Ah! 10948 edited. ch4.
In the presence of the Almighty One:
"Almighty One," began Lind formally, "per the direction of the council I have brought Goddess second class Urd to face your divine judgment."
"Very well Lind," came the booming voice from the obelisk, "you may leave us now."
This sudden dismissal caught Lind by surprise. Like the bailiffs on earth it was supposed to be her job to maintain order in the antechamber. To be dismissed out of hand like this was a serious breach of protocol. She started to object but caught herself before the utterance escaped her lips. After all it was going against the will of the Almighty One that resulted in situations like the one Urd found herself in now.
"Very well," Lind replied as she rose and left the chamber.
When Lind left the chamber that didn't mean she left her responsibilities behind. As soon as she stepped into the outer room she placed the shaft of her ax against the wall and leaned heavily upon it. Using her goddess power she heightened her senses and continued to monitor the proceedings by listening to the conversations by means of bone induction.
After Lind was gone Urd bowed formally to the obelisk and said, "Father, I await your merciful judgment."
In Heaven as is in any other society there are rules of protocol, when it came to addressing the Almighty One the correct form was either Almighty One or the less formal Sire. This rule was applied to all the denizens of Heaven save the three Norns. The reason being, not surprisingly, was because he really was their father!
"Over here," came a familiar voice from behind her.
"Father?" She said turning to face the new sound.
Looking about she spied the familiar old vestige of a god whose face hadn't been seen in Heaven in many years. "Father!" she screamed again this time in joy as she ran towards the old god who sat there in the garden lounging on the bench like he owned the place, (he did actually). Urd was so overjoyed she felt her heart would burst, for there sat the only man Urd ever truly loved, her very own father.
She ran towards her father intending to hug him when she suddenly realized that her hands were bound. She stopped herself short and stroked his haggard old face instead.
"Oh father, why did you let yourself get so old?" she asked him bluntly.
Smiling with a wisdom born of many lifetimes he replied. "You are too young to realize this yet, my daughter, but after about ten or twenty iterations old age and death become like old friends. Come sit with me and let us visit for awhile."
"So father, what is so serious that you would be willing to step down from your position as the Almighty One to be just another parent even if for just a little while."
"I want you to help me to understand why we find ourselves here. I guess it is just the nature of the universe that children seem to think they know more than their parents do. I know in my case my own father warned me about having girls. But did I listen to him nooo; I had not one, not two but three daughters. Whose purpose it would seem is to keep the entire universe in a state of constant chaos."
"And didn't grandma also tell you not to get involved with that woman?" Urd ribbed him.
"Oh, she told you that did she?"
"Yes she did, but you didn't listen to her either, so here I am."
"She didn't by any chance tell you when she is coming home did she?"
"She did mention something about being on contract to the Mayans until 2012. After that she mentioned wanting to retire."
"Mother Nature retire? That will be the day. She might take a couple of iterations off but I guarantee that she'll be up to her elbows in something new before you know it."
"You mentioned Father Time just now how is he doing by the way?"
"Enjoying his retirement. The Job Corps keep offering him new iterations but he keeps turning them down. He says he is waiting for the perfect fit. Personally I think he just enjoys watching the three of you make me squirm. It must be the nature of my karma to be ever the idealist, and let's be honest; nobody ever accused your old man of being the sharpest knife in the drawer."
That last comment caused Urd to look down at her bound hands. Her father took them in his own and touching the bonds with his little finger the restraints faded away. Urd sat silently for a moment as she studied her hands, seeming to notice as if for the first time the difference between the color of her skin and his own.
"I am the goddess Urd," she said to herself, "the black and the white, the noble mistake."
"But never a disappointment," her father chided.
"Father," Urd asked, suddenly turning serious, "just how much trouble am I in?"
"Well," her father began in earnest, "one of the less draconian punishments being considered are stripping you of your powers and sending you to live with your mother—permanently!"
"Who the hell is proposing that!"
"Me," he said sadly, "however, I'm biased so I'm afraid the council is likely to overrule me and impose a more severe sentence."
"Just what the devil am I being accused of anyway?"
"Just what Lind told you, the deliberate subversion of the will of Heaven!
"You see, my girl, when Yggdrasil did its last review of your file a whole list of minor offenses were revealed. Nothing too serious mind you but taken as a whole it seems that you have been subverting the principals of Fate, Destiny and Freewill. These are the very cornerstones of our existence and you have walked all over these inconvenient truths whenever they got between you and your goal. That's why I want to see you this way, as your father and not as the Almighty One. I was hoping that maybe you could explain yourself to me in a way that only a father might understand. I'm hoping that if your explanation is good enough I could intervene with myself and get your punishment reduced."
"Well first, Urd began, I need to know what the nature of the charges are against me because frankly I can't begin to fathom what it is I'm supposed to have done to be accused of this crime."
"It's this Keiichi thing with your sister! Don't pretend that you haven't been meddling with their destiny because the evidence is all there."
"What evidence?"
"Just now before you were taken into custody didn't you prevent Keiichi from revoking Belldandy's contract?"
"Yes I did! But that wasn't what he wanted and it wasn't what Belldandy wanted either!"
"Nonetheless you prevented him from suffering the consequences of his own actions. Sometimes humans have to suffer for their mistakes. You kept that from happening."
"Looking out after your friends and family is what people do. Don't tell me I'm in trouble for doing the right thing!"
"If it were only that, you wouldn't be here. But there is other evidence as well."
"Such as?"
"Very well, let's see. First we have the deliberate and planned convergence of two divergent fates."
"Now honestly father that's really nothing more than a traffic ticket. I meddle in fates all the time. It's my job, remember?"
"Okay I'll concede that one to you. Next you are charged with altering the ephemeris of a lucky star and its companion unlucky star. The boys in the Orbit Analyst shop were really peeved by this."
"Again what's the big deal, so the number crunchers had to do some orbit remodeling. What happened did they run out of fingers and toes to count on?"
"The deliberate crashing and subsequent disabling of the system force with regard to your sister's contract."
"Hey, now that's not fair I paid my debt on that one."
"And finally the deliberate merging of two alternate realities."
"I'm the goddess of the past, alternate realities are what I deal in."
"Yes it is, but only with regard to the mortals. You are not allowed to create separate realities for Heaven!"
"Oh," Urd said in resignation, "how did you find out about that."
"By accident really," he smiled, "right after they merged there was a sudden jump in efficiency due to there being twice as many people showing up for work every day. The admin. people were fixing to start handing out bonuses to themselves when one of the accountants realized that the hours billed didn't jive with the hours worked. I almost had a full scale revolt on my hands when I told them that they couldn't keep things that way from now on."
"Dammit, I knew I should have hired Arthur Anderson to cook the books!" Urd swore under her breath.
"But basically," her father continued, "what it all boils down to is that your sister and that human's paths should never have crossed. Or at the most she should have been there and gone instead of having been stuck down on the surface world for all this time. Their fates should never have become intertwined and every time Destiny starts to pull them apart you are in the middle of it making sure that it doesn't happen. Divine beings like you and your sisters were never meant to be living among the surface dwellers. So tell me, can you explain yourself?"
"Well," Urd began, "to start with I am one of the fates. So I'll cross the paths of anyone I choose. Last time I checked gods and goddesses fell under that mandate too. As for Destiny not liking it; that narcissistic bitch can just kiss my ass!"
"Urd!" her father started to interrupt.
"No, I'm serious Father. If she had been more interested in Belldandy and less interested in getting into your bed then none of the rest would ever have been necessary."
"Are you telling me that it wasn't my natural animal magnetism that was motivating her, ah, invitations?"
"Father, get real," Urd sighed, "I've been going head to head with Venus and Aphrodite long enough to tell the difference between lust and shall we say, less pure motives. She was after something!"
"You really think so?"
"Yes I do, the signs were all there, Celestin had been disrupting the council meetings for the longest time and she goes and hands a first iteration goddess like Belldandy over to him to mentor without thinking! All she really wanted to do was get on your good side by getting on her backside!"
"Ah! Vanity, it's not just for the young anymore," her father sighed, "but if it's any consolation she didn't get what she wanted."
"What did she want by the way?"
"She wanted to secure Skuld's iteration for one of her own people. She said it was a waste of time to put your sister in that slot because she would never be able to develop enough to support her own angel."
"Well, I'm happy to say we proved her wrong on that one," Urd said proudly.
Suddenly Urd had an insight. "Is Destiny behind all this?"
"She could be," her father conceded, "it is her job after all."
"Well then, my defense, where to begin," Urd pondered out loud, "Tell me father, when is the last time we took a walk down memory lane?"
Lind was suddenly on the alert. Outside the antechamber the Almighty One was vulnerable and his protection was her top priority. While Urd was unquestionably the daughter of the Almighty One she was also the get of the Ruler of the Demon realm. Lind was immediately suspicious of Urd's seemingly innocent request because she knew it could place the ruler of Heaven in harms way. Besides, Urd's offer to her father was unprecedented; even in Heaven opening up one's mind to another was almost unheard of. Divine beings have their secrets too.
Pausing for a second Urd stared at the section of the wall where Lind was standing on the other side and added, "We will need to have Lind join us as well."
"And why is that?" her father asked bemusedly.
"Because, father in this room you are the Almighty One. Outside, you are just another aging god whose power is on the wane. I'd rather you pass judgment on me now than have you leave the safety of this room without a proper guard."
"Really, Urd I am quite capable of taking care of myself."
"I'm afraid I must agree with your daughter," came the unexpected voice of Lind. "If you leave the chamber then I insist that I accompany you."
"I don't recall asking you to rejoin us Lind." The AMO responded, his voice that of tempered steel, "Why have you entered here unbidden?"
"Because keeping you safe is my duty," Lind answered flatly, "even when you don't see the need. You can dismiss me if you desire but I still will not leave you unprotected!"
The startled old god looked questioningly at his daughter. Urd just shrugged and said, "It's a Valkyrie thing. You wouldn't understand."
"Well then a test," the old god said, "Lind, do you consider my daughter a friend?"
"Yes sir, I do."
"And were my daughter to raise her hand to me?"
"I would destroy her without hesitation!"
"And Urd what do you think of what your friend just said."
"I would expect nothing less coming from a friend." she replied her eyes twinkling.
"I think the two of you are conspiring to give me a headache," he sighed.
"The test is easy to understand when you think about it." Urd explained, "A friend, a true friend, will always let you know where you stand."
"I think I see," the AMO said, although it was obvious that he didn't, "okay then Lind gets to come along."
Turning his attention towards Urd he asked, "By the way, where are we going anyway?"
Pointing to the greenery that was just beyond the marble columns surrounding the central obelisk Urd said, "Just out into the garden and about 16 years into the past."
"Very well then, Lind since you seem to be so obsessed with my safety I'll let you lead the way."
With that Lind linked her mind to both the Almighty One and Urd and the room became fuzzy to be replaced by the garden that was just outside. But this wasn't the garden of the now. Instead it was the garden as it was 16 years ago.
As the trio looked around Urd spoke a warning.
"We must be very careful," she warned, "this is the living past, anything we do here can have an impact on the now."
"What are we looking for by the way?" her father asked.
"A nexus is about to form here, an important one, one that should have never happened."
"Keep going." Her father told her.
"There are, as you know certain events, decision points that determine our future. Every so often we reach a nexus, a joining of our past and future where we must make a choice of which path to take. As children we are blissfully unawares of this fact and make our choices, sometimes bad ones, at random. Normally the bad choices we might make when we are young are offset by the more enlightened choices we make later on in life. So the mistakes we make as children really don't amount to much when looked at in the grand scheme of things. However, it can also be said that the straighter the path we follow the sooner we reach our goal. Celestin was well aware of this fact and made dam sure that Belldandy never strayed from the path he laid before her. As a result Belldandy never got to enjoy growing up like the rest of us.
"Now there are two types of nexuses, those that naturally occur and those that we force into being. This is one of the latter. We are at the point when Belldandy finally got tired of having Celestin making all her decisions for her and decided to take matters into her own hands."
"I don't feel anything," her father said, touching the threads of time as they flowed around the trio, "Are you sure such an important Nexus will form here?"
"I am the Goddess of the past," Urd told him proudly, "the most significant divergence in the history of Heaven began at this point in the here and now."
"What happened?" Lind asked.
"Did you ever play hide and seek when you were young Lind?"
"Sadly no," Lind answered her, "I never had anybody to play with."
"How about you father?"
"Yes I did," the AMO acknowledged, "a long long time ago."
"So, Father, would you care to explain to Lind how the game is played?"
"Well," he began, "the basics are relatively simple. You find a place to hide and your opponent has to find you. What makes the game different from how they play it down on earth is that if a god or goddess doesn't want to be seen then they can't be seen. To find your quarry you have to look for signs of their passing. A scent on the breeze, a bloom that shouldn't be blooming, the flight of the birds. Things like that."
"Exactly," Urd agreed, "Belldandy and I use to play hide and seek in this garden when we were younger. Me being the elder my powers were greater than hers and as a result she wound up hiding and I wound up being the seeker most of the time."
"You see this tree," Urd asked as she pointed to an old oak of no particular interest, "I call it Belldandy's tree."
The old god looked quizzically at the old oak before his eyes lit up in recognition. "I know this tree," he exclaimed, "this is where I first met your mother!"
"I'm not surprised," Urd said in response to this new revelation, "if this tree is where you met my mother then it would contain an imprint of the joy of the event. In effect it would be a naturally occurring happy place and Belldandy would have been drawn to it. To her it would have been a place of safety."
"That's a dangerous way of thinking," Lind remarked.
"Exactly, the imprint creates a false sense of security," Urd agreed, "but Belldandy was just a little girl and this was her safe place, or at least it was."
"What do you mean was?" The AMO asked.
"See for yourself," Urd told him, "Come Father; come listen to the memories of the tree with me."
"What is it that I'm listening for?" he asked as he and his daughter pressed their ears to its bark.
"Do you feel the tree Father, do you feel how happy its memories are?"
"Yes, my daughter I do."
"It wasn't always so," Urd said, "Listen harder, listen to the memories of the past. Can you feel the sadness of the past?"
"Yes I can."
"That's Belldandy's sadness you're feeling. The sadness of a little girl who thinks she has failed to measure up."
As the trio watched the past unfold all around them an eight-year-old Belldandy wearing an unkempt brown dress came to the tree and climbed to the top disappearing from view as she did so. Seeing with eyes not dimmed by the past they could see as the young goddess climbed to the highest limb and started crying to herself. Her father, moved by the image of the past, started to reach for her before being stopped by the handle of Lind's battle-ax.
"Remember Urd's warning," she said.
Time jumped forward slightly and a young Urd, smiling to herself as she enjoyed the game came walking down the path searching for her younger sister. Spying the tree she sighted Belldandy as she cried to herself. The smile left Urd's face as she turned away and continued down the path, pretending that she never knew where her sister hid.
"The reason I call this Belldandy's tree is because she would always come here when she thought that she had failed Celestin somehow." Urd explained, "On this day I discovered that when Belldandy hid here she didn't want me to find her and from that time forward I made sure that I never did!
"Celestin was another matter however." Urd said grimly.
Time jumped forward again, this time it wasn't Urd but Celestin that was seeking Belldandy. As the three looked on they could see Celestin as he called her down. From their vantagepoint they could see how Belldandy forced herself to smile as she floated down to the ground. The image so heartbreaking to the old god that tears were starting to run down his face.
"How could I have been so blind?" the AMO asked himself.
Instinctively the old god began to reach for his daughter, the image beginning to waver as the Universe of the past tried to re-orient itself to accommodate this interloper from the future.
Suddenly Lind broke in. "Quickly now! We must be away!" With that urgent warning Urd brought them back to the here and now.
"What just happened!" demanded the old god. "Why did you make it stop!"
"The tree," Lind began, "the tree sensed your presence. We might have affected the future just now!"
"It doesn't really matter," Urd said sadly, "Belldandy's constant negative imprints were having an impact on the tree and after Celestin found Belldandy he had her sing it back to health. Celestin stole Belldandy's happy place from her that day and since she didn't feel safe there anymore she never went back. But that wasn't the last time we played hide and seek."
Suddenly Urd's expression turned hard. "Tell me father, what kind of fool threatens an eight year old child with elimination!"
Startled by Urd's sudden change in attitude Lind instinctively stepped forward brandishing her ax as she did so.
"What do you mean!" Her father almost roared before he remembered what he had done. "Celestin," he started over, "Celestin was worried that Belldandy's powers were developing too quickly, he said I needed to be extra firm with her."
"Be extra firm?" Urd scoffed, ignoring Lind, "With an eight year old child whose only wish is to make other people happy!"
"Well," he said sheepishly, "I guess my words could have been calibrated differently."
"You think!" Urd said scornfully.
Seeming to finally notice Lind's defensive posture Urd started over, "The last time…" she said wistfully. "The last time we played hide and seek nobody could find her for seven days."
"Yes, I remember that," spoke up Lind relaxing. "Everybody was in a panic because they thought the demons had kidnapped her!"
"The real reason that we couldn't find her," Urd explained to Lind, "was because she had fled to the surface world where she made the acquaintance of a young mortal her own age the name of…"
"Keiichi Morisato," her father finished for her.
"You mean that their paths have crossed before?" Lind asked awestruck, "Their fates became intertwined from that first meeting?"
"Precisely and therein lies the basis for my defense. The incident by itself was really nothing, just a little girl who ran off to play with a new friend. But Belldandy had also forced a nexus into being that day, a divergence from Celestin's intended path for her, one so profound that it would literally redefine the future of Heaven someday. Celestin probably sensed this somehow and was forced to advance his timetable before he had fully indoctrinated Belldandy. Then came 10948 and you know the aftermath of what happened there.
"I'm not privy to that information," Lind said, "Can you fill me in, assuming it's okay with your father?"
Both goddesses looked to the old god questioningly who nodded his head in affirmation.
"Belldandy sealed herself," Urd explained, "By the time the healers were able to crack her password so they could get to her she was comatose. The council held an emergency meeting where they decided to seal the memory of the event from her and then passed off the responsibility to me to do their dirty work for them in order to bring her back.
"The bureaucrats in that chamber thought that all I needed to do was mix some obscure ingredients together, say a few magic words and the problem would all be fixed. But life isn't that simple. I couldn't just give her the potion, first I had to go inside her mind and bring her back. She had retreated deep inside too, all the way back to that one week of summer, where she was playing an endless game of hide and seek with the little boy who only wanted her for a friend.
"Being inside someone's psyche is a dangerous place to be, you can wind up trapped inside forever if they respond to some kind of stimulus while you're there, but to me it didn't matter, I knew I needed to lead her back to reality. When I found Belldandy, however, she didn't want to come out, she was happy where she was at and it's not like I could force my will onto hers while inside her own mind. So I had to lure her out like some sick child predator would and then when she was distracted I hid that happy place from her by forcing her to drink the potion.
Looking at the ground as the bittersweet memory played out in her mind Urd continued. "I have always been considered an outsider, somehow different, unworthy. But until then I had never really felt dirty, like maybe there was some truth to what they said. It was awful Father," Urd started to cry for only the third time in her life, "having to steal from my eight-year-old sister the only happy memory she had. So I made Belldandy a promise, my first contract really, that I would help her find her happy place again and ever since then I have been working towards that goal."
"I see," her father said, stroking his beard as he began to see a possible path to save his eldest daughter. "So the main argument you are making on your behalf is that all this time you have been manipulating events to keep your promise to your sister."
"It goes deeper than that, but yes I have." Urd agreed, "That boy, he had such a pure heart; I wanted Belldandy to be able to experience that purity again. But the mortal world tends to corrupt so I kept tabs on him from time to time. Luck was with me. Him being so short in stature nobody of the fairer sex wanted to get close to him but I knew my luck couldn't last forever. So I hit on a plan to help keep him pure, as soon as I was in a position to do so, I parked an unlucky star over his head."
"Devious," said Lind, "using someone else's bad luck to keep your lucky streak going."
"Like it?" Urd smiled wiping the tears from her face as she did so, "I thought it was pretty clever myself. Then I parked the companion lucky star over Belldandy and made sure she stayed off of the OPS floor doing busy work until the time was right. After that it was really just a matter of waiting for Keiichi to make his phone call and then routing it to Belldandy's workstation."
"How did you know when the call would come?" her father asked.
"Because opposites attract. Lucky stars and their companion Unlucky stars orbit about each other as they travel through space. I knew that Keiichi's call couldn't come until his unlucky star was eclipsed by Belldandy's star. Since I was the one who parked them there the ephemeris was easy to calculate."
"And afterward?"
"I didn't know what kind of wish he was going to make. I just wanted them to meet again, to restore the happy memory that I had stolen from her. Then that idiot goes and wishes for a goddess like her to stay with him forever! When I first heard it I thought it was no big deal, just a minor inconvenience, and we would just rotate a new goddess in and out every so often to satisfy the contract."
"Ah, but Belldandy didn't see it that way did she?" Lind piped in.
"No, this was her first contract and she intended to see it through herself and of course you stuck your foot in it again Father!"
"Huh," the AMO asked quizzically, "how can you say that any of this is my fault?"
"Remember when she called in a panic right after the contract was made?" Urd needled him, "What did you tell her?"
"I told her that the contract was valid and she needed to make the best of it," he sighed.
"And she did didn't she?" Urd rubbed it in, "As a matter of fact she made so much of the best of it that she is happier now on Earth than she ever was in Heaven. That's why I had to disable the system force."
"Huh," asked Lind, "How is one related to the other?"
"Do you know how the system force works," Urd asked her, "how it actually is able to do what it does?"
"I believe that falls under the topics of 'special significance,'" her father warned.
"Oh, don't be such a stick in the mud," Urd replied, "Anybody can figure it out if they just look closely enough."
"Sire," began Lind, "it would be a significant strategic advantage if I knew the answer."
"Very well," he conceded, "but this knowledge never leaves this room."
"The system force is basically just another expression of the Almighty One's will." Urd explained, "The conduit between Heaven and the surface world always has been the gods and goddesses who travel there. When a goddess enters into a contract the parameters are entered into the system then crosschecked between the heart and the head. The system force is that same force we use every day to work the Almighty's Will with one important difference. The crosscheck is removed! The system force manifests itself strictly by way of the heart of the granter. The deity it is traveling through has no control over the power or how it will react, with one important exception.
"We all know that the harder something pushes against the force the harder it pushes back. But there is another aspect to this. Since the system force flows only through the heart the more the god or goddess wants the system to prevail the more powerful the reaction is and this can be exacerbated even more by how powerful that god or goddess is.
"Belldandy loves that boy, more than life itself. The longer she stayed with him the more she wanted to stay. I began to notice that the system force was reacting disproportionately to what were really just minor glitches in their relationship. When I looked into it I discovered that the deeper they fell in love the more violent these reactions were becoming. If I had left the system force engaged she would have wound up accidentally killing somebody! I crashed the system to disengage it in order to keep a disaster from happening."
"It also had the added advantage of keeping Belldandy's presence on earth off my radar." Her father interjected.
"Now father, I know, you know, that she has always been down there."
"True, what I meant by keeping her off my radar was that I wasn't aware of just how powerful she has become. I just now glanced at her power readings and noticed that they have increased exponentially since she arrived. I'm surprised Hild hasn't moved against her more forcefully by now. We might have another problem brewing."
"Mother is cleverer than that, why destroy her and risk starting a war when she could subvert Belldandy's power to her own ends. It would be much more satisfying from her perspective to allow you and Heaven to think you have accumulated all that energy then just steal it right out from under your nose."
"You know daughter, when you start thinking like your mother it gives me the chills." her father shuddered.
"What I find scary," Urd said, "is that Keiichi saw this last attack coming before I did."
"Is there anything else that you think might aid in your defense," the AMO asked.
"No Father, what I did I did for the sake of my sister whom Heaven betrayed!"
"Well, you've done at least a reasonable job of explaining you're actions and I'm proud that you have placed your sister's needs ahead of your own. Still, I can't say for sure if I'll sign off on it once I resume my post but as your father I'm satisfied that your intentions were good. But sadly, we all know what road is paved with those. However, you've yet to explain away the biggie. Why did you create an alternate reality for Heaven?"
"I was hoping you might have forgotten about that," said Urd sheepishly.
"Hey, this is me remember, your father, AKA the Almighty One."
"Well remember that awful bug leakage we had on the surface world nine months after Belldandy arrived?"
"You mean the one where you used the Ultimate Magic Circle of Warding without my permission, got your license suspended and forced me to give Skuld her earth trainee modification? Not to mention having to listen to Destiny bitch and moan for an hour about you undercutting her authority! Now why would I remember something like that?"
"Uh, yeah, well that's the one. Well all those problems were caused by opposing magical fields. The seal on Keiichi's memories was drawing power from the energy sealed in that tree and that was reacting with Belldandy's natural power. You just can't erase memories; the energies of the past still remain. The only way I could give the two of them a fresh start was to slightly re-write their history. So I went back to that critical event where Keiichi asked Belldandy for her promise and made sure that it never got entered into the system. Unfortunately, I had to create another time line up here to prevent the paradox. Looking back, if I hadn't done that then she might not have been able to pass the gate."
"I still don't understand why you thought you needed to alter Heaven's time line?" Lind asked.
"It involves planer physics," Urd answered her, "We are, all of us, really nothing more than a manifestation of an amalgamation of all of our possible selves. Of all the different people we are in all of the alternate realities where we exist. A thousand different people gathered in the same space for a brief instant before splitting off to go our different ways, only to remerge an instant later then repeating the process ad infinitum. With regard to those two there are two major divergence's in their past that contradict the other. In one Belldandy was forced to seal Keiichi's memories, and in the other she didn't. In all cases involving matters such as these the will of Heaven prevails. So while Belldandy sealed Keiichi's memories in only one iteration of his past the amalgamized Keiichi, the Keiichi we see, has had his memories sealed in all of his current iterations. The same goes for Belldandy and that dam cheery tree except I reversed the process and because the events occurred in two separate realities, realities of my making, they are now mis-phased. Keiichi's seal can't draw power from the magical field sealed inside the tree because even though Belldandy's seal is on his mind Belldandy never put it there. The event simply doesn't exist in their world. More importantly, Belldandy, the Belldandy that passed through the Judgment gate unharmed, was able to do so because she was never once deceitful or doubtful with her lover."
"Can you even do that with a goddess?" asked Lind in amazement.
"Not really, Belldandy is ruled by the will of Heaven as are we all, so AU adjustments don't really affect her but she has an advantage in that she has more than one reality to choose from. Belldandy being Belldandy simply chooses to be who she is now."
"Ouch, ouch, ouch!" Lind exclaimed out loud, "Stop it already, you're making my head hurt!"
"Mine too!" the AMO said, "While you might consider this a good thing for your sister, you have admitted that you knowingly altered the course of Heaven's history," her father growled. "That kind of meddling cannot be tolerated even by a first class goddess! That is, and always will be, the sole domain of the Almighty One. I really don't know how I'm going to take this when I try to explain it to myself!
"However," the old god said craftily, "I might be able to grant you some leniency if you offer to make amends."
"What do you mean by amends?" said Urd suddenly on the defensive.
"There is no question that your contract to your sister has been fulfilled. You have more than replaced that week of happiness you stole from her with close to four years of happy memories. It's time for you to close this project down. Belldandy and Keiichi need to go their separate ways. Destiny has her own plans for the two of them. If you do that, then I might be able to get you off with just administrative punishment."
"I'm sorry father but I can't."
"And why not!" the old god boomed.
"Because Belldandy still needs Keiichi," Urd said flatly, "She is horribly scarred on the inside and she has just begun to heal. She needs him in ways I can't even fathom. If I take him from her now, all of what's gone before will have been for naught. In all honesty, Heaven needs for him to stay with her too."
"How so?"
"She needs him to serve as her missing compass."
"Missing compass? You need to elaborate on that one for me."
"Well let's see if I can explain it, for me as the goddess of the past, whenever I need to make a decision I have the advantage of already knowing what has been tried and failed. So I've been blessed with a pretty reliable compass to guide my actions. Skuld, the poor dear, has it a lot harder than me since she only has an anticipated cause and effect on a nebulous future to guide her actions. Nonetheless, she knows where she's at and knows where she wants to wind up so she too has a fairly good compass. But Belldandy will always have the most difficulty in finding her way of us all. As the goddess of the present she has no built in compass to guide her. To her the past is a fading memory and the future something yet to happen. Keiichi serves as her compass. He allows her to live in the present while keeping her pointing in the right direction."
"So, I guess this means that you intend to stand by your actions without offering to make amends and with no remorse?"
"I'm sorry that I had to do what I did, if that is what you're asking. But I still think what I did was right and for that I will make no apology."
"Very well," the old god said, "let me talk this over with myself. To be honest though, the outlook is pretty bleak my girl."
He smiled at her as he stroked her hair. She placed her hands together and once again they were bound. His presence faded from the room to once again meld with the heart of all things to form the spirit and will of the Almighty One.
"If it's any consolation I think you've made a very good accounting of yourself." Lind said as she resumed her post as Heaven's bailiff, her expression grim.
"If for some reason I don't get to tell you later, you really are a very good friend Lind." Urd confided.
"I appreciate you telling me that Urd, I really do." Lind whispered.
All too soon the internal deliberations were done and judgment was pronounced. "Goddess second class, first category, Urd, Norn of the past." the Almighty's voice boomed, "You have been found guilty of placing your will ahead of that of Heaven. Further you have shown neither remorse nor inclination to make any amends for your actions. Therefore, your sentence is to be as follows: You are hereby permanently stripped of your 2nd class license and all powers and privileges attached to said license are hereby revoked, you will be required to make penance for your actions; you are banished from the realm of Heaven…