Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The new cycle of Amphoreus began not with a bang, nor a prophecy, but with the sound of sloshing bathwater and a scholar screaming into a towel.

After the Black Tide swept away the last threads of the previous era, Amphoreus had returned—restructured, realigned, and rewritten. The stars remained indifferent, glittering above a world that refused to stay dead.

A different timeline.

In this iteration, the Grove of Epiphany stood proud once more: glass observatories hanging from tree-borne bridges, moss-text walls breathing with forgotten formulas, and at its heart, Anaxagoras, the inheritor of Coreflame of Reason, reclined in a steaming mineral bath of his own making—if only he were alone.

“Cerces, for the love of sanity, stop peeking from the ceiling.”

“I am not peeking child,” came the unmistakably smug voice from above. “I am floating. There's a difference.”

Anaxa sank lower into the water, only his nose above the surface now, as if submerging deeper might erase his irritation. It wouldn’t. Not with her here. The former sage of the Grove, now a Titan of Reason, floated upside-down like an aimless paper crane, grinning.

“You could at least pretend to respect the concept of privacy,” Anaxa muttered, reaching for a soap vial as if it might serve as a weapon.

“I could,” Cerces mused, flipping lazily through the air, her beige hair swaying with gravity’s confusion. “But then you’d get bored.”

Despite himself, Anaxa sighed. Cerces had followed him through cycles, storms, and soul-shattering theorems. This reset had spared the world, true—but cursed him with her company intact. Worse still, the other Chrysos Heirs were alive this time, each more eccentric than the last.

And none more perilous than the beige-haired menace currently stretching her arms above her head.

“So,” Cerces said, voice dripping with faux innocence as she touched down lightly beside the steaming bath, her feet barely making a sound against the polished stone floor. “Since you’re using the big bath today... there’s room for two, isn’t there?”

Anaxa’s eyes narrowed. “Cerces. No.”

She tilted her head, untying the first knot of her long, shimmering robe.

“Cerces—!”

“Come now,” she cooed, slowly sliding the robe from one shoulder. “It’s not like I haven’t seen you panic before.”

She purred, letting the robe slip further down her arms, exposing just enough shoulder to be dangerous and absolutely nothing helpful to his blood pressure.

“I—Don’t you dare—!” Anaxa snapped, covering his eyes with one hand as he turned half-away, frantically reaching for the edge of the bath with the other. “Cerces, I swear to all the laws of metaphysics—!”

“Oh no, you’ve gone full academic,” Cerces giggled, stepping forward with a soft pad of bare feet on warm stone. “That means I win.”

“You are a Titan of Reason, not shamelessness!” he barked, scrambling upright in the water, limbs flailing for anything remotely cloth-like. His hand landed on a folded towel at the edge of the bath and hurled it toward her like a makeshift projectile shield. “Have some decency!”

The towel passes through her and hits the floor with a wet flump.

“You are not winning anything,” Anaxa hissed, eyes still shielded as he hoisted himself out of the bath with all the frantic dignity of a scholar fleeing a fire.

“Too late,” she said, voice laced with laughter. “We already share half a soul. Or did you forget?”

He slipped slightly on the bathmat but caught himself, snatching a towel and wrapping it around his waist with excessive urgency.

“You are a perverted ghost of a woman,” he muttered under his breath as he stormed toward the door, dripping, steaming, and visibly vibrating with academic offense. “An unholy union of chaos and flirtation. A menace wrapped in a pretty face and poor boundaries.”

It started with a bath.

Then it became a siege.

Since that ill-fated evening of sandalwood steam and questionable teasing, Cerces, Titan of Reason and self-proclaimed Chaotic Neutral Housemate, had declared a new personal research project: "Observe Anaxa in his Natural Habitat — Constantly."

And she meant it.

By the next morning, the situation had escalated.

Anaxa emerged from meditation to find Cerces already soaking in the bath he’d drawn for himself, completely unapologetic and wearing a crown of soap bubbles like some goddess of bath-time chaos. She waved his copy of On the Layered Nature of Soulfire at him like a fan.

“You said I don’t read enough,” she chirped. “So I’m making improvements. In a moist, aromatic setting.”

He left without a word. Just a flick of his soaked sleeve and a silent scream lodged in his throat.

That had been Day Two.

Day Three found him seated on the toilet — the only place he had assumed she would not follow.

The knock on the door was soft. Too soft.

He tensed.

“Child~?” Cerces's voice cooed from behind the thin wood. “What are your thoughts on shared emotional feedback loops during moments of vulnerability?”

He stared blankly at the floor tiles, pulse rising like a curse. “I am going to destroy the Grove,” he whispered to himself. “Brick by brick. And then salt the foundation.”

By Day Four, he awoke with a start, heart pounding from dreams he would not speak of. Dreams involving sharp needles and golden thread and a certain cold-eyed seamstress.

He turned—and froze.

Cerces was hovering upside down beside his bed, grinning like a mischievous moon.

“Sleep data collected! Did you know you murmur Aglaea’s name in your sleep? Twice. It was very cute.”

He screamed into his pillow.

“Look! Your breathing gets erratic when you enter REM state. I’ve labeled the spikes ‘tsundere denial flares.’”

His only response was to launch the entire pillow across the room.

By Day Five, Anaxa had done what few scholars dared — he fled.

To the mountains. To the edge of the known map. Through a soul-burned barrier, past his own decoy wards, into a cave guarded by his loyal golem.

And still… she was there.

Cerces sat cross-legged by a fire, sipping tea brewed from ice orchids. “You used this escape path three months ago,” she said brightly, patting the stone beside her. “Don’t worry, I brought your anxiety blanket.”

Anaxa didn't speak. He just lay face down in the dirt and wished for death. Or at least, temporary soul deletion.

By the time he returned to the Grove of Epiphany, robes singed and sanity threadbare, he had aged several decades in posture alone. His notes were smudged. His diagrams wobbled. He no longer trusted mirrors or candlelight.

He sat at his desk, twitching slightly, ink blotting his thumb.

“I am being hunted,” he muttered to no one. “Observed. Stalked by a creature with zero shame and infinite time.”

Cerces, seated casually on a shelf above him, sipped from her oversized mug that read #1 Soulmate Researcher. “I call it The Slow Collapse of a Man Too Logical to Love. Working title.”

Day Six arrived not with birdsong, but with the sound of scribbling.

Furious, relentless scribbling.

Cerces awoke—if one could call it that, given she’d been floating midair and watching Anaxa for the past three hours—and rubbed one eye with the back of her hand, only to see him hunched at his workbench like a warlock possessed.

The dim green glow of alchemical lights pooled under his eyes, casting his features into tired shadows and strained intensity. His quill moved with the desperation of a man chased by deadlines that only existed in his own head.

"Let me guess," Cerces yawned. "You're inventing a machine that makes toast and also deletes emotional vulnerability."

No response. Only the sharp clang of a lever being pulled.

Then came the hiss. A familiar alchemical seal. The faint bubbling of enchanted solution.

Cerces leaned forward, perching on a floating crystal shard like a curious cat. Her usual grin faltered slightly.

Something new was being built.

At the heart of the laboratory, surrounded by coils, tubing, and glowing runes, sat a large cylindrical industrial vat, reinforced with darksteel and inscribed with double helix soul-matrix seals. It pulsed faintly with green light—thick and alive, like swamp mist bottled into purity.

Inside it, suspended in that luminous fluid… was something.

Small. Pale. Organic.

At first, Cerces thought it was a malformed mana stone. A clump of matter shaped by accident.

Then it twitched. And she blinked.

“...Is that meat?” she said aloud, eyebrows rising.

No answer.

She floated closer, peering past the condensation frosting the vat. Her breath caught as the shape resolved into something unmistakable.

A curled figure.

A head. Limbs. Spine.

An embryo.

Cerces’ entire posture shifted — from amused to alert. Her eyes narrowed, golden irises glinting with genuine intellect now, not just playful chaos.

“You made a homunculus,” she murmured, almost impressed.

Still, Anaxa didn’t speak. He adjusted a dial on the side of the tank, muttering measurements under his breath. “Stabilize memory substrate. Reduce echo lag in neural webbing… twenty-nine percent dampening…”

Cerces floated beside him now, tilting her head. “So. Who’s it for?”

Anaxa didn’t answer at first. He adjusted a dial on the side of the tank with surgical precision, muttering equations under his breath like prayers. Then, he froze. A low breath escaped him.

Then—

He began to laugh.

Softly at first, a chuckle from the back of his throat. Then it grew — rising into something that echoed off the walls of the lab, manic and unrestrained.

“It’s for YOU!”

Cerces flinched. “O-Oh.”

Anaxa grinned like a man who had cracked the secrets of life, death, and how to finally get five minutes alone.

“YES, CER–CES! For you! A homunculus body! Fully grown! Carefully crafted! You’ll have mass, bones, joints! Glands! You can taste your own chaos instead of projecting it into mine! You'll leave me alone in my sleep!”

He spun back toward the vat, arms wide like a conductor leading a deranged orchestra. “Look at her! My creation! My solution! My glorious peace pact in fleshy form!”

Cerces floated backward slowly, eyes wide. “You’ve cracked,” she murmured. “You’ve officially lost it.”

He turned again, face flushed, veins glowing faintly with overstimulated mana. “I haven’t cracked. I’ve evolved. You made this happen. You and your bedroom hovering and your REM-state evaluations. You broke the final restraint on my soul.”

Cerces looked at the embryo again.

Then, at the man ranting like a prophecy was pouring from his pores.

The,n back at the embryo.

“…You know this is going to backfire spectacularly, right?”

“I accept those terms,” Anaxa said without hesitation.

Cerces sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose now. “Gods. You’re really going to shove my soul into that.”

“No,” Anaxa said with unsettling glee. “You are.”

He pulled the lever.

With a single hiss, the entire Grove of Epiphany trembled.

Every lumen crystal flickered. Candles sputtered. Mana lines across the walls surged once—blinding white—before collapsing into nothing.

And then— Darkness.

Total. Unyielding. Absolute.

.

.

.

He didn’t know how long he’d been floating.

Seconds? Minutes? A whole week lost between soul matrices?

Anaxa’s thoughts returned before his vision did.

The sensation came first — not thought, not clarity, just feeling. His body... was not right.

He was aware of his surroundings in an unnatural, full-bodied way. Every inch of skin was touched—no, suffocated-by something thick and clinging. Warm, viscous fluid pressed against his ears, filled his nose, his mouth, his everything.

Slime. Slime and silence.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. And yet, his mind whirred to life like a clock’s final gear engaging.

"Am I dead?" he wondered. But no. That wasn’t it.

He opened his eyes, slow and reluctant, like lifting stone lids. Green. Blurry, luminous green filled his vision, pressing against his retinas.

The shapes beyond it were warped—tubes, metal limbs, and the faint, flickering edge of the vat. His vat.

The one he built for Cerces.

“…No.”

He tried to move his hand. It responded.

Slowly.

Uncoordinated.

Squishy.

With a wet squelch, his fingers slapped against glass. His own palm—smaller than usual, too smooth—hit the transparent interior of the tank. He tried to pull his knees up and—yes, legs too. Weak. Floating. He drifted like a limp kelp stalk in brine.

Panic began to rise like a broken seal.

He reached for the emergency rune—he always built one inside the chamber just in case—and slammed his hand against it.

A flash. A spark of reaction.

FWOOOSH—!

A burst of arcane pressure ejected the hatch.

Green solution spilled like birthing waters onto the stone floor as Anaxa collapsed outward, coughing, sputtering, gasping like a fish that had seen the face of God and rejected it.

“GAHHH—haahh—!!”

He gagged up a mouthful of soul-infused fluid, then more. He sprawled, dripping, limbs trembling. Every nerve screamed, oversensitive, raw from the transition.

Hair stuck to his cheeks. Every breath burned like mint and shame.

He lay there on the lab floor, drenched and wide-eyed, as the glowstones slowly flickered back to life above him.

He lifted his head. Dragged in a lungful of air.

Looked at his reflection in the fluid puddle beneath him—

—and screamed.

“CER—CES?!”

What stared back was not the man he knew — not the sharp-boned, shadow-eyed scholar with premature wrinkles and elegant spite.

No.

It was her.

His lips.

Her cheeks.

Cerces.

He scrambled backward until he hit the base of the tank, his breath heaving. His voice — when it finally came — was too high, too soft, too playfully melodic.

“No no no no no—!!”

He stared down at his hands, slender, adorned with excessive bangles. He slapped his own cheek. It jiggled. He cursed aloud.

“By all stars, I HAVE BREASTS.”

The door at the far end of the lab creaked. A voice — his voice, calm and disoriented — floated in.

“Ugh. My back hurts. Why is everything so… tall?” Anaxa whipped his head around, horrified.

Because now someone else was wearing his face.

Or rather—his body.

Wearing his robe.

He watched, slack-jawed, as Anaxa looked down at his own hands, frowned, and muttered in his voice: “...I have ankles. Sharp ones. And these knees—why do they feel like they were forged from gravel and spite?”

“No.”

Anaxa’s breath hitched. He scrambled to his feet, nearly slipping in the amniotic sludge on the floor. The body in front of him—his body—now turned to the mirror shard propped against the alchemy bench and inspected itself like it had just discovered mirrors were funny.

Anaxa knew that tone. That wicked lilt. That amused detachment.

Cerces.

Cerces was inside his body. And he was inside hers, literally.

He pointed a wet, trembling finger at her—him—her-in-him—whatever—words failed him.

“You—CER—GET OUT—WHY DO I HAVE BREASTS!?”

The Titan in his skin turned with infuriating calm, tilting his head the same way Anaxa did when assessing chemical residue.

Cerces grinned.

“Oh my stars. Look at me. I look like someone who reads books at funerals.”

“I do not do that!”

She started frowning in the mirror.

“No no—don’t—don’t do that! That’s my thinking scowl!”

Cerces-as-Anaxa hummed thoughtfully. “It’s addictive. Like glaring through your glasses at poor life choices.”

“Those are reading lenses!”

She turned fully to him now—her original body, wet, fuming, and half-covered in a bath towel like a banshee of modesty.

Anaxa wanted to cry.

Instead, he gritted his—Cerces’s—teeth and forced his mind to function.

“You were supposed to go into the homunculus,” he seethed. “Not me. I tuned the soul-thread specifically to your resonance. It was perfect. Symmetrical. Stable.”

“How…”

“You’re in my body!”

“And you're in mine.” She folded his arms—his arms!—across his chest, posture completely relaxed. “We’re soul-roommates now. Isn't that poetic?”

Anaxa screamed. Again. Briefly.

He tried to pace, but the swish of Cerces’s long legs threw him off. Everything felt wrong—his center of gravity, his balance, the way the bangles clinked against his wrists like they were mocking him.

He grabbed a strand of wet hair—far too long, far too shiny—and shook it. “This isn’t real. I’m having a Coreflame-induced coma. That’s it. I’m dreaming. I’m going to wake up. And you’re going to be outside my door saying something stupid like ‘do you dream in diagrams?’”

Cerces, in his body, adjusted his robes and cleared her throat.

Then, with perfect deadpan mimicry, she spoke:

“Hmm. I suppose I shall now compose a thesis on the emotional dissonance of wet socks and female intuition.”

……

The last thing Anaxa remembered was his own voice—or rather, Cerces's voice in his body, declaring something vile about socks and intuition.

That, and the sight of his dignified academic posture being used to smirk like a tavern flirt.

It was too much. And he fainted again.

Slowly after that, he began to wake up.

To warmth.

To softness.

And… to something else.

Something… firm.

Anaxa blinked, eyelids heavy. His head rested on something gently squishy, yet springy beneath the weight of his skull. He sighed, nuzzling a little deeper into it without thinking. His hands, still groggy, shifted forward and—

He felt something.

Still barely conscious, his fingers explored the texture like a scholar testing an unknown surface. He squished. He prodded. It yielded and bounced back. A fascinating study in contrast.

“You’re moving really fast, Child. We haven’t even married yet~”

His eyes snapped open.

There, looking down at him with a wide grin and his own face, was Cerces.

Still in his body.

And he…

He was face-first in her chest.

He didn’t scream.

He ejected.

His entire body launched upward in a pure reflexive escape maneuver — arms flailing, legs curling beneath him like a panicked shrimp fleeing a whale.

“AAAAAAGHHHHHHH—!”

He slammed into a hanging lantern.

Bounced off a bookshelf.

Landed in a pile of dusty alchemical journals with a thud and a plume of glowing powder.

Cerces burst into laughter, clutching her his—stomach.

“Okay, okay—you faint dramatically into me, then wake up and do a soul-grope, and I’m the menace?!”

Anaxa sat up in the wreckage of his notes, hair full of crushed stardust petals, eyes wide with pure spiritual trauma.

“I—I was unconscious! Reflexive contact doesn’t count as intent!”

Cerces winked. “That’s exactly what someone guilty would say.”

“I am a scholar! I do not grope—!”

“You were analyzing my chest like it was an unidentified elemental sample.”

“That is exactly what it was!!”

She leaned down toward him, still wearing his smug grin and his stupidly smug cheekbones.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll keep your secret. After all, what are friends for~?”

Anaxa fell back again, arms sprawled, accepting death.

“Stars above. Kill me now. End this. Smite me where I lie.”

 The towel clung to his—no, her—skin like damp guilt.

Anaxa stared at the mirror again, eyes hollow, towel wrapped tightly around his—ugh—upper torso like it was the last defense against total ego annihilation.

Cerces’s body was warm. Soft. Horribly well-moisturized.

Everything bounced.

“This is a nightmare,” he muttered in her voice. “A flesh-prison designed by irony.”

He stomped—no, wobbled—to the wardrobe and threw it open with all the defiance of a man on the edge. There, mercifully, was the one thing that might offer stability in the midst of chaos:

His Dromas pajamas.

Dark. Modest. Embroidered with elegant constellations and layered like a scholar’s cocoon. Comfortable and unassuming. The armor of a reasonable man.

He yanked them off the hanger and forced Cerces’s limbs into them. It took effort. The sleeves drooped past his wrists. The pants puddled at the ankles. The entire set was built for Anaxa’s original body — long, lean, and severe.

Now, worn on Cerces’s petite and curvier frame, they draped.

They hung off his shoulders like a collapsing curtain, cinched only by panic and spite. The sleeves slid every time he moved. The waistband bunched awkwardly no matter how he tied it.

He looked like a child pretending to be their own father.

Or worse — a blanket ghost, attempting dignity.

Behind him, Cerces (still inhabiting his actual body) leaned against the bookshelf with infuriating ease and said, “Awwww.”

Anaxa turned slowly, eyes twitching.

“What?”

“You’re adorable,” she said, clasping his hands together like she was hosting a tea party. “My body is just so cute when it’s wrapped in five layers of brooding.”

Anaxa refused to dignify that with a response. He stormed across the room, sleeves flapping, hair bouncing, dignity slowly leaking through the floorboards.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” he muttered, pacing like a scholar possessed. “I triple-layered the resonance filters. Soulstream density matched. The memory root lattice was intact. You were the intended core.”

Cerces watched with open amusement as her body circled the room in his voice, low and academic, but distorted slightly by Cerces’s lighter vocal cords.

It was like watching a particularly serious cat trapped in a basket of silk ribbons.

“I even tested the echo chamber runes with a compressed soul worm,” he continued. “There’s no reason the swap would default to the builder without a deliberate override. The synchronization matrix must’ve inverted—no, corrupted—unless…”

Cerces hummed. “It was rejected by the coreflame.”

He froze.

Anaxa turned, eyes wide.

She smiled smugly.

“Ohhhh. Did I just accidentally point out a critical flaw in your design?”

e paled.

Cerces approached slowly, still in his body, hands tucked behind her back in that scholarly posture he knew too well.

“You didn’t build a shell. You built a vessel. And maybe,” she leaned in, whispering like thunder in his ear, “your soul just wanted a place where no one could watch you bathe.”

Anaxa inhaled sharply.

“Don’t psychoanalyze me in my own voice.”

Cerces grinned.

“But it fits me so well, doesn’t it?”

Anaxa yanked his sleeve up, only for it to fall right back down. He growled under his breath and resumed pacing, mumbling to himself like a broken theorem.

“Should I get you some tea?” Cerces offered. “You look very flustered in my skin.”

Anaxa stopped dead in his tracks.

“I swear to the stars, if you touch even one leaf of my jasmine stash, I will end your bloodline.”

Cerces’s grin only grew.

“Oh, darling,” she cooed, “I am your bloodline now.”

Anaxa wailed softly into the oversized sleeve of his own pajamas.

Chapter Text

As if the universe itself had grown tired of giving Anaxa time to scream into sleeves, a knock echoed from the door.

A firm, polite tap-tap-tap, just loud enough to be official. Just soft enough to imply it wasn’t going away.

Anaxa froze mid-pace.

Cerces froze mid-smirk.

The world held its breath.

“…No,” Anaxa whispered.

Another knock.

“Professor Anaxa?” came a bright, familiar voice through the door. “It’s Hyacine. I brought your morning tonic!”

Anaxa spun toward the door, panic setting in like frost. His first instinct was to reply—“Wait a moment!”—but the sound caught in his throat. He remembered, too late, whose voice he now had.

Cerces’s.

If he spoke now, all Hyacine would hear was Cerces’s teasing soprano echoing from his private quarters.

He clamped his mouth shut.

Cerces, meanwhile, turned toward the door like she’d just been handed front-row seats to a comedy opera. She grinned with his mouth — his very serious, very intimidating professor expression twisted into something unnervingly warm.

“Guess I’ll get it, hmm?” she said sweetly.

Anaxa reached out a hand, wide-eyed. “Don’t you dare—”

Too late.

Cerces strolled toward the door with the gait of someone pretending to be serious but absolutely not taking the role seriously.

Anaxa, still in Cerces’s body, dove into the corner of the room, tugging a stack of books in front of him like they were riot shields. “I am not here. I do not exist. I am an ethical crisis wrapped in cotton.”

Cerces opened the door with a flourish.

“Good morning, dear~” she sang, voice smooth and syrupy.

Hyacine blinked up at her beloved professor, bottle in hand. “…Uh.” She tilted her head. “Professor…?”

Cerces tilted his head to match. “Yes?”

There was silence.

Anaxa peeked out from behind his fortress of tomes and horror.

Hyacine narrowed her eyes.

“You’re smiling,” she said slowly.

Cerces raised both brows. “I often do.”

“No,” Hyacine said, stepping in just slightly. “You don’t.”

Cerces leaned on the doorframe. “Oh come now, dearie. A new day! A warm brew! Life is beautiful, isn’t it?”

Anaxa mouthed the words “stop it stop it STOP IT” from behind the shelf.

Hyacine looked positively unsettled. “…Did you finally crack under thesis grading?”

Cerces chuckled, adjusting Anaxa’s collar like a cat fluffing its fur. “Not at all. I’ve simply had a refreshing morning. Did a bit of… reflection.”

Cerces turned, half-facing the room. “Do come in, dear. I was just—”

Anaxa’s soul nearly ejected itself again. “NOPE—!”

He dove behind a towering pile of grimoires with the grace of a panicked street cat. The motion kicked over a stack of enchanted beakers, but he caught them midair—barely—before scuttling into the corner like a guilty spirit.

Think. Think. THINK. He could not let Hyacine see him like this. Cerces’s body. His pajamas. Her towel was still barely clinging to his shoulder like a shame bib. Her bangles jingling treacherously with every breath.

It was a horror and a comedy and a scandal waiting to detonate.

“Do not enter,” Anaxa hissed under his breath. “Do not cross the threshold. I am not here. I am a hallucination. A fever dream from the tea shop.”

But Cerces, the infernal, delighted menace, simply stepped aside in his body and gestured with a too-sweet smile. “Come in, darling. It’s fine!”

Anaxa’s soul screamed internally.

Hyacine hesitated at the door, brow furrowed. “Professor... are you sure? You sound... different.”

“Oh, I’ve been working on self-reflection,” Cerces replied cheerily. “Quite literally. You could say it’s a soul-deep cleanse.”

Hyacine stepped in—just a few feet. Her eyes immediately scanned the room. She was a sharp student, diligent, observant.

Anaxa crouched deeper, pulling a dusty curtain over himself.

He was Cerces, wrapped in his own starry pajama robe, hiding behind a drapery like a haunted mop.

This is undignified. This is war crime levels of undignified.

Hyacine tilted her head. “Is someone else in here?”

Cerces turned to the curtain.

Anaxa’s soul stopped breathing.

“…Nope,” Cerces said brightly. “Just me and my... inner voice. Getting louder these days, you know?”

Hyacine narrowed her eyes. “Professor, are you… Feeling alright?”

Cerces strode over and plucked a glowing potion bottle from the shelf. “Absolutely radiant. Why, do I not look like my usual grumpy self?”

“Exactly,” Hyacine replied, suspicious.

Anaxa crouched lower behind the book pile, every nerve vibrating with panic.

The Dromas pajamas—designed to hang with scholarly elegance—now swallowed him like a haunted tent. The sleeves flopped over his hands. The collar slipped sideways every time he breathed. The pant legs dragged behind him like the train of a wedding gown he never agreed to wear.

He tucked the hem under his knees, hiding as best as Cerces’s shorter frame could allow. “Maybe if I slow my breathing, she won’t sense me. Maybe I can blend into the academic shame like a chameleon of failure.”

Hyacine, meanwhile, stepped farther into the lab, her eyes scanning with professional, surgical precision.

“Professor,” she said slowly, voice tightening, “something is definitely off.”

She paused mid-step, her gaze catching on something that made Anaxa’s stomach sink.

The tank.

His homunculus tank.

Its hatch was open. The fluid inside—vital and irreplaceable—had spilled across the tiles in streaks of faintly glowing green. The slick puddle oozed like melted dreams.

Hyacine walked closer, frowning. “Is that… resonance gel? Wait—this containment rune is shattered.”

Anaxa held his breath.

Cerces, still gleefully wearing his body like a misbehaving professor-costume, casually wandered over to the tank. She crossed her arms in that familiar Anaxa stance and nodded, utterly unbothered.

“Yes, yes. A bit of a… side project,” she said, voice solemn and cryptic. “An experiment on—well—a mutant.”

Anaxa nearly died behind the shelf.

Hyacine blinked. “A… mutant? Professor, that’s not regulation. The Board will—”

Cerces waved her—his—hand lazily. “Oh, psh. Definitions are for cowards. If you can't question what defines humanity, are you really a scholar?”

Hyacine looked deeply unsettled. “That’s… extremely not how you usually talk.”

From behind the bookshelf, Anaxa could feel his reputation melting. It oozed down the shelves like the spilled gel, a slow descent into chaos and faculty review meetings.

Cerces turned to the tank, sighing wistfully. “It was going to be beautiful. But alas… some unforeseen cross-contamination occurred.”

Hyacine squinted. “Why is your hair longer today? And your voice has this weird… softness?”

Behind the pile of books and spilled dignity, Anaxa stayed as still as death itself.

The ruined homunculus tank hummed faintly beside him, casting a low, sickly green glow across the floor like a spotlight for academic failure. His heart thundered against Cerces’s chest—too fast, too high up, and far too exposed beneath the suffocating folds of oversized Dromas pajamas.

Hyacine let out a long, tired sigh as she stared at him—or rather, Cerces wearing his body with all the grace of a fox in a professor’s skin. “…I don’t know what’s wrong with you today,” she said at last, clearly uneasy. “But you’re even weirder than usual.”

Anaxa gritted his teeth.

Cerces—still lounging near the broken tank like chaos personified—just smiled softly with his mouth and shrugged. “Oh, I’m just… embracing change.”

Hyacine frowned deeper. “Whatever that means.”

She stepped forward and placed the tonic bottle down on the table with a soft clink. The scent of mint, lavender, and distilled mana rose from the corked vial. “Please drink this later. It’s the calming blend.”

Cerces beamed. “Why? Am I not calm?”

“You’re terrifying,” Hyacine replied flatly. Then she glanced toward the door. “And by the way, don’t forget: your morning lecture starts at entry hour.”

That was when Anaxa’s spine straightened under the pile of books.

His breath caught.

No.

Hyacine turned halfway toward the door, adding casually over her shoulder: “Lady Aglaea said she’ll attend today. To observe your analysis on soul vessels and artificial body theory.”

Cerces blinked innocently.

Behind the book pile, Anaxa's soul detonated.

His entire world flashed before his eyes like a lecture scroll catching fire.

Cerces gasped dramatically—not from fear, but delight. “Oh, really~? That’s today? My, how exciting.”

Hyacine raised an eyebrow. “You usually rehearse for this kind of thing for a week straight.”

Cerces tilted his—Anaxa’s—head. “I’ve decided to go off-script today. Speak from the soul, as it were.”

Anaxa nearly vomited into his sleeve.

Hyacine narrowed her eyes. “…Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Never better,” Cerces purred.

Hyacine paused. “…You’re not possessed or something, right?”

Behind the shelf, Anaxa whispered, “I am possessed…”

Cerces smiled wider. “If I am, the spirit’s very charming.”

Hyacine just shook her head and backed out of the room. “Well… good luck. I guess.”

As soon as the door clicked shut behind her, Anaxa shot out from the books like a fired bolt. “No. No. Absolutely not. You are not going to that class. Not like that!”

Cerces swiveled on his heels and crossed his arms like a smug statue. “Why not? I’ve got the face, the voice, the hips.”

Anaxa flushed in a rage. “You don't understand! Aglaea doesn’t just attend lectures! She dissects them. She brings critique scrolls. She grades the professor.”

Cerces grinned. “Excellent. I’ll wear your best coat and smile every time she scowls.”

“You’ll unravel the balance between Reason and Romance!”

“She’ll love it.”

“She’ll KILL ME!”

Anaxa began to hyperventilate into his pajama sleeve.

Cerces just walked past him, casually adjusting the collar of his robes. “I suppose I’d better get ready, then.”

----

“Please,” Anaxa begged, still in her body, arms outstretched and voice trembling with panic. “Cerces, I’m begging you—don’t go. Let’s stay here. Let’s fix this. We can recalibrate the soul weave. We can—”

Cerces simply smiled, radiant in his face, like a saint on the way to start a lecture with interpretive dance. “No,” she said, gently cupping his cheek. “You stay home, little soul slug. Rest. Reflect. Be moisturized.”

Anaxa twitched. “What does that even mean—”

She kissed his forehead.

Anaxa yelped in emotional confusion.

“I’ve missed this, you know,” she said softly. “The smell of chalk. The gossip in the hallways. The terrified silence of students.” Then she turned toward the door, adjusted her coat (his best one—of course), and added with a wink, “Time to taste a day in the normal scholarly life I once abandoned.”

And with that, she closed the door behind her.

Anaxa ran to the window, peeking through the curtains like a ghostly widow in a night robe. Outside, Cerces-as-Anaxa walked down the stone path of the Grove of Epiphany with a skip in her step. An actual skip. There were butterflies.

Students greeted her hesitantly. Teachers stared. Several paused mid-conversation just to watch.

One instructor whispered to another, “Did he just wave at me?”

A group of students froze as Cerces approached. One particularly small first-year—Elta, a quiet summoning student—looked up at him nervously.

“Professor?” she asked. “A-Are you okay today?”

Cerces crouched, patted the top of her head gently, and smiled like a warm breeze.

“Of course I’m okay, little moonbean,” she said with a wink. “Don’t worry that sweet little head of yours.”

Elta promptly turned red, glitched slightly, and fell into emotional disarray.

Anaxa didn’t even need to hear the rest. he lunged toward his wardrobe like a scholar possessed, flinging open drawers with the urgency of a man escaping execution.

He ripped off the ridiculous oversized Dromas pajamas and hurled them across the room. They landed on a scroll rack, where they slumped like a shamed ghost.

Frantically, he pulled on one of Cerces’s more modest scholar robes—navy blue, trimmed in gold. It hung a little too loosely across the shoulders, but it gave him just enough range to move without tripping over himself.

He tied a belt around the middle. Then stopped. Stared at the mirror.

Still her face.

Still that unmistakable Cerces softness: flushed cheeks, long lashes, glossy lips, and eyes that sparkled like trouble.

It would never do.

“Disguise.”

He ransacked the shelves.

He pulled a heavy hooded shawl over his head—hood low, face shadowed.

Then a masquerade mask—half-moon shaped, leftover from one of his abandoned festival projects.

Still not enough.

Finally, he grabbed a pair of massive black sunglasses—the absurd ones he used when pretending to be “mysterious” around local markets.

He looked at himself in the mirror.

Hood. Mask. Sunglasses. Cerces’s long, beige hair tumbling dramatically down his back.

He looked like a fugitive wizard trying not to be recognized at a masquerade party.

Perfect.

“I am shadow,” he whispered. “I am wind. I am the crisis management plan the Grove doesn’t have.”

He stepped out through the back entrance of the lab, moving fast and low, hugging the garden hedges. Every few meters, he ducked behind planters or ancient statues. A few students wandered the stone walkways ahead, chatting idly.

Anaxa pressed himself against a rose arch.

He peered out from the shrubbery and spotted her.

Cerces. In his body. Strolling up the path toward the central lecture hall, hair swaying, coat fluttering, skipping like she was about to attend a spring festival and not a lecture about soul vessel ethics.

She greeted every passing student. A few older professors. Waved at a courtyard bird. At one point, she even spun once and curtsied to a statue of High Scholar Galvant.

Anaxa cringed so hard behind a tree that his joints locked.

And yet, Cerces continued onward, waving at people, whistling lightly, entirely unaware—or perhaps very aware—of the destruction she was leaving in her well-meaning wake.

Anaxa crouched lower in the bushes and began to follow.

He moved from cover to cover. Darted behind the benches. Hid behind walls. Once, he accidentally rolled into a shrub and emerged covered in leaves, but pressed on anyway.

“She can’t reach that lecture hall,” he muttered. “Not before I intercept. Not before—”

His thoughts froze.

Just ahead, on the wide steps of the lecture hall, Cerces—still joyfully wearing his body like a fashionable coat—paused to greet two very familiar figures.

Phainon and Castorice.

Anaxa’s heart clenched. “No. No, not them. Anyone but them.”

They were his best graduates. His success stories. The two students he had personally mentored through four years of existential theory, thermodynamic soul compression, and late-night thesis panic sessions.

And they were waving back at Cerces like nothing was wrong.

He ducked behind a potted tree and peeked through the leaves.

“Professor!” Phainon called, grinning, as he adjusted the strap on his battered traveling pack. “Didn’t expect to see you outside this early.”

“Or smiling,” Castorice added softly, standing beside him with a polite nod and her usual unreadable expression.

Anaxa leaned closer in horror.

Cerces smiled.

Not the subtle curve he had mastered for academic politics.

No. This was a bright, warm, sunbeam-through-the-window smile. It was almost enough to summon flower petals.

“Oh~!” she said, clasping her hands. “Phainon! Castorice! My dear prodigies!”

Phainon and Castorice froze.

Cerces continued, stepping forward. “What are you doing back at the Grove? I thought I sent you two off to achieve greatness and emotional instability!”

Phainon blinked. “Uh. Yeah. We were… accompanying Lady Aglaea for her report assessment.”

Castorice tilted her head slightly, studying the professor. “You seem… different today.”

Anaxa gripped the bark of the tree he was hiding behind.

Cerces pouted.

She actually pouted. Lips pressed, eyes big, voice raised half an octave.

“Why does everyone keep saying that today? I’m still me! Don’t you trust your sweet, gentle old professor~?”

She even tilted her head and blinked twice.

It was lethal.

Phainon stared.

Castorice stared harder.

“…Professor,” Phainon said slowly, turning slightly to Castorice, “are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“Did someone hex you with personality inversion?” Castorice asked flatly.

Cerces beamed brighter. “Nooo~ Just feeling radiant today~! Maybe I’m finally in touch with my emotional core. You know, that thing I always told you two to repress for later essays?”

Phainon opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

Anaxa, still watching from the bush, was dying inside.

Cerces waved at them like a noble at a flower festival. “Now, go on~ Don’t let me keep you!”

Phainon and Castorice nodded very slowly as they backed away.

Phainon whispered, “I liked him better when he only smiled once per semester.”

Castorice murmured, “Is this what happens after tenure?”

They vanished down the hallway, whispering urgently.

Cerces turned, glanced skyward with a theatrical sigh, and spun in place as if to welcome the morning sun.

Anaxa melted into a pile behind the hedge.

He adjusted the angle of his oversized sunglasses as he crouched at the side entrance of the Grove’s main lecture hall, heart thundering like a war drum.

The wide amphitheater had begun to fill.

Cloaked scholars arrived in pairs, chatting softly about theory revisions and last cycle’s soul-quota audit. Bright-eyed students trickled in—many still clutching notebooks, ink quills, or emergency coffee brews. The murmur of anticipation filled the air, mixing with the quiet hum of resonant crystals embedded in the chamber walls.

From his hiding place behind a tall banner stand, Anaxa peeked inside.

At the front of the hall, upon the elevated podium stage, stood Cerces.

Still wearing his body.

Still surrounded by his legacy.

But—for once—not ruining everything.

She was speaking with Hyacine near the base of the podium. The two conversed in hushed tones while checking lecture notes. Cerces adjusted the chalk array on the board. She even tested the soul-infuser prism, ensuring the backup glyph projector pulsed in rhythm.

Hyacine handed over the schedule and gave a small nod, stepping aside respectfully.

Then Cerces turned to ascend the steps of the podium.

Anaxa’s body moved with practiced ease—one hand behind the back, the other clutching the schedule scroll. Calm. Measured. Poised.

The amphitheater quieted.

Students settled. Scholars leaned forward. The enchanted board lit with the title of today’s lecture:

“Resonant Imprints and the Ethics of Soul Anchoring.”

Cerces stepped to the center, gazed across the assembled audience, and opened with a voice that was not bubbly, not ridiculous, not dripping with fake charm.

But instead—level. Clear. Rational.

“Esteemed citizens, colleagues, and students… thank you for joining me this morning.”

Anaxa blinked, stunned. She was using his formal cadence.

“Today’s lecture,” she continued, “concerns the relationship between memory residue, artificial vessels, and the question of what truly defines sentient continuity. While the recent cycles have brought many theoretical reforms, the heart of our inquiry remains unchanged: What makes a soul—itself?”

Anaxa’s breath caught. “She actually read the thesis.”

Cerces paced once, her gestures measured. Calm hand movements. No pirouettes. No winks. No cutesy interjections. Not a single head pat in sight. “This subject, as many of you know, is dear to me. And in these uncertain times, it remains essential we tread with clarity—both theoretical and moral.”

The older scholars nodded in approval. Some scribbled in their margins. Students leaned in.

From the shadows, Anaxa stared with wide eyes, stunned.

For the first time since the disaster began, he didn’t feel the need to fake his own death.

“Perhaps,” Cerces added, her tone slowing, “to understand the boundary of the soul… we must learn to cross it—without abandoning who we are.”

A pause.

A beat of respectful silence.

Anaxa slowly let his forehead rest against the cool wall behind the curtain and exhaled. “She did it. She’s actually doing it right.”

He briefly considered collapsing into a seated heap of tension relief. He might even let his shoulders drop—just a little. Maybe he wouldn’t need to hijack his own lecture after all. Maybe Cerces could be trusted with ten minutes of academic responsibility.

For a fleeting moment, he felt something he hadn't expected to feel all day:

Hope.

Then Cerces smiled faintly, lips curling just slightly as she looked directly toward the back of the room and said, voice still calm: “Before we begin our demonstration,” Cerces said, turning gracefully toward the audience again, “I must extend my gratitude.”

Her hands folded politely behind her back, her posture refined and solemn.

Anaxa leaned slightly forward behind the curtain, his disguised face twitching nervously.

“This amphitheater’s availability today was made possible by a very special supporter. A patron of the arts. A guardian of academic quality. A seamstress of romance itself…”

Anaxa’s stomach dropped.

“Lady Aglaea.”

A hush fell.

The curtain rustled.

And then—she stepped out.

Lady Aglaea, in all her precision-crafted authority, emerged from behind the side curtain opposite Anaxa. Her golden-threaded robes shimmered faintly under the hall’s skylight. Her hair was braided to the left in ceremonial style. In one hand, she held her signature critique scroll.

A soft murmur rippled through the audience—half awe, half tension. Then polite applause. Short, sharp, measured—exactly like Aglaea herself.

Aglaea stepped to the center of the stage, beside Cerces, and nodded with a cool smile.

“Thank you, Professor Anaxagoras,” she said, her voice clear and firm. “It is my honor to attend this lecture. The Grove of Epiphany has long upheld our city’s highest scholarly standards, and my visit today is to ensure that such standards are not merely tradition—but living proof of excellence.”

Anaxa, from behind the curtain, was biting the edge of his sleeve to stop himself from screaming.

He watched as Cerces—his body—stood unnaturally still beside Aglaea.

Her back was straight, hands still behind her back, but something in the posture had changed.

A subtle tremble in the shoulder.

Anaxa narrowed his eyes.

The crowd quieted.

Aglaea was preparing to turn and hand over the stage again when suddenly—

Cerces moved.

And wrapped her arms around Aglaea from behind.

An audible gasp went through the audience.

A hug.

A full, gentle, intimate, two-armed hug—from Professor Anaxa to Lady Aglaea. In front of every student, every scholar, and the entire Ethics Council proxy seated in the third row.

Aglaea froze. Like a thunderbolt had hit the back of her skull.

Cerces closed her eyes softly, pressing her cheek against Aglaea’s shoulder.

“It’s been too long,” she said in the most tender voice imaginable.

“I missed you, my dear… Mnestia.”

Chapter Text

To be born in the Twilight Courtyard was to be raised among silken whispers, rustling lantern leaves, and the steady breath of dying light.

To be trained there as a healer meant something far deeper than simply knowing which tonics eased pain or what spell soothed fevers. It was the art of attunement—to breath, to silence, to the weight of words unsaid. The Twilight Courtyard taught one to see the human soul not through rituals or mirrors, but through small things:

The flicker of an eye. The pace of a sentence. The ripple of hesitation in a laugh.

And so, Hyacine watched.

It wasn’t something she did intentionally, not anymore. It was simply natural. People called her gentle, but that wasn’t it—she simply saw people before they even knew how they felt themselves.

And today, her instincts rang off-key the moment she stepped into the lab.

At first, it was subtle.

A glance. A tone. A… smile. That was the first alarm bell.

Professor Anaxa smiled at her.

Not the polite, begrudging, lip-twitch he sometimes gave when she handed in paperwork on time. Not the crooked half-grin he wore when correcting Phainon’s outbursts or dodging Tribbie’s complaints.

But a genuine, open, sun-kissed smile. It had stretched across his face like he’d just won a love poem contest.

She stopped mid-step, tonic in hand, and blinked slowly.

He grumbled. He waxed poetic on existential entropy. He did not tilt his head and wink like he’d just been called charming by a cloud spirit.

That was the second red flag.

Still, she tried to let it slide.

He was eccentric. Everyone knew it. Maybe he had finally snapped in a direction that involved pleasantness. Stranger things had happened.

Maybe he was… enlightened. Maybe he had slept well for once.

As she stood beside him—no, not him, but someone in his skin—she watched carefully. His shoulders were a touch too relaxed. His breathing was too even. The way he handled the scrolls was precise… but not Anaxa’s precise. Too graceful. Too… flourished.

Something wasn’t aligning.

And the moment she stepped out of that lab, she kept watching. Quietly. Calmly.

From the shadows of the amphitheater, she took a seat by the stairs rather than near the front as usual. Her tonic sat unopened in her hands. Her pulse was steady, but her thoughts ran fast.

She wasn’t sure what was wrong.

He walked across the stage with the weight of knowledge in every step. He paused at the center, just as he always did, folding his hands behind his back. The room calmed under the tone of authority, under the cadence of wisdom, under that unmistakable presence she had come to associate with clarity amid chaos.

He was back.

Hyacine felt her breath settle.

Maybe she had overthought things. Maybe it was just an off morning. He was eccentric, after all. Scholars didn’t think linearly—maybe today was simply one of his more experimental moods.

But this? This was her professor.

She let herself relax slightly.

Until—

Before the entire room—every scholar, every student, every soul watching—he reached out.

And embraced Aglaea.

The entire stadium froze.

Hyacine didn’t breathe.

Her mind—trained to read the smallest signs—halted. The healer’s instinct, the gentle observer’s gaze, could not process what she was seeing.

The entire stadium was held in that strange, delicate moment—suspended like a glass orb teetering on the edge of a shelf.

No one moved.

The Goldweaver stood perfectly still, her hands frozen mid-response. “Anaxa”—taller, strangely gentler than ever—still held her in that unsettlingly familiar embrace.

And Hyacine?

She couldn’t feel her own heartbeat anymore.

Then—something moved.

A sudden blur—swift as a striking hawk—darted out from behind the curtain at the far edge of the amphitheater stage.

Someone was running.

No—charging.

A figure draped in a rumpled scholar's robe, oversized hood half-slipping from their head, eyes wild behind comically large sunglasses, hair beige and tangled behind them like a flag of madness.

It was a woman.

Before anyone could react, before any soul in the room could voice their confusion—

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOINGGG—!!!”

—came the shout, raw and furious, as the flying silhouette launched into the air with perfect drop-kick form.

The impact was real.

A loud, resounding THWACK echoed as Anaxa (in Cerces body) delivered a precise, furious kick to his own body’s ribs—sending the false professor sprawling away from Aglaea, who instinctively stepped back in shock.

(Fake) Professor Anaxa was torn away from Lady Aglaea, flailing sideways like a ragdoll in a soulstorm and tumbling across the polished marble floor.

The stadium erupted into chaos.

Chairs scraped. Scholars gasped. A student dropped her soul calculator. Someone yelled, “Is this performance art!?”

The cloaked figure rolled, then stood shakily—face flushed with fury and embarrassment, Anaxa’s long hair veil behind her. The oversized robe flapped open as she pointed a trembling finger at his sprawled body across the stage.

“You absolute lunatic! I leave you alone for FIVE MINUTES and you start hugging Aglaea in front of the entire Grove!? Have you lost every ounce of reason in my—I mean your—bone marrow!?”

The stunned crowd turned as one toward the ragged figure.

…and the one now screaming at the professor from across the stage in a voice unmistakably feminine.

Gasps still echoed through the upper seats. Whispers skittered like startled insects between scholars and students.

Aglaea remained motionless, her back straight but her eyes unfocused—caught between the sudden warmth of a hug that never should’ve happened and the thunderous dropkick that followed.

Cerces—still in Anaxa’s body—sat up slowly on the polished marble stage, one hand clutching her ribs.

“Ow… You really gave me a good one,” she wheezed, dragging herself to her feet with a grimace. “I felt that in three livers. You don’t even have three livers!”

Her voice was strained, but her smile remained—unbothered, charming, utterly Cerces despite the frame she wore.

Across from her, Anaxa—draped in her too-long robes, still breathing heavily in Cerces’s smaller, slighter body—looked ready to charge again. Hair disheveled, cloak flapping, her hands trembled not from exhaustion, but sheer fury.

Anaxa’s legs tensed. He lunged.

But—

He was blocked.

A figure moved between her and the stage in a blur of silk and stillness.

Castorice.

She stepped forward like a shadow parting light, silent and calm, her silver-pinned gloves catching the glint of crystal from the ceiling above. Her hand was already raised—not in violence, but in warning.

“Who are you?” Castorice asked, softly, but it cut through the noise like a blade through thread.

Anaxa froze.

The former student stared him down, dark eyes devoid of fear, her petite frame calm, unshaking. But Anaxa knew better—those gloves weren’t for show.

“Stand down,” Castorice said, her palm still raised. “If you’re trying to get to Lady Aglaea, you’ll have to go through me.”

Anaxa stiffened.

His mind raced. One wrong step, and Castorice would put him down before he got another word out. He knew his students—especially this one. Loyal to Aglaea. Loyal to him. Even without knowing who was in which body, Castorice had already made her choice.

Anaxa gritted his teeth. “You don’t understand—”

But Castorice only narrowed her eyes. “No. I understand too well.”

Behind her, Cerces (in Anaxa’s tall frame) had finally made it to her feet.

She dusted off her professor’s cloak and strode forward, boots clicking softly against the stage floor. With gentle purpose, she stepped past the place where she’d been kicked—toward Aglaea, who hadn’t moved an inch.

Aglaea’s eyes blinked slowly, unfocused. She wasn’t hurt—but she wasn’t here, either. Not entirely. She stood like a machine caught in a logic loop, mind spinning between context and emotion, memory and decorum.

Cerces reached her.

Placed a hand softly on Aglaea’s shoulder.

“Why are you standing in the way…”

“...of the one I love?”

They echoed through the vaulted dome of the amphitheater like thunder in a bell jar—slow, reverberating, inescapable.

Anaxa, still in Cerces’s smaller body, stood frozen behind Castorice, his mind reeling.

He opened his mouth—but no words came. The weight of Cerces’s declaration was still sinking through his spine.

Aglaea, for her part, had not moved.

She stood like a statue of woven gold and cracked glass, eyes wide, brows low, jaw caught between disbelief and complete system failure.

Her scroll had slackened in her hand. Her posture remained perfect, as always—but her soul was somewhere between this timeline and the last.

To her left, Phainon stood halfway out of his seat, jaw hanging open like someone had just told him lunch was banned.

“DID PROFESSOR JUST SAY—???”

Hyacine, normally the calmest soul in the room, was gripping the stone banister like a lifeline, her voice caught in her throat, her healer’s senses screaming with secondhand mortification.

Castorice, still barring Anaxa’s path, had stiffened as though hit with a spell of paralysis. Her eyes—wide and sharp—flitted between the body of her professor and the word love echoing like a siren in her mind.

Cerces moved.

Still in Anaxa’s tall frame, she leaned just slightly toward Aglaea.

Her eyes were gentle. Too gentle.

Her hand, still resting on Aglaea’s shoulder, slid just barely upward. “I always wanted to do this when it wasn’t the end of the world,” she murmured, softly, genuinely—

And then—She kissed Aglaea.

On the cheek.

In front of the entire Grove.

The sound wasn’t just gasps—it was shrieks.

A wave of voices exploded from the audience.

The female scholars in particular erupted—some with shock, others with scandalized delight, a few with notebooks already out, scribbling theories about the long-rumored tension between the Goldweaver and the Grove’s aloof alchemist.

Phainon fell back into his chair as if physically struck.

Her fingers clenched faintly. Her face didn’t change—but her pupils dilated. Dangerously.

“He kissed her…” Castorice said under her breath, voice soft and lethal.

Behind her, Anaxa had stopped breathing.

He hadn’t moved an inch since the moment the kiss landed.

He didn’t feel rage. Or betrayal. Or even fear.

He felt… a full-body academic breakdown. Like all his equations on emotional boundaries and public dignity had just been set on fire with a smile.

The amphitheater was no longer a place of learning.

It was a theater of stunned chaos.

The scholars—some elderly, some distinguished, many bewildered—began rising from their seats in waves of silk, parchment, and whispered disbelief.

Dozens of murmured conversations buzzed across the dome like hornets—speculation, outrage, amusement. A few scribes had already started noting the sequence of events as if it were a case study on public emotional breakdown.

Up on the stage, the tension finally snapped into motion.

Two senior attendants of the Grove—both bearing the green and silver armbands of Order Masters—quietly emerged from the shadowed wings.

Their steps were calm, precise. A signal that the gathering had spiraled beyond protocol.

“Clear the stage. Escort the subjects to containment or counsel,” one whispered behind his monocle.

Hyacine heard them. And understood.

She moved first.

Still dazed but steady, she approached the trembling figure of Anaxa—in Cerces’s body—who stood rooted to the marble floor like a statue of embarrassment and existential regret.

His eyes stared past everything, his fingers twitching in the folds of his oversized robe.

Hyacine didn’t speak.

She simply reached out and placed her hand—gently, reassuringly—on his arm.

Anaxa blinked. Once. Slowly. Like a machine coming back online.

He looked at her with the wide, desperate expression of a man who knew he'd lost control of everything.

And then she gently shoved him toward the wings.

“Come on,” she murmured softly, “before someone draws fan art of this.”

Anaxa stumbled into motion, too hollow to resist.

Meanwhile, Phainon, still in full body-reactive shock, had somehow recovered enough to spring into action. He darted up to Aglaea, whose scroll had long since fallen to the floor.

She had not spoken. Her face remained unreadable—but her eyes were fixed ahead, unblinking, unreadable.

“L-Lady Aglaea, hey, hey—let’s go, yeah?” Phainon said awkwardly, offering his arm. “Exit stage left before you, uh, throw hands?”

She did not answer, but allowed him to guide her without resistance.

Beside her, Cerces—still in Anaxa’s tall frame—followed cheerfully, completely unbothered. She strolled alongside Phainon with a half-smile, waving politely to the shocked crowd like she’d just finished a performance.

Behind them, Castorice remained composed, her steps measured as she descended the stage. As always, her words were simple but carried the weight of an entire directive.

“We’ll regroup at Professor Anaxa’s study chamber.”

She turned toward the Order Masters and nodded sharply.

“Secure the amphitheater. No one else needs to follow.”

Her voice was calm, but her eyes had that glint again—cold steel under silk.

Even the elders, who usually scoffed at younger voices, nodded.

“Agreed,” said one. “Let the Grove contain its own fire before the city gets wind of this.”

The scholars slowly dispersed, many still whispering furiously, others already sending encrypted light-scrolls back to their respective institutions.

But the central figures—Anaxa, Cerces, Aglaea, Phainon, Hyacine, and Castorice—had already been guided away, down the marble side steps, through the quiet rear corridor of the Grove.

Away from the murmurs. Away from the stares.

Chapter Text

The Grove's chaos was left behind.

Beyond the great amphitheater, past the winding cloisters and whispering archives, stood a narrow spiral staircase carved into obsidian rootstone—leading to a study hidden high above the central grove, nestled in the upper lattice of glowing trees.

Anaxa’s home.

The walls of the chamber were soft with candlelight. Shelves cradled volumes older than Okhema itself. Tools—both alchemical and arcane—lined every table, and in the center of the domed room, a round sitting area encircled a low crystal hearth.

Tonight, it no longer felt like a scholar’s sanctuary. It was a containment zone.

Phainon moved first, his usual spring in his step now dulled by caution. He gently guided Aglaea toward one of the cushioned chairs beside the hearth.

She obeyed, but not out of willingness—her body moved like someone caught between timelines, as though a single wrong word would unravel her presence.

Her eyes were fixed forward. Not cold. Not furious.

Just… blank.

Beside her, Cerces—still in Anaxa’s body—settled gracefully at her side, moving like she owned the room (and, well, the legs in it). She reached out, slowly and without assumption, to place her gloved hand atop Aglaea’s smaller, trembling one.

She leaned in slightly and whispered, her voice soft.

“It’s alright, darling. You're not dreaming. You’re not broken.” She smiled gently.

Her thumb began to trace slow, soothing circles across Aglaea’s knuckles.

Across the room, Hyacine had never let go of the figure beside her—the cloaked, small-framed body still wrapped awkwardly in a long, trailing robe.

Anaxa had not spoken since being escorted here. Not a sound. His limbs were stiff, shoulders hunched like a statue chiseled from guilt.

Hyacine, ever gentle, kept her arm around his shoulders—not to restrain, but to stabilize.

“Come on,” she coaxed. “We’re not going to hex you. Just breathe.”

Anaxa didn’t respond.

But he let her guide him to the farthest chair, where he sat and folded in on himself—arms crossed, legs tucked, gaze buried behind the oversized collar of the robe.

His hair—Cerces’s wild beige strands—fell like a curtain between him and the room.

At the door, Castorice stood sentinel. She didn’t pace. She didn’t speak.

Her back was against the frame, her gloved hand resting calmly at her side. But her eyes never left the room.

The quiet stretched so long it felt like it would wrap around them all like a rope.

The only sound was the low hum of the memory-flame and the almost rhythmic creak of the chair as Aglaea shifted faintly—still lost in a daze, her posture too stiff for her silk.

Hyacine, still seated beside the cloaked figure in Cerces’s body, finally turned to him with her soft, healer’s hands. Her brow was furrowed—not in anger, but in silent concern, the kind that ran deeper than words.

“...May I?” she whispered.

Anaxa flinched beneath the robe.

But he didn’t stop her.

Slowly, carefully, Hyacine reached beneath the heavy hood and began to draw it back. She brushed aside the comically oversized sunglasses and the tangle of beige hair draped over his face.

The cloak fell.

And what it revealed was a young woman—soft-featured, luminous-eyed, and strikingly beautiful. Her expression was caught between shame and shock, her lips drawn tight in a line.

Hyacine blinked.

Phainon inhaled sharply.

Even Castorice narrowed her eyes, just slightly.

“...Who is she?” Hyacine asked quietly, looking toward the real Anaxa—but still speaking to the professor’s body seated calmly beside Aglaea.

Cerces, of course, smiled.

She continued to gently rub Aglaea’s back, her touch practiced and soothing, her eyes aglow with amusement as if she were simply unraveling a game to children.

“That,” she said lightly, “is your professor, Anaxa.”

Hyacine tilted her head.

Phainon’s jaw fell open, but no sound came out.

Castorice’s eyes narrowed into slits.

Cerces raised her hand with a tiny, theatrical gesture—never stopping the rhythmic motion on Aglaea’s trembling spine.

“And I,” she continued, tone smooth and sweet as velvet tea, “am Cerces. The Titan of Reason. In his body.”

There was a beat of pure silence.

Even the fire in the hearth seemed to flicker in confusion.

Then—Phainon, very slowly, turned to Hyacine.

“...So she’s him and he’s her?”

“Explain. Now.”

Cerces gave a happy little hum. “But of course~”

She turned slightly toward the group—still seated beside Aglaea, whose eyes were glassy and distant—and gave a theatrical shrug. “It all started with a bath, a little homunculus experiment, and a catastrophic lack of self-control.”

She continued to explain how Anaxa’s in attempt to separate the coreflame from his body, accidentally misplaced their souls instead. Cerces in his own and Anaxa’s into the newly created homunculi.

“And then…” She made a spinning motion with her hand. “Zap. Swap. Oops.”

Phainon blinked slowly. “…That’s it?”

Cerces grinned. “That’s the academic summary, yes.”

Hyacine looked between her and the cloaked figure on the far end of the room—the woman with Cerces’s face, still curled up in her chair, silent as stone.

Anaxa groaned into his palms.

Castorice had not moved from her position near the door, but her gaze was razor sharp. “That’s very difficult to believe,” she said coldly. “A homunculus causing a full soul displacement?”

Cerces tilted her head, then gave a dramatic shrug.

“You’d have to ask the man who built it. My field’s memory, not metaphysics.”

She gestured lazily toward Anaxa—still in Cerces’s body, still bundled awkwardly in a robe two sizes too long.

The others turned slowly to look at him.

But he didn’t speak.

His shoulders remained hunched, his fingers tightly woven together. He looked like someone trying to fold himself into a single atom.

And finally— Aglaea moved.

Subtle. Small.

Her hand—still under Cerces’s—twitched slightly. Her lashes fluttered once. Then, slowly, her eyes turned to look at the man seated beside her.

The man who had spoken so gently.

Who had hugged her. Who had kissed her cheek.

A face she knew. But the gaze?

It was not his.

“...You’re not him,” she murmured softly.

Cerces smiled wider, but more gently now. She nodded once.

“No, my love. I’m not.”

A long silence followed—heavy, fragile. Aglaea didn’t pull away.

She just… watched her.

For a moment, the world softened.

The tension that had knotted Aglaea’s shoulders began to ease—not completely, but just enough for her voice to return. Her gaze flickered up at the man beside her—his tall frame, sharp jaw, that calm, unbothered smile.

Her eyes lingered.And then—she blushed.

Barely.

Faint, but visible.

A dusting of warmth across her cheeks, like sunlight filtering through her composure.

She tore her gaze away instantly, looking down at her lap. Her fingers tightened in her silk sleeves.

Cerces saw it.

Her smile bloomed, sweet and triumphant like a girl watching her cake rise exactly as she planned. With the same calm arrogance as someone who knew the moment would come eventually—no matter how many timelines or soul swaps it took.

She lifted a hand and cupped Aglaea’s cheek again, gently guiding her chin up—not forcing, just coaxing.

“Darling,” she said, using that old name with a whisper, “don’t hide it. Your coreflame is responding. It’s resonating with mine.”

“It always has. And now, without all that reason clouding romance… You can feel it too, can’t you?”

Aglaea swallowed hard, her throat shifting visibly. Her lashes fluttered once more.

“I… I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.

Cerces chuckled softly, her voice light, silk-wrapped mischief.

“You’ve lived for centuries, stitched gods into gowns, turned heartbreak into power…”

“And yet here you are—still cute as a girl in love for the first time.”

Aglaea looked away again.

But this time—she didn’t pull her hand back.

The rest of the room had turned to statues.

Phainon had gone rigid on the floor cushion, mouth half-open, blinking in slow, confused intervals like someone caught buffering a romance novel he didn’t download.

Hyacine looked between the two with wide eyes and faint panic, as if she were witnessing something that was definitely not Twilight Courtyard Certified.

Castorice… actually blinked. Her lips parted. Just a fraction. But for Castorice, that was the equivalent of throwing a chair.

And Anaxa, still slouched in Cerces’s much smaller frame across the room, looked like someone who had just heard their own thesis being rejected by the stars themselves. His face had gone from mortified to utterly lost.

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. And he absolutely could not watch himself—or rather, his body—hold Aglaea like she was the protagonist of a soft-focus romance opera.

The lines had long been crossed.

Watching her blush?

Watching Cerces call her cute?

Watching her not pull away?!

In HIS BODY??!

He abruptly stood from his chair, the long sleeves of Cerces’s robe flapping like a tragic bird caught in the wind. His disheveled silver hair spilled over his shoulders in wild waves, making his movements look even more frantic.

He stormed toward Castorice, who still stood like a silent sentinel near the door.

“Touch me,” he demanded, voice trembling with the urgency of a madman. “Castorice—your corrosion. Use it. Now. Unmake this vessel. I beg of you.”

Castorice’s brows rose a single degree—her version of a full scream. “...Professor?” she asked flatly.

“I am not your professor right now. I am a trapped soul! A condemned scholar forced to spectate his own romantic downfall! End me!”

Castorice raised her other hand instinctively—but she didn’t get the chance to act.

“Absolutely NOT!” a voice cried beside them.

In a blur of motion, Hyacine lunged forward and grabbed Anaxa by the collar of his robe.

“You are not getting dissolved in front of the fireplace!” she scolded, dragging him bodily away from Castorice. “What part of talking this out sounded like ‘touch me with a death spell’ to you?!”

“All of it!” Anaxa wailed, flailing as she wrestled him backward. “All of it sounded like death would be kinder!”

“You’re being dramatic.”

Anaxa was now tangled in his own oversized sleeves, being slowly and steadily sat back down like a misbehaving toddler by the surprisingly strong Twilight Courtyard healer.

Cerces, still seated beside Aglaea, glanced over at the scuffle and waved cheerfully. “Don’t be jealous, love~” she teased toward Anaxa. “You still look gorgeous in my body.”

“I'm going to restrict your entry permission!” Anaxa screamed.

“Too late. I made a copy of your sigil.”

Phainon scratched the back of his head, his blonde strands already tousled beyond recognition. His gaze drifted from Aglaea, still staring off as if someone had pulled her soul halfway out, to Cerces, still doting on her, to Anaxa, currently being held in place by Hyacine like an unruly scroll being pressed flat.

“Okay…” he said slowly. “So… what do we actually do now?”

He turned helplessly to Castorice and Hyacine. “Do we… let them keep being each other? Or is this some kind of one-week trial kind of deal?”

Castorice didn’t even blink. “If I knew, I’d be outside right now walling off the Grove with salt.”

Hyacine, however, gave a gentle sigh and placed her hand once again on Anaxa’s shoulder. He tensed—but did not move this time.

She leaned in, voice soft but clear.

“Is it true, Professor?”

“Did you really build a homunculus for her? The tank, the soulcraft, all of it?”

Anaxa swallowed. His eyes didn’t lift from the floor.

But—after a long pause—he nodded.

Once. Heavy.

Hyacine exchanged a brief glance with Castorice, who folded her arms in silent anticipation. “Then… do you know how to reverse it?” she asked, keeping her tone gentle, yet pressing.

Another long pause.

Anaxa finally pulled his legs in closer to sit upright, the oversized robe sagging around him like a collapsed tent.

“...In theory,” he muttered. “But it will take time. To analyze the soul print residue. To ensure stability. If I reroute the Coreflame—”

“No,” Cerces interrupted. Her voice wasn’t teasing now.

It was calm, even… but firm.

Everyone turned toward her. Cerces slowly let go of Aglaea’s hand, lifting herself to a more upright posture.

Her expression remained serene, but something behind her eyes had shifted. “You shouldn’t try to reverse it,” she said softly. “Because you’re forgetting why it happened.”

Anaxa stared at her.

“The resonance,” she said, tapping lightly over her chest—the place where the Coreflame of Reason now resided, in Anaxa’s original body. “It rejected the host. The homunculus shell.”

She turned toward him fully now, meeting his stunned gaze with calm certainty.

“The Coreflame refused to settle into that empty vessel you made for me. It didn’t recognize it. It saw it as unnatural—unworthy. So instead…”

She gestured gently between the two of them. “...It came to the closest soul it knew.”

Anaxa’s throat tightened. His mouth opened—but no argument came out.

Because she was right.

That resonance…

That flicker of connection he felt before the chamber went dark—

It had been the Coreflame of Reason, seeking a vessel it knew—rejecting the artificial one. Choosing the one whose soul had danced with it for centuries.

With a graceful tilt, she leaned in and wrapped her arms around the silent seamstress beside her. The body of Anaxa enveloped Aglaea’s smaller frame, and Cerces let out a pleased hum.

“Still,” she murmured, nestling in a little too comfortably, “I would also like to keep holding my dear Mnestia.”

She pouted, cheek resting against Aglaea’s temple. “It’s been so long. And you’re so warm now.”

Aglaea stiffened beneath the contact, her entire face quickly going from drained to glowing red—again. Her lips parted like she meant to object.

Hyacine, ever the calm among storms, slowly let her hand fall from Anaxa’s shoulder and stood straighter. Her golden eyes turned to Cerces—still hugging Aglaea like a child refusing to give up their favorite plushie.

“Then… what should we do?” she asked, softly but clearly. “If reversing the ritual might damage Professor Anaxa’s soul… we can’t force it. But we also can’t ignore it.”

Cerces looked up from Aglaea’s hair, blinking once. Her expression shifted—not into mockery or smugness, but into something surprisingly measured.

“Observe it,” she said simply. “Monitor his vessel—the body he’s using now. It was never meant to house a Coreflame. If it starts to degrade, the backlash could modify his soul entirely.”

A soft, dreadful silence followed.

Anaxa finally lifted his face, pale with the weight of that implication. The words that modify his soul rang like a verdict through his bones.

Hyacine nodded grimly. “Then we’ll need routine checks. I’ll prepare resonance diagnostics.”

Castorice stepped forward next, her voice crisp and unshakable. “And if that’s the case,” she said, “then we must keep this quiet.”

The others turned to her.

“No one outside this room can know,” she continued. “Not until we understand the limits of this… situation. If word spreads, it will only invite panic—and worse, attention.”

They all understood.

Cerces leaned back slightly, arms still looped around Aglaea’s waist as if it were her throne.

“Mmm. Reasonable,” she murmured. “Though I daresay it’s already a little late for that.”

Phainon let out a pained groan, dragging a hand down his face.

“Right. The amphitheater,” he muttered. “I’m pretty sure at least sixty people saw you call Aglaea your soulmate and kiss her.”

Cerces grinned. “Ah, yes. That was my best work.”

“That rumour’s halfway to Okhema already!” he cried.

Castorice’s eyes narrowed. “Then we have even more reason to move carefully. Phainon—start monitoring public chatter. If this escalates, we may need a narrative to redirect the fallout.”

Phainon saluted lazily. “I’ll pretend I’m doing recon and not damage control for a romance scandal.”

“It isn’t a romance scandal,” Anaxa hissed, lifting his head. “It’s an arcano-metaphysical identity collapse due to homunculus resonance instability!”

“You kissed her,” Phainon said.

“She kissed her!” Anaxa snapped, pointing accusingly at Cerces.

Cerces beamed, resting her chin on Aglaea’s shoulder. “Semantics.”

Cerces, still seated beside Aglaea, turned to face her fully now. The teasing edge in her smile faded into something tender and achingly sincere.

She reached forward, her fingers brushing lightly against Aglaea’s wrist before clasping her hands with both of her own.

“Aglaea,” she said gently, “what do you want to do?”

That question—so simple, so heavy—hung in the air like incense.

Aglaea blinked, as if awakening again. She slowly pried herself free from Cerces’s grasp—not forcefully, but with a graceful pause, as if needing just a breath of space.

She turned to face her—face him—with brows drawn low in thought.

“Are you really…” she murmured, voice barely above a breath, “…Cerces?”

Cerces gave a slow, resolute nod. “Through and through.”

Aglaea’s lashes fluttered low. She brought her hand to her chest, lightly pressing against the golden brooch clasping her mantle.

“Then I can’t… deny it,” she whispered. “There’s something inside me. Not just me— The flame I inherited—she’s trying to reach out. But… It’s like she can’t speak. Just pulses. Longing.”

Her voice trembled faintly.

Cerces leaned forward and grasped both her hands again, more firmly now—warm, grounding.

“I know,” she said softly. “It isn’t just your feeling. And it isn’t just mine.”

“But I know it’s real. Even if it’s muddled by these bodies and mistakes… It’s real.”

Her voice dropped to a hush—just between them.

“Please,” Cerces whispered. “Let me prove it to you. Let me stay. Let me love you, even like this.”

Aglaea’s eyes locked with hers.

And for a moment, the Goldweaver was quiet.

A moment stretched long enough to almost feel sacred.

Until—

“Could you please stop saying creepy things with my body !?”

Everyone turned at once to the other end of the room, where Anaxa, still cloaked and wrapped in Cerces’s form, stood trembling with indignation. His fists were clenched. His teeth ground audibly.

“Every time you touch her, it’s my hands.”

“Every time you say something ridiculous, it’s my voice.”

“This is psychological warfare, and I refuse to sit through it like a silent background prop!”

Cerces, still kneeling with Aglaea’s hands in hers, looked over her shoulder and gave him the smuggest smile imaginable.

“Then don’t sit,” she said sweetly. “Come join us.”

“I would rather be dissolved by Castorice.”

Phainon had already curled into a cushion, visibly wincing at the secondhand embarrassment.

Hyacine sighed. “We are never going to be able to go back to normal after this, are we?”

No one answered.

**Knock knock knock.

The door thudded three times, sharp and authoritative, interrupting the still-charged atmosphere inside Anaxa’s study.

Castorice straightened immediately, already sensing the ripple of formality in the air. She opened the door with measured calm, revealing two Grove Guards in silver-accented armor bearing the insignia of the Council of Sages.

“Apologies for the intrusion,” the taller of the two said. “We were dispatched following a report of an assault on Sage Anaxa during this morning’s amphitheater lecture. We’re here to check on his condition—and locate the assailant.”

Castorice remained impassive. “He is alive and well. Lady Aglaea is with him. There is no threat to either of them at the moment.”

The guards looked relieved—but only briefly.

The shorter one glanced past her into the room, where Anaxa, still in Cerces’s borrowed body and completely wrapped in oversized robes and a hood, stood frozen like a deer in ceremonial floodlights.

The taller soldier narrowed his gaze. “And the perpetrator?”

He stepped forward just enough to spot the suspicious cloaked figure by the shelves—Anaxa, with long beige hair trailing like smoke. “...Is that her?” the guard asked, pointing. “That’s the one who launched the dropkick on the Sage?”

Cerces muffled a laugh behind Aglaea’s shoulder.

Anaxa stiffened, and his voice shot up in panic.

“This is my house!” he blurted, clinging to the arm of the desk like it was a cliff edge. “You can’t just come in and question a resident on baseless accusations!”

The guards exchanged looks.

The shorter one scratched his chin. “But... isn’t this the Sage’s home?”

“I am the Sage!” Anaxa barked.

“Sir,” said the taller guard gently, “you are… clearly a woman.”

“I AM NOT—!” Anaxa screamed, only to be cut off mid-declaration by Hyacine, who placed a calming hand on his shoulder again like she was soothing a panicking ghost.

“She’s… very upset,” Hyacine said carefully. “There was a magical mishap. Please don’t mind the outburst.”

“She dropkicked a Sage,” the guard replied flatly.

Phainon stood up, looking apologetic. “It was… more like a dramatic tackle. There were extenuating circumstances. A stage. Emotions. Theatrics.”

The guards remained unconvinced.

“Regardless,” the taller one said, “we must escort the suspect for questioning. The Seven Sages have already convened for an emergency hearing. It’s protocol.”

Anaxa’s heart dropped to his stomach.

A tribunal? Already?!

He turned to Cerces, eyes wide in horror. “Do something!” he hissed. “Tell them the truth!”

Cerces let out a long, theatrical sigh, rising slowly from the couch as if burdened by divine martyrdom. She patted Aglaea’s hand as she stepped away.

“You know, for someone who spends all day solving impossible theorems,” she muttered over her shoulder, “you sure didn’t calculate how fast karma would find you.”

She turned to face the two Grove Guards, her borrowed form—Anaxa’s, austere frame—looming like an academic storm cloud.

The soldiers visibly straightened.

“Lord Anaxagoras,” the taller one addressed formally, “is this woman—” he gestured to Anaxa’s disguised body, “—the one who assaulted you?”

Cerces blinked at them, then smiled faintly. “No, no. This is all a misunderstanding,” she said breezily, flipping Anaxa’s long coat sleeve like it was a fashion statement.

“That woman is my sister. She came from a faraway land to visit me, and… well, she got a little passionate. You know how siblings are.”

Both guards stared.

The shorter one frowned. “So she didn’t attack you? You’re not under duress?”

Cerces laughed. It was the kind of laugh that made Anaxa die inside.

“Threaten me? Please. That’s ridiculous.”

“She just gets jealous sometimes when I’m being adored in public.”

And without waiting for permission or consent, she turned and wrapped her arms around Anaxa, pulling his much smaller form flush against his own original body.

He went stiff as stone, arms pinned like a restrained squirrel, eyes wide with a twitch.

His left eye twitched again as he forced his arms—forced—to awkwardly lift and barely, just barely, return the embrace. It was like watching a cat try to hug a tree it hated.

Cerces practically sparkled.

“Oh darling, you’re so shy in public,” she cooed, ruffling his hair in a way that made his soul attempt to phase out of his body.

The guards blinked, clearly still unsure of what reality they had just entered.

The taller one coughed politely.

“Well then… Lord Anaxagoras—ma’am—sir… whatever the case… do take care.”

“If your… sister’s behavior becomes hostile again, you are encouraged to report it immediately. For safety reasons.”

Cerces gave them a dazzling smile and a wave.

“Of course, of course. We’ll be just fine. A little fire keeps things exciting, doesn’t it?”

Chapter Text

When Anaxa woke up the next morning, his eyes blinked open against the ceiling of his own study chamber.

But it didn’t feel like waking up. It felt like surfacing. After drowning.

Everything ached. Not physically, but in that dull, grating way exhaustion drills into your very essence.

He sat up slowly, pushing away the mound of oversized blue blankets tangled around him like seaweed. The blanket slipped off one shoulder—and there it was again.

The wrong shoulder. Slightly slimmer. Softer. Lighter.

Still his body in theory—still Cerces’s in flesh.

He looked down, dragging a hand across his face only to feel the unfamiliar angle of the cheekbone. He groaned.

“Still this…” he muttered to himself.

Still stuck.

Still her.

And utterly alone in his own house… except for the one person who refused to leave.

The day before had been a whirlwind of containment, explanation, and collapse. Once they had collectively agreed to keep the event under wraps, Aglaea and the rest of the Chrysos Heirs returned to Okhema, leaving Anaxa to his grim research. Cerces, of course, had stayed behind—by explicit order.

He glanced across the room.

There she was.

Cerces, the Titan of Reason, lounging on his couch in his body, legs propped up on a footstool, munching cheerfully on candied pine-nuts and roasted lotus crisps like she had always belonged there.

She waved lazily at him with a skewer of half-eaten snacks. “Morning, dollface.”

Anaxa gritted his teeth and turned back to his workbench.

The desk was covered in scrolls and thin crystalline frames glowing faintly with fragmented soul-signature data. Diagrams of Coreflame channels. Rejected formulas. Notes crisscrossed with ink from hours of scribbling. He had spent the entire night hunting for a bypass, a reversal, a stabilizer—anything.

But so far…Nothing.

Nothing could tamper with the Coreflame of Reason inside Cerces.

Not a soul tether. Not a divine resonance loop. Not even a neural echo restoration.

He leaned back with a sigh, massaging the base of his neck—again, unfamiliar. His hair was tied up to keep it out of his face, but it still clung to his shoulders like silk. Even that felt wrong.

He could still hear Aglaea’s words from the day before. Clear. Stern.

“Do what you must. But while the Titan of Reason resides in your body—do not endanger her.”

“It is not just your body anymore, Anaxa. It is the vessel of a divine anchor. And it is my duty, as Mnestia’s heir, to protect her.”

And then, just before she departed…

That last glance.

A calm, unreadable stare was cast at Cerces, still smirking behind Anaxa’s face.

Then she was gone—riding off with Castorice and the others back toward Okhema, leaving Anaxa to the worst part of any magical catastrophe.

He groaned again, slumping over his notes.

Behind him, Cerces crunched something loudly and cheerfully.

“Don’t worry, professor~” she purred from the couch. “You’re doing amazing. I always thought watching you stress out was entertaining, but doing it while wearing your face? Chef’s kiss.”

Anaxa pressed his fingers into the bridge of his nose, willing his soul not to abandon him outright.

Across the room, Cerces was humming a tune while flipping through one of his annotated philosophy texts—upside down, no less—occasionally giggling at her own marginal doodles in the margins.

He didn’t rise to her bait.

He had learned. Over the course of the last twenty-four hours, he had painstakingly conditioned himself not to react—no matter the provocation.

Not when she asked to “help” with his soul graphs by doodling hearts in the flame lattice, not when she wrote Anaxa was here in eyeliner on the tank glass, and certainly not when she renamed his favorite chair to The Throne of Cerces the Wise and Extremely Kissable.

No.

Not today.

He stood from his desk, rolled his scrolls into a bundle, and calmly tucked them into the drawer beside his sealed soul-stabilizer. A cleansing breath passed through him.

He grabbed a towel from the wall peg, turned to the hallway, and walked—walked to the bathroom like a man clinging to the last shred of civilization.

The door closed behind him with a satisfying click as he slid the bolt shut.

Locked. Finally.

For the first time in two days, Anaxa let out a breath that didn’t sound like it came from a stressed librarian on their last day of life.

He folded the towel neatly over the rack, lit the warming crystal beside the sink, and took a long, hard look at the mirror.

It wasn’t his reflection. Not entirely.

Cerces’s face stared back. His own body, foreign now—long hair cascading over one shoulder, skin lighter, softer, with the faint radiant glow of a Titan’s influence coursing beneath the surface.

‘This is fine,’ he told himself. ‘It’s still just anatomy. Basic homuncular familiarity. I dissected bodies in my apprenticeship. I rebuilt limbs. I am a man of reason.’

And yet…

He reached for the hem of the robe slowly. Like he was defusing a bomb wired directly to his remaining dignity.

One sleeve. Then the other.

And then he froze, arms mid-air, staring down at the tied sash around the waist.

“Which part… do I start with… without going clinically insane,” he muttered aloud, eyes twitching.

From the other side of the door, Cerces’s voice echoed like a siren from the Void:

“Don’t forget to admire the view~ You’ve got excellent shoulders, by the way!”

Anaxa’s soul visibly attempted to exit his body.

“Go away!”

“I am outside,” she sang. “Just morally adjacent~”

“I will personally reconstruct a new soul chamber just to trap you in it!”

“So romantic.”

Anaxa turned away from the mirror.

No. He didn’t need visual confirmation of his plight. The tactile discomfort of it all was already punishment enough.

Just get it over with, he told himself. Cleanse. Breathe. Ignore her. It’s your body. Technically.

He reached behind to undo the clothing, fingers hesitating only slightly before tugging the knot free. The fabric slid off his shoulders slowly, cool air brushing against unfamiliar skin. He swallowed.

The hem of the robe was next. A single tug. Piece by piece, the layers fell away. His motions were mechanical, surgical—as if he were operating on himself rather than being himself.

But as he did—

From outside the bathroom door, came a high, teasing voice.

“Aahh~ no, Professor… aah… ooh~”

Anaxa’s spine snapped straighter than a steel tuning rod. “Don’t make sounds like that!” he barked, now holding the robe half off like he was caught in some heretical ritual.

“Ah—n-not there, Professor~ Ohh~ don’t be so rough—”

“I will end you.”

“Sorry, sorry~” Cerces giggled. “I just couldn’t resist. It’s not every day I get to hear you nervously undressing in my body.”

That’s that, Anaxa immediately flash strip to retain his sanity. He practically dove into the bath as if it were holy water, steam rising around him like the spirits of his vanishing pride. The warmth helped… a little.

He took a deep breath. In. Out. For the first time in what felt like centuries, Anaxa was alone.

The bathwater lapped gently against porcelain, scented faintly with juniper, steam curling lazily around the edges of the tub. It was quiet—truly quiet. No teasing voice from behind the door. No giggling titan rifling through his textbooks. No soft munching of snacks that made his soul fray like an overwashed robe.

Just heat. Solitude. And… him.

Sort of.

He raised an arm above the waterline. It shimmered. Pale. Slender. Delicate in structure. It responded to his intent instantly, his will commanding it with perfect precision. But it wasn’t his.

“So this… is the product of my own genius,” he muttered.

The homunculus vessel, crafted from memory and divine resonance, had adapted to match Cerces’s original form as closely as possible. Her body—or at least, a near-perfect recreation—rendered in flesh and Coreflame harmonics.

The fingers were long, finely boned, with soft joints like they’d never once held a scalpel or ink-stained quill. The arm narrowed at the wrist with almost unnatural grace. When he shifted, the curve of her leg brushed his own beneath the water—smooth, weightless, silk-like skin that caught no resistance from the current.

He didn’t shudder. But he did blink slowly.

I made this, he thought grimly. I made it too well.

Not out of vanity. Out of accuracy. For Cerces. But now he was in it.

He reached across to pick up the soap—paused—then sighed.

“Get used to it,” he said under his breath, staring down at this borrowed body. “You need familiarity if you’re going to correct the resonance safely. Start with sensory mapping. Arm. Hand. Shoulder.”

He brushed the lathered soap down the length of his borrowed forearm. The skin twitched—he twitched.

“...Ignore that. Reflex.”

The next stroke went along his shoulder. Then across the collarbone. He tried to keep his thoughts clinical, methodical. Like a proper academic performing a post-mortem dissection. Except the subject was alive. And sighing involuntarily.

A soft slip of breath escaped him as the warmth clung to his skin.

“This is... dangerous.”

Not in the magical sense. Not in the divine resonance breakdown sense. But in the I-will-eventually-lose-my-mind-if-this-goes-on sense.

The body moved too easily. Felt too responsive. It was like wearing a perfectly tailored robe that somehow knew your thoughts. Worse still, it whispered back.

“Never again,” he muttered. “Never again will I underestimate the importance of neutral anatomical templates.”

Outside the door, he heard a shuffle. Then silence. Anaxa paused mid-scrub, tilting his head just slightly toward the sound.

Nothing.

Not a taunt. Not a giggle. Not even a snack being crunched between teeth. Just... silence. His fingers stopped against the soapstone. His brow furrowed.

“Cerces?” he called, cautiously.

No response.

He narrowed his eyes. That was either suspicious or a small miracle granted by whatever divine force still had pity left for him. But Cerces, quiet? That wasn’t just unnatural—it was borderline apocalyptic.

Anaxa stared at the door for another five seconds. “Good,” he muttered.

He didn't need her antics today. If silence was what he was granted, he’d take it—and use every precious second to reestablish some semblance of control in this madness.

He leaned back, submerged up to his chin once more, and gave a long exhale. The hot water embraced him like it was the only thing in the world that hadn’t betrayed him lately.

After a few final minutes of scrubbing down the vessel—his vessel, for now—he reached for the bathrobe. The plush fabric wrapped around his lithe frame with unsettling ease, the collar slipping off one shoulder until he readjusted it with a grumble. He hated how natural it felt.

With a second towel, he began to dry the long curtain of wet hair clinging to his back and chest. Hair so fine and ethereal it almost glowed under the warm light.

“Why does everything about this body defy physics and dignity?” he muttered, swishing the towel over the back of his head.

Stray droplets slid down his neck and shoulders as he worked through the long strands, now beginning to realize how often Cerces must have tied this into ridiculous styles. It was soft. Too soft. He shouldn’t have hair this soft.

Still no sound outside.

Anaxa stepped out of the steamy bathroom, towel slung over his shoulder, bathrobe tied as tightly as decency would allow. The warm scent of the juniper bath still clung faintly to his skin.

The house greeted him with stillness.

The living room—his living room—was uncharacteristically quiet. No giggling. No humming. No Titan of Reason pirouetting in his scholar robe while making finger puppets of long-dead philosophers.

Just…

Quiet.

His sharp gaze scanned the room out of habit, observing the evidence of recent occupation: an open bag of dried lotus crisps abandoned on the armrest, a half-unwrapped sweet bun with one bite taken out of it (Cerces never finished her snacks), and a lone sock—his sock, somehow—draped over the arm of a chair like a limp flag of surrender.

But Cerces herself? Gone. Not even a trace of Coreflame resonance lingering in the air. Wherever she’d gone, she’d done it quietly—and, worse, voluntarily.

Anaxa stood in place for a long moment.

“...Do I mind?” He smiled. “Not at all.”

He hummed, faintly and tunelessly, as he padded across the smooth wooden floor. A small victory. A breath of air uncontaminated by teasing or chaos. He reached his drawer—his sacred drawer—and pulled it open.

Then paused. And frowned.

Row after row of scholar robes, research layers, lecture outfits, and nightgowns—all designed for his original body. None of them would fit the current him. One sleeve nearly dragged to the floor as he held it up experimentally.

“...Useless,” he muttered.

He tossed it back in with a sigh and leaned against the edge of the table, arms crossed. If he was going to survive another day in this form without looking like a drowned librarian in exile, he needed to at least find a passable outfit.

Which brought him—unfortunately—to the logical solution. “I’ll need new clothes. Something tailored to this frame. Flexible, modest, inconspicuous... and tolerable.”

While he scanned again, he noticed something. A slip of parchment—thin, neatly folded—wedged just behind the wardrobe door’s inner hinge. It hadn’t been there before.

Anaxa stared at it for two long seconds.

His fingers—still unnervingly dainty—unfolded the letter with surgical precision.

Cerces’s handwriting was unmistakable: a looping, elegant script that curled like vines pretending to be formal.

“Gone to see my beloved. Don’t wait up. ♥”

He reread it. Then once more, just to be certain that those words truly meant what they meant.

Gone. To see. Aglaea.

The blood in Anaxa’s face drained faster than logic could catch it. His eyes widened in full academic horror.

In a frantic dash, he flung open the drawer and yanked out the same oversized scholar robe he’d rejected not five minutes ago. It draped over him like a collapsing curtain, but he had no time to care. He wrestled the sleeves into place while simultaneously stuffing his long hair into the hood like he was cramming scrolls into a fireproof box.

With robe flapping behind him like a noble trying to escape his own wedding, Anaxa bolted out the door, his long legs (currently not his) pounding the pavement with surprising grace as he tore down the winding path of the Grove.

“Cerces, if you so much as look at her like a romance protagonist, I will dismantle the astral plane with my bare hands—!”

---

Morning light poured down over Okhema. Golden rays danced across white stone rooftops and hanging silk canopies, casting soft colors over the bustling market streets.

At the heart of it all—walking with measured grace, head held like a banner of divine indifference—was Aglaea.

Clad in a cream-and-gold travel shawl, her steps were poised, deliberate. Flanking her were two loyal handmaidens, dutifully following with market baskets and silent concern etched in their eyes.

It had been an hour since she left the palace.

And so far…

At least twenty-seven citizens had congratulated her on her engagement. Ten more had asked when the ceremony would be.

Five had inquired whether the child would inherit her eyes or the professor’s.

And one elderly baker—bless her enthusiastic heart—had handed her a gift basket full of infant milk powder with tears in her eyes and whispered, "We’re all so proud of you, dear. Even if he’s a little… intense."

Aglaea had not blinked the entire exchange.

Her eyes twitched slightly now, lips drawn into a razor-straight line as a street performer began playing a flute rendition of what she was 95% certain was a romantic ballad titled “My Scholar, My Sin.”

“My lady,” one of her handmaids finally whispered, “should we return to the estate?”

“No,” Aglaea said, voice still calm. “We must restock the clove root and silken beans. We’re out of both.”

“Yes, but... the citizens keep... smiling.”

“Let them.”

She kept walking. Through another arch.

Past another couple who gasped and whispered, “That’s her! The demigoddess and her mad professor!”

She briefly wondered if she could order a citywide silence under divine decree. Behind her, the handmaids whispered again as a cart vendor leaned out, handing her a pair of heart-shaped sweets.

“You’ll need the sugar, Lady Aglaea! For the honeymoon!”

She accepted the sweets. Smiled. And gently crushed them in her palm.

Aglaea let out a long, careful sigh as she paused before a spice stall, her handmaidens respectfully keeping their distance.

She stared at the glimmering jars of star anise and saffron as if they held answers. They did not.

“Unashamed,” she muttered under her breath. “Brazen. Shameless.”

Yesterday’s images still burned behind her eyes like sunlight etched onto parchment: Anaxa’s face, contorted into a sweet, uncharacteristically soft smile. Anaxa’s voice, purring with affection. And worst of all—

His arms—well, Cerces’s, now—around her. The gentle warmth of a cheek brushing hers, that whisper of “I missed you, my Mnestia.”

Aglaea’s ears flushed faintly, her spine going taut like a bowstring.

“Insufferable titan,” she muttered. “Insufferable man.”

Cerces had pulled it off with such audacity, using his body like a weaponized love letter.

And what had Aglaea done? Nothing.

She hadn’t slapped her. Hadn’t stabbed her with a divine needle. Hadn’t scorched her to cinders with a single glare. She had stood there.

Like a moon-dazed village girl seeing a traveling bard for the first time.

You’re the Goldweaver, she scolded herself, the Inheritor of Romance. You wield the Coreflame that spun the strings of fates in Okhema. And you… you froze.

She gritted her teeth. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on her.

Romance had always been something she understood in theory, the way a weaver understands how to construct a tapestry without ever having worn the garment herself.

Sure, she'd had emotions before. She had even played at love, long ago—years ago—when she was still a girl too clever for her own heart. Back when the only person who ever made her feel unmoored was…

“…Anaxagoras,” she whispered.

It was a memory she hadn’t invited. The quiet hours spent beside him as they studied, the long debates that felt more like private dances, the way he always looked at her—not as a priestess or ruler, but as an equal. Annoying. Brilliant. Maddening.

She had buried those thoughts long ago. But yesterday, seeing Cerces wielding that very body so freely, so intimately, had unearthed it all with a single stolen kiss.

Her face darkened again—not from embarrassment this time, but from the sheer insolence of it.

She turned from the stall while muttering. “I don’t have time for childish emotions or Titan flirtations.”

She froze.

There—sudden and seamless—two arms slipped gently around her waist from behind, drawing her close in a now painfully familiar motion.

Not forceful. Not invasive. Deliberate.

Her body tensed instantly. Reflex screamed to call forth her divine threads, to weave a dozen shimmering needles from the threads of the world and sew this shameless ghost into the cobblestones.

But she didn’t.

Because in the space between impulse and action, something stirred. Something old. Something deep. Her demigoddess blood sang—not with wrath, but with recognition.

And in her ear, that maddening voice purred. “Good morning, my love. Did you sleep well without me?”

Cerces.

Still in Anaxa’s body.

Still smiling as if this were nothing more than a midsummer’s day stroll.

Aglaea’s fingers twitched.

“Remove your hands,” she said, voice sharp enough to cleave stone.

Cerces chuckled, head resting lightly against her shoulder. “But I missed you so terribly. And the market is simply no fun without you staring at me like I’m about to detonate.”

Aglaea’s eye twitched again. “You are about to detonate.”

Cerces turned her head to look at her with Anaxa’s eyes—though they sparkled with unmistakable mischief only a Titan could muster. “Mmm. Romantic, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“You hesitated.”

Aglaea’s breath caught for half a second. Her handmaidens behind her were frozen like statues, mouths parted mid-word, utterly stunned.

So was half the market. A few citizens even applauded. Someone shouted, “There he is! The groom!”

The crowd was growing.

What began as the usual polite bustle of the market had bloomed into a full-blown procession. Word had already spread since the incident at the Grove, but now—now—the citizens had visual confirmation.

Their Lady Aglaea. And her scholar. Engaged in open affection. In daylight. In public.

The square buzzed with whispers, gasps, giggles, and more than a few hopeful sighs from onlookers who clearly adored romance more than reality.

The two handmaidens at Aglaea’s flank were starting to sweat beneath their veils. One leaned close, her voice taut with concern. “My lady, with respect… perhaps we should return to the estate. The people seem… overly fond today.”

And then, with slow, deliberate grace, she turned her head toward Cerces—still smiling, still oblivious—and gripped her wrist tightly.

Cerces blinked. “Oh?”

“We’re leaving,” she said curtly.

It wasn’t the kind of grip meant to hurt. But it wasn’t gentle, either. It was the grip of a woman whose carefully braided patience had finally frayed.

The crowd gasped as she pulled the figure forward, pushing through the stunned bystanders, her maids trailing behind like two ducks fleeing fire.

Cerces followed without resistance, smiling as though she had just been invited to an elopement instead of a reckoning.

Only once they reached the hidden courtyard behind the marbled walls—lush with cypress trees and veiled from the city’s view—did Aglaea stop.

She let go of Cerces’s wrist. Took a breath. And turned.

“You will explain yourself, right now.”

Cerces, still with Anaxa’s face but undeniably her in posture and tone, gave a small bow. “Of course, my beloved.”

“ Revered titan of reason, please do not tease me .”

Cerces laughed softly, leaning against one of the ivy-covered columns. “Very well. But you dragged me all the way here. Some part of you wanted this conversation.”

Chapter Text

The estate gates closed behind them with a faint thud of finality.

The two handmaidens—Lykopis and Irene—stood just within the outer chamber corridor, hearts thudding as they leaned subtly toward the veiled courtyard, where the muffled echoes of their lady’s voice could be heard exchanging heated words with the notorious "scholar."

Neither dared to breathe too loudly.

The Lady Aglaea, ruler of Okhema, demigoddess of Mnestia, weaver of fate and flame—holding hands with a man in broad daylight. Not just any man, but him.

The talk of the Grove. The walking scandal. The eccentric philosopher of the Grove, whose reputation was a complicated blend of brilliance, heresy, and suspicious charisma.

“That’s... Lord Anaxagoras, isn’t it?” Lykopis whispered.

“He’s shorter than I imagined,” Irene murmured, her voice still hushed as if afraid the stone might hear. “But he walked like he was being dragged to the altar.”

They had seen their lady in many lights before—cloaked in dignity while weaving gold-thread prayers for the dying, seated in stoic silence at the council of heirs, even fending off marriage proposals from high nobles with nothing more than a tilt of her eyebrow.

But this?

This was new.

“I didn’t think she... You know...” Lykopis trailed off.

“Neither did I,” said Irene. “Aside from Lady Tribbie or perhaps Lady Castorice, there’s never been anyone... no man, anyway.”

That much was well known. In Amphoreus, the students worshipped her like a distant star. Countless poems had been penned comparing her to astral fire. Even the noble houses had long accepted that she would never bend to something as base and political as a romantic union. Not with someone of a lower station.

Not with someone like Anaxagoras.

“He’s not even noble,” Lykopis whispered, aghast. “He’s just... brilliant and mad.”

Even now, behind the silk curtain that separated the outer chamber from the sanctum, they could faintly hear Cerces’s voice—saccharine and teasing, made all the more jarring coming from Anaxa’s mouth.

Lykopis wrung her hands. “Do we—should we fetch someone? Lady Castorice?”

“No,” Irene said, gulping. “If anyone steps in now, Lady Aglaea might actually unravel their soul.”

They paused. Then, quietly, they both leaned a little closer to the curtain.

Not out of duty. But curiosity.

The courtyard had grown quieter now, the hum of the market a distant murmur behind the estate walls. Only the gentle rustling of ivy and the occasional chirp of a morning dove broke the stillness.

Aglaea stood tall, back straight like a reed drawn by a bowstring, her shawl drawn tighter over her shoulders as she faced the figure of Cerces—or rather, Cerces within Anaxa’s body—still leaning with smug elegance against the stone column, half-casual, half-predator.

“You may be a Titan of Reason, and I acknowledge that title with due reverence,” Aglaea began, her tone like calm steel, “but I am the Lady of Okhema. The leader of the Chrysos Heirs. My position… my image… is not for play.”

Cerces tilted her head, eyes twinkling with mild interest as Aglaea continued.

“Do you think I allow myself to remain untouched out of vanity? My distance is a shield—for myself, and for others. Anyone too close to me becomes a tool. A target. A pawn. Especially someone like… him.”

She did not speak Anaxa’s name.

She didn’t have to.

Cerces exhaled softly, brushing invisible dust off the borrowed scholar’s robe.

“Ah, yes. Our dear Anaxa.” Her voice dripped with fond sarcasm. “The darling heretic. A man so buried in logic he forgets what a heart sounds like… and yet, paradoxically, someone with a long list of enemies who all carry quills sharper than swords.”

Aglaea’s eyes narrowed.

“He has ties to the Elders. The same Elders who whisper of abolishing the Heirs entirely and returning to the ‘Era Chrysea.’ He’s brilliant—but reckless. A useful mind, but a dangerous ally.”

Cerces chuckled, folding her arms over her chest—well, Anaxa’s chest, which made the image absurd. “And yet,” she said, “you still surround yourself with him. You bicker like star-crossed ghosts. You let him call you things no one else dares to whisper. You never banish him. Why is that, I wonder?”

Aglaea didn’t answer. Not right away.

The silence between them stretched like a pulled thread, vibrating on the edge of something raw and unspoken.

“Because I respect him,” Aglaea said at last, voice lower. “He challenged me. Saw through the performance. And now, he’s not even allowed to look me in the eyes without it being you staring back.”

Cerces stood before her—still bearing Anaxa’s face, and yet, there was no mistaking it now. The warmth in her voice. The gentleness in her presence. The gravity that didn’t belong to a man of reason, but to something far older.

“Tell me, Aglaea,” Cerces said, tilting her head just slightly, “how do you feel now?”

Aglaea furrowed her brows. “What sort of question is that?”

Cerces gave a soft chuckle, the kind that almost echoed from her borrowed chest like a whisper from deep within the earth. Then, without waiting for permission, she reached forward and took Aglaea’s hand in her own.

Their skin met—warm against warm.

And Aglaea’s breath caught.

“Not with your mind, Lady of Gold,” Cerces murmured, her thumb brushing the back of Aglaea’s hand. “Don’t rationalize it. Don’t filter it. Feel. Go back to that place… before reason.”

Aglaea’s lips parted slightly. She stared at the hand in hers. Something stirred, slow but unmistakable.

A gentle heat, rising from her chest. Familiar… and not.

It was not lust. Not even longing.

It was the feeling she once knew as a child—on the day she awakened to her inheritance. When she had first heard the heartbeat of the world through the golden Coreflame of Romance.

“I…” she whispered, eyes wide. “There’s something… calling.”

Cerces nodded gently. “You hear it now. That voice that’s always been with you. Mnestia.”

And then, all around them—without warning—a shimmer filled the air.

From the corners of the courtyard, the garden, and the seams between shade and sunlight, golden butterflies emerged. Dozens. No—hundreds. They fluttered like silk made of sun and memory, surrounding the two women in a quiet spiral.

They whispered.

Not in words. Not fully.

But Aglaea felt it as a hum against her bones. A hush in her blood.

And then… a name:

“…Cerces…”

She gasped softly, staring at the Titan before her. “I know this voice. I know this feeling. It’s her. Mnestia’s… feelings. The ones I sealed away long ago.”

Cerces gave her a sad, kind smile. “They weren’t yours alone. They were meant to pass through you. But you buried them to protect yourself. And now… you’re hearing them again because I’m here. Because you let me reach you.”

Aglaea’s body trembled, just slightly.

For the first time in what felt like centuries, she felt not like a queen, not like a priestess, not like the Flame’s chosen.

But like a woman—standing before someone who could make her forget everything she was supposed to be.

Aglaea stood frozen, still trembling faintly from the resonance.

The voice—Mnestia’s voice—still lingered in her ears like a lullaby caught between memory and dream. That warmth inside her chest pulsed again. Not fire. Not heat. Something gentler.

Something sacred.

Cerces, still inhabiting the shell of Anaxa, stepped closer—no longer teasing, no longer playful. Her fingers grazed Aglaea’s cheek with reverence, thumb brushing just beneath the corner of her eye as if to wipe away a tear that hadn't yet fallen.

“This,” Cerces said softly, “is why I did what I did.”

Aglaea looked up at her, startled.

“I wanted to call her out,” Cerces continued, her voice low, aching. “ My love is buried deep within you. Her voice, her longing, her love. Not just for me… but for you. For the girl who carried her, the woman who silenced her, the goddess who wore solitude like silk because it was safer that way.”

Aglaea’s lips parted. She couldn’t breathe.

Cerces leaned forward, her forehead brushing gently against hers.

“I missed her. I missed you.”

The butterflies pulsed brighter, their glow deepening with the weight of the moment.

“So I chose this madness. This body. This farce,” Cerces whispered. “Because even if it humiliated me, even if the whole of Okhema laughed or spat—I would wear his skin for a thousand days if it meant she could hear me again.”

Her hand cupped the back of Aglaea’s neck now, pulling her closer—not possessively, but protectively. As if she were trying to cradle something fragile and ancient and holy.

“Let go, Aglaea,” Cerces murmured. “Let go of fear. Of duty. Of image. Let Mnestia speak. Let yourself feel. You don’t have to carry her in silence anymore.”

Aglaea’s eyes brimmed, wide and uncertain.

She looked at Cerces—not the body, not the face, but the essence she had always known. That playful, maddening, eternal warmth.

And for once in her life…

She wanted to let herself fall.

Beyond the stone arches, just past the bloom-heavy pergola where ivy draped like theater curtains, the handmaids of the Chrysos Estate had begun to gather. First, it was just Lykopis and Irene, but by now…

There were seven.

Seven young women in gold-threaded robes, faces half-hidden behind their fans, pretending to sweep or polish or carry trays that had long since been forgotten

 And all of them were peeking, subtly and not-so-subtly, through the parted silk screens into the inner sanctum of their lady.

The untouched Flame of Romance.

And standing across from her—the heretic himself. Draped in the silhouette of the famed scholar Anaxa, wearing his stolen form like a scandal made flesh, was the greatest living controversy to ever set foot inside Okhema’s walls.

They couldn’t hear what was being said. The tones were low, hushed, softened by distance and dense blooms. But the gesture said everything:

Fingers brushing cheeks. Eyes locked with longing. Faces closer than court etiquette could possibly allow.

Cerces—tall, radiant in the guise of Anaxa—cupped Lady Aglaea’s cheek like something priceless and sacred.

Aglaea did not pull away.

She stood there, trembling slightly, lips parted, not in protest… but as if waiting for something unspoken to fall into place.

“Stars above…” one maid whispered behind her fan.

“I know,” breathed another, barely able to contain her gasp. “I think I just witnessed actual romance.”

“Do you think they’re... together-together?” a younger maid asked, eyes wide as saucers.

“Of course they are!” hissed Lykopis, clutching her broom like a lifeline. “Look at the way he’s touching her—like a poem made flesh.”

“It’s so wrong,” Irene murmured, eyes sparkling, “and yet… so right.”

They swooned as a collective. Half from excitement, half from disbelief.

Their imaginations spiraled faster than any court gossip could possibly keep up.

“They’re going to kiss,” one maid whispered, trembling.

BANG!!

A deafening crash exploded against the front door of the courtyard.

“A-AHH!!” “What was that?!” “The ancestors have spoken—!”

Cerces and Aglaea both flinched sharply, heads snapping toward the front entrance.

From beyond the gate—hoarse, furious, and unmistakably familiar—came a voice dripping with dramatic accusation:

“ANAXAGORAS!!!”

Cerces blinked.

Aglaea stiffened.

The maids—half-fainted from the sheer emotional whiplash—peeked from behind their screens like terrified theatergoers caught mid-tragedy.

The door burst open.

A slightly hunched, storm-eyed Anaxa, still trapped in Cerces’s curvaceous form, clad in a scholar's robe far too big in the shoulders, a mask over his face, and large black sunglasses that did nothing to hide the fury bubbling beneath.Panting. Fuming.

“You!” he barked, voice half-growled through gritted teeth. “What do you think you're doing?!”

Cerces blinked with innocent curiosity, her lips still parted from the almost-kiss.

“What am I doing?” she echoed, raising a brow.

Cerces—glanced lazily over her shoulder.

“Hmm? Greeting my beloved?” she said, tone light as air.

“In my body?! In public?! Do you have no shame?!” Anaxa’s voice cracked slightly from sheer emotional whiplash.

Cerces tilted her head. “You're the one who called me by name.”

“I called you Anaxagoras!” Anaxa hissed, glancing at the watching maids, who were now positively vibrating with gossip energy. “You’re Anaxagoras. Remember?!”

Cerces offered a sheepish shrug.

“Oops.”

The maids whispered furiously:

“Is this a secret relationship?”

“Is this some political marriage drama?!”

To defuse it, Cerces turned to the crowd with the smoothest grin Anaxa’s face had probably ever made and called out:

“Don’t worry, my friends. That’s just my… dear traveling companion. She gets a little dramatic sometimes when I’m away too long.”

And to make matters exponentially worse— She blew Anaxa a kiss.

The crowd collectively squealed.

“He has a jealous wife?!”

“Wait… they’re together?!”

“Lady Aglaea and him… but also her—?!”

Meanwhile, Anaxa stared, frozen in his tracks, caught between storming out, screaming, or combusting from humiliation.

Cerces turned back to Aglaea and, in a hushed whisper that only she could hear, leaned in:

“Should I kiss you now… or after the crowd starts betting on which one of us seduced you first?”

Aglaea’s expression did not change.

Her soul, however, briefly left her body.

From the hedge-lined corridor above the estate’s inner courtyard, the handmaidens of Lady Aglaea stood in stunned silence—each one clutching handkerchiefs, trays, or each other, all of them thoroughly emotionally compromised.

“I-I can’t believe what I’m seeing…” One maiden stared aghast. “First the scholar almost kisses her—now this woman—”

“Is this… is this a duel for love?!”

Before anyone could react, the cloaked figure—Anaxa, still in Cerces’s petite and deceptively elegant frame—grabbed Cerces by the collar and wrenched her away from Aglaea in one fluid, furious motion.

“That’s enough!!” Anaxa snapped, his voice strained with barely suppressed fury.

To the handmaidens, it was a scene plucked straight from the tragic dramas performed at the Celestial Amphitheater.

There she stood—Lady Aglaea, beautiful and untouchable, torn between two lovers.

There stood the handsome, if eccentric, Professor Anaxa, his hair tousled, pulled back by a possessive, jealous third party.

And there, dragging him back with tearful desperation, was a mysterious young noblewoman with beige hair and burning eyes.

Cerces stumbled slightly in Anaxa’s grasp, but rather than struggle, she simply tilted her head and offered Aglaea a soft smile.

“See?” she called out lightly. “She’s a little possessive when I spend too long with someone else. It’s endearing, really.”

“Shut.up! Shut.up!” Anaxa hissed through gritted teeth.

Aglaea said nothing.

She was frozen—visibly, mentally, spiritually—her soul half-detached from her body like a demigoddess contemplating a reset button.

The flutter of gossip surged among the maids like a wildfire. “Lady Aglaea is caught in a love triangle…”

Anaxa’s patience—already hanging by threads finer than a spider’s breath—finally snapped.

With his grip firm on Cerces’s wrist (a wrist that, to his despair, was far daintier than it used to be), he yanked her away from Aglaea once more. “We are leaving,” he hissed under his breath, jaw tight, teeth clenched. “Before you start invoking marriage rites in my body.”

Cerces tilted her head playfully, utterly unbothered, even as she was being dragged.

But then, just as Anaxa turned to storm off—A hand shot out and caught his.

Not Cerces’s.

Aglaea’s.

But her expression was different now.

Her eyes—cold moments ago—were wide, shining, almost glowing faintly. Her lips parted, trembling not from hesitation, but from recognition. And when she spoke, her voice had changed: deeper, more serene, echoing with something older.

“...Cerces.”

Anaxa stopped dead in his tracks. Cerces did too. Her breath hitched.

She turned slowly toward the source of that voice.

Aglaea’s hand was still wrapped tightly around Anaxa’s borrowed wrist. Her eyes—those golden dusk-born eyes—were not merely her own anymore.

Cerces stared.

She knew that voice.

“Mnestia…?” she whispered.

The courtyard stilled again, but this time the silence was thick, reverent—like the very air had bowed.

Even the wind paused to listen.

And then it happened.

Before Anaxa could step away—before he could bark a warning, or hiss another protest, or stop anything at all—Aglaea stepped forward, eyes locked on the vessel wearing Cerces’s soul…

…and kissed him.

Square. On. The lips.

His lips.

Anaxa’s body.

The world exploded into soundless white. The handmaidens shrieked behind the hedges.

Cerces’s soul within Anaxa's frame jolted as if a thousand bells had rung within her.

And Anaxa—

Anaxa’s entire spirit recoiled like a cursed shrimp thrown into boiling oil. His eyes went wide behind the mask and glasses. His hands flailed midair like a startled owl.

But Aglaea—or Mnestia—wasn't looking at him.

She was gazing at Cerces, her voice soft and awed. “I remember you now… the one who called me back.”

Cerces could barely breathe. Tears welled behind Anaxa’s stern, battle-tested eyes. “You heard me…”

Aglaea gently cupped his—no, Cerces’s—cheek again, and whispered “I never stopped listening.”

Meanwhile, Anaxa could only scream internally in nineteen languages, all while trying not to faint from the unbearable intimacy being conducted with his face.

Anaxa stood there—frozen, disassociating, utterly detached from reality—as he bore witness to an act so profoundly intimate, so incomprehensibly scandalous, that his logical mind simply ceased to function.

His body—his body—was kissing Aglaea.

No, not kissing. Mingling. Melting. Becoming one, mouth to mouth like a scene from a forbidden opera banned in four sectors of Okhema.

“They’re still going,” someone behind him whispered.

He wasn’t sure who. Or what. Time was melting. Color desaturated. Logic was bleeding from the walls. A golden butterfly landed on his shoulder and promptly fainted.

Cerces (in his body) had gone completely pliant under Aglaea’s lips, hands curling tenderly into the folds of her robes. Aglaea, still half-possessed by Mnestia’s divinity, looked lost in a trance of ancient yearning.

And Anaxa—still in Cerces’s small, deceptively fragile body—could only watch with a hollow, echoing thought:

That’s my face.

That’s my mouth.

That is… MY. TONGUE.

He stepped forward in dazed horror, a hand reaching out as if to reclaim a piece of his dignity from the floor. “Stop. Stop. This isn’t—!”

But as soon as he moved—

A high-pitched gasp rang out behind him, and suddenly several handmaidens lunged forward like an elite palace guard possessed by romantic delusion. “How dare you interrupt our Lady’s sacred moment of love?!”

Anaxa barely had time to squeak before arms wrapped around his waist from behind, another around his shoulders. A frilly cushion was slapped over his face.

“I’m not a threat—LET ME G—mph!!”

He flailed helplessly in Cerces’s petite form, legs kicking midair as one maid hoisted him off the ground like an angry, flustered scroll.

The moment shattered—gently, like starlight cracking over still water—when Aglaea, or rather the presence within her, slowly lifted her lips from Cerces’s.

Her golden eyes now shimmered not with human confusion but with divine recognition.

She turned her gaze to the figure restrained by lacy ribbons and relentless maids.

Anaxa—still bound in Cerces’s body—froze as Mnestia looked at him.

Not Aglaea.

Mnestia.

The goddess behind the heir.

“Who… is that?” she asked softly, her voice a whisper of golden dust through the courtyard.

Cerces—still smiling, still very much draped in Anaxa’s body—tilted her head fondly and gently rubbed Mnestia’s back.

“That’s the scholar I told you about,” Cerces said, her tone filled with affectionate mischief. “The one who never lets me bathe in peace.”

Mnestia blinked. Her brow furrowed ever so slightly.

“The… blasphemer?”

Her tone was not judgmental, merely puzzled.

Anaxa, halfway upside-down in a flustered maid’s grip, tried to speak up—

“I can explain everything!”

—only for a cushion to be promptly slapped back over his mouth.

Mnestia’s eyes narrowed slightly in divine thought. She stepped forward just enough to look at him more clearly—at herself, at Cerces’s soul trapped within his frame. “But… why is he wearing your face? And you… his?”

There was a long pause.

Cerces simply wrapped her arms around Mnestia’s waist again and buried her head into her chest with a content sigh.

“Details,” she murmured.

“All that matters is… I can finally hold you like this.”

There was a soft flutter of golden butterflies between them. A divine hum danced in the air. For a moment, it felt like a love story from the beginning of the cosmos.

Anaxa, gagged and red-faced, could only scream into the cushion.

Mnestia looked at him again. This time, her expression softened. “Release her,” she commanded gently. “Do not harm the scholar.”

The maids, who had been performing their best imitation of an emotional exorcism, immediately froze. “But—my Lady—! She tried to ruin your kiss!”

“Release her.”

The golden undertone of command echoed in their bones. They obeyed.

Anaxa was promptly unwrapped from the towel restraint and set carefully on the marble steps like a defused scroll. He coughed, flailing for his dignity.

Mnestia turned to the nearest maid and added, “Escort her out of the estate. She is… not to be punished.”

The maids bowed in unison, now completely reverent, treating the flustered scholar in Cerces’s petite form like some misunderstood noble guest.

Cerces gave Anaxa a wink as he was ushered away in embarrassed silence.

“Do visit again soon,” she called sweetly.

Chapter Text

Sunlight spilled over the upper terraces of Goldweaver estate like liquid bronze, warming flagstones that had barely cooled from the night. Inside the building, the handmaid corridors were buzzing—not with orders, but with whispers.

“The jealous wife”

“Did you hear?” Lykopis breathed, polishing a silver vase she’d already polished twice. “They say the jealous wife stormed the courtyard yesterday—right in the middle of His Lordship’s embrace!”

Irene glanced over her shoulder before leaning closer. “Stormed? She all but kicked the gate off its hinges, called him Anaxagoras in front of everyone, then tried to drag him away like a wayward swan!”

A third maid,  pressed her hands to flushed cheeks. “And Lady Aglaea didn’t banish her! She let the poor woman go without a scratch. Such mercy! Such poise!”

The three maids sighed in unison, half‑swooning at their mistress’s rumored benevolence.

Down the next gallery, two laundresses exchanged folded linens, voices low:

“After the uproar, they say the scholar spent the night in Her Ladyship’s bedchamber,” one murmured, a blush creeping up to her ears.

“Do you think they… you know…” the other prompted, eyes wide.

The first maid shook her head, letting imagination fill the silence: candlelight, soft laughter, lips meeting in quiet reverence. Her partner bit her lip, equally scandalised—and delighted.

That silence, that sacred closed door—had fed a fire of speculation stronger than any official proclamation could contain. Some claimed the golden butterflies from yesterday’s divine moment had returned in the night. Others believed they heard music—no, sobbing—from behind the walls. A few claimed Lady Aglaea’s own smile lingered longer that morning as she accepted the day’s schedule.

Every glance at the shuttered wing turned heads.

Every quiet footstep made hearts beat faster.

And as maids crossed paths in candle-lit hallways, they looked at one another not with suspicion—but with complicity.

For Aglaea, the light of morning did not come with ceremony.

No tapping footsteps from her garmentmaker. No cold silver trays of steamed jasmine water. No breeze trailing in from the balcony’s golden drapes.

This morning arrived wrapped in something warm.

Soft. Subtle. Steady in its quiet rhythm.

Aglaea stirred, blinking beneath heavy lids that did not want to rise—not because of exhaustion, but because of comfort. Something surrounded her. Not the linen sheets or the brocade duvet she slept under every night. Something living.

She inhaled slowly, her body still suspended between waking and dreaming. Her fingers twitched, brushing velvet warmth. Her heart, always so carefully locked in its rhythm, missed a beat.

A second passed.

Then another.

And then realization struck like a golden needle through silk—

She wasn’t alone.

Her eyes fluttered open, adjusting to the soft filtered light that slipped past the drawn curtain. And there—lying beside her, his breath slow, his head tilted slightly toward her—was a face she knew.

Anaxagoras.

Or rather… not quite.

Cerces.

The titan of Reason, still wearing the form of the scholar she could never fully unravel.

Her breath caught.

The sight of him—of her, in that stolen skin—was so still, so deeply asleep, that Aglaea remained frozen. Her body knew to still itself in presence of danger, but this wasn’t danger.

This was something far worse.

Intimacy.

Her heart thudded again, gently but insistently, and she reached up—foolishly, tenderly—with fingers that trembled far more than she would ever admit. She paused just above his face, then slowly let her hand glide down—

From his temple.
To his cheekbone.
Down to the line of his jaw.

The contour was sharp yet soft beneath her touch, like a sculpture left half-carved by an artisan who couldn’t decide whether to perfect beauty or leave it real. Even with her poor eyesight, she could feel it: the gentle slope of his nose, the faint roughness along his chin.

No wonder Cipher used to call him a “pretty boy” with that exasperated pout.

But now that the world was quiet and the morning dared not interrupt them, she could admit—

Yes. He was beautiful.

Too beautiful, perhaps.

Her fingertips hesitated near his lips. And that was when—

One eye cracked open.

A slow, drowsy gleam of amber peered up at her.

“Curious little heir,” he murmured, a lazy smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Tracing your fiancé’s face like it’s your embroidery frame.”

Aglaea flinched—just subtly—and retracted her hand with practiced elegance, folding it back onto her chest as if it had never strayed.

“You were breathing oddly,” she lied softly, eyes half-lidded. “I was checking if you were alive.”

“Ah,” Cerces—Anaxa—grinned wider, voice still husky from sleep. “Always the healer’s excuse. Next time you want to caress my face, just do it honestly.”

Aglaea looked away, feigning nonchalance. Her heart was still beating too loudly, an unwelcome sound that disrupted her usual clarity.

But now, as her mind sharpened further into wakefulness, something else drew her attention—something strange.

Something… wrong.

She turned her head just slightly, casting a cautious glance back toward the warm presence beside her. And then she saw it—

The faint shimmer of voidlight tracing across a bare chest.

Where his shirt should have been.

Her breath hitched. Her spine stiffened. Heat pooled suddenly—frustratingly—in her face and ears.

He—no, Cerces—was shirtless.

And not just modestly so. His entire upper torso lay in full display, bare to the rising dawn. The sculpted shape of it would have been distracting enough, but the spiral of stars marking his chest—the divine, living brand of the Coreflame—twisted in slow motion like an infinite galaxy.

Aglaea looked down at herself with a jolt, half-afraid—

Relief washed over her.

She was still clothed. Her silken night robe, carefully secured. Not even a single button undone.

But even so…

She clutched her blanket to her chest, drawing it up higher—not out of cold, but as a shield. As a barrier. As if a single breath more of proximity would unravel the bindings she worked so hard to maintain.

She swallowed.

Then, in a tone that barely rose above a whisper:

“Did you…” She hesitated. “Did both of you do anything? When I was unconscious?”

Her meaning hung clearly in the air. The weight of it settled like morning fog. She couldn’t believe she was asking—couldn’t believe she was even considering it—but she had to know.

Cerces, still reclining like a cat in borrowed skin, blinked once. Her smirk softened into something quieter, more reflective. Her voice came with no teasing this time, only a stillness as she replied:

“No.”

She shook her head gently.

“As you respect Mnestia… so too does the Goddess of Romance respect yours.”

The silence afterward was thick—but not heavy. It hummed with honesty.

Aglaea let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. Her fingers loosened slightly on the blanket, but she still didn’t let go.

The silence returned—not cold this time, but cautious. Lingering. Like a thread held between two fingertips, unsure whether to tie a knot or let go.

Cerces, still lounging half-bare beside her, turned slightly and asked:

“Do you remember anything? After we met?”

Aglaea blinked, gaze distant for a moment. Her lashes fluttered shut as she searched the shadowy edges of her memory.

There was—

A face.

A voice, loud and indignant.

The call of her name—no, Mnestia’s name—cutting through the veil.

Then a kiss, warmer than anything she’d allowed herself in lifetimes.

But after that...

“I vaguely recall someone barging in.”

“They shouted... Anaxagoras?”

She said it like a question, as if trying to attach it to a face. But everything else was dark. A black curtain dropped on a stage before the final act.

“Then nothing,” she added quietly. “Only that I awoke... with you.”

Cerces nodded.

She didn’t look smug or pleased. No slyness on her lips now. Instead, she stood—gracefully, unhurried—and moved to the edge of the bed to retrieve her fallen garments. She picked up the loose robe that had slipped to the floor at some point in the night.

The swirl of stars across her borrowed chest faded as she slipped the fabric over it, buttoning each piece with gentle care. When she finally turned back to face Aglaea, her voice was low—almost regretful.

“I’m sorry,” Cerces said. “For using your body like this.”

Aglaea’s fingers clutched the blanket again.

“I only wanted to spend time with her,” Cerces continued, nodding toward her. “With Mnestia. Even if it was fleeting. Even if it wasn’t mine to keep.”

Her words hung like a confession, naked and delicate.

Aglaea didn’t speak at first. She simply watched—watched the way Cerces fastened the last clasp, smoothing out the folds, looking for all the world like a proper scholar now. A priestess might have mistaken her for one of Mnemos’ attending saints. It almost made her laugh.

But it didn’t.

Instead, Aglaea lowered her gaze and said quietly: “I don’t blame you.”

Cerces glanced up.

“It’s just—”

“It’s too fast.”

Aglaea’s voice was firm, but laced with emotion. The kind that was measured, guarded, cautiously honest.

“My entire life, I’ve been a vessel. A mirror for a goddess. The priestess of Romance... barred from offering my heart to anyone, lest it compromise the divine voice within.”

She breathed slowly, pressing a palm against her chest where Mnestia still stirred, faint as golden dust behind her ribs. “And now, without warning, the goddess inside me leapt into your arms like a lovesick girl.”

A pause.

Then, softly “I don’t know if I’m allowed to follow her.”

Cerces smiled again.

It was that same disarming smile—the kind that curved Anaxagoras’s mouth only when he’d solved a particularly impossible equation. That familiar expression, now worn by Cerces, twisted something uneasy in Aglaea’s chest.

It was too much like him.

And yet, the voice that came with it was softer, brighter. Not Anaxa’s usual baritone laced with sarcasm and restraint, but something lilting—playful—hers.

Aglaea shifted on the bed, trying to focus. To remind herself that she was speaking to a Titan, to the oldest Sage of Reason. Not her… not her rival. Not the one she’d clashed with in debate halls. Not the one who left messes in her office and stole her tea leaves.

But seeing that face—his face—smiling like that, hurting her with kindness instead of wit…

It was disorienting.

And Cerces—wearing it—only made it worse.

The Titan slowly seated herself again at the edge of the bed, robes gathered around her like moonlight pooling on marble. She looked at Aglaea directly, gaze warm but unflinching.

“Then what if you did?” she asked. “What if you loved me… but only through Mnestia’s eyes?”

Aglaea’s breath caught.

Her lips parted, but no sound came immediately. The thought twisted around her heart like a golden thread—pulling, tightening, unsure if it was binding or unraveling.

“Would you still feel it?” Cerces added gently. “Would you still choose to?”

Aglaea turned her gaze downward again. Her hands, still tangled in the blanket, were pale with tension. “If I did…” she began slowly, “Would it not be treason?”

Her voice was barely audible—almost ashamed.

“To the gods?” she continued, “To everything we’ve sworn, everything I represent?”

She glanced up again, eyes shimmering but firm.

“I’ve spent my life keeping the goddess’s heart protected. Not indulged. Not tempted. To let her fall into love—freely, openly… even through me—what does that make me?”

A heretic? A fool?

She didn’t say it.

She didn’t have to.

Cerces watched her carefully, lips slightly parted—not with argument, but with understanding. With sorrow. With love so quiet it could drown you.

Aglaea searched her face—his face—and felt that confusing warmth again rise in her.

It was not him, but it was. It was her, but she could only reach through another's skin.

It began with a pause—small but infectious.

The hands of the seamstress-maid stilled over her needlework. The cook’s ladle stopped mid-stir. A young scullery girl, arms full of fresh linens, leaned slightly over the railing on the upper balcony.

They’d all noticed it at once.

Their Lady Aglaea—draped in her usual refined poise, each footstep measured like a loom’s pass across silk—was walking side by side with him. The scholar. The blasphemer. Anaxagoras.

Yet something was unmistakably… different.

There was no air of tension. No verbal fencing or curt dismissals. No bristling pride that usually sparked when their Lady exchanged words with the Grove's stoic prodigy. Instead—

She was smiling.

Not wide. Not obvious. But to the practiced eyes of maids who had dressed her through grief and triumph alike, it was there—a delicate upturn at the corner of her lips. A whisper of warmth that spoke volumes.

They passed through the marble hallway, sunlight casting gentle bars across their path from the latticework above. And though neither said anything the maids could catch, their synchronized pace told its own story—one more intimate than speech.

At the far side of the orchard path, beneath the great Ithilian Tree, the two stopped.

There, in the still air rich with nectar and silence, their Lady produced a small golden apple, glistening under the morning light. She cut it deftly with a slim blade from her sash—half for herself, and half… offered with quiet reverence to him.

The scholar leaned slightly forward, and to the astonished gasps of a dozen hidden spectators, accepted the fruit from her fingers. His teeth grazed the edge of the slice, but his eyes never left hers.

He chewed slowly.

Then said something.

The words were too faint to carry—but whatever it was, Aglaea smiled wider.

A bloom in full sunlight.

Some of the younger maids quietly squealed behind their aprons. One whispered, breathless:

“Did you see how he looked at her…?”

“He smiled. He never smiles!”

“They’re in love,” another sighed, clutching the linen to her chest. “Even after the fight…”

Behind the hedges and pillars, the maids shared knowing glances, each secretly enthralled by the unfolding drama they were never meant to see.

The Lady Goldweaver and the forbidden scholar.

Heart against duty.

Reputation versus longing.

And in the hush of the palace garden, it was as if the gods themselves had stilled the wind to witness a single apple pass between two hands.

In the age-old traditions of the Goldweaver estate, men rarely—if ever—crossed the threshold. The estate was a sanctum of femininity, of woven silk and scented scrolls, of soft-heeled shoes upon marble and voices trained in grace and command. A place where the Chrysos Heir ruled with cool clarity, untouchable and revered.

And yet, this morning…

With sunlight pouring through the high arching windows and the petals of the violetglass trees drifting through the courtyard, the scholar walked beside Lady Aglaea with the ease of one long welcomed.

At the threshold to the dining hall, the old headmaid, draped in deep indigo robes and silver-stitched apron, stood waiting with the warmth and calm of someone who had seen decades of rising drama and quietly outlasted them all.

She greeted Aglaea with a bow that was precise yet tender, her gaze never betraying surprise at the presence of the man beside her lady.

“Good morning, my Lady,” she said with gentle steel. “The morning spread has been prepared. Would the scholar care to join?”

Before Cerces could speak, Aglaea offered a nod of approval.

“Yes,” she replied with her usual composed tone. “He’ll stay for breakfast.”

“Much obliged,” Cerces—still in Anaxa’s form—said smoothly, inclining her head.

And just like that, the two were led in quiet ceremony toward the long mahogany table.

They took their seats—not across, but side by side, near the sunlit end where the golden light filtered through cascading ivy. No fanfare. No grand declarations. Just… presence. Proximity. A peaceful familiarity that unsettled and delighted the estate all at once.

The maids, returning from the kitchen with silver trays and bowls of crystal-cut fruit, exchanged subtle glances as they passed each other. Their steps were trained to be silent, but their thoughts were riotous.

Behind the farthest pillar, near the staircase, a congregation of younger maids peered around the corner, eyes wide with wonder.

And just as one of them leaned too far over the balustrade—

“Ahem.”

The sharp throat-clearing came from the headmaid, who had reappeared with her walking staff, tapping it once on the marble floor with practiced menace.

“If you have time to gawk, you have time to prepare the veranda for second tea,” she said coolly.

A flock of aprons disappeared in a flurry of muffled apologies.

At the table, the reprimand did not go unnoticed.

Aglaea—still elegant in morning gold—allowed herself a soft chuckle. Her smile, normally reserved for dignitaries and children, lingered on her lips as she glanced at the now-empty hallway.

Cerces chuckled as well beside her, shoulders relaxed, eyes quietly gleaming.

“I suppose being with you is always a public affair,” she teased under her breath.

Aglaea turned slightly, just enough for her voice to carry between them.

“They’ll recover,” she said. “They’ve never seen me have breakfast with a scandal before.”

Cerces grinned, resting one arm across the back of the chair, just barely brushing her shoulder. “They’ll see worse before the cycle’s end.”

Aglaea sighed, but she didn’t pull away.

A hush drifted through the dining hall: only the faint clink of porcelain, the slow whisper of ivy against the tall windows, and two measured heartbeats at the table’s sun‑lit end.

Cerces—wearing Anaxagoras’s handsome features—set her cup aside and regarded Aglaea with a thoughtful tilt of the head. “Have you felt her again?” he asked softly. “Mnestia?”

Aglaea traced the rim of her saucer. “No. Since yesterday’s… moment, she’s fallen silent. I fear something’s wrong.”

Cerces’s smile was gentle, knowing. “Nothing is wrong. Your will is simply stronger than most mortals’. You’ve trained yourself to keep every feeling caged. The goddess only steps forward when your heartstrings are tugged enough.”

Aglaea frowned. “How is that supposed to happen on command?”

“Close your eyes,” Cerces whispered.

She hesitated, but at last the gold of her gaze slipped beneath dark lashes. The room seemed to breathe with her.

Then—warmth. Feather‑light. A brush of lips, tentative yet certain, finding hers.

Aglaea’s breath caught.

In that instant the world narrowed: the distant garden murmurs faded; the ivory pillars, the silver dishes, the breathless maids hidden behind curtains—everything slipped away until there was only the soft pressure of a single kiss.

She should have stiffened. She should have drawn back. Instead, the first shock gave way to a bloom of heat, spreading gently through her chest, rising like dawn behind closed lids. With every slow heartbeat the kiss deepened—not urgent, but patient, coaxing.

For a moment she tried to marshal her composure, to summon ice around the warmth. It melted. Her fingers uncurled, brushing the table’s polished edge as if searching for an anchor and finding none. She leaned in—just a breath—answering the touch with a flutter‑soft sigh, as though stepping barefoot into a meadow of late‑summer flowers.

And there—quietly, faintly—she heard it: the hush of golden wings, the whisper of Mnestia’s laughter stirring somewhere deep within.

Cerces drew back only far enough to rest his forehead against hers. “Do you feel her now?” he murmured.

Aglaea’s eyes opened slowly, pupils wide with wonder. She could not yet speak, but the shimmer in her gaze was answer enough: a goddess awakening, a heart unclenching petal by petal.

Outside the doorway, a line of maids stood frozen, hands clasped to racing chests—bearing witness to a legend still unfolding.

Morning light spilled across the long refectory table, gilding Aglaea’s profile in warm amber. 

Her eyes—moments ago only gold—now shimmered with a sigil of fine butterfly wings, each vein aglow, as Mnestia eased forward behind her gaze.
Cerces watched, delighted.

“Should I worry,” Mnestia murmured, voice honey‑low but edged with mirth, “that the Titan of Reason navigates romance better than the Demigoddess who embodies it?”

Cerces’s borrowed lips curved into a carefree grin. “Never, Mnestia. Your quiet heart merely needed a louder guide.”

She spoke the name once more—Mnestia—and reached out. Aglaea’s shoulders relaxed as the goddess within accepted the embrace: two timeless beings reunited in mortal skin.

The younger maids hovering near the lintel clutched one another, muffling squeals; they had never imagined love could look both so reverent and so daring.

Their elder, the silver‑haired head‑maid, managed only a long‑suffering sigh. “Contain yourselves,” she whispered, though her own lips betrayed the faintest smile.

Then— A ceremonial bell at the estate’s front gate echoed down the corridor.

The head‑maid straightened her apron, motioned the younger girls back to work, and made for the entrance. The wide doors parted with a soft groan of hinges, revealing a tableau that stole even her well‑seasoned breath.

On the threshold stood the Demigoddesses of Fate—the triplet sisters who seldom left their Loom‑Chamber.

And flitting just ahead of them—travelling coat half‑buttoned, expression equal parts charm and exasperation—was Cipher, the fleet‑footed wanderer whose teasing quips had long tested Aglaea’s composure.

The headmaid blinked twice before her training reasserted itself—masking her surprise beneath a graceful bow.

“Lady Tribbie,” she greeted with crisp reverence, eyes flicking to the crimson-haired demigoddess whose grin already promised chaos. “Lady Trinnon. Lady Trianne. And... Lady Cipher.” She nodded to the last with polite familiarity.

Tribbie was already grinning like a child before festival cakes. “We heard something scandalous fluttering in the market air this morning,” she said, tone light, but her eyes sharp with knowing.

“Something about Agy and Naxy… eloping.” She laughed as she pressed her hands together dramatically. “We just had to see if the tales are true. You know how fond I am of messy romances with divine implications.”

Cipher chimed in beside her, hands on her hips and eyes bright with intrigue. Her shoulder-length hair bounced as she leaned forward. “I’m also here for divine implications. And juicy details. The temple gossip lines are on fire. Is it true? Did the Goldweaver run off with that deliciously insufferable professor?” She half-whispered the last part, her tone giddy.

The headmaid, who had survived wars, wild gods, and worse—only offered a serene, diplomatic smile.

“I am not privy to the Lady’s private affairs,” she replied smoothly, as if she hadn’t seen that very same ‘insufferable professor’ being fed a golden apple by their mistress not even an hour ago. “But her Ladyship is presently in the dining hall with the scholar.”

She stepped aside and gestured with one hand, motioning for them to follow. “You are most welcome to wait in the guest receiving chamber. I shall inform the Lady that the Fates and our swift-footed guest have arrived.”

Tribbie linked her arms with Cipher gleefully, practically dragging her along, while Trinnon and Trianne followed in quieter, more measured steps. Trinnon murmured something about the threads of fate twitching, while Trianne, ever gentle, simply nodded at passing maids whose faces lit up with awe at the divine visitors.

The procession swept through the hallway with quiet grace and thinly veiled excitement, their destination set: the guest chamber of House Goldweaver, where scandal—real or imagined—was surely only moments away from blooming.

Cipher barely managed to slip away from the others the moment the headmaid left them to settle in the guest room.

Tribbie was too busy teasing Trinnon and sipping from the rose-scented tea provided, while Trianne smiled gently at the crackling fireplace. No one noticed the nimble-footed girl vanish from the doorway like a breeze.

The stone hallways of the estate were dimly lit with soft golden sconces, and Cipher tiptoed with the grace of a professional sneak, pressing her back to the walls every time she passed a maid.

She weaved past two who were carrying folded linens, vaulted over a low railing, and landed silently near the dining hall's threshold.

But when she peeked around the corner...

“—Eh?” Cipher blinked. The dining table, the chairs, even the sweet whiff of morning pastries—it was gone. The curtains were drawn neatly, and the scent of freshly eaten breakfast had already faded.

“They teleported out of breakfast?!” she hissed under her breath, staring at the pristine space with a twitching eye.

 “Of all the moments to miss... ugh, I bet they did something embarrassing like kiss with jam on their lips or talk about love through croissant or something...”

She groaned and dragged her hands down her cheeks. Then a mischievous idea struck her, a slow grin spreading across her lips.

“Well. If they’re not at the table...”

Her eyes gleamed dangerously as she turned her head toward the hallway that led to the chambers.

“Maybe they’re already rolling in something spicy,” she whispered, and began tiptoeing toward Aglaea’s private wing like a cat that smelled chaos.

But before she could reach the archway, a pair of arms swooped out of the shadows and hoisted her up by the back of her collar like a misbehaving kitten.

“Caught something interesting, did I?” a playful voice crooned near her ear. “A little kitty, stalking through halls she shouldn’t be in…”

Cipher let out a yelp, legs flailing for a moment before she was spun around to face the smiling visage of Anaxagoras—or so the world would see him.

“P-Professor?!” Cipher squealed, trying to wriggle free. “Hey! What the heck?! I wasn’t doing anything illegal! I was investigating! As a representative of the people’s curiosity!”

Anaxa—no, Anaxagoras—simply looked amused, one brow raised and a faint curl of a smile tugging at his lips in a way that made Cipher blink. Something was… off.

The way he smiled at her. It was too relaxed. Too teasing.

Cipher froze in his grip, her expression slowly shifting from alarm to suspicion.

“…Are you okay, Professor?”

“Perfectly,” came the silky reply.

“That’s not reassuring,” she muttered, narrowing her eyes as he set her down with unnerving gentleness.

He brushed imaginary dust off her shoulders and nudged her with the ease of someone far too familiar. “You’re quick, cat girl, but not that quick today.”

Cipher took a wary step back, folding her arms. “Okay. That’s definitely not how you talk. Did you hit your head or drink something funny?”

The man just chuckled.

Before Cipher could ask more, a distant voice echoed down the hallway—the headmaid calling for the guests to return for tea. Cipher glanced toward the voice and then back at the man before her, still smirking like he knew all her secrets.

“…Weird,” she muttered, then quickly darted off toward the guest room, casting one last glance over her shoulder.

“Something’s seriously wrong with him…” she murmured.

The door opened with the faintest creak, letting the sunlight from the corridor spill onto polished marble.

Mnēstia emerged from within, the scent of myrrh and rosewater lingering softly behind her. Draped in a flowing, iridescent chiton embroidered with golden threads of blooming ivy, her every movement seemed like a slow ripple in water, fluid and graceful.

“Was someone just out here?” she asked softly, her voice serene but edged with natural authority.

Cerces—still wearing Anaxa’s body like an over-embroidered costume—leaned against the pillar nearby, arms folded, that same perpetual smirk gracing her (his) lips.

“You look beautiful,” she said without hesitation, eyes glittering with something far deeper than amusement.

Mnēstia flushed, her composure dipping just for a beat. She averted her gaze, raising her hand to her cheek as though to dismiss the warmth. “Do not tease me with that tongue, dear Cerces. Just answer the question.”

Cerces chuckled, the baritone rumble not quite matching her usual lilt but carrying her mischief all the same.

“Their presence? Oh, yes. A little shadow kitten from Zagreus’s chosen priestess was peeking around corners—Cipher, I believe. No doubt she brought her patron's meddling companion along.”

Mnēstia blinked, her features returning to divine calm. “Zagreus’s tricksters,” she said with faint dismay. “Let me guess—come to pester about the rumor? The one involving my original host eloping with the scholar of the Grove?”

Cerces grinned wider. “Most probably. Gossip in Okhema spreads faster than wildfire in dry fields.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “They’ll find out sooner or later. Little kitty in particular can smell a secret like a hound chasing perfume.”

Mnēstia stepped toward her, folding her arms gently beneath her chiton. “Then what shall we do?”

Cerces straightened and met her gaze with eyes that sparkled like stardust caught in a tide.

“We let them stew. We watch their faces twist and contort when the truths unfold like a tragedy or a romance, depending on who’s watching.” She shrugged, tone teasing. “Besides, I wouldn’t mind a little mischief. It’ll be fun to watch their divine little jaws drop.”

Mnēstia sighed, though a smile ghosted on her lips.“You are still a Titan.”

“And you,” Cerces replied, stepping just close enough to brush her fingers against Mnēstia’s, “are still the girl I’ve waited lifetimes to hold again.”

In the soft-lit guest chamber of Aglaea’s estate, the three demigoddess representatives of Janus—Tribbie, Trinnon, and Trianne—lounged on plush velvet cushions, sipping butterfly pea tea while halfheartedly picking at a tray of apricot tarts. The conversation had, of course, drifted toward the subject that brought them here in the first place: the whispered scandal of Aglaea and Anaxagoras eloping.

“I still say we should gift her a bolt of starlace silk,” Trinnon offered, twirling her finger through a lock of white-blond hair. “It’s elegant, subtle—appropriate for a discreet wedding.”

“She’s Agy, not some timid debutante,” Tribbie argued, reclining dramatically. “We should get her a custom loom with runes that weave embroidery directly from dreams. Romantic and practical.”

Trianne, ever the more excitable of the three, gasped as she scribbled on a small notebook. “What about a silken canopy that glows when kissed underneath? We’ll enchant it to detect intimacy! Imagine—every stolen moment under the stars, glowing faintly golden!”

As they bickered and brainstormed, the door creaked open, and Cipher sauntered in, nonchalantly adjusting the brim of her wide traveling hood. Her mischievous grin gave her away immediately.

“Where were you?” Trianne asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

Cipher flopped onto a vacant pillow and stretched like a cat. “Just wandering aimlessly, y’know. Taking in the atmosphere... until I got caught by that Grove Boy.”

All three girls froze.

Trianne shrieked first, practically bouncing. “You mean Naxy? He’s here?!”

Cipher smirked with a finger raised to her lips. “The very same. In front of the seamstress room, no less.”

A squeal erupted from Trianne that probably could have shattered a few crystal goblets. “They’re already doing something illicit, aren’t they?! I knew it!”

Cipher lazily nodded. “I mean, wouldn’t you, if you were locked in a villa with Lady Goldweaver?”

The room exploded into an unfiltered chorus of giggles, gasps, and speculative groans of drama. Even Tribbie, who usually maintained a semblance of dignity, looked mildly flustered.

“I need to write a poem about this,” Trianne declared, already pulling out a feather pen. “‘In the folds of golden dusk, the blasphemer whispers, and she, aglow, listens...’”

“Too tame,” Trinnon muttered, pouring herself more tea.

The cheerful banter among the triplets simmered down into an eager hush the moment a gentle knock echoed from the guest room door.

“Come in!” Tribbie chimed, already bouncing in her seat.

The door eased open, and there stood Aglaea and Anaxa, or so the others thought—dressed plainly in a scholar’s robe He wore his usual, unreadable smile, the kind that carried more wit than warmth.

“Good morning, my stars,” Tribbie sang, hopping up and rushing to Aglaea’s side to link arms. “We were just conspiring—ahem—discussing what to get you for your grand honeymoon!”

Trianne appeared behind her, practically glowing with glee. “Or is it still a secret wedding? Elopement, maybe? Should we be whispering?”

Aglaea gave a long-suffering sigh but allowed the flurry of attention, her hand still lightly resting near Cerces’—or rather, Anaxa’s—wrist. “You’re all being dramatic.”

“Well, it is dramatic,” Trianne insisted. “You vanished for days, then reappeared with a man in your home, smiling like Mnestia herself just handed you a sonnet.”

But while her sisters swarmed, Trinnon lingered near the back. Her sharp blue eyes didn’t glitter with the same mischief. They were narrowed—observing. And Cipher, perched cross-legged near the corner, hadn’t said a word since their entrance.

Her gaze locked onto 'Anaxa.'

She was grinning, but her eyes… were calculating. Watching.

“Something feels off,” Cipher thought, tilting her head just slightly. “The real Professor Anaxa would have flinched by now. Or scoffed. Or... insulted me. Something.”

The man—Cerces in disguise—only gave her a slow, knowing smile. One that seemed too soft for the infamous eccentric scholar. Too composed. Too amused.

Cipher’s grin tightened. Her fingers idly toyed with the rim of her glove as she leaned forward.

“So, Professor,” she purred aloud. “Good to see you up and about. Not exhausted from—” her eyes flicked to Aglaea, “—a night of divine inspiration, I assume?”

Cerces, with all the mischief of a thousand years behind her eyes, simply tilted her head and replied in Anaxa’s voice, “Ah, Cipher. It warms me that you’re still concerned for my well-being. You always were my most attentive student.”

‘Aglaea’ elbowed her—lightly.

Cipher’s lips parted into a small, mocking hah.

“Oh yeah,” she thought. That’s not the Professor.

‘Aglaea’ moved with graceful restraint, settling into the velvet-cushioned sofa like a queen slipping back into her throne.

Beside her, ‘Anaxa’—with all the composed dignity befitting a scholar—took the seat at her right, their knees barely brushing, yet close enough to suggest intimacy not usually seen between the infamously reserved councilwoman and the Grove’s most sarcastic mouth.

Trianne, ever effervescent, clapped her hands with delight. “You two are so romantic now. I swear, I still can’t believe it! Weren’t you always bickering like cats in heat just a few months ago?”

Tribbie snorted at her younger sister’s phrasing but nodded in agreement, arms folded behind her head. “Seriously though, gloomy ‘Naxa over here always acted like the sky was falling. Never thought he had a soft side, let alone a romantic one.”

She leaned in with a teasing grin, addressing the ‘scholar’ directly. “But I knew. I knew you liked Agy. Back when we were kids and you’d always hover near her during training, carrying her things when you thought no one noticed. Real subtle, you were.”

‘Anaxa’ gave a polite, almost bashful chuckle—so unlike the real Anaxa’s usual scoff or sarcastic jab—that Cipher’s eyes practically narrowed into slits.

She didn’t say anything yet. Just leaned back, one leg draped over the other, arms folded with all the lazy suspicion of a cat watching a mouse dig its own grave.

Trinnon remained still beside her, unreadable as always, save for the one twitch of her brow every time ‘Anaxa’ smiled too easily or sat too close.

Meanwhile, ‘Aglaea’ nodded with perfect civility, her voice as even as spring rain. “You’re too kind,” she said smoothly, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “But this is a complicated situation. We’re… still figuring things out.”

Trianne all but squealed. “So you are dating?!”

Aglaea simply smiled in reply.

But neither Cipher nor Trinnon missed how her gaze lingered for half a second too long.

‘Aglaea’ folded her hands on her lap, the delicate tension of ceremony in her posture, yet something softer glittered behind her eyes—something unmistakably fond. “It was all so sudden,” she admitted, her voice as cool and composed as a Chrysos heir should be, “but… for now, we’d like to take things slow.”

She turned her head, not quite facing the others—her gaze was fixed on the man beside her. ‘Anaxa’, smiling with a serenity that looked saintly on the body of the infamous blasphemer, met her eyes with a calm warmth that made the room still. It was subtle. Barely a breath. But it happened.

“It’s been… a long time since we’ve even spoken like this, much less sat side by side.” Her voice lowered, honest in a way that unnerved Cipher. “We haven’t… decided on the date. Of anything official.”

The moment the words left her mouth, ‘Anaxa’ leaned in with impeccable timing and placed a soft kiss on her cheek. “I thought we were already official,” he murmured with faux-wounded charm.

A flush spread over ‘Aglaea’s’ porcelain face. “Stop that,” she mumbled, turning her head away slightly, though she didn’t push him back.

“EEEEEEEK!”

Tribbie and Trianne practically exploded into a duet of squeals, Trianne nearly bouncing off the sofa in secondhand glee. “That’s it, that’s it, they’re totally married already! I don’t care if they didn’t say vows!”

“RIGHT?!” Tribbie clutched her face in mock-despair. “I should’ve brought gifts! Or a bouquet! I knew I should’ve gone with my instincts!”

Across from them, Cipher was perfectly still—save for the way her eyes were twitching. She ground her teeth just enough to feel the tension in her jaw, one finger tapping anxiously against her sleeve. Her face was flushed, but not from joy. From confusion. From something she couldn’t place, and didn’t like.

A sudden knock on the side chamber door broke through the thickening air of tension and affection. A young maid stepped in, looking visibly flustered yet dutiful, her gaze quickly bowing before the lady of the house.

“Lady Aglaea,” she said, breath just a hair unsteady. “‘Tis urgent—representatives from the Twilight Courtyard and the Grove of Epiphany have come bearing news.”

‘Aglaea’—still seated beside ‘Anaxa’—tilted her head slightly, the poise of nobility returned to her frame. “Send them in,” she instructed evenly.

The doors opened wider, revealing two figures in the crisp regalia of their respective orders. A Twilight Courtyard envoy in pale blue, and a Grove scholar in the dark moss-trimmed robes of the ephiphanic archives. They entered with deep bows, casting cautious glances at the guests gathered in the sitting room.

“Speak freely,” ‘Aglaea’ said, not unkindly, but with the commanding calm of one who ruled both people and words. “Do not worry for the audience.”

The envoys exchanged another glance, then the one from the Grove stepped forward. His voice was careful, diplomatic—but something uneasy clouded his expression.

“Apologies, my lady. We were instructed to find Lord Anaxagoras directly. We… did not expect to find him here.”

‘Anaxa’—adjusted the collar of the robe she wore and stepped forward with a soft, practiced smile that was growing more difficult to maintain by the hour. “That would be me. Is something the matter?”

The envoys hesitated again, and the Twilight Courtyard representative cleared her throat. “My apologies, truly. We do not mean to speak out of turn in front of Lady Goldweaver, but…”

“Say it,” ‘Aglaea’ commanded, voice sharp but curious now. “I permit it.”

The envoy bowed again, resigned. “We bring news from the infirmary. Your… your wife—we were told she is staying in the Grove in your estate—was discovered early this morning after fainting near the research wing.”

‘Anaxa’s’ face froze, her breath caught somewhere between her ribs.

the envoy continued.

“And, um… Lord Anaxagoras… the results revealed that she is currently with child.”

Chapter Text

Cerces - [ Inside Anaxa's body ]

credit: AI

Chapter Text

Cerces sat straight‑backed in the high council chamber, a sea of carved cedar and burnished brass reflecting sunrise through tall arched windows. She wore Anaxagoras’s robe—his shoulders, his hands folded calmly on the table—but every heartbeat in her chest belonged to the Titan of Reason, assessing the scene like an intricate theorem.

Across from her, the Dawncloud Council—white‑robed physicians and soft‑voiced ethicists—occupied the left dais, while the rust‑and‑moss sleeves of the Grove Sages lined the right. In the hollow center of the room, a silver sun‑disk inlaid on the floor marked the place for the accused.

A Dawncloud elder cleared his throat, voice echoing through the gallery.

“Lady and Lords, we are convened to address the growing scandal inflaming Okhema and sages alike: the alleged affairs of Lord Anaxagoras—” he motioned to Cerces’s borrowed body, “—with Lady Goldweaver and a young woman who presents herself as his wife. The city is rife with rumors. The Grove’s reputation stands in question. The Heirs’ dignity, likewise. We require clarity.”

Another sage—a Grove historian—added in clipped tones, “This… pregnancy report from the Twilight courtyard complicates matters further. Legitimacy, guardianship of a potential Coreflame lineage, political consequences—each demands immediate explanation.”

Cerces felt every gaze converge on her borrowed face. She allowed herself a slow breath, tasting cedar and the faint sting of lamp oil.

Her eyes swept the room with the ease of a chess master skimming a board. The councilors hunched like suspicious ravens, fingers curled, eyes hawk-sharp. The sages of the Grove sat rigidly composed, but Cerces could feel their tension—the kind born not of belief, but of consequence.

And then there was him.

Anaxa, sitting just adjacent, cloaked in her own former frame. His long sleeves draped over his lap, fingers tugged nervously at the seams, one sleeve drawn up just enough to obscure the lower half of his face. It was only the shimmer of tears glistening at the edge of his lashes that betrayed his inner tremor.

Oh? Cerces blinked slowly. You cry now, my dearest Alchemist? In front of a council that would devour either of us if we misstep?

She watched him—studied him.

That display… that barely-contained despair… It was far too poised to be pure panic. No sobbing, no sharp breath, no nervous outburst. Just a careful, trembling silence and the tears—placed like a flourish on a painting.

A sharp glint flickered behind Cerces's smile.

You’re playing me, she thought with a quiet hum of amusement. You clever, wounded little philosopher.

She tilted her head and let her smile sharpen, the kind of expression meant for only one person to read. And Anaxa—perhaps sensing her gaze—shifted slightly in his seat but didn’t meet her eyes.

One thing that Cerces immediately realizes, this.. this is a political game.

Rising, Cerces let her deeper voice carry across the hall—measured, resonant, unhurried. She even managed the scholar’s trademark nod of austere courtesy.

“Honored councilors, sages,” she began, “the rumors you cite are… partially misread. What appears as deception or scandal is, in truth, a matter of rare metaphysical entanglement.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Cipher—perched in the public gallery—lean forward, smirking. Tribbie clutched Trianne’s hand in delight, while Trinnon watched, hawk‑eyed.

Cerces adjusted her robe and stood, her expression composed with just the right amount of solemnity. In Anaxa’s body, every movement felt calculated, but necessary—because in this moment, precision was power.

“Honored members of the Council,” Cerces began, her voice tempered with that rational edge Anaxa often wore like armor, “I would like to state clearly, and without deceit, that I—Anaxagoras—have no ill intent in my dealings. The woman I introduced earlier, Calypso, is not my consort nor partner, but my sister. We share blood, yes. But no bond beyond that.”

For a breath, silence.

Then—

A slow rising murmur, like bees disturbed in the hive.

One of the seated Twilight Courtyard representatives, an older woman draped in dusky blue robes and silver-threaded sashes, cleared her throat sharply. She stood, unrolling a scroll from her side satchel.

“That is false,” she said calmly, but firmly. “We have official records here that contradict your claim.”

She unfurled the scroll, and the glint of a state-sealed document caught the chamber light. “This document, stamped by the Grove’s registrar and witnessed by two elder sages, confirms that Anaxagoras is married. The name of his spouse: Calypso. Registered three months ago under a dual-core alignment binding contract.”

Gasps erupted.

A hushed confusion swept through the council hall like a chill wind. Heads turned. A few whispers began to turn into pointed questions—“Married?” “When did this happen?”

Cerces blinked, brows knitting. She leaned forward, her composure flickering just slightly as she took the scroll.

She read it—twice.

No mistakes.

Her own handwriting.

No… Anaxa’s handwriting, forged perfectly, with just the right stroke to mimic how he wrote under pressure. Her mouth tightened into a barely restrained line.

“This… This cannot be—”

But before she could finish, the sound of fabric rustling broke the tension.

From across the chamber, ‘Calypso’ stood—his own body now wrapped in long sleeves that masked trembling hands, or perhaps masked the smirk trying to crawl its way out from behind trembling lips.

And then he wailed.

A spectacular, mournful sound that echoed against the walls with theatrical elegance.

“SO IT’S TRUE…!” he cried, one hand rising dramatically to his chest—her chest—while the other swept behind him. “You deny me?! Your wife?! Your own child’s mother?!”

“Child—?” someone whispered.

“Unborn child!” Anaxa sobbed, sniffling delicately and dabbing his eyes with a crumpled handkerchief he must have planted hours before.

Cerces stared, stunned. A muscle twitched in her jaw.

She’d been baited.

Mnestia—still occupying Aglaea’s body—shifted beside her, her expression unreadable but sharp as a blade half-drawn.

The chamber descended into chaos. Council members whisper-shouted among themselves, papers rustling, confusion mounting. One of the Grove elders actually dropped his monocle.

Anaxa sniffled again and looked directly at Cerces.

“You promised…” he whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear, “that no matter what happened between us, you’d never lie to me in public.”

Cerces lowered the scroll, expression blank.

She turned toward him slowly, so very slowly, and let out the faintest of sighs through her nose.

So this was how he wanted to play.

She smiled—a perfect imitation of Anaxa’s tight-lipped diplomatic smile—and returned to her seat with the grace of a seasoned manipulator.

“...I see now,” she mutter silently, voice laced with both amusement and simmering wrath, “that this is not a trial. It’s a drama. And the playwright… is particularly vindictive.”

She glanced sideways at Anaxa, who peeked up from beneath his sleeve with the tiniest smirk.

A fresh hush fell over the chamber when a tall Dawncloud elder—Madame Althaea, silver‑haired and sharp‑voiced—rose from her seat. Her walking staff tapped once against the marble to demand attention.

“Lord Anaxagoras,” she began, every syllable clipped. “You were elevated to the Circle of the Seven Sages precisely because the Grove believed your brilliance served the realm. Yet here you stand—tarnishing that name with tales of falsified kinship and a hidden wife heavy with child. The Grove is not a stage for farce.”

Cerces—still wielding Anaxa’s face—inclined his head, expression a mask of sober penitence while seething beneath the calm.

Althaea’s gaze slid to the silent figure of Aglaea—or Mnēstia behind her golden eyes—who stood statuesque, though each passing moment honed her gaze to a blade’s edge.

“And you, Lady Goldweaver,” the elder continued, voice cool as iced steel, “as Crown of the Chrysos Heirs and protector of Okhema, you should know better than to entangle yourself in another’s household. Your very presence in this scandal undermines the dignity of your office.”

‘Aglaea’s’ silence shattered. She rose with swift, controlled grace, chiton rippling like a banner. “Are you calling me—” her voice cut, low and dangerous, “—a home‑wrecker, Elder?”

The chamber bristled.

Althaea folded her hands. “I state only the evident truth. If the scholar is already lawfully bound, then any—affection—you display publicly is, by definition, a breach of propriety and a threat to domestic harmony.”

A flicker of gold flared behind ‘Aglaea’s’ eyes, divine heat coiling—a warning rumble before the storm.

Cerces—in Anaxa’s body—had stepped beside her. Her grip was soft, but firm. Her eyes met Mnēstia’s with quiet gravity.

“’ Lady Aglaea’,” she said, the name a reverent whisper. “This is not the place. Let me carry the burden of their judgment. You do not have to burn for me.”

Mnēstia paused. Her eyes searched Cerces’s, and for a moment, the divine tension ebbed. Her shoulders lowered, the light in her gaze dimming—not in defeat, but restraint.

She said nothing, but her hand relaxed.

Cerces offered the faintest smile—wry and knowing—and returned to her seat, taking all the weight of scrutiny upon her own borrowed shoulders.

Meanwhile, the murmurs continued. The court of sages mistook the moment for silence, not sacrifice.

The room was still trembling beneath the weight of unspoken tensions when a second elder—a Grove representative known for his calculated diplomacy—cleared his throat, his deep voice cutting through the remaining whispers like a chisel through marble.

“Now that all sides have... laid their entanglements bare, thanks to Lady Althaea’s clarity,” he said, folding his hands on the curved stone table, “we may proceed to resolution.”

His eyes swept slowly across the gathering, pausing at Cerces, then at Mnēstia, then at the still-sobbing figure of Calypso.

“The solution we propose is simple, and in the best interest of all parties—especially the Grove’s standing and the Okhema’s dignity.”

He took a breath.

“Lord Anaxagoras—*you will formally renounce your illicit liaison with Lady Goldweaver. From this point forward, you shall refrain from any further personal involvement, spoken or implied, to prevent public misconception, divine backlash, and unnecessary heartbreak—” his gaze flicked, meaningfully, toward Calypso “—to all involved.”

The words dropped like thunder on still waters.

The next voice that rang out was not calm.

“Absolutely not.”

The council turned.

Mnēstia—still clad in Aglaea’s regal form—stood with fire behind her golden irises, the sigils of her core flame pulsing beneath the surface of her skin like molten gold.

“This lesser woman,” she gestured sharply to Calypso without sparing her a second glance, “is not worthy of ‘him’.”

A sharp collective gasp echoed from the chamber. Even the seasoned council members blinked in disbelief.

Calypso—Anaxa, buried in layers of theatre—gasped audibly, clinging to her handkerchief as she doubled down with another anguished sob.

“H–how can you say that?” she cried dramatically, rising to her feet and wobbling like a wounded heroine. “I—I carried his child! And now I’m cast aside for some haughty priestess—!”

Mnēstia's fingers twitched.

That single word echoed in her head, replaying louder with each pulse of divine irritation.

She, the eternal flame of longing, goddess of sacred unions and star-crossed hearts—haughty?

Her golden pupils gleamed like molten glass, the sigil of Romance nearly burning through her human shell. She took a step forward—light-footed and terrifying, her jaw clenched as her aura flared in heatless fire.

Mnēstia was about to march across the floor and tear Calypso’s performance apart limb by limb—metaphorically, of course—but a firm grip caught her by the wrist.

Cerces.

Still cloaked in the appearance of Anaxagoras, Cerces held her tightly—not to restrain, but to remind.

Mnēstia turned sharply.

Their eyes met—one fiery with indignation, the other cool and composed, shaded in a calm that could weather stars.

Cerces squeezed her wrist, her expression silent but resolute: Remember, you are Aglaea now. Breathe.

Mnēstia exhaled sharply through her nose.

A muscle in her jaw tightened, but she stopped. She turned slightly away, her back straight, her shoulders poised once more like the Lady Goldweaver should be—not the wrathful goddess smiting a delusional blasphemer.

“Forgive my sharp words,” Mnēstia said, addressing the council with only a faint tremble in her voice, “The accusation struck deeper than expected. I… forgot myself.”

Cerces gently released her wrist.

The council, now unsure whether they'd just witnessed divine wrath or high-strung nobility, collectively nodded in wary understanding.

Calypso, of course, clutched her handkerchief tighter and sobbed even louder. “She tried to strike me! In public! Even now she thinks she can silence the truth!”

The atmosphere inside the council chamber thickened, like mist before a storm.

As Calypso’s sobs echoed dramatically through the marble walls, one of the senior Dawncloud Council members—an elder with a silver beard and zero patience for scandal—cleared his throat sharply.

“We understand that emotions are high,” he said, pointedly looking at 'Aglaea'. “But such an outburst is uncalled for—even from you, Lady Goldweaver.”

A stunned silence fell.

'Aglaea’s' jaw dropped ever so slightly. Mnēstia’s rage, simmering just beneath her mortal skin, trembled like a dam ready to burst. But she held herself, barely. Her lips parted, perhaps to speak—but no words came. Her golden eyes darted between the council members, Calypso’s pitiful act, and Cerces’ impassive gaze.

She was divine, eternal, and revered—but now, boxed in by mortals playing judge and jury to her heart.

Her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on her lap.

From the shadowed alcove near the council seats, the spectators—Cipher, Tribbie, Trinnon, Trianne, and Hyacine—sat frozen, half hiding behind a tapestry and half clinging to each other like children at a scandalous puppet show.

“Did you see that?” Cipher whispered, her eyes sparkling with mischief and intellect. “The seamstress almost snapped. She’s actually mad. I knew the love triangle story was true. I just knew it!”

Tribbie gave a quiet gasp. “No, no—this is bigger. This girl Calypso, claims to be his wife. She’s even pregnant! This is opera-tier drama!”

“I’m writing this down later,” Trianne whispered back, already drawing heart diagrams in the air. “Who knew Naxy had the capacity for this much romance...?”

Cipher, meanwhile, was practically vibrating as she scanned every player in the chamber, piecing the narrative together like a playwright mapping her final act.

She whispered into her sleeve dramatically, “The untouchable Lady Goldweaver—betrayed by her secret lover, now confronted by a mysterious wife! And the husband... caught between duty and desire!”

Tribbie nodded solemnly. “Tragic. Powerful. Romantic.”

From the side, away from Cipher’s dramatics and Trianne’s cooing, Trinnon sat quietly, her gaze fixed—not on the performance—but on the space between the masks.

She had always been the calmest of the triplets. Where Tribbie found joy in chaos and Trianne fed off a romantic frenzy, Trinnon lingered at the edge of the storm, eyes watchful, heart still. And now, that instinct stirred uneasily.

There was something… strange.

Not in the way of rumors or scandal—those were loud, messy things. This was subtle. A whisper at the back of her mind. A sensation.

When she first saw ‘Aglaea’ and ‘Anaxa’ walk in, hand in hand, there had been a flicker—just for a moment—of something raw, powerful. Unbound. Not the careful, deliberate grace of demigods dwelling among mortals, but something closer to true divinity. Wild. Ancient.

Goddess.

And now, watching 'Aglaea' seethe with thinly veiled rage and 'Anaxa'—Cerces, surely—keep pace beside her with a gaze like tempered steel, the thought returned.

Trinnon exhaled, her brows furrowed faintly. If she were braver, or more reckless, like Cipher, she might’ve asked them right there: Who are you, really?

A soft shift beside her broke her focus.

Hyacine. Normally composed. Dutiful. Smiling like a springtime sun. Now…?

Her fingers were nervously twisting the small ica pouch she always kept at her side. Her shoulders were tight, her posture stiff. Her gaze, usually steady, flicked uncertainly toward the council floor.

Trinnon tilted her head slightly and leaned closer, her voice just above a whisper. “Are you alright?”

Hyacine jumped a little at the sound, nearly dropping her pouch. “Ah—!” She looked sideways, clearly caught off guard, before giving a tight, embarrassed smile. “I’m fine. Just… nerves. That’s all.”

Trinnon didn’t respond immediately. She just studied her for another long second. Something deeper was working through Hyacine too—an unease she was trying hard to contain.

But Trinnon didn’t press. She simply gave a small, knowing nod, folded her hands, and returned her gaze to the stage of this divine farce—though now, with sharpened eyes.

The chamber fell into a hush, a silence so taut that even Cipher dared not murmur a snide remark.

‘Aglaea’ had spoken again—this time with the quiet, tempered resolve of someone who had carefully measured every word and consequence. Her voice, though calm, carried a weight that none could ignore.

“I understand,” she said, folding her hands before her, her gaze leveled toward the center of the council. “It has been a difficult week—for many of us. I let my emotions cloud my judgment earlier. For that, I offer my sincerest apology to the Grove, the Twilight Courtyard, and this Council.”

The elders nodded, some solemnly, some still hesitant.

“However,” she continued, her voice hardening just slightly, “IF it is true that the woman before me… Calypso… holds the child of Lord Anaxagoras—then yes, the responsibility lies with him.”

She glanced at ‘Anaxa’—Cerces—who sat unnervingly calm, even as the gaze of the room bore down on her borrowed face.

“But,” ‘Aglaea’ pressed on, “I too have been publicly betrothed to the same scholar. The rumors have spread far beyond the Garden already. The people are watching. And I cannot—will not—step aside quietly. I have a name to uphold. Not just as Lady Goldweaver, but as the representative of Romance, and as a Chrysos Heir. I will not be shamed or diminished for another’s mistake.”

There was power in her words. Power and truth, layered with something more ancient that only Trinnon could truly feel. A goddess speaking beneath mortal skin.

The council began to murmur again. Some looked uneasy. Others began calculating the political weight of every possible outcome.

Then Lady Althaea stood.

Draped in her robe of sky blue and silver thread, her hair streaked with wisdom and time, she raised a hand, silencing the discussion with practiced ease.

“Lady Goldweaver speaks with clarity,” she said with her usual grave calm. “And her words are not without merit. We are not only stewards of law, but of the faith and harmony among our people. If the public learns of this entanglement—and they will, if they haven’t already—our very institutions may be questioned.”

She turned her head slowly, gazing between the two women and the man caught in between—the scholar Anaxagoras, whose face remained unreadable under the curtain of his hair, though a slight tremble at his sleeve-covered lips betrayed him.

“To mend what has been frayed, there is precedent,” Althaea continued. “And in the name of unity between the Grove and the Heirs of Chrysos… I offer a solution.”

Everyone leaned forward.

“Lord Anaxagoras,” she said, her tone final, “shall take both women as his wives. Publicly. Within the next cycle.”

A stunned hush echoed through the chamber once more.

“And,” she added, “the announcement will be made before the end of this week, before the pregnancy becomes visible. If any further delay occurs, it may be seen as deceit or scandal—something we cannot afford.”

Cerces blinked.

Anaxa (in Cerces’s body) twitched visibly.

Mnestia—still veiled in the body of Aglaea—slowly turned her gaze toward her beloved, something sharp and unreadable within it.

And Cipher, sitting in the audience, nearly dropped her quill.

The drama had just ascended to its next level.

Chapter Text

When Hyacine first stepped through the vine‑wreathed arch of the Grove of Epiphany—barely sixteen, clutching a satchel stuffed with worn herbals—she imagined she would spend her days grinding roots and cataloguing pathogens.

The Grove, after all, was a haven for scholars who traded in precise weights and measurable cures. And so it was: corridors awash with ink and lamp‑smoke, rows of meticulous botanists from the Twilight Courtyard cross‑referencing Lotophagist texts on medicinal lotus derivatives.

Yet as months slipped into years, Hyacine found her gaze drifting beyond the glass beakers and poultice presses. She began lingering in the side lectures—those sparsely attended afternoon seminars where veteran Sages debated the shimmering doctrine of psycho‑alchimia: the idea that sickness does not merely gnaw at flesh but corrodes the spirit’s weave. A fractured soul, they argued, could rot the body from the inside out.

It captivated her.

“To mend a body is mercy,” she wrote in her notebook after one revelatory colloquium, “but to forge a soul anew—that is redemption.”

At first, Hyacine thought she was dreaming—or perhaps witnessing a carefully orchestrated provocation by one of the dramatists who occasionally attended the open forums for inspiration.

The forum chamber was packed, sages cloaked in sapphire and gray seated in the amphitheater tiers, and a hush had fallen like a silken curtain. She could still remember the exact moment it broke:

A young man, impossibly young—maybe barely older than she was—stood calmly in the center. His ink-dark robes were simple, his sleeves frayed at the hem, but his voice rang clear and unwavering.

“You speak of the soul as if it were divinely charted,” he said, eyes glittering with quiet fire. “As if to mend it were to bow before mysteries we are never meant to touch. I refuse that. The gods are not arbiters of our soul’s integrity.”

The boy—no, she realized, the scholar—began to sketch diagrams in the air with his fingers, tracing patterns of soul-forging as if he had studied them not in books, but lived them.

He spoke of interwoven consciousness, of fragment harmonics, and the phenomenon of soul-flame resonance—terms that had been taboo, half-buried in apocryphal glossaries the elders dared not speak aloud.

“Why we  need to fear the path of the gods—when we alone are the gods themselves.”

Hyacine watched in silence as the first sparks of a new philosophy ignited before her eyes—Nousporism, he called it. A belief that the soul, like the body, could be shaped, nurtured, and even elevated beyond mortal limits.

And its founder, the one who uttered those infamous words that scorched the sanctity of the gods themselves, was named Anaxagoras.

From the years she spent under his unpredictable tutelage, one thing became certain: this man was not a teacher in any traditional sense.

He was a wildfire—brilliant, consuming, and impossible to contain by any conventional method. Safe to say, Nousporism was not a path for the cautious.

Now, seated among the hushed observers in the chamber of the Grove, Hyacine could feel the weight of every breath, every whisper curling in the vaulted air above them. The council convened with all the gravity of a historical reckoning—yet to her, it wasn’t history. It was personal. It was unfolding right before her—again.

The scandal had taken its most theatrical shape, dragging names as heavy as Anaxagoras, Aglaea, and even the Titans into its web.

From the very first question to the final damning decree, she had not blinked once. Her professor, once the flame that lit her scholarly path, now stood as the centerpiece of a debate teetering on myth and madness. His form—borrowed by the Titan Cerces—sat almost too still, while the real Anaxagoras, in that deceivingly delicate body, had wept and wailed like a master performer in the theatre of the gods.

Hyacine gripped her pouch of ica, fingers twitching faintly. Her mind traced back—just yesterday, or so it felt—when they stumbled upon his experiment. A homunculus body. A vessel, built to contain a Coreflame.

All he wanted was a moment to breathe without hearing the gods screaming through his soul.

Hyacine can still taste the damp night air of that evening—sharp with cedar and the faint tang of storm‑stirred lotus sap—when the Grove’s side gate creaked open and a figure stumbled in, half‑hidden beneath an oversized hood.

Ridiculous, sky‑blue Dromas sleepwear patterned with tiny alchemical sigils: the trademark bedtime attire of a man who never slept at reasonable hours.

But the face above the collar wasn’t his: it was the porcelain‑pale mask of Cerces’s homunculus, beige hair spilling in disarray.

“Hyacine,” he whispered, voice wobbling between breathlessness and resolve, “I need… clothing.”

She guided him to her study, fetching a plain scholar’s robe she’d never found occasion to wear. It hung awkwardly on the slender homunculus frame—sleeves too long, shoulders too narrow—yet he cinched the belt with grim determination.

Only when the door shut and the lamplight steadied did he speak again, meeting her gaze with a flicker of the old, blazing certainty.

“They banished me,” he said, voice quiet but ringing in the small room. “Mnēstia—Aglaea—whichever name she’s wearing—cast me out of the estate.” He tugged the robe’s collar, as if still strangled by events.

Hyacine’s pulse thrummed. She opened her mouth to reassure, to heal—but he lifted a hand.

“I didn’t come for comfort.” He said, “I came for help.”

He drew a breath so deep it seemed to shake the homunculus ribs. Then, with the same impossible conviction that first drew her to his lectures, Anaxa said it—slow, dramatic, simple:

“I want to overthrow the Titans.”

The house fell utterly still—save for the faint hiss of the soup pot simmering on Hyacine’s hearth, a gentle bubble‑pop that scented the air with fennel and coriander.

Hyacine’s response was, perhaps, disappointingly ordinary. She settled on the low bench opposite him, smoothed her skirts, and tilted her head as if he’d suggested brewing a new tincture. “All right,” she said, voice calm and almost clinical, “elaborate.”

The borrowed face of Cerces—pale, fine‑boned—looked momentarily startled by her composure. Then those familiar dark eyes steadied, grateful for the absence of judgment.

“My first goal hasn’t changed,” Anaxa began, lowering his voice though no one else was near. “I need my body back. It’s… maddening.” He flexed slim fingers that weren’t really his, as if reminding himself.

“And I realize now Cerces doesn’t intend to give it up quickly. She’s enamored with the freedom—doing as she pleases, acting out every reckless whim. The Grove, the Council, Aglaea—she treats them like pieces in some elaborate game.”

He paused, searching her gaze. The lamplight caught a faint sheen of exhaustion on his borrowed brow.

“This started because I wanted peace. A private room. A bath without a Titan’s running commentary.” He huffed—a bitter, self‑mocking sound. “I built a vessel to cage her for a day. Instead, she seized me for a lifetime.”

Outside, wind nudged the shutters. Inside, the soup bubbled once—soft, comforting, absurdly mundane against the scope of his confession.

Hyacine stirred her soup slowly, the wooden spoon drawing spirals across the surface as if tracing her thoughts. “The Coreflame rejected the homunculus body,” she finally murmured. “The Goddess said it herself. The vessel wasn’t worthy. It couldn’t hold your soul.”

Anaxa let out a dry, brittle laugh. Not mocking—just tired, like a man who’s heard the same sermon recited too many times.

“I know,” he said, setting the half-empty bowl down. “I know what she said. That’s exactly why I need to do this.”

She blinked at him, confused. “Do what?”

He leaned forward across the table, eyes gleaming beneath the borrowed lashes, more alive than she’d seen in days. His voice lowered—not with secrecy, but weight.

“Let me ask you something, Hyacine. What defines a body? What defines its worth to carry a soul?” He gestured at himself—Cerces’s stolen form. “This skin? These bones? The swirl of Coreflame etched on a chest I barely recognize?”

Hyacine hesitated.

“A worthy soul for the vessel,” she echoed softly.

“Exactly. And what makes a soul worthy? Is a human soul inherently greater than a Dromas? Than a homunculus?” He held her gaze, firm but not accusing.

Hyacine found herself unable to answer. The steam from the soup curled between them like the rising breath of an unanswered question.

Anaxa’s smile was grim, but not cruel.

“Ridiculous,” he said, quietly. “All of it. Worthiness isn’t given—it’s forged. Souls evolve, Hyacine. And as they evolve... the vessel can become worthy.”

He leaned back, the weight of those words sinking into the room like sediment.

Hyacine’s gaze lingered on Anaxa, her fingers now curled beneath her chin, the steam from her soup long forgotten. “How can you be so sure?” she asked softly. “That this isn’t just wishful thinking? That the vessel can become worthy?”

Anaxa’s response was immediate—too immediate to be anything but rehearsed conviction.

“Because I already have the hypothesis,” he said. “And the evidence.”

Hyacine frowned slightly. “You mean your homunculus?”

“No.” He leaned back in his seat, eyes narrowing, not with anger—but with that singular, focused intensity she had seen only when he was truly serious. “I mean every life I’ve lived before this. Until—finally—the Coreflame forged itself into my original body.”

Hyacine studied the face before her—Cerces’s borrowed features framed by loose silver hair—but searched only for the flicker of Anaxa she’d always known: a wry twist of the mouth, a betrayed softness in the eyes that might hint at doubt. Anything she might seize upon to dissuade him from yet another perilous step.

She found none. The resolve behind those dark eyelashes was ironclad.

“How?” she whispered at last. “How in the Riven One’s name do you plan to eclipse Titans—and what part could I possibly play?”

Cerces—Anaxa—nodded once, as though bracing her for a deeper plunge.

"In this game against the gods, I first needed a piece on the board to tip the scales." He drew a slow breath, shoulders squaring, and answered with disarming simplicity:

“So first I need you… to impregnate me.”

Silence smothered the room—deeper than the hush after his first declaration of rebellion, deeper than the night air beyond the shuttered windows. Even the soup seemed to still its simmer.

Hyacine felt her pulse throb at her neck. Words tangled, refusing to leave her lips. She had expected alchemy, surgery of the soul, maybe even sacrificial ritual—but not this.

He saw her shock and lifted a calming hand. “Not the usual manner,” he added quickly, reading her expression.

“I meant through the same method I used—at the lab. The same way I forged my current vessel. Artificial insemination, embryo transfer, controlled growth. No... interaction needed.”

He leaned forward, eyes gleaming beneath borrowed lashes. “I just need your help to prepare the environment. The containment, the infusion chamber. The biological scaffold.”

Still, Hyacine could only stare.

Anaxa blinked as Hyacine rose without a word and stepped closer to him. Her face was unreadable as she slowly reached out—one hand pressing lightly to his forehead, the other cupping his cheek.

He tensed. “…Hyacine?”

She tilted her head, her expression calm, almost clinical. “Hmm. No fever,” she murmured thoughtfully. “But you’re clearly hallucinating.”

Anaxa narrowed his eyes.

She sighed and gently patted his cheek. “You need rest, Professor. Preferably a month’s worth. Maybe two.”

“I’m not sick.”

“You’re wearing another woman’s body, asking me to help you inseminate yourself with a lab-grown child to win a metaphysical tug-of-war against titans. Forgive me for double-checking if you’ve lost your mind.”

“I haven’t—!”

She shook her head, stepping back toward her bubbling stew. “Sit down. Drink broth. Breathe. Maybe take a nap.”

“I don’t need soup, Hyacine. I need results.”

“You need boundaries.”

Anaxa groaned, pulling the sleeves of the too-long robe over his face. “I can’t believe I’m arguing the logic of artificial parthenogenesis while wearing Cerces’s hairclip.”

Hyacine moved with eerie calmness, setting the ladle aside before scanning her shelf. She reached up, fingers brushing the worn spine of a thick, leather-bound encyclopedia titled “Essentials of Dromas Biology and Arcane Reproduction.” With a practiced hand, she yanked it free—thick enough to be used as a murder weapon.

Anaxa, still muttering under his breath about godhood and lab wombs, didn’t notice until the shadow loomed over him.

BONK.

“—Ow!?” he yelped, clutching his borrowed skull with both hands. “What in Mnemosyne’s—?!”

She stared at him with deadpan serenity.

BONK. Again. Harder this time. ‘Cerces’s’ body winced, nearly toppling over the tiny couch.

Hyacine crossed her arms, the heavy tome still resting in her lap like a threat yet to be re-summoned. Her brows arched gently as she asked, “Are you more sane now?”

Anaxa, still massaging the fresh welt on his head with a theatrical wince, let out a small sigh. “I was perfectly sane from the beginning,” he muttered.

Hyacine didn’t flinch. “You do realize this kind of cosmic trespassing is the sort of thing that actually gets you smitten. Properly smitten. As in plague of boils and public trial by celestial tribunal kind of smitten.”

He scoffed, leaning his head back on the couch with a dry laugh. “Divine retribution? Hyacine, I am divine retribution now.” His tone soured as he added, “Or at least the butt of it. I’m trapped in this—” he gestured vaguely to Cerces’s lithe frame, still cloaked in Hyacine’s oversized robe, “—watching my own body probably being used by the Titan of Reason to flirt her way through Aglaea’s defenses.”

Hyacine blinked once. “...Flirt?”

Anaxa stared at the ceiling in despair. “Gods only know what she’s doing. Romantic soul entanglement? Philosophical pillow talk? She probably has my nose pressed up to Aglaea’s neck as they whisper about eternity or some awful, poetic garbage.”

He dragged his hands down his face, muttering to himself, “I was there for her first kiss. Now I don’t even get to use my own lips.”

Hyacine snorted despite herself. “You sound like a ghost haunting your own love life.”

“I am a ghost haunting my own love life!”

She leaned forward with a small, amused smile, resting her chin in her palm. “And you’re asking me to help you bring a soul into a vessel just so you can win your body back. Do you even hear yourself?”

He looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Of course I do. I wrote this play. I’m just stuck in the wrong act.”

Hyacine leaned back again, her fingers laced atop the encyclopedia in her lap, eyes narrowing at the man wearing a goddess’s skin. “Alright, playwright,” she said, tone wry but not unkind. “Tell me, how do you even suppose this farce plays out? What’s the ending here?”

Anaxa exhaled, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion and quiet defiance. But before he could answer, Hyacine continued—voice now edged with sharp practicality.

“You do realize they’re literal gods, right? Not just eccentric sages with long lifespans and too many admirers. I might—might—believe you’ll get mercy from Cerces. She’s Reason incarnate, after all. She may indulge you like a curious hypothesis.”

She paused, her voice lowering as she folded her arms. “But Mnestia? The Demigoddess of Romance? She’s a wild card, Professor. You’ve only ever seen her through Lady Goldweaver’s cold command and her carefully clipped judgment.” Her tone sharpened. “You really think she won’t tear your flimsy little homunculus body apart the second she feels betrayed? She could.”

She let the words hang in the air, like the scent of her boiling soup still wafting through the small kitchen.

Hyacine had seen many masks pass across her professor’s face—haughty indifference in debate halls, boyish delight over a new equation, hollow exhaustion after sleepless nights—but never this.

A low chuckle spilled from ‘Cerces’s’ borrowed lips, climbing in pitch until it rippled into something between a cackle and a cultured noblewoman’s laugh.

Then he stilled. One hand slashed through the air like a blade, eyes sharpening into glittering obsidian.

“That,” he hissed, voice a velvet rasp, “is precisely why I need a counterweight. I will set the scale first—drag the Titans down from their high thrones.”

Hyacine’s jaw slackened, words caught behind her teeth. She had not expected menace from a ‘man’ dressed in oversized scholar’s robes and satin sleep pants—but there it was, thrumming just beneath his borrowed skin.

“If Titans are nothing more than blood‑hungry tyrants,” Anaxa went on, the sinister smile never quite touching his eyes, “then civilization itself is a lie. We regress to the First Era—Amphoreus drowning in chaos, gods feeding on fear instead of reverence.”

Anaxa leaned back in the chair, a slow breath escaping from between Cerces’s lips as he observed Hyacine’s shifting expression—one of dawning clarity, like sunlight pushing through the morning haze.

“The prosperity we bask in,” he said with a measured tone, “was never truly ours. It was curated—offered selectively by the Titans, rationed like wine at a noble feast. And we, the people, are expected to lift our heads in reverence, praising their divine ‘benevolence’... all while drinking the crumbs of their grace.”

Hyacine nodded slowly, eyes narrowing not in defiance, but in understanding.

“So,” she murmured, fingers tracing the edge of her lap, “what you mean to say is—this whole structure, all this order and sanctity, is a performance. Political stability is just their leash, gilded and wrapped around our necks. And you…” she looked up, meeting his sharp gaze, “you want to pull the curtain. Drag them from their thrones and shove them into the public square—where the divine can no longer act with impunity.”

Anaxa’s grin widened, pride glimmering behind it like a blade sheathed in velvet. “Precisely,” he said. “Let them know the weight of consequence. Let them feel what it means to live not as untouchable idols, but as beings accountable to those they rule over.”

He  rested his borrowed hands on the tabletop, the lamplight catching the faint silver swirl of Cerces’s stolen sigils. His voice dipped to a low, steady current—less a boast, more a vow.

“All my failures, Hyacine—the false starts, have tempered my soul like steel in a forge.”

He tapped his chest once, where his true heartbeat should have been. “When I’m done, my soul will fit its rightful shape. I’ll reclaim my body, strand by strand, nerve by nerve—until Cerces has no foothold left.”

A thin, almost feral smile crossed the Titan‑borrowed lips.

“And when that moment comes, when the objectives is completed.  I’ll flush her precious Coreflame down the nearest toilet and bolt the lid.”

Hyacine’s brows lifted, part horror, part admiration.

Anaxa only straightened, eyes alive with a fire wholly his own.

“That is all.”

Chapter Text

Cerces—still locked behind Anaxagoras’s angular features—watched the end of the tribunal like a spectator trapped behind a pane of glass.

As the elders filed out, the room quickly re‑arranged itself around Calypso: Anaxa in her own familiar skin, bowing demurely to every Grove scholar who approached, thanking Dawncloud physicians for their “kind concern,” even clasping forearms with Council elders as though they were cherished uncles.

The performance was masterful—obscenely so. Each sweet smile, each lowered lash was an arrow; each grateful nod, a hook. She had to admit, with a flicker of perverse pride, that her face wore innocence almost too well.

Of course it does, she thought dryly, feeling Anaxa’s practiced charm ripple across the flawless porcelain she had once called her own. I made this face irresistible.

Men—especially the junior archivists—hovered around “Calypso” like moths enamored of an eternal flame.

Even grey‑haired sages, normally immune to flirtation, found themselves promising resources, scribes, and extra quarters for the “expectant mother.” It was repulsive, impressive, and faintly hilarious all at once.

Cerces folded Anaxa’s long fingers into a polite clasp, met every congratulation with a scholar’s restrained nod—and filed away each pledge of help in the ledger of favors she would eventually repay… or collect.

Calypso—Anaxa wearing her own elegant features—had timed it perfectly. With the amphitheater still buzzing, he stepped into the open space before the council benches, one hand cradling his faux‑pregnant belly, the other extended toward Lady Aglaea.

“Though we have our… differences,” he said, voice laced with gentle tremor, “I hope the revered Demigoddess of Romance will stand beside me in this uncertain hour.”

Every head pivoted. The gesture was a gauntlet tossed in silk. A single, fragile hand—deliberately offered in front of elders, scribes, nobles, and a half‑dozen gasp‑ready onlookers.

For the briefest beat, Mnēstia’s disguise cracked. A twitch at the corner of Aglaea’s gold‑rimmed eye—barely there, but Cerces saw it. She could almost hear the unspoken words:

So—nice to meet you, Wife Number Two.

With the poise of practiced royalty, Aglaea lifted her own hand and laid it atop Calypso’s. “Of course,” she replied, voice smooth as hammered gold. “We must all do what is best for the child.”

The room exhaled in relief. Pens scratched, nods exchanged, a chorus of polite approval swelled. But Cerces caught the gleam in Mnēstia’s gaze: a promise that this game was far from over.

And Calypso? He just smiled—sweet, victorious, maddening—knowing full well the challenge he’d issued had been accepted, whether Mnēstia confessed it aloud or not.

From her borrowed vantage—Anaxa’s measured stance, Anaxa’s calm scholar’s face—Cerces watched the hand‑clasp and felt a shiver of reluctant admiration.

That was power play elevated to art: Calypso’s disarming sweetness, the flawless timing, the hushed court hanging on each practiced tremor. Pride—deadly, delicious—delivered with the elegance of a slow blade.

A sin of pride capable of toppling gods, wrapped in silk and maternal innocence. Cerces almost tilted her head in open awe.

Magnificent, Reason crooned—and immediately shrieked a crimson warning in her skull: Mnēstia will come for you later. The demigoddess would not let public humiliation rest. There would be a reckoning behind closed doors, and it would not be gentle.

Yet even that looming lecture couldn’t dim the absurd realization blooming in Cerces’s mind. By sheer farcical momentum, she now occupied the body of the Great Performer—at the center of a scandalous melodrama—and the script had recast her as the tragic heroine: a woman torn between two “lovers,” her own stolen body weeping with faux innocence while Mnēstia’s gaze promised divine war.

How had this farce spiraled so quickly? Mere days ago she’d teased Anaxa for longing after privacy; now she was fighting for it herself—trapped in cobweb threads of love and rivalry that tightened with every elegant lie.

Truly, ‘he’ is The Great Performer.

The council session was all but adjourned when Elder Althaea raised a final, measured hand.

“One last matter,” she said, her voice calm but firm. “Beginning at first light, our officers will brief the town criers and guild scribes.

The news must reach the citizenry gradually—controlled, factual—so it does not ignite rumor into riot. We cannot predict how free minds will spin untended whispers.”

A murmur of agreement circled the dais; wax seals were pressed to tablets, messengers summoned to the corridor.

Cerces—inhabiting Anaxa’s form—felt the tightening of an invisible noose. Public disclosure meant eyes everywhere, speculation etched into every marketplace conversation.

She could not protest without appearing evasive, so she lifted her chin, summoned a scholar’s poise, and offered a single dignified nod.

“Your prudence is appreciated,” she managed, voice smooth and even. “Thank you for safeguarding order.

Across the floor, Mnēstia—still wearing Aglaea’s serene mask—caught the subtext instantly. The council’s decree was as much a warning to her as it was logistical planning: Do not act rashly; the entire city will be watching.

A barely perceptible flare of golden light flickered in Mnēstia’s eyes, then dimmed. She inclined her head in solemn agreement, lips pressed into a calm line.

Cerces exhaled once, quietly. The game board had expanded—from closed‑door intrigue to the streets of Okhema, where every step would echo in the court of public opinion. One wrong move, and their personal war could topple more than reputations.

And so it returned—this winding path of absurdities—to her current condition.

They were back at the Goldweaver estate now. Cerces, still bound within Anaxa’s body, stood with poise beside Calypso—Anaxa, draped in her own former beauty, playing the role of the radiant and wronged mother-to-be with the grace of a divine courtesan. And gods, how quickly the world bent to her performance.

It hadn’t even taken ten minutes.

Ten minutes of breathy sighs, trembling words, and that shimmering veil of false modesty—and the Council had not only swallowed the tale whole, but lavished the woman with sympathy, favor, and staff.

Yes—staff. Two attendants now accompanied Calypso, courtesy of the Grove Council, meant to “support her fragile condition” and ensure the wellbeing of the scholar’s wife.

Cerces could barely keep her eye from twitching.

The attendants—had already informed them both of the arrangements: that they would come by regularly to check on Calypso's health and ensure harmony between the now-officially acknowledged “households.”

A new quarter would even be constructed, nearby the Goldweaver estate, “to make Lord Anaxagoras’s duties easier”—duties which now inexplicably included managing two wives and continuing his Grove-sanctioned “research.”

Such leniency. Such opulent sabotage.

Cerces could practically hear Anaxa's laughter rattling in her own skull. Not out loud, of course—Calypso was currently fanning herself on a chaise, blissfully radiant in her role, occasionally stealing a glance at Cerces as if to say, Why yes, darling, your reputation is still burning and I look stunning amid the flames.

And Mnestia… gods help her.

Still cloaked in Aglaea’s form, she sat across the parlor in contemplative silence, the scent of saffron tea untouched on her table, her expression unreadable—too still to be human. Her patience, Cerces knew, was stretched thin.

That very same patience, so tightly reined beneath Mnestia’s borrowed gold-threaded visage, finally snapped the moment the chamber doors were sealed and the attendants dismissed.

Before either of them could draw a breath, Mnestia spun—silent, swift, divine—and seized Calypso by the wrist.

A glimmer of gold flared across her fingers.

Her expression, once serene and unreadable, transformed like silk catching fire: the cool detachment gone, replaced by a fury so refined it cut cleaner than a blade.

Her Coreflame, once slumbering beneath the mortal form of Aglaea, rose to the surface, threading itself along her brow and jaw like a living crown.

Calypso—no, Anaxa—flinched. Just barely. But she stood her ground, raising her chin as if daring the goddess to go further. The mask of innocence faltered, but only for a flicker. Her gaze locked with Mnestia’s—goddess to mortal, performer to divine judge.

Cerces stood at the side, unmoving, hands clenched behind her back. She didn’t intervene. She trusted Mnestia. She always had, even when the goddess’ temper was a storm and her silence a dagger.

But this—this was dangerous ground.

Mnestia’s eyes, now lit with the shimmer of a thousand unseen butterflies, scanned Calypso like parchment. Not the skin. Not the borrowed beauty of Cerces’ form. But deeper. She looked through the vessel and into the soul.

And there—yes—she saw it.

There was another.

A second flame. Small, flickering. Alive.

Within the false womb of her beloved’s stolen form… there was life.

Mnestia’s expression did not change, but her grip softened by a single degree. Her voice, when it came, was quiet. “You’ve made this real,” she said—not as accusation, but as recognition.

And Calypso, face unreadable once more, merely replied with a careful smile. “I warned you,” she whispered. “That I never play unless I intend to win.”

Mnestia’s gaze remained locked with Calypso’s, unmoving, unblinking—like the surface of still water before the storm splits it in two.

Her words dropped into the heavy silence like a sword cleaving marble.

“With such blasphemy committed against a god,” she said, her voice low and sharpened by divine ire, “what power do you think you hold that would stay my hand from turning you to cinders where you stand?”

Her fingers twitched, and a gold-hot shimmer of Coreflame flickered along her grip. “Child or not. Be damned with it.”

Calypso’s breath hitched—not in fear, but from the sheer heat pressing so close to her skin. Yet still, her chin remained lifted, though a fine sheen of sweat glistened across Cerces’ borrowed brow.

Cerces, standing off to the side, felt the moment falter. Her foot stepped forward, hand half-raised in quiet instinct to de-escalate. She knew the edge Mnestia stood upon. She had seen it in the War. She had loved her from its ruins.

But before she could touch them—before even a whisper could be uttered—Mnestia’s golden eyes cut toward her like a guillotine.

Do not. Intervere.

The command was silent. Absolute. And Cerces froze mid-step.

She withdrew her hand slowly, eyes narrowing with concern. Yet she said nothing. For even the Goddess of Reason knew—this was no longer about logic.

It was about the unrelenting fury of a goddess whose love had been twisted… and who now stood face to face with the one bold enough to reshape fate in her image.

And yet—amidst the rising tension, amidst the swirling gold of divine fury and the suffocating weight of judgment—something strange cracked through the air.

A trembling laugh.

It came not from Mnestia, not from Cerces, but from her own body—from the figure draped in the form of the Goddess of Reason. Calypso. Anaxa.

The chuckle, first soft and uncertain, swelled rapidly into something more manic. Uncontrolled. A jagged, delighted cackle that echoed through the closed chamber like the sound of glass fracturing.

Both goddesses froze.

Mnestia’s fingers released their grip unconsciously, her eyes narrowing in confusion. Cerces tensed, unsure what she was seeing—what he was doing.

The false Cerces—Anaxa—lowered his head slightly, letting the fall of soft beige hair veil his expression. But even so, his shoulders trembled with his laughter.

Then, slowly, he raised an arm to wipe at his mouth in theatrical exaggeration, sighing with pleasure as if having just tasted the rarest wine.

"Bravo," he whispered with biting reverence. “Truly, as the revered Goddess of Romance… you terrify me.”

His lips curled into a wicked smile—not mocking, but something older. Sharper.

“I applaud you.”

The words slipped from his mouth like a dagger sheathed in silk, and even Mnestia did not speak.

“I mean it,” he continued, straightening slowly with an exaggerated poise. “Out of all the chaos, the screaming, the judgment, the performance—this—” he gestured lightly to her, to her golden fury and trembling Coreflame, “this divine wrath you hold like a lover's blade... It’s beautiful.”

Then, with an elegant flourish, he bent slightly—bowing mockingly deep toward her. "I respect your authority, o' Titan of Romance. And I would never dare to disrespect the gods."

The way he said it—slow, deliberate, soaking in irony—made even the walls feel colder.

For a heartbeat, Mnestia did not answer. Her Coreflame dimmed to a low simmer, her expression unreadable.

Anaxa—still cloaked in Cerces’s form—straightened from his mocking bow, eyes gleaming with the thrill of confrontation. His voice, now steadier, more venomously calm, echoed softly:

“Of course, everything you’ve said is true. You are a goddess. And I, in this pathetic skin, am a mortal. I hold no divine might to rival yours, no celestial weight to tip the scale in my favor. And yet…”

He spread his arms, as if presenting himself to be struck down.

“You forget the one thing that truly matters. The one who bears your Coreflame. The one whose name you wear like a mantle.”

His eyes glinted. “Aglaea.”

Mnestia’s breath caught ever so slightly.

“She has been... very quiet, hasn’t she?” Anaxa continued, stepping a little closer, his tone sharp as a needle’s point.

He turned to Mnestia fully now, no longer hiding the bite in his tone. “Tell me, Goddess of Romance. When was the last time you asked her? When you listened—not to her heart, but to her will. Or are you so certain that her silence is consent?”

Mnestia flinched—barely, but it was there. Her grip loosened. Her gaze faltered. The divine fury, now for the first time, trembled with doubt.

“She revere me,” Mnestia replied at last, though it sounded more like a defense than a truth. “Her feelings are real.”

“But feelings,” Calypso—smiled darkly, “are not the same as will.”

He leaned in, voice softer now. Dangerous.

“If you believe in her love, then call her. Let Aglaea speak.” The silence that followed hung heavy in the air—so tense it pressed down on the very walls of the estate.

Cerces—watching from the side—felt her own breath still.

Mnestia, after a beat of stillness, slowly exhaled and took a step back—her voice regaining its poise, a deliberate coldness cutting through the tension.

“Then allow me to show you.”

She closed her eyes.

In an instant, the fire that had once danced in her gaze was extinguished. The fury drained like water from a shattered cup.

What remained behind was silence—icy, practiced, composed. When she opened her eyes again, what stood in her place was no longer Mnestia.

It was Aglaea.

The true Lady Goldweaver had returned.

Her presence shifted the room. Where divine heat once pressed, now a glacial stillness reigned. She didn’t speak right away—only stood, blinking once as her gaze swept across the chamber. First to Cerces. Then to the woman bearing her own beloved’s face.

Finally, her eyes fell on him.

Cerces. But no—she knew what was beneath.

She stepped forward. One foot after another, each echoing like the ticking hands of fate.

Her lips parted only slightly as she asked, quietly, too quietly:

“Are you truly... Anaxagoras?”

The figure in front of her—her own beloved’s skin wrapped in the spirit of another—hesitated only a breath.

“I am.”

Aglaea's expression remained unreadable, as still as a painted mask. But then—just slightly—something flickered behind her eyes. A crack. A glimmer. A divine twitch of barely contained emotion.

She raised her hand.

Cerces—or rather, Anaxa in Cerces’s body—tensed.

The hand touched her shoulder gently, then drifted upward, brushing the side of her neck. For a moment, it looked like a caress. Tender. Almost regretful.

Then—clench.

“Ack—!”

Aglaea’s fingers closed around Calypso’s throat in a very unladylike chokehold. Calypso gasped, arms flailing as Aglaea’s grip tightened with goddess-level elegance. Her expression, still serene, now glowed with a terrifying, glowing intensity like the calm before a divine lightning bolt.

“I. Leave. For five minutes—” she hissed between her teeth, “—and you marry me?! In front of a full council?! Without my consent?!”

Calypso (Anaxa) wheezed, eyes watering. “It—ack—was symbolic!!”

“Symbolic?!” Aglaea’s voice cracked up an octave. “You drafted legal documents!”

From somewhere in her mind, Mnestia could be heard cheering, likely with popcorn: “YES! CRUSH HIM! CHOKE HIM! TEACH THAT THEATRICAL TWIT!”

Aglaea, still throttling Calypso, continued with all the grace of a goddess delivering divine judgment while multitasking. “Do you know how many political entanglements you just wrapped me in? Do you know how many scribe are outside my estate right now trying to ask if I’m the homewrecker?! ME!”

Calypso gagged. “I—it’s good PR…?”

“You’re a walking scandal with cheekbones,” Aglaea snapped. “And I am not going down in history as ‘the other woman’ to my own forbidden love triangle!”

Finally, she released her grip with a huff. Calypso stumbled back, coughing, hair tousled, and looking more like a disheveled starlet than ever.

Aglaea's sharp gaze never wavered, her fingers still brushing off the wrinkles from her sleeves as she spoke with deadly precision.

"I will commend you for one thing," she said, voice crisp as ever, eyes boring into Anaxa—no, Calypso—“you’ve got guts to play political chess with the gods themselves. You bluffed, you lied, you performed—gods, did you perform—and now the board is set, with you pretending to be a grieving wife while wearing a divine face like some theater prop.”

She flicked her eyes toward Cerces, who stood silent nearby, a mixture of fondness and weary resignation crossing her borrowed face.

“You do realize,” Aglaea continued, “that as the leader of the Chrysos Heirs, the public trusts me to uphold divine unity. And yet now it seems I’ve let a titan play favorites, while also appearing as if she—” Aglaea gestured at Cerces without looking, “—has killed a pregnant woman over a mortal love. You know how that sounds?”

A pointed glance at Calypso’s dainty figure. “—even if that woman happens to be a lying, body-snatching, self-marrying menace.”

“Ah yes,” Calypso muttered. “How tragic it would be if the gods lost their PR team.”

“Silence.” Aglaea didn’t even look at her this time.

Cerces moved closer, gaze softening only slightly. “That’s why I didn’t stop you from your little… dramatics. Even if part of me dearly wished to.”

Then she added, mostly to herself, “I’m still not sure what’s worse—watching you choke him or wanting to cheer you on.”

Aglaea gave her a flat look, but Cerces’s tone grew a touch more serious. “Still… it is worth noting. He may be prancing about in my body, but the reason he’s not dead on impact is because his soul remains latched to the Coreflame.”

At that, Aglaea narrowed her gaze, contemplative now. “So the thread isn’t fully severed…”

“No,” Cerces said, eyes flickering with logic behind the sentiment. “Which means, Mnestia willing, there may still be a way to bring him to heel—without tearing the world apart in the process.”

Calypso, still slightly red in the cheeks and neck, perked up. “Ah, see? You do still care.”

“Shut. Up.” both Aglaea and Cerces said in unison.

The silence after that was only broken by a dramatic sigh from Calypso, the kind that would’ve earned a theatre encore.

A knock echoed gently against the heavy chamber doors, soft but firm, cutting through the tension-laced quiet of the room like a whisper over water.

Aglaea, still turned away and steadying her breath after all that had transpired, didn’t flinch. Her posture remained statuesque, an elegant mask drawn tight. Instead, it was Calypso—Anaxa, in her skin—who strode over, his robe billowing a bit too theatrically for someone carrying a goddess’s face.

He opened the door with a practiced grace, only to be greeted by a nervous maid who dipped her head deeply.

“Apologies for the intrusion, my lady,” she murmured to Calypso, “but the… ah, Ladies of Fate, and the fleet-footed traveler came with several more guests, request an audience. They said it concerns your recent… marriage.”

Behind him, Cerces raised a brow. Calypso turned to glance back with mild exasperation before turning to the maid with a honeyed smile.

“We’ll be out in a moment,” he said smoothly, voice low with practiced warmth.

The maid bowed again and scurried off, leaving Calypso to close the door quietly—only to freeze halfway through turning back.

A sound.

It started low, quiet, as though someone had caught their breath a little too hard. Then it shifted—wet, trembling, cracking like a porcelain plate strained under invisible pressure.

Cerces turned at the same time, her eyes widening as she saw what Calypso had already picked up: Aglaea, or rather Mnestia, was trembling. Her shoulders rose and fell in uneven beats, and then—without warning—she spun around, golden threads wet with her tears, her lip quivering in outrage.

“You’re cruel, Cerces!” she cried out suddenly, voice wobbling between righteous fury and heart-wrenched despair.

“I want a divorce!”