The air split open above the dead camp without warning.
A shape descended from nothing and hovered over the campsite. Her shadow-dark hair spilled around her like a black tide. She was enormous, at least ten meters tall, and even then she did not feel clumsy or oversized. She were a long black dress. She had a pale face and elegant hands. She was also beautiful, but not in the soft, ethereal way of celestial beings.
Astaraela looked up at her and immediately recognized what she was.
A Phonoroxan.
They are an ancient race created by the Primordial of Creation and Life to serve as enforcers of cosmic balance and, in the polite version, police of the universe. The being lowered her head. It was not quite a bow but close enough to signal recognition.
"You're the one in control of the Immortal Anchor?"
Her voice was like that of a beautiful echoing tone like many voices repeated her.
"Yes. I am the one conducting the Time Trial set by Lady Thyrexxa for you. I was also sent by the Time Primordial herself to guide you through it. The reason you suffered so much is—"
Astaraela answered before she could finish.
"My Destiny, Suffering Before Reward. I know already."
"You do?"
"Yes. I was born under it, or cursed by it, or blessed by it, depending on who's pretending to be poetic. I always have to suffer before I get rewarded. So tell me the important part. What's the reward this time?"
For the first time, the Phonoroxan looked faintly impressed.
"Before I answer that, I should introduce myself properly. I am Ednil. I maintain the order and balance of the Immortal Anchor of the Timeless Realm. My brother, Ilned, maintains the Mortal Anchor. My other sister, Linde, governs the Divine Anchor."
"Fine. If you're here to help, then explain everything with no riddles or grand speeches. I'm not in the mood."
Ednil looked at her for a long moment, then gave the smallest nod, as though approving the directness.
"You're very lucky. Lady Thyrexxa does not favor anyone and this is the first time I've seen someone she clearly cares about enough to guide this carefully."
Astaraela went quiet at that..
"You are in the Timeless Realm, one of the eight realms separated from the universe. Every Primordial except Existence has their own realm. The Timeless Realm exists to keep what time forgets. People, events, truths, beings, failures. Some are allowed to leave temporarily for specific reasons. Some leave permanently. Most do not leave at all. There are three realms: Mortal, Immortal, and Divine. You already know the first two. The Divine Anchor is where deities exist."
Astaraela looked out over the dead camp, then back to her.
"So this war is related to one of the factions on the Divine Anchor."
"Yes."
"Which one?"
"I can't tell you."
"Because of the Time Trial, huh?"
"Yes."
"Of course."
Ednil did not react to the sarcasm.
"The purpose of your Time Trial is to cross the Immortal Anchor and reach the Divine Anchor. It does not matter how long it takes. What matters is that it will not take less than three hundred years."
For a moment, even Astaraela had no immediate response.
"Three hundred years in this place."
"Yes."
"You're telling me the nightmare isn't even the full nightmare yet."
"No. I'm telling you that the current stage is only the beginning of the route."
Astaraela laughed once but it was short and humorless.
"That's disgusting."
Ednil let that pass.
"You have been in the Timeless Realm for twenty years total. Ten of those years were in the Mortal Anchor, where you were with your family and training them well. The other ten were here, in war. The battlefield you've been fighting on is not a true war in the ordinary sense. It is a playing field for pantheons to test lower immortals who live here. This is one of seventy-nine camps of this pantheon."
Astaraela looked down at the bodies around her. She had just erased one of those seventy nine.
"Your decision to annihilate your own camp and everyone in it has tilted the scales of the One Hundred Immortal War."
"So this is sport for pantheons using immortals."
"Yes."
"That's vile."
"It is also common. You would be surprised how often lower beings are made to function as proof of concept for higher ones."
Astaraela gave a dry, empty laugh.
"No, I wouldn't. I've seen how that works."
"Your action here matters. You've already changed the balance. That means you now have choices. Many choices. Whatever choice you make next will unlock a sealed capability of yours or multiple sealed capabilities."
Astaraela stood in silence for a long moment, looking over the bodies she'd made herself before she sighed. It was relief.
"I'm grateful. Thyrexxa didn't forget me."
The words came out softer than anything she'd said in days. Biolumine was silent the entire time and hearing that made her smile. At least he didn't lose himself in this ten year war.
"Lady Thyrexxa rarely forgets anyone who has been properly marked by destiny. Your trial was always going to be severe."
Astaraela gave a small, crooked smile.
"Severe is a polite word."
"Yes, it is."
"So what comes next?"
Ednil's black dress seemed to flow in the air as she hovered over the camp.
"That depends on the choice you make now."
Astaraela went still after Ednil finished speaking.
For a long second, the dead camp around them felt even quieter than before, as if the bodies themselves were waiting to hear what she would choose. Then she lifted her head. The look on her face was so cold it made Bio shiver without meaning to.
"I'm not doing half-measures. I'm killing both sides."
"That is a very large undertaking."
"I know."
"You would be turning the war against both factions."
"I'm aware."
"You would be making yourself the target of every surviving force in the Immortal Anchor."
Astaraela smiled. It was a small, clean smile, and it had no warmth in it at all.
"Good. I've been a pawn in someone else's plan this entire time. I'm not enduring that again."
"Then you understand the scale of what you're choosing."
"I do. And it's what I've decided."
Ednil did not argue. She simply lifted one hand.
"To carry out this task, you will need to choose two capabilities. Once you do, it will take a long time before another one is unsealed. You cannot choose Divinities."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Choose carefully."
°°°°°
Ninety years later....
It was raining that morning, turning the camp grounds into mud. Men moved faster than necessary. Orders came out clipped and sharp. Rations were checked twice. Blades were polished that would likely be useless. The commander in chief had not slept properly in three nights and everyone knew why.
The Prism Madonna.
That was the only name anyone feared.
She had spent the last fifty years hunting both armies without discrimination. Enemy camps, ally camps, supply lines, rear encampments, marching columns, all of it had been reduced to crystal. If they belonged to the war, she could find them. If she could find them, they could die. No one knew how she moved so quickly or how she seemed to appear wherever morale was weakest and leadership was most vulnerable. No one knew how she turned entire battalions into crystal fields before their commanders even realized the front had broken. They only knew the result.
They were always dead. She had come alone this time. That was the part that terrified them most.
One soldier had survived the last encounter only because she had chosen to spare him. She had stood over him in the rain, her staff glowing faintly, her visor dark against the sky and told him to carry a message back to the camp. He had shaken so hard he could barely speak, but he had managed to listen.
"Tell them she's coming to kill them all in battle."
That message had spread through the camp faster than any official order. So when dawn came and the rainy field beyond the tents started to glow, nobody doubted who it was.
A light appeared at the far edge of the horizon first. At first it seemed like a distant point refusing to be swallowed by the rain. Then it grew brighter. The soldiers stopped what they were doing. Conversations died mid-sentence. A few men reached for weapons they already knew would not matter. The commander in chief stepped out beneath the awning.
The star climbed over the hill. Astaraela walked down the slope alone. Around her, the rain struck and lightning flashed in their eyes.
The entire camp went silent.
There were one hundred thousand immortal soldiers waiting for one person to appear and now that person was here. Their final stand had become a waiting room for disaster. Somewhere behind the front line, a man actually whispered her title under his breath.
"The Prism Madonna."
No one corrected him.
Astaraela stopped at the bottom of the hill and looked at them through the rain. Her fractured eyes did not need to be visible for the soldiers to feel that she had already seen every campfire, every trench, every escape route and every nervous person in the place.
The commander in chief took one step forward, then stopped. Even he was afraid.
That was the funniest part, if anyone had been in a mood to laugh. The man who had held a hundred thousand soldiers together through fifty years of immortal war was standing there with his throat tight and his hands cold because one woman had made a habit of erasing everyone who thought themselves safe
"I came alone as I said! You've been waiting for me? How pleasant!"
There was no answer as her voice echoed.
"Good. Then I won't waste your time."
The soldiers in the front ranks shifted back without meaning to. A ripple moved through the line. No one wanted to be first. No one wanted to be the one who made the Prism Madonna start moving.
She took one step forward.
The rain slid off her as if the world had already failed to touch her properly. Every soldier in that camp had heard the stories. Every soldier had seen the aftermath. Every soldier knew what happened when she entered a field. The commander in chief finally found his voice.
"Hold the line!"
No one moved at first. Astaraela smiled when she heard that.
"That's right. Hold it. I want to see how long you can pretend this is still your war."
Sapphire started to emerge under her feet.
The earth cracked open and sapphire spears shot out in every direction.
A man in the front line had only enough time to look down before a spike burst through his chest and lifted him off the ground. Another had his leg pinned by one that came up through the mud and then a second one split his stomach open from below. The soldiers who were standing too close to each other suffered the most. One spike impaled a body. The blood from that body touched the man beside him and the blood turned to sapphire too, crawling into his flesh like a crystalline infection. The man opened his mouth to scream and his jaw locked halfway through the sound as his throat turned to crystal from the inside out.
Astaraela kept walking.
She didn't run. She didn't spread her arms. She didn't shout a grand spell. She just walked through the rain like someone crossing a garden path while the battlefield around her became a mass grave of crystal and panic.
The first line broke within seconds. The second line tried to reinforce it and only made the slaughter worse. One man got cut on the arm and looked down to see the wound crystallizing at the edges before his entire forearm became a blue sculpture. He stumbled into the next soldier, smeared blood across his armor and that soldier froze too.
The screaming started in earnest.
"Back! Back!"
"Move, move, move!"
"It's the ground—"
"No, no, no, behind you!"
Panic hit like a chain reaction. Men who had spent their whole lives being trained to endure suddenly remembered that endurance didn't matter when the battlefield itself had turned against them. A few turned to flee in pure terror, abandoning formation except the desperate need to survive.
They ran straight into the wall.
It appeared sixty meters high in a single breath of sapphire light, rising from the mud. It was long enough to stretch almost five kilometers across the battlefield that blocked every route of escape. Rain hammered against it and shattered into glittering mist. The soldiers who reached it first threw themselves at the surface with their hands, shields, blades, shoulders or whatever they had left and found that it did not even scratch.
One man took a hammer to it with both hands and watched the impact bounce back without leaving a dent. Another tried a Tether-driven strike and had his arm fracture from the recoil. A third slammed a spear into the wall so hard the shaft snapped and the fragments ricocheted into his face.
Tall, brutal sapphire spikes shot out from the wall's surface. The first wave took the men closest to it through the back, piercing shoulders, throats and skulls. The second wave came seconds later and caught those who had stepped back from the first, thinking they'd escaped the edge.
The soldiers at the edges began to panic harder, trying to climb, trying to dig under it or even trying to find any crack in the thing. All they found were more spikes. A whole forest of sapphire thorns rose from the wall surface and pierced through bodies. One man was stuck half on the wall and half in the mud with his armor transmuted into crystal.
By the time the survivors realized they should run around the wall instead, it was already too late. Astaraela had reached the front. She was still walking, by the way.
Rain slid off her body. She removed the visor completely, letting the world see what had been hidden under it. Her eyes were so unusual. Golden irises were split by blue cracks.
Her Law of Divinity, Sapphire Transmutation, activated.
It spread from her in a vast sapphire horizon, spreading across the battlefield for kilometers in a single look. Where it touched mud, the ground hardened into blue crystal. Where it touched armor, the metal became crystal. Where it touched flesh, the body transmuted. Bones, sinew, organs, blood, all of it turned into sapphire statues caught in the posture of their final second. A man charging with a spear became a frozen blue silhouette with his mouth still open. A commander raising his hand to order a retreat turned into a crystal figure with rain caught forever on his face. A soldier who had fallen to his knees in prayer became a kneeling monument with his head bowed in blue stone.
And all the while, Astaraela kept walking.
Soldiers tried to shoot her. Their projectiles hit her body but they didn't do any damage. The camp became a maze of fear and useless motion. Astaraela reached a cluster of officers who had formed a defensive knot around their banner. She looked at the banner, then at them and raised Calimostria.
The banner, the pole, the officers and the men shielding them all turned to sapphire in a single perfect sweep. The banner turned into crystal and shattered at the top as it fell. The officers froze like blue statues of men who had been very sure they would survive another minute.
They didn't. No one did.
A soldier at the rear actually screamed her title as if saying it might protect him.
"Prism Madonna—"
Astaraela did not answer him.
The sapphire spread under his boots and climbed his legs before he could take a second breath. He stumbled, dropped his weapon and stared down in horror as the crystal reached his waist and kept going. His hands rose in reflex but the transmutation reached his chest first. He became another statue in the rain, caught in the exact posture of panic that had brought him to her attention in the first place.
It took thirty minutes for the battlefield to go quiet.
By the end, the rain was still falling on a field filled with corpses, blue statues, shattered crystal, broken weapons and blood soaked into the mud. Astaraela stood in the middle of it all. Her staff rested on one hand with rain dripping from her sleeves.
She had collected one hundred and fifty million souls in ninety years.
She destroyed five hundred and sixty-two camps, enemy and ally alike by the time the hundredth year of the Timeless Realm had finally arrived. She would have ended it faster if the trial hadn't forced her to stay a full century, but the realm had its rules. She had learned to hate rules by making them useful.
She lifted her gaze to the rain and spoke to nobody and everybody at once.
"I did it. I destroyed all five hundred and sixty-two camps in ninety years."
Bio appeared beside her. Even she, who had seen Astaraela do impossible things for decades now, seemed momentarily stunned by the scale of it.
"You really did it."
Astaraela gave her a sidelong glance.
"Of course I did. You've said this more than five hundred times and you still doubt it?"
"You killed everyone on the battlefield in such a short period of time."
Astaraela snorted softly.
"Ninety years isn't exactly short."
"For normal people, it is."
"For normal people," Astaraela repeated, as if testing the phrase for taste, then shrugged. "I'm immortal. It didn't feel like much."
The rain kept falling. A dead soldier's helmet rolled slowly through the mud and stopped at the toe of Astaraela's boot. She didn't move it.
"Now what?"
Bio turned her head at the horizon, where the sapphire wall still stood and the blue field still stretched as far as the eye could see.
"Now we're not restricted by the battlefield anymore. We can leave it."
Astaraela was silent.
"We can head out and see the Immortal Anchor beyond the camps."
"That's a good idea."
It was strange how simple it sounded after all this time. She turned away from the dead camps and started walking towards the horizon. Biolumine followed her. Behind them lay the corpses that would never rise again, the blue statues that would never thaw, the camps that would never speak and the battlefield that had finally been cut down to silence.
In front of them was the Immortal Anchor beyond the war. Behind them was a century of blood.
For the first time in a hundred years, Astaraela was not walking to battle.
She was walking away from one.