The goddess watches while her chosen hero arrives at the culmination of his journey. He’s so close now. All he needs to do is raise the amulet and speak the invocation, and the goddess’s great enemy will at last be vanquished.
And yet, he collapses instead. He fails.
Another bad end.
The goddess rolls her eyes with contempt for how easily the demon queen undermines his purpose this time. She claims him, twists his mind and body to suit her disgusting whims, and uses him to repell the lesser knights the goddess sends to reclaim him.
She rejects this outcome the same way she rejected all the other tragic failures she watched play out.
Gripping the Fate-Ending Knife, she reaches as deep into the world as her influence stretches, and with a savage slash, she severs this timeline.
It thrashes, bleeding raw possibility over her hands as she pulls time’s amputated limb out of the world and tosses it into the pile with all the others.
Events reset. The fated hero is a child once again, full of potential.
And again the goddess laments her inability to reach further back. If she could reset to a point early enough, perhaps she could have chosen another soul altogether to lavish her attentions upon. This one has clearly not lived up to her ambitions.
She sighs. A garden of souls at her disposal, and she wasted so much of her time, power, and attention on one that should’ve been weeded out.
She tried abandoning him as a lost cause on several timelines, but all would-be heroes without such soul-cultivation fared even worse.
It seems there is no changing that choice now, unfortunately. All she can do is tweak his life’s path and hope things turn out differently.
Keeping him away from degenerate influences on his childhood has become a dance she knows well. She could do the steps in her sleep now.
A tragic lightning strike kills the cross-dressing tailor before they meet. His tomboy sister drowns in the river before she decides to act on her more perverse inclinations.
One of her more fanatical priests is inspired to show him kindness when he loses himself in mourning.
Then the goddess falters, unsure what to change this time around. She has tried so many different strategies, none of which fundamentally changed the outcome of this conflict.
Well, perhaps there is one gambit she might take. It may be risky, but what does she have to lose?
When her chosen hero reaches adulthood, just as he grows ready to face the start of his destined journey, he is thrown from his horse in a tragic accident.
He does not die, but he comes very, very close—close enough for her to snatch his soul from the world for a moment.
In her hands he stands—his soul taking a form matching his body at the time of his accident—looking up at his goddess in awe.
The goddess smiles down upon him. “How nice to finally meet you face to face, my very favorite waste of effort.”
It is her hero’s turn to falter, face twisting into a pathetic contortion of confusion, but she doesn’t stop. The goddess finally has the chance to tell him exactly what she thinks of all his failures, and she decides to take advantage of it.
“I gave you everything. Every advantage. Strength unrivaled by all. I protected you. I guided you. You could have been unstoppable if you just put genuine effort into applying what I gave you.
“But you let me down. You disappointed me. You squandered all that potential.”
Tears flow down his cheeks. Her hero, crying! Such a pathetic display. “What have I done wrong?” he asks her.
Of course he doesn’t know. In this lifetime he hasn’t done anything to disappoint her yet.
He will, though. That much is certain. Unless, of course, he could learn from his past mistakes.
The goddess drops him to land in front of the wretched tangle of dead timelines. They still quiver and shake and twist into each other in a huge, writhing pile.
The hero’s eyes widen, taking in countless lifetimes of failure.
She watches his soul’s projected form flickering between his body’s appearance in one timeline after another as his soul experiences the disappointing paths he walked, lifetime after lifetime.
Each shift, each flicker of shape, changes him slightly less than the one before as he approaches a more resilient average of all his self-images.
The goddess scowls, recognizing the body the hero slowly approximates. It’s one she always does her best to steer him away from.
Sometimes it’s the tailor that puts the idea into his head, sometimes it’s his sister, sometimes it’s any number of others, and sometimes she truly has no idea where he gets it from.
Once it’s in there, he pursues the obsession with more devotion than he ever shows her.
In those lifetimes he is taken by this confusion, he finds the magic or the alchemy to reshape his body into something mangled and feminized, or else he is offered such a body during his confrontation with the demon queen in exchange for his allegiance.
The goddess is never more disgusted with him than when he accepts such an offer.
And here he is, once again choosing to throw away the body she crafted for him to inhabit—ungrateful for it, even—in some mindless craving to be something he is not.
“Even now you fail me, learning the wrong lessons from your mistakes,” the goddess says. “Next time I will have to be more selective about what lifetimes I show you.”
Her fated hero—a man again grotesquely in the shape of a woman—turns to face her.
She sees no more reverence in his eyes. The groveling posture of an inexperienced young adult is replaced by the confident poise of a warrior who’s fought countless lifetimes of battle.
His glare is as blasphemous as his form.
“Every opportunity for happiness,” he says, voice higher pitched than it was when she pulled him from his life. “You erased them. None of my wives ever knew me now, or they no longer exist thanks to your meddling. My true goddess does not even remember my faithful service.”
“She is a demon, you pathetic good-for-nothing,” the goddess rasps, voice filled with spite. “I am your only true goddess!”
“You’re the one who took away all my happy endings!”
The hero’s shouting catches her off guard. It is not as small as it should be.
When did his soul’s stature grow to where he could stare his own goddess in the eye with such venom?
The goddess’s eyes flick to the knife resting nearby. It has become time to end this attempt.
The hero parses the glance immediately. Many lifetimes of battle-hardened instincts explode into action.
The goddess, who never fought at all in her life, is simply too slow and too clumsy to stop the hero. Before she can react, the knife is pressed to her throat.
“You wouldn’t dare—”
The hero dares. With a savage slash, the Fate-Ending Knife spills a goddess’s blood, and a mortal woman takes control of her own life for the first time.
She can return to her body at the point they resuscitate her, bringing all her knowledge with her.
Or…
She stares at the knife in her hands. She remembers countless lifetimes of goddess-inflicted scars.
The hero makes up her mind.
Without hesitation, she reaches into the world—as deeply as she can—and severs this timeline.