22 hours before the Second Awakening event

Lyssa had never told anyone her sleeping habits. It wasn’t a topic that readily came up in conversation. Despite her age, her lower eyelids were a shade darker, painted by years of overbearing dreams and nonconsensual nightly exercise. It had gotten better in the recent weeks. Tonight was a kind of relapse.

She kept stirring. Sweat soaked her neck and back. It felt like a nightmare. Except she wasn’t really asleep yet. She rode the fence between unconscious and preconscious. She was awake, but not all there. She was being moved in strange directions. Flashes of vivid imagery jumped. She saw her mind mansion, twisted into a spiked ball of dimensions. Halls jutted in all directions, branching and shrinking inward into sizes that looked inaccessible, but expanded once she moved closer. Grey concrete spilled into the superstructure here and there. The doors to realms melded into the walls with their hinges fused. Doors that no longer led anywhere. The chandelier in the antechamber, shattered, but suspended still, like a slow motion capture of glass breaking. The nitid shards had an exquisite beauty. In its destruction, for the moment, its value was exceeded.

The eye was arrested by its ephemeral radiance, the ears drawn to the sound of its breaking, the heart tugged with the emotion of knowing that the pieces could only remain in that state for an instant.

But Lyssa had not let go. She had held onto this incomplete fusion for a record-breaking time, and whether she knew it or not she had resolved to keep it going forever. This stubbornness would become her greatest strength and weakness. So the shards fell, bright and broken, but so slow it just might have fallen forever.

A torchlight on a candle’s wick.

But she saw a view pour through those shards of glass. A fractured panorama of swirling desert. Blue and yellow and a dazzling green. She had seen this green before. It had never been this pronounced. Now it was overwhelming, enclosing around the borders of the mansion. Snared deep in sleep paralysis, she was powerless to stop it.

She could only watch the scene unfold.

The ball was practically within arm’s reach. The monster inside extended its multitude of mechanical arms and began to knit like a master seamstress. Except not with needle and thread, but the fabric of the desert itself. The sands closed around Oscar’s island of stability, captured by an oil-slick bubble.

“You’ve killed us!” Grogar screeched.

“Hold on!” Oscar said, ignoring the creature. He gathered the psychic landscape around them. The sands were becoming more pliable to his power. Like a metaphor that’s been spoken often and now rolled off the tongue easier.

The monster’s bubble net was enclosing around them like a haul of fish. But the borders were not yet complete. There was a gap ahead, and it was closing fast, pinched by the monster’s influence. Where the bubble touched, the sands came to a standstill. The monster was cutting them off from the desert’s rules.

Oscar gritted his teeth. He was too old for these sorts of moments. But he pressed on. Their island approached the gap, leaving a violent wake of fine grains. The bubble slammed towards them. Hot static brushed past them, then snapped shut like jaws inches behind his back.

“We got out!” Oscar exclaimed.

“We didn’t do lickety squat,” Hagathar said.

The bubble popped. The creature withdrew its influence. Oscar’s eyes widened as it began to crawl out of its sphere, one arm and leg at a time, until the entirety of its multi-pedal form was on the sand. The glass sphere shrunk in a betrayal of perspective. Beginning at the monster’s back, in a trick of the light it was withdrawn into a neat globe in one of the monster’s hands. It disappeared into the innards of its cloak. The monster pulled a weapon out of its garb in the same beat. A long, curved blade on a pole of brass was unfolded from its shadow. It began to chase on foot. Wherever it stepped, the sands lost color and motion.

“Help me,” Oscar said. “You’re native to these places. Is there any way we can deter this entity?”

“It’s unstoppable,” Hagathar said. “But we can try slowing it.”

“How?”

“You possess powers not even the wyrm sharks have. Use it to drive the sands around its feet.”

Their island dimmed from the monster’s advancing shadow. Oscar saw the scythe swing before he heard it. The blade rent the air above their heads as they ducked.

“I’ll try anything,” Oscar said. He allowed the surrounding chaos to spill behind them. The desert’s unpredictable rules made dunes of varying sizes behind them like low walls. The monster bulldozed through, but its touch forced the land to obey its colder logic. It was like wading through shallow water that froze every time a stride was made.

But the frozen formations broke from the force of the monster’s stampede. It was slowed, but only just. The island they were riding on was not making distance.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Creature, you’re slowing!” Hagathar said.

Oscar felt it too. His mental acuity was declining. His own power wasn’t the issue; his impromptu amplifier was the one giving out. Young, non-psychics who have never practiced the art of the mind had been doing their best for the past two hours. They were tiring.

“No,” he breathed. He wanted to tell them, Keep it up! But that would require him to lose concentration on the situation. The scythe swung again, cutting away a section of their island. Grogar had to jump to evade it. The monster must have decided capturing them was a waste of time. The scythe was raised again. A pit suddenly swallowed the monster as the blade swung. It missed Oscar by an uncomfortably short distance. The weapon was colder than ice, designed to silence thought.

“The girl’s brain is a goddamned zoo,” he muttered.

He appreciated the stroke of luck. But in a place so governed by randomness, he could rely on that happening again. He continued to move, leaving behind the monster thrashing in the sand. He set himself down on a knee, taking the moment to rest.

“You look drained,” Hagathar said. “Or constipated.”

“The first one,” Oscar said. “I do not know how long I can keep this up.” He didn’t bother explaining how he was essentially sharing the mental power of several people.

“Here.” Hagathar offered him a horn. It was almost empty save for a droplet of fluid at the very bottom.

“What is that?” Oscar asked.

“It will help.”

Oscar hesitated. He peered at the green drink with apprehension. It smelled fermented, whatever that meant in this realm. As he looked at it, an explosion of sand shot into the sky behind them. The monster was resuming its chase. It leaned lower to the ground, and had employed more of its arms to wield two more curved weapons, manically stomping on the desert towards them. But its mask remained unnervingly blank.

“No one’s too old to try new things, I suppose,” Oscar said. He tilted the horn. The droplet fell on his tongue. It was warm, and as dense as liquid gold, but spread as readily as smoke. And it tasted like a fever dream, or a forgotten nightmare, or the distilled essence of delirium.

He was snickering. His voice went high, then low, then he began to laugh. Hagathar backed away as far as he could in their island. Grogar almost fell off entirely, whimpering.

“Creature?” Hagathar said.

Their island shot ahead. Their determined hunter began to shrink towards the horizon.

“I’ve never seen this reaction before,” Hagathar said.

Grogar pointed ahead. “Look! Look!” He squealed.

A mountain rose as a wave of desert fell. It was clear that no tectonic activity made such a bastion, for it was inverted. It began from a sharp point, expanding outward into a wide disk like a spinning top. This one, however, was stationary. It was the surrounding land that spun. Forward, backward, straight into the air; the desert spun in all directions.

“The star of chaos,” Hagathar breathed.

“We’re here right? We’ve made it I knew we would I told you,” Oscar said between uncontrollable fits of laughter. “My god what was that stuff?”

“Rain?” Grogar said.

“Do you have anymore?”

“I think you should watch the path,” Hagathar said.

Their island slid into the maelstrom. Tentacles of sand grasped at nothing before dissipating in a clash of particulates. The chaos bred images of something that seemed alive, but only in the moment. Dust devils split into smaller dust devils countless times. They were being tossed and turned.

The churning colors formed other images. Pictures and even scenes of a small apartment. Of a rapidly approaching car. Of a day in the park. Of a sprig of licorice. Oscar couldn’t make sense of it, but looking upon them gave him a tinge of sadness. He came down from whatever he had just imbibed.

“That’s the entrance, right?” He asked, pointing to the opening at the very bottom of the inverted mountain.

“Probably?” Hagathar said. “We’ve never been here before.”

“Look!” Grogar squealed.

The monster had reentered its glass ball, and was flying over the swirling chaos towards them.

Oscar dove them into the heart of it. The inverted peak lied in wait, rotating faster and faster the closer they came. In reality it was they who were spinning, and it was they who had to make the approach. Their island skipped along tsunami’s of sand, collapsing into tunnels that threw them into the air, churning their path in endless deformity.

None of that mattered. Oscar drove their island with all his force straight into the peak. The pocket of stability disintegrated, dissolving back into the maelstrom. The world spun once. They fell up, landing on the mountaintop in a bed of snow. An upside-down ball raced towards them. The air whistled as the monster’s scythes swung. Oscar covered his face with his hands.

When he uncovered them, he realized he was still alive. They all were. The monster had stayed its hand, its scythe paused mid-swing within reaping distance of a human. It was no human Oscar had ever seen.

She was wearing the vibrant suit of a circus director, covered in all colors of the rainbow, green most of all. Her hair was black at the roots, but became verdant by the end. She wore the face of the girl, Lyssa. Except she looked mad.

“Now sister,” she said. “This is my territory.”

The monster’s joints clicked. It withdrew its weapon and stepped back into its realm. The ball climbed back out of the maelstrom.

Absinthe turned to greet them. Hagathar and Grogar dropped onto their knees and began to perform a complicated obeisance.

“You ever seen butterflies?” She asked.

“Butterflies?” Oscar said, still out of breath.

“They come outta a cocoon all dolled up, but they’re already dead. They just got one last thing to do ‘fore they drop.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t-”

“What’s a normal doing in my chaos? You belong in a head, not a hatter.”

“Listen.” He couldn’t let himself be dragged away on her pace. His connection was weakening by the minute. “I want to make a deal with you.”

“What makes you think I got needs?”

“You all have needs,” he said. “You voices all want to be the lead. It’s in your nature.”

Absinthe seemed to think, or whatever passed for thinking for something like her. Oscar had made a guess. He couldn’t read her expression. Looking into her eyes was like staring into pure synesthesia. Meaning was utterly destroyed somewhere in those emerald irises.

“You don’t much understand us,” she said.

“You’re spreading already,” Oscar said. “Look at this place. It’s attracted those parasites. Your mind has become a nest for disorder.”

“It’s ugly— I mean beautiful.” She frowned. “Always get the two mixed up.”

“But you’ve hit a barrier, haven’t you?” Oscar pointed at the sky, which was down, from their current orientation. “Order is leaking. Your desert is dying.”

“She won’t hold forever,” Absinthe said. “She never does. They will all come to me eventually.”

Oscar’s hold here was failing. If he had to leave now, there’s no telling how long it would take to return. He sat down and began to think of a way to reason with the unreasonable.