping her future husband.' He thought, 'No wonder.'
He didn't say any of this aloud and looked at Celestia, who was watching him with a question on her face.
"Don't doubt Svetlana." he said, "Her intentions toward the Empire are genuine. In time, she'll join me. The same way Lysandra, Mary, Sylvana, and Eveline did."
Celestia absorbed this. He watched her parse the list of names, all of them women who had become part of the Holy Empire's inner circle in a specific capacity, and a look of understanding settled over her face. She said nothing further on the subject.
…
Several hundred million kilometers away, Svetlana felt something shift in the river. She extended her Divine Sense into it and began to see the future. Her mastery of the Law of Fate was ten thousand times what Caelith commanded. Where Caelith had needed to strain and bleed for fragments, Svetlana read the full branch like text on a page.
She could see every thread of fate in the universe, except one. That was Haru's own thread, which remained invisible to her, even when he had been a mortal, before he had any Divine Power at all. His fate simply didn't register to her. She'd never understood why. It had nothing to do with his strength; it seemed to be a property of whatever he was at his core. She could only approach his future obliquely, through the threads of people connected to him.
What she could see was her own thread, and compared to an hour ago, it had changed. The connection between her thread and the invisible space where Haru's should have been was tighter, woven closer, the light of it brighter. It had moved from a side branch into a main thread.
She looked at it for a long moment and thought, 'In hundreds of thousands of years, this is the first time.*
The feeling was new enough that she didn't have a name for it yet, but it wasn't unpleasant.
"I need to accelerate Lily's training." She said to herself, "The sooner she's ready to take the priesthood, the sooner I'm free."
What Haru didn't know was that Svetlana had begun preparing for the priesthood transfer the moment he'd arrived on the Endless Continent with the other Castle Lords. The unusual luck that had surrounded that little girl from her earliest days wasn't coincidence. The Goddess of Fate was also, in her quieter aspects, the Goddess of Luck and Fortune, and she'd been generous towards Lily.
…
Back on Arboriel's surface, the Imperial Army was going home.
750,000 strong, cycling through the teleportation arrays in formation, and not one of them missing. The Guardian Angels, embedded throughout every legion, have done their work cleanly, reviving fallen soldiers at the moment of death before the loss became permanent. Every other force had taken casualties. The Great Aetherium was the sole exception and this elite army was what the upcoming Imperial War against the Light Empire would be fought with.
Haru looked out over a landscape of bones and cooling lava and said, "It's such a waste. I wanted this entire plane world."
Celestia listened.
"But the decision was already made the moment I learned the Eye existed." he continued, "A planet I could occupy, or a top-quality master artifact with the power to devour world laws. The Eye wins that comparison. And now, stripped of its laws, Arboriel has no extraordinary power—no mana, no Divine Laws, nothing."
"Continuous geological disasters for the next several centuries is guaranteed at minimum. If we garrison here, we're pouring resources into defending a dead rock and provoking the Demon Emperor before we're ready for that fight."
"It has no development value." Celestia agreed. Without mana, Arboriel was simply an unnaturally large habitable planet, and those were common enough throughout the universe to be unremarkable. If it ever needed size, he could just seize thousands of smaller ones to make up for it.
"Go find whatever's left worth finding. Both of you. We return when the window closes." Celestia and Yvonne departed.
…
Alone, Haru opened his storage ring, the Ring of the Eternal Sanctum, and laid out what he'd taken from the bodies of the two Demon Lords, especially the two Godheads, still blazing with Supreme God Tier Divine Power. He turned them over in his hands with the satisfaction of someone looking at things he would absolutely never sell.
The Sixteen-Winged Angels under his command had been capped at the peak of the High God Tier, but there was someone who could use these to break through the High God Tier and reach the Supreme God Tier.
It was Sylvana, the Dryad spirit of the Elven Mother Tree, who had no cap on her growth potential just like Castle Lords and Rangers.
Dantean's natal artifact lay beside them. Usable, undamaged, a genuine Supreme God Tier Artifact unlike the High God Tier Artifacts Haru was still carrying himself.
Miltonic's natal artifact was gone, detonated by the Demon Soul in its final moment of defiance. A loss, but an acceptable one given everything else.
Then came the two blueprints. He identified them without hesitation, read the results and his expression stopped moving. Then, slowly, something lit up behind his eyes that had nothing to do with calm.
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