After his training Avakian had fallen asleep early, his body tired from the exertion as well as the echoes of pain from the etching process. It felt like a mere moment had passed before he woke up, in an entirely unfamiliar room.

Calling it a room was a misnomer, looking around Avakian couldn't see walls or a ceiling, simply an infinite recursion filled with fancy furniture. Looking closer he realised he recognised the furniture from somewhere; the erebology department.

He was dreaming. Something he had not personally experienced before in his short life. He pinched himself and was surprised to feel just as much pain as if he were awake.

Odd. He was fairly sure this wasn't real, but it also didn't feel quite like a dream.

Avakian decided to pick a direction and walk straight until he either found a way out, or figured out how to wake up.

---

He had been walking for what felt like several days, and had yet to find a single clue as to what he was doing here, or what here even was. Avakian had tried kicking over a chair to see if he was walking around in a loop, and sure enough when he walked far enough he found another chair also kicked over, although infuriatingly, it wasn't even the same type of chair.

"AAARGH!" He yelled in frustration, he had things to do! He didn't have time to waste walking around an infinitely repeating boardroom.

"I will take the Merlot dear, thank you." A harmonious voice sounded from behind him.

He twirled around to find a woman seated at a dining table, flipping through a paper menu. The woman had an incredibly graceful posture, with dark curls flowing down to the middle of her back.

She hadn't been there before, he was sure of it.

"I.. Don't work here." Stumbled Avakian. "In fact I don't even know where I am."

"Of course you work here. You are here. This entire place is a fabrication of the mind - your mind - to be exact." She explained patiently as he walked closer. "Now; the Merlot."

He was about to explain that he didn't have any, when a red bottle appeared on the table in front of the woman. She gave a gentle smile.

"Sit down. Order something, you're the one paying after all."

She passed him the paper menu. On it was a list of every meal that Avakian had tried or knew about. He was just about to ask out loud for the spaghetti, when it popped into existence in front of him.

"So, uh.. Why am I here exactly?" He asked cautiously.

"You tell me, it's your subconscious we're in." The woman told him mysteriously.

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Avakian sat there, gobsmacked at the audacity of the woman before she started laughing in a familiar mocking tone.

"Now where have I heard that laugh before?" Avakian thought. "Come to think of it, she does look rather familiar."

"Erebus' scrotum, I hate it when people do that. Act all mysterious in order to feel in control. My friend used to pull that shit all the time. Prick." The woman grumbled.

Avakian laughed nervously, he simply couldn't get a read on the woman's character, she slipped from graceful to crude at the drop of a hat.

"So." She drank deeply from the tall glass of wine. "I have brought you here for a conversation. From what I have gathered you will be departing the 74th Fold soon enough. There are several things I need to tell you before you leave."

"What things? Also who are you? You seem familiar somehow." Avakian pondered.

"Who am I? That's a hard one." The woman tapped her cheek in thought. "I am a vestige of a woman who was known as Cypria Starborne. In my life I was one of the most powerful sorcerers in the Manifold."

"Your life? You're saying you're dead?" He asked incredulously. The existence of Void gave rise to many seemingly unnatural phenomena, but as far as he knew ghosts weren't one of them.

"Not exactly, but I'm not exactly alive either." She sighed. "My original self was nigh-immortal, having many stored spells and etchings she used in order to cheat death. After centuries of being immortal, the very concept of death was rather elusive to me. In other words: I got cocky."

"In my search for knowledge and meaning, I unearthed something; an ancient star-map. I spent decades trying to uncover what it led to, and eventually, I found it." Cypria recounted.

"What was it?" Avakian asked, his breath baited.

"I have no idea." She shook her head in disappointment. "Whatever it was that I found, also found me. It launched some kind of mental attack that wiped my memories of ever seeing it, as well as destroying half my mind."

"So what does that have to do with me? If it almost killed you I'm pretty sure there's absolutely nothing I can do about it." Avakian reasoned. "I'm not particularly special."

"No-one is really. Not me, not you, nor anyone on this twisted rock we call the world." She sighed again. "But you have - and I despise this word - potential. Potential perhaps to someday find a solution to a threat that not even I know the nature of."

"What makes me so different?" He asked dubiously.

"I don't know, Avakian!" She exclaimed. "You cannot imagine how frustrating this is for me. I'm trying to solve a puzzle with not only half the pieces, but half a brain!"

There was silence between the two. Cypria took another sip of her wine, Avakian had totally forgotten his pasta.

"Our time is almost up, this spell is costing my reserves. The final message from my original self is as follows." She cleared her throat.

"Seal Create, reject Light, destroy Darkness." She finished.

"I hope you know how little that means to me." He muttered.

"Yep! I wouldn't worry about it too much, just keep it in the back of your mind." She replied, far too cheerfully. "Take care of Ellian for me!"

---

Cypria had clearly terminated the spell, as Avakian woke up almost instantly after she finished.

"Incredible. I never knew dreaming could be so interesting. That felt incredibly real!" Avakian thought. "Lucky I don't actually have to worry about anything she said, that whole experience was simply a product of my imagination."

That line of thought continued for almost half a minute, until he noticed a square piece of paper resting on his pillow.

"Not just a dream, dearest -The Starborne Sorceress." The note read.

"Rats!"