The limousine glided to a halt within the Spire's inner sanctum, its obsidian chassis reflecting the towering monument like a dark mirror. Before them, Amaterasu's palace rose—a symphony of alabaster and gilt, its every edge kissed by sunlight. The central orb at its apex pulsed with molten radiance, rotating in perfect mimicry of the celestial body it honored, casting prismatic fractals across the courtyard. The air here smelled of ozone and something older, like scorched parchment and sanctified incense.
Inside the vehicle, silence clung thicker than the plush velvet seats. The four archaeologists sat stiffly, their families a buffer of nervous warmth between them. The lead scientist—tall, gaunt, conspicuously alone—felt the weight of wrongness settle in his bones. Why summon scientists to the goddess's throne? This was rarely priestly domain. His fingers twitched against his knee, the ghost of cave dirt still beneath his nails.
The door swung open. A Royal Scout stood framed in sunlight, his uniform blinding white, the gold embroidery catching fire in the noon glare. He was broad as a bull, his corded neck straining against the high collar, yet his face held the serene cruelty of a honed blade. "Step out."
They obeyed, shuffling onto the marble promenade. The lead scientist's stomach lurched. Behind the Scout, two more sentinels flanked the castle's entrance—statues given breath. Their eyes tracked the group with mechanical precision, pupils contracting like rifle scopes.
One misstep, the scientist thought, and we'll be ash before we hit the ground.
The families huddled closer. The female archaeologist clutched her daughter's shoulder, the child's braids brushing against a pendant of Shintoist Saint. To their left, a man whispered to his brother in the dialect of the Eastern slums, the words swallowed by the scrape of polished shoes on stone.
"Proceed."
The command slithered down their spines. They moved as one, their footsteps echoing in the cavernous yard. The Spire loomed larger with each step, its gates—twenty feet of engraved bronze—yawned wider, revealing a sliver of the sanctum beyond. The motifs told stories: Amaterasu's birth from the primordial void, her battle with the Moon Eater, the bestowal of fire upon the unworthy. The scientist's throat tightened. Those scripts in the cave… they spoke of older wars, spewed different tales?
The gates groaned inward, their movement slow as a dying breath. Golden light spilled forth, painting the procession in divine judgment. The lead scientist glimpsed the antechamber—a vaulted nave of pearl-inlaid arches, where shadows pooled like spilled ink beneath the colonnades. Something hummed in the air, a frequency just beyond hearing. The child whimpered.
Then—
A flicker. High above, in the Spire's orbiting rings, a sigil flared crimson. The scientist's pulse stuttered. He knew that symbol. It matched the glyphs they'd unearthed in the cave, the ones buried beneath strata of forgotten time.
The gates stood fully open now. The Scout's voice came again, softer, deadlier: "Her Radiance awaits."
But the scientist hesitated. The script fragments in his satchel seemed to burn against his hip. Whatever lay beyond those doors—whatever game the goddess played—they were no longer just archaeologists.
They were pawns stepping onto a board older than the Spire itself.
And the rules, he suspected, had already been written in blood.
The procession had barely taken three steps when another Royal Scout materialized behind them, his footfalls silent as falling ash. In his gloved hands, he carried an ornate case—obsidian chased with veins of gold, its seams sealed with a mechanism that whispered of ancient craftsmanship. The lock bore Amaterasu's crest: a stylized sunburst with eight radiating points. It pulsed faintly, as though something inside thrummed with a heartbeat of its own.
The scientists and their families moved forward, their breaths shallow, their footsteps muffled by the cavernous hall. Ahead, the second set of doors—twin monoliths of white jade inlaid with constellations of topaz—parted with a sigh. More Scouts stood sentinel here, their gazes sharp enough to flay skin from bone. The little girl, her fingers tangled in her mother's, giggled at the shimmering patterns underfoot, oblivious to the tension coiling around the adults like smoke. Her father's jaw was rigid; his wife's knuckles had gone pale around their child's hand. Why us? The question hung unspoken in the air, thick as the incense curling from braziers shaped like coiled serpents.
Then—the throne room.
Solar grandeur erupted before them, a vision wrought by divine hands. The chamber stretched upward into a vaulted zenith, where frescoes of creation spiraled across the dome. There, in strokes of lapis and gold, the myth unfolded: Amaterasu and her three celestial allies—the Weaver of Flesh, the Forger of Mountains, and the Whisperer of Winds—spinning the cosmos from the void's raw threads. They blew galaxies into being with a breath, sculpted continents from celestial clay, kindled the first souls with embers stolen from the heart of a dying star. The scientists' eyes darted like startled birds, torn between reverence and dread. These were not just stories. The cave glyphs had shown the same figures—but in those carvings, the gods wielded blades, not blessings.
Lava fountains flanked the walkway, their molten cores contained within pillars of transparent quartz. The heat should have scorched the air, yet the room held the crisp coolness of high-altitude dawn. Everything was either white—the marble floors, the mother-of-pearl mosaics—or gold: the filigree vines climbing the columns, the suspended lanterns shaped like captured supernovae.
And there, upon a dais that rose like the crest of a frozen wave, sat Amaterasu.
Fifteen feet above them, she was both woman and monument. Her hair cascaded in rivers of ink-black silk, threaded with strands of gold that caught the light like solar flares. The kimono she wore was a masterpiece of restraint: snow-white silk painted with barely-there patterns of the celestial dance, its obi a single stripe of molten gold. Her face was a mask of perfect serenity, but her eyes—amber flecked with burning copper—held the weight of epochs. Above her, eight miniature suns orbited in a slow, hypnotic waltz, their light painting her in gradients of dawn and high noon.
The throne itself was a marvel—a fusion of alabaster and gilt, its back arched like the wings of a phoenix mid-flight. The armrests tapered into stylized flames, and the seat seemed to hover a finger's breadth above the dais, defying gravity as effortlessly as the goddess defied time. At its base, two more Scouts knelt, their heads bowed but their hands resting on the pommels of sun-forged blades.
The little girl gasped, her free hand reaching toward the floating orbs. Her mother yanked her back with a hissed warning. The scientists stood paralyzed, caught between the urge to prostrate themselves and the animal instinct to flee. The lead archaeologist's throat burned with unshed questions. That case the Scout carried—the glyphs in the cave—the way Amaterasu's gaze lingered a heartbeat too long on him, as though she could see the script fragments burning a hole in his satchel.
The air itself held its breath.
Somewhere, a chime sounded—a single, crystalline note that shivered down the spine of the world.
The goddess leaned forward, just slightly.
And waited.
The command cracked through the throne room like a whip of solar fire. "Stop."
The procession froze mid-step, their bodies locked in sudden paralysis. Only the Scout carrying the case moved forward, his polished boots whispering against the marble as he closed the final six feet to the base of the dais. With ritual precision, he knelt—one knee pressed to the ground, the other bent in supplication—and raised the case toward the goddess as though offering a sacrifice to an unquenchable flame.
"Bow."
The weight of the word pressed upon their shoulders like a physical force. The scientists and their families bent forward, foreheads nearly brushing the cold floor. The female archaeologist gripped her daughter's neck, forcing the child down as the little girl whimpered, confusion knotting her brow. The air itself seemed to thicken, heavy with the scent of ozone and something older—burnt parchment, the iron tang of divinity.
Amaterasu gazed down at them, her amber eyes half-lidded. There was no malice in her expression, only the detached indifference of a goddess observing insects beneath her heel. For an eternity stretched thin, she simply watched, her silence more terrible than any condemnation.
Then—movement.
She rose from her throne in a single, fluid motion, her kimono pooling around her like liquid moonlight. There was no sound as she floated forward, no shift in the air to mark her descent. Her feet, hidden beneath the silk, never touched the ground; she hovered a hair's breadth above it, as though the earth itself was unworthy of her tread. The eight miniature suns orbiting her throne pulsed in time with her steps, their light casting long, trembling shadows across the bowed figures.
She stopped an inch from the kneeling Scout.
"Is this all of it?" Her voice was melody and menace intertwined, each syllable crisp as a scalpel's edge.
The Scout's reply was a study in controlled deference. "Yes, Your Majesty. It is all that they granted us." His tone, so different from the barked orders he'd given the scientists, was velvet over steel.
A beat. Amaterasu's head tilted, just slightly. "Vague answer."
The Scout's fingers twitched around the case. Though his face remained hidden, the goddess saw the fear anyway—in the minute tremor of his shoulders, the way his breath hitched. She always saw.
Her gaze lifted, scanning the prostrate forms before her. "Who is the leading scientist?"
The lead archaeologist's spine turned to ice. "It is I, Goddess. I am the lead archaeologist here." His voice emerged as a rasp, scraped raw by the weight of her attention.
"Arise."
Mario Clawford pushed himself up slowly, his muscles protesting as though moving through tar. The throne room swam in his vision—a dizzying panorama of gold and white, the lava fountains' glow painting his skin in feverish hues. He dared not meet her eyes. The air around her warped, not with heat, but with something deeper, something that made his atoms ache in protest.
"What is your name, child?"
The question was a blade pressed to his throat. He swallowed, his mouth a desert. "Mario Clawford, Your Majesty." His name sounded foreign on his own tongue, a brittle thing.
Her gaze flickered over him, then back to the case. "Tell me, Clawford. Is this all you and your team gathered in your expedition?"
Every instinct screamed at him to lie. But the weight of her stare pinned him in place, dissecting him layer by layer. "Y-Yes, Your Majesty. That is everything we were able to collect."
A pause. The room held its breath.
Amaterasu took the case from the Scout. Her fingers, slender and flawless, brushed the lock—and it clicked open without her touching it. The lid lifted, revealing the contents: fragments of ancient script, their glyphs still caked with cave dust.
Her eyes darted across them, parsing secrets carved in dead tongues. A tilt of her head—almost curious. Then—
—nothing.
In the space between heartbeats, the case and its contents sublimed. No flash of light, no roar of flame. One moment, history rested in her hands; the next, it was simply gone, erased from existence as thoroughly as a sigh in a hurricane.
Mario's stomach dropped. He'd expected violence, perhaps. A rebuke. Not this… unmaking. The absence was louder than any explosion.
Then the realization struck him like a physical blow: She burned them.
Not with fire, but with something far older, far crueler. The findings—the proof of histories she'd, by his understanding, deemed forbidden—were now less than ash. They were never.
And in that moment, Mario Clawford understood the true reason they'd been summoned.
This was no audience.
It was a purge.
The goddess's voice, when it came again, was softer now, almost gentle. "Tell me, child…" She stepped closer, her shadow swallowing him whole. "What did you see in those caves?"
The question hung in the air, a guillotine's blade poised to fall.
And Mario knew, with crystalline clarity, that his next words would decide whether he left this room alive.
Amaterasu murders the archaeologists and researchers who found the evidence