Chapter 793: 793

Even in the depths of a drunken stupor, Tweet and Boros seemed to be nursing their grudge. Between heavy snores, one would lazily attempt to kick the other, while the second would shove back with a limp, uncoordinated arm, trying to reclaim his personal space.

Ikenga felt the heavy, judgmental weight of the other gods’ stares. Crepuscular reached out, tapping Ikenga’s shoulder with a distinctly mocking grin. "You truly are unique, brother. It stands to reason that those in your orbit would possess... similar quirks."

Ikenga didn’t miss a beat, glancing sideways at him. "Does that assessment include you, then? Seeing as you consider yourself so close to me?"

The question caught Crepuscular off guard. He stammered, floating backward a few inches as he raised his hands in a defensive gesture. "I... I believe I must have worded that poorly."

Ikenga rolled his eyes and knelt in the grass beside the sleeping Tweet. He reached out and poked the man’s cheek. Tweet blindly swatted the finger away, murmuring into the dirt, "I’m home... just let me sleep."

A genuine smile touched Ikenga’s lips. He reached out again, his fingertips beginning to pulse with a vibrant, golden-green light. He pressed a finger to Tweet’s forehead, and the divine blessing surged forward, instantly washing away the haze of the alcohol and clearing the man’s mind.

Tweet’s dream fractured, the hazy comfort of sleep stripped away as his senses surged back to life. The first thing he felt wasn’t the grass beneath him, but the crushing weight of five vast, celestial presences. They pressed against the air like a physical force, one of them looming directly over him with a sharp, familiar intensity.

Cracking his eyes open, Tweet found himself staring directly into Ikenga’s smiling face. He blinked, looking past his patron to find the other four Origin Gods watching him with unblinking, ancient eyes.

Instead of fear, a spark of electric excitement ignited in his chest. He had felt this coming. Ever since his return home, a restless shadow had followed him, a nagging sense that he was drifting, under-accomplished and stagnant. While he watched Boros fulfill her grim but necessary function for the cursed spirits, he had simply sat and let the days dissolve into drink.

But seeing the Five gathered here, he knew the drift was over. His purpose had finally arrived.

Ikenga straightened, floating back to join the line of his siblings. Tweet didn’t hesitate; he scrambled from the dirt and immediately dropped to one knee, his head bowed low in the grass.

"This humble one bows before the Origin Gods," he said, his voice steady despite the thrumming power in the air.

Crepuscular drifted forward, the crystal pulsing faintly in his palm. "Do you know what this is, Tweet?" he asked, his voice scorching that the hairs on Tweet’s head fringed.

Tweet lifted his head, his gaze locked onto the stone. The moment he focused, the world around him dissolved. He wasn’t looking at a crystal anymore; he was staring into the abyss of the cosmos. He saw stars birthing in nebulae, gas giants swirling in silent majesty, and endless, untethered worlds spinning in the dark.

With a flick of his wrist, Crepuscular closed his hand. The vision snapped shut, leaving Tweet breathless and struck dumb.

"This is the Key," Crepuscular declared. "It is our bridge to the infinite. It is how we reach out to claim new worlds, to draw them into our origin and bolster our strength through conquest."

Jaus drifted forward, his shadow looming over the kneeling man. "You have been chosen. You have been ordained to carry this duty, to sail the currents of the cosmos."

Mahu followed, her presence calming "To cast your eyes beyond the sky of our world, to scout the uncharted, and to find what remains hidden."

Keles moved into place, her voice resonating with his soul "To serve as the singular bridge that connects our divinity to the vast, terrifying unknown."

Finally, Ikenga stepped forward, his eyes bright with a rare, tempered respect. "You have mastered every map of this world," he said, his tone dropping to a quiet, earnest intensity. "But this world has become a cage, Tweet. To save it, we must look beyond the horizon of the stars."

As the last word hung in the air, the five Origin Gods spoke as one. Their voices overlapped, a layered harmony of thunder and starlight that resonated deep within Tweet’s very marrow, sealing the pact.

The cosmic crystal surged, its rhythm locking pulse-for-pulse with the beat of Tweet’s own heart. The gods watched in silence as the stone’s multifaceted edges began to liquefy, bleeding into his form until they merged entirely with his feathers. Where there had once been simple plumage, there were now shimmering conduits of raw, bottled starlight.

As the crystal’s core fused with his spirit, Tweet’s physical form underwent a tectonic shift. He was no longer merely a creature of flesh and blood, he was shedding his mortal coil to ascend as a World Spirit, a living bridge between their stagnant reality and the vast, infinite reaping grounds of the cosmos.

"Your duty is no longer to trace the paths of men, but to map the destinies of worlds," Ikenga declared, his voice cutting through the ritual’s crescendo like a blade. "You shall traverse the void to identify the domains we are to harvest. You are our scout, our herald, and the singular eye of our reaping."

The Five raised their hands in unison, their combined authority weaving a shroud of cosmic law around him.

"From this moment, your old name exists only in the fading songs of mortals," they intoned, their voices a singular, thundering vibration. "To the cosmos, and to us, you are Astraeus, the Navigator of Origins."

The cocoon of iridescent light that had enveloped his bird form began to fracture. Within minutes, the shell dissolved into nothingness, revealing the being who had emerged from the silence.

Astraeus stood before the Five, his form a breathtaking fusion of predator and celestial art. He retained the elegant silhouette of a great raptor, but the mundane reality of feathers had been discarded for something far more profound. His plumage was no longer opaque, it had transformed into translucent, diamond-like shards that caught and shattered the ambient light into a thousand prismatic slivers.

His primary feathers were now long, crystalline needles. With the slightest movement of his wings, the air didn’t rustle; instead, it rang with the melodic, haunting chime of a thousand glass bells. Beneath the translucent structure of his wings, the pulse of the Cosmic Crystal remained visible, a living, shifting map of the cosmos. Intricate, glowing silver lines traced patterns across his skin, eternally connecting distant, flickering points of light that pulsed in time with his own heartbeat.

His eyes had become twin orbs of polished silver, devoid of pupils yet seeing more than any god. They didn’t merely perceive distance; they pierced the very fabric of space to discern the "Origin" of distant realms, reading the potential of worlds before they were even reached.

A faint, shimmering nebula of violet and gold dust clung to him, trailing from his tail feathers like the train of a royal mantle. It was a beautiful, spectral veil, the concentrated essence of his home world, serving as both a mark of his origin and a protective ward against the crushing, airless void of the cosmos.

Astraeus let out a piercing, melodic cry that fractured the very air around him; space buckled and snapped shut like a closing door. He turned back, his silver-orb eyes lingering on the still-slumbering form of Boros. Even amidst the thunderous wake of his ascension, she remained deep in a divine, forced sleep. He was grateful; he had no words for a goodbye, and this silent parting felt, in its own way, like the best.

He turned toward the Five, bowing his crystalline head in a final gesture of fealty. He then pivoted to Ikenga, who offered a solemn, steady nod. Astraeus nudged his beak gently against Ikenga’s upturned palm, a final tactile connection to the god who had set him on this path.

With a sharp, resonant cry that vibrated not just through the clearing but across the marrow of the planet, he launched himself into the sky.

The movement was effortless, defying the laws of nature. With the first beat of his wings, he tore through the boundaries of Ikenga’s domain. With the second, he had breached the atmosphere, leaving the sky behind for the cold, velvet dark of the stars.

As he hung in the silence of the void, his form began to expand, shifting and growing until he seemed as vast as a constellation. He beat his wings one final time, a silent motion that rippled through the fabric of space. Then, he was gone, his shimmering, starlit silhouette merging seamlessly into the fabric of the night, becoming a part of the cosmos he was now destined to map.