#[ set pre-apho bc I can ]

[secondsovereign]

Here's to you, Herrscher of Reason.

Welt Birthday Drabble 2024

December is a month of many things, to the man who rarely called himself Joachim any more it was full of birthdays, anniversaries, life and death intertwined in ways that have become so utterly beautiful. It's funny now, when he can finally stop and look back at it for once, that he celebrates four things on the same day, a day that feels too short to recognise them all. It was his birthday when they'd found Joey in the remnants of Cocolia's labs, little more than a baby, and yet he'd taken him in all the same, cherished him like a biological son that shared all of his DNA with him and Welt Joyce. A candle is lit, one of three to signify the wellspring of memories

His birthday is both a joyful and sombre occasion, to be born twice, even as a man who he'd come to consider a father like figure had resigned himself to his fate. He remembers, just barely, the faces of Henrietta and Elias with a cake they'd spent the days painstakingly making for him. His parents have long since passed, resigned to memory, yet that stood irreplaceable by the memories of Birthday after Birthday with Einstein and Tesla, ageing while the Key of Creation had left them frozen in time. Another candle lit, another memory pulled from his core.

The Herrscher remembers the single birthday spent with Welt Joyce and the irreplaceable gift the man had given. That day had become his second birth, when the identity of Joachim Nokianvirtanen was left behind in favour of the name and purpose his second father had gifted to him. Joachim remembers the whispers, the idea that spread so quickly that Joachim Nokianvirtanen had died in the fires of New York, leaving only Welt Yang behind with Reason humming at his fingertips and the power to shape the shapeless within his mind.

Perhaps they were right, Welt would never tell who emerged from the flames that day, his deepest and darkest secret sanctified within the Core of Reason as year after year was spent toiling to master the powers that had become his. His younger self, his innocent self, had faded from memory by the time Anti Entropy had made its appearance and mandate clear, and yet Welt still lit a candle for him and Joyce, even when the torrential rains threatened to snuff the flames.

A flicker of the light, a flash of lightning before he's disappearing once more into the streets of St. Fountain, intent on getting to the source of their mysterious technological advances. Surely Bronya would be fine without him for a few hours...