After everything the girls had gone through, it was actually surprising for Sryine and Vwyx to suddenly confront the lake again so easily. After all the struggles they had endured, it felt like it would take quite a lot to simply get back there.

Sryine still felt like she had only blinked, which was strange considering how much her acceleration could achieve while others blinked. One moment they were in the halls of the fortress, the realization that they would be walking through it lost once again beset upon her.. and the next they were stepping back upon the sand of the beach. One quick blow, Riyxia had punctured straight through the wall, breaking a way out of the fortress. Vwyx had figured out at least what had happened, apparently there was a problem with pressure containment, a very careful and mighty blow could rupture the entire wall and blow a massive hole in it. This would have been seriously dangerous to attempt had the wall not led directly outside, leaving Vwyx worried about Riyxia’s confidence in such actions. Vwyx had found she didn’t even know where the map she had carried had vanished off to, worried that the phantoms of the fortress had simply taken it back. The place was so totally and obviously haunted, after all.

At the lakeside, the three girls took an opportunity to put together the sorts of things they would require. Vwyx and Sryine worked together to get a collection of small spheres made from ice, things that would be expected to carry her flame. Vwyx expected that the spheres would not last long once exposed, so they should save such a resource for once they got inside. Riyxia at least tested one, and found a way she could actually possess the infuriating little thing. Through such she also learned that possessing ice was not at all comfortable, the frost itself even felt so very draining. While Sryine was working with the winds to provide them some measure of a shared transport, Riyxia tried to apply her own gift again to at least make some improvements of the health for her friends. The vent was rough, any slight advantage would be important. It was for this reason too that Riyxia found her own injuries repaired, even if she didn’t have many. Once such preparation was in order, the three of them began their descent into the lake, letting Sryine’s wind settle into their own protection from the aquatic depths. With Sryine on the job, the waters of the lake weren’t going to be a problem.

Instead, the lake had other ideas for obstacles and obstructions. The water itself rippled with the force and vibration of the ground below.. something had just happened. The depth of the water would have been a concern for visibility.. except for the fact that they were being followed by their own personal star. Riyxia’s glowing intensity lit up the entire floor bed of the lake far below them, giving them the opportunity to witness the after-effects of such seismic activity. A hiss of steam was escaping from an obsidian formation of rock at the bottom middle, the obsidian having collapsed in the process. The three rushed to investigate, concerned to discover that there was no longer any viable passage inside. Vwyx tried to manipulate the obsidian itself, the void stone being completely unresponsive to her gift. She had shaped void crystals before, but this obsidian was diamond strong, its own integrity boosted by the heart of the world itself. Vwyx simply wasn’t strong enough, her flame simply could not compare to the heart of the world. Riyxia touched the rock preparing to crush her way through, only to find that the void itself became ravenous for her own flame on contact. After all, the world was fully capable of feeding off of a flame such as Riyxia.. the source would even only be even more eager to do the same as well if it too had the chance. Sryine looked upon the situation carefully, the escape route for the steam having caught her attention instead. Looking into that a bit more carefully, she found a rather small opening leading inside.. the stones having fallen into a formation similar in shape as a crescent moon. Sryine sighed, feeling about as lead to her discovery as the blossom in the fortress, they really had started to follow this shape everywhere, even in the strangest of circumstances.

As Sryine drew attention to the small opening, Riyxia figured out the implications. No person could slip through something this small, the largest thing that could pass through would be a couple of icy spheres. More than her previous idea of leaving the others behind, it appeared she would have no choice but to even leave herself behind in the process, her Spectre would have to do this alone. Everyone else was so obviously aware of this too, while also understanding the risk involved in the process. The vent was huge, this might be far further from her body than she had ever gone before, far more than would even be safe. However, it also solved another problem, without the wood of her body, Liyuzhe wouldn’t be as capable of her special trick. She had no idea what would happen if she pressed the distance limits of her spectre, but it seemed like she was going to find out, doing nothing was completely out of the question. She turned to the others, both silently trying to prepare some kind of complaint and plan, coming up with nothing useful this time. Riyxia presented them with a soft smile instead, also keeping silent. If nothing else, this would mean entrusting her body to their care while she simply focused upon the trial ahead of her.. and she knew she could entrust them with such a responsibility. While still smiling for her friends, the entire lake suddenly grew much darker for a moment as each of the ice spheres lit up in sequence.. and floated into the opening. Riyxia left her non-glowing body to settle as close as she could to the opening without being in direct contact with the obsidian, then closed her eyes for a quick underwater nap. She knew it would be best to conserve her own strength.

She didn’t need to worry about the presence of Sryine’s gift much further, as the heat within had appeared to entrap a bubble of superheated air. She expected though that even the air would feel thin around here, the flame taking full dominion over all the elements present. There was no harmony of the elements here, this was no place for the living. She could only imagine how this would feel for Liyuzhe and the others, who had actually pressed into such a domain as normal ordinary living people. Getting the three of them out of here was going to require some warping.. though she expected that the void around them was even working to suppress the influence of her own rifts. Dark elements could easily be confused as a void of the elements, but it wasn’t quite the same thing, so Ieqyisa’s rifts, light or dark, would still be overwhelmed by the intensity of the obsidian around them. If their exit was cut off completely.. there would be no escape. It was actually incredible that the simple facts behind the obsidian hadn’t conjectured enough evidence of how crazy this whole thing actually was. More than the crystal produced from herself, the obsidian here was the purity of the world’s void.. and nothing beyond the world itself could manipulate it. Such a thing was itself also just as dangerous as the flame, being the effect of destruction itself. The crystal they had would only have two outcomes, it would either shatter behind the intensity of what it couldn’t hope to contain, or it would be empowered by destruction itself and relay the same effects in kind.. just the same way obsidian worked. It took far too many elements to negate the influence of such destruction, and this location wasn’t the best place to find any kind of harmony of the elements.

On that subject, as Riyxia pressed deeper through the vent, she noticed the spheres escorting her rapidly being spent, almost like an offering of passage. Fire and ice working together in harmony was a completely alien concept to a place this rich with death and destruction. With the whole area hungry for the flames contained in the frost.. Riyxia felt it best to keep her spectre outside of any sort of vessel. Sure, the selection might leave a lot to be desired as things stood, but she really didn’t want to get eaten in the process either. Even being linked to the spheres being consumed was harsh for her, leaving nothing to her imagination in the dangers she was presented to. She continued to descend into the vent, to locate where Liyuzhe had gone.. and was getting worried just how far things were going. Of course, Liyuzhe would be going as deep as she could, so as to not add additional complexity to what she was trying to achieve. The link to the Celesi flame was strongest the deeper things ran, and that would then provide the best location to access the source too, with all the variables at their optimum. Such was utterly wrong, but that’s exactly how Liyuzhe would think. Technically, the deeper she went, the more her own flame felt at home with things too. In that light, she was actually certain she was in fact going in the right direction, her instincts in the subject would be all too perfect in coming up with the answer. It was all of the scary for many reasons, such as how that comfort was actually trying to lure her to oblivion.. and how she had already wandered deep enough to have lost over half of her sphere supply. Much like her return trip in the last vent.. this return voyage was going to be rough.. if it was even possible.

At one point, she started to notice that measuring possibilities had even grown much harder for her to accomplish, her mind growing even more hazy for each turn of the depth. Concentrating on basic thoughts was starting to get harder.. and that might have been affecting her for a while at that point actually, her mind frequently wandering way more than it should. It was at that point that the truth dawned upon her, technically her mind wasn’t wandering at all, it was left at the exit of the vent with her friends, within her bound form. She herself was only a spectre, one which had been bound to a body in the process and thus given the benefits of a mortal form. That provided her with not just a body, but also a mind.. a place to process thoughts and memories. All of that was growing distant from her, making any thought processes even harder. This implied the answer to her original concerns.. about the consequences of her distance. If she continued going forward, she would eventually be unable to sustain her link to her actual body. At worst, that would itself be fatal, her body falling into a state of death and her essence left to the regular process of being without a body in such a death.. but even if she could be sustained for the duration of her absence, even if she made it back, there would be other problems. She would have to progress forward on instinct and intuition alone, the feelings embedded within the essence. If she lost access to her mind, she would have no way to think of her ideas, and no way to access any of her memories.

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Such was a problem with obvious consequences, but it was not as if there was nothing she could do about it. The ability her own essence invested upon her left her with the ability to influence the essence of others, to shape life and death.. but also would give options for smaller ideas. She would then have to ponder and plan what she needed to know now, while she still had access to her mind, and then instill her essence with what it needed to ensure she could deal with all of the problems before her. Such would be no simple feat, she wasn’t even aware of exactly what she would be facing. She knew there were three people she cared about waiting down there, she knew the whole place was dangerous to everything she cared about, she knew the flames here were trying to destroy her and everything important to her.. and that the source could appear at any time as an even worse instance of the flame. She knew there would be tools used to empower such things, the term ‘instrument’ becoming too complex for her, but at least these tools needed to be dealt with for her to get what she actually wanted. She needed to somehow guide the three people still here out, and she needed to escape from the flame herself.. to find the place her essence had called home. She couldn’t even remember what it was called anymore.. not the names of anything.. not even her own name. But her essence brimmed with the feelings it was left with, the basic goals she felt she had to accomplish.

As she got deeper, she felt suddenly a wash of a presence of despair, too familiar in her past. It was a place she had previously been forced to call home, and it had been awakened to call her back again. No, that was the worst she had to avoid, it was bad. Things were bad, she had to do something. She didn’t know what she was doing, so she just rushed ahead, doing what felt right. There was a faint glimmer of familiar, the astral flame pressing against its confinement further ahead, calling out to her.. to encourage her to join in its effort. It was hungry, and past this one final obstruction it would be free to feast. It was only a matter of time now. Such a feast was bad though, such a feast was wrong, she knew this through the very core of her being, through even the flame of her essence. There was so much more that a flame could get from being a part of such harmony than it gained from simply tearing it apart. This flame didn’t understand, and wanted to take everything from her, to leave her starving for more of such harmony. It was way more powerful than her simple trace of a flame, but she had to stand against it, or lose everything.

Liyuzhe realized in that moment that she had failed. She had thought that in all of her preparation, all the things she had done.. she would be ready for the astral flame. Faced with it herself, the realization that the little defense she had prepared would shatter, the fact that she had no way to simply close the gate that had been torn wide with power far greater than anything she had ever witnessed before.. far more than she could ever hope to control.. she had failed so completely. Of course, how could she have ever expected to have done better than Khyzae had. Instead, she had only made things worse. Now, the three of them would be faced with death too. She was also backed into a corner of the room, with no room to escape.. so she would really be faced with a true death for herself too. All of her instruments had failed, a fact she had also forgotten about.. that the flame would render all of their equipment beyond their own control. The gate had suffered too, in that same way. However, the fact that it worked at all showed that it wasn’t that stuff failed, instead that she had lost control.. like she had become a victim of her own gift. It was a horrible irony in that. Her instruments, malfunctioning like crazy, still managed to report considerable aptitudes in the flame, a massive link between instruments here and what she had done to the other vent, resulting in growing seismic activity. She was going to die, but she wasn’t going to die alone. She wasn’t even just going to die with her friends, she had to face the fact that the death of all Celese was going to be completely her fault. Riyxia.. Khyza.. had been right all along, like usual. She really should never have doubted. And at that thought, a small handful of glowing purple spheres entered the room, recognizable as being of the astral flame too.

“Khyzae, why.. why are you here? I guess though, even that would be inevitable, you wouldn't have left the world to be destroyed just sitting still. Showing up at the last moment.. that’s been my cousin all along. Even if I could never keep up with your pure blood, I was really hoping to have proven capable too. But.. there really is nothing more I can do about this, and I’m pretty sure the astral flame is already seeping into this room as we speak, the three of us are honestly as good as dead. You’re however of the same flame yourself, you’re the only one here that could by any chance do anything about it, just as always then. Please, help me to at least spare the world from my mistake, to keep things as contained as possible.” Liyzuhe realized that this would be the end of her, but things would be alright if Khyzae would endure. Instead of doing something better than her cousin, she had instead done worse. Of course, she was talking only to Riyxia, Khyzae’s successor.. but she could still strongly feel Khyzae’s presence at the same time, the girl who had always looked out for her despite her tainted half blood for all these years. Riyxia was working to allow Khyzae’s dreams to endure, so Liyuzhe would have to entrust her own to Khyzae’s successor as well. It would be only inevitable, after all. Liyuzhe turned to her two companions, Fhyernx unable to focus on anything at all, Ieqyisa having fully passed out very early on. Wisps of the astral flame were already being unleashed by the source, leading all three of them to death’s door. All three also had lost color in various parts of their body, the astral flame having already ignited upon them. It was far too obvious, there was no way they could survive, they were basically already dead. As Liyuzh herself felt the last of her life fade away from her, her other final regret was that neither of them had ever been told that she actually wasn't fully human.. only her cousin...

The spectre didn’t understand the noises being made by the people here, even though she felt everything was important. Oh, they were the ones she had to save.. but was that even possible? The flame, it already had them, it was far too late for such a thing. That was bad, she felt sadness in that feeling, but there were still other things she could do, things she also felt remained important. The room had some obvious tools, things the flame was actively using to commit its growing power. Of course, this was the tool stuff that was bad, because the flame was bad. She then needed to put a stop to everything. She reached out for the instruments holding the gate open.. the source feeling her flame as if a friend.. the world heart however understanding whose side such a flame was really on. She linked to the parts of the instrument, and began tearing the whole thing apart, even while covered in the flickers of the astral flame. The source was not happy, recognizing such an act as a kind of betrayal, seeing that her flame was filled with the might of another. It scoured this flame, draining it of its might, forcing it to bend to its own. It was the strongest here, it could control everything. However, the flame present did not want to lose its own domain to such a mighty opponent either, so instead the heart of the world shared it’s own might with this small trace, empowering it even further. The source was still nothing more than a trickle of a presence in this world, it hadn’t had the time to forge its own dominion yet. Torn between trying to fight with it’s limited ground against foes that should be otherwise meaningless, it still had no way to assert itself onto an object its passage depended upon. The source didn’t assert such things, it rather more frequently only destroyed.. Destruction was exactly what that little trace wanted, to utterly destroy the gate its essence hated. In this lair of destruction, a place where such potential was at its greatest, the trace’s will for destruction overcame all else.

The purple haze of the room quickly diminished, fading away as its access to the source became lost. The spectre glanced around the room, seeing nothing of importance except maybe the glowing ashes in one of the corners. The spheres however were gone too, the presence of the source having consumed everything. The spectre was then in a daze, left perplexed on the continuation of its own existence. It had a direction to go, but would it even make it? It couldn’t even ponder such an idea, not without any mind of its own. All it had was a feeling of uncertainty. However, it also felt.. refreshed? The world had no wants for the foreign flames that it had been exposed to, threatened its own.. but it could tell such flames were similar in nature to the small trace that had appeared to protect its own dominion. Instead of taking any flame away, the heart of the world made an offering of the unwanted flame to the trace, making use of it as a presence to be rid of such a thing. This trace.. it wanted to escape the domain of the world too.. to reach the expanse beyond its own domain. If that happened, it would be rid of such an unwanted presence, an idea that could prove to work completely in its own favour.

Such a trace then was left untouched in its return, to freely depart from the lair of destruction without threat of being destroyed itself. Instead, Celese would have much greater plans for such a trace.. one that was deeply ingrained in the fabric of the world’s veil itself.