That very moment, the lirene in her other hand floated up and began to glow. As if to reciprocate its white radiance, the miasma around the witch’s point of appearance had been replaced with a white smoke—and somewhere inside the fog, I saw sparkles of gold.
Although we’d prepared a handful of bonfires to light the yard, the sun had set and it was far darker than daytime. Yet the flower and cloud were glowing a transcendent gold and white.
What in the world?
“I-I don’t know what’s happening, but it looks like the witch is appearing!” Lady Kobayashee said. “Huh? Th-There’s something in the smoke!”
“Why does she have a body?!” Lord Endoh cried. “The Witch of Yore is supposed to be sealed away as a formless spirit!”
Following the gods’ commentary, I turned my attention to the smoke. I could definitely see something within.
Come at us!
A sudden gale swept through the yard. The lirene danced off into the night sky and the cloud obscuring our sight disappeared. What remained was the silhouette of the Witch of Yore. Known as the Great Calamity and Malevolent Black, this sentient catastrophe had felled countless nations and brought our very world to the brink of destruction several times over.
At long last, she appeared before us...groveling in the dirt.
“Why’s she kneeling?”
“What’s with the pose?”
“Can I try punching her?”
“But what if she’s preparing an unusual spell?”
“Stay on guard, this might be a ruse!”
Although we were all thrown into chaotic discussion, not a single person broke their stance—ah, well, other than Art. For whatever reason, he was frozen in place with his jaw wide open.
“The witch’s hair is white!” Lord Endoh said, confused.
Both the prophecy and the two gods had claimed the Witch of Yore to be an entity of total darkness. However, in reality she had fair white skin that bordered on translucent, and her hair was a glowing platinum blonde. Her heavenly locks were beautiful enough to steal my breath away. Her strange pose caused it to sprawl out on the ground, filling me with a strange sensation of guilt.
“Why does she look like a P2 color variant? Why is she physically there instead of being an ephemeral ghost?” Lady Kobayashee asked in a rhetorical tone. “I have no idea. Don’t let your guard down!”
I nodded out of habit, but the figure on the ground looked so far from evil that I couldn’t bring myself to act. Rather, I had my qualms about trying to hurt someone that looked like they were begging for forgiveness. I was sure everyone else felt the same.
“Oh? Fiene’s making her move!”
“It looks like she’s as lost as us, but her plan is to start off with a punch to test things out. Hm? No, it looks like Art caught on and is moving in to stop her, for some reason...”
Apparently, I’d been wrong. Not everyone felt the same, as there were two exceptions that the gods dutifully offered their play-by-play and analysis on.
“Fiene, wait!” Art said. “You can’t hit her, she’s—”
“I-I’m so incredibly sorry for what I’ve done!” the witch shouted.
In a quivering voice, she cut off our wonder-priest. Yet we heard her loud and clear despite the shaky tone: the Witch of Yore had apologized. She raised her head and stared straight at me with shimmering, golden eyes.
“I don’t have any intent to resist! I unconditionally surrender! So please, I humbly beg you to show mercy!” Slam! She bowed down so hard that I could hear her head hit the ground.
“Wait, no, oh my—p-please, raise your head!” Art rushed over to her in a panic and tried to help her up. I couldn’t even remember the last time he’d spoken this politely to someone.
“Let go!” the witch said, pushing him away. “Groveling is the least I can do! I’m the Witch of Yore—I’ve done terrible things! I even tried to hurt Lady Lieselotte, and the remnants of my malice attacked her just now... One hundred times is a bit scary, but I can’t argue with being killed!”
Knowing that I was the preeminent authority, Art looked up at me as if he were the one begging for forgiveness. Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know what’s going on.
“What does this mean?” I asked.
What I’d gleaned up until this point was that as glowy as this clump of white and gold was, she was still the Witch of Yore. I found it awkward to reconcile her infamy and the colors I shared with the Goddess Lirenna herself, but I was still on full alert.
The witch’s voice was shaky as she began to speak; I couldn’t tell for sure because her face was still in the dirt, but she might have been crying.
“Um...I’ve been linking my heart to Lady Lieselotte’s. I was hoping that my loneliness, suffering, frustration, jealousy, and hatred would all resonate with her and we’d sync up together.”
I already knew that. That lined up with what the gods and Liese had told me.
“But then emotions like happiness and bliss came flooding back to me! Thoughts like, I love Prince Siegwald I love him he’s so cool I love him he’s as lovely as ever I love him oh I love him so much—”
“Stop! S-Silence!” Liese screamed. She was beet red.
“Yes, ma’am! I’m so sorry!” The witch ground her forehead deeper into the ground and fell quiet.
“Such a shame that everyone here already knew how madly in love Lieselotte is.”
“The two of us have been letting it slip left and right, and it’s not like it’s that hard to figure out. Lately, Liese-tan herself admits it when she loses her temper.”
The witch glanced at me while I was busy smirking at the gods’ remarks. Simultaneously, Liese looked up at me with teary eyes. I grinned from ear to ear.
“Miss Witch,” I said, “continue, if you would.”
Seeing me press for more was quite the shock for Liese, but the witch seemed rather happy and she resumed her story.
“Yes, sir! Gosh, it got so bad that I nearly fell for you myself! I’ve heard that there’s nothing stronger than a lovestruck maiden, and boy, they meant it! As Lady Lieselotte’s happiness and love for you filled my empty heart, the ugly feelings clinging to me dissolved away. See, look at my eyes! They’re back to their original gold, right?!” The witch raised her head and pointed at her sparkling eyes.
“I wouldn’t know what color they originally were,” I said, troubled.
“These are, without a doubt, her original eyes.” Art sighed. “I’m fairly certain this woman is the Goddess of Creation, Her Holiness Lirenna... Am I right?”
“Yay, you know me! That’s right, I’m Lirenna! You have a good eye!”
If we were to believe the two kneeling on the ground, the woman squealing in joy was apparently the Creation Goddess.
“I’m not a priest for nothing,” Art said in modesty. He then turned to me. “So it’d really make me feel better if we could have her stop grinding her face into the floor. It doesn’t look like she has any will to resist, so can we please let her at least sit up?”
“Let’s hear what she has to say. I get that Liese-tan’s heart cured the Witch of Yore to restore the Creation Goddess to her true form. But why were you a witch to begin with? Why did you attack Liese-tan in particular? And I’m not sure you know the answer, but why can the people of this world hear our voices—including you? Tell us everything you know.”
Hearing Lady Kobayashee speak, I looked at Lirenna and realized something. “There’s nothing stronger than a lovestruck maiden” was a phrase from my color commentator in the heavens, but this new goddess had repeated it moments ago.
“As you wish, Lady Kobayashi, fair goddess of the outer realm. But please, this pitiful fool has sinned so heavily that it pains me to hear you call me a goddess. Lirenna is plenty. And I think we should start with the story of how we first created this world to mirror yours.”
The almighty Goddess Lirenna knew all to be known about our world—perhaps even of Lord Endoh and Lady Kobayashee’s—and she began to tell her tale...
────
In the beginning, there was one. This singular entity simply was—until it eventually came to realize its own state of being. The thing was, and it had an overwhelming duty to foster reality.
Immediately after recognizing its own consciousness, the existence was overcome with loneliness. It knew itself to be absolute. It knew itself to be God. It followed that it knew itself to be alone.
Thus, the entity split itself into halves. These two gods leaned on one another, cooperating to create the world.
“Reality is boring. I want others that will talk to us.”
“You want sentience? That will be a daunting task. It will take many eternities, and we may still fail.”
“Then we merely need to imitate creatures from somewhere else. Let us find intelligent life elsewhere and shape our world to support beings like them.”
The two wills converged to give birth to a planet much like the one they used for reference. They made land, seas, and sky, filling them all with the same kinds of life they saw outside of their realm. And so, the world came into being.
“Let us be the mother and father of this land.”
Upon creating their own cast of mortals, the two halves morphed into the Mother Goddess Lirenna and the Father God Kuon, defining themselves with the familiar forms of a humanity from a distant star. With platinum hair and golden eyes, the beautiful pair glowed with holy light.
Seeing one another, the two felt love. They went on to birth all sorts of life: those that propagated without needing to consume other life, those that soared the skies, those that were strong, those with sharp claws, those with poison, those that bred quickly, and more.
Many things came from their matrimony, but only the fittest went on to survive. After much life and death, at long last, the world saw its first person in their image.
“How similarly it looks to us.”
Seeing a creature so perfectly alike to the species the gods had mimicked filled their hearts with love, and their affection for their progeny was to be shared in equal parts between them. Alas, Kuon faltered.
As the first man and woman fell in love, the Father God watched them and pined for a more mortal yearning. And so, he wished to make the first of women his own.
“I have no need for the other.”