A light descends from the sky, making landfall on a gray planet.

Although there is no breeze, windswept dunes of soft sand are piled up until the horizon, dipping and rising to form a barren, homogenous sight. The air is still and dead. And yet, the sand still rises up on its own whim, forming dust devils and spiraling up into the sky, almost reaching the heavens, before falling back down and dissipating without a trace.

The light pauses in its descent, hovering above the surface of the desert. The sand around it calms, sinking back into its pretense of lying still.

A thousand seconds pass, or perhaps eight thousand are lost before the light speaks.

“Well?” It asks in a voice made of a million others, high-pitched and low-pitched tones resonating within each other, clicks and burbles clashing together, shrieks and whispers nullifying each other out.

The discordant harmony rings out across the landscape.

There is no response.

The light begins to burn brighter, increasing in intensity. “She was supposed to die, every bone in her body broken and her lungs full of water. What, none of your fanatics locked up in their tower interested you? You had to stick your sand into the new world that’s being integrated? Now look at what's happened. She’s interfering, going around killing or saving people as she wishes. The girl she killed, well, she had a minor part anyway, but the girl she saved? That one was also supposed to die, but it was supposed to be poetic. The siren was going to be alone till the end, terrified to her core but determined to throw her life away if it gave even one more person the chance to escape, repenting for a crime with no witnesses but her conscience. It would have been a martyr’s end, foolish, but the culmination of her life, the transformation of a sinner into a saint. Your little pet project took that away from her.”

The light continues to flare as the words spill forth. It begins to grow, too, fracturing into an infinite amount of shards of light. Red, blue, purple, green, gold, all colors are represented in its constellation, the voices bouncing off of each shard of light and crescendoing into a cataclysmic orchestra.

“And she killed the [Hive Heliotrope] before it could even reach its full potential! What was supposed to be but a stepping stone to it, a chance to feast on a powerful but untrained psyche, instead became its downfall. Do you even know what I had planned for it? It would have been a scourge upon the arena, crawling into everyone’s minds and whispering treacherous thoughts with the callousness that only a being with a greater purpose can achieve. She robbed everyone of that! Of their opportunity to overcome such an insidious obstacle. And what am I supposed to do with my hero now? Everything was in place. He would have been the lone pillar of light, standing against the darkness. The humans in arena 16748 would have rallied behind him, allying themselves together in preparation for their Introduction. I know you can see what I have put him through to prepare him for this role, but clearly, you don’t care! And if you don’t, then why should I? In fact, I bet you timed everything so that your plaything would end up in that specific arena, which means you’ve been messing with my plans on purpose. You think I’ve actually been trying to have her fulfill her fate? I’ve simply been sending you warnings, but since you won’t heed them, I see no reason why I shouldn’t arrange for her to be dragged to the bottom of an ocean and left there.”

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The sand rises up, forming a rapidly swirling hurricane centered around the light, dampening its glow. The tirade stops, and the light pulls itself back together again, every shard of color overlapping and merging until the only one visible is white.

The sand dies down, and everything is still once more.

Silence reigns as an eternity passes.

“Apologies,” the light begins again, remorse echoing throughout its voices. “You know how I get when new worlds are being Integrated. These things need to be planned so far in advance due to the constraints, a change in any of the starting points can wildly shift the finale. Regardless, I did not mean to threaten. Instead, I propose a trade, as well as a gesture of good faith. You know what I want, and in return, I will unmoor your [Time Witch] from the strands of her old fate that she is caught in.”

Two words ripple out, spreading across the sands. They ring heavy, weighed down by the implications behind them.

A dune to the side of the light collapses inwards, revealing the top half of an hourglass with its lower half still buried. The hourglass rises out of the sand and floats over to the light. Inside it is gray sand, identical to the type that makes up the planet.

“I’m glad we could come to an arrangement. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, and I do hope you will enjoy the show,” The voices of the light sound out once more as it begins to fly upwards, the hourglass trailing behind it. The light continues to ascend until it is no longer visible from the surface of the planet, lost among the stars.

The sands rise up again, continuing their dance, drifting along winds that aren’t there and forming patterns for no one to see.