“All things yearn to converge,” Nia said, slipping the bloody scissors back into whichever hidden pocket she had gotten them from. “Magic is the act of imposing one’s will, and by extension their emotions, onto the world, changing it to fit their beliefs and passions. It is a power all life has. It dwells in the recesses of our hearts and minds, and flows through our every action. But why? Why are our emotions so destructive? The Church will tell you it is to punish us, and as a result we must repress them. But we all know that’s not true. To be human is to feel, and by repressing our emotions, we reject our humanity.”
Ceres clenched her fists. “I can’t say I disagree. But how would you know? None of us can know the will of a god. Or even if the Goddess really exists. Or existed.”
The others nodded their heads in unison.
“I do,” Nia replied coldly. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before us is, as you call her, Asteria. She is a living, breathing star. A manifestation of your wish. Your desire. Perhaps even your entire village’s hopes and dreams.”
The grim comedy of the situation was almost palpable. It was like Nia was a professor in charge of teaching a class of bloodied, battered invalids.
Nakir raised his head inquisitively. “Is she truly from the Blissful Sleep? The land beyond? The afterlife?”
The Black Sorceress nodded affirmatively. “That’s right. There are forces in this world unbeknownst to us. Dreams and nightmares that lie just beyond the boundary of our natural perception. Asteria is one such dream. My family was murdered by another. A nightmare made manifest…”
Grovalt shoved his blade at the red-eyed woman. His grip was loose. His injuries halted the smooth motion of his muscles. He glared at her with the same disdain he held for Zandos. “You killed your mother, no one else! We saw it with our own eyes!”
Nia pushed back the raven-black hair atop her shoulders and chuckled. “And who allowed me to deal the finishing blow, hm? It certainly wasn’t I.”
Grovalt exhaled sharply in frustration.
“And that was no longer any mother of mine. You as well as everyone here knows that she was not in her right mind. Even in her final moments, she denied the impossible. She denied the rebirth of her own daughter. I should have killed her many moons before then.”
Grovalt rooted around in his pockets before finding the object he sought. He threw it at the Sorceress, and she caught it with her free hand. It was the twinkling sapphire stone he’d picked up. The last remnant of the Archmage’s physical body.
Nia raised it to eye-level, gazing into its kaleidoscopic colors briefly before looking beyond it at the others. “What do you hope to gain from showing me this?”
The pale man swung his sword down and looked at it. Or past it. His vision sunk into the rust and stone. The grungy nails and screws. The tinged iron. The bleached rock. The fibrous strands of wiring and the pallid roots. He felt sick to his stomach. “Zandos gave his life for you. All he really wanted… was for you to be happy.”
Nia wistfully leaned her head backwards, then crushed the sapphire piece in her hand. Its glimmering powder seeped through her fingers and fell to the ground, gathering in a small pile. “Yes, that was his role. Can’t you see that he accomplished it? I am quite happy at the moment. You have all come here, as I thought you would, and are too injured to make any sudden moves. Just like at that horrid mansion, all you can do is sit and watch as I exact my ideal reality onto the world. There couldn’t have been a better outcome.”
“You’re insane,” Zenzi muttered.
“Insane, you say?” Nia gripped her weapon tighter. It was the same one she had used when they’d first met her; a wholly unique mix between a sword and a magic staff. It was similar to a guandao or a common polearm, but the lower edge of the blade, near the base of the staff portion, was cut out in a semicircle with the rest of it attributed to the empty space there afterward. In that circular space was a small, round sphere dotted with tiny symbols that were impossible to ascertain from a distance. It hovered there, as if it were linked to the blade by invisible strings. “I dare say that this whole world is mad. I’m mad. You’re mad. We’ve all been made in her image, after all.”
Raum stepped an inch forward. A white crow was perched on his shoulder. “If I may ask, what is this all about? What calamity did Zandos speak of?”
Nia smiled with the same worrisome, doll-like grin. Delicately, she procured another item from her clothes. A tome, similar to the one found in Sirithis, though it was lined with different lettering. Her eyes widened as she gazed at it with both fear and elation. “Haven’t you heard them? Those beautiful, horrific bells and chimes? With every single one, our magic turns this world to madness. My father couldn’t scrub them from his mind. He’d say they spoke to him. Whispered in his ear. They convinced him that humanity was no more than a line of puppets, but that they were valuable nonetheless. I think he had a point. But he went too far. In a fury one day, he gouged out dear Pluto’s eyes. Oh, how it cried and screamed. I can still hear it now. When the cat could barely cling on to life, he called for something to enter its body. Something out of sight… A creature unfathomable to the human eyes. Unheard. Unfelt. Unseen. Unloved. He lured it and plucked it from its resting place in the void. The hidden child of an archon. The Scion of the so-called ‘Goddess’ Ymiris. Do you even know what Archizend is? Or perhaps, more importantly, what his mother is?”
Grovalt glared at the Sorceress as he rested against the hilt of his blade. “What the hell are you rambling about?”
Nia chuckled again. It put a sour face on all those present. “In ancient times, the kel-anisai and the Five Dragonlords of the land referred to her as Yanamura. In our tongue, it would roughly translate to ‘Godbeast’. A parasite. Her and her kin. Long, long, long ago before anyone could remember, that cat’s wretch of a mother descended upon this land and devoured it. Leeched it of all of its vital energies. The world was made monochrome. Colorless. Though, she saw promise in such a planet. She stored everything that made up herself into it. Her magic, her life, her soul, everything. She put it all into the core of this disgusting world and pumped it full until it was made four times larger. Life sprouted from every corner. Mating. Killing. Surviving. On the outside, it was like any other natural world. But on the inside, she hid in a chrysalis and waited. She had sown the seeds. All she would have to do is go into waiting. As long as it took. And suddenly, one day, she’d return to reap what she’d sown. Doomsday. Calamity.”
A fierce chill ran up Ceres’s back, as if an ice-cold hand had firmly grasped her spine. She shuddered.
“That… that is outrageous. The Goddess? A world-eating parasite? You must take us for simple fools that will believe anything at the drop of a hat.” Nakir exhaled black smoke through his nostrils. It entered the air and slowly dissipated.
Nia grinned and leisurely blinked. It was blatantly obvious that she deeply enjoyed elucidating the weary, bloodsoaked party in front of her. “Deny it if you wish, but it is all true. Your ancestor, Oriphos the Wise, was one of the first to discover it. For his dangerous curiosity, his father and brothers devoured him.”
Ceres assumed an attacking stance. Her onyx claw’s appendages tightened into rows of blades. “Enough! I’m tired of your bullshit! You can make up all the excuses in the world, but it won’t change the fact that you stole my sister!”
“Hmph.” Nia magically flipped through dozens of the tome’s pages. A flurry of inscriptions and words from a dead language flew past. Some of them reddened and began to levitate off the very pages themselves, becoming solid objects that hovered above the ancient book. Chimes resonated, but they were not lonely and sad like they normally were. They created, in flux, a beautiful melody. It sounded like the multitudes of the world ringing bells and plucking harps. In any other situation, it would have calmed the Ravens. Now, however, it did the opposite. “How ironic that a girl that knows nothing of the world would call me a liar. I have done nothing but study this my whole life. Delved into horrors you couldn’t even fathom. Throughout everything, there is but one solution I found. The only way to return my life’s meaning.”
The rest of the Ravens prepared. For all they knew, Nia could turn them all into ash within a nanosecond. If she was even a little stronger than Eloise, which they assumed she was, then it could very well mean that they had almost no chance of winning. Even so, Ceres and the others did not falter. They hadn’t set off on this doomed escapade for nothing, after all. They had to see it to the end. The Tyranny Resistance’s rallying cry echoed in Ceres’s head.
The Black Sorceress raised her sword-staff in the air. The cacophony did not cease. “We use magic to influence reality. We warp and change reality to fit our needs, even though it fundamentally challenges the idea of existence. What we see isn’t truly what there is. What if everything we see and hear wasn’t set in stone? Hot and cold, life and death. What if the way we perceive these things was changed, and by changing our perception of them, we change those things in reality? We could rewrite the inner workings of our world. Change them. Destroy them. We could save ourselves from this horrifying system entrapping us without our knowledge. Don’t you see? If nothing matters, we need to make it matter. If something is lost, we must find it again. If my Lily is gone, her body broken down by her own mind, we just need to alter the world to make that reality impossible. Yes, sacrifices must be made. But they are wholly inconsequential when compared to what we can achieve. This new magic, rivaling high magic, could do anything we wish. All it requires is the Aspect; your sister Asteria’s heart! The heart of a fallen star!”
“Talk all you want, but this reality you dream of is nothing more than a delusion!” Nakir roared over the deafening notes. “Even if it could be done, you’d be killing thousands, millions of innocent people in the process! You’ve already done irreparable damage to others as well! No amount of lives would be worth this!”
“So you’d rather just give up? Succumb to our limits and be apathetic to a world designed to make us kill one another?”
“No, my dear. I believe in a better world for all of us, but it won’t be achieved this way. All we need is more time, and I’m-”
“No. I’ve waited long enough. I’ve worked long enough. I’ve suffered enough. I’ve been alone for far too long...” The raving woman’s voice cracked, and faint tears formed in her eyes as she glanced at what was once her little sister. It was only for a moment. Her focus returned to her adversaries and her lifelong goal, as it always had when grief and sorrow threatened to swallow her heart. “The time is now. Be silent and watch as your Sorceress commands existence itself to bend to her wishes. Through the peerless minds of the students, fueled by a star’s infinite magic, we will pierce into a world free of death! Free of limitations! Free of lies!”
“Stop her!” Ceres screamed.
Raum walked forward and conjured a flock of the same pearlescent birds to barrage Nia with. They darted through the air, avoiding the sinister red and black sigils floating therein, and aimed their razor-sharp beaks at their target.
The pages of Nia’s tome flipped some more, then stopped. “Hymn of Shielding.” A thick, translucent bubble appeared surrounding the Sorceress. Raum’s heavenly birds could not stop in time. Each of them hit the shield and exploded on impact, leaving nothing but their white feathers drifting downward to settle on the ground. The orb in Nia’s sword-staff tumbled and spun, and as if inspired by its movements, her tome’s pages returned to their continuous flipping.
The pale warrior with his blade caked in frigid rime ran at the Sorceress and swung mightily from left to right. His body gave out a bit, but after a short stagger, he retained his poise. Nia’s protective bubble was cut, but she was not the least bit hurt. Before he could strain his body again to land a physical hit on her, she had already stopped on another archaic page.
“Spears of Torment,” she stated, and through the flurry of musical notes ringing around her, four scarlet spears dripping with sanguine liquid torpedoed through the space between them and into Grovalt. It was as if they were made of the very air they slid through, weightless yet terribly quick.
Grovalt managed to successfully guard against one of the spears, its sharp end flinging off of the black steel and piercing halfway through the stone floor behind him. Unfortunately, the rest made their way through without issue. Three scarlet spears impaled him. One shot through his right leg, another through his abdomen, and the other through his left shoulder. They, after piercing their target, also stuck into the floor, leaving Grovalt’s heaving, bloodied form pinned in place with no easy way to escape. Just as he thought that his predicament couldn’t get any worse, he realized that the spears were slowly draining him of his blood. He began to grow pale, paler than usual, and his body grew weak. He could scarcely lift a finger, let alone his blade. His mighty greatsword had fallen from his hands. The ice plastered onto its edge slowly disappeared until it looked like nothing but a lost, discarded weapon near its dying master. Searing pain overwhelmed him. Gravity slowly pulled him down, and thus it also grinded his oozing wounds against the vermilion stakes, adding buckets of pain to a collection that was already comparable to a lake.
“I’m sorry to say that you are far too late. There is no power equal to an archontic tome nor the minds of countless students of the Academy, let alone the top students whom you all so dishonorably killed.”
Grovalt scoffed, though it was more like he was choking. He spat up globulous blood that promptly landed on his chest, creating a red splatter.
“Now, if you could be so kind as to give me some space, I would appreciate it. I need only extract the Aspect with a single slash of-”
Something exploded towards Nia as soon as she turned her back even slightly to face Asteria. Though she brought up her blade to block in time, three scratches appeared on her face as blood seeped out from the folds created in her skin. Ceres had launched her claw at her foe as fast as she could muster, but even that wasn’t quite enough to seriously injure the Sorceress. Again and again, the hybrid girl swiped with her claw and dagger. Still, none of the attacks could land correctly. Even so, she still managed to draw the tiniest bit of blood from her enemy with every strike. A centimeter or two would make it through each time. Nia would dodge backward and deflect most of it, but the smallest sliver would squirm its way into her flesh. Small scratches and cuts across her dark clothing and armored padding could be seen. That was nearly enough for the half-dragon girl. It was undeniable proof she’d grown notably stronger than she was even a mere day or two ago.
Lamentably, it wasn’t enough. Nia’s tome stopped on another page, and after another intonation, the incantation brought forth a flurry of scattering thorns that blew Ceres onto her backside and riddled her with crooked spines. Before any could close in on her again, she let loose another spell. The same barbs and gnarled thorns came to life in front of the Ravens, completely blocking them from reaching their enemy.
It seemed to Ceres that, compared to Nia, they had not fought anything quite like her before. How could they hope to guess what else she could pull from her book? It was akin to a magician’s bag of tricks, unknowable until it was known and revealed to the public eye. A tome only Nia could read and only she had transcribed; with the help of her father’s notes left behind, of course.
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It was then, as Ceres deliberated and Nakir breathed hot flame to dispel the barrier that impeded them, that Nia made her final move. An action that shook the foundations of the coming future and the fate of all those present. With sword-staff in hand, she cut a deep vertical wound into Asteria’s chest and abdomen, exposing what should never be seen of the body’s inner workings. Liters of blood fell from the gaping wound, splattering across the stone floor with no sign of ceasing. It pooled and scattered about like a crimson spider web. Whatever quelling enchantment put on her seemed to leave as she gurgled unintelligible words. She tried to reach out for her sister and give her the last light of love still present in her, but failed to do so. Her energy had long faded, even before her cruel dissection at the hands of the Black Sorceress.
And from within the wound, something that distracted from the blood and viscera caught the eye. A ball of dazzling azure light. Asteria’s true form: the Aspect within her. A true fallen star.
“Behold!” Nia shouted. “The key to happiness! The last vestiges of hope lingering on this revolting globe!” She shoved her hand into Asteria’s chest cavity without a wince, firmly grasped the radiant orb, and ripped it from its prison of flesh.
“You…!” Ceres began to scream, rage brimming inside her. It filled her mind. Her sight seemed to turn red with wrath. She was overcome with but one desire now. To kill the woman cackling before her. To rip her apart with her claw. To splay her insides across the same floor splayed with her sister’s. It was the only recourse for the unforgivable sin the Sorceress had finally committed. “I’ll kill you…!” She gritted her teeth, grinding her molars. Her jaw began to hurt.
“Lily…” Nia fell into a manic ecstasy. Her dream, fueled by the bleeding remains of another girl’s dream, was becoming reality at long last. “Lily…! Come back to me! Come to me!” She raised her weapon aloft and held the star in her other hand. Asteria’s heart glimmered and shimmered endlessly. Swirling messes of blue, teal, green, dots of white, purple, cerulean, and so many others filled the space. It was blindingly beautiful, like standing atop the highest tower in the world, or floating in the atmosphere on a cloudless starry night. Endless gleaming colors. Boundless wonder. “Can’t you hear me!? Can’t you hear my cries now? You must, for we gaze into the border of eternal sleep! The realm in which you were taken is here among us! You must hear me! You must hear my cries!!!”
Nothing was heard, but Nia was right. Amidst the infinite energy pooling and generating from the star she gripped fiercely were faint whispers and chimes. Lily’s angelic monstrous body, covered in pale branches, began to glow with golden light. The glass encompassing her form cracked and shattered, sending shards sprinkling across the ground like a downpour of rain.
With a thrust of her sword-staff, a dimensional tear rippled across the invisible surface of existence. The air quavered underneath its vibrating shimmer. It ripped open, revealing a realm of night. Calming darkness painted with twinkling pointillism.
“...Sis…? Who…?” Despite the impossibility, the two worlds collided and ran parallel, if just for a moment. For the first time in many years and a decade, Nia heard kind Lily’s voice. It was so very faint, but even so, she heard it. She really did. Through the crescendo and rumbling earth, her darling sister’s call rang true.
“Fellows, scatter and take cover!” A soft yet commanding voice also joined the fray. It was Raum, standing over the burnt thorns, holding a familiar item. “Now, friends! Scatter!”
Everyone ducked out of the way apart from a despairing Ceres and pinned Grovalt, who were swiftly carried off by Nakir and the two anisai women.
To their amazement, Raum carried an archontic tome, the same one he had taken from the false Sirithis back in Nia’s mental realm. None had a clue as to how or why, but for some unknown reason, it had been converted into the material world along with everyone. It didn’t seem possible, but with the way things were going at the present moment, the impossible didn’t seem so out of reach as it often was.
“Nullae vi nextra. Zera vor muvienne.” A magical sigil briefly shone from the open book and in bands around Raum’s arms. His open palm, aimed at Nia and the opened passageway, let loose a spiraling vortex of light and dark. It spun like a torpedo through the air and penetrated the rip in reality, constricting it, pulling it together, and rendering it null and void. With a rapturous and thunderous array of sounds, chimes, and musical notes, the portal was closed. Almost instantaneously, Raum fell to the floor in complete exhaustion.
“W-What…? How could you…? How…? No. No. No.” Nia fell into hysterics, a far cry from the heights of elation she just stood upon. “This can’t be. I will not allow this…! No! No! Not again… You can’t take her from me again… Not like this…” She joined Ceres in despair and frenzy.
Lily’s body and the container that once contained it were all but gone, lost to time for all anyone knew. There was nothing left but Asteria’s mutilated body and her shining heart still gleaming with everlasting light in Nia’s loosened grip. The air was filled only with the lamenting sobs of Ceres and Nia, having lost their two worlds. Their passion. Their light. Truly, nothing was left.
But the aftershocks of the high magic conducted by the Sorceress and Raum were not unfelt. Quakes shook the earth. The rumbling had not ceased, though it had gone ignored for quite some time. Then, as the sobs congealed and tears fell upon the stained white rock, an indescribable feeling touched all of their hearts at once. A strange feeling. The feeling of ice-cold, dagger-like fingers wrapping around one’s spine, like a towel wound around a metal pole. An eminence of the deepest sorrow. The void, devoid of color and the absence of it. Nothingness incarnate. The Black Moon. One would not call the grim reaper evil upon meeting him, as it is simply the role he had been given since he could remember. A ferryman to take those deserving of a rest to their Blissful Sleep. Though, perhaps it wasn’t so simple. If this being wasn’t death personified, did it hold malicious intent like its mother? Or maybe it was simply programmed to act in such a way to ensure her plan came to fruition.
S o r c e r e s s . . .
Nia shook her head in an attempt to stop the oppressive voice. Each syllable sent needles into her brain. She shook with less intention and more reaction, as if the words were hitting her central nervous system with considerable force.
F l y , S o r c e r e s s . T a k e f l i g h t a n d l e t l o o s e y o u r f u r y .
“Shut up! Shut up!” Memories chained in black surfaced in Nia’s ailing mind. Endless lonely days since Lily’s death, confined to her room. Strangled by grief. Forced to live in the same empty house that had once been home to such a terror.
‘We revolve around the moon.’ That phrase, over and over and over. Nia’s father wouldn’t stop repeating it, even in his sleep. At first it was like a mantra, something calming yet slightly odd that he would say at times without even realizing it. Eventually, though, it became a curse. A wealthy man that had at one time been respected and admired for his genius was now seen as psychotic when people passed him on the street. Mooncursed. Gone to lunacy. A madman. That’s all people could say about him. How else would anyone explain it?
Black feathers began to grow from Nia’s bare skin. Her armor pushed off of her disheveled body, revealing a deeply scarred past. Years of self-hatred and neglect.
At the same time, pure, heavenly white petals fell dreamily from the sky far above.
Hopelessness and regret stained the young girl’s heart. Afflicted by malice both sinful and justified, she lashed out at the raven-haired and raven-feathered woman and, by extension, the world.
The world had been silent before, but now erupted in a coughing fit and crumpled. The quakes shook them even more so, as if the land would split in half at any second. Chaos grasped the scene.
Their surroundings warped and folded. Nia’s torrential emotions changed the Technicist facilities and labs, creating something entirely different than before. Her scream violently echoed throughout the ever-changing expanse. Black ripples and waves shot out of the Sorceress in all directions. It drove a certain half-dragon girl, who was already on the verge of a breakdown herself, to leap onto her with murderous intent.
What am I doing?
Ceres’s body and her mind were quite separate at that moment. Rage itself, emotion given form through her acting as a catalyst, sprung forth. She knew it was wrong. Lily’s words scratched at her psyche, urging her to draw back her claw and try to convince her sister again. Convince her that all of this was wrong and that it wouldn’t solve anything. That everything she did before and everything she aimed to do now wasn’t in her sister’s best wishes. But she couldn’t do anything to stop it. She looked through her eyes like an audience watches a movie on a screen, unable to alter the events taking place. All she could do was watch in trembling unease and pray that something or someone could save her from herself.
But she knew that even if she could stay composed, even if she could tell her Lily’s feelings, it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. She’d already said as much at that dark manor on the outskirts of the city. Their family home. She’d said that she didn’t care one bit about what Lily wanted for her. Nia wanted her, needed her, and that was all that mattered to her in the world. Nothing anyone could say would push her from that path, that much was deathly certain.
And what of Ceres? She was just as lost as Nia was. Lost to the loss of someone uniquely special to her. A loss so utterly heartbreaking that it ravaged her insides, spilling her selfishness and frustrations out of her. The mere wincing thought of Asteria’s bloodied corpse not ten feet away from them was enough to cut her to pieces. The undeserved guilt sliced through her like a jagged shard of glass. It was far more painful than anything she had been through up to that moment. Soul-rending.
The two girls fought and scratched at one another, lashed at each other. They fought blindly with the person in front of them. Blind to everything but the lasting, burning incision in their minds and the image of their beloved being taken from them.
Ceres lost her human arm. Nia, a large portion of her leg and much of her face and abdomen. They crawled over one another in a bloody mess, stabbing, kicking, slashing and biting. Finally, exhaustion took them. They succumbed to gravity’s unwavering pull and the sweet tranquility of stasis.
The Aspect fell from the blood-slathered duo and rolled across the floor, the quakes causing it to tumble wayward past Asteria and into a jumbled corner. With every bounce along its trajectory, a faint chime rang out.
“Ceres!” Nakir shouted and ran to her side, carefully making an effort to raise her head off of the wet red-dyed stone.
With him, Maxra and Venza made an attempt to finish off the dying Sorceress, but that is all it was. An attempt. Among the lazily falling petals of light came down a large mass from the ceiling. It fell to the floor with nothing to brace its fall, breaking the ground and sending script-like cracks outward from itself. Raising its head and upper body, the raven-haired woman’s defender was made clear.
It was Arkiel, her pointed horns looking almost like another set of sharp, angry eyebrows pointing slightly downward. Her eyes gleamed with a cold fierceness, much different from the fiery loathing she had held before at the Imperium’s peak. She unsheathed her mortal blade without hesitation and positioned herself between her mistress and her foes. “Stray and I will end your pitiful lives where you stand. You will not make so much as another inch towards my lady without paying the ultimate price.”
“And she will not live another minute without attention,” Zenzi remarked, pointing crudely at Nia’s slashed and bite-ridden form.
Arkiel eerily turned her eyes to the half-dragon girl on the floor bleeding profusely. “Neither will she.”
“Hold,” Raum called, barely standing even with help from his staff. “There is no reason for such hostility now. They have both failed in their missions, and as such, so have we: their friends and vassals. There is no gain in fighting now.”
Maxra and Venza reluctantly stepped back, lowering their weapons to their sides. Yet, of course, they still eyed the dragon with immense suspicion. They were ready to combat her if she dared to make a move.
Arkiel, too, stepped backward. She picked up the Sorceress with one arm and flung her bloodied body over her left shoulder as if she were a schoolgirl flinging her backpack on for the day. It was extremely evident just how weightless any human, even her master and lady, was to her when compared to a dragon’s strength. “Quakes. Something is coming.”
Nakir peered upwards at his sister with worry in his heart. He held Ceres up with both hands, cradling her as gently as he could. “The Goddess?”
Arkiel stared deeply into her brother for a long moment, then turned around, changed forms, and flew up through the hole the Archmage and Esternn had come through without so much as a word.
Left there in the dark, transfigured laboratories were the Ravens, Asteria, and her glittering star waning against the heavy rumbling from below.
Zenzi managed to bring Grovalt to a stable condition, but that was the best she could do. Like the others, the endless battles had also led to endless fatigue. There wasn’t much else that could be done without succumbing to a comatose state or risking reflecting her magic back onto herself.
“It was all for nothing…”
Nakir started and looked down at Ceres with astonishment and fear. “Do not speak, little one. You are terribly injured.”
Ceres looked on with weights dragging down her eyelids. Her body begged her for sleep, as if by some miracle a night’s rest could cure her mortal wounds. A distant longing was present in both of them. Her verdant human eye held the green leaves of her long-past village and her dragon eye held the shivering visage of her adoptive father.
The others, too. Raum, Grovalt, Zenzi, Maxra and Venza all crowded around to gaze upon her with grim faces.
“All I can do to achieve my dream is crush the dreams of others. What kind of world is that?” Ceres coughed up viscous blood, her body convulsing slightly from its suddenness. “We’re all just like Ymiris, trying to survive by any means necessary. We’re evil. I’m evil.”
“No, Ceres. You are not evil. You are human. The truest human, one that is not swayed by the cruelty of nature. One who gives others the chance to redeem themselves. One who gives hope to the hopeless. You are far from evil, little one. You are everything that makes the human mind the way it is. Fear, warmth, loneliness, passion, anxiety, conviction, doubt, love. Without all of those colors, all of those emotions, the world would be a dull gray. Monochromatic. Our dreams are our purpose, whether we fulfill them or not. To live a life paved by our ideals and passion is, in itself, quite ideal.”
“But… I failed you. I failed you all. I’m… going to die. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to her… not this time or the last.” Ceres’s face collapsed into a sorrowful mess, and a deluge of crystal clear tears fell like rivers across her pallid cheeks.
Nakir stiffened. “...Do you remember when we first met? Not at the campfire, but in the woods, just before I saved your life.”
Ceres nodded, her wet eyes darting to Asteria and the shining Aspect.
“I asked you. I asked you a question. Do you remember?”
She nodded again.
“And so,” Nakir choked on his own words. The next portion came out in a gravely whisper, as if saying each word physically pained him. “I ask you again. Little one, do you wish for life or death?”
The star was unbearably bright in that dark corner of the room. Its light slowly burned away the blood that was caked on its surface during the fight. Its radiance nearly hypnotized the dying girl, nearly lulling her into an eternal sleep. It painted the body that once housed it in a faded blue hue, like sunlight shining through a rainy window in the afternoon.
Asteria looked just as she did when she was sleeping. By whatever magic, the wound dug into her by Nia had been zipped up like it had never happened. Her porcelain skin looked just the same as when she had been alive. Ceres recalled the morning of that last peaceful day with her. After an eerie dream, she had looked across her room with weary eyes as she did now. But the dream hadn’t been reality. The sun shone brightly through that old, dusty window. The trees rustled and swung against the light wind passing through their creaking branches. The smell of grass and her mother’s cooking ignited her nostrils. And… a sound.
Asteria’s snoring, accompanied by her crazed bedhead and crooked sleeping posture. No doubt, she had tossed and turned just as she had every night before. The sheets were a mess, her hair was a mess, and so was her face. Her mouth hung open, snoring loudly without a single care in the world. She was about to scold her, but…
Asteria’s hanging mouth turned into the warmest, sweetest smile. A smile anyone could love, filled with the kindness that swelled in the deepest canals of her starborn heart. She giggled in her sleep. A pleasant dream. Turning her head slightly to the side, still smiling, she eked out, “Ceres…” She giggled again, rolling over onto her side. Her sleepwear was loose and disheveled.
That memory. It was enough. Enough to push on, through any pain and strife. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t waver. Pain makes us all warp and waver as it passes through us in waves. If the coast is not immune to the weak water’s erosion, nor is humanity to the slow passage of time and worrisome thoughts and feelings. But that erosion could not stop her. And! She screamed in her mind, I will not become like her! I am not Nia. I am not her. And I will never be her. I am Ceres, sister of Asteria. And I always will be!
She looked into Nakir’s vapid azure eyes, spirit welling up inside her. She took a long, deep breath. With the memory in mind and burning true within her heart, pounding and beating as fast as it could in that moment, only one response came to mind. The only answer to such a simple question. And so she intoned only one.
“Life!”
And Nakir swung his arms around the young girl, clutching her tightly. Holding her as best he could so that she would not fade away among those rippling waves. Staying true and steadfast against the tides of terror. Fleeing not from the imagined doom, but sailing into the known calamity, for which there was no better recourse.
When it came to all those present, it simply wasn’t in their nature. Human or otherwise, a living being is not swept up in the tempest. It rides along as best it can, taking the storm in stride with a kind soul and a hearty laugh.
