Chapter 741: Goddess in the Glass
Sienna’s vision swam with static from the primordial dark, the cello music twisting into a mocking dirge for her composure, each note a reminder that even in the tallest building, the abyss had booked a room and was ready to check in.
She tasted iron and ozone and the bitter ash of her own ancient irritation; a lesser entity would have screamed, clawed at the mirrors, let the glass shatter and the real her pour out to devour the floors below in vengeful ecstasy.
Yet Sienna endured, jaw locked, face a mask of polite teen ennui, while inside the cosmos seemed to have howled with laughter at the absurdity: ’a Nether Goddess, breaker of realities, brought low by a finger flick and her own disappointing progeny, leaking divinity like a faulty relic in an elevator soundtracked by elevator music.’
The dark humor of it all was almost enough to make her crack a real smile—almost. The boy had done this, indirectly; his spectacle the spark that lit the fuse on her overtaxed body, and the irony was delicious, the kind of joke the void told when it was feeling particularly cruel.
’Congratulations, little dragon,’ she thought through the haze of agony, ’you’ve made the Nether Goddess herself consider the benefits of spontaneous combustion.’
But a goddess’s body did not crack the way mortal bodies cracked.
This was not bone or skin failing but a thin, patient membrane between the seventeen-year-old body and the cosmic power of the entity wearing that body tearing along a stress line that had been accumulating since she ripped open reality in the forest yesterday and sent her Unfinished Children to chew through a Lesser God Witch’s dome.
Some of them had not been strong enough.
That was what irritated her—not the dome, not the witch and the cost in power, but her own children, the patient half-formed things she had birthed from the abyss with deliberate breath, almost failing against a mid-tier construct and requiring reinforcement mid-assault by their stronger siblings.
Those reinforcements had demanded additional output her current body was never equipped to sustain, and now the body was presenting its invoice in full.
The irritation festered into full-blown hellish resentment, the kind that made her want to reach into the abyss and throttle her own creations for their incompetence—
’You had one job, you netheric disappointment,’ she mentally snarled at herself, even as the pain redoubled, the fractures spreading to her wrist now, another thin line of energy escaping to stain her sleeve like a badge of divine overexertion.
The ascent felt eternal, each floor a fresh layer of torment, the numbers on the display kept ticking like the countdown to her vessel’s inevitable bankruptcy.
She had to curse, if she could, why her grandmother had to build the tallest building there was.
The pain reached its apex perhaps another three breaths into the ascent, a deep, grinding hell that clawed at the boundary between what she was and what she was forced to wear.
A lesser woman would have made a sound... maybe a jaw would have tightened.
The corners of her eyes would have pinched, her mouth would have betrayed the effort with some small, involuntary betrayal; Sienna’s face did nothing.
This was not stoicism for its own sake, rather a doctrine.
Pain was information, if she permitted it to write itself across her features, the universe—and more dangerously, she herself—might misread the expression as regret for her actions.
And she did not regret overexherting her body.
The mission had succeeded and she that’s all she cared about, the only thing that mattered even when the alternative was breaking apart.
And here, sealed in this elegant little cage of mirrors and cello music, the hell was hers alone—the membrane tearing, the black-violet energy pressing against dark fabric like a secret that refused to stay contained while it leaked in avalanche out of her continuously breaking body, the irritation at her own’s weakness mixing with the raw, grinding cost of having pushed her body never designed for divine-tier work.
She kept her hand folded despite that being useless since the rest of her body was already breaking apart. She kept her face arranged. She let the energy leak from all parts of her body into the left, against expensive cloth and older indifference while the lift carried her upward through floors that had never been built to contain what she was becoming.
The hell was exquisite in its privacy, a solo performance of agony for an audience of one, the mirrors reflecting her perfect mask while the real show—the leaking, the fracturing of her body and the slow surrender of the glass—
It was pathetic no matter how much she thought about it; here she was, the daughter of Ryujin Tiamat, Nether Goddess extraordinaire, reduced to a walking (leaking) liability because her abyssal brats couldn’t handle a mid-level dome job.
The boy, bless his chaotic little heart, had no idea the collateral damage his little mission had caused—or perhaps he did, and that was the funniest part.
The goddess in the glass did not break.
Not today.
But she could feel the hairline fractures allover her body spreading into deeper openings, quiet and inevitable, and she wondered, with the dry, ancient humour of something vast wearing something young and breakable, whether the Phei would be the one to finally shatter her composure entirely—or simply teach her how to smile while the glass gave way and the abyss, patient as ever, waited on the other side.
"Mm-mm~"
She wondered it with a void-touched amusement that had seen empires rise and fall like bad comedy routines, the sort that made the pain almost bearable; if she did shatter and die right here, at least the abyss would have a new toy—and the Phei, might just be worth the mess.
Or perhaps the real punchline was yet to come: the day the glass finally gave, and Paradise learned what happened when you poked a dragon too hard. Either way, the joke was on her, and she was starting to appreciate the author of her story for it all.
Almost.
