Things fall into a routine.
Sanctus is too busy co-ruling the heavens to pay any more personal visits, and Asterius makes sure he has no reason to change his mind, sticking to his little cottage. He paints and paints, and then paints some more, covering canvases with images of a world only he knows. Pluma always joins him and the little angel has gotten rather good, he’s terrible at creating a piece from nothing but if he has a reference he can pretty much copy it exactly. Sadly the only thing Pluma wants to paint happens to be Asterius himself. He tried to get Pluma to paint something else and the seraphim had the guts to quote Asterius’s own words back at him.
“But Master said I should paint what I like,” Pluma had repeated, scrunched up his nose and wiping dark purple paint on his once pristine white outfit, “so I’m painting what I like the most!”
It had been so cute, that Asterius had just let it go, he was never going to win. So he learns to get used to Pluma’s glances and the stacks of paintings that carry his own face.
He doesn’t just paint though and eventually, he gets bored enough (and brave enough) to follow Cadeyrn out into the garden during the day. Cadeyrn had been on edge, constantly glancing at Asterius as he worked, but Asterius just picked a spot in the shade of the house and watched, enjoying the wind on his skin. The next time he joins, he asks if he can help. The demon doesn’t look like he wants to accept that offer, but he quietly hands over a watering can. From Cadeyrn’s amused glances, Asterius knows he’s terrible at it, but the demon never asks him to leave, even helps Asterius learn how to replant some of the flowers and how to properly remove weeds.
Cadeyrn talks as he works and relays to Asterius centuries worth of gardening knowledge. Most of it Asterius can’t understand, but even if Cadeyrn were speaking complete gibberish he would listen, it was really unfair how nice the demon’s voice is. Though the nice voice isn’t the only reason he listens, for this is the time when Cadeyrn talks the most, and it's sweet to see how much the mysterious demon genuinely does love the garden.
Despite being under (self-inflicted) house arrest, he still does have a job to do. Summoning the Weave of Fate becomes as easy as breathing, an extension of his own senses. He knows better than to touch his own strings, but he does occasionally peak into the lives of the main cast.
Vae's life isn’t great, but it's certainly not as bad as it could have been. Seems his little stunt did lower the heat of her harassment. The System scolds him a little for it, but relents before too long. Sometimes he just finds a random string and looks at their branching future, it isn't as entertaining as TV but it’s the closest he’s going to get here.
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Mostly though he uses the weave to check in on Maria, her life is as happy as the novel promised. He feels partially responsible for her now as he was the one who gave her this fate, so every week or so he checks in to make sure things are still going alright. He whispers praises and encouragement through their barely tied string, he likes to pretend she can hear it, that somehow he’s helping. (He doesn’t need the System to tell him he’s being ridiculous, though it reminds him every time.)
On the days leading up to the full moon, he and Cadeyrn join the fairies at the pond. Asterius stops going to the pool of memories. It feels wrong to go now, knowing he’s asking ghosts to do his job, feels worse when he remembers that Asterius used to go to be closer to his mother. Going now feels like a poor lie, and a dishonesty to the memory of the creatures still bound to the pool.
He likes being able to help, even though he’s still not very good at shaping dreams himself, he still likes seeing the colorful array of dreams. The nightmares are his favorite, and most nights when he and Cadeyrn arrive the little fairies have already started collecting a pile of night terrors for them to sort through. It feels a little like he’s invading the privacy of these people’s lives, but he justifies it by promising to only look at the nightmares. And while he might glimpse another dream occasionally, he’s quick to look away. Though he would like to break all the horrifying dreams that he sees, he knows better than to do that recklessly. Dreams are a reflection of a person’s moods and thoughts after all, to erase them carelessly would be to diminish the factors that lead to the dream. Still, he does sometimes quiet the more re-occurring and nightmarish dreams he finds.
And every year like clockwork, all of Celestia gathers in the Palace of the Sun. Sanctus gives his speech about the old Royal Sun, and each year he subtly shifts the blame to Asterius for there being no new Royal Sun. Every year these words get more pointed, the stares boring into his back sharper. Every year he has to be the one who places the crown on Messis’s head. She is not the real Royal Sun, she can not wear the crown of the God Emperor but for a few hours. It is only a show of her temporary position and an excuse to paint Asterius as the villain. The crown always greets him, asking random pointless questions it doesn’t seem to actually want the answer to. He spends those ceremonies tense and rigid, feeling the heavy weighted stares of the Primordial Creation, Sanctus, and the crowd boring into him, waiting for him to slip.
But he holds his ground, keeping the carefully constructed mask of the original Asterius firmly in place. He gives no one a reason to suspect any change, and most days he has to remind himself that he wasn’t always Asterius.
Like sand gathering in an hourglass, the time slowly collects day after day, and suddenly 20 years have passed, and its finally time. The true opening of “Bride of the God Emperor”, Maria’s ascension day.