My own emotions were still locked down tight, a distant curiosity buried under layers of unnatural calm. There was no fear, only a blank, procedural need to investigate. I stepped onto the white shore. It was cool and smooth underfoot. I moved toward the central pattern, my mind a quiet, empty room.
I knelt, my shadow falling across the nearest etching. The symbols were impossibly complex, geometries that hurt to look at for too long.
The moment my fingertips, more on instinct than intent, brushed against the cool white stone, the symbols ignited.
A soft, white light bloomed from the grooves, not a violent explosion but a rapid, overwhelming unfurling. It wasn't just light; it was a torrent. A flood of… everything. Emotions that weren't mine—a sudden, sharp grief, a burst of irrational joy, a deep-seated envy—slammed into me. They were followed by fragmented thoughts, whispers of conversations I'd never had, and memories of places I'd never seen. A marketplace smelling of spices, the feel of cold rain on a stone balcony, the weight of a child's hand in mine.
It was too much, too fast. It was like someone was hammering another's life into my skull. My knees gave way and I slumped to the ground, a low groan escaping my lips. My head throbbed, scrambling itself while trying to accommodate the knowledge, the sheer pressure of foreign consciousness pouring in. My vision swam, the white island and the colourful sea tilting crazily.
No. Too much. Off. Turn it OFF!
It was a primal, desperate thought, a plea from the core of whatever was left that was me. And somewhere deep inside, a switch flipped. A mechanism I never knew I possessed engaged with a soft, mental click. It was like the slamming of a bulkhead, sealing off the flood and allowing me to force the rest of the noise out my my ears. It took a few seconds longer for me to stand though.
I lay there for a long moment, panting, my forehead pressed against the cool, white stone. My mind felt raw, scoured. Most of the deluge was already gone, my brain having automatically junked the vast majority of the data to protect itself. But a few pieces, like the most vivid fragments of a dream upon waking, remained for a few seconds.
A name: Elara.
A place: The Dark City
And underpinning it all, a profound, aching sense of longing. A deep, homesick yearning for a warmth and a safety that felt galaxies away.
The clarity was fleeting. The cold, analytical part of my mind, the part that had just saved me, identified these fragments as non-essential. Emotional artifacts. With a quiet, internal sigh that wasn't really my own, they were scrubbed away, deleted from my short-term memory like corrupt files. The echo of the feeling vanished, leaving behind only the sterile knowledge that something deeply personal had just been erased.
Then the island shuddered.
A network of hairline cracks appeared in the white marble-sand. With a low, grinding rumble, the entire landmass began to sink into the colourful sea, dissolving at the edges. The monoliths tilted precariously.
Adrenaline, real and sharp and mine, finally broke through the numbness. I scrambled backward on my hands and knees, then launched myself into a stumbling run. I threw myself off the dissolving edge just as the last of the standing stones was swallowed without a splash.
I landed on the resilient surface of the sea, the impact jarring my knees. I turned back, heart hammering against my ribs—a feeling that was terrifying and exhilarating in its familiarity.
The island was gone. The sea was perfectly calm, showing no sign it had ever existed. I was alone again, adrift in the silence. But now the silence felt different. I had been violated, scraped empty, and then saved by a part of myself I didn't understand. And the only traces of what I'd found were the ghost of a feeling I could no longer remember, and the cold, empty space where it had been.
Yet something had been triggered, or maybe my time in solitary was up: the veil covering the sky parted, and light fell through, descending onto me. Closing my eyes at the brightness, I felt the world shift and fall away around me-or rather, felt myself ascend higher. Before I was completely pulled through the veil however, I forced my eyes opened and took in the full realm I had been trapped in. The sea seemed to stretch forever, and I saw what was possibly other islands dotted around it, some pure and white, others blackened and overflowing polluted filth into the sea. On the very horizon of my vision, I noticed what seemed like a large gathering of white islands, but then...I saw it.
It wasn't part of the sky. It was suspended in the space between, a silent observer. A grotesque, greyish-white object that looked like a monstrous fusion of a human brain and a galaxy, all convoluted folds and swirling, nebulous matter. And floating directly in front of this thing was a single, massive pair of eyes.
They were golden, with vertical reptilian pupils. And they were utterly, terrifyingly emotionless. They weren't looking at the sea or the islands. They were simply observing. Taking in all of it with a cold, dispassionate gaze. This thing was the overseer of this entire insane dimension.
A cold that had nothing to do with temperature shot down my spine. My ascent halted. I just hung there in the air, staring.
And as I stared, the eyes moved.
The vertical pupils contracted minutely, and then the entire orbs rotated with a slow, deliberate precision until they were fixed directly on me.
The moment its gaze locked with mine, it felt like a thunderclap inside my skull. A psychic storm of pure force ripped through my soul and my mind. It wasn't an attack of rage or malice. It was worse. It was the indifferent, overwhelming pressure of an ocean depth applied directly to my consciousness. The pain was instant and indescribable—a white-hot agony of being known, being measured, and being found infinitesimally small by something vast and ancient.
I would have screamed, but I had no air. I would have convulsed, but I was frozen in its gaze.
And as the pain threatened to shatter me completely, information was forced into my mind. Not a flood this time, but a single, sharp, precise injection. It wasn't a memory or an emotion. It was a cold, hard fact, a fundamental law of this place etched directly onto my being:
Psychiatrist
Main Ingredients:
The fruit of the Tree of Elders and a pair of eyes from a Mirror Dragon.
Supplementary Ingredients:
50 millilitres of Mirror Dragon's Blood, 15 grams of Tree of Elders Bark Powder, 10 drops of Foxglove essential oil and 9 strands of infant hair.
Hypnotist
Main Ingredients:
60 milliliters of a Black-hunting Giant Lizard's spinal fluid and the fruit of an Illusory Chime Tree, or the complete pituitary gland of an adolescent Mind Dragon
Supplementary Ingredients:
80 milliliters of blood from an adolescent Mind Dragon (or black-hunt giant lizard), three scales from an adolescent Mind Dragon (or 3 pieces of bark from the Illusory Chime Tree), one belladonna fruit and a mirror kept in one's own room for over three months.
The words weren't in any language; they were the concept itself, branded into me.