Chapter 57: Dreaming in Time

Yasaka drifted.

Or thought she drifted… her mind swam through thick warmth and dull static, her thoughts slurring together as though dipped in syrup. Nothing held shape for longer than a heartbeat. Her limbs felt impossibly heavy, her body unresponsive as stone, and yet she remained acutely aware of her own lack of awareness. The odd, off-kilter sensation reminded her vaguely of lucid dreams she’d had as a child… yet even those had not felt so wrong.
Something was missing from her. Something vital.

A flicker of gold. A ripple of sound.

Then…

She was small again. Five still tails as she stood barely reaching her mother’s waist. The tatami mats of centuries ago still smelled the same. She vividly remembered the cold clasp of sweat on her palms; that was also the same. And her own mother watched the same…

That emotionless, statuesque stare with those same golden eyes she had inherited. Not a shred of affection shining through them. They reminded her of some lyrics from one of those awful bands Ichigo was so fond of… ‘hard and cold, bought and sold, a heart that’s made of gold.’

Yes… Yasaka remembered this old ache too vividly. The cold discomfort of being seen only as an heir, never as a child.

But beside her knelt the kindly servant, smiling as though her little attempts meant the world.

“Very good, Yasaka-hime,” she murmured. “Again, gently now.”

And Yasaka felt her tiny hands trembling as she molded her first threads of chakra - awkward, uneven, but earnest. All the while her mother observed silently with no praise or any acknowledgement.

That coldness had always stayed with her even when she left the mortal plane.

She blinked, and now she was older, the same age, some distant sensation told her… and she was seated upon her throne in Kyoto.

Before her stood a young devil girl with crimson hair… why did she recognize her as Rias Gremory? And beside her, the Pawn with the sacred gauntlet of the Red Dragon Emperor. Both were smiling warmly at her. But why?

Yasaka had never even met them. Not like this.

Yet the Yasaka in the vision felt gratitude… immense, bright and uncomfortably overwhelming. And she felt strangely drawn to the boy, to the draconic cadence in his aura. Attraction mixed with appreciation.

What in Amaterasu’s name…?

The scene dissolved before she could parse it more.

And then…

Blackness.

Agony.

Unadulterated, sheer agony.

A wave of suffocating pressure crushed her mind - dark and oppressive, like a mountain collapsing inward. She screamed soundlessly as her thoughts fractured, clouded by sheer torment. She felt herself massive, and filled with tremendous power - her true form unfurled, nine immense golden tails lashing through fire and shadow.

Something was pushing into her consciousness, tearing at her identity.

And this was no memory, nor some baffling thing that never happened. Some dark part of her mind whispered this a thing yet to be.

But then all this too vanished.

And there was a blinding flash.

And Yasaka felt warmth bloom in her heart. She could nearly cry. It felt so familiar, so comforting, like the call of home. Like…

Everything turned to liquid gold, and the air felt lighter - free, almost buoyant. A sharp gasp tore from her throat as she found herself standing – floating? -  on a golden sea beneath a paler gold sky.

And her heart surged.

“Ichigo?”

Her husband stood before her. Wraithlike, looking equally shocked and more real in a way nothing else in the impossible things she had seen so far.

This wasn’t some sort of fiction. This was him! This was her husband!

Her Ichigo!

And past his surprise, she could see the marvel and wonder in his eyes. She felt his mind brush against hers and she felt security through all this sudden madness.

She reached for him –

- and the world yanked her away the moment their fingertips brushed.

Like the cold before the deep plunge, Yasaka inhaled sharply, gasping at the sudden realness of feeling suffocated.

Air.

Real air.

Her fingers twitched, then curled, then flexed fully. Sensation returned in a rush: real weight, real warmth, and a very real sense of gravity. She looked down at her hands and her arms, finally having a returned sense of her body.

But before she could gather herself further, a voice, breathless and mystified, cut her thoughts.

“Impossible.”

Yasaka’s head snapped upward.

And her golden eyes fell upon an impossibly beautiful androgynous figure that stood before her, dressed in opulent robes of a fashion she had not seen in centuries. His pale skin nearly glowed; his black hair cascaded like ink even as his red-painted lips parted in disbelief.

And she knew him instantly.

Tsukiyomi-no-Mikoto… she thought as her mind reeled at the implications of her Lady’s divine twin being before her.

She looked wildly around and there she was, radiant in her equally opulent robes, with warmth and comforting sunlight pooling from her very being.

Amaterasu-sama.

And behind them, floating like a storm given flesh, a towering giant of a being with wild red hair and beard as lightning arced from eye to eye.

Very slowly, Yasaka took it all in. Her gaze falling on the impossible and yet very familiar looking scenery.

There were multiple suns, not one, hanging at different points across a golden horizon. Beneath them stretched a vast sea of clouds, not mist or fog, but solid, rolling banks of gold-white vapor. Scattered across that glowing expanse were floating islands, each no larger than a palace courtyard, shaped in clean, deliberate designs with stone paths, trimmed greenery, polished railings, and small shrines built in unmistakably Shinto style.

Horror pooled in her belly as realization sank in.

Takamagahara. Heaven, she was in Heaven. The High Celestial Plane of the Shinto Pantheon… but how?

But even with that thought, centuries of religious training kicked in and Yasaka immediately dropped into a deep bow so fast her knees nearly buckled.

“Holy Ones, please forgive my intrusion. I-I do not know how I-”

“Peace, child,” Amaterasu-sama said, her voice calm and warm as the dawn. Yasaka felt an invisible force seize her shoulders and lift her upright effortlessly. “Worry not.”

“She should not be here,” Tsukiyomi hissed, eyes narrowing with visible displeasure.

Yasaka’s heart leapt into her throat. “I - I apologize, Tsukiyomi-sama. I swear I know not how I arrived.”

“He does not blame you,” Amaterasu interjected coolly. “By his words, he means you are supposed to be elsewhere at this moment.”

Yasaka’s brows knit, but she forced herself to stillness. Whatever confusion twisted in her chest, she swallowed it and remained respectfully silent before the divinities. But, what did she mean elsewhere?

The third figure, the one she did not recognize, let out a booming laugh, the sound rolling across the heavens until the clouds themselves trembled with thunder. His shape twisted, folding in on itself like storm squalls collapsing and reforming. Lightning threaded through his outline, and in the next blink, the towering foreign deity was no longer there at all.

Yasaka could only stare stunned as Susanoo-sama stood in his place.

Instinct jolted through her; Yasaka bowed before she even thought to. But Breathing Storm only flicked two fingers toward her in a dismissive wave, as if the gesture were unnecessary.

“Time has shifted most unnaturally,” he said, voice as rough and alive as the storm he commanded. “We three are looking down at the mortal flow even now. In accordance with linear causality, this moment,” he pointed a thumb downward, toward the world she could not see, “you are deep in conversation with the bride of Lucifer. After which you will steal away, briefly, to the Underworld to check on your felled husband.”

Yasaka stiffened. Felled!? What did he mean by felled!? But Susanoo-sama continued without pause.

“And yet here you stand,” he said, eyeing her with something between curiosity and mad delight, “dreaming outside of Time. Standing in the Fourth World where past, present, and the will-be intermingle. A thing quite impossible for someone of your station.”

But then, she grasped something other that he had said. Dreaming? She was dreaming?

The Breathing Storm shook his head, his great mane of black hair flying wildly in his own gales. “Ah, but what fun all this is! The Divine Pair have reemerged once more! All of time shudders at their touch!”

“Susanoo,” and there was a touch of disapproval in Amaterasu-sama’s voice as she gave the smiling figure a pointed glare.

“Apologies, dear Elder Sister, I have said too much.”

But Yasaka understood it all too well. In all the Supernatural, everyone understood the connotations of what the Divine Pair meant. Across all pantheons, those words had the same meaning.

Heavens above… Ophis and the Great Red? Those impossibilities had returned to the Earth?

But then, Susanoo-sama’s form twisted again - lightning folding inward, storm-winds curling through themselves, and in the space of a heartbeat the Shinto Storm was gone. In his place towered the massive red-haired deity she had first seen: broad-shouldered, wild of beard and thunder rolling within his eyes.

The living storm turned his gaze toward Amaterasu.

“By your leave, Queen of the Far East,” he rumbled, voice shaking the very air, “I shall have the Valkyrja hunt down the Wargs and drag them from your skies. Alas, they are cloaked in their Father’s boon and the fell beasts cannot be seen by sun nor moon’s light. They are hidden from your eyes even as they nip at your heels like the craven curs they are. Only the flash of thunder can reveal their forms.”

And at his words, recognition finally lit her eyes.

Thor of the Aesir!

And with that understanding, her mind began linking things together. The cries of the two wolves she had heard just as she had fallen unconscious in the halls of her palace; she recalled the myth of the two wolves who chased the Sun and Moon across the sky.

Sköll and Hati.

Those were the invaders in her country? But then, why had those two ancient beasts crossed over from the Norse pantheon into theirs?

The Summit between the Three Great Powers was being held off the far coast of Japan, her very own husband was there representing the Devil species. And he had been felled? Injured somehow? Add to that she somehow fell unconscious and was now dreaming of the beyond time amidst immortals and on top of all that, two monstrous wolves of another mythos were invading her home.

To borrow her husband’s lexicon: what the Hell?

But Amaterasu-sama broke her out of her chaotic thoughts as she gave a single, cool nod and said, “Very well, We shall grant your maidens leave to cleanse Our Garden. But, Aesir, tell your All-Father We shall be having words with him.”

Thor dipped his head in respectful acknowledgment. And then his electric gaze shifted to Yasaka, causing her to freeze in place.

The moment those piercing blue eyes touched her, she felt the world lurch, like the ground had dropped away beneath her feet. A pulling sensation gripped her from behind her sternum, something dragging her outward and away.

“T’would appear the Oldest Dream has deemed you have seen what it wished you to see,” Thor said, the thunder in his voice softening only barely, “but young Empress, steel yourself. Your mind will be assailed as the threads of Time are woven back into place.”

Yasaka’s vision blurred as the Aesir’s words reached her. She lost her footing and the ethereal gold of the Takamagahara began to bleed into a pitch-black dark.

“Nevertheless,” Thor’s voice echoed in her ears, even as his visage faded from her eyes, “I ask that you carry my words to your husband. When he is whole once more, he would do well to seek out the Sapling of Yggdrasil.”

Yasaka opened her mouth to ask what he meant, trying to push past the overwhelming sensation of her senses only for her entire mind to erupt in blinding, shattering pain.

------

Far beneath Infernity, the world burned.

Grayfia stood with her arms folded tight beneath her chest, heels planted on volcanic glass. The cavern she was in stretched out in every direction for dozens upon dozens of miles; a volcanic wound big enough to swallow an entire city-state. Rivers of magma pulsed through fissures in the stone floor, their glow painting the jagged stalactites above in hues of molten orange and blood-red. Heat wafted up in constant waves, thick with sulfur and demonic miasma, but none of that held any of her attention.

Grayfia’s fingers dug into her own biceps until the leather of her gloves creaked. She would have preferred the heat of battle, preferred some simple, honest slaughter to bleed this feeling out of her veins. Instead, she had nothing but waiting and watching, and the memory of what Sirzechs had carried in his hands.

Ichigo, the very same young man she spent nearly a year guiding into thresholds of adulthood, that same young man who had been so forcibly mantled a Demon Lord, had been utterly shattered.

Grayfia had lost family before, her own parents died in the chaos that followed after the Great War and what remaining Demon Lords desperately grasped for power. She had been so young when she buried them both. And then came the subsequent Civil War orchestrated by the Demon who would later become her husband.

How many did she lose then? How many cousins and childhood friendships had been destroyed in the raging Civil War of Sirzechs and Ajuka’s revolution?

Yes, Grayfia Lucifuge was no stranger to violent loss.

But that did not mean she enjoyed it or was even desensitized to it. Never that.

When Sirzechs had first reincarnated that young human boy with Hell in his soul, she had asked him if he would make a good addition to their family, to their Peerage. And how little did she know then that that teenage boy would grow so fondly on her? She had taken to educating and acclimating him to their society and species with great relish. And how incredibly positive had he been in her own son’s life?

Ichigo had become an older brother to Millicas, and, at times, she felt something akin to maternal affection for the young Demon. Though she doubted she could ever approach that seat in his heart, what she could claim was that of an older sister’s station.

Especially given her disastrous relationship with her actual brother.

So, to see him, that young man who had become a most welcome unit in her family, be so horrifically maimed and reduced to…

A head.

Just a head.

Not even a whole head at that too.

The right side half-gone, eaten away in layers: skin, muscle, bone, all disintegrating into ash as divine light gnawed through him. Demons could not simply be mended like Devils.

They were too much. Too dense. Too wrong for reality. Their true selves existed half-a-step out of phase with the world at large. It was why all of their kind, from the first Demons who partook in Lucifer’s pact with Hell, to those Devils like herself and Ichigo who became Demons through force of power, they all required inner sanctums like this: pocket dimensions tailored to hold the full weight of their existence.

Seven Crown Princes, Seventy-Two Pillars and a host of Extra Houses… at the height of the Old Empire, there were so many Demons in existence that the Underworld could not sustain all of them. They would have destroyed the entirety of the plane through sheer force of existence. So, the Demons shaped inner worlds that could bear them, poured the bulk of their essence into those spaces, and moved through the Empire in limited avatars, like Ichigo’s current “body.”

And now that avatar was gone, burned away. All that remained of him was sealed inside, his demonic core locked in battle with a foreign divinity trying to tear him apart and remake him in its own image.

Grayfia’s gaze flicked upward as she beheld the titanic pair of doors before her.

They rose from the far wall of the cavern, two colossal slabs of perfectly smooth obsidian carved into the living rock. No hinges, no seams, no handles or reliefs - just a monolithic, featureless black that drank in the light around it. Even the magma’s glow refused to cling to it, sliding off its surface and leaving it in unnatural shadow.

The Irameron.

The Inner Sanctum of the Crown Prince of Wrath. The original Wrath, the original Satan. But now, like everything that once belonged to that Dread Lord, it was now firmly Ichigo’s. Behind those skyscraper-sized monoliths was an endless world of infernal magic and might, the font of power that fueled the realm of Infernity as an extension of its master will and magic.

Grayfia’s grey eyes then flickered towards the four that flew vigil before the titanic doors, each like a dark star of demonic power. They flew in slow, controlled arcs, each radiating such dense, oppressive demonic energy that the air trembled around them. The corruption pouring from them was thick and ugly, even by Underworld standards. To any normal Devil, their presence alone would have been suffocating.

They were the Imperators: the mightiest of the Reavers who had been personally fashioned by the original Wrath.

Nihil, Ruel, Ecayd, and Furia.

Each one easily equal in power to those in the upper echelons of Ultimate-class; and, more importantly, they were veterans of the Great War and countless battles. They were the reason Ichigo felt so secure about leaving Infernity so frequently, because he had them to guard his domain in his absence.

They guarded the Irameron vehemently, ensuring none dared to approach their vulnerable master, and demonic auras flaring whenever anything even remotely shifted in the gargantuan cavern.

Further out, hugging the shadow of a basalt pillar, a colossal form lurked half-submerged in black smoke: Humbaba. Ichigo’s Rook was perfectly still, but it’s imposing aura filled the area just as easily as the combined might of the four Imperators.

And on the ground closer to Grayfia’s level, a massive white wolf paced tight arcs along the edge of a magma flow, claws clicking against cooled rock. Fangs bared, fur bristling, Saviġuk looked one heartbeat away from tearing apart the next person to make a sound. Occasionally, icy mist hissed off her fur when her emotions slipped, only to evaporate instantly in the heat.

And yet, for all of that, it was the stillest figure that drew Grayfia’s eye.

Tiamat.

The Dragon King stood a short distance from the observation ridge, close enough to feel the doors’ oppressive presence, far enough that the Imperators wouldn’t bristle at her proximity. She remained rooted in place, arms folded loosely under her chest, white hair hanging in disheveled waves down her back. Her sharp, regal features were drawn tight in a way Grayfia had never seen.

Just that one scream.

Grayfia could still hear it.

The moment she and Sirzechs had returned to the Underworld with Ichigo’s fragmented head, Tiamat’s roar had torn through the realm. It hadn’t been of rage though. It had been something older, rawer - primordial grief unleashed. The entire Underworld had trembled in face of the oldest Dragon King’s heartbreak.

Ajuka had had to personally appear, shackles of magic weaving around the Dragon King before she threatened to tear apart the Underworld in insane grief. And Sirzechs hadn’t wasted a second; he’d rushed down into the Irameron immediately.

And Tiamat hadn’t spoken since.

Grayfia exhaled slowly through her nose, bile of anxiety rising through her throat. She could not afford to be rattled. Not when everything about this situation was already teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

One of the Ruling Satans had been nearly annihilated by a foreign divinity using the Void as a conduit in the midst of a battle against the Old Satan Faction and Khaos Brigade just as the Three Great Powers had been gathered in one place to discuss an armistice.

Ironic that it was: she, the former general for the Old Satan Faction, felt nothing but utter loathing for them now. A part of her wished things were like the old days, where she could just go and tear into the armies of her former masters with reckless abandon, consequences be damned. To delight in their blood as she froze their hearts in their chests, to see them broken and crawling beneath her feet, to see hear them scream in despair.

Grayfia’s lips thinned as she reluctantly turned her thoughts away from wanton violence. Alas, she could ill afford to march into enemy territories now. Not with a family now. Not with Ophis itself standing alongside their foes.

No. That path was closed to her now. She had other roles to play, other duties to uphold.

Suddenly, she was pulled from her spiraling thoughts by a sharp cry.

One that split the sound of roiling magma in the cavern.

Grayfia became startled as Yasaka doubled over, one knee nearly buckling as she clutched both sides of her head, golden tails twitching in frantic disarray.

For a brief, disorienting instant, Grayfia felt a jolt of shock - how had Yasaka gotten here? But the confusion evaporated the moment it formed, replaced by the recollection that she had gone to Kyoto, she had delivered the news, she had brought Yasaka to Infernity herself. The momentary fog lifted from her mind, and she immediately hurried forward and towards the downed Empress.

“Your Highness,” her voice tight, “is something the matter?”

Briefly, Grayfia considered that the potent miasma within the underground chamber was adversely affecting the Kyūbi Empress, but she dismissed those thoughts rather quickly. Yasaka was powerful enough to resist the latent demonic energies here.

Or, perhaps, it was something to do with the leylines? She wasn’t exactly sure of the mechanics of how Yasaka’s bloodline was bound to and controlled the intersecting leylines beneath Kyoto, but she knew Yasaka could ill afford to leave the city for long periods of time. Could her absence from the city be adversely affecting her then?

However, before Yasaka could force out a response, a presence rippled the air beside them, Tiamat stood at Yasaka’s other side, her expression stripped of usual haughty countenance, replaced instead by an expression Grayfia had rarely seen on the Dragon King: genuine concern.

The sight alone was jarring. Ichigo’s two consorts were not enemies in the strictest sense, but neither were they… amicable. His dragon and his princess tolerated each other at best, which wasn’t unnatural considering how prideful both women were.

Yet now Tiamat had reached out to Yasaka with legitimate worry. She wondered if Ichigo’s current critical state had softened the ancient Dragon’s heart, even if momentarily

And then Tiamat’s hand settled firmly on Yasaka’s shoulder. “Breathe,” she instructed, her voice low and steady. “Slowly. Focus on the structure of your mind. Do not let the conflicting memories overwhelm you.”

Yasaka sucked in a sharp breath, her face twisted in pain as she tried to force words past clenched teeth.

“I… I remember… memories,” she managed, voice shaking, “mine, but not mine.”

Grayfia stiffened. Memories that never occurred? A cold prickle ran down her spine.

The Dragon King’s eyes narrowed, her hand still bracing Yasaka’s shoulder. “Time shudders,” she murmured, gaze sharp as a blade. “I sense emanations from the Fourth World.”

Yasaka nodded her head even as she took in a deep breath, her visage still contorted in pain. “I was in Takamagahara,” she ground out.

“Say no more,” Tiamat said soothingly. “Continue to try and organize your thoughts.”

Grayfia frowned heavily. “She was pulled out of Time?” she asked, turning towards Tiamat.

“Not entirely,” she Dragon King said, casting a doubtful look at the titanic doors of the Irameron. “Rather, I surmise Time was rent around her, and alternate realities were merged into one. Her mind was assailed as she was forced to acclimate conflicting accounts of causality. Paradox is no simple thing to experience.”

Grayfia nearly took a step back. Merging alternate time-lines? That went beyond simple magic. It was what the rest of the supernatural referred to as Miracles, when True Immortals imposed their Wills on Time itself and shaped reality. It could be done with magic, but the amount of power needed to do so was impossible to imagine.

As far as she knew, the only ones capable of manipulating Time on such a scale with magic alone were her husband and Ajuka. But even then, the two of them ventured far away from such blatant temporal manipulations. Time was a delicate thing, and interfering with it too much can easily result in cataclysmic consequences.

“But why would Amaterasu force her own High Priestess through a temporal paradox?” Grayfia questioned.

But Tiamat merely narrowed her eyes as she continued to stare down at Yasaka. The Dragon King’s nostrils flared briefly even as her lips curled. “No,” she said after several seconds of observation. “Not that one. This is not the work of the Sun. What I sense is the Eternal Dream, a touch I am all too familiar with."

And Grayfia’s blood ran cold.

The Eternal Dream? The Apocalypse Dragon itself?

Grayfia closed her eyes with a silent sigh. “So, both of the Divine Pair have reemerged into the cosmos.” She had to let Sirzechs know immediately.

Tiamat’s lips pressed into a grim line as she turned her gaze back to the Irameron. “I believe we are all now caught in the weft of their fleeting whims.”

------

Ichigo stood barefoot upon the golden sea, its surface rippling outward in slow, soundless waves beneath him. The radiance of the place was soft, ancient, and absolute; and it pressed against his skin like warm mist. Before him, seated upon nothing but the shimmering surface, rested the golden skeleton in Shinto priestly robes. And each of those empty sockets were four pupils that stared deep into his very being.

Oddly enough, Ichigo could sense everything he ever said and thought contained in the gaze of this immortal before. Even odder, he felt something deeply familiar about it. Not quite a memory but something more… primal?

And when the immortal spoke, he realized it wasn’t just a voice. There was something else, something pressing into his mind. Almost as though there were a second person there, communicating with more than just words.

Ichigo narrowed his eyes.

Aidôneus.

He knew that name. In his many adventures of chasing the Souls of sinners across dimensions and realities, he had dealt with the Sovereigns of many other afterlives. It was just another one of the many side effects of being a psychopomp for Hell.

“Hades,” Ichigo said aloud, his voice steady despite the strangeness of it all.

The golden skeleton shifted in response.

Not physically, but the light around it seemed to bend, as if reality were answering his words. The robed bones dissolved for a heartbeat into the towering figure of a man with deep Mediterranean skin, a thick, curled black beard, and heavy, imperious features. His eyes burned with golden fire, like a pair of luminous stars.

The Lord of the Dead, who drew the lots of the mists and the darkness when the Sons of Kronos divided the cosmos, stared back at him.

Then, as quickly as the vision came, it fractured into motes of gold and the skeleton returned to its place, unbroken, unmoving.

Ichigo exhaled slowly and his thoughts churned. There was anothe rpang within him, something old and very intimate to him. And it didn't take him long to recognize what it was. But he was surprised, he had thought this part of him lost to him a very long time ago.

The remnants of his humanity.

Which had been swallowed by Sirzechs Pawn Piece and later, the very Sin that stained him a Demon Lord.

This familiarity, this recognition… this very primal and primitive feeling that he had last felt when in the presence of Amaterasu…

The Soul King, he realized.

And even as that thought finished, the radiant skeleton shifted again.

This time the golden robes bled into patterned white and ink-black fabric. The skeletal frame gained the shape of a man: tall and distinctively Japanese, his hair short and neatly combed as though perpetually formal. A katana hung sheathed at his side, its polished scabbard pristine, its presence humming with a might Ichigo instinctively recognized as being far older and more potent than any other sword he had ever encountered.

So, this was the legendary Soul King he had heard so much about. And the name given, Adnyeus. It was so incredibly similar to Hades’.

“You’re the same being,” Ichigo said in understanding.

“We are.”

We are not.

He blinked in confusion. “What do you mean you are and aren’t?”

“The siege of divinity is within the Fourth World, where Time has no direction but every direction.”

All possibilities are true and thus equally false.

“So Hades has always been the Soul King?” he asked even more confused now.

“Yes.”

And no.

Eight pupils shifted and the world around them changed, gone were the rippling gold waters and instead there were soft dawn hued clouds and numerous floating islands dominated by Shinto architecture filling his view. He blinked in surprise as he recognized the place all too well.

“Adnyeus has always been from Celestial Plane of Takamagahara. It was I who took the Mantle of the Dead after Izanami was consumed in the rage of the Heavenly Two, and it was I who partitioned the Realms of Dead to keep it from reflecting back onto the Living.”

Hades has ever been of the Aegean, born of the Titans Kronos and Rhea. It was I who aided my siblings in throwing down the Sky’s Children, so that High Olympos may overlook and reign over all. It was I who first wrote the Precepts of Death and dictated that a taken soul may never return to walk Gaea.

“But then something changed,” Ichigo noted sharply.

All things change.

The Soul King waved his hand, and they left Takamagahara and returned to his place in the golden sea. “The Slaying Spear is more formidable than the fool of a Fallen could ever understand. Its blade pierced even here, the edge of Eternity. A choice had been made, that two join as one to fortify the Throne, else risk that Life and Death returned to the primal ooze.”

Balance is paramount, all else is peripheral.

Ichigo’s gaze narrowed at the Soul King and Hades' words.

So that’s how the tear in Kuoh was repaired! The Soul King had merged with Hades, and with renewed strength, he had managed to fix the torn barriers. It would also explain the strange things going on in Soul Society. Ichigo had been right, the Soul King had changed, and since ruler and realm reflected back onto one another, the merger between the Soul King and Hades had meant that Soul Society would inevitably change.

“So you are the same then,” Ichigo surmised.

“We are.”

We are not.

He sighed audibly. Yeah, of course. Because it wouldn’t be his life if things were ever that simple.

“Separate.”

But the same.

“Such is the way of the Fourth World. Do not try and use mortal logic to define and restrict this reality. It has no place here,” the Soul King said solemnly.

Is and Is Not flow together. Such is the Privilage of the Undying.

Ichigo nodded to himself. From what he had read in the books borrowed from Sirzechs, and from his own training with Tiamat, it was starting to make sense to him. Hades and the Soul King existed as separate beings but at the same time, due to whatever they had done to fix the damage done by Rhongomyniad, it had inexorably linked the two. And not just from that moment on. Due to how the fourth dimension worked, they were linked through all of Time now.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve tried to talk to me,” Ichigo said to them then. “I briefly recall you trying to tell me something, before Ophis interfered.”

The Soul King nodded very slowly. “The Infinite Ouroboros has kept us from reaching out to you again. We had to wait for its other to create the bridge that this dialogue may come about.”

You Dream in your Sanctum, in the depths of your Infernal Realm.

Ichigo eyes widened briefly. Yeah, it made sense to him. The last thing he recalled was being blasted with divine energy and Sirzechs being opposed by Ophis when he tried to reach the Golden Moon. Based on Hades’ words, Sirzechs had managed to get him back to Infernity and seal him inside his inner sanctum so that he could recover.

But then…

“Ophis’ other? You mean the Great Red?” He asked with a frown. “It’s allowing us to talk right now?”

“To make of Dreams and Reality a Duality,” the Soul King said, his voice causing the sky above to ripple with starlight.

Unlimited Power, beyond comprehension. The Apocalypse Dragon is a mirror reflecting infinity back onto infinity, ever and eternally.

Ichigo let their words settle in his mind and looked away, trying to gather his thoughts. The sea beneath his feet rippled gently, carrying the sensation of radiant spiritual waves.

The Divine Dragons: so immensely powerful that the entire universe might as well have been a soap bubble next to them. If they so much as put too much of themselves inside, it would pop, and everything would forevermore be destroyed.

He thought back to what ancient lore he had gleamed from Tiamat, of how, time and again, those impossibly powerful dragons would manifest in some fashion of this Earth and whimsically move about before falling silent for centuries again.

But why?

Why Earth? Why the various realities and pantheons that stem from this one single planet in a lone galaxy with billions of other planets in a universe with trillions of other galaxies? What was so special about this place and the planes that connected it?

“What are they playing at…?” Ichigo whispered, more to himself than to the figure in front of him.

The Soul King watched without expression. His eight pupils shifted in quiet consideration.

Pushing thoughts of those reality breaking dragons away, Ichigo steeled his gaze and asked tightly. “Why am I here?”

Gold light stirred like wind across water.

“The merging between Aidôneus and I was a gamble,” the Soul King replied. “And a temporary one. Now that two have become one, the Hadean lands of the dead and the Shinto afterlife drift towards union.”

The Realm reflects its Ruler.

Ichigo frowned as he crossed his arms. “Is that a problem? All the dead realms are connected anyway, aren’t they? Their borders only exist because the rulers maintain them.”

“In the grand span of things, it is not worth noting,” the Soul King acknowledged. “But the union will reshape what lies beyond death. The Fields of Asphodel, Elysium, Soul Society, Hueco Mundo: these planes will have become obsolete. A new realm must form.”

Reorganized and restructured, that the flow of souls be moderated and conjoined. For the new to come, the old must die.

Ichigo felt the words strike deeper than he expected as the sheer scale of what the two Kings were saying sank in. Technically speaking, the afterlives were infinite in size. It was the equivalent of rearranging the cosmos.

“You’re talking about erasing entire dimensions,” he said disbelievingly. “Wait, what happens to the souls already there?”

“They return to their primal state,” the Soul King answered. “A purity untouched by narrative nor memory. They will be sorted into the new realm as blank spirits.”

Immaculate human souls, unfettered by mortal identity

“What?” And his voice came out just above a breath even as his blood ran cold. “You’ll take away their identities? What makes them, them? You’re essentially killing them!”

Faces flickered in his mind: Rukia, Renji, Toshiro and all the countless Shinigami he had fought beside. He hadn’t spoken to most of them in years, but still… Not to mention the millions upon million of souls living in Soul Society! And in the Hades too!

“They are already dead,” the Soul King said. “The dead are meant to rest in tranquility. Not to labor, not to suffer, not to build families and repeat the struggles of life. The cycle was meant to flow freely, without withering in stagnation.”

Ichigo clenched his fists. Anger rose, sharp and instinctive, but then something hit him. A thought, a sudden epiphany.

He drew in a slow breath. “You still haven’t answered me: why am I here?”

The Soul King’s lips curved into the faintest, most imperceptible smile.

“The merging of the afterlives is axiomatic… yet the pantheons would prefer the realms remain separate. To each their own. Amaterasu and Zeus are in agreement on this.” he said. “Thus, the solution is rather self-evident: another can take up the Mantle of the Dead. One who can rebuild the Shinto afterlife without Izanami’s curse. One who will keep this realm distinct from the Hadean realm.”

The Realm reflects the Ruler, but if the Throne is passed, so too is the Realm. What say you, our Son whom we Bore in Darkness?

Ichigo stared at him, stunned for a long moment. Then he dragged his palm down his face. “Amaterasu’s plan,” he muttered. “And why do you keep calling me son?”

“She set the first stone, yes. Not for naught is the sword in your Soul called Moon Slayer. Why else would the Divine Moon strike you down?” the Soul King said plainly. “But the path existed long before her design. Who but We placed your soul in the womb of a Quincy? Who but We allowed that soul to mingle with Shinigami and Hollow essence? You are the full spectrum of the Human soul born from the remnants of Izanami’s echo. You are the bridge.”

Ichigo rolled his jaw, not liking what he was hearing in the slightest. Well, it wasn’t the first time he had heard this. Amaterasu had essentially admitted to the same. It just turns out that the Soul King was in on it the whole time as well. But then, that’s what the Undying do isn’t it? Play with the lives and fates of others?

“Yeah,” Ichigo said through grit teeth. “I’ve heard this story before. I was ‘fated’ to take your place but along came Sirzechs and he proceeded to ruin everything.”

“No.”

That too was intentional on Our part.

Ichigo balked. That was not what Amaterasu told him.

“The Hell do you mean?” Ichigo growled. “There’s no way you’re telling me you managed to manipulate Sirzechs’ fate. Me, a powerless human at the time, sure, I can understand. But I am Satan now. And I damn well know not even you True Immortals can mess with we Sins as you like.”

“The Morningstar is beyond our reach, this is true,” the Soul King agreed. “But a calculated series of altered bits of causality increased the chance of your meeting with him.”

The Infinite Ouroboros altered the narrative of reality when it shrouded the foolish Fallen Lord and aided him in unleashing the Slaying Spear. This was not Rhongomyniad’s prophesied time of return, the Once and Future King still slumbers.

Ichigo opened his mouth to respond but promptly closed it. But yeah, it made sense. From what he knew, there was a host of horrific, apocalyptic prophecies surround King Arthur’s eventual return to the Earth.

“What I’m gathering here then is,” Ichigo said slowly as he rubbed his jaw. “Ophis’ interference made your merging inevitable.”

“Yes. Your meeting with the Devil is an anomaly of our making.”

Time bent inwards, We were forced to alter the past.

Ichigo’s eyes narrowed. “How?”

“The true narrative.”

What should have been.

And the Soul King lifted one hand, and the golden sea rippled outward in perfect circles. The surface rose like a mirror given shape, and images bloomed atop it.

He watched a seventeen-year-old version of himself trudging home from school, face tired, posture slumped under the weight of being powerless and purposeless. His younger self moved through Karakura with empty eyes, and without any fire of ambition. Ichigo felt a coldness grip his heart; he remembered those lonely days all too well.

But then a stranger approached him in the night, tall and sharp-smiled - Kūgo Ginjō, the Fullbringer he had killed when he was last in Karakura Town. Ichigo felt an alien chill as he watched his other self accept the man’s Xcution card.

Is that what was supposed to have happened? Was he supposed to have met Ginjō when he was seventeen and still in high school? Still powerless?

More visions followed. Xcution’s hideout, and Ichigo could only watch transfixed at what could have been.

Training sessions where his younger, alternative self struggled to understand what a Fullbring was. Striving to draw power from his Substitute Shinigami badge as it twisted into strange shapes, then a blade, then a whit armor. He saw himself pushed through the various trials of the Xcution members.

He watched the moment Ginjō struck him down: the shock and complete look of betrayal as his Fullbringer powers were torn from his soul and absorbed by the rest of Xcution. And then, just as the younger Ichigo collapsed in despair, one last sword pierced through his chest, and from behind the kind smile of Rukia, the very first friend he had made in the supernatural. And in the same way she had first given him powers, she had returned his own.

Ichigo’s chest tightened at that sight. The vision felt distant and strangely intimate, like a memory of a memory.

What should have been.

He saw that teenage boy - renewed with power, with purpose, with hope - rush back into battle against Ginjō with fierce and righteous anger blazing through him. At long last, Zangetsu in hand once more, the world felt right again, like all the pieces of the puzzle fell neatly back into place.

A complete arc. A circle closed.

And he understood with unsettling clarity: if this path had been his, the presence of Hell inside him would have been smothered before it ever stirred during his college years. The meeting with Sirzechs would have passed like two ships in the night. He would not be a Demon Lord. He would not be here - standing on a sea of gold, speaking to the King of Souls and the Lord of Hades merged into one.

The sea stilled, the images faded, and Ichigo felt the absence of that other life like a phantom limb - something that could have been his yet belonged entirely to someone else.

“I-I…” Ichigo simply stared at the empty space where the visions had been, unable to form coherent thought. Such a different life… one without Infernity, without his Demonic power, without Tiamat or Yasaka…

One where he would have stayed human.

And it all came down to a lone question: “Why?”

“To prevent a rebellious Son from taking this Throne and leaving it vulnerable to what lays beyond.”

To prevent a Thousand-Year Blood War.

-------

A/N: Sorry, I meant to publish this yesterday, but surprise, surprise, I got food poisoning from Thanksgiving leftovers. I've spent more time with my toilet than my PC these last 24 hours. (Yes, I acknowledge the irony. We physicians also get sick.)

Because of all the Time manipulation shennanigans going on, I can understand if there is some confusion as to what's going on. Feel free to ask, I shall try and clarify as much as possible without giving away spoilers.

Also, I know I said I would rewrite chapter 56, but after consulting with friends, the general consensus is I am being too much of a perfectinist and the chapter is fine.

Have a lovely weekend!