Hela laughs softly.
Not the sharp laugh she uses when gods scream.
Not the indulgent one she reserves for irony.
This laugh is older.
Dry.
Fond in the way only funerals can be.
"Ah," she purrs, fingers drumming against the arm of her throne, bone clicking against bone. "You felt it, didn't you? The Hellbound shudder. The doors hesitate."
A corpse in the front row nods. Its neck snaps back into place halfway through.
"Yes. Of course you did."
She leans forward, violet light leaking from behind her mask like bruised starlight.
"You do not become the Gatekeeper without first being born into thresholds."
The lanterns dim.
The void listens.
"Before the blood. Before the fragments learned how to laugh."
Her voice softens. "Before everything fell apart."
Niriai was born between doors.
Not metaphorically—literally.
The cosmos split open in its second dimension, in a place where space was still deciding how to behave, and from that hesitation came twins.
Niriai.
And Nysaeon.
The moment they existed, reality rearranged itself around them.
Nysaeon screamed—and dimensions answered, folding and unfolding like breath.
Niriai did not cry. She opened her eyes—and every boundary in existence felt it.
She was not loud.
She was not violent.
She was permission.
Where Nysaeon shaped realms, Niriai made them reachable.
Where he wove infinity, she decided who could cross it.
They grew together—twin constants in a young multiverse. He playful, curious, dangerous in the way creation always is. She precise, observant, already understanding that every opening is also a wound.
"They balanced each other," Hela says mildly. "Which, of course, meant the universe was doomed."
They met Komus in Qvidire.
Ah—Qvidire.
Second dimension.
Fields of sunstar flowers stretching forever, each bloom glowing like a captured dawn.
Komus stood there like he belonged.
Not claiming.
Not conquering.
Just… present.
He held a bouquet like it embarrassed him.
When Niriai approached—curious, cautious, already aware of the gravity he carried—he didn't bow.
He smiled. Small. Earnest.
And said, "Every girl deserves flowers. Even an Ascendant."
Hela hums appreciatively. "Oh, yes. That was his first sin."
Komus was quiet without being empty.
He listened—not to reply, not to persuade, but because he genuinely cared what someone was becoming while they spoke. His strength never rushed ahead of him. When danger came, he stepped in front of it without announcing himself.
He noticed things.
Forced smiles.
Silences that hurt.
Moments where kindness mattered more than truth.
He protected without trapping.
Loved without owning.
And when he was angry—truly angry—it terrified other gods not because he was loud, but because he had already thought through what he would do…
…and chosen not to.
"A gentle man," Hela sighs, "in a universe that eats them alive."
Niriai noticed.
She pretended she didn't.
Nysaeon noticed too.
He pretended he approved.
When Komus asked for Niriai's heart, the cosmos held its breath.
Nysaeon smiled—a dangerous thing.
"My sister," he said lightly, "does not belong to someone who merely speaks of love."
Reality folded closer, listening.
"If you desire her," Nysaeon continued, "cross every realm she has ever created. On foot. No portals. No shortcuts."
A pause.
"Only then will you understand distance."
Infinite realms.
Time running backward.
Worlds made of grief.
Realities where memory devoured identity.
Galaxies collapsing and reforming between breaths.
Komus bowed once.
And began to walk.
He aged centuries in moments.
Forgot his name.
Died.
Unmade.
Reassembled by will alone.
And every step—
Niriai watched.
She opened every gate he passed through. She could not help him. And every wound he suffered carved something open in her that had never existed before.
After eternity folded in on itself, Komus reached the Final Gate.
It did not lead anywhere.
So he made one.
With his bare hands, he forged a doorway shaped from absence and devotion—a Gate to Nowhere and Everywhere, keyed not to space…
…but to his heart.
Only one soul could pass through it.
Niriai stepped forward.
And for the first time, she felt her own power reflected back at her—not as control.
As love.
When she crossed, she did not travel.
She belonged.
Nysaeon watched.
And blessed them.
"Love," he said softly, "is the only force more infinite than dimensions."
Sixteen children followed.
Architects of movement.
Of passage.
Of elegance.
And Niriai created the Dulajan—servants who chose to serve, who lived lives beyond summons, who dreamed.
Ama was with her first—one Dulajan who painted when she wasn't summoned, who laughed like she'd never seen a throne she respected. Niriai loved that about them. The right to choose. The right to leave
"Ah," Hela muses, "she always believed power should come with dignity. How inconvenient."
She learned early that gates are not only exits—they are shelters.
Then Orhaiah arrived.
Order, given form by the Voice of Hrolyn.
She balanced Nysaeon. Corrected him. Loved him.
Love at first argument.
And then—
Dirjira.
A dimension Nysaeon did not make.
Burning flesh.
Molten despair.
Screams without end.
Atramenta.
Noct.
They cursed him.
Erased him.
Tortured him for sport.
Komus came for his brother.
And was destroyed.
Not killed.
Removed.
His brain. His eyes. His skin. His memory. His existence.
Even the fragments forgot him.
Niriai found what was left of them.
Charred.
Still.
For months she waited.
Nysaeon healed.
Komus did not.
Hela's voice drops. "And that," she says gently, "is why Nysaeon will never accept the one who walks in his body now."
Because the Komus who earned his blessing is gone.
What remains is an echo wearing borrowed flesh.
That is why she placed Lexen's mind into Komus's body later—because a shell was unbearable, and hope is a kind of violence too.
She did not choose Lexen to bring Komus back—she chose him because even death failed to teach Beloveds how to stay apart.
Orhaiah refused to let Nysaeon fade.
She traded an eye in Cdasi the realm of memories where Skersaus, the Ascendant of Memory.
Dug through an empty memory river with bleeding hands.
Skersaus said, 'To restore memory, you must surrender one.' Orhaiah's mouth opened—then closed. She wouldn't barter a single moment of him away. So she reached up, and tore free her eye as if pain was just another law to rewrite.
She restored him.
But not everything.
He remembers love.
Not the monsters.
And sometimes—when certain stars align—he stares at nothing.
A scar without a wound.
Niriai knows.
She always knows.
"This," Hela whispers, satisfied, "is why the Gatekeeper does not hesitate."
She leans back.
"Dirjira taught her what gates are for."
That was the moment Niriai learned mercy was a luxury gates could not afford.
And she swore—quietly, eternally—that Atramenta and Noct would never touch another world without her permission again.
"The gate they fear," Hela smiles, "was not born in the Hellbound. It remembers Dirjira."
The lanterns flicker.
"And now," Hela smiles, sharp and delighted, "you've seen the warning."
A pause.
"Next," she says lightly, "we open the floor."
The stage darkens.
Somewhere in the Hellbound—
Daviyi steps forward—unaware that the Hellbound does not test strength next, but belief.
And the dead lean in.