DROWN

Calling a human a Fawkes was probably the next worst thing you could call them adjacent to an Envoy of Creation or Destruction. The Fawkes were hated by even many of the Gods. Their abilities were legendary and the fear they struck in many was great. There was a reason they were betrayed by even their own people in the end before they were systematically wiped out by everyone else.

So they were supposed to believe that a Fawkes just happened to appear around the same time all of this other stuff was happening?

Why had the Cloud Race chosen to impersonate Lyra in specific? Wasn't pretending to be a Dwarven Race member enough? Why go the extra step?

And why did this "Fawkes" just so happen to appear in Spiritual Race territory as well?

It felt like someone was trying to frame the Spirituals and Dwarven Race at the same time.

And that was when Flaura's tail was caught.

Leonel understood intimately the way the Dream Asuras did things after studying the methods Somnus left before. It was because of this that he learned of how Flaura was sending her letters and was able to expose her in this way.

As he had found out through Wicked, the Nomads somehow gained the capability of using the Dark half of the Northern Star Lineage Factor. This almost certainly related to their God.

After seeing Little Fox's hands, he was able to put two and two together.

The hand of an Owlan, a beast, a Dream Asura and what was, supposedly, a human.

These hands were obviously the result of Little Fox mingling with these Races and fusing his own path with their unique abilities. But how?

The answer was obvious: the four of them had been working together all along. He had stumbled into maybe the largest conspiracy in all of Existence, and this was likely a coalition of Races and powers readying themselves to battle with the Gods themselves.

But Leonel didn't care about any of that for now. What he did know was that the Dream Asura who was targeting him, had conveniently co opted a method of the Envoys of Destruction to send messages through the Inbetween Worlds, ignoring the Anarchic Force, or more accurately, even using its unpredictability to their advantage.

All Leonel had to do was allow the right person to find it, and that right person was none other than the Emberheart Lord.

Leonel hated the Spirituals. He didn't know why they had done what they did, but what he did know was that they had slandered his wife and the rest of the Human Race for no other reason than to protect themselves.

But in a matter of life and death, this didn't matter as much. All that mattered was whether they could be used.

When the Emberheart Lord found out how Flaura was sending his messages, he was intelligent enough to understand what was going on. He didn't need to know the full picture to understand that the ability to control Anarchic Force was a huge taboo as it was something only the Void Beast, its envoys and Regulators could do.

When the Emberheart Lord caught onto this weakness, he counterattacked immediately, and Leonel had given him the perfect reason to do so.

Hadn't his daughter been impersonated? Wasn't it only right that he lash out due to being targeted?

This action not only sealed Flaura's fate, but it also invalidated the Fawkes story even further.

Why would the Emberheart Lord be helping the Fawkes who killed his brother's son? Unless he wasn't actually helping him at all and was just exposing the fact that his identity was a lie all along?

When all of these pieces sifted into place, there were only two paths left to the Dream Asuras, one of which they didn't even consider.

The first was to drown with Flaura.

The second was to abandon her like they had done everyone before her.

They expelled her from the Clan, and unlike everyone else, they didn't even allow her the chance to take her valuables. She was completely shunned and ostracized, her name stricken from all records.

As for her life and death, they didn't care. Everyone knew that this was the policy of the Dream Asuras, and maybe were dissatisfied about it, but they didn't dare to do anything.

The Dream Asuras were too strong. They were the Demi-God Race that had formed the most number of Gods and their strength was constantly shrouded by mystery due to their scheming.

Even if the public wanted them to punish the wrongdoers more, what could they do? They had no right to force the Dream Asuras to do a single thing.

...

Beaten and ragged from fighting back to no avail, Flaura stood in the midst of the swirling madness of the Inbetween Worlds. She had known that fighting back would do nothing, but she had mostly done it out of pride.

How many times had she watched others be kicked out? She had even warned her own little brother against it, but she never thought that she would be one of them. She thought she was above it all, that she was untouchable by the standards of the masses.

And yet, she had messed with the wrong person. Now, everything that she had built had come crumbling down. She was forced to watch it all slip through her fingers, and no matter how hard she grabbed out, she couldn't grasp any of it at all.

Soon, there would likely be people who came to hunt her down. Some of them might even be Gods. Content © 2024.

If she went to the Human Bubble now, she would only be making herself a live target. That was probably one of the first places they might check for her because they knew she'd have a grudge.

She wanted to go anyway, she wanted to vent her hatred, but in the end, she laughed.

She raised her head high into the skies, her violet hair dancing and her cherry lips parting as her laughter echoed.