The Goddess Returns

 

I still remember the first moment I saw them—the boots everyone now calls Ascension / Retribution. I didn’t design them to be beautiful. I didn’t design them to be worn. I designed them because I needed to understand what power looked like when it stopped apologizing for existing. People talk about muses, about inspiration, about gentle little sparks of creativity. But these boots weren’t a spark. They were a strike—lightning straight to the ribs. A reminder that divinity doesn’t always arrive with grace. Sometimes it arrives with temper.

When I began sketching them, I didn’t picture a sweet, celestial goddess. I didn’t imagine soft clouds or gentle light. I imagined the one they stopped worshipping because she became too powerful. The one temples tried to forget. The one stories tried to erase. The one who doesn’t descend to earth, because the earth rearranges itself around her feet. I realized, slowly but absolutely, that these boots weren’t just footwear—they were the footprint of her return.

The silhouette came first: knee-high, razor-sharp, unmistakably confrontational. They follow the leg like ritual armor, not fabric. No seams. Nothing to indicate they were crafted by human hands. They look forged—born of heat and pressure, like something pulled from the core of the earth. I wanted them to feel inevitable, as if they had always existed and I merely dug them up.

Then came the materials, and that was when the design stopped being a design and started becoming a story. The base is a molten-gold toned metal leather. Not shiny: brushed, intentional, ancient. Gold that looks like it remembers something. I inlaid cracked alabaster-white veins through it—lines like living marble, as if the boots themselves were waking up. Under light, they shift with a subtle iridescence, the kind you notice only if you’re paying attention. Not glitter. Not sparkle. Something closer to a celestial pulse. Inside, there’s blood-red silk, though no one ever sees it unless the wearer moves. It’s a secret. A heartbeat hidden inside armor.

And then, of course, the heel. The part that always makes people pause because they don’t understand how it exists. Sculpted like a falling star frozen at the moment of impact, jagged and asymmetrical. It looks like it shattered the ground when she arrived. Tiny gold fractures glow faintly, the way hot metal does before it cools. To me, it feels like trapped divine energy—dangerous in a beautiful way, the kind of danger that isn’t reckless but righteous. A reminder that the stiletto, in this case, is not seductive. It is architectural violence: a vertical refusal to soften oneself for space.

The divine detailing was the last thing I added, and probably the part that makes the boots feel most like her. Symbols etched into the surface—not a readable language, but a remembered one. Inspired by lost scripts, star maps, and the ruins of temples long ago swallowed by sand. On the knee, the guard curves like a halo split in half, as if to say: once whole, now sharpened. Embedded within the gold are tiny sculptural relics: a sun disc, a crescent shard, a broken crown fragment. Not ornaments—warnings. Each one represents power taken back, not gifted.

I wrote a list of rules for how the boots must be worn, though I’m not sure I ever showed it to anyone. No pants over the boots. Ever. Skin or sheer fabric only, because armor needs contrast. The walk must be slow, deliberate, unbothered. Gods don’t hurry. And most importantly: no smile. Not because she isn’t capable of joy, but because she doesn’t perform for approval.

As the design took shape, I started imagining her story. She was once worshipped for her beauty. Then feared for her power. Then erased from the stories when mortals decided she had become too much—too strong, too independent, too uncontrollable. But divinity doesn’t disappear. It waits. And these boots are modeled after the moment she returns—not as myth, but as proof.

They carry the weight of temples built in her name.

They carry the silence after prayers stopped.

They carry the fury of a goddess who realized she never needed belief to exist.

I wrote a manifesto to go with them—something personal, something sharp enough to match the boots themselves:

I am not divine because you worship me.

You worship because I exist.

I do not descend.

I arrive.

I am not gentle.

I am eternal.

At first, I thought I wrote those lines for the goddess. But the more time passes, the more I realize I wrote them for myself. Or for anyone who has ever shrunk themselves to make others feel comfortable. For anyone who has ever been told they’re “too much.” For anyone who forgot their own power and needs something to shake it awake.

When I finally finished the boots, they didn’t feel like a creation. They felt like a confrontation. Like the universe looking back at me and saying: “Now do you understand?” They frightened some people. Confused others. A few loved them immediately, which almost concerned me, because pieces like this aren’t meant to be loved instantly. They’re meant to be absorbed, wrestled with, questioned. If they frighten you, they’re working. If they confuse you, they’re evolving.

And if you love them immediately…

you’ve misunderstood them.

There will only ever be one pair. Not because of rarity, though people like to think that. Not because they were difficult—though they were. But because not every idea deserves to be repeated. Some things are meant to exist once. Singular. Untamed.

That’s why the boots aren’t named after a goddess.

They’re named after what happens when she comes back.

People ask me what Ascension / Retribution is meant to be—fashion, sculpture, costume, armor? The truth is, it’s none of those things.

This is not fashion.

This is evidence.