He tilted his head slightly, his sapphire gaze narrowing with sudden curiosity as if something about me no longer aligned with the fabric of the cosmos itself.
"What planet did you say you came from?"
I hesitated for a second, then straightened my posture and answered him despite the hollow ache echoing in my chest.
"Earth. The year was 2127... before it was destroyed, anyway."
At first, there was deafening, suffocating silence that stretched between us like the vacuum of space around us. He exhaled softly, the kind of breath that sounded more like a sigh of disappointment than shock. But then, he stood.
And I realized I had completely misjudged him.
The moment he rose from the lotus position, it was as if the very stars dimmed to accommodate his presence. His sheer scale hit me like gravity collapsing in on itself. He was five meters high, ethereal, his white robe flowing like it was woven from comets and cloud light. I hadn't known gods could look... furious.
With one motion of his hand, several holographic panels blinked into existence around him. They were written in a shifting language that danced between symbols and geometry, too alien to read, too ancient to question. His eyes scanned the panels rapidly, absorbing streams of data, flipping through time and space like they were footnotes in a forgotten book.
And then, he froze.
The panels flickered for a heartbeat, and one detail—whatever it was—made him pause. I couldn't read the data, but I knew what it was. I saw the tension in his jaw, the way his fingers twitched. His voice dropped to a low murmur.
"Erased. No longer on the registry... Not even a pulse in the…"
Then his expression shifted into something darker. His hands clenched and a quiet rumble echoed across the starlit void as he muttered under his breath.
"She was assigned that quadrant. She had one assignment. Monitor, stabilize and preserve. I gave her clear instructions. She said Earth was secure. This shouldn't have happened."
He snapped the holograms closed with a flick, and they vanished in a shimmer of golden sparks. Then he looked at me again, not as a deity gazing down at a mortal, but as someone who had failed her. His voice softened, but the weight behind it could shatter moons.
"I'm sorry, Verdamona. For the loss of your world."
But I didn't want his apology. Not when my bones still remembered the screams, the firestorms, the sky cracking in half. Not when I had buried my mother with my bare hands and watched my city turn into molten ash.
I clenched my fists, the pain too old to cry about but too fresh to forgive.
"You let it die. You could've stopped it. You're... you're a god, right? Why didn't you save us?"
He didn't argue. He didn't flinch. He didn't give me some hollow comfort like "there was nothing I could do." Instead, he looked me dead in the eyes, and gave me the truth.
"I didn't save Earth because someone else was protecting it."
His voice was even, too calm for the gravity of what he was saying.
"What?"
"Well, I'm not the one meant to protect Earth," he said, tilting his head slightly, that maddening calm never breaking. "It's outside my direct jurisdiction. There was another assigned to it. However, since this is… an exceptional circumstance, I—"
"Exceptional? More than a hundred ago, we suffered something called the Ashven Blood Rain. Billions died. It didn't just kill. It warped everything. Survivors started developing Fluxes, supernatural powers no one knew how to control. People went mad. Whole cities collapsed into chaos."
I could feel it all flooding back. Ruins beneath red skies, children born with eyes like molten glass, countries tearing themselves apart over relics they didn't understand. And he'd been meditating?
"And after the Ashven Blood Rain, we endured five more apocalyptic events. Five disasters that erased the last of our governments, our leaders, even the oceans in some places. Earth died, and where the fuck were you?"
He didn't flinch. He didn't defend himself either. He simply looked at me. And then, quietly, he said something that stopped me cold.
"I'm sorry for what you experienced. But if you don't know a thing about how the world works... you should shut up."
My jaw locked.
"Now, you mentioned six disasters. That number's not arbitrary. Tell me about the Seven. You said you were one of the Seven."
I swallowed hard, throat dry.
"There was an oracle," I said carefully. "During the fifth disaster, she appeared and said there were seven warriors who bore the full force of the world's pain. That they were the strongest of all of us. They tried to save the planet. They failed."
He went still.
Then, slowly, he raised a hand and summoned the holograms again. They appeared instantly, glyphs spinning in complex circles, data moving faster than light. He murmured something in a tongue that vibrated in my bones. It wasn't meant for mortals.
And then his face twisted not in confusion but in realization.
"So that's what happened. Humanity wasn't a victim. You... ruined yourselves."
I said nothing.
"The Ashven Blood Rain wasn't random. It was a gift from the gods. Your world was rich in potential, so much so, we gave you more leeway than most mortal realms. And what did you do with it?"
He flipped one of the panels. I caught a glimpse of something that looked like footage of wars, nuclear detonations, mechanical monstrosities tearing apart forests the size of continents.
"You poisoned your oceans with the power we gave. You broke your sky. You turned your dead into weapons. And when the gods sent warnings, you ignored them. You even made a World War III in 2040 for a decade, did you not? So the gods sent six disasters. They weren't accidents. They were your reckoning."
He looked down at me, his eyes no longer curious.
"Maybe I shouldn't have apologized at all. Not when you did this to yourselves."
I felt my heart drop like a stone in space.
I wanted to scream again. I wanted to claw at him, tell him we weren't all evil. That we tried. That people like me and the Seven had fought. That we bled for every child we saved, every city we rebuilt. But I couldn't. Not when I had seen what humanity did in those years. Not when the blood on our hands matched the sky.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything.
Then I spoke, quietly.
"So... what happens now?"