Chapter 80: Vial of Fate

Ouroboros looked at me with a small, definite smile and whispered, "If it were normal times, I would have killed you. But considering that you saved my life, I suppose I have to return the favor. Eh?"

I couldn’t answer him.

It was not out of fear, exactly, though there was plenty of that too.

It was the pressure. A vast and invisible weight that had settled over the entire hilltop the moment he had stepped free of the smoke, the spiritual pressure was so absolute it felt less like standing near something powerful and more like standing at the bottom of an ocean I had no business being submerged in.

Words piled up somewhere behind my teeth and simply refused to come any further.

A door bloomed open beside me, magical tracing spinned lazily along its edges before it split apart and released a low curl of fog.

Theodore, Mary, and Sera stepped through.

I watched all the color drain out of their faces the instant they saw him.

Ouroboros laughed, low and warm, entirely unbothered by five terrified teenagers staring at him like he might unmake reality on a whim, which, given everything I ha just witnessed, seemed like a fairly reasonable thing to be worried about.

"Hahaha. Well, let’s start with introductions."

I forced the words out first, my voice barely holding steady. "I am Edmund Rhys, Your Eminence."

"Arthur Eesper, Your Eminence."

"Sera Rhys, Your Eminence."

"Mary June, Your Eminence."

"Theodore Hans, Your Eminence."

He looked over each of us in turn, unhurried, almost fond, the way someone might look over a set of gifts they hadn’t expected but were pleasantly surprised by.

"I am the Supreme Angel of Fate," he said, and something in his voice shifted, deepened, carrying an authority that seemed to settle into the ground itself. "The Grace of Destiny. The Spirit of Time. Ouroboros."

My heart trembled at the sound of it, an instinctive, bone-deep reaction that had nothing to do with choice.

Supreme... It was somewhere far above whatever rank a Saint like Tony occupied, in territory I hadn’t even known existed until this exact moment, let alone dared to imagine standing anywhere near.

"Well, Edmund." His deep crimson eyes settled on me again, and I fought the urge to take a step back. "Since you’re the lucky soul who pulled me out of my own dreaming, the reward belongs to you."

He summoned a small glass vial out of thin air, and the moment it existed, I felt it, a strange, heavy resonance pressing against my senses, the kind of feeling that told you, without needing an explanation, that whatever this was mattered far more than its size suggested.

A thin needle extended from the vial’s tip. Without any hesitation at all, he pressed it into his own fingertip and drew a small bead of blood free.

It wasn’t red like humans.

It was gold and gleaming and thick, and inside it, impossibly, I could make out tiny illusory wheels, each one marked with twelve delicate points, spinning slowly in place like something measuring out increments of a clock only it could see.

He tossed the vial toward me, and I caught it on reflex, my hands moving faster than my thoughts.

[You Have Acquired A New Gift]

[Vial of Fate]

[Description: Contains The Ichor of Ouroboros]

[Rank: Mythical]

I stared at the word Mythical for a long moment, feeling distinctly like I had just been handed something far too heavy for my hands to hold, metaphorically if not literally.

"Now," Ouroboros continued, folding his hands behind his back, "I’ll tell you two things."

I nodded, not trusting my voice yet.

"First. You can use that to create a Good Luck Charm. Wear it as a locket, and it will produce a small amount of good fortune every day, for at least two hundred years before it fades. To make it, simply pour your own spiritual power into the vial, and it will do the rest on its own."

"Or," he continued, "you could create a Time Card instead. Use it, and you’ll be pulled three minutes into the past along with the enviornment. It will give you five uses, total, before it’s spent. To make that version, you’ll need spiritual power drawn from three separate sources, along with an Eye of Fate Stealing Spirit. You’ll find one buried somewhere beneath the Soul World. Use my name if you need the doors to open faster."

I swallowed hard, trying to memorize every word before the weight of everything else happening crowded it back out of my head.

"Second." His smile didn’t fade, but something in his tone sharpened, just slightly, into something closer to an actual warning. "Head toward that mountain, if you want what you actually came here for. There are mortals there as well."

I glanced toward the distant peak we had spotted earlier from the hilltop, the one separated from us by that long stretch of flat, empty black earth, and felt my stomach twist with the sudden, dizzying realization that whatever waited there was apparently important enough for a Supreme Angel to mention by name.

"Goodbye," Ouroboros said, still smiling, entirely too pleasant for someone about to vanish from the mortal world with zero further explanation.

His body shifted.

Flesh and armor dissolved into something that looked less like matter and more like compressed starlight, a swirling, q condensed knot of cosmic rock and glittering dust, and then he simply wasn’t there anymore, he was gone in a streak of light too fast for my eyes to properly track, already halfway to the horizon before I had even fully processed that he had moved at all.

The pressure lifted all at once, and I staggered, my knees nearly buckling with the sudden absence of it.

For a long moment, none of us said anything.

Then Theodore let out a long, shaky breath. "Okay. So. Anyone else feel like we just got recruited into something way, way above our pay grade?"

"That would be an understatement," Mary said quietly.

I looked down at the small glass vial still clutched in my hand, gold ichor swirling faintly inside it, twelve tiny wheels still turning in perfect, patient silence, and found I didn’t have a single argument to offer against that.