Chapter Text
The weight of the heavens did not feel like stone, nor did it feel like lead. It felt like an endless, suffocating ocean of cold iron, pressing down with the absolute authority of a universe demanding submission.
Artemis stood at the epicenter of the crushing expanse, her divine knees trembling, silver armor cracked like fine porcelain. Strands of moonlit hair clung to her blood-streaks and sweat-slicked brow. Goddess or not, the sky was tearing her apart.
Then came a mortal.
Cordelia "Ely" Jackson stepped into the epicenter of the shattered earth. Her boots crunched against dust that had never seen a sunrise, her breathing already ragged from the sheer divine pressure radiating through the air.
"Step back, Lady Artemis," Ely choked out, her voice a fragile reed against the howling abyss.
Artemis looked up, shock flashing through eyes the color of a winter sky. "Mortal... no. You will be ground to ash."
"Then let me burn," Ely gritted her teeth, stepping directly into the shadow of the celestial dome. She reached up, her hands trembling violently as her palms met the underside of the crushing expanse.
For a single breath, as their hands brushed and the transfer began, their eyes met.
Artemis did not look at her with pity. In the goddess’s silver gaze was a tempest of emotion: a fierce, radiant pride in the audacity of a human, a solemn, crushing gratitude, and a piercing thread of divine concern for the sacrifice unfolding before her.
Ely couldn't speak. She couldn't draw breath. But through the agonizing strain rending her muscles and shattering her bones, she offered Artemis a single, strained, knowing smile.
I've carried worse, the smile whispered.
Then Artemis fell back, free, and the sky collapsed onto Ely.
BANG.
It wasn't a sound in her ears; it was an explosion inside her soul.
The physical agony was immediate—ribs groaning under impossible pressure, skin rupturing, the taste of copper flooding her throat. But as her body teetered on the knife-edge of death, something far deeper snapped.
Under the unbearable hydraulic press of the sky, the invisible seals binding her spirit cracked wide open.
The dam burst.
Tingen Town. A revolver on a wooden desk. Cold gray fog.
Red gloves. A cracked monocle smiling in the dark. The smell of cheap tea and dim sum.
"We saved Backlund."
A top hat. Wandering through the cosmos. Crimson stars twinkling in an endless void.
Two lives smashed together like tectonic plates.
Ely—no, Klein—screamed, a sound swallowed entirely by the roaring sky above. The sensory overload was agonizing. She was a young woman crushing her hands against a Greek sky, and she was a Fool waking up in a room drenched in blood. She was Cordelia, feeling the frost bite her cheeks, and she was Klein, feeling the slippery, maddening tentacles of the Spirit World slithering beneath his skin.
The memories didn't drift in gently; they flooded her shattered nervous system like hot lead. The laughter of the Tarot Club, the smell of gunpowder, the terror of Amon, the sorrow of a lost home—all of it collided with the terrified, fierce heart of a girl dying under the weight of the heavens.
Her eyes snapped open. They were no longer merely human, nor were they entirely mortal. Beneath the tears and dust, a faint, swirling vortex of gray fog flickered in the depths of her pupils.
Her spine straightened by a fraction of a millimeter beneath the weight of the universe.
The pain was terrifying. The noise was deafening.
But amidst the roaring sky and colliding lifetimes, the Fool had opened her eyes.