Chapter 416: Beneath the Eye of the Cosmos

"Ugh..."

Jasmine’s skull throbbed. Without thinking, she clutched her head with both hands and let out a quiet moan of pain.

’This feels like déjà vu...’

Feeling the back of her head resting against some smooth, cold stone, Jasmine’s eyes finally fluttered open.

"Uh...? Where... where am I now?" she asked, her voice unsteady with confusion.

"This is a garden I used to visit whenever I felt like clearing my mind."

Her head snapped toward the familiar voice.

Pollux stood there with his arms crossed, leaning back against one of the pillars of a colonnade. A serene, almost nostalgic smile rested on his face.

Only then did Jasmine realize that she too was leaning against the beautiful, dark-shaded colonnade.

She turned her gaze forward.

And all she could do was stare in amazement.

"Wow..." she murmured, trying to take it all in.

Beyond the colonnade where they stood, a garden stretched before her with such improbable grandeur that it seemed less planted than conjured. The paths were laid in broad sheets of dark, lustrous stone, each slab inlaid with concentric filigree that caught the astral light and held it, so that the ground itself glimmered with a subdued, ceremonial radiance.

Nothing here possessed the vulgar abundance of an earthly garden.

Every line had been composed.

Every blossom had been placed with the fastidious intelligence of a court that believed beauty, to be worthy of power, must also be exact.

Jasmine’s eyes began to tremble.

On either side of the avenue, alien flowers rose in dense constellations of argent stems and translucent leaves, their petals suffused with a cold cyan fire. They did not merely glow; they emanated a lucid effulgence, as though each bloom enclosed a captive star. The light they cast was delicate, yet pervasive, spilling across the stone in washes of pale viridian and aqueous blue, glazing the undersides of leaves, tracing the edges of balustrades, and catching in the silver runnels that threaded between the beds.

The air was rich with a fragrance so refined it was almost abstract—something between night-blooming jasmine, rain on marble, and the faint metallic sweetness of something Jasmine could not name.

Then, when she finally found the courage to lift her gaze from the impossible beauty before her, she saw something even more unnamable.

The sky.

Or perhaps it was more accurate to say the sky found her.

It unfurled above in a spectacle so immense that it diminished every earthly notion of night. This was not darkness scattered with stars, but an empire of galaxies in motion. Great violet nebulae drifted across the heavens like torn imperial banners, luminous at the edges and deepening into bruised indigo at their hearts. Constellations burned with an almost sentient clarity. A colossal planet hung low over the horizon, its surface banded in dusky amethyst and smoked pearl, rimmed by a faint corona that gave it the aspect of a sealed eye watching from the firmament.

Smaller celestial bodies—some ringed, some little more than polished points of rose-gold fire—hovered in the farther reaches of the empyrean, lending the whole vault a depth so vertiginous that it felt as though one might fall upward into it.

"Ha... haha... hahahaha..."

A strange, empty laugh slipped from Jasmine’s lips, and for some reason, she did not even understand why.

Feeling like some unworthy ant staring at something she should never have seen, Jasmine lowered her head in shame.

...It was too much.

Here and there, lanterns stood along the pathways on elegant iron pedestals, though they were scarcely necessary. Their flames burned violet and unwavering, not fed by wick or oil, but contained instead within faceted crystal chambers. Between them drifted tiny motes of amber light, rising from the flowerbeds and hanging in the air like fugitive sparks from some invisible forge.

It gave the impression that the garden itself was breathing—slowly, imperceptibly, with the vast patience of something older than dynasties.

Jasmine did not know what to feel.

Did not know what to say.

She felt too much.

Nothing about the garden invited ease. It inspired awe too acute to be called comfort. Its splendor was immaculate, yes, but also faintly forbidding, as though it had been cultivated by beings to whom beauty was never separate from dominion. It was the sort of place where emperors might walk alone at the dead center of night, their robes trailing over starlit stone, while above them whole worlds kept silent vigil.

A place where the flowers glowed not to welcome, but to witness.

A place suspended between paradise and apparatus, between dream and decree—where the universe, exquisitely disciplined, had been forced to bloom within palace walls.

"Ah..."

A faint sound slipped from her lips.

"This... this is just..."

A chuckle escaped Pollux as he watched her, clearly pleased by her reaction.

"I had the same expression on my face when I first came here myself."

He closed his eyes, then said quietly,

"They say the first Emperor of the Starbloods built this eternal garden for his brother... to show that his love for him was as undying as the garden itself."

Jasmine turned toward him, her lips pressing into a thin line.

"Why bring me here...? Why won’t you just kill me? What is the point of showing me this if you’re planning to kill me... if you’re planning to kill my brother...?"

The smile on Pollux’s face slowly vanished.

He walked toward her with unhurried confidence, then crouched before her, both knees touching the ground without the slightest care for dignity or distance. When he lifted a hand toward her, Jasmine flinched, her body instinctively pressing harder against the pillar behind her.

"Shh. It’s alright now, child."

His voice was quiet, almost fatherly, and his fingers gently brushed away the tears that had slipped down her cheeks before she had even realized she was crying.

The moment she understood what he was doing, heat rushed to her face. Embarrassment burned through her, yet she still looked at him in confusion, startled by the tenderness in his eyes—by the care he seemed to show her.

"I never spoke of killing you," Pollux said.

"I would never do that."

"But you would kill my little brother..." Jasmine’s voice came out hoarse, trembling at its edges as though it might break into sobs at any second.

"There is no other way. He must die."

"Why...?"

"Because it is the gods’ wish."

Jasmine stared at him, lost and shaken.

"I thought the gods were on his side... A-Azriel... he is the Apostle of Death, isn’t he...?"

Pollux gazed downward solemnly and let out a long, quiet sigh as he withdrew his hand.

"The gods are complicated beings. I do not know what passes through their minds... but I know of their hatred for him. Not just the Ten Ancient Gods. All those who bear the title of god... all of them possess a hatred for him so vast that it is beyond anything I could ever imagine feeling myself. I imagine that all races—not only the gods, but every race—wish for his death."

Jasmine lowered her gaze as well, her lips trembling.

"No..." she whispered.

Her voice shook so badly it barely sounded like her own.

"The True Stars have already told me," Pollux said. "He will inevitably die in forty-nine hours."

"No..."

"His own undoing was believing himself cleverer than everyone else, and willingly allowing himself to be trapped by us in the Judged Realm. Had he remained on your planet, he would have lived—protected by the World Providence."

"No!" Jasmine’s head snapped up, tears spilling freely now. "I refuse! I refuse all of this! There is no way I’m allowing this to happen! He won’t die! Azriel won’t die!"

She glared at him through tear-blurred eyes, her face twisted by grief and fury.

"He is my brother—not some evil god all of you hate! He is my brother, do you hear me?!" Her voice broke into something raw and mournful. "I won’t allow him to die! I’ll kill all of you before that happens!"

Pollux looked at her without mockery, without anger. If anything, there was only understanding in his gaze.

He reached toward her again, intending to wipe away her tears, but Jasmine slapped his hand aside.

"Don’t touch me! If you hate Azriel, then I hate you! I hate everyone who hates my brother!"

She felt less like some threatening being and more like a child throwing a tantrum, but that only made her grit her teeth harder. She had no choice. She had to do something. She had to shout, had to cry, had to do anything but sit there and drown in the helplessness crushing her chest.

"I never said I hated him."

"What?"

Jasmine froze.

Pollux met her stare and continued,

"I bear no hatred toward him."

"T-Then why...? Why must you kill him? Why are you even working with them...? None of this makes sense...!"

"Because our interests align. As I can help them, they can help me."

"With what!?"

"Killing him."

Jasmine stared at him as if the answer itself had wounded her.

"And how does killing him align with your interests!? Why do they hate Azriel!?"

Pollux rose slowly to his feet, his expression solemn, and looked upward—toward something Jasmine did not dare follow with her own eyes.

"...There are apparently many reasons to hate him. Most of them, I do not know. The gods have tried to bury his very existence into nothingness, so even I know little about him. But from what she told me... and from what the True Stars revealed... he was the one who sealed all the races."

"...!"

Jasmine’s eyes widened.

For a moment, she could not even begin to grasp what he meant.

Then Pollux lowered his gaze again. He raised both hands and stared at them with a sorrow so deep it seemed almost ancient.

A single tear slipped from his eye.

"As for me..." he said quietly, "from before I was even born, to the moment I came into this world, and until the day I die, my existence has been bound to a single purpose."

His fingers curled slightly.

"To kill him."