A vision entered Soren’s mind.

A vision of the future. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

A future where he was forsaken in a land forever eclipsed. Where the endless gray fog ran from the light of the lamp.

A future where he was imprisoned among a menagerie of horrors. Where the line between man and monster could not be seen.

A future where he was ascending a winding tower made from the corpses of coiling dragons. Where those who were worshipped as immortals first bled.

A future where… A graveyard of ships swam inside an endless void, forever awaiting the war that never came.

“What… What is happening!?” His mind was being overwhelmed, but not to the same degree as when he first entered the Veil of Perception. The images were jumbled and incomprehensible, like a broken cassette player.

Pushing the images away, he noticed the board changing. With his eyes still blurred, he glanced down at the pieces and the formation. [Fictionalization] has to move the white king into the E2 position… At least, it was doing so for a bit…

Until something far more jarring manifested itself. Underneath the pieces, the black and white checkered board… had sprawled an eyeball. The board… it was seeing what was happening…

A shiver ran down Soren’s spine.

The eyeball shifted around, gazing from beneath the pieces at the luminous marble canopy. Then, in an instant, its terrifying gaze locked on to Soren’s presence.

“C-cease! Cease divination!” He screamed at his Soul Weapon, but the familiar voice couldn’t be heard.

Soren grit his teeth and slammed his fist into the chessboard, scattering the pieces everywhere. [Fictionalization] finally came undone, and the summoned chessboard broke apart into golden butterflies once more.

The divination was over.

If he had hesitated for more than a second, that entity would have most likely succeeded in usurping full control over [The Faerie Court]...

Soroen leaned forward on the round table—body drenched in sweat. His breath came in ragged gasps, and his face which he could see from the reflection of the marble was deathly pale. There was nothing he could say. All he could do was stay silent and contemplate over everything.

The voice finally reached out to him again, “Did you finally obtain what you wanted?” The voice sounded concerned, but he could tell it was mocking him.

Soren didn’t reply. His mind was racing with thoughts regarding what he saw at the very end. The visions that played were clearly visions of the future.

“Do you think these are all fates that will appear in sequence, or simply different versions of what the future could look like?”

Before the black queen took the free rook on A1, the different fates he saw clearly corresponded to the agenda and purpose of the players. He could tell for one, that white’s pieces had a much closer relationship to his original fate—at least, at the start. Black on the other hand seemed to showcase alternative fates that didn’t happen—which made sense because black was losing in the game.

But that still came at the cost of his original fate—white needed to sacrifice countless pieces to attack the enemy.

However, this cohesion and structure to the divination collapsed the moment the black queen captured the last remaining rook on white’s side. No, it might have been due to… That eyeball.

It was fairly obvious what it was. One of the entities playing with his fate had noticed his presence and somehow managed to pass through and influence [Fictionalization] to disrupt his flow of anima… It also used it against Soren to manifest a part of itself into the forbidden space…

How… Terrifying… This level of power was not something he could ever go against. Even Hurion mentioned that the gods of Yarian stood no chance against fate, and yet these two beings were somehow manipulating it like it was a game to them…

Who the hell are they? There was no way to know.

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Regardless, due to the interference, the futures he saw all became jumbled and unclear, with no coherent timeline or even a way to differentiate whether those fates corresponded to white or black. He couldn’t tell at all which side wanted those visions to come true and which didn’t…

Hearing his question, the voice answered, “Does it matter? Your goal was to defy fate, was it not?”

Hearing this, Soren’s lips curved into a faint smile. “You’re right.”

“How foolish.”

Still, it was possible. The fact that there were entities out there who could manipulate fate proved this. Though, whether he would even reach such a level of power seemed both delusional and or outright insane. Even Hurion had given up on such a folly goal…

Besides, there was still the question of what fate even was in the first place… He had a theory though.

From what he witnessed during the game, the futures were being played with different possibilities, with their probability of coming true fluctuating based on the state of the game. Soren was human—he could for the most part see a couple to a dozen moves ahead depending on the formations. His memory was also honed to memorizing hundreds to thousands of different variations—some popular while others more obscure.

However, that was still the limit. He was a human, not a chess computer engine. But even with that limitation, he could tell that 9 times out of 10, white would win. In fact, that first blunder with the bishop already cemented the game as a loss for black—at least in his (grandmaster) opinion. If it was him personally playing as black in that position, he would have immediately surrendered the match.

Which meant that the probability of events going the way white fated them to be was much higher. His original fate being abandoned at the start of the game was due to white’s movements—his probability of winning influenced the outcome of fate going in that direction.

That was unntil he noticed something.

The game… It was disrupted by white…

He came to this conclusion because of the last move. Before the game was disrupted, it was white’s turn to move. With the black queen positioned in A1, the king had to be forced up a rank to avoid the check. But when [Fictionalization] started to shift the pieces in accordance to the next turn being played, a certain change occurred. It was fairly subtle but Soren still picked up on it.

[Fictionalization] which shifted the king into E2, shifted the king back to F1 for absolutely no reason… As if the person enacting the move changed his mind last second… From what Soren remembered of official chess tournaments rules, taking a move back that you already enacted intentionally usually results in a disqualification.

This obviously introduced a question—why? Why would white, the side that was clearly winning, sabotage themselves into losing the match?

The truth eluded him, but it still aided his theory regarding fate.

Fate, in accordance with standard Yarian theology and astrology, was usually denoted as the ‘Three Orbits.’ Soren had always found the name strange—yes, there was a clear indication that one’s fate in the three layers—Epoch, World, Celestial—was denoted through the stars. When Soren enacted an accord with Sienna as witness, he spoke that promise aloud to his Epoch Star.

But that didn't really explain the ‘why’ behind such a mechanism. Why would fate, which was divided into three segments, orbit each other?

The Epoch Star orbits around the World Star, and the World Star orbits around the Celestial Star. The Celestial Star orbits around itself and the other Celestial Stars… So for Yarian’s Celestial Fate to be frozen, its orbit in the context of other Celestial Stars would have to stop, leaving the three orbits beneath it out of sync.

That did however, bring up a question, what exactly are these orbits? There were countless theories across a spectrum of schools of thought and philosophies, but none seemed to grasp an answer. Soren however, might have finally obtained one.

The laws of attraction.

That was what an orbit surmised to in the first place after all—gravity.

One needs gravity to orbit a star… So in the same manner, the orbits of fate would also require an external force to keep the orbits going… And that would also mean that the stars of Fate themselves play a role in manipulating each other.

After witnessing those two beings playing with his fate, his theory only became clearer in his mind… And when he applied it to Yarian’s case of having its Celestial fate frozen, it only made even more sense.

If the three orbits could be thought of in the same context as gravity, then being out of sync with one another would mean a disruption in their orbits—as well as their influence on each other. And what happens if, for example, the World Star which orbits the Celestial Star in Yarian’s context was flung completely out of orbit?

The end of the world.

Without a destiny to follow, the world would have to cease to exist, and by extension, the stars of epoch that orbit that World Star would also have their existence questioned.

In essence, The Whispering Dream’s goal could be explained using this context—he was plotting the ‘acceleration’ of the instability of these orbits to further separate the three fate stars from one another and bring total collapse to this world’s existence.

But this also proved something else.

Fate might be unbreakable, but it was not unchangeable.

Just as gravity governs the motion of celestial bodies, fate can be seen as a universal law shaping the course of existence. But how that future could be shaped depends on the stars influencing the orbits. Changing the stars means changing the orbits, or simply introducing new stars could simply alter the forces of attraction on fate, in the same manner that adding another planet to a star system would have an adverse effect on the current orbits…

In a way, the two god-like beings that were playing with his fate were doing exactly that—influencing the orbits by introducing new fates or parallel futures. Some succeeded, while others didn’t. Some were sacrificed to empower another more powerful force of attraction… If one viewed the flow of destiny in such a manner, then perhaps with enough astral anima to ‘influence’ the world, fate could be changed…

Soren glanced up at the flickering bonfire and smiled.

“Perhaps it's finally time I revisit that ill-fated contract…”