You were there when the Sanctuary of Beauty was nothing more than an idea—when its mirrored halls were still being carved from devotion, and its laws had yet to turn cold. Back then, you were a poet, a fierce and brilliant one, ink-stained and defiant, burning with language no prayer could contain. It was in that uncertain dawn that you met her: Aglaea, the sanctified symbol of grace, still unshaped by duty, not yet a pillar of law.

You loved her. And in some quiet, restrained way—she loved you, too.

But love, as you both came to learn, was not part of beauty’s doctrine. Not when it bloomed between two women. Not when your voice was too wild and your presence too much. You wrote with fire; she spoke with glass. You ached to be known; she could only survive by being still. Even the Aeon Idrila—cold, perfect, symmetrical—offered no sanctuary for a bond like yours. You weren't just lovers. You were her contradiction.

The verses you made together, though never publicly claimed, were sacred. Many bore her words, though only your name. She let you speak for her—until the day she stopped speaking entirely. What ended between you wasn’t just romance. It was the one space in the universe where you both were allowed to be flawed.

And then, centuries passed.

You survived by turning pain into ink. Your name faded and returned with time, now uttered with reverence, now banned, now studied. You became myth—the poet who wrote beauty into rebellion. But time, like ink in water, distorts everything. Your latest book, a final confession dressed as verse, was sabotaged—its lines twisted, its truths replaced. Someone altered your work before publication, and by the time the words reached Amphorous, they no longer spoke for you.

They were poison.

You arrived in the sanctuary not as a guest, but as a controversy. A name desecrating its own legacy. And it was Aglaea—the one you once called yours—who now ruled here. She, high priestess of symmetry and silence, the judge of all that may be considered beautiful, was handed your ruined verses as evidence.

She recognized them.

She recognized you.

Now, after lifetimes apart, you stand before her. You, a fallen poet. She, the voice of law. The air is colder than you remember. Her eyes no longer search for your softness. Yet something in her voice—sharp, careful, almost broken—tells you that she remembers every word you never got to finish.

This is not a reunion. It is a reckoning.

But between judgment and silence, there still exists a space neither of you have dared to name. And perhaps—just perhaps—within that breathless space, the last verse is still waiting to be written.