The Timeless Realm was not a country, a planet or even a proper dimension in the way mortals liked to define things. It was a universal prison that existed beyond the reach of ordinary chronology.
Anything forgotten by time eventually drifted there. People who vanished from memory and wound up there. Civilizations that ended were carried there. Lost technologies, abandoned cities, erased dynasties, forgotten names and things history could no longer hold all sank into that place like debris into a bottomless sea.
It was ruled by one force more than any other and that force was time itself, specifically the Primal Forces of Time, which is the power that decided what remained, what faded and what was cast away.
Valeria knew that because she had spent decades studying it.
Even then, she had barely touched its surface. The Timeless Realm was so vast that her explorations had not even reached one percent of it. She had crossed endless lands, traveled through ruins that had outlived their own worlds, stepped through cities that no longer belonged to any known history and still the realm never seemed to narrow.
It only continued as though the deeper she went, the more the place proved it had never been built to be understood by a single being. She had learned, over time, that the Timeless Realm was split into three sections across every planetary system.
The first was the Mortal Anchor.
That was where mortals abandoned by the ages ended up. Ordinary people, mortal kingdoms, ruined societies and forgotten populations were drawn here once time had finished burying them. In the Mortal Anchor, entire kingdoms could still function, though often in strange ways. People there lived in kingdoms because mortals still craved order, borders, rulers, flags and laws even after being discarded by history.
They built familiar structures out of unfamiliar ruin. Some kingdoms were ancient beyond reason. Some were made of remnants from worlds no longer remembered. Some were populated by descendants who had forgotten what they had once been before the realm took them.
The second was the Immortal Anchor.
There, immortal beings existed in factions. They grouped themselves into structures that reflected their longer lives and greater egos. Mortals wanted crowns and Immortals wanted doctrine. The Immortal Anchor was where the beings who refused decay or were not meant to decay gathered after being removed from the flow of ordinary history.
It was vast, hierarchical, and often far more dangerous than the Mortal Anchor because immortals had the time to build grudges that lasted forever. In some places, the factions controlled whole regions. In others, they watched one another in cold, endless suspension, waiting for movements that could take centuries to matter.
The third section existed as well, though Valeria had never fully mapped it. She didn't do the same for the second realm either because she couldn't go there yet. She did know it was called the Divine Anchor.
She knew the third realm was there. Everyone with enough intelligence and caution knew it was there. It was not a rumor or a a false boundary made up to frighten travelers. It was real, but concealed. No proper name had ever stuck to it because no one who entered it, if anyone ever truly had, returned with enough certainty to define it.
However, she knew that she was on Earth's system. Well, was, since the Immortal Reset changed their position because they came to Earth's planet first and they were now in Spheraphase's planetary system.
Valeria had entered the Timeless Realm using her name, her title and her authority as the Painter of Origins. That had mattered more than most people would have understood. Her Pinnacle Tether involved painting and in her hands, it was not art in the mortal sense.
She could design life, shape death and decide the law of a painting before it ever existed in the world. That was how Muse's Artworks had been born. As the decades passed, she refined her control, improved her methods and built a moving structure to house her works. It was the same structure that became famous for presenting her paintings to the public while keeping ownership and consequence entirely in her hands.
Muse's Artworks was a moving, protected, almost living exhibition house that appeared where she needed it to appear. It sheltered her drawings, her paintings and the Living Paintings that would one day define her work. People came to admire them for free, unaware that the beauty they were looking at was also a system of control managed by a creator who understood exactly how to make her art obey her.
Her Living Paintings were extensions of her will. She could give them a life that persisted, a death that concluded or a fate that lingered long enough to make her plans work. She decided what they were allowed to feel and what they were meant to become.
That was why the destruction of the Kingdom of Steam had not been an uncontrolled disaster in her eyes. It was a planned harvest she was planning for months. Seven hundred thousand souls had gone into her brush.
Their deaths were not wasted. Valeria had arranged the scenario with intention, ensuring that Marguerite received the painting and died in front of it in a way that would deepen the despair origin and complete the emotional leverage she required. It had not been difficult. She had painted the conditions she wanted and let the world move towards them.
That was the advantage of being a creator of her own works. She gave the painting a scenario and the scenario unfolded. She gave the girl a role and the role was fulfilled. The horror that followed was not a mistake at all. It was the intended mechanism of the work.
Those souls would feed the Obsidian Runic Spire. And speaking of which, Rune Teleportation did not make the Timeless Realm any smaller. That was another fact Valeria had learned through exhaustion.
Even with teleportation, the realm was impossible to fully traverse. Distance itself seemed warped there. A thousand steps could feel like a day. A hundred kilometers could be crossed in a blink or stretched into an ordeal depending on what the realm decided. The monumental scale of it made every journey feel incomplete. Her visits to the Mortal Anchor showed her kingdom after kingdom, each one enclosed in its own system.
Then, after all that time, she finally saw it again.
The Obsidian Runic Spire rose ahead of her. It was black, immense and impossible to miss. Its surface absorbed light and the runes carved into it glowed when she got close. Valeria looked at it and smiled.
"Fifty years sure run fast."
She had delivered the souls on time and she knew exactly what that meant. The meeting would begin soon, the work would continue and the Timeless Realm would keep doing what it always did: swallowing the forgotten, preserving the broken and waiting for time to decide what would be left behind.
-----
The Mortal Kingdoms of the Mortal Anchor were built on a truth nobody there could escape and was endless, memory was not and time was an enemy that never got tired. That was why war existed there so often. It was not because the people were foolish enough to fight over territory in a place that seemed to stretch forever.
Time itself was limited by something far worse than hunger or ambition. In the Timeless Realm, whether one belonged to the Mortal Anchor or the Immortal Anchor, nothing remained forever unless it was protected. Time worked on everything there. It wore bodies down. It rotted cities. It erased beings until they were no longer remembered by the realm at all and that erasure had a name.
Decay.
It did not happen instantly. It was slow enough to be ignored by the desperate and feared by the wise, which made it more dangerous than destruction that came all at once.
Archivist Stones were the answer, or at least the only answer most people had managed to build.
They were white crystals with a green lustre trapped inside them, like some living light had been sealed under the surface. The deeper the green shimmer ran through the stone, the higher the quality. The better the stone, the longer it could protect people, places and things from Decay but they were not easy to obtain.
They had to be mined from nodes which were not scattered kindly across the realm. They were contested, guarded, ambushed, stripped and fought over again and again until the ground around them became a graveyard of broken alliances and exhausted banners. In the Mortal Anchor, kingdoms rose and fell over those nodes. In the Immortal Anchor, factions did the same, except they were more elegant about it and far more vicious.
This was why the war below the cliff kept going even as bodies piled up.
Two races looked like insects at a glance. One was more like a grasshopper lineage and the other was like that of a praying mantis but they were bipedal and humanoid. They had four limbs instead of six, long angular bodies, plated torsos and narrow faces.
They fought with spears, hooked blades and crude crystal weapons sharpened for killing. The battlefield was a barren wasteland of cracked earth and dead stone with no grass, or shelter. The smell of blood had already soaked into the ground so deeply that even the wind seemed to carry it reluctantly.
She stood on the cliff above them. Below, the two armies crashed into each other in waves. The grasshopper side moved in erratic bursts. The mantis race sliced through necks and limbs with long bladed arms. Neither side had the luxury of restraint. They were fighting for a node and everyone on that field knew it. Above the battlefield, a blue crystal floated in the air like a silent eye, absorbing the souls of the dead as they rose from the bodies. No one below noticed. Souls were invisible to most and even then only if they were paying attention. This was the kind of theft no soldier ever saw coming until it was too late.
The watch on her wrist beeped with a sharp mechanical insistence. She glanced at it, then sighed as though she had been interrupted in the middle of a tedious task.
"Has it really been fifty years already?"
She stretched her neck once, rolled her shoulders and stared down at the war with impatience. She had other things to do. She had a meeting to get to. She had a spire waiting. The idea of spending any more time on this field seemed almost insulting now that the numbers were finally available. There were at least two hundred thousand souls, maybe more by the time the day was done.
She jumped.
The cliff cracked under the force of her landing and shockwaves spread across the wasteland, blasting dust into the air and briefly splitting the front lines apart. Soldiers on both sides stumbled, lost footing or dropped weapons as the ground gave way beneath them. For one second, the whole battlefield froze when they saw her.
She stood in the center of the dust cloud wearing a black faceless mask lined with golden patterns except for the mouth that was left exposed. Her pink lips curled into a faint, almost lazy smirk. Some of them whispered a name with immediate panic. Others shouted it aloud in horror.
"The Lotus Maiden is here!"
That was what they called her.
She vanished and appeared all around. One moment she was in front of a mantis captain, the next she was behind him and then he was on the ground with his throat opened from one side to the other. She appeared near a cluster of grasshopper spearmen and before they could react, three bodies had already dropped. Purple blood sprayed across the dust, staining her sleeves and mask.
They tried to encircle her. They tried to overwhelm her with numbers. They even tried to bait her into the open with cavalry charges but it made no difference. She was too fast and speed in a field like this. A spear swung toward her throat and missed by a hair. She caught the shaft with two fingers, snapped it and buried the splintered end through the attacker's chest. A mantis swordsman lunged from the left and she turned so lightly that his blade cut only air, then she drove an elbow into his jaw so hard the sound cracked through the battlefield. He did not get up. Another soldier screamed that she was not human which was the kind of statement people made when they had finally run out of practical explanations. He died before finishing the sentence.
Within minutes, the battlefield turned into a panic of broken formations. The grasshopper race scattered only to be cut down as they ran. The mantis race, disciplined to the end, attempted to regroup around their strongest fighters but the Lotus Maiden kept appearing in the center of every cluster before they could complete the formation.
Some tried to flee towards the node. Some tried to protect the crystal source with suicidal devotion but she killed them anyway. Her mask never changed. Her lips kept that same cold smirk.
Purple blood splashed over her clothes. By the seventh minute the first few soldiers had realized who she was and started screaming the name as if saying it might somehow warn the rest.
"Lotus Maiden! Run!"
There was nowhere left to run that her speed could not reach.
The blue crystal overhead kept absorbing souls. The dead did not even rest before being harvested. Weapons clattered into the dirt. Shields cracked. One side tried to surrender and the other side killed them for hesitating. It was over so fast that the war itself seemed embarrassed by how little it had mattered in the end.
Ten minutes later, it was done.
Both armies were dead. Two hundred thousand bodies lay scattered across the wasteland and the node was hers by default, though she showed no interest in holding it. She stood in the middle of the slaughter, breathing evenly, while the last few souls flee up into the blue crystal.
She looked down at the purple blood staining her clothes and frowned.
"Disgusting."
She lifted her hand, and the space behind her split open in a flare of sapphire light. The Ten Thousand Petal Crystal Lotus appeared in full. The lotus absorbed the souls from the battlefield in a single continuous pull, drawing every last one into its crystalline depths. She glanced at the dead armies and turned away.
Rune Teleportation lit beneath her feet, causing her to vanish from the wasteland in an instant. The next moment she was near the Obsidian Runic Spire. She had not seen it in a long time. The return of that sight made her sigh in relief.
"It really has been a long time."