In the furthest depths of sleep, in the space between the stars, Dallen dreamed.
He was in a wide expanse of flat, grey dirt. It stretched on forever, reaching toward a perfectly even horizon that met the pitch black of a starless sky. The air was still as stone. Still as death.
And there was a disc before him. A strange circle of cracked porcelain, steel grey and cold to the touch. Dallen held it up before him, and gazed into it.
His face gazed back, but it was not his own. The crack ran across it, distorting it, but there was something deeper. Something off. Like someone had stolen his skin and was wearing it now.
“We won,” he said. Or did the face in the mirror speak those words? Dallen was confused by them. But the bent face, jagged in the cracked disc, smiled back at him. “We broke him. The liar.”
Muddied memories of a fight came to him. A battle with a giant. Heavy, bloody blows. The world lurching, pain splitting in his head and his bones. A screaming laugh that sent a shiver through him, though he wasn’t sure whose it had been.
“We fought Hadrir…” Dallen said, trying to sift through words and memory, “...to save the town.”
The reflection still wore its jagged smile. It seemed to be shaking its head, though perhaps that was just a trick of the light.
“We killed him to prove the truth.”
There was a tugging from deep within him. As he remembered that fight, a thirst awoke, and grew. A burning ambition. A need to fight again.
“My master made us to be unbreakable,” his reflection said. “That was the task he set before me, from the moment of my creation. We shall prove his word.”
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“How?” Dallen’s voice was dry.
The porcelain cracked further, and the face was barely recognizable. His voice grated like a knife against stone.
“By breaking all else that we come across. Until only we remain.”
For the first time, the air shifted. A warm wind blew gentle across the wide expanse, and Dallen turned to follow it. The porcelain plate in his hand crumbled into the grey dust that covered the rest of the world, and its soft crackling made one final whisper.
We are not yet complete.
The wind gathered motes of sparkling grey dust, swirling into a single point. Up, into the black sky above. The shimmering dust coalesced, and disappeared, more and more added to the nothingness.
Then, the sliver of dark uncertainty tilted, and revealed a thin edge. It turned further, and a distant light from nowhere caught upon it.
It was a sword of dark, flat stone. Its surface was murky shadow, and it was as heavy as the world. The sword was death. The sword was fate.
The wind blew harder now, and Dallen was caught within it. The sword vanished, and from behind it, a tower rose from the flat horizon. A tower as tall as a mountain, and behind it, a rising sun. The one piece of warmth in the empty expanse. He hurtled toward it, pulled into it like a whirlpool.
Then the sunrise shattered. A wave of anguish erupted from it, and all over, cold spread. It enveloped everything, even froze the wind itself in place, threatening to break.
And then Dallen was still. And before him lay a door.
Black. Empty. Darker than the starless sky beyond it.
It beckoned him to look inward. To see what truly lay in the space between the stars. In the Dark Beyond.
But he knew that darkness. And he feared it. The door seemed to loom over him now, growing larger with each moment. Something from deep within his guts tugged at him to look inward, and the voice from the cracked mirror pressed him forward.
See where our fate lies. See what secrets the Dark holds.
Dallen fell backwards, away from the door. Away from its secrets and horrors. He screamed as he fell, but no sound came out. There was only the sound of an old heart, full of malice, reverberating through his bones.
A harsh, empty wind took the land, and him with it. The grey dust of the world was blown away, whipped into the empty beyond until the ground and sky were one in the same, and the dream faded into nothingness.