Their voices still echoed.
Their touches still lingered.
My skin remembered their warmth. My breath, their names whispered into it. My body, the rhythm of each of them—how they reached for me like drowning women reaching for shore.
But I sat alone now.
In the shadow of the throne I still refused.
The empire was silent again, as if holding its breath.
They had poured themselves into me—fire, time, illusion, knowledge, life. They had given everything. And I had taken it.
Not cruelly.
But without return.
Not once did I say the words they wanted.
Not because I couldn't.
Because I wouldn't.
Love is a tether.
A choice that creates a future.
But I had no future to give.
I built this empire to preserve, to conquer, to keep. To shelter things too rare to be left in the worlds that discarded them. I created the goddesses to hold its bones together so I wouldn't have to.
I made them beautiful, powerful, devoted.
Then I made them mine.
And I never told them why.
Sometimes I wonder if I am a god, or merely a thief who stole too much and buried the evidence in silk and silence.
They want me to speak.
But speech is promise.
Speech is permission.
And if I ever say what they wish to hear, I don't know what I'll become.
Because when they look at me with those desperate eyes, whispering "I love you," I feel something crawl to the surface.
Something like guilt.
Or something worse.
Something that almost feels like…
Need.
But I am not allowed to need.
I am what they need.
That is enough.
It has to be.
I stood in the throne room a long time.
Staring at the empty seat.
The empire pulsed beneath my feet.
Alive.
But waiting.
And I, its maker, felt nothing.
Or maybe… I felt everything.
Just too much to ever let it out.
So I turned.
And I walked away.
Again.
Because silence is easier than truth.
And I am tired of being seen.
She shouldn't have felt this way.
Her days had returned to normal. Her life was quiet again. Sweet. Routine.
Ren walked her to school. Smiled like always. Blushed at her teasing. He was gentle, awkward, soft-spoken—everything she loved.
And yet… something was missing.
A hollow shape in the space between breaths.
She would wake up at night with the feeling that she'd forgotten something important. Something enormous. Her fingers would shake when she looked at Ren's face too long—like her body remembered something her mind did not.
Did we fight?Did I cry?
She didn't know.
And that terrified her more than anything.
POV: Minako
The code wouldn't compile.
Every string she touched distorted—like some invisible hand reached back into her machine and rewrote reality as she saw it.
She tried everything.
Restores. Clean builds. Redundancy sweeps.
Still, the deeper she searched, the more she found fragments she shouldn't have.
Digital ghosts.
Logs that shouldn't exist.
Cameras aimed at things with no origin.
One folder was named simply: petals_000.
Inside were ten seconds of corrupted footage.
A girl's face, eyes wide in frozen terror, floating in a fluid chamber. A hand reached in to caress the glass, then vanished.
That hand looked familiar.
Minako shut her laptop.
Her skin was crawling.
POV: Elira
In the silence beneath the earth, she waited.
Ren hadn't returned for days.
But his last command still rang in her ears: "Watch Airi."
She obeyed, of course. Always.
Through cameras and bio-sensors, through quietly tapping into networks he left behind, she monitored everything.
Airi smiling at Ren.
Airi kissing him goodbye.
Airi... standing too long at her window in the dark.
Elira pressed her palm to the cold screen, staring at the girl's face.
"I'll protect him," she whispered. "Even from you."
Even if it broke her heart.
???
And far away, in a place even Ren had once sealed off and forgotten...
Something stirred.
A light blinked on in an old vault deep within the empire's outer void-space.
Not red.
Not blue.
But green.
A system he didn't remember installing.
A program activating on its own.
Inside, in a stasis chamber marked DO NOT ENGAGE – SYSTEM LOCKED, a girl opened her eyes.
Hair like silver water.
Skin that shimmered faintly, like a reflection from another universe.
Her eyes did not focus.
They searched.
And her lips moved with words that were not spoken but written into reality:
"I found you, Worldwalker."