The air in the room was thick with the scent of night-blooming flowers, a perfume so heavy it felt like a physical presence. It clung to the silk sheets, to the velvet curtains, to the very walls of the Babel Tower suite. At its center, drowning in that fragrant sea, lay Freya.
Her white nightgown was a whisper of fabric, a careless drape that traced the landscape of her body—the gentle swell of her breasts, the subtle curve of her hip—before pooling around her on the massive bed. Her silver hair, unbound, spread across the pillows like a river of moonlight. But her eyes, the color of liquid amber, were fixed on the ceiling, seeing nothing.
A soft sound escaped her, a tremor in the perfumed silence. "Fufufu."
The chuckle grew, a low, private melody that filled the empty space. "Ha ha ha."
Freya laughed, a genuine, heartfelt laugh that shook her shoulders. She wasn't seeing the ornate ceiling. She was seeing him. A mortal, his soul a star dropped into the mud. It hadn't just shone; it had blazed. For an eternity she had wandered a world painted in shades of grey, and then, in an instant, he had set it on fire. The dull ache of endless years had, for a breathtaking moment, been replaced by a furious, beautiful warmth.
"Ahhh," she sighed, the sound a caress. "My Ódr. You finally came."
The smile that had graced her lips, a genuine, rare thing, faltered. The memory shifted. The fire in her chest turned to ash.
Why did you run?
The desperate image of him fleeing, of her reaching out and grasping nothing but air, flooded back. The world, so briefly brilliant, dimmed again. The smile vanished, wiped clean by the cold hand of rejection. The goddess of beauty lay still, a perfect statue carved from loneliness.
Knock. Knock.
The sound was gentle, but in the profound silence, it was a thunderclap.
Freya didn't move. "Who?" Her voice was flat, the echo of her laughter gone.
"It's me, Freya-sama. Mia."
A flicker of life returned to her eyes. The goddess sat up, the silk sheets whispering against her skin. With practiced, elegant movements, she smoothed her hair, straightened her gown, and composed her features into their usual mask of serene indifference. It took only a moment to rebuild the fortress. "Enter."
Mia Grand stepped in, her usual stoic demeanor firmly in place.
Without turning from the window she now faced, Freya asked, "Mia. Is it done?"
"Yes, Freya-sama. Everything went smoothly." A pause. "Though I doubt I'll ever understand the mind of an old man like Zeus."
"That is of no consequence." Freya's gaze remained fixed on the city lights far below. "And her?"
"Goddess Hera did not take kindly to what Lord Zeus has done. She is... displeased." Mia smiled bitterly as she spoke.
"It is not our concern. I bound a favor to them both. What they do with it is their own affair." Finally, Freya turned. Her amber eyes, sharp and perceptive, immediately caught the tension in her executive's posture, the way her hands were clenched at her sides. "What is it, Mia?"
Mia swallowed, a rare crack in her composure. "My... my apologies, Freya-sama." She bowed her head, unable to meet that piercing gaze. "But I wish to leave the Familia."
The temperature in the perfumed room seemed to plummet. The silence that followed wasn't empty; it was heavy, a held breath before a storm. When Freya spoke, her voice was deceptively soft, a velvet glove over a steel blade.
"Should I ask why?"
It wasn't a question. It was a demand. And in that single, chilling sentence, the true weight of the goddess's loneliness and her desperate, possessive grip on anything that brought her light was laid bare.
====x====
The midday sun over Orario was a liar.
It painted the white marble of the balcony in cheerful gold, while below, the city's soul was a churning river of grey. From their vantage point high above the main thoroughfare, two goddesses watched the uneasy tide of humanity flow past.
The recent announcement, its contents still buzzing in the air like a struck gong, had stripped the smiles from every face. Children clutched their parents' hands with white-knuckled grips, and the usual boisterous calls of merchants were replaced by hushed, worried murmurs.
On the balcony, the silence between the two immortals was a heavy tapestry, woven with the threads of a shared, unspoken history. The news had traveled faster than any bird: the Zeus and Hera Familias, the twin pillars of Orario's might, were gone. Wiped out. Their gods, blamed for awakening the One-Eyed Black Dragon and bringing ruin to the kingdom of Fultone, had been cast out, banished from Orario.
"I don't know if I should be happy, or sad, Astraea."
The voice, soft and laced with a melancholy confusion, belonged to Artemis. She had arrived in the Labyrinth City only that morning, her path crossing with her dear friend's by what could only be called divine coincidence.
Astraea, the goddess of justice, offered a smile that didn't quite reach her violet eyes. She understood the conflict within her friend perfectly.
"As the goddess of justice," she began, her voice calm as a still lake, "I can see the scales find their balance when evil is punished for its crimes."
She gestured with a subtle nod toward the street below, where a father hoisted his daughter onto his shoulders, his own smile a fragile, forced thing. "But the mortals… they placed their hope in those Familias. They dared to believe the monster could be slain. Fate, it seems, was not so kind to that hope."
Artemis followed her gaze, her silver hair stirring in a warm breeze that did nothing to dispel the chill in the air. "I feel it, Astraea. A change. It's like the calm before after the storm. Our time here is drawing close."
Astraea turned, her brow furrowing in surprise. This was not the Artemis she knew—the eternal huntress, focused solely on her sacred vow and the wilds beyond the city walls. "That's… a surprising thing to hear from you, Artemis. Does it have something to do with that rather large crate you had your followers hauling? The one you nearly started a diplomatic incident over at the Guild?"
A faint blush, the first crack in Artemis's melancholic demeanor, touched her cheeks. "That's… part of it." She took a breath, as if steadying herself for a great hunt. "Astraea… do you remember Phoebe's prophecy? About me?"
Astraea's mind sifted through centuries of memories. Phoebe, the Oracle of Delphi, a being whose words, though often cryptic, were never wrong. And then it hit her. The prophecy. The one about Artemis finding a man—a specific, fated man—who would make the eternal huntress, the sworn maiden, fall in love.
Astraea's composed warmth vanished. Her eyes widened, and her mouth fell open in a most un-goddess-like gape. She reached out, pressing a cool hand to Artemis's forehead.
"Don't tell me… you, of all the goddesses?" Her voice was thick with disbelief and a sudden, genuine worry. "Are you feeling well, Artemis? Did something in the Dungeon affect you? Have you been sleeping?"
Artemis gently but firmly pushed her friend's hand away, a flicker of annoyance in her celestial eyes. "I am not sick, and I am certainly not crazy." She pouted, a remarkably human expression on a divine face. "Is it so strange for me to even talk about romance?"
Yes. Yes, it was.
Astraea vividly remembered the day Phoebe's prophecy was delivered. The great hall had fallen silent as the words hung in the air. For the first time in eons, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, the untamed, the untouchable, had been rendered utterly speechless.
"If Phoebe's words are coming to pass…" Astraea began, her voice soft but insistent, "it means you would have to set aside your vow of purity. That is not a simple matter, Artemis. It is the core of your Divinity."
Artemis's jaw tightened. The tales of other goddesses who had abandoned their clarity were woven into the cautionary tales of Heaven. None more so than Ariadne.
"Ariadne was an idiot," Artemis muttered, the old, familiar dismissal.
"She may have been," Astraea conceded, pouring herself a cup of wine from a nearby pitcher and watching the deep red liquid swirl. "But her feelings were genuine. Her love was real. She suffered, yes, terribly so." She took a slow sip, her gaze distant. "But you are aware of how happy she was. I met her, you know, when she returned to Heaven. There was a change in her, a… softness. A light that hadn't been there before. When I asked if she regretted it, do you know what she said?"
Artemis shook her head, her pride warring with a flicker of morbid curiosity.
Astraea leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "She looked at me with the most peaceful eyes I have ever seen on a returning soul and said, 'Not for a single, solitary moment. It was worth the world.'"
The words hung in the air, heavier than the news of the fallen Familias. Artemis felt a strange, unfamiliar tightness in her chest. She thought of Ariadne, of the love so powerful it could make a goddess surrender her very divinity. A tear, unbidden, traced a warm path down her cool cheek. She quickly wiped it away.
"…She was still an idiot," Artemis whispered, her voice thick with sobs she couldn't quite suppress.
Astraea couldn't help it. A small, warm giggle escaped her, breaking the tension. It was the exact same thing another certain goddess, a loner with hair of gold, had said when Astraea had told her the very same story.
The laughter faded, and the two goddesses turned back to the city below, their own futures now seeming as uncertain and turbulent as the river of humanity flowing beneath them. The calm before the storm had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.
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