Chapter 156: Headless Gallery
Kivas blinked into haze, her thoughts drifting like smoke in a vast, empty expanse.
The world around her was a flawless white room, edges crisp and visible where walls met floor and ceiling in perfect, unyielding geometry—no seams, no shadows, just an infinite suggestion of containment that stretched to a horizon she could almost touch.
"What... is this...?"
Her mind felt... lighter, unmoored, as if a vital thread had been snipped clean.
For a disorienting second, she reached inward, probing the familiar hum of her soul, and found only echoes—faint, resonant, but incomplete.
Severance.
The word surfaced unbidden, a clinical anchor amid the fog.
Of course, the ritual’s aftershock, her essence decoupled from the vessel, adrift in this limbo of Fathomi’s indecision.
In a way, this was the actualization of that aftermath, made into an entirely new reality.
She floated upright, or perhaps walked, the distinction blurred in the weightless air.
No pain, no urgency—just a profound quiet that pressed against her temples like forgotten rain.
Then, without warning, a seam etched itself into one wall, blooming outward into a doorframe of soft, pulsing light.
It creaked open on silent hinges, exhaling a breath of cooler air that carried scents of polished stone and faint, blooming jasmine.
"Should I... Am I supposed to go there...?"
Beyond lay not the chasm’s glow or Vaingall’s familiar runes, but an entirely alien tableau.
"Maybe I should."
Like a toddler who opened their tablet inside a dark room, her sight was overwhelmed and tried to retract.
A sprawling garden of headless white statues, each draped in flowing white dresses that caught nonexistent breezes, frozen mid-pose—arms outstretched in supplication, their supposedly non-existent heads bowed in eternal repose, fingers curled as if grasping at lost whispers.
They dotted a manicured lawn that blended seamlessly into household vignettes: wrought-iron benches flanked by potted ferns, a low tea table laden with porcelain cups that steamed eternally, a grandfather clock ticking backward in the corner of what seemed a parlor, its pendulum slicing shadows that weren’t there.
Kivas stepped through, the door sealing behind her with a whisper, the white room dissolving like mist.
"Feels like I just got myself lost in a wonderland." Kivas wryly chuckled. "A bizarre one, that is."
Her bare feet sank into cool grass that felt too real, too textured for this unreality.
"I hope that the severance didn’t fail, and I just got, transported to another world or other places in Fathomi in a new vessel."
Speaking of vessel, she glanced at a small mirror on the side of the sight.
It was still her face, the same two-toned white and gold long hair, and that determined angelic face.
"Well, now I know for sure that this is some sort of another dreamscape that I’ve went into."
Too bad that she could barely do anything at the moment, since her Well of the Soul had been yanked out of her.
She wandered the paths, weaving between the statues, her hand brushing a bench’s armrest—solid, chilled marble veined with silver.
A bird alighted then, small and unremarkable, its feathers a mottled gray that drank the light.
"Looks like I’m not alone here either."
It perched on the shoulder of a nearby statue, one posed in quiet contemplation, arms folded serenely.
The moment its talons touched fabric, corruption bloomed.
Veins of inky black spiderwebbed across the statue’s form, dress and stone alike, and a voice emanated—not from a mouth, but from the air around it, layered and dissonant, like an orchestra tuning to a frequency just beyond human ears.
Words formed in halting language, each syllable stretched and warped, as if an alien intellect strained through mortal constraints.
"This one... persists. Alive... This is unexpected."
Kivas froze, her pulse quickening in the haze. "What... what do you mean by that?"
The bird hopped free, the corruption receding like a tide from shore, leaving the statue pristine once more.
It fluttered to another, this one mid-stride as if fleeing an unseen gale, and the infection took hold anew—black tendrils coiling upward.
The voice shifted, smoother now, laced with a weary cadence, as if a different consciousness filtered through the same vessel.
"The other meant you endure. The sole remnant in this... contest. All others surrendered, ceased the fray of eternal damnation."
Kivas circled the statue slowly, her golden eyes narrowing on the faceless head, where shadows pooled like unspoken regrets. "Contest? Who are the ’others’?"
The bird departed with a trill, corruption fading, and sought a third perch on a statue kneeling in apparent prayer, hands clasped eternally.
Ink bloomed faster this time, and the voice emerged softer, almost pedagogical, with a rhythm like echoing footsteps in a vast hall.
"Others... your antecedents. The chain before you, the you who stood there and gawked at this immaculate sight. Those statutes, they released the probe into shadow, and chose stasis over storm. Behold them—the gallery of the still."
Kivas trailed the bird’s erratic path, her pace hastening as it veered toward yet another statue—this one locked in a gesture of quiet resolve, hands pressed to its chest as if cradling a fading ember.
The gray feathers settled on its shoulder, and corruption unfurled like roots seeking soil: black veins threading through marble and fabric, coiling upward in deliberate hunger.
"These forms you behold... are echoes of Kivases prior to you. They relinquished the drive, ceased the blind thrust into obscurity. Opted for immobility, a deliberate halt—shedding the ceaseless scourge that gnaws without mercy."
The words landed soft but unyielding, burrowing into her thoughts like seeds in fallow ground.
Kivas halted, gaze sweeping the tableau anew.
The statues no longer mere curiosities, but a legion of halted selves, their poses a lexicon of quiet defeat—supplicants, wanderers paused mid-stride, guardians with arms slackened.
Her chest tightened, the haze fracturing into shards of unwelcome insight.
Were they truly her? Fractured iterations, each one a mirror cracked under the same relentless gaze?
But then, what exactly made them her predecessors, and what made Kivas their successors?
What was happening?
Before doubt could fully root, the bird lifted off with a mocking chirp, corruption ebbing from the statue like ink diluted in water, leaving it pristine and voiceless once more.
It alighted on the next effigy nearby—a figure caught in mid-reach, as if straining toward an unreachable light
The new voice layered in, distinct yet harmonious with the last, a continuation from a chorus of the resigned, its tone laced with the dry finality of archived truths.
"After Kivas resigned from their struggle, freeing themselves from the endless torment, Fathomi falters in its verdict—uncertain how to resolve the unraveling thread where a Kivas stopped their movement forward.
"Thus, Fathomi recoils to genesis: rewinds the tapestry to inception, forges a flawless facsimile of you anew, and recommences the weave. In another world, everything was reset once again, a true reset unlike the timeline reset where you still remember the memories of your death from a now known past.
"Simulation upon simulation, the loops simply become an inexorable grace."
Kivas’s breath caught, the pieces slotting with a nauseating click.
A true reset. Not a timeline reset like what she experienced—a cosmic stutter, Fathomi’s indifferent machinery grinding her essence into replicas, each doomed to probe the same shadows until fracture.
The statues blurred in her vision, not millions, not billions, but a multitude defying count, a graveyard of iterations stretching into perceptual infinity.
Belief warred with incredulity, was this hallucination born of severance’s vertigo, or a glimpse behind the veil her predecessors had recoiled from?
Her mouth went dry, voice emerging as a hushed murmur, laced with the tremor of one teetering on revelation’s brink.
"How many... gave up before me?"
The bird wheeled away, a speck against the pallid sky, and Kivas pursued, feet pounding soft earth that yielded like memory.
The landscape unfolded endlessly: statues in clusters like forgotten armies, some solitary on benches nursing teacups, others arrayed around a fountain that burbled silence.
Mountains of them rose in the distance, white peaks capped with floral crowns, a necropolis of the resolute-unresolved.
Her breath came ragged, legs burning in this dream-logic, until the bird descended upon the final monument—a colossal statue wreathed in blooming vines, flowers cascading from its headless crown like a bridal veil of decay.
Corruption ignited in slow, thorny waves, and the voice resonated deeper, resonant with finality, each word a petal unfurling.
"At minimum... one trillion three hundred seventy-eight quadrillion four hundred eighty-four trillion three hundred eighty-six billion three hundred forty-five million three hundred thirty-three thousand four hundred twenty-three. That which this form tallied. Before you, the latest of the dying light I perceive."
Dread cascaded through Kivas, a vertigo that buckled her knees to the grass.
Numbers too vast to grasp, each a mirror of her own face, her own breaking point.
There was a great chance that all of these were a mere lie.
But what if it wasn’t?
"Why? Why did they all... give up?"
The flowered statue’s voice softened, almost maternal, petals rustling in phantom wind. "Simplicity itself is your answer. Exhaustion from the grind—the wheel turned ceaselessly, yet spun in place.
"Effort into ether, torment without terminus. Cycles of striving, only to glimpse the loop’s cruel jest.
"Some concluded in quiet elegy, others in honeyed rue, but all converged: capitulation. The dark devours the unyielding, they chose peace in pose."
Kivas rose shakily, fists clenched at her sides, the haze fully burned away now, leaving raw edges of self. "Then why show me this? What’s the point of dragging me here?" She tried to fight back her confusion and anger. "Why all of you kept showing me a dark future that I haven’t even stepped on yet!? To ensure that I will never have a peaceful moment in this new life of mine!?"
A pause, the corruption flickering like candleflame. "No designs are found, no intentions are concluded. We are simply giving a mere response to your query—curiosity’s echo. Your ingress to this place? It is unscripted, unfated, uncontrived.
"In a way, it is a surprising happenstance in the haze. This too illustrates the futility, combat blind against the unknowable.
"It is meaningless, just like everything in life."
So, she just happened to be here, just because?
Kivas tried her best to hold her laughter.
And at the same time, it made her mind clearer.
Determination etched on Kivas’ features, jaw set against the floral shroud. "That very meaninglessness—it’s a moldable clay, you know that? Most often than not, meaninglessness begs creation of a brand new purpose, a brand new meaning...
"Has a single one of my predecessors ever taken a step on this place before their resignation?"
The statue stilled, vines quivering. "None. This anomaly is yours alone."
Kivas laughed like she had never laughed before.
Comical, it was, everything was nothing but theater of absurdity in her eyes.
"If my stumbling here defies pattern, unplanned and unbound... did it ever befall a prior me? One who still burned to press on?" Kivas’s eyes blazed, a spark igniting in the white void. "There—over a quadrillion iterations, like skies birthing statues like clockwork, none breached this gallery with fire unquenched!
"That’s no jest; it’s a fracture in your logic. It is proof the cycle cracks. Change is fermenting, and it will eventually turn into a cup of coffee you can drink!
"Perhaps, one dawn, no more wheels to turn—no loops to lament. The cycle of this bold scarcity of meaning, can end—an end where Kivas didn’t end up resigning, and keep on pushing forward to a new, happy end to her story."
The voice tilted, skeptical thorns in its timbre, but laced in wrath forgone in ancient manifolds.
"Bold utterance from one unscarred! What of the agonies that felled them? The crucibles that forged surrender? You claim audacity without experiencing their suffering!"
"But that is their suffering, not mine." Kivas’ smile emerged, fierce and unyielding, a blade sheathed in warmth. "Back then, maybe I would answer that I can persevere with will alone? You know, all that crap like endurance’s grit, clutching pain till providence gleams?
"No—not this time. I tether to more." She pressed a hand to her chest, where echoes of bonds thrummed faint but fierce. "They often say that life start solitary, and always concludes in isolation... yet each of them have a history, a path, a destination and an ongoing end.
"Life is a string, and strings can entwine. I knot mine to another’s—twist the lonely thread with kin on the same shadowed trail. That anchor? It bids me forward. Not blind faith, but woven certainty that I’m not living a lonely life, a life that is not worth resigned from!"
Laughter rippled from the statue, dry as falling leaves, petals shedding in scorn. "Idealist unbloodied. You’ll trail the procession yet—lost in labyrinths, groping eternities in gloom is the fate of all Kivas, and that is the path that each Kivas will walk forward as they prod darkness in eternal damnation!"
Kivas smirked, pivoting to survey the marble legions, her gesture sweeping the expanse. "Who decreed the trail is mine to tread? You might not know it, but somewhere in your past, you have the power and determination to forge the same thing, you just forgot that very culmination of strength!"
"And forge what? A boulevard to nowhere? No lodestar gleams; the map mocks the mapper." Anger became even more and more obvious on the faceless flowered statue. "There’s no limit to the expanse of destiny, who are you to claim that you have the privilege to walk a different path than those before you?"
"There you err," Kivas countered, voice rising like dawn through fog. "This whole time, I always try to seek any semblance of pattern or shape in the darkness in front of me, but that is where it dawns on my mind...
"There is not a single path before me, only in my wake!"
"... What?"
"Destiny is wrought by the mad who wed folly to fortune, who wager sanity on serendipity’s edge. Effort guarantees nothing, but the inverse is also the truth!" Kivas words blazed as she rebel in the existential dillemma. "Triumph without toil is a myth, so amplify it! Labor till the veil rends, until the shadows yield to voids ripe for claiming!
"And eventually, the darkness before us turns merely into an empty space, one that we can definitely claim, one at a time."
The bird, who had been a silent sentinel till now, trilled—a voice crystalline, laced with wry approval.
"Well said."
It ballooned mid-air, feathers erupting into fur and fang, swelling to a towering wolf humanoid, sinews rippling under moon-pale pelt, crimson eyes aglow with feral glee.
Claws gripped a blade of scarlet steel, runes pulsing like heartfire, and it lunged—impaling the flowered statue’s chest in a spray of shattered petal and stone.
The corruption howled, vines withering to ash as the effigy crumbled, voice silenced in a gasp of finality.
The wolf’s form shimmered, contracting with a fluid grace, fur receding to reveal red eyes gleaming mischief, silver hair cascading in wild waves, a small frame cloaked in shadowed grays.
It was Blanchette, that little white haired rascal stood there, sword dissolving to mist in her grip, her wide poker smile splitting the surreal like a crack in porcelain.
Kivas arched a brow, surprise flickering but not shattering her poise. "To think that you would evoke such an elaborate prank on your dearest sister."
Blanchette’s grin widened, teeth flashing white against the pallor. "Nah—I’m just accelerating the reel. Felt that this loop drags if we let it spin lazy; figured a nudge toward crescendo couldn’t hurt."
Kivas crossed her arms, gaze sweeping the wreckage of the flowered statue, then the endless ranks beyond. "All this... the gallery, the loops, the legions of me. Are all of it real? Or is it another weave of a jest."
Blanchette shrugged, casual as confiding over tea, though her eyes danced with shadows only she read. "Real as the knots in your gut right now. How’s it sit? Another layer for the existential stew—broth of selves, seasoned with despair? It all sounds delicious to me~"
Kivas exhaled, a laugh bubbling low and ragged, more exhale than mirth. "Ridiculous. All of it. Quadrillions of me, whittling down to statues because the grind ground them flat?
"It’s absurd. Makes me want to flip the board just to hear it crack." Kivas smirked. "It made me feel rebellious, so that’s what I did."
Blanchette’s chuckle echoed, light and laced with something sharper, like glass in velvet. "That’s the fire I hoped you’d fan for a while. Hold that spark, Kivas—through the blaze and the ash.
"Alongside it, maybe it is time for you to start opening your eyes."
The words hung, innocuous yet insistent, and Kivas complied—blinking against the white, the statues blurring to afterimages.
Reality reasserted in fragments.
The chasm’s glow filtering through rune-light, the platform’s hum vibrating under her... not her original skin, but the new vessel’s—taller, heavier, laced with unfamiliar echoes.
At the same time, spells swirled in frantic spirals around the ceremonial bed, crimson and violet threads clashing against an encroaching foreign weave, oily and insistent, coating her severed soul and consciousness like tar.
Samael loomed closest, draconic wings flared, hurling something at the barrier that was protecting here that shattered on impact.
Her scream was raw and guttural, and so was everyone as if something bad was happening to her.
"KIIIVAAAAS!"