When the world was to end in darkness, she smiled and set alight the starless night with a heart so remarkably bright. When entire kingdoms lay helpless in the face of calamity, she chose to fight. When a god descended to erase humanity from Helios, she alone stood before him, more fearless and proud than any other hero's might. Impossibility to her was merely a suggestion, for she could do anything.
With her dying words, she said:
"A life free from fate. That was, and always has been, the path I desired to follow. Burn bright now and forevermore, my love, my smile, my humanity. Fight back, for this is my gift to you."
She was Xinyu Ma, The Merchant of Joy, and she changed everything when she killed a god.
On that day, the sky had darkened across the entire Helios continent. The elder god Sango, larger than three mountains, walked upon the Southland deserts and intended to end everything in a single swing. Humanity's existence should have been perpetuated in that eternal darkness, yet it was washed away with an ocean of light just minutes later. Xinyu's creed, heard and felt by every single mortal soul in the world, was shown in a universal waking dream everyone experienced at once.
But it was no dream.
News of the Eastern girl's exploits spread like wildfire and turned the world on its head in the span of a night. A mortal legend had been born, inspiring hope to an uncertain humanity and paving the way to new possibilities, but a dark shadow came in her wake. To kill Sango, an elder god, was not something the rest of the gods would take silently. Xinyu had indeed succeeded in her goal of exposing heaven's secret that gods could die, but that didn't change the fact that humanity lacked the ability to fight them. The only one in history who could have felled them had already relinquished their life to do so.
Zeus. Hades. Odin. Thor. Ogun. Amun-Ra. The most prominent gods of the various heavens convened and met in the Westland heavens above to discuss Xinyu, humanity, and the witch. It was the first time in centuries that divine intervention within the mortal world was to be considered, and while this meeting was well beyond any mortal's knowledge, it would likely determine the fate of all humankind.
Before that, however, the Helios continent itself became a hellfire of political turmoil as the Northland armies prepared to invade the Westlands, which had recently entered a bloody civil war aimed at removing King Arthur as the dominant power in favor of Lionel Jr.
Amid widespread talk of the world's prophetic end, people sought one who could bring them salvation, and while Arthur had done so many decades earlier, he had grown old. His heroics had not been forgotten, but they had certainly lost impact over time, as was the case with many of his other allies, such as Lancelot and Percival. With a need for strong leaders once more, Lionel chose to fill the power vacuum that no one knew existed and brought Arthur's Round Table to its knees and beneath the cold sword of the north.
It wasn't just the Northlands and Westlands at odds, either.
Legions of soldiers marched through a crumbling Kalahari as the disjointed Southlands became a desert of battling factions and sovereign states. The power had always been unstable in those shattered lands and was constantly at odds with itself, but never on a regional scale. Now, amidst the chaos of the world, warlords and governments rushed to seize it all. The casualties throughout the lands began to pile up like mountains of bodies. Not just of soldiers, but civilians too, caught in the brutal mass destruction of faction wars. Some were killed in cities turned into war zones, while others felt the effects of a world at war. Food shortages. Unchecked disease outbreaks. Crime spikes.
Whether it was rebellion, civil war, invasion, or otherwise, each group had its own intentions, but none had the desire to stop.
None could stop.
Despite the world that cracked and crumbled because of her actions, Xinyu became a hero to humankind. She was the kind of legendary figure whom children began to look up to and quickly rose to mythological proportions, as no one had ever imagined someone who could make the impossible possible like her. Yes, she had indeed destroyed the world, but it was a necessary step in creating the future she envisioned. The legacy she had in mind before she died.
That was because her true legacy was not the dying message she announced to the minds of the world, nor was it a plan derived from the prophecies she despised. It was the trust she had in the comrades she left behind. When she first journeyed from the Eastlands, she knew her time was short and thus chose to light the fire in as many people's hearts as she could before it came, because her plan was not a plan at all; it was faith in her fellow humans.
In the end, that was her true legacy. For better or for worse, this was the future she chose.