“Do you know what it means to have your being shattered, scattered across the stars, and still choose joy?”
💐 Seat of Azem, Proserpina 💐
Once, she was Kore—Proserpina—an Ancient, bright-eyed and brimming with rebellious charm. The title of Azem passed to her from her dearest friend, Venat, but she never wore it quietly. She invented pants. She painted her mask. She made flowers with no purpose but joy. And she loved with the kind of radiant boldness only someone unafraid of consequence could. Where others saw grandeur in power, she found it in creation. She spent her days among plants and poems, often drifting between Elpis and Ktisis Hyperboreia, always a little out of bounds, always smiling. It was there her heart turned fully to Hades—keeper of the aether; solemn, guarded, distant. She teased him, pestered him, stole his books, haunted his office like a particularly affectionate ghost. In time, he smiled for her. And in time, she would break his heart.
When the Final Days came, Kore could not abide the path of the Convocation. She refused the summoning of Zodiark. With tearful goodbyes and fire at her heels, she vanished into the dying world—one soul refusing to surrender her joy to despair. In secret, her aether was preserved by Hydaelyn in a single Elpis flower, a final keepsake of the friend she once called “Venat.”
Millennia passed. Light consumed the First. In that moment of unraveling, the flower bloomed again—planted in fae-touched soil, where life still danced. And from its petals rose Cora, a woman with no memory but a name, a laugh, and a strange hunger to find beauty in a world she did not understand. She wandered to Eulmore. Befriended Dulia-Chai. Found kindness. Found the Crystarium. And found him again—Emet-Selch, her Hades, though she did not know why his voice ached like a forgotten song.
Now, she walks among mortals, half-forgotten and half-divine, planting hope in wildflower seeds. But memory stirs. The world burns anew. And Proserpina, the flame-hearted Azem, may yet rise again to speak her truth:
That joy is worth fighting for. That beauty can be rebellion. And that flowers bloom best when the world says they shouldn’t.