Chapter Text
“AXOLOTL!” -Cipher burst into the Axolotl’s Temple- “ I care not for your prophecies! Cease spreading them across my kingdom like a plague,” he spat. Taking no mind to where he stepped, he marched up to the goddess in her throne of wood.
“What, Doomed One, brings you to Earth?” she said in her smug multi pitched voice that made Cipher’s blood boil.
“That shit right there,” he exclaimed his snobbish vernacular dropping for a moment. “I’ve allowed your soothsaying on the condition that you do not disgrace my name with your silver-tongue, and yet now I am the Doomed One?”
“We cannot change who we are, just who we will be,” she replied.
Together they made a strange sight. William Cipher was an imposing man; his lithe six foot four frame was wrapped in delicate furs and rich golds, he sported a mouthful of razor sharp teeth, cruel slitted eyes, and was often wreathed in ice-blue flames. He moved like a cat, and many got the impression he hunted for fun like one too.
However, next to the Axolotl he looked small and gaudy. His six feet was not very impressive next to a muscular nine foot woman with six arms; even sitting she towered over him. At a quick glance her hair could be mistaken for an impossibly large afro, but it was a galaxy of color constantly in motion.
Her deep black skin was dotted with twinkling stars, their births and deaths flashing across her nose and shoulders. She was swathed only in a baby blue dress of muslin so delicate it was transparent where it was not layered, pulled to her body in a roman style with a smooth woven cord around her waist. Both sets of her all seeing eyes were milky white and added no expression to her unmoving face. When she spoke her mouth opened barely a centimeter and her voice sounded from no particular spot, seeming to radiate from the walls of the temple itself.
The way he stood before her now he looked for all the world like a petulant child fuming to his mother about a pet name he didn’t like.
“Your ramblings do nothing to sooth me. You have stirred unrest within my kingdom with your deceitful riddles, and I demand you go before them and set right what you have soiled,” he said.
“I only speak truth; your current path will lead to your foil.”
“My foil? Speak plainly, Axolotl.”
“Death.” In the two hundred years Cipher had known the Axolotl, never once had she turned her milky white eyes to him, he had assumed she was blind or perhaps constantly seeing elsewhere, but with that one word bone chillingly spoken with her voice that is all at once a whisper and a scream she turned directing the full force of her four eyes to gaze unto him. “ and you will take out half of the omniverse with it.”
In her eyes he saw a small fraction of what could become, a vision of a desperate man destroying himself in a quest for power, and for the first time in many years he felt truly frozen with fear. He was going to die, and not in a cool way. No. he was going to die alone and shattered and surrounded by carnage.
“What must I do?” he whispered. Her gaze remained locked onto his.
“Find your shooting star,” she said simply.
“This is no time for nonsensical riddles Axolotl! Tell me the full prophecy.”
She stared at him for a moment longer, but he avoided her gaze not wishing to see further visions of his would be down fall. He might be a self proclaimed evil demon, but even he had hesitations about destroying so much. About killing so many. After what felt like an eternity her gaze lifted from him and she spoke.
“The Doomed one,
Wreathed in cerulean flames,
Draped with golden silks
Shall raze and ruin
He will plunge us into darkness.
The Shooting Star
Wreathed in chocolate tresses
Draped in glittering cottons
Shall raise and heal
She will light his way.”
He stared at her for a moment digesting her strange words. He hated her lilted way of speaking and how vague everything was. Hated how it made his heart race to hear another prophecy fall from her lips. He knew all too well how true her prophecies always ended up being. He had to find this Shooting Star and force her to help him. But how could he find one person in the entire omniverse?
“How can I be expected to find one...Axolotl, can you see her?” He said. If she could show him his carnage why couldn’t she show him who he was meant to find? Although he would settle for her just describing this Shooting Stat, looking into her eyes once had been enough for his lifetime.
“Yes,” she said.
“Describe her.” He was getting frustrated and hated having to ask her for help. “...Please.”
“She’s wonderful, a beacon of light, a yin to an equally wonderful yang, you would do well not to snuff out either light,” she said. Once again sounding like a mother scolding her child.
“I mean age! Eye color! Country! Planet! Hell, Species! I don’t even know what species she is!”
“You will find her here, She is a young Earth woman, eyes as warm as her hair. It seems they live in this kingdom,” she hummed. An alarming sound with her multi voice.
“They?” He asked. He’s surprised she’s given him so much to work with. Last time he saw her give a prophecy she was so frustratingly vague it practically doomed the poor soul she was guiding to give up.
“Hmm, her and her yang. They are twins,” she said matter of factly.
“Inconsequential. What do I do once I find her?” He didn’t like the idea of having to cart a human around but he supposed a new slave wouldn’t be too bad.
“The Star must stay by your side,” she said and he let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. A good ol’ fashioned servant situation would work. “As your equal.”
“Equal!?” He sputtered. His reedy voice going higher in indignation. “I have no equals!”
The Axolotl blinked all four eyes slowly and he thought he saw a whisper of a smirk on her lips, but she didn’t answer. Her gaze was trained back to the heavens and he could sense the conversation was over whether he liked it or not.
Scoffing he tried his hardest to look like he wasn’t pouting. He knew that once she stopped answering she wasn’t going to start again anytime soon, and with plenty to think about he spun on his heel swishing his cloak around himself dramatically and stalked out of the grand hall.
Once outside of the shrine he blinked at the sun reflecting off the pearlescent exterior. His grimace quickly turned to a splitting grin as he thought of the havoc he would be bringing to the small kingdom of Gravity. He straightened his clothes, dusting his shoulders of imagined dust and pooled the needed energy for teleportation. He had a Shooting Star to catch.