Before time had shape, when stars had not yet been imagined and silence stretched across the void, there stood one thing — alive, eternal, and sacred. The Arbor Primordia, the First Tree.
It grew at the center of all things, its roots threading through realms seen and unseen. From its branches hung seven fruits, heavy with power — not merely nourishment, but vessels of divine essence. Each fruit held the potential of a goddess, dormant and dreaming: beauty, desire, memory, fate, passion, love, and truth. The gods, in reverence and fear, left the Tree untouched. They knew that the fruits were not yet meant to awaken, and that once plucked, their power could never be returned.
But the mortal heart is a restless wound.
In a forgotten kingdom torn by war and grief, a mortal queen — wise, proud, and hollow with loss — sought salvation not from gods, but from the root of creation itself. By forbidden rites and blood-torn sacrifice, she reached the Arbor Primordia, cloaked in night with nothing left to lose. Beneath a sky that held its breath, she plucked the seven fruits — one for each wound she carried — and ate them, one after another, weeping and laughing as the juice stained her lips.
She thought she was claiming power.
Instead, she became the altar.
The moment the seventh fruit passed her throat, the Queen’s body convulsed. Her veins turned to fire. Her bones cracked like ancient trees in a storm. Her screams shook the foundations of the world. The fruits, never meant to be consumed, took root within her, germinating not in flesh, but in soul.
Erisma was the first to claw her way free — born from the queen’s greed and the golden apple’s fire. She split from her host like a second skin, laughing, eyes burning with betrayal, and carried the queen’s ambition into the world, twisted into ruin.
Zephyra bloomed next, not from flesh but from breath — a vapor of green stormlight and kiwi haze. She whispered the queen’s fractured memories into madness, her form flickering between selves.
Persa emerged from the queen’s mouth, a golden bloom of peach-scented rot and desire, her smile wide as she drank the last warmth from her dying vessel.
Idalia tore free from the queen’s womb, thorned and blood-soaked, raspberries blooming where her hands touched the soil. She carried the queen’s heartbreak as a blade, sharp and endless.
Fragora curled up from the chest cavity, cradled in the remains of the queen’s heart, red as a crushed strawberry, lips whispering lies of love with every breath.
Mystava seeped from the queen’s eyes like ink, blueberry-dark and cold, trailing visions of futures too terrible to name.
And Granara, last and eternal, rose from the queen’s shadow — not born, but awakened — stepping forth with a crown of pomegranate seeds, her voice grave-sweet with the promise of death.
By the end, the queen was no more. Her soul had been devoured, her body torn asunder, her name erased by the gods in pity and fear. The First Tree, its purpose fulfilled in blasphemy, cracked and crumbled. Its bark turned to ash, its roots withdrawn from the world, and in its place remained only silence.
The Seven wandered free — goddesses born of longing, twisted by mortal trespass, and forever marked by the queen’s final wish. They carried her emotions as their essence: ambition, delusion, desire, vengeance, obsession, madness, and fear.
