The battlefield had gone still. Chains hung in the air like threads of light, no longer binding but breathing.
Hespera—no longer just Pandora—hovered at the center of it, her eyes the color of dusk and dawn meeting. Every breath she drew sent ripples through reality itself.
She saw everything at once: the Underworld in ruin, the trembling heavens, Nyx shielding the Gremorys, and in a place outside of time, a girl with cat ears smiling before the blade struck her down.
Kuroka. The name was a wound.
Hespera closed her eyes. Her voice, when it came, was quiet enough that even the Primordials had to still their power to hear.
“If my curse was to end all things,” she said, “then let my choice be to begin them again.”
She raised her hand. The runes of Pandora’s box flickered to life across her skin, red sigils coiling with gold. The air warped as cause and effect folded backward.
Storms ran in reverse. Angels’ feathers reattached to wings. Broken worlds stitched themselves together like rewound film.
Far below, Nyx whispered, “She’s turning the wheel…”
Chaos’s hysterical overjoyed laughter could be the only sound all across the battlefield. They were such proud parent~
Time himself felt it first.
In his clock-world, every pendulum froze mid-swing. The old man’s face rippled into youth, then back again, as he stared at the gears unspooling.
“Who,” he muttered, “is touching my hourglasses?”
Behind him, hundreds of clocks began to spin counter to each other. He groaned, grabbed his walking stick—which at the moment was also a sundial—and sighed.
“I leave for one century and someone’s already tampering again.”
One by one, the others felt it.
Abyss blinked up from her dark ocean, annoyance curling her lips. “Someone’s leaking light into my quiet.”
Void, beside her, only murmured, “Let it all end again. I was almost asleep.”
Aether appeared upside-down over them, hair full of starlight. “Did anyone see where I put my—oh. Never mind. Found them.” He wasn’t holding anything.
Oblivion stared at him blankly. “Who are you again?”
In a meadow made of blood and blossoms, Nature smiled sweetly. “A reset means new growth.” The vines behind her writhed eagerly.
Life, her mirror and rival, laughed softly. “Let’s hope she remembers to plant mercy this time.”
Far off, Fate sighed as golden threads snapped and rewove. “Of course it has something to do with Chaos. It’s always a Chaos incident .”
Genesis grinned beside her, sparks of newborn stars swirling in her palms. “Let them play. Creation’s prettier when it’s messy.”
From the upper spheres, Celestial opened his wings, light and shadow in equal halves. “Balance wavers. We answer.”
And finally, in the center of it all, Time raised his voice, echoing across every plane.
“Brothers, sisters—our little sister, Pandora's rewriting the script again. Let’s tidy before the whole stage collapses. Before she causes another Pandemonium.”
Hespera’s body trembled. The magic was too vast even for her divine frame. She saw the moment she wanted—Kuroka laughing, alive—but the more she pulled at the timeline, the more the universe screamed. The threads of existence tore free like loosened stitches.
From the rippling edge of reality, Chaos appeared, laughing softly, their hydra-heads fading one by one into a single, almost-gentle face.
“You really are my favorite mistake,” they said. “Even I wouldn’t dare twist Time’s tail like that.”
Hespera’s voice cracked. “I just want her back.”
“I know. That’s why they’re coming. Ah, it's been so long since we last had a family reunion~!”
The sky broke open—not in fire this time, but in color. Every hue that had ever existed flooded downward: the green of newborn leaves, the blue of first oceans, the gray of still death. Twelve presences stepped through, each older than form, yet familiar as family.
Time stood at their front, ticking staff in hand. “You moved my clocks, girl. Don't be like that trouble maker over there and start messing with my stuff.”
Chaos giggled and waved. "Hiya old man timey~"
Time grunted.
Aether waved dreamily. “She did more than that. She rewound the film.”
Abyss crossed her arms. “And flooded my shadows. My shadows
!”Void just sighed.
Chaos grinned at them all, leaning on one of their serpent heads. “Ah, family reunion. We should try not to kill each other in front of the mortals.”
Fate flicked a thread from her sleeve. “She’s not meant to erase grief. It anchors the weave. Nature, tell her she's messing with everything.”
Nature’s vines brushed Hespera’s cheek. “But look—she made flowers out of loss. Isn’t that worth something?”
Celestial’s voice, calm and resonant, ended the murmur. “The balance must stand. If one rewrites, we must rewrite with her.”
The Primordials joined hands—or ideas of hands—and light and darkness merged. Around Hespera, the world stilled again, the rewound timeline crystallizing into a single point: the night before Kuroka’s death.
Kuroka’s laughter echoed through the air. She was alive, real, unaware. Hespera reached for her, but Chaos’s voice stopped her.
“To change the past is to rewrite yourself. Save her, and you’ll never have been this Hespera. You’ll never have been Pandora. Do you really want to be incomplete again?”
Hespera looked back at the others—Death’s calm sorrow, Order’s patient gaze, Time’s weary frown—and smiled faintly.
“No, but... maybe that’s all right.”
Light swept through the world. The chains unraveled into petals. The Dimensional Gap closed.
The stars were being repainted. Rivers found their courses again. Souls drifted back to their resting places, not quite remembering why they had been torn apart.
On the edge of that newborn calm, twelve shapes gathered over what had been the battlefield. The Primordials stood—or floated, or simply were—in a ring of pale fire and shadow.
Time was the first to move. He turned his clock-staff once, and every ticking heart synchronized.
“Forward again,” he muttered, winding the spring of existence. “No more rewinds without a signature.”
Abyss and Void spread out opposite one another, painting depth back into space. Abyss’s voice was velvet-low.
“I’ll keep the grief she tried to erase,” she said. “It belongs somewhere.”
Aether traced lazy spirals above them, scattering new constellations.
“Look, balance! Pretty, isn’t it?” He immediately forgot what he’d said, already distracted by his own starlight.
Nature crouched beside the ruined ground, letting roots burst through the stone.
Life followed, coaxing the shoots to bloom. Between them they remade color.
Fate re-threaded the broken destinies that hung like torn spider silk.
“So many detours,” she sighed. “But at least this time, love was the reason.”
Genesis lifted her hand, and the first sunrise of the corrected age bled over the horizon.
“New beginning, same actors,” she said with a wink toward Chaos.
Celestial unfurled wings that shimmered with day and night both. His radiance wrapped around the others like a dome, sealing the mended cosmos.
“Order restored,” he intoned softly. “For now.”
At the center, Chaos laughed—not their usual manic trill, but something gentler.
“See? Family therapy works. Universe intact, souls accounted for, drama quotient reduced to tolerable levels.”
Death leaned against them, wineglass in hand as promised. “You’re insufferable,” she said, though the corners of her mouth curved.
“And yet,” Chaos replied, “you love me for it.”
Where Hespera had stood was only a shimmer—neither light nor void, but the memory of a heartbeat. The mortals below would someday call it “the Evening Star,” unaware that it watched over them.
Nyx knelt in the still air, her voice barely a breath. “She did it. She rewrote time and space.”
Death approached her, setting a cool hand on her shoulder.
“She’s not gone, shadow-lover. She’s resting inside her own dimension. When the world settles back into its correct timeline, she’ll wake. Afterall, she still needs to keep a promise with a certain dragon.”
Nyx looked up, eyes shining faintly. “Then I’ll keep the sky dark until she does.”
Time closed his clocks and faced his siblings.
“Everything flows again. Try not to break it for at least one epoch.”
Aether raised his hand. “Define break?”
Fate groaned. “Here we go.”
Chaos grinned, twin horns glinting. “Let him. The mortals need a few surprises; keeps the narrative spicy.”
Celestial’s halo flared briefly—a smile in light. “Very well. Balance achieved, mischief permitted.”
Across the re-stitched worlds, morning began. The Gremorys awoke in their own domain, the memory of terror fading like a dream. The heavens glowed gold where once they bled. And far below, a cat-eared girl yawned, sunlight warm on her face, unaware that she had been loved across the collapse of creation.
High above, the Primordials turned to go, vanishing into their respective realms—Time to his clocks, Abyss to her silence, Nature to her gardens, and Chaos with Death on their arm, laughing softly as they dissolved into paradox.
The universe exhaled. For the first time in eons, everything was simply balanced.