Chapter 1: Every inconsistency a bar, every revision another lock.
Worlds died differently than people, Estelle discovered, as she contemplated destroying her own. Twelve years of worldbuilding stared back at her from the screen—continents sketched in digital ink, histories written and rewritten, civilizations risen and abandoned mid-thought. She used to believe every revision would make the World of Astris more coherent, more real, but now it felt like a house where all the rooms had been built by different architects, none speaking the same language. The dark interface of her worldbuilding software filled her ultrawide monitor, its familiar layout of tools and panels glowing in muted cyan against the black background. The main viewport dominated the center, while creation tools lined the left side and property panels nested themselves on the right.
Her hand trembled as she moved the cursor, an accidental click sending half of the continent drifting across the screen. The mountain range she had spent three months perfecting split apart like a broken promise. Muscle memory reached for the familiar comfort of CTRL+Z, and the world snapped back into place—just as it had countless times before. But this time, the action felt hollow, a band-aid on a wound that had festered too long.
‘How many times?’ Estelle wondered, drawing her knees to her chest. Reset, redo, rewrite, rebuild. The same cycle she had been trapped in since she was thirteen, when creating a world had seemed like the perfect escape from her own. Her fingers ghosted across the mechanical keyboard, its ragged clicks mixing with the low hum of her distant electric fan and the rumbling groan of her computer—the usual ambience to another restless night. With practiced ease, she adjusted her fingers and pressed down on the keys, triggering a small notification that faded into the corner of the screen: [Tool switched: move]. The cursor transformed into a familiar hand icon, confirming to Estelle that she could navigate the vast digital canvas before her.
Hugging her legs closer, she hunched forward and panned the map leftward until something caught her eye. There in the northwest, far from any massive islands, lay the Soliel Archipelago—a frozen realm where winter ruled eternal. This was the domain of many ancient kinds: the Soliel kin, the litra-masters wielding their runic arts, and more crucially, the prison that held the Foreign Gods beneath true ice. A weary sigh escaped her as she positioned her mouse and spun the wheel, drawing closer to this corner of her world.
The screen transitioned through animated clouds and azure skies, pixelated images blurring past before gradually slowing to a halt. As Estelle's finger hovered over the mouse wheel, the pixelated graphics suddenly crystallized into sharp focus. A pod of Waillights materialized, their gigantic kite-shaped fins catching invisible currents as they soared overhead. Below them, a fleet of airships hung in perfect formation, their massive white envelopes framed in steel, wooden decks swaying beneath. Though the scene was frozen in time, everything moved in perpetual animation—Waillight’s fins undulating like birds in flight, airship propellers spinning in an endless loop.
Estelle's weak smile barely touched her eyes as she hugged her legs tighter, her chin sinking between her knees. Even here, in this perfectly crafted moment, something felt incomplete.
Waillights had been her first animated creation. She remembered those months spent learning animation, determined to make them fit seamlessly into the worldmap. That moment when they finally moved smoothly, meeting her exacting standards—the joy had felt infinite. She had crafted a mountainous region in the Soliel Archipelago just for them, a racing track where they could soar and dive between peaks. Those had been happier times, when each new addition felt like a pure discovery.
Estelle dragged the map again, taking in the transformed skyscape. What had once been empty space now teemed with floating debris, each rocky isle crowned with verdant life. Tree roots wove through stone like hungry fingers, while waterfalls cascaded from cracked cliffsides into the endless void below. These details were new—added just this month—breathing life into what had been barren expanses. Her gaze caught on a blue crystal protruding from beneath one of the isles, one of countless formations that kept millions of islands suspended in the void. Its glow seemed... different. ‘Had it always dimmed this bright?’ She frowned, second-guessing herself. Perhaps she had just messed up the brightness settings... perhaps.
"Fuck... I'll think about it... later..." Estelle sighed, dragging the map once more before flicking her mouse wheel, trying to scroll away her doubts.
The map zoomed further, passing clusters of pixelated debris until the clouds gradually thinned and disappeared. The distant blue faded to misty gray as the screen settled on the mainland of Soliel, Errt Vollago Isle—its name materializing in bold letters above the landscape.
At first, the island emerged in chunks of blocky pixels: swathes of green dotted with dark brown and gray in the top-down view. The northwestern regions rendered painfully slow, as they always did—slower than any other land Estelle had crafted. Her attention drifted to the white mug beside her keyboard, untouched for too long now. She reached for it anyway, seeking comfort in its fading warmth. The familiar scent of her favorite blend wafted up, but even that felt muted somehow, failing to provide the comfort she was itching for.
Estelle bumped her knees against the desk as she leaned back in her chair. The island remained stubbornly pixelated on screen, drawing another soft sigh from her lips. She took small, continuous sips of her lukewarm coffee, trying to distract herself from the growing hollow in her chest. This region's glacial loading times were no surprise—thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of item files packed into every corner of the island's details.
“Home of eternal winter—what a fitting name,” Estelle muttered, a dry smile twisting her lips.
The name "eternal winter" wasn't Estelle's only designation for this region. Behind the scenes, she had labeled it "the archive of item files"—a massive repository of culture, linguistics, history, and concept art, all detailed down to the last bit. True to her hyperfixated nature, she had even created a function for tracking timelines and specific dates, allowing her to separate and chronicle eras from the distant past to the far future. Each date served as a snapshot where she could isolate, create, and progress the virtual worldmap.
With one hand, Estelle tapped a familiar shortcut on her keyboard. The top panel appeared, resizing her view of the worldmap. Her eyes scanned until she found the timestamp display: "Current timeline-universal time year 854-9th month-winter-noon." As if on cue, a muffled orchestra filled her earphones, accompanied by playful, fluttering tribal whistles. The pixelated island finally rendered into clear view, and the music shifted—strings and whispered voices weaving into the track, their low-quality audio somehow perfect for capturing the dreading despair of Soliel's eternal winter. The soundtrack pulled at her attention, as it always did, matching the frozen landscape with haunting perfection.
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'I'll keep all the assets, at least,' Estelle thought, scrolling to zoom closer to the island. 'They're too valuable to delete. Besides, they're stored separately—safe in their own internal folder.'
Thick, black tree trunks stood barely visible among the dark green canopies, the ground beneath almost entirely hidden from view. Where the leaves parted, small brooks and larger rivers flowed in animated streams, their dim blue waters outlining the flow and standing out against the muted landscape. The scene pleased the creator's eye—atmospheric, fitting, lovely in its style and nature. Following one of the rivers, she discovered two boats drifting in line. Each carried two seated figures, while one stood at the wooden prow, gripping it firmly. From each bow hung chains suspending iron pans that cradled flames, flickering like ancient braziers to light their path through the gloom.
The region's core identity had shifted many times under Estelle's hand. At first, she envisioned it as a desolate winterland where gods reigned and rested. Then it became a pirate's haven, later transforming into a sanctuary cove for assassins. Yet none of these ideas truly resonated with her, and even shifting timelines couldn't fill the gaps that remained. After months of frustrating creative drought, she finally found her answer: a tribal homeland, the most ancient region in her world, where magic, runes, and otherworldly vestiges of power first took root.
Estelle moved her cursor, dragging the map downward along the stream until new details emerged through the gray mist: wooden roofs peeking between the canopies, barely visible through the perpetual fog.
Through the rare gaps in the canopy, Estelle watched the daily life of Ertt Valago unfold. People traversed wooden hanging bridges or walked the ground below, while others gathered at tables and chairs woven from living tree roots, sharing their noon meal. Though it was winter, the white wisps weren't clouds but condensed breath—threading between trees, obscuring both view and light. The wintery snow partially covered the ground and blanketed the treetops, which retained their unusual vibrant green hue, mixed with patches of gray and other muted colors. The natives had adapted, activating runic words to conjure fire for torches, while bioluminescent crystals wrapped in hemp rope hung as auxiliary lighting across the lands. It seemed a normal day for the community, yet beneath this peaceful façade lay deeper complications that plagued the entire region.
The most pressing issue, invisible to the current view, was the tangle of their histories. Estelle had never settled on a single, definitive version of events. Instead, revisions and variants existed side by side, particularly regarding the pivotal interactions between gods and the world. The narratives refused to align, creating a web of contradictions that grew more complex with each attempt to reconcile them.
A dry frown crossed Estelle's face as she considered their historical progression. Futuristic devices—artifacts left by their first foreigners—still lay inlaid in ice, waiting to be discovered and used as tools of progress. Their writing system, as old as the first floating islands themselves, possessed impossible capabilities. These weren't simple letters but crystallized messages that could communicate across time itself, offering glimpses of both past and future, sharing magic between timelines, granting power across eras for all Soliel’s survival. The roots of the problem only grew. The anachronisms had spiraled beyond her control, with every addition making the timeline more convoluted.
The Soliel were capable—yet their creator had never granted them true agency, never given their digital forms the freedom to evolve naturally. Estelle knew an eight-hundred-year-old civilization couldn't remain frozen in time—and in truth, they hadn't. The many snippets of official history spoke of tribal conflicts and wars, but she had never provided them with a driving force for progression. The reason eluded her, perhaps buried beneath mountains of worldbuilding files, or perhaps reflecting her own creative paralysis.
Foreign invasions or diplomacy were options she had tried, but nothing clicked—something vital remained missing. Perhaps it was the way the Soliel would interact, or how future wars would unfold. The image remained blurry, lost in the fog of abandoned ideas. The Soliel people remained bound by ancient ways, their necks wrapped in cultural doctrine, their minds shaped by elders who preached eternal connection to the living forest and their old gods. Faithful to their old blood, they waited, forever frozen in eternal winter for their Creator to weave their fate—a fate that would never come. How fitting. The irony of that eternal stasis wasn't lost on her; it felt like a reflection of her own creative drought.
A dry scoff escaped her lips as she considered erasing this region from the world entirely. Estelle shook her head. The thought vanished as quickly as it came—deletion would bring no clarity. If anything, it would shatter the entire world's foundation. The Soliel archipelago was threaded through everything: hundreds of characters, countless storylines, all tangled in this narrative web. Their influence touched every pivotal moment in the world's history, whether through individual characters, the movement of winds, the flow of magic, or their ancient artifacts. Removing them would unravel everything.
The inconsistencies ran deeper, infecting every layer of her world—from surface-level details to backend systems, from core principles to fundamental laws. The Soliel were meant to be both the world's beginning and its end, should the foreign gods trapped in ice ever awaken. Yet they weren't unique in their problems; other regions, lands, timelines, and power systems were equally flawed. The problems were everywhere, too numerous to count, too entangled to untangle.
Estelle inhaled deeply, the cold night air filling her lungs. It calmed her nerves, but her mind remained fixated on deleting the World of Astris. For a month, this thought had paralyzed her progress—so much so that it bled into her real life, a relentless storm raging in her consciousness. 'Delete the world, and be free. Wipe the world, and be free. Erase the world, so I can start anew,' she chanted mentally, exhaling sharply through her nose.
Summoning her strength, Estelle guided the mouse cursor to the top panel of the software, hovering over the cog-shaped wheel icon. She paused, her heart pounding like distant thunder. Her mind urged her forward, yet her fingers rebelled, trembling slightly. Still, she persisted. With a long, deliberate click, she opened the settings menu, her finger frozen on the left mouse button. Another deep breath did little to calm her frayed nerves as unending waves of shivers prickled her skin. Finally, she lifted her finger, aware of the sweat beading on her forehead and fingers, and her increasingly labored breathing.
A new window materialized beneath the cursor, a panel of core settings stretching to the bottom of the screen. Estelle moved the mouse with agonizing slowness, her heart and mind locked in violent conflict. The once-comforting rhythm of music from her earphones was now drowned out by the deafening beat of her pulse. Despite her inner turmoil, she pressed on until the cursor hovered over the red lettering, its selection highlighted: "Delete 'World of Astris'?"
The words on screen made Estelle's mind go blank. She gritted her teeth as waves of numbness washed over her skin, something swelling inside that she struggled to contain. Swallowing hard, she chanted, "Delete the world, and be free. Erase the world, and be free. So that I can start anew."
With trembling fingers, Estelle weakly tapped the left mouse button. Without warning, the muffled, irritating music in her earphones abruptly cut off. The screen dimmed, overlaid by a gray film that froze the world beneath as if stuck in time. Estelle's eyes widened as a new window appeared in the center, its red text stark against the backdrop: "Are you certain you want to delete 'The World of Astris'? (Containing 67,934 item files. 144GB)”