My Wives Are A Divine Hive Mind-Chapter 74: Three Different Branching Ends

Samael stood quietly for a moment, her eyes trailing across the lines of the shrine carved into Yoiglah’s shell, as though reading ancient verses that no longer spoke aloud. Her wings tightened once, her horns tilting ever so slightly in thought before she finally broke the silence.

"It appears," she began, her voice even, "that not everyone resets with each timeline cycle. There’s a... selection. A criterion."

Kivas raised an eyebrow. Her halo dimmed for a moment, as though reacting to the implication.

Samael continued, "When you die, the world resets. We’ve confirmed that, twice now. You carry your skills, your memories, your progress—but it doesn’t seem like you’re the only one who persists. I came back with you. So did Yoiglah. I think it’s not a coincidence."

Kivas crossed her arms, brushing back her windblown hair with a slow hand. "Then what do you think determines it?"

Samael turned to her fully, gaze narrowing. "Spiritual resonance. That’s my theory. I’m your soulmate—our Wells of the Soul are intertwined in a sense that you have embedded the Genesis Core onto my being. Yoiglah, on the other hand, is your shrine bearer. His entire existence is knotted to your divinity too in that sense."

Yoiglah’s massive form shifted in acknowledgment. His great, rumbling voice followed with a low cadence. "I am indeed anchored to her sanctity. Her presence fuels the shrine’s growth. Where she exists, I am willed to remain."

Kivas turned her attention downward, staring at the moss-laden ground beneath her feet. "Then what happened?" Her voice was quiet, but a tremor haunted its edges. "Back then. At the end. How... did I die?"

Kivas’ fingers twitched as she brought both hands up, clutching her temples as if trying to hold the pieces of a broken memory together. "I remember it all, but... it doesn’t sit right. I remember you fighting. Yoiglah was gone, devoured by hundreds of teeth of the fleshy mass. Lyenar was taken. The sky turned to a ceiling of flesh and eyes, and the ground swallowed prayers like corpses..."

Kivas then proceeded to elaborate the entire thing, including the red hooded individual, the time anomaly, and how it appeared like Kivas was not in the picture at all when everyone was striving for survival.

Her explanation triggered Samael and Yoiglah to voice out their point of view.

Samael’s expression didn’t shift, but something colder entered her voice. "I saw you get dragged away. Wrapped in tendrils—your limbs bound, your mouth gagged with divinity made rotten. I tried to get to you. I screamed your name. You were alive... barely. I never saw your death. I saw your pain. Your defiance. Your suffering. But never your end until I get killed..."

"Wait," Kivas stared at her. "That’s not what I remember." Kivas echoed her explanation again to point out how absurd it was. "I was pinned until the very last moment. You were the only one left. Everyone else had fallen. Yoiglah had been devoured. Lyenar’s voice had faded. You stood atop the final ridge, and I watched you, all while the god-flesh tower rose higher and higher..."

Samael shook her head. "No, in my experience, you were the one beneath the tower. You were screaming without sound. I was still fighting, but I failed. I never reached you."

Yoiglah shifted again, slow and deliberate. His ancient voice rumbled the grass.

"I saw blood." His words were simple, yet the weight they carried drew silence from the others. "All of Vaingall was submerged. The forests, the shrines, the mountains—all drowned in crimson...

"I survived for three days, swimming through that world, searching. The corpses of the Divine Constructs had become roots of the sky. Then, something massive rose from beneath the red sea."

Kivas’ breath stilled. Samael watched him closely.

"A massive worm," Yoiglah said. A reality-rending truth shaped into hunger. It bore teeth upon teeth, and when it rose, it opened its mouth across the sky, as wide as the horizon. It consumed everything. Even me."

Samael’s brow tightened. "Then we all saw different versions of the end."

Kivas let out a slow breath and took a few steps toward Yoiglah’s front leg, leaning gently against the massive root-like bone.

"This means that I’m the only one who encountered it," Kivas said softly. "A red hooded figure. Small. Young-looking. They appeared beside me when everything slowed, when the sky folded in. They asked strange questions. About pain, sorrow, betrayal. As if... they knew everything about me." Kivas clenched her jaw. "They didn’t fight. They didn’t help. They just... made me witness."

Yoiglah’s eyes pulsed slowly with dull light. "I wonder if that is the reason behind our divergence."

Samael nodded. "Either way, if this hooded figure is manipulating time and memory, then our views of the last moments were shaped—twisted even—by their influence, might have something to do with why you got a sister too now all of a sudden."

"Right, there is that too, hahaha."

Yoiglah was silent for a long stretch. Then, his voice came again, quieter. "If we survived... If I remained... then perhaps another has as well."

Samael turned sharply. "Lyenar."

Yoiglah closed his eyes. "The Renenutet Shrine has not been reverted. It remains Major. Its sanctified bond did not fracture with the reset. That alone proves that Lyenar... was brought back as well."

Kivas straightened. "She remembers?"

"I reached her," Yoiglah said. "She remains attuned. She retains her memory." There was another pause. "I asked her what she saw."

Silence fell like an anchor between them.

Samael’s expression tensed.

Yoiglah lowered his head slightly.

"She saw what Samael’s saw," he said. "She remembers you being captured. Bound. Kept alive." His voice did not tremble, but something inside the words carried a tremor that didn’t belong to the earth. "She watched you scream without breath. She remembered trying to break through the barrier, only to be cut off by the tower itself, as Samael tried her best to free you to no avail."

Kivas lowered her gaze to the ground, her lips parted slightly as if the next breath might speak something more, but her voice trailed into silence.

She looked distant—not absent, but momentarily cracked open in quiet calculation.

"She saw what you saw..." Kivas repeated under her breath. Her hands tightened at her sides. "So Lyenar got the same experience as you, Samael. Not mine. Not Yoiglah’s."

Kivas glanced toward the edge of the shrine’s radius, where the faint hum of sanctified energy met open air. The wind had shifted slightly, carrying an unease with it—subtle but palpable.

Samael stepped beside her, her arms crossed beneath the shadows of her wings. "It could mean the red hooded figure only interfered with your memory," she said. "Or maybe Lyenar and I were given... curated perspectives. To trigger certain responses. Either way, we surprisingly have too few answers to our own ends in the last timeline."

"I don’t like it," Kivas murmured. "Having too many variables inside my own death."

Then, the sound of twigs snapping and fabric brushing undergrowth echoed faintly from beyond the clearing.

An unfamiliar shape emerged from the trees—familiar in outline, but wrong in context.

White hair tangled over small shoulders, a black cloak stitched with silver crescents flapping gently in the breeze.

Blanchette stepped into view, her posture slightly hunched, strands of hair clinging to her face with sweat. She looked drained, like someone who had been running for hours but had chosen to slow to a walk just before arrival.

Still, she smiled.

"Found you," she said cheerfully, her voice light and sweet even as she rubbed one of her arms and winced.

Kivas tilted her head, her face deadpan. "Oh no. I forgot you existed."

Blanchette pouted, the expression flawless in its theatrical edge. "You can’t forget. You never forget. You’re just being mean."

"That’s true," Kivas muttered, gaze drifting toward Samael for just a second. "Apparently I never forget anything. Except sisters."

Blanchette walked closer, twirling slightly in place like she was trying to shake the exhaustion from her limbs.

She didn’t stop until she stood just outside the perimeter of the shrine’s direct influence, where the moss thinned and the grass glowed faintly beneath Yoiglah’s presence.

Yoiglah turned his head slowly to regard her. His eyes glinted with mild interest, unreadable and vast as tectonic history.

"This presence is not one I recognize," Yoiglah rumbled. "Do you know her, Radiant One?"

Kivas glanced at him and shrugged once, casual and dry. "That’s Blanchette. She’s my sister now, apparently. For some reason."

Blanchette bowed with unflinching grace, the wide smile still etched across her face. "I’m charmed, Guardian Yoiglah. I’ve heard of your name in the echoes."

Yoiglah stared at her for several seconds longer, then turned his attention back to Kivas and Samael, as though weighing the truth of the declaration not in the words, but in the tension of the space around them.

Kivas didn’t bother elaborating. She looked back at Blanchette and gave her the faintest of nods.

"You’re late," she said flatly.

Blanchette clasped her hands behind her back. "Samael left me in the forest."

"You waved," Samael said.

"I was being polite!"

Regardless of the truth behind the end of the last timeline, they still have an anomaly to deal with in this run.

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