The sun shone fiercely golden on Asina, yet a more powerful star outshone it.

  Aloe Ayad, a woman of bygone times, knelt in the middle of the throne room, tens of soldiers surrounding her. Against such odds, one would expect the former scribe to show some hesitation, some modicum of doubt for having barged this brazenly into the pace of Asina.

  But it was the opposite.

  The ones surrounding the emerald-eyed woman trembled. Their skin sweated, their arms trembled as they gripped hard on their weapons, and their feet became unstable as the tiles of the floor had been shattered.

  They were legion, and yet, they couldn't stand up to Aloe Ayad.

  She was standing against the whole world.

  No one dared to move, they were forced into an impasse of fear. The woman of the green dress herself had forgotten that she was alive, as her chest stopped heaving up and down from breathing as well as her eyes that had gone unblinking. But it wasn't out of fear.

  But her words certainly infused fear into the very bones of every individual in the hall.

  "Should I end it all?" It was the most melodious yet devoid-of-life tone that anyone had heard in Khaffat. Soldiers were partially enticed to follow her, as grim as her words were, for they were bound by the most powerful leash of all: lust.

  The same couldn't be said for the woman standing before Aloe.

  Nai-al-Ydaz, sovereign of the Caliphate of Ydaz, matriarch to many, ruler of the civilized world, matricidal to the worst woman in all of Khaffat, froze upon hearing those words.

  She was the ruler of everything the eye could see, she had killed her own mother who was inarguably the source of all her ills but the strongest cultivator the world had seen, and yet she froze upon hearing those words.

  The Calipha had forgotten to breathe.

  The Calipha had forgotten to blink.

  Nai-al-Ydaz's gaze was fixated upon Aloe Ayad, and whilst the same was true for the former scribe, the kneeling woman wasn't seeing her. She was completely ignoring the most powerful woman in the world.

  And that scared the Calipha.

  "Should I end it all?"

  Those words were so powerful that even echoed in her mind with an unheard-of might. They echoed as if they were spoken again but directly to her mind, almost tangible too. For she knew that woman wasn't speaking about killing herself, but destroying the whole world.

  And she thought Aloe Ayad was perfectly capable of doing so.

  There was almost no doubt about it in her bones.

  There was no word other than dread to describe the feeling that was drowning her. Her mother had tortured her each day she had been alive, if not by actions, just by the sheer fact of occupying a space in her mind at all times. Yet not once, not even as she forced her to rape the woman she actually considered her mother before her did she feel so much as a grain of the freezing fear she was feeling at this very moment.

  The fact alone that she was affected by the centuries-old woman was proof enough of her world-ending cim. But what truly scared the Calipha wasn't how Aloe Ayad was alive for this long, that she had barged into her throne room wanting to kill her dead mother, or that she threatened to destroy the whole world.

  No, threats were always empty. Even if you had the will to fulfill them. Threats were only threats until the hand was brought down.

  What truly chilled her blood and made her stop flowing was how she couldn't detect the emerald-eyed woman's vitality.

  When she had met Aloe Ayad for the st time she had been a cultivator and an assassin with three Haya under her name. Now she had a single one.

  But Nai-al-Ydaz wasn't so foolish to think the former scribe had now a single Haya. It was a preposterous concept in this day and age when a single pill could get you to that amount. And besides, she had proved massive strength by shoving the throne room's building-sized stone doors open and charming all her soldiers into a standstill.

  Those feats of strength couldn't be performed with a single Haya.

  But the greatest feat of all wasn't those, but her age.

  Prior to the discovery of the pills, Nai-al-Ydaz had reaped every single day of her life to her maximum once she became the Heavenly Descendant and then increased her intake with said pills. She had managed to surpass her mother's vitality, and still, time had taken a toll on her. The Calipha was still beauty incarnate, but she no longer was a divine beauty of eternal youth, but a mature one. The beauty of a mother and not the fairy-tale princess.

  And somehow, Aloe Ayad looked younger than her.

  The former scribe of commoners wasn't young by any means, but she was the beauty of a thirty-year-old. Nai-al-Ydaz had the beauty of a forty-year-old. It was true that Aloe Ayad had always been an undeveloped woman, but that was no longer the case with her ample bosom, enticing curves, wide hips, and charming visage. This was not a trick of the eye of a more youthful body.

  This was Nurture on a scale the Calipha hadn't seen before in her long, long life.

  That single Haya of vitality was proof of everything.

  Only once in her life had Nai-al-Ydaz seen vitality – the fre of life – disappear like that. It had been when Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had used her stealth stance.

  Most sultanzade took it as a weapon of cowards, but Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had no concept of cowardice or honor. Only ruthless efficiency and extravaganza. She still remembered it, how her mother had disappeared from everyone's gaze even though the stance only provided camoufge and not invisibility. It should have been impossible to lose track of someone wielding the stealth stance, and yet they did. The Sultanah had disappeared both from the sense of sight and vitality.

  And that was the problem.

  Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had done that when she was donning the stealth stance.

  Aloe Ayad was donning the charm stance.

  In words someone with half a wit could understand, the Aloe Ayad before her had the power of a passive stance that Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had with an active stance on that fateful day.

  The Calipha's mind couldn't even wrap around that concept.

  And that was why she was paralyzed by fear.

  But she had to pull from her own reigns, otherwise the being in front of her would destroy everything she knew. Aloe Ayad would truly bring the end to everything; she had no doubt about it. And right now, Nai-al-Ydaz was the only one who could save the world.

  "Aloe Ayad," the Calipha spoke softly, but the dark-skinned woman on the ground ignored her as she instead chose to drown in her misery.

  There was a fine rope of a battlefield here. Nai-al-Ydaz didn't know how fine the line she had to walk was, but she knew that if she didn't even try, everything would be lost either way.

  So she lifted the woman by the neck.

  Or tried to.

  Aloe Ayad felt more colossal than the World Tree at that very moment. Nai-al-Ydaz had to wield the strength stance to even make the woman's limp body shift around, and she only managed to slightly shift the woman's face from the ground.

  But that was enough.

  Enough for their eyes to meet.

  Sun-blinding emeralds against glistering ambers.

  Nai-al-Ydaz knew at that moment that she wasn't a match in a battle of charms, but she had never intended to make it one. And besides, it was the worst of her stances and by a lot.

  "Aloe Ayad!" The Calipha shouted again and that got an infinitesimally small hint of cognition from the emerald eyes.

  Small, but existing.

  She knew from then onward that abrasiveness was the way forward. That was the woman Aloe Ayad remembered: Nai Asina.

  "Where is that fighting spirit when I saw you stand against three sultanzade when you were a frail girl bound to a wheelchair? Where is that rage against everything and not just my mother? The ambition? The hate? The fire? Are you just a broken toy that will mope on the ground? Are you just an infant with too much power that is throwing a tantrum? Or… are you something more? Tell me, Aloe Ayad, is this pathetic shell of a being who has been stripped of her vengeance everything that there is?"

  The charm stance made her words sound motivating and powerful. Endearing. But the truth was that Nai-al-Ydaz was scared out of her mind. Her hands weren't trembling just out of the adrenaline her body was pumping to keep her moving. This wasn't a motivational speech to keep a girl from killing herself, but a desperate cry for help from a woman trying to survive.

  The Calipha didn't see a woman before her, but a monster of incommensurable power.

  She saw Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

  Worse.

  She saw an unstable Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

  The words she had spoken had taken no effect, but the moment she had formuted those thoughts, Aloe Ayad shook as if she had read the Calipha's thoughts.

  The tree of a woman trembled and raised from her prone position. The world seemed to move around her, and in a way, it was. For most people in the throne room, she was the world to them. But for Nai-al-Ydaz, she knew the fate of said world depended on her.

  The moment Aloe Ayad stood upright, she towered over the Calipha. Nai-al-Ydaz swore the woman hadn't been that tall a moment ago, but this wasn't the moment for such trivial distractions.

  She braced herself as the gorgeous and succulent lips of the emerald-eyed woman started moving.

  "How are you alive, Nai?" Aloe Ayad spoke in a dazed manner as if the st minutes hadn't happened.

  Those weren't the words the Calipha was expecting, but… Curiosity, I can work with that. It was a result she was satisfied with. Whatever it meant for their survival.

  "It is a long story, Ayad," she shared with confidence. "I am more than willing to share it with you, but not in a pce with this many praying eyes. Could I invite you for a tea?"

  The monster in human appearance remained unmoving for a pregnant moment, still like a tree yet mighty like the whole forest. Her long hair was lush and thick like foliage. Her skin was dark like hot cocoa and glinted like grass covered in morning dew. The emeralds she had for eyes were but two new suns.

  In other words… Heavens, she is beautiful.

  The Calipha of Ydaz, the ruler of the civilized world, couldn't help but be entranced by her beauty. She had experienced the effects of the charm stance before and many times at that, but this felt different. The charm stance could feel sometimes like being spiked with aphrodisiacs, but the image she was seeing was the enthralling ndscape of nature and not a curated picture of a model overloaded with vitality and makeup.

  If she had to give it a word – a concept – it would be that of true beauty.

  All of that happened in a single moment. One that expanded for all of eternity. Then Aloe Ayad curved her lips upward in the warm smile of a mother, one she truly hadn't had.

  "Yes. I would love that." Perhaps the Calipha was bewitched by that smile but not enthralled; an important distinction. But she understood how people would murder and obey alone by that sheer image.

  Then she noticed.

  Aloe Ayad wasn't a monster.

  She was something far, far worse. More nefarious. Not a feral beast that left a trail of carnage behind its trail as it hunted, but a being that created death, war, hate, and destruction in its wake.

  Aloe Ayad was a goddess.

  Epsilon_Twilight