--5 minutes ago, elsewhere in the dungeon.--

Sally floated the the corridors of her sister's dungeon, wishing she could punch someone. She felt so damn helpless! The Dungeon adrift in some wacky other dimensional space, her sister at a loss for what to do to bring them back, and her Guardian whisked away by the damn-his-eyes lich bastard.

And here she was unable to do a damned thing about any of it.

She floated through the dungeon, not swerving to the left or right as all manner of mobs raced by her on missions of their own. She was too mad to move. Let the fuckers move out of her way instead. She was in no mood to put up with--

Tug.

"FUCK!" Sally swore out loud as the world tilted sideways and she felt something grab her insides and yank on them like a dying swimmer grabbing a rope. Mobs screeched to a halt around her, staring at her curiously. One of them, she couldn't remember his name right now but she'd seen him around the dungeon, big orc, good guy, wise words, came up and asked her something. Probably asking if she was okay. Dumb question, when something just tried to turn her insides into scrambled fucking eggs.

But it wasn't that tug that had her afraid. She'd dealt with magical attacks before. Hell, she'd fired off enough of them herself in the old times, although she had no actual memories of doing so but Persephone had shared her own recollections with Sally and showed her when she'd been a fucking force to be reckoned with on the battlefield, back when they'd been whole.

No, what had her scared was the fact that she could feel Cora's essence through their own unique bond, and her sister had just been attacked too.

Sally moved. Her dungeon core body rocketed away from the mobs, leaving all kinds of shouted questions in her wake.

She was the warrior in this dungeon. She was the one who knew how to handle attacks, how to stand toe to toe with enemies and trade blows with them. Cora, gentle Cora, was the defender, the one who stayed home and protected the walls of the dungeon from interlopers. If she was getting hit like this too...

TUG.

The second yank spun Sally off her axis just as she got to what they had affectionately dubbed the Portal Room. Her vision went white, but she snarled it away and fought her way back to consciousness. Damn this body. If she were in her old form, back when the sisters had just been one entity, she knew she could have fought off whatever was happening. Or if her Guardian had been around to lend her his strength. Or if, or if, or if. But none of those 'or if's were reality right now, and some unseen enemy was attacking not just her, but her sister as well.

Sally rose off the floor where this damn body had fallen and shook herself violently. All around she saw mobs and allies staring at either her or Cora. Her sister was--

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"Cora!" Sally's cry came involuntarily. Her sister was sprawled on the floor, surrounded by a half-dozen mobs who looked like fluttering chicks for all the good they were doing. Cora's silvery body was shiny with sweat. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was locked into what looked like a silent scream. She wasn't moving.

She dimly heard Pearl, the little narrator fairy, screaming about how her sister wasn’t responding. The little woman was landed on Cora’s chest, pressing both palms into the silvery flesh of Cora’s throat and sending wave after wave of healing magic into her. To no apparent effect.

Sally lurched forward, bulling her way through the crowd by sheer force of velocity. Her orboid body rolled over and through, until she was right by Cora's side.

"Cora, hang on!" She tried to say, but only got as far as the first syllable when...

TUG!

Sally felt herself torn free of her body and yanked somewhere else. For a brief, fleeting moment she felt another consciousness brush hers. Cora. Her sister, pulled out of reality as well by whoever the unknown assailant was.

And there, just for an instant, she felt something else caught up in the rush of power. A little presence, surprised and terrified, carried with them on the tides of whatever magic was pulling them forward.

And then the blackness closed in.

* * *

This is the Essence.

If you think of it as a vast tapestry woven of unfeasibly complex strands of light that crisscross with one another in a never-ending dance of cycles, you would only be wrong in ways no one cares about.

And these are the systems of the world, large collections of threads around which the weft of the world is woven.

And this is the Dungeon. It is a primary system within the Essence of the world, around which dozens and hundreds of secondary and tertiary systems are formed. It was never intended to be such, but over millennia the Essence has reformed and shaped itself to include the Dungeon within its design. And with that design came stability.

Up until a second ago, when an invisible hand tugged on a very specific thread.

Until that time, the dungeon had been anchored to the Last, its powers connected to and controlled by her. And through that connection to the Last, the Dungeon connected to the Essence as well. The two anchor points were stable and kept the Dungeon from fraying and disrupting the pattern.

Then, one second ago, the Failstate pulled on the connecting thread between the Last and their Guardian. And when something gave way, it was not the connection between the Guardian and the Last.

Already bereft of its anchor to the Essence because of Samuel Tolliver's escape strategy wherein the entire dungeon was transported to a secondary plane of existence, the dungeon's link to the Last was weakened. And when the Failstate tugged, the link broke.

But it did not dissolve.

Like seeks like, and an anchor seeks to anchor itself. Within the dungeon were scores of thinking beings all connected to Dungeon in some form or another. But only one of those beings had been connected to the Last herself through a series of mishaps and un-looked-for occurences. Only a single being, who was connected to the Last when the link to the dungeon was severed, and who had been connected through the Last to the Dungeon itself since the first day it had spawned.

The dangling threads of the Dungeon's power writhed and reached, and found the one being they recognized as a connection point more desirable than all the others.

Araxes didn’t have time to move as Cora and Pearl blinked out of existence. He didn’t have time to breathe as Sally did the same. And he did not even have time to scream before power slammed into him, and darkness claimed him as well.