Aperio frowned at the rune representing the Soul; or more accurately, the ability to read a Soul. It most certainly belonged in this part of the System — it governed the part that let mortals increase the various aspects of their body, after all — but it shouldn't be quite where it was now. It also reeked of Elder God meddling.

"Neat," Caethya mumbled as she placed a piece of a rune she had taken out of the visual representation of the System back. "But it also shows that this is only for my benefit."

"It is not only for yours," the All-Mother replied as she pushed herself onto her toes and grabbed a rune that sat just outside her normal reach. "This is how I view the System; therefore, that is what it is."

Caethya shook her head. "I think it's best if I shelve trying to fully understand it all until I have done some ascending myself."

"It is not hard to understand," Aperio said, turning slightly to look at her love. "What I wish reality to be simply is, if I let myself."

"It's that last part that confuses me a little," her love said. "How do you know you are not always twisting reality to how you want it to be?"

"That is why I made this," the All-Mother replied and nodded towards the piece of the System in front of them. "I am effectively forcing my subconsciousness to behave. If I did not, a lot of things would have gone very differently." I probably wouldn't have been a slave for nearly as long.

She could truly see herself simply awakening with all her powers and memories one day because she had grown tired of her self-imposed punishment. There probably would have been even more death than the ritual that sacrificed her had brought about. And probably no Caethya… That alone would have been bad enough.

"I see," her love replied as she tapped at her chin and simply stared at her. After a moment longer, she simply shrugged. "Well, I am glad you are you and that you are here."

"So am I," Aperio replied, extending a wing to wrap it around the Demigoddess and pull her closer. "But I would prefer you to be right here as well. Perhaps I have need of an assistant."

"We both know that is a poor excuse." Despite her words, Caethya let herself be nudged along by the feathered appendage.

Aperio lightly touched her chest and looked at her love with faux shock on her face. "Do you truly think I would do such a thing?"

"One hundred percent."

"You wound me," the All-Mother said, turning back to the System. "I do, in fact, have a few things here I could use your help with. Mainly, trying to figure out why the Elder Gods would move around the reading of a Soul from its actual place to here."

"What is 'here'?" Caethya asked as she followed Aperio's gaze. "I don't recognise most of what makes up this bit of the System."

"This deals mostly with arbitrating between the perception of the mortal's Soul and everything that they have done so far, in order to figure out if the distribution of attributes has to be changed to fit the person's self-image.

"Now, you might think reading a Soul is important for this," she continued, "but it is not. Well, not in the way it is read here, at least. For whatever reason, this is trying to retrieve every potential action a mortal might take, via the Soul. Information it does not even have; can't have."

"Sounds like they wanted another way to use divination," Caethya said with a small shrug. "And it's not a far stretch to think that a Soul might already know its own destiny. You can perfectly predict the future after all."

Aperio frowned at the words. "Is it truly prediction if I just enforce what I said would come to pass?"

"Well, no, but you don't have to do that to be accurate. You said yourself you can do it."

The All-Mother only grumbled in reply, not enjoying the little reminder of her looming omniscience. There was only one kind of looming she accepted, and that was herself physically looming over someone else. That was fun; knowing everything was not.

"In any case," Aperio said with a slight shake of her head, "they should have realised that it did not work and removed the rune again. At least, I cannot see that it works as things currently stand."

She was about to continue when she noticed another rune connected to the mess the Elder Gods had made. It had been well hidden; obfuscated even. The All-Mother blinked when she realised what it was. Once. Twice. Then she let out a long sigh.

"They did not want to gain the ability themselves, but make it possible for a mortal to gain it." She pinched the bridge of her nose. "And I already know one that it worked on. Certainly explains a lot about why they targeted her family this much."

"Maria?" Caethya guessed.

"Maria," Aperio confirmed. "Her version of this ability is a bit twisted by my blessing, but it would have been powerful despite that. Probably."

She did not know how this little experiment would manifest in a mortal — and neither did she want to peek into Maria's mind — but she wouldn't doubt that it would have been most useful to the Gods. They probably would have loved the focus on me, too. Would have let them know my every move.

It wouldn't have helped them much as she was still the All-Mother, but it certainly could have enabled them to commit vastly larger amounts of random shenanigans. Shenanigans she would have had to deal with. A lot more death, was her best guess.

"How does that work, though?" Caethya asked. "It seems a bit… weird that just reading something from a Soul would make the person born from it capable of seeing the future? That doesn't seem all that connected to me, if I am honest."

"Usually, that would be true," Aperio replied with a nod. "But in this case, they are asking the System to effectively figure out what might be the best fit for this specific Soul in the future — which requires foresight — and then bind it to a mortal body at the exact moment the System tries to divine what this person might become."

The All-Mother shrugged. "It is quite obviously not meant to work this way, but it does regardless. Well, did. I am fixing it after all."

"You really did not care all that much in the past, did you?" The words were more of a statement than a question. "Makes sense though, as you only wanted to stop yourself from erasing things due to being slightly annoyed at them."

"I still could have paid it a bit more mind. Mortals depend on this and it is a poor excuse for a System. Broken on a fundamental level."

"Not quite broken," her love argued. "It does work, after all."

"That is debatable," Aperio replied. "It technically does, yes, but the way it currently works is by no means acceptable. It is riddled with things like this"—she gestured towards the bit of the System—"that are so easily exploitable and fundamentally broken.

"How many other things are lurking in here, things that mortals have grown used to over the last millennia, that should never have existed in the first place?" the All-Mother asked. "How many of Epemirial's hair-brained schemes were actually implemented?"

Her shoulders slumped as she let out a long sigh and mumbled to herself. "Perhaps I should simply fix this instantly? It is important, after all…"

"And what are the chances you will do something you don't like once you make yourself a little more mortal again?" Caethya asked, once again stabbing a finger into Aperio's stomach. "I think you should just continue doing what you are doing now. It's not like time means much for either of us. If time is even passing at any appreciable rate in the mortal world, anyway."

Aperio tilted her head and glanced at her love. "I did not stop time, if you meant that. But we could spend a good while here before a day would pass on Verenier."

"No rush then," her love said with a smile. "Plenty of time for you to slow down and fix this in a way that you actually enjoy. And — maybe even more importantly — that you can understand in a few more millennia when you inevitably want to switch things up again."

The All-Mother did not reply, but she knew Caethya was at least a little right. At the moment, she just wished to be done with this and wander around Verenier. But if she fixed this properly now, any future change would be easier.

"Perhaps we should schedule a visit with Maria when we are done here," Aperio said after a while. With a thought, she also removed the Soul rune from this part of the System. Though divination was nice, she would much rather have a proper implementation of the ability. And even then, any form of future-predicting would have to rely on her own ability to do the same; a skill that the All-Mother was still uneasy about having.

 

"I'm sure she will be happy about seeing you again," Caethya said, her eyes fixed on the System as it rearranged itself around the new runes Aperio placed inside it. "Probably shouldn't tell her about the Elder Gods being responsible for her abilities, though. I have a feeling she wouldn't handle that all that well just yet."

"She would not, but she is also still a child," Aperio said before she looked up. The direction was arbitrary, but if she wanted Verenier to be in that direction, it would be. "I will, however, tell her father. There is a chance that what remains of Vigil's or Inanis’ church will try to go after them again, and I believe it prudent to inform him of that possibility." And then keep an eye on them and disappear anyone who tries anything…

She shook her head lightly and looked back at the System. There was still much to do and her desire to not do it all at once still outweighed her annoyance at all the idiotic changes the Elder Gods had wrought. Her old self truly had a knack for only picking the worst people to uplift into Godhood.

An idle wave of her hand caused the current part of the System to fold in on itself and vanish, only to be replaced by yet another one that had been tampered with. "Why is it that they always tried to predict the future or mess with Souls even more than they did before I vanished?" She glared at the fractally unfurling piece of her System. "Was it not enough to force people to follow you?"

"Apparently not," Caethya replied, tapping at one of the runes that had been a little haphazardly attached to the rest of the System. "Is this species selection?"

"It is indeed." Aperio nodded. "And most of this is not something I made. The basics were simply reading a Soul and then assigning it whatever the System thought would suit it best." She looked around the mess of runes, trying to understand why this would be needed. "I see… They wished for more mortals to be born on Verenier, so they simply put a Soul in any body available."

"What happened before if a Soul wanted to be an Elf but every Elven child already had one?" her love asked. "Did they just get thrown to a different world?"

"The prospective Soul would be returned to my Void and try again later." Aperio tilted her head slightly to the side. "It's not the best way to go about it in the first place."

The best solution was to just throw out the whole thing and let the Verenier System — or any other world's, for that matter — provide a list of available bodies to her Void, where she could create something that found suitable Souls and sent them on their way. It would solve the issue of a Soul not finding a body, as well as not forcing it to be something it does not want to be. And result in fewer mortals giving birth to a child without a Soul…

"Why did I do it like this in the first place?" Aperio asked, mostly of herself. "It just seems… cruel to effectively guarantee the birth of a dead child for many mortals."

"I was about to ask what would happen if — for some reason — a child would be born without a Soul," Caethya said, her voice a little more subdued. "I'm glad you are not like that anymore…"

"So am I."

She looked at the piece of the System governing Verenier's population one more time before a thought removed it all. A replacement would definitely be better. Much better.

Another thought caused reality to bend and a new set of runes to appear. She added more and more, forming an increasingly complex pattern of interlocking symbols. The runes shifted, changing their own shape as they could not be properly contained by the physical reality Caethya and herself currently inhabited.

At the same time, another flex of her mental muscles began creating another part of her System with a connection to her Void. If, on Verenier, it worked as she wanted it to, she would probably change every world over to this new System function. They are currently all a little bit fucked up at the moment…

Her implementation of multiple realities had already rippled out to quite a few planes, but there were many aspects of the reflections that she had not yet touched. Her light touch had only changed as much as needed to allow the multiple instances of a world to exist side by side.

The All-Mother began to hum a tune she had overheard on Earth to herself as her love stepped next to her and wrapped an arm around her waist. Caethya's eyes were fixed on the ever-changing runes in front of them, totally absorbed in the act of creation… almost like Aperio herself.

With a small smile, Aperio added a few more runes and draped a wing over her love. One day, they would create something together. One day.