The East PacificBoard

The smallest fire, burning out, may carry on should the wind pick up.

The smallest microbe, should it survive, may proliferate and reproduce until an entire cluster reforms.

The smallest speck of dust in an empty cosmos, should it retain its mass, may form into a blazing star over the eons.

So it is with nature. And so it is with the Heaven of All Worlds.

Tenkyoku had long fallen, abandoning its presence in Valsora. Whether by a magical calamity, an exile to another world, or self-obliteration was never known- only that the island nation’s transmissions ceased and presence vanished. Perhaps it remained as only a flicker of a memory in any who heard of it. Perhaps history was rewritten, perhaps it never was and was to be. Whatever the case, Tenkyoku was no more...

But it was not the only exodus of a collapsing Heaven. And by chance or by fate or by design, so too did the next emerge into Valsora on a remote, isolated island, soon to be a new paradise...

Under their breath, the children sing. Sing the songs of obedience and submission as they put up the tents and pavilions and towers. Sing the hymns of war as they arm themselves and march in unison along the coast. Sing the chorus of unity as they bow in their rituals, as the flames are lit and put out and their prayers unheard by the invisible creator who left this land long ago. But the songs and the hymns and the prayers are heard by the Songmistress all the same. And in time, so too are they heard by the Veiled Goddess, sitting enshrouded in her mountain fortress, unseen and unheard and the ultimate authority in all of this new Heaven...

So did Atarashi Tenkyoku come to be.

But this Heaven has a different vision than the last.

For Tenkyoku the original was the shattered remnant of a forgotten cause. Ruled by a woman of split desire and wavering madness, one who wanted nothing more than to regret and to recover, to be something more than a broken shell and a shattered dream.

And Tenkyoku the new is ruled by a different design. Not a resigned contempt, but of deific ambition. The canvas is set to be moulded. The treatment is set to be used. Behind that veil lies a vision of a perfect world. Of unbroken symmetry and unyielding obedience, of a world without flaw or defect or impurity, where every illness and every heresy is purged utterly from existence.

And will be as She wills it. So the chorus goes.