Devil in a Red Dress

23

A/N

Guys, there's some hopefully obvious time skips in this chapter too so just a heads up, the beginning precedes Lisa finding out about the prophecy. Then it skips forwards to present time, hopefully the sequence of events is pretty clear.

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"It's time." Chaeyoung solemnly said to the stars, standing in front of Lisa's waterfall in the living realm. It was peaceful here, and what she needed most now was peace.

She looked up and noticed several stars wink at her and she knew they had heard.  They had been watching, as they always had ever since the other realms were tainted by the Black. The Spiritual Realm may have not been affected in the same way as the others, but it was affected nonetheless. Their peace was marred by the sadness the fae felt from the knowledge that the humans in the other realms suffered, hurt, and killed each other because they were tainted by corruption.

Chaeyoung wished it didn't have to come to this. She thought she would be able to avoid the risk of possibly dooming more fae to the anguish of leaving the peace of the Spiritual Realm, possibly forever. She wasn't sure if the Spiritual Realm could survive the other realms collapsing but she had hope, and if it did survive should they fail, and chances were that they would fail, the fae that were about to join the cause would be doomed forever.

She hated that the inevitable had happened and she had been forced to make an impossible choice long ago. A choice that would affect her fae, because she knew they would not sit idly by, it wasn't in their nature. Not with the connections they had formed in their previous lives. Not with the pureness of their souls. They had no choice either but to jump from the Spiritual Realm down to the realm of the living when the time came. When their creators needed them the most.

Chaeyoung knew eventually the time would come that the last wave of the brave fae would leave their true home, because she had made the choice to tell the real Hades about the prophecy she had stumbled upon.

She had to tell him that Jennie or Lisa would kill the other. She called it a prophecy because technically it was, since it happened in every single vision Chaeyoung ever had over those two, except in two possibilities.

She hadn't told anyone that there had been two, because Chaeyoung had made sure to do everything in her power to make sure one of those didn't come true. Because in the one possibility where Chaeyoung didn't tell Hades about the prophecy, Jennie and Lisa would both succumb to the power of the Black, so she took that option away and hoped for the best.

She didn't know what would happen in the remaining possibility anymore, it kept changing, there were too many decisions and too many players between now and that moment so she wasn't sure if that was even the possibility they wanted but Chaeyoung was hopeful that it meant neither of them would die.

She hoped that despite the insurmountable odds stacked against them, they would at least survive and save the realms. She hadn't wanted to give the Black more fodder to tear Jennie and Lisa apart but at least this way the Black wouldn't know what Lisa really was, everything he loathed personified, love.

Chaeyoung had to tell him because on the day Jennie finally realized what love really meant in this lifetime, when she figured out who Love really was even though she didn't know the extent of that truth, Chaeyoung knew Lisa would remember all of her past lives as soon as her soulmate saw her for who she truly was.

It was inevitable, borne out of some obscure form of pure magic that Jennie and Lisa had inadvertently made while they were creators. It had taken Chaeyoung a long time to realize that they had all created things without even knowing it, that they had infused their powers into the realms and that at desperate times the realms intuitively produced the very magic they needed so that their creators weren't harmed.