"Promise me, Charlene."

…

…

"I'll stay here."

…

…

"I will only be gone a minute. I will be right back, I promise. Things are going to be okay, Charlene."

This isn't real. In the midst of a burning city ripping itself apart, all I can feel is the warmth of her body.

"..Jess…"

She won't look at me. Her eyes stare toward the sky as I hold her, looking at something far past me. I move to brush the blood from her mouth; she can't do it herself, only to find sticky red covering my hand. Then I see it, the hole in her chest, right through the bone, deep and carnal.

"I have something," I tell her. My hand shakes as I reach into my inventory, one of the potions I took from the adventurer's hall appearing between my fingers. The blood on my nails makes them too slick to pull the stopper from the bottle. "Sorry," I mutter. "Sorry."

The glass bottle tumbles out of my hand, bouncing on the broken brick, rolling away with a rattle.

"I have another one," I assure her. "I have another."

My last bottle drops into my hand. I bite the topper, chipping the glass with my teeth rather than bothering with the stopper. She won't drink it when I put it to her lips. "Come on." The potion trickles into her mouth as I hold her. She won't look at me. "Come on, Jess."

Motes of magic spark in the liquid. It's like nothing moves. Just a still scene, a still face, looking up and away from me. The empty bottle falls from my hand, the noise like a church bell. She doesn't complain when my bloody fingers touch her cheek. "I'm sorry," I tell her as my arms start to shake. "I didn't mean to. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it." My fingers leave streaks on her face, but she doesn't look up. She doesn't look at me.

Then she does.

"I looked for you," Jess says. "Why didn't you wait for me?" Tears spill from her eyes, mixing with the blood on her face into streaks of watery pink.

"I…I didn't," I stammer. "I'm sorry. I should have stayed. I'm sorry. Gods, I'm sorry."

Her fingers brush the side of my face, colder than ice. "You did this, Charlene," she says. "You killed me."

I try to say something, but air can't force its way through the tightness in my throat. She is right. Of course she is. Gods, I can't breathe.

Then, it isn't her hand on my face. The pads of the fingertips spin, turning to join the pale wrist reaching over my shoulder to brush gently at my hair with bloody fingers. Blonde hair falls across my shoulder, a hot whisper pours iron breath into my ear, and the tightness in my throat becomes a steel grip as the monster embracing me from behind squeezes with a lover's tenderness.

"No," Ferro whispers. Despite the warmth of the night, his breath puffs into a mist that smells of death. "We did this," he says to Jess. There is a smile in his voice.

Jess stares up as I hold her, her eyes looking at the monster hugging me tight. Terror enters her eyes, more fright than I have ever seen from her. She stares at the thing smiling down at her, and her throat tries to draw in air, but the dead don't breathe.

"We did this," the monster whispers again; its words boring into my brain. The hand around my throat continues to squeeze, tighter and tighter, until I can feel cartilage bend.

"We did this!" his tender voice becomes violent. The soft and caressing hand on my face grabs hard and desperately, his bloody thumb and forefinger forcing a smile on my face.

His forehead presses against the back of my skull, forcing me to look down with a bloody grin at Jess lying in my arms. Her eyes are gone, replaced with holes more pitch than anything.

"We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this," he chants. The warmth of his breath flows across my neck as he forces me to look.

"We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this."

Jess' body begins to cave in on itself, turning to dust as her mouth falls open impossibly wide.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this."

I start to shake, feeling the weight of her leave me as she turns to dust running through my fingers. I can't breathe.

"We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this."

Jess falls into dark dust that spills onto the ground, coating my legs and mixing into the sand around us, just motes of dark vanishing into the sea.

"We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this. We did this."

I did this.

Then, the heat is gone. Sound vanishes with it, and I am alone. A desert of dark dunes rises around me, running away as far as I can see without any features to break the rise and fall of their gentle slopes. Black sand pours from the folds in my torn dress as I stand. The grainy cold leeches my body's warmth. Danfalla is gone, and I am alone.

A moon far too large to be real illuminates the sky like a double-sized sun. There are no stars. I cry out, my voice bouncing off the sand, echoing into sadistic cackles that run away and return. My feet start moving, climbing through the sliding sand toward the light of the moon.

It takes hours or seconds to top the first rise, to escape the cold shadow cast by sand eclipsing moonlight. The pale orb in the sky sinks, falling toward the hilly horizon, and I chase after it. I run too fast, my bare feet kicking up clouds of black sand ahead of me as I run down the side of the dune. My knee crashes into the sand as I trip. I tumble, sliding through wisps of dark, bouncing down until I come to rest in the valley between two high dunes.

The sky rotates above me, and the moon comes to rest at the top of the nearest rise. The light it casts over the desert doesn't reach me in the valley. I am left alone in shadow, the ground beneath me sucking away at my warmth, at my heart, at my very soul. The pale light of the heavenly orb changes as it comes to rest at the top of the dune, the wan light turning golden like the rays of the sun, though the desert remains in deepest shadow.

It changes, lines of endless depth rivening its surface, running like glowing cracks across the celestial orb in an intricate web of meaning and purpose. The gold of the moon glows, the cracks running across its surface pulsing with otherworldly lights,

When I see her, sitting at the top of the dune, staring down into the valley of shadow I flounder at the bottom of, the perspective of the world shifts. This woman, a warrior bathed in armored scales of pale gold, decorated with cloth and pendants so crimson that I imagine they openly bleed, stares down at me with eyes of black and red, her hand cupped in her hand, stares down at me through crimson strands, boredom writ on her face. With a lazy roll of her wrist, the entire moon changes, lights in the cuts across its surface lighting up, burning too brightly to look at, yet I do. In the flash of golden light, I see the crown of imperium flash with opalescent light above her. Magic more precious and powerful than anything I have ever felt pulses from the heavens, turning the endless void above into a storm of chaotic lightning as the entire earth quakes around me.

I crawl to my knees, my eyes never leaving hers as she continues to stare down at me. There is something in her gaze. Not pity, it is far worse than that. She looks down at me with disinterest, as if all that I am is nothing more interesting than another grain of onyx sand.

"I will do it!" I yell up at her. I don't know why the words feel right, but they do. My feet kick the sand as I scramble up the dune. "I will do it!"

I run, and my heart thuds in my chest as I climb the side. When my legs ache too much to carry me, I scramble forward with my hands. No matter how long I climb, no matter how many times I scream up at her, I never draw any closer. Behind me, a mountainside of black sand stretches long into the valley of shadow.

"You can't stop me!" I scream. "You can't!"

The woman says nothing, just watching me with the same bored expression as I rage. The line, the boundary between light and shadow, stays just out of reach, moving impossibly away from the tips of my fingers as I crawl toward the top. My energy runs out, and I collapse forward in a splash of sand.

A speck of warmth fills me. The tip of my middle finger stretches across the line, and the moonlight feels like the kiss of the sun on my skin. She still sits there at the top of the sand, looking down at me.

"You can't stop me." My voice is a harsh whisper. "I will do it."

The sand around me begins to slide away, and I roll along with it. The cold that washes over my hand is worse for knowing the warmth of light. As I slide back into shadow, a female voice speaks with the rumble of the dune.

"Of course. It couldn't have gone any other way."

Sensation returns in the feeling of rough pages spread out under my arms. As I lift my head, pulling away a scrap of paper stuck to the side of my face by a dried tear, urgency seems to slip away. It always feels so real when you are in a dream, only to become so fake when you wake.

My back doesn't ache as I push myself off the table in front of me; I don't really get aches anymore. I am in my laboratory, the only sound is the soft humming of the shiny and new mana probe that was left on overnight.

"I fell asleep," I mumble. Books lay splayed on the table in front of me. Research notes, designs, shopping lists, and a few receipts fill in the spaces between. What I had been doing comes back to me slowly, the memory doing its best to push through the awful visions that still press against the forefront of my mind. It is only when I turn my head to the side and see the heavy steel box sitting in the corner with a dark metal boot sticking up from a bed of straw that I full grab hold of the memory.

I shake my head as I stand. "This is why I don't sleep."

I almost bump right into Dovik as I stumble from the lab in search of something to banish the fog still hanging over me.

The man quirks his eyebrow as he looks me up and down. "Is that what you're wearing?"

The kitchen welcomes me as I stumble inside. For a moment, the thought of making a cup of coffee is inviting, but I decide against it. The immediate relief from a bottle of sour kavida in the icebox is far better. I have the drink half down my gullet before leaning back and locking eyes with Dovik as he lingers in the hallway.

"To what?" I ask. The likely harmful chemicals in the kavida do wonders in ripping away the last bit of sleep that lingers.

Dovik looks back at me for a moment. Then he glances at the open door of the laboratory, before turning back to me. "Charlene, today is the first day of classes."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.