The ancient witch that looked and, in a way, was a six-year-old girl put herself into a comfortable sleeping position. Of course, there was no need to do that, her physical body was beyond sturdy and would be fine even in the centre of a burning star and the feelings would not be transmitted to her where her mind was about to head.

Still, the little witch took her time to get the most comfortable position, just for sake of it.

After she was done she looked up. In her mind, she checked her plans and made sure that everything is where it’s supposed to be and remembered all the preparations she made.

After the destruction of the Pantheon, three Elder Gods have visited the manor where she resided.

Though, unlike the Earth Gods, the Elder Gods were much wiser and didn’t try to stir up trouble, as expected. They even walked in through the front door and waited in the waiting room.

Expecting them to make an appointment, naturally, would be silly, but they did behave courteously and only made sure that Lavenna bore no ill will.

After dealing with them and asking to send the message she wanted to make the entire ordeal with gods ended. For now. Lavenna, for some reason, always hated all things Divine and the kind Elder Gods were no exception. Well, there was only one Elder God that was an exception, the creepy ball of gas that her beloved fairy called “Uncle Jim”. He was a hilarious fella and a really good friend, something very rare for Lavenna who had serious trust issues.

As they were, in a way, kin to that guy and because they acted so nice, Lavenna decided to pardon the Elder Gods until they misbehave next time, so, unknowingly they dodged a bullet.

Next was teaching her mother magic. Lavenna didn’t have any time to try and figure out the mess that this world called magic, so the least she could do was teaching the closest person on this planet to her what she believed to be magic.

It will probably take a few centuries until Heralfia will be able to take the first step to proper witchcraft, was what Lavenna concluded, taking the literally limitless potential that Temerians possessed into her calculations.

There were also a lot of small miscellaneous things that she did, but in the end, she was ready to go. A strange combination of anticipation and uncertainty welled up in her chest, but she put those feelings aside and dived deep inside her mind and outside the known physical universe to the place she referred to as “The River of Souls”.

When she opened her eyes again, she was greeted with a pitch-black space she was oh-so-familiar with. There were whirlwinds made up of glistening golden stars that danced across the blackness.

None of it was real, of course. For the reasons unknown, the River always would look like this to anybody who had the misfortune to catch a glimpse at it. The luckier ones would take a hit at their sanity, the less lucky ones would lose their sanity altogether and the very unlucky would lose their very soul.

It’s as expected of a place where neither time nor space nor matter was real. A mind, immortal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to handle such things. Lavenna’s could somehow. Or maybe she was insane to begin with, what was she mused.

She willed for her soul to take place before her mind.

An awfully bright sphere-like thing appeared. It shot out little sparks out of itself in all directions and they flew around it, collided with each other and in the end fell back into the sphere.

It would look beautiful to anybody who wouldn’t lose their mind just being there and Lavenna admitted it was, but her expertise said that it was severely damaged.

Her will made the soul expand and revolve around her, the rich soul essence hit her so hard, she almost went back into her own body.

She steadied herself again and looked around.

There were many cocoon-like structures, woven with fine golden threads that were shining even more intensely than the rest of her already bright soul in the core of it all. There were pulsing with golden lights and expanding and shrinking down as if breathing. Those were core enchantments that Lavenna made. Even when the soul was damaged so thoroughly the enchantments still worked.

They all were connected with thicker threads and all of those threads gradually melted into the rest of the soul.

It was a unique sight, to say the least.

But the most eye-catching thing in there was probably the constantly trembling membrane around all those cocoons. It was thin enough to believe it existed only in two dimensions and the intensity of its light was not that great either. But it was shaking madly and the amplitude of the vibrations was scary. The extent to which the membrane elongated in the process was enough to make multiple of these membranes.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It was trembling with a very high frequency and sometimes parts of it were overlapping and sometimes they were crossing right through each other.

Lavenna willed for the membrane to shrink, it went right through the cocoons as if it wasn’t there and in the end condensed into a flickering sphere that was, from Lavenna’s relative point of view, small enough to fit into her palm.

The sphere contained her memories. It was very unstable because it wasn’t made with a tested theory behind it and while it wouldn’t break or Lavenna wouldn’t lose her memories there were still other things to worry about.

Like false memories or the ones she wanted to forget or the ones she sealed away.

Such things had to be put in check.

She steadied the sphere and then unfolded it like a ball of yarn. It turned out it was also made with the golden threads, only these ones were incredibly thin.

After all the threads were unveiled she proceeded to weave them together. She already had an understanding of how to operate them properly, as she spent a lot of the time out of the seven years in attempts to improve the method of the memory transfer.

The threads were being skillfully weaved into thicker threads until they were around as thick as the ones connecting the cocoons.

Those threads then were connected to the core enchantments. The web of enchantments was growing and growing to the point that it looked more complex than a spider web.

After she was done with that, she began organizing the rest of the soul.

A lot of it was destroyed completely and many parts were torn apart. Putting it back together was akin to building a palace out of sand grains.

Lavenna didn’t mind. In fact, she was extremely tempted to rebuild it anew with all the knowledge and understanding of the soul she had accumulated right before she reincarnated for the first time.

But, she knew that even though her perception was accelerated by many times, the process of rebuilding it would take too much time. Her adorable blue fairy was never one to be patient and she did promise to destroy the universe if Lavenna didn’t come back soon enough, and besides, Lavenna’s mother was a first-rate worrywart and she was also showing many signs of attachments that bordered on obsession, so… Maybe another time.

Lavenna, of course, no matter how good she was at soul magic, couldn’t restore it back manually, so she had to restore the foundation let the rest reassemble on its own with her guidance, of course.

So, she began taking the sparks of gold that were flying around so freely and assemble them into what she needed.

If mixing grans of salt and grains of rice and them separating them with chopsticks was supposed to be a test of patience then using the fragments of one’s soul to rebuild parts of it was a method of mental torture.

In the River Lavenna’s perception was very fast. She spent centuries of subjective time remaking the canvas for enchantments that was her soul, but back in the physical world probably a month or two at most passed.

In the end, there were a few pillars circling around the cocoons, slowly drawing in the dot-like fragments that filled the soul. There were many threads connecting them all into a single structure, of course.

Some pillars had veins bulging out and pulsing as if actual blood was running through them. It meant that so far all was proceeding fine.

Lavenna was about to do the next step but in the corner of her mind she caught something unfamiliar.

Looking at it was many times harder than remembering a fleeting dream but it was no problem to someone as experienced as the ancient witch.

It felt both alien and familiar. And dead. A strange feeling. Lavenna went to inspect it but as she concentrated on it, it came to life and disappeared from both Lavenna’s perception and her memories.

******

Right after that happened the dark skies above the Righteous Lands melted and countless golden stars began to fly unreservedly across the lands, erasing the boundary between the real world and the ethereal that was fickle in the first place in the Righteous Lands.

Those stars, that were moving randomly, then froze and began moving in cleared trajectories and in an organized manner, like soldiers on a parade.

They slowly filled the place and began to merge together into a rigid form out of straight lines that looked like a large mosaic.

The structure then faded and in an underground dungeon in a room with many bookshelves, a set of pearl white bones began emitting golden radiance. On the bones, flesh began growing and soon even clothes appeared.

A very pretty woman with pale silver hair and some streaks of violet was sleeping soundly in the place of the bones.

******

Meanwhile, Lavenna, unaware of what was happening in that place, continued working on her soul.

There were many transparent gems that were hardly visible. Little fires were weakly shining in them and some torn threads were stretching out of the gems.

Lavenna was extremely careful when dealing with them, more so than with any other parts.

She was slowly spinning unbelievably thin threads together and connecting them to the torn parts.

It didn’t take nearly as long as restoring the foundations for some parts out of fragments but it required a lot more patience and concentration and effort. Even Lavenna felt like crying in frustration.

But she painstakingly continued with the task and in the end, the gem’s fires were shining brightly with many colors across all places inside the soul.

The new threads were stretching into nothingness and it was impossible to detect where they ended.

At last, Lavenna was able to use arcane energies again and convert them into mana.

If Lavenna at her peak was a tall mountain, piercing the skies and looming over the world from above, now she was a moderately sized mountain that was slowly growing.

Her soul had countless sections with their own unique functions and most of them were destroyed when she compressed her soul.

She restored the essential parts and under her supervision in the next decade or so most of the destroyed parts should be restored and then close to eighty years was needed to stabilize her soul and make it more durable so that she wouldn’t get stuck on her level forever.

The amount of work behind it all was scary, but Lavenna was looking forward to it. But now it was time to go back to the physical world.