Myst was in a predicament.

It was her heart that got her into this mess. Vile how human this is, she thought.

Once she’d felt the heart, that’s when the emotional framework soaked through her soul. She couldn’t shake its clinginess. Her body became a wash of emotions—all good at first, all euphoric.

But now the E-squad called her name, drawing closer to a truth and a power they didn’t deserve.

Myst wasn’t used to feeling as exposed as she was—and she was definitely, definitely exposed now that the altar was uprooted and taken by Ruby’s hench-birds. In the beginning, she had a ball when she found herself floating up in the skies, zooming from one darkness to another. She experimented with melding into the slightly shadowed edges of the light-bright world. There was the sun, a wonderful light cast upon nature.

She never imagined something so powerful—and she never imagined not getting eviscerated by such a luminous thing either. But she didn’t. She wasn’t like what the humans referred to as a vampire. A girl of shadow was still allowed to live in the world, which was surprisingly comfortable. Comfortable and shocking.

Fun, so much fun, at least in the first days of freedom, crawling through new facets of Cearth.

Every inch of her vision was brain fuel to stimulate her for decades should she have to return to a type of altar. Never once did she think she’d not be subsumed back into the shadowdeep. The girl was surprised that being outside of her element didn’t outright obliterate her, but she had no illusions about her surface life being a forever type of thing.

Seconds, minutes, days, weeks. Maybe months. Perhaps years.

Forever? No way.

But the time soon came when she realized that forever wasn’t a sustainable situation—not with the Cearth humans being able to access her through a simple prayer. Genie was the concept she’d read in their minds. And that somewhat approximated her role but it didn’t give her a positive sense of her worth. She didn’t want to be an on-call entity even if her job was on-call by nature. Myst yearned for a boundary to give herself some breathing room. The altar was that boundary though she’d never thought of it as such—she never needed to, being previously untouchable as she was.

But she was so touchable now. Intangible—but reachable. People knew her name. They held an idea of her in their heads and affixed their hopes to it.

They weren’t asking Cearth for its bounty. They were asking Myst.

She became a false prophet in a way—not because her ego was overinflated by her mystic prowess, but because the people of Cearth were stupid, stupid, stupid.

They called her, though, every other second, every minute, every hour. She knew relative peace—but not perfect peace. Not the immaculate unreachable state of living in the shadowdeep abyss.

She was chosen for this. A representative, a first line of Cearthen defense. She was its lawyer, its broker.

Its face and body and soul.

So of course she felt a little exposed. A little vulnerable…no, that wasn’t the full truth.

A lot vulnerable. More vulnerable than Swishy or Trey or anyone else knew, could know, or cared to discover.

Why? Why did it matter to her if anyone cared? What was with her? What was going on?

See? Exposed.

She hated these nagging notions. The nuance of emotion was an utterly shocking nonsense for a girl who didn’t live among others, who didn’t live in a society, and who knew no equal. Myst did, however, wind up in an increasingly creative world, where the magic—while not more powerful than hers—assumed forms that she hadn’t once considered. Perhaps being in solitude and safety was a bane to her creativity, though she liked to think her shadow-wielding ingenuity was boundless in its own right. And by her own right, she meant every right.

I’m a goddess. I think I am…right?

That’s what people called her anyway. And without the altar, she’d heard every instance of it. Goddess this. Goddess that. Goddess please, please, please.

She felt their voices in tugs.

Feeling, ugh.

How unsettling. How disgusting.

But the humans aside, there was another problem. The spirits. The strong ones. She couldn’t believe that Swishy had gone and absorbed the E-squad into his chest. She sensed them getting chased around in the heart as well. It was a funny vision for her to behold as the boys were plagued on the outside by MIDNIGHT curses and shadowclaws and wrathravens and other feats of aggressive darkness. Now that the Emi-Emilio-Eren-Emily was being chased, they were desperate.

They were saying her name now, though. Myst, Myst, Myst, Myst. They were tasting her vitality. Something in the air told them that they were in the midst—no pun intended—of an incredible power. Hungry as the E-squad was, they wondered if they could feed off her. First, they started with her name. They experimented with how they said it. The cadences switched from quizzical to prayerful to contemptuous to meditative. Some calls sounded like Myst owed them money. Others sounded like they had a crush on her. They spoke of her as a best friend. They were trying out the different forms of Myst, a fashion show upon their tongues until they could figure out her form and shape and who she truly was as an entity.

Myst, Myst, Myst, Myst, who are you, what are you, and when will you reveal yourself?

Technically not an altar wish, so she didn’t answer the call—but it was close, too close, and she knew that from the metaphysical twinges that she felt upon her essence. She had no nerves, yet the sensation of feeling was an unwelcome breach of the boundaries she was used to.

Myst wasn’t supposed to feel anything as she had no intention of ever participating in the world.

But they called her name. And things in the world had names. Things that were reachable had names.

Ah, how bothersome…

The E-squad wanted to know her. Everybody did.

She waited for the other shoe to drop, the Cearth to force her before their faces as they begged her to assuage their wants. Love us. Do for us. Myst felt a lot like Swishy at this moment. When she granted wishes within the territory of a physical altar, she never had any emotion attached to her actions. But now she was exposed. She could feel. Or rather, feeling could be inflicted upon her. One of these days, a wish would cost her. In fact, it already had. Everything changed once the altar’s heart was sent to the surface realm within Swishy’s body.

More changes swept her into its rhythm when she placed a heart inside her chest. The feelings were good, overwhelming, and euphoric. And then she gradually realized that these were feelings, too, and that this spectrum of emotion could easily shift toward the exact opposite end.

The shift happened to Swishy, didn’t it? It’d happen to her, too.

Swishy’s cursed heart was closing in on the E-squad. The curses were reaching and grasping, edging upon the cusp of extinguishing their personalities.

Get them! Myst rooted for them. Do me this small kindness, dear curses. Take them, please.

[BRAINSTORM]—the E-squad’s thinking was bolstered as they sifted through their notes of the darkness. Everything they knew was frantically inspected in their search for a helpful revelation about how to escape Swishy. They were focused, too, singularly aiming to decipher the correct way to pronounce—to enunciate—Myst’s hallowed name.

Myst, Myst, Myst, Myst…she hated their ‘tongues’. She hated the creeping sensation of these strange and powerful beings prowling around her essence.

Fear? She didn’t want to admit to that. But did the tightness around her heart count as fear?

It was something to investigate.

(…)

Myst’s exposure to the surface world increased by small increments ever since The Curse a hundred years ago.

One day, everything was chill. But suddenly, there were problems—a frequent Swishy complaint that now applied to her, an irritating revelation.

Her life became one continuous trip to the zoo. She was bound to Straw City, the wildest enclosure on the planet. During the initial riots, she watched the humans throw themselves into begging and self-harm in exchange for their nonsensical wishes. They most often wanted power and sustenance, two honorable things. But something about the infinite possibilities of the altar watered the dangerous seeds of curiosity that were already inherent to the human brain.

There was always a moment when a person went beyond the boundaries they’d worked out with themselves before their altar wish. Everyone rehearsed their lines, their body language, their general tact when confronted with the all-powerful, and, if they played their cards right, the all-giving.

But the boundaries were flexible. They didn’t know that until they’d gotten to the altar, though. Confronted with the awesome power of the shadows, the humans no doubt wanted to shift their boundaries ever so slightly. A nudge. A couple of metaphysical millimeters more toward a greater reward.

Push and push and push.

Power and possibility were a combination that the human psyche failed to resist. People were reliably hacked in this way, no magic involved, no mind control, no hex of the heart.

People crafted their self-poisons through their minds.

It was never enough to be alive. Myst, vaguely, understood this. She wasn’t someone who experienced weakness. She was strong. Unbreakable. You couldn’t do anything to her, who was bound to the endless wellspring of the Cearth’s power—at least within the hundreds of acres that comprised the straw plains.

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The girl had known since the beginning that the shadows were not her own. They belonged to Cearth. She essentially did errands for the Cearth and the people revealed themselves through the deepest desires of their hearts. Nobody approached the altar for a light ask. Everything was heavy. Cearth was petitioned to lift the most profound of burdens from the humans.

But before the first people came to her, she was alone in the dark. The shadowdeep as she’d known it, was a wonderful place.

There were neighbors, of course, but they were so self-absorbed in their own perceived deficiencies. She wouldn’t have a label for them until she read Swishy’s mind years later when he’d referred to them as “peeves”. Curses…she wasn’t the largest fan of that term. It was one that she used but she knew it reflected on her as well, and Myst, who took to her VANITY intent didn’t exactly want something like a curse on her reputation.

The Cursed Earth—Cearth—was the known name. And she represented all these curses and made them do her bidding. But she was sensitive to the connotation when she knew, that her, in her soul-bound duty as the altar emissary, couldn’t do anything to besmirch the honor of her station.

People asked for things, paid up, and received exactly what they paid for. It wasn’t her fault that many lacked the foresight and arcane knowledge to know how the shadows calculated their rewards. People often said one thing but wished with their hearts for another, and the sensitive shadows took this into account.

Myst didn’t do the math all by herself. The dark dweller hive was all-knowing in its own way. All-knowing to the human perspective at least—because they were lesser creatures, embarrassingly easy to read.

She was just a girl with powers. Truthfully, she didn’t know how long she’d had them. She didn’t count time upon her birth in the abyss. Her experience was insular, a shadowdeep one.

One day she was a consciousness. Her fellow dark dwellers were full of woes that she ignored for her comfortable tenure as a bodiless, flexible entity. Everyone complained of the hollowness, the emptiness, the darkness. Everything was black. Everything they’d claimed, was a nothing.

Myst didn’t think this way. Her imagination was grand.

She could see the fields, the birds in the sky, and the snakes in the hollows. Sometimes there was snowy weather. And it was almost always cold, the frosty breath puffing from the animals’ mouths. Yet in spite of the persistent chill, the skies were mostly balmy and ever-changing, a strobe of blue and red and orange and pink without ever coming with a consequence.

Occasionally, a hot day happened, drying out the leaves. But nothing burned, and anything that did catch a spark was soon flaked to ash through by intelligent dark-dwellers.

Cearth was quite active in protecting itself and preventing natural disasters.

This was the story she thought she told in her mind—but who knew how much overlap her imagination had with the reality of the planet. Perhaps she could always travel outside or see outside, yet she was bound. She didn’t know what she was. She didn’t even know that she inhabited a form. Myst simply was.

But it was the rise of the altars that made her existence all the more apparent. That’s when the darkness she’d grown used to, the one the others so often complained about, began to undergo tangible changes of their own.

The physical manifestation was a mystery to her: a stone scarecrow in a wooden clearing. There were miles of straw plains surrounding them, excessively high grass, an organic labyrinth. She wasn’t for or against it. It was a curiosity, though, and in her VANITY, she remembered the vague thought that the aged stone was quite ugly. Polish that, let it shine in the light. Shadow is slick and clean. Why must we be stone? Actually, why be anything physical at all?

But then she shrugged. She’d developed a motto whenever any wrinkle or anomalous event introduced itself to the shadowdeep. The world is the world.

Cearth, it seemed, was quite flat. Myst thought there would be a lot more to the realm but she also sensed that tons of energy had reversed into the shadowdeep. The buzz of magic swelled in the dark as plant souls, water shadows, and small animals were absorbed from the surface.

A surge of feeling overcame Myst at that moment. Like the realm had gotten…full. But everything leveled out after the initial siphoning of what she didn’t yet know was everything. So much was returned to the shadowdeep—a tremendous production must’ve occurred. She worked out the image in her mind and envisioned her rich, vibrant world shrunken, flattened, and smoothed over with the heaviest palette of shadow.

All that only to push a cross-shaped stone through the surface. What’s with that?

While she was overall dismissive of The Curse producing this altar and assigning her to its operation, she became closer to the actual world on that day. Now, Myst had a role. She saw with clarity what the outside world was. The woods, the plains, the skies, and its various animals—none of these were imaginary constructions. They were real. In another realm, of course. But real. The concept of their tangibility and autonomy demanded another kind of focus.

There was a lot of knowledge that sort of appeared.

Time. She’d realized that nobody had visited the stone altar for years. Years? When did she start to conceive of time in such a way? When did she even begin to perceive time in the first place?

Without knowing it, Myst became more attuned to a physical, Cearthen life. She made no effort to establish herself on the surface but her knowledge passively broadened.

The desires of unseen others flowed toward the scarecrow altar, asylum seekers mostly.

In the first days, the altar was easy to find. The world was leveled. From miles away, one could see the mysterious structure, though people were not eager to adventure and investigate when they were panicked from the original Curse that buried their infrastructure.

But as the desperation of the surface creatures flowed in waves toward the altar, some became curious and sensitive to the prominent spirits.

The Cearth wanted to be found. It liked the conventional science of naturally occurring water and seeds producing vegetation, but proved that it could exist as a blank slate, too.

Barrenness wasn’t a joke—nor was it the desired vision for the planet—it was a warning to everyone.

Unfortunately, the animals were first to receive the message.

When a deer grazed against the altar, or a salamander rested in the shade of its shadow, Myst would feel grabbed.

She was drawn up from the depths and surged into the form, constructing a loose aura around the scarecrow altar, then flowing outward to produce a smokiness, a voluminous presence that’d scare and impress the baser mortal mind.

Or in this case, a scared-stiff deer, or a slow-to-attention salamander.

An unoriginal thought, something that was fed to her by divine osmosis, blared in the forefront of her mind. A script. Her first message toward the

“Come…let us talk. We are giving—so long as you are giving as well.”

The deer couldn’t so much as blink.

The salamander did nothing but blink.

Her natural programming told her how to tap into their fears, changing from a smoky shape into a dense, active flame. Black fire paid dividends in making the mortal soul quake.

The animals bolted off.

Finally!

Myst was a little exasperated by the animals—but impressed with her chosen form. She kept the flame of herself crackling. She shot out embers. She emitted charcoal clouds, caging the area in dense but incorporeal tufts. FEAR was an intent that she never planned on exuding, but it now became integral to her existence. She jazzed it up with dramatic flourishes. The shadow girl really put on a show.

Flame-flame, crackle-crackle.

Bigger smoke.

An atmospheric surge in the temperature.

A rumbling…herds of deer stampeding far, far away.

Myst laughed, the VANITY and MISCHIEF weaving through her soul.

What more could she say?

Myst liked to look cool.

(…)

A long time passed wherein Myst had forgotten the presence of the scarecrow-shaped portal into the outer world.

Nobody had visited the altar for countless seasons.

Though the world had scrambled toward devising ways to use their scientific knowledge to claw back to their old life, the technologically and resource-rich one, it took certain regions too many years to find magical solutions. Before The Curse, there were no altars or no known magic upon the Cearth. In fact, the concept of magic remained an unserious and theatrical concept. Those who discovered altars knew that contracts existed. Costs were paid and resources were doled out. But one only knew that upon finding an altar, which mostly happened by luck. Or if people already lived in a place where The Curse had taken back the most.

It was something that happened all over the planet but hadn’t yet happened to Myst.

Myst existed as a shadow, though she would’ve paused the idea of ‘existing’ in the first place. Her life wasn’t one of interaction or community. She was a microbe at best, and even then that was a generous description of how she considered herself as a being. She was the environment itself. She was the world. And she happened to possess more positivity than the average dark dweller. Myst prioritized fun if nothing else, and she didn’t have to ‘exist’ for her to fulfill that purpose.

To her knowledge, she wasn’t consuming a type of fuel to make that disposition shine through. She was who she was, an imaginative and contented nothing.

The world, though, was anything but content. Myst had no way of knowing that, though.

Not until she met her first legitimate visitor.

A little shadowclaw landed upon the altar stone and to Myst’s displeasure she ‘felt’ it. What she felt wasn’t the physical friction between solids, but a desire in the bird’s body that generated a mysterious magic current.

The bird thrummed with a needy aura. It shifted uncomfortably upon its newfound perch and pecked around the stone. It searched the scarecrow statue for a crack or any type of ingress. The shadowclaw considered the structure but had no clue how to regard it. Its surface had no give. There was no food. There were no stray harvestable areas through which it could gather materials for a nest.

As the bird panicked from the unpleasant fortitude of the structure, Myst discovered that she, for lack of a better term, knew how to ‘read’. SORROW and PANIC and DISPLACEMENT spread in ruffled currents among the bird’s pleated feathers.

“What’s wrong little bird?” Myst called through the shadows, using a tuft of dark flame to warm the bird’s plumage.

My nest! It’s gone!

Myst didn’t know what a nest was but she focused on those words, on the bird’s needs, and traced the image of a nest quite easily within her consciousness. How did your nest come to be gone?

I don’t know, but everything’s gone. Can’t you see? There’s no home, no food, no anything! What are we going to do?

“I don’t have that answer for you, but perhaps panic less?”

This is a situation to panic about!

“It is?” Myst was having a baffling time. She spoke to the bird as if this were the most natural activity in the world but she hadn’t yet had a conversation with another, not until now.

I could maybe live here. Can I?

“I don’t see why not.”

This stone is just so…so hard. There’s nowhere to comfortably roost. I’m having a hard time without, you know, trees.

“Trees, you say?” The image of trees popped into Myst’s mind. She had an easier time envisioning this. Her mental forests were full of these lovely wooden constructs. Branches, knots, leaves, colors. Myst was confident that she was a certified expert on at least a thousand different species of tree. There were a million ways a forest could be. So many homes for a bird to choose from—at least in her mind. But when she followed the shadowclaw’s gaze out at the flat and empty expanse of Cearth, low-cut grass, visible soil, dull colors devoid of sheen and moisture, a mournful twinge pulled at her essence. Again with the feelings…how annoying.

“So, little creature. You gather the things of these trees and create your home?”

I did—when things EXISTED.

“How lovely…”

I don’t want to hear about love. I need a home first. Then I need food. I need a drink. I need at least a dozen other things before I can even consider that calorically challenged little thing called love.

The more the bird talked, the more its feathers ruffled with dissatisfaction, and the clearer the image of its needs gathered in Myst’s mind. A nest, a nest—she could see it in countless ways. But her concentration honed toward the one way that the bird wanted it. He wanted its one thing. In one way.

A sapling. Autumn leaves. Brittle and freely picked branches.

Shadows welled from beneath her and surged upward through the altar. She controlled its flow, stopping it in sections, and redirecting it toward other directions. Myst was crafting with the darkness until the sapling of her mind became a sapling that suddenly sprouted in the physical realm, a few feet from the altar.

At its base, a few stalks of wheat—starter sustenance for the disgruntled little bird.

Thanklessly, the bird began to build a nest. He was done with Myst. Not that he had an attitude or anything—he was just a bird, doing what its body drove it to do.

Cearth provided. For a bird, the cost was nothing, the planet itself was happy to provide.

Myst, having done her job, watched the bird for a few brief seconds before receding into the abyss. She returned home, feeling normal, feeling like a dutiful and responsible nothing.

But this time when she activated the multitudes of forests in her imagination, her powerful creativity now mixed with an unexpected and in some regard unwelcome intrusion.

Memory. The way the world was, the sights and interactions of her day, mixed with the way she wanted her dreams to go.

How annoying…She laughed about it, though. At least until remembering that the bird was kind of an asshole. These words, these concepts, came naturally to her as well.

Asshole…yeah, that feels just about right. That feels like exactly what your wingbeats say about you.

Myst didn’t know she was speaking out loud—didn’t care either. But when the bird heard her from its roost it groaned, it cawed, and then it closed its eyes and shot glue toward the altar.

“Unsightly,” Myst said.

“Aaah…” the bird said, drifting off to sleep.