Her reflection in the crystal, still as the glass.


Silence as the darkness outside called to allothers, the shaping of the Realm with eyes above.


There, she did sit in solitude. Elreyna's mind was elsewhere.



"Little scholar" the voice mocked once more. "You must choose."


In the deepest recesses of her mind, beyond fears and affections, passed every fibre and obsession, there is a Refuge of her own. This place, she forged with thought and woe, constructed from the regrets of lost time, from the forgotten sanity. A street of dirt and gravel, uneven bricks and imperfection. A clocktower above ticking away, its face telling different time of thirteen hours each time one dared to look upon it. Hedges and ruins blend into the cityscape easily, as windows flicker with candlelight beneath the moons. Overshadowing the city, as a God loomed above its creation, The Spire. This was Elreyna's mind and her safety: the town she came to love.


And yet, the moons collided, even in her safe dream.


The dream fractured in an instant around her. First the clockface began spinning wildly, then the buildings deconstructed themselves, bricks floating away. The visage of the stars above began to blot out, with some fizzling out of existence once others visibly became brighter. Water began to flood some streets, whilst others were infested with dried sands as the candles extinguished and glass shattered. Everything began to fall apart whilst another everything finally began. A mist shrouded the Spire, yet it remained still and unaffected by the chaos around it in the dreamscape.


"You built it all to lose it all" it spoke again. "Do you feel no shame?"


A Thorn stuck in her mind, unable to be pulled out. It's voice low, masculine with a thunderous echo following each word. The nightmare took dark pleasure in torment, despite its familiarity as a friend. Elreyna stood motionless on the street surrounded by the destruction as the entity circled. The beast's tendril-like tails flicked and weaved through the air, whilst its scuttling paws clawed at the ground in ghostly motion. Ragged fur blew against the impossible winds as hundreds of purple glowing eyes throughout its body saw everything at once. Jagged, uneven and monstrous teeth and fangs grinned, illuminated from the mystical violet shimmer of its innards. It circled Elreyna as a predator, ready to pounce.


"Choose, little scholar."


"It is not an easy decision" Elreyna quietly said in return, her voice louder than the blistering winds and roaring fires surrounding. "It'll be as if it never existed."


"A kill, then... A murder or a sacrifice. Part of you must die so that the other can live. That is the way of survival, to make life from death, bloom from rot. Banish oneself to chrysalis, eat away at the mind to break free and fly. You must choose, as you know you always had to."


"It is cruel. One would uplift the veil, the other unable to explain. The stars could have been ours, but the other grounded unto the earth for all time, immortal to reality. What cruel fate decided this choice to happen? What surface has the most gravity?"


"Life is cruel. Cling to love if you wish, fleeting as it is. You would be foolish to not accept the suffering."


There are screams now. Cries of the damned. Elreyna's violet gaze followed their source, peering toward the Spire Hospital. Flashing images of men wounded from war, women aching from childbirth and children lost. There, she saw a line watching her-- hundreds of eyes, staring at her in judgement. Some smiled welcomingly, others scowled that she had to make a choice at all. The Spirefolk stood in a firing squad, ready to welcome her embrace.


Then a shimmering crystalline echo. Opposite direction; the choice to choose. Reality fragmented as the street dismantled, bricks hovering to defy gravity whilst the dirt sunk into the Void. A circular sparking bioluminescence, a break in slipspace. A portal opened, starting as a small hole in the wall to a large gateway to the Otherside. Beyond the veil, there was splendour beyond mortal comprehension. The surface of a star beckoned, flaring in its solar orbit as an ocean of purple below stormed with islands appearing and vanishing in flickers of brilliance. In the distance, ever present, a large Tower shadowed over the ocean... as a being blotting out the stars themselves drifted above in the shape of a dragon.


This was the choice. Mortality or enlightenment, community or solitude serene, a life magical or a magical life.


"You must choose, little scholar" Thorn said once more. "Is it worth it?"


Above it all, the twin moon's collided. The dark sky set ablaze as the sky began to fall. Dust settled across the land, suffocating everything in a cascade, destroying everything it fell upon. A distant storm, twirling vortex of flame and ash, breaking the Refuge into nothingness but void. It was not a darkness that shrouded in its remnants; it was a nothing, complete vacuum of anything, leaving naught an atom to exist. Elreyna watched as her dream was being wiped away in a cascade of arcane change. A cataclysm approached.


"I don't want to go"


Elreyna whimpered, her visage cracking and fragmenting like the Realm around her. Peering down at her open palm, she saw crystalline cracks appear in her skin. Shards of a broken mirror revealed a violet glow within her veins, exposed. A shattering crackled through her entire body, threatening to break down into millions of fragments, the debris of what once was. A craquelure tore her visage; a face of rippled, broken masks ontop of masks.


The clocktower's bell rang out in its toll. It was time. The unmaking of her reality. A voiceless crowd rung out a cry of sorrow. The dreamer wished away with the closing of her eyes this fate inevitable. There was no sound, no noise that greeted the arrival of the arcane change. It was the equinox of all things, the eternity and the stagnation; a solstice horizon. A blinding light flashed through the cracks in the moons, the final thing she ever saw.


...


Her reflection in the crystal, still as the glass.


The darkness outside interrupted by the shaping of the Realms, the moons collided. A distant thunderstorm.


There, she did sit and cry with tears falling down her face in silence. Dust burned down through the atmosphere outside, an ashfall rainstorm of distant flame.


All that is left is a memory.