[Rewrite]Chapter 4: Abnormal Mark

“So,” Left broke the quiet. “I heard you were just born. Happy birthday.”

Tavja inclined her head. “Thank you. You heard it from the request?”

“Haha, Yes,” he said, a thin laugh in the syllable. “The audience request made that clear.”

She nodded again. “Then you know why I am here.”

“Indeed, indeed…” he said. The laugh came back, a little nervous this time.

An awkward silence stretched out for a few breaths.

“Well, since you are new to Neel,” he finally ventured, eager. “You likely do not know much, right? How about this, I could-”

“Let's do the name first,” she said, smiling. Not bothering with politeness.

“Ah, come now, what’s the rush? You are a young devil, freshly spawned. What’s a couple of years? I can offer a few decades of educational-”

“The name, if you would.”

His iris suddenly sharpened, voice dropping to a chilly beat. “You dare interrupt a divine being again?” he chuckled darkly. “It seems my benevolence has been-”

“Name or I leave.”

The eye paused, widened, then he exhaled. He spoke again, now in a more diplomatic, measured tone. “A-all right, all right. I get it. Let’s just all calm down here…” 

He continued, the mask of a calm negotiator talking someone down from the edge.  “Look, I apologize…It’s just… I’m a little on edge here. No one ever visits, no one ever calls…” 

The eye became downcast, looking exceptionally pitiful. “Perhaps, young one, just once… You could indulge in an old eye’s-”

“The name,” She cut in smoothly. Small face smiling, head tilting. “As promised.”

He closed his eye for the count. He knew a losing battle when he saw it, he was an eye.

Resignation settled on him like dust. The tricks he had prepared wouldn’t catch this child.

‘A Six-star. One likely with much of her ancestral knowledge already awakened.’

“Sigh…Very well.” He blinked, and a red book appeared between the two of them.

Tavja smiled at the book's appearance, while she hid a curl of derision for the host. ‘This cringey bastard was really planning on trapping me here for years to gossip. When my cold handsome and divine powers are waiting for me in Hellnia? Guess again!’

She knew the rule with Left Direction. Always finish the transaction first. He would hold a door closed with conversation if the rules here didn’t forbid it. Luckily, this plane obeyed laws older than his habits.

“The book…sigh… contains the names the Master created for you…sigh” Left said, sighing between clauses. “The one you take…sigh… will be chosen…sigh… by your soul’s proclivities.”

“Aite, sounds good.” she said absentmindedly, ignoring Left’s weary looks and dramatic sighs, attention already on the oddity of the process. 

‘I thought he would just hand me a name. Why a book? What does it mean for the soul to choose? Hidden lore?’ The little devil wondered.

She glanced up, saw the sparkle at the corner of Left’s gaze and decided to proceed without questions. It made her scalp tingle, instincts telling her she would only regret inquiring further.

Seeing the devil girl having no intention of asking questions; giving him a reason to tell the tale of how his scoundrel of a Master once had a tryst with a chaos devil, leading to the promised wish pact, the eye could only deflate more.

He couldn’t force her to learn the real reason why all devils had a free wish for audience within the inbetween. The damned rules wouldn’t allow him to yap without her consent.

“Sighhhhh.” Another sigh from Left, longer this time. “We will do a simple evaluation. I will show you a few pictures. You say the first thing you see. After that, a name will choose you.”

“Simple.” She folded her hands and nodded. The name would come from a high god either way. In the end, the source mattered more than the path.

A sheet of white paper appeared on the table. Its surface was packed with frenetic strokes, dense enough that the paper’s color remained only at the edges. Not quite a mirrored blot test. More like a child’s scribbles, seemingly until they got tired or the lead ground down.

Tavja studied it, then looked up to Left, incredulous.

“What is the matter, young one?” Left asked. Mirth twinkling in his large eye.

“Isn’t this too obvious? Wouldn’t everyone just say the same thing?”

He lifted an invisible brow. “Really? Then tell me, what do you see?”

She held back the need to roll her eyes and answered. “It’s a rose.” she said, unimpressed.

“A rose, huh? Look again. Is that all?”

She let her eyes return to the mass. The picture adjusted for her, detail sliding into focus the way an image emerges in a tray. “Oh…right. The field where the rose grows. The roots run into a hill of bodies. I guess I missed that the first time.” She muttered.

“Male or female?” Left asked.

“Both. More women than men. Hornless. Are they human?”

He didn’t answer that. He placed the next sheet. “Now the next one.”

Concentric circles filled this one from center to edge. Closer inspection revealed structure inside the repetition.

Tavja looked a bit longer this time, then nodded once; confident. “A person sits where the moon should be, looking down at Hellnia’s plane. Everyone looks back and sees only a person in the sky. But the person sees more when they look at everyone else, they see everything. The stars turn around them while the person ponders.”

“Is this person you?”

“No.”

“Are you in the picture at all?”

“No.”

She met his gaze with squinted eyes, as if to ask whether he planned to accuse her of narcissism. She was only reading what was there. None of this was even abstract.

“Very good,” he said softly. “Last one.”

The final page was nearly blank. A single vertical mark ran from top to bottom.

Her brows drew together at the sight.

Left’s tone lightened with a teacher’s pleasure. “I know what you’re thinking, yes, the first two tend to be different for everyone. Not all see a flower in a field, or a person in the sky…” 

Tavja nodded at the explanation, so it was magic, somehow. Curiously, she couldn’t feel the mana like she did with Gula’s statue, it felt like normal paper. She wondered how such a feat was achieved-

“But the last is mostly the same. A simple vertical line,” He chuckled. “I cannot tell you its meaning, but it is a good-”

“Line?” she questioned, snapping out of her previous thoughts.

“Yes. The line here-” He gestured and stopped. Suspicion rose in him. “...You do see a line. Right?”

She shook her head, rubbing her small chin as she gazed at the paper again. She didn’t notice the way his iris widened across the table.

“If not the anchor,” he said quietly, holding down the rising unease. “what do you see?”

“It’s a… spiral, I think?” she answered. Curious rather than afraid.

~~~

Somewhere in between, the Observatory.

The dome hung in an endless white, glass-cased and suspended by nothing. A hooded figure sat in an elegant white chair and watched the table far below through the curved wall. Six empty eye sockets faced the scene; where eyes should have been, attention flowed instead. In his hand, a white cup held a sparkling black drink.

His favorite beverage. Well, it used to be.

Sip.

He tasted it. Grimaced. Tasted again as if endurance could alter the chemistry within. He waited for the sweetness to arrive like a promised guest, a guest who never arrived on time. But He wasn’t going to fetch it, nor was he going to drink it cold. The principles he carried for himself didn’t bend, not even for taste.

Sip.

“Ugh, won’t be long now,” he said. He took another drink and made another face. “Bland.” He drank. “Artificial.” He gagged and recovered. “But soon…soon a little sugar should bring back the spice I like.”

A black eye floated at his side, its red iris bright. Right Direction spoke with patient exasperation. “Master, if you dislike it, why not just wait until the sugar is added.”

He scoffed. Wildly offended. “Principle, Right. All is done in principle. If a god didn’t fulfill his role faithfully, who would believe in him?”

Right nodded, but still couldn’t help but voice her doubts. “What of the gods governing Neel? They put their roles second to their glory and remain gods all the same. Why?”

The Observer laughed. “Right, skeptic to the end. Your curious eye is why I gave you the authority to gaze at the other worlds. Right Direction, the Observer's eye that gazes beyond.”

She narrowed her gaze, unimpressed. He had avoided the question.

“Fine, fine.” he said, amused. “Then answer me this. Why do those children build churches, shrines, and temples everywhere they can on the mainland of Neel?”

She looked down at the metal floor in thought, then answered. “Well, if no one worships them, they lose divinity and authority. They become mortal.”

“Correct,” he said, pointing through the glass toward the white table below. “Then tell me why that little one is the only living soul who knows my name, yet I remain divine?”

Right was silent for a moment, then tried the obvious path. “Because you brought her here from that demon world. She loved your prophecy. So, of course she-”

The Observer shook his head and scolded. “You miss the point. You might be the youngest, but you aren’t a child. Think carefully. How did I bring her here?”

His chiding tone made her feel a little indignant. She wanted to say the ugly version, but swallowed it down. He had killed the demon woman and placed her in a blank vessel for sixty years. But she knew that too was not the answer he wanted. 

Then another thought came and settled.

“You used divine power to bend rules…” she said slowly. “So worship is not the real axis. If the world itself acknowledges you, you are a god whether anyone prays or not.”

He nodded and drank again. “Principles keep the shape. Popularity is just the paint.” 

“I see, Principle keeps the shape…” Right muttered looking over to her Master with humbled awe.

The Observer, feeling the gaze of fervent respect on the back of his neck, kept his face masked with sagely enlightenment; deciding to hold back a private truth. A crippling compulsion to work, not virtue, had kept his hands on the wheel for an uncountable span.

Sip. Sip. Sip.

He counted sips in his head until the number became a kind of mockery. ‘Damn, This era sucks!’

Right then suddenly shivered once, a tiny vibration of a signal received. Her iris flashed. “Master. A message from Left. It’s about the young devil’s soul discovery.”

He didn’t change his posture. “Speak.”

“The first image reads romance as the primary, slaughter secondary. A rose blooming from the blood of others. Peculiar, but not unprecedented.”

He nodded. “The conscious body of a Luxuria variant. The aggression is a little weird though. Continue.”

“The second reads as admiration…I think? An entity among the stars, watching the world below, all seeing. She is not included among those who look up.”

He paused and smiled. “Not quite admiration. Mutated. Fixation. It is the subconscious heart of obsession. She stands outside the crowd by choice. She sees what the entity sees and believes she belongs with it.”

“Understood.”

“And the mark,” he asked. “Anchor I assume? The common soul of destiny?”

Right hesitated. And the Observer noticed. He furrowed his brows. “The branch then? The soul of the anomalous fate?”

She shook her gaze. “No. Left says she saw… the spiral. And…Umm…He requests permission to eliminate her at once.”

The Observer calmly set the cup down. For a moment the white room seemed to tilt, though it didn’t move at all. He looked again through the glass at the small pink-haired devil and the golden eye across from her. He did not answer immediately.

And for some reason, his arm felt a little numb.