-=[High-Administrator Han Axiom Sempiter, Enforcer of the Will of Boundless Chorus]=-

Han looked at the blue sky above him. He remembered flying on his sword and then there was the pain. A whole ocean of it. He hadn’t felt pain like that in fourteen years, not since he walked through ninety-nine thousand hells, killing everything in his path. Death. He was the embodiment of it and he brought it upon the devils and foul beasts that inhabited the hells. He pulverised, shredded, crushed creatures with far too many eyes and limbs. He trudged through lakes of fire and acid and survived impossible, indescribable things made of too many angles for his eyes to properly perceive, the visions of which had haunted him still.

He had walked through it all and emerged victorious, an Immortal. Nothing and nobody could possibly stop him. Nothing was able to bring him down like this for a decade!

How? He had no idea.

Who? A Stormweaver knight, if he had to hazard a guess. Did the Stormweavers have hidden agents in the Gold city? It was certainly possible. Who had betrayed him? Who knew about the cores?

His ears were ringing with a dull tone and his body was failing to respond. Half of his organs were torn apart by some sort of an immeasurable force akin to a thousand gales and the fall from seven thousand elbows up in the sky.

What happened? Was he attacked? Han turned his head looking at his right arm that was once connected to the case with seven beast cores. The case wasn’t there anymore. The arm didn’t feel like it was there either. His fingers were blackened, scorched husks. He couldn't feel them anymore. Han groaned and began to weave Qi around his body to repair what had been broken and burned away.

The sun sat, then rose again. Han was losing a lot of time, but he was patient. It would be a shame to miss the Deathstorm Convergence. Thirteen more years would be slightly irksome for a chance at revenge. He swore to himself that he would slaughter as many citizens of the Deathstorm Matriarch as he could for this unsportly, fiendish treachery.

A storm cloud formed overhead and rain began to fall on the unmoving, scorched husk of a man. Han closed his eyes and continued to focus on healing himself.

It was unfortunate that he was robbed of the seven cores, irritating that his plan had been disrupted. Once he was fully healed he would find the hidden agent culprit and destroy them utterly for blasting him out of the sky and taking the cores. Insolence! He would unleash all of the suffering, hatred and death that was locked in the darkest reaches of his mind, pain that he had carried with him back from the hells.

This would not be a swift death, no. He would tear them bit by bit, with incredible precision, make them suffer just as he had suffered in hells fourteen years ago.

-=[Arianna Manning]=-

Arianna Manning sat on a rock within the temple of Serenity, hugging her knees. She had a wash in the hot spring and was given a new dress but she still felt sullied. Never in her life had she been this embarrassed, torn asunder, knocked from her position of power. The Hand gang didn’t belong to her anymore. Her bodyguard had left her too. It was as if she had woken up in a different world today, one in which she didn’t belong.

Things started to go sideways in the market today, when she smelled Ash Sparks. Sparks was always an insolent child, hiding in the cursed city, disobeying her orders, refusing to threaten the insubordinate younglings, refusing to hurt people who needed to be taught a lesson. Grandfather Manning taught Arianna that the people under her care had to learn obedience, to feel only fear and love. Her father had reinforced this lesson further. Fear was love and love was fear, the two were interconnected, intertwined, and all weakness had to be cut away.

Ash was a big liar and Arianna could always tell exactly when she was lied to. Her truth-sensing noble nose had never betrayed her. Even grandfather couldn't lie to her. Arianna tried to beat lying and fear out of Ash, tried to make an example of her again and again, but the damn urchin was stubbornness incarnate. Sparks’ obsession with the cursed land beneath Lord Boundless was dangerous - the past was buried for a reason. The ancients had been cursed by the gods, vanquished for their sins. They tried to become gods and were punished for it, how could people like Sparks not see that. It was so obvious, clear as day!

When Arianna looked into the urchin’s eyes at the market, she saw something there. Not a spark that she could usually put out with a mere slap of her hand, but an unyielding firestorm. It was as if something… ancient and monstrous had taken residence within the girl. Something cursed. Something that grew in power with every passing hour. How could Ash have a servitor that could bite celesteel in half? She didn’t smell like a proper high-cultivator, didn’t have anywhere enough Qi required to wield such a strong phantom! She smelled, looked like Ash Sparks, but she wasn’t. She was something OTHER, an irregularity in the mundane tapestry of the world that didn’t fit in, stood out like a nail made of celesteel.

Arianna had tried to pry this metaphorical nail out and instead somehow fell on it, losing everything. The fabric of Qi permeated the world and Arianna could usually guess, predict exactly who could do what. Grandfather Manning was tough. He taught her how to see the future with fear and pain and love, made her try to guess the flip of a coin and punished her severely if she was wrong. All her life Arianna had been flipping coins, getting better and better at smelling the future.

The new… Sparks acted like an unpredictable pattern led by an unknowable, external force. She was a coin that didn’t flip how Arianna expected it to. How? Qi governed all decisions in life. How could someone act without Qi guiding, nudging them along the way? How could someone step away from their predetermined path again and again?!

Arianna focused the entirety of her thoughts on Ash Sparks, obsessively rolled over every single event of the day in her mind again and again ad nauseum. Sparks was using irregular, incomprehensible idioms. She no longer talked like someone who was born in the Gold city. She turned into a stranger, an anomaly. Arianna knew about the power of the gods. People could return from the hells, sure… but Ash didn’t return from no bloody hells! Ash wasn’t a high-cultivator! Ash smelled like she spent five minutes at most in the company of High-Administrator Han!

The seventh scion of the noble house of Manning tightened her knuckles until they turned pure white. Ash wasn’t an apprentice of Enforcer Sempiter. She had found something in the cursed city. Something that was breaking all of the rules, bending the world to its will. On one hand Arianna could try to resist this alien thing, try to vanquish, end it.

However, on the other hand Anathema coveted this secret power for herself, because it was something that nobody else had, a thing that she herself could not figure out. No matter how she tried to reassemble the pieces of information in her mind, they refused to come together. She didn’t know enough. Why didn’t Ash kill her? Why had she offered Arianna her hand? Why had she asked for help to conquer the world?

"Sup dawg?" Sparks emerged from the temple proper. "Don't stress it or you'll blow a gasket."

“There it was again. Alien words,” Arianna thought. “Ash wasn't even trying to hide it! What the Qi was a gasket? Who even says 'sup dawg'?!”

Ash plopped down to the rocky bench next to her.

"Sorry for biting your knife in half and terrorising you, but you were trying to stab me and that's kind of rude."

Arianna blinked. What in the hells?! Did she just apologize? Why?!

"It was a legit cool knife. Good for cutting salamis probably. Hope it didn't cost you an arm and a leg, ha ha." Ash laughed, inexplicably sounding like an extremely tired, overworked adult.

Arianna gulped as the long-limbed ghost walked after Ash. The tall servitor phantom moved with slow deliberation and sat on the ground in front of them, staring at Arianna with unblinking eyes, a hundred teeth snarling at her.

Arianna shuddered. Was this a good-cultivator, bad-spirit interrogation strategy or something?

"If you're trying to scare me, it's not going to work," she ground out through clenched teeth in the direction of Ash.

"Ah, Mr. Murr! How's things?" Sparks inquired with abundant cheerfulness.

The spirit shook its head side to side.

"So, so?" Ash raised an eyebrow. "Why is that?"

The phantom pointed one of its grotesquely-long fingers at Arianna.

"You don't trust her?" Ash wiggled her ears. "Yea she's quite the mean character. Do you think she's my arrogant young master? She did slap me around a lot in misguided attempts at a general education."

Arianna’s thoughts slanted sideways, spiralling into the deep.

“What in the hells is happening?” She finally ground out. “Why are you talking to your servitor like it’s a separate, sentient being? What kind of a sick, crazy torture is this?”

“Contrary to what you think... I didn’t bring you here to torture you, Arianna,” Ash shook her head. “I’m here to make you see the world with different eyes.”