Fairy King POV: The Fairy King's Vigil.
Zaharus summoned me.
His voice still carries the first sound the universe obeyed. When he speaks, constellations shift to listen.
“The Demon Lords are assembling,” he said, in the Hall of Changing Constellations. “Oikoumen will fall unless a new Creator is found. Seek one who bears the Spark. But not again a heart that bends toward power. This time, find purity.”
It was not an order. Zaharus does not give those.
It was a request shaped like a command.
I had failed him once already.
Akira Takamoto created beauty. His hands shaped worlds that gentled the soul. When he arrived in Oikoumen, I mistook suffering for inoculation. His childhood had been cruel, his talent limitless. I believed pain had made him immune to temptation.
I was wrong.
Power found him anyway. The villagers’ scorn hollowed him. Authority answered where compassion did not. When the Demon Lord offered him purpose, Akira accepted without hesitation and rose as his second general.
The balance of Oikoumen nearly tore itself apart.
So I searched again.
I crossed dimensions where stars were born screaming and others where they died in perfect silence. I watched artists on a thousand worlds. Talent was common. Brilliance less so. Purity was rare.
Everywhere, the same fracture: ambition. The need to be seen. The quiet hunger for dominion disguised as creation.
My watch became a burden I could not set down.
Then I found her.
Sayaka Tsukishiro.
Her fame was small. Her light did not announce itself. Standing unseen behind her in the mortal world, I felt no grasping in her heart—only patience. Her stories tell of love, sorrow, and the beauty of the world she created.
She created because she loved the act itself.
That restraint was rarer than genius.
Once, as I lingered too long, she stiffened. Her pen paused mid-line. She glanced over her shoulder, eyes wide. She could not see me.
But she felt the weight of being watched.
Her death was unceremonious. A heart too full for its vessel ceased without warning. I stood beside the God of Reincarnation as her soul was called.
“This one,” I said. “Chosen for Oikoumen.”
I did not expect her request.
Not a brush, as Akira had asked.
A G-pen.
It was a humble, precise tool. A tool of control, of creating strong, varying lines. A perfect, unconscious safeguard.
We would not repeat our error. This time, we wove a safeguard into the gift itself: the power to edit reality, a magic that mirrors the wielder's soul. Its strength, and its danger, would be a direct reflection of the purity of her heart. A mirror, not a hammer.
I watched her born again as Elsbeth.
In Oikoumen, every child is marked at birth by an element. Fire claims the forge. Water commands the seas. Earth, the builder. A color decides a life before the first word is spoken.
Elsbeth was born without one, as colorless is the potential for all colors.
The midwife went silent. Her mother did not rejoice.
Colorless does not mean blessed. It means undefined.
The forge fire came for her early.
The forge fire was the catalyst. As her brother worked, a vein of wild magic in the ore ignited a cataclysm of flame. Her panic was a sharp, bright thing. Her mother’s simple wind spell was feeding the flames instead of killing them.
Elsbeth panicked.
And in that moment, I spoke to her.
Use the pen.
“Who are you?” she screamed. “What good is a pen against this?!”
Trust your craft, I told her. Use it.
She did.
No training. No theory. Only instinct and desperation. She did not summon water.
She drew it.
A perfect circle, controlled and whole. A torrent given a boundary. Magic is not a force but an art translated into law.
I felt awe, a thing I had not felt in millennia.
My path was set. I would train her. I would not repeat my mistake.
And then I committed a smaller one.
In the marketplace, seeing her alone, I appeared too soon. Familiarity betrayed me.
“Sayaka.”
A name is a soul's first contract. I spoke the wrong one, and for a moment, I saw not my chosen Creator, but a frightened artist dying alone at her desk. I had reached for her past and revived its ghost.
I spoke her old name without thinking.
The mistake was small. The wound was not.
She is Elsbeth now, and Sayaka has died in that studio from a heart attack. I regret calling her Sayaka.
Later, I came to her in dreams, as a radiance, not as a command. I could see she had many questions to ask me, but I must not burden her with too much information, not yet. So I reveal what I could.
Then the world screamed.
I felt the disturbance tear through Oikoumen’s harmonies—a spike of discord so sharp it tore my attention from the entire continent to a single point.
Her village.
Not chaos. Not malice.
Law.
I knew the signature instantly.
This was not the Demon Lord’s hand.
This was ours.
After Akira’s betrayal, Zaharus did not mourn alone. He engineered certainty. Twenty beings of primordial essence, forged not of nature but of decree, the Elemental Vigilants. Their purpose was singular: sense profound imbalance and erase it.
They did not judge. They corrected.
And now, one had found her.
To the Vigilant, Elsbeth was not a child.
She was a deviation.
A foreign note in the world’s design. The same category of anomaly Akira had become. It could not distinguish salvation from corruption. It moved to burn the error from existence.
Her father stepped into its path.
A man of flesh, opposing a law, to save her daughter.
The contradiction was unbearable.
Then Elsbeth broke.
Not her spirit—her restraint.
Three elements erupted at once, a wild scream of creation unbound. In fighting the Vigilant, she proved its accusation. Her untamed power tore at the world’s seams.
The construct was correct.
And it would doom us all.
I intervened.
I descended not as an ally nor enemy, but as an author. I overrode the law I had helped write.
“You came to taste the foreign magic waking here,” I said, my voice settling over stone and bone alike. “You have done so.”
The Vigilant faltered, fire stuttering into uncertainty.
“She wounded you,” I continued. “A child. Untrained.”
I stepped forward. It recoiled.
“She is under my protection. Do you challenge that?”
Before judgment fell, I looked to the broken man on the stones—the cost of her first war..
This loss would shape her. I would not deny it.
I had found a Creator once before.
This time, I would not abandon her to the consequences of my design.
