Twenty Five
There is no descent into sleep. No drifting, no unfolding. I am simply here, in the dream, awake inside it, my consciousness snatched from my skull and hung in this place like a carcass.
White. And nothing else.
Endless white in every direction. No horizon or vanishing point, only the kind of light that sears the eyes and renders depth into a suggestion.
Beneath my feet the ground is smooth, polished crystal—except my reflection is wrong.
It doesn’t show me, but something fainter, thinner, like the surface isn’t of this world.
The world above should be a sky, but it isn’t. It’s a black sea, thick and motionless, floating just metres above my head, slick with tension. It wants to fall, but something holds it back. The weight of it crushes the air from my lungs.
Suspended in the sky is the golden death counter.
Not in any one place, but in all of them—each direction I look, it’s there, a beacon of burning amber, numbers churning in a cycle I can’t decipher.
The numbers stutter, unable to settle: fourteen, then a flicker of ten and seven overlapping.
Then it splits into letters, XVII, before collapsing into sixteen, then fifteen, then seventeen, then ten, then seven, as though the counter can’t find its own boundary. Each shift feels like a heartbeat.
I am not alone.
She stands in front of me, not ten paces away: a woman sculpted from light.
Skin almost translucent, veins threaded with gold.
Her white robes, stitched with fine gold wire, fall in impossible, weightless drapes.
Her hands are folded at her waist, every finger perfect.
Her face is beautiful, but in a way that doesn’t look real—lips too precise, cheeks too symmetrical, hair thick and heavy with not a strand out of place. Her eyes are bottomless and in motion.
She smiles. It is a slow, maternal thing, but her face flickers at the edge—sometimes her jaw is Kael’s, sometimes her chin pulls narrow and sharp like Sera Vayne’s, sometimes her mouth is my own. When she blinks, her face resets. It’s tailored to me, every shift another lure.
I say nothing. My tongue is thick and tastes of metal.
Her voice comes warm and distilled, carefully crafted for comfort. But I can almost hear the whir of gears. A choir of identical voices harmonise behind each syllable, rippling echoes of her words that sound a fraction later.
“You have done well, Luceris,” she says. “The Light has never made it this far.”
First to die. Just as Atheron had said.
Above us the counter pulses, bleeding light. I don’t respond. I am not here for her praise. I am here because this is where she always brings me.
She steps closer. The movement is uncanny, too smooth, like the world is redrawing itself around her. Her feet make no sound on the crystal.
“You are curious,” she says, tilting her head just so. The gesture is eerily familiar to Kael’s, the one he uses when he doesn’t believe what I’m saying.
“You have questions,” she says, and her eyes shine brighter. “You wish to know why the Rites are necessary. Why I am necessary. Why you must kill, and why you must die.”
She isn’t wrong.
She circles me in a perfect arc. “It is a simple thing. The world is sick, and I am the cure. The cycle allows the world to survive. Without it, all would fall.”
The language is changing. The words lose their smooth edge. It’s becoming more formal, like the liturgy recited by the Overseers. It’s rote now, a mechanical song she can’t un-sing.
“The count must resolve,” she says, each syllable like the tick of a clock. “Ten to bind. Seven to sanctify. Seventeen in all to close. The number cannot remain unfinished.”
She stops pretending. She stands before me now, towering, her form shuddering at the edges—Kael, Sera, an Overseer. Then it’s her again, flawless and loving.
I try to speak, but the words are barely there. “Why me?”
She cocks her head, eyes flickering. “Why me?” she echoes.
She repeats my name, over and over, and the other voices layer in: Luceris, Luceris, Luceris, until the sound is nonsense and the world is full of the noise.
I press my palms against my eyes, hoping to shut her out. It doesn’t work.
She moves close enough that I can smell her: sweet and metallic, like sugar in blood. “You are the answer to a question I have asked for so long.”
She reaches out, setting one perfect hand on my shoulder. “You are the correction.”
“Correction for what?”
“For failure,” she whispers. “For corruption.”
A shudder ripples through her.
“The Veins must be fed. Balance requires devotion. Perfection requires completion.”
Her words fracture, the voices out of sync, and the expanse begins to vibrate. At the edges of the dream, shadows flicker and assemble themselves into Overseers, a perfect ring of them, each one identical, facing forward and humming its own note. A song of death.
“The cycle will finish,” they sing, stuttered and broken. “The cycle will finish. The cycle will finish. Until the count is true.”
The Mother Shard’s face is melting now. One moment Kael, the next a corpse with my eyes, the next a face with no features at all. She cycles through them, desperate for one that will cow me.
“Maybe your count is wrong,” I tell her.
The number above freezes. For the first time since I arrived in the dream, it does not shift. It locks at sixteen.
She looks at the number, then to me. Her face is my own, perfectly, down to the trembling in the jaw.
“Impossible,” she says, but the voice is smaller.
She sounds afraid.
The expanse fractures and the Overseers scream. The noise is bright enough to hurt. Numbers crawl on every surface, black and red and gold, all of them counting: up, down, sideways, none of them aligning.
The walls of the world buckle inwards. XVII is scratched over and over again across the sky, the ground, even on my own hands.
The Mother Shard’s voice is everywhere now, inside and out, whispering and screaming at the same time.
“The count must resolve. True, true, true, tr—”
All of the voices join as one.
“SEVENTEEN.”
The world goes black. There is no sound.
But as the void begins to eat me alive, her voice comes again, alone, stripped of all its power.
“You remind me of someone,” she says again.
Then I am awake.
I wake flat on my stomach, ribs pressed into cold sand. There is no up. No down. For a second, I think I’m still in the dream. I blink and blink, but the darkness is absolute. My eyes ache with the effort of seeing nothing. Not black, not even a shade—just the total lack of anything.
I try to move, and the first thing I feel is the sand: gritty, wet, sticky with some kind of residue.
There is salt beneath my nails and inside my nose.
The world narrows to the crash and retreat of waves nearby, the rhythm slow and steady, at war with my own heartbeat.
The air is sharp, slicing at my lungs with every shallow breath.
My hands are outstretched, palms down in the grit. I arch my back and my shirt clings to me with saltwater and sweat.
I turn my face up, and through the darkness the death counter burns high above, suspended like a coin flipped but never caught. It is the only light in the world, gold and unwavering, yet it casts none. It’s just there. The number is fourteen.
I lie there for a long time, cataloguing the world. The cold sand. The nearby ocean. The nothingness of the void. Every sound echoes in my skull, as though I’m in a cave, or a box. The air hums—not a sound, but a vibration trapped in the walls of the world. The Mother Shard is listening.
I push myself upright, careful and silent, and nothing changes. The dark does not recede. I wave my hands in front of my nose and see nothing. I could be blind, or the world could be gone. Maybe both are true.
I reach for my Mana—out of fear, or newfound habit—and the light bubbles up, ready to answer. But I force it down. The urge to make light is instinctive, animal, but I know there are enemies in the dark, and the death that follows will not be kind.
The silence between the crash of the waves grows unbearable. I start to hear other things in it: a footstep, a click of teeth, the wet suck of movement somewhere behind me. I hold my breath and wait, body tight. Nothing moves. Maybe it’s in my head.
I decide to move anyway.
The cold bites through my legs until my feet go numb. The sand is uneven, ridged with the remnants of old waves. I keep the ocean to my right, a fixed line in the world. There is nothing else to orient myself by.
I shuffle forward with careful steps. Every shift of my weight feels deafening. I want to run, but I know better.
The death counter waits above, unblinking.
I keep walking, arms outstretched, fingertips feeling ahead for anything—rock, wall, the edge of the world. There is only more sand. Maybe the arena is endless. Maybe I’m the only one alive, and the darkness is my prize. A god could be that cruel.
I think about Kael. I hope he’s at home in the dark, that he’s already searching for me. But he might be hunting someone else. The thought makes me dizzy.
I don’t know how long I walk for, but my legs start to ache, and the world remains unchanged. The crash of the waves never gets closer or farther. It just is, and I am nowhere.
Then, far across the sand, a pinprick of orange. It’s so small that for a second, I think I’ve imagined it. But it’s there, a thread of fire, small as a candle, the only other living thing I’ve seen.
I freeze, my breath turning to stone in my chest.
The flame flickers once, twice. Then it vanishes. The silence rushes in, louder than the ocean, heavier than anything else.
Golden-red light spirals through the blackness, bright enough to hurt my eyes after so much time in the dark. It winds upwards, twisting before being absorbed into the death counter above. The number flickers: fourteen, then fifteen.
I know, without question, who is dead.