By the time she and her entourage left the planes of the Empire, Yuriko had terminated her marriage contract. Well, it was more an extended Offspring Contract than a true marriage, but since she didn’t want to give him more than one child, the terms technically weren’t fulfilled.

But rebels were rebels and many of their affairs were frozen and subsequently overturned in the courts. The civil war turned out to be nothing more than a civil hiccup, but she had nothing more to do with it. She was sick of politics and intrigue, and she’d much rather spend her time with the study of Chaos Shaping that she’d fallen in love with in her youth. Or rather, that was the only thing she loved now. Her family…

With a shudder, Yuriko refocused on the now. The Silver Wolf was a Chaos Ship. A luxury yacht much like the Mishala Clan’s Silver Tiger. It had minimal weaponry but robust shielding. Her current honour guards were the crewmembers, and the ship was captained by a woman who fell under her thrall. Willingly.

Yuriko didn’t even push her Mien to control Felicia, but the woman had embraced the waves of power that emanated from Yuriko’s Anima and made it a part of her core. She could no longer bear to live without Yuriko.

Haaah. Another victim of the Mishala Mien.

She had tried to remove it from her Anima, tried to cover it up, change it, or return it to dormancy, but it was all futile. The most she was able to do was change its impetus from affection and idolatry to morale booster and steadfastness. It made it so that her people wouldn’t falter in the face of adversity. Much like what they faced now.

A gigantic eye peered at them from the Chaos Sea, its gaze freezing the ship’s momentum. A rumbling voice made numerous demands even as tentacles of solidified Chaos lashed at the hull.

It was an Unformed. The primordial kind of Chaos Lord, stronger in the Chaos Sea, but ultimately weaker since it could not risk touching the planes lest it becomes trapped in a corpus. What did it want anyway?

Yuriko extended her Anima around the Chaos ship, her Radiant glow quelling the restless sea. Ah! The unformed felt the touch of her Anima and steam rose from its edges. Why was it leaving?

You’ve already come here, why not stay? Yuriko needed more materials to form her own plane after all.

With a sedate smile, she expanded her Anima as far as it would go, three thousand paces. Three longstrides. The creature was wider than that, actually, with its Anima spanning hundreds of thousands of paces. But its core was nearby and her sudden flare had trapped it.

She watched as it struggled to leave her influence, idly wondering if it would leave an eye-shaped Chaos Seed. Just as it was about to leave her reach, she solidified her boundaries and pulled him back.

“NO! NO! MERCY!”

“You wanted my Anima, didn’t you?” Yuriko replied easily, “You wanted to get ahold of the ‘filthy thief’? Well, here I am.”

She crunched down on its Anima, slowly applying pressure until it started to contract itself in a ball in a bid to protect its all-important core. She materialised a sunblade, having it appear just outside the ship, then rammed it into the eyeball. Black smoke rose from the wounds, and a pained screech echoed across the Waypoints.

More sunblades! More stabby!

Snikt! Snikt! Snikt!

The lidless eye tried to squirm away, to turn into light and shadow and escape her grasp.

‘No. You are an eye. You are nothing but an eye!’

Resistance against her insinuation.

Her words should have become reality, but the Unformed resisted. Of course, it would.

If she succeeded, it would cease to be Unformed. It’s Anima may be the same afterwards, but its mind would alter enough that it might as well be a different creature. Well, no matter.

She pressed down on it with her Anima, while she whittled it down with blades wrought from the fires of the Radiant Sun.

Just as she was about to win, she felt a chunk of earth enter within her range. It was huge, easily ten times as large as the Silver Wolf. It careened towards the Eye, and smashed into the core. And in so doing, it pushed the thing out of her grip.

“Where did that come from?” she growled in annoyance. The bridge crew scrambled to move the Silver Wolf, now that the Unformed had released them from its grip. The Chaos Ship jumped forward and cut through the remaining blockage.

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Yuriko focused her perception in the direction the boulder came from, wondering if another foe was there. But there was nothing. She pushed aside her forebodings and focused on her task.

It took several weeks to find a proper seed. A Fysalli was needed as the core of the plane. She could have started with raw Chaos but without a foundation, her work would have been ten times more difficult and that much slower too. With a Fysalli, all she needed to do was take over its core and slowly stabilize it.

The core was a frayed thing, much like a tangled skein of yarn after a kitty cat had gotten to it. It also held the Fysalli’s identity. This one was that of water. Churning seas whipped into a frenzy by unending storms.

What she needed to do was fix the tangles and make sure that all of the strands connected to each other and sustained the core instead of needing to draw on the Primordial Chaos. Fysallis didn’t last long. Some lasted years, even decades, but they were the exception rather than the norm. Most of them barely lasted a couple of weeks, with the core fraying down to nothing even as the Chaos ate away at its borders. They drew on the Chaos for power but that very thing is what hastened their demise.

Another concern was that she needed to change the Fysalli’s identity. A stable plane wasn’t made entirely of one environment. Who knew that her pained studies in Natural Sciences gave her the necessary knowledge to redefine the very fabric of reality?

She started with forming an idea. Land surrounded by water and nourished by it. Air and atmosphere. No need for such fierce weather. Once the plane was wide enough, the climate should calm down. And of course, she imparted a bit of her Radiant Essence into the plane. It took her nearly a year to form each Essence, but using that to empower her plane meant that it would be her place of power and not merely another land to stand on. Ah, and it allowed the Radiant Sun and the Luminous Moon to more easily connect to it.

She would need to tether the plane, too…or, hmmm, maybe not. Perhaps a drifting plane would better suit her purposes.

Three years.

It took that long to repair, grow, then shape the Fysalli into a proper plane. Her guard started to call it the Yuriko plane, but she trod on that relentlessly. She would be embarrassed beyond belief to have a place named after her given name.

“The plane of lilies,” Ryoko suggested. “After the meaning of your name.”

“I suppose.” Yuriko sighed.

And so it was. The Lily plane. Even the plane agreed and it grew lilies of all varieties where it would.

Now, she settled to spend the rest of her life in her seat of power. She was merely on the level of a Knight Dominus. It wasn’t enough for immortality. One needed to rise above Knight Imperius to achieve that. It was a worthwhile goal, though something she wasn’t sure she could achieve. Only the Empress was at that level after all. Anyway, she needed to consolidate her Ennoias and form a true Domain. It didn’t help that in her youth, she had scattered her attention. She held a shallow understanding of the Ennoia of Fire, Water, Wind, and Earth, from the Four Phases of the Sword, and of course the Ennoia of Swordsmanship. Then, she had trained for Sorcery, finding out too late that her Animus needed to be as dense as possible to follow the forms taught by the Empire.

Perhaps there were other traditions from other places, but she couldn’t learn those anyway. However, by using her Anima to impose her Will on Reality, it was practically the same. Ennoias, fragments of profound secrets, clashed when there were opposites. Somehow, her insights weren’t enough to merge them into a Domain. Or perhaps her own Anima was the culprit since it functioned as the same anyway. Well, she would find out, and she would advance and grow her strength.

Years. Decades. Time flowed like a river, like a waterfall. Her body never aged beyond what it was when she first achieved Knight. Which meant that if she didn’t have her formal robes on, she looked like a pubescent girl even if she was as tall as most men. Some of her lovers seemed to like that though.

Years back, her plane was discovered by refugees and she allowed them to settle. Her old honour guard had become the core settlers of the Lily plane. Ryoko, dear Ryoko, had become an old woman, her Anima wasn’t as strong as it could be. Her attendant served her until her last moment, despite Yuriko’s urging for her to rest and retire.

“You are my light.” Ryoko’s last words.

Afterwards, Yuriko secluded herself. She kept herself deep under the earth, right next to the Planar Heart. Her fragment of Radiant Essence was right at the centre, allowing her to control the plane as though it were part of her Anima. But something was wrong. She didn’t realise it until it had stopped growing. Her Anima could no longer expand beyond the plane. She had reached Dominus but could go no further. And it wasn’t until she discovered that by expanding the plane, she could expand her power that hope returned.

The plane grew and grew. Bigger than her old homeland. Bigger than Realmheart. Over the next years and decades, even centuries she Shaped the Chaos into Order.

Until…

THAT WHICH HAS A BEGINNING, HAS AN END.

Out of the Abyss came tendrils the size of mountains. They wrapped around the plane and crushed it. Yuriko could no more resist against it than an ant could against being stepped on. Before the darkness claimed her, she caught a glimpse of the source. Two red eyes, burning with stygian flames. And a grin shaped like the Crescent Moon.

____

The figure in front of Yuriko withdrew her hand and floated back. Memories flooded her mind, of things that hadn’t happened yet. Of things that never will! Bile rose up her throat and only the knowledge that she’d throw up in her real body did she manage to stop.

The memories faded like mist at noon. It left impressions and fragments. It was enough to make her shiver.

“What…what was that?” she gasped. The leftmost figure, of the one that was her in that future, looked pale and faded. Her smile had a tinge of sadness, but she also looked content from a life well-lived. But it was wrong.

That wasn’t how she wanted her future to be! She pulled herself away from the figures but stopped when she felt a glimmer of a warning. She had to face each of them, live the lives that could be. Then she must choose. Which one did she want for herself?

Her gaze shifted to the one in the middle. The one in an unmistakable warrior’s attire. That Yuriko grinned a bloodthirsty smirk. She reached over and touched her arm. Yuriko could see the figure unravel, and she could feel herself doing the same. And in the next moment, she was in another place, in another time.

And into a sea of blood and broken flesh.