Samael stood in the broken clearing, wind tearing through the torn branches, light still bleeding in jagged arcs through the atmosphere.
Her hands throbbed with heat from the remnants of the shattered halo, her chest rising and falling as the weight of what had just occurred began to sink in. Kivas knelt among the fragments of her wings, sobbing in golden streaks that melted into the soil.
But it wasn't the end yet,
The divine pressure hadn't dissipated. The ground around Kivas' body vibrated with a rising current, a twisting cyclone of raw essence spiraling out from her core. Samael could see it—not physically, but within the soul-layer.
Threads of fate-weaving energies flailed in every direction, tangled and breaking against one another. Each one screamed instability.
Kivas' body was resisting collapse only by reflex, but her soul had begun to unravel into recursive loops, sparking flashes of transcendent structure inside her Well of the Soul.
"How troublesome…"
Samael's eyes narrowed. She knew how to end a Fateling. Cut the wings. Sever the halo. Break the anchors. Or better, immediately go in for annihilation. She knew how to prevent apotheosis. But she had never tried to preserve one intact with sanity.
This instability right before her would either devour Kivas entirely or erupt again in another chaotic surge that she might not survive a second time.
The wingless angel trembled as she knelt, arms cradled around herself. Her voice was small, crushed under the weight of everything, barely pushing past her lips.
"Everyone leaves me…"
Samael stepped closer, cautious, silent.
"They always leave… no matter what I do."
The voice cracked, splintered with a sorrow so intimate it struck through the divine static around her.
"They always… leave, and I need to do everything myself.. alone…"
Samael tilted her head slightly. This wasn't a divine frenzy. This was grief. Her emotions weren't disjointed—they were focused, buried deep and erupting in response to some spiritual pain that the apotheosis had triggered.
"Tormenting emotion, the negativity, it resonates with the instability." Samael's gaze lingered on Kivas' bent posture, her weakened shoulders, her fractured sobs. "...This might give me a clue on how to proceed forward."
Samael's fingers twitched. She remembered the tool. A simple skill, one she'd shown Kivas out of boredom. A hunch, a theory. Yet with the right pressure, it became a weapon, a thread, an all encompasing lifeline.
She crossed the distance in a breath.
Her fingers grasped Kivas' trembling hand.
"Please connect!"
Attaching one soul to another is greatly demanding, regardless of the wisdom and experience. At this point, Samael barely had enough Mana Psyche to create a stable connection.
But maybe, just maybe.
If the praise about her being a fated soulmate to Kivas, maybe a resonance will be made regardless of the catalyst.
Samael reached inward and began casting the link, the simplest and most underestimated skill in the soul arts—Soul Entanglement.
And then, a latch. A gentle clasp of one existence to another.
The world around her blurred.
"... Where am I?"
Samael found herself to be no longer in Fathomi.
A low, stale wind passed over her. Her sole pressed against a strange stone, tiled and smooth. The air carried a chemical burn, a sterile sterility unnatural to the forests of Vaingall.
A sea of black-clothed strangers stood beneath a flat gray sky. Faces downturned, conversations murmured in quiet monotony.
In front of the group, two long rectangular boxes rested atop metal stands, each draped in white with framed pictures above them—one of a woman, one of a man. Their expressions held fixed smiles.
And in front of them, alone, knelt a tiny child.
Samael stepped forward. No one turned to acknowledge her. No one saw her. Her form moved through them like smoke.
The child trembled, fists clenched at her sides, sobbing violently into the silence.
"What…?"
The child's face was obscured—no features, just a black void, as if her soul had never completed its shape.
"They say it was a double suicide," muttered a man nearby. "The parents planned to bring their daughter with them, poisoning her lunch before they went and hanged themselves. What kind of parents is that!?"
"Thankfully, she didn't eat it," added another. "The child has some sort of eating disorder. And by sheer luck, she didn't touch her food at school."
"I say that this is the worst circumstance. The parents had a massive debt, and now that mountain of burden is being inherited by the poor child."
Samael's fingers twitched as she looked at the girl again. A hollow shell. The noise of grief clashed with the muttered pities around her, like two realities competing.
Then unnaturally, the faceless child stared at Samael, as if the child could see her.
The scene immediately melted, transforming into another.
"Huh, it's a clear sky."
Stone gave way to concrete, high above a cityscape. The wind blew colder now. Samael stood atop a tall structure, looking down at endless streets and moving lights.
Beside her stood a teenage girl.
Her hoodie draped loosely over her thin frame. Black hair spilled messily down her shoulders. Her hands clutched the railing, and her knees shook as she leaned forward. Her expression showed no panic—only exhaustion, and something far worse, resignation.
Samael noticed a familiarity in this teenager's face.
This person was a teenage Kivas.
Her mortal form, before Fathomi.
"I should've jumped months ago," she muttered as she looked down. "But I have a job now at least. I'm not twenty yet, maybe I can pay it all until I got into my thirty."
She exhaled sharply, laughing once, bitter and hopeless.
Then she stepped back from the edge.
The world blinked again.
And it happened again, and again, and again.
Slowly and surely, Samael began to uncover her own so-called soulmate, her story, her emotion, her reasons for existing.
What should have felt like years and years of Kivas' compilation at her lowest, was a mere fraction of Samael's lifetime.
Samael knew how to empathize and construct a relation, feeling the emotion of the lower kind. However, she never really felt their emotions.
But in this case, there was a single vibrant emotion that was lingering in Samael's heart.
Her pity for this human she had just observed.
However, this very pity should soon bloom into something brilliant and warm.
In a smooth realization, Samael's consciousness returned to the shattered grove.
Kivas stood with quite the distance, her wingless form vibrating with divine tension.
Her eyes had returned to the hollow glow. Her tears had dried into heat. Her skin cracked with luminous sigils spreading across her body like crawling fractures in porcelain.
Divine equations spun around her head, reality-bending glyphs of unstable holy magic snapping open like jaws and launching projectiles in spiked geometric patterns. Triangles spun into orbiting blades. Fractals turned into spears. Cubes imploded into raw pressure pulses.
"She is restarting her apotheosis…" Samael gallantly stepped forward. "Her feeling of loneliness, the fatigue of carrying her burden without a single person sharing the weight…
"If I can at least soothe that emotion, there might be a chance to calm her divine energy and return her to normal!"
Multiple projectiles were launched in deceptive arcs, all aiming at a single person.
Yet none of them could gauge the true distance of their paths.
"In her world, there I learned so many gestures of true affection, appreciation, and assuredness." Samael's legs burned as she closed the gap, dashing through collapsing loops of spiraling spellwork. "Yet she receives none of them, or at least their utmost genuine form of intimacy."
The moment Kivas saw her approach, she sent three more kinetic triangles toward her face. Samael slid underneath them, spun into a jump, and reached the girl's shoulder with her hand.
The divine energy tore at her skin.
Still, she leaned in.
She grabbed Kivas fully with both hands, pulling her close.
"All or nothing!"
Samael then pushed her face forward, slamming a passionate kiss.