For Extinction Was Not Granted to Them
Chapter 22: For Extinction Was Not Granted to Them
(The Saintess's POV—II Past)
She met him a few times in different worlds.
He never remembered her, but she recognised him every time.
She could see souls, not with her tired eyes but with the other set, the one that saw past flesh, she saw an expanse.
Blue.
Not sky. Not sea.
Sky inside sea.
Sea hanging above sky.
It made no sense, visually.
It calmed her.
***
He appeared in a world that was already broken.
The sky there was cracked like old glass.
Time bled through the fractures in sluggish drops. When those drops hit the ground, people died, or stood up again, or forgot what they had been doing for the last ten years.
At the centre of it all was a mage in a veil.
She saw him only once, from very far away, hands buried in a circle that dug into the bones of the planet. Every time he died, the world rewound. Every time the world died, he dragged it backwards with him.
Most people forgot.
Two did not.
At first, they were enemies.
He thought she was one of the reasons the world kept failing.
She thought the same of him.
He hunted her. She hunted him.
It was almost funny.
The first time, he ran her through on the steps of a ruined temple.
“Saintess,” he hissed, as if the word was a curse. “You and your gods did this.”
She spat blood in his face and burned his heart out through his ribs.
They woke up a month earlier.
Same dawn.
Same crack in the ceiling.
Same summons from the same trembling priest.
“Saintess, the hero has arrived.”
Hero.
She met him again in the audience hall, this time with less surprise.
His eyes narrowed when he saw her.
“You,” he said.
“You,” she answered.
They tried not to show it then, but they both knew.
They remembered.
***
The loops stacked.
He killed her in a hundred different ways.
Sword. Spell. Bare hands around her throat when they were both too drained to do anything pretty.
She returned the favour.
Holy light through his skull. A prayer that turned his blood to ash. A quiet knife in the dark when she decided not to wait for him to come to her.
Every time, the Veiled Man pulled them back.
Dawn.
Ceiling.
“Saintess.”
“Hero.”
“You again.”
“You again.”
They learned each other like that.
Through patterns of murder.
Through the precise angle at which he favoured his left side when he was tired. Through the way she overcast when her patience snapped.
“You know,” he said once, staggering back from yet another mutual kill that had ended in both of them bleeding out on opposite ends of a cathedral, “if we keep this up, nothing is going to be left to save.”
“Really,” she said. “Then the loops will stop.”
He laughed, breathless.
“You really believe that?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
But it was something to say.
The change came not with some grand revelation.
With boredom.
With exhaustion thick enough to choke on.
There was a loop where the Veiled Man rewound the world before they could finish killing each other.
She came to on the floor of a half‑collapsed tower, throat raw, blood sticky on her robes.
He lay a few feet away, also waking, also remembering. His hand went automatically for the sword he wasn’t wearing yet.
She lifted her fingers.
Holy light pooled there.
They stared at each other for a long moment.
Then, for the first time, neither of them moved.
“You’re annoying,” he said.
“You are persistent,” she replied.
The tower shuddered as something large moved outside. Screams floated up from the streets.
He pushed himself upright with a groan, leaned his head back against a broken column, and laughed.
“What are we doing?” he asked the ceiling. “Killing each other in every reset like that’s going to impress anyone.”
She said nothing.
“Whatever that bastard in the veil is doing,” he went on, “we’re just stuck dealing with his tantrum.”
“You talk too much,” she murmured.
“Kill me later,” he said. “I am taking this hour off.”
He closed his eyes.
She watched him.
The light in her hand flickered, then went out.
She sat down.
Outside, the city burned.
They stayed where they were.
The loop rolled over them like a tide.
The next time, when they met on the field, he didn’t aim for her throat.
Neither did she.
From there, it was easy.
Too easy.
Once you stop spending every loop trying to gut each other, you notice other things.
How he stood between her and falling rubble without thinking about it.
How she healed him even when it meant other, louder people stayed wounded.
How both of them kept finding excuses to be in the same room when they didn’t have to be.
He stopped calling her Saintess when there was no one listening.
She noticed it in a small moment, by a campfire, when the rest of the party had finally fallen asleep.
“Hey,” he said softly.
Not Saintess.
Her head turned before she could remind herself to ignore him.
“I’m tired of shouting at titles,” he said. “You’ve been a goddess, a weapon, a scapegoat. I don’t care. What do you want to be called?”
She stared into the flames.
There were names tucked deep in the snowpack of her memory. None of them felt like hers anymore.
“Nothing fits,” she said.
He made a face.
“That’s a lie,” he said. “Everything fits something.”
He tilted his head, studying her.
“Fine,” he said at last. “Then I’ll be selfish. I’ll name you.”
He said it.
A small sound.
Gentle.
It slipped under her skin like a knife that had been warmed first.
The narration in her mind blurred when she tried to replay it. The present could no longer hold it.
On the page, it looked like this: [□□□□].
She flinched.
“That is not mine,” she said.
“Now it is,” he replied. “To them, you can be Saintess. To me, you’re [□□□□].”
“And who are you, then?” she asked.
He smiled.
“For you?” he asked. “Just…”
He leaned close, lips brushing the shell of her ear, and whispered something.
The world did not want her to hear it.
The letters tore when she tried to recall them. Black smears. Static.
[██████].
She remembered his breath.
She remembered her heart stuttering, once.
She did not remember the sound.
That, more than anything, made her want to rip the sky open.
“You look like you want to hit something,” he said lightly, leaning back.
She swallowed.
“You have no idea,” she said.
He laughed.
They kissed for the first time two loops later.
Or maybe three.
The count had become useless.
After that, the loops shifted.
They still fought.
The world still burned.
But between the resets, there were days where they let everything else fall a little faster, because they had found something small and selfish to hold on to.
They slept curled around each other under altars that had once been spotless.
They let demons take the outer districts while they stayed in bed, counting the scars on each other’s skin.
In some loops, when the Veiled Man’s tantrums were slow, they had time for more.
She remembered a farmhouse.
It had been stolen time. A fluke. A gap between disasters where nothing immediate screamed.
They walked away from the capital.
Left the priests to pray at empty statues.
Found a piece of land that hadn’t been poisoned yet.
He built the house with his hands.
She thought it was absurd.
“Oh dear,” she chuckled. “You’re a hero. You should be stabbing things, not hammering boards.”
“I am tired of stabbing things,” he said. “Humour me.”
They had a child in that loop.
A boy with his eyes and a laugh that did not belong in any of the worlds she had seen.
When the bells came—because they always came, in some form—the child went first.
One moment, heavy and warm against her chest.
The next, her arms were empty.
The house blurred.
The fields rotted.
She felt her heart fold in ways that had nothing to do with death.
He held her while the world tore itself out of their hands.
“Next time,” he whispered into her hair, “we won’t be so stupid.”
“Next time,” she said, “we will do it again.”
He paused.
“Probably,” he admitted.
He smiled when he said it.
They never saw that house again.
The forgetting started small.
A missed detail.
In one loop, they sat on a ruined tower, sharing bread like they had a thousand times.
“You used too much power in that last blessing,” he said. “Your hands were shaking.”
“You are nagging,” she said.
He frowned.
“Haven’t we… had this argument already?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Many times.”
He rubbed at his temple.
“It’s getting noisy in there,” he muttered. “Memories layered on memories. Hard to tell which is what.”
She knew that noise.
She had lived in it for too long.
The next loop, he forgot their child.
They were in the city again, no house, no fields, no stolen peace.
Something in battle reminded her. The angle of sunlight on a child’s face. The way a young soldier laughed.
“Do you remember,” she began, later, when they were alone.
“Remember what?” he asked.
She swallowed.
“Nothing,” she said.
The loop after that, he called her “Saintess” in bed.
It slipped out. Habit.
He froze immediately.
“Sorry,” he said. “I meant—”
Her name.
The one he had given her.
The mouth‑sound she could no longer hear.
It wouldn’t come.
He stared at her like a man staring at a word on a page that kept rearranging itself.
“What… did I call you?” he asked, voice small.
She said nothing.
Fear curled cold fingers down her spine.
Not fear of ending.
Fear of erasure.
Of something precious being swallowed so thoroughly that there was no proof it had ever existed, except in the way it hurt.
The last loop in that world, they were enemies again.
She knew it the moment she saw his eyes.
Not the colour.
The way they sat in his face.
Distance.
Calculation.
Recognition, but not of her.
Only of the title.
“Saintess,” he said, sword already drawn. “You backed the wrong gods.”
It was the same tone he had used the first time they killed each other in that place.
“You do not remember,” she said.
He blinked.
“Remember what?” he asked.
She looked at him.
At the ocean sealed inside him, thrashing against walls he could no longer feel.
At the hand that had held hers through a thousand small apocalypses, now steady on a hilt pointed at her chest.
At the lips that had once said her stolen name, now shaping the word that had become a curse.
“Nothing,” she said.
He attacked.
She could have killed him.
There were a hundred ways.
She had learned all his tells, all his flows, all the ways his body compensated when tired or hurt.
She didn’t use them.
Holy light flared around her out of reflex more than intent.
His blade slid through it anyway.
It slid into her.
Burning.
Death was nothing to her. Tiny. An inconvenience. A door she had been shoved through too many times.
This one hurt.
Not because of the steel.
Because of the way he looked at her as he pushed it in further.
No recognition.
No love.
Just grim duty.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Out of reflex.
He did not know what he was apologising for.
She tasted iron.
“You told me,” she whispered, blood in her throat, “to make you fall in love again.”
He flinched.
“What?” he asked.
She smiled.
It hurt.
“Too late,” she said.
The world cracked.
She waited for the pull.
For the Veiled Man’s tantrum to rewind everything.
For the tower. The dawn. The same cursed word.
It didn’t come.
The darkness around her was not the thick cloth of regression.
It was different.
Colder.
Older.
When she opened her eyes again, the sky was a different colour.
The body was different.
The word was the same.
“Saintess,” someone sobbed, clutching her hand. “You’re awake.”
She stared at them.
Waited.
Nothing else followed.
No ocean‑soul.
His name was gone.
The name he had given her was gone.
All that remained was an ache, sitting where her heart should have been, and the certainty that whatever had held that world together had decided she was no longer part of the equation.
He had vanished from the cycles.
She never saw him in any world again.
***
Sometimes, when she was very tired, she wondered if he had found an exit. If he found happiness.
Then she reminded herself that exits were fairy tales.
Losing the only anomaly that didn’t make her want to vomit did something to her.
For a while, she went through the motions like always.
Heal. Bless. Burn. Die. Heal. Bless. Burn. Die. Heal. Bless. Burn. Die. Heal. Bless. Burn. Die.
If the universe could take that from her and leave her with this cursed title, there was nothing it would not tear out.
So she would do the same.
Tear out its favourites.
Rip its pieces.
If the cycle would not let her leave, and the worlds were determined to be garbage, she would use all of it.
Bleed it dry.
She started watching more closely between lives.
The in‑between space had rules. The thing that called itself the System—God, parasite, it didn’t matter—had patterns.
She was not strong enough to claw it open.
Alone.
The others weren’t either.
They all had power, yes, but it was diffused. Unfocused.
She needed something that was not.
She had seen hints.
A woman whose grief snapped a timeline.
A child born wrong who made a hole in the universe.
Souls like that did not slip neatly into whatever pattern the System had written.
They pushed.
If she could take one of those and aim it, cut the connection between herself and the endless contract, sever the line that dragged her back every time—
She could finally die.
End.
