Chương 52: Chapter 38 - Interlude: The Older Sister

She is watching the child again. Not that she ever truly stops. None of them do. Countless gazes stretch across the firmament, scattered through the vastness of existence, each one vast enough to cradle worlds—yet all of them are fixed, fond and unwavering, on a single, impossibly small point. One girl. The beloved daughter of the stars. And yet, for a single, suspended moment, not one of them understands what they have just witnessed. The silence that follows is rare. Startling.

Heavy in a way only beings like them can feel. Then one of them speaks. Low. Almost hesitant. A thought that slips free before it can be shaped into something wiser.

"... What a monster." Annoyance snaps through her, sharp and incandescent, like a flare igniting along her surface. She knows the voice immediately. Another star—one of the nearer ones. One of the fortunate few close enough to speak to their daughter directly. Close enough to have been given a name by her. That alone should have taught him better. She snorts, a sound that sends ripples through the surrounding light. Tactless.

A fitting name for someone who has never learned to keep his thoughts behind his own gravity. At the very least, he has the sense to dampen the transmission—to keep the layered emotions and impossibly dense meaning of star-speech from reaching their daughter. The child does not hear the word. She does not feel it. That mercy does nothing to cool her anger.

"Do not ever call her that again." Her voice is calm. It does not need to be anything else. The pressure behind it makes the surrounding stars subtly recoil, their light dimming as if instinctively aware they have strayed too close to something dangerous. The other star stutters, his presence flickering.

"B-but she—""Quiet." The word lands with finality. There is no room within it for protest, no space for justification.

"You know how much that word has hurt her." He has no answer. Of course he doesn't. Because they all know. They have all seen it. Every flinch. Every narrowing of trust. Every scar, both visible and invisible. She turns her attention back to their daughter as the child reengages the dragon below, the motion seamless, effortless, as if nothing monumental has just occurred. Her hair gleams beneath the starlight she herself forced into being. White. Ethereal. Too bright for any natural lineage.

A visible impossibility. The most obvious scar she carries, and the only one that can never truly be hidden—no matter how much time passes, no matter how far she might ascend. It will never fade into the background like the others. And yet— The star does not hate it. None of them do. Because their daughter herself does not. She wears it without shame. Without apology. She does not try to diminish it, nor does she pretend it is not there.

She simply exists as she is, and dares the universe to take issue with that fact. A child who finds pride where only loathing should have grown. A child who chooses humor over pain. Genius over humanity. The universe has rules for power. It has far fewer for identity. When someone like her refuses to be reduced—refuses to bend, to simplify, to become smaller—reality cannot disregard it forever. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

It responds the same way it always does. Across the breadth of existence, among the thousands of greater worlds like Asteria—no matter how their systems differ, no matter how power is quantified or worshipped—there is a single unifying constant. Arcana. Not a spell. Not a technique. Not a blessing. An assertion. A means by which will is no longer expressed through reality, but imposed upon it. Even among beings who have clawed their way to apotheosis, there are many who cannot wield it.

Divinity does not guarantee authority. Power does not imply selfhood. Mortals, paradoxically, are not barred from it at all. They acquire Arcana not through strength, nor through accumulation, but through coherence—through will refined into something indivisible. Through identity that refuses dilution. It is not all that rare. What is rare is the speed.

In all her long, patient existence—watching worlds rise and collapse, watching champions fail and gods calcify—the one that the child calls Older Sister has never seen an Arcana take root so quickly. Let alone one so complete. Something that should have been impossible. Accomplished without hesitation. By their own daughter. She stops watching the world the child has made—and studies the child instead. Her attention narrows, not to posture or motion, but to the girl's eyes. They appear unchanged.

Black beyond comparison, darker than any event horizon, swallowing light so completely that it seems to thin the air around them. And yet— The space they occupy feels heavier than it did a moment ago. Not visibly altered. Not measurably distorted. Just… weighted. She does not comment on it. She has no need to. She has seen this before. They all have. A moment etched into the shared memory of the stars—not as a failure of understanding, but as a failure of response. One they carry with shame.

They were still mourning the loss of their previous daughter then. Still reeling from her absence. Five hundred years is nothing against the lifespan of the stars, and grief does not diminish simply because time passes. And then— A resonance. One that should not have existed for millions of years yet. A new Starborn signature, impossibly early, impossibly strong. An event so rare that some stars never witness it even once. The signal was undeniable.

It rippled outward, touching every corner of the universe, drawing the attention of every star that still remembered how to care. For a moment—just a moment—the weight of their grief eased. Not erased. Never erased. But softened, by the fragile hope that the universe had not gone entirely silent. They turned their gaze outward. Not in search of replacement. But in disbelief. They found her on a small, rocky world—a lesser planet, unremarkable by any cosmic standard. No system. No ambient magic.

Nothing that should have drawn their attention at all. There, they saw her. And none of them spoke. Because what lay beneath their gaze was not a newborn, but a child already reaching outward. Small. Round-faced. Still clumsy with her own limbs. She lay in the grass beneath an open sky, reaching upward with a chubby hand, fingers stretching as though she might grasp the night itself. Her expression was one of joy. And longing. An unguarded, impossible yearning, directed at the stars without knowing what they were.

None of them answered. They could not. Because for a single instant—one so brief that most mortals could never perceive it—the child's eyes changed. The vibrant green was swallowed whole. Not dimmed. Or eclipsed. Consumed. Blackness spread where color had been, deeper than void, deeper than absence—something that did not reflect or respond, only existed. The resonance surged. And the child became a Starborn. In that moment, as they looked into those depthless eyes, every star in existence felt fear. Not of her.

But of what they did not understand. Fear born from the realization that this was not a gift they had given, nor a role they had shaped. It was something that had reached back toward them. An emotion no parent should ever feel toward their child. One they have carried in silence ever since. The child believes her black eyes are the result of being a Starborn. The stars have never corrected her. Not because the belief is convenient. But because they do not know what they would replace it with.

The eyes did not answer the System. They did not shift when she was integrated. If they changed at all, it was too subtle for certainty—less a transformation than a quiet removal of something that had once been in the way. What had been softened—hidden behind the green of borrowed normalcy—was no longer masked. What remained was unfamiliar. Not altered or enhanced in any way. Simply… present. The System did not claim it. The stars did not name it.

And none of the frameworks they understood seemed willing to approach it for long. Something left unspoken. Something they learned, very quickly, not to reach for. Something that resisted every word they might have used to describe it. Something— undefined. And yet, in the end, it is something almost entirely irrelevant. Because she is their daughter. Bright. Beloved. Chosen. The star watches fondly as the child resumes testing her Arcana, sending her garden into motion.

Vines glide and coil at her idle direction, interrupting incoming attacks, reshaping the battlefield with casual precision. She spins and twirls as she moves—unnecessary, inefficient, and unmistakably her. Her Garden, meanwhile, continues framing her every movement. The light from the stars—their light—shifts constantly around the child without permission, casting her in dramatic silhouettes as she moves through the endless midnight. Naturally, she does not question this at all. The Garden reacts to everything.

To her motions. To her emotions. To the quiet swell of smug satisfaction radiating from her tiny fox-shaped body at any given moment. Her flowers regrow in aesthetically pleasing arrangements whenever damaged, dark petals unfolding in elegant patterns that prioritize visual impact more than practicality. As though the entire Arcana is trying very, very hard to look cool. Unfortunately for reality, it is succeeding.

The little girl's grin fades, her features smoothing back into a careful mask of composed neutrality, emotion once again measured and controlled. Her body, however, always tells the truth. Foxkin ears twitch. Tail flicks. Posture loosened just enough to betray the delight that she refuses to show. The System of this greater world did well in that regard. Changing her into a race that suits her far better than it ever intended.

Though the child herself seems convinced that it is lazy, inelegant, and deeply flawed—and that it will, one day, receive righteous punishment in the form of a strongly worded letter, personally written and delivered. The star cannot help but recall the moment clearly.

The child standing with her hands planted firmly on her hips, tail lashing back and forth in animated irritation as she delivered a dramatic lecture on questionable terrain generation, inefficient foliage placement, and frankly offensive pathing decisions. The memory draws something like laughter from the surrounding light. A daughter who adopted herself into the family. Not born to them. Not granted. But claimed—again and again—through every word spoken, every action taken, every sharp joke and smug declaration.

A presence that brings smiles where silence once reigned. Enough to dull the ache of loss. Enough to ease the long grief carried for the Starborn they lost five hundred years ago. She would have loved this child. Undoubtedly. So while that loss will never be forgotten, they will not let it define them. They will hold it gently. And pour what remains of their care, their attention, their boundless affection, into the girl who reached for them first. To make sure she is loved. To ensure her scars are allowed to heal.

The star speaks into the quiet of eternity—unheard by the child, unnoticed by her peers, but no less sincere for it.

"We love you, Lyn."