(Jerry's POV)
Bright lights and colors dragged past me as if I were being hauled through a river made of shattered glass.
I'd expected slipping into Mavis's soul to be… smoother. Cleaner. Maybe a dignified drifting, a spiritual sinking into calm water.
Instead, I was hurled into the expanse like someone had grabbed my tail and flung me across creation.
Void.
That was the first thing I noticed.
A vast, star-studded void—dark, endless, filled with shimmering wisps of memory and emotion. Not silent, either. There was a hum here. A heartbeat that wasn't mine, a tide that rose and fell in time with something deep and stubborn.
Her.
This was Mavis's spirit realm.
Chaotic didn't begin to cover it.
Wisps passed by me like tiny comets, each one showing flickers of her life—a hand reaching for bread, a frozen forest, a tattered blanket, a cold, fog-choked village. Each memory spun away as soon as I focused on it, drifting upward like smoke.
I narrowed my eyes.
I was here for a reason.
"Blessings first," I muttered to myself. "Existential crisis later."
I turned—or the spirit equivalent of turning—and tried to orient myself, searching for the familiar tug of divinity. Hel's mark would be cold, rigid, binding. Odin's would be sharp, heavy, radiant. Two very different signatures—one from the underworld, one from the seat of war and wisdom.
I drifted forward.
That was when I saw her.
A small girl ran past me, almost colliding with my side. She had white hair in messy braids, cheeks pink from cold, eyes bright and wide and so full of hope it made my chest ache.
Mavis.
Younger. Softer. Before everything sharpened.
She stopped, turned, and smiled at me—at something in my direction, even if she couldn't see me. Tiny hands reached out, holding up a crown made of frozen flowers. She offered it to something just beyond my view.
Before I could see who—or what—she was giving it to, the environment shifted.
Fog seeped in around us.
Not the pleasant kind that lingered over rivers at dawn—no. This was thick, suffocating, spreading like spilled ink, swallowing edges and light. It curled around the girl's ankles, climbed higher, swallowed her waist.
I watched it with an ancient, bitter familiarity.
The fog had always been there.
In her memories. In her life. In her kingdom.
In her soul.
When I looked back, the girl was gone.
In her place stood an older version of her—still Mavis, but taller, thinner, her features hardened, eyes shadowed. She wasn't looking at me this time. She was looking past me.
I turned.
A tall man stood several paces away, the faint blur of his face impossible to fully catch. He held two urns—one in each hand. Something about him felt almost familiar, like an echo of a king. It tugged at me, but the fog thickened, and my vision warped slightly.
I turned back in time to see the little girl again—flickering back into existence like a ghost layered behind the older Mavis.
Her eyes were full.
Not of light, not of innocence.
Of tears.
One slid down her cheek.
It fell slowly, impossibly slowly, like time itself had been stretched thin around it.
Then it hit the ground.
And the world changed.
There was a sound—soft, but vast. Like the first drip of water in a cavern, multiplied across an ocean. Then another tear fell. And another. And another.
They hit the ground, one after another, until the floor beneath us began to ripple.
Her tears pooled, gathered, swirled—turned from droplets into a sheet, then a stream, then a flood. In seconds, the entire plane broke open, and water surged upward like a beast unleashed.
The girl dissolved, replaced by waves.
Before I could slither away, the sea grabbed me.
I sank.
No matter how I twisted, no matter how I fought, the water swallowed me whole. It was not ordinary water. This was her sorrow, her grief, her lost childhood, her unfed hope made liquid and endless.
It drowned in silence.
I, ancient serpent of the sea, let out a strangled laugh in my head.
"Of course," I thought. "Of course her spirit realm is an ocean."
The deeper I sank, the quieter it became.
Down and down, past layers of light and memory, until the world above dimmed into a distant shimmer. When I finally stopped falling, I found myself suspended in dark, shimmering blue.
And there—floating in front of me—was Mavis.
Not the child. Not the shaken girl at the academy.
A version of her that looked… whole.
Her hair fanned around her like white kelp in still water. Her eyes were closed, her expression calm—so calm it unnerved me. Light clung to her skin like a second layer, thin and gold, pulsing in time with some silent rhythm.
For the first time in a long time, I felt small.
"Mavis," I whispered, though I knew she couldn't hear me.
Her body began to glow.
Not faintly.
Brightly.
Her eyelids lifted.
Her eyes opened.
And instead of their usual deep ocean blue, they shone gold. Old gold. Sunlight-on-shield gold. The kind of gold that belonged in ancient halls full of spears and oaths.
Odin's gold.
My breath caught—for a serpent in spirit form, anyway.
Then, suddenly, symbols erupted around us.
Text—no, runes—spun past me in spiraling arcs. Strange, curling letters in a language that even I, ancient as I am, could not decipher. They streamed through the water, glowing faintly, twisting around Mavis in looping patterns like script across the surface of her soul.
I recognized pieces.
Not from understanding—
but from instinct.
These were not Hel's cold, dead runes. Hers were rigid, angular, like bones jutting at wrong angles. These were older. Wilder. They crackled with war and foresight and sacrifice.
Odin's writing.
The runes swept past me in dizzying lines, flickering images riding on their current.
I saw a gold trident, its shaft wrapped in sea grass and barnacles, wedged into stone at the bottom of a trench.
I saw a Greek-like pillar, broken and half-buried, embraced by drifting kelp.
I saw two gods.
I recognized them both.
Relief washed through me when I finally found what I was looking for.
To Mavis's right stood Odin.
He appeared as humans often imagined him—an old man with a heavy beard, one eye like a storm, the other socket shadowed and strange. A spear rested in his hand. Crows circled above his head in black arcs.
Wisdom. War. Ruin. Order.
He watched Mavis with an unreadable expression. Not gentle, not cruel. Assessing. Measuring.
To her left stood Hel.
My sister.
Half of her face was smooth, pale, eerily beautiful. The other half was corpse-pale, skin stretched tight, cold and void-like, shadow pooling in the hollow of her cheek. Her dark eyes met mine across the distance.
My scales crawled.
I remembered the last time we saw each other. The disappointment in her voice. The way her power felt like a frozen fist around my spine. I remembered being cast out, drifting, purposeless.
Her gaze did not soften.
But there was something else there.
Not quite anger.
Not quite pity.
Something in between.
The two gods flanked Mavis like silent sentries, hands resting lightly on her shoulders. Their power seeped into her, gold and black mixing like ink and sunlight. The runes spun faster, merging, tangling.
That was it.
The blessings.
They didn't float above her like neat, tidy symbols. They were woven into the fabric of her soul—braided with her grief, her hope, her ocean-deep self.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.
"I found them," I thought. "Both of them."
Before I could try to reach closer, Odin turned his head slightly.
Not toward Mavis.
Toward me.
His single eye pierced through me like a spear.
I froze.
Then Hel looked too.
Two divine gazes locked on me in the depths of Mavis's soul.
I wanted to shrink. To fold in on myself like a frightened eel. Instead, I held still. An ancient serpent I may be, but even I knew when to show humility.
Hel's lips parted.
I didn't hear words.
I felt them.
An order.
A warning.
A… begrudging approval?
Before I could respond, their bodies crumbled—not violently, not like statues shattered by force, but like mist losing form.
They dissolved into vapor.
The sea around me shuddered.
The gold light pulled back into Mavis's chest. Her eyes fluttered shut again, the glow dimming to a faint ember beneath closed lids.
Then—
The water faded.
The runes vanished.
The oppressive depth lifted.
I found myself drifting back upward, as if some current had decided I'd seen enough.
The sea dropped away.
The void returned.
Stars flickered back into existence around me, hovering in the dark like punctured holes in reality. Wisps of memory drifted again. The chaos of her spirit realm reassembled itself wordlessly.
And in the center of it all—
Mavis stood.
The real one this time—or as "real" as anything could be in a soulscape. She looked almost exactly as she did in the waking world, except for the faint luminescent shimmer clinging to her hair and clothes like fog.
She regarded me quietly.
For the first time since entering, I heard her clearly.
"By the grace of Odin," she said, voice calm, steady, carrying an echo that did not belong to any mortal girl, "take me to the altar."
I didn't move on my own.
The command was not to me.
The realm responded.
The stars streaked past in blurs of light.
The ground—or whatever passed for ground here—vanished. Space twisted, folded inward, and spat us out into a new shape.
I blinked—mentally, spiritually, whatever.
We stood in a marble-tiled hall.
Tall pillars rose on either side, etched with faint carvings of battles, ships, beasts, runes I couldn't read. The walls were draped with water—yes, water—flowing down in thin, constant streams without ever forming puddles on the floor.
It was somewhere between a temple and a tomb.
Mavis knelt in front of an altar.
Both knees on the floor. Head bowed. Hands cupped together.
I hovered behind her, unseen, watching.
She began to pray.
Not out loud—not in any language I recognized—but her soul spoke. Words poured from her hands in the form of water, clear and gleaming. The liquid pooled in her palms, then rose, spiraling into the air in shimmering ribbons.
The water shined.
Then evaporated.
A sacrifice—not of blood or flesh, but of will.
In front of her, the air thickened.
Something—someone—formed.
A woman, translucent and glowing faintly, drifted into existence above the altar. Her hair floated behind her like a veil of starlight on dark water. Her eyes were old and kind and weary.
A spirit.
A guide.
One of the first.
I wanted to move closer.
To see her more clearly.
But I wasn't given the chance.
The marble hall shattered.
The water, the pillars, the altar, the spirit—
All of it broke apart into shards of light and vanished in a single, blinding flash.
Then something grabbed me—no hand, no form, just force—and pulled.
Hard.
The stars, the void, the wisps of memory—all streaked away from me like I was being slingshotted out of a dream.
The next thing I knew—
I was back.
Back in the dorm room.
Back on Mavis's bed.
Back wrapped around her wrist, my heart pounding in my tiny serpent chest.
My head throbbed.
My vision swam.
Mavis lay in front of me, still, staring at the ceiling, her eyes glassy but awake. A faint gold glimmer lingered in her left eye before fading.
She swallowed.
"Well?" she whispered, voice hoarse. "What did you see?"
I stared at her for a long moment.
Then let out a shaky hiss.
"…Everything," I said quietly.
And for the first time in a very, very long time—
I was afraid.
Not of her.
But of what she was destined to become.