Chapter 1: Every inconsistency a bar, every revision another lock.

Worlds died differently than people, Estelle discovered, as she contemplated destroying her own. Twelve years of worldbuilding stared back at her from the screen—continents sketched in digital ink, histories written and rewritten, civilizations risen and abandoned mid-thought. She used to believe every revision would make the World of Astris more coherent, more real, but now it felt like a house where different architects had built each room, none speaking the same language. The familiar interface of her worldbuilding software rendered in muted cyan against the black background of her ultrawide monitor.

Her hand trembled as she moved the cursor, an accidental click sending half of the continent drifting across the screen. The mountain range she had spent three months perfecting came unmoored from its history, a meaningless husk behind the pixels. Muscle memory reached for the familiar comfort of CTRL+Z, and the world snapped back into place—just as it had countless times before. But this time, the action felt hollow, undoing everything except the accumulated mess of those twelve years.

‘How many times?’ Estelle wondered, drawing her knees to her chest.

Reset, redo, rewrite, rebuild. The same cycle that had trapped her since she was thirteen, when creating a world seemed like the perfect escape from her own. Her fingers found the mechanical keyboard, its sharp clicks mixing with the low hum of her fan and computer's rumbling. These familiar sounds cut through her wireless headphones, blending with the lo-fi soundtrack she'd commissioned for this very tallest peak. She sighed. Another sleepless night—more hours wasted staring at her creation without any impulse for progression.

With listlessness starting to void her thoughts, she switched tools and hugged her legs tightly. Hunching forward, she panned the map leftward until something caught her eye.

There, in the northwest, far from the massive continents, lay the Soliel Archipelago—a frozen realm of eternal winter. This was the domain of ancient peoples: the people of Soleil, the litra-masters wielding their runic arts, and most importantly, the prison holding the Starless Kins beneath True Ice.

A weary sigh escaped her as she zoomed closer. The screen transitioned through misty clouds and gray-tinged skies before settling on an unexpected encounter. A pod of Waillights materialized, their gigantic kite-shaped fins catching invisible currents as they soared overhead. Below them, a fleet of airships hung in formation, their massive white envelopes reinforced with Ferric Tal'kin bone ribs, wooden decks swaying beneath. Though the world was suspended, ambient details still moved in their endless cycles—fins swaying, propellers rotating, cabin windows glowing, tiny touches that kept the world feeling alive.

Estelle's weak smile barely touched her eyes as she hugged her legs tighter, clenching them as if to hold the pieces together. Even here, in this perfectly crafted moment, something felt incomplete.

Waillights had been her first animated creation. She remembered those months spent learning animation, determined to make them fit naturally into the world. That moment when they finally moved smoothly, meeting her exacting standards—the joy had felt infinite. She had crafted a home in the Soliel Archipelago's mountains—the Shrine of Mantleless Highbells, or Kalth’sol Feir Haib’syrn in the native tongue. A racing track where they could soar between Karst peaks, thriving among Beltine trees, friendly creatures both great and small. Those had been happier times, when each creation felt like pure discovery, when every addition deepened the world organically.

She panned across the transformed landscape. What had once been empty space now teemed with floating islands, each rocky mass crowned with verdant life. Tree roots wove through the stone like hungry fingers, while waterfalls cascaded from cracked cliffsides into the abyss below. These details were new—added just this month—breathing life between spaces. Her gaze caught on a blue crystal protruding from beneath one isle, part of the formations keeping millions of islands suspended. Its glow seemed dimmer.

'Had it always been this dim?' She frowned, second-guessing herself. Perhaps she had messed up the global illumination in the settings, or accidentally altered the crystal emission values when batch-editing the formations. "Fuck… I'll think about it later," she sighed, scrolling away from her doubts.

The map zoomed further, passing clusters of pixelated debris until the clouds gradually thinned and disappeared. The distant blues faded to misty gray as the screen settled on Soliel's mainland, Errt Vollago Isle—its name materializing in bold letters above the landscape. Among the names in the world, this one felt wrong somehow, as it always did. Was it because she had merely adapted her native language as a dialect, rather than inventing something entirely new?

The issue gnawed at her like seeing a modern slang scrawled across ancient ruins. To an outsider who didn't know her language, "Errt Vollago" might sound perfectly fitting for this frozen realm, but to her, it carried the cadence and structure of contemporary speech, making the ancient dwellers feel like children playing dress-up in historical costumes. The topology placement too deserved better, the language design could have been stronger—a language as timeless and distinctive as the landscape itself.

At first, the island emerged in pixelated chunks: swathes of green dotted with dark brown and gray in the top-down view. The northwestern regions rendered painfully slow, as they always did—slower than any other land Estelle had crafted. Her attention drifted to the white mug beside her keyboard, untouched for too long now. She reached for it, seeking comfort in its fading warmth. The familiar scent of her favorite blend wafted up, but even that felt muted somehow, failing to provide the comfort she craved.

Estelle bumped her knees against the desk as she leaned back in her chair. The island remained stubbornly pixelated on-screen. She took small, continuous sips of her lukewarm coffee, trying to distract herself from the growing hollow in her chest. This region's glacial loading times were no surprise—thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of item files packed into every corner of the island's details.

“Home of eternal winter—what a fitting name,” Estelle muttered, a dry smile twisting her lips.

The name "eternal winter" wasn't Estelle's only designation for this region. Behind the scenes, she had labeled it "the archive of item files"—a massive repository of culture, magic, linguistics, history, and concept art, all detailed down to the smallest detail. True to her hyperfixated nature, she had even created a function for tracking timelines and specific dates, allowing her to separate and chronicle eras from the distant past to the far future. Each date served as a snapshot where she could isolate, create, and progress the virtual world map.

With one hand, Estelle tapped a familiar shortcut on her keyboard. The top panel appeared, resizing her view of the worldmap. Her eyes scanned until she found the timestamp display: "Current timeline-universal time year 854-9th month-winter-noon." As if on cue, a muffled orchestra filled her earphones, accompanied by playful, fluttering tribal whistles. The pixelated island finally rendered into clarity, and the music shifted—strings and whispered voices weaving into the track, their low-quality audio somehow perfect for capturing the dreadful despair of Soliel's eternal winter. The soundtrack drew her in, as it always did, matching the frozen landscape in perfection.

'I'll keep all the assets, at least,' Estelle thought, scrolling to zoom closer to the island. 'They're too valuable to delete. Besides, they're stored separately—safe in their own folder.'

Thick, black tree trunks stood barely visible among the dark green canopies, the ground beneath almost entirely hidden from view. Where the leaves parted, small brooks and larger rivers flowed in animated streams, their dim blue waters outlining the flow and standing out against the muted landscape. The scene pleased the creator's eye—atmospheric, fitting, lovely in its style and nature. Following one of the rivers, she discovered two boats drifting in line. Each carried two seated figures, though one had risen to stand, gripping the wooden prow as they led the way. From each prow hung chains suspending iron pans that cradled flames, flickering like ancient braziers to light their path through the gloom.

The region's core identity had shifted many times under Estelle's hand. At first, she envisioned it as a desolate winterland where gods reigned and rested. Then it became a pirate's haven, later transforming into a sanctuary cove for assassins. Yet none of these ideas truly resonated with her, and even shifting timelines couldn't resolve the inconsistencies that remained—couldn't match the perfect vision of what it should be, leaving her feeling like a fraud in her own creation. After months of frustrating creative drought, she finally found her answer: a tribal homeland, the most ancient region in her world, where magic, runes, and otherworldly vestiges of power first took root.

Estelle moved her cursor, dragging the map downward along the stream until new details emerged through the gray mist: wooden roofs barely visible through the treetops and the perpetual fog.

Through the rare gaps in the foliage, Estelle watched the daily life of Errt Vollago unfold. People traversed wooden hanging bridges or walked the ground below, while others gathered at tables and chairs woven from living tree roots, sharing their noon meal. Winter breath misted in the cold air, threading between trees, obscuring both view and light. The snow partially covered the ground and blanketed the treetops, which retained their deep green hue despite patches of gray and winter's muted palette. The natives had adapted, activating runic words to conjure fire for torches, while bioluminescent crystals wrapped in hemp rope hung as auxiliary lighting across the lands. It seemed a normal day for the community, yet beneath this peaceful façade lay deeper complications that plagued the entire region.

The most pressing issue, invisible to the current view, was the tangle of their histories. Estelle had never settled on a single, definitive version of events. Instead, revisions and variants existed side by side, particularly regarding the pivotal interactions between gods and the world. The narratives refused to align, creating a web of contradictions that grew more complex with each attempt to reconcile them.

A frown creased Estelle's features as she considered their historical progression. Futuristic devices—artifacts left by the first foreigners—still lay buried in ice, waiting to be discovered as tools of progress. Their writing system was as ancient as the floating islands themselves, yet possessed capabilities that wouldn't be discovered until far into the future.

Not only that, the characters they used weren't simply letters borrowed from her native tongue, but messages designed to bridge distant times. She had envisioned an immortal language linking ages lost to wind and ruin—connecting the golden age when the first foreigners would seek kinship in Astris to the ancient tales of world fragmentation, when native gods fought the Starless Kins and sealed them beneath True Ice.

Language was powerful, she knew, and communication was the tool to wield it—meant as a key allowing the future to catch whispers of the past, and the past to answer in kind. Yet despite this elegant design, no matter how well the idea worked conceptually, it didn't feel natural. She struggled to make it organic, but altering this fundamental element would require rewriting Soliel. Again.

The roots of the problem only grew deeper. Anachronisms from the future bled into the past—terminology and concepts appearing in ancient text that shouldn't exist yet. That was supposed to be the concept's function, but it was destroying the distinct character of each era, blurring boundaries until nothing felt authentic anymore.

The Soliel were capable—yet their creator had never granted them true agency, never given their digital forms freedom to evolve naturally. She knew an eight-hundred-year-old civilization couldn't remain frozen in time—and in truth, they hadn't. Official histories spoke of tribal conflicts and wars, but she had never provided them with a driving force for real progression. The reason eluded her, perhaps buried beneath mountains of worldbuilding files, or perhaps reflecting her own creative paralysis.

She had tried foreign invasions, diplomacy, internal revolution—but nothing clicked. Something vital remained missing, something unreachable—true coherence. The Soliel people remained bound by ancient ways, their minds shaped by elders who preached eternal connection to the living forest and their old gods. Faithful to tradition, they waited, forever frozen in eternal winter for their Creator to weave their fate—a fate that would never come.

The irony wasn't lost on her; their eternal stasis felt like a reflection of her own creative drought.

A scoff escaped her lips as she considered erasing the region entirely. The thought vanished as quickly as it came. Deletion would bring no clarity; it would only shatter the world's foundation. The Soliel archipelago was woven through many layered structures she had crafted. Hundreds of characters and countless storylines were all tangled in this narrative web. Their influence shaped pivotal moments in the world's history—be it through individual characters, the movement of winds, the flow of magic, or their ancient artifacts. To remove them would unravel everything, stripping away the narrative cohesion that gave her vision purpose and meaning.

The Soliel were meant to be both the World's beginning and its end, should the Starless Kins trapped in ice ever awaken. Yet, they weren't unique in their problems; other regions, lands, timelines, and power systems were equally flawed. The problems were everywhere, too numerous to count, too entangled to untangle.

Even as the Creator, the interaction between countless details was overwhelming. Many drafts remained unfinished, debated proposals awaited integration, outdated files needed updates, unused content gathered dust in folders, deleted content and ideas sat archived elsewhere. Despite her daily routine of organizing connections, files, articles, and references, thousands of elements were still riddled with inconsistencies.

Estelle inhaled deeply, the cold night air filling her lungs. It calmed her nerves, but her mind remained fixated on deleting the World of Astris. For a month, this thought had paralyzed her creative progress, bleeding into her real life like an infection. 'Delete the world and be free,' she chanted mentally, exhaling sharply.

Summoning her strength, Estelle guided the mouse cursor to the top panel of the software, hovering over the cog-shaped setting icon. She paused, her pulse hammering against her ribs. Her mind urged her forward, yet her fingers rebelled, trembling slightly. Still, she had considered this many times, spent countless days thinking about it—it was time. With a deliberate click, she opened the settings menu. Another deep breath did little to calm her frayed nerves as waves of cold prickled her skin. Sweat beaded on her forehead as her breathing grew labored.

A new window materialized, a panel of core settings stretching down the screen. Estelle moved the cursor with agonizing slowness, her heart and mind locked in violent conflict. The once-comforting music from her earphones was now drowned out by the deafening beat of her pulse. Despite her inner turmoil, she pressed on until the cursor hovered over red lettering: "Delete 'World of Astris'?"

The words onscreen made her mind go blank. She gritted her teeth as waves of numbness chilled over her skin, something desperate swelling in her chest, so uncomfortable she wanted to claw it out. Swallowing hard, she chanted, "Delete the world and be free. Erase everything and start over. Begin again."

With trembling fingers, Estelle tapped the left mouse button. The soft music cut off, replaced by a sudden, deafening silence. The screen dimmed, overlaid by a gray film that froze the world beneath. Her breath hitched as a new window appeared: "Are you certain you want to delete 'The World of Astris'? (Containing 67,934 item files. 144GB)"

The confirmation window stared back, the numbers a cold, clinical summary of twelve years of work. Each of the 67,934 files was a fragment of her imagination, each gigabyte a piece of her soul. The cursor trembled in the empty space below the text, a terrified pinprick of light hovering near the point of no return.

At the bottom of the dialog box, two buttons waited: "Cancel" in a washed-out gray, and "Delete" in a stark, crimson red that pulsed with finality. Her hand, hovering over the mouse, was paralyzed between creation and destruction, caught between the suffocating weight of keeping something broken and the terrifying void of losing everything.

The World of Astris hung in digital limbo, waiting for its Creator's final judgment.