Chapter 18: Chapter 17

image [https://i.imgur.com/c9UmkYj.png]

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“Fragmented truths,

Cosmic dance of cruel intent.

A shattered mirror,

Reflecting endless, twisted games.

The hero's path, a bleeding bloom.”

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You're asking the wrong questions. You're seeking the wrong answers. You grope in the dark for a single, comforting truth you can grasp and cling to. You want heroes, neat and gleaming. You demand villains, black as pitch. You crave a tale you can place neatly on a shelf, and label it “Odyssey,” and believe in it like a bedtime prayer, a shield against the vast, indifferent darkness. But the cosmos? Ah, they don't merely laugh at your quaint need for clarity; they shriek with mirth, their laughter echoing through the void, shattering any illusion of order you might try to construct.

Now, I don’t mean to mock. Well. Maybe. A little bit, perhaps. It’s a habit, one I find rather difficult to break, much like the cosmos finds it difficult to walk in a straight line.

But before we speak of crimson blossoms and blood-wet steel, before the whispers of a warrior with a shattered past consume us, let me remind you of a simple truth. A truth, so painfully obvious, that you likely miss it entirely, chasing after grander, more elusive deceptions. There is no such thing as a single truth, if I'm being honest. Only overlapping lenses, fractured like fragile shards, each reflecting a sliver of what might be. And when the light hits just wrong… or perhaps, just right, depending on your perspective, you see it. The shimmer of something truer than truth. Or infinitely, exquisitely crueler.

You seek the tale of the Proving Grounds, yes? The grand arena—no, no, that is far too crude a word, conjuring images of dusty pits and roaring crowds. That’s for mortals. This is… different. A battle—royal, perhaps? Yes. A battleground of judgment, then, blooming not with flowers, but with trials.

Here, in our improbable corner of the celestial tapestry, the thirteen Zodiac deities gather every third aeon—though I’m told time bends and warps oddly in this corner of the sky, like a ribbon caught in a gale. Third to us might be first to another, or never to yet another. It’s all terribly confusing, and utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

This "Proving" is no mere tournament, either. It is selection, brutal and beautiful. It is sacrifice, often unwitting. And it is spectacle, grand beyond your wildest nightmares. Five gods are chosen by consensus—or coercion, depending on which divine tongue you trust—to oversee the trial. They sit on thrones woven from starlight and the forgotten pleas of dying worlds, their gazes like burning coals. And from among the mortals plucked from their sleeping worlds, those poor, unsuspecting souls, champions will rise. Or perish. It’s all the same to the Grounds, in the end.

Sometimes, the gods bicker. Oh, do they bicker! Their voices like thunder, their squabbles shaking the very fabric of existence. Occasionally, they cheat. A little nudge here, a whispered prophecy there, a convenient “accident.” But that’s divine politics for you, isn’t it? Messy. Beautiful. Dangerous. And utterly captivating, if you have the stomach for it.

Now—Yumi.

Ah yes. Yumi, the Jane Doe in red, her fate a vibrant splash against the muted canvas of the Grounds.

You’ve heard the name whispered, haven’t you? Perhaps screamed, in moments of terror or triumph. “The Crimson Sakura.” A flower once beloved, a symbol of delicate beauty, now feared, a harbinger of bloody glory. But names do lie, as do blossoms, their beauty often concealing thorns. Let’s trace her petals backward, shall we? Back to the roots, to the soil where she was first planted.

She arrived as a samurai, yes, armed with a keen blade and a sharper spirit. Though “arrived” might be too neat a term, too gentle. She was shattered into the Grounds, like a fragile tea bowl flung from a mountaintop. Whole in one moment, a thousand glittering fragments in the next, scattered across a landscape that cares nothing for mortal frailty.

Her blade was obsidian kissed with ruby—yes, that part’s true, I’ve seen it, a glint in a shadowed memory. A cruel, beautiful thing, sharp enough to cleave souls. She named it “Yūgure no Tenshi,” Angel of Dusk, though even she, in her fractured state, forgot why. Or perhaps she simply refused to say, holding that secret close, a tiny ember of defiance against the Ground’s relentless assault on memory.

And here’s the part the gods don’t like me sharing, the inconvenient truth they attempt to scrub clean from the cosmic records: Yumi wasn’t on their side. Not at first. How could she be? They were the ones who took everything.

Oh, she didn’t sprout horns or cackle over bubbling cauldrons. She wasn’t a villain in the simplistic sense you mortals understand. But the ones who stand at the edge of light, those who linger in the twilight, always see more of the dark. She had questions, burning like embers. She carried grief, heavy as a stone. And she nursed a quiet, simmering rage that promised to consume everything in its path. And Evil—yes, the real kind, ancient and oily as serpent skin, a whisper from the deepest abyss—it slithered into those cracks, those open wounds, and offered her answers.

“You were taken,” it said, its voice a soothing balm.

“You were wronged,” another promised, a sweet poison.

“You were abandoned,” a third crooned, the ultimate betrayal.

Was it lying? I ask you, was it? In the Proving Grounds, the line between truth and deception is as thin as a spider’s silk.

Juno, the Pandere goddess of secrets and birthrights, the cosmic librarian with a penchant for selective history, tried to bury those early memories. She claims it was mercy. For Yumi’s sake, a kindness to spare her the unbearable weight of what she had lost. Or perhaps, more likely, to protect the pristine reputation of the Sleeping Bamboo Realm, that idyllic land from which Yumi was so cruelly chosen to protect. You’d be surprised, truly, how quickly gods start scrubbing stories clean, polishing away the inconvenient stains.

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But I remember. I remember the echoes, the fragments.

Yumi stood on the edge of the Proving Grounds once, barefoot in demon ash, her hair tangled with cinders, her eyes blank with shock. And she wept. Not for herself, no. The warrior in her refused such weakness. She wept for a girl she had once known, a girl from Kyoto who played the flute and wanted nothing more than to grow plum trees, their blossoms a promise of gentle beauty.

That girl was gone. Crushed beneath the heel of divine whim.

Ayumi learned the inevitable truth. There was no going back. So, gone was Yumi. In her place: Ayaka of House Rengetsu—a name forged in flame, in silence, and in a broken allegiance to an existence that had betrayed her.

Don’t misunderstand. Her story’s not a tragedy.

Not yet. There’s still time for it to become something else entirely.

But tell me, if you dare to ponder such uncomfortable truths: what do you think becomes of a champion who was once a villain… and remembers it? What fury ignites when a soul awakens to its own corruption?

Shall I continue? The threads are tangled, but I can unravel them, if you insist.

No, not yet. Let that sink in. Let the notion of a hero forged in darkness curdle in your gut. I told you truth is a fickle, looping thing, a serpent devouring its own tail. And Yumi? Ayaka? She’s the twist in your tale you didn’t see coming. The flower blooming backward, its petals drawing back into the bud, reversing time itself. The sword with a memory, a blade that whispers of past sins even as it cuts a path to a shadowed future.

And the Proving Grounds? They never forget. Not truly. They merely choose when to reveal their secrets.

Neither should you.

Ah… now you want to go back, don’t you? Back to the beginning, before the storm of champions and betrayals and that strange, red blossom that bled through the stars. Back to the quiet hum before the chaos erupted.

Very well. But I warn you—memory lies, especially mine. It shifts like sand, reforms like clouds, and sometimes, simply vanishes like smoke.

Let us rewind the loom, unspin the thread. No, further than that. Further still. Before there were champions, before swords clashed and banners burned, before she became Ayaka, the Crimson Sakura. Back when she was just Yumi—just another whisper in the tide of fate, unaware of the storm gathering around her.

But I digress. Again. It’s a habit, as I said. A charming flaw, don’t you agree?

First, a lesson, whether you want it or not. I've found lessons are often best received when unsolicited.

You see, the cosmos—they don’t care about your pathetic need for order. Your craving for a start, a middle, an end, for a narrative arc that makes sense. The universe doesn’t walk a line; it dances in dizzying loops, skips backward through forgotten epochs, then forward again, propelled by forces beyond your comprehension. It forgets, with the vast indifference of eternity. Then remembers, often with brutal clarity. Then lies about what it remembered, weaving new fictions from the threads of old truths.

We are nothing. Just echoes in a dream, brief flickers of awareness in a cosmic slumber. Grains of sand skimming the surface of the Architects’ sea, vast and terrifying in its indifference. You’ve heard of them, haven’t you? The Architects? No? Hm. Probably for the best. Some truths are too vast, too brilliant; mortal eyes simply melt under their unfiltered light.

Still, I’ll share what I dare. A whisper of what lies beyond the veil.

This place you call hime, it is but one among countless—constellations unknown. Your home, quaintly enough, is known as the Zodiac Universe. Not the only one, mind you, oh no. There are infinite numbers of universes, an endless parade of cosmic wonders. But ours for now. Our flickering speck in the endless black, a tiny, fragile candle against an infinite storm.

This Zodiac tapestry, this fragile cosmos, is woven from the thirteen: thirteen realms, each with its own peculiar laws and inhabitants. Thirteen gods, their personalities as varied and volatile as the elements themselves. Thirteen stones hidden beneath mountains and myths, their power humming beneath the surface of reality. What? Oh yes, there have always been thirteen Zodiacs, one of which is the architect of this single universe. They like their patterns, the gods do. Even if they claim to be above such mortal fixations, they are as bound by them as any peasant to their plow.

But even within this constellation of bright, deceptive order, there are frayed edges—the Shattered Realms. Lost worlds, their names forgotten even by the gods who once presided over them. Cursed skies, where sanity frays and reality unravels. Places where nightmares breed and crawl, unchecked, toward the veil, yearning to burst forth and consume all.

They were not always broken, these realms. I remember… faintly. A lullaby, perhaps, sung in a language long dead. Or a war, a cataclysm that tore the very fabric of being. Who’s to say? Memory, as I’ve already established, is such a fickle thing.

Sometimes—only sometimes—the darkness leaks through. A festering wound in the cosmos. And when it does, the Zodiac gods, those grand, theatrical beings, do what gods must—they hold council. Their thrones of stardust and bone creak beneath their celestial weight, groaning under the burden of their own indifference. Their voices echo like thunder across the ecliptic void, debating fates with all the gravitas of children squabbling over toys.

And then comes the choosing. The momentous, arbitrary choosing.

Five among twelve. Selected by the one, not always for wisdom, nor kindness, nor strength—but for… reasons. Divine logic, you see, is rarely logical. It operates on a plane entirely alien to your understanding, driven by whims and ancient rivalries.

These five, these arbiters of fate, oversee the Proving Grounds—a realm that does not exist in one place but across all places, shimmering between dimensions. Floating islands adrift in an ethereal sea. Fractured cities, their spires reaching for a sky that is no longer there. Jungles of living crystal and fields of screaming wind, where the very air conspires against you. Have I seen it? Perhaps. In a dream. Or a death. It’s all much the same, in the end.

As I stated. The Proving Grounds are not an arena, per se. That’s far too small a word, a mortal construct for something so vast and terrifying. The Proving is a living challenge—a ritual, ancient and bloody. A reckoning, where past sins are paid in present suffering. A game, but one only gods understand, and mortals suffer through with agonizing clarity.

Here, champions are forged from dreamstuff and regret, their very existence a cosmic accident. Heroes rise, gleaming with stolen glory. Monsters fall, their demise a satisfying thud. Or is it the other way around? Hard to say, hard to remember. Sometimes I think it’s all just a game of dice thrown by bored deities, their colossal fingers toying with the fates of worlds inscribedon parchment and notes.

And yes, every constellation has its own version of the Proving Grounds. You didn't think this universe was special, did you? Such quaint arrogance belies you. There are infinite such arenas, each a unique testament to divine cruelty.

Sometimes—rarely, mind you—there are inter-constellational tournaments, I believe some mortals call them “MOBA's?” In any case, it is where champions from utterly alien realities clash. I once saw a warrior from the Orion Spires, all starlight and focused energy, fight a beast born of forgotten math, its form a shifting paradox. Or did I imagine that? The tea was very strong that day, infused with strange, ethereal herbs.

But that’s a tale for another thread, for another time. When your mind is perhaps a little more… pliable.

For now… remember this:

The Proving Grounds are more than a battleground. They are a mirror. And what they reflect is rarely pleasant, often distorted, and always unsettling.

What you see depends on who you are. What you believe depends on what you fear. And what you become?

Well, that depends on who’s watching. And what they want to achieve.