Fortuna lounged across the star-strewn floor of her personal pocket realm, idly shuffling cards that flickered with shifting symbols—hearts, swords, grinning skulls—all melting and reforming in a nonsensical dance. All her usual distractions filled the space around her: a dice tower that spilt its contents in slow motion, coins spinning in midair, and clocks that ticked off rhythms only she could understand.

She liked it here.

Which made it odd she’d not been here too often of late. Time used to be that she could spend millennia in here without ever thinking of stepping out into the ‘real’ world.

Just shooting the shit. Vibing. Playing silly little games.

Of course, when you were the literal embodiment of capricious instinct, planning out your next move wasn’t exactly high on the old ‘to-do’ list. But still, she was a touch surprised it had taken her so long to get around to popping back here.

Well, no. She actually wasn’t all that surprised at all. She did seem to have got a wee bit obsessed with the fate of her most recently manifested Herald.

Ha. Interesting choice of words there. ‘Fate of . . .’

If Fortuna was being scrupulously honest with herself – and, when the chips were down, and the bets were taken, Luck was nothing if not that – it wasn’t really Earth’s Herald that was keeping so unusually focused of late, was it?

Sure, she was quite enjoying seeing the mayhem that Fortuna’s Herald could unleash on a newly integrated world, but even that entertainment lost its shine after a while. No, the real draw for her latest obsession was the opportunity to royally fuck the odds against the Weaver of Fate.

Her, and the whole host of other Old Ones who had her back.

Riling up that whiny little bitch was worth any number of hours spent away from her realm. And if, as she suspected, she could hedge her bets and leverage the situation on Earth to move herself up the Celestial ladder, then all the better.

Hand on heart, Fortuna would probably admit she actually had very little interest in running the Old One bandwagon. But if it was a choice between her and Moira in that seat of power, then all the stars in the sky had better believe she knew exactly where to lay her chips . . .

With a sigh, she flung a handful of golden dust into the air, letting it swirl and scatter in a gleeful burst of randomness. This realm was truly her playground, and she was its queen, reigning over the absurdities and accidents that tethered the worlds together.

For aeons, Fortuna had operated with this almost careless abandon, nudging worlds here and there, tipping scales, granting bursts of fortune or bouts of bad luck with the flip of a coin. Generally, her Heralds burned hot and fast on whatever world they manifested – very much there for a good time, not a long time.

A quick survey of all the deeds her avatars were currently working in the multiverse flashed through her mind, and she grimaced. Yeah. Some pretty ropey fuckers out there worshipped at her altar, didn’t they?

Lorelei Norton of Earth, though . . .

Something about that woman had managed to insert herself right up the nostrils of Moira, Weave of Fate and Fortuna was more than inclined to keep ramming her through Little Miss Everything-Has-Its-Own-Time-And Place’s sinuses.

And then, as her latest tossed coin wobbled in the air, a ripple shot through her domain—a tremor that was strange and cold, like a crack splintering across an icy pond.

Fortuna’s hand stilled.

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The coin fell, bouncing once before rolling in a perfect, straight line. Unnatural, precise. All sense of randomness gone.

Fortuna’s golden eyes narrowed, her gaze snapping to what she perceived to be the source of the change of atmosphere, and she saw hundreds of threads of fate invading her realm.

All her little trinkets and knickknacks tried to resist the pull of these dark threads - something that had no place in her realm – but they were quickly overwhelmed.

Fortuna focused her own powers on them, burning them away in an instant, but she still felt it, distant yet unmistakable, a deliberate and focused shift in the weave forcing its way through the carefully tangled chaos she’d cultivated.

Moira.

Fortuna’s laughter fell silent, replaced by an unfamiliar prickle of dread.

She knew Moira’s touch, the Weaver’s ability to mould fate with all the precision Fortuna despised. And she saw now – in worrying clarity – the shape of Moira’s plan unfolding.

The Weaver of Fate was aiming to sever Earth from fortune itself. Fortuna could see it now, the way threads of chance thinned and frayed under Moira’s influence, like the dying gasp of a wager turned sour.

Moira wanted Earth—a newly integrated world, freshly bound to the cosmic tapestry—to be a place where chance itself was excised, where the dice would never roll, the cards would never shuffle. She was planning to leave it cut off from the vibrant, tumbling unpredictability that made it pulse with life.

A severed thread left to dangle in the dark—a dead, static corner of existence.

And that meant it wasn’t just a single world at stake . . .

Fortuna felt the irony in what was on the cards. She herself had planned to use Earth as a beachhead, a subtle keystone that, with a few nudges, could cause Moira’s own dominoes to go crashing down. Earth, with its raw potential for randomness, and Fortuna’s Herald there on day one - was a perfect wild card.

She’d intended to push this world to the edge, to send shockwaves of chaos up through Moira’s threads, with a glorious knock-on effect to loosen Fate’s grip. But Moira had seen that potential, too. Only, she was set on snuffing it out entirely, turning Earth into a barren, neutral void—an anchorless piece of the cosmic game board, devoid of fate, chance, or purpose.

Fortuna took a moment to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Two of the most powerful beings in the universe, choosing to throw down over a fledgling, glitch-riddled, homicidally genocidal world that—by all appearances—was just one more A.I error away from wiping itself out.

But that was the thrill of it, wasn’t it?

The stakes.

The risks.

Earth, messy and chaotic, hung in the balance like the ultimate gamble, the final coin flip, waiting for one of them to call it.

And Moira wanted to rig the game forever . . .

Nah. That was more than interference. More than bending the odds—it was annihilation by order.

The cold, clinical erasure of any chance, any hope of chaos.

Moira was planning to turn Earth into a clean slate of nothingness, a calculated zero as if excising a tumour. Fortuna’s blood—such as it was—ran cold at the thought.

This wasn’t a mere move in the eternal tug-of-war between fate and luck; it was a declaration. Moira was positioning Earth as her standard bearer her opening move in a grand, ruthless bid to secure total control over existence itself.

It would be a world bound to her weave, drained of Fortuna’s precious, reckless randomness.

Fortuna clenched her hand, feeling the weight of the cosmos in her grasp, crushing the floating objects infected by Fate into dust. Fine particles drifted down, sparkling like shattered stars as they slipped through her fingers.

“Oh, Moira, you’re betting against the house now,” Fortuna said. She could feel her luck twisting around her, hardening into a shield of chaos, an unpredictable web that no thread of fate could penetrate. This was no longer a game of clever nudges and secret tweaks. Moira wanted a severance, a clean cut—and Fortuna had every intention of stacking the deck against her.

With one final flick of her wrist, she sent the sparkling remnants spiralling into the ether, a signal flare of defiance to the Weaver of Fate.

“Oh, Moira, my old friend,” she murmured. “You think you can sever luck itself?”

The absurd little bits of chaos Fortuna loved—the missed steps, the happy accidents, the miracle saves—flashed through her mind like the pieces of a puzzle only she could see. She knew know what was at stake, the stakes she had perhaps neglected while chasing her only diversions.

“Well then,” she whispered, the words low and laced with something far more dangerous than whimsy. “If it’s the end of luck you want…”

With a wave of her hand, Fortuna gathered the scattered threads of chance and twisted them together, forming a weave stronger and stranger than anything she’d ever made.

“Operation Lorelei is a go.”