108

108
Astella's POV

"The Architects are not the first to offer," I declare, my brown eyes surveying the faces of our supernatural allies as the twins dance with urgent insight within my swollen belly. My face, its pallor reflecting the psychic pressure of all that mystical energy I'm handling, now looks like it's doing the squeezing. “The twins are sharing memories with me – not their own, memories from the Devourer.”

Thane inches closer to me, his wide shoulders bunched with an urge to protect, even though his green eyes are scouring my face for signs of the mental distress I’m going through. "What kind of memories?"

"It's the first Alpha King that was the Devourer," I say, feeling the twisted being's torment through our otherworldly bond. “His appetite for unity magic wasn’t always so insatiable. Long before the Architects twisted him, he was a man like you—a man endeavoring to protect his people, grappling for peace in a world drowning in supernatural war."

The great Bulk of the Devourer trembles, and for an instant, a corrupted mask over noble features glimpses the centuries of ravenous hunger. When it does speak, the voice is redolent of the leader it used to be. “She sees truth in her still-unborn children. I was King Matthias Blackthorne, werewolf lord of the united territories that had existed when memories of the Great Schism seared our world."

"The Great Schism?" Queen Titania inquires, her voice ghostly and filled with ages-old wisdom that causes her moonlight hair to appear brighter than before. "You tempted as war which broke the supernatural world into territories. It is more than two thousand years since I myself did it."

“I can remember it as if it was yesterday,” the creature says, a strain in its many inflections. “Vampires literally sucked entire packs of werewolves dry in order to expand their wars. Witches lit the sacred fae groves afire to fuel their most devastating magicks. Werewolf packs attacked vampire nests in vampire strongholds, making lairs and havens into bloody battlegrounds. The world was dying from our hatred.

And via the twins’ bond, I can feel the gravity of those ancient conflicts pressing against my mind like a physical weight. The distortions were so severe it nearly rent holes in reality, generating dimensions-high weak spots between worlds that have never entirely healed. “That’s how the Architects first made it into our it world,” I realize out loud. “These supernatural wars opened up dimensional wounds that made them possible for plundering.”

“Yes,” Matthias sighs, his twisted shape seeming to droop in sorrow at the heaviness of age-old regret. They came to me at the height of the Schism Wars, it seemed that it would be the end of all supernatural life. They gave me the ability to control everyone and bring them to one race, make myself strong enough to make that fight end using contemptible strength.”

And you did because you had no other choice." Understanding fills Lord Valerian's ancient voice. The pallid face is filled with empathy rather than scorn for the untenable position the Alpha King of old was in. "You chose to defile you soul rather than die out as a race."

"The process was. “… slow,” Matthias goes on, his voice trailing off into something almost too quiet to hear. "First they've pumped up my werewolfness, and I'm faster and stronger than any Alpha that ever breathed. Then they started adopting characteristics of other supernatural races — vampire speed, witch craft, fae glamour. I thought I was getting stronger.”

“But you were being less of yourself,” I whisper, my tears flow down my pale cheeks as the twins reveal to me the full meaning of what was done to him. “They were not adding to your nature but taking it away and replacing it, bit by piece, with something else until very little left of the original Matthias.

“By the time I understood what was happening, it was already too late,” he concedes, his hulking frame shivering with emotion. "I'd already taken in dozens of other supernaturals who'd taken similar 'enhancements'." We turned into a hive mind fueled by a fake consumerist emptiness that we simply made up just to bridge one another's gaps."

Thane’s hand locates mine, his rough fingers lacing through my more delicate ones as he takes in this news. The Architects do not bring about any unity at all. They generate weapons that are meant to annihilate the variety of the supernatural by making everything the same.”

"Exactly," Matthias confirms. “And now they’ve come upon your reality, for you’re doing this on your own—naturally unified, you’re achieving this by choice, without force. They want to corrupt your method before it can demonstrate that their method is not necessary.”

But as we take in this knowledge, the twins reveal something to me that speeds my heart with hope, not fear. Through their link to forces of the beyond in our reality, they’ve picked up on something the Architects didn’t anticipate—other planes of existence where magical entities elsewhere found alternative routes to togetherness, ones that did not involve outside interference to bring about forced mergers.

"There are other truths," I proclaim, my voice getting louder and stronger as this truth courses through me. "Worlds where the supernatural races established a natural balance hundreds of years ago. They’ve been watching us try, and the are getting ready to help us succeed, where so many others in the past have failed.'

"How is that possible?" The magic ripples are swarming around us and High Priestess Morgana turns to me, wrinkled hands latched onto her staff. “If there were other realities unified, why haven’t they been involved in this before?”

“And because intervention from other realities can be as corrupting as that from the Architects,” Elder Raven explains, and I let her ancient wisdom give some context to what it is we’re seeing. “They had to wait until we find our own way, our own sense of what unity really means.

The sky beyond us seems to ripple like summer pavement, and in the distortion I can catch sight of impossible landscapes. Cities where werewolf packs prowl opposite vampire covens along with witch gardens and fae glades. Schools where all manner of supernatural creatures are brought together to learn, sharing immemorial wisdom that has only been amplified, not erased, by their shared power. Families in which children can take on various traits from more than one supernatural parent, but without losing their essential selves.

They’re pushing through,” I whisper, my voice filled with wonder as the walls between dimensions weaken around us. “Not to fight our fights for us, but to show us what’s possible when unity is achieved not through force but through understanding.”

However, the first waves of these triumphant fates bring forth a longing of the Architects' vortex of space. The geometry above is angry bright and alien voices resonate in our skulls vibrating our bones.

“No interference will be tolerated,” chimes the voices of the Architects, the alien cadence of their threat stretching across worlds. "The swarming unity realities threaten the cosmic structure we have built. They are all shall fit in within our design or they will be cast into the void."

"You see?" I’m not a monster, Matthias growls, beholden to the Architects’ rip, his contempt scalding like acid in his distorted voices. "They cannot tolerate successful natural solidarity the same way they cannot tolerate trial lawyers or anyone else who prove to society that they are not merely unnecessary but actively destructive. If your kind of realities continue to thrive, their entire cosmic empire is rendered obsolete.”

The truth of it hits me like a punch to my gut as the twins’ wisdom flows into my own. The Architects aren't just trying to pervert our unity ritual—they're trying to ensure that natural supernatural unity never exists anywhere in the multiverse.

They have been selectively erasing and perverting every reality in which a truce between supernatural species was actually achieved.

“This is not just our world,” I whisper, my brown eyes staring at him wide, and Lord knows how wide the truth that we are up against really is. “It’s not just our unity that we’re fighting for. We're pushing for the ability of every supernatural creature across every reality to determine its own path to cooperation.”

The dimension-shimmers strengthen, and through the expanding dimensional tears, I can see our counterparts from successful realities starting to appear—us and our allies from the successful realities, each of whom found a different but equally valid way to exist in harmony with the supernatural. But I can also see the Architects gathering resources across dimensions to halt this confluence before it becomes critical.

"Get ready everyone," Thane orders, his Alpha King voice telling us all what we are up against. "We're going into war with these other different multiverses. The stakes aren’t just the future of our world — they’re the future of supernatural free will throughout the multiverse.”

But as the first rents fix well enough I can travel between worlds, the twins offer me one last, terrible insight. The Architects haven’t just been seducing those who would attempt to maintain unity—the refinement of failed unity efforts have been a recruiting tool for them, building an army of Multiversal henchmen that will do as they say in all realities. And that army is about to heard toward our location and attempt to end natural supernatural harmony FOREVER.