Still in immense pain, I fell onto my side, looking back behind me through tears.

Celistar was sitting on a chair, holding a cup of what was probably tea in one hand and a saucer in the other. Steeve was curled up on her head like a hat, with her tail sticking out to one side. Yuèyīng was sitting in Steeve's customary position in her lap, looking like she was taking a nap.

The Moon Fairy had been halfway to taking a sip and now looked extremely confused, looking around warily before seeing me lying on the floor.

"Benefactor!" she said, 'tossing' away the tea and rushing over to me, scattering poor Yuèyīng into the air in the process. I found it kind of amazing how fast she'd reacted to the situation, despite being caught so off guard by it.

Put me in her shoes and I might not even have noticed anything was wrong yet.

She bent down next to me and spoke in a way that only I could hear. "What happened? We were forcibly removed from your Soul Sea."

"I wish I knew," I said, struggling to take a full breath. "I just walked over into the city - this happened as soon as I stepped on the stone."

Celistar stared at the stone, but it refused to reveal any secrets to her. She stood, looking around with a bit of a glare, as if accusing an invisible foe of whatever misfortune had befallen me.

She walked farther inward, and her eyebrows rose.

"This makes no sense." It came out almost as a mumble, with her looking down at the ground and then back up again.

She held up her hand towards me, and a wisps and Motes of Nebula emerged - all of them a very pale blue, almost white in color. I'd seen hers before - most recently in the space between worlds. It was green - a basic Nature affinity. Why had it changed?

I felt her voice back in my head - but it sounded very distant.

We need to speak, right now. I'm going to carry you out of the city. You need to act incapacitated.

Well, that wasn't hard. I more or less was incapacitated. While the feeling of having my insides scrambled was slowly improving, it still wasn't anything I could easily deal with and still do anything else.

I felt her lift me in her arms, having closed my eyes as instructed.

"I am going to take the Venerable and see if I can treat her." She said, a sort of energy in her voice that would not tolerate any objection. "I need to be undisturbed. Keep a watch."

Then she carried me over the hill and down into the hollow.

I blinked my eyes, the abrupt transition jarring.

We were somehow back in my Soul Space. Celistar was standing in front of me, looking very strange. The wings on her back were still there, but they were very ethereal, almost transparent.

She reached her hand up to one, and a ghostly trail of afterimages was left behind as her body moved, the hand just passing through the wing.

"That's… different." I said.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"To say the least," she replied. "I was worried that I wouldn't even be able to enter this space. It seems that our bond is still present, if altered. I'm not sure as to the permanence of the change, yet."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. That city is entirely misplaced." She sighed. "I'm not sure where it came from. If I'm not standing in it, I can't even detect it."

She held up a hand - and some Nature Affinity Nebula poured out from it.

"It's back to how it was." I said.

She shook her head. "No, my Affinity originally related to the moon." A faint outline of a moon burst into being above her head, and almost jumped back. In this space, the reflection of my Core was the main representation of the moon Celistar would use.

"I shouldn't even be able to do that," she said. "Or rather, I wasn't able to. My Affinity changed when I chose to enter your 'shrine'. Nature was the strongest Affinity there, likely because of where you created it. I took on the Affinity willingly to stay alive. But now…" She held out her hand again, and this time, the Nebula was the pale light of her original Affinity shown down.

"So you have both?" I asked.

"No," she said, and I her outline blurred a little, with the word sounding garbled somehow. "I have one," she said, and her surroundings filled with Nature. "I have the other," she intoned, and her shape almost jolted, somehow, and the surroundings energy did so in response, jumping to the other Affinity as though it'd always been there.

"But I don't have both." As she finished, her words sounded strange again, as though two identical voices spoke the exact words at the same time with no difference. So why did it feel like there were two voices at all?

I wasn't sure.

"I can't give you any idea of what we are going to encounter, but I doubt it will be fun."

I hung my head a bit at that - this beginning bit wasn't fun.

"Do I have to?"

Surprisingly, crossing into the city a second time didn't hurt. At all. Which was almost worse than if it had, since my 'what the heck is going on' idea meter was now deep into the negatives.

After all, someone with no idea what was happening was still better off than someone who had a bunch of preconceptions shattered.

Celistar put a hand on the small of my back, something I found remarkably reassuring, for some reason.

"How are you feeling, Benefactor?" She said. I will say that hearing that method of speech out of her again for the first time in a while really grated on my nerves. I didn't like how subservient it sounded, not when I considered Celistar as an equal or even a mentor.

"Disturbingly well…" I started saying, before course correcting. "Or rather, I am still suffering a fair bit of pain, but nothing new happened."

István joined us, stepping onto the stone himself. He gave himself a once-over. "Everything seems 'right as rain', as Elder Gran so succinctly puts it."

"That's good," I said, as Viktor also made the same transition. Fire adorned his fists as he stepped across, as if daring the powers that be to mess with him. Not something I'd bet against either, so good choice there, mysterious city.

"That felt weird," Qīwù said, as she made the transition herself. She doubled-up in my vision as my head spun a bit. I tried shaking it out, but it made the dizziness worse.

"Oof," I said, almost toppling over.

István caught me in his arms, and then looked me over, before reaching out and pinching my arm.

"A revolt!" I said, sounding weaker than I'd intended.

"When was the last time you had some water?" He asked, a corked bottle appearing out of whatever magical space he stored all his shit in. I laughed a little bit inside my head, wondering if he kept his actual shit in it.

"Oh, uh," I stuttered. I had no recollection, and realized he probably had a point, between the dizziness and disjointed thoughts. "Not a clue. I will definitely take you up on that."

The spinning went away once I was more hydrated, and we moved a little way down the street.

Architecture in this part of the city mostly comprised of stacked stone cottages, round and squat, with thatched roofs. They looked like they'd burn really easily if a dragon were to light them on fire.

I took some consummate sips of water, realizing my thoughts were still going in some strange directions.

Feeling better, if a little, uh, 'sloshy', I poked my head through the empty doorway of one of the vacant dwellings. There was very little dust, but nothing else of note. They didn't even look lived in.

Just as I was about to look away, I saw what looked like a shimmer in the corner. Before I could investigate more though, I heard a shrill scream. Qīwù's.

She was in the center of the street on her knees with her feet splaying out to sides, the very picture of a distraught young woman. She was looking down at her hands as though they had betrayed her.

"I've lost my Nebula!"

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