Ashikai did not remember pain like this.
Not the sharp kind. Not the kind that screamed and bled.
This pain was absence.
He walked through the palace corridors as dawn crept over stone towers, every step feeling slightly wrong—as if the world had shifted a fraction to the left and he had not moved with it. His paws touched the ground, yet something vast inside him no longer answered.
He reached instinctively for it.
Nothing.
His tail dragged.
So it's really gone, he thought.
The Nine Heavens had not been a dream. His father's voice had not been an illusion. And what had been sealed—locked forever—had once been the core of his being.
Ashikai was not born a fox.
He had never been meant to walk on four legs.
Before fur, before claws, before this fragile little body that could bleed and bruise, he had been Ashael of the Ninth Choir.
A seraph.
Not a minor one. Not a messenger.
A warden.
In the age before demon kings ruled thrones and fate required patchwork repairs, Ashael had been created to guard the weave between realms. Where heaven brushed against the mortal world. Where divine law softened into choice.
His wings had been gold and white, burning at the edges like dawn breaking through storm clouds. His voice—ah, his voice—had once commanded storms to pause, threads to hold, time itself to hesitate.
He had stood beside Fate once.
Not as servant.
As balance.
Seraphs did not rule. They maintained. They watched. They corrected small deviations before they became catastrophes.
And Ashael had been very good at it.
Too good.
He saw patterns others ignored. Fractures before they split. He noticed when mortals resisted where they were meant to obey.
And he noticed something else.
That resistance mattered.
The first time he intervened improperly, it was small.
A girl who should have died in a flood.
A boy meant to grow cruel, who instead was given one moment of mercy.
Each time, the heavens corrected the deviation.
Warnings were issued.
Ashael, remain impartial.
Ashael, do not interfere.
But the fractures kept coming.
And one day, he saw her.
Not Lena—another incarnation. Another lifetime. Same soul-thread.
Unmarked.
Unblessed.
Unimportant.
Yet she stood against a tyrant and said no.
Ashael had felt it then—something wrong and right all at once.
This soul did not follow the weave.
It pulled at it.
He had protected her.
Once.
Twice.
A thousand times across lifetimes, nudging fate just enough so she might reach another crossroads.
And that was the crime.
Seraphs were forbidden to choose sides.
Especially not mortal ones.
When the council discovered his interference, they summoned him before the Radiant Throne.
His father—Soltherion, Voice of the First Light—had spoken the sentence himself.
"You have confused compassion with rebellion."
"I have confused obedience with cruelty," Ashael had replied.
That sealed his fate.
They could not destroy him—not a being bound to balance.
So they stripped him.
Wings torn from essence.
Body sealed.
Name erased from the Choir.
His consciousness bound to the lowest, least threatening vessel available in the mortal realm.
A fox.
Clever. Observant. Powerless.
A mockery.
And yet—
They had underestimated one thing.
Even bound, Ashael remembered.
Not clearly. Not fully.
But enough.
Enough to recognize Lena when he found her again.
Enough to know that this time was different.
This incarnation was closer to the breaking point than any before.
Ashikai stopped walking.
He was back near the maids' quarters now, unseen in a shadowed archway.
"I wasn't meant to love her," he murmured to the empty air.
Seraphs did not love.
They observed.
But somewhere between lifetimes and laughter, between corn dogs and defiance, something had gone terribly, beautifully wrong.
He had chosen her—not as a duty.
As family.
That was why his father had come.
Not to save him.
To reclaim a broken asset.
And Ashikai had refused.
His punishment was worse than banishment.
It was finality.
No ascension.
No restoration.
No return to what he was.
The fox body he wore now—once temporary—was permanent.
A mortal lifespan.
A mortal end.
Ashikai exhaled shakily.
"Guess I really am just a fox now," he said, attempting a laugh.
It came out thin.
Yet even stripped of heaven, something remained.
Not wings.
Not divine voice.
But memory.
And memory was dangerous.
Because if Ashikai had once been a warden of the weave…
Then he knew things.
About Fate.
About Kairos.
About the Shadow that called itself ruin.
And most importantly—
About what Lena could become.
His ears twitched sharply.
A pull tugged at him—not divine, not celestial.
Something darker.
The Shadow was aware now.
And it would come for her.
Ashikai turned toward the door to Lena's room, resolve hardening behind his tired eyes.
"Fine," he muttered. "Fox or not."
He would guard her.
He always had.
And if heaven itself had fallen away from him for that choice—
Then heaven had never deserved him in the first place.