Chapter 215: Beginning (XV)
"Twins?"
The word stumbled past Erin Volter’s dry, trembling lips like a fragile glass marble dropping onto stone. She stared at the Doom Overseer, her green eyes wide with an erratic mixture of shock, confusion, and rising dread. "Are... are you saying I am going to have twins?"
The majestic teal beast did not immediately answer. It remained sitting in the center of her living room, its long, deep-blue ribbon antlers swaying in a gentle, non-existent breeze. Its emerald eye held a profound, ancient calm that contrasted sharply with Erin’s spiraling panic.
Slowly, the Overseer shook its heavy head.
"No, Erin Volter," the beast’s harmonious telepathic voice vibrated gently within her mind. "They are not twins. They shall not share the same birth. They will be born under different skies, in different times, bound by a single destiny."
The declaration hung in the quiet air of the wooden house like a heavy fog.
"Not... not twins?" Erin whispered, her voice barely audible.
The feline beast offered no further elaboration. It simply bowed its head in quiet reverence, stood up with fluid, silent grace, and glided out of the wooden house, leaving her alone with the staggering weight of its prophecy.
That night, sleep was an impossibility.
Erin lay on her narrow wooden bed, staring up at the polished timber ceiling as twilight deepened into the dark, bruised-purple night of Rilth. Every time she closed her eyes, the Overseer’s words echoed in her ears, louder than the howling wind outside.
How was she going to bear two children?
She was a prisoner on a floating mountain in the origin world of monsters, held captive by the Supreme Overlord—a primordial entity who had confessed to unleashing the apocalypse upon her home planet. Was Roshhide ever going to send her back to Earth? Or was she doomed to live out her remaining days trapped in this beautiful, alien cage?
Internal questions clawed at her mind, tearing her logical discipline to shreds. If she ever did return to Earth, how could she face humanity? Would she ever find a normal man to marry? Could she ever live the quiet, peaceful life of a normal woman—building a home, raising a family without the shadow of gates, blood, and monsters hanging over her?
The anxiety became a physical weight, pressing down on her chest until she could barely breathe. Erin sat up abruptly on the edge of her bed, her silver-white hair falling wildly over her pale shoulders. Her heart hammered violently against her ribs like a trapped bird.
This was all so impossibly, brutally messed up.
Then, a sharp spark of indignance ignited within her chest. She squeezed her fists tightly into the thin fabric of her blanket.
’I am an Oracle,’ Erin reminded herself, her jaw clenching against the despair. ’I possess the sight as well. If that feline beast can look into the ocean of time and see my fate... why can’t I look for myself?’
Driven by a desperate need for answers, Erin pulled her legs up and crossed them on the wooden mattress. She took a slow, deep, grounding breath, forcing her erratic pulse to steady.
Closing her eyes, she turned her consciousness inward, reaching for the Core deep in her body. Following the exact mental disciplines the Doom Overseer had taught her over the past two days, she aligned her breathing with the pulse of her internal mana.
She stopped fighting the dark energy. Instead, she let her spirit float upon it, pushing her mind beyond the boundaries of her physical body, stepping out into the world beyond.
SWOOSH.
The physical realm dissolved entirely.
Erin found herself standing in a realm devoid of light, sound, or gravity. It was a secluded, desolate plane—the spiritual threshold where past, present, and future ceased to exist.
It was the place of all beginnings.
The atmosphere here was suffocatingly heavy, saturated with a cold, primordial dread that made her soul shiver. In the vast, infinite darkness surrounding her, she felt them—countless invisible, eldritch entities lurking in the gloom. Cold, ancient, and grotesque eyes were fixed upon her fragile human soul, watching her every movement with hungry curiosity.
Primal terror screamed in the back of her mind, demanding that she turn around and flee back to the safety of her physical body.
’No,’ Erin told herself fiercely, her spiritual form trembling. ’Do not turn back. You must not look at them.’
Remembering the Overseer’s instructions, she kept her focus locked strictly forward. She swallowed hard, trying to anchor her intent. She needed a tether. She needed to direct her consciousness toward a specific point.
What did she want to see? Did she want to see her future? Did she want to see her children? Did she want to see if she ever made it back home?
But midway through the spiritual expanse, her focus fractured.
The staggering infinity of the temporal ocean overwhelmed her mind. Millions of glowing threads of fate crisscrossed through the dark void like a blinding spiderweb. Erin grew confused, her thoughts tangling. What was her actual question? What was she supposed to find? In her hesitation, her spiritual anchor slipped.
Without a tether to hold her, the currents of time seized her consciousness.
"No—!" Erin gasped, but her voice was swallowed by the void.
She was violently yanked into a random point, dragged kicking and screaming through a blinding, agonizing vortex of light and shadow. She couldn’t tell if she was being thrown into the far future or the distant past.
Suddenly, reality slammed back into her senses with the force of a falling mountain.
Erin felt the cold, hard impact of stone beneath her body. The air was thick, humid, and nauseatingly sour, carrying the metallic stench of fresh rust and copper.
She tried to move, but her limbs felt like heavy lead. She looked down at her chest. A thick, dark pool of blood was expanding beneath her form, soaking through her clothes and pooling onto the white marble. She was bleeding out.
Panic seized her. Erin opened her mouth, trying to scream for help, to anyone—but her throat was a ruined, jagged mess. No sound escaped her lips, save for a wet, gurgling rasp of air.
Through her failing, blood-smeared vision, she desperately looked around her surroundings.
Standing just a few feet away in the shadows were two Calamity Beasts. They weren’t majestic or noble like the Doom Overseer; they were feral, grotesque abominations with glowing red eyes, their jaws dripping with saliva as they watched her die.
And then, footsteps echoed against the stone.
Out of the deep darkness, a tall figure stepped forward. Erin tried to lift her head to see the person’s face, but her vision was spinning into blackness. Before she could process who it was, the figure raised a heavy boot and delivered a brutal, merciless kick directly into her ribs.
The impact shattered what remained of her life force. Dark oblivion claimed her.
BOOM!
Erin’s consciousness was violently thrown back across the dimensional veil, slamming with catastrophic force back into her physical body.
"AHHHHHHHHHHH—!"
Erin bolted upright on her bed, letting out a raw, blood-curdling shriek that tore through the quiet night.
Her physical vessel rejected the trauma. Erin tumbled off the bed, crashing hard onto the wooden floorboards. She dropped to her hands and knees, her entire body convulsing as she began to vomit blood and dark bile onto the floor.
Her head felt as though a white-hot iron spike had been driven straight through her left eye and dragged across her brain. The agony was so profound, so utterly excruciating, that her vision turned completely white. She clutched her head with both hands, screaming hysterically as her mind tore itself apart.
She had died. She had physically felt her breath leaving her lungs. She had felt her throat bleeding out. She had experienced her own murder in the future!
The excruciating pain in her skull reached an unbearable peak. Erin’s screams abruptly cut off, her eyes rolling back into her head as dark unconsciousness dragged her under once again.