A little pair of hands reached out for Gemini’s face as he nibbled away at a slice of cake. From what he could remember, babies and cake shouldn’t mix, which was why Aria could only stare at the sugary treat and lick her lips. Her diet had been meticulously controlled by Lila, and she would get really angry if Gemini were to spoil Aria’s food intake.

“Auh!”

“No, Aria,” Gemini replied. “No cake until you’re older than two or something. You’re too young, got it?”

“Auh…”

Wrapping the cake with a thin film of divinity, Gemini teleported it to the far end of the table, where Lila was reading a book.

“Oh, you’re not eating that anymore?” Lila asked.

“Hard to, when Aria is staring at me with eyes that are on the verge of crying,” Gemini replied, before lifting up the pouting toddler. “See? She’s going to hate me if I continue eating in front of her. I’ll do it behind her back next time.”

Aria stuffed her fingers into Gemini’s nose at those words.

“Gemini!” Lila shot up and raced over to Aria, before gently separating her hands from his nose. Aria, however, wasn’t capable of actually causing pain to him, but the Demon Sovereign was still startled by that sudden action. “Aria. Don’t do that to papa, alright?”

“Auh…”

“Now, now,” said Gemini. “It’s rare for her to act up. I get a feeling that it’s not so much as a baby’s curiosity, though. If you ask me, she was definitely expressing her displeasure after I said that…”

He leaned back and looked around Lila’s house. Lila didn’t want to live in the house built in the replica Erudition Street after he didn’t make it out of the Wildlands back then, but the authorities and masses wanted to do something. Therefore, they gave her something like looked like a miniature mansion, without thinking too hard about the logistics required to maintain such a huge place.

Idiots, the whole lot of them. Fortunately, there were relatively fast ways of cleaning an entire house, since Lila was a Knight, but still…

“Right, is Hereward still sleeping in?” Gemini asked, stifling a yawn. “I didn’t know great gods liked sleeping on beds.”

“Well, what else would you have me sleep on?” A voice came from behind him. “I’m not some dodecahedron with twenty arms that has life and spirit; last I checked, I am still a bipedal form of life, with all the sensibilities that follow. I’m not a monster, buddy.”

“Well, you are called the Sentinel of Space, after all,” Gemini replied. “Long ago, I thought your true form would be some geometry aberration that can speak, you know.”

“How long ago was that?”

“When I…we were first summoned,” Gemini replied. “Now that I look back on the circumstances back then, it was obviously that the brainwashing was at full blast already. We didn’t question orders, we accepted their normative values as our normative values, and we treated the Human God’s words as the sole truth. I should have realised it, really. All crimes begin by thinking of other people as things, and the spiel of how beastfolk and demons weren’t alive…”

He shook his head. “Of course, Anren’s efforts only worked because there was a seed of discrimination in everyone’s hearts. He simply amplified our flaws and turned them into an opening to pour his will in.”

“It is natural for the Human God to have a profound understanding of the mortal mind,” Hereward replied. “He had discovered the limitations of his existence long ago, as a being bound by his conceptual boundaries. He could not overcome his mental limits, since these limits were the very definition of his existence, so he sought to understand the minds of the unfettered, and watched on as they fettered themselves.”

“Fettered themselves?”

“By becoming a Knight,” Hereward replied. “I find it rather ironic, now that I think about it. The source of chaos, the Crying Abyss, enforced a strict order on Orb by imposing mental limits on those who sought power, while enabling a relative freedom for the few with great strength. In turn, the vows they made turned into spectres, but these agents of chaos are protecting the new world of order that the Abyss Sovereign desires, a new world that would shackle strength and liberate the weak.”

Gemini spent a second or so to parse those words, while Aria gurgled away in confusion. “Huh. Put that way, this whole thing seems like a mess or something.”

“I agree,” said Lila. “Don’t cha, little buddy?”

“Auh!” Aria reached out to Hereward with her little hands, and the great god reappeared in front of her to rub her head.

“Chaos in order, and order in chaos.” The Sentinel of Space extended a finger to Aria, who gripped it happily. “Contradictions everywhere, but the Abyss is a miraculous contradiction in its own right, no? It is an extra-chronological entity, yet is affected by beings within time itself. It sees all existence as a single dot, but it affects events that are playing out in order.”

“Hmm. Would its champion also be equally contradictory?” Gemini mused.

“Who knows? But you did say that you convinced that kid that he was on the wrong path, so maybe he wouldn’t be that contradictory after all,” Hereward replied. “Still, good job breaking it, man. You somehow convinced him that the world was at fault, so he decided to make a new one. Well done.”

“I was beginning to wonder when you’d bring that up, though,” Gemini replied. “In my defence, I had no way of knowing who that kid was. And besides, creating a world? Even you couldn’t do that. How was I supposed to know that some random Demigod was actually capable of doing that?”

“He definitely wasn’t able to do that,” Hereward replied. “Not on his own, anyway. I believe the Crying Abyss helped him in that regard.”

“And why would the Crying Abyss do such a thing?”

Hereward glanced at him, and then looked out of the window. “Maybe it wants to end itself.”