The lad turned his eye upon the distant lands beyond.

Artemis, the City that gated the Ragnarok and protected the lands of the South-East from its myriad beasts, stood tall.

There was water running freely through every duct in every street, and white stone walls barred entry from the border side.

The boy, Rapture, half closed his eyes at the sight of it.

Days had passed since he’d come to this spot, and yet the scenery never ceased to catch his eye.

There was the city standing at the bottom of a cliff inside of a pass and bordered by the water.

The thing never failed to remind him of the only counterparts he’d known in this world.

He thought of Saturn, but then of Venus, and then his gaze turned cold.

According to Lucretia’s dreams, which he was sure weren’t merely dreams at all, Uriel and his brother had called this place home for many eclipses, and their Lord had apparently contributed to Jupiter’s decimation, which had caused her countless sleepless nights.

Nobody could tell what was behind that cold twinkle in his eye, but it surely wasn’t anything good, no, not at all.

He listened to the forest, to the lurking beastly shadow that stalked them each and every night.

That beast, the Scylla, was too big to pass through the places they ventured, it could never catch them, despite its persistent pursuit.

That was, of course, the whole point of the thing.

He turned his gaze to the golden hawks who combed the sky, haunting the beast with their eyes.

After that, then he turned on his heels and came back to the place where tonight his head would rest.

Old ruins marked the forest, moss covered and stony, pyramid-like in shape.

He peered upon the works of a bygone era, for he was never quite able to relax inside its walls, no matter how many nights they bid to rest within them.

His wandering eye then found the Princess, Lucretia, who with torch in hand was brushing dust and debris from the murals and the markings.

He stepped forward, a hawk landed on the stone by his side and then marked him with its eye.

“Uriel was here, recently, in relative terms,” Said the Princess half in a trance.

She didn’t look at Rapture, didn’t really need to, at least at first.

Only when it occurred to her how rude it was to spy him through her familiars alone as she conversed did she bid to amend that blunder.

“My apologies,” She said.

The man didn’t reply, he stood stock still, staring back at her in silence.

Only after a while did he eye the murals she’d brushed off.

What they portrayed wasn’t unfamiliar to him, he’d seen them already, once or twice.

There was a man kneeling to a God, and that God held a gemstone over the man’s head.

The young man’s eye glanced then upon the Princess’ bosom with both worry and unease.

He allowed several emotions to spiral his chest, it must've marked his expression as well for Lucretia clenched her hand over the gemstone laying hidden in the canyon between her two breasts.

She was too distracted to care about his gaze, or maybe she’d just gotten accustomed to it?

Her earlier proposal for him to become a Lord and therefore have the status to make himself fit to wed her might have also played a hand in her lack of a guard.

‘If I said that you could marry a Princess...would you then be willing?’

Those words came back to his mind often regularly, just as they did now, and he forced the thought to scatter.

He thought it best not to have such desires, it was dangerous to risk crossing a threshold from which one could not turn back.

Perhaps he’d revisit the subject another day, but he did not have the luxury to even dream of it under the current circumstances.

He returned to the mural, where the next image depicted the praying mortal being now becoming encased in a cocoon of the gemstone’s light.

After that, he emerged, now like the god, but smaller, weaker and in bondage to his chosen patron.

“Einherjar,” Muttered Lucretia, and Rapture nodded in turn.

The pair of them knew enough by now to identify the mural's purpose.

The thing was depicting the birth of a newborn member of the Yggdrasil Race.

The illustration showed how they were born from the Ash of a chosen human, which was then added to by the Ash of the Beacon and the surrounding fallen.

The result was something whose core identity favored the chosen mortal, but whose outer layers of “self” were painted by the fragments of those other things.

Whether this could count as a perpetuation of life, an afterlife or just some profane imitation of life, neither he nor she could really say for certain.

The murals went on then to depict the parent god changing its form three times.

Firstly, of course, he appeared human but at all times a heavy cloud stood over him.

This image was centered by three others, which spread out in a widening spiral to show progress from the center to the three other states at the closest right, furthest north and middling left points.

The aforementioned right most image then was a kind of crawling creature.

The cloud above had vanished, most likely its mass had been added to form this larger body of mass.

These crawling creatures, with long bodies and many legs, wings and tails, were stated by Uriel’s memories to be the forms of the weakest and least evolved among the Vanir Gods.

That is to say that both then and today the 256 Leser Vanir all still had the power to only take this form, and so the term could be deemed synonymous with that appearance altogether.

The next image then must surely be that of the 81 Middling Vanir.

Lucretia recalled it well, for she’d seen that shape in her dreams.

These were the shapes of the Gods extant in Elain Markus’ memory, and hence, their form made sense to her.

They were multi-armed, multi-winged, sometimes faceless, and sometimes oddly faced, humanoid torsos whose legs were replaced by spherical masses akin to the blazing sun in the sky.

Uriel’s memories, as well as Elain’s, supplied her with far too many references for both of these forms.

The final depiction however was wholly outside of her knowledge.

The thing was like a half formed moon; a sphere which was clearly incomplete.

Today, Uriel’s memories told her that only the Nine Greater Vanir had that hideous form.

From that, threads binding the other three shapes protruded downward.

The image of Alfheim flashed through her mind; the image of Grimnir, who was the moon, and his Einherjar, who were so mighty as to take the same forms as the lesser and the middling Vanir.

Yet beyond all of that, the spiral ended and the trail led off into a new and final depiction, a depiction of that once half formed moon complete and wandering through a sea of twinkling objects.

“Those are...stars,” Muttered Lucretia, “We can’t see them because our continent only ever faces the sun...but if you lived in Jotunheim.”

The young man behind her gave a nod of comprehension.

He was no scholar, of course, but once armed with all of the knowledge she espoused he could hardly fail to infer the basic purpose of the mural, at any rate.

Lucretia’s gaze however was lured away by something else.

She spied the metal cities and steel birds which also moved among that sea of stars.

Unlike Uriel, who flew into a panic at the sight of these images, she fell into a fury, albeit very briefly.

That fury had not been her own, however, and that is why she pushed it down with all her effort.

She was not surprised by the intrusive emotion either, for those very images belonged to the same metal things that had escaped from Elain Markus’ dying world.

They were the arcs and cities that had carried the chosen ones into the stars and had left her and the other tainted to die with the ruin.

For Uriel, this mural depicted the utter hopelessness of her former vocation.

For Elain, it must have depicted the utter unfairness of her abandonment to a dying wasteland.

Yet, for her, for Lucretia, it was proof of only one thing: that her dreams were real, they weren’t just figments of her subconscious.

That someone named Elain Markus really had existed, she really had seen these sights, and her memories were still alive in the Ash.

She stepped forward, her boots clapped down on the stone as she stroked her fingers over the murals.

What was depicted next was the death of the planet, the large round sphere from which metal birds had fled alongside the fully evolved Vanir shattered and then something emerged form its husk in abandon.

Her steps ceased, and eyes opened wide.

The moment she saw that image, it appeared before her and then once again, she was in the body of Elain Markus, watching through her eyes as her old world died.

The Vanir who had failed to evolve bellowed out in shrieks of terror, but none could escape it.

The planet crumbled, whole continents cracked, and then the whole mantle was shed like an egg shell as the thing emerged.

Adorning its head was a set of massive horns, two of them, which bordered its tendril-like hair.

The body looked vaguely human, it had a chest and torso.

The lower abdomen turned into a long tail which extended like a serpent into the void.

The thing did not have arms nor did it have legs, it might’ve made them if it needed to, but there would be no purpose in the act.

Then at last did it open its eyes; a sound echoed into the void and resounded in the hearts of the many scattered Vanir.

The Countless Crawlers and their airborne superiors flailed in the darkness and cried out in terror.

They were scattered with the dust of the dying planet, but they did not die.

The sound washed over them, it was a signal, a command.

Their struggle ceased, their forms melted, rounded, and they moved into orbit around the newly born Aesir.

After that a second signal saw each sphere erupt into a sea of branch-like limbs that groped into the void.

Like that then the Vanir who had failed in their ascension became the limbs of the Aesir, in just the same manner that the Einherjar had served them now they became its slaves once again.

The third “signal” was soundless, it echoed so through the quiet sea of stars.

The newborn Aesir used that to congratulate those Vanir who had escaped the dying world.

Then the Aesir left, it moved on its way towards the sun, burning bright and blue, together with its countless kin off in the distant vastness of their native solar system.