Bella sprinted along the beach between two rocks. Back and forth, her lungs burned, faster, faster, as Skidmark called out beeps. Sand churned and flung high with every step. Fish swam in the air and scattered as she sprinted through their schools. Her heart felt like it would burst in her chest, and at last, she crashed down into the sand.
“Better than yesterday,” Skidmark said. “Though I still think training is a waste of time and you should focus on grinding levels.”
Too out of breath to respond, Bella merely flipped off Skidmark. The other woman tittered, but then her eyes widened. She grabbed at her chest.
“Does your heart feel weird?”
Bella raised an eye as she struggled for breath.
“I just sprinted enough to shame an Olympic athlete…” she frowned as she trailed off. “What’s happening?”
She placed a hand over her heart. Her skin rumbled with the panicked beating. It ached, just below her shaking ribs, just out of reach. Thoughts drowned in the racing blood, growing ever fainter, and darkness ate at her eyes. If she didn’t have inhuman durability, beating like this would make her heart explode. Her runesword whined from where it lay stabbed into the ground. It could help her, Bella knew it could, and she crawled across the sand toward it, but her muscles refused to move.
“What’s going on?” Skidmark said. “What’s —”
One of Anton’s silver eyes darted out from within his repurposed surf shop down the end of the beach. It wavered and dipped like a tired bird as it flew toward them.
“It’s Zoe,” he said, and his voice sounded strained through the eye. “Her heart technique is squeezing at us.”
“Is she trying to kill us?”
“Something must have happened. We need to help her.”
The unspoken “or else” got Skidmark and Bella to their feet, but after a couple of steps, they fell again.
“We can’t move,” Skidmark gasped. “Anton… is… is it ready?”
“I didn’t want to test it on us.”
“What are you talking about?” Bella asked.
“Do it!” Skidmark shouted.
Anton’s silver eye hung there for a moment before it shattered. A purple dome expanded from the shack. The shockwave raced across the dunes without disturbing a single grain of sand. Where it passed over, it left silence, and when it struck Bella, a sound like breaking glass filled her ears. Her heart eased in her chest. The roaring in her ears faded away as Zoe’s technique dissipated.
The purple bubble expanded out and left silence in its wake.
[Toll of the Mirrorbell]
[All Skein is neutralized for 1 minute]
Bella looked over at Skidmark.
“Something’s wrong with Zoe,” she said, her voice strange and fragile in the silence. “We have to check on her.”
Anton sprinted over to them from his workshop. He nodded at Bella and they met up as they ran across the dunes. With a single goal, they raced toward the island’s edge where Zoe spent her days meditating. The purple dome shredded at the edges as it raced beyond the island's edge and into the sky. Holes tore and expanded as it spread itself too thin. The island listed as the sound wave robbed the floating rocks of buoyancy. Bella, Skidmark, and Anton ran uphill as sand poured toward them. They had to get to Zoe and see that she was alright.
But Bella knew she wasn’t. Things had been good for too long, too peaceful, and now fate had come to balance the scales.
###
[You have received a Quest]
[Rebirth]
[Enter the Witch’s maw and disintegrate in the womb of dreams]
[Reward: let yourself be born again to a mother who wants you. Born to a universe that is yours. Born to an unfettered destiny]
Zoe stood in bloody sand of her own making. Life flowed down into the beach. No ocean lapped, but she heard the waves like a rolling echo of her empty mind. Rebirth. Power. Cut away time. She could become a member of the Trinity, and all she had to do was…
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What?
Give up herself? Give up her flesh, her mind, her soul, her friends? But if she did so to save them, to save all of them, wasn’t that price worth it?
A hand as pale as bone extended down toward her. Fingers lengthened as she stared, as though they crossed a distance vast beyond imagination. Beyond the fingers, an arm, beyond the arm, a woman, the woman, and beyond her lay darkness from which unseen eyes saw everything.
There was no trusting something so powerful. How could there be? But this wasn’t about trust, it was about want.
[What is want? Doesn’t the diamond want to be cut and polished? Doesn’t the pearl want to be torn from its home and worn?]
Zoe thought back to all her trials and tribulations. All the pain. Wading through Hell. Did she deserve to be chosen for that, to be rewarded simply for surviving?
[It is not up to you how you are rewarded. Simply accept]
It felt so wrong…
But this was what she wanted.
Zoe’s heart pounded as she looked up at the Witch. Her mind paled as her blood flowed, but if power lay within reach… why change who she was?
[Do you accept?]
Zoe knelt.
[Yes]
[Yes…]
She blinked as the Witch’s offer knelt as the Witch unfolded. The gigantic woman knelt in time with her and spread her arms wide. Her flesh parted from chin to navel and spread wide peeled out in fractals as the world twisted at the edges to contain something so profound like a hot coal in a paper bag. Within that slitted flesh, ichor flowed, darkness squirmed, and from this event horizon, a new Witch stepped forth. A child, translucent, her hat providing cover against the constant bloody rain that fell from the witch above.
The childlike Witch walked toward Zoe with steps timid and tumultuous, excited, she crossed the distance in no time, but long enough for Zoe to see her own face upon those ghostly bones. Here on the shore of the spectral ocean, she confronted a vision of herself, upon the sand, as blood flowed like a tide and howled like a wave of beasts.
Zoe wept as her emotions diverged from humanity. A small hand reached out, and Zoe reached out to take those slender porcelain fingers.
Silence whacked the back of her head like a hammer.
The sound of shattering glass filled her ears. Her eyes widened in shock as a purple bubble raced over her. [Our Hearts Toll as One] ended immediately. Her Mirrored hands and feet vanished and she stumbled forward, knees pressing into the bloodied dune as she struggled to maintain her balance. The blood flow vanished at the same time as her bloodied foot. A piece of glass as sharp as a frozen star fell to the red mud with a wet and pathetic sound.
[Toll of the Mirrorbell]
[All Skein is neutralized for 1 minute]
All this in a split second..
The purple bubble raced onwards and struck the childlike translucent Witch. This spectre evaporated. Swept away like dust before a broom. The purple silence hit the Witch proper in her split form — half portal, half woman, a goddess presenting herself as flesh — and reality groaned.
The purple anti-skein struck her like a flow of molten glass against a rock. Purple slag blasted away and stretched into beads, twisting, glowing red and white with distorted bubbles of hissing static. A stench bloomed. Death of flowers. Seasons collapsing. Winter cold in the bones. Summer heat sloughing skin. Purple stretched, silence screamed, and the Witch’s head snapped forward to shatter the Mirrorbell’s effects.
Her eyes burned with a deeper darkness.
[You dare?]
The bubble of purple anti-Skein disintegrated. Holes gaped across the vast expanse as the Witch’s supreme will shred the construct. Zoe fell back as the world tipped around her. Sand flowed in thick rivers around her, but hands reached up from the rock beneath, pale as limestone, to hold Zoe in place.
Their grip was like chains, and Zoe fought, and growled, with the reflex of the beast, but there was nothing she could do. She looked up, and the split Witch stood before her. A portal vast as the vertical horizon of space and nothing bled inside as it beckoned.
[The dark baptism of rebirth… drown yourself in the river beyond time… step away from these tilted shores and know yourself no longer… become… more]
The bones slithered away from her wrists, ankles, and throat. Flesh flowed from her stumps and with dreamlike wonder, Zoe stood on her feet.
[A gift in good faith]
Her strength kept her upright despite the listing island. She looked up at the portal before her. The witch beckoned her inwards. This was what she wanted… right?
It felt wrong to have such power offered to her, but wasn’t this the Witch’s purpose? The Smith created. The Gambler — may he rest in damnation — rewarded and punished. The Witch cheats. She is the crossroads, the intersection of infinities, and the shortcut up the Mountain.
Zoe took a deep breath and stepped toward the slithering black portal.
If this was to be her choice, then she would choose power.
She stepped again onto a step of flesh. Higher. The sweet scent buckled the air and twisted her nostrils. Fingers on her flesh, beckoning, hooking through her skin, dragging.
“Zoe!”
Yes, she thought to herself, scream my name with adoration for I have become your new goddess.
“Zoe, stop!”
Beg me to stop, but it shall not be enough, never be enough.
“Please!”
Footsteps pattered the sand. Zoe glanced to the side. Bella raced toward her, Anton behind, and Skidmark trailing. Her friends reached for her as Zoe stepped ever higher, ever closer, to the portal of the Witch.
They reached her and stared. Their eyes wide and faces pale. Steam rose from their skin as the unmasked horror’s presence roiled against them. Bella clapped hands to her eyes and looked away. Skidmark fell screaming. Anton collapsed to his knees. His eyes clenched shut as blood flowed down his cheeks, but a dozen silver orbs popped into existence as they swept around Zoe and the Witch, tiny orbits, refusing to look away.
“What are you doing, Zoe?” Bella groaned through the pain.
“I am becoming more,” Zoe said and her voice came from far away as though an echo down the hallway of time. “I will save Earth.”
“What is the price?”
Zoe smiled, her scarred lips twisting, the heat in her blood, the growls, cooling.
“Everything for everything,” she whispered as she stepped inside the Witch’s portal. “It seems a fair trade.”
[Indeed, it does, but nothing is fair]
The voice scraped reality like a blade upon a stone, and it was not the Witch.