A trail of dark blood smeared out with every dragging pull of the black mass atop it.

Shhhhhrrkkk… he scraped against the dark flagstones.

They always wonder—what does the mirror represent?

He scraped further. The trail of blood became wider as he went.

I tried with you, Jirtu. I really tried.

He dropped the limp arm which was his pulley, took out a rag to wipe his face before the door...

He froze before the rag touched skin.

Oh. That's right.

He smeared the rag weakly against his glistening mirror.

I haven't got a face anymore.

X

Ivalié limped with his white-blue staff as his cane. He'd abandoned his robes some time ago, left them draped up on a stray tree branch. He'd abandoned his topknot in favor of letting his blonde hair fall loosely atop his shoulders.

He winced against the hangover-esque headache which pulsated searingly with every step, with every motion.

Okella… Okella!

The truth gleaned from that faux-child's worming through his skull was everpresent at the surface of his mind. Like a truth serum, it was like he had no choice at all now but to think of it.

The final piece of Dyosius Stabilis… were Jirtu here, he'd have ripped my throat out just as soon as I'd spat out the answer. Rykaedi tried Kogar, tried Castelbre…

It was as though his mind had gotten caught on the name.

Castelbre. Yes, that would work, I remember. But more importantly than that…

He looked up to the blazing jungle sun.

I remembered you, Liara…

It was an early amber sunrise in autumn, in the town of Duskyrr. A teenaged Ivalié lay in the grass with his short blonde hair, his giant, rounded spectacles pointed up at that soft blue sky.

Ivalié shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he had risen the letter in his hand up into view.

“You going to accept?” asked a girl’s voice.

“I… was thinking about it.” And there came a soft smile upon his lips. How egotistical of him to be the one to choose whether or not to accept a prestigious university's invitation. If they knew, they'd surely be insulted. A mere boy like him? The gall.

“I think you should. You're really smart.”

I know, he thought. But Liara’s heart would think he was joking anyway—he glanced up at that coppery-haired girl against the tree past his head, hugging it behind herself and gazing up at those same puffy clouds, like blobs of white paint gently placed in the sky. “Thank you.”

Liara looked down to him, smiled that charming, crooked-teeth smile. Her freckled cheeks puffed up and dimpled. Ivalié felt his heart pang.

Then he sat up, looked over the great forest which Dunskyrr inhabited, one with trees that rivaled the thickness of Cylenia's own. He asked, “What about you?”

“Well, I'm back to those same old nightmares—”

“I meant for next year.”

“Oh!” She tossed her head left and right. “I'm not sure myself. If you went to university, I'd want to follow. I know it's probably not possible—we're on completely different levels…”

He wanted to say ‘that's right,’ chide her for her insufficiencies… but that would hurt his own heart just as much as it would hurt hers.

“If only Calamon had a university…”

Ivalié spun his head to her in surprise, almost tweaked his neck in the process. Then he began to stand. “Calamon? Is that where you're going? Why?”

Liara smiled coyly, hid behind the tree. “I'm not telling!”

“Liara…”

“It's embarassing!”

His face contorted in annoyance. She poked her blushing face out from behind the dark bark, and his irate expression fell. "Liara. Please?"

Her smile became soft, genuine. She was exposing a side of herself she rarely did: the honest side. “...It was a dream I had. One of the nightmares.”

“Dreams are hardly a good reason to—”

“No, it's different.” Her voice took on a pained tone, and she looked away. “They weren't just nightmares… It was like… it was like she was talking to me.”

“Who?”

Liara looked aside like a character in a stage drama. Her eyelids looked heavy, like she might fall asleep right there. “...The Queen of Death.”

Ivalié's eyebrows sprung up in sardonic surprise. Then he began to laugh.

“I'm serious!” Liara cracked a big branch full of gentle leaves free from the tree and swatted him with it.

"Hey!" Ivalié stopped laughing immediately, though her impish tendencies had returned. “Ow!”

“Sorry!” She discarded the weapon. “But I'm serious! I don't remember her name… she visits me every night—in the dreams, at least. But I almost find myself wondering if it means something more. And in the last few dreams, she's been showing me visages of Calamon, and a dark chamber within.”

“Dark chamber…?” Ivalié scratched his peach-fuzzed chin.

Liara stood upright like a bolt, resolute. “So I think my future is in Calamon.”

“All of this predicated off some few nightmares…”

She pouted, looked at the ground abashedly.

Ivalié didn't know what to say for a moment. He wanted to console her, but he hadn't the faintest idea how.

…And then it came to him. He said, “I'll help you find this Queen of Nightmares, then. There are a great many in Calamon from every different religion.”

“You will!?” Her dejection immediately swelled into delight—she couldn't resist clapping her hands together.

“Oh, yes. We will find which nightmare demon plagues you. And then we can visit a relevant chapel, have the thing exorcized. Brutally.” He smiled cockily, though his eyes were bright with good humor. “...And then… Well, let's just say we succeed. That might be grounds enough for your own entry into Aeon University.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

And Liara smiled brighter than she ever had. But little did she know...

“Don't you think you should have told her?”

Ivalié scoffed, pushed up his glasses. “Why? So we could live a false love, destined to die in misery?”

“Why are you so damn dreary? You, Jirtu, and Kogar all.”

“What the fuck do you know? We were friends from the first, we were—” Ivalié spun in a rage but stopped short. That male voice that was behind him—there was Cedric Castelbre, crouched down nearby him. Like a consoling friend. “How did you get here?”

But as he approached, the flat illusion fell apart. What had been his hair was a patch of dirt, his face some sand… A collection of stones had formed his leather gear.

Ivalié leaned his staff up against a tree, pulled his shorts free from his body to reveal the rest of his pale, skinny figure. He buried his face in the shorts and desperately wiped the sweat away.

This is where I fucking die. Delirious, dehydrated, and overheated, all in my underwear. Talking to a pile of rocks and some dirt… No mana to even be able to draw water from the sky. This is abysmal.

…What would Liara do?

He choked.

No. That's just the faux-Okella talking. She's trapped at the surface of my mind not because I asked for her to be there, but because of the rise which Jirtu gave to my memories. My mind is still searching for that early schematic of Dyosius…

“There is Drenn, God of Nightmares.”

Liara shook her head. “No…”

“Orbitta the Dark Mind.”

“Mm-mm.”

Ivalie flipped another page. “Perhaps it was Waking Toad Jiraldi?”

Liara stood up, began to pace with a hand inquisitively held upon her chin. “No, it wasn't any of those… It's a woman…”

“Orbitta is a woman.” Ivalié laid the book flat and watched her pace around the dimly lit library, that quiet, scarcely visited bastion of knowledge in the sleepy woods town of Dunskyrr. The whole thing, as many of the homes and buildings of Dunskyrr were, was carved into a magnificent hundred-foot radius tree. The walls, floors, ceiling, and bookshelves were all carved of the same material, some polished, but most left unchanged from exactly how the tree had grown it decades ago. The lights were all mage bulbs, small bulbs of glass which they'd filled with raw concentrations of ley. That way, they didn't risk a fire.

“It wasn't Orbitta.” Liara finally said after a moment. “I just know it. Orbitta’s color is blue, she wears that blue bulb over her head…”

“Yes, the Dark Princess of a world destroyed by cataclysmic warp." He rolled his eyes. "I'm pretty sure this one is all a fairytale anyway.” Ivalié shut the book and tossed it aside, took another one from the stack and flipped it open. “Consecretta, Divathri, Shögal, Tethering, Te-Naka…”

“Maybe we're looking in the wrong place. Maybe she's not a deity of nightmares.”

Ivalié grumpily shut the book, dropped his head onto his palm. “Then what?”

Liara already had a black tome in her hands. There was a big lock clasping the thing shut, no indication on any part of it as to what it might be. She asked, “You can crack a lock. Can't you?”

"Where did you...?" Ivalié glanced up toward the counter down the short hall. The librarian aide, a young girl from their class with big spectacles much like Ivalié's own, was too busily engrossed in a book to notice anything he might have done.

Liara brought the book over and placed it on the table before him.

He picked it up, inspected it. “You're sure about this? Who says this thing is even in Huntish? If we're going to get caught…”

“It had better be worth it.” Liara tightened her grip on the back of his chair. Ivalié had never seen her so convicted. It almost made him blush. “It will be.”

Ivalié took a long, deep breath as he stared at the thing. He'd never once felt uncomfortable in the presence of knowledge... But something about this book told him he'd be better off leaving it unopened. Something told him that the knowledge which lay within the tome would change his life forever if he were to witness it.

But another part of him told him that he didn't have a choice.

He scrunched his fingers at the lock. It snapped in half with nary a tug on the leylines.

Liara did not express her typical amazement at his magic. She held her breath.

Ivalié's eyes lingered on her for a long moment. Then he turned back to the book. He put his fingers between the pages, began to pull it open—

“That book is off limits.” said a soft, demure voice.

They both looked up. The tension dropped.

There was the librarian girl, short and wide, big spectacles on her big nose over a slathering of acne blemishes. Unattractive, Ivalié figured, by any measure. Destined to a life of no renown. And yet you stop me, he who is capable of all, in time.

Ivalié, despite the arrogance of his thoughts, mustered up only a stammer, “I—It was on the shelf—”

“A-And it was locked.” the girl, as well, stuttered nervously. “Do you just go around opening any lock which you see fit?”

His eyes narrowed, though he couldn't manage to get any of his rebellious words out of his throat. His own anxiety grasped him tight.

“...Let us look.” asked Liara.

Ivalié looked to her in surprise.

“Please.”

The librarian girl stomped forward and snatched the book from Ivalié's hand. Liara thrust herself forward and grappled the book, yanked it close to her chest.

“Haa!” cried out the librarian, stumbling over the table.

Ivalié leapt up, “Liara! Stop, what are you…?”

But his eyes caught upon a strange hooded figure in the doorway. A white robe, blue accents littered about it. Like an illusion in the sunlight through the open portal, like he didn't exist at all. His long blue banners flapped in the outside gust just once... And then he was gone.

Liara fell atop the girl, tore the book away from her.

Then came a loud stomping through the tree. Ivalié lunged his gaze back to attention just as the big and burly librarian himself, a man who you'd think was a blacksmith by his stature, grabbed the collar of Liara’s shirt and yanked her away kicking and howling.

“What in the ten hells is going on over here!?” he shouted.

Ivalié stepped forward and grabbed Liara’s hand in a daze. He tried to pull her away but the man had the back of her collar tight within his palm. With a single swipe of Ivalié's hands, the ley danced—the librarian’s entire arm fell limp.

“Come on!” he shouted, yanked her up to her feet.

And they bounded out the door.

"The book... The book!" Liara shouted as they ran. Her hand began to pull away from his. Her eyes began to well with tears.

"Blast the damn book! What the hell are you thinking!? What's gotten into you!?" he shouted, and shouted, and shouted, and...

I really didn't stop shouting at her that day.

Ivalié laughed at the memory.

Looking back, it feels uncharacteristic of me.

He pulled himself to a halt just as his foot touched the edge of a precipice beyond, unseeable through the mass of trees blocking the way. A couple of stones slipped beneath his boot, rolled down, and down, and down, and…

“Just how deep is this pit…?”

He took his shorts into his hands, threw them around the bark of a big tree swept over the hole. He dug one boot against the bark and pulled the shorts tight, then lifted his other foot so he was stood sideways at the vertical base of the tree.

He took a step. Then another. His foot slipped on the third but found footing just a few inches further up.

After ten steps, the tree began to level out. Ivalié slipped, slammed his chest hard against the bark. But he dropped his shorts, bit his fingernails into the other side, hugged it tight until blood leaked from his fingertips. The pain was no worse than the sunburn forming all over his body. The pain was no worse than the debilitating agony of dehydration.

He inched forward from there like a worm, one desperate movement at a time.

And then he could see over the precipice. It was a crater, maybe thousands of miles wide, surrounded on all sides by dense jungle. In the center of that pit was sand of all things, a huge desert separating him from the rest of the hell he'd awoken trapped in. And though the visage was amazing in and of itself, it was the center of it all which truly bedazzled him.

There was a beautiful city of sorts in the middle. Maybe not a city, maybe a hub—a few big buildings made of glistening polished sandstone, golden accoutrement, giant glass windows, and giant square pools of water carefully placed all around.

But best of all, he could see people. At the very least, there was some life in this place, some silhouettes dancing amongst the sands down there. Unless that, too, was a symptom of delirium.

Ivalié smiled like a madman. He pushed his broken glasses back up onto his face and began to cackle.

“Liara… Liara, I'm coming home!”